This might be true. But it works both ways. Right or wrong, the UK govt has lost all trust in France’s seriousness as a partner re the brewing social, pol and econ crisis in N Ireland. Stunts over sausages at the G7 only confirm view Paris cares only for legalism and threats.....
I think it’s a serious misreading to say that this is just a spat which can be sorted out after the French election. The rift is deeper and wider than in 2003. French trust in the UK as a reliable partner has broken down. That will take time and sustained effort to repair.
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.
When the Quiet Man is the voice of Conservative reason, and he is. What does that say about the rest of them?
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.
They came from France, conquered us, and then we started speaking French Morris.
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 ... ;_
I've been round it - I'm not a museum fan, but it's well done, and with its individual stories rather touching. "The Martyrs" as a group are harder to relate to than the people who took part.
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.
I was in a taxi the other night with 1.3 million km on it! Four year old Toyota Camry.
Dubai is a long and thin city, with fast roads. Taxis, with two drivers per car in shifts, rack up 1,000km a day on average!
The majority of modern cars are incredibly reliable by any standards. The future problems of today’s cars will be the electric bits, rather than the mechanicals.
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"...
Stand by for "these things happened after Brexit, not because of it". A bit like "they died with Covid, not of it".
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.
It was a flawed system, but a system nonetheless that allowed blue collar RedWall voters to drive cheap-lease new BMW's and gave us the cheapest food in Europe.
I am not sure what regressive food price inflation will do for structural imbalances.
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"...
Stand by for "these things happened after Brexit, not because of it". A bit like "they died with Covid, not of it".
Some companies will decide to invest in the UK, some others won't. We can guess which stories each side will highlight.
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.
They came from France, conquered us, and then we started speaking French Morris.
That's about all you need to know.
We're living with the linguistic effects yet - the animals we eat (cow, pig, sheep) names derive from Anglo-Saxon roots, while the meat that they provide (beef, pork, mutton) come from Norman French - as the peasantry's job was to tend the animals rather than eat them....
Re the article, 'Agree' in polling about the contents of a long speech is meaningless without digging down into the areas of agreement.
Mike Smithson says he does not know what all this polling about speeches means in political terms. Essentially nothing, except that everyone knows the UK is heading for the sort of winter which breaks governments (NHS, Covid inflation, energy, tubs of Celebrations shortage, pigs being shot).
In 2017 there was no electable leader in the GE. In 2019 there was (in the Brexit circumstances) exactly one - the minimum required. SKS is determined that in 2023/4 there will be at least one, himself. Whether there will be one or two people electable as PM is an unknown. The electability of Boris is not a given until we are well past this winter.
I suspect the problem in Lincolnshire is that times have changed. When I were a lad ... etc, we'd dream of working on the land.
Not really, but there was little else for married women with the kids at school, or the older kids who needed pocket money. Now other opportunities are available. No, stop with the 4 Yorkshire men sketch. We can import the labour as an easy fix but it won't be a permanent solution.
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.
(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 ... ;_
I've been round it - I'm not a museum fan, but it's well done, and with its individual stories rather touching. "The Martyrs" as a group are harder to relate to than the people who took part.
I'd like to see a museum - or more recognition of - the Kinder Mass Trespass. It had a massive effect on the country we live in today.
Although I suppose Kinder Scout and Bleaklow are a museum to it, in some sort of way...
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.
When the Quiet Man is the voice of Conservative reason, and he is. What does that say about the rest of them?
As I said earlier let us see what Rishi has in his budget in three weeks as it needs to inject fairness which is sadly lacking at present
I am looking at changes to UC rules, a good increase in the minimum wage, equalising pension tax relief at 25%, and changes to IHT and even CGT
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"...
Stand by for "these things happened after Brexit, not because of it". A bit like "they died with Covid, not of it".
Some companies will decide to invest in the UK, some others won't. We can guess which stories each side will highlight.
Sure, US private equity has been snapping up cash generative UK businesses like Morrisons. Not sure that is economically useful 'investment' as far as the UK is concerned, though.
Mr. Topping, they came from Normandy, conquered the Anglo-Saxons, and then the English started speaking Norman French.
Your persistent refusal to acknowledge some basic historical facts, including the comparison between the invasions of the 11th and 13th centuries, does not necessarily enhance the credibility of your ahistorical argument.
Mr. Topping, they came from Normandy, conquered the Anglo-Saxons, and then the English started speaking Norman French.
Your persistent refusal to acknowledge some basic historical facts, including the comparison between the invasions of the 11th and 13th centuries, does not necessarily enhance the credibility of your ahistorical argument.
Actually they were Vikings just resting in Normandy?
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.
I agree up to a point - although I'm a fan of high taxes and good services, a taper effect producing anything over 50-60% effective tax on people who are already hard up is seriously demoralising, and impossible to justify when people on 100 grand pay much less.
But there are a chunk of people who can't get jobs, for reasons which are only to a limited degree their fault. I know a brother and sister who grew up in a home full of violence. They ran away together at 15 and tried to make it without much education. One succeeded and got a good acting career. The other failed and has not worked for many years. It's hard to see that as more than just good and bad luck respectively, and making the latter live on the permanent edge of penury is not really encouraging him to make an effort - he's made lots of efforts, and has now I think given up.
I'm surprised that Boris is rated so highly, even as a comedian. His timing is awful. He goes off at tangents and you keep thinking "Finish the bloody sentence."
Boris' speech getting a malleting by that well known anti-govt broadcaster James O'Brien Nick Ferrari. And also by all the callers.
Surely some mistake. The PB Tory hot take last night suggested this was a speech whose wit and wisdom knew no bounds.
What you want from a leader's speech is real vision and substance, leavened by enough jokes to make sitting through it entertaining. This leader's effort over-achieved on the jokes; strip them away and there is next to nothing there.
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.
A few days ago, I posted the "Britain is Booming/Don't let Labour blow it" poster the Conservatives used in 1997. There are several reasons why it didn't work, but one was that even if GDP was ticking up nicely, people didn't really feel any richer.
It's all very well having the numbers (though looking at this graph, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/58793537 one wonders about the "quarter of a century" claim) but if people's pay has gone up and they can't buy more nice things, they won't thank the people telling them how much better off they are.
So- if this pay rise is real and sustained, what stops it all being sucked up by house price inflation?
The majority of modern cars are incredibly reliable by any standards. The future problems of today’s cars will be the electric bits, rather than the mechanicals.
All of the suspension bushes, wheel bearing and engine mounts will be fucked after 1,000,000km. I agree that contemporary engines (apart from the usual suspects, JLR, Jeep, etc.) are very reliable. Transmissions generally give out first on modern cars.
As an aside, I can strongly recommend Marc Morris' book The Norman Conquest, which is very good indeed and covers both the preceding and succeeding times as well as the Conquest itself.
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"...
Stand by for "these things happened after Brexit, not because of it". A bit like "they died with Covid, not of it".
Some companies will decide to invest in the UK, some others won't. We can guess which stories each side will highlight.
Sure, US private equity has been snapping up cash generative UK businesses like Morrisons. Not sure that is economically useful 'investment' as far as the UK is concerned, though.
HMG needs to wake up to the fact it is not just high tech companies that need to be defended but also companies like Morrisons as profits flow out of Britain to America (or anywhere else).
The majority of modern cars are incredibly reliable by any standards. The future problems of today’s cars will be the electric bits, rather than the mechanicals.
All of the suspension bushes, wheel bearing and engine mounts will be fucked after 1,000,000km. I agree that contemporary engines (apart from the usual suspects, JLR, Jeep, etc.) are very reliable. Transmissions generally give out first on modern cars.
If you're designing anything, you need to think about its reasonable lifetime - the sort of time that it is expected to keep working. In Consumer Electronics, it is a few years. One million km seems a rather extreme mileage for most cars, and one not worth designing for. Yes, some may manage it: but they're very much in the minority.
I'll bet the design life of a modern car is a quarter to a third of that.
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"...
Stand by for "these things happened after Brexit, not because of it". A bit like "they died with Covid, not of it".
Some companies will decide to invest in the UK, some others won't. We can guess which stories each side will highlight.
But there is so much you don't see or has an impact that isn't on the face of it Brexit, but is. Large pharmaceutical cancels move of Ireland operation to UK and moves most of drug safety (including UK safety) to India because of loss of European Medicine Agency. This just looks like day to day unrelated decisions unless you are involved. The cost savings of going to India just tipped the balance after. None of this is in the news .
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 ... ;_
I've been round it - I'm not a museum fan, but it's well done, and with its individual stories rather touching. "The Martyrs" as a group are harder to relate to than the people who took part.
I'd like to see a museum - or more recognition of - the Kinder Mass Trespass. It had a massive effect on the country we live in today.
Although I suppose Kinder Scout and Bleaklow are a museum to it, in some sort of way...
not enough of an effect given large parts of the England are not open to the public when no good reason they should not be including waterways
Boris' speech getting a malleting by that well known anti-govt broadcaster James O'Brien Nick Ferrari. And also by all the callers.
I caught up with the speech on R4 WATO and PM and the analysis was classic comedic Johnson at the top of his game. I ventured on here and the analysis? It was classic comedic Johnson at the top of his game.
I hated it from the faux comedy to the unfounded, in denial, boosterism but I would, wouldn't I? What has happened in the last 24 hours?
As an aside, I can strongly recommend Marc Morris' book The Norman Conquest, which is very good indeed and covers both the preceding and succeeding times as well as the Conquest itself.
I am reading his Anglo Saxon book and looking forward to the Norman book! Its part of my quest to read a full chronological spectrum of British history .
Boris' speech getting a malleting by that well known anti-govt broadcaster James O'Brien Nick Ferrari. And also by all the callers.
Surely some mistake. The PB Tory hot take last night suggested this was a speech whose wit and wisdom knew no bounds.
