In my view Boris' speech was a great speech in that he (and tory advisors and indeed any modern CEO /PR directors do) uses the current crisis or issues (created by not planning long term) to project a future solution that sounds sexy and good and understandable. Boris adds good humour on top to make it even better.
The trouble is everyone forgets why the crisis arose in the first place - brexit, lack of proper job training , taking the easy solution of paying more benefits to people who should be working or training for work.
Lots of talk on here about pay rises leading to inflation, and whether or not that's a good thing, but isn't it all just a bit more complicated than that?
Not everyone is getting pay rises right now.
Skilled/semi-skilled manual workers, care workers, wagon drivers, building site labourers are getting big rises.
The white collar and middle class types - accountants, administrators, design engineers, project managers aren't suffering from a sudden reduction in their part of the workforce, so their wages are going to be static.
This means that after allowing for the effect of the inflation caused by rising wages in some sectors, we'll actually see a rebalancing - the working class will generally earn more than before, and everyone else less.
This is seriously good news for the working class types who voted for Brext as its exactly what they expected to happen. So it's no good for the lefty-remainery types to screech and moan about it to them - Brext has done what it said on the tin.
I get why there is a lot of screeching and moaning on here - posters here tend to be well off white collar types or posher, rather than digger drivers or steel erectors. Even I'm not a typical specimen of the working class (I'm a SME owner now!) although I'm probably closer to the action there than most.
I suspect that the biggest medium term challenge for the government is going to be public sector pay. They'll have to pay the manual workers more, or they'll all drift to the private sector. They don't need to (and won't be able to afford to) pay the planning officers, NHS managers, etc a similar rise. But how on earth do they do one without the other?
(this is the public sector teacher problem on a massive scale - maths teachers have more real world value in alternative careers than history or art teachers, but they are usually on identical pay scales - so hiring good art and history teachers is easy, but good maths teachers nearly impossible).
I'm not sure it's all Brexit related - there's tremendous wage inflation in the US and even the Eurozone* right now as demand bounces back post pandemic.
I have been in Vegas at a conference the last three days (and Vegas was utterly rammed, which is staggering for a Monday to Wednesday in early October). In the cab heading back to the airport, the driver told me he used to be an HGV driver. I asked him if he'd been tempted to go back, as there is a shortage. He told me his old firm had offered him a $10,000 sign on bonus - but that he wasn't tempted because he could earn really well doing taxi and food delivery.
* German wage growth in June was the highest since the early 90s
Saw a 18-wheeler on I-287 the other day bearing a big sign advertising rates for drivers of $2,500+ a week.
Based on my conversation with a taxi driver, you can now earn nearly as much driving Ubers/cabs/food delivery as an HGV driver. And you get to sleep in your own bed every night, not in the cramped cabin of a truck.
The other problem, I suspect, is that people think that a lot of long distance driving is going away with the rise of autonomous vehicles. So why go into a business where wages are likely to be a lot lower in the future?
Yup, it's the same as what that guy was saying about becoming a stevedore in the US. No one new enters the market because it's a job that has almost been eliminated by automation. It doesn't help the container ships stacking up at secondary ports in the US where lazy dockyard owners have failed to invest in automation but it's enough to cause a permanent labour shortage in the shipping industry.
What I got from Boris's speech is what he wanted me to get. This is a government on a mission and with a hugely ambitious program to change this country for the better. He wants better transport, education, skills, education, law and order, the list went on and on.
Will he be able to deliver? Who knows, certainly not on all of it but maybe on some. If he does he will have done better than most of his recent predecessors. The message from his speech is that this is not a government blundering around not knowing what it wants to do. I think he succeeded in that.
Don't all political parties want things to be better? Has any conference speech stated they want transport and education to get worse?
What I got from the speech was not that the Tories want to change the country for the better, but to impress upon people that they are still energetic and coming up with ideas (he talked about 'tired old Labour'), rather than a sclerotic 11 year old government paddling along.
Yes, the entire rhetoric is remarkable. What the Tories are doing is pretending that Labour was in power until 2019, when Boris took over. Astonishingly, quite a lot of voters seem to think that this is true, and any current woes should be blamed on the Labour government 2010-2019. Things haven't got better yet because of Labour's misrule - but now Boris is in charge. It takes some brass neck, but it seems to work.
The trick in the under the radar social media targetted ads has been to blame Labour Councils for Nationa Government policies.
So "lack of funding for the NHS" is blamed on the local Labour Council.
It has shown to be remarkably effective.
Whether it can work at a second election in a row will be interesting to see...
Yes, that was really clear from the vox pops I've seen from 'Red Wall' seats in the north and midlands. People were blaming everything on their Labour councils - hilariously, in some cases, when they didn't even have Labour councils any more. "I've had to wait 4 years for my hip operation, thanks to my Labour council", and stuff like that.
I’m sure there is much of this going on. But there is also a sense that labour took Scotland’s voters for granted, until they were swept away. And then they still had the red wall in the north... until that was swept away. With too many in labour more interested in Palestine than in Peterborough they won’t win those voters back.
I agree with your Scotland point. But your last sentence is just a facile Daily Mail-type myth. What's more, Peterborough isn't anywhere near 'the red wall in the north'.
I know, but I couldn’t think of a P from the red wall. Preston?
Pontefract?
No. Yvette Cooper. Must try harder.
I know that. I was looking for “red wall with a P”
Even if @theProle is correct I dont think further erosion of the middle class will prove to be a fruitful political strategy in the long run - especially as many middle aged “working class” red wallers are actually in what PB tories would consider as middle class jobs
It's important to understand that - ultimately - the money that gets shared out among the workers and shareholders is a consequence of the productivity of employees and firms.
Paying an HGV driver twice as much to haul the same amount of cargo, the same number of miles, is not increasing the size of the pie, it is merely redistributing who gets what.
Now, it may be that the middle classes (or perhaps I should say the owners of capital), have had it away at the expense of workers due to immigration. (Although that doesn't explain why the same trends have been seen across the developed world irrespective of levels of net migration.) And it may be that a rebalancing is due. But it is important to realise that unless the size of the pie grows, it is a zero sum game.
Governments would be well advised to concentrate more on growing the pie, than on dividing the spoils. Why? Because if the pie is growing, then nobody need become absolutely poorer. But if it isn't, then someone is going to be losing out.
Track down some of Mark Blythe’s stuff (Brown Uni) on YouTube. He gave a lecture or series of lectures some years ago on “Global Trumpism”which even now explains fluidly what is happening.
Perhaps someone here will challenge his data but it seems quite clear that in the last 40 years, the extra slices of pie created by productivity growth, have pretty much all accrued to capital holders and to a lesser extent the new middle classes in emerging markets (principally China).
This started off as a desirable and inbuilt feature of the Bretton Woods / globalist system, after the previous system of heavily organised labour had imploded, with high inflation and state over-interference disincentivising the entrepreneurial class from creating new wealth. But it went too far. Just as the system which Bretton Woods replaced started off with the desirable goal of lifting poverty stricken westerners up into the middle class and rebuilding economic resilience after the ravages of WW2. Before the state bureaucrats and labour unions took it too far that is.
It’s long past time for an equivalent reset to western capitalism and it will mean centre right political leaders being brave enough to shoot the foxes called Reagan, Thatcher and Blair. Or else it will be an evolution to capitalism led by AOC / Corbyn types. Credit to Boris Johnson that his political antenna has picked up on all this.
15 hour workday yesterday and cannot get out of bed this morning
Hard work, digging coal. You sort-of signed up for at least occasional long days but don't make a habit of it. Get up, shower, breakfast, coffee. You can catch up with Coronation Street at the weekend. Try to develop a flexible routine that can incorporate long days, and an understanding partner. Little things like picking out shirts in advance and always keeping your keys, pass and other work detritus in the same place so you do not waste time making decisions in the morning.
Dump the partner.
Frankly, they're not good enough for the person you'll be.
Someone's got to make coffee in the morning so either it's the understanding partner, one of those machines, or swinging by the drive-through McDonalds for coffee and a Sausage McMuffin for breakfast (as eaten by American celebrity billionaire Warren Buffet). The trick is to have made these decisions, or contingency plans, in advance.
I've often thought that Britain and France are two countries with a mutual inferiority complex. A truly peculiar, maybe unique relationship.
In my experience (went to university there, own a house there) French people spend far less time thinking about England than English people imagine. They view the USA as their cultural usurper. They are just not that into you.
The obsession with France is weird isn't it. It's definitely a one-sided affair. You don't see it in Scotland, either. Seems to be mainly a thing with posh English blokes. Maybe some cultural memory of all those aristos going to the guillotine?
What I got from Boris's speech is what he wanted me to get. This is a government on a mission and with a hugely ambitious program to change this country for the better. He wants better transport, education, skills, education, law and order, the list went on and on.
Will he be able to deliver? Who knows, certainly not on all of it but maybe on some. If he does he will have done better than most of his recent predecessors. The message from his speech is that this is not a government blundering around not knowing what it wants to do. I think he succeeded in that.
Don't all political parties want things to be better? Has any conference speech stated they want transport and education to get worse?
What I got from the speech was not that the Tories want to change the country for the better, but to impress upon people that they are still energetic and coming up with ideas (he talked about 'tired old Labour'), rather than a sclerotic 11 year old government paddling along.
Yes, the entire rhetoric is remarkable. What the Tories are doing is pretending that Labour was in power until 2019, when Boris took over. Astonishingly, quite a lot of voters seem to think that this is true, and any current woes should be blamed on the Labour government 2010-2019. Things haven't got better yet because of Labour's misrule - but now Boris is in charge. It takes some brass neck, but it seems to work.
The trick in the under the radar social media targetted ads has been to blame Labour Councils for Nationa Government policies.
So "lack of funding for the NHS" is blamed on the local Labour Council.
It has shown to be remarkably effective.
Whether it can work at a second election in a row will be interesting to see...
Yes, that was really clear from the vox pops I've seen from 'Red Wall' seats in the north and midlands. People were blaming everything on their Labour councils - hilariously, in some cases, when they didn't even have Labour councils any more. "I've had to wait 4 years for my hip operation, thanks to my Labour council", and stuff like that.
I’m sure there is much of this going on. But there is also a sense that labour took Scotland’s voters for granted, until they were swept away. And then they still had the red wall in the north... until that was swept away. With too many in labour more interested in Palestine than in Peterborough they won’t win those voters back.
I agree with your Scotland point. But your last sentence is just a facile Daily Mail-type myth. What's more, Peterborough isn't anywhere near 'the red wall in the north'.
I know, but I couldn’t think of a P from the red wall. Preston?
Pontefract?
No. Yvette Cooper. Must try harder.
I know that. I was looking for “red wall with a P”
15 hour workday yesterday and cannot get out of bed this morning
Hard work, digging coal. You sort-of signed up for at least occasional long days but don't make a habit of it. Get up, shower, breakfast, coffee. You can catch up with Coronation Street at the weekend. Try to develop a flexible routine that can incorporate long days, and an understanding partner. Little things like picking out shirts in advance and always keeping your keys, pass and other work detritus in the same place so you do not waste time making decisions in the morning.
Dump the partner.
Frankly, they're not good enough for the person you'll be.
Someone's got to make coffee in the morning so either it's the understanding partner, one of those machines, or swinging by the drive-through McDonalds for coffee and a Sausage McMuffin for breakfast (as eaten by American celebrity billionaire Warren Buffet). The trick is to have made these decisions, or contingency plans, in advance.
Coffee machines are cheap and don't moan.
I even had a second set of keys cut in order to always keep my "going to work kit" together in the same bowl so I could just scoop up the lot without thinking on my way to the door.
Even if @theProle is correct I dont think further erosion of the middle class will prove to be a fruitful political strategy in the long run - especially as many middle aged “working class” red wallers are actually in what PB tories would consider as middle class jobs
It's important to understand that - ultimately - the money that gets shared out among the workers and shareholders is a consequence of the productivity of employees and firms.
Paying an HGV driver twice as much to haul the same amount of cargo, the same number of miles, is not increasing the size of the pie, it is merely redistributing who gets what.
Now, it may be that the middle classes (or perhaps I should say the owners of capital), have had it away at the expense of workers due to immigration. (Although that doesn't explain why the same trends have been seen across the developed world irrespective of levels of net migration.) And it may be that a rebalancing is due. But it is important to realise that unless the size of the pie grows, it is a zero sum game.
Governments would be well advised to concentrate more on growing the pie, than on dividing the spoils. Why? Because if the pie is growing, then nobody need become absolutely poorer. But if it isn't, then someone is going to be losing out.
Track down some of Mark Blythe’s stuff (Brown Uni) on YouTube. He gave a lecture or series of lectures some years ago on “Global Trumpism”which even now explains fluidly what is happening.
Perhaps someone here will challenge his data but it seems quite clear that in the last 40 years, the extra slices of pie created by productivity growth, have pretty much all accrued to capital holders and to a lesser extent the new middle classes in emerging markets (principally China).
This started off as a desirable and inbuilt feature of the Bretton Woods / globalist system, after the previous system of heavily organised labour had imploded, with high inflation and state over-interference disincentivising the entrepreneurial class from creating new wealth. But it went too far. Just as the system which Bretton Woods replaced started off with the desirable goal of lifting poverty stricken westerners up into the middle class and rebuilding economic resilience after the ravages of WW2. Before the state bureaucrats and labour unions took it too far that is.
It’s long past time for an equivalent reset to western capitalism and it will mean centre right political leaders being brave enough to shoot the foxes called Reagan, Thatcher and Blair. Or else it will be an evolution to capitalism led by AOC / Corbyn types. Credit to Boris Johnson that his political antenna has picked up on all this.
So, I'm about to go to bed, but I just want to address a little bit of this.
A few years ago, I went to Tesla's factory in Fremont, in the Bay Area. Their CFO told me proudly that they'd bought the factory in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis in 2010 for just $42m.
He went on to say that when GM had owned the plant, it had employed more than 8,000 people. Now, he said, they were churning out almost the same number of cars with under 600 full time employees.
When it was a GM plant, the 8,000 jobs were well paid, skilled labour.
When it was Tesla, the roles were people with degrees who looked after machines. The skilled labour had been replaced by machines and people with Masters, and then people who swept up and polished glass, and were basically unskilled labour.
And this is a large part of what has happened in the West. Work has bifurcated between highly skilled, and unskilled. The middle ground, i.e. demand for skilled manual labour, has largely disappeared.
That is one of the two mega challenge facing the developed world (the other being ageing populations). Unfortunately, discussing the real issues requires rather more nuance than political debate usually gets.
I've often thought that Britain and France are two countries with a mutual inferiority complex. A truly peculiar, maybe unique relationship.
In my experience (went to university there, own a house there) French people spend far less time thinking about England than English people imagine. They view the USA as their cultural usurper. They are just not that into you.
The obsession with France is weird isn't it. It's definitely a one-sided affair. You don't see it in Scotland, either. Seems to be mainly a thing with posh English blokes. Maybe some cultural memory of all those aristos going to the guillotine?
Lots of talk on here about pay rises leading to inflation, and whether or not that's a good thing, but isn't it all just a bit more complicated than that?
Not everyone is getting pay rises right now.
Skilled/semi-skilled manual workers, care workers, wagon drivers, building site labourers are getting big rises.
The white collar and middle class types - accountants, administrators, design engineers, project managers aren't suffering from a sudden reduction in their part of the workforce, so their wages are going to be static.
This means that after allowing for the effect of the inflation caused by rising wages in some sectors, we'll actually see a rebalancing - the working class will generally earn more than before, and everyone else less.
This is seriously good news for the working class types who voted for Brext as its exactly what they expected to happen. So it's no good for the lefty-remainery types to screech and moan about it to them - Brext has done what it said on the tin.
I get why there is a lot of screeching and moaning on here - posters here tend to be well off white collar types or posher, rather than digger drivers or steel erectors. Even I'm not a typical specimen of the working class (I'm a SME owner now!) although I'm probably closer to the action there than most.
I suspect that the biggest medium term challenge for the government is going to be public sector pay. They'll have to pay the manual workers more, or they'll all drift to the private sector. They don't need to (and won't be able to afford to) pay the planning officers, NHS managers, etc a similar rise. But how on earth do they do one without the other?
(this is the public sector teacher problem on a massive scale - maths teachers have more real world value in alternative careers than history or art teachers, but they are usually on identical pay scales - so hiring good art and history teachers is easy, but good maths teachers nearly impossible).
I'm not sure it's all Brexit related - there's tremendous wage inflation in the US and even the Eurozone* right now as demand bounces back post pandemic.
I have been in Vegas at a conference the last three days (and Vegas was utterly rammed, which is staggering for a Monday to Wednesday in early October). In the cab heading back to the airport, the driver told me he used to be an HGV driver. I asked him if he'd been tempted to go back, as there is a shortage. He told me his old firm had offered him a $10,000 sign on bonus - but that he wasn't tempted because he could earn really well doing taxi and food delivery.
* German wage growth in June was the highest since the early 90s
Saw a 18-wheeler on I-287 the other day bearing a big sign advertising rates for drivers of $2,500+ a week.
Based on my conversation with a taxi driver, you can now earn nearly as much driving Ubers/cabs/food delivery as an HGV driver. And you get to sleep in your own bed every night, not in the cramped cabin of a truck.
The other problem, I suspect, is that people think that a lot of long distance driving is going away with the rise of autonomous vehicles. So why go into a business where wages are likely to be a lot lower in the future?
Arent higher wages in food delivery likely to be driven down as more entrants are attracted into the sector? The barriers to entry cant be that high.
Before the pandemic Uber drivers, albeit taxi not food, were complaining they were taking home less than minimum wage (in Leeds at least).
You'd have thought so. The other day my fish and chips turned up in a 68-plate Mercedes, and not an A-class. I can only imagine its day job is as a posh Uber. If we assume £3 to £4 a delivery, 4 deliveries and £5 tips an hour, that is £30 gross an hour which is not bad but at quieter times, £15 an hour before tax and before expenses like petrol is better than a poke in the eye with a hot chip but not by much.
Using an expensive car to make short deliveries is a very false economy.
