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…
Didn't one of them try to shoehorn indiref1 somehow? I never did see it, but wonder what happened.
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'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.
Think it's been suggested on here, but why don't we make people become nurses before they can become doctors?
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.
They look aboard, after the Russell group. HR even have lists of the RussellGroupEquivelent degree farms overseas.....
I've actually been part of attempts to hire outside the top universities. There were some good people there, but the ratio of dross to gold was much higher. A big problem was the lack of banding in degree results. Some of the 1sts were.... interesting.
The reason that Russell Group is used as a filter, is to save time and effort.
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.
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.
Think it's been suggested on here, but why don't we make people become nurses before they can become doctors?
Because either they would spend 10 minutes being a nurse, or we would end up with doctors qualifying just in time to retire?
The Greens won’t get 9% in a GE and a lot of those will move to Labour . So that needs to be factored in .
Why won't the Greens get 9%?
There's always a "pox on both your houses" protest vote. That used to be the Lib Dems but post-Clegg it changes which party it goes to. No reason it can't be the Greens next time.
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.
The end of the furlough scheme is going to be a big story. It would be quite interesting to see a breakdown of the people still there at the end, by job and market segment. There will likely be a combination of redundancies, retentions and a few companies rolling their own furlough scheme for critical employees (such as airline pilots, who cost a fortune to hire and train).
The Greens won’t get 9% in a GE and a lot of those will move to Labour . So that needs to be factored in .
A dangerous assumption for Labour to make, and one of their current problems, I would say. At the dawn of New Labour the Green Party were nowhere, and the disillusioned really did have nowhere else to go ; and the Lib Dems were also a less metropolitan-friendly party, a combination which I've mentioned a few times on here. If Mandelson and some other New Labour figures are playing a big role again, it's vital they update to the 2020s picture to allow for this, *as well as* attracting new votes on the centre-right, because I'm not sure they've made the adjustment sufficiently just yet.
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.
The end of the furlough scheme is going to be a big story. It would be quite interesting to see a breakdown of the people still there at the end, by job and market segment. There will likely be a combination of redundancies, retentions and a few companies rolling their own furlough scheme for critical employees (such as airline pilots, who cost a fortune to hire and train).
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
Most doctors come from medical schools. I wonder if there has been a study of which ones top doctors come from. It sounds like the sort of thing that might have appeared in the Christmas edition of the BMJ, if that is still a thing. Now you come to mention it, I vaguely recall from decades back it being said that the posher a consultant's school, the higher up the body he specialised.
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.
Personally, I am quite attracted to the idea that donations to political parties should only be from individuals.
I have been concerned that a weakness of that has been that Tories were mainly much richer than Lab, but looking at the supporters of various parties - eg Luvvies, footballers, business people worth tens of millions each and the wealthy areas of the country being more leftish now - I wonder if that is still a relevant concern.
An alternative might be to overhaul TU democracy which seems not to work. I'm not sure just how I would frame that.
The Tory vote is sticky. The red wall bought into Brexit, and the bought into Boris. They aren't being peeled off that quickly.
Remember that in any election or any vote it isn't just what you get, its what the other side gets as well. Whilst there is no correlation between national vote tallies and seats under FPTP, it is a good indicator of popularity.
In 2017 the perception is that May screwed up the campaign - and she did. That Ooh Jeremy Corbyn was a successful failure - and vs expectations he was. But in 2017 May added 2.3m votes to the Tory tally after 7 years in government, a 20% rise.
So whatever Labour does it will most likely lose if the Tory vote stays Tory. Any successful campaign needs to take votes off the Tory tally or it will fail as it did in 2017. Starmer is Labour's best bet to do that, far more than Nandy or any of the hard left prospects would be.
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.
Yes but the old system also had that, with enrolled nurses (2-year course iirc) being lower than registered nurses (3-year course) but with some possibility of progression.
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.
I think that it can work well. In Iceland 90% of the heating is direct geothermal.
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.
The end of the furlough scheme is going to be a big story. It would be quite interesting to see a breakdown of the people still there at the end, by job and market segment. There will likely be a combination of redundancies, retentions and a few companies rolling their own furlough scheme for critical employees (such as airline pilots, who cost a fortune to hire and train).
It won't surprise me if a significant chunk of people "on furlough" are those who can exploit the system to get free cash.
Eg if an individual has a small family business with their family or close friends all on paywall then they could be tempted keep some of them on furlough even if they are working. The family is getting money into the business via work, money from HMRC via furlough, and since everyone's related then everyone can be a winner from the arrangement with plausible deniability that there's any wrongdoing.
It won't surprise me if half the stragglers still on furlough to the end miraculously start working from tomorrow.
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…
Tamiya? Blimey, I remember seeing them in the model shops in days of yore. A bit exotic for me. I tended to stick to Airfix and the odd Revell and Matchbox and once, I think, a Frog.
I have just had my Asda order delivered and again complete as ordered
I asked the driver how he was managing with the fuel and he said it 'was over' and this morning there was one car at Asda filling station when he came away just now
I was surprised but the he does work for Asda and has to fuel daily, so he is in the know
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.
Yes but the old system also had that, with enrolled nurses (2-year course iirc) being lower than registered nurses (3-year course) but with some possibility of progression.
To an extent Nurse Apprenticeships are the equivalent of the SEN grade. There were HCA's back in the day too, but known as Nurse Auxillaries, who had very few formal qualifications.
As an aside thought, I had forgotten that Furlough ended today, and I wonder whether they want to have at least some idea how that will unwind into the wider employment market before doing drastic things.
1 million coming off furlough, according to the BBC.
Will that fill any of the employment gaps?
(Analogy to property availability, and the 100s of thousands - not sure of exact number but I have 2 or 3 myself - of rentals that are unavailable due to Covid regulations.)
I have just had my Asda order delivered and again complete as ordered
I asked the driver how he was managing with the fuel and he said it 'was over' and this morning there was one car at Asda filling station when he came away just now
I was surprised but the he does work for Asda and has to fuel daily, so he is in the know
Not remotely surprised. I said last Saturday this would be substantially over by Wednesday and so it was.
It doesn't take long to recover from a fake panic and that's exactly what this was. It was all fake, there were no issues, so its over.
The end of the furlough scheme is going to be a big story. It would be quite interesting to see a breakdown of the people still there at the end, by job and market segment. There will likely be a combination of redundancies, retentions and a few companies rolling their own furlough scheme for critical employees (such as airline pilots, who cost a fortune to hire and train).
At the height of the pandemic, furlough for many people meant sitting at home doing nothing. But I do not think it is necessary like that now. There are more people on shades of partial furlough, and those that may be working one job while furloughed from their second job. The 1m figure is also an extrapolation from BICS industries and may not be wholly accurate.
I expect the result to be underwhelming. I don't think there's a pool of people just waiting to fill the gaps as regards vacancies but nor do I think this is 1m straight onto the unemployment figures.
You make a good point about specific jobs but clearly the numbers there are very small.
Conducted before yesterday's speech. The Opinium poll is the up to date and more relevant one regarding Starmer. 18 months in, he beats Johnson and Corbyn hands down, even though the comparison is at a point when Corbyn was at his least unpopular.
You really want Starmer and Labour to fail in 2024, don't you?
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…
Tamiya? Blimey, I remember seeing them in the model shops in days of yore. A bit exotic for me. I tended to stick to Airfix and the odd Revell and Matchbox and once, I think, a Frog.
Tamiya were a level up in terms of quality to Airfix or Revell, and particularly strong on armour vehicles and racing cars, often with motors. In the early Seventies I could muster enough for a blitzkrieg.
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.
Think it's been suggested on here, but why don't we make people become nurses before they can become doctors?
Because either they would spend 10 minutes being a nurse, or we would end up with doctors qualifying just in time to retire?
But that's true of all businesses with career progression.
I have just had my Asda order delivered and again complete as ordered
I asked the driver how he was managing with the fuel and he said it 'was over' and this morning there was one car at Asda filling station when he came away just now
I was surprised but the he does work for Asda and has to fuel daily, so he is in the know
Our local stations still out of all but super unleaded, I hear (extended family member who commutes and does need to top up with diesel in next 2-3 days or will have problems - she'll just join a queue nearer work, station there seems to have fuel but has queues too).
Our fairly regular Morrisons driver is quitting in a couple of weeks to do HGV training. Market forces at work, I guess.
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…
Tamiya? Blimey, I remember seeing them in the model shops in days of yore. A bit exotic for me. I tended to stick to Airfix and the odd Revell and Matchbox and once, I think, a Frog.
Man, I was on all them drugs, eventually maxed out on the hard stuff of vac form and scratch building.
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.
The end of the furlough scheme is going to be a big story. It would be quite interesting to see a breakdown of the people still there at the end, by job and market segment. There will likely be a combination of redundancies, retentions and a few companies rolling their own furlough scheme for critical employees (such as airline pilots, who cost a fortune to hire and train).
It won't surprise me if a significant chunk of people "on furlough" are those who can exploit the system to get free cash.