What you want from a leader's speech is real vision and substance, leavened by enough jokes to make sitting through it entertaining. This leader's effort over-achieved on the jokes; strip them away and there is next to nothing there.
Like Starmer's, Boris's speech could have used an editor's blue pencil. I've heard worse but stripped down, it was a wishlist with jokes, rather than anything resembling a plan.
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.
A few days ago, I posted the "Britain is Booming/Don't let Labour blow it" poster the Conservatives used in 1997. There are several reasons why it didn't work, but one was that even if GDP was ticking up nicely, people didn't really feel any richer.
It's all very well having the numbers (though looking at this graph, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/58793537 one wonders about the "quarter of a century" claim) but if people's pay has gone up and they can't buy more nice things, they won't thank the people telling them how much better off they are.
So- if this pay rise is real and sustained, what stops it all being sucked up by house price inflation?
I disagree about 1997 - people were feeling more affluent with low mortgages, home ownership rising, unemployment falling and demutualising building societies providing free money.
What they weren't willing to do was give the government any credit for it - that tends to happen when the government's economic strategy crashes a few years earlier and they are forced to do things they had previously claimed would be disastrous but in reality weren't.
Boris' speech getting a malleting by that well known anti-govt broadcaster James O'Brien Nick Ferrari. And also by all the callers.
Surely some mistake. The PB Tory hot take last night suggested this was a speech whose wit and wisdom knew no bounds.
What you want from a leader's speech is real vision and substance, leavened by enough jokes to make sitting through it entertaining. This leader's effort over-achieved on the jokes; strip them away and there is next to nothing there.
Like Starmer's, Boris's speech could have used an editor's blue pencil. I've heard worse but stripped down, it was a wishlist with jokes, rather than anything resembling a plan.
There is a plan for a high wage high skill economy but the problem Boris and HMG face is that the cost of living crisis is now and how HMG deals with it will determine their hopes of another election win
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 ... ;_
I've been round it - I'm not a museum fan, but it's well done, and with its individual stories rather touching. "The Martyrs" as a group are harder to relate to than the people who took part.
I'd like to see a museum - or more recognition of - the Kinder Mass Trespass. It had a massive effect on the country we live in today.
Although I suppose Kinder Scout and Bleaklow are a museum to it, in some sort of way...
You mighjt enjoy this if you've not read it, though their idea of a visitor centre seems to have come to nothing as it was written nearly 10 years ago:
The majority of modern cars are incredibly reliable by any standards. The future problems of today’s cars will be the electric bits, rather than the mechanicals.
All of the suspension bushes, wheel bearing and engine mounts will be fucked after 1,000,000km. I agree that contemporary engines (apart from the usual suspects, JLR, Jeep, etc.) are very reliable. Transmissions generally give out first on modern cars.
Dual mass clutches at a thousand pounds a pop tend to eat themselves. I have heard 10,000 miles on a 1.0l Ford Ecoboost is good going. I was getting 60,000 miles out of my Hyundai i40 clutch and I am a quarter of a million miles on the same clutch kind of a guy.
What was in it for the dealer when my new in 1989 Cavalier only needed service parts and a brake light switch in 90,000 miles? And should the clutch fail on that car a removable panel on the clutch housing meant the clutch could be in an out in half an hour. They soon put a stop to that kind of nonsense. It became a six hour job in the Vectra B.
Boris' speech getting a malleting by that well known anti-govt broadcaster James O'Brien Nick Ferrari. And also by all the callers.
Surely some mistake. The PB Tory hot take last night suggested this was a speech whose wit and wisdom knew no bounds.
What you want from a leader's speech is real vision and substance, leavened by enough jokes to make sitting through it entertaining. This leader's effort over-achieved on the jokes; strip them away and there is next to nothing there.
Like Starmer's, Boris's speech could have used an editor's blue pencil. I've heard worse but stripped down, it was a wishlist with jokes, rather than anything resembling a plan.
There is a plan for a high wage high skill economy but the problem Boris and HMG face is that the cost of living crisis is now and how HMG deals with it will determine their hopes of another election win
There is no plan, just an aspiration for a high wage, high skill economy, or if there is a plan, Boris did not let conference in on it.
I'm surprised that Boris is rated so highly, even as a comedian. His timing is awful. He goes off at tangents and you keep thinking "Finish the bloody sentence."
Frankie Howerd did it much better.
Frankie Howerd spend vast amounts of time planning, refining, testing and practicing. None of these things apply to the current third rate comedian doing stand up in Manchester.
.@afneil on @LBC: "You can have more alliteration, as Mr Johnson had, than a West Coast poet from the 1960s on LSD. That's all fine.
"But we're a country with major problems and we need to know the Government's solution to these problems and on that Mr Johnson had not a jot."
And that is why it is getting a beating. Sunny uplit futures are great when things are on the up. When things are on the down you have to first identify why that is and map your way out to the sunny places ahead.
The Tory position remains incoherent. There is no crisis. There is a crisis but its your fault. There isn't a crisis because look at Europe. There is a crisis but you can't blame Brexit. There isn't a crisis and we won't bring in workers. There is a crisis and we are bringing in workers. There are no downsides. There are downsides but actually they were the plan all along and aren't they marvellous.
If the government was not the Muppet Show, if they had an Alastair Campbell / Peter Mandleson / Dominic Cummings strategist then they would have had all this laid out. This is what we are doing, these are the issues we can mitigate, these we can't mitigate but here's how we will spin them, here's the line repeat the line until people believe it. Instead we have *this*.
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.
Maybe not everyone is seeing pay rises but a great many are ... And equally importantly perhaps a great many hope to do so too. It just seems those who are lining up for pay rises are the "wrong" kind of people for you ... The sort who should be getting their income from UC instead of wages in your eyes perhaps?
As for energy bills going up that's a shame but its global due to the energy market globally. But also quite frankly energy is a relatively small part of a household's budget and out of touch self-entitled people who are only now discovering the perils of inflation are making me very amused.
The average household energy bill is £95 per month. The average household rent bill is £868 per month.
As I'm utterly fed up of repeating, housing costs have gone up by over 6% compound growth per annum while wages haven't, since before the end of the twentieth century. Wages have only gone up by 2.8% compound growth per annum in the same time.
Which is a bigger challenge to a household's budget: a 6% increase on your £868 monthly bill, or a 10% increase on a £95 monthly bill?
The latter will only be your top concern if you're fortunate enough not to worry about paying for keeping a roof over your head.
"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.
If MPs pay was no more than the median income for the country that would certainly slash the number of PPE educated Oxbridge grads who become MPs. They would stick to higher paid jobs in the law, the city or being SPADs and not bother to stand for Parliament.
Instead most MPs would be local councillors and party activists rooted in their local communities.
I would disagree though that being an MP is not a full time job. MPs have to do a lot of constituency casework and when not Ministers scrutinise legislation from the backbenches rather than making it from the frontbenches and they serve on select cttees etc
Boris' speech getting a malleting by that well known anti-govt broadcaster James O'Brien Nick Ferrari. And also by all the callers.
Surely some mistake. The PB Tory hot take last night suggested this was a speech whose wit and wisdom knew no bounds.
What you want from a leader's speech is real vision and substance, leavened by enough jokes to make sitting through it entertaining. This leader's effort over-achieved on the jokes; strip them away and there is next to nothing there.
Like Starmer's, Boris's speech could have used an editor's blue pencil. I've heard worse but stripped down, it was a wishlist with jokes, rather than anything resembling a plan.
There is a plan for a high wage high skill economy but the problem Boris and HMG face is that the cost of living crisis is now and how HMG deals with it will determine their hopes of another election win
Not quite
There is a dream of a high wage, high skill economy but I've never seen any plan for one in this country.
Until last year any plan was subsided by a short term profit motive that said employ another cheap worker, investment will eat into our immediate profits..
.@afneil on @LBC: "You can have more alliteration, as Mr Johnson had, than a West Coast poet from the 1960s on LSD. That's all fine.
"But we're a country with major problems and we need to know the Government's solution to these problems and on that Mr Johnson had not a jot."
And that is why it is getting a beating. Sunny uplit futures are great when things are on the up. When things are on the down you have to first identify why that is and map your way out to the sunny places ahead.
The Tory position remains incoherent. There is no crisis. There is a crisis but its your fault. There isn't a crisis because look at Europe. There is a crisis but you can't blame Brexit. There isn't a crisis and we won't bring in workers. There is a crisis and we are bringing in workers. There are no downsides. There are downsides but actually they were the plan all along and aren't they marvellous.
If the government was not the Muppet Show, if they had an Alastair Campbell / Peter Mandleson / Dominic Cummings strategist then they would have had all this laid out. This is what we are doing, these are the issues we can mitigate, these we can't mitigate but here's how we will spin them, here's the line repeat the line until people believe it. Instead we have *this*.
Kermit the Frog.
What are the downsides, if any, of the driver shortage on the continent?
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 ... ;_
I've been round it - I'm not a museum fan, but it's well done, and with its individual stories rather touching. "The Martyrs" as a group are harder to relate to than the people who took part.
I'd like to see a museum - or more recognition of - the Kinder Mass Trespass. It had a massive effect on the country we live in today.
Although I suppose Kinder Scout and Bleaklow are a museum to it, in some sort of way...
not enough of an effect given large parts of the England are not open to the public when no good reason they should not be including waterways
I have some sympathy with that. However, before the Kinder Mass Trespass, access rights were regressing considerably. After it, legislation considerably opened the countryside up. But it's a work in progress.
Waterways in particular are a gaping hole in the legislation.
However: as our friends in Scotland have discovered, access is fine in theory: as long as the public behave responsibly. And that's a big issue. People in farming have genuine concerns about people accessing their land. Open Access is a responsibility as well as right. Come parts of Scotland, e.g. Loch Lomond, are struggling with this.