People only look at the immediate marginal cost of operating the car (time and petrol), and miss the depreciation, finance and servicing costs that make it quite uneconomical. It you’re unemployed and with a lease commitment on the car though, you likely don’t have much choice.
Or maybe it was just that his airport run got cancelled that day, and he found himself with time on his hands.
Spot on.
Someone doing a Deliveroo job in a Mercedes E Class is likely to be losing money once depreciation is taken into account. It's why the ride share leasing companies use such a narrow range of vehicles.
Yes, if you’re doing short delivery or taxi runs in the city you want something like a Prius, and prefereably not a new one either.
The guy doing 100 miles at a time to the airport, well his customer expects to see something like 2018 E Class, and is happy to pay £150 for the trip.
I've often thought that Britain and France are two countries with a mutual inferiority complex. A truly peculiar, maybe unique relationship.
In my experience (went to university there, own a house there) French people spend far less time thinking about England than English people imagine. They view the USA as their cultural usurper. They are just not that into you.
The obsession with France is weird isn't it. It's definitely a one-sided affair. You don't see it in Scotland, either. Seems to be mainly a thing with posh English blokes. Maybe some cultural memory of all those aristos going to the guillotine?
It's not that weird.
The French invasion of England may have been a millennium ago but despite all the how many Frenchmen does it take to defend Paris jokes we have a deep and profound psychosis about that early total defeat, occupation and transformation.
15 hour workday yesterday and cannot get out of bed this morning
Hard work, digging coal. You sort-of signed up for at least occasional long days but don't make a habit of it. Get up, shower, breakfast, coffee. You can catch up with Coronation Street at the weekend. Try to develop a flexible routine that can incorporate long days, and an understanding partner. Little things like picking out shirts in advance and always keeping your keys, pass and other work detritus in the same place so you do not waste time making decisions in the morning.
Dump the partner.
Frankly, they're not good enough for the person you'll be.
Someone's got to make coffee in the morning so either it's the understanding partner, one of those machines, or swinging by the drive-through McDonalds for coffee and a Sausage McMuffin for breakfast (as eaten by American celebrity billionaire Warren Buffet). The trick is to have made these decisions, or contingency plans, in advance.
Coffee machines are cheap and don't moan.
Best money we ever spent on something for the house. Beans in the top, push button, wait 30s, coffee out the bottom!
Couldn’t that graph just show an exponential growth in PCR testing over the last decade ? A significantly earlier start for the pandemic wouldn’t really match the infectiousness of the virus, either, which throws up a lot of other questions.
Without long term data, we don't know if this is a sudden unexplained increase, or simply part of a trend.
There is long term data in that graph on the link. What's lacking is a lot of contextual data. There's certainly been a rapid increase in PCR testing everywhere, which is as much technology determined as demand determined. Either could be true, but if the pandemic started months earlier, it doesn't really match what we know about the epidemiology of the virus - which might imply a significantly less infectious precursor.
As one of many who had the worst cold of their life in December 2019, I would not be totally surprised if we missed something about its origins. Wasnt there something about covid19 being found in sewage from 2019 in multiple countries? If an earlier version wasn't lethal and perhaps less transmissible too would we definitely have picked up on it?
Lots of talk on here about pay rises leading to inflation, and whether or not that's a good thing, but isn't it all just a bit more complicated than that?
Not everyone is getting pay rises right now.
Skilled/semi-skilled manual workers, care workers, wagon drivers, building site labourers are getting big rises.
The white collar and middle class types - accountants, administrators, design engineers, project managers aren't suffering from a sudden reduction in their part of the workforce, so their wages are going to be static.
This means that after allowing for the effect of the inflation caused by rising wages in some sectors, we'll actually see a rebalancing - the working class will generally earn more than before, and everyone else less.
This is seriously good news for the working class types who voted for Brext as its exactly what they expected to happen. So it's no good for the lefty-remainery types to screech and moan about it to them - Brext has done what it said on the tin.
I get why there is a lot of screeching and moaning on here - posters here tend to be well off white collar types or posher, rather than digger drivers or steel erectors. Even I'm not a typical specimen of the working class (I'm a SME owner now!) although I'm probably closer to the action there than most.
I suspect that the biggest medium term challenge for the government is going to be public sector pay. They'll have to pay the manual workers more, or they'll all drift to the private sector. They don't need to (and won't be able to afford to) pay the planning officers, NHS managers, etc a similar rise. But how on earth do they do one without the other?
(this is the public sector teacher problem on a massive scale - maths teachers have more real world value in alternative careers than history or art teachers, but they are usually on identical pay scales - so hiring good art and history teachers is easy, but good maths teachers nearly impossible).
I'm not sure it's all Brexit related - there's tremendous wage inflation in the US and even the Eurozone* right now as demand bounces back post pandemic.
I have been in Vegas at a conference the last three days (and Vegas was utterly rammed, which is staggering for a Monday to Wednesday in early October). In the cab heading back to the airport, the driver told me he used to be an HGV driver. I asked him if he'd been tempted to go back, as there is a shortage. He told me his old firm had offered him a $10,000 sign on bonus - but that he wasn't tempted because he could earn really well doing taxi and food delivery.
* German wage growth in June was the highest since the early 90s
Saw a 18-wheeler on I-287 the other day bearing a big sign advertising rates for drivers of $2,500+ a week.
Clearly 400k driver shortage in Europe has been caused by Brexit!
I do love how people still keep posting this guff. Aside from nobody having claimed the UK shortage was exclusively the fault of brexit, the driver shortage on the continent is not creating any shortages, unlike here.
Lots of talk on here about pay rises leading to inflation, and whether or not that's a good thing, but isn't it all just a bit more complicated than that?
Not everyone is getting pay rises right now.
Skilled/semi-skilled manual workers, care workers, wagon drivers, building site labourers are getting big rises.
The white collar and middle class types - accountants, administrators, design engineers, project managers aren't suffering from a sudden reduction in their part of the workforce, so their wages are going to be static.
This means that after allowing for the effect of the inflation caused by rising wages in some sectors, we'll actually see a rebalancing - the working class will generally earn more than before, and everyone else less.
This is seriously good news for the working class types who voted for Brext as its exactly what they expected to happen. So it's no good for the lefty-remainery types to screech and moan about it to them - Brext has done what it said on the tin.
I get why there is a lot of screeching and moaning on here - posters here tend to be well off white collar types or posher, rather than digger drivers or steel erectors. Even I'm not a typical specimen of the working class (I'm a SME owner now!) although I'm probably closer to the action there than most.
I suspect that the biggest medium term challenge for the government is going to be public sector pay. They'll have to pay the manual workers more, or they'll all drift to the private sector. They don't need to (and won't be able to afford to) pay the planning officers, NHS managers, etc a similar rise. But how on earth do they do one without the other?
(this is the public sector teacher problem on a massive scale - maths teachers have more real world value in alternative careers than history or art teachers, but they are usually on identical pay scales - so hiring good art and history teachers is easy, but good maths teachers nearly impossible).
I'm not sure it's all Brexit related - there's tremendous wage inflation in the US and even the Eurozone* right now as demand bounces back post pandemic.
I have been in Vegas at a conference the last three days (and Vegas was utterly rammed, which is staggering for a Monday to Wednesday in early October). In the cab heading back to the airport, the driver told me he used to be an HGV driver. I asked him if he'd been tempted to go back, as there is a shortage. He told me his old firm had offered him a $10,000 sign on bonus - but that he wasn't tempted because he could earn really well doing taxi and food delivery.
* German wage growth in June was the highest since the early 90s
Saw a 18-wheeler on I-287 the other day bearing a big sign advertising rates for drivers of $2,500+ a week.
Based on my conversation with a taxi driver, you can now earn nearly as much driving Ubers/cabs/food delivery as an HGV driver. And you get to sleep in your own bed every night, not in the cramped cabin of a truck.
The other problem, I suspect, is that people think that a lot of long distance driving is going away with the rise of autonomous vehicles. So why go into a business where wages are likely to be a lot lower in the future?
Arent higher wages in food delivery likely to be driven down as more entrants are attracted into the sector? The barriers to entry cant be that high.
Before the pandemic Uber drivers, albeit taxi not food, were complaining they were taking home less than minimum wage (in Leeds at least).
You'd have thought so. The other day my fish and chips turned up in a 68-plate Mercedes, and not an A-class. I can only imagine its day job is as a posh Uber. If we assume £3 to £4 a delivery, 4 deliveries and £5 tips an hour, that is £30 gross an hour which is not bad but at quieter times, £15 an hour before tax and before expenses like petrol is better than a poke in the eye with a hot chip but not by much.
Using an expensive car to make short deliveries is a very false economy.
People only look at the immediate marginal cost of operating the car (time and petrol), and miss the depreciation, finance and servicing costs that make it quite uneconomical. It you’re unemployed and with a lease commitment on the car though, you likely don’t have much choice.
Or maybe it was just that his airport run got cancelled that day, and he found himself with time on his hands.
Spot on.
Someone doing a Deliveroo job in a Mercedes E Class is likely to be losing money once depreciation is taken into account. It's why the ride share leasing companies use such a narrow range of vehicles.
Yes, if you’re doing short delivery or taxi runs in the city you want something like a Prius, and prefereably not a new one either.
The guy doing 100 miles at a time to the airport, well his customer expects to see something like 2018 E Class, and is happy to pay £150 for the trip.
I can ony assume the people doing deliveroo deliveries in expensive cars are getting big promotional driver incentives and stop when they don't.
Or they cant do basic sums and don't realise how mich money they are losing.
I've often thought that Britain and France are two countries with a mutual inferiority complex. A truly peculiar, maybe unique relationship.
In my experience (went to university there, own a house there) French people spend far less time thinking about England than English people imagine. They view the USA as their cultural usurper. They are just not that into you.
The obsession with France is weird isn't it. It's definitely a one-sided affair. You don't see it in Scotland, either. Seems to be mainly a thing with posh English blokes. Maybe some cultural memory of all those aristos going to the guillotine?
It's not that weird.
The French invasion of England may have been a millennium ago but despite all the how many Frenchmen does it take to defend Paris jokes we have a deep and profound psychosis about that early total defeat, occupation and transformation.
It just comes down to slight arrogance in human thinking in that humans generally assume that others are more interested and even judgemental of them than they actually are. Its just scaled up in this case to think France or indeed any other country thinks much about us as a nation. On an individual level this shows when resigning from a job for instance - you anguish about telling your colleagues you are going thinking they will beg you to stay or at least be upset or think you are a traitor and get nervous about doing so and then when you do tell everyone most people shrug their shoulders , say a few polite words that you will be missed and then think about what they are having for tea.
Also people who do not enter sporting events or not play golf for fear of coming last , hitting bad shot - nobody actually cares but that person
15 hour workday yesterday and cannot get out of bed this morning
Hard work, digging coal. You sort-of signed up for at least occasional long days but don't make a habit of it. Get up, shower, breakfast, coffee. You can catch up with Coronation Street at the weekend. Try to develop a flexible routine that can incorporate long days, and an understanding partner. Little things like picking out shirts in advance and always keeping your keys, pass and other work detritus in the same place so you do not waste time making decisions in the morning.
Dump the partner.
Frankly, they're not good enough for the person you'll be.
Someone's got to make coffee in the morning so either it's the understanding partner, one of those machines, or swinging by the drive-through McDonalds for coffee and a Sausage McMuffin for breakfast (as eaten by American celebrity billionaire Warren Buffet). The trick is to have made these decisions, or contingency plans, in advance.
Coffee machines are cheap and don't moan.
Best money we ever spent on something for the house. Beans in the top, push button, wait 30s, coffee out the bottom!
Heresy.
Warm the cafetiere, put beans in grinder, grind for two seconds, pause, shake the cafetiere, grind for a further 10 seconds until you can just hear the broken up beans rattling. Put ground beans in cafetiere.
Start to boil the kettle and when it's half boiled pour one inch of water over the coffee. Stir with wooden spoon. Almost boil the water and before it does so pour the rest of the water on.
Leave for five minutes.
Strength to taste in number of beans to start with.
15 hour workday yesterday and cannot get out of bed this morning
Hard work, digging coal. You sort-of signed up for at least occasional long days but don't make a habit of it. Get up, shower, breakfast, coffee. You can catch up with Coronation Street at the weekend. Try to develop a flexible routine that can incorporate long days, and an understanding partner. Little things like picking out shirts in advance and always keeping your keys, pass and other work detritus in the same place so you do not waste time making decisions in the morning.
Dump the partner.
Frankly, they're not good enough for the person you'll be.
Someone's got to make coffee in the morning so either it's the understanding partner, one of those machines, or swinging by the drive-through McDonalds for coffee and a Sausage McMuffin for breakfast (as eaten by American celebrity billionaire Warren Buffet). The trick is to have made these decisions, or contingency plans, in advance.
Coffee machines are cheap and don't moan.
Best money we ever spent on something for the house. Beans in the top, push button, wait 30s, coffee out the bottom!
We even had people at work buying them for the office out of their own money. Coffee machines are a lot better than instant or vending machine coffee, and a damn sight cheaper than coffee-shop coffee.
I've often thought that Britain and France are two countries with a mutual inferiority complex. A truly peculiar, maybe unique relationship.
In my experience (went to university there, own a house there) French people spend far less time thinking about England than English people imagine. They view the USA as their cultural usurper. They are just not that into you.
The obsession with France is weird isn't it. It's definitely a one-sided affair. You don't see it in Scotland, either. Seems to be mainly a thing with posh English blokes. Maybe some cultural memory of all those aristos going to the guillotine?
It's not that weird.
The French invasion of England may have been a millennium ago but despite all the how many Frenchmen does it take to defend Paris jokes we have a deep and profound psychosis about that early total defeat, occupation and transformation.
It just comes down to slight arrogance in human thinking in that humans generally assume that others are more interested and even judgemental of them than they actually are. Its just scaled up in this case to think France or indeed any other country thinks much about us as a nation. On an individual level this shows when resigning from a job for instance - you anguish about telling your colleagues you are going thinking they will beg you to stay or at least be upset or think you are a traitor and get nervous about doing so and then when you do tell everyone most people shrug their shoulders , say a few polite words that you will be missed and then think about what they are having for tea.
Also people who do not enter sporting events or not play golf for fear of coming last , hitting bad shot - nobody actually cares but that person
It's true people generally care a lot less about what we do than we think they might.
Lots of talk on here about pay rises leading to inflation, and whether or not that's a good thing, but isn't it all just a bit more complicated than that?
Not everyone is getting pay rises right now.
Skilled/semi-skilled manual workers, care workers, wagon drivers, building site labourers are getting big rises.
The white collar and middle class types - accountants, administrators, design engineers, project managers aren't suffering from a sudden reduction in their part of the workforce, so their wages are going to be static.
This means that after allowing for the effect of the inflation caused by rising wages in some sectors, we'll actually see a rebalancing - the working class will generally earn more than before, and everyone else less.
This is seriously good news for the working class types who voted for Brext as its exactly what they expected to happen. So it's no good for the lefty-remainery types to screech and moan about it to them - Brext has done what it said on the tin.
I get why there is a lot of screeching and moaning on here - posters here tend to be well off white collar types or posher, rather than digger drivers or steel erectors. Even I'm not a typical specimen of the working class (I'm a SME owner now!) although I'm probably closer to the action there than most.
I suspect that the biggest medium term challenge for the government is going to be public sector pay. They'll have to pay the manual workers more, or they'll all drift to the private sector. They don't need to (and won't be able to afford to) pay the planning officers, NHS managers, etc a similar rise. But how on earth do they do one without the other?
(this is the public sector teacher problem on a massive scale - maths teachers have more real world value in alternative careers than history or art teachers, but they are usually on identical pay scales - so hiring good art and history teachers is easy, but good maths teachers nearly impossible).
I'm not sure it's all Brexit related - there's tremendous wage inflation in the US and even the Eurozone* right now as demand bounces back post pandemic.
I have been in Vegas at a conference the last three days (and Vegas was utterly rammed, which is staggering for a Monday to Wednesday in early October). In the cab heading back to the airport, the driver told me he used to be an HGV driver. I asked him if he'd been tempted to go back, as there is a shortage. He told me his old firm had offered him a $10,000 sign on bonus - but that he wasn't tempted because he could earn really well doing taxi and food delivery.
* German wage growth in June was the highest since the early 90s
Saw a 18-wheeler on I-287 the other day bearing a big sign advertising rates for drivers of $2,500+ a week.
Based on my conversation with a taxi driver, you can now earn nearly as much driving Ubers/cabs/food delivery as an HGV driver. And you get to sleep in your own bed every night, not in the cramped cabin of a truck.
The other problem, I suspect, is that people think that a lot of long distance driving is going away with the rise of autonomous vehicles. So why go into a business where wages are likely to be a lot lower in the future?
Arent higher wages in food delivery likely to be driven down as more entrants are attracted into the sector? The barriers to entry cant be that high.
Before the pandemic Uber drivers, albeit taxi not food, were complaining they were taking home less than minimum wage (in Leeds at least).
You'd have thought so. The other day my fish and chips turned up in a 68-plate Mercedes, and not an A-class. I can only imagine its day job is as a posh Uber. If we assume £3 to £4 a delivery, 4 deliveries and £5 tips an hour, that is £30 gross an hour which is not bad but at quieter times, £15 an hour before tax and before expenses like petrol is better than a poke in the eye with a hot chip but not by much.
Using an expensive car to make short deliveries is a very false economy.
People only look at the immediate marginal cost of operating the car (time and petrol), and miss the depreciation, finance and servicing costs that make it quite uneconomical. It you’re unemployed and with a lease commitment on the car though, you likely don’t have much choice.
Or maybe it was just that his airport run got cancelled that day, and he found himself with time on his hands.
Spot on.
Someone doing a Deliveroo job in a Mercedes E Class is likely to be losing money once depreciation is taken into account. It's why the ride share leasing companies use such a narrow range of vehicles.
Lets be fair. You'd be unlikely to choose an E-Class (estate I assume, not a coupe...?) to do Deliveroo. But if you had one and needed dollah to make the payments, doing Deliveroo might make sense.
