I don't get the enduring appeal of James Bond films. Sorry.
I mean when I was a spotty teenager, thrilled by the gadgets and bikini girls, I loved them and recall that my first cinema experience without parents was to see The Spy Who Loved Me with my friend. But as an adult?
The franchise has a reputation for me of lame sets, dodgy acting and banal, implausible script. All-round a bit ... naff.
If you want to watch an action movie then JB films aren't in the same league as, say, the Bourne movies or the awesome and flawless Mad Max Thunder Road are they?
I hope that's not too controversial so as to make you choke on your cornflakes especially on James Bond Day.
JB films have been transformed by Bourne.
Once upon a time they were light hearted, self-parodic, and tremendous and unserious fun.
However, despite their copying Bourne, or trying to, they are long, lumbering, taking themselves far too seriously with hugely convoluted plots.
Both the Bond films and Doctor Who have fallen victim to the same phenomenon of believing the hype of a few obsessives.
The Bourne films moved that kind of film into a different league in the same way that the Matrix did with sci-fi. I think Daniel Craig worked hard to keep up with that but there is an incredible amount of baggage with Bond that the fanatics need to see which makes the films long and cumbersome. I will go and see the new Bond but I can't claim that I have been desperate to do so over the last year.
Like Dr Who, a couple of decades of rest would not go amiss.
I’ve not yet seen the latest Bond. But it’s an interesting quandary about how to reinvent it post Craig. The Big Bad in today’s world is of course China. But it’s also one of the biggest movie markets. So instead of plotting relevant to today’s threats, we get stuck in a cycle of quiet psycho terrorist type villains.
I’d go back to the beginning and do it as a lavish period action saga. Mad Men styling. Classic cars. Take away the silliness, comic book villains and plodding plotting of the originals. Draw a proper multi film plot arc rather than the retconning of Spectre and make-it-up-as-we-film of Quantum of Solace. A rounded character following a coherent arc, with a personality that can breath around the action sequences rather than be suffocated by them.
Much of the best bits of the Craig era followed this template but they should go full throttle with it.
It seems a very worthy idea but I am astounded at the money apparently being made from it. Are we in a bubble?
It’s not actual folding stuff. It’s just the implied value based on the price someone was willing to invest money at
And the more actual folding money that gets invested, the smaller the stake Mr Blair retains in the company.
But he’s still done well - pre money around £550m implying his stake £150-200m
Yes, but how much actual cash at that valuation? Could just as easily easily be a friend of his ‘investing’ £550k for 0.1%, so he can hype the valuation to drive down the rate of his own divestment.
It was £95m from American VCs.
He would have got - maybe - a few million in cash.
I've said before that I tend to really respect jobs that need doing, but I wouldn't want to do myself. At uni I had a friend who had worked in one, and his stories were...interesting. I've also been in one on a few occasions (*), and even though clean and bright, there's something heavy about them, spirit-wise.
Hence, even if it is semi-skilled, abattoir workers should be being paid much more than they are. It's an awful, soul-destroying job.
(*) Abattoirs have sumps where... well, you can guess what ends up in them. Every so often these need cleaning out, so we hired a pump to do it. A pump and pipework that was kept for that express purpose, and was kept on a part of the depot well away from anything else as, even after cleaning, it stank. (AFAICR the sump had its own pump, that would often break down and so they had to hire one in to drain the sump, so some poor sod could go down and fix it.)
Most of this problem ultimately comes back to the supermarket sector. If they didn’t demand meat at extremely low prices, and sometimes even at a loss, there wouldn’t be such an issue.
But then that begs another question, of course - are people willing to pay the cost of production?
This is just the nature of capitalism - competition driving down prices and squeezing costs at every stage of production. It's well covered in books like the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It's the great strength but also the great weakness of capitalism as an economic system, when those costs getting squeezed are human beings. It's why I vote Labour, for enlightened policies to temper capitalism with interventions to protect people from the remorseless logic of the system - but still capturing the positive elements of that system as much as possible.
Yet now it’s the Conservatives arguing for higher wages and employers to provide training, while Labour want to throw hundreds of thousands of cheap immigrants at the problem, to prop up the supermarkets’ profits.
My question is how and why these companies are to provide training to "drive up productivity". The Tories want labour mobility, which means as soon as you finish training a driver they are out the door. Wouldn't happen if we re-unionised the sector. And drivers are hardly unproductive - being harried every minute of every shift is a reason why so many are not coming back into it having left.
There is a simple reality here - British workers don't want the work. Whether it is in factories or care homes or a whole stack of jobs, we don't want them. You can say "pay more" but the point where we stopped wanting to do them relative pay was higher.
I have a lot of sympathy for the Tory thinkers who wrote the "British workers are lazy" book. I have worked for various companies with various facilities where it is clear and obviously true. Eastern Europeans became so popular not because they were cheaper, but because they actually turned up to do the job.
I have absolutely zero sympathy for the "British workers don't want the work" line. Its bullshit. Supposedly British workers don't want to work in almost every poorly paid job, I wonder what the common denominator is there? Maybe British workers don't want the piss taken out of them?
Supposedly people claim that British workers don't want to work in care for instance, and yet 10 of every 12 care staff are British. 1 in 12 are European and 1 in 12 are non-European. Similar figures exist in many other jobs British workers "don't want to do".
There is no job someone won't take if you offer enough money, and there's no reason to run the country for businesses that can't or won't offer enough money to fill their vacancies.
What would your price be to become a prostitute?
That's the old joke isn't it? Sometimes accredited to George Bernard Shaw though that's probably apocryphal.
Shaw: Madam, would you sleep with me for a million pounds?
Actress: My goodness. Well, I'd certainly think about it.
Shaw: Would you sleep with me for a pound?
Actress: Certainly not! What kind of woman do you think I am?!
Shaw: Madam, we've already established that. Now we are haggling about the price.
Yep.
So what's your price?
I don't know but certainly the free market rate for other people who work in the sector probably clears at a lower amount. 😉
I've said before that I tend to really respect jobs that need doing, but I wouldn't want to do myself. At uni I had a friend who had worked in one, and his stories were...interesting. I've also been in one on a few occasions (*), and even though clean and bright, there's something heavy about them, spirit-wise.
Hence, even if it is semi-skilled, abattoir workers should be being paid much more than they are. It's an awful, soul-destroying job.
(*) Abattoirs have sumps where... well, you can guess what ends up in them. Every so often these need cleaning out, so we hired a pump to do it. A pump and pipework that was kept for that express purpose, and was kept on a part of the depot well away from anything else as, even after cleaning, it stank. (AFAICR the sump had its own pump, that would often break down and so they had to hire one in to drain the sump, so some poor sod could go down and fix it.)
Most of this problem ultimately comes back to the supermarket sector. If they didn’t demand meat at extremely low prices, and sometimes even at a loss, there wouldn’t be such an issue.
But then that begs another question, of course - are people willing to pay the cost of production?
This is just the nature of capitalism - competition driving down prices and squeezing costs at every stage of production. It's well covered in books like the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It's the great strength but also the great weakness of capitalism as an economic system, when those costs getting squeezed are human beings. It's why I vote Labour, for enlightened policies to temper capitalism with interventions to protect people from the remorseless logic of the system - but still capturing the positive elements of that system as much as possible.
Yet now it’s the Conservatives arguing for higher wages and employers to provide training, while Labour want to throw hundreds of thousands of cheap immigrants at the problem, to prop up the supermarkets’ profits.
My question is how and why these companies are to provide training to "drive up productivity". The Tories want labour mobility, which means as soon as you finish training a driver they are out the door. Wouldn't happen if we re-unionised the sector. And drivers are hardly unproductive - being harried every minute of every shift is a reason why so many are not coming back into it having left.
There is a simple reality here - British workers don't want the work. Whether it is in factories or care homes or a whole stack of jobs, we don't want them. You can say "pay more" but the point where we stopped wanting to do them relative pay was higher.
I have a lot of sympathy for the Tory thinkers who wrote the "British workers are lazy" book. I have worked for various companies with various facilities where it is clear and obviously true. Eastern Europeans became so popular not because they were cheaper, but because they actually turned up to do the job.
If British workers are too lazy to do the jobs - why is that in every single such low paid jobs*, the overwhelming majority of the workers are British?
*With the possible exception of some part of Central London.
Mind you, some ancient Roman writers held that since members of the Head Count would do work that was supposed to be things that slaves were for... well, that was evidence that the Head Count shouldn't be considered Roman and didn't deserve rights.
I’m guessing that worlld natural gas prices are going to be bid up for a while yet…
The proximate cause of this is reportedly coal shortages, but energy is energy, and the Asian region is a very large buyer of gas. In #Suzhou several factories supplying Apple have reportedly suspended production due to electricity cuts. https://twitter.com/StephenMcDonell/status/1443158297268396035
It clearly suits Putin to divert what gas he can to China and Asia more widely, while squeezing supply to Europe and being able to sell at much higher prices. And it’s not even winter yet.
Maybe the new German Chancellor might want to think about how dependent his country now is on Mr Putin, and his ability to keep his people warm and with power over the next few months.
The cost equation of WFH has been a bit of a no-brainer the last 18 months. But faced with heating bills 50pc higher the office might look a bit more attractive this winter.
Need to get a log burner for the home office I think
Am I right that you have land in the middle of nowhere?
I'm a bit sceptical about log burners except where people have free wood, and enjoy chopping. What will the payback period be?
When it is cheaper to commute to work than pay the £1 a day it might cost to heat a room, then perhaps one needs to reflect .
Indeed I do. But the wood doesn’t need to be free for it to be cost effective or environmentally sound, depending on your alternative. Which for me is heading oil. Looked into heat pumps but they’re an expensive, power hungry and noisy option right now.
I’m guessing that worlld natural gas prices are going to be bid up for a while yet…
The proximate cause of this is reportedly coal shortages, but energy is energy, and the Asian region is a very large buyer of gas. In #Suzhou several factories supplying Apple have reportedly suspended production due to electricity cuts. https://twitter.com/StephenMcDonell/status/1443158297268396035
It clearly suits Putin to divert what gas he can to China and Asia more widely, while squeezing supply to Europe and being able to sell at much higher prices. And it’s not even winter yet.
Maybe the new German Chancellor might want to think about how dependent his country now is on Mr Putin, and his ability to keep his people warm and with power over the next few months.
The cost equation of WFH has been a bit of a no-brainer the last 18 months. But faced with heating bills 50pc higher the office might look a bit more attractive this winter.
Need to get a log burner for the home office I think
Am I right that you have land in the middle of nowhere?
I'm a bit sceptical about log burners except where people have free wood, and enjoy chopping. What will the payback period be?
When it is cheaper to commute to work than pay the £1 a day it might cost to heat a room, then perhaps one needs to reflect .
Indeed I do. But the wood doesn’t need to be free for it to be cost effective or environmentally sound, depending on your alternative. Which for me is heading oil. Looked into heat pumps but they’re an expensive, power hungry and noisy option right now.
In Devon, 1 in 6 trees is ash - and I suspect from what I am seeing around me is that a significant portion of those will have to felled because of the danger of falling branches due to die back.
No shortage of wood to burn down here for many a year.
I’m guessing that worlld natural gas prices are going to be bid up for a while yet…
The proximate cause of this is reportedly coal shortages, but energy is energy, and the Asian region is a very large buyer of gas. In #Suzhou several factories supplying Apple have reportedly suspended production due to electricity cuts. https://twitter.com/StephenMcDonell/status/1443158297268396035
It clearly suits Putin to divert what gas he can to China and Asia more widely, while squeezing supply to Europe and being able to sell at much higher prices. And it’s not even winter yet.
Maybe the new German Chancellor might want to think about how dependent his country now is on Mr Putin, and his ability to keep his people warm and with power over the next few months.
The cost equation of WFH has been a bit of a no-brainer the last 18 months. But faced with heating bills 50pc higher the office might look a bit more attractive this winter.
Need to get a log burner for the home office I think
Am I right that you have land in the middle of nowhere?
I'm a bit sceptical about log burners except where people have free wood, and enjoy chopping. What will the payback period be?
When it is cheaper to commute to work than pay the £1 a day it might cost to heat a room, then perhaps one needs to reflect .
Indeed I do. But the wood doesn’t need to be free for it to be cost effective or environmentally sound, depending on your alternative. Which for me is heading oil. Looked into heat pumps but they’re an expensive, power hungry and noisy option right now.
I found out what the drilling was going on yesterday near me. The council are installing ground source heat pumps to replace electric storage heaters in council tower blocks. Great for the residents I imagine. But they wont be stumping up the capital cost like you would have to at yours.
I don't get the enduring appeal of James Bond films. Sorry.
I mean when I was a spotty teenager, thrilled by the gadgets and bikini girls, I loved them and recall that my first cinema experience without parents was to see The Spy Who Loved Me with my friend. But as an adult?
The franchise has a reputation for me of lame sets, dodgy acting and banal, implausible script. All-round a bit ... naff.
If you want to watch an action movie then JB films aren't in the same league as, say, the Bourne movies or the awesome and flawless Mad Max Thunder Road are they?
I hope that's not too controversial so as to make you choke on your cornflakes especially on James Bond Day.
JB films have been transformed by Bourne.
Once upon a time they were light hearted, self-parodic, and tremendous and unserious fun.
However, despite their copying Bourne, or trying to, they are long, lumbering, taking themselves far too seriously with hugely convoluted plots.
Both the Bond films and Doctor Who have fallen victim to the same phenomenon of believing the hype of a few obsessives.
The Bourne films moved that kind of film into a different league in the same way that the Matrix did with sci-fi. I think Daniel Craig worked hard to keep up with that but there is an incredible amount of baggage with Bond that the fanatics need to see which makes the films long and cumbersome. I will go and see the new Bond but I can't claim that I have been desperate to do so over the last year.
Like Dr Who, a couple of decades of rest would not go amiss.
I’ve not yet seen the latest Bond. But it’s an interesting quandary about how to reinvent it post Craig. The Big Bad in today’s world is of course China. But it’s also one of the biggest movie markets. So instead of plotting relevant to today’s threats, we get stuck in a cycle of quiet psycho terrorist type villains.
I’d go back to the beginning and do it as a lavish period action saga. Mad Men styling. Classic cars. Take away the silliness, comic book villains and plodding plotting of the originals. Draw a proper multi film plot arc rather than the retconning of Spectre and make-it-up-as-we-film of Quantum of Solace. A rounded character following a coherent arc, with a personality that can breath around the action sequences rather than be suffocated by them.
Much of the best bits of the Craig era followed this template but they should go full throttle with it.
They need someone like Kevin Feige. The job he has done with the MCU, where every movie is standalone but also building a story arc up, is really impressive.
There's much material with Spectre etc that could be done along those lines from a reboot onwards.
I've said before that I tend to really respect jobs that need doing, but I wouldn't want to do myself. At uni I had a friend who had worked in one, and his stories were...interesting. I've also been in one on a few occasions (*), and even though clean and bright, there's something heavy about them, spirit-wise.
Hence, even if it is semi-skilled, abattoir workers should be being paid much more than they are. It's an awful, soul-destroying job.
(*) Abattoirs have sumps where... well, you can guess what ends up in them. Every so often these need cleaning out, so we hired a pump to do it. A pump and pipework that was kept for that express purpose, and was kept on a part of the depot well away from anything else as, even after cleaning, it stank. (AFAICR the sump had its own pump, that would often break down and so they had to hire one in to drain the sump, so some poor sod could go down and fix it.)
Most of this problem ultimately comes back to the supermarket sector. If they didn’t demand meat at extremely low prices, and sometimes even at a loss, there wouldn’t be such an issue.
But then that begs another question, of course - are people willing to pay the cost of production?
This is just the nature of capitalism - competition driving down prices and squeezing costs at every stage of production. It's well covered in books like the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It's the great strength but also the great weakness of capitalism as an economic system, when those costs getting squeezed are human beings. It's why I vote Labour, for enlightened policies to temper capitalism with interventions to protect people from the remorseless logic of the system - but still capturing the positive elements of that system as much as possible.
Yet now it’s the Conservatives arguing for higher wages and employers to provide training, while Labour want to throw hundreds of thousands of cheap immigrants at the problem, to prop up the supermarkets’ profits.
My question is how and why these companies are to provide training to "drive up productivity". The Tories want labour mobility, which means as soon as you finish training a driver they are out the door. Wouldn't happen if we re-unionised the sector. And drivers are hardly unproductive - being harried every minute of every shift is a reason why so many are not coming back into it having left.
There is a simple reality here - British workers don't want the work. Whether it is in factories or care homes or a whole stack of jobs, we don't want them. You can say "pay more" but the point where we stopped wanting to do them relative pay was higher.
I have a lot of sympathy for the Tory thinkers who wrote the "British workers are lazy" book. I have worked for various companies with various facilities where it is clear and obviously true. Eastern Europeans became so popular not because they were cheaper, but because they actually turned up to do the job.
But you need to look at why British Labour relations are so poor compared to much of our neighbours in Northern Europe in the historical round.
Britain's postwar settlement disguised class and employer-employee relations that were still feudal. The union militancy of the 1970's was the flipside of an almost seigneurially abusive attitude from many large employers compared to countries like Germany or Sweden. Thatcher then "solved" this by a scorched-earth victory for the employers. The alienation in the British Labour market is deep-seated and deep-rooted, and I would very strongly reject blaming that just on the employees.
Agreed. It was telling that the most obvious exceptions to this tended to be foreign imports starting from scratch without that baggage such as we saw and see in the car assembly plants where Unions and management work constructively together.
I've said before that I tend to really respect jobs that need doing, but I wouldn't want to do myself. At uni I had a friend who had worked in one, and his stories were...interesting. I've also been in one on a few occasions (*), and even though clean and bright, there's something heavy about them, spirit-wise.
Hence, even if it is semi-skilled, abattoir workers should be being paid much more than they are. It's an awful, soul-destroying job.
(*) Abattoirs have sumps where... well, you can guess what ends up in them. Every so often these need cleaning out, so we hired a pump to do it. A pump and pipework that was kept for that express purpose, and was kept on a part of the depot well away from anything else as, even after cleaning, it stank. (AFAICR the sump had its own pump, that would often break down and so they had to hire one in to drain the sump, so some poor sod could go down and fix it.)
Most of this problem ultimately comes back to the supermarket sector. If they didn’t demand meat at extremely low prices, and sometimes even at a loss, there wouldn’t be such an issue.
But then that begs another question, of course - are people willing to pay the cost of production?
This is just the nature of capitalism - competition driving down prices and squeezing costs at every stage of production. It's well covered in books like the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It's the great strength but also the great weakness of capitalism as an economic system, when those costs getting squeezed are human beings. It's why I vote Labour, for enlightened policies to temper capitalism with interventions to protect people from the remorseless logic of the system - but still capturing the positive elements of that system as much as possible.
Yet now it’s the Conservatives arguing for higher wages and employers to provide training, while Labour want to throw hundreds of thousands of cheap immigrants at the problem, to prop up the supermarkets’ profits.
My question is how and why these companies are to provide training to "drive up productivity". The Tories want labour mobility, which means as soon as you finish training a driver they are out the door. Wouldn't happen if we re-unionised the sector. And drivers are hardly unproductive - being harried every minute of every shift is a reason why so many are not coming back into it having left.
There is a simple reality here - British workers don't want the work. Whether it is in factories or care homes or a whole stack of jobs, we don't want them. You can say "pay more" but the point where we stopped wanting to do them relative pay was higher.
I have a lot of sympathy for the Tory thinkers who wrote the "British workers are lazy" book. I have worked for various companies with various facilities where it is clear and obviously true. Eastern Europeans became so popular not because they were cheaper, but because they actually turned up to do the job.
But you need to look at why British Labour relations are so poor compared to much of our neighbours in Northern Europe in the historical round.
Britain's postwar settlement disguised class and employer-employee relations that were still feudal. The union militancy of the 1970's was the flipside of an almost seigneurially abusive attitude from many large employers compared to countries like Germany or Sweden. Thatcher then "solved" this by a scorched-earth victory for the employers. The alienation in the British Labour market is deep-seated and deep-rooted, and I would very strongly reject blaming that just on the employees.
I don't blame the employees! I said this was structural not the fault of individuals. We need to equip and empower a workforce for the 21st century and we aren't going to do that by only focusing on warehouse and delivery jobs.
The part of the Starmer speech was was surprising was "The Good Society and the Strong Economy need each other" because its sad that this needs to be said. Companies need a workforce productive and engaged, employees need companies supportive and nurturing.
We are a long way from getting this. Too few people are unionised and frankly several of the big unions seem wedded to overthrowing capitalism still. Too few companies give a shit about their employees and the tax system gives no incentive to the long term investment in people.
It seems a very worthy idea but I am astounded at the money apparently being made from it. Are we in a bubble?
It’s not actual folding stuff. It’s just the implied value based on the price someone was willing to invest money at
Still, its basically a niche employment consultant. Where on earth are the cash flows that would justify such multiples of value? How much are companies prepared to pay to outsource something they could so easily do themselves (an advert for Google, for example, is likely to attract lots of bright young things)? They are talking about the company soon being worth $1bn. That is just weird.
Valuations are crazy right now
I can't remember the details but vaguely recall that Mr Blair's business model was similar to solar panel fitters, in that it relied heavily on indirect government subsidies, in this case the apprenticeship levy. I'd imagine there must be something similar in America given the new investment.
As an aside, I know a chap whose basic plan is, whenever a new government subsidy is announced, to work out if and how he can set up a company to exploit it. And he does not seem to be the only one. I am not sure it is commendable but then I guess that is what the government wants.
So he needs to sell up before they make it more efficient
I've said before that I tend to really respect jobs that need doing, but I wouldn't want to do myself. At uni I had a friend who had worked in one, and his stories were...interesting. I've also been in one on a few occasions (*), and even though clean and bright, there's something heavy about them, spirit-wise.
Hence, even if it is semi-skilled, abattoir workers should be being paid much more than they are. It's an awful, soul-destroying job.
(*) Abattoirs have sumps where... well, you can guess what ends up in them. Every so often these need cleaning out, so we hired a pump to do it. A pump and pipework that was kept for that express purpose, and was kept on a part of the depot well away from anything else as, even after cleaning, it stank. (AFAICR the sump had its own pump, that would often break down and so they had to hire one in to drain the sump, so some poor sod could go down and fix it.)
Most of this problem ultimately comes back to the supermarket sector. If they didn’t demand meat at extremely low prices, and sometimes even at a loss, there wouldn’t be such an issue.
But then that begs another question, of course - are people willing to pay the cost of production?
This is just the nature of capitalism - competition driving down prices and squeezing costs at every stage of production. It's well covered in books like the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It's the great strength but also the great weakness of capitalism as an economic system, when those costs getting squeezed are human beings. It's why I vote Labour, for enlightened policies to temper capitalism with interventions to protect people from the remorseless logic of the system - but still capturing the positive elements of that system as much as possible.
Yet now it’s the Conservatives arguing for higher wages and employers to provide training, while Labour want to throw hundreds of thousands of cheap immigrants at the problem, to prop up the supermarkets’ profits.
Spot on. Labour has forgotten their original purpose - swamped by internationalism
It's principally driven by the desperation to show that freedom of movement in the SM was a good thing that we shouldn't have given up, regardless of the consequences for their natural supporters.
Their vision is a cheap labour, low productivity future where skilled, middle class professionals get a lot of services on the cheap, a good standard of living and the flexibility to move if they so want and the opportunity to sell their services into a bigger market so they can justify a higher price. I mean, from the viewpoint of a professional in London doing financial services etc where they UK is more than competitive you can see why this seems a no brainer but from the viewpoint of a former Labour supporter in the red wall its mainly downside. The absolute refusal to see that suggests to me that winning those supporters back is going to be problematic.
Worth pointing out that it is not just professionals that think Brexit is going badly. Even Leave voters were more likely to say going "very badly" vs "very well". If it wasn't Labour and related shortages, why do you think they feel that way?
If I were a fan of Brexit/the government, what would worry me most about that survey is the incredibly small proportion thinking that Brexit was going "very well". 4% overall? Only 7% of leavers?
Surely if all the promises of Brexit were on course to be fulfilled there would be a much higher % thinking that it was going very well thus far, while recognising that the process has a long way to go.
I’m guessing that worlld natural gas prices are going to be bid up for a while yet…
The proximate cause of this is reportedly coal shortages, but energy is energy, and the Asian region is a very large buyer of gas. In #Suzhou several factories supplying Apple have reportedly suspended production due to electricity cuts. https://twitter.com/StephenMcDonell/status/1443158297268396035
It clearly suits Putin to divert what gas he can to China and Asia more widely, while squeezing supply to Europe and being able to sell at much higher prices. And it’s not even winter yet.
Maybe the new German Chancellor might want to think about how dependent his country now is on Mr Putin, and his ability to keep his people warm and with power over the next few months.
The cost equation of WFH has been a bit of a no-brainer the last 18 months. But faced with heating bills 50pc higher the office might look a bit more attractive this winter.
Need to get a log burner for the home office I think
My office is the former bank which makes up much of the ground floor of the building we live in. Have spent much of the last 7 months renovating the former banking hall which will be open office space, so I'm working out of the former manager's office.
Single Glazing and 200 year old granite walls means cold in winter - there are storage heaters everywhere and even wall-mounted heaters in the toilets. Long term project to replace all the windows will have to wait for next summer when resources allow. In the meantime I have an electric radiator on a smart plug that does the job when heat is needed.