As it happens, I haven't encountered many GOMLs ("Get Orrf My Land") when out and about, off-public routes. On my >6,000 mile coastal walk, I had one, in Scotland, on a broad track across farmland where I was doing zero harm. And incidentally, someone who threatened us in Ullapool for parking our motorhome near his house. On my recent running madness, I've had one farmer GOML me for using a footpath that he said had been 'closed' for decades, despite it being on the official maps. As there was an alternative a few hundred metres away, it was no big thing.
But generally I see only kindness. Including one farmer who found me wild camping on his land, and invited me in for breakfast. Or a man who invited me to camp in his large garden, much to the surprise of his wife when she found me there!
I'm surprised that Boris is rated so highly, even as a comedian. His timing is awful. He goes off at tangents and you keep thinking "Finish the bloody sentence."
Frankie Howerd did it much better.
Johnson's comedy is more visual and basic. He is Benny Hill.
"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.
Damn! You caught my faulty double negative before I corrected 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"...
Stand by for "these things happened after Brexit, not because of it". A bit like "they died with Covid, not of it".
In all likelihood the only way we would have got a semiconductor factory is with a bung. The US government is spending tens of billions to support the US semiconductor business, despite that business being highly profitable as it is. Left to their own devices most semiconductor companies would choose to build fabs in east Asia for logistical reasons. i.e. Make the chips near where the parts need to go next.
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.
I agree up to a point - although I'm a fan of high taxes and good services, a taper effect producing anything over 50-60% effective tax on people who are already hard up is seriously demoralising, and impossible to justify when people on 100 grand pay much less.
But there are a chunk of people who can't get jobs, for reasons which are only to a limited degree their fault. I know a brother and sister who grew up in a home full of violence. They ran away together at 15 and tried to make it without much education. One succeeded and got a good acting career. The other failed and has not worked for many years. It's hard to see that as more than just good and bad luck respectively, and making the latter live on the permanent edge of penury is not really encouraging him to make an effort - he's made lots of efforts, and has now I think given up.
Its terrible that someone feels like they ought to give up, especially given we're in an environment with plenty of vacancies.
But just giving more cash isn't going to make him start trying again. What make him start trying again is ensuring that when he tries, he actually gets to keep his income that he works hard for instead of the state taking back 75% in taper, NI and Income Tax.
Whenever I've spoken long to people who've 'given up' the message that comes through in the end far, far too often is "why bother, I'll lose my benefits" - and they're right. They're trapped in poverty and its not appropriate, we need to end the poverty trap not simply give more cash to say "OK you're £1 above the poverty line now we can forget about you".
The majority of modern cars are incredibly reliable by any standards. The future problems of today’s cars will be the electric bits, rather than the mechanicals.
All of the suspension bushes, wheel bearing and engine mounts will be fucked after 1,000,000km. I agree that contemporary engines (apart from the usual suspects, JLR, Jeep, etc.) are very reliable. Transmissions generally give out first on modern cars.
Dual mass clutches at a thousand pounds a pop tend to eat themselves. I have heard 10,000 miles on a 1.0l Ford Ecoboost is good going. I was getting 60,000 miles out of my Hyundai i40 clutch and I am a quarter of a million miles on the same clutch kind of a guy.
What was in it for the dealer when my new in 1989 Cavalier only needed service parts and a brake light switch in 90,000 miles? And should the clutch fail on that car a removable panel on the clutch housing meant the clutch could be in an out in half an hour. They soon put a stop to that kind of nonsense. It became a six hour job in the Vectra B.
Ultimately the adoption of EVs will kill a lot of big manufacturers for exactly this reason. When you design cars to be difficult to service and to break, you know that you will have a lengthy revenue stream in the future. What maintenance revenue stream for Tesla? They don't even have a service schedule.
This was an early source of contention with our 2014 Nissan Leaf. Evans Hellshaw wanted to charge their usual crazy service costs (and notoriously were caught pissing in the wash bucket for one guy's Leaf service) despite the car not needing any actual maintenance. So I negotiated a 3 year free service agreement on a Columbo close. Which they then tried to get out of despite having a written agreement...
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 ... ;_
I've been round it - I'm not a museum fan, but it's well done, and with its individual stories rather touching. "The Martyrs" as a group are harder to relate to than the people who took part.
I'd like to see a museum - or more recognition of - the Kinder Mass Trespass. It had a massive effect on the country we live in today.
Although I suppose Kinder Scout and Bleaklow are a museum to it, in some sort of way...
How about a thousand Anthony Gormleys, all astride Kinder scout?
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 ... ;_
I've been round it - I'm not a museum fan, but it's well done, and with its individual stories rather touching. "The Martyrs" as a group are harder to relate to than the people who took part.
I'd like to see a museum - or more recognition of - the Kinder Mass Trespass. It had a massive effect on the country we live in today.
Although I suppose Kinder Scout and Bleaklow are a museum to it, in some sort of way...
You mighjt enjoy this if you've not read it, though their idea of a visitor centre seems to have come to nothing as it was written nearly 10 years ago:
Family legend has it that my granddad took part in a later (the second?) mass trespass, more or less by accident, although information on later ones are hard to come by. He told me a story once of cycling on a tandem with a friend from his home on Derby, and pushing the bike up Jacob's Ladder onto Kinder. He said the mud was so thick it was three steps up, two steps back.
I'm surprised that Boris is rated so highly, even as a comedian. His timing is awful. He goes off at tangents and you keep thinking "Finish the bloody sentence."
Frankie Howerd did it much better.
Johnson's comedy is more visual and basic. He is Benny Hill.
Yep. Chases anything in a skirt at high speed and has a demeaning attitude to people with disabilities and disfigurements (like their watermelon smiles).
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"...
Stand by for "these things happened after Brexit, not because of it". A bit like "they died with Covid, not of it".
In all likelihood the only way we would have got a semiconductor factory is with a bung. The US government is spending tens of billions to support the US semiconductor business, despite that business being highly profitable as it is. Left to their own devices most semiconductor companies would choose to build fabs in east Asia for logistical reasons. i.e. Make the chips near where the parts need to go next.
Exactly. They've already said they're expecting a bung from the EU (and no doubt from whatever nation it ends up in too). So if we'd still been in the EU we almost certainly still wouldn't have got the factory but we would have paid for the bung.
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 ... ;_
I've been round it - I'm not a museum fan, but it's well done, and with its individual stories rather touching. "The Martyrs" as a group are harder to relate to than the people who took part.
I'd like to see a museum - or more recognition of - the Kinder Mass Trespass. It had a massive effect on the country we live in today.
Although I suppose Kinder Scout and Bleaklow are a museum to it, in some sort of way...
How about a thousand Anthony Gormleys, all astride Kinder scout?
Don't talk about my fellow ramblers in that manner!
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...
Way off topic
You have two 993s? The most inflationary 911s (outside the 912) of the moment. Wow! I loved the blue targa they did on Wheeler Dealers years ago. At the time they were pennies. I feel, as I can't afford the last of the air-cooled cars I should invest in a first of the water cooled cars, but 994s are not as cheap as they were.
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.
Maybe not everyone is seeing pay rises but a great many are ... And equally importantly perhaps a great many hope to do so too. It just seems those who are lining up for pay rises are the "wrong" kind of people for you ... The sort who should be getting their income from UC instead of wages in your eyes perhaps?
As for energy bills going up that's a shame but its global due to the energy market globally. But also quite frankly energy is a relatively small part of a household's budget and out of touch self-entitled people who are only now discovering the perils of inflation are making me very amused.
The average household energy bill is £95 per month. The average household rent bill is £868 per month.
As I'm utterly fed up of repeating, housing costs have gone up by over 6% compound growth per annum while wages haven't, since before the end of the twentieth century. Wages have only gone up by 2.8% compound growth per annum in the same time.
Which is a bigger challenge to a household's budget: a 6% increase on your £868 monthly bill, or a 10% increase on a £95 monthly bill?
The latter will only be your top concern if you're fortunate enough not to worry about paying for keeping a roof over your head.
Concur to an extent but housing payments gets extra government support that have been tracking housing inflation over time, hence the massive increase in housing benefit.
So for people on universal credit getting housing benefit the energy bills are the bigger short term factor. For people above the universal credit level who don't fully/mostly own their homes then housing is the biggest factor. For people who fully own their homes, they want the house price inflation so are back to energy being the biggest factor.
.@afneil on @LBC: "You can have more alliteration, as Mr Johnson had, than a West Coast poet from the 1960s on LSD. That's all fine.
"But we're a country with major problems and we need to know the Government's solution to these problems and on that Mr Johnson had not a jot."
And that is why it is getting a beating. Sunny uplit futures are great when things are on the up. When things are on the down you have to first identify why that is and map your way out to the sunny places ahead.
The Tory position remains incoherent. There is no crisis. There is a crisis but its your fault. There isn't a crisis because look at Europe. There is a crisis but you can't blame Brexit. There isn't a crisis and we won't bring in workers. There is a crisis and we are bringing in workers. There are no downsides. There are downsides but actually they were the plan all along and aren't they marvellous.
If the government was not the Muppet Show, if they had an Alastair Campbell / Peter Mandleson / Dominic Cummings strategist then they would have had all this laid out. This is what we are doing, these are the issues we can mitigate, these we can't mitigate but here's how we will spin them, here's the line repeat the line until people believe it. Instead we have *this*.
Kermit the Frog.
What are the downsides, if any, of the driver shortage on the continent?
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 ... ;_
I've been round it - I'm not a museum fan, but it's well done, and with its individual stories rather touching. "The Martyrs" as a group are harder to relate to than the people who took part.
I'd like to see a museum - or more recognition of - the Kinder Mass Trespass. It had a massive effect on the country we live in today.