Back when I was on Teesside the local parcel delivery guy was using a 20 year old Passat estate. Depreciated to nothing, and the legendary PD engine just kept going and didn't care about lots of stop start and was still reasonably economical!
Even if @theProle is correct I dont think further erosion of the middle class will prove to be a fruitful political strategy in the long run - especially as many middle aged “working class” red wallers are actually in what PB tories would consider as middle class jobs
It's important to understand that - ultimately - the money that gets shared out among the workers and shareholders is a consequence of the productivity of employees and firms.
Paying an HGV driver twice as much to haul the same amount of cargo, the same number of miles, is not increasing the size of the pie, it is merely redistributing who gets what.
Now, it may be that the middle classes (or perhaps I should say the owners of capital), have had it away at the expense of workers due to immigration. (Although that doesn't explain why the same trends have been seen across the developed world irrespective of levels of net migration.) And it may be that a rebalancing is due. But it is important to realise that unless the size of the pie grows, it is a zero sum game.
Governments would be well advised to concentrate more on growing the pie, than on dividing the spoils. Why? Because if the pie is growing, then nobody need become absolutely poorer. But if it isn't, then someone is going to be losing out.
And, if we take the HGV industry as an example, way UK-EU relations are currently managed is making productivity worse, not better:
If it had been French then the king of France or his heir would've become king of England (the latter would have been the case in the early 13th century when the French almost conquered England during John's disastrous reign).
So, I'm about to go to bed, but I just want to address a little bit of this.
A few years ago, I went to Tesla's factory in Fremont, in the Bay Area. Their CFO told me proudly that they'd bought the factory in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis in 2010 for just $42m. He went on to say that when GM had owned the plant, it had employed more than 8,000 people. Now, he said, they were churning out almost the same number of cars with under 600 full time employees.
When it was a GM plant, the 8,000 jobs were well paid, skilled labour.
Give the factory under GM/Toyota produced over 400,000 cars a year that sounds rather implausible.
Lots of talk on here about pay rises leading to inflation, and whether or not that's a good thing, but isn't it all just a bit more complicated than that?
Not everyone is getting pay rises right now.
Skilled/semi-skilled manual workers, care workers, wagon drivers, building site labourers are getting big rises.
The white collar and middle class types - accountants, administrators, design engineers, project managers aren't suffering from a sudden reduction in their part of the workforce, so their wages are going to be static.
This means that after allowing for the effect of the inflation caused by rising wages in some sectors, we'll actually see a rebalancing - the working class will generally earn more than before, and everyone else less.
This is seriously good news for the working class types who voted for Brext as its exactly what they expected to happen. So it's no good for the lefty-remainery types to screech and moan about it to them - Brext has done what it said on the tin.
I get why there is a lot of screeching and moaning on here - posters here tend to be well off white collar types or posher, rather than digger drivers or steel erectors. Even I'm not a typical specimen of the working class (I'm a SME owner now!) although I'm probably closer to the action there than most.
I suspect that the biggest medium term challenge for the government is going to be public sector pay. They'll have to pay the manual workers more, or they'll all drift to the private sector. They don't need to (and won't be able to afford to) pay the planning officers, NHS managers, etc a similar rise. But how on earth do they do one without the other?
(this is the public sector teacher problem on a massive scale - maths teachers have more real world value in alternative careers than history or art teachers, but they are usually on identical pay scales - so hiring good art and history teachers is easy, but good maths teachers nearly impossible).
I'm not sure it's all Brexit related - there's tremendous wage inflation in the US and even the Eurozone* right now as demand bounces back post pandemic.
I have been in Vegas at a conference the last three days (and Vegas was utterly rammed, which is staggering for a Monday to Wednesday in early October). In the cab heading back to the airport, the driver told me he used to be an HGV driver. I asked him if he'd been tempted to go back, as there is a shortage. He told me his old firm had offered him a $10,000 sign on bonus - but that he wasn't tempted because he could earn really well doing taxi and food delivery.
* German wage growth in June was the highest since the early 90s
Saw a 18-wheeler on I-287 the other day bearing a big sign advertising rates for drivers of $2,500+ a week.
Based on my conversation with a taxi driver, you can now earn nearly as much driving Ubers/cabs/food delivery as an HGV driver. And you get to sleep in your own bed every night, not in the cramped cabin of a truck.
The other problem, I suspect, is that people think that a lot of long distance driving is going away with the rise of autonomous vehicles. So why go into a business where wages are likely to be a lot lower in the future?
Arent higher wages in food delivery likely to be driven down as more entrants are attracted into the sector? The barriers to entry cant be that high.
Before the pandemic Uber drivers, albeit taxi not food, were complaining they were taking home less than minimum wage (in Leeds at least).
You'd have thought so. The other day my fish and chips turned up in a 68-plate Mercedes, and not an A-class. I can only imagine its day job is as a posh Uber. If we assume £3 to £4 a delivery, 4 deliveries and £5 tips an hour, that is £30 gross an hour which is not bad but at quieter times, £15 an hour before tax and before expenses like petrol is better than a poke in the eye with a hot chip but not by much.
Using an expensive car to make short deliveries is a very false economy.
People only look at the immediate marginal cost of operating the car (time and petrol), and miss the depreciation, finance and servicing costs that make it quite uneconomical. It you’re unemployed and with a lease commitment on the car though, you likely don’t have much choice.
Or maybe it was just that his airport run got cancelled that day, and he found himself with time on his hands.
Spot on.
Someone doing a Deliveroo job in a Mercedes E Class is likely to be losing money once depreciation is taken into account. It's why the ride share leasing companies use such a narrow range of vehicles.
Yes, if you’re doing short delivery or taxi runs in the city you want something like a Prius, and prefereably not a new one either.
The guy doing 100 miles at a time to the airport, well his customer expects to see something like 2018 E Class, and is happy to pay £150 for the trip.
I can ony assume the people doing deliveroo deliveries in expensive cars are getting big promotional driver incentives and stop when they don't.
Or they cant do basic sums and don't realise how mich money they are losing.
Or they have leased their car, and aren't going to hit the mileage cap.
In my view Boris' speech was a great speech in that he (and tory advisors and indeed any modern CEO /PR directors do) uses the current crisis or issues (created by not planning long term) to project a future solution that sounds sexy and good and understandable. Boris adds good humour on top to make it even better.
The trouble is everyone forgets why the crisis arose in the first place - brexit, lack of proper job training , taking the easy solution of paying more benefits to people who should be working or training for work.
He is a performer and he's always been great at that whether it be doing spots on the Telly or a conference speech or persuading his mistress to have an abortion because he really will leave his wife this time.
The problem is trust. He can boost jam tomorrow but sooner or later people will expect him to leave his wife jam. And the party has no idea how to make jam or train people to make jam jars.
Remember that there are no shortages, that the shortages are there but someone else's fault, that you absolutely can't blame the shortages on Brexit, and finally that the shortages are a brilliant feature of Brexit improving the economy. No wonder the speech was torn to shreds by their own thinktanks and the CBI.
As I keep pointing out, northerners voted for Brexit and for the Tories wanting change. 2 years in and the only change is things getting worse with no understanding of that even happening or is it the plan but don't worry folks, that jam will be along tomorrow. No wonder red wallers have gone off him.
Lots of talk on here about pay rises leading to inflation, and whether or not that's a good thing, but isn't it all just a bit more complicated than that?
Not everyone is getting pay rises right now.
Skilled/semi-skilled manual workers, care workers, wagon drivers, building site labourers are getting big rises.
The white collar and middle class types - accountants, administrators, design engineers, project managers aren't suffering from a sudden reduction in their part of the workforce, so their wages are going to be static.
This means that after allowing for the effect of the inflation caused by rising wages in some sectors, we'll actually see a rebalancing - the working class will generally earn more than before, and everyone else less.
This is seriously good news for the working class types who voted for Brext as its exactly what they expected to happen. So it's no good for the lefty-remainery types to screech and moan about it to them - Brext has done what it said on the tin.
I get why there is a lot of screeching and moaning on here - posters here tend to be well off white collar types or posher, rather than digger drivers or steel erectors. Even I'm not a typical specimen of the working class (I'm a SME owner now!) although I'm probably closer to the action there than most.
I suspect that the biggest medium term challenge for the government is going to be public sector pay. They'll have to pay the manual workers more, or they'll all drift to the private sector. They don't need to (and won't be able to afford to) pay the planning officers, NHS managers, etc a similar rise. But how on earth do they do one without the other?
(this is the public sector teacher problem on a massive scale - maths teachers have more real world value in alternative careers than history or art teachers, but they are usually on identical pay scales - so hiring good art and history teachers is easy, but good maths teachers nearly impossible).
I'm not sure it's all Brexit related - there's tremendous wage inflation in the US and even the Eurozone* right now as demand bounces back post pandemic.
I have been in Vegas at a conference the last three days (and Vegas was utterly rammed, which is staggering for a Monday to Wednesday in early October). In the cab heading back to the airport, the driver told me he used to be an HGV driver. I asked him if he'd been tempted to go back, as there is a shortage. He told me his old firm had offered him a $10,000 sign on bonus - but that he wasn't tempted because he could earn really well doing taxi and food delivery.
* German wage growth in June was the highest since the early 90s
Saw a 18-wheeler on I-287 the other day bearing a big sign advertising rates for drivers of $2,500+ a week.
Based on my conversation with a taxi driver, you can now earn nearly as much driving Ubers/cabs/food delivery as an HGV driver. And you get to sleep in your own bed every night, not in the cramped cabin of a truck.
The other problem, I suspect, is that people think that a lot of long distance driving is going away with the rise of autonomous vehicles. So why go into a business where wages are likely to be a lot lower in the future?
Arent higher wages in food delivery likely to be driven down as more entrants are attracted into the sector? The barriers to entry cant be that high.
Before the pandemic Uber drivers, albeit taxi not food, were complaining they were taking home less than minimum wage (in Leeds at least).
You'd have thought so. The other day my fish and chips turned up in a 68-plate Mercedes, and not an A-class. I can only imagine its day job is as a posh Uber. If we assume £3 to £4 a delivery, 4 deliveries and £5 tips an hour, that is £30 gross an hour which is not bad but at quieter times, £15 an hour before tax and before expenses like petrol is better than a poke in the eye with a hot chip but not by much.
Using an expensive car to make short deliveries is a very false economy.
People only look at the immediate marginal cost of operating the car (time and petrol), and miss the depreciation, finance and servicing costs that make it quite uneconomical. It you’re unemployed and with a lease commitment on the car though, you likely don’t have much choice.
Or maybe it was just that his airport run got cancelled that day, and he found himself with time on his hands.
Spot on.
Someone doing a Deliveroo job in a Mercedes E Class is likely to be losing money once depreciation is taken into account. It's why the ride share leasing companies use such a narrow range of vehicles.
Yes, if you’re doing short delivery or taxi runs in the city you want something like a Prius, and prefereably not a new one either.
The guy doing 100 miles at a time to the airport, well his customer expects to see something like 2018 E Class, and is happy to pay £150 for the trip.
I can ony assume the people doing deliveroo deliveries in expensive cars are getting big promotional driver incentives and stop when they don't.
Or they cant do basic sums and don't realise how mich money they are losing.
Or they have leased their car, and aren't going to hit the mileage cap.
Or they have nicked the car and potentially the food
Or they are having an affair and use this as an excuse to meet up with their squeeze
So, I'm about to go to bed, but I just want to address a little bit of this.
A few years ago, I went to Tesla's factory in Fremont, in the Bay Area. Their CFO told me proudly that they'd bought the factory in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis in 2010 for just $42m. He went on to say that when GM had owned the plant, it had employed more than 8,000 people. Now, he said, they were churning out almost the same number of cars with under 600 full time employees.
When it was a GM plant, the 8,000 jobs were well paid, skilled labour.
Give the factory under GM/Toyota produced over 400,000 cars a year that sounds rather implausible.
Tesla's annual production is now close to 1m units, and Fremont is by far their biggest facility.
There may have been some exaggeration (and you may also be using the peak GM production), but it doesn't sound far odd to me.
What I got from Boris's speech is what he wanted me to get. This is a government on a mission and with a hugely ambitious program to change this country for the better. He wants better transport, education, skills, education, law and order, the list went on and on.
Will he be able to deliver? Who knows, certainly not on all of it but maybe on some. If he does he will have done better than most of his recent predecessors. The message from his speech is that this is not a government blundering around not knowing what it wants to do. I think he succeeded in that.
Don't all political parties want things to be better? Has any conference speech stated they want transport and education to get worse?
What I got from the speech was not that the Tories want to change the country for the better, but to impress upon people that they are still energetic and coming up with ideas (he talked about 'tired old Labour'), rather than a sclerotic 11 year old government paddling along.
Yes, the entire rhetoric is remarkable. What the Tories are doing is pretending that Labour was in power until 2019, when Boris took over. Astonishingly, quite a lot of voters seem to think that this is true, and any current woes should be blamed on the Labour government 2010-2019. Things haven't got better yet because of Labour's misrule - but now Boris is in charge. It takes some brass neck, but it seems to work.
The trick in the under the radar social media targetted ads has been to blame Labour Councils for Nationa Government policies.
So "lack of funding for the NHS" is blamed on the local Labour Council.
It has shown to be remarkably effective.
Whether it can work at a second election in a row will be interesting to see...
Yes, that was really clear from the vox pops I've seen from 'Red Wall' seats in the north and midlands. People were blaming everything on their Labour councils - hilariously, in some cases, when they didn't even have Labour councils any more. "I've had to wait 4 years for my hip operation, thanks to my Labour council", and stuff like that.
I’m sure there is much of this going on. But there is also a sense that labour took Scotland’s voters for granted, until they were swept away. And then they still had the red wall in the north... until that was swept away. With too many in labour more interested in Palestine than in Peterborough they won’t win those voters back.
I agree with your Scotland point. But your last sentence is just a facile Daily Mail-type myth. What's more, Peterborough isn't anywhere near 'the red wall in the north'.
I know, but I couldn’t think of a P from the red wall. Preston?
Pontefract?
No. Yvette Cooper. Must try harder.
I know that. I was looking for “red wall with a P”
I've often thought that Britain and France are two countries with a mutual inferiority complex. A truly peculiar, maybe unique relationship.
In my experience (went to university there, own a house there) French people spend far less time thinking about England than English people imagine. They view the USA as their cultural usurper. They are just not that into you.
The obsession with France is weird isn't it. It's definitely a one-sided affair. You don't see it in Scotland, either. Seems to be mainly a thing with posh English blokes. Maybe some cultural memory of all those aristos going to the guillotine?
It's not that weird.
The French invasion of England may have been a millennium ago but despite all the how many Frenchmen does it take to defend Paris jokes we have a deep and profound psychosis about that early total defeat, occupation and transformation.
Point of order. The *Norman* invasion. William the Conquerer was not French and Normandy was ceded to the Vikings by the King of France.
"Tory Sir Peter Bottomley describes the 'desperately difficult' financial woes faced by MPs living on £82,000-a-year - and calls for an increase to more than £100,000
Bottomley says he is not sure how MPs 'manage' on current salary He told the New Statesman he wanted to see salary rise to match those of GPs MPs are currently paid £82,000-a-year and get help for costs through expenses The average Britain meanwhile earned £31,000 a year last year, figures show"
I don't disagree that MPs should be earning a substantial salary but in exchange for that, all the multiple £100k one day a year Non-Executive Directorships they also have should be stopped.
In the meantime, hasn't bottomly got the wit to find himself a Non- Executive Directorship?
Lots of talk on here about pay rises leading to inflation, and whether or not that's a good thing, but isn't it all just a bit more complicated than that?
Not everyone is getting pay rises right now.
Skilled/semi-skilled manual workers, care workers, wagon drivers, building site labourers are getting big rises.
The white collar and middle class types - accountants, administrators, design engineers, project managers aren't suffering from a sudden reduction in their part of the workforce, so their wages are going to be static.
This means that after allowing for the effect of the inflation caused by rising wages in some sectors, we'll actually see a rebalancing - the working class will generally earn more than before, and everyone else less.
This is seriously good news for the working class types who voted for Brext as its exactly what they expected to happen. So it's no good for the lefty-remainery types to screech and moan about it to them - Brext has done what it said on the tin.
I get why there is a lot of screeching and moaning on here - posters here tend to be well off white collar types or posher, rather than digger drivers or steel erectors. Even I'm not a typical specimen of the working class (I'm a SME owner now!) although I'm probably closer to the action there than most.
I suspect that the biggest medium term challenge for the government is going to be public sector pay. They'll have to pay the manual workers more, or they'll all drift to the private sector. They don't need to (and won't be able to afford to) pay the planning officers, NHS managers, etc a similar rise. But how on earth do they do one without the other?
(this is the public sector teacher problem on a massive scale - maths teachers have more real world value in alternative careers than history or art teachers, but they are usually on identical pay scales - so hiring good art and history teachers is easy, but good maths teachers nearly impossible).
I'm not sure it's all Brexit related - there's tremendous wage inflation in the US and even the Eurozone* right now as demand bounces back post pandemic.
I have been in Vegas at a conference the last three days (and Vegas was utterly rammed, which is staggering for a Monday to Wednesday in early October). In the cab heading back to the airport, the driver told me he used to be an HGV driver. I asked him if he'd been tempted to go back, as there is a shortage. He told me his old firm had offered him a $10,000 sign on bonus - but that he wasn't tempted because he could earn really well doing taxi and food delivery.
* German wage growth in June was the highest since the early 90s
Saw a 18-wheeler on I-287 the other day bearing a big sign advertising rates for drivers of $2,500+ a week.
Based on my conversation with a taxi driver, you can now earn nearly as much driving Ubers/cabs/food delivery as an HGV driver. And you get to sleep in your own bed every night, not in the cramped cabin of a truck.
The other problem, I suspect, is that people think that a lot of long distance driving is going away with the rise of autonomous vehicles. So why go into a business where wages are likely to be a lot lower in the future?