It always amuses me that banking halls (and the large atriums in modern banks) are reverse psychology
They are designed to make the customer think “if they can afford to waste so much money they must be a safe place to leave my cash”
I'm not sure how much money Bank of Scotland actually spent! Ripping out the security partition, the teller's counter, the admin area, cupboards and other stuff (no safe, that had long gone) what is clear is that whilst at some point they had a refit to install the main partition and counter, they were built on layers of bodge.
Of particular amusement were the electrics. I removed several runs of sockets (8 or 10 in a line) all of which turned out to split off a single 13a socket on the wall. My sparky was amused! Various other "that's not safe" discoveries.
What they did invest in was data. This place had an substantial data network fed from a leased fibre line. I've ripped out all the (dead and severed) ethernet cables, but the fibre line remains as too messy to remove. A mere £900 a month if I want it reconnecting!
We’ve just refurbed our shop to make it look exactly like it did before.
But also converted the FX desk into a nice sitting room for customers
I’m guessing that worlld natural gas prices are going to be bid up for a while yet…
The proximate cause of this is reportedly coal shortages, but energy is energy, and the Asian region is a very large buyer of gas. In #Suzhou several factories supplying Apple have reportedly suspended production due to electricity cuts. https://twitter.com/StephenMcDonell/status/1443158297268396035
It clearly suits Putin to divert what gas he can to China and Asia more widely, while squeezing supply to Europe and being able to sell at much higher prices. And it’s not even winter yet.
Maybe the new German Chancellor might want to think about how dependent his country now is on Mr Putin, and his ability to keep his people warm and with power over the next few months.
The cost equation of WFH has been a bit of a no-brainer the last 18 months. But faced with heating bills 50pc higher the office might look a bit more attractive this winter.
Need to get a log burner for the home office I think
Am I right that you have land in the middle of nowhere?
I'm a bit sceptical about log burners except where people have free wood, and enjoy chopping. What will the payback period be?
When it is cheaper to commute to work than pay the £1 a day it might cost to heat a room, then perhaps one needs to reflect .
Indeed I do. But the wood doesn’t need to be free for it to be cost effective or environmentally sound, depending on your alternative. Which for me is heading oil. Looked into heat pumps but they’re an expensive, power hungry and noisy option right now.
I found out what the drilling was going on yesterday near me. The council are installing ground source heat pumps to replace electric storage heaters in council tower blocks. Great for the residents I imagine. But they wont be stumping up the capital cost like you would have to at yours.
I hope those flats are well insulated or that GSHP is not going to be running very efficiently…
To be fair the capital cost of drilling boreholes is much more attractive when split across many flats rather than one detached dwelling.
Even taking that figure of 400k HGV driver shortages in the EU vs 100k in the UK that @SimonClarkeMP kept wheeling out - compare it to the population they service: that's 1.5 drivers short per 100k of population in the UK vs 0.9 short in the EU. UK has a much more acute crisis. https://twitter.com/sturdyAlex/status/1443477106797785090
@sturdyAlex@SimonClarkeMP Even if you accept his premise, the shelves in Europe are full and there aren't fistfights at the pumps.
I've said before that I tend to really respect jobs that need doing, but I wouldn't want to do myself. At uni I had a friend who had worked in one, and his stories were...interesting. I've also been in one on a few occasions (*), and even though clean and bright, there's something heavy about them, spirit-wise.
Hence, even if it is semi-skilled, abattoir workers should be being paid much more than they are. It's an awful, soul-destroying job.
(*) Abattoirs have sumps where... well, you can guess what ends up in them. Every so often these need cleaning out, so we hired a pump to do it. A pump and pipework that was kept for that express purpose, and was kept on a part of the depot well away from anything else as, even after cleaning, it stank. (AFAICR the sump had its own pump, that would often break down and so they had to hire one in to drain the sump, so some poor sod could go down and fix it.)
Most of this problem ultimately comes back to the supermarket sector. If they didn’t demand meat at extremely low prices, and sometimes even at a loss, there wouldn’t be such an issue.
But then that begs another question, of course - are people willing to pay the cost of production?
This is just the nature of capitalism - competition driving down prices and squeezing costs at every stage of production. It's well covered in books like the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It's the great strength but also the great weakness of capitalism as an economic system, when those costs getting squeezed are human beings. It's why I vote Labour, for enlightened policies to temper capitalism with interventions to protect people from the remorseless logic of the system - but still capturing the positive elements of that system as much as possible.
Yet now it’s the Conservatives arguing for higher wages and employers to provide training, while Labour want to throw hundreds of thousands of cheap immigrants at the problem, to prop up the supermarkets’ profits.
Spot on. Labour has forgotten their original purpose - swamped by internationalism
"Workers *of the world* unite" is the phrase! Internationalism isn't a new development for the Labour movement. Blaming immigrants for low wages is as old as the hills - eg Moseley in the thirties.
Wages are set by supply and demand. Unlimited supply of labour reduces incentives to invest in training and pay labour more. It’s basic economics.
“Workers of the world unite” was a political slogan not an economic one
The interesting thing is that the demand for importing cheap labour because the locals are lazy, bolshy etc was the exact argument of the Peruvian upper class - they imported a lot of Japanese people at the end of the 19th cent to work the guano.
Essentially the locals wanted more money* and the hacienda types didn't want to invest in machinery.
*EDIT In addition to money, they wanted not to be beaten to death by overseers.
I've said before that I tend to really respect jobs that need doing, but I wouldn't want to do myself. At uni I had a friend who had worked in one, and his stories were...interesting. I've also been in one on a few occasions (*), and even though clean and bright, there's something heavy about them, spirit-wise.
Hence, even if it is semi-skilled, abattoir workers should be being paid much more than they are. It's an awful, soul-destroying job.
(*) Abattoirs have sumps where... well, you can guess what ends up in them. Every so often these need cleaning out, so we hired a pump to do it. A pump and pipework that was kept for that express purpose, and was kept on a part of the depot well away from anything else as, even after cleaning, it stank. (AFAICR the sump had its own pump, that would often break down and so they had to hire one in to drain the sump, so some poor sod could go down and fix it.)
Most of this problem ultimately comes back to the supermarket sector. If they didn’t demand meat at extremely low prices, and sometimes even at a loss, there wouldn’t be such an issue.
But then that begs another question, of course - are people willing to pay the cost of production?
This is just the nature of capitalism - competition driving down prices and squeezing costs at every stage of production. It's well covered in books like the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It's the great strength but also the great weakness of capitalism as an economic system, when those costs getting squeezed are human beings. It's why I vote Labour, for enlightened policies to temper capitalism with interventions to protect people from the remorseless logic of the system - but still capturing the positive elements of that system as much as possible.
Yet now it’s the Conservatives arguing for higher wages and employers to provide training, while Labour want to throw hundreds of thousands of cheap immigrants at the problem, to prop up the supermarkets’ profits.
My question is how and why these companies are to provide training to "drive up productivity". The Tories want labour mobility, which means as soon as you finish training a driver they are out the door. Wouldn't happen if we re-unionised the sector. And drivers are hardly unproductive - being harried every minute of every shift is a reason why so many are not coming back into it having left.
There is a simple reality here - British workers don't want the work. Whether it is in factories or care homes or a whole stack of jobs, we don't want them. You can say "pay more" but the point where we stopped wanting to do them relative pay was higher.
I have a lot of sympathy for the Tory thinkers who wrote the "British workers are lazy" book. I have worked for various companies with various facilities where it is clear and obviously true. Eastern Europeans became so popular not because they were cheaper, but because they actually turned up to do the job.
But you need to look at why British Labour relations are so poor compared to much of our neighbours in Northern Europe in the historical round.
Britain's postwar settlement disguised class and employer-employee relations that were still feudal. The union militancy of the 1970's was the flipside of an almost seigneurially abusive attitude from many large employers compared to countries like Germany or Sweden. Thatcher then "solved" this by a scorched-earth victory for the employers. The alienation in the British Labour market is deep-seated and deep-rooted, and I would very strongly reject blaming that just on the employees.
I don't blame the employees! I said this was structural not the fault of individuals. We need to equip and empower a workforce for the 21st century and we aren't going to do that by only focusing on warehouse and delivery jobs.
The part of the Starmer speech was was surprising was "The Good Society and the Strong Economy need each other" because its sad that this needs to be said. Companies need a workforce productive and engaged, employees need companies supportive and nurturing.
We are a long way from getting this. Too few people are unionised and frankly several of the big unions seem wedded to overthrowing capitalism still. Too few companies give a shit about their employees and the tax system gives no incentive to the long term investment in people.
Unions are not the solution. Unions are just as much a distortion, trying to get businesses to pay above market rates, as the current issue of businesses trying to get employees in for below market rates.
Just stand back and laissez-faire. Let the productive employers find the productive employees.
Unions try to ensure there is no other supply available so they can get away with picket lines etc, while 'free movement' ensured there was an infinite supply available. What we need is simply what we have now a competitive market with a finite supply.
I’m guessing that worlld natural gas prices are going to be bid up for a while yet…
The proximate cause of this is reportedly coal shortages, but energy is energy, and the Asian region is a very large buyer of gas. In #Suzhou several factories supplying Apple have reportedly suspended production due to electricity cuts. https://twitter.com/StephenMcDonell/status/1443158297268396035
It clearly suits Putin to divert what gas he can to China and Asia more widely, while squeezing supply to Europe and being able to sell at much higher prices. And it’s not even winter yet.
Maybe the new German Chancellor might want to think about how dependent his country now is on Mr Putin, and his ability to keep his people warm and with power over the next few months.
The cost equation of WFH has been a bit of a no-brainer the last 18 months. But faced with heating bills 50pc higher the office might look a bit more attractive this winter.
Need to get a log burner for the home office I think
Am I right that you have land in the middle of nowhere?
I'm a bit sceptical about log burners except where people have free wood, and enjoy chopping. What will the payback period be?
When it is cheaper to commute to work than pay the £1 a day it might cost to heat a room, then perhaps one needs to reflect .
Indeed I do. But the wood doesn’t need to be free for it to be cost effective or environmentally sound, depending on your alternative. Which for me is heading oil. Looked into heat pumps but they’re an expensive, power hungry and noisy option right now.
I’m guessing that worlld natural gas prices are going to be bid up for a while yet…
The proximate cause of this is reportedly coal shortages, but energy is energy, and the Asian region is a very large buyer of gas. In #Suzhou several factories supplying Apple have reportedly suspended production due to electricity cuts. https://twitter.com/StephenMcDonell/status/1443158297268396035
It clearly suits Putin to divert what gas he can to China and Asia more widely, while squeezing supply to Europe and being able to sell at much higher prices. And it’s not even winter yet.
Maybe the new German Chancellor might want to think about how dependent his country now is on Mr Putin, and his ability to keep his people warm and with power over the next few months.
The cost equation of WFH has been a bit of a no-brainer the last 18 months. But faced with heating bills 50pc higher the office might look a bit more attractive this winter.
Need to get a log burner for the home office I think
Am I right that you have land in the middle of nowhere?
I'm a bit sceptical about log burners except where people have free wood, and enjoy chopping. What will the payback period be?
When it is cheaper to commute to work than pay the £1 a day it might cost to heat a room, then perhaps one needs to reflect .
Indeed I do. But the wood doesn’t need to be free for it to be cost effective or environmentally sound, depending on your alternative. Which for me is heading oil. Looked into heat pumps but they’re an expensive, power hungry and noisy option right now.
In Devon, 1 in 6 trees is ash - and I suspect from what I am seeing around me is that a significant portion of those will have to felled because of the danger of falling branches due to die back.
No shortage of wood to burn down here for many a year.
Ashes to ashes, to coin a phrase.
Interesting. Given that this area is called Ashfield, there may be some similar possibilities.
I was chatting to someone the other day about green roofs, and he was a bit nonplussed when I pointed out that a green roof essentially only fixes C02 once, whilst solar panels repeat the trick every year, unless he was proposing a peat bog on his roof. Yes, the green roof also recycles C02 to oxygen, but the overall arithmetic is the other way.
I've said before that I tend to really respect jobs that need doing, but I wouldn't want to do myself. At uni I had a friend who had worked in one, and his stories were...interesting. I've also been in one on a few occasions (*), and even though clean and bright, there's something heavy about them, spirit-wise.
Hence, even if it is semi-skilled, abattoir workers should be being paid much more than they are. It's an awful, soul-destroying job.
(*) Abattoirs have sumps where... well, you can guess what ends up in them. Every so often these need cleaning out, so we hired a pump to do it. A pump and pipework that was kept for that express purpose, and was kept on a part of the depot well away from anything else as, even after cleaning, it stank. (AFAICR the sump had its own pump, that would often break down and so they had to hire one in to drain the sump, so some poor sod could go down and fix it.)
Most of this problem ultimately comes back to the supermarket sector. If they didn’t demand meat at extremely low prices, and sometimes even at a loss, there wouldn’t be such an issue.
But then that begs another question, of course - are people willing to pay the cost of production?
This is just the nature of capitalism - competition driving down prices and squeezing costs at every stage of production. It's well covered in books like the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It's the great strength but also the great weakness of capitalism as an economic system, when those costs getting squeezed are human beings. It's why I vote Labour, for enlightened policies to temper capitalism with interventions to protect people from the remorseless logic of the system - but still capturing the positive elements of that system as much as possible.
Yet now it’s the Conservatives arguing for higher wages and employers to provide training, while Labour want to throw hundreds of thousands of cheap immigrants at the problem, to prop up the supermarkets’ profits.
Spot on. Labour has forgotten their original purpose - swamped by internationalism
"Workers *of the world* unite" is the phrase! Internationalism isn't a new development for the Labour movement. Blaming immigrants for low wages is as old as the hills - eg Moseley in the thirties.
Wages are set by supply and demand. Unlimited supply of labour reduces incentives to invest in training and pay labour more. It’s basic economics.
“Workers of the world unite” was a political slogan not an economic one
It's an economic slogan as much as a political one. In a world where workers can't move the jobs will instead. That's why Marx thought you could only liberate workers by liberating all of them. (I'm not a Marxist BTW). If I were a low paid worker I would be wary of relying on supply and demand for pay rises. Today's excess demand can quickly become tomorrow's excess supply, and the high wage Tory cheerleaders on here would be calling for pay cuts before you knew it. Still, good luck to them, I hope they make hay while the sun shines, and it comes out of the pockets of the bosses and not other low paid workers in the shape of higher prices.
I've said before that I tend to really respect jobs that need doing, but I wouldn't want to do myself. At uni I had a friend who had worked in one, and his stories were...interesting. I've also been in one on a few occasions (*), and even though clean and bright, there's something heavy about them, spirit-wise.
Hence, even if it is semi-skilled, abattoir workers should be being paid much more than they are. It's an awful, soul-destroying job.
(*) Abattoirs have sumps where... well, you can guess what ends up in them. Every so often these need cleaning out, so we hired a pump to do it. A pump and pipework that was kept for that express purpose, and was kept on a part of the depot well away from anything else as, even after cleaning, it stank. (AFAICR the sump had its own pump, that would often break down and so they had to hire one in to drain the sump, so some poor sod could go down and fix it.)
Most of this problem ultimately comes back to the supermarket sector. If they didn’t demand meat at extremely low prices, and sometimes even at a loss, there wouldn’t be such an issue.
But then that begs another question, of course - are people willing to pay the cost of production?
This is just the nature of capitalism - competition driving down prices and squeezing costs at every stage of production. It's well covered in books like the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It's the great strength but also the great weakness of capitalism as an economic system, when those costs getting squeezed are human beings. It's why I vote Labour, for enlightened policies to temper capitalism with interventions to protect people from the remorseless logic of the system - but still capturing the positive elements of that system as much as possible.
Yet now it’s the Conservatives arguing for higher wages and employers to provide training, while Labour want to throw hundreds of thousands of cheap immigrants at the problem, to prop up the supermarkets’ profits.
Spot on. Labour has forgotten their original purpose - swamped by internationalism
It's principally driven by the desperation to show that freedom of movement in the SM was a good thing that we shouldn't have given up, regardless of the consequences for their natural supporters.
Their vision is a cheap labour, low productivity future where skilled, middle class professionals get a lot of services on the cheap, a good standard of living and the flexibility to move if they so want and the opportunity to sell their services into a bigger market so they can justify a higher price. I mean, from the viewpoint of a professional in London doing financial services etc where they UK is more than competitive you can see why this seems a no brainer but from the viewpoint of a former Labour supporter in the red wall its mainly downside. The absolute refusal to see that suggests to me that winning those supporters back is going to be problematic.
Worth pointing out that it is not just professionals that think Brexit is going badly. Even Leave voters were more likely to say going "very badly" vs "very well". If it wasn't Labour and related shortages, why do you think they feel that way?
If I were a fan of Brexit/the government, what would worry me most about that survey is the incredibly small proportion thinking that Brexit was going "very well". 4% overall? Only 7% of leavers?
Surely if all the promises of Brexit were on course to be fulfilled there would be a much higher % thinking that it was going very well thus far, while recognising that the process has a long way to go.
At what stage do Brexiteers switch their votes? I think its only when its very badly or a sustained over a long time fairly badly. The proportion who think its going very well vs fairly well or nothing in it doesn't matter much imo, they will all be government loyalists. And they can always pretend that the upsides will be seen in 50 years time too.
I've said before that I tend to really respect jobs that need doing, but I wouldn't want to do myself. At uni I had a friend who had worked in one, and his stories were...interesting. I've also been in one on a few occasions (*), and even though clean and bright, there's something heavy about them, spirit-wise.
Hence, even if it is semi-skilled, abattoir workers should be being paid much more than they are. It's an awful, soul-destroying job.
(*) Abattoirs have sumps where... well, you can guess what ends up in them. Every so often these need cleaning out, so we hired a pump to do it. A pump and pipework that was kept for that express purpose, and was kept on a part of the depot well away from anything else as, even after cleaning, it stank. (AFAICR the sump had its own pump, that would often break down and so they had to hire one in to drain the sump, so some poor sod could go down and fix it.)
Most of this problem ultimately comes back to the supermarket sector. If they didn’t demand meat at extremely low prices, and sometimes even at a loss, there wouldn’t be such an issue.
But then that begs another question, of course - are people willing to pay the cost of production?
This is just the nature of capitalism - competition driving down prices and squeezing costs at every stage of production. It's well covered in books like the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It's the great strength but also the great weakness of capitalism as an economic system, when those costs getting squeezed are human beings. It's why I vote Labour, for enlightened policies to temper capitalism with interventions to protect people from the remorseless logic of the system - but still capturing the positive elements of that system as much as possible.
Yet now it’s the Conservatives arguing for higher wages and employers to provide training, while Labour want to throw hundreds of thousands of cheap immigrants at the problem, to prop up the supermarkets’ profits.
Spot on. Labour has forgotten their original purpose - swamped by internationalism
It's principally driven by the desperation to show that freedom of movement in the SM was a good thing that we shouldn't have given up, regardless of the consequences for their natural supporters.
Their vision is a cheap labour, low productivity future where skilled, middle class professionals get a lot of services on the cheap, a good standard of living and the flexibility to move if they so want and the opportunity to sell their services into a bigger market so they can justify a higher price. I mean, from the viewpoint of a professional in London doing financial services etc where they UK is more than competitive you can see why this seems a no brainer but from the viewpoint of a former Labour supporter in the red wall its mainly downside. The absolute refusal to see that suggests to me that winning those supporters back is going to be problematic.
This is simplistic chattering class nonsense David. My girlfriend is red wall works band 3 in the NHS and is struggling because her team cannot recruit anyone.
She’s also worried about heating bills, the cost of petrol, and her salary not keeping pace with cost of living.
The idea that the ‘red wall’ are going to be happy with abstract ‘pay rises’ is frankly out of touch and insulting.
I guess the proof will be in the pudding. If wages outpace cost of living at the low end then you might be right but that remains to be seen.
Yes. There is a structural problem in the economy which Covid has amplified to both visibility and crisis point. We have simultaneously a punishing cost of living crisis and companies unable (and sometimes unwilling) to pay living wages. For all that "just pay more" is a simple solution, how does that work when none of the smaller companies can do and we then end up with a small number of giants with all that entails?
Nursing. Midwifery. HGV Drivers. Carers. Chefs - there are a stack of skilled professions who simply cannot recruit because of a combination of punitive training costs and low pay/crap conditions when you get there. And thats just skilled work, its even worse with unskilled.
As with 2 decades ago where you couldn't find plumbers, joiners, skilled tradespeople at any price we have a choice. Do we blame people and wait an indefinite period of time for people to be trained up and become available for work? Or do we import the workers because the work needs doing now?
To Make Brexit Work (great slogan btw) we need two things. One - make the points-based immigration system functional. Saying "yer barred" to anyone to pacify the red wall is daft. We need a shit ton of people so give them proper visas not a handful of "fuck off at Christmas" ones. Two - properly invest in skills and education so that we will have a pipeline of our own people coming through to replace migrants. As people can't afford their own training and companies won't due to high turnover, we will have to centralise it, a Manpower Services Commission for the 10s.
Part of the problem is forcing things to be graduate jobs. Nursing, for example, shouldn’t require 3 years academic study and £27k of debt. We need to be a lot more thoughtful.
Perhaps there is an argument for the government to fund training for a role which is then paid back by companies during someone’s first few years in the role? And would move with them to a new employer?
Totally agree about nursing. My wife was one of the last diploma nurse cohort I think. She left nursing but returned to help with Covid. She had to write a 4000 word reflective essay which took her days. She would've been much more use on the ward. She spent half a day learning how to reference articles and books correctly. Pointless.
I don't get the enduring appeal of James Bond films. Sorry.
I mean when I was a spotty teenager, thrilled by the gadgets and bikini girls, I loved them and recall that my first cinema experience without parents was to see The Spy Who Loved Me with my friend. But as an adult?
The franchise has a reputation for me of lame sets, dodgy acting and banal, implausible script. All-round a bit ... naff.
If you want to watch an action movie then JB films aren't in the same league as, say, the Bourne movies or the awesome and flawless Mad Max Thunder Road are they?
I hope that's not too controversial so as to make you choke on your cornflakes especially on James Bond Day.
JB films have been transformed by Bourne.
Once upon a time they were light hearted, self-parodic, and tremendous and unserious fun.
However, despite their copying Bourne, or trying to, they are long, lumbering, taking themselves far too seriously with hugely convoluted plots.
Both the Bond films and Doctor Who have fallen victim to the same phenomenon of believing the hype of a few obsessives.
The Bourne films moved that kind of film into a different league in the same way that the Matrix did with sci-fi. I think Daniel Craig worked hard to keep up with that but there is an incredible amount of baggage with Bond that the fanatics need to see which makes the films long and cumbersome. I will go and see the new Bond but I can't claim that I have been desperate to do so over the last year.
Like Dr Who, a couple of decades of rest would not go amiss.
I’ve not yet seen the latest Bond. But it’s an interesting quandary about how to reinvent it post Craig. The Big Bad in today’s world is of course China. But it’s also one of the biggest movie markets. So instead of plotting relevant to today’s threats, we get stuck in a cycle of quiet psycho terrorist type villains.
I’d go back to the beginning and do it as a lavish period action saga. Mad Men styling. Classic cars. Take away the silliness, comic book villains and plodding plotting of the originals. Draw a proper multi film plot arc rather than the retconning of Spectre and make-it-up-as-we-film of Quantum of Solace. A rounded character following a coherent arc, with a personality that can breath around the action sequences rather than be suffocated by them.
Much of the best bits of the Craig era followed this template but they should go full throttle with it.
Yes, I could see that working. A fairly stripped back Bond in a late Fifties/ early Sixties style, where his tastes fit pre counter-culture, and with a clear Cold War enemy. Part of what makes James Bond such a dinosaur is his 1950s style idea of sophistication, and a Britain which still was a world power. It makes as much sense to place him in the modern era as setting Poirot in modern London investigating County Lines.
Laura Pidcock absolutely hated the speech. That for me looms larger than the speech itself.
For me she rained on his parade, or as Angela Rayner might say " p****** on his chips".
This is not a Prime Minister or Government in waiting until Starmer punishes dissenters like Pidcock in the same way Johnson did to Soubry and Grieve, and Corbyn did to Umuna.
I've said before that I tend to really respect jobs that need doing, but I wouldn't want to do myself. At uni I had a friend who had worked in one, and his stories were...interesting. I've also been in one on a few occasions (*), and even though clean and bright, there's something heavy about them, spirit-wise.
Hence, even if it is semi-skilled, abattoir workers should be being paid much more than they are. It's an awful, soul-destroying job.
(*) Abattoirs have sumps where... well, you can guess what ends up in them. Every so often these need cleaning out, so we hired a pump to do it. A pump and pipework that was kept for that express purpose, and was kept on a part of the depot well away from anything else as, even after cleaning, it stank. (AFAICR the sump had its own pump, that would often break down and so they had to hire one in to drain the sump, so some poor sod could go down and fix it.)
Most of this problem ultimately comes back to the supermarket sector. If they didn’t demand meat at extremely low prices, and sometimes even at a loss, there wouldn’t be such an issue.
But then that begs another question, of course - are people willing to pay the cost of production?
This is just the nature of capitalism - competition driving down prices and squeezing costs at every stage of production. It's well covered in books like the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It's the great strength but also the great weakness of capitalism as an economic system, when those costs getting squeezed are human beings. It's why I vote Labour, for enlightened policies to temper capitalism with interventions to protect people from the remorseless logic of the system - but still capturing the positive elements of that system as much as possible.
Yet now it’s the Conservatives arguing for higher wages and employers to provide training, while Labour want to throw hundreds of thousands of cheap immigrants at the problem, to prop up the supermarkets’ profits.