Although I suppose Kinder Scout and Bleaklow are a museum to it, in some sort of way...
not enough of an effect given large parts of the England are not open to the public when no good reason they should not be including waterways
I have some sympathy with that. However, before the Kinder Mass Trespass, access rights were regressing considerably. After it, legislation considerably opened the countryside up. But it's a work in progress.
Waterways in particular are a gaping hole in the legislation.
However: as our friends in Scotland have discovered, access is fine in theory: as long as the public behave responsibly. And that's a big issue. People in farming have genuine concerns about people accessing their land. Open Access is a responsibility as well as right. Come parts of Scotland, e.g. Loch Lomond, are struggling with this.
As it happens, I haven't encountered many GOMLs ("Get Orrf My Land") when out and about, off-public routes. On my >6,000 mile coastal walk, I had one, in Scotland, on a broad track across farmland where I was doing zero harm. And incidentally, someone who threatened us in Ullapool for parking our motorhome near his house. On my recent running madness, I've had one farmer GOML me for using a footpath that he said had been 'closed' for decades, despite it being on the official maps. As there was an alternative a few hundred metres away, it was no big thing.
But generally I see only kindness. Including one farmer who found me wild camping on his land, and invited me in for breakfast. Or a man who invited me to camp in his large garden, much to the surprise of his wife when she found me there!
There is another more fundamental issue with the Scottish open access system, not in its theory/philosophy - which I agree with whole heartedly - but with its application and unseen consequences.
Scottish OS maps do not show footpaths/public rights of way as they do on English maps. I don't know if this is a consequence of the open access scheme or not but it makes actually planning walks bloody difficult. The fact that you are allowed to walk where you like doesn't help if you can't actually see where you can practically walk.
Boris' speech getting a malleting by that well known anti-govt broadcaster James O'Brien Nick Ferrari. And also by all the callers.
Surely some mistake. The PB Tory hot take last night suggested this was a speech whose wit and wisdom knew no bounds.
What you want from a leader's speech is real vision and substance, leavened by enough jokes to make sitting through it entertaining. This leader's effort over-achieved on the jokes; strip them away and there is next to nothing there.
Like Starmer's, Boris's speech could have used an editor's blue pencil. I've heard worse but stripped down, it was a wishlist with jokes, rather than anything resembling a plan.
There is a plan for a high wage high skill economy but the problem Boris and HMG face is that the cost of living crisis is now and how HMG deals with it will determine their hopes of another election win
Not quite
There is a dream of a high wage, high skill economy but I've never seen any plan for one in this country.
Until last year any plan was subsided by a short term profit motive that said employ another cheap worker, investment will eat into our immediate profits..
Are you suggesting stopping HGV tests for 18 months was not part of a grand plan to raise the existing drivers wages? Surely it cant be down to covid, when we were happy to allow taxis throughout.
.@afneil on @LBC: "You can have more alliteration, as Mr Johnson had, than a West Coast poet from the 1960s on LSD. That's all fine.
"But we're a country with major problems and we need to know the Government's solution to these problems and on that Mr Johnson had not a jot."
And that is why it is getting a beating. Sunny uplit futures are great when things are on the up. When things are on the down you have to first identify why that is and map your way out to the sunny places ahead.
The Tory position remains incoherent. There is no crisis. There is a crisis but its your fault. There isn't a crisis because look at Europe. There is a crisis but you can't blame Brexit. There isn't a crisis and we won't bring in workers. There is a crisis and we are bringing in workers. There are no downsides. There are downsides but actually they were the plan all along and aren't they marvellous.
If the government was not the Muppet Show, if they had an Alastair Campbell / Peter Mandleson / Dominic Cummings strategist then they would have had all this laid out. This is what we are doing, these are the issues we can mitigate, these we can't mitigate but here's how we will spin them, here's the line repeat the line until people believe it. Instead we have *this*.
Kermit the Frog.
What are the downsides, if any, of the driver shortage on the continent?
It is slower and more expensive to move stuff around. But remember that the driver shortage isn't universal, it is in patches. On a continent that is both a single logistics network and a single employment market. Drivers and vehicles gets filled from other countries - as an example some of the "driver shortages" in places like Poland are due to them winning contracts in Germany.
What is a real problem is getting stuff to the UK. My clients shift refrigerated product out of Romania to places like the Netherlands without issues. To the UK? You can't shift small loads at all. You can't consolidate very easily due to caobtage and paperwork issues. I've just opened up a chilled business for them here and it took a month to plan transport.
And yet fools and outright liars try to tell people that there is no UK-only issue, that Europe has a driver shortage therefore its the same there. It isn't, they know it isn't, they hope that some people will just accept what they are told without question.
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"...
Stand by for "these things happened after Brexit, not because of it". A bit like "they died with Covid, not of it".
In all likelihood the only way we would have got a semiconductor factory is with a bung. The US government is spending tens of billions to support the US semiconductor business, despite that business being highly profitable as it is. Left to their own devices most semiconductor companies would choose to build fabs in east Asia for logistical reasons. i.e. Make the chips near where the parts need to go next.
Exactly. They've already said they're expecting a bung from the EU (and no doubt from whatever nation it ends up in too). So if we'd still been in the EU we almost certainly still wouldn't have got the factory but we would have paid for the bung.
That's not a reason to be in the EU.
No doubt that if Intel did build a fab here the very same people would bemoan us giving the highly profitable Intel many hundreds of millions of pounds to do so.
I'd much rather the UK had a R&D centre than a fab, or an HQ ideally. But giving such corporations huge amounts of tax payer money to open fabs is peverse.
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.
Maybe not everyone is seeing pay rises but a great many are ... And equally importantly perhaps a great many hope to do so too. It just seems those who are lining up for pay rises are the "wrong" kind of people for you ... The sort who should be getting their income from UC instead of wages in your eyes perhaps?
As for energy bills going up that's a shame but its global due to the energy market globally. But also quite frankly energy is a relatively small part of a household's budget and out of touch self-entitled people who are only now discovering the perils of inflation are making me very amused.
The average household energy bill is £95 per month. The average household rent bill is £868 per month.
As I'm utterly fed up of repeating, housing costs have gone up by over 6% compound growth per annum while wages haven't, since before the end of the twentieth century. Wages have only gone up by 2.8% compound growth per annum in the same time.
Which is a bigger challenge to a household's budget: a 6% increase on your £868 monthly bill, or a 10% increase on a £95 monthly bill?
The latter will only be your top concern if you're fortunate enough not to worry about paying for keeping a roof over your head.
Concur to an extent but housing payments gets extra government support that have been tracking housing inflation over time, hence the massive increase in housing benefit.
So for people on universal credit getting housing benefit the energy bills are the bigger short term factor. For people above the universal credit level who don't fully/mostly own their homes then housing is the biggest factor. For people who fully own their homes, they want the house price inflation so are back to energy being the biggest factor.
To an extent Lord Copper.
Even for those on UC housing payments are capped (and quite rightly) so a very large proportion of UC claimants will still be paying for housing costs and the differential between claim and bills is probably over £95 per month.
Plus of course for anyone working UC is tapered so they won't be getting the full housing element anyway.
Your final factor sums up why the media is so much more concerned with energy inflation rather than the devastating housing inflation the nation has suffered for decades. They've viewed housing inflation as a good thing, while energy inflation affects them.
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.
I agree up to a point - although I'm a fan of high taxes and good services, a taper effect producing anything over 50-60% effective tax on people who are already hard up is seriously demoralising, and impossible to justify when people on 100 grand pay much less.
But there are a chunk of people who can't get jobs, for reasons which are only to a limited degree their fault. I know a brother and sister who grew up in a home full of violence. They ran away together at 15 and tried to make it without much education. One succeeded and got a good acting career. The other failed and has not worked for many years. It's hard to see that as more than just good and bad luck respectively, and making the latter live on the permanent edge of penury is not really encouraging him to make an effort - he's made lots of efforts, and has now I think given up.
Its terrible that someone feels like they ought to give up, especially given we're in an environment with plenty of vacancies.
But just giving more cash isn't going to make him start trying again. What make him start trying again is ensuring that when he tries, he actually gets to keep his income that he works hard for instead of the state taking back 75% in taper, NI and Income Tax.
Whenever I've spoken long to people who've 'given up' the message that comes through in the end far, far too often is "why bother, I'll lose my benefits" - and they're right. They're trapped in poverty and its not appropriate, we need to end the poverty trap not simply give more cash to say "OK you're £1 above the poverty line now we can forget about you".
It does not have to be either or, we can get the taper down below 50% and pay a liveable level of universal credit.
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.
I agree up to a point - although I'm a fan of high taxes and good services, a taper effect producing anything over 50-60% effective tax on people who are already hard up is seriously demoralising, and impossible to justify when people on 100 grand pay much less.
But there are a chunk of people who can't get jobs, for reasons which are only to a limited degree their fault. I know a brother and sister who grew up in a home full of violence. They ran away together at 15 and tried to make it without much education. One succeeded and got a good acting career. The other failed and has not worked for many years. It's hard to see that as more than just good and bad luck respectively, and making the latter live on the permanent edge of penury is not really encouraging him to make an effort - he's made lots of efforts, and has now I think given up.
Its terrible that someone feels like they ought to give up, especially given we're in an environment with plenty of vacancies.
But just giving more cash isn't going to make him start trying again. What make him start trying again is ensuring that when he tries, he actually gets to keep his income that he works hard for instead of the state taking back 75% in taper, NI and Income Tax.
Whenever I've spoken long to people who've 'given up' the message that comes through in the end far, far too often is "why bother, I'll lose my benefits" - and they're right. They're trapped in poverty and its not appropriate, we need to end the poverty trap not simply give more cash to say "OK you're £1 above the poverty line now we can forget about you".
It is not just that they will lose benefits but it can be that if things do not work out, they'll have the devil's own job reclaiming those benefits. Perhaps there could be a scheme where benefit claims are put on hold for six months ready to be reactivated at the touch of a button, though I guess this would not have helped the shift to UC.