Eg if an individual has a small family business with their family or close friends all on paywall then they could be tempted keep some of them on furlough even if they are working. The family is getting money into the business via work, money from HMRC via furlough, and since everyone's related then everyone can be a winner from the arrangement with plausible deniability that there's any wrongdoing.
It won't surprise me if half the stragglers still on furlough to the end miraculously start working from tomorrow.
Yes, there are likely a lot of small family business, some of whom probably don’t really need the money any more.
Probably also quite a few people who have left the country already (Starbucks manager in the City, Polish, for example), who will neither be going back to work nor claiming unemployment.
Some detailed statistics would be really useful here.
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.
The end of the furlough scheme is going to be a big story. It would be quite interesting to see a breakdown of the people still there at the end, by job and market segment. There will likely be a combination of redundancies, retentions and a few companies rolling their own furlough scheme for critical employees (such as airline pilots, who cost a fortune to hire and train).
It won't surprise me if a significant chunk of people "on furlough" are those who can exploit the system to get free cash.
Eg if an individual has a small family business with their family or close friends all on paywall then they could be tempted keep some of them on furlough even if they are working. The family is getting money into the business via work, money from HMRC via furlough, and since everyone's related then everyone can be a winner from the arrangement with plausible deniability that there's any wrongdoing.
It won't surprise me if half the stragglers still on furlough to the end miraculously start working from tomorrow.
Yes, I know a few people in private practice via companies, who have furloughed their spouses from the payroll, for 18 months now. Not Mrs Foxy, as I missed that dodge by not having her on the payroll.
Conducted before yesterday's speech. The Opinium poll is the up to date and more relevant one regarding Starmer. 18 months in, he beats Johnson and Corbyn hands down, even though the comparison is at a point when Corbyn was at his least unpopular.
You really want Starmer and Labour to fail in 2024, don't you?
Most people won't even have noticed that KS made a speech. If Labour get a bounce it will be because of the fuel shortages.
I have just had my Asda order delivered and again complete as ordered
I asked the driver how he was managing with the fuel and he said it 'was over' and this morning there was one car at Asda filling station when he came away just now
I was surprised but the he does work for Asda and has to fuel daily, so he is in the know
Yes all the closed petrol stations and long queues outside the few that are open are an anti government conspiracy.
It is fine in parts of the country, in other parts we are struggling. Please don't minimise our real problems just because it is okay where you are.
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.
Think it's been suggested on here, but why don't we make people become nurses before they can become doctors?
Because either they would spend 10 minutes being a nurse, or we would end up with doctors qualifying just in time to retire?
But that's true of all businesses with career progression.
It's 7 years or so to build your average pill roller, already.
It's a bit like the military idea of everyone starts as a private. Either some are going to need to spend 10 minutes in each rank, or all the Generals will be 95.
I have just had my Asda order delivered and again complete as ordered
I asked the driver how he was managing with the fuel and he said it 'was over' and this morning there was one car at Asda filling station when he came away just now
I was surprised but the he does work for Asda and has to fuel daily, so he is in the know
Yes all the closed petrol stations and long queues outside the few that are open are an anti government conspiracy.
It is fine in parts of the country, in other parts we are struggling. Please don't minimise our real problems just because it is okay where you are.
Yes, it's still patchy. Some relatives and friends acting as if everything is over ; others still stressed or furious.
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…
Tamiya? Blimey, I remember seeing them in the model shops in days of yore. A bit exotic for me. I tended to stick to Airfix and the odd Revell and Matchbox and once, I think, a Frog.
Man, I was on all them drugs, eventually maxed out on the hard stuff of vac form and scratch building.
Not to mention the smell of Britfix polystyrene cement in the morning. Though Lepages Styrene was too much for me - the equivalent of Capstan Extra Strength.
Interesting, though, about JB. I can remember when the Airfix 1:24 Aston Martin DB5 with swivelling number plates, machine guns and calthrops was the go-for model of the month. And that was a very, very long time ago. The fact that the latest film is harking back to that particular model of [full size!] car is quite significant.
The end of the furlough scheme is going to be a big story. It would be quite interesting to see a breakdown of the people still there at the end, by job and market segment. There will likely be a combination of redundancies, retentions and a few companies rolling their own furlough scheme for critical employees (such as airline pilots, who cost a fortune to hire and train).
At the height of the pandemic, furlough for many people meant sitting at home doing nothing. But I do not think it is necessary like that now. There are more people on shades of partial furlough, and those that may be working one job while furloughed from their second job. The 1m figure is also an extrapolation from BICS industries and may not be wholly accurate.
I expect the result to be underwhelming. I don't think there's a pool of people just waiting to fill the gaps as regards vacancies but nor do I think this is 1m straight onto the unemployment figures.
You make a good point about specific jobs but clearly the numbers there are very small.
People are weird.
You or I would have either confirmed that our employer was taking us back to work, or frantically hunted for another job..... to start the day furlough ended.
Despite the frequently signalling that furlough is going to end, there will be a series of people appearing on the BBC, shocked, saying "But what do I do now?"
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
Most doctors come from medical schools. I wonder if there has been a study of which ones top doctors come from. It sounds like the sort of thing that might have appeared in the Christmas edition of the BMJ, if that is still a thing. Now you come to mention it, I vaguely recall from decades back it being said that the posher a consultant's school, the higher up the body he specialised.
I don't think that true any longer, if it ever was. Most of my Consultant colleagues were privately educated, but unless you are familiar with the ranking of private schools in Lahore, Madurai, Khartoum and Thessaloniki then it would be hard to rank them in terms of poshness.
Incidentally, in Leicester we appoint Medical Students post A Level, and perhaps 50% work as HCAs in their year off. A number continue to do so during undergraduate training, and benefit by doing so.
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.
Personally, I am quite attracted to the idea that donations to political parties should only be from individuals.
I have been concerned that a weakness of that has been that Tories were mainly much richer than Lab, but looking at the supporters of various parties - eg Luvvies, footballers, business people worth tens of millions each and the wealthy areas of the country being more leftish now - I wonder if that is still a relevant concern.
An alternative might be to overhaul TU democracy which seems not to work. I'm not sure just how I would frame that.
Hmm, that last was done by Mrs T. The real issue is the low proportion of those who do vote. But that's true of any election. One could hardly claim that HYUFD for instance should be deposed from his councillorship just because the Epping citizens did not turn out 100% [or so one assumes: obviously I can't check the actual figure].
Conducted before yesterday's speech. The Opinium poll is the up to date and more relevant one regarding Starmer. 18 months in, he beats Johnson and Corbyn hands down, even though the comparison is at a point when Corbyn was at his least unpopular.
You really want Starmer and Labour to fail in 2024, don't you?
Most people won't even have noticed that KS made a speech. If Labour get a bounce it will be because of the fuel shortages.
I think the polls next week may probably give a better picture, because both Starmer's pitch may take a while to register, and as MexicanPete says, people pi***ed off enough at the pumps to actually change their voting preferences may become so only gradually, or by attrition.
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.
The end of the furlough scheme is going to be a big story. It would be quite interesting to see a breakdown of the people still there at the end, by job and market segment. There will likely be a combination of redundancies, retentions and a few companies rolling their own furlough scheme for critical employees (such as airline pilots, who cost a fortune to hire and train).
It won't surprise me if a significant chunk of people "on furlough" are those who can exploit the system to get free cash.
Eg if an individual has a small family business with their family or close friends all on paywall then they could be tempted keep some of them on furlough even if they are working. The family is getting money into the business via work, money from HMRC via furlough, and since everyone's related then everyone can be a winner from the arrangement with plausible deniability that there's any wrongdoing.
It won't surprise me if half the stragglers still on furlough to the end miraculously start working from tomorrow.
Yes, I know a few people in private practice via companies, who have furloughed their spouses from the payroll, for 18 months now. Not Mrs Foxy, as I missed that dodge by not having her on the payroll.
I expect the same in many other small companies.
Having the missus on the payroll (or husband, whichever way around) and saying they do 'admin' is an age old con for small businesses. Mostly a way of getting another 10k or so a year out the company tax free.
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…
Tamiya? Blimey, I remember seeing them in the model shops in days of yore. A bit exotic for me. I tended to stick to Airfix and the odd Revell and Matchbox and once, I think, a Frog.
Man, I was on all them drugs, eventually maxed out on the hard stuff of vac form and scratch building.
Not to mention the smell of Britfix polystyrene cement in the morning. Though Lepages Styrene was too much for me - the equivalent of Capstan Extra Strength.
Interesting, though, about JB. I can remember when the Airfix 1:24 Aston Martin DB5 with swivelling number plates, machine guns and calthrops was the go-for model of the month. And that was a very, very long time ago. The fact that the latest film is harking back to that particular model of [full size!] car is quite significant.
Yossarian sidled up drunkenly to Colonel Korn at the officers' club one night to kid with him about the new Lepage gun that the Germans had moved in. 'What Lepage gun?' Colonle Korn inquired with curiousity. 'The new three-hundred-and-forty-four-millimeter Lepage glue gun,' Yossarian answered. 'It glues a whole formation of planes together in mid-air.'