Spot on. Labour has forgotten their original purpose - swamped by internationalism
It's principally driven by the desperation to show that freedom of movement in the SM was a good thing that we shouldn't have given up, regardless of the consequences for their natural supporters.
Their vision is a cheap labour, low productivity future where skilled, middle class professionals get a lot of services on the cheap, a good standard of living and the flexibility to move if they so want and the opportunity to sell their services into a bigger market so they can justify a higher price. I mean, from the viewpoint of a professional in London doing financial services etc where they UK is more than competitive you can see why this seems a no brainer but from the viewpoint of a former Labour supporter in the red wall its mainly downside. The absolute refusal to see that suggests to me that winning those supporters back is going to be problematic.
There was not a hint of contrition from Starmer or the wider Labour Party towards those who felt that Labour had screwed them over, and out of frustration turned first to Brexit and then the Tories.
I've said before that I tend to really respect jobs that need doing, but I wouldn't want to do myself. At uni I had a friend who had worked in one, and his stories were...interesting. I've also been in one on a few occasions (*), and even though clean and bright, there's something heavy about them, spirit-wise.
Hence, even if it is semi-skilled, abattoir workers should be being paid much more than they are. It's an awful, soul-destroying job.
(*) Abattoirs have sumps where... well, you can guess what ends up in them. Every so often these need cleaning out, so we hired a pump to do it. A pump and pipework that was kept for that express purpose, and was kept on a part of the depot well away from anything else as, even after cleaning, it stank. (AFAICR the sump had its own pump, that would often break down and so they had to hire one in to drain the sump, so some poor sod could go down and fix it.)
Most of this problem ultimately comes back to the supermarket sector. If they didn’t demand meat at extremely low prices, and sometimes even at a loss, there wouldn’t be such an issue.
But then that begs another question, of course - are people willing to pay the cost of production?
This is just the nature of capitalism - competition driving down prices and squeezing costs at every stage of production. It's well covered in books like the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It's the great strength but also the great weakness of capitalism as an economic system, when those costs getting squeezed are human beings. It's why I vote Labour, for enlightened policies to temper capitalism with interventions to protect people from the remorseless logic of the system - but still capturing the positive elements of that system as much as possible.
Yet now it’s the Conservatives arguing for higher wages and employers to provide training, while Labour want to throw hundreds of thousands of cheap immigrants at the problem, to prop up the supermarkets’ profits.
Spot on. Labour has forgotten their original purpose - swamped by internationalism
It's principally driven by the desperation to show that freedom of movement in the SM was a good thing that we shouldn't have given up, regardless of the consequences for their natural supporters.
Their vision is a cheap labour, low productivity future where skilled, middle class professionals get a lot of services on the cheap, a good standard of living and the flexibility to move if they so want and the opportunity to sell their services into a bigger market so they can justify a higher price. I mean, from the viewpoint of a professional in London doing financial services etc where they UK is more than competitive you can see why this seems a no brainer but from the viewpoint of a former Labour supporter in the red wall its mainly downside. The absolute refusal to see that suggests to me that winning those supporters back is going to be problematic.
This is simplistic chattering class nonsense David. My girlfriend is red wall works band 3 in the NHS and is struggling because her team cannot recruit anyone.
She’s also worried about heating bills, the cost of petrol, and her salary not keeping pace with cost of living.
The idea that the ‘red wall’ are going to be happy with abstract ‘pay rises’ is frankly out of touch and insulting.
I guess the proof will be in the pudding. If wages outpace cost of living at the low end then you might be right but that remains to be seen.
Yes. There is a structural problem in the economy which Covid has amplified to both visibility and crisis point. We have simultaneously a punishing cost of living crisis and companies unable (and sometimes unwilling) to pay living wages. For all that "just pay more" is a simple solution, how does that work when none of the smaller companies can do and we then end up with a small number of giants with all that entails?
Nursing. Midwifery. HGV Drivers. Carers. Chefs - there are a stack of skilled professions who simply cannot recruit because of a combination of punitive training costs and low pay/crap conditions when you get there. And thats just skilled work, its even worse with unskilled.
As with 2 decades ago where you couldn't find plumbers, joiners, skilled tradespeople at any price we have a choice. Do we blame people and wait an indefinite period of time for people to be trained up and become available for work? Or do we import the workers because the work needs doing now?
To Make Brexit Work (great slogan btw) we need two things. One - make the points-based immigration system functional. Saying "yer barred" to anyone to pacify the red wall is daft. We need a shit ton of people so give them proper visas not a handful of "fuck off at Christmas" ones. Two - properly invest in skills and education so that we will have a pipeline of our own people coming through to replace migrants. As people can't afford their own training and companies won't due to high turnover, we will have to centralise it, a Manpower Services Commission for the 10s.
Part of the problem is forcing things to be graduate jobs. Nursing, for example, shouldn’t require 3 years academic study and £27k of debt. We need to be a lot more thoughtful.
Perhaps there is an argument for the government to fund training for a role which is then paid back by companies during someone’s first few years in the role? And would move with them to a new employer?
Totally agree about nursing. My wife was one of the last diploma nurse cohort I think. She left nursing but returned to help with Covid. She had to write a 4000 word reflective essay which took her days. She would've been much more use on the ward. She spent half a day learning how to reference articles and books correctly. Pointless.
The genius in making nursing more academic and medically knowledgable has been.. the creation of various new jobs for people to do the tasks discarded.
I've said before that I tend to really respect jobs that need doing, but I wouldn't want to do myself. At uni I had a friend who had worked in one, and his stories were...interesting. I've also been in one on a few occasions (*), and even though clean and bright, there's something heavy about them, spirit-wise.
Hence, even if it is semi-skilled, abattoir workers should be being paid much more than they are. It's an awful, soul-destroying job.
(*) Abattoirs have sumps where... well, you can guess what ends up in them. Every so often these need cleaning out, so we hired a pump to do it. A pump and pipework that was kept for that express purpose, and was kept on a part of the depot well away from anything else as, even after cleaning, it stank. (AFAICR the sump had its own pump, that would often break down and so they had to hire one in to drain the sump, so some poor sod could go down and fix it.)
Most of this problem ultimately comes back to the supermarket sector. If they didn’t demand meat at extremely low prices, and sometimes even at a loss, there wouldn’t be such an issue.
But then that begs another question, of course - are people willing to pay the cost of production?
This is just the nature of capitalism - competition driving down prices and squeezing costs at every stage of production. It's well covered in books like the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It's the great strength but also the great weakness of capitalism as an economic system, when those costs getting squeezed are human beings. It's why I vote Labour, for enlightened policies to temper capitalism with interventions to protect people from the remorseless logic of the system - but still capturing the positive elements of that system as much as possible.
Yet now it’s the Conservatives arguing for higher wages and employers to provide training, while Labour want to throw hundreds of thousands of cheap immigrants at the problem, to prop up the supermarkets’ profits.
Spot on. Labour has forgotten their original purpose - swamped by internationalism
"Workers *of the world* unite" is the phrase! Internationalism isn't a new development for the Labour movement. Blaming immigrants for low wages is as old as the hills - eg Moseley in the thirties.
Wages are set by supply and demand. Unlimited supply of labour reduces incentives to invest in training and pay labour more. It’s basic economics.
“Workers of the world unite” was a political slogan not an economic one
It's an economic slogan as much as a political one. In a world where workers can't move the jobs will instead. That's why Marx thought you could only liberate workers by liberating all of them. (I'm not a Marxist BTW). If I were a low paid worker I would be wary of relying on supply and demand for pay rises. Today's excess demand can quickly become tomorrow's excess supply, and the high wage Tory cheerleaders on here would be calling for pay cuts before you knew it. Still, good luck to them, I hope they make hay while the sun shines, and it comes out of the pockets of the bosses and not other low paid workers in the shape of higher prices.
Liberation is a political concept - it was all about uniting to take control of the “commanding heights” of the economy
I've said before that I tend to really respect jobs that need doing, but I wouldn't want to do myself. At uni I had a friend who had worked in one, and his stories were...interesting. I've also been in one on a few occasions (*), and even though clean and bright, there's something heavy about them, spirit-wise.
Hence, even if it is semi-skilled, abattoir workers should be being paid much more than they are. It's an awful, soul-destroying job.
(*) Abattoirs have sumps where... well, you can guess what ends up in them. Every so often these need cleaning out, so we hired a pump to do it. A pump and pipework that was kept for that express purpose, and was kept on a part of the depot well away from anything else as, even after cleaning, it stank. (AFAICR the sump had its own pump, that would often break down and so they had to hire one in to drain the sump, so some poor sod could go down and fix it.)
Most of this problem ultimately comes back to the supermarket sector. If they didn’t demand meat at extremely low prices, and sometimes even at a loss, there wouldn’t be such an issue.
But then that begs another question, of course - are people willing to pay the cost of production?
This is just the nature of capitalism - competition driving down prices and squeezing costs at every stage of production. It's well covered in books like the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It's the great strength but also the great weakness of capitalism as an economic system, when those costs getting squeezed are human beings. It's why I vote Labour, for enlightened policies to temper capitalism with interventions to protect people from the remorseless logic of the system - but still capturing the positive elements of that system as much as possible.
Yet now it’s the Conservatives arguing for higher wages and employers to provide training, while Labour want to throw hundreds of thousands of cheap immigrants at the problem, to prop up the supermarkets’ profits.
Spot on. Labour has forgotten their original purpose - swamped by internationalism
"Workers *of the world* unite" is the phrase! Internationalism isn't a new development for the Labour movement. Blaming immigrants for low wages is as old as the hills - eg Moseley in the thirties.
Wages are set by supply and demand. Unlimited supply of labour reduces incentives to invest in training and pay labour more. It’s basic economics.
“Workers of the world unite” was a political slogan not an economic one
It's an economic slogan as much as a political one. In a world where workers can't move the jobs will instead. That's why Marx thought you could only liberate workers by liberating all of them. (I'm not a Marxist BTW). If I were a low paid worker I would be wary of relying on supply and demand for pay rises. Today's excess demand can quickly become tomorrow's excess supply, and the high wage Tory cheerleaders on here would be calling for pay cuts before you knew it. Still, good luck to them, I hope they make hay while the sun shines, and it comes out of the pockets of the bosses and not other low paid workers in the shape of higher prices.
Liberation is a political concept - it was all about uniting to take control of the “commanding heights” of the economy
I've said before that I tend to really respect jobs that need doing, but I wouldn't want to do myself. At uni I had a friend who had worked in one, and his stories were...interesting. I've also been in one on a few occasions (*), and even though clean and bright, there's something heavy about them, spirit-wise.
Hence, even if it is semi-skilled, abattoir workers should be being paid much more than they are. It's an awful, soul-destroying job.
(*) Abattoirs have sumps where... well, you can guess what ends up in them. Every so often these need cleaning out, so we hired a pump to do it. A pump and pipework that was kept for that express purpose, and was kept on a part of the depot well away from anything else as, even after cleaning, it stank. (AFAICR the sump had its own pump, that would often break down and so they had to hire one in to drain the sump, so some poor sod could go down and fix it.)
Most of this problem ultimately comes back to the supermarket sector. If they didn’t demand meat at extremely low prices, and sometimes even at a loss, there wouldn’t be such an issue.
But then that begs another question, of course - are people willing to pay the cost of production?
This is just the nature of capitalism - competition driving down prices and squeezing costs at every stage of production. It's well covered in books like the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It's the great strength but also the great weakness of capitalism as an economic system, when those costs getting squeezed are human beings. It's why I vote Labour, for enlightened policies to temper capitalism with interventions to protect people from the remorseless logic of the system - but still capturing the positive elements of that system as much as possible.
Yet now it’s the Conservatives arguing for higher wages and employers to provide training, while Labour want to throw hundreds of thousands of cheap immigrants at the problem, to prop up the supermarkets’ profits.
My question is how and why these companies are to provide training to "drive up productivity". The Tories want labour mobility, which means as soon as you finish training a driver they are out the door. Wouldn't happen if we re-unionised the sector. And drivers are hardly unproductive - being harried every minute of every shift is a reason why so many are not coming back into it having left.
There is a simple reality here - British workers don't want the work. Whether it is in factories or care homes or a whole stack of jobs, we don't want them. You can say "pay more" but the point where we stopped wanting to do them relative pay was higher.
I have a lot of sympathy for the Tory thinkers who wrote the "British workers are lazy" book. I have worked for various companies with various facilities where it is clear and obviously true. Eastern Europeans became so popular not because they were cheaper, but because they actually turned up to do the job.
But you need to look at why British Labour relations are so poor compared to much of our neighbours in Northern Europe in the historical round.
Britain's postwar settlement disguised class and employer-employee relations that were still feudal. The union militancy of the 1970's was the flipside of an almost seigneurially abusive attitude from many large employers compared to countries like Germany or Sweden. Thatcher then "solved" this by a scorched-earth victory for the employers. The alienation in the British Labour market is deep-seated and deep-rooted, and I would very strongly reject blaming that just on the employees.
I don't blame the employees! I said this was structural not the fault of individuals. We need to equip and empower a workforce for the 21st century and we aren't going to do that by only focusing on warehouse and delivery jobs.
The part of the Starmer speech was was surprising was "The Good Society and the Strong Economy need each other" because its sad that this needs to be said. Companies need a workforce productive and engaged, employees need companies supportive and nurturing.
We are a long way from getting this. Too few people are unionised and frankly several of the big unions seem wedded to overthrowing capitalism still. Too few companies give a shit about their employees and the tax system gives no incentive to the long term investment in people.
Unions are not the solution. Unions are just as much a distortion, trying to get businesses to pay above market rates, as the current issue of businesses trying to get employees in for below market rates.
Just stand back and laissez-faire. Let the productive employers find the productive employees.
Unions try to ensure there is no other supply available so they can get away with picket lines etc, while 'free movement' ensured there was an infinite supply available. What we need is simply what we have now a competitive market with a finite supply.
Being unionised is the single most effective way of achieving better pay and conditions. That is just a fact. Perhaps Brexit will make it easier for workers to organise, one lives in hope.
I don't get the enduring appeal of James Bond films. Sorry.
I mean when I was a spotty teenager, thrilled by the gadgets and bikini girls, I loved them and recall that my first cinema experience without parents was to see The Spy Who Loved Me with my friend. But as an adult?
The franchise has a reputation for me of lame sets, dodgy acting and banal, implausible script. All-round a bit ... naff.
If you want to watch an action movie then JB films aren't in the same league as, say, the Bourne movies or the awesome and flawless Mad Max Thunder Road are they?
I hope that's not too controversial so as to make you choke on your cornflakes especially on James Bond Day.
JB films have been transformed by Bourne.
Once upon a time they were light hearted, self-parodic, and tremendous and unserious fun.
However, despite their copying Bourne, or trying to, they are long, lumbering, taking themselves far too seriously with hugely convoluted plots.
Both the Bond films and Doctor Who have fallen victim to the same phenomenon of believing the hype of a few obsessives.
The Bourne films moved that kind of film into a different league in the same way that the Matrix did with sci-fi. I think Daniel Craig worked hard to keep up with that but there is an incredible amount of baggage with Bond that the fanatics need to see which makes the films long and cumbersome. I will go and see the new Bond but I can't claim that I have been desperate to do so over the last year.
Like Dr Who, a couple of decades of rest would not go amiss.
I’ve not yet seen the latest Bond. But it’s an interesting quandary about how to reinvent it post Craig. The Big Bad in today’s world is of course China. But it’s also one of the biggest movie markets. So instead of plotting relevant to today’s threats, we get stuck in a cycle of quiet psycho terrorist type villains.
I’d go back to the beginning and do it as a lavish period action saga. Mad Men styling. Classic cars. Take away the silliness, comic book villains and plodding plotting of the originals. Draw a proper multi film plot arc rather than the retconning of Spectre and make-it-up-as-we-film of Quantum of Solace. A rounded character following a coherent arc, with a personality that can breath around the action sequences rather than be suffocated by them.
Much of the best bits of the Craig era followed this template but they should go full throttle with it.
Yes, I could see that working. A fairly stripped back Bond in a late Fifties/ early Sixties style, where his tastes fit pre counter-culture, and with a clear Cold War enemy. Part of what makes James Bond such a dinosaur is his 1950s style idea of sophistication, and a Britain which still was a world power. It makes as much sense to place him in the modern era as setting Poirot in modern London investigating County Lines.
Tarrentino apparently pitched doing Casino Royale from the book - set in the early 50s, unchanged...
EDIT: All the Bond films avoided direct references to Russia as the enemy. Even in From Russia With Love, the Russian element was explained as Russian defectors to SPECTRE - taking on both the Russians and the British...
I've said before that I tend to really respect jobs that need doing, but I wouldn't want to do myself. At uni I had a friend who had worked in one, and his stories were...interesting. I've also been in one on a few occasions (*), and even though clean and bright, there's something heavy about them, spirit-wise.
Hence, even if it is semi-skilled, abattoir workers should be being paid much more than they are. It's an awful, soul-destroying job.
(*) Abattoirs have sumps where... well, you can guess what ends up in them. Every so often these need cleaning out, so we hired a pump to do it. A pump and pipework that was kept for that express purpose, and was kept on a part of the depot well away from anything else as, even after cleaning, it stank. (AFAICR the sump had its own pump, that would often break down and so they had to hire one in to drain the sump, so some poor sod could go down and fix it.)
Most of this problem ultimately comes back to the supermarket sector. If they didn’t demand meat at extremely low prices, and sometimes even at a loss, there wouldn’t be such an issue.
But then that begs another question, of course - are people willing to pay the cost of production?
This is just the nature of capitalism - competition driving down prices and squeezing costs at every stage of production. It's well covered in books like the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It's the great strength but also the great weakness of capitalism as an economic system, when those costs getting squeezed are human beings. It's why I vote Labour, for enlightened policies to temper capitalism with interventions to protect people from the remorseless logic of the system - but still capturing the positive elements of that system as much as possible.
Yet now it’s the Conservatives arguing for higher wages and employers to provide training, while Labour want to throw hundreds of thousands of cheap immigrants at the problem, to prop up the supermarkets’ profits.
Spot on. Labour has forgotten their original purpose - swamped by internationalism
It's principally driven by the desperation to show that freedom of movement in the SM was a good thing that we shouldn't have given up, regardless of the consequences for their natural supporters.
Their vision is a cheap labour, low productivity future where skilled, middle class professionals get a lot of services on the cheap, a good standard of living and the flexibility to move if they so want and the opportunity to sell their services into a bigger market so they can justify a higher price. I mean, from the viewpoint of a professional in London doing financial services etc where they UK is more than competitive you can see why this seems a no brainer but from the viewpoint of a former Labour supporter in the red wall its mainly downside. The absolute refusal to see that suggests to me that winning those supporters back is going to be problematic.
This is simplistic chattering class nonsense David. My girlfriend is red wall works band 3 in the NHS and is struggling because her team cannot recruit anyone.
She’s also worried about heating bills, the cost of petrol, and her salary not keeping pace with cost of living.
The idea that the ‘red wall’ are going to be happy with abstract ‘pay rises’ is frankly out of touch and insulting.
I guess the proof will be in the pudding. If wages outpace cost of living at the low end then you might be right but that remains to be seen.
Yes. There is a structural problem in the economy which Covid has amplified to both visibility and crisis point. We have simultaneously a punishing cost of living crisis and companies unable (and sometimes unwilling) to pay living wages. For all that "just pay more" is a simple solution, how does that work when none of the smaller companies can do and we then end up with a small number of giants with all that entails?
Nursing. Midwifery. HGV Drivers. Carers. Chefs - there are a stack of skilled professions who simply cannot recruit because of a combination of punitive training costs and low pay/crap conditions when you get there. And thats just skilled work, its even worse with unskilled.
As with 2 decades ago where you couldn't find plumbers, joiners, skilled tradespeople at any price we have a choice. Do we blame people and wait an indefinite period of time for people to be trained up and become available for work? Or do we import the workers because the work needs doing now?
To Make Brexit Work (great slogan btw) we need two things. One - make the points-based immigration system functional. Saying "yer barred" to anyone to pacify the red wall is daft. We need a shit ton of people so give them proper visas not a handful of "fuck off at Christmas" ones. Two - properly invest in skills and education so that we will have a pipeline of our own people coming through to replace migrants. As people can't afford their own training and companies won't due to high turnover, we will have to centralise it, a Manpower Services Commission for the 10s.
Part of the problem is forcing things to be graduate jobs. Nursing, for example, shouldn’t require 3 years academic study and £27k of debt. We need to be a lot more thoughtful.
Perhaps there is an argument for the government to fund training for a role which is then paid back by companies during someone’s first few years in the role? And would move with them to a new employer?
Totally agree about nursing. My wife was one of the last diploma nurse cohort I think. She left nursing but returned to help with Covid. She had to write a 4000 word reflective essay which took her days. She would've been much more use on the ward. She spent half a day learning how to reference articles and books correctly. Pointless.
The genius in making nursing more academic and medically knowledgable has been.. the creation of various new jobs for people to do the tasks discarded.
This is the thing. The role of ‘nurse’ in most people’s minds has been replaced by healthcare assistants who don’t require a degree as far as I’m aware.
The whole ‘nurses shouldn’t go to uni’ thing stinks of ‘back in my day…’
The question of whether the nhs should pay the fees is another question
It seems a very worthy idea but I am astounded at the money apparently being made from it. Are we in a bubble?
It’s not actual folding stuff. It’s just the implied value based on the price someone was willing to invest money at
And the more actual folding money that gets invested, the smaller the stake Mr Blair retains in the company.
But he’s still done well - pre money around £550m implying his stake £150-200m
Yes, but how much actual cash at that valuation? Could just as easily easily be a friend of his ‘investing’ £550k for 0.1%, so he can hype the valuation to drive down the rate of his own divestment.
The article says they raised £95m for a £650m valuation, so they sold a meaningful chunk of the company. 400 staff, but only "more than 5000 placements".
I can't make sense of the numbers.
That’s because they don’t make sense!
400 staff are going to be costing let’s say £40m a year, so they have two years of cash to ‘ramp up’ the actual work and start seeing revenues exceeding expenses. Maybe they’re simply hoping to get close and hope that a bigger player buys them out, maybe Microsoft/LinkedIn.
The valuation is based on the potential future of the business, rather than what they do today, but yes, it does look an awful lot like 1999 all over again.
It seems a very worthy idea but I am astounded at the money apparently being made from it. Are we in a bubble?
It’s not actual folding stuff. It’s just the implied value based on the price someone was willing to invest money at
Still, its basically a niche employment consultant. Where on earth are the cash flows that would justify such multiples of value? How much are companies prepared to pay to outsource something they could so easily do themselves (an advert for Google, for example, is likely to attract lots of bright young things)? They are talking about the company soon being worth $1bn. That is just weird.
Valuations are crazy right now
I can't remember the details but vaguely recall that Mr Blair's business model was similar to solar panel fitters, in that it relied heavily on indirect government subsidies, in this case the apprenticeship levy. I'd imagine there must be something similar in America given the new investment.
As an aside, I know a chap whose basic plan is, whenever a new government subsidy is announced, to work out if and how he can set up a company to exploit it. And he does not seem to be the only one. I am not sure it is commendable but then I guess that is what the government wants.
1. Far too much of the apprenticeship levy is soaked up by brokers, who act as middlemen between apprentices and employers; I'm not sure if that's what Blair is doing. 2. The apprenticeship market has far too many cowboys in it, offering very poor quality apprenticeships. See Ofsted reports passim. 3. Far too much of the apprenticeship levy money is being spent on training that is not actually new, but is simply re-badged; it was provided anyway by employers, but now they just get a government subsidy for it. 4. Far too much of the apprenticeship levy money is going to higher education, level 4/5 apprenticeships - stuff like business administration and psuedo-management courses - rather than training the next generation of skilled workers. 5. There are some brilliant, high-quality apprenticeship schemes, but not nearly enough (see Ofsted reports again).
Conclusion: apprenticeships are a mess, and there's some easy money being made by far too many people with far too little benefit.
I've said before that I tend to really respect jobs that need doing, but I wouldn't want to do myself. At uni I had a friend who had worked in one, and his stories were...interesting. I've also been in one on a few occasions (*), and even though clean and bright, there's something heavy about them, spirit-wise.
Hence, even if it is semi-skilled, abattoir workers should be being paid much more than they are. It's an awful, soul-destroying job.
(*) Abattoirs have sumps where... well, you can guess what ends up in them. Every so often these need cleaning out, so we hired a pump to do it. A pump and pipework that was kept for that express purpose, and was kept on a part of the depot well away from anything else as, even after cleaning, it stank. (AFAICR the sump had its own pump, that would often break down and so they had to hire one in to drain the sump, so some poor sod could go down and fix it.)
Most of this problem ultimately comes back to the supermarket sector. If they didn’t demand meat at extremely low prices, and sometimes even at a loss, there wouldn’t be such an issue.
But then that begs another question, of course - are people willing to pay the cost of production?
This is just the nature of capitalism - competition driving down prices and squeezing costs at every stage of production. It's well covered in books like the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It's the great strength but also the great weakness of capitalism as an economic system, when those costs getting squeezed are human beings. It's why I vote Labour, for enlightened policies to temper capitalism with interventions to protect people from the remorseless logic of the system - but still capturing the positive elements of that system as much as possible.
Yet now it’s the Conservatives arguing for higher wages and employers to provide training, while Labour want to throw hundreds of thousands of cheap immigrants at the problem, to prop up the supermarkets’ profits.