And sometimes it is just hard getting a job even when there are jobs to be had. I spent years on the dole getting knockback after knockback because I was too inexperienced or too highly educated. And it is always safer to give the job to someone already doing the same job for the company down the road.
It might have been significant that Amazon's recent job adverts explicitly said you do not need experience or qualifications to work there.
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.
I agree up to a point - although I'm a fan of high taxes and good services, a taper effect producing anything over 50-60% effective tax on people who are already hard up is seriously demoralising, and impossible to justify when people on 100 grand pay much less.
But there are a chunk of people who can't get jobs, for reasons which are only to a limited degree their fault. I know a brother and sister who grew up in a home full of violence. They ran away together at 15 and tried to make it without much education. One succeeded and got a good acting career. The other failed and has not worked for many years. It's hard to see that as more than just good and bad luck respectively, and making the latter live on the permanent edge of penury is not really encouraging him to make an effort - he's made lots of efforts, and has now I think given up.
Its terrible that someone feels like they ought to give up, especially given we're in an environment with plenty of vacancies.
But just giving more cash isn't going to make him start trying again. What make him start trying again is ensuring that when he tries, he actually gets to keep his income that he works hard for instead of the state taking back 75% in taper, NI and Income Tax.
Whenever I've spoken long to people who've 'given up' the message that comes through in the end far, far too often is "why bother, I'll lose my benefits" - and they're right. They're trapped in poverty and its not appropriate, we need to end the poverty trap not simply give more cash to say "OK you're £1 above the poverty line now we can forget about you".
It does not have to be either or, we can get the taper down below 50% and pay a liveable level of universal credit.
If we had a bottomless sum of money yes, although no doubt people would start demanding that money is redirected to the NHS before long.
If it is either/or then getting the taper down (and not just below 50% but very far below that ideally) should be the top priority.
The more people feel they can keep, the more effort people put in.
Boris' speech getting a malleting by that well known anti-govt broadcaster James O'Brien Nick Ferrari. And also by all the callers.
Surely some mistake. The PB Tory hot take last night suggested this was a speech whose wit and wisdom knew no bounds.
What you want from a leader's speech is real vision and substance, leavened by enough jokes to make sitting through it entertaining. This leader's effort over-achieved on the jokes; strip them away and there is next to nothing there.
Like Starmer's, Boris's speech could have used an editor's blue pencil. I've heard worse but stripped down, it was a wishlist with jokes, rather than anything resembling a plan.
There is a plan for a high wage high skill economy but the problem Boris and HMG face is that the cost of living crisis is now and how HMG deals with it will determine their hopes of another election win
Not quite
There is a dream of a high wage, high skill economy but I've never seen any plan for one in this country.
Until last year any plan was subsided by a short term profit motive that said employ another cheap worker, investment will eat into our immediate profits..
Indeed.
But people have complained for as long as I remember about that short-termism.
Now we have the beginning of business being forced to end short-termism and think in terms of investment and upskilling the workforce.
And we have an effortless shift from 'short-termism bad, investment good' to 'investment bad, short-termism good' among opponents.
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.
I agree up to a point - although I'm a fan of high taxes and good services, a taper effect producing anything over 50-60% effective tax on people who are already hard up is seriously demoralising, and impossible to justify when people on 100 grand pay much less.
But there are a chunk of people who can't get jobs, for reasons which are only to a limited degree their fault. I know a brother and sister who grew up in a home full of violence. They ran away together at 15 and tried to make it without much education. One succeeded and got a good acting career. The other failed and has not worked for many years. It's hard to see that as more than just good and bad luck respectively, and making the latter live on the permanent edge of penury is not really encouraging him to make an effort - he's made lots of efforts, and has now I think given up.
Its terrible that someone feels like they ought to give up, especially given we're in an environment with plenty of vacancies.
But just giving more cash isn't going to make him start trying again. What make him start trying again is ensuring that when he tries, he actually gets to keep his income that he works hard for instead of the state taking back 75% in taper, NI and Income Tax.
Whenever I've spoken long to people who've 'given up' the message that comes through in the end far, far too often is "why bother, I'll lose my benefits" - and they're right. They're trapped in poverty and its not appropriate, we need to end the poverty trap not simply give more cash to say "OK you're £1 above the poverty line now we can forget about you".
It does not have to be either or, we can get the taper down below 50% and pay a liveable level of universal credit.
The problem is that you can't have a sane taper if tax rates are already at 35%. You would then end up with a taper running at 15% which would just drag a whole new set of workers into Universal Credit..
One reason why the taper is so high is because you want to be sure once people are earning above X, there is no universal credit payment.
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.
Maybe not everyone is seeing pay rises but a great many are ... And equally importantly perhaps a great many hope to do so too. It just seems those who are lining up for pay rises are the "wrong" kind of people for you ... The sort who should be getting their income from UC instead of wages in your eyes perhaps?
As for energy bills going up that's a shame but its global due to the energy market globally. But also quite frankly energy is a relatively small part of a household's budget and out of touch self-entitled people who are only now discovering the perils of inflation are making me very amused.
The average household energy bill is £95 per month. The average household rent bill is £868 per month.
As I'm utterly fed up of repeating, housing costs have gone up by over 6% compound growth per annum while wages haven't, since before the end of the twentieth century. Wages have only gone up by 2.8% compound growth per annum in the same time.
Which is a bigger challenge to a household's budget: a 6% increase on your £868 monthly bill, or a 10% increase on a £95 monthly bill?
The latter will only be your top concern if you're fortunate enough not to worry about paying for keeping a roof over your head.
Concur to an extent but housing payments gets extra government support that have been tracking housing inflation over time, hence the massive increase in housing benefit.
So for people on universal credit getting housing benefit the energy bills are the bigger short term factor. For people above the universal credit level who don't fully/mostly own their homes then housing is the biggest factor. For people who fully own their homes, they want the house price inflation so are back to energy being the biggest factor.
To an extent Lord Copper.
Even for those on UC housing payments are capped (and quite rightly) so a very large proportion of UC claimants will still be paying for housing costs and the differential between claim and bills is probably over £95 per month.
Plus of course for anyone working UC is tapered so they won't be getting the full housing element anyway.
Your final factor sums up why the media is so much more concerned with energy inflation rather than the devastating housing inflation the nation has suffered for decades. They've viewed housing inflation as a good thing, while energy inflation affects them.
If you own a house then house price inflation (of an asset you own) is good.
Otherwise house price inflation (if you are looking to buy a first home, or renting) is just bad.
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.
I agree up to a point - although I'm a fan of high taxes and good services, a taper effect producing anything over 50-60% effective tax on people who are already hard up is seriously demoralising, and impossible to justify when people on 100 grand pay much less.
But there are a chunk of people who can't get jobs, for reasons which are only to a limited degree their fault. I know a brother and sister who grew up in a home full of violence. They ran away together at 15 and tried to make it without much education. One succeeded and got a good acting career. The other failed and has not worked for many years. It's hard to see that as more than just good and bad luck respectively, and making the latter live on the permanent edge of penury is not really encouraging him to make an effort - he's made lots of efforts, and has now I think given up.
Its terrible that someone feels like they ought to give up, especially given we're in an environment with plenty of vacancies.
But just giving more cash isn't going to make him start trying again. What make him start trying again is ensuring that when he tries, he actually gets to keep his income that he works hard for instead of the state taking back 75% in taper, NI and Income Tax.
Whenever I've spoken long to people who've 'given up' the message that comes through in the end far, far too often is "why bother, I'll lose my benefits" - and they're right. They're trapped in poverty and its not appropriate, we need to end the poverty trap not simply give more cash to say "OK you're £1 above the poverty line now we can forget about you".
It is not just that they will lose benefits but it can be that if things do not work out, they'll have the devil's own job reclaiming those benefits. Perhaps there could be a scheme where benefit claims are put on hold for six months ready to be reactivated at the touch of a button, though I guess this would not have helped the shift to UC.
And sometimes it is just hard getting a job even when there are jobs to be had. I spent years on the dole getting knockback after knockback because I was too inexperienced or too highly educated. And it is always safer to give the job to someone already doing the same job for the company down the road.
It might have been significant that Amazon's recent job adverts explicitly said you do not need experience or qualifications to work there.
One reason that UC is much better than JSA was is that you don't "sign off" and "sign on" again so your first point isn't an issue unless you've taken a job so high paying as to no longer be eligible to in-work benefits anymore, which would be incredibly good for someone long term unemployed re-entering the workplace.
Though if we went with my preferred solution of merging UC, NI, Income Tax, Student Loans etc all into a single "negative income tax" aka a UBI + a single rate of tax then this issue would never arise. Your tax/benefits would automatically adjust based on a single rate based on real time reporting of wages and you'd never need to sign for anything ever again ideally.
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"...
Stand by for "these things happened after Brexit, not because of it". A bit like "they died with Covid, not of it".
In all likelihood the only way we would have got a semiconductor factory is with a bung. The US government is spending tens of billions to support the US semiconductor business, despite that business being highly profitable as it is. Left to their own devices most semiconductor companies would choose to build fabs in east Asia for logistical reasons. i.e. Make the chips near where the parts need to go next.
Exactly. They've already said they're expecting a bung from the EU (and no doubt from whatever nation it ends up in too). So if we'd still been in the EU we almost certainly still wouldn't have got the factory but we would have paid for the bung.
That's not a reason to be in the EU.
No doubt that if Intel did build a fab here the very same people would bemoan us giving the highly profitable Intel many hundreds of millions of pounds to do so.
I'd much rather the UK had a R&D centre than a fab, or an HQ ideally. But giving such corporations huge amounts of tax payer money to open fabs is peverse.
+1 and we really don't have enough people skilled to run a proper fab. Chances are intel are of to Dresden (which has the skills) but need a beauty parade to maximise the subsidy given.