Arent higher wages in food delivery likely to be driven down as more entrants are attracted into the sector? The barriers to entry cant be that high.
Before the pandemic Uber drivers, albeit taxi not food, were complaining they were taking home less than minimum wage (in Leeds at least).
You'd have thought so. The other day my fish and chips turned up in a 68-plate Mercedes, and not an A-class. I can only imagine its day job is as a posh Uber. If we assume £3 to £4 a delivery, 4 deliveries and £5 tips an hour, that is £30 gross an hour which is not bad but at quieter times, £15 an hour before tax and before expenses like petrol is better than a poke in the eye with a hot chip but not by much.
Using an expensive car to make short deliveries is a very false economy.
People only look at the immediate marginal cost of operating the car (time and petrol), and miss the depreciation, finance and servicing costs that make it quite uneconomical. It you’re unemployed and with a lease commitment on the car though, you likely don’t have much choice.
Or maybe it was just that his airport run got cancelled that day, and he found himself with time on his hands.
Spot on.
Someone doing a Deliveroo job in a Mercedes E Class is likely to be losing money once depreciation is taken into account. It's why the ride share leasing companies use such a narrow range of vehicles.
Yes, if you’re doing short delivery or taxi runs in the city you want something like a Prius, and prefereably not a new one either.
The guy doing 100 miles at a time to the airport, well his customer expects to see something like 2018 E Class, and is happy to pay £150 for the trip.
I can ony assume the people doing deliveroo deliveries in expensive cars are getting big promotional driver incentives and stop when they don't.
Or they cant do basic sums and don't realise how mich money they are losing.
I'll tell you what happens with impossible promises. You start with far-fetched resolutions; they are then pickled into a rigid dogma, a code, and you go through the years sticking to that, out-placed, outdated, irrelevant to the real needs, and you end in the grotesque chaos of a Conservative government, a Conservative Government, hiring taxis to scuttle round the city handing out fish and chips to its own workers. I tell you - and you'll listen - you can't play politics with people's jobs and people's homes and people's services.
Yes that is the point of a Party Conference speech.
Its not supposed to be the Queen's Speech where the agenda for the next year is given. That's already happened and will happen again before the next Party Conference.
Not really the reaction to the speech that Boris was hoping for. The Daily Express is creaming all over its front cover and, presumably, the sticky inside pages, but the rest of the normal press seem to vary from lukewarm to downright hostile, and not just the usual suspects either.
Most intelligent people have seen through Boris.
Stupid people haven't and I'm afraid there's really no way of dressing up the fact that a lot of people are really daft. It's not entirely their fault. When you have 'news'papers like the Express, and social media, churning out tosh day after day it's quite difficult to be discerning.
It's also the problem with charisma. It's easy to beguile people with charm. Sell them snakeoil. The magician's sleight of hand. The voice of Saruman. Johnson has it all.
15 hour workday yesterday and cannot get out of bed this morning
Hard work, digging coal. You sort-of signed up for at least occasional long days but don't make a habit of it. Get up, shower, breakfast, coffee. You can catch up with Coronation Street at the weekend. Try to develop a flexible routine that can incorporate long days, and an understanding partner. Little things like picking out shirts in advance and always keeping your keys, pass and other work detritus in the same place so you do not waste time making decisions in the morning.
Dump the partner.
Frankly, they're not good enough for the person you'll be.
Someone's got to make coffee in the morning so either it's the understanding partner, one of those machines, or swinging by the drive-through McDonalds for coffee and a Sausage McMuffin for breakfast (as eaten by American celebrity billionaire Warren Buffet). The trick is to have made these decisions, or contingency plans, in advance.
Coffee machines are cheap and don't moan.
Best money we ever spent on something for the house. Beans in the top, push button, wait 30s, coffee out the bottom!
Heresy.
Warm the cafetiere, put beans in grinder, grind for two seconds, pause, shake the cafetiere, grind for a further 10 seconds until you can just hear the broken up beans rattling. Put ground beans in cafetiere.
Start to boil the kettle and when it's half boiled pour one inch of water over the coffee. Stir with wooden spoon. Almost boil the water and before it does so pour the rest of the water on.
Leave for five minutes.
Strength to taste in number of beans to start with.
Poncing about with wooden spoons is not going to get @Gallowgate from bed to office any quicker.
Even if @theProle is correct I dont think further erosion of the middle class will prove to be a fruitful political strategy in the long run - especially as many middle aged “working class” red wallers are actually in what PB tories would consider as middle class jobs
It's important to understand that - ultimately - the money that gets shared out among the workers and shareholders is a consequence of the productivity of employees and firms.
Paying an HGV driver twice as much to haul the same amount of cargo, the same number of miles, is not increasing the size of the pie, it is merely redistributing who gets what.
Now, it may be that the middle classes (or perhaps I should say the owners of capital), have had it away at the expense of workers due to immigration. (Although that doesn't explain why the same trends have been seen across the developed world irrespective of levels of net migration.) And it may be that a rebalancing is due. But it is important to realise that unless the size of the pie grows, it is a zero sum game.
Governments would be well advised to concentrate more on growing the pie, than on dividing the spoils. Why? Because if the pie is growing, then nobody need become absolutely poorer. But if it isn't, then someone is going to be losing out.
Track down some of Mark Blythe’s stuff (Brown Uni) on YouTube. He gave a lecture or series of lectures some years ago on “Global Trumpism”which even now explains fluidly what is happening.
Perhaps someone here will challenge his data but it seems quite clear that in the last 40 years, the extra slices of pie created by productivity growth, have pretty much all accrued to capital holders and to a lesser extent the new middle classes in emerging markets (principally China).
This started off as a desirable and inbuilt feature of the Bretton Woods / globalist system, after the previous system of heavily organised labour had imploded, with high inflation and state over-interference disincentivising the entrepreneurial class from creating new wealth. But it went too far. Just as the system which Bretton Woods replaced started off with the desirable goal of lifting poverty stricken westerners up into the middle class and rebuilding economic resilience after the ravages of WW2. Before the state bureaucrats and labour unions took it too far that is.
It’s long past time for an equivalent reset to western capitalism and it will mean centre right political leaders being brave enough to shoot the foxes called Reagan, Thatcher and Blair. Or else it will be an evolution to capitalism led by AOC / Corbyn types. Credit to Boris Johnson that his political antenna has picked up on all this.
So, I'm about to go to bed, but I just want to address a little bit of this.
A few years ago, I went to Tesla's factory in Fremont, in the Bay Area. Their CFO told me proudly that they'd bought the factory in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis in 2010 for just $42m.
He went on to say that when GM had owned the plant, it had employed more than 8,000 people. Now, he said, they were churning out almost the same number of cars with under 600 full time employees.
When it was a GM plant, the 8,000 jobs were well paid, skilled labour.
When it was Tesla, the roles were people with degrees who looked after machines. The skilled labour had been replaced by machines and people with Masters, and then people who swept up and polished glass, and were basically unskilled labour.
And this is a large part of what has happened in the West. Work has bifurcated between highly skilled, and unskilled. The middle ground, i.e. demand for skilled manual labour, has largely disappeared.
That is one of the two mega challenge facing the developed world (the other being ageing populations). Unfortunately, discussing the real issues requires rather more nuance than political debate usually gets.
" 600 full time employees. "
Is that the total number of people working full-time at the plant, or the number of Tesla full-time employees who are not on repetitive short-term contracts?
If it is only 600 employees, then the racism problem in the plant is much more significant than I thought ...
Edit: a partial answer to my question. According to Tesla themselves: "Today, more than 10,000 employees work at the Fremont factory. " https://www.tesla.com/en_GB/factory
Couldn’t that graph just show an exponential growth in PCR testing over the last decade ? A significantly earlier start for the pandemic wouldn’t really match the infectiousness of the virus, either, which throws up a lot of other questions.
Without long term data, we don't know if this is a sudden unexplained increase, or simply part of a trend.
There is long term data in that graph on the link. What's lacking is a lot of contextual data. There's certainly been a rapid increase in PCR testing everywhere, which is as much technology determined as demand determined. Either could be true, but if the pandemic started months earlier, it doesn't really match what we know about the epidemiology of the virus - which might imply a significantly less infectious precursor.
As one of many who had the worst cold of their life in December 2019, I would not be totally surprised if we missed something about its origins. Wasnt there something about covid19 being found in sewage from 2019 in multiple countries? If an earlier version wasn't lethal and perhaps less transmissible too would we definitely have picked up on it?
Yes - we've tested thousands of blood etc samples taken in the second half of 2019, and nothing has shown up. In any event, a globally distributed earlier version of the virus would also have shown up in the genetic lineages of later mass sequencing. It hasn't, so it's pretty well impossible that Covid was around much earlier.
"Tory Sir Peter Bottomley describes the 'desperately difficult' financial woes faced by MPs living on £82,000-a-year - and calls for an increase to more than £100,000
Bottomley says he is not sure how MPs 'manage' on current salary He told the New Statesman he wanted to see salary rise to match those of GPs MPs are currently paid £82,000-a-year and get help for costs through expenses The average Britain meanwhile earned £31,000 a year last year, figures show"
I don't disagree that MPs shouldn't be earning a substantial salary but in exchange for that, all the multiple £100k one day a year Non-Executive Directorships they also have should be stopped.
In theeantime, hasn't bottomly got the wit to find himself a Non- Executive Directorship?
I completely disagree. Given that being an MP is a part time job (all Ministers do the job on top of being an MP) there is no reason why backbenchers shouldn't have a real job just like Ministers do to supplement their incomes.
An MPs pay should be no higher than median income for the country in my opinion, which even then is generous for a part-time job. If they want a higher income, they should be performance-related to the rest of the nation. If the median income goes up, then the MPs would too, if it goes down then theirs does too.
Besides if we go by the principles of supply and demand its quite clear that MPs salaries are far too high. There's never a shortage of people applying for the job, even looking at the different parties alone. So the salary is too high.
Not really the reaction to the speech that Boris was hoping for. The Daily Express is creaming all over its front cover and, presumably, the sticky inside pages, but the rest of the normal press seem to vary from lukewarm to downright hostile, and not just the usual suspects either.
Most intelligent people have seen through Boris.
Stupid people haven't and I'm afraid there's really no way of dressing up the fact that a lot of people are really daft. It's not entirely their fault. When you have 'news'papers like the Express, and social media, churning out tosh day after day it's quite difficult to be discerning.
It's also the problem with charisma. It's easy to beguile people with charm. Sell them snakeoil. The magician's sleight of hand. The voice of Saruman. Johnson has it all.
Yes. When I attack the delivery of Brexit and the increasing shite being rained down I am not attacking "stupid Brexit voters" - that is just me. I am attacking the people who have manipulated voters to believe that the sky is green and not blue.
If it had been French then the king of France or his heir would've become king of England (the latter would have been the case in the early 13th century when the French almost conquered England during John's disastrous reign).
Morris they came from over there and ended up over here.
Or are we going to do another he's not a scouser he's from Liverpool thing?
I've often thought that Britain and France are two countries with a mutual inferiority complex. A truly peculiar, maybe unique relationship.
In my experience (went to university there, own a house there) French people spend far less time thinking about England than English people imagine. They view the USA as their cultural usurper. They are just not that into you.
The obsession with France is weird isn't it. It's definitely a one-sided affair. You don't see it in Scotland, either. Seems to be mainly a thing with posh English blokes. Maybe some cultural memory of all those aristos going to the guillotine?
It's not that weird.
The French invasion of England may have been a millennium ago but despite all the how many Frenchmen does it take to defend Paris jokes we have a deep and profound psychosis about that early total defeat, occupation and transformation.
Point of order. The *Norman* invasion. William the Conquerer was not French and Normandy was ceded to the Vikings by the King of France.
Did they not speak a bastardised version of the language, though ?
Lots of talk on here about pay rises leading to inflation, and whether or not that's a good thing, but isn't it all just a bit more complicated than that?
Not everyone is getting pay rises right now.
Skilled/semi-skilled manual workers, care workers, wagon drivers, building site labourers are getting big rises.
The white collar and middle class types - accountants, administrators, design engineers, project managers aren't suffering from a sudden reduction in their part of the workforce, so their wages are going to be static.
This means that after allowing for the effect of the inflation caused by rising wages in some sectors, we'll actually see a rebalancing - the working class will generally earn more than before, and everyone else less.
This is seriously good news for the working class types who voted for Brext as its exactly what they expected to happen. So it's no good for the lefty-remainery types to screech and moan about it to them - Brext has done what it said on the tin.
I get why there is a lot of screeching and moaning on here - posters here tend to be well off white collar types or posher, rather than digger drivers or steel erectors. Even I'm not a typical specimen of the working class (I'm a SME owner now!) although I'm probably closer to the action there than most.
I suspect that the biggest medium term challenge for the government is going to be public sector pay. They'll have to pay the manual workers more, or they'll all drift to the private sector. They don't need to (and won't be able to afford to) pay the planning officers, NHS managers, etc a similar rise. But how on earth do they do one without the other?
(this is the public sector teacher problem on a massive scale - maths teachers have more real world value in alternative careers than history or art teachers, but they are usually on identical pay scales - so hiring good art and history teachers is easy, but good maths teachers nearly impossible).
I'm not sure it's all Brexit related - there's tremendous wage inflation in the US and even the Eurozone* right now as demand bounces back post pandemic.
I have been in Vegas at a conference the last three days (and Vegas was utterly rammed, which is staggering for a Monday to Wednesday in early October). In the cab heading back to the airport, the driver told me he used to be an HGV driver. I asked him if he'd been tempted to go back, as there is a shortage. He told me his old firm had offered him a $10,000 sign on bonus - but that he wasn't tempted because he could earn really well doing taxi and food delivery.
* German wage growth in June was the highest since the early 90s
Saw a 18-wheeler on I-287 the other day bearing a big sign advertising rates for drivers of $2,500+ a week.
Based on my conversation with a taxi driver, you can now earn nearly as much driving Ubers/cabs/food delivery as an HGV driver. And you get to sleep in your own bed every night, not in the cramped cabin of a truck.
The other problem, I suspect, is that people think that a lot of long distance driving is going away with the rise of autonomous vehicles. So why go into a business where wages are likely to be a lot lower in the future?
Arent higher wages in food delivery likely to be driven down as more entrants are attracted into the sector? The barriers to entry cant be that high.
Before the pandemic Uber drivers, albeit taxi not food, were complaining they were taking home less than minimum wage (in Leeds at least).
You'd have thought so. The other day my fish and chips turned up in a 68-plate Mercedes, and not an A-class. I can only imagine its day job is as a posh Uber. If we assume £3 to £4 a delivery, 4 deliveries and £5 tips an hour, that is £30 gross an hour which is not bad but at quieter times, £15 an hour before tax and before expenses like petrol is better than a poke in the eye with a hot chip but not by much.
Using an expensive car to make short deliveries is a very false economy.
People only look at the immediate marginal cost of operating the car (time and petrol), and miss the depreciation, finance and servicing costs that make it quite uneconomical. It you’re unemployed and with a lease commitment on the car though, you likely don’t have much choice.
Or maybe it was just that his airport run got cancelled that day, and he found himself with time on his hands.
Spot on.
Someone doing a Deliveroo job in a Mercedes E Class is likely to be losing money once depreciation is taken into account. It's why the ride share leasing companies use such a narrow range of vehicles.
Lets be fair. You'd be unlikely to choose an E-Class (estate I assume, not a coupe...?) to do Deliveroo. But if you had one and needed dollah to make the payments, doing Deliveroo might make sense.
Back when I was on Teesside the local parcel delivery guy was using a 20 year old Passat estate. Depreciated to nothing, and the legendary PD engine just kept going and didn't care about lots of stop start and was still reasonably economical!
Yes, if you need a big car for that sort of work, find an older one without massive miles on it. A mid-2000s E Class or Passat will run pretty much forever, so long as you put petrol in in and change the oil occasionally. German taxis of 15 and 20 years ago.
More modern Japanese and Korean cars will be the ones to have in future, and probably even cheaper to buy and run.
But if you’ve lost your job and need to make the lease payment, you’ll use the car you have to earn whatever you can today.
Lots of talk on here about pay rises leading to inflation, and whether or not that's a good thing, but isn't it all just a bit more complicated than that?
Not everyone is getting pay rises right now.
Skilled/semi-skilled manual workers, care workers, wagon drivers, building site labourers are getting big rises.
The white collar and middle class types - accountants, administrators, design engineers, project managers aren't suffering from a sudden reduction in their part of the workforce, so their wages are going to be static.
This means that after allowing for the effect of the inflation caused by rising wages in some sectors, we'll actually see a rebalancing - the working class will generally earn more than before, and everyone else less.
This is seriously good news for the working class types who voted for Brext as its exactly what they expected to happen. So it's no good for the lefty-remainery types to screech and moan about it to them - Brext has done what it said on the tin.
I get why there is a lot of screeching and moaning on here - posters here tend to be well off white collar types or posher, rather than digger drivers or steel erectors. Even I'm not a typical specimen of the working class (I'm a SME owner now!) although I'm probably closer to the action there than most.
I suspect that the biggest medium term challenge for the government is going to be public sector pay. They'll have to pay the manual workers more, or they'll all drift to the private sector. They don't need to (and won't be able to afford to) pay the planning officers, NHS managers, etc a similar rise. But how on earth do they do one without the other?
(this is the public sector teacher problem on a massive scale - maths teachers have more real world value in alternative careers than history or art teachers, but they are usually on identical pay scales - so hiring good art and history teachers is easy, but good maths teachers nearly impossible).
I'm not sure it's all Brexit related - there's tremendous wage inflation in the US and even the Eurozone* right now as demand bounces back post pandemic.
I have been in Vegas at a conference the last three days (and Vegas was utterly rammed, which is staggering for a Monday to Wednesday in early October). In the cab heading back to the airport, the driver told me he used to be an HGV driver. I asked him if he'd been tempted to go back, as there is a shortage. He told me his old firm had offered him a $10,000 sign on bonus - but that he wasn't tempted because he could earn really well doing taxi and food delivery.