Spot on. Labour has forgotten their original purpose - swamped by internationalism
It's principally driven by the desperation to show that freedom of movement in the SM was a good thing that we shouldn't have given up, regardless of the consequences for their natural supporters.
Their vision is a cheap labour, low productivity future where skilled, middle class professionals get a lot of services on the cheap, a good standard of living and the flexibility to move if they so want and the opportunity to sell their services into a bigger market so they can justify a higher price. I mean, from the viewpoint of a professional in London doing financial services etc where they UK is more than competitive you can see why this seems a no brainer but from the viewpoint of a former Labour supporter in the red wall its mainly downside. The absolute refusal to see that suggests to me that winning those supporters back is going to be problematic.
This is simplistic chattering class nonsense David. My girlfriend is red wall works band 3 in the NHS and is struggling because her team cannot recruit anyone.
She’s also worried about heating bills, the cost of petrol, and her salary not keeping pace with cost of living.
The idea that the ‘red wall’ are going to be happy with abstract ‘pay rises’ is frankly out of touch and insulting.
I guess the proof will be in the pudding. If wages outpace cost of living at the low end then you might be right but that remains to be seen.
Yes. There is a structural problem in the economy which Covid has amplified to both visibility and crisis point. We have simultaneously a punishing cost of living crisis and companies unable (and sometimes unwilling) to pay living wages. For all that "just pay more" is a simple solution, how does that work when none of the smaller companies can do and we then end up with a small number of giants with all that entails?
Nursing. Midwifery. HGV Drivers. Carers. Chefs - there are a stack of skilled professions who simply cannot recruit because of a combination of punitive training costs and low pay/crap conditions when you get there. And thats just skilled work, its even worse with unskilled.
As with 2 decades ago where you couldn't find plumbers, joiners, skilled tradespeople at any price we have a choice. Do we blame people and wait an indefinite period of time for people to be trained up and become available for work? Or do we import the workers because the work needs doing now?
To Make Brexit Work (great slogan btw) we need two things. One - make the points-based immigration system functional. Saying "yer barred" to anyone to pacify the red wall is daft. We need a shit ton of people so give them proper visas not a handful of "fuck off at Christmas" ones. Two - properly invest in skills and education so that we will have a pipeline of our own people coming through to replace migrants. As people can't afford their own training and companies won't due to high turnover, we will have to centralise it, a Manpower Services Commission for the 10s.
Part of the problem is forcing things to be graduate jobs. Nursing, for example, shouldn’t require 3 years academic study and £27k of debt. We need to be a lot more thoughtful.
Perhaps there is an argument for the government to fund training for a role which is then paid back by companies during someone’s first few years in the role? And would move with them to a new employer?
Totally agree about nursing. My wife was one of the last diploma nurse cohort I think. She left nursing but returned to help with Covid. She had to write a 4000 word reflective essay which took her days. She would've been much more use on the ward. She spent half a day learning how to reference articles and books correctly. Pointless.
The genius in making nursing more academic and medically knowledgable has been.. the creation of various new jobs for people to do the tasks discarded.
This is the thing. The role of ‘nurse’ in most people’s minds has been replaced by healthcare assistants who don’t require a degree as far as I’m aware.
The whole ‘nurses shouldn’t go to uni’ thing stinks of ‘back in my day…’
The question of whether the nhs should pay the fees is another question
If healthcare needs some people with only on the job training and others with seven year degrees, it is surprising that many argue there is no place or roles for people with a 3 year degree.
I've said before that I tend to really respect jobs that need doing, but I wouldn't want to do myself. At uni I had a friend who had worked in one, and his stories were...interesting. I've also been in one on a few occasions (*), and even though clean and bright, there's something heavy about them, spirit-wise.
Hence, even if it is semi-skilled, abattoir workers should be being paid much more than they are. It's an awful, soul-destroying job.
(*) Abattoirs have sumps where... well, you can guess what ends up in them. Every so often these need cleaning out, so we hired a pump to do it. A pump and pipework that was kept for that express purpose, and was kept on a part of the depot well away from anything else as, even after cleaning, it stank. (AFAICR the sump had its own pump, that would often break down and so they had to hire one in to drain the sump, so some poor sod could go down and fix it.)
Most of this problem ultimately comes back to the supermarket sector. If they didn’t demand meat at extremely low prices, and sometimes even at a loss, there wouldn’t be such an issue.
But then that begs another question, of course - are people willing to pay the cost of production?
This is just the nature of capitalism - competition driving down prices and squeezing costs at every stage of production. It's well covered in books like the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It's the great strength but also the great weakness of capitalism as an economic system, when those costs getting squeezed are human beings. It's why I vote Labour, for enlightened policies to temper capitalism with interventions to protect people from the remorseless logic of the system - but still capturing the positive elements of that system as much as possible.
Yet now it’s the Conservatives arguing for higher wages and employers to provide training, while Labour want to throw hundreds of thousands of cheap immigrants at the problem, to prop up the supermarkets’ profits.
Spot on. Labour has forgotten their original purpose - swamped by internationalism
It's principally driven by the desperation to show that freedom of movement in the SM was a good thing that we shouldn't have given up, regardless of the consequences for their natural supporters.
Their vision is a cheap labour, low productivity future where skilled, middle class professionals get a lot of services on the cheap, a good standard of living and the flexibility to move if they so want and the opportunity to sell their services into a bigger market so they can justify a higher price. I mean, from the viewpoint of a professional in London doing financial services etc where they UK is more than competitive you can see why this seems a no brainer but from the viewpoint of a former Labour supporter in the red wall its mainly downside. The absolute refusal to see that suggests to me that winning those supporters back is going to be problematic.
Worth pointing out that it is not just professionals that think Brexit is going badly. Even Leave voters were more likely to say going "very badly" vs "very well". If it wasn't Labour and related shortages, why do you think they feel that way?
If I were a fan of Brexit/the government, what would worry me most about that survey is the incredibly small proportion thinking that Brexit was going "very well". 4% overall? Only 7% of leavers?
Surely if all the promises of Brexit were on course to be fulfilled there would be a much higher % thinking that it was going very well thus far, while recognising that the process has a long way to go.
Yes, those polling results are pretty damning, and not just the usual suspects when you look at the demographic breakdowns.
Fortunately nearly the entire 4% that believe "very well" appear on PB daily...
I've said before that I tend to really respect jobs that need doing, but I wouldn't want to do myself. At uni I had a friend who had worked in one, and his stories were...interesting. I've also been in one on a few occasions (*), and even though clean and bright, there's something heavy about them, spirit-wise.
Hence, even if it is semi-skilled, abattoir workers should be being paid much more than they are. It's an awful, soul-destroying job.
(*) Abattoirs have sumps where... well, you can guess what ends up in them. Every so often these need cleaning out, so we hired a pump to do it. A pump and pipework that was kept for that express purpose, and was kept on a part of the depot well away from anything else as, even after cleaning, it stank. (AFAICR the sump had its own pump, that would often break down and so they had to hire one in to drain the sump, so some poor sod could go down and fix it.)
Most of this problem ultimately comes back to the supermarket sector. If they didn’t demand meat at extremely low prices, and sometimes even at a loss, there wouldn’t be such an issue.
But then that begs another question, of course - are people willing to pay the cost of production?
This is just the nature of capitalism - competition driving down prices and squeezing costs at every stage of production. It's well covered in books like the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It's the great strength but also the great weakness of capitalism as an economic system, when those costs getting squeezed are human beings. It's why I vote Labour, for enlightened policies to temper capitalism with interventions to protect people from the remorseless logic of the system - but still capturing the positive elements of that system as much as possible.
Yet now it’s the Conservatives arguing for higher wages and employers to provide training, while Labour want to throw hundreds of thousands of cheap immigrants at the problem, to prop up the supermarkets’ profits.
Spot on. Labour has forgotten their original purpose - swamped by internationalism
It's principally driven by the desperation to show that freedom of movement in the SM was a good thing that we shouldn't have given up, regardless of the consequences for their natural supporters.
Their vision is a cheap labour, low productivity future where skilled, middle class professionals get a lot of services on the cheap, a good standard of living and the flexibility to move if they so want and the opportunity to sell their services into a bigger market so they can justify a higher price. I mean, from the viewpoint of a professional in London doing financial services etc where they UK is more than competitive you can see why this seems a no brainer but from the viewpoint of a former Labour supporter in the red wall its mainly downside. The absolute refusal to see that suggests to me that winning those supporters back is going to be problematic.
This is simplistic chattering class nonsense David. My girlfriend is red wall works band 3 in the NHS and is struggling because her team cannot recruit anyone.
She’s also worried about heating bills, the cost of petrol, and her salary not keeping pace with cost of living.
The idea that the ‘red wall’ are going to be happy with abstract ‘pay rises’ is frankly out of touch and insulting.
I guess the proof will be in the pudding. If wages outpace cost of living at the low end then you might be right but that remains to be seen.
Yes. There is a structural problem in the economy which Covid has amplified to both visibility and crisis point. We have simultaneously a punishing cost of living crisis and companies unable (and sometimes unwilling) to pay living wages. For all that "just pay more" is a simple solution, how does that work when none of the smaller companies can do and we then end up with a small number of giants with all that entails?
Nursing. Midwifery. HGV Drivers. Carers. Chefs - there are a stack of skilled professions who simply cannot recruit because of a combination of punitive training costs and low pay/crap conditions when you get there. And thats just skilled work, its even worse with unskilled.
As with 2 decades ago where you couldn't find plumbers, joiners, skilled tradespeople at any price we have a choice. Do we blame people and wait an indefinite period of time for people to be trained up and become available for work? Or do we import the workers because the work needs doing now?
To Make Brexit Work (great slogan btw) we need two things. One - make the points-based immigration system functional. Saying "yer barred" to anyone to pacify the red wall is daft. We need a shit ton of people so give them proper visas not a handful of "fuck off at Christmas" ones. Two - properly invest in skills and education so that we will have a pipeline of our own people coming through to replace migrants. As people can't afford their own training and companies won't due to high turnover, we will have to centralise it, a Manpower Services Commission for the 10s.
Part of the problem is forcing things to be graduate jobs. Nursing, for example, shouldn’t require 3 years academic study and £27k of debt. We need to be a lot more thoughtful.
Perhaps there is an argument for the government to fund training for a role which is then paid back by companies during someone’s first few years in the role? And would move with them to a new employer?
Totally agree about nursing. My wife was one of the last diploma nurse cohort I think. She left nursing but returned to help with Covid. She had to write a 4000 word reflective essay which took her days. She would've been much more use on the ward. She spent half a day learning how to reference articles and books correctly. Pointless.
The genius in making nursing more academic and medically knowledgable has been.. the creation of various new jobs for people to do the tasks discarded.
This is the thing. The role of ‘nurse’ in most people’s minds has been replaced by healthcare assistants who don’t require a degree as far as I’m aware.
The whole ‘nurses shouldn’t go to uni’ thing stinks of ‘back in my day…’
The question of whether the nhs should pay the fees is another question
I heard a story that healthcare assistants (at least their union representatives) wanted them to move up the qualification ladder, as well..... I presume this would require creating another group to be at the bottom?
When one of my daughters was in hospital (a while back) a rather angry man had a go at a group of people "lazing around at the nurses station" - his child had been waiting for something medical for a while....
None of them were actually medics - doctors or nurses. Just kids wearing a uniform who weren't allowed to do anything much on their own...
Laura Pidcock absolutely hated the speech. That for me looms larger than the speech itself.
For me she rained on his parade, or as Angela Rayner might say " p****** on his chips".
This is not a Prime Minister or Government in waiting until Starmer punishes dissenters like Pidcock in the same way Johnson did to Soubry and Grieve, and Corbyn did to Umuna.
Corbyn did nothing to Chuka Umunna who was one of several former frontbenchers who refused to serve under Corbyn, and who later left the party. All this of his own accord. Labour did not have the Stalinist purges that Tories enjoyed under Boris.
Laura Pidcock absolutely hated the speech. That for me looms larger than the speech itself.
For me she rained on his parade, or as Angela Rayner might say " p****** on his chips".
This is not a Prime Minister or Government in waiting until Starmer punishes dissenters like Pidcock in the same way Johnson did to Soubry and Grieve, and Corbyn did to Umuna.
Corbyn did nothing to Chuka Umunna who was one of several former frontbenchers who refused to serve under Corbyn, and who later left the party.
I don't get the enduring appeal of James Bond films. Sorry.
I mean when I was a spotty teenager, thrilled by the gadgets and bikini girls, I loved them and recall that my first cinema experience without parents was to see The Spy Who Loved Me with my friend. But as an adult?
The franchise has a reputation for me of lame sets, dodgy acting and banal, implausible script. All-round a bit ... naff.
If you want to watch an action movie then JB films aren't in the same league as, say, the Bourne movies or the awesome and flawless Mad Max Thunder Road are they?
I hope that's not too controversial so as to make you choke on your cornflakes especially on James Bond Day.
JB films have been transformed by Bourne.
Once upon a time they were light hearted, self-parodic, and tremendous and unserious fun.
However, despite their copying Bourne, or trying to, they are long, lumbering, taking themselves far too seriously with hugely convoluted plots.
Both the Bond films and Doctor Who have fallen victim to the same phenomenon of believing the hype of a few obsessives.
The Bourne films moved that kind of film into a different league in the same way that the Matrix did with sci-fi. I think Daniel Craig worked hard to keep up with that but there is an incredible amount of baggage with Bond that the fanatics need to see which makes the films long and cumbersome. I will go and see the new Bond but I can't claim that I have been desperate to do so over the last year.
Like Dr Who, a couple of decades of rest would not go amiss.
I’ve not yet seen the latest Bond. But it’s an interesting quandary about how to reinvent it post Craig. The Big Bad in today’s world is of course China. But it’s also one of the biggest movie markets. So instead of plotting relevant to today’s threats, we get stuck in a cycle of quiet psycho terrorist type villains.
I’d go back to the beginning and do it as a lavish period action saga. Mad Men styling. Classic cars. Take away the silliness, comic book villains and plodding plotting of the originals. Draw a proper multi film plot arc rather than the retconning of Spectre and make-it-up-as-we-film of Quantum of Solace. A rounded character following a coherent arc, with a personality that can breath around the action sequences rather than be suffocated by them.
Much of the best bits of the Craig era followed this template but they should go full throttle with it.
During lockdown I have watched most if not all the Bond films. Outside the Craig era, the only one I wouldn't ignite all copies of would be Goldfinger. (I wouldn't spare Quantum of Solace either.) But the rest of the Craig era stand up as a superb series of films.
Laura Pidcock absolutely hated the speech. That for me looms larger than the speech itself.
For me she rained on his parade, or as Angela Rayner might say " p****** on his chips".
This is not a Prime Minister or Government in waiting until Starmer punishes dissenters like Pidcock in the same way Johnson did to Soubry and Grieve, and Corbyn did to Umuna.
I've said before that I tend to really respect jobs that need doing, but I wouldn't want to do myself. At uni I had a friend who had worked in one, and his stories were...interesting. I've also been in one on a few occasions (*), and even though clean and bright, there's something heavy about them, spirit-wise.
Hence, even if it is semi-skilled, abattoir workers should be being paid much more than they are. It's an awful, soul-destroying job.
(*) Abattoirs have sumps where... well, you can guess what ends up in them. Every so often these need cleaning out, so we hired a pump to do it. A pump and pipework that was kept for that express purpose, and was kept on a part of the depot well away from anything else as, even after cleaning, it stank. (AFAICR the sump had its own pump, that would often break down and so they had to hire one in to drain the sump, so some poor sod could go down and fix it.)
Most of this problem ultimately comes back to the supermarket sector. If they didn’t demand meat at extremely low prices, and sometimes even at a loss, there wouldn’t be such an issue.
But then that begs another question, of course - are people willing to pay the cost of production?
This is just the nature of capitalism - competition driving down prices and squeezing costs at every stage of production. It's well covered in books like the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It's the great strength but also the great weakness of capitalism as an economic system, when those costs getting squeezed are human beings. It's why I vote Labour, for enlightened policies to temper capitalism with interventions to protect people from the remorseless logic of the system - but still capturing the positive elements of that system as much as possible.
Yet now it’s the Conservatives arguing for higher wages and employers to provide training, while Labour want to throw hundreds of thousands of cheap immigrants at the problem, to prop up the supermarkets’ profits.
Spot on. Labour has forgotten their original purpose - swamped by internationalism
It's principally driven by the desperation to show that freedom of movement in the SM was a good thing that we shouldn't have given up, regardless of the consequences for their natural supporters.
Their vision is a cheap labour, low productivity future where skilled, middle class professionals get a lot of services on the cheap, a good standard of living and the flexibility to move if they so want and the opportunity to sell their services into a bigger market so they can justify a higher price. I mean, from the viewpoint of a professional in London doing financial services etc where they UK is more than competitive you can see why this seems a no brainer but from the viewpoint of a former Labour supporter in the red wall its mainly downside. The absolute refusal to see that suggests to me that winning those supporters back is going to be problematic.
There was not a hint of contrition from Starmer or the wider Labour Party towards those who felt that Labour had screwed them over, and out of frustration turned first to Brexit and then the Tories.
Did Laura Pidcock write that post for you?
Haven’t the electorate of North West Durham, already made clear their view of Miss Pidcock?
I've said before that I tend to really respect jobs that need doing, but I wouldn't want to do myself. At uni I had a friend who had worked in one, and his stories were...interesting. I've also been in one on a few occasions (*), and even though clean and bright, there's something heavy about them, spirit-wise.
Hence, even if it is semi-skilled, abattoir workers should be being paid much more than they are. It's an awful, soul-destroying job.
(*) Abattoirs have sumps where... well, you can guess what ends up in them. Every so often these need cleaning out, so we hired a pump to do it. A pump and pipework that was kept for that express purpose, and was kept on a part of the depot well away from anything else as, even after cleaning, it stank. (AFAICR the sump had its own pump, that would often break down and so they had to hire one in to drain the sump, so some poor sod could go down and fix it.)
Most of this problem ultimately comes back to the supermarket sector. If they didn’t demand meat at extremely low prices, and sometimes even at a loss, there wouldn’t be such an issue.
But then that begs another question, of course - are people willing to pay the cost of production?
This is just the nature of capitalism - competition driving down prices and squeezing costs at every stage of production. It's well covered in books like the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It's the great strength but also the great weakness of capitalism as an economic system, when those costs getting squeezed are human beings. It's why I vote Labour, for enlightened policies to temper capitalism with interventions to protect people from the remorseless logic of the system - but still capturing the positive elements of that system as much as possible.
Yet now it’s the Conservatives arguing for higher wages and employers to provide training, while Labour want to throw hundreds of thousands of cheap immigrants at the problem, to prop up the supermarkets’ profits.
Spot on. Labour has forgotten their original purpose - swamped by internationalism
It's principally driven by the desperation to show that freedom of movement in the SM was a good thing that we shouldn't have given up, regardless of the consequences for their natural supporters.
Their vision is a cheap labour, low productivity future where skilled, middle class professionals get a lot of services on the cheap, a good standard of living and the flexibility to move if they so want and the opportunity to sell their services into a bigger market so they can justify a higher price. I mean, from the viewpoint of a professional in London doing financial services etc where they UK is more than competitive you can see why this seems a no brainer but from the viewpoint of a former Labour supporter in the red wall its mainly downside. The absolute refusal to see that suggests to me that winning those supporters back is going to be problematic.
Worth pointing out that it is not just professionals that think Brexit is going badly. Even Leave voters were more likely to say going "very badly" vs "very well". If it wasn't Labour and related shortages, why do you think they feel that way?
If I were a fan of Brexit/the government, what would worry me most about that survey is the incredibly small proportion thinking that Brexit was going "very well". 4% overall? Only 7% of leavers?
Surely if all the promises of Brexit were on course to be fulfilled there would be a much higher % thinking that it was going very well thus far, while recognising that the process has a long way to go.
Yes, those polling results are pretty damning, and not just the usual suspects when you look at the demographic breakdowns.
Fortunately nearly the entire 4% that believe "very well" appear on PB daily...
They correlate highly with those who believe petrol is flowing freely across the country.
I see Raab's brilliant plan is to let prisoners drive HGVs. Quite how or why they are going to jump the long queues for the tests or get the funding for the training is not clear yet.
I hope those flats are well insulated or that GSHP is not going to be running very efficiently…
To be fair the capital cost of drilling boreholes is much more attractive when split across many flats rather than one detached dwelling.
Yes - in general areas with lots of homes in proximity are best served by district heating (i.e. a central source with pipes to al lthe homes), with the added benefit that you don't need to clutter up your home with a boiler and worry about maintenance. I'd never known anything else when I grew up in blocks of flats in Denmark and Switzerland. The case is less clear when you have lots of detached houses.
We need to wait for the weekend polls to see if Labour has got any post conference bounce
Indeed and I would suggest we need to wait until the end of October/ early November to determine the overall effects of the conference speeches and of course the budget on the 27th October
I note HMG has announced a £500 million hardship fund to be available through local authorities no doubt to ameliorate the effects of the lost UC uplift and towards the increases in gas supply
It has been announced the UK economy has grown by 5.5% between April and June, higher than the previous estimate of 4.8%
And I did chuckle when Starmer said just now to Burley that his speech was so long because of the number of interruptions from the applause
We need to wait for the weekend polls to see if Labour has got any post conference bounce
True but it does appear that the Petrol Crisis (sic) hasn't hurt the Tories.
It might even enhance their standing.
Once Johnson took the reins personally, it was over... or it hasn't filtered through to the polling yet.
It might be more harmful to the Tories when more households come off fixed tariff energy contracts. I'm not sure many will care if something similar is happening across Europe.
Laura Pidcock absolutely hated the speech. That for me looms larger than the speech itself.
For me she rained on his parade, or as Angela Rayner might say " p****** on his chips".
This is not a Prime Minister or Government in waiting until Starmer punishes dissenters like Pidcock in the same way Johnson did to Soubry and Grieve, and Corbyn did to Umuna.
I've said before that I tend to really respect jobs that need doing, but I wouldn't want to do myself. At uni I had a friend who had worked in one, and his stories were...interesting. I've also been in one on a few occasions (*), and even though clean and bright, there's something heavy about them, spirit-wise.
Hence, even if it is semi-skilled, abattoir workers should be being paid much more than they are. It's an awful, soul-destroying job.
(*) Abattoirs have sumps where... well, you can guess what ends up in them. Every so often these need cleaning out, so we hired a pump to do it. A pump and pipework that was kept for that express purpose, and was kept on a part of the depot well away from anything else as, even after cleaning, it stank. (AFAICR the sump had its own pump, that would often break down and so they had to hire one in to drain the sump, so some poor sod could go down and fix it.)
Most of this problem ultimately comes back to the supermarket sector. If they didn’t demand meat at extremely low prices, and sometimes even at a loss, there wouldn’t be such an issue.
But then that begs another question, of course - are people willing to pay the cost of production?
This is just the nature of capitalism - competition driving down prices and squeezing costs at every stage of production. It's well covered in books like the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It's the great strength but also the great weakness of capitalism as an economic system, when those costs getting squeezed are human beings. It's why I vote Labour, for enlightened policies to temper capitalism with interventions to protect people from the remorseless logic of the system - but still capturing the positive elements of that system as much as possible.
Yet now it’s the Conservatives arguing for higher wages and employers to provide training, while Labour want to throw hundreds of thousands of cheap immigrants at the problem, to prop up the supermarkets’ profits.
Spot on. Labour has forgotten their original purpose - swamped by internationalism
It's principally driven by the desperation to show that freedom of movement in the SM was a good thing that we shouldn't have given up, regardless of the consequences for their natural supporters.
Their vision is a cheap labour, low productivity future where skilled, middle class professionals get a lot of services on the cheap, a good standard of living and the flexibility to move if they so want and the opportunity to sell their services into a bigger market so they can justify a higher price. I mean, from the viewpoint of a professional in London doing financial services etc where they UK is more than competitive you can see why this seems a no brainer but from the viewpoint of a former Labour supporter in the red wall its mainly downside. The absolute refusal to see that suggests to me that winning those supporters back is going to be problematic.
There was not a hint of contrition from Starmer or the wider Labour Party towards those who felt that Labour had screwed them over, and out of frustration turned first to Brexit and then the Tories.
Did Laura Pidcock write that post for you?
Haven’t the electorate of North West Durham, already made clear their view of Miss Pidcock?
She still loomed large yesterday on the BBC. And she hated the speech.
What we have here by my reckoning is a potential future party leader... if only they could find her a safe seat.
I hope those flats are well insulated or that GSHP is not going to be running very efficiently…
To be fair the capital cost of drilling boreholes is much more attractive when split across many flats rather than one detached dwelling.
Yes - in general areas with lots of homes in proximity are best served by district heating (i.e. a central source with pipes to al lthe homes), with the added benefit that you don't need to clutter up your home with a boiler and worry about maintenance. I'd never known anything else when I grew up in blocks of flats in Denmark and Switzerland. The case is less clear when you have lots of detached houses.
Indeed. In my part of the world, we have district cooling, which provides much the same function but for air-conditioning and cold water supply.
There was not a hint of contrition from Starmer or the wider Labour Party towards those who felt that Labour had screwed them over, and out of frustration turned first to Brexit and then the Tories.
"To those Labour voters who said their grandparents would turn in their graves, that they couldn’t trust us with high office, to those who reluctantly chose the Tories because they didn’t believe our promises were credible.
To the voters who thought we were unpatriotic or irresponsible or that we looked down on them, I say these simple but powerful words. We will never under my leadership go into an election with a manifesto that is not a serious plan for government."