Conducted before yesterday's speech. The Opinium poll is the up to date and more relevant one regarding Starmer. 18 months in, he beats Johnson and Corbyn hands down, even though the comparison is at a point when Corbyn was at his least unpopular.
You really want Starmer and Labour to fail in 2024, don't you?
Most people won't even have noticed that KS made a speech. If Labour get a bounce it will be because of the fuel shortages.
I think the polls next week may give a better picture, because both Starmer's pitch may take a while to register, and as MexicanPete says, people pi***ed off enough at the pumps to actually change their voting preferences may become so only gradually, or by attrition.
If the pumps are back to normal(ish) this weekend, then it'll be a blip if anything.
I have just had my Asda order delivered and again complete as ordered
I asked the driver how he was managing with the fuel and he said it 'was over' and this morning there was one car at Asda filling station when he came away just now
I was surprised but the he does work for Asda and has to fuel daily, so he is in the know
Not remotely surprised. I said last Saturday this would be substantially over by Wednesday and so it was.
It doesn't take long to recover from a fake panic and that's exactly what this was. It was all fake, there were no issues, so its over.
I still have a quarter of a tank so am fine but at least the last ten petrol stations I passed last night are empty. Not fine or fake, other people are not going to work because of this.
I have just had my Asda order delivered and again complete as ordered
I asked the driver how he was managing with the fuel and he said it 'was over' and this morning there was one car at Asda filling station when he came away just now
I was surprised but the he does work for Asda and has to fuel daily, so he is in the know
Not remotely surprised. I said last Saturday this would be substantially over by Wednesday and so it was.
It doesn't take long to recover from a fake panic and that's exactly what this was. It was all fake, there were no issues, so its over.
I still have a quarter of a tank so am fine but at least the last ten petrol stations I passed last night are empty. Not fine or fake, other people are not going to work because of this.
Out of curiosity, where we you driving from and to?
I have just had my Asda order delivered and again complete as ordered
I asked the driver how he was managing with the fuel and he said it 'was over' and this morning there was one car at Asda filling station when he came away just now
I was surprised but the he does work for Asda and has to fuel daily, so he is in the know
Not remotely surprised. I said last Saturday this would be substantially over by Wednesday and so it was.
It doesn't take long to recover from a fake panic and that's exactly what this was. It was all fake, there were no issues, so its over.
I still have a quarter of a tank so am fine but at least the last ten petrol stations I passed last night are empty. Not fine or fake, other people are not going to work because of this.
Out of curiosity, where we you driving from and to?
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.
Yep the idea that any sane tech firms looks at the place your degree came from was zero.
In fact I can't think of any good tech firm that cares about whether you have a degree at all. Out of few that do and that I've worked with none of them are firms I could recommend..
Not to mention the smell of Britfix polystyrene cement in the morning. Though Lepages Styrene was too much for me - the equivalent of Capstan Extra Strength.
Interesting, though, about JB. I can remember when the Airfix 1:24 Aston Martin DB5 with swivelling number plates, machine guns and calthrops was the go-for model of the month. And that was a very, very long time ago. The fact that the latest film is harking back to that particular model of [full size!] car is quite significant.
Don’t remember the Airfix model but the die cast Corgi version was much beloved in primary school, particularly the vulgar gold version. Things are even weirder nowadays, you can now get a £90k 2/3 scale driveable model to scratch that itch.
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.
The end of the furlough scheme is going to be a big story. It would be quite interesting to see a breakdown of the people still there at the end, by job and market segment. There will likely be a combination of redundancies, retentions and a few companies rolling their own furlough scheme for critical employees (such as airline pilots, who cost a fortune to hire and train).
It won't surprise me if a significant chunk of people "on furlough" are those who can exploit the system to get free cash.
Eg if an individual has a small family business with their family or close friends all on paywall then they could be tempted keep some of them on furlough even if they are working. The family is getting money into the business via work, money from HMRC via furlough, and since everyone's related then everyone can be a winner from the arrangement with plausible deniability that there's any wrongdoing.
It won't surprise me if half the stragglers still on furlough to the end miraculously start working from tomorrow.
Yes, I know a few people in private practice via companies, who have furloughed their spouses from the payroll, for 18 months now. Not Mrs Foxy, as I missed that dodge by not having her on the payroll.
I expect the same in many other small companies.
Having the missus on the payroll (or husband, whichever way around) and saying they do 'admin' is an age old con for small businesses. Mostly a way of getting another 10k or so a year out the company tax free.
Yes, you can use two lots of personal allowance and two lots of 20% income tax rate, with other income all paid as dividends.
My dad used to work as a consultant contractor for his own company, and mum used to do secretarial tasks and office admin, in exchange for a salary just below the 40% tax bracket. I think she was quite well paid, for the amount of work she did!
I have just had my Asda order delivered and again complete as ordered
I asked the driver how he was managing with the fuel and he said it 'was over' and this morning there was one car at Asda filling station when he came away just now
I was surprised but the he does work for Asda and has to fuel daily, so he is in the know
Yes all the closed petrol stations and long queues outside the few that are open are an anti government conspiracy.
It is fine in parts of the country, in other parts we are struggling. Please don't minimise our real problems just because it is okay where you are.
It's not remotely true that only a few are open. Yesterday more than three quarters were and that figure has been increasing daily.
I expect fewer than a fifth if that will be out today. This is over.
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…
Tamiya? Blimey, I remember seeing them in the model shops in days of yore. A bit exotic for me. I tended to stick to Airfix and the odd Revell and Matchbox and once, I think, a Frog.
Man, I was on all them drugs, eventually maxed out on the hard stuff of vac form and scratch building.
Not to mention the smell of Britfix polystyrene cement in the morning. Though Lepages Styrene was too much for me - the equivalent of Capstan Extra Strength.
Interesting, though, about JB. I can remember when the Airfix 1:24 Aston Martin DB5 with swivelling number plates, machine guns and calthrops was the go-for model of the month. And that was a very, very long time ago. The fact that the latest film is harking back to that particular model of [full size!] car is quite significant.
Yossarian sidled up drunkenly to Colonel Korn at the officers' club one night to kid with him about the new Lepage gun that the Germans had moved in. 'What Lepage gun?' Colonle Korn inquired with curiousity. 'The new three-hundred-and-forty-four-millimeter Lepage glue gun,' Yossarian answered. 'It glues a whole formation of planes together in mid-air.'
Oh, that's nice! Not an anachronism either as a quick check donfirms there were Lepages glues before plastic kits and Lepages styrene cement.
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.
The end of the furlough scheme is going to be a big story. It would be quite interesting to see a breakdown of the people still there at the end, by job and market segment. There will likely be a combination of redundancies, retentions and a few companies rolling their own furlough scheme for critical employees (such as airline pilots, who cost a fortune to hire and train).
It won't surprise me if a significant chunk of people "on furlough" are those who can exploit the system to get free cash.
Eg if an individual has a small family business with their family or close friends all on paywall then they could be tempted keep some of them on furlough even if they are working. The family is getting money into the business via work, money from HMRC via furlough, and since everyone's related then everyone can be a winner from the arrangement with plausible deniability that there's any wrongdoing.
It won't surprise me if half the stragglers still on furlough to the end miraculously start working from tomorrow.
Yes, I know a few people in private practice via companies, who have furloughed their spouses from the payroll, for 18 months now. Not Mrs Foxy, as I missed that dodge by not having her on the payroll.
I expect the same in many other small companies.
Having the missus on the payroll (or husband, whichever way around) and saying they do 'admin' is an age old con for small businesses. Mostly a way of getting another 10k or so a year out the company tax free.
Which for the past 18 months has become a way to get £12k from the state tax free.
I have just had my Asda order delivered and again complete as ordered
I asked the driver how he was managing with the fuel and he said it 'was over' and this morning there was one car at Asda filling station when he came away just now
I was surprised but the he does work for Asda and has to fuel daily, so he is in the know
Yes all the closed petrol stations and long queues outside the few that are open are an anti government conspiracy.
It is fine in parts of the country, in other parts we are struggling. Please don't minimise our real problems just because it is okay where you are.
It's not remotely true that only a few are open. Yesterday more than three quarters were and that figure has been increasing daily.
I expect fewer than a fifth if that will be out today. This is over.
Whatever, we shall add knowing the exact status of petrol stations across the land to your omniscient skillset.
Perhaps listening to what people say might help sometimes.
Not to mention the smell of Britfix polystyrene cement in the morning. Though Lepages Styrene was too much for me - the equivalent of Capstan Extra Strength.
Interesting, though, about JB. I can remember when the Airfix 1:24 Aston Martin DB5 with swivelling number plates, machine guns and calthrops was the go-for model of the month. And that was a very, very long time ago. The fact that the latest film is harking back to that particular model of [full size!] car is quite significant.