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...
Way off topic
You have two 993s? The most inflationary 911s (outside the 912) of the moment. Wow! I loved the blue targa they did on Wheeler Dealers years ago. At the time they were pennies. I feel, as I can't afford the last of the air-cooled cars I should invest in a first of the water cooled cars, but 994s are not as cheap as they were.
The first of the water-cooled are the 996, and also the cheapest at the moment thanks to the unloved front end design. They’re slowly starting to creep up in price though, as the newer models have got fatter.
Those who are demanding some masterplan from Boris are starting from the wrong place. Their perception is that we are in some form of existential crisis, well we must be because we Brexited.
The reality is rather more complicated. What we have is record employment, a country that is generating jobs faster than we can fill them and a need to think about how the available labour is better utilised. We have enjoyed a sudden burst of growth triggered by the end of lockdown and some distribution problems as a result. We also have long term problems which Boris did, in fairness, talk about yesterday: the shortage of skills, the dependence on cheap labour, the lack of aspiration in some areas and the waste of talent as a result. He could also have talked about our lack of investment (although Rishi is trying to improve that), saving and excess consumption.
I don't think this needs a masterplan or even a vision. It needs us to keep buggering on for quite a while addressing problems as they arise and trying to gradually improve things. That is what we will get from Boris (along with the odd daft idea or white elephant) and it should in fact do us fine.
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.
Maybe not everyone is seeing pay rises but a great many are ... And equally importantly perhaps a great many hope to do so too. It just seems those who are lining up for pay rises are the "wrong" kind of people for you ... The sort who should be getting their income from UC instead of wages in your eyes perhaps?
As for energy bills going up that's a shame but its global due to the energy market globally. But also quite frankly energy is a relatively small part of a household's budget and out of touch self-entitled people who are only now discovering the perils of inflation are making me very amused.
The average household energy bill is £95 per month. The average household rent bill is £868 per month.
As I'm utterly fed up of repeating, housing costs have gone up by over 6% compound growth per annum while wages haven't, since before the end of the twentieth century. Wages have only gone up by 2.8% compound growth per annum in the same time.
Which is a bigger challenge to a household's budget: a 6% increase on your £868 monthly bill, or a 10% increase on a £95 monthly bill?
The latter will only be your top concern if you're fortunate enough not to worry about paying for keeping a roof over your head.
Concur to an extent but housing payments gets extra government support that have been tracking housing inflation over time, hence the massive increase in housing benefit.
So for people on universal credit getting housing benefit the energy bills are the bigger short term factor. For people above the universal credit level who don't fully/mostly own their homes then housing is the biggest factor. For people who fully own their homes, they want the house price inflation so are back to energy being the biggest factor.
To an extent Lord Copper.
Even for those on UC housing payments are capped (and quite rightly) so a very large proportion of UC claimants will still be paying for housing costs and the differential between claim and bills is probably over £95 per month.
Plus of course for anyone working UC is tapered so they won't be getting the full housing element anyway.
Your final factor sums up why the media is so much more concerned with energy inflation rather than the devastating housing inflation the nation has suffered for decades. They've viewed housing inflation as a good thing, while energy inflation affects them.
If you own a house then house price inflation (of an asset you own) is good.
Otherwise house price inflation (if you are looking to buy a first home, or renting) is just bad.
Though that's short-termism from home owners too. If you own a house then even house price inflation is bad for you since if prices weren't going up faster than wages you'd find it much easier to sell your home and buy a better home.
If prices are going up, then anyone seeking to climb the property ladder is disadvantaged similarly to first time buyers.
The only real long-term winners are those who can downsize, or those who own multiple properties. Everyone else really loses.
Boris' speech getting a malleting by that well known anti-govt broadcaster James O'Brien Nick Ferrari. And also by all the callers.
Surely some mistake. The PB Tory hot take last night suggested this was a speech whose wit and wisdom knew no bounds.
What you want from a leader's speech is real vision and substance, leavened by enough jokes to make sitting through it entertaining. This leader's effort over-achieved on the jokes; strip them away and there is next to nothing there.
Like Starmer's, Boris's speech could have used an editor's blue pencil. I've heard worse but stripped down, it was a wishlist with jokes, rather than anything resembling a plan.
There is a plan for a high wage high skill economy but the problem Boris and HMG face is that the cost of living crisis is now and how HMG deals with it will determine their hopes of another election win
Not quite
There is a dream of a high wage, high skill economy but I've never seen any plan for one in this country.
Until last year any plan was subsided by a short term profit motive that said employ another cheap worker, investment will eat into our immediate profits..
Are you suggesting stopping HGV tests for 18 months was not part of a grand plan to raise the existing drivers wages? Surely it cant be down to covid, when we were happy to allow taxis throughout.
Taxis - self employed workers Testers - civil servants who have Health and Safety requirements and unions ensuring they are enforced.
First, the mandate part. The idea that a mandate can be attained for the exercise of powers reserved to one parliament at an election to another parliament is to establish a constitutional principle. This places devolved legislatures on an equal footing with the sovereign Parliament that created them......
Why should a democratic principle apply only to constitutional affairs? Does the referendum precedent apply across all devolved legislatures? Does it apply to other democratically-elected bodies, such as councils?
Whether one sincerely believes in this moveable feast of popular democracy, is just eager for Britain to get its just deserts for Brexit – or merely wants to see Boris Johnson come a cropper – these questions and others must be wrestled with. If pro-independence parties win a majority of seats at the next Holyrood election on manifestos promising a referendum on removing the nuclear deterrent from the Clyde, is it democratically offensive to deny such a vote? True, defence is a reserved matter but, then, so is the constitution.
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 ... ;_
I've been round it - I'm not a museum fan, but it's well done, and with its individual stories rather touching. "The Martyrs" as a group are harder to relate to than the people who took part.
I'd like to see a museum - or more recognition of - the Kinder Mass Trespass. It had a massive effect on the country we live in today.
Although I suppose Kinder Scout and Bleaklow are a museum to it, in some sort of way...
not enough of an effect given large parts of the England are not open to the public when no good reason they should not be including waterways
I have some sympathy with that. However, before the Kinder Mass Trespass, access rights were regressing considerably. After it, legislation considerably opened the countryside up. But it's a work in progress.
Waterways in particular are a gaping hole in the legislation.
However: as our friends in Scotland have discovered, access is fine in theory: as long as the public behave responsibly. And that's a big issue. People in farming have genuine concerns about people accessing their land. Open Access is a responsibility as well as right. Come parts of Scotland, e.g. Loch Lomond, are struggling with this.
As it happens, I haven't encountered many GOMLs ("Get Orrf My Land") when out and about, off-public routes. On my >6,000 mile coastal walk, I had one, in Scotland, on a broad track across farmland where I was doing zero harm. And incidentally, someone who threatened us in Ullapool for parking our motorhome near his house. On my recent running madness, I've had one farmer GOML me for using a footpath that he said had been 'closed' for decades, despite it being on the official maps. As there was an alternative a few hundred metres away, it was no big thing.
But generally I see only kindness. Including one farmer who found me wild camping on his land, and invited me in for breakfast. Or a man who invited me to camp in his large garden, much to the surprise of his wife when she found me there!
There is another more fundamental issue with the Scottish open access system, not in its theory/philosophy - which I agree with whole heartedly - but with its application and unseen consequences.
Scottish OS maps do not show footpaths/public rights of way as they do on English maps. I don't know if this is a consequence of the open access scheme or not but it makes actually planning walks bloody difficult. The fact that you are allowed to walk where you like doesn't help if you can't actually see where you can practically walk.
AIUI - and I might be wrong - it's because the legislation that made councils formalise footpaths and put them on definitive maps (back in the 1930s/40s?) did not operate in Scotland.
Even in England, footpath/bridleway provision is very patchy. IMO your ?home area? of Lincolnshire is very poorly catered for.
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"...
Stand by for "these things happened after Brexit, not because of it". A bit like "they died with Covid, not of it".
In all likelihood the only way we would have got a semiconductor factory is with a bung. The US government is spending tens of billions to support the US semiconductor business, despite that business being highly profitable as it is. Left to their own devices most semiconductor companies would choose to build fabs in east Asia for logistical reasons. i.e. Make the chips near where the parts need to go next.
Exactly. They've already said they're expecting a bung from the EU (and no doubt from whatever nation it ends up in too). So if we'd still been in the EU we almost certainly still wouldn't have got the factory but we would have paid for the bung.
That's not a reason to be in the EU.
No doubt that if Intel did build a fab here the very same people would bemoan us giving the highly profitable Intel many hundreds of millions of pounds to do so.
I'd much rather the UK had a R&D centre than a fab, or an HQ ideally. But giving such corporations huge amounts of tax payer money to open fabs is peverse.
That’s a huge issue in the US, where states and cities compete to hand subsidies and tax breaks to large companies.
Much better to go down the Ireland route, of saying that taxes on companies are low for everyone.
+1 and we really don't have enough people skilled to run a proper fab. Chances are intel are of to Dresden (which has the skills) but need a beauty parade to maximise the subsidy given.
I'd be very happy for the likes of Intel to build fabs in the UK. I just don't think we should pay some of the most highly profitable businesses in the world in order for them to do so. The tech industry gets governments to pay to host fabs, data centres and so on, and then the governments watch those same companies hoover their profits out of the country by paying subsidiaries for "services". It's wrong.
I'm surprised that Boris is rated so highly, even as a comedian. His timing is awful. He goes off at tangents and you keep thinking "Finish the bloody sentence."
Frankie Howerd did it much better.
Johnson's comedy is more visual and basic. He is Benny Hill.
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 ... ;_
I've been round it - I'm not a museum fan, but it's well done, and with its individual stories rather touching. "The Martyrs" as a group are harder to relate to than the people who took part.