Laura Pidcock absolutely hated the speech. That for me looms larger than the speech itself.
For me she rained on his parade, or as Angela Rayner might say " p****** on his chips".
This is not a Prime Minister or Government in waiting until Starmer punishes dissenters like Pidcock in the same way Johnson did to Soubry and Grieve, and Corbyn did to Umuna.
I've said before that I tend to really respect jobs that need doing, but I wouldn't want to do myself. At uni I had a friend who had worked in one, and his stories were...interesting. I've also been in one on a few occasions (*), and even though clean and bright, there's something heavy about them, spirit-wise.
Hence, even if it is semi-skilled, abattoir workers should be being paid much more than they are. It's an awful, soul-destroying job.
(*) Abattoirs have sumps where... well, you can guess what ends up in them. Every so often these need cleaning out, so we hired a pump to do it. A pump and pipework that was kept for that express purpose, and was kept on a part of the depot well away from anything else as, even after cleaning, it stank. (AFAICR the sump had its own pump, that would often break down and so they had to hire one in to drain the sump, so some poor sod could go down and fix it.)
Most of this problem ultimately comes back to the supermarket sector. If they didn’t demand meat at extremely low prices, and sometimes even at a loss, there wouldn’t be such an issue.
But then that begs another question, of course - are people willing to pay the cost of production?
This is just the nature of capitalism - competition driving down prices and squeezing costs at every stage of production. It's well covered in books like the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It's the great strength but also the great weakness of capitalism as an economic system, when those costs getting squeezed are human beings. It's why I vote Labour, for enlightened policies to temper capitalism with interventions to protect people from the remorseless logic of the system - but still capturing the positive elements of that system as much as possible.
Yet now it’s the Conservatives arguing for higher wages and employers to provide training, while Labour want to throw hundreds of thousands of cheap immigrants at the problem, to prop up the supermarkets’ profits.
Spot on. Labour has forgotten their original purpose - swamped by internationalism
It's principally driven by the desperation to show that freedom of movement in the SM was a good thing that we shouldn't have given up, regardless of the consequences for their natural supporters.
Their vision is a cheap labour, low productivity future where skilled, middle class professionals get a lot of services on the cheap, a good standard of living and the flexibility to move if they so want and the opportunity to sell their services into a bigger market so they can justify a higher price. I mean, from the viewpoint of a professional in London doing financial services etc where they UK is more than competitive you can see why this seems a no brainer but from the viewpoint of a former Labour supporter in the red wall its mainly downside. The absolute refusal to see that suggests to me that winning those supporters back is going to be problematic.
There was not a hint of contrition from Starmer or the wider Labour Party towards those who felt that Labour had screwed them over, and out of frustration turned first to Brexit and then the Tories.
Did Laura Pidcock write that post for you?
Haven’t the electorate of North West Durham, already made clear their view of Miss Pidcock?
She still loomed large yesterday on the BBC. And she hated the speech.
What we have here by my reckoning is a potential future party leader... if only they could find her a safe seat.
I've said before that I tend to really respect jobs that need doing, but I wouldn't want to do myself. At uni I had a friend who had worked in one, and his stories were...interesting. I've also been in one on a few occasions (*), and even though clean and bright, there's something heavy about them, spirit-wise.
Hence, even if it is semi-skilled, abattoir workers should be being paid much more than they are. It's an awful, soul-destroying job.
(*) Abattoirs have sumps where... well, you can guess what ends up in them. Every so often these need cleaning out, so we hired a pump to do it. A pump and pipework that was kept for that express purpose, and was kept on a part of the depot well away from anything else as, even after cleaning, it stank. (AFAICR the sump had its own pump, that would often break down and so they had to hire one in to drain the sump, so some poor sod could go down and fix it.)
Most of this problem ultimately comes back to the supermarket sector. If they didn’t demand meat at extremely low prices, and sometimes even at a loss, there wouldn’t be such an issue.
But then that begs another question, of course - are people willing to pay the cost of production?
This is just the nature of capitalism - competition driving down prices and squeezing costs at every stage of production. It's well covered in books like the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It's the great strength but also the great weakness of capitalism as an economic system, when those costs getting squeezed are human beings. It's why I vote Labour, for enlightened policies to temper capitalism with interventions to protect people from the remorseless logic of the system - but still capturing the positive elements of that system as much as possible.
Yet now it’s the Conservatives arguing for higher wages and employers to provide training, while Labour want to throw hundreds of thousands of cheap immigrants at the problem, to prop up the supermarkets’ profits.
My question is how and why these companies are to provide training to "drive up productivity". The Tories want labour mobility, which means as soon as you finish training a driver they are out the door. Wouldn't happen if we re-unionised the sector. And drivers are hardly unproductive - being harried every minute of every shift is a reason why so many are not coming back into it having left.
There is a simple reality here - British workers don't want the work. Whether it is in factories or care homes or a whole stack of jobs, we don't want them. You can say "pay more" but the point where we stopped wanting to do them relative pay was higher.
I have a lot of sympathy for the Tory thinkers who wrote the "British workers are lazy" book. I have worked for various companies with various facilities where it is clear and obviously true. Eastern Europeans became so popular not because they were cheaper, but because they actually turned up to do the job.
But you need to look at why British Labour relations are so poor compared to much of our neighbours in Northern Europe in the historical round.
Britain's postwar settlement disguised class and employer-employee relations that were still feudal. The union militancy of the 1970's was the flipside of an almost seigneurially abusive attitude from many large employers compared to countries like Germany or Sweden. Thatcher then "solved" this by a scorched-earth victory for the employers. The alienation in the British Labour market is deep-seated and deep-rooted, and I would very strongly reject blaming that just on the employees.
I don't blame the employees! I said this was structural not the fault of individuals. We need to equip and empower a workforce for the 21st century and we aren't going to do that by only focusing on warehouse and delivery jobs.
The part of the Starmer speech was was surprising was "The Good Society and the Strong Economy need each other" because its sad that this needs to be said. Companies need a workforce productive and engaged, employees need companies supportive and nurturing.
We are a long way from getting this. Too few people are unionised and frankly several of the big unions seem wedded to overthrowing capitalism still. Too few companies give a shit about their employees and the tax system gives no incentive to the long term investment in people.
Unions are not the solution. Unions are just as much a distortion, trying to get businesses to pay above market rates, as the current issue of businesses trying to get employees in for below market rates.
Just stand back and laissez-faire. Let the productive employers find the productive employees.
Unions try to ensure there is no other supply available so they can get away with picket lines etc, while 'free movement' ensured there was an infinite supply available. What we need is simply what we have now a competitive market with a finite supply.
Being unionised is the single most effective way of achieving better pay and conditions. That is just a fact. Perhaps Brexit will make it easier for workers to organise, one lives in hope.
Not convinced.
If we have Unions, they must be depoliticised. I would perhaps follow some aspects of the German Model.
Laura Pidcock absolutely hated the speech. That for me looms larger than the speech itself.
For me she rained on his parade, or as Angela Rayner might say " p****** on his chips".
This is not a Prime Minister or Government in waiting until Starmer punishes dissenters like Pidcock in the same way Johnson did to Soubry and Grieve, and Corbyn did to Umuna.
I've said before that I tend to really respect jobs that need doing, but I wouldn't want to do myself. At uni I had a friend who had worked in one, and his stories were...interesting. I've also been in one on a few occasions (*), and even though clean and bright, there's something heavy about them, spirit-wise.
Hence, even if it is semi-skilled, abattoir workers should be being paid much more than they are. It's an awful, soul-destroying job.
(*) Abattoirs have sumps where... well, you can guess what ends up in them. Every so often these need cleaning out, so we hired a pump to do it. A pump and pipework that was kept for that express purpose, and was kept on a part of the depot well away from anything else as, even after cleaning, it stank. (AFAICR the sump had its own pump, that would often break down and so they had to hire one in to drain the sump, so some poor sod could go down and fix it.)
Most of this problem ultimately comes back to the supermarket sector. If they didn’t demand meat at extremely low prices, and sometimes even at a loss, there wouldn’t be such an issue.
But then that begs another question, of course - are people willing to pay the cost of production?
This is just the nature of capitalism - competition driving down prices and squeezing costs at every stage of production. It's well covered in books like the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It's the great strength but also the great weakness of capitalism as an economic system, when those costs getting squeezed are human beings. It's why I vote Labour, for enlightened policies to temper capitalism with interventions to protect people from the remorseless logic of the system - but still capturing the positive elements of that system as much as possible.
Yet now it’s the Conservatives arguing for higher wages and employers to provide training, while Labour want to throw hundreds of thousands of cheap immigrants at the problem, to prop up the supermarkets’ profits.
Spot on. Labour has forgotten their original purpose - swamped by internationalism
It's principally driven by the desperation to show that freedom of movement in the SM was a good thing that we shouldn't have given up, regardless of the consequences for their natural supporters.
Their vision is a cheap labour, low productivity future where skilled, middle class professionals get a lot of services on the cheap, a good standard of living and the flexibility to move if they so want and the opportunity to sell their services into a bigger market so they can justify a higher price. I mean, from the viewpoint of a professional in London doing financial services etc where they UK is more than competitive you can see why this seems a no brainer but from the viewpoint of a former Labour supporter in the red wall its mainly downside. The absolute refusal to see that suggests to me that winning those supporters back is going to be problematic.
There was not a hint of contrition from Starmer or the wider Labour Party towards those who felt that Labour had screwed them over, and out of frustration turned first to Brexit and then the Tories.
Did Laura Pidcock write that post for you?
Haven’t the electorate of North West Durham, already made clear their view of Miss Pidcock?
She still loomed large yesterday on the BBC. And she hated the speech.
What we have here by my reckoning is a potential future party leader... if only they could find her a safe seat.
I don't get the enduring appeal of James Bond films. Sorry.
I mean when I was a spotty teenager, thrilled by the gadgets and bikini girls, I loved them and recall that my first cinema experience without parents was to see The Spy Who Loved Me with my friend. But as an adult?
The franchise has a reputation for me of lame sets, dodgy acting and banal, implausible script. All-round a bit ... naff.
If you want to watch an action movie then JB films aren't in the same league as, say, the Bourne movies or the awesome and flawless Mad Max Thunder Road are they?
I hope that's not too controversial so as to make you choke on your cornflakes especially on James Bond Day.
JB films have been transformed by Bourne.
Once upon a time they were light hearted, self-parodic, and tremendous and unserious fun.
However, despite their copying Bourne, or trying to, they are long, lumbering, taking themselves far too seriously with hugely convoluted plots.
Both the Bond films and Doctor Who have fallen victim to the same phenomenon of believing the hype of a few obsessives.
The Bourne films moved that kind of film into a different league in the same way that the Matrix did with sci-fi. I think Daniel Craig worked hard to keep up with that but there is an incredible amount of baggage with Bond that the fanatics need to see which makes the films long and cumbersome. I will go and see the new Bond but I can't claim that I have been desperate to do so over the last year.
Like Dr Who, a couple of decades of rest would not go amiss.
I’ve not yet seen the latest Bond. But it’s an interesting quandary about how to reinvent it post Craig. The Big Bad in today’s world is of course China. But it’s also one of the biggest movie markets. So instead of plotting relevant to today’s threats, we get stuck in a cycle of quiet psycho terrorist type villains.
I’d go back to the beginning and do it as a lavish period action saga. Mad Men styling. Classic cars. Take away the silliness, comic book villains and plodding plotting of the originals. Draw a proper multi film plot arc rather than the retconning of Spectre and make-it-up-as-we-film of Quantum of Solace. A rounded character following a coherent arc, with a personality that can breath around the action sequences rather than be suffocated by them.
Much of the best bits of the Craig era followed this template but they should go full throttle with it.
During lockdown I have watched most if not all the Bond films. Outside the Craig era, the only one I wouldn't ignite all copies of would be Goldfinger. (I wouldn't spare Quantum of Solace either.) But the rest of the Craig era stand up as a superb series of films.
The best early Bond film is "On He Majesty's Secret Service". It is more watchable than the entire Connery and Moore catalogues. Just a shame about Lazenby's acting performance.
Very interesting that no big Tory dent following the fuel chaos - johnson will be delighted with that, if it's borne out in other polls. Very high Green position again, too.
We need to wait for the weekend polls to see if Labour has got any post conference bounce
Indeed and I would suggest we need to wait until the end of October/ early November to determine the overall effects of the conference speeches and of course the budget on the 27th October
I note HMG has announced a £500 million hardship fund to be available through local authorities no doubt to ameliorate the effects of the lost UC uplift and towards the increases in gas supply
It has been announced the UK economy has grown by 5.5% between April and June, higher than the previous estimate of 4.8%
And I did chuckle when Starmer said just now to Burley that his speech was so long because of the number of interruptions from the applause
Last para made me laugh.
£500m isnt going to go very far if it's being shared between say 5m poorer households. Would have been better to delay the UC cut til spring. But that would cost more. Not sure how much.
Laura Pidcock absolutely hated the speech. That for me looms larger than the speech itself.
For me she rained on his parade, or as Angela Rayner might say " p****** on his chips".
This is not a Prime Minister or Government in waiting until Starmer punishes dissenters like Pidcock in the same way Johnson did to Soubry and Grieve, and Corbyn did to Umuna.
I've said before that I tend to really respect jobs that need doing, but I wouldn't want to do myself. At uni I had a friend who had worked in one, and his stories were...interesting. I've also been in one on a few occasions (*), and even though clean and bright, there's something heavy about them, spirit-wise.
Hence, even if it is semi-skilled, abattoir workers should be being paid much more than they are. It's an awful, soul-destroying job.
(*) Abattoirs have sumps where... well, you can guess what ends up in them. Every so often these need cleaning out, so we hired a pump to do it. A pump and pipework that was kept for that express purpose, and was kept on a part of the depot well away from anything else as, even after cleaning, it stank. (AFAICR the sump had its own pump, that would often break down and so they had to hire one in to drain the sump, so some poor sod could go down and fix it.)
Most of this problem ultimately comes back to the supermarket sector. If they didn’t demand meat at extremely low prices, and sometimes even at a loss, there wouldn’t be such an issue.
But then that begs another question, of course - are people willing to pay the cost of production?
This is just the nature of capitalism - competition driving down prices and squeezing costs at every stage of production. It's well covered in books like the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It's the great strength but also the great weakness of capitalism as an economic system, when those costs getting squeezed are human beings. It's why I vote Labour, for enlightened policies to temper capitalism with interventions to protect people from the remorseless logic of the system - but still capturing the positive elements of that system as much as possible.
Yet now it’s the Conservatives arguing for higher wages and employers to provide training, while Labour want to throw hundreds of thousands of cheap immigrants at the problem, to prop up the supermarkets’ profits.
Spot on. Labour has forgotten their original purpose - swamped by internationalism
It's principally driven by the desperation to show that freedom of movement in the SM was a good thing that we shouldn't have given up, regardless of the consequences for their natural supporters.
Their vision is a cheap labour, low productivity future where skilled, middle class professionals get a lot of services on the cheap, a good standard of living and the flexibility to move if they so want and the opportunity to sell their services into a bigger market so they can justify a higher price. I mean, from the viewpoint of a professional in London doing financial services etc where they UK is more than competitive you can see why this seems a no brainer but from the viewpoint of a former Labour supporter in the red wall its mainly downside. The absolute refusal to see that suggests to me that winning those supporters back is going to be problematic.
There was not a hint of contrition from Starmer or the wider Labour Party towards those who felt that Labour had screwed them over, and out of frustration turned first to Brexit and then the Tories.
Did Laura Pidcock write that post for you?
Haven’t the electorate of North West Durham, already made clear their view of Miss Pidcock?
She still loomed large yesterday on the BBC. And she hated the speech.
What we have here by my reckoning is a potential future party leader... if only they could find her a safe seat.
I found it surprising that the BBC even had her front and centre of their coverage
I hope those flats are well insulated or that GSHP is not going to be running very efficiently…
To be fair the capital cost of drilling boreholes is much more attractive when split across many flats rather than one detached dwelling.
Yes - in general areas with lots of homes in proximity are best served by district heating (i.e. a central source with pipes to al lthe homes), with the added benefit that you don't need to clutter up your home with a boiler and worry about maintenance. I'd never known anything else when I grew up in blocks of flats in Denmark and Switzerland. The case is less clear when you have lots of detached houses.
A friend of ours is Romanian, and they used to have such a system in their tower block. Then communism fell, and people could start buying their flats. Apparently the first thing people would do is turn off the old system and put in a new, localised one. The reason: the pipes were always on, meaning that in summer the building would get insufferably hot, particularly on the lower floors, and heat often did not reach the upper floors at times of high demand. There was also very little control of the heating, except at a building level.
That's obviously one system, but it shows how they can be utter failures if not designed and implemented correctly.
It seems a very worthy idea but I am astounded at the money apparently being made from it. Are we in a bubble?
It’s not actual folding stuff. It’s just the implied value based on the price someone was willing to invest money at
Still, its basically a niche employment consultant. Where on earth are the cash flows that would justify such multiples of value? How much are companies prepared to pay to outsource something they could so easily do themselves (an advert for Google, for example, is likely to attract lots of bright young things)? They are talking about the company soon being worth $1bn. That is just weird.
Valuations are crazy right now
I can't remember the details but vaguely recall that Mr Blair's business model was similar to solar panel fitters, in that it relied heavily on indirect government subsidies, in this case the apprenticeship levy. I'd imagine there must be something similar in America given the new investment.
As an aside, I know a chap whose basic plan is, whenever a new government subsidy is announced, to work out if and how he can set up a company to exploit it. And he does not seem to be the only one. I am not sure it is commendable but then I guess that is what the government wants.
1. Far too much of the apprenticeship levy is soaked up by brokers, who act as middlemen between apprentices and employers; I'm not sure if that's what Blair is doing. 2. The apprenticeship market has far too many cowboys in it, offering very poor quality apprenticeships. See Ofsted reports passim. 3. Far too much of the apprenticeship levy money is being spent on training that is not actually new, but is simply re-badged; it was provided anyway by employers, but now they just get a government subsidy for it. 4. Far too much of the apprenticeship levy money is going to higher education, level 4/5 apprenticeships - stuff like business administration and psuedo-management courses - rather than training the next generation of skilled workers. 5. There are some brilliant, high-quality apprenticeship schemes, but not nearly enough (see Ofsted reports again).
Conclusion: apprenticeships are a mess, and there's some easy money being made by far too many people with far too little benefit.
From that piece - 400 staff and they have only matched 5000 apprenticeships.
Since then it has matched more than 5,000 apprentices with top employers and doubled its headcount to 400 staff, including in a newly-launched New York office. Facebook, Google, Depop, Bloomberg and Morgan Stanley are among the 300 or so leading companies Multiverse has partnered with so far and Blair says several young people have even turned down places at Oxford to join the scheme.
We need to wait for the weekend polls to see if Labour has got any post conference bounce
Indeed and I would suggest we need to wait until the end of October/ early November to determine the overall effects of the conference speeches and of course the budget on the 27th October
I note HMG has announced a £500 million hardship fund to be available through local authorities no doubt to ameliorate the effects of the lost UC uplift and towards the increases in gas supply
It has been announced the UK economy has grown by 5.5% between April and June, higher than the previous estimate of 4.8%
And I did chuckle when Starmer said just now to Burley that his speech was so long because of the number of interruptions from the applause
Last para made me laugh.
£500m isnt going to go very far if it's being shared between say 5m poorer households. Would have been better to delay the UC cut til spring. But that would cost more. Not sure how much.
The £20 UC uplift was costed at £6bn, so £500m per month.
I don't get the enduring appeal of James Bond films. Sorry.
I mean when I was a spotty teenager, thrilled by the gadgets and bikini girls, I loved them and recall that my first cinema experience without parents was to see The Spy Who Loved Me with my friend. But as an adult?
The franchise has a reputation for me of lame sets, dodgy acting and banal, implausible script. All-round a bit ... naff.
If you want to watch an action movie then JB films aren't in the same league as, say, the Bourne movies or the awesome and flawless Mad Max Thunder Road are they?
I hope that's not too controversial so as to make you choke on your cornflakes especially on James Bond Day.
JB films have been transformed by Bourne.
Once upon a time they were light hearted, self-parodic, and tremendous and unserious fun.
However, despite their copying Bourne, or trying to, they are long, lumbering, taking themselves far too seriously with hugely convoluted plots.
Both the Bond films and Doctor Who have fallen victim to the same phenomenon of believing the hype of a few obsessives.
The Bourne films moved that kind of film into a different league in the same way that the Matrix did with sci-fi. I think Daniel Craig worked hard to keep up with that but there is an incredible amount of baggage with Bond that the fanatics need to see which makes the films long and cumbersome. I will go and see the new Bond but I can't claim that I have been desperate to do so over the last year.
Like Dr Who, a couple of decades of rest would not go amiss.
I’ve not yet seen the latest Bond. But it’s an interesting quandary about how to reinvent it post Craig. The Big Bad in today’s world is of course China. But it’s also one of the biggest movie markets. So instead of plotting relevant to today’s threats, we get stuck in a cycle of quiet psycho terrorist type villains.
I’d go back to the beginning and do it as a lavish period action saga. Mad Men styling. Classic cars. Take away the silliness, comic book villains and plodding plotting of the originals. Draw a proper multi film plot arc rather than the retconning of Spectre and make-it-up-as-we-film of Quantum of Solace. A rounded character following a coherent arc, with a personality that can breath around the action sequences rather than be suffocated by them.
Much of the best bits of the Craig era followed this template but they should go full throttle with it.
During lockdown I have watched most if not all the Bond films. Outside the Craig era, the only one I wouldn't ignite all copies of would be Goldfinger. (I wouldn't spare Quantum of Solace either.) But the rest of the Craig era stand up as a superb series of films.
I think you are being a little unfair on From Russia With Love, Spy Who Loved Me, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and Goldeneye. And the Living Daylights, Bond training Bin Laden is classic with hindsight.
We need to wait for the weekend polls to see if Labour has got any post conference bounce
Indeed and I would suggest we need to wait until the end of October/ early November to determine the overall effects of the conference speeches and of course the budget on the 27th October
I note HMG has announced a £500 million hardship fund to be available through local authorities no doubt to ameliorate the effects of the lost UC uplift and towards the increases in gas supply
It has been announced the UK economy has grown by 5.5% between April and June, higher than the previous estimate of 4.8%
And I did chuckle when Starmer said just now to Burley that his speech was so long because of the number of interruptions from the applause
Last para made me laugh.
£500m isnt going to go very far if it's being shared between say 5m poorer households. Would have been better to delay the UC cut til spring. But that would cost more. Not sure how much.
Actually I think we can detect quite an astute attitude from Rishi because he can add to the hardship fund on need throughout the winter without making a 6 billion annual increase with the UC uplift made permanent
Laura Pidcock absolutely hated the speech. That for me looms larger than the speech itself.
For me she rained on his parade, or as Angela Rayner might say " p****** on his chips".
This is not a Prime Minister or Government in waiting until Starmer punishes dissenters like Pidcock in the same way Johnson did to Soubry and Grieve, and Corbyn did to Umuna.
I've said before that I tend to really respect jobs that need doing, but I wouldn't want to do myself. At uni I had a friend who had worked in one, and his stories were...interesting. I've also been in one on a few occasions (*), and even though clean and bright, there's something heavy about them, spirit-wise.
Hence, even if it is semi-skilled, abattoir workers should be being paid much more than they are. It's an awful, soul-destroying job.
(*) Abattoirs have sumps where... well, you can guess what ends up in them. Every so often these need cleaning out, so we hired a pump to do it. A pump and pipework that was kept for that express purpose, and was kept on a part of the depot well away from anything else as, even after cleaning, it stank. (AFAICR the sump had its own pump, that would often break down and so they had to hire one in to drain the sump, so some poor sod could go down and fix it.)
Most of this problem ultimately comes back to the supermarket sector. If they didn’t demand meat at extremely low prices, and sometimes even at a loss, there wouldn’t be such an issue.
But then that begs another question, of course - are people willing to pay the cost of production?
This is just the nature of capitalism - competition driving down prices and squeezing costs at every stage of production. It's well covered in books like the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It's the great strength but also the great weakness of capitalism as an economic system, when those costs getting squeezed are human beings. It's why I vote Labour, for enlightened policies to temper capitalism with interventions to protect people from the remorseless logic of the system - but still capturing the positive elements of that system as much as possible.
Yet now it’s the Conservatives arguing for higher wages and employers to provide training, while Labour want to throw hundreds of thousands of cheap immigrants at the problem, to prop up the supermarkets’ profits.
Spot on. Labour has forgotten their original purpose - swamped by internationalism
It's principally driven by the desperation to show that freedom of movement in the SM was a good thing that we shouldn't have given up, regardless of the consequences for their natural supporters.
Their vision is a cheap labour, low productivity future where skilled, middle class professionals get a lot of services on the cheap, a good standard of living and the flexibility to move if they so want and the opportunity to sell their services into a bigger market so they can justify a higher price. I mean, from the viewpoint of a professional in London doing financial services etc where they UK is more than competitive you can see why this seems a no brainer but from the viewpoint of a former Labour supporter in the red wall its mainly downside. The absolute refusal to see that suggests to me that winning those supporters back is going to be problematic.
There was not a hint of contrition from Starmer or the wider Labour Party towards those who felt that Labour had screwed them over, and out of frustration turned first to Brexit and then the Tories.
Did Laura Pidcock write that post for you?
Haven’t the electorate of North West Durham, already made clear their view of Miss Pidcock?