* German wage growth in June was the highest since the early 90s
Saw a 18-wheeler on I-287 the other day bearing a big sign advertising rates for drivers of $2,500+ a week.
Based on my conversation with a taxi driver, you can now earn nearly as much driving Ubers/cabs/food delivery as an HGV driver. And you get to sleep in your own bed every night, not in the cramped cabin of a truck.
The other problem, I suspect, is that people think that a lot of long distance driving is going away with the rise of autonomous vehicles. So why go into a business where wages are likely to be a lot lower in the future?
Arent higher wages in food delivery likely to be driven down as more entrants are attracted into the sector? The barriers to entry cant be that high.
Before the pandemic Uber drivers, albeit taxi not food, were complaining they were taking home less than minimum wage (in Leeds at least).
You'd have thought so. The other day my fish and chips turned up in a 68-plate Mercedes, and not an A-class. I can only imagine its day job is as a posh Uber. If we assume £3 to £4 a delivery, 4 deliveries and £5 tips an hour, that is £30 gross an hour which is not bad but at quieter times, £15 an hour before tax and before expenses like petrol is better than a poke in the eye with a hot chip but not by much.
Using an expensive car to make short deliveries is a very false economy.
People only look at the immediate marginal cost of operating the car (time and petrol), and miss the depreciation, finance and servicing costs that make it quite uneconomical. It you’re unemployed and with a lease commitment on the car though, you likely don’t have much choice.
Or maybe it was just that his airport run got cancelled that day, and he found himself with time on his hands.
Spot on.
Someone doing a Deliveroo job in a Mercedes E Class is likely to be losing money once depreciation is taken into account. It's why the ride share leasing companies use such a narrow range of vehicles.
Lets be fair. You'd be unlikely to choose an E-Class (estate I assume, not a coupe...?) to do Deliveroo. But if you had one and needed dollah to make the payments, doing Deliveroo might make sense.
Back when I was on Teesside the local parcel delivery guy was using a 20 year old Passat estate. Depreciated to nothing, and the legendary PD engine just kept going and didn't care about lots of stop start and was still reasonably economical!
My other half has a 13 yr old Passat estate. Aside from the park brake its fab
I listened to Boris's speech yesterday and it was a tour de force painting a vision for the UK and with some genuinely funny jokes, all penned by himself
It was half the length of Starmer's, which in my view was far too long, but I doubt either speech will have a direct impact on the polls and to be honest yesterday's Opinium seems like a voodoo poll picking out random parts of a speech and seeking a judgement.
However, back to real life it is clear the energy and cost of living crisis is very real and happening now and the way HMG deals with it over the coming months will have an effect on public opinion and it is for this reason I believe Rishi's budget on the 27th of this month is a very important moment for the country and it must inject fairness as that is sadly lacking at present
I have received my Asda order delivery details for later this morning and again fulfilled entirely and I am just not seeing any shortages, and as for the fuel crises that was inflicted on the country by the media and pure selfishness
However, I have noticed more of Amazon's products indicating delayed delivery dates which chimes with the worldwide supply issues and I doubt these issues either on energy prices or worldwide supply are going away anytime soon, though a period of warmer weather would be a help
As far as the next GE is concerned whether it is 2023 or 2024 I have no idea how it will pan out and I would not bet on a majority government of any stripe at present (though I do not bet anyway) and there are so many moving parts I do not anticipate the make up of the next government will become clearer until mid 2023
We can amuse ourselves with electoral calculus as much as we like but that is all it is, amusing as we must remember the saying, a week is a long time in politics
Couldn’t that graph just show an exponential growth in PCR testing over the last decade ? A significantly earlier start for the pandemic wouldn’t really match the infectiousness of the virus, either, which throws up a lot of other questions.
Without long term data, we don't know if this is a sudden unexplained increase, or simply part of a trend.
There is long term data in that graph on the link. What's lacking is a lot of contextual data. There's certainly been a rapid increase in PCR testing everywhere, which is as much technology determined as demand determined. Either could be true, but if the pandemic started months earlier, it doesn't really match what we know about the epidemiology of the virus - which might imply a significantly less infectious precursor.
As one of many who had the worst cold of their life in December 2019, I would not be totally surprised if we missed something about its origins. Wasnt there something about covid19 being found in sewage from 2019 in multiple countries? If an earlier version wasn't lethal and perhaps less transmissible too would we definitely have picked up on it?
Yes - we've tested thousands of blood etc samples taken in the second half of 2019, and nothing has shown up. In any event, a globally distributed earlier version of the virus would also have shown up in the genetic lineages of later mass sequencing. It hasn't, so it's pretty well impossible that Covid was around much earlier.
Anecdote alert.
Friend of mine went to the Austrian Alps December 2019. She had the mother-and-father of all 'flus'. Laid her out completely with all the subsequent symptoms ...
"Tory Sir Peter Bottomley describes the 'desperately difficult' financial woes faced by MPs living on £82,000-a-year - and calls for an increase to more than £100,000
Bottomley says he is not sure how MPs 'manage' on current salary He told the New Statesman he wanted to see salary rise to match those of GPs MPs are currently paid £82,000-a-year and get help for costs through expenses The average Britain meanwhile earned £31,000 a year last year, figures show"
I don't disagree that MPs should be earning a substantial salary but in exchange for that, all the multiple £100k one day a year Non-Executive Directorships they also have should be stopped.
In the meantime, hasn't bottomly got the wit to find himself a Non- Executive Directorship?
Not to mention that a salaried GP (not a partner) is on about £80,000, the same as an MP.
Not really the reaction to the speech that Boris was hoping for. The Daily Express is creaming all over its front cover and, presumably, the sticky inside pages, but the rest of the normal press seem to vary from lukewarm to downright hostile, and not just the usual suspects either.
Most intelligent people have seen through Boris.
Stupid people haven't and I'm afraid there's really no way of dressing up the fact that a lot of people are really daft. It's not entirely their fault. When you have 'news'papers like the Express, and social media, churning out tosh day after day it's quite difficult to be discerning.
It's also the problem with charisma. It's easy to beguile people with charm. Sell them snakeoil. The magician's sleight of hand. The voice of Saruman. Johnson has it all.
Yes. When I attack the delivery of Brexit and the increasing shite being rained down I am not attacking "stupid Brexit voters" - that is just me. I am attacking the people who have manipulated voters to believe that the sky is green and not blue.
When the "shite" is that people's pay is going up, there's a reason why voters are so happy to be "manipulated".
Isn't it weird that people aren't unhappy that real wages are going up for the first time in a quarter of a century? So strange, almost incomprehensible.
Johnson is an ex hack so always gets an easy ride from other hacks.
Riiiiiiiighto.
No thoughts of "how did that lazy fat fucker make it to be PM when I still have to spend my days covering the Hamster Swimwear Festival*....let's give him hell...."???
15 hour workday yesterday and cannot get out of bed this morning
Hard work, digging coal. You sort-of signed up for at least occasional long days but don't make a habit of it. Get up, shower, breakfast, coffee. You can catch up with Coronation Street at the weekend. Try to develop a flexible routine that can incorporate long days, and an understanding partner. Little things like picking out shirts in advance and always keeping your keys, pass and other work detritus in the same place so you do not waste time making decisions in the morning.
Dump the partner.
Frankly, they're not good enough for the person you'll be.
Someone's got to make coffee in the morning so either it's the understanding partner, one of those machines, or swinging by the drive-through McDonalds for coffee and a Sausage McMuffin for breakfast (as eaten by American celebrity billionaire Warren Buffet). The trick is to have made these decisions, or contingency plans, in advance.
Coffee machines are cheap and don't moan.
Best money we ever spent on something for the house. Beans in the top, push button, wait 30s, coffee out the bottom!
Heresy.
Warm the cafetiere, put beans in grinder, grind for two seconds, pause, shake the cafetiere, grind for a further 10 seconds until you can just hear the broken up beans rattling. Put ground beans in cafetiere.
Start to boil the kettle and when it's half boiled pour one inch of water over the coffee. Stir with wooden spoon. Almost boil the water and before it does so pour the rest of the water on.
Leave for five minutes.
Strength to taste in number of beans to start with.
Poncing about with wooden spoons is not going to get @Gallowgate from bed to office any quicker.
Even I am cheating. Purists pour the water directly over the ground beans in a jug and then pour a cup of small water over that later to take the ground beans to the bottom.
But for @Gallowgate a routine is important and getting up and making the coffee in such a way is one such.
Even if @theProle is correct I dont think further erosion of the middle class will prove to be a fruitful political strategy in the long run - especially as many middle aged “working class” red wallers are actually in what PB tories would consider as middle class jobs
It's important to understand that - ultimately - the money that gets shared out among the workers and shareholders is a consequence of the productivity of employees and firms.
Paying an HGV driver twice as much to haul the same amount of cargo, the same number of miles, is not increasing the size of the pie, it is merely redistributing who gets what.
Now, it may be that the middle classes (or perhaps I should say the owners of capital), have had it away at the expense of workers due to immigration. (Although that doesn't explain why the same trends have been seen across the developed world irrespective of levels of net migration.) And it may be that a rebalancing is due. But it is important to realise that unless the size of the pie grows, it is a zero sum game.
Governments would be well advised to concentrate more on growing the pie, than on dividing the spoils. Why? Because if the pie is growing, then nobody need become absolutely poorer. But if it isn't, then someone is going to be losing out.
Track down some of Mark Blythe’s stuff (Brown Uni) on YouTube. He gave a lecture or series of lectures some years ago on “Global Trumpism”which even now explains fluidly what is happening.
Perhaps someone here will challenge his data but it seems quite clear that in the last 40 years, the extra slices of pie created by productivity growth, have pretty much all accrued to capital holders and to a lesser extent the new middle classes in emerging markets (principally China).
This started off as a desirable and inbuilt feature of the Bretton Woods / globalist system, after the previous system of heavily organised labour had imploded, with high inflation and state over-interference disincentivising the entrepreneurial class from creating new wealth. But it went too far. Just as the system which Bretton Woods replaced started off with the desirable goal of lifting poverty stricken westerners up into the middle class and rebuilding economic resilience after the ravages of WW2. Before the state bureaucrats and labour unions took it too far that is.
It’s long past time for an equivalent reset to western capitalism and it will mean centre right political leaders being brave enough to shoot the foxes called Reagan, Thatcher and Blair. Or else it will be an evolution to capitalism led by AOC / Corbyn types. Credit to Boris Johnson that his political antenna has picked up on all this.
So, I'm about to go to bed, but I just want to address a little bit of this.
A few years ago, I went to Tesla's factory in Fremont, in the Bay Area. Their CFO told me proudly that they'd bought the factory in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis in 2010 for just $42m.
He went on to say that when GM had owned the plant, it had employed more than 8,000 people. Now, he said, they were churning out almost the same number of cars with under 600 full time employees.
When it was a GM plant, the 8,000 jobs were well paid, skilled labour.
When it was Tesla, the roles were people with degrees who looked after machines. The skilled labour had been replaced by machines and people with Masters, and then people who swept up and polished glass, and were basically unskilled labour.
And this is a large part of what has happened in the West. Work has bifurcated between highly skilled, and unskilled. The middle ground, i.e. demand for skilled manual labour, has largely disappeared.
That is one of the two mega challenge facing the developed world (the other being ageing populations). Unfortunately, discussing the real issues requires rather more nuance than political debate usually gets.
" 600 full time employees. "
Is that the total number of people working full-time at the plant, or the number of Tesla full-time employees who are not on repetitive short-term contracts?
If it is only 600 employees, then the racism problem in the plant is much more significant than I thought ...
Edit: a partial answer to my question. According to Tesla themselves: "Today, more than 10,000 employees work at the Fremont factory. " https://www.tesla.com/en_GB/factory
So the CFO was probably being very disingenuous.
Wasn’t that the Model 3 plant, where they designed it with almost no humans involved, but had to rip out a load of the robots and replace them with people, because of quality issues as they ramped up production?
In my view Boris' speech was a great speech in that he (and tory advisors and indeed any modern CEO /PR directors do) uses the current crisis or issues (created by not planning long term) to project a future solution that sounds sexy and good and understandable. Boris adds good humour on top to make it even better.
The trouble is everyone forgets why the crisis arose in the first place - brexit, lack of proper job training , taking the easy solution of paying more benefits to people who should be working or training for work.
He is a performer and he's always been great at that whether it be doing spots on the Telly or a conference speech or persuading his mistress to have an abortion because he really will leave his wife this time.
The problem is trust. He can boost jam tomorrow but sooner or later people will expect him to leave his wife jam. And the party has no idea how to make jam or train people to make jam jars.
Remember that there are no shortages, that the shortages are there but someone else's fault, that you absolutely can't blame the shortages on Brexit, and finally that the shortages are a brilliant feature of Brexit improving the economy. No wonder the speech was torn to shreds by their own thinktanks and the CBI.
As I keep pointing out, northerners voted for Brexit and for the Tories wanting change. 2 years in and the only change is things getting worse with no understanding of that even happening or is it the plan but don't worry folks, that jam will be along tomorrow. No wonder red wallers have gone off him.
Just seen the BBC report that "Intel are not coming to the UK because of Brexit". How should Johnson deal with such news? I know, get MadNad to close down the BBC, problem solved.
Lots of talk on here about pay rises leading to inflation, and whether or not that's a good thing, but isn't it all just a bit more complicated than that?
Not everyone is getting pay rises right now.
Skilled/semi-skilled manual workers, care workers, wagon drivers, building site labourers are getting big rises.
The white collar and middle class types - accountants, administrators, design engineers, project managers aren't suffering from a sudden reduction in their part of the workforce, so their wages are going to be static.
This means that after allowing for the effect of the inflation caused by rising wages in some sectors, we'll actually see a rebalancing - the working class will generally earn more than before, and everyone else less.
This is seriously good news for the working class types who voted for Brext as its exactly what they expected to happen. So it's no good for the lefty-remainery types to screech and moan about it to them - Brext has done what it said on the tin.
I get why there is a lot of screeching and moaning on here - posters here tend to be well off white collar types or posher, rather than digger drivers or steel erectors. Even I'm not a typical specimen of the working class (I'm a SME owner now!) although I'm probably closer to the action there than most.
I suspect that the biggest medium term challenge for the government is going to be public sector pay. They'll have to pay the manual workers more, or they'll all drift to the private sector. They don't need to (and won't be able to afford to) pay the planning officers, NHS managers, etc a similar rise. But how on earth do they do one without the other?
(this is the public sector teacher problem on a massive scale - maths teachers have more real world value in alternative careers than history or art teachers, but they are usually on identical pay scales - so hiring good art and history teachers is easy, but good maths teachers nearly impossible).
I'm not sure it's all Brexit related - there's tremendous wage inflation in the US and even the Eurozone* right now as demand bounces back post pandemic.
I have been in Vegas at a conference the last three days (and Vegas was utterly rammed, which is staggering for a Monday to Wednesday in early October). In the cab heading back to the airport, the driver told me he used to be an HGV driver. I asked him if he'd been tempted to go back, as there is a shortage. He told me his old firm had offered him a $10,000 sign on bonus - but that he wasn't tempted because he could earn really well doing taxi and food delivery.
* German wage growth in June was the highest since the early 90s
Saw a 18-wheeler on I-287 the other day bearing a big sign advertising rates for drivers of $2,500+ a week.
Based on my conversation with a taxi driver, you can now earn nearly as much driving Ubers/cabs/food delivery as an HGV driver. And you get to sleep in your own bed every night, not in the cramped cabin of a truck.
The other problem, I suspect, is that people think that a lot of long distance driving is going away with the rise of autonomous vehicles. So why go into a business where wages are likely to be a lot lower in the future?
Arent higher wages in food delivery likely to be driven down as more entrants are attracted into the sector? The barriers to entry cant be that high.
Before the pandemic Uber drivers, albeit taxi not food, were complaining they were taking home less than minimum wage (in Leeds at least).
You'd have thought so. The other day my fish and chips turned up in a 68-plate Mercedes, and not an A-class. I can only imagine its day job is as a posh Uber. If we assume £3 to £4 a delivery, 4 deliveries and £5 tips an hour, that is £30 gross an hour which is not bad but at quieter times, £15 an hour before tax and before expenses like petrol is better than a poke in the eye with a hot chip but not by much.
Using an expensive car to make short deliveries is a very false economy.
People only look at the immediate marginal cost of operating the car (time and petrol), and miss the depreciation, finance and servicing costs that make it quite uneconomical. It you’re unemployed and with a lease commitment on the car though, you likely don’t have much choice.
Or maybe it was just that his airport run got cancelled that day, and he found himself with time on his hands.
Spot on.
Someone doing a Deliveroo job in a Mercedes E Class is likely to be losing money once depreciation is taken into account. It's why the ride share leasing companies use such a narrow range of vehicles.
Lets be fair. You'd be unlikely to choose an E-Class (estate I assume, not a coupe...?) to do Deliveroo. But if you had one and needed dollah to make the payments, doing Deliveroo might make sense.
Back when I was on Teesside the local parcel delivery guy was using a 20 year old Passat estate. Depreciated to nothing, and the legendary PD engine just kept going and didn't care about lots of stop start and was still reasonably economical!
My other half has a 13 yr old Passat estate. Aside from the park brake its fab
Our 9-year old Passat is brilliant. My wife's Hyundai I20 is also fab. I reckon most modern cars are, indeed fab, even if some look fugly (OMG, the latest Land Rover Defender is hideous...)
There are seven years between the two cars. My Passat with the I20's tech would be awesome.
I've often thought that Britain and France are two countries with a mutual inferiority complex. A truly peculiar, maybe unique relationship.
In my experience (went to university there, own a house there) French people spend far less time thinking about England than English people imagine. They view the USA as their cultural usurper. They are just not that into you.
The obsession with France is weird isn't it. It's definitely a one-sided affair. You don't see it in Scotland, either. Seems to be mainly a thing with posh English blokes. Maybe some cultural memory of all those aristos going to the guillotine?
It's not that weird.
The French invasion of England may have been a millennium ago but despite all the how many Frenchmen does it take to defend Paris jokes we have a deep and profound psychosis about that early total defeat, occupation and transformation.