Don’t remember the Airfix model but the die cast Corgi version was much beloved in primary school, particularly the vulgar gold version. Things are even weirder nowadays, you can now get a £90k 2/3 scale driveable model to scratch that itch.
I don't need that jumped-up bogie cart. I remember when I was quite young being taken to London bto stay with the relatives in Orpington and an exotic afternoon out at Battersea funfair park where that very car (the film one) was being shown off that day - got to sit in it ...
“Congratulations to Professor Devi Sridhar for staying true to science and communicating with clarity in the covid pandemic @devisridhar #TheBMJAwards”
“Congratulations to Professor Christina Pagel for constantly discussing science, breaking it down and making it digestible and keeping the public engaged during the pandemic @chrischirp #TheBMJAwards
I have just had my Asda order delivered and again complete as ordered
I asked the driver how he was managing with the fuel and he said it 'was over' and this morning there was one car at Asda filling station when he came away just now
I was surprised but the he does work for Asda and has to fuel daily, so he is in the know
Yes all the closed petrol stations and long queues outside the few that are open are an anti government conspiracy.
It is fine in parts of the country, in other parts we are struggling. Please don't minimise our real problems just because it is okay where you are.
It's not remotely true that only a few are open. Yesterday more than three quarters were and that figure has been increasing daily.
I expect fewer than a fifth if that will be out today. This is over.
Whatever, we shall add knowing the exact status of petrol stations across the land to your omniscient skillset.
Perhaps listening to what people say might help sometimes.
Not the exact status across the land but the average across the land is a known and published figure which I used.
It wouldn't surprise me if there's bubbles of areas across the country with more panicking morons than others bleeding the system dry still even when there's absolutely no reason to do so whatsoever.
I have just had my Asda order delivered and again complete as ordered
I asked the driver how he was managing with the fuel and he said it 'was over' and this morning there was one car at Asda filling station when he came away just now
I was surprised but the he does work for Asda and has to fuel daily, so he is in the know
Yes all the closed petrol stations and long queues outside the few that are open are an anti government conspiracy.
It is fine in parts of the country, in other parts we are struggling. Please don't minimise our real problems just because it is okay where you are.
Sorry but I did say it was an anecdote and it was an Asda driver who fuels daily
I see no reason for not commenting on it
And the recent poll shows only 23% blame HMG, 22% the public and 47% the media
On topic, I wouldn't read too much into these numbers - it was a selected group of people (the vast majority of people won't have watched it) and almost all of what Starmer said was bland inoffensive stuff that almost any mainstream politician could have said.
That said, in terms of signalling that Labour is now unthreatening it may have important medium-term effects, if this theme is stuck to and developed, so one to look out for.
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.
Personally, I am quite attracted to the idea that donations to political parties should only be from individuals.
I have been concerned that a weakness of that has been that Tories were mainly much richer than Lab, but looking at the supporters of various parties - eg Luvvies, footballers, business people worth tens of millions each and the wealthy areas of the country being more leftish now - I wonder if that is still a relevant concern.
An alternative might be to overhaul TU democracy which seems not to work. I'm not sure just how I would frame that.
Hmm, that last was done by Mrs T. The real issue is the low proportion of those who do vote. But that's true of any election. One could hardly claim that HYUFD for instance should be deposed from his councillorship just because the Epping citizens did not turn out 100% [or so one assumes: obviously I can't check the actual figure].
The last time the idea of banning non-individual donations (and limiting individual donations) came up (semi-seriously), the Labour party was all for it. Provided Trade Unions were exempt.
A very, very Old Labour friend was in favour. He was much put out by my plan to start the National Union of Boilermakers and Hedge Fund Managers.
He thought that this wouldn't be a Real Union.
He tried "TUC affiliation" - I pointed out that I would be applying, plus there are a number of legit unions outside the TUC...
He did finally laugh at my suggestions for swag - a deluxe, stainless steel drum for picket line fires (decorated by a high end Calypso drum maker). A Versace badged version of a road mans jacket.....
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.
I'd much prefer that.
I think the alternative is that what happens to future Bond films is what happened to Doctor Who.
From Stephen Bush of the Staggers's morning email:
'... the British government still doesn’t have a serious strategy as far as violence against women and girls is concerned. [...] Then there are the specific failures within the police force in general and the Metropolitan Police in particular. When Couzens was charged, Cressida Dick said that “all of us in the Met are sickened, angered and devastated by this man’s crimes”.
I’m sure that’s true. The vast majority of social workers were “sickened, angered and devastated” by the failures that led to the murder of Victoria Climbié in 2000. The vast majority of doctors were “sickened, angered and devastated” by the failures that allowed Harold Shipman to murder as many as 250 people. But crucially those failures led to serious reforms to child protection and to palliative care in the United Kingdom.
The murder of Sarah Everard is the story of two long-running problems in British politics: the failure to take violence against women and girls seriously, and the failure by senior leaders in too many of the United Kingdom’s police forces to acknowledge mistakes as things that need to be learnt from rather than unfortunate and unavoidable accidents.'
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.
Personally, I am quite attracted to the idea that donations to political parties should only be from individuals.
I have been concerned that a weakness of that has been that Tories were mainly much richer than Lab, but looking at the supporters of various parties - eg Luvvies, footballers, business people worth tens of millions each and the wealthy areas of the country being more leftish now - I wonder if that is still a relevant concern.
An alternative might be to overhaul TU democracy which seems not to work. I'm not sure just how I would frame that.
Hmm, that last was done by Mrs T. The real issue is the low proportion of those who do vote. But that's true of any election. One could hardly claim that HYUFD for instance should be deposed from his councillorship just because the Epping citizens did not turn out 100% [or so one assumes: obviously I can't check the actual figure].
The last time the idea of banning non-individual donations (and limiting individual donations) came up (semi-seriously), the Labour party was all for it. Provided Trade Unions were exempt.
A very, very Old Labour friend was in favour. He was much put out by my plan to start the National Union of Boilermakers and Hedge Fund Managers.
He thought that this wouldn't be a Real Union.
He tried "TUC affiliation" - I pointed out that I would be applying, plus there are a number of legit unions outside the TUC...
He did finally laugh at my suggestions for swag - a deluxe, stainless steel drum for picket line fires (decorated by a high end Calypso drum maker). A Versace badged version of a road mans jacket.....
There’s a couple of airline pilot unions, and an air traffic controllers’ union, none of which I believe affiliate with the TUC nor the Labour Party. Probably a few others too.
Do senior civil servants not have their own union, and senior ranks of the police?
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.
Personally, I am quite attracted to the idea that donations to political parties should only be from individuals.
I have been concerned that a weakness of that has been that Tories were mainly much richer than Lab, but looking at the supporters of various parties - eg Luvvies, footballers, business people worth tens of millions each and the wealthy areas of the country being more leftish now - I wonder if that is still a relevant concern.
An alternative might be to overhaul TU democracy which seems not to work. I'm not sure just how I would frame that.
Hmm, that last was done by Mrs T. The real issue is the low proportion of those who do vote. But that's true of any election. One could hardly claim that HYUFD for instance should be deposed from his councillorship just because the Epping citizens did not turn out 100% [or so one assumes: obviously I can't check the actual figure].
The last time the idea of banning non-individual donations (and limiting individual donations) came up (semi-seriously), the Labour party was all for it. Provided Trade Unions were exempt.
A very, very Old Labour friend was in favour. He was much put out by my plan to start the National Union of Boilermakers and Hedge Fund Managers.
He thought that this wouldn't be a Real Union.
He tried "TUC affiliation" - I pointed out that I would be applying, plus there are a number of legit unions outside the TUC...
He did finally laugh at my suggestions for swag - a deluxe, stainless steel drum for picket line fires (decorated by a high end Calypso drum maker). A Versace badged version of a road mans jacket.....
There’s a couple of airline pilot unions, and an air traffic controllers’ union, none of which I believe affiliate with the TUC nor the Labour Party. Probably a few others too.
Do senior civil servants not have their own union, and senior ranks of the police?
The First Division Association is the senior c.s.'s union.
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.
The end of the furlough scheme is going to be a big story. It would be quite interesting to see a breakdown of the people still there at the end, by job and market segment. There will likely be a combination of redundancies, retentions and a few companies rolling their own furlough scheme for critical employees (such as airline pilots, who cost a fortune to hire and train).
It won't surprise me if a significant chunk of people "on furlough" are those who can exploit the system to get free cash.
Eg if an individual has a small family business with their family or close friends all on paywall then they could be tempted keep some of them on furlough even if they are working. The family is getting money into the business via work, money from HMRC via furlough, and since everyone's related then everyone can be a winner from the arrangement with plausible deniability that there's any wrongdoing.
It won't surprise me if half the stragglers still on furlough to the end miraculously start working from tomorrow.
Yes, I know a few people in private practice via companies, who have furloughed their spouses from the payroll, for 18 months now. Not Mrs Foxy, as I missed that dodge by not having her on the payroll.
I expect the same in many other small companies.
Having the missus on the payroll (or husband, whichever way around) and saying they do 'admin' is an age old con for small businesses. Mostly a way of getting another 10k or so a year out the company tax free.