I'd like to see a museum - or more recognition of - the Kinder Mass Trespass. It had a massive effect on the country we live in today.
Although I suppose Kinder Scout and Bleaklow are a museum to it, in some sort of way...
not enough of an effect given large parts of the England are not open to the public when no good reason they should not be including waterways
I have some sympathy with that. However, before the Kinder Mass Trespass, access rights were regressing considerably. After it, legislation considerably opened the countryside up. But it's a work in progress.
Waterways in particular are a gaping hole in the legislation.
However: as our friends in Scotland have discovered, access is fine in theory: as long as the public behave responsibly. And that's a big issue. People in farming have genuine concerns about people accessing their land. Open Access is a responsibility as well as right. Come parts of Scotland, e.g. Loch Lomond, are struggling with this.
As it happens, I haven't encountered many GOMLs ("Get Orrf My Land") when out and about, off-public routes. On my >6,000 mile coastal walk, I had one, in Scotland, on a broad track across farmland where I was doing zero harm. And incidentally, someone who threatened us in Ullapool for parking our motorhome near his house. On my recent running madness, I've had one farmer GOML me for using a footpath that he said had been 'closed' for decades, despite it being on the official maps. As there was an alternative a few hundred metres away, it was no big thing.
But generally I see only kindness. Including one farmer who found me wild camping on his land, and invited me in for breakfast. Or a man who invited me to camp in his large garden, much to the surprise of his wife when she found me there!
There is another more fundamental issue with the Scottish open access system, not in its theory/philosophy - which I agree with whole heartedly - but with its application and unseen consequences.
Scottish OS maps do not show footpaths/public rights of way as they do on English maps. I don't know if this is a consequence of the open access scheme or not but it makes actually planning walks bloody difficult. The fact that you are allowed to walk where you like doesn't help if you can't actually see where you can practically walk.
I managed to find an app which did route planing including footpaths and public rights of way in Scotland, but it was a fiddle to find.
The problem with people wandering across land is that 99% are fine, but there are 1% who are determined to cause problems.
A number of years ago, when I was out horse riding, an idiot of the shouty type with a dog off the lead decided that, his dog having chased the farmers cows, he would have a go at us.
He was shouting about hunting - presumably unaware that 99% of people who ride horses have never been to hunt, much less participated.
He concluded the matter by hitting my horse with a stick to try and make it bolt. The horse I was riding was a hard case. He looked round with a gleam in his eye and kicked the idiot in question into low earth orbit....
Those who are demanding some masterplan from Boris are starting from the wrong place. Their perception is that we are in some form of existential crisis, well we must be because we Brexited.
The reality is rather more complicated. What we have is record employment, a country that is generating jobs faster than we can fill them and a need to think about how the available labour is better utilised. We have enjoyed a sudden burst of growth triggered by the end of lockdown and some distribution problems as a result. We also have long term problems which Boris did, in fairness, talk about yesterday: the shortage of skills, the dependence on cheap labour, the lack of aspiration in some areas and the waste of talent as a result. He could also have talked about our lack of investment (although Rishi is trying to improve that), saving and excess consumption.
I don't think this needs a masterplan or even a vision. It needs us to keep buggering on for quite a while addressing problems as they arise and trying to gradually improve things. That is what we will get from Boris (along with the odd daft idea or white elephant) and it should in fact do us fine.
Indeed.
Its going to be a process akin to evolutionary change in a general direction with many uncertainties rather than a roadmap with a precise process and endpoint.
Boris' speech getting a malleting by that well known anti-govt broadcaster James O'Brien Nick Ferrari. And also by all the callers.
Surely some mistake. The PB Tory hot take last night suggested this was a speech whose wit and wisdom knew no bounds.
What you want from a leader's speech is real vision and substance, leavened by enough jokes to make sitting through it entertaining. This leader's effort over-achieved on the jokes; strip them away and there is next to nothing there.
Like Starmer's, Boris's speech could have used an editor's blue pencil. I've heard worse but stripped down, it was a wishlist with jokes, rather than anything resembling a plan.
There is a plan for a high wage high skill economy but the problem Boris and HMG face is that the cost of living crisis is now and how HMG deals with it will determine their hopes of another election win
Not quite
There is a dream of a high wage, high skill economy but I've never seen any plan for one in this country.
Until last year any plan was subsided by a short term profit motive that said employ another cheap worker, investment will eat into our immediate profits..
Are you suggesting stopping HGV tests for 18 months was not part of a grand plan to raise the existing drivers wages? Surely it cant be down to covid, when we were happy to allow taxis throughout.
Taxis - self employed workers Testers - civil servants who have Health and Safety requirements and unions ensuring they are enforced.
Driving lessons were also stopped owing to Covid but instructors are not civil servants.
Boris' speech getting a malleting by that well known anti-govt broadcaster James O'Brien Nick Ferrari. And also by all the callers.
Surely some mistake. The PB Tory hot take last night suggested this was a speech whose wit and wisdom knew no bounds.
What you want from a leader's speech is real vision and substance, leavened by enough jokes to make sitting through it entertaining. This leader's effort over-achieved on the jokes; strip them away and there is next to nothing there.
Like Starmer's, Boris's speech could have used an editor's blue pencil. I've heard worse but stripped down, it was a wishlist with jokes, rather than anything resembling a plan.
There is a plan for a high wage high skill economy but the problem Boris and HMG face is that the cost of living crisis is now and how HMG deals with it will determine their hopes of another election win
Not quite
There is a dream of a high wage, high skill economy but I've never seen any plan for one in this country.
Until last year any plan was subsided by a short term profit motive that said employ another cheap worker, investment will eat into our immediate profits..
Are you suggesting stopping HGV tests for 18 months was not part of a grand plan to raise the existing drivers wages? Surely it cant be down to covid, when we were happy to allow taxis throughout.
Taxis - self employed workers Testers - civil servants who have Health and Safety requirements and unions ensuring they are enforced.
Driving lessons were also stopped owing to Covid but instructors are not civil servants.
I think it was that the directive from the top was seen as "shut down *everything* we can, put as many people as required on furlough".
The driving instructors - many of whom are self employed but contracted to the big driving instruction outfits - were not happy.
Mr. Away, Ian Mortimer's got some great ones, from Roger Mortimer (The Greatest Traitor) and Edward III (The Perfecting King). And his book on Henry IV (The Fears of Henry IV) is excellent too.
That’s a huge issue in the US, where states and cities compete to hand subsidies and tax breaks to large companies.
Much better to go down the Ireland route, of saying that taxes on companies are low for everyone.
Data centres are the worst as once they are built they do not employ many people. The idea that they bring lots of skilled jobs to an area is nonsense, so paying millions to host one is nuts. Still it goes down well with the rubes when a politician can boast of bringing "Facebook to Montana" or something like that.
Those who are demanding some masterplan from Boris are starting from the wrong place. Their perception is that we are in some form of existential crisis, well we must be because we Brexited.
The reality is rather more complicated. What we have is record employment, a country that is generating jobs faster than we can fill them and a need to think about how the available labour is better utilised. We have enjoyed a sudden burst of growth triggered by the end of lockdown and some distribution problems as a result. We also have long term problems which Boris did, in fairness, talk about yesterday: the shortage of skills, the dependence on cheap labour, the lack of aspiration in some areas and the waste of talent as a result. He could also have talked about our lack of investment (although Rishi is trying to improve that), saving and excess consumption.
I don't think this needs a masterplan or even a vision. It needs us to keep buggering on for quite a while addressing problems as they arise and trying to gradually improve things. That is what we will get from Boris (along with the odd daft idea or white elephant) and it should in fact do us fine.
Indeed.
Its going to be a process akin to evolutionary change in a general direction with many uncertainties rather than a roadmap with a precise process and endpoint.
As it should be.
The last thing we need is the state to get involved in picking winners and losers.
The state needs to set out a general vision and clear the hurdles to get there as much as possible - let people do the detail.
First, the mandate part. The idea that a mandate can be attained for the exercise of powers reserved to one parliament at an election to another parliament is to establish a constitutional principle. This places devolved legislatures on an equal footing with the sovereign Parliament that created them......
Why should a democratic principle apply only to constitutional affairs? Does the referendum precedent apply across all devolved legislatures? Does it apply to other democratically-elected bodies, such as councils?
Whether one sincerely believes in this moveable feast of popular democracy, is just eager for Britain to get its just deserts for Brexit – or merely wants to see Boris Johnson come a cropper – these questions and others must be wrestled with. If pro-independence parties win a majority of seats at the next Holyrood election on manifestos promising a referendum on removing the nuclear deterrent from the Clyde, is it democratically offensive to deny such a vote? True, defence is a reserved matter but, then, so is the constitution.
Interesting. The questions in democracy, which like justice, freedon, motherhood and apple pie is a universal good thing, are of course: Which democracy? Whose democracy? How democracy?
In this sense democracy is always going to be subordinate to the exercise of power, which as always is never freely given away by those who have it.
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...
Way off topic
You have two 993s? The most inflationary 911s (outside the 912) of the moment. Wow! I loved the blue targa they did on Wheeler Dealers years ago. At the time they were pennies. I feel, as I can't afford the last of the air-cooled cars I should invest in a first of the water cooled cars, but 994s are not as cheap as they were.
The first of the water-cooled are the 996, and also the cheapest at the moment thanks to the unloved front end design. They’re slowly starting to creep up in price though, as the newer models have got fatter.
That’s a huge issue in the US, where states and cities compete to hand subsidies and tax breaks to large companies.
Much better to go down the Ireland route, of saying that taxes on companies are low for everyone.
Data centres are the worst as once they are built they do not employ many people. The idea that they bring lots of skilled jobs to an area is nonsense, so paying millions to host one is nuts. Still it goes down well with the rubes when a politician can boast of bringing "Facebook to Montana" or something like that.