She still loomed large yesterday on the BBC. And she hated the speech.
What we have here by my reckoning is a potential future party leader... if only they could find her a safe seat.
I found it surprising that the BBC even had her front and centre of their coverage
A reminder from Tim Davie perhaps, that despite the shiny new bottle, it still contains unpleasant bitter wine. Or in Pidcock's case "whine"- a case of sour grapes if ever I saw one
I hope those flats are well insulated or that GSHP is not going to be running very efficiently…
To be fair the capital cost of drilling boreholes is much more attractive when split across many flats rather than one detached dwelling.
Yes - in general areas with lots of homes in proximity are best served by district heating (i.e. a central source with pipes to al lthe homes), with the added benefit that you don't need to clutter up your home with a boiler and worry about maintenance. I'd never known anything else when I grew up in blocks of flats in Denmark and Switzerland. The case is less clear when you have lots of detached houses.
A friend of ours is Romanian, and they used to have such a system in their tower block. Then communism fell, and people could start buying their flats. Apparently the first thing people would do is turn off the old system and put in a new, localised one. The reason: the pipes were always on, meaning that in summer the building would get insufferably hot, particularly on the lower floors, and heat often did not reach the upper floors at times of high demand. There was also very little control of the heating, except at a building level.
That's obviously one system, but it shows how they can be utter failures if not designed and implemented correctly.
Funnily enough, there's a large development near where I live with a similar system. A friend who lives there was complaining about it last week. The residents in the flats have no control over their heating - a completely bizarre state of affairs. And of course the block management set it on the assumption that everyone is a 90-year-old granny who will die if their flats aren't as warm as Hawaii in December. So the flats rent at a discount to everywhere else around there.
Very interesting that no big Tory dent following the fuel chaos - No.10 will be delighted with that, if it's borne out in other polls. Very high Green position again.
It does reflect the recent poll at 23% blaming HMG
We need to wait for the weekend polls to see if Labour has got any post conference bounce
Indeed and I would suggest we need to wait until the end of October/ early November to determine the overall effects of the conference speeches and of course the budget on the 27th October
I note HMG has announced a £500 million hardship fund to be available through local authorities no doubt to ameliorate the effects of the lost UC uplift and towards the increases in gas supply
It has been announced the UK economy has grown by 5.5% between April and June, higher than the previous estimate of 4.8%
And I did chuckle when Starmer said just now to Burley that his speech was so long because of the number of interruptions from the applause
Last para made me laugh.
£500m isnt going to go very far if it's being shared between say 5m poorer households. Would have been better to delay the UC cut til spring. But that would cost more. Not sure how much.
The £20 UC uplift was costed at £6bn, so £500m per month.
If divided equally won't even cover the forthcoming fuel price increases so still £20 a week worse off.
We need to wait for the weekend polls to see if Labour has got any post conference bounce
Indeed and I would suggest we need to wait until the end of October/ early November to determine the overall effects of the conference speeches and of course the budget on the 27th October
I note HMG has announced a £500 million hardship fund to be available through local authorities no doubt to ameliorate the effects of the lost UC uplift and towards the increases in gas supply
It has been announced the UK economy has grown by 5.5% between April and June, higher than the previous estimate of 4.8%
And I did chuckle when Starmer said just now to Burley that his speech was so long because of the number of interruptions from the applause
Last para made me laugh.
£500m isnt going to go very far if it's being shared between say 5m poorer households. Would have been better to delay the UC cut til spring. But that would cost more. Not sure how much.
Actually I think we can detect quite an astute attitude from Rishi because he can add to the hardship fund on need throughout the winter without making a 6 billion annual increase with the UC uplift made permanent
We still need a reverse ferret on the salami slicing of UC since 2015, and the too steep taper.
I wonder if UK Gov want a higher than tiny Green vote to strip some from Lab.
It seems a very worthy idea but I am astounded at the money apparently being made from it. Are we in a bubble?
It’s not actual folding stuff. It’s just the implied value based on the price someone was willing to invest money at
Still, its basically a niche employment consultant. Where on earth are the cash flows that would justify such multiples of value? How much are companies prepared to pay to outsource something they could so easily do themselves (an advert for Google, for example, is likely to attract lots of bright young things)? They are talking about the company soon being worth $1bn. That is just weird.
Valuations are crazy right now
I can't remember the details but vaguely recall that Mr Blair's business model was similar to solar panel fitters, in that it relied heavily on indirect government subsidies, in this case the apprenticeship levy. I'd imagine there must be something similar in America given the new investment.
As an aside, I know a chap whose basic plan is, whenever a new government subsidy is announced, to work out if and how he can set up a company to exploit it. And he does not seem to be the only one. I am not sure it is commendable but then I guess that is what the government wants.
1. Far too much of the apprenticeship levy is soaked up by brokers, who act as middlemen between apprentices and employers; I'm not sure if that's what Blair is doing. 2. The apprenticeship market has far too many cowboys in it, offering very poor quality apprenticeships. See Ofsted reports passim. 3. Far too much of the apprenticeship levy money is being spent on training that is not actually new, but is simply re-badged; it was provided anyway by employers, but now they just get a government subsidy for it. 4. Far too much of the apprenticeship levy money is going to higher education, level 4/5 apprenticeships - stuff like business administration and psuedo-management courses - rather than training the next generation of skilled workers. 5. There are some brilliant, high-quality apprenticeship schemes, but not nearly enough (see Ofsted reports again).
Conclusion: apprenticeships are a mess, and there's some easy money being made by far too many people with far too little benefit.
From that piece - 400 staff and they have only matched 5000 apprenticeships.
Since then it has matched more than 5,000 apprentices with top employers and doubled its headcount to 400 staff, including in a newly-launched New York office. Facebook, Google, Depop, Bloomberg and Morgan Stanley are among the 300 or so leading companies Multiverse has partnered with so far and Blair says several young people have even turned down places at Oxford to join the scheme.
Are they taking a temping agency type margin?
Mostly hype so far then, as opposed to actually placing lots of people.
Anyone who turns down a place at a Red-Brick or Ivy League is a little silly though, degrees from top institutions are definitely worth the investment.
Very interesting that no big Tory dent following the fuel chaos - Johnson will be delighted with that, if it's borne out in other polls. Very high Green position again, too.
I've said before that I tend to really respect jobs that need doing, but I wouldn't want to do myself. At uni I had a friend who had worked in one, and his stories were...interesting. I've also been in one on a few occasions (*), and even though clean and bright, there's something heavy about them, spirit-wise.
Hence, even if it is semi-skilled, abattoir workers should be being paid much more than they are. It's an awful, soul-destroying job.
(*) Abattoirs have sumps where... well, you can guess what ends up in them. Every so often these need cleaning out, so we hired a pump to do it. A pump and pipework that was kept for that express purpose, and was kept on a part of the depot well away from anything else as, even after cleaning, it stank. (AFAICR the sump had its own pump, that would often break down and so they had to hire one in to drain the sump, so some poor sod could go down and fix it.)
Most of this problem ultimately comes back to the supermarket sector. If they didn’t demand meat at extremely low prices, and sometimes even at a loss, there wouldn’t be such an issue.
But then that begs another question, of course - are people willing to pay the cost of production?
This is just the nature of capitalism - competition driving down prices and squeezing costs at every stage of production. It's well covered in books like the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It's the great strength but also the great weakness of capitalism as an economic system, when those costs getting squeezed are human beings. It's why I vote Labour, for enlightened policies to temper capitalism with interventions to protect people from the remorseless logic of the system - but still capturing the positive elements of that system as much as possible.
Yet now it’s the Conservatives arguing for higher wages and employers to provide training, while Labour want to throw hundreds of thousands of cheap immigrants at the problem, to prop up the supermarkets’ profits.
Spot on. Labour has forgotten their original purpose - swamped by internationalism
It's principally driven by the desperation to show that freedom of movement in the SM was a good thing that we shouldn't have given up, regardless of the consequences for their natural supporters.
Their vision is a cheap labour, low productivity future where skilled, middle class professionals get a lot of services on the cheap, a good standard of living and the flexibility to move if they so want and the opportunity to sell their services into a bigger market so they can justify a higher price. I mean, from the viewpoint of a professional in London doing financial services etc where they UK is more than competitive you can see why this seems a no brainer but from the viewpoint of a former Labour supporter in the red wall its mainly downside. The absolute refusal to see that suggests to me that winning those supporters back is going to be problematic.
This is simplistic chattering class nonsense David. My girlfriend is red wall works band 3 in the NHS and is struggling because her team cannot recruit anyone.
She’s also worried about heating bills, the cost of petrol, and her salary not keeping pace with cost of living.
The idea that the ‘red wall’ are going to be happy with abstract ‘pay rises’ is frankly out of touch and insulting.
I guess the proof will be in the pudding. If wages outpace cost of living at the low end then you might be right but that remains to be seen.
Yes. There is a structural problem in the economy which Covid has amplified to both visibility and crisis point. We have simultaneously a punishing cost of living crisis and companies unable (and sometimes unwilling) to pay living wages. For all that "just pay more" is a simple solution, how does that work when none of the smaller companies can do and we then end up with a small number of giants with all that entails?
Nursing. Midwifery. HGV Drivers. Carers. Chefs - there are a stack of skilled professions who simply cannot recruit because of a combination of punitive training costs and low pay/crap conditions when you get there. And thats just skilled work, its even worse with unskilled.
As with 2 decades ago where you couldn't find plumbers, joiners, skilled tradespeople at any price we have a choice. Do we blame people and wait an indefinite period of time for people to be trained up and become available for work? Or do we import the workers because the work needs doing now?
To Make Brexit Work (great slogan btw) we need two things. One - make the points-based immigration system functional. Saying "yer barred" to anyone to pacify the red wall is daft. We need a shit ton of people so give them proper visas not a handful of "fuck off at Christmas" ones. Two - properly invest in skills and education so that we will have a pipeline of our own people coming through to replace migrants. As people can't afford their own training and companies won't due to high turnover, we will have to centralise it, a Manpower Services Commission for the 10s.
Part of the problem is forcing things to be graduate jobs. Nursing, for example, shouldn’t require 3 years academic study and £27k of debt. We need to be a lot more thoughtful.
Perhaps there is an argument for the government to fund training for a role which is then paid back by companies during someone’s first few years in the role? And would move with them to a new employer?
Totally agree about nursing. My wife was one of the last diploma nurse cohort I think. She left nursing but returned to help with Covid. She had to write a 4000 word reflective essay which took her days. She would've been much more use on the ward. She spent half a day learning how to reference articles and books correctly. Pointless.
The genius in making nursing more academic and medically knowledgable has been.. the creation of various new jobs for people to do the tasks discarded.
This is the thing. The role of ‘nurse’ in most people’s minds has been replaced by healthcare assistants who don’t require a degree as far as I’m aware.
The whole ‘nurses shouldn’t go to uni’ thing stinks of ‘back in my day…’
The question of whether the nhs should pay the fees is another question
Nursing used to take a 3-year course to state registration. Call it an apprenticeship if you like because student nurses were paid. Now it takes a 3-year degree. Another large factor, aside from the humungous debt, however, was the Thatcher government selling off all the nurses' homes.
As an aside, 100 years ago you'd have had the same debate about doctors, which used not to need a degree. More recently law and accountancy have become largely graduate professions. Progress?
I've said before that I tend to really respect jobs that need doing, but I wouldn't want to do myself. At uni I had a friend who had worked in one, and his stories were...interesting. I've also been in one on a few occasions (*), and even though clean and bright, there's something heavy about them, spirit-wise.
Hence, even if it is semi-skilled, abattoir workers should be being paid much more than they are. It's an awful, soul-destroying job.
(*) Abattoirs have sumps where... well, you can guess what ends up in them. Every so often these need cleaning out, so we hired a pump to do it. A pump and pipework that was kept for that express purpose, and was kept on a part of the depot well away from anything else as, even after cleaning, it stank. (AFAICR the sump had its own pump, that would often break down and so they had to hire one in to drain the sump, so some poor sod could go down and fix it.)
Most of this problem ultimately comes back to the supermarket sector. If they didn’t demand meat at extremely low prices, and sometimes even at a loss, there wouldn’t be such an issue.
But then that begs another question, of course - are people willing to pay the cost of production?
This is just the nature of capitalism - competition driving down prices and squeezing costs at every stage of production. It's well covered in books like the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It's the great strength but also the great weakness of capitalism as an economic system, when those costs getting squeezed are human beings. It's why I vote Labour, for enlightened policies to temper capitalism with interventions to protect people from the remorseless logic of the system - but still capturing the positive elements of that system as much as possible.
Yet now it’s the Conservatives arguing for higher wages and employers to provide training, while Labour want to throw hundreds of thousands of cheap immigrants at the problem, to prop up the supermarkets’ profits.
My question is how and why these companies are to provide training to "drive up productivity". The Tories want labour mobility, which means as soon as you finish training a driver they are out the door. Wouldn't happen if we re-unionised the sector. And drivers are hardly unproductive - being harried every minute of every shift is a reason why so many are not coming back into it having left.
There is a simple reality here - British workers don't want the work. Whether it is in factories or care homes or a whole stack of jobs, we don't want them. You can say "pay more" but the point where we stopped wanting to do them relative pay was higher.
I have a lot of sympathy for the Tory thinkers who wrote the "British workers are lazy" book. I have worked for various companies with various facilities where it is clear and obviously true. Eastern Europeans became so popular not because they were cheaper, but because they actually turned up to do the job.
But you need to look at why British Labour relations are so poor compared to much of our neighbours in Northern Europe in the historical round.
Britain's postwar settlement disguised class and employer-employee relations that were still feudal. The union militancy of the 1970's was the flipside of an almost seigneurially abusive attitude from many large employers compared to countries like Germany or Sweden. Thatcher then "solved" this by a scorched-earth victory for the employers. The alienation in the British Labour market is deep-seated and deep-rooted, and I would very strongly reject blaming that just on the employees.
I don't blame the employees! I said this was structural not the fault of individuals. We need to equip and empower a workforce for the 21st century and we aren't going to do that by only focusing on warehouse and delivery jobs.
The part of the Starmer speech was was surprising was "The Good Society and the Strong Economy need each other" because its sad that this needs to be said. Companies need a workforce productive and engaged, employees need companies supportive and nurturing.
We are a long way from getting this. Too few people are unionised and frankly several of the big unions seem wedded to overthrowing capitalism still. Too few companies give a shit about their employees and the tax system gives no incentive to the long term investment in people.
Unions are not the solution. Unions are just as much a distortion, trying to get businesses to pay above market rates, as the current issue of businesses trying to get employees in for below market rates.
Just stand back and laissez-faire. Let the productive employers find the productive employees.
Unions try to ensure there is no other supply available so they can get away with picket lines etc, while 'free movement' ensured there was an infinite supply available. What we need is simply what we have now a competitive market with a finite supply.
Being unionised is the single most effective way of achieving better pay and conditions. That is just a fact. Perhaps Brexit will make it easier for workers to organise, one lives in hope.
Only in the short-term and it screws up the economy in the long term. That is just a fact.
You need to be in a position where supply = demand for a healthy economy. In a free market if demand > supply then prices go up (which is where we are now) and if supply > demand then prices go down (which is what we've had in the past).
But if unions or businesses can rig the market to get a price away from equilibrium then there is a market failure and the result if prices are too high is unemployment. So the workers in the business get a better price in the short-term, but they're resulting in people on the dole instead. How is that "uniting" workers?
Plus then it damages the employers in the long-term, which damages the employees themselves in the long-term if they intend to stick with the employer.
We need to wait for the weekend polls to see if Labour has got any post conference bounce
Indeed and I would suggest we need to wait until the end of October/ early November to determine the overall effects of the conference speeches and of course the budget on the 27th October
I note HMG has announced a £500 million hardship fund to be available through local authorities no doubt to ameliorate the effects of the lost UC uplift and towards the increases in gas supply
It has been announced the UK economy has grown by 5.5% between April and June, higher than the previous estimate of 4.8%
And I did chuckle when Starmer said just now to Burley that his speech was so long because of the number of interruptions from the applause
Last para made me laugh.
£500m isnt going to go very far if it's being shared between say 5m poorer households. Would have been better to delay the UC cut til spring. But that would cost more. Not sure how much.
The £20 UC uplift was costed at £6bn, so £500m per month.
If divided equally won't even cover the forthcoming fuel price increases so still £20 a week worse off.
Absolutely. Let alone the huge price rises among many other sectors, the perfect storm of the ending of the tenancy protections..and very much else. I very much hope Mr Rashford gives the government another kick up the backside and wins in extra time on social media again.
North West Durham is a good example of the challenge facing Labour. It's number 12 on their target list - so not like Bassetlaw (149th) or Dudley North (176th) where the media were yesterday. Labour require 1.2 pp swing to win it back. But, that 2.4 pp win for the Tories in 2019 was done without incumbency and the Brexit Party won 6.7 pp of the vote. It would be foolish to assume that the Tories would sweep up all Brexit Party votes, but neither should Labour count on getting them back without incumbency.
I reckon NW Durham is probably as hard for Labour to win as the Milton Keynes seats, which require swings of 5pp and 5.4pp.
We need to wait for the weekend polls to see if Labour has got any post conference bounce
Indeed and I would suggest we need to wait until the end of October/ early November to determine the overall effects of the conference speeches and of course the budget on the 27th October
I note HMG has announced a £500 million hardship fund to be available through local authorities no doubt to ameliorate the effects of the lost UC uplift and towards the increases in gas supply
It has been announced the UK economy has grown by 5.5% between April and June, higher than the previous estimate of 4.8%
And I did chuckle when Starmer said just now to Burley that his speech was so long because of the number of interruptions from the applause
Last para made me laugh.
£500m isnt going to go very far if it's being shared between say 5m poorer households. Would have been better to delay the UC cut til spring. But that would cost more. Not sure how much.
Actually I think we can detect quite an astute attitude from Rishi because he can add to the hardship fund on need throughout the winter without making a 6 billion annual increase with the UC uplift made permanent
We still need a reverse ferret on the salami slicing of UC since 2015, and the too steep taper.
I wonder if UK Gov want a higher than tiny Green vote to strip some from Lab.
I expect something will be announced in the budget
I've said before that I tend to really respect jobs that need doing, but I wouldn't want to do myself. At uni I had a friend who had worked in one, and his stories were...interesting. I've also been in one on a few occasions (*), and even though clean and bright, there's something heavy about them, spirit-wise.
Hence, even if it is semi-skilled, abattoir workers should be being paid much more than they are. It's an awful, soul-destroying job.
(*) Abattoirs have sumps where... well, you can guess what ends up in them. Every so often these need cleaning out, so we hired a pump to do it. A pump and pipework that was kept for that express purpose, and was kept on a part of the depot well away from anything else as, even after cleaning, it stank. (AFAICR the sump had its own pump, that would often break down and so they had to hire one in to drain the sump, so some poor sod could go down and fix it.)
Most of this problem ultimately comes back to the supermarket sector. If they didn’t demand meat at extremely low prices, and sometimes even at a loss, there wouldn’t be such an issue.
But then that begs another question, of course - are people willing to pay the cost of production?
This is just the nature of capitalism - competition driving down prices and squeezing costs at every stage of production. It's well covered in books like the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It's the great strength but also the great weakness of capitalism as an economic system, when those costs getting squeezed are human beings. It's why I vote Labour, for enlightened policies to temper capitalism with interventions to protect people from the remorseless logic of the system - but still capturing the positive elements of that system as much as possible.
Yet now it’s the Conservatives arguing for higher wages and employers to provide training, while Labour want to throw hundreds of thousands of cheap immigrants at the problem, to prop up the supermarkets’ profits.
My question is how and why these companies are to provide training to "drive up productivity". The Tories want labour mobility, which means as soon as you finish training a driver they are out the door. Wouldn't happen if we re-unionised the sector. And drivers are hardly unproductive - being harried every minute of every shift is a reason why so many are not coming back into it having left.
There is a simple reality here - British workers don't want the work. Whether it is in factories or care homes or a whole stack of jobs, we don't want them. You can say "pay more" but the point where we stopped wanting to do them relative pay was higher.
I have a lot of sympathy for the Tory thinkers who wrote the "British workers are lazy" book. I have worked for various companies with various facilities where it is clear and obviously true. Eastern Europeans became so popular not because they were cheaper, but because they actually turned up to do the job.
But you need to look at why British Labour relations are so poor compared to much of our neighbours in Northern Europe in the historical round.
Britain's postwar settlement disguised class and employer-employee relations that were still feudal. The union militancy of the 1970's was the flipside of an almost seigneurially abusive attitude from many large employers compared to countries like Germany or Sweden. Thatcher then "solved" this by a scorched-earth victory for the employers. The alienation in the British Labour market is deep-seated and deep-rooted, and I would very strongly reject blaming that just on the employees.
I don't blame the employees! I said this was structural not the fault of individuals. We need to equip and empower a workforce for the 21st century and we aren't going to do that by only focusing on warehouse and delivery jobs.
The part of the Starmer speech was was surprising was "The Good Society and the Strong Economy need each other" because its sad that this needs to be said. Companies need a workforce productive and engaged, employees need companies supportive and nurturing.
We are a long way from getting this. Too few people are unionised and frankly several of the big unions seem wedded to overthrowing capitalism still. Too few companies give a shit about their employees and the tax system gives no incentive to the long term investment in people.
Unions are not the solution. Unions are just as much a distortion, trying to get businesses to pay above market rates, as the current issue of businesses trying to get employees in for below market rates.
Just stand back and laissez-faire. Let the productive employers find the productive employees.
Unions try to ensure there is no other supply available so they can get away with picket lines etc, while 'free movement' ensured there was an infinite supply available. What we need is simply what we have now a competitive market with a finite supply.
Being unionised is the single most effective way of achieving better pay and conditions. That is just a fact. Perhaps Brexit will make it easier for workers to organise, one lives in hope.
Not convinced.
If we have Unions, they must be depoliticised. I would perhaps follow some aspects of the German Model.
But [edit] you don't say whether it's OK for the bosses to make donations to political parties with other people's (shareholders') money? Including thinly disguised gifts such as booking space at party conferences.
The equivalent to depoliticising unions would be to permit company directors only to make personal gifts to political parties. Never out of company money.
Edit: oifg course, you may be opposed to that too.
I hope those flats are well insulated or that GSHP is not going to be running very efficiently…
To be fair the capital cost of drilling boreholes is much more attractive when split across many flats rather than one detached dwelling.
Yes - in general areas with lots of homes in proximity are best served by district heating (i.e. a central source with pipes to al lthe homes), with the added benefit that you don't need to clutter up your home with a boiler and worry about maintenance. I'd never known anything else when I grew up in blocks of flats in Denmark and Switzerland. The case is less clear when you have lots of detached houses.
A friend of ours is Romanian, and they used to have such a system in their tower block. Then communism fell, and people could start buying their flats. Apparently the first thing people would do is turn off the old system and put in a new, localised one. The reason: the pipes were always on, meaning that in summer the building would get insufferably hot, particularly on the lower floors, and heat often did not reach the upper floors at times of high demand. There was also very little control of the heating, except at a building level.
That's obviously one system, but it shows how they can be utter failures if not designed and implemented correctly.
Funnily enough, there's a large development near where I live with a similar system. A friend who lives there was complaining about it last week. The residents in the flats have no control over their heating - a completely bizarre state of affairs. And of course the block management set it on the assumption that everyone is a 90-year-old granny who will die if their flats aren't as warm as Hawaii in December. So the flats rent at a discount to everywhere else around there.
One-size-fits-all socialism in action.
In our office, when we used it, we couldn't control the temperature for our floor. It was often so cold the company bought a batch of hoodies to wear if it was too cold. Bonkers.
I've said before that I tend to really respect jobs that need doing, but I wouldn't want to do myself. At uni I had a friend who had worked in one, and his stories were...interesting. I've also been in one on a few occasions (*), and even though clean and bright, there's something heavy about them, spirit-wise.
Hence, even if it is semi-skilled, abattoir workers should be being paid much more than they are. It's an awful, soul-destroying job.
(*) Abattoirs have sumps where... well, you can guess what ends up in them. Every so often these need cleaning out, so we hired a pump to do it. A pump and pipework that was kept for that express purpose, and was kept on a part of the depot well away from anything else as, even after cleaning, it stank. (AFAICR the sump had its own pump, that would often break down and so they had to hire one in to drain the sump, so some poor sod could go down and fix it.)
Most of this problem ultimately comes back to the supermarket sector. If they didn’t demand meat at extremely low prices, and sometimes even at a loss, there wouldn’t be such an issue.
But then that begs another question, of course - are people willing to pay the cost of production?
This is just the nature of capitalism - competition driving down prices and squeezing costs at every stage of production. It's well covered in books like the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It's the great strength but also the great weakness of capitalism as an economic system, when those costs getting squeezed are human beings. It's why I vote Labour, for enlightened policies to temper capitalism with interventions to protect people from the remorseless logic of the system - but still capturing the positive elements of that system as much as possible.
Yet now it’s the Conservatives arguing for higher wages and employers to provide training, while Labour want to throw hundreds of thousands of cheap immigrants at the problem, to prop up the supermarkets’ profits.
Spot on. Labour has forgotten their original purpose - swamped by internationalism
It's principally driven by the desperation to show that freedom of movement in the SM was a good thing that we shouldn't have given up, regardless of the consequences for their natural supporters.