The perception that it is all a tax dodge is rather frustrating if your wife (or partner) does actually do work for the business.
Conducted before yesterday's speech. The Opinium poll is the up to date and more relevant one regarding Starmer. 18 months in, he beats Johnson and Corbyn hands down, even though the comparison is at a point when Corbyn was at his least unpopular.
You really want Starmer and Labour to fail in 2024, don't you?
Most people won't even have noticed that KS made a speech. If Labour get a bounce it will be because of the fuel shortages.
I think the polls next week may probably give a better picture, because both Starmer's pitch may take a while to register, and as MexicanPete says, people pi***ed off enough at the pumps to actually change their voting preferences may become so only gradually, or by attrition.
Next week is Boris's turn the two weeks later the budget so end of month time to detect any real and lasting changes
From Stephen Bush of the Staggers's morning email:
'... the British government still doesn’t have a serious strategy as far as violence against women and girls is concerned. [...] Then there are the specific failures within the police force in general and the Metropolitan Police in particular. When Couzens was charged, Cressida Dick said that “all of us in the Met are sickened, angered and devastated by this man’s crimes”.
I’m sure that’s true. The vast majority of social workers were “sickened, angered and devastated” by the failures that led to the murder of Victoria Climbié in 2000. The vast majority of doctors were “sickened, angered and devastated” by the failures that allowed Harold Shipman to murder as many as 250 people. But crucially those failures led to serious reforms to child protection and to palliative care in the United Kingdom.
The murder of Sarah Everard is the story of two long-running problems in British politics: the failure to take violence against women and girls seriously, and the failure by senior leaders in too many of the United Kingdom’s police forces to acknowledge mistakes as things that need to be learnt from rather than unfortunate and unavoidable accidents.'
Lessons Will Be Learned
When I become unDictator of Britain, anyone using that phrase will be taught a lesson. Crucifixion, I think. I have absolutely no doubt that they wouldn't forget *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.
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.
Personally, I am quite attracted to the idea that donations to political parties should only be from individuals.
I have been concerned that a weakness of that has been that Tories were mainly much richer than Lab, but looking at the supporters of various parties - eg Luvvies, footballers, business people worth tens of millions each and the wealthy areas of the country being more leftish now - I wonder if that is still a relevant concern.
An alternative might be to overhaul TU democracy which seems not to work. I'm not sure just how I would frame that.
Hmm, that last was done by Mrs T. The real issue is the low proportion of those who do vote. But that's true of any election. One could hardly claim that HYUFD for instance should be deposed from his councillorship just because the Epping citizens did not turn out 100% [or so one assumes: obviously I can't check the actual figure].
The last time the idea of banning non-individual donations (and limiting individual donations) came up (semi-seriously), the Labour party was all for it. Provided Trade Unions were exempt.
A very, very Old Labour friend was in favour. He was much put out by my plan to start the National Union of Boilermakers and Hedge Fund Managers.
He thought that this wouldn't be a Real Union.
He tried "TUC affiliation" - I pointed out that I would be applying, plus there are a number of legit unions outside the TUC...
He did finally laugh at my suggestions for swag - a deluxe, stainless steel drum for picket line fires (decorated by a high end Calypso drum maker). A Versace badged version of a road mans jacket.....
There’s a couple of airline pilot unions, and an air traffic controllers’ union, none of which I believe affiliate with the TUC nor the Labour Party. Probably a few others too.
Do senior civil servants not have their own union, and senior ranks of the police?
The First Division Association is the senior c.s.'s union.
Thanks! I thought I’d heard that one somewhere before.
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.
The Living Daylights is my favourite Bond film, and Timothy Dalton my favourite actor.
He plays Flemings' Bond in the books and is much more like Bond would be in real life, an understated and professional spy but intelligent, driven and ruthless.
From Stephen Bush of the Staggers's morning email:
'... the British government still doesn’t have a serious strategy as far as violence against women and girls is concerned. [...] Then there are the specific failures within the police force in general and the Metropolitan Police in particular. When Couzens was charged, Cressida Dick said that “all of us in the Met are sickened, angered and devastated by this man’s crimes”.
I’m sure that’s true. The vast majority of social workers were “sickened, angered and devastated” by the failures that led to the murder of Victoria Climbié in 2000. The vast majority of doctors were “sickened, angered and devastated” by the failures that allowed Harold Shipman to murder as many as 250 people. But crucially those failures led to serious reforms to child protection and to palliative care in the United Kingdom.
The murder of Sarah Everard is the story of two long-running problems in British politics: the failure to take violence against women and girls seriously, and the failure by senior leaders in too many of the United Kingdom’s police forces to acknowledge mistakes as things that need to be learnt from rather than unfortunate and unavoidable accidents.'
Lessons Will Be Learned
When I become unDictator of Britain, anyone using that phrase will be taught a lesson. Crucifixion, I think. I have absolutely no doubt that they wouldn't forget *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.
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.
Personally, I am quite attracted to the idea that donations to political parties should only be from individuals.
I have been concerned that a weakness of that has been that Tories were mainly much richer than Lab, but looking at the supporters of various parties - eg Luvvies, footballers, business people worth tens of millions each and the wealthy areas of the country being more leftish now - I wonder if that is still a relevant concern.
An alternative might be to overhaul TU democracy which seems not to work. I'm not sure just how I would frame that.
Hmm, that last was done by Mrs T. The real issue is the low proportion of those who do vote. But that's true of any election. One could hardly claim that HYUFD for instance should be deposed from his councillorship just because the Epping citizens did not turn out 100% [or so one assumes: obviously I can't check the actual figure].
The last time the idea of banning non-individual donations (and limiting individual donations) came up (semi-seriously), the Labour party was all for it. Provided Trade Unions were exempt.
A very, very Old Labour friend was in favour. He was much put out by my plan to start the National Union of Boilermakers and Hedge Fund Managers.
He thought that this wouldn't be a Real Union.
He tried "TUC affiliation" - I pointed out that I would be applying, plus there are a number of legit unions outside the TUC...
He did finally laugh at my suggestions for swag - a deluxe, stainless steel drum for picket line fires (decorated by a high end Calypso drum maker). A Versace badged version of a road mans jacket.....
I am a member of the HCSA (Hospital Consultants and Specialists Association) which alongside the FDA (First Division Association) must be amongst the highest paid of TUC affiliated Unions, unless there is one for Judges.
From Stephen Bush of the Staggers's morning email:
'... the British government still doesn’t have a serious strategy as far as violence against women and girls is concerned. [...] Then there are the specific failures within the police force in general and the Metropolitan Police in particular. When Couzens was charged, Cressida Dick said that “all of us in the Met are sickened, angered and devastated by this man’s crimes”.
I’m sure that’s true. The vast majority of social workers were “sickened, angered and devastated” by the failures that led to the murder of Victoria Climbié in 2000. The vast majority of doctors were “sickened, angered and devastated” by the failures that allowed Harold Shipman to murder as many as 250 people. But crucially those failures led to serious reforms to child protection and to palliative care in the United Kingdom.
The murder of Sarah Everard is the story of two long-running problems in British politics: the failure to take violence against women and girls seriously, and the failure by senior leaders in too many of the United Kingdom’s police forces to acknowledge mistakes as things that need to be learnt from rather than unfortunate and unavoidable accidents.'
Lessons Will Be Learned
When I become unDictator of Britain, anyone using that phrase will be taught a lesson. Crucifixion, I think. I have absolutely no doubt that they wouldn't forget *that*.
Didn't always work, mind.
On the one hand, he didn't forget, did he? And substantially modified the business plan as a result.
At what point does pressure on Commander Dick come from below, as the junior ranks realise the police have now really lost the confidence of the law-abiding public?
250p/therm for dec delivery. Boris, you've got a problem…
Sky did a chart yesterday showing world gas prices rocketing from 50p to 200p in a few weeks
Boris had a problem, but so does very other government and I have no idea how it is fixed
I am amused and curious about the timing of this right before COP26.
On the one hand it's showing why long term we should move away from gas. On the other hand it's showing why in the short term investment in preferably domestic gas (at least not from hostile states) could be a really good idea.
Hopefully it gets people thinking about credible long term plans to move away from fossil fuels, instead of short term gesture bullshit.
On topic, I wouldn't read too much into these numbers - it was a selected group of people (the vast majority of people won't have watched it) and almost all of what Starmer said was bland inoffensive stuff that almost any mainstream politician could have said.
That said, in terms of signalling that Labour is now unthreatening it may have important medium-term effects, if this theme is stuck to and developed, so one to look out for.
A problem for the future of party membership (Lan, Con and LD):
1) What normal person would queue up to join a party with people entrenched in it who heckle their own leader on significant public occasions?
2) Given that political parties pretend in public to oppose everything supported by the others, why would any normal person - who thinks the human race as whole has lots of decent people with differing opinions - join a party?
3) As they all tend to converge identically on the genuinely big issues, why would anyone join one?
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.