Point of order. The *Norman* invasion. William the Conquerer was not French and Normandy was ceded to the Vikings by the King of France.
Did they not speak a bastardised version of the language, though ?
Couldn’t that graph just show an exponential growth in PCR testing over the last decade ? A significantly earlier start for the pandemic wouldn’t really match the infectiousness of the virus, either, which throws up a lot of other questions.
Without long term data, we don't know if this is a sudden unexplained increase, or simply part of a trend.
There is long term data in that graph on the link. What's lacking is a lot of contextual data. There's certainly been a rapid increase in PCR testing everywhere, which is as much technology determined as demand determined. Either could be true, but if the pandemic started months earlier, it doesn't really match what we know about the epidemiology of the virus - which might imply a significantly less infectious precursor.
As one of many who had the worst cold of their life in December 2019, I would not be totally surprised if we missed something about its origins. Wasnt there something about covid19 being found in sewage from 2019 in multiple countries? If an earlier version wasn't lethal and perhaps less transmissible too would we definitely have picked up on it?
Yes - we've tested thousands of blood etc samples taken in the second half of 2019, and nothing has shown up. In any event, a globally distributed earlier version of the virus would also have shown up in the genetic lineages of later mass sequencing. It hasn't, so it's pretty well impossible that Covid was around much earlier.
Anecdote alert.
Friend of mine went to the Austrian Alps December 2019. She had the mother-and-father of all 'flus'. Laid her out completely with all the subsequent symptoms ...
In retrospect I'm not sure it was 'just' flu.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy is routinely now becoming a pre hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.
15 hour workday yesterday and cannot get out of bed this morning
Hard work, digging coal. You sort-of signed up for at least occasional long days but don't make a habit of it. Get up, shower, breakfast, coffee. You can catch up with Coronation Street at the weekend. Try to develop a flexible routine that can incorporate long days, and an understanding partner. Little things like picking out shirts in advance and always keeping your keys, pass and other work detritus in the same place so you do not waste time making decisions in the morning.
Dump the partner.
Frankly, they're not good enough for the person you'll be.
Someone's got to make coffee in the morning so either it's the understanding partner, one of those machines, or swinging by the drive-through McDonalds for coffee and a Sausage McMuffin for breakfast (as eaten by American celebrity billionaire Warren Buffet). The trick is to have made these decisions, or contingency plans, in advance.
Coffee machines are cheap and don't moan.
Best money we ever spent on something for the house. Beans in the top, push button, wait 30s, coffee out the bottom!
Heresy.
Warm the cafetiere, put beans in grinder, grind for two seconds, pause, shake the cafetiere, grind for a further 10 seconds until you can just hear the broken up beans rattling. Put ground beans in cafetiere.
Start to boil the kettle and when it's half boiled pour one inch of water over the coffee. Stir with wooden spoon. Almost boil the water and before it does so pour the rest of the water on.
Leave for five minutes.
Strength to taste in number of beans to start with.
Poncing about with wooden spoons is not going to get @Gallowgate from bed to office any quicker.
I thought about this - I bought myself an aeropress for the office!
"Tory Sir Peter Bottomley describes the 'desperately difficult' financial woes faced by MPs living on £82,000-a-year - and calls for an increase to more than £100,000
Bottomley says he is not sure how MPs 'manage' on current salary He told the New Statesman he wanted to see salary rise to match those of GPs MPs are currently paid £82,000-a-year and get help for costs through expenses The average Britain meanwhile earned £31,000 a year last year, figures show"
I don't disagree that MPs shouldn't be earning a substantial salary but in exchange for that, all the multiple £100k one day a year Non-Executive Directorships they also have should be stopped.
In theeantime, hasn't bottomly got the wit to find himself a Non- Executive Directorship?
I completely disagree. Given that being an MP is a part time job (all Ministers do the job on top of being an MP) there is no reason why backbenchers shouldn't have a real job just like Ministers do to supplement their incomes.
An MPs pay should be no higher than median income for the country in my opinion, which even then is generous for a part-time job. If they want a higher income, they should be performance-related to the rest of the nation. If the median income goes up, then the MPs would too, if it goes down then theirs does too.
Besides if we go by the principles of supply and demand its quite clear that MPs salaries are far too high. There's never a shortage of people applying for the job, even looking at the different parties alone. So the salary is too high.
Linking the pay of MPs to the median salary sounds like a good idea. Level up the country, and get a raise for it.
Even if @theProle is correct I dont think further erosion of the middle class will prove to be a fruitful political strategy in the long run - especially as many middle aged “working class” red wallers are actually in what PB tories would consider as middle class jobs
It's important to understand that - ultimately - the money that gets shared out among the workers and shareholders is a consequence of the productivity of employees and firms.
Paying an HGV driver twice as much to haul the same amount of cargo, the same number of miles, is not increasing the size of the pie, it is merely redistributing who gets what.
Now, it may be that the middle classes (or perhaps I should say the owners of capital), have had it away at the expense of workers due to immigration. (Although that doesn't explain why the same trends have been seen across the developed world irrespective of levels of net migration.) And it may be that a rebalancing is due. But it is important to realise that unless the size of the pie grows, it is a zero sum game.
Governments would be well advised to concentrate more on growing the pie, than on dividing the spoils. Why? Because if the pie is growing, then nobody need become absolutely poorer. But if it isn't, then someone is going to be losing out.
Track down some of Mark Blythe’s stuff (Brown Uni) on YouTube. He gave a lecture or series of lectures some years ago on “Global Trumpism”which even now explains fluidly what is happening.
Perhaps someone here will challenge his data but it seems quite clear that in the last 40 years, the extra slices of pie created by productivity growth, have pretty much all accrued to capital holders and to a lesser extent the new middle classes in emerging markets (principally China).
This started off as a desirable and inbuilt feature of the Bretton Woods / globalist system, after the previous system of heavily organised labour had imploded, with high inflation and state over-interference disincentivising the entrepreneurial class from creating new wealth. But it went too far. Just as the system which Bretton Woods replaced started off with the desirable goal of lifting poverty stricken westerners up into the middle class and rebuilding economic resilience after the ravages of WW2. Before the state bureaucrats and labour unions took it too far that is.
It’s long past time for an equivalent reset to western capitalism and it will mean centre right political leaders being brave enough to shoot the foxes called Reagan, Thatcher and Blair. Or else it will be an evolution to capitalism led by AOC / Corbyn types. Credit to Boris Johnson that his political antenna has picked up on all this.
So, I'm about to go to bed, but I just want to address a little bit of this.
A few years ago, I went to Tesla's factory in Fremont, in the Bay Area. Their CFO told me proudly that they'd bought the factory in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis in 2010 for just $42m.
He went on to say that when GM had owned the plant, it had employed more than 8,000 people. Now, he said, they were churning out almost the same number of cars with under 600 full time employees.
When it was a GM plant, the 8,000 jobs were well paid, skilled labour.
When it was Tesla, the roles were people with degrees who looked after machines. The skilled labour had been replaced by machines and people with Masters, and then people who swept up and polished glass, and were basically unskilled labour.
And this is a large part of what has happened in the West. Work has bifurcated between highly skilled, and unskilled. The middle ground, i.e. demand for skilled manual labour, has largely disappeared.
That is one of the two mega challenge facing the developed world (the other being ageing populations). Unfortunately, discussing the real issues requires rather more nuance than political debate usually gets.
" 600 full time employees. "
Is that the total number of people working full-time at the plant, or the number of Tesla full-time employees who are not on repetitive short-term contracts?
If it is only 600 employees, then the racism problem in the plant is much more significant than I thought ...
Edit: a partial answer to my question. According to Tesla themselves: "Today, more than 10,000 employees work at the Fremont factory. " https://www.tesla.com/en_GB/factory
So the CFO was probably being very disingenuous.
Wasn’t that the Model 3 plant, where they designed it with almost no humans involved, but had to rip out a load of the robots and replace them with people because of quality issues as they ramped up production?
I've no idea. Perhaps the management get fed up with Musky baby stepping in front of production lines. But something doesn't add up. The Fremont plant used to employ 8,000. It now employs 10,000, according to Tesla. Not 600.
I listened to Boris's speech yesterday and it was a tour de force painting a vision for the UK and with some genuinely funny jokes, all penned by himself
It was half the length of Starmer's, which in my view was far too long, but I doubt either speech will have a direct impact on the polls and to be honest yesterday's Opinium seems like a voodoo poll picking out random parts of a speech and seeking a judgement.
Apparently Boris's speech was the same length as Starmer's by number of words, just delivered faster and without pauses for jokes or significant points to sink in. As a result of Boris gabbling, and as posted during the speech, often the applause seemed to be in the wrong places.
Lots of talk on here about pay rises leading to inflation, and whether or not that's a good thing, but isn't it all just a bit more complicated than that?
Not everyone is getting pay rises right now.
Skilled/semi-skilled manual workers, care workers, wagon drivers, building site labourers are getting big rises.
The white collar and middle class types - accountants, administrators, design engineers, project managers aren't suffering from a sudden reduction in their part of the workforce, so their wages are going to be static.
This means that after allowing for the effect of the inflation caused by rising wages in some sectors, we'll actually see a rebalancing - the working class will generally earn more than before, and everyone else less.
This is seriously good news for the working class types who voted for Brext as its exactly what they expected to happen. So it's no good for the lefty-remainery types to screech and moan about it to them - Brext has done what it said on the tin.
I get why there is a lot of screeching and moaning on here - posters here tend to be well off white collar types or posher, rather than digger drivers or steel erectors. Even I'm not a typical specimen of the working class (I'm a SME owner now!) although I'm probably closer to the action there than most.
I suspect that the biggest medium term challenge for the government is going to be public sector pay. They'll have to pay the manual workers more, or they'll all drift to the private sector. They don't need to (and won't be able to afford to) pay the planning officers, NHS managers, etc a similar rise. But how on earth do they do one without the other?
(this is the public sector teacher problem on a massive scale - maths teachers have more real world value in alternative careers than history or art teachers, but they are usually on identical pay scales - so hiring good art and history teachers is easy, but good maths teachers nearly impossible).
I'm not sure it's all Brexit related - there's tremendous wage inflation in the US and even the Eurozone* right now as demand bounces back post pandemic.
I have been in Vegas at a conference the last three days (and Vegas was utterly rammed, which is staggering for a Monday to Wednesday in early October). In the cab heading back to the airport, the driver told me he used to be an HGV driver. I asked him if he'd been tempted to go back, as there is a shortage. He told me his old firm had offered him a $10,000 sign on bonus - but that he wasn't tempted because he could earn really well doing taxi and food delivery.
* German wage growth in June was the highest since the early 90s
Saw a 18-wheeler on I-287 the other day bearing a big sign advertising rates for drivers of $2,500+ a week.
Based on my conversation with a taxi driver, you can now earn nearly as much driving Ubers/cabs/food delivery as an HGV driver. And you get to sleep in your own bed every night, not in the cramped cabin of a truck.
The other problem, I suspect, is that people think that a lot of long distance driving is going away with the rise of autonomous vehicles. So why go into a business where wages are likely to be a lot lower in the future?
Arent higher wages in food delivery likely to be driven down as more entrants are attracted into the sector? The barriers to entry cant be that high.
Before the pandemic Uber drivers, albeit taxi not food, were complaining they were taking home less than minimum wage (in Leeds at least).
You'd have thought so. The other day my fish and chips turned up in a 68-plate Mercedes, and not an A-class. I can only imagine its day job is as a posh Uber. If we assume £3 to £4 a delivery, 4 deliveries and £5 tips an hour, that is £30 gross an hour which is not bad but at quieter times, £15 an hour before tax and before expenses like petrol is better than a poke in the eye with a hot chip but not by much.
Using an expensive car to make short deliveries is a very false economy.
People only look at the immediate marginal cost of operating the car (time and petrol), and miss the depreciation, finance and servicing costs that make it quite uneconomical. It you’re unemployed and with a lease commitment on the car though, you likely don’t have much choice.
Or maybe it was just that his airport run got cancelled that day, and he found himself with time on his hands.
Spot on.
Someone doing a Deliveroo job in a Mercedes E Class is likely to be losing money once depreciation is taken into account. It's why the ride share leasing companies use such a narrow range of vehicles.
Lets be fair. You'd be unlikely to choose an E-Class (estate I assume, not a coupe...?) to do Deliveroo. But if you had one and needed dollah to make the payments, doing Deliveroo might make sense.
Back when I was on Teesside the local parcel delivery guy was using a 20 year old Passat estate. Depreciated to nothing, and the legendary PD engine just kept going and didn't care about lots of stop start and was still reasonably economical!
My other half has a 13 yr old Passat estate. Aside from the park brake its fab
Our 9-year old Passat is brilliant. My wife's Hyundai I20 is also fab. I reckon most modern cars are, indeed fab, even if some look fugly (OMG, the latest Land Rover Defender is hideous...)
There are seven years between the two cars. My Passat with the I20's tech would be awesome.
I just bought an old car, and the first thing I did was upgraded the stereo to a new one with CarPlay, sat nav and reverse camera. It’s the biggest difference between old cars and new cars, and makes the world of difference.
Not really the reaction to the speech that Boris was hoping for. The Daily Express is creaming all over its front cover and, presumably, the sticky inside pages, but the rest of the normal press seem to vary from lukewarm to downright hostile, and not just the usual suspects either.
Most intelligent people have seen through Boris.
Stupid people haven't and I'm afraid there's really no way of dressing up the fact that a lot of people are really daft. It's not entirely their fault. When you have 'news'papers like the Express, and social media, churning out tosh day after day it's quite difficult to be discerning.
It's also the problem with charisma. It's easy to beguile people with charm. Sell them snakeoil. The magician's sleight of hand. The voice of Saruman. Johnson has it all.
Yes. When I attack the delivery of Brexit and the increasing shite being rained down I am not attacking "stupid Brexit voters" - that is just me. I am attacking the people who have manipulated voters to believe that the sky is green and not blue.
When the "shite" is that people's pay is going up, there's a reason why voters are so happy to be "manipulated".
Isn't it weird that people aren't unhappy that real wages are going up for the first time in a quarter of a century? So strange, almost incomprehensible.
easy solution like paying more benefits to people who should be working or training for work.
ghastly comment
Pig ignorant comment. "Why don't you get a job" say Tories and other right wing morons to people on UC who already have a job and likely work harder than they do. Work flat out just to be broke and get patronised by morons? Thats life on UC.
What I got from Boris's speech is what he wanted me to get. This is a government on a mission and with a hugely ambitious program to change this country for the better. He wants better transport, education, skills, education, law and order, the list went on and on.
Will he be able to deliver? Who knows, certainly not on all of it but maybe on some. If he does he will have done better than most of his recent predecessors. The message from his speech is that this is not a government blundering around not knowing what it wants to do. I think he succeeded in that.
Don't all political parties want things to be better? Has any conference speech stated they want transport and education to get worse?
What I got from the speech was not that the Tories want to change the country for the better, but to impress upon people that they are still energetic and coming up with ideas (he talked about 'tired old Labour'), rather than a sclerotic 11 year old government paddling along.
Yes, the entire rhetoric is remarkable. What the Tories are doing is pretending that Labour was in power until 2019, when Boris took over. Astonishingly, quite a lot of voters seem to think that this is true, and any current woes should be blamed on the Labour government 2010-2019. Things haven't got better yet because of Labour's misrule - but now Boris is in charge. It takes some brass neck, but it seems to work.
He is probably trying to draw a line between Leave and Remain - Sir Keir’s Labour being associated with the low wage, high immigration era whilst his Tories want to train our youngsters and see wages increase etc
I'd be interested in examples of what has been done to "train our youngsters", rather than what has been said. As someone in the FE trade, it appears to be the cube root of jack shite thus far.
I’d have thought it was an aim for the future, in contrast to the mass importation of cheap labour, rather than something that has already been done
Yes but. He's been in power for 2 years plus. We all are aware of the Grand Plan. Yet nowt practical seems to happen. When will this training begin? And who will do it? And where?
The pandemic probably hasn’t helped. That’s been most of the time since he won the election, before that he didn’t have a majority, and Brexit wasn’t done. So in reality he’s had 22 months of which at least 18 have been dominated by Covid
Surely then a speech to Conference would be the ideal time to outline some specifics? Apparently not.
Yes, I thought that Labour's conference was a bit light on policy, but the Conservatives are actually in Government - you'd think they'd have had something to say. For the first 3 days the journalists were told it was all being saved up for Johnson's speech, which turned out to be about nothing in particular. Just odd - why did they bother to get into politics if they don't want to do anything?
We didn't seem to get much in the way of defections either.
Mr Palmer wasnt saying that when Labour 3had nothing to say, which was often in their yrs in Office and whilst they were destroying the Economy. Granted it took 13 yrs before they destroyed the ecomomy but they got there in the end.....
Labour did not destroy the economy, the GFC did. The economy was recovering under Labour but that halfwit Osborne flatlined it. Boris, you will note, ran against the austerity economics of Cameron/Osborne even before the pandemic.
Labour allowed the structural imbalances to develop
Lots of talk on here about pay rises leading to inflation, and whether or not that's a good thing, but isn't it all just a bit more complicated than that?
Not everyone is getting pay rises right now.
Skilled/semi-skilled manual workers, care workers, wagon drivers, building site labourers are getting big rises.
The white collar and middle class types - accountants, administrators, design engineers, project managers aren't suffering from a sudden reduction in their part of the workforce, so their wages are going to be static.
This means that after allowing for the effect of the inflation caused by rising wages in some sectors, we'll actually see a rebalancing - the working class will generally earn more than before, and everyone else less.
This is seriously good news for the working class types who voted for Brext as its exactly what they expected to happen. So it's no good for the lefty-remainery types to screech and moan about it to them - Brext has done what it said on the tin.
I get why there is a lot of screeching and moaning on here - posters here tend to be well off white collar types or posher, rather than digger drivers or steel erectors. Even I'm not a typical specimen of the working class (I'm a SME owner now!) although I'm probably closer to the action there than most.