Their vision is a cheap labour, low productivity future where skilled, middle class professionals get a lot of services on the cheap, a good standard of living and the flexibility to move if they so want and the opportunity to sell their services into a bigger market so they can justify a higher price. I mean, from the viewpoint of a professional in London doing financial services etc where they UK is more than competitive you can see why this seems a no brainer but from the viewpoint of a former Labour supporter in the red wall its mainly downside. The absolute refusal to see that suggests to me that winning those supporters back is going to be problematic.
This is simplistic chattering class nonsense David. My girlfriend is red wall works band 3 in the NHS and is struggling because her team cannot recruit anyone.
She’s also worried about heating bills, the cost of petrol, and her salary not keeping pace with cost of living.
The idea that the ‘red wall’ are going to be happy with abstract ‘pay rises’ is frankly out of touch and insulting.
I guess the proof will be in the pudding. If wages outpace cost of living at the low end then you might be right but that remains to be seen.
Yes. There is a structural problem in the economy which Covid has amplified to both visibility and crisis point. We have simultaneously a punishing cost of living crisis and companies unable (and sometimes unwilling) to pay living wages. For all that "just pay more" is a simple solution, how does that work when none of the smaller companies can do and we then end up with a small number of giants with all that entails?
Nursing. Midwifery. HGV Drivers. Carers. Chefs - there are a stack of skilled professions who simply cannot recruit because of a combination of punitive training costs and low pay/crap conditions when you get there. And thats just skilled work, its even worse with unskilled.
As with 2 decades ago where you couldn't find plumbers, joiners, skilled tradespeople at any price we have a choice. Do we blame people and wait an indefinite period of time for people to be trained up and become available for work? Or do we import the workers because the work needs doing now?
To Make Brexit Work (great slogan btw) we need two things. One - make the points-based immigration system functional. Saying "yer barred" to anyone to pacify the red wall is daft. We need a shit ton of people so give them proper visas not a handful of "fuck off at Christmas" ones. Two - properly invest in skills and education so that we will have a pipeline of our own people coming through to replace migrants. As people can't afford their own training and companies won't due to high turnover, we will have to centralise it, a Manpower Services Commission for the 10s.
Part of the problem is forcing things to be graduate jobs. Nursing, for example, shouldn’t require 3 years academic study and £27k of debt. We need to be a lot more thoughtful.
Perhaps there is an argument for the government to fund training for a role which is then paid back by companies during someone’s first few years in the role? And would move with them to a new employer?
Totally agree about nursing. My wife was one of the last diploma nurse cohort I think. She left nursing but returned to help with Covid. She had to write a 4000 word reflective essay which took her days. She would've been much more use on the ward. She spent half a day learning how to reference articles and books correctly. Pointless.
The genius in making nursing more academic and medically knowledgable has been.. the creation of various new jobs for people to do the tasks discarded.
This is the thing. The role of ‘nurse’ in most people’s minds has been replaced by healthcare assistants who don’t require a degree as far as I’m aware.
The whole ‘nurses shouldn’t go to uni’ thing stinks of ‘back in my day…’
The question of whether the nhs should pay the fees is another question
I heard a story that healthcare assistants (at least their union representatives) wanted them to move up the qualification ladder, as well..... I presume this would require creating another group to be at the bottom?
When one of my daughters was in hospital (a while back) a rather angry man had a go at a group of people "lazing around at the nurses station" - his child had been waiting for something medical for a while....
None of them were actually medics - doctors or nurses. Just kids wearing a uniform who weren't allowed to do anything much on their own...
HCAs require few qualifications, and often moved up to being Nurses by going off to nursing school, but few can afford to do so now as the need to earn and cannot pay the fees. Mrs Foxy was paid by the NHS even while training, and did plenty of work for the money*.
There is now an avenue where they can convert via "Nurse Apprenticeships" to fully registered Nurses, and quite a few of ours now do so. They do find the written parts of the course quite hard, and often need remedial maths etc.
The shift to Nursing being a degree antedates the expansion of the universities, being conceived as Project 2000 in the 1980s, recognising the increased technology and skills that modern Nurses need to use.
*much more of the training was "hands on" in her training, with 8 week ward attachments, broken by 2 weeks in Nursing School and a week off, in a regular cycle. By staggering starts, the wards always had a full complement of students. When I met Mrs Foxy she was a final year student, and able to take charge of a chest surgery ward. A bit full on at age 21, but that was the norm then.
I hope those flats are well insulated or that GSHP is not going to be running very efficiently…
To be fair the capital cost of drilling boreholes is much more attractive when split across many flats rather than one detached dwelling.
Yes - in general areas with lots of homes in proximity are best served by district heating (i.e. a central source with pipes to al lthe homes), with the added benefit that you don't need to clutter up your home with a boiler and worry about maintenance. I'd never known anything else when I grew up in blocks of flats in Denmark and Switzerland. The case is less clear when you have lots of detached houses.
A friend of ours is Romanian, and they used to have such a system in their tower block. Then communism fell, and people could start buying their flats. Apparently the first thing people would do is turn off the old system and put in a new, localised one. The reason: the pipes were always on, meaning that in summer the building would get insufferably hot, particularly on the lower floors, and heat often did not reach the upper floors at times of high demand. There was also very little control of the heating, except at a building level.
That's obviously one system, but it shows how they can be utter failures if not designed and implemented correctly.
Funnily enough, there's a large development near where I live with a similar system. A friend who lives there was complaining about it last week. The residents in the flats have no control over their heating - a completely bizarre state of affairs. And of course the block management set it on the assumption that everyone is a 90-year-old granny who will die if their flats aren't as warm as Hawaii in December. So the flats rent at a discount to everywhere else around there.
We need to wait for the weekend polls to see if Labour has got any post conference bounce
Indeed and I would suggest we need to wait until the end of October/ early November to determine the overall effects of the conference speeches and of course the budget on the 27th October
I note HMG has announced a £500 million hardship fund to be available through local authorities no doubt to ameliorate the effects of the lost UC uplift and towards the increases in gas supply
It has been announced the UK economy has grown by 5.5% between April and June, higher than the previous estimate of 4.8%
And I did chuckle when Starmer said just now to Burley that his speech was so long because of the number of interruptions from the applause
Last para made me laugh.
£500m isnt going to go very far if it's being shared between say 5m poorer households. Would have been better to delay the UC cut til spring. But that would cost more. Not sure how much.
The £20 UC uplift was costed at £6bn, so £500m per month.
If divided equally won't even cover the forthcoming fuel price increases so still £20 a week worse off.
Absolutely. Let alone the huge price rises among many other sectors, the perfect storm of the ending of the tenancy protections..and much else. I very much hope Mr Rashford gives the government another kick up the backside.
Moving it to councils means they can:
Reward marginal Tory voters in "preferred" councils Blame councils for any problems
Typically cynical, passing the buck and ignoring the problem.
Laura Pidcock absolutely hated the speech. That for me looms larger than the speech itself.
For me she rained on his parade, or as Angela Rayner might say " p****** on his chips".
This is not a Prime Minister or Government in waiting until Starmer punishes dissenters like Pidcock in the same way Johnson did to Soubry and Grieve, and Corbyn did to Umuna.
Corbyn did nothing to Chuka Umunna who was one of several former frontbenchers who refused to serve under Corbyn, and who later left the party. All this of his own accord. Labour did not have the Stalinist purges that Tories enjoyed under Boris.
This misses the point. Voters are centrists. When centrists act against extremes this is generally approved. When extremists act against centrists it isn't. There is politics in this as well as facts.
I've said before that I tend to really respect jobs that need doing, but I wouldn't want to do myself. At uni I had a friend who had worked in one, and his stories were...interesting. I've also been in one on a few occasions (*), and even though clean and bright, there's something heavy about them, spirit-wise.
Hence, even if it is semi-skilled, abattoir workers should be being paid much more than they are. It's an awful, soul-destroying job.
(*) Abattoirs have sumps where... well, you can guess what ends up in them. Every so often these need cleaning out, so we hired a pump to do it. A pump and pipework that was kept for that express purpose, and was kept on a part of the depot well away from anything else as, even after cleaning, it stank. (AFAICR the sump had its own pump, that would often break down and so they had to hire one in to drain the sump, so some poor sod could go down and fix it.)
Most of this problem ultimately comes back to the supermarket sector. If they didn’t demand meat at extremely low prices, and sometimes even at a loss, there wouldn’t be such an issue.
But then that begs another question, of course - are people willing to pay the cost of production?
This is just the nature of capitalism - competition driving down prices and squeezing costs at every stage of production. It's well covered in books like the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It's the great strength but also the great weakness of capitalism as an economic system, when those costs getting squeezed are human beings. It's why I vote Labour, for enlightened policies to temper capitalism with interventions to protect people from the remorseless logic of the system - but still capturing the positive elements of that system as much as possible.
Yet now it’s the Conservatives arguing for higher wages and employers to provide training, while Labour want to throw hundreds of thousands of cheap immigrants at the problem, to prop up the supermarkets’ profits.
Spot on. Labour has forgotten their original purpose - swamped by internationalism
"Workers *of the world* unite" is the phrase! Internationalism isn't a new development for the Labour movement. Blaming immigrants for low wages is as old as the hills - eg Moseley in the thirties.
Wages are set by supply and demand. Unlimited supply of labour reduces incentives to invest in training and pay labour more. It’s basic economics.
“Workers of the world unite” was a political slogan not an economic one
It's an economic slogan as much as a political one. In a world where workers can't move the jobs will instead. That's why Marx thought you could only liberate workers by liberating all of them. (I'm not a Marxist BTW). If I were a low paid worker I would be wary of relying on supply and demand for pay rises. Today's excess demand can quickly become tomorrow's excess supply, and the high wage Tory cheerleaders on here would be calling for pay cuts before you knew it. Still, good luck to them, I hope they make hay while the sun shines, and it comes out of the pockets of the bosses and not other low paid workers in the shape of higher prices.
Absolutely if excess supply exist then there needs to be real terms pay cuts to fix that. Just as if there's excess demand then there needs to be real terms pay rises to fix that. What's wrong with that? Are you wanting supply and demand permanently out of equilibrium? If there's excess supply and the market isn't allowed to fix that via prices, it will fix that via unemployment. Either way it will be fixed, but how is that a good fix?
Though what you overlook of course is that via the "Single Market" the UK economy has had a virtually infinite excess supply of low wage labour. So yes that excess supply has depressed wages in the UK like you seem concerned as a possibility for the future - plus its inevitably led to the destruction of jobs elsewhere on the continent as a result too to compensate. Excess supply would remain infinite keeping wages to the minimum floor unless or until the UK wage reached equilibrium with the rest of the world's wages . . . that is what "workers of the world unite" means if you have free movement.
Is that what you want? For the British working poor to be on the same pay, terms and conditions as the rest of the world's working poor? 🤔
It seems a very worthy idea but I am astounded at the money apparently being made from it. Are we in a bubble?
It’s not actual folding stuff. It’s just the implied value based on the price someone was willing to invest money at
Still, its basically a niche employment consultant. Where on earth are the cash flows that would justify such multiples of value? How much are companies prepared to pay to outsource something they could so easily do themselves (an advert for Google, for example, is likely to attract lots of bright young things)? They are talking about the company soon being worth $1bn. That is just weird.
Valuations are crazy right now
I can't remember the details but vaguely recall that Mr Blair's business model was similar to solar panel fitters, in that it relied heavily on indirect government subsidies, in this case the apprenticeship levy. I'd imagine there must be something similar in America given the new investment.
As an aside, I know a chap whose basic plan is, whenever a new government subsidy is announced, to work out if and how he can set up a company to exploit it. And he does not seem to be the only one. I am not sure it is commendable but then I guess that is what the government wants.
1. Far too much of the apprenticeship levy is soaked up by brokers, who act as middlemen between apprentices and employers; I'm not sure if that's what Blair is doing. 2. The apprenticeship market has far too many cowboys in it, offering very poor quality apprenticeships. See Ofsted reports passim. 3. Far too much of the apprenticeship levy money is being spent on training that is not actually new, but is simply re-badged; it was provided anyway by employers, but now they just get a government subsidy for it. 4. Far too much of the apprenticeship levy money is going to higher education, level 4/5 apprenticeships - stuff like business administration and psuedo-management courses - rather than training the next generation of skilled workers. 5. There are some brilliant, high-quality apprenticeship schemes, but not nearly enough (see Ofsted reports again).
Conclusion: apprenticeships are a mess, and there's some easy money being made by far too many people with far too little benefit.
From that piece - 400 staff and they have only matched 5000 apprenticeships.
Since then it has matched more than 5,000 apprentices with top employers and doubled its headcount to 400 staff, including in a newly-launched New York office. Facebook, Google, Depop, Bloomberg and Morgan Stanley are among the 300 or so leading companies Multiverse has partnered with so far and Blair says several young people have even turned down places at Oxford to join the scheme.
Are they taking a temping agency type margin?
Mostly hype so far then, as opposed to actually placing lots of people.
Anyone who turns down a place at a Red-Brick or Ivy League is a little silly though, degrees from top institutions are definitely worth the investment.
That there is a premium attached to Russell Group universities might be a sign of inefficiency in the British graduate labour market. Employers look first at Oxbridge then Russell Group and not much further. Famously, when, a few years ago, American tech giants started to crunch the numbers, they found lots of their best employees came from second-tier schools (as they call them). Possibly the same is true here. It is not like Oxford and Oxford Brookes teach different values of pi.
I've said before that I tend to really respect jobs that need doing, but I wouldn't want to do myself. At uni I had a friend who had worked in one, and his stories were...interesting. I've also been in one on a few occasions (*), and even though clean and bright, there's something heavy about them, spirit-wise.
Hence, even if it is semi-skilled, abattoir workers should be being paid much more than they are. It's an awful, soul-destroying job.
(*) Abattoirs have sumps where... well, you can guess what ends up in them. Every so often these need cleaning out, so we hired a pump to do it. A pump and pipework that was kept for that express purpose, and was kept on a part of the depot well away from anything else as, even after cleaning, it stank. (AFAICR the sump had its own pump, that would often break down and so they had to hire one in to drain the sump, so some poor sod could go down and fix it.)
Most of this problem ultimately comes back to the supermarket sector. If they didn’t demand meat at extremely low prices, and sometimes even at a loss, there wouldn’t be such an issue.
But then that begs another question, of course - are people willing to pay the cost of production?
This is just the nature of capitalism - competition driving down prices and squeezing costs at every stage of production. It's well covered in books like the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It's the great strength but also the great weakness of capitalism as an economic system, when those costs getting squeezed are human beings. It's why I vote Labour, for enlightened policies to temper capitalism with interventions to protect people from the remorseless logic of the system - but still capturing the positive elements of that system as much as possible.
Yet now it’s the Conservatives arguing for higher wages and employers to provide training, while Labour want to throw hundreds of thousands of cheap immigrants at the problem, to prop up the supermarkets’ profits.
Spot on. Labour has forgotten their original purpose - swamped by internationalism
It's principally driven by the desperation to show that freedom of movement in the SM was a good thing that we shouldn't have given up, regardless of the consequences for their natural supporters.
Their vision is a cheap labour, low productivity future where skilled, middle class professionals get a lot of services on the cheap, a good standard of living and the flexibility to move if they so want and the opportunity to sell their services into a bigger market so they can justify a higher price. I mean, from the viewpoint of a professional in London doing financial services etc where they UK is more than competitive you can see why this seems a no brainer but from the viewpoint of a former Labour supporter in the red wall its mainly downside. The absolute refusal to see that suggests to me that winning those supporters back is going to be problematic.
This is simplistic chattering class nonsense David. My girlfriend is red wall works band 3 in the NHS and is struggling because her team cannot recruit anyone.
She’s also worried about heating bills, the cost of petrol, and her salary not keeping pace with cost of living.
The idea that the ‘red wall’ are going to be happy with abstract ‘pay rises’ is frankly out of touch and insulting.
I guess the proof will be in the pudding. If wages outpace cost of living at the low end then you might be right but that remains to be seen.
Yes. There is a structural problem in the economy which Covid has amplified to both visibility and crisis point. We have simultaneously a punishing cost of living crisis and companies unable (and sometimes unwilling) to pay living wages. For all that "just pay more" is a simple solution, how does that work when none of the smaller companies can do and we then end up with a small number of giants with all that entails?
Nursing. Midwifery. HGV Drivers. Carers. Chefs - there are a stack of skilled professions who simply cannot recruit because of a combination of punitive training costs and low pay/crap conditions when you get there. And thats just skilled work, its even worse with unskilled.
As with 2 decades ago where you couldn't find plumbers, joiners, skilled tradespeople at any price we have a choice. Do we blame people and wait an indefinite period of time for people to be trained up and become available for work? Or do we import the workers because the work needs doing now?
To Make Brexit Work (great slogan btw) we need two things. One - make the points-based immigration system functional. Saying "yer barred" to anyone to pacify the red wall is daft. We need a shit ton of people so give them proper visas not a handful of "fuck off at Christmas" ones. Two - properly invest in skills and education so that we will have a pipeline of our own people coming through to replace migrants. As people can't afford their own training and companies won't due to high turnover, we will have to centralise it, a Manpower Services Commission for the 10s.
Part of the problem is forcing things to be graduate jobs. Nursing, for example, shouldn’t require 3 years academic study and £27k of debt. We need to be a lot more thoughtful.
Perhaps there is an argument for the government to fund training for a role which is then paid back by companies during someone’s first few years in the role? And would move with them to a new employer?
Totally agree about nursing. My wife was one of the last diploma nurse cohort I think. She left nursing but returned to help with Covid. She had to write a 4000 word reflective essay which took her days. She would've been much more use on the ward. She spent half a day learning how to reference articles and books correctly. Pointless.
The genius in making nursing more academic and medically knowledgable has been.. the creation of various new jobs for people to do the tasks discarded.
This is the thing. The role of ‘nurse’ in most people’s minds has been replaced by healthcare assistants who don’t require a degree as far as I’m aware.
The whole ‘nurses shouldn’t go to uni’ thing stinks of ‘back in my day…’
The question of whether the nhs should pay the fees is another question
I heard a story that healthcare assistants (at least their union representatives) wanted them to move up the qualification ladder, as well..... I presume this would require creating another group to be at the bottom?
When one of my daughters was in hospital (a while back) a rather angry man had a go at a group of people "lazing around at the nurses station" - his child had been waiting for something medical for a while....
None of them were actually medics - doctors or nurses. Just kids wearing a uniform who weren't allowed to do anything much on their own...
HCAs require few qualifications, and often moved up to being Nurses by going off to nursing school, but few can afford to do so now as the need to earn and cannot pay the fees. Mrs Foxy was paid by the NHS even while training, and did plenty of work for the money*.
There is now an avenue where they can convert via "Nurse Apprenticeships" to fully registered Nurses, and quite a few of ours now do so. They do find the written parts of the course quite hard, and often need remedial maths etc.
The shift to Nursing being a degree antedates the expansion of the universities, being conceived as Project 2000 in the 1980s, recognising the increased technology and skills that modern Nurses need to use.
*much more of the training was "hands on" in her training, with 8 week ward attachments, broken by 2 weeks in Nursing School and a week off, in a regular cycle. By staggering starts, the wards always had a full complement of students. When I met Mrs Foxy she was a final year student, and able to take charge of a chest surgery ward. A bit full on at age 21, but that was the norm then.
I think I was most annoyed with the cynical way in which they were dressed up to look as if they were medical staff, while actually not being. So that the place looked full of "medics" for Angry Man to vent at - but actually.....
As is usual with such ideas, they had the shitty end of the stick as a result.
I hope those flats are well insulated or that GSHP is not going to be running very efficiently…
To be fair the capital cost of drilling boreholes is much more attractive when split across many flats rather than one detached dwelling.
Yes - in general areas with lots of homes in proximity are best served by district heating (i.e. a central source with pipes to al lthe homes), with the added benefit that you don't need to clutter up your home with a boiler and worry about maintenance. I'd never known anything else when I grew up in blocks of flats in Denmark and Switzerland. The case is less clear when you have lots of detached houses.
A friend of ours is Romanian, and they used to have such a system in their tower block. Then communism fell, and people could start buying their flats. Apparently the first thing people would do is turn off the old system and put in a new, localised one. The reason: the pipes were always on, meaning that in summer the building would get insufferably hot, particularly on the lower floors, and heat often did not reach the upper floors at times of high demand. There was also very little control of the heating, except at a building level.
That's obviously one system, but it shows how they can be utter failures if not designed and implemented correctly.
Good design, as ever, is crucial. You can experience the same thing in some hotels with poorly-designed hot water systems, where the heat of your shower varies randomly as other people turn on and off theirs.
My instinct is that a district heating system introduces complexity that means more maintenance is required and failure more likely.
We need to wait for the weekend polls to see if Labour has got any post conference bounce
Indeed and I would suggest we need to wait until the end of October/ early November to determine the overall effects of the conference speeches and of course the budget on the 27th October
I note HMG has announced a £500 million hardship fund to be available through local authorities no doubt to ameliorate the effects of the lost UC uplift and towards the increases in gas supply
It has been announced the UK economy has grown by 5.5% between April and June, higher than the previous estimate of 4.8%
And I did chuckle when Starmer said just now to Burley that his speech was so long because of the number of interruptions from the applause
Last para made me laugh.
£500m isnt going to go very far if it's being shared between say 5m poorer households. Would have been better to delay the UC cut til spring. But that would cost more. Not sure how much.
Actually I think we can detect quite an astute attitude from Rishi because he can add to the hardship fund on need throughout the winter without making a 6 billion annual increase with the UC uplift made permanent
We still need a reverse ferret on the salami slicing of UC since 2015, and the too steep taper.
I wonder if UK Gov want a higher than tiny Green vote to strip some from Lab.
I expect something will be announced in the budget
If he's announcing something in the budget why the leaking of the £500m today? Just a media stunt to distract from SKS doing too well?
Furlough ends today. I'm interested to see how much churn we see in the jobs market before we pay too much heed to employers moaning about unfilled vacancies and needing FOM relaxation.
It seems a very worthy idea but I am astounded at the money apparently being made from it. Are we in a bubble?
It’s not actual folding stuff. It’s just the implied value based on the price someone was willing to invest money at
Still, its basically a niche employment consultant. Where on earth are the cash flows that would justify such multiples of value? How much are companies prepared to pay to outsource something they could so easily do themselves (an advert for Google, for example, is likely to attract lots of bright young things)? They are talking about the company soon being worth $1bn. That is just weird.
Valuations are crazy right now
I can't remember the details but vaguely recall that Mr Blair's business model was similar to solar panel fitters, in that it relied heavily on indirect government subsidies, in this case the apprenticeship levy. I'd imagine there must be something similar in America given the new investment.
As an aside, I know a chap whose basic plan is, whenever a new government subsidy is announced, to work out if and how he can set up a company to exploit it. And he does not seem to be the only one. I am not sure it is commendable but then I guess that is what the government wants.
1. Far too much of the apprenticeship levy is soaked up by brokers, who act as middlemen between apprentices and employers; I'm not sure if that's what Blair is doing. 2. The apprenticeship market has far too many cowboys in it, offering very poor quality apprenticeships. See Ofsted reports passim. 3. Far too much of the apprenticeship levy money is being spent on training that is not actually new, but is simply re-badged; it was provided anyway by employers, but now they just get a government subsidy for it. 4. Far too much of the apprenticeship levy money is going to higher education, level 4/5 apprenticeships - stuff like business administration and psuedo-management courses - rather than training the next generation of skilled workers. 5. There are some brilliant, high-quality apprenticeship schemes, but not nearly enough (see Ofsted reports again).
Conclusion: apprenticeships are a mess, and there's some easy money being made by far too many people with far too little benefit.
From that piece - 400 staff and they have only matched 5000 apprenticeships.
Since then it has matched more than 5,000 apprentices with top employers and doubled its headcount to 400 staff, including in a newly-launched New York office. Facebook, Google, Depop, Bloomberg and Morgan Stanley are among the 300 or so leading companies Multiverse has partnered with so far and Blair says several young people have even turned down places at Oxford to join the scheme.
Are they taking a temping agency type margin?
Mostly hype so far then, as opposed to actually placing lots of people.
Anyone who turns down a place at a Red-Brick or Ivy League is a little silly though, degrees from top institutions are definitely worth the investment.
That there is a premium attached to Russell Group universities might be a sign of inefficiency in the British graduate labour market. Employers look first at Oxbridge then Russell Group and not much further. Famously, when, a few years ago, American tech giants started to crunch the numbers, they found lots of their best employees came from second-tier schools (as they call them). Possibly the same is true here. It is not like Oxford and Oxford Brookes teach different values of pi.
I thought in Oxford, at least for Classics, they use 6.2831853, by teaching you how to have the pi and eat it too?
It seems a very worthy idea but I am astounded at the money apparently being made from it. Are we in a bubble?
It’s not actual folding stuff. It’s just the implied value based on the price someone was willing to invest money at
Still, its basically a niche employment consultant. Where on earth are the cash flows that would justify such multiples of value? How much are companies prepared to pay to outsource something they could so easily do themselves (an advert for Google, for example, is likely to attract lots of bright young things)? They are talking about the company soon being worth $1bn. That is just weird.
Valuations are crazy right now
I can't remember the details but vaguely recall that Mr Blair's business model was similar to solar panel fitters, in that it relied heavily on indirect government subsidies, in this case the apprenticeship levy. I'd imagine there must be something similar in America given the new investment.
As an aside, I know a chap whose basic plan is, whenever a new government subsidy is announced, to work out if and how he can set up a company to exploit it. And he does not seem to be the only one. I am not sure it is commendable but then I guess that is what the government wants.