Personally, I am quite attracted to the idea that donations to political parties should only be from individuals.
I have been concerned that a weakness of that has been that Tories were mainly much richer than Lab, but looking at the supporters of various parties - eg Luvvies, footballers, business people worth tens of millions each and the wealthy areas of the country being more leftish now - I wonder if that is still a relevant concern.
An alternative might be to overhaul TU democracy which seems not to work. I'm not sure just how I would frame that.
Hmm, that last was done by Mrs T. The real issue is the low proportion of those who do vote. But that's true of any election. One could hardly claim that HYUFD for instance should be deposed from his councillorship just because the Epping citizens did not turn out 100% [or so one assumes: obviously I can't check the actual figure].
The last time the idea of banning non-individual donations (and limiting individual donations) came up (semi-seriously), the Labour party was all for it. Provided Trade Unions were exempt.
A very, very Old Labour friend was in favour. He was much put out by my plan to start the National Union of Boilermakers and Hedge Fund Managers.
He thought that this wouldn't be a Real Union.
He tried "TUC affiliation" - I pointed out that I would be applying, plus there are a number of legit unions outside the TUC...
He did finally laugh at my suggestions for swag - a deluxe, stainless steel drum for picket line fires (decorated by a high end Calypso drum maker). A Versace badged version of a road mans jacket.....
There’s a couple of airline pilot unions, and an air traffic controllers’ union, none of which I believe affiliate with the TUC nor the Labour Party. Probably a few others too.
Do senior civil servants not have their own union, and senior ranks of the police?
The First Division Association is the senior c.s.'s union.
Thanks! I thought I’d heard that one somewhere before.
It does include managerial and professional roles, not just the mandarinate, mind.
From Stephen Bush of the Staggers's morning email:
'... the British government still doesn’t have a serious strategy as far as violence against women and girls is concerned. [...] Then there are the specific failures within the police force in general and the Metropolitan Police in particular. When Couzens was charged, Cressida Dick said that “all of us in the Met are sickened, angered and devastated by this man’s crimes”.
I’m sure that’s true. The vast majority of social workers were “sickened, angered and devastated” by the failures that led to the murder of Victoria Climbié in 2000. The vast majority of doctors were “sickened, angered and devastated” by the failures that allowed Harold Shipman to murder as many as 250 people. But crucially those failures led to serious reforms to child protection and to palliative care in the United Kingdom.
The murder of Sarah Everard is the story of two long-running problems in British politics: the failure to take violence against women and girls seriously, and the failure by senior leaders in too many of the United Kingdom’s police forces to acknowledge mistakes as things that need to be learnt from rather than unfortunate and unavoidable accidents.'
Lessons Will Be Learned
When I become unDictator of Britain, anyone using that phrase will be taught a lesson. Crucifixion, I think. I have absolutely no doubt that they wouldn't forget *that*.
Didn't always work, mind.
On the one hand, he didn't forget, did he? And substantially modified the business plan as a result.
On the other....
[deleted - thought 'use' wass referring to JC ...]
I have just had my Asda order delivered and again complete as ordered
I asked the driver how he was managing with the fuel and he said it 'was over' and this morning there was one car at Asda filling station when he came away just now
I was surprised but the he does work for Asda and has to fuel daily, so he is in the know
Waitrose was fully stocked at 8.45am this morning, all shelves filled with fresh fruit & vegetables and fresh meat and fish on top too.
That said, HMG really need to get on top of this with a logistics and labour strategy for transportation, agriculture and hospitality that works across industry to address low-pay and ameliorate poor working conditions in the aftermath of Brexit and Covid. They need to start training up and recruiting people in - because it's going at least 6-12 month process to get results. I suspect where we'll end up is a mix of a changed and improved domestic market, some price rises, and some seasonal/temporary visas on top for extra labour, but nothing like the levels we had under free movement.
It really does need fixing because it will rapidly discredit the Government if left to its own devices.
At what point does pressure on Commander Dick come from below, as the junior ranks realise the police have now really lost the confidence of the law-abiding public?
Consider the senior police officer who, when the Alan'sSnackbarist was stabbing a policeman to death in front of him, locked himself in his car.
Said officer was well known, when in police stations, for reprimanding officers for not wearing their body armour in the station.
He was not wearing body armour at the time he hid in his car. Which was his excuse for hiding in his car.
On topic, I wouldn't read too much into these numbers - it was a selected group of people (the vast majority of people won't have watched it) and almost all of what Starmer said was bland inoffensive stuff that almost any mainstream politician could have said.
That said, in terms of signalling that Labour is now unthreatening it may have important medium-term effects, if this theme is stuck to and developed, so one to look out for.
A problem for the future of party membership (Lan, Con and LD):
1) What normal person would queue up to join a party with people entrenched in it who heckle their own leader on significant public occasions?
2) Given that political parties pretend in public to oppose everything supported by the others, why would any normal person - who thinks the human race as whole has lots of decent people with differing opinions - join a party?
3) As they all tend to converge identically on the genuinely big issues, why would anyone join one?
You join a political party if you are either an ideologue or if you want to be selected as a candidate by that party for local council, or the Westminster or devolved parliaments.
Most normal people are not ideologues nor want to be politicians so don't and we now have dating apps so you don't need to join the YCs to find your future partner if you live in a market town or village
On topic, I wouldn't read too much into these numbers - it was a selected group of people (the vast majority of people won't have watched it) and almost all of what Starmer said was bland inoffensive stuff that almost any mainstream politician could have said.
That said, in terms of signalling that Labour is now unthreatening it may have important medium-term effects, if this theme is stuck to and developed, so one to look out for.
A problem for the future of party membership (Lan, Con and LD):
1) What normal person would queue up to join a party with people entrenched in it who heckle their own leader on significant public occasions?
2) Given that political parties pretend in public to oppose everything supported by the others, why would any normal person - who thinks the human race as whole has lots of decent people with differing opinions - join a party?
3) As they all tend to converge identically on the genuinely big issues, why would anyone join one?
I think the general public think that anyone who joins a political party these days is a bit weird.
I have just had my Asda order delivered and again complete as ordered
I asked the driver how he was managing with the fuel and he said it 'was over' and this morning there was one car at Asda filling station when he came away just now
I was surprised but the he does work for Asda and has to fuel daily, so he is in the know
Waitrose was fully stocked at 8.45am this morning, all shelves filled with fresh fruit & vegetables and fresh meat and fish on top too.
That said, HMG really need to get on top of this with a logistics and labour strategy for transportation, agriculture and hospitality that works across industry to address low-pay and ameliorate poor working conditions in the aftermath of Brexit and Covid. They need to start training up and recruiting people in - because it's going at least 6-12 month process to get results. I suspect where we'll end up is a mix of a changed and improved domestic market, some price rises, and some seasonal/temporary visas on top for extra labour, but nothing like the levels we had under free movement.
It really does need fixing because it will rapidly discredit the Government if left to its own devices.
Why do you think that?
Realistically we're at the worst of the disruption now as people spring back post-Covid and companies haven't yet filled vacancies. Yet shelves are still fully stocked and people are already moving on.
As time goes by things will realistically get better as companies engage in training and recruitment. That's already began.
I would rather trust every business and every employee to sort themselves out, leading to the invisible hand fixing this, than I would trust Boris, Gove, Sir Humphrey or anyone else to micromanage this from Whitehall.
EDIT: If the government needs to be fixing anything, its likely gas. Though any actions there may be too little, to late.
250p/therm for dec delivery. Boris, you've got a problem…
Sky did a chart yesterday showing world gas prices rocketing from 50p to 200p in a few weeks
Boris had a problem, but so does very other government and I have no idea how it is fixed
For the UK short term relief available will come from increased electricity availability reducing the need for gas fired power stations to be used. That may benefit elec prices, but may not benefit gas prices. Both depending on whether our wholesale market is isolated, perhaps.
Sources:
1.4 GW Norway interconnector coming on stream very soon. You can see them testing it on Gridwatch 1 GW French interconnector due back from maintenance very soon. * 2 GW half burnt-down French interconnector. Not quite clear about this. Half of it is out until March. Not sure about the other half. *
There's a .85 GW wind farm expected on stream some time in the next 6 months (Triton Knoll).
Increased winter wind.
I don't know enough to judge the potential impact.
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
Most doctors come from medical schools. I wonder if there has been a study of which ones top doctors come from. It sounds like the sort of thing that might have appeared in the Christmas edition of the BMJ, if that is still a thing. Now you come to mention it, I vaguely recall from decades back it being said that the posher a consultant's school, the higher up the body he specialised.
Regarding trade unions: I have been in several public sector trade unions. They are good for protection, better than any insurance policy you can imagine. I don't understand why people don't join them, it puts them at the mercy of an adversarial management culture if they ever run in to problems. And when you work in the public sector, problems can come from any direction, there are any number of accusations that can be levelled at you, and if you are marked, then you are in a very difficult place without union representation. I've seen many people come back from the biggest disasters imaginable to promotion and success, thanks to the union. Sometimes this is a good thing, other times it is a bad thing.