I suspect that the biggest medium term challenge for the government is going to be public sector pay. They'll have to pay the manual workers more, or they'll all drift to the private sector. They don't need to (and won't be able to afford to) pay the planning officers, NHS managers, etc a similar rise. But how on earth do they do one without the other?
(this is the public sector teacher problem on a massive scale - maths teachers have more real world value in alternative careers than history or art teachers, but they are usually on identical pay scales - so hiring good art and history teachers is easy, but good maths teachers nearly impossible).
I'm not sure it's all Brexit related - there's tremendous wage inflation in the US and even the Eurozone* right now as demand bounces back post pandemic.
I have been in Vegas at a conference the last three days (and Vegas was utterly rammed, which is staggering for a Monday to Wednesday in early October). In the cab heading back to the airport, the driver told me he used to be an HGV driver. I asked him if he'd been tempted to go back, as there is a shortage. He told me his old firm had offered him a $10,000 sign on bonus - but that he wasn't tempted because he could earn really well doing taxi and food delivery.
* German wage growth in June was the highest since the early 90s
Saw a 18-wheeler on I-287 the other day bearing a big sign advertising rates for drivers of $2,500+ a week.
Based on my conversation with a taxi driver, you can now earn nearly as much driving Ubers/cabs/food delivery as an HGV driver. And you get to sleep in your own bed every night, not in the cramped cabin of a truck.
The other problem, I suspect, is that people think that a lot of long distance driving is going away with the rise of autonomous vehicles. So why go into a business where wages are likely to be a lot lower in the future?
Arent higher wages in food delivery likely to be driven down as more entrants are attracted into the sector? The barriers to entry cant be that high.
Before the pandemic Uber drivers, albeit taxi not food, were complaining they were taking home less than minimum wage (in Leeds at least).
You'd have thought so. The other day my fish and chips turned up in a 68-plate Mercedes, and not an A-class. I can only imagine its day job is as a posh Uber. If we assume £3 to £4 a delivery, 4 deliveries and £5 tips an hour, that is £30 gross an hour which is not bad but at quieter times, £15 an hour before tax and before expenses like petrol is better than a poke in the eye with a hot chip but not by much.
Using an expensive car to make short deliveries is a very false economy.
People only look at the immediate marginal cost of operating the car (time and petrol), and miss the depreciation, finance and servicing costs that make it quite uneconomical. It you’re unemployed and with a lease commitment on the car though, you likely don’t have much choice.
Or maybe it was just that his airport run got cancelled that day, and he found himself with time on his hands.
FWIW Charles de Gaulle was deserted yesterday morning. A ghost town. 23 flights all day from Terminal 2A
Couldn’t that graph just show an exponential growth in PCR testing over the last decade ? A significantly earlier start for the pandemic wouldn’t really match the infectiousness of the virus, either, which throws up a lot of other questions.
Without long term data, we don't know if this is a sudden unexplained increase, or simply part of a trend.
There is long term data in that graph on the link. What's lacking is a lot of contextual data. There's certainly been a rapid increase in PCR testing everywhere, which is as much technology determined as demand determined. Either could be true, but if the pandemic started months earlier, it doesn't really match what we know about the epidemiology of the virus - which might imply a significantly less infectious precursor.
As one of many who had the worst cold of their life in December 2019, I would not be totally surprised if we missed something about its origins. Wasnt there something about covid19 being found in sewage from 2019 in multiple countries? If an earlier version wasn't lethal and perhaps less transmissible too would we definitely have picked up on it?
Yes - we've tested thousands of blood etc samples taken in the second half of 2019, and nothing has shown up. In any event, a globally distributed earlier version of the virus would also have shown up in the genetic lineages of later mass sequencing. It hasn't, so it's pretty well impossible that Covid was around much earlier.
Anecdote alert.
Friend of mine went to the Austrian Alps December 2019. She had the mother-and-father of all 'flus'. Laid her out completely with all the subsequent symptoms ...
In retrospect I'm not sure it was 'just' flu.
We had a friend come to stay with us on 1st December 2019. From northern Italy.
She was really unwell and any sensible person would have stayed away. Hey, what can I say, my wife does not have sensible friends.
About 8 days later, just as the election campaign finished, I went down with, assuming it was not Covid 19, what was the bastard cousin of Covid 19. Couldn't go to the election count. Had to go to bed for two days - every bone in my body ached, terrible headache, hacking cough (that eventually lasted six weeks).
Nobody could ever know what I had, as it was never tested. Whatever it was, the science says it was most likely not Covid. But it was damned nasty. And it came from northern Italy.
Lots of talk on here about pay rises leading to inflation, and whether or not that's a good thing, but isn't it all just a bit more complicated than that?
Not everyone is getting pay rises right now.
Skilled/semi-skilled manual workers, care workers, wagon drivers, building site labourers are getting big rises.
The white collar and middle class types - accountants, administrators, design engineers, project managers aren't suffering from a sudden reduction in their part of the workforce, so their wages are going to be static.
This means that after allowing for the effect of the inflation caused by rising wages in some sectors, we'll actually see a rebalancing - the working class will generally earn more than before, and everyone else less.
This is seriously good news for the working class types who voted for Brext as its exactly what they expected to happen. So it's no good for the lefty-remainery types to screech and moan about it to them - Brext has done what it said on the tin.
I get why there is a lot of screeching and moaning on here - posters here tend to be well off white collar types or posher, rather than digger drivers or steel erectors. Even I'm not a typical specimen of the working class (I'm a SME owner now!) although I'm probably closer to the action there than most.
I suspect that the biggest medium term challenge for the government is going to be public sector pay. They'll have to pay the manual workers more, or they'll all drift to the private sector. They don't need to (and won't be able to afford to) pay the planning officers, NHS managers, etc a similar rise. But how on earth do they do one without the other?
(this is the public sector teacher problem on a massive scale - maths teachers have more real world value in alternative careers than history or art teachers, but they are usually on identical pay scales - so hiring good art and history teachers is easy, but good maths teachers nearly impossible).
I'm not sure it's all Brexit related - there's tremendous wage inflation in the US and even the Eurozone* right now as demand bounces back post pandemic.
I have been in Vegas at a conference the last three days (and Vegas was utterly rammed, which is staggering for a Monday to Wednesday in early October). In the cab heading back to the airport, the driver told me he used to be an HGV driver. I asked him if he'd been tempted to go back, as there is a shortage. He told me his old firm had offered him a $10,000 sign on bonus - but that he wasn't tempted because he could earn really well doing taxi and food delivery.
* German wage growth in June was the highest since the early 90s
Saw a 18-wheeler on I-287 the other day bearing a big sign advertising rates for drivers of $2,500+ a week.
Clearly 400k driver shortage in Europe has been caused by Brexit!
I do love how people still keep posting this guff. Aside from nobody having claimed the UK shortage was exclusively the fault of brexit, the driver shortage on the continent is not creating any shortages, unlike here.
What are the downsides of the driver shortage on the continent?
easy solution like paying more benefits to people who should be working or training for work.
ghastly comment
Pig ignorant comment. "Why don't you get a job" say Tories and other right wing morons to people on UC who already have a job and likely work harder than they do. Work flat out just to be broke and get patronised by morons? Thats life on UC.
I'm a massive advocate for fixing the flaws of UC, most especially the taper rate.
But I am not in favour of increasing the base rate of UC.
Absolutely the £6bn boost to UC should have come to an end but every single penny of that should have gone back into reforming UC by lowering the taper rate.
That way the people who "work flat out" keep more of their own money - and can keep even more if they get a pay rise - but those who don't work, don't benefit.
Lots of talk on here about pay rises leading to inflation, and whether or not that's a good thing, but isn't it all just a bit more complicated than that?
Not everyone is getting pay rises right now.
Skilled/semi-skilled manual workers, care workers, wagon drivers, building site labourers are getting big rises.
The white collar and middle class types - accountants, administrators, design engineers, project managers aren't suffering from a sudden reduction in their part of the workforce, so their wages are going to be static.
This means that after allowing for the effect of the inflation caused by rising wages in some sectors, we'll actually see a rebalancing - the working class will generally earn more than before, and everyone else less.
This is seriously good news for the working class types who voted for Brext as its exactly what they expected to happen. So it's no good for the lefty-remainery types to screech and moan about it to them - Brext has done what it said on the tin.
I get why there is a lot of screeching and moaning on here - posters here tend to be well off white collar types or posher, rather than digger drivers or steel erectors. Even I'm not a typical specimen of the working class (I'm a SME owner now!) although I'm probably closer to the action there than most.
I suspect that the biggest medium term challenge for the government is going to be public sector pay. They'll have to pay the manual workers more, or they'll all drift to the private sector. They don't need to (and won't be able to afford to) pay the planning officers, NHS managers, etc a similar rise. But how on earth do they do one without the other?
(this is the public sector teacher problem on a massive scale - maths teachers have more real world value in alternative careers than history or art teachers, but they are usually on identical pay scales - so hiring good art and history teachers is easy, but good maths teachers nearly impossible).
I'm not sure it's all Brexit related - there's tremendous wage inflation in the US and even the Eurozone* right now as demand bounces back post pandemic.
I have been in Vegas at a conference the last three days (and Vegas was utterly rammed, which is staggering for a Monday to Wednesday in early October). In the cab heading back to the airport, the driver told me he used to be an HGV driver. I asked him if he'd been tempted to go back, as there is a shortage. He told me his old firm had offered him a $10,000 sign on bonus - but that he wasn't tempted because he could earn really well doing taxi and food delivery.
* German wage growth in June was the highest since the early 90s
Saw a 18-wheeler on I-287 the other day bearing a big sign advertising rates for drivers of $2,500+ a week.
Based on my conversation with a taxi driver, you can now earn nearly as much driving Ubers/cabs/food delivery as an HGV driver. And you get to sleep in your own bed every night, not in the cramped cabin of a truck.
The other problem, I suspect, is that people think that a lot of long distance driving is going away with the rise of autonomous vehicles. So why go into a business where wages are likely to be a lot lower in the future?
Arent higher wages in food delivery likely to be driven down as more entrants are attracted into the sector? The barriers to entry cant be that high.
Before the pandemic Uber drivers, albeit taxi not food, were complaining they were taking home less than minimum wage (in Leeds at least).
You'd have thought so. The other day my fish and chips turned up in a 68-plate Mercedes, and not an A-class. I can only imagine its day job is as a posh Uber. If we assume £3 to £4 a delivery, 4 deliveries and £5 tips an hour, that is £30 gross an hour which is not bad but at quieter times, £15 an hour before tax and before expenses like petrol is better than a poke in the eye with a hot chip but not by much.
My dad got a Mercedes many years ago which is still going. What promoted the purchase was talking to an immigrant taxi driver in Holland. The car was shared between two families who both worked long hours, it was hardly ever parked. Those things just go on and on.
Also my next door neighbour used to be a Korean loan shark who would lend people money against their cars, and the parling spaces outside were a continually revolving selection of high-priced models. One night someone, presumably one of his debtors, showed up with an axe and started laying into a Mercedes. Hardly made a dent, those things are built tough.
I just bought an old car, and the first thing I did was upgraded the stereo to a new one with CarPlay, sat nav and reverse camera. It’s the biggest difference between old cars and new cars, and makes the world of difference.
Porsche make the PCRN which is a retro look single DIN head unit with satnav, CarPlay, etc specifically for their older models. They are mint. I've got them in both of my 993s. They are, however, slightly expensive...
Lots of talk on here about pay rises leading to inflation, and whether or not that's a good thing, but isn't it all just a bit more complicated than that?
Not everyone is getting pay rises right now.
Skilled/semi-skilled manual workers, care workers, wagon drivers, building site labourers are getting big rises.
The white collar and middle class types - accountants, administrators, design engineers, project managers aren't suffering from a sudden reduction in their part of the workforce, so their wages are going to be static.
This means that after allowing for the effect of the inflation caused by rising wages in some sectors, we'll actually see a rebalancing - the working class will generally earn more than before, and everyone else less.
This is seriously good news for the working class types who voted for Brext as its exactly what they expected to happen. So it's no good for the lefty-remainery types to screech and moan about it to them - Brext has done what it said on the tin.
I get why there is a lot of screeching and moaning on here - posters here tend to be well off white collar types or posher, rather than digger drivers or steel erectors. Even I'm not a typical specimen of the working class (I'm a SME owner now!) although I'm probably closer to the action there than most.
I suspect that the biggest medium term challenge for the government is going to be public sector pay. They'll have to pay the manual workers more, or they'll all drift to the private sector. They don't need to (and won't be able to afford to) pay the planning officers, NHS managers, etc a similar rise. But how on earth do they do one without the other?
(this is the public sector teacher problem on a massive scale - maths teachers have more real world value in alternative careers than history or art teachers, but they are usually on identical pay scales - so hiring good art and history teachers is easy, but good maths teachers nearly impossible).
I'm not sure it's all Brexit related - there's tremendous wage inflation in the US and even the Eurozone* right now as demand bounces back post pandemic.
I have been in Vegas at a conference the last three days (and Vegas was utterly rammed, which is staggering for a Monday to Wednesday in early October). In the cab heading back to the airport, the driver told me he used to be an HGV driver. I asked him if he'd been tempted to go back, as there is a shortage. He told me his old firm had offered him a $10,000 sign on bonus - but that he wasn't tempted because he could earn really well doing taxi and food delivery.
* German wage growth in June was the highest since the early 90s
Saw a 18-wheeler on I-287 the other day bearing a big sign advertising rates for drivers of $2,500+ a week.
Based on my conversation with a taxi driver, you can now earn nearly as much driving Ubers/cabs/food delivery as an HGV driver. And you get to sleep in your own bed every night, not in the cramped cabin of a truck.
The other problem, I suspect, is that people think that a lot of long distance driving is going away with the rise of autonomous vehicles. So why go into a business where wages are likely to be a lot lower in the future?
Arent higher wages in food delivery likely to be driven down as more entrants are attracted into the sector? The barriers to entry cant be that high.
Before the pandemic Uber drivers, albeit taxi not food, were complaining they were taking home less than minimum wage (in Leeds at least).
You'd have thought so. The other day my fish and chips turned up in a 68-plate Mercedes, and not an A-class. I can only imagine its day job is as a posh Uber. If we assume £3 to £4 a delivery, 4 deliveries and £5 tips an hour, that is £30 gross an hour which is not bad but at quieter times, £15 an hour before tax and before expenses like petrol is better than a poke in the eye with a hot chip but not by much.
My dad got a Mercedes many years ago which is still going. What promoted the purchase was talking to an immigrant taxi driver in Holland. The car was shared between two families who both worked long hours, it was hardly ever parked. Those things just go on and on.
Also my next door neighbour used to be a Korean loan shark who would lend people money against their cars, and the parling spaces outside were a continually revolving selection of high-priced models. One night someone, presumably one of his debtors, showed up with an axe and started laying into a Mercedes. Hardly made a dent, those things are built tough.
When we were in Singapore in the late 60s every taxi was a Merc. Those cars were also driven around the clock on shifts and seemed to last forever.
Mr. Topping, no, we're going to do a "You're imposing an anachronistic understanding of political geography on the 11th century" thing.
The king of 'France' (the remnants of Western Francia) had very little power at the time. When William Rufus popped his clogs the battle for the English throne had nothing to do with the French king, whose territory in the 11th century was Paris and a little bit of land around it.
The protagonists were the Duke of Normandy (William the Conqueror's eldest son Robert Curthose) and Henry, who won.
The only reason English kings were ever seen as subordinate was Henry II's shortsighted tomfoolery in agreeing to pay homage for lands a century or so after the Conquest. It was an Angevin matter, not a Norman one. And it pertained only to lands that were claimed (as overlord) by the French king. Which did not include England.
If it were a French rather than Norman invasion then the king of France would have been acknowledged as ruler, with a mere client as king. As per the plan in the early 13th century.
Not really the reaction to the speech that Boris was hoping for. The Daily Express is creaming all over its front cover and, presumably, the sticky inside pages, but the rest of the normal press seem to vary from lukewarm to downright hostile, and not just the usual suspects either.
Most intelligent people have seen through Boris.
Stupid people haven't and I'm afraid there's really no way of dressing up the fact that a lot of people are really daft. It's not entirely their fault. When you have 'news'papers like the Express, and social media, churning out tosh day after day it's quite difficult to be discerning.
It's also the problem with charisma. It's easy to beguile people with charm. Sell them snakeoil. The magician's sleight of hand. The voice of Saruman. Johnson has it all.
Yes. When I attack the delivery of Brexit and the increasing shite being rained down I am not attacking "stupid Brexit voters" - that is just me. I am attacking the people who have manipulated voters to believe that the sky is green and not blue.
When the "shite" is that people's pay is going up, there's a reason why voters are so happy to be "manipulated".
Isn't it weird that people aren't unhappy that real wages are going up for the first time in a quarter of a century? So strange, almost incomprehensible.
Most people are not seeing pay rises. Then you have the explosion in energy bills and the looming whopping tax rise and the UC cut for the poorest working families.
Saying "cheer up everything is marvellous" is how to lose votes when people can see things are not marvellous.
How things have changed. The unions, and hence, the Labour Party, arose to some extent on the efforts of the Tolpuddle Martyrs - a group of Gloucestershire agricultural labourers defending their wages.
Now they say we must allow cheap European labour to keep food prices low.
Mr Dancer,
I dropped History at school at my first opportunity, but there are fascinating nuggets. John was a bit of a disaster, but history was perhaps unfair to him. He (sort of) kept the French away, or at least, the supporters of his son did.
What I got from Boris's speech is what he wanted me to get. This is a government on a mission and with a hugely ambitious program to change this country for the better. He wants better transport, education, skills, education, law and order, the list went on and on.
Will he be able to deliver? Who knows, certainly not on all of it but maybe on some. If he does he will have done better than most of his recent predecessors. The message from his speech is that this is not a government blundering around not knowing what it wants to do. I think he succeeded in that.
Don't all political parties want things to be better? Has any conference speech stated they want transport and education to get worse?