1. Far too much of the apprenticeship levy is soaked up by brokers, who act as middlemen between apprentices and employers; I'm not sure if that's what Blair is doing. 2. The apprenticeship market has far too many cowboys in it, offering very poor quality apprenticeships. See Ofsted reports passim. 3. Far too much of the apprenticeship levy money is being spent on training that is not actually new, but is simply re-badged; it was provided anyway by employers, but now they just get a government subsidy for it. 4. Far too much of the apprenticeship levy money is going to higher education, level 4/5 apprenticeships - stuff like business administration and psuedo-management courses - rather than training the next generation of skilled workers. 5. There are some brilliant, high-quality apprenticeship schemes, but not nearly enough (see Ofsted reports again).
Conclusion: apprenticeships are a mess, and there's some easy money being made by far too many people with far too little benefit.
From that piece - 400 staff and they have only matched 5000 apprenticeships.
Since then it has matched more than 5,000 apprentices with top employers and doubled its headcount to 400 staff, including in a newly-launched New York office. Facebook, Google, Depop, Bloomberg and Morgan Stanley are among the 300 or so leading companies Multiverse has partnered with so far and Blair says several young people have even turned down places at Oxford to join the scheme.
Are they taking a temping agency type margin?
The apprenticeship levy funding rules are incredibly complicated and not for the faint-hearted. Although the levy is not meant to be spent on brokerage services, there are a whole load of work-arounds that can be used. In short, it's virtually impossible to disentangle the raft of payments involved.
What's needed is a few criminal prosecutions for misuse/fraud relating to apprenticeship funding. It never happens, despite those in the sector knowing that quite a few companies/individuals have illegally fleeced the taxpayer.
I hope those flats are well insulated or that GSHP is not going to be running very efficiently…
To be fair the capital cost of drilling boreholes is much more attractive when split across many flats rather than one detached dwelling.
Yes - in general areas with lots of homes in proximity are best served by district heating (i.e. a central source with pipes to al lthe homes), with the added benefit that you don't need to clutter up your home with a boiler and worry about maintenance. I'd never known anything else when I grew up in blocks of flats in Denmark and Switzerland. The case is less clear when you have lots of detached houses.
A friend of ours is Romanian, and they used to have such a system in their tower block. Then communism fell, and people could start buying their flats. Apparently the first thing people would do is turn off the old system and put in a new, localised one. The reason: the pipes were always on, meaning that in summer the building would get insufferably hot, particularly on the lower floors, and heat often did not reach the upper floors at times of high demand. There was also very little control of the heating, except at a building level.
That's obviously one system, but it shows how they can be utter failures if not designed and implemented correctly.
Funnily enough, there's a large development near where I live with a similar system. A friend who lives there was complaining about it last week. The residents in the flats have no control over their heating - a completely bizarre state of affairs. And of course the block management set it on the assumption that everyone is a 90-year-old granny who will die if their flats aren't as warm as Hawaii in December. So the flats rent at a discount to everywhere else around there.
One-size-fits-all socialism in action.
In our office, when we used it, we couldn't control the temperature for our floor. It was often so cold the company bought a batch of hoodies to wear if it was too cold. Bonkers.
In my wife's old flat, the communal heating system was extremely powerful and the radiators very difficult to turn off.
So, in many flats, they left them on. And opened the windows. In winter.....
It seems a very worthy idea but I am astounded at the money apparently being made from it. Are we in a bubble?
It’s not actual folding stuff. It’s just the implied value based on the price someone was willing to invest money at
Still, its basically a niche employment consultant. Where on earth are the cash flows that would justify such multiples of value? How much are companies prepared to pay to outsource something they could so easily do themselves (an advert for Google, for example, is likely to attract lots of bright young things)? They are talking about the company soon being worth $1bn. That is just weird.
Valuations are crazy right now
I can't remember the details but vaguely recall that Mr Blair's business model was similar to solar panel fitters, in that it relied heavily on indirect government subsidies, in this case the apprenticeship levy. I'd imagine there must be something similar in America given the new investment.
As an aside, I know a chap whose basic plan is, whenever a new government subsidy is announced, to work out if and how he can set up a company to exploit it. And he does not seem to be the only one. I am not sure it is commendable but then I guess that is what the government wants.
1. Far too much of the apprenticeship levy is soaked up by brokers, who act as middlemen between apprentices and employers; I'm not sure if that's what Blair is doing. 2. The apprenticeship market has far too many cowboys in it, offering very poor quality apprenticeships. See Ofsted reports passim. 3. Far too much of the apprenticeship levy money is being spent on training that is not actually new, but is simply re-badged; it was provided anyway by employers, but now they just get a government subsidy for it. 4. Far too much of the apprenticeship levy money is going to higher education, level 4/5 apprenticeships - stuff like business administration and psuedo-management courses - rather than training the next generation of skilled workers. 5. There are some brilliant, high-quality apprenticeship schemes, but not nearly enough (see Ofsted reports again).
Conclusion: apprenticeships are a mess, and there's some easy money being made by far too many people with far too little benefit.
From that piece - 400 staff and they have only matched 5000 apprenticeships.
Since then it has matched more than 5,000 apprentices with top employers and doubled its headcount to 400 staff, including in a newly-launched New York office. Facebook, Google, Depop, Bloomberg and Morgan Stanley are among the 300 or so leading companies Multiverse has partnered with so far and Blair says several young people have even turned down places at Oxford to join the scheme.
Are they taking a temping agency type margin?
Mostly hype so far then, as opposed to actually placing lots of people.
Anyone who turns down a place at a Red-Brick or Ivy League is a little silly though, degrees from top institutions are definitely worth the investment.
That there is a premium attached to Russell Group universities might be a sign of inefficiency in the British graduate labour market. Employers look first at Oxbridge then Russell Group and not much further. Famously, when, a few years ago, American tech giants started to crunch the numbers, they found lots of their best employees came from second-tier schools (as they call them). Possibly the same is true here. It is not like Oxford and Oxford Brookes teach different values of pi.
Depends what employers. Top law and city and tech firms and broadsheets may not look much beyond the Russell group (most top barristers chambers not much beyond Oxbridge) and most doctors come from the Russell Group too.
However plenty of recruiters for middle management jobs will look beyond the top universities
It seems a very worthy idea but I am astounded at the money apparently being made from it. Are we in a bubble?
It’s not actual folding stuff. It’s just the implied value based on the price someone was willing to invest money at
Still, its basically a niche employment consultant. Where on earth are the cash flows that would justify such multiples of value? How much are companies prepared to pay to outsource something they could so easily do themselves (an advert for Google, for example, is likely to attract lots of bright young things)? They are talking about the company soon being worth $1bn. That is just weird.
Valuations are crazy right now
I can't remember the details but vaguely recall that Mr Blair's business model was similar to solar panel fitters, in that it relied heavily on indirect government subsidies, in this case the apprenticeship levy. I'd imagine there must be something similar in America given the new investment.
As an aside, I know a chap whose basic plan is, whenever a new government subsidy is announced, to work out if and how he can set up a company to exploit it. And he does not seem to be the only one. I am not sure it is commendable but then I guess that is what the government wants.
1. Far too much of the apprenticeship levy is soaked up by brokers, who act as middlemen between apprentices and employers; I'm not sure if that's what Blair is doing. 2. The apprenticeship market has far too many cowboys in it, offering very poor quality apprenticeships. See Ofsted reports passim. 3. Far too much of the apprenticeship levy money is being spent on training that is not actually new, but is simply re-badged; it was provided anyway by employers, but now they just get a government subsidy for it. 4. Far too much of the apprenticeship levy money is going to higher education, level 4/5 apprenticeships - stuff like business administration and psuedo-management courses - rather than training the next generation of skilled workers. 5. There are some brilliant, high-quality apprenticeship schemes, but not nearly enough (see Ofsted reports again).
Conclusion: apprenticeships are a mess, and there's some easy money being made by far too many people with far too little benefit.
From that piece - 400 staff and they have only matched 5000 apprenticeships.
Since then it has matched more than 5,000 apprentices with top employers and doubled its headcount to 400 staff, including in a newly-launched New York office. Facebook, Google, Depop, Bloomberg and Morgan Stanley are among the 300 or so leading companies Multiverse has partnered with so far and Blair says several young people have even turned down places at Oxford to join the scheme.
Are they taking a temping agency type margin?
Mostly hype so far then, as opposed to actually placing lots of people.
Anyone who turns down a place at a Red-Brick or Ivy League is a little silly though, degrees from top institutions are definitely worth the investment.
That there is a premium attached to Russell Group universities might be a sign of inefficiency in the British graduate labour market. Employers look first at Oxbridge then Russell Group and not much further. Famously, when, a few years ago, American tech giants started to crunch the numbers, they found lots of their best employees came from second-tier schools (as they call them). Possibly the same is true here. It is not like Oxford and Oxford Brookes teach different values of pi.
I thought in Oxford, at least for Classics, they use 6.2831853, by teaching you how to have the pi and eat it too?
No. The Greats lecturers haven't got beyond Latin and Greek numerals, never mind as far as the decimal point.
I don't get the enduring appeal of James Bond films. Sorry.
I mean when I was a spotty teenager, thrilled by the gadgets and bikini girls, I loved them and recall that my first cinema experience without parents was to see The Spy Who Loved Me with my friend. But as an adult?
The franchise has a reputation for me of lame sets, dodgy acting and banal, implausible script. All-round a bit ... naff.
If you want to watch an action movie then JB films aren't in the same league as, say, the Bourne movies or the awesome and flawless Mad Max Thunder Road are they?
I hope that's not too controversial so as to make you choke on your cornflakes especially on James Bond Day.
JB films have been transformed by Bourne.
Once upon a time they were light hearted, self-parodic, and tremendous and unserious fun.
However, despite their copying Bourne, or trying to, they are now long, lumbering, taking themselves far too seriously with hugely convoluted plots.
Both the Bond films and Doctor Who have fallen victim to the same phenomenon of believing the hype of a few obsessives.
Edit: the obsessives in the case of Bond being the financiers, mainly.
They also seem to have become (weirdly to me) part of the UK national psyche: film premiere 2nd or 3rd on BBC news bulletins, lots of talking heading about meaning, much angst about whether it’s a ‘good one’, the London Olympics silliness.
Aside from something to watch at Christmas while building Tamiya’s latest panzer they never really did it for me. Apart from anything else they’ve become such exercises in self referential nostalgia; I believe the latest offering includes a DB5, a Vantage, a Land Rover III and Triumph’s own self referring tribute to its ‘iconic’ scrambler, helpfully plastered with a UJ in case you didn’t get the message.
Eventually Bond will be OHMSS equipped with a Webley revolver and a Sopwith Camel, which is essentially Richard Hannay. Actually, I might watch that…
I've said before that I tend to really respect jobs that need doing, but I wouldn't want to do myself. At uni I had a friend who had worked in one, and his stories were...interesting. I've also been in one on a few occasions (*), and even though clean and bright, there's something heavy about them, spirit-wise.
Hence, even if it is semi-skilled, abattoir workers should be being paid much more than they are. It's an awful, soul-destroying job.
(*) Abattoirs have sumps where... well, you can guess what ends up in them. Every so often these need cleaning out, so we hired a pump to do it. A pump and pipework that was kept for that express purpose, and was kept on a part of the depot well away from anything else as, even after cleaning, it stank. (AFAICR the sump had its own pump, that would often break down and so they had to hire one in to drain the sump, so some poor sod could go down and fix it.)
Most of this problem ultimately comes back to the supermarket sector. If they didn’t demand meat at extremely low prices, and sometimes even at a loss, there wouldn’t be such an issue.
But then that begs another question, of course - are people willing to pay the cost of production?
This is just the nature of capitalism - competition driving down prices and squeezing costs at every stage of production. It's well covered in books like the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It's the great strength but also the great weakness of capitalism as an economic system, when those costs getting squeezed are human beings. It's why I vote Labour, for enlightened policies to temper capitalism with interventions to protect people from the remorseless logic of the system - but still capturing the positive elements of that system as much as possible.
Yet now it’s the Conservatives arguing for higher wages and employers to provide training, while Labour want to throw hundreds of thousands of cheap immigrants at the problem, to prop up the supermarkets’ profits.
Spot on. Labour has forgotten their original purpose - swamped by internationalism
It's principally driven by the desperation to show that freedom of movement in the SM was a good thing that we shouldn't have given up, regardless of the consequences for their natural supporters.
Their vision is a cheap labour, low productivity future where skilled, middle class professionals get a lot of services on the cheap, a good standard of living and the flexibility to move if they so want and the opportunity to sell their services into a bigger market so they can justify a higher price. I mean, from the viewpoint of a professional in London doing financial services etc where they UK is more than competitive you can see why this seems a no brainer but from the viewpoint of a former Labour supporter in the red wall its mainly downside. The absolute refusal to see that suggests to me that winning those supporters back is going to be problematic.
This is simplistic chattering class nonsense David. My girlfriend is red wall works band 3 in the NHS and is struggling because her team cannot recruit anyone.
She’s also worried about heating bills, the cost of petrol, and her salary not keeping pace with cost of living.
The idea that the ‘red wall’ are going to be happy with abstract ‘pay rises’ is frankly out of touch and insulting.
I guess the proof will be in the pudding. If wages outpace cost of living at the low end then you might be right but that remains to be seen.
Yes. There is a structural problem in the economy which Covid has amplified to both visibility and crisis point. We have simultaneously a punishing cost of living crisis and companies unable (and sometimes unwilling) to pay living wages. For all that "just pay more" is a simple solution, how does that work when none of the smaller companies can do and we then end up with a small number of giants with all that entails?
Nursing. Midwifery. HGV Drivers. Carers. Chefs - there are a stack of skilled professions who simply cannot recruit because of a combination of punitive training costs and low pay/crap conditions when you get there. And thats just skilled work, its even worse with unskilled.
As with 2 decades ago where you couldn't find plumbers, joiners, skilled tradespeople at any price we have a choice. Do we blame people and wait an indefinite period of time for people to be trained up and become available for work? Or do we import the workers because the work needs doing now?
To Make Brexit Work (great slogan btw) we need two things. One - make the points-based immigration system functional. Saying "yer barred" to anyone to pacify the red wall is daft. We need a shit ton of people so give them proper visas not a handful of "fuck off at Christmas" ones. Two - properly invest in skills and education so that we will have a pipeline of our own people coming through to replace migrants. As people can't afford their own training and companies won't due to high turnover, we will have to centralise it, a Manpower Services Commission for the 10s.
Part of the problem is forcing things to be graduate jobs. Nursing, for example, shouldn’t require 3 years academic study and £27k of debt. We need to be a lot more thoughtful.
Perhaps there is an argument for the government to fund training for a role which is then paid back by companies during someone’s first few years in the role? And would move with them to a new employer?
Totally agree about nursing. My wife was one of the last diploma nurse cohort I think. She left nursing but returned to help with Covid. She had to write a 4000 word reflective essay which took her days. She would've been much more use on the ward. She spent half a day learning how to reference articles and books correctly. Pointless.
The genius in making nursing more academic and medically knowledgable has been.. the creation of various new jobs for people to do the tasks discarded.
Indeed, but that is a good thing. There is an entry point for school Leavers with few formal qualifications to start as HCA's, progress via Nurse Apprenticeships to become Staff Nurses, then to become Specialist Clinical Nurses with autonomy. There are a lot of steps, but clear possibility of career progression.
Comments
I’d go back to the beginning and do it as a lavish period action saga. Mad Men styling. Classic cars. Take away the silliness, comic book villains and plodding plotting of the originals. Draw a proper multi film plot arc rather than the retconning of Spectre and make-it-up-as-we-film of Quantum of Solace. A rounded character following a coherent arc, with a personality that can breath around the action sequences rather than be suffocated by them.
Much of the best bits of the Craig era followed this template but they should go full throttle with it.
He would have got - maybe - a few million in cash.
*With the possible exception of some part of Central London.
Mind you, some ancient Roman writers held that since members of the Head Count would do work that was supposed to be things that slaves were for... well, that was evidence that the Head Count shouldn't be considered Roman and didn't deserve rights.
There's much material with Spectre etc that could be done along those lines from a reboot onwards.
The part of the Starmer speech was was surprising was "The Good Society and the Strong Economy need each other" because its sad that this needs to be said. Companies need a workforce productive and engaged, employees need companies supportive and nurturing.
We are a long way from getting this. Too few people are unionised and frankly several of the big unions seem wedded to overthrowing capitalism still. Too few companies give a shit about their employees and the tax system gives no incentive to the long term investment in people.
Surely if all the promises of Brexit were on course to be fulfilled there would be a much higher % thinking that it was going very well thus far, while recognising that the process has a long way to go.
But also converted the FX desk into a nice sitting room for customers
To be fair the capital cost of drilling boreholes is much more attractive when split across many flats rather than one detached dwelling.
https://twitter.com/sturdyAlex/status/1443477106797785090
@sturdyAlex @SimonClarkeMP Even if you accept his premise, the shelves in Europe are full and there aren't fistfights at the pumps.
I'm not sure, "Witness our complete inability to manage a crisis the EU is apparently managing just fine" is the devastating counterpunch he believes it to be.
https://twitter.com/DmitryOpines/status/1443478030081462275
Essentially the locals wanted more money* and the hacienda types didn't want to invest in machinery.
*EDIT In addition to money, they wanted not to be beaten to death by overseers.
Just stand back and laissez-faire. Let the productive employers find the productive employees.
Unions try to ensure there is no other supply available so they can get away with picket lines etc, while 'free movement' ensured there was an infinite supply available. What we need is simply what we have now a competitive market with a finite supply.
I was chatting to someone the other day about green roofs, and he was a bit nonplussed when I pointed out that a green roof essentially only fixes C02 once, whilst solar panels repeat the trick every year, unless he was proposing a peat bog on his roof. Yes, the green roof also recycles C02 to oxygen, but the overall arithmetic is the other way.
https://www.theecoexperts.co.uk/solar-panels/green-roofs
If I were a low paid worker I would be wary of relying on supply and demand for pay rises. Today's excess demand can quickly become tomorrow's excess supply, and the high wage Tory cheerleaders on here would be calling for pay cuts before you knew it. Still, good luck to them, I hope they make hay while the sun shines, and it comes out of the pockets of the bosses and not other low paid workers in the shape of higher prices.
For me she rained on his parade, or as Angela Rayner might say " p****** on his chips".
This is not a Prime Minister or Government in waiting until Starmer punishes dissenters like Pidcock in the same way Johnson did to Soubry and Grieve, and Corbyn did to Umuna. Did Laura Pidcock write that post for you?
EDIT: All the Bond films avoided direct references to Russia as the enemy. Even in From Russia With Love, the Russian element was explained as Russian defectors to SPECTRE - taking on both the Russians and the British...
The whole ‘nurses shouldn’t go to uni’ thing stinks of ‘back in my day…’
The question of whether the nhs should pay the fees is another question
400 staff are going to be costing let’s say £40m a year, so they have two years of cash to ‘ramp up’ the actual work and start seeing revenues exceeding expenses. Maybe they’re simply hoping to get close and hope that a bigger player buys them out, maybe Microsoft/LinkedIn.
The valuation is based on the potential future of the business, rather than what they do today, but yes, it does look an awful lot like 1999 all over again.
2. The apprenticeship market has far too many cowboys in it, offering very poor quality apprenticeships. See Ofsted reports passim.
3. Far too much of the apprenticeship levy money is being spent on training that is not actually new, but is simply re-badged; it was provided anyway by employers, but now they just get a government subsidy for it.
4. Far too much of the apprenticeship levy money is going to higher education, level 4/5 apprenticeships - stuff like business administration and psuedo-management courses - rather than training the next generation of skilled workers.
5. There are some brilliant, high-quality apprenticeship schemes, but not nearly enough (see Ofsted reports again).
Conclusion: apprenticeships are a mess, and there's some easy money being made by far too many people with far too little benefit.
Con 39 (-)
Lab 31 (-1)
LDs 8 (-)
Greens 9
REFUK 4 (+1)
We need to wait for the weekend polls to see if Labour has got any post conference bounce
Fortunately nearly the entire 4% that believe "very well" appear on PB daily...
When one of my daughters was in hospital (a while back) a rather angry man had a go at a group of people "lazing around at the nurses station" - his child had been waiting for something medical for a while....
None of them were actually medics - doctors or nurses. Just kids wearing a uniform who weren't allowed to do anything much on their own...
Once Johnson took the reins personally, it was over... or it hasn't filtered through to the polling yet.
I see Raab's brilliant plan is to let prisoners drive HGVs. Quite how or why they are going to jump the long queues for the tests or get the funding for the training is not clear yet.
Even Labour voters were only marginally more inclined to blame the government than the media.
I note HMG has announced a £500 million hardship fund to be available through local authorities no doubt to ameliorate the effects of the lost UC uplift and towards the increases in gas supply
It has been announced the UK economy has grown by 5.5% between April and June, higher than the previous estimate of 4.8%
And I did chuckle when Starmer said just now to Burley that his speech was so long because of the number of interruptions from the applause
What we have here by my reckoning is a potential future party leader... if only they could find her a safe seat.
To the voters who thought we were unpatriotic or irresponsible or that we looked down on them, I say these simple but powerful words. We will never under my leadership go into an election with a manifesto that is not a serious plan for government."
If we have Unions, they must be depoliticised. I would perhaps follow some aspects of the German Model.
£500m isnt going to go very far if it's being shared between say 5m poorer households. Would have been better to delay the UC cut til spring. But that would cost more. Not sure how much.
That's obviously one system, but it shows how they can be utter failures if not designed and implemented correctly.
Since then it has matched more than 5,000 apprentices with top employers and doubled its headcount to 400 staff, including in a newly-launched New York office. Facebook, Google, Depop, Bloomberg and Morgan Stanley are among the 300 or so leading companies Multiverse has partnered with so far and Blair says several young people have even turned down places at Oxford to join the scheme.
Are they taking a temping agency type margin?
One-size-fits-all socialism in action.
I wonder if UK Gov want a higher than tiny Green vote to strip some from Lab.
Anyone who turns down a place at a Red-Brick or Ivy League is a little silly though, degrees from top institutions are definitely worth the investment.
As an aside, 100 years ago you'd have had the same debate about doctors, which used not to need a degree. More recently law and accountancy have become largely graduate professions. Progress?
You need to be in a position where supply = demand for a healthy economy. In a free market if demand > supply then prices go up (which is where we are now) and if supply > demand then prices go down (which is what we've had in the past).
But if unions or businesses can rig the market to get a price away from equilibrium then there is a market failure and the result if prices are too high is unemployment. So the workers in the business get a better price in the short-term, but they're resulting in people on the dole instead. How is that "uniting" workers?
Plus then it damages the employers in the long-term, which damages the employees themselves in the long-term if they intend to stick with the employer.
I reckon NW Durham is probably as hard for Labour to win as the Milton Keynes seats, which require swings of 5pp and 5.4pp.
The equivalent to depoliticising unions would be to permit company directors only to make personal gifts to political parties. Never out of company money.
Edit: oifg course, you may be opposed to that too.
There is now an avenue where they can convert via "Nurse Apprenticeships" to fully registered Nurses, and quite a few of ours now do so. They do find the written parts of the course quite hard, and often need remedial maths etc.
The shift to Nursing being a degree antedates the expansion of the universities, being conceived as Project 2000 in the 1980s, recognising the increased technology and skills that modern Nurses need to use.
*much more of the training was "hands on" in her training, with 8 week ward attachments, broken by 2 weeks in Nursing School and a week off, in a regular cycle. By staggering starts, the wards always had a full complement of students. When I met Mrs Foxy she was a final year student, and able to take charge of a chest surgery ward. A bit full on at age 21, but that was the norm then.
Reward marginal Tory voters in "preferred" councils
Blame councils for any problems
Typically cynical, passing the buck and ignoring the problem.
Though what you overlook of course is that via the "Single Market" the UK economy has had a virtually infinite excess supply of low wage labour. So yes that excess supply has depressed wages in the UK like you seem concerned as a possibility for the future - plus its inevitably led to the destruction of jobs elsewhere on the continent as a result too to compensate. Excess supply would remain infinite keeping wages to the minimum floor unless or until the UK wage reached equilibrium with the rest of the world's wages . . . that is what "workers of the world unite" means if you have free movement.
Is that what you want? For the British working poor to be on the same pay, terms and conditions as the rest of the world's working poor? 🤔
Lab on 31%
Down 1
Further behind than last week
SKS fans please explain
As is usual with such ideas, they had the shitty end of the stick as a result.
My instinct is that a district heating system introduces complexity that means more maintenance is required and failure more likely.
Furlough ends today. I'm interested to see how much churn we see in the jobs market before we pay too much heed to employers moaning about unfilled vacancies and needing FOM relaxation.
What's needed is a few criminal prosecutions for misuse/fraud relating to apprenticeship funding. It never happens, despite those in the sector knowing that quite a few companies/individuals have illegally fleeced the taxpayer.
So, in many flats, they left them on. And opened the windows. In winter.....
Get Burnham a seat quick.
However plenty of recruiters for middle management jobs will look beyond the top universities
Aside from something to watch at Christmas while building Tamiya’s latest panzer they never really did it for me. Apart from anything else they’ve become such exercises in self referential nostalgia; I believe the latest offering includes a DB5, a Vantage, a Land Rover III and Triumph’s own self referring tribute to its ‘iconic’ scrambler, helpfully plastered with a UJ in case you didn’t get the message.
Eventually Bond will be OHMSS equipped with a Webley revolver and a Sopwith Camel, which is essentially Richard Hannay. Actually, I might watch that…