On the other hand, the political stuff is an annoying sideshow. Unions rarely represent the views of members, but members in turn show little interest in changing this side of of trade unionism. So it goes on.
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…
Tamiya? Blimey, I remember seeing them in the model shops in days of yore. A bit exotic for me. I tended to stick to Airfix and the odd Revell and Matchbox and once, I think, a Frog.
Man, I was on all them drugs, eventually maxed out on the hard stuff of vac form and scratch building.
Not to mention the smell of Britfix polystyrene cement in the morning. Though Lepages Styrene was too much for me - the equivalent of Capstan Extra Strength.
Interesting, though, about JB. I can remember when the Airfix 1:24 Aston Martin DB5 with swivelling number plates, machine guns and calthrops was the go-for model of the month. And that was a very, very long time ago. The fact that the latest film is harking back to that particular model of [full size!] car is quite significant.
Even though it's a terrible kit I reckon I've built the Airfix 1/24 Sea Harrier over 40 times for retirement presentations. F/A-2s are particularly irksome as they need an additional resin conversion kit of variable quality.
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.
The Living Daylights is my favourite Bond film, and Timothy Dalton my favourite actor.
He plays Flemings' Bond in the books and is much more like Bond would be in real life, an understated and professional spy but intelligent, driven and ruthless.
Yes, that’s an absolutely excellent picture. I’ll forgive the massive failure of geography (the Austria/Warsaw Pact border is flat, not mountainous). And Dalton was massively underrated. It is a shame he only made two films.
I have my ticket for No Time To Die on Saturday and am looking forward to it. But the run time is going to be hard on the bladder, especially as I’m going to a posh cinema with a proper bar.
Why don’t we reintroduce intervals for films close to three hours in length?
I have just had my Asda order delivered and again complete as ordered
I asked the driver how he was managing with the fuel and he said it 'was over' and this morning there was one car at Asda filling station when he came away just now
I was surprised but the he does work for Asda and has to fuel daily, so he is in the know
Yes all the closed petrol stations and long queues outside the few that are open are an anti government conspiracy.
It is fine in parts of the country, in other parts we are struggling. Please don't minimise our real problems just because it is okay where you are.
It's not remotely true that only a few are open. Yesterday more than three quarters were and that figure has been increasing daily.
I expect fewer than a fifth if that will be out today. This is over.
I do hope so, as I want my "we've got half a tank and few plans to go anywhere for the next couple of weeks so we* don't need to go and queue for ages at a petrol station" mantra to make me look like a sage, rather than a turnip.
I have just had my Asda order delivered and again complete as ordered
I asked the driver how he was managing with the fuel and he said it 'was over' and this morning there was one car at Asda filling station when he came away just now
I was surprised but the he does work for Asda and has to fuel daily, so he is in the know
Waitrose was fully stocked at 8.45am this morning, all shelves filled with fresh fruit & vegetables and fresh meat and fish on top too.
That said, HMG really need to get on top of this with a logistics and labour strategy for transportation, agriculture and hospitality that works across industry to address low-pay and ameliorate poor working conditions in the aftermath of Brexit and Covid. They need to start training up and recruiting people in - because it's going at least 6-12 month process to get results. I suspect where we'll end up is a mix of a changed and improved domestic market, some price rises, and some seasonal/temporary visas on top for extra labour, but nothing like the levels we had under free movement.
It really does need fixing because it will rapidly discredit the Government if left to its own devices.
Why do you think that?
Realistically we're at the worst of the disruption now as people spring back post-Covid and companies haven't yet filled vacancies. Yet shelves are still fully stocked and people are already moving on.
As time goes by things will realistically get better as companies engage in training and recruitment. That's already began.
I would rather trust every business and every employee to sort themselves out, leading to the invisible hand fixing this, than I would trust Boris, Gove, Sir Humphrey or anyone else to micromanage this from Whitehall.
EDIT: If the government needs to be fixing anything, its likely gas. Though any actions there may be too little, to late.
What the Government needs to fix is those WFH working for Local Authorities as Local Authorities are grinding to a halt due to those WFH not working.
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
Most doctors come from medical schools. I wonder if there has been a study of which ones top doctors come from. It sounds like the sort of thing that might have appeared in the Christmas edition of the BMJ, if that is still a thing. Now you come to mention it, I vaguely recall from decades back it being said that the posher a consultant's school, the higher up the body he specialised.
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.
I'd much prefer that.
I think the alternative is that what happens to future Bond films is what happened to Doctor Who.
If you haven't already seen it, The Man from UNCLE film is basically this, and it's excellent; unfortunately it flopped commercially so very little chance of a sequel.
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.
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…
Tamiya? Blimey, I remember seeing them in the model shops in days of yore. A bit exotic for me. I tended to stick to Airfix and the odd Revell and Matchbox and once, I think, a Frog.
Man, I was on all them drugs, eventually maxed out on the hard stuff of vac form and scratch building.
Not to mention the smell of Britfix polystyrene cement in the morning. Though Lepages Styrene was too much for me - the equivalent of Capstan Extra Strength.
Interesting, though, about JB. I can remember when the Airfix 1:24 Aston Martin DB5 with swivelling number plates, machine guns and calthrops was the go-for model of the month. And that was a very, very long time ago. The fact that the latest film is harking back to that particular model of [full size!] car is quite significant.
Even though it's a terrible kit I reckon I've built the Airfix 1/24 Sea Harrier over 40 times for retirement presentations. F/A-2s are particularly irksome as they need an additional resin conversion kit of variable quality.
I'm surprised that Big And Expensive didn't have piles of die-cast models to give away.
Hell, when I was at JCB a little while back, because we were picking up some kit, the office guy heard that we had kids and was offering tons of rather nice toys/models....
Regarding trade unions: I have been in several public sector trade unions. They are good for protection, better than any insurance policy you can imagine. I don't understand why people don't join them, it puts them at the mercy of an adversarial management culture if they ever run in to problems. And when you work in the public sector, problems can come from any direction, there are any number of accusations that can be levelled at you, and if you are marked, then you are in a very difficult place without union representation. I've seen many people come back from the biggest disasters imaginable to promotion and success, thanks to the union. Sometimes this is a good thing, other times it is a bad thing.
On the other hand, the political stuff is an annoying sideshow. Unions rarely represent the views of members, but members in turn show little interest in changing this side of of trade unionism. So it goes on.
I joined the HCSA when working as a manager on a number of disciplinary incidents, or allegations there of.
The BMA reps were poorly prepared, and the ones with no rep like lambs to the slaughter. The HCSA reps were professionally prepared, knew their brief and advocated clearly and highly competently. So I joined. When in trouble, you do not want an advocate who is reasonable, you want a pit bull who scares the opposition.
The HCSA also doesn't do politics, just terms and conditions.
Comments
I've actually been part of attempts to hire outside the top universities. There were some good people there, but the ratio of dross to gold was much higher. A big problem was the lack of banding in degree results. Some of the 1sts were.... interesting.
The reason that Russell Group is used as a filter, is to save time and effort.
There's always a "pox on both your houses" protest vote. That used to be the Lib Dems but post-Clegg it changes which party it goes to. No reason it can't be the Greens next time.
I have been concerned that a weakness of that has been that Tories were mainly much richer than Lab, but looking at the supporters of various parties - eg Luvvies, footballers, business people worth tens of millions each and the wealthy areas of the country being more leftish now - I wonder if that is still a relevant concern.
An alternative might be to overhaul TU democracy which seems not to work. I'm not sure just how I would frame that.
Remember that in any election or any vote it isn't just what you get, its what the other side gets as well. Whilst there is no correlation between national vote tallies and seats under FPTP, it is a good indicator of popularity.
In 2017 the perception is that May screwed up the campaign - and she did. That Ooh Jeremy Corbyn was a successful failure - and vs expectations he was. But in 2017 May added 2.3m votes to the Tory tally after 7 years in government, a 20% rise.
So whatever Labour does it will most likely lose if the Tory vote stays Tory. Any successful campaign needs to take votes off the Tory tally or it will fail as it did in 2017. Starmer is Labour's best bet to do that, far more than Nandy or any of the hard left prospects would be.
https://www.euroheat.org/knowledge-hub/district-energy-iceland/
Eg if an individual has a small family business with their family or close friends all on paywall then they could be tempted keep some of them on furlough even if they are working. The family is getting money into the business via work, money from HMRC via furlough, and since everyone's related then everyone can be a winner from the arrangement with plausible deniability that there's any wrongdoing.
It won't surprise me if half the stragglers still on furlough to the end miraculously start working from tomorrow.
I have just had my Asda order delivered and again complete as ordered
I asked the driver how he was managing with the fuel and he said it 'was over' and this morning there was one car at Asda filling station when he came away just now
I was surprised but the he does work for Asda and has to fuel daily, so he is in the know
1 million coming off furlough, according to the BBC.
Will that fill any of the employment gaps?