What I got from the speech was not that the Tories want to change the country for the better, but to impress upon people that they are still energetic and coming up with ideas (he talked about 'tired old Labour'), rather than a sclerotic 11 year old government paddling along.
Yes, the entire rhetoric is remarkable. What the Tories are doing is pretending that Labour was in power until 2019, when Boris took over. Astonishingly, quite a lot of voters seem to think that this is true, and any current woes should be blamed on the Labour government 2010-2019. Things haven't got better yet because of Labour's misrule - but now Boris is in charge. It takes some brass neck, but it seems to work.
He is probably trying to draw a line between Leave and Remain - Sir Keir’s Labour being associated with the low wage, high immigration era whilst his Tories want to train our youngsters and see wages increase etc
I'd be interested in examples of what has been done to "train our youngsters", rather than what has been said. As someone in the FE trade, it appears to be the cube root of jack shite thus far.
I’d have thought it was an aim for the future, in contrast to the mass importation of cheap labour, rather than something that has already been done
Yes but. He's been in power for 2 years plus. We all are aware of the Grand Plan. Yet nowt practical seems to happen. When will this training begin? And who will do it? And where?
The pandemic probably hasn’t helped. That’s been most of the time since he won the election, before that he didn’t have a majority, and Brexit wasn’t done. So in reality he’s had 22 months of which at least 18 have been dominated by Covid
Surely then a speech to Conference would be the ideal time to outline some specifics? Apparently not.
Yes, I thought that Labour's conference was a bit light on policy, but the Conservatives are actually in Government - you'd think they'd have had something to say. For the first 3 days the journalists were told it was all being saved up for Johnson's speech, which turned out to be about nothing in particular. Just odd - why did they bother to get into politics if they don't want to do anything?
We didn't seem to get much in the way of defections either.
Mr Palmer wasnt saying that when Labour 3had nothing to say, which was often in their yrs in Office and whilst they were destroying the Economy. Granted it took 13 yrs before they destroyed the ecomomy but they got there in the end.....
Labour did not destroy the economy, the GFC did. The economy was recovering under Labour but that halfwit Osborne flatlined it. Boris, you will note, ran against the austerity economics of Cameron/Osborne even before the pandemic.
Labour allowed the structural imbalances to develop
Arguably yes but these were set in train by Mrs Thatcher. Britain was to become a service economy rather than manufacturing or trading.
easy solution like paying more benefits to people who should be working or training for work.
ghastly comment
Pig ignorant comment. "Why don't you get a job" say Tories and other right wing morons to people on UC who already have a job and likely work harder than they do. Work flat out just to be broke and get patronised by morons? Thats life on UC.
I notice the Quiet Man was on the radio this morning advocating for the UC increase to be retained for the time being. And was making sensible arguments for it.
Nope. The boss of Intel says the US chipmaker is no longer considering building a factory in the UK because of Brexit. Pat Gelsinger told the BBC that before the UK left the EU, the country "would have been a site that we would have considered"...
How things have changed. The unions, and hence, the Labour Party, arose to some extent on the efforts of the Tolpuddle Martyrs - a group of Gloucestershire agricultural labourers defending their wages.
Now they say we must allow cheap European labour to keep food prices low.
Mr Dancer,
I dropped History at school at my first opportunity, but there are fascinating nuggets. John was a bit of a disaster, but history was perhaps unfair to him. He (sort of) kept the French away, or at least, the supporters of his son did.
Not really the reaction to the speech that Boris was hoping for. The Daily Express is creaming all over its front cover and, presumably, the sticky inside pages, but the rest of the normal press seem to vary from lukewarm to downright hostile, and not just the usual suspects either.
Most intelligent people have seen through Boris.
Stupid people haven't and I'm afraid there's really no way of dressing up the fact that a lot of people are really daft. It's not entirely their fault. When you have 'news'papers like the Express, and social media, churning out tosh day after day it's quite difficult to be discerning.
It's also the problem with charisma. It's easy to beguile people with charm. Sell them snakeoil. The magician's sleight of hand. The voice of Saruman. Johnson has it all.
This attitude that only intelligent people see through Boris and everyone else is stupid is the kind of breathtaking arrogance that saw Brexit and will see Boris in office for years to come
You do not win an argument by saying you are superior
I just bought an old car, and the first thing I did was upgraded the stereo to a new one with CarPlay, sat nav and reverse camera. It’s the biggest difference between old cars and new cars, and makes the world of difference.
Porsche make the PCRN which is a retro look single DIN head unit with satnav, CarPlay, etc specifically for their older models. They are mint. I've got them in both of my 993s. They are, however, slightly expensive...
Yeah, I saw those when they were launched a year or so ago. Typical German OEM prices though, not a £200 Chinese cheapie.
How things have changed. The unions, and hence, the Labour Party, arose to some extent on the efforts of the Tolpuddle Martyrs - a group of Gloucestershire agricultural labourers defending their wages.
Now they say we must allow cheap European labour to keep food prices low
I'm not the right person to speak for the Labour Party any more. But I don't think they are advocating "cheap European labour to keep food prices low".
There is a big and growing labour shortage across the entire food chain. We need people now to slaughter pigs. Process food through manufacturing into the products we want. Work in warehouses and drive trucks to distribute them.
There isn't enough labour supply to fill the vacancies. Where a lot of these vacancies are real employment is close to full - you can't get people to do night shifts in a factory at any salary.
A long term restructuring of the economy can fix some of these - and will frankly require new towns being built in the countryside to provide a labour pool. A New Wisbech if you like so that unemployed people in Widnes have a means to relocate to find work.
But that does nothing to fix the issue we have today. So its either expand the labour pool or see some of the food chain go to the wall (as Philip keeps advocating) so that we then end up reliant on imports and there are no jobs for anyone domestic or foreign.
How things have changed. The unions, and hence, the Labour Party, arose to some extent on the efforts of the Tolpuddle Martyrs - a group of Gloucestershire agricultural labourers defending their wages.
(Snip)
Point of order: The Tolpuddle Martyrs were from Dorset, not Gloucestershire. I've walked past the museum, and am fairly sure I didn't stray a few counties ... ;_
Comments
The trouble is everyone forgets why the crisis arose in the first place - brexit, lack of proper job training , taking the easy solution of paying more benefits to people who should be working or training for work.
Perhaps someone here will challenge his data but it seems quite clear that in the last 40 years, the extra slices of pie created by productivity growth, have pretty much all accrued to capital holders and to a lesser extent the new middle classes in emerging markets (principally China).
This started off as a desirable and inbuilt feature of the Bretton Woods / globalist system, after the previous system of heavily organised labour had imploded, with high inflation and state over-interference disincentivising the entrepreneurial class from creating new wealth. But it went too far. Just as the system which Bretton Woods replaced started off with the desirable goal of lifting poverty stricken westerners up into the middle class and rebuilding economic resilience after the ravages of WW2. Before the state bureaucrats and labour unions took it too far that is.
It’s long past time for an equivalent reset to western capitalism and it will mean centre right political leaders being brave enough to shoot the foxes called Reagan, Thatcher and Blair. Or else it will be an evolution to capitalism led by AOC / Corbyn types. Credit to Boris Johnson that his political antenna has picked up on all this.
Motivation comes after you start doing something, not before, so just force yourself out and into it with a smile on your face and you'll be ok!
A few years ago, I went to Tesla's factory in Fremont, in the Bay Area. Their CFO told me proudly that they'd bought the factory in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis in 2010 for just $42m.
He went on to say that when GM had owned the plant, it had employed more than 8,000 people. Now, he said, they were churning out almost the same number of cars with under 600 full time employees.
When it was a GM plant, the 8,000 jobs were well paid, skilled labour.
When it was Tesla, the roles were people with degrees who looked after machines. The skilled labour had been replaced by machines and people with Masters, and then people who swept up and polished glass, and were basically unskilled labour.
And this is a large part of what has happened in the West. Work has bifurcated between highly skilled, and unskilled. The middle ground, i.e. demand for skilled manual labour, has largely disappeared.
That is one of the two mega challenge facing the developed world (the other being ageing populations). Unfortunately, discussing the real issues requires rather more nuance than political debate usually gets.
The guy doing 100 miles at a time to the airport, well his customer expects to see something like 2018 E Class, and is happy to pay £150 for the trip.
The French invasion of England may have been a millennium ago but despite all the how many Frenchmen does it take to defend Paris jokes we have a deep and profound psychosis about that early total defeat, occupation and transformation.
Or they cant do basic sums and don't realise how mich money they are losing.
On an individual level this shows when resigning from a job for instance - you anguish about telling your colleagues you are going thinking they will beg you to stay or at least be upset or think you are a traitor and get nervous about doing so and then when you do tell everyone most people shrug their shoulders , say a few polite words that you will be missed and then think about what they are having for tea.
Also people who do not enter sporting events or not play golf for fear of coming last , hitting bad shot - nobody actually cares but that person
Warm the cafetiere, put beans in grinder, grind for two seconds, pause, shake the cafetiere, grind for a further 10 seconds until you can just hear the broken up beans rattling. Put ground beans in cafetiere.
Start to boil the kettle and when it's half boiled pour one inch of water over the coffee. Stir with wooden spoon. Almost boil the water and before it does so pour the rest of the water on.
Leave for five minutes.
Strength to taste in number of beans to start with.
Back when I was on Teesside the local parcel delivery guy was using a 20 year old Passat estate. Depreciated to nothing, and the legendary PD engine just kept going and didn't care about lots of stop start and was still reasonably economical!
https://capx.co/on-hgv-driver-shortages-both-sides-are-missing-the-point/
This might explain why the EU seems to be able to ride out their driver shortage better than the UK.
If it had been French then the king of France or his heir would've become king of England (the latter would have been the case in the early 13th century when the French almost conquered England during John's disastrous reign).
The problem is trust. He can boost jam tomorrow but sooner or later people will expect
him to leave his wifejam. And the party has no idea how to make jam or train people to make jam jars.Remember that there are no shortages, that the shortages are there but someone else's fault, that you absolutely can't blame the shortages on Brexit, and finally that the shortages are a brilliant feature of Brexit improving the economy. No wonder the speech was torn to shreds by their own thinktanks and the CBI.
As I keep pointing out, northerners voted for Brexit and for the Tories wanting change. 2 years in and the only change is things getting worse with no understanding of that even happening or is it the plan but don't worry folks, that jam will be along tomorrow. No wonder red wallers have gone off him.
Or they are having an affair and use this as an excuse to meet up with their squeeze
There may have been some exaggeration (and you may also be using the peak GM production), but it doesn't sound far odd to me.
https://twitter.com/hzbrandenburg/status/1445719763477401604?s=21
It was news to be when I went round Lincoln castle. If it had gone the other way, we'd be speaking modern French and so would the Americans.
A total disaster.
In the meantime, hasn't bottomly got the wit to find himself a Non- Executive Directorship?
Its not supposed to be the Queen's Speech where the agenda for the next year is given. That's already happened and will happen again before the next Party Conference.
Most intelligent people have seen through Boris.
Stupid people haven't and I'm afraid there's really no way of dressing up the fact that a lot of people are really daft. It's not entirely their fault. When you have 'news'papers like the Express, and social media, churning out tosh day after day it's quite difficult to be discerning.
It's also the problem with charisma. It's easy to beguile people with charm. Sell them snakeoil. The magician's sleight of hand. The voice of Saruman. Johnson has it all.
Is that the total number of people working full-time at the plant, or the number of Tesla full-time employees who are not on repetitive short-term contracts?
If it is only 600 employees, then the racism problem in the plant is much more significant than I thought ...
Edit: a partial answer to my question. According to Tesla themselves: "Today, more than 10,000 employees work at the Fremont factory. "
https://www.tesla.com/en_GB/factory
So the CFO was probably being very disingenuous.
In any event, a globally distributed earlier version of the virus would also have shown up in the genetic lineages of later mass sequencing. It hasn't, so it's pretty well impossible that Covid was around much earlier.
An MPs pay should be no higher than median income for the country in my opinion, which even then is generous for a part-time job. If they want a higher income, they should be performance-related to the rest of the nation. If the median income goes up, then the MPs would too, if it goes down then theirs does too.
Besides if we go by the principles of supply and demand its quite clear that MPs salaries are far too high. There's never a shortage of people applying for the job, even looking at the different parties alone. So the salary is too high.
Or are we going to do another he's not a scouser he's from Liverpool thing?
More modern Japanese and Korean cars will be the ones to have in future, and probably even cheaper to buy and run.
But if you’ve lost your job and need to make the lease payment, you’ll use the car you have to earn whatever you can today.
I listened to Boris's speech yesterday and it was a tour de force painting a vision for the UK and with some genuinely funny jokes, all penned by himself
It was half the length of Starmer's, which in my view was far too long, but I doubt either speech will have a direct impact on the polls and to be honest yesterday's Opinium seems like a voodoo poll picking out random parts of a speech and seeking a judgement.
However, back to real life it is clear the energy and cost of living crisis is very real and happening now and the way HMG deals with it over the coming months will have an effect on public opinion and it is for this reason I believe Rishi's budget on the 27th of this month is a very important moment for the country and it must inject fairness as that is sadly lacking at present
I have received my Asda order delivery details for later this morning and again fulfilled entirely and I am just not seeing any shortages, and as for the fuel crises that was inflicted on the country by the media and pure selfishness
However, I have noticed more of Amazon's products indicating delayed delivery dates which chimes with the worldwide supply issues and I doubt these issues either on energy prices or worldwide supply are going away anytime soon, though a period of warmer weather would be a help
As far as the next GE is concerned whether it is 2023 or 2024 I have no idea how it will pan out and I would not bet on a majority government of any stripe at present (though I do not bet anyway) and there are so many moving parts I do not anticipate the make up of the next government will become clearer until mid 2023
We can amuse ourselves with electoral calculus as much as we like but that is all it is, amusing as we must remember the saying, a week is a long time in politics
Friend of mine went to the Austrian Alps December 2019. She had the mother-and-father of all 'flus'. Laid her out completely with all the subsequent symptoms ...
In retrospect I'm not sure it was 'just' flu.
Isn't it weird that people aren't unhappy that real wages are going up for the first time in a quarter of a century? So strange, almost incomprehensible.
No thoughts of "how did that lazy fat fucker make it to be PM when I still have to spend my days covering the Hamster Swimwear Festival*....let's give him hell...."???
*by way of example
But for @Gallowgate a routine is important and getting up and making the coffee in such a way is one such.
There are seven years between the two cars. My Passat with the I20's tech would be awesome.
The narrative comes from how they are reported and even then I don't think these days many people are listening.
In terms of opinion polling? Nul points.
https://twitter.com/dominicpenna/status/1445802589308604421?s=21
Nothing to do with Brexit, presumably?
She was really unwell and any sensible person would have stayed away. Hey, what can I say, my wife does not have sensible friends.
About 8 days later, just as the election campaign finished, I went down with, assuming it was not Covid 19, what was the bastard cousin of Covid 19. Couldn't go to the election count. Had to go to bed for two days - every bone in my body ached, terrible headache, hacking cough (that eventually lasted six weeks).
Nobody could ever know what I had, as it was never tested. Whatever it was, the science says it was most likely not Covid. But it was damned nasty. And it came from northern Italy.
But I am not in favour of increasing the base rate of UC.
Absolutely the £6bn boost to UC should have come to an end but every single penny of that should have gone back into reforming UC by lowering the taper rate.
That way the people who "work flat out" keep more of their own money - and can keep even more if they get a pay rise - but those who don't work, don't benefit.
Also my next door neighbour used to be a Korean loan shark who would lend people money against their cars, and the parling spaces outside were a continually revolving selection of high-priced models. One night someone, presumably one of his debtors, showed up with an axe and started laying into a Mercedes. Hardly made a dent, those things are built tough.
This was always part of the plan for Brexit Britain to become a high wage, high skills economy ‘cos reasons.
The king of 'France' (the remnants of Western Francia) had very little power at the time. When William Rufus popped his clogs the battle for the English throne had nothing to do with the French king, whose territory in the 11th century was Paris and a little bit of land around it.
The protagonists were the Duke of Normandy (William the Conqueror's eldest son Robert Curthose) and Henry, who won.
The only reason English kings were ever seen as subordinate was Henry II's shortsighted tomfoolery in agreeing to pay homage for lands a century or so after the Conquest. It was an Angevin matter, not a Norman one. And it pertained only to lands that were claimed (as overlord) by the French king. Which did not include England.
If it were a French rather than Norman invasion then the king of France would have been acknowledged as ruler, with a mere client as king. As per the plan in the early 13th century.
Saying "cheer up everything is marvellous" is how to lose votes when people can see things are not marvellous.
How things have changed. The unions, and hence, the Labour Party, arose to some extent on the efforts of the Tolpuddle Martyrs - a group of Gloucestershire agricultural labourers defending their wages.
Now they say we must allow cheap European labour to keep food prices low.
Mr Dancer,
I dropped History at school at my first opportunity, but there are fascinating nuggets. John was a bit of a disaster, but history was perhaps unfair to him. He (sort of) kept the French away, or at least, the supporters of his son did.
The boss of Intel says the US chipmaker is no longer considering building a factory in the UK because of Brexit.
Pat Gelsinger told the BBC that before the UK left the EU, the country "would have been a site that we would have considered"...
You do not win an argument by saying you are superior
"Dorset agricultural labourers, surely?"
I'll take your word for it. Somewhere down there. Dorset, Cornwall, Hereford - aren't they all the same?
There is a big and growing labour shortage across the entire food chain. We need people now to slaughter pigs. Process food through manufacturing into the products we want. Work in warehouses and drive trucks to distribute them.
There isn't enough labour supply to fill the vacancies. Where a lot of these vacancies are real employment is close to full - you can't get people to do night shifts in a factory at any salary.
A long term restructuring of the economy can fix some of these - and will frankly require new towns being built in the countryside to provide a labour pool. A New Wisbech if you like so that unemployed people in Widnes have a means to relocate to find work.
But that does nothing to fix the issue we have today. So its either expand the labour pool or see some of the food chain go to the wall (as Philip keeps advocating) so that we then end up reliant on imports and there are no jobs for anyone domestic or foreign.