(Analogy to property availability, and the 100s of thousands - not sure of exact number but I have 2 or 3 myself - of rentals that are unavailable due to Covid regulations.)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58735299
It doesn't take long to recover from a fake panic and that's exactly what this was. It was all fake, there were no issues, so its over.
I expect the result to be underwhelming. I don't think there's a pool of people just waiting to fill the gaps as regards vacancies but nor do I think this is 1m straight onto the unemployment figures.
You make a good point about specific jobs but clearly the numbers there are very small.
You really want Starmer and Labour to fail in 2024, don't you?
Our fairly regular Morrisons driver is quitting in a couple of weeks to do HGV training. Market forces at work, I guess.
Probably also quite a few people who have left the country already (Starbucks manager in the City, Polish, for example), who will neither be going back to work nor claiming unemployment.
Some detailed statistics would be really useful here.
I expect the same in many other small companies.
If Labour get a bounce it will be because of the fuel shortages.
It is fine in parts of the country, in other parts we are struggling. Please don't minimise our real problems just because it is okay where you are.
It's a bit like the military idea of everyone starts as a private. Either some are going to need to spend 10 minutes in each rank, or all the Generals will be 95.
250p/therm for dec delivery. Boris, you've got a problem…
Interesting, though, about JB. I can remember when the Airfix 1:24 Aston Martin DB5 with swivelling number plates, machine guns and calthrops was the go-for model of the month. And that was a very, very long time ago. The fact that the latest film is harking back to that particular model of [full size!] car is quite significant.
You or I would have either confirmed that our employer was taking us back to work, or frantically hunted for another job..... to start the day furlough ended.
Despite the frequently signalling that furlough is going to end, there will be a series of people appearing on the BBC, shocked, saying "But what do I do now?"
Incidentally, in Leicester we appoint Medical Students post A Level, and perhaps 50% work as HCAs in their year off. A number continue to do so during undergraduate training, and benefit by doing so.
'What Lepage gun?' Colonle Korn inquired with curiousity.
'The new three-hundred-and-forty-four-millimeter Lepage glue gun,' Yossarian answered. 'It glues a whole formation of planes together in mid-air.'
In fact I can't think of any good tech firm that cares about whether you have a degree at all. Out of few that do and that I've worked with none of them are firms I could recommend..
Things are even weirder nowadays, you can now get a £90k 2/3 scale driveable model to scratch that itch.
https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/aston-martin/356085/limited-run-aston-martin-db5-junior-launched-new-james-bond-film
My dad used to work as a consultant contractor for his own company, and mum used to do secretarial tasks and office admin, in exchange for a salary just below the 40% tax bracket. I think she was quite well paid, for the amount of work she did!
I expect fewer than a fifth if that will be out today. This is over.
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=uGJQePNkYJMC&pg=PA74&dq="lepage+glue"&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj69OP0qqbzAhVOY8AKHa46DFoQ6AF6BAgEEAI#v=onepage&q="lepage glue"&f=false
Perhaps listening to what people say might help sometimes.
“Congratulations to Professor Devi Sridhar for staying true to science and communicating with clarity in the covid pandemic @devisridhar #TheBMJAwards”
https://twitter.com/bmj_latest/status/1443296159565553666
“Congratulations to Professor Christina Pagel for constantly discussing science, breaking it down and making it digestible and keeping the public engaged during the pandemic @chrischirp #TheBMJAwards
https://twitter.com/bmj_latest/status/1443298045777547271
It wouldn't surprise me if there's bubbles of areas across the country with more panicking morons than others bleeding the system dry still even when there's absolutely no reason to do so whatsoever.
I see no reason for not commenting on it
And the recent poll shows only 23% blame HMG, 22% the public and 47% the media
That said, in terms of signalling that Labour is now unthreatening it may have important medium-term effects, if this theme is stuck to and developed, so one to look out for.
A very, very Old Labour friend was in favour. He was much put out by my plan to start the National Union of Boilermakers and Hedge Fund Managers.
He thought that this wouldn't be a Real Union.
He tried "TUC affiliation" - I pointed out that I would be applying, plus there are a number of legit unions outside the TUC...
He did finally laugh at my suggestions for swag - a deluxe, stainless steel drum for picket line fires (decorated by a high end Calypso drum maker). A Versace badged version of a road mans jacket.....
I think the alternative is that what happens to future Bond films is what happened to Doctor Who.
'... the British government still doesn’t have a serious strategy as far as violence against women and girls is concerned. [...] Then there are the specific failures within the police force in general and the Metropolitan Police in particular. When Couzens was charged, Cressida Dick said that “all of us in the Met are sickened, angered and devastated by this man’s crimes”.
I’m sure that’s true. The vast majority of social workers were “sickened, angered and devastated” by the failures that led to the murder of Victoria Climbié in 2000. The vast majority of doctors were “sickened, angered and devastated” by the failures that allowed Harold Shipman to murder as many as 250 people. But crucially those failures led to serious reforms to child protection and to palliative care in the United Kingdom.
The murder of Sarah Everard is the story of two long-running problems in British politics: the failure to take violence against women and girls seriously, and the failure by senior leaders in too many of the United Kingdom’s police forces to acknowledge mistakes as things that need to be learnt from rather than unfortunate and unavoidable accidents.'
Boris had a problem, but so does very other government and I have no idea how it is fixed
Do senior civil servants not have their own union, and senior ranks of the police?
When I become unDictator of Britain, anyone using that phrase will be taught a lesson. Crucifixion, I think. I have absolutely no doubt that they wouldn't forget *that*.
He plays Flemings' Bond in the books and is much more like Bond would be in real life, an understated and professional spy but intelligent, driven and ruthless.
On the other....
On the one hand it's showing why long term we should move away from gas. On the other hand it's showing why in the short term investment in preferably domestic gas (at least not from hostile states) could be a really good idea.
Hopefully it gets people thinking about credible long term plans to move away from fossil fuels, instead of short term gesture bullshit.
1) What normal person would queue up to join a party with people entrenched in it who heckle their own leader on significant public occasions?
2) Given that political parties pretend in public to oppose everything supported by the others, why would any normal person - who thinks the human race as whole has lots of decent people with differing opinions - join a party?
3) As they all tend to converge identically on the genuinely big issues, why would anyone join one?
That said, HMG really need to get on top of this with a logistics and labour strategy for transportation, agriculture and hospitality that works across industry to address low-pay and ameliorate poor working conditions in the aftermath of Brexit and Covid. They need to start training up and recruiting people in - because it's going at least 6-12 month process to get results. I suspect where we'll end up is a mix of a changed and improved domestic market, some price rises, and some seasonal/temporary visas on top for extra labour, but nothing like the levels we had under free movement.
It really does need fixing because it will rapidly discredit the Government if left to its own devices.
Said officer was well known, when in police stations, for reprimanding officers for not wearing their body armour in the station.
He was not wearing body armour at the time he hid in his car. Which was his excuse for hiding in his car.
Most normal people are not ideologues nor want to be politicians so don't and we now have dating apps so you don't need to join the YCs to find your future partner if you live in a market town or village
Realistically we're at the worst of the disruption now as people spring back post-Covid and companies haven't yet filled vacancies. Yet shelves are still fully stocked and people are already moving on.
As time goes by things will realistically get better as companies engage in training and recruitment. That's already began.
I would rather trust every business and every employee to sort themselves out, leading to the invisible hand fixing this, than I would trust Boris, Gove, Sir Humphrey or anyone else to micromanage this from Whitehall.
EDIT: If the government needs to be fixing anything, its likely gas. Though any actions there may be too little, to late.
Sources:
1.4 GW Norway interconnector coming on stream very soon. You can see them testing it on Gridwatch
1 GW French interconnector due back from maintenance very soon. *
2 GW half burnt-down French interconnector. Not quite clear about this. Half of it is out until March. Not sure about the other half. *
There's a .85 GW wind farm expected on stream some time in the next 6 months (Triton Knoll).
Increased winter wind.
I don't know enough to judge the potential impact.
(* Subject - maybe - to French fishing politics
https://russellgroup.ac.uk/about/
Just noticed this.
Even closing their own branch for staff use in the HQ in Gosforth ...
On the other hand, the political stuff is an annoying sideshow. Unions rarely represent the views of members, but members in turn show little interest in changing this side of of trade unionism. So it goes on.
I have my ticket for No Time To Die on Saturday and am looking forward to it. But the run time is going to be hard on the bladder, especially as I’m going to a posh cinema with a proper bar.
Why don’t we reintroduce intervals for films close to three hours in length?
*me, most likely, hence my particular resistance
https://www.suttontrust.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Leading-People_Feb16.pdf
Hell, when I was at JCB a little while back, because we were picking up some kit, the office guy heard that we had kids and was offering tons of rather nice toys/models....
The BMA reps were poorly prepared, and the ones with no rep like lambs to the slaughter. The HCSA reps were professionally prepared, knew their brief and advocated clearly and highly competently. So I joined. When in trouble, you do not want an advocate who is reasonable, you want a pit bull who scares the opposition.
The HCSA also doesn't do politics, just terms and conditions.