You would have thought there was a clue in the fact Microsoft have spent years working out how to put them in submersible containers and putting then in the sea
Those who are demanding some masterplan from Boris are starting from the wrong place. Their perception is that we are in some form of existential crisis, well we must be because we Brexited.
The reality is rather more complicated. What we have is record employment, a country that is generating jobs faster than we can fill them and a need to think about how the available labour is better utilised. We have enjoyed a sudden burst of growth triggered by the end of lockdown and some distribution problems as a result. We also have long term problems which Boris did, in fairness, talk about yesterday: the shortage of skills, the dependence on cheap labour, the lack of aspiration in some areas and the waste of talent as a result. He could also have talked about our lack of investment (although Rishi is trying to improve that), saving and excess consumption.
I don't think this needs a masterplan or even a vision. It needs us to keep buggering on for quite a while addressing problems as they arise and trying to gradually improve things. That is what we will get from Boris (along with the odd daft idea or white elephant) and it should in fact do us fine.
Great post, as i have said before for someone who left school in the early 80s when unemployment was 3 million, to have one of the major current issues as too many jobs is quite hard to comprehend.
That’s a huge issue in the US, where states and cities compete to hand subsidies and tax breaks to large companies.
Much better to go down the Ireland route, of saying that taxes on companies are low for everyone.
Data centres are the worst as once they are built they do not employ many people. The idea that they bring lots of skilled jobs to an area is nonsense, so paying millions to host one is nuts. Still it goes down well with the rubes when a politician can boast of bringing "Facebook to Montana" or something like that.
You would have thought there was a clue in the fact Microsoft have spent years working out how to put them in submersible containers and putting then in the sea
It impresses people when they see these huge buildings. What they don't realise is how few people work in them, and that many of those that do aren't locals but contractors visiting for the day. Something like an equally large Amazon distribution centre would likely do more good for the local economy.
Comments
I think it’s a serious misreading to say that this is just a spat which can be sorted out after the French election. The rift is deeper and wider than in 2003. French trust in the UK as a reliable partner has broken down. That will take time and sustained effort to repair.
https://twitter.com/TomMcTague/status/1446008809554681863?s=20
That's about all you need to know.
James O'BrienNick Ferrari. And also by all the callers.Dubai is a long and thin city, with fast roads. Taxis, with two drivers per car in shifts, rack up 1,000km a day on average!
The majority of modern cars are incredibly reliable by any standards. The future problems of today’s cars will be the electric bits, rather than the mechanicals.
I am not sure what regressive food price inflation will do for structural imbalances.
Mike Smithson says he does not know what all this polling about speeches means in political terms. Essentially nothing, except that everyone knows the UK is heading for the sort of winter which breaks governments (NHS, Covid inflation, energy, tubs of Celebrations shortage, pigs being shot).
In 2017 there was no electable leader in the GE. In 2019 there was (in the Brexit circumstances) exactly one - the minimum required. SKS is determined that in 2023/4 there will be at least one, himself. Whether there will be one or two people electable as PM is an unknown. The electability of Boris is not a given until we are well past this winter.
SKS has a 40%+ chance of being next PM.
I suspect the problem in Lincolnshire is that times have changed. When I were a lad ... etc, we'd dream of working on the land.
Not really, but there was little else for married women with the kids at school, or the older kids who needed pocket money. Now other opportunities are available. No, stop with the 4 Yorkshire men sketch. We can import the labour as an easy fix but it won't be a permanent solution.
Although I suppose Kinder Scout and Bleaklow are a museum to it, in some sort of way...
I am looking at changes to UC rules, a good increase in the minimum wage, equalising pension tax relief at 25%, and changes to IHT and even CGT
It is a very important budget
Your persistent refusal to acknowledge some basic historical facts, including the comparison between the invasions of the 11th and 13th centuries, does not necessarily enhance the credibility of your ahistorical argument.
But there are a chunk of people who can't get jobs, for reasons which are only to a limited degree their fault. I know a brother and sister who grew up in a home full of violence. They ran away together at 15 and tried to make it without much education. One succeeded and got a good acting career. The other failed and has not worked for many years. It's hard to see that as more than just good and bad luck respectively, and making the latter live on the permanent edge of penury is not really encouraging him to make an effort - he's made lots of efforts, and has now I think given up.
Frankie Howerd did it much better.
It's all very well having the numbers (though looking at this graph,
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/58793537
one wonders about the "quarter of a century" claim) but if people's pay has gone up and they can't buy more nice things, they won't thank the people telling them how much better off they are.
So- if this pay rise is real and sustained, what stops it all being sucked up by house price inflation?
As an aside, I can strongly recommend Marc Morris' book The Norman Conquest, which is very good indeed and covers both the preceding and succeeding times as well as the Conquest itself.
I'll bet the design life of a modern car is a quarter to a third of that.
I hated it from the faux comedy to the unfounded, in denial, boosterism but I would, wouldn't I? What has happened in the last 24 hours?
"But we're a country with major problems and we need to know the Government's solution to these problems and on that Mr Johnson had not a jot."
What they weren't willing to do was give the government any credit for it - that tends to happen when the government's economic strategy crashes a few years earlier and they are forced to do things they had previously claimed would be disastrous but in reality weren't.
http://kindertrespass.org.uk/kinder-mass-trespass-history/
Update here: https://letsgopeakdistrict.co.uk/the-kinder-mass-trespass/
What was in it for the dealer when my new in 1989 Cavalier only needed service parts and a brake light switch in 90,000 miles? And should the clutch fail on that car a removable panel on the clutch housing meant the clutch could be in an out in half an hour. They soon put a stop to that kind of nonsense. It became a six hour job in the Vectra B.
The Tory position remains incoherent. There is no crisis. There is a crisis but its your fault. There isn't a crisis because look at Europe. There is a crisis but you can't blame Brexit. There isn't a crisis and we won't bring in workers. There is a crisis and we are bringing in workers. There are no downsides. There are downsides but actually they were the plan all along and aren't they marvellous.
If the government was not the Muppet Show, if they had an Alastair Campbell / Peter Mandleson / Dominic Cummings strategist then they would have had all this laid out. This is what we are doing, these are the issues we can mitigate, these we can't mitigate but here's how we will spin them, here's the line repeat the line until people believe it. Instead we have *this*.
Kermit the Frog.
As for energy bills going up that's a shame but its global due to the energy market globally. But also quite frankly energy is a relatively small part of a household's budget and out of touch self-entitled people who are only now discovering the perils of inflation are making me very amused.
The average household energy bill is £95 per month.
The average household rent bill is £868 per month.
As I'm utterly fed up of repeating, housing costs have gone up by over 6% compound growth per annum while wages haven't, since before the end of the twentieth century. Wages have only gone up by 2.8% compound growth per annum in the same time.
Which is a bigger challenge to a household's budget: a 6% increase on your £868 monthly bill, or a 10% increase on a £95 monthly bill?
The latter will only be your top concern if you're fortunate enough not to worry about paying for keeping a roof over your head.
Instead most MPs would be local councillors and party activists rooted in their local communities.
I would disagree though that being an MP is not a full time job. MPs have to do a lot of constituency casework and when not Ministers scrutinise legislation from the backbenches rather than making it from the frontbenches and they serve on select cttees etc
There is a dream of a high wage, high skill economy but I've never seen any plan for one in this country.
Until last year any plan was subsided by a short term profit motive that said employ another cheap worker, investment will eat into our immediate profits..
Waterways in particular are a gaping hole in the legislation.
However: as our friends in Scotland have discovered, access is fine in theory: as long as the public behave responsibly. And that's a big issue. People in farming have genuine concerns about people accessing their land. Open Access is a responsibility as well as right. Come parts of Scotland, e.g. Loch Lomond, are struggling with this.
As it happens, I haven't encountered many GOMLs ("Get Orrf My Land") when out and about, off-public routes. On my >6,000 mile coastal walk, I had one, in Scotland, on a broad track across farmland where I was doing zero harm. And incidentally, someone who threatened us in Ullapool for parking our motorhome near his house. On my recent running madness, I've had one farmer GOML me for using a footpath that he said had been 'closed' for decades, despite it being on the official maps. As there was an alternative a few hundred metres away, it was no big thing.
But generally I see only kindness. Including one farmer who found me wild camping on his land, and invited me in for breakfast. Or a man who invited me to camp in his large garden, much to the surprise of his wife when she found me there!
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/oct/06/texas-abortion-ban-temporary-block-us-judge
Oh and you are wrong
But just giving more cash isn't going to make him start trying again. What make him start trying again is ensuring that when he tries, he actually gets to keep his income that he works hard for instead of the state taking back 75% in taper, NI and Income Tax.
Whenever I've spoken long to people who've 'given up' the message that comes through in the end far, far too often is "why bother, I'll lose my benefits" - and they're right. They're trapped in poverty and its not appropriate, we need to end the poverty trap not simply give more cash to say "OK you're £1 above the poverty line now we can forget about you".
This was an early source of contention with our 2014 Nissan Leaf. Evans Hellshaw wanted to charge their usual crazy service costs (and notoriously were caught pissing in the wash bucket for one guy's Leaf service) despite the car not needing any actual maintenance. So I negotiated a 3 year free service agreement on a Columbo close. Which they then tried to get out of despite having a written agreement...
That's not a reason to be in the EU.
You have two 993s? The most inflationary 911s (outside the 912) of the moment. Wow! I loved the blue targa they did on Wheeler Dealers years ago. At the time they were pennies. I feel, as I can't afford the last of the air-cooled cars I should invest in a first of the water cooled cars, but 994s are not as cheap as they were.
So for people on universal credit getting housing benefit the energy bills are the bigger short term factor.
For people above the universal credit level who don't fully/mostly own their homes then housing is the biggest factor.
For people who fully own their homes, they want the house price inflation so are back to energy being the biggest factor.
Scottish OS maps do not show footpaths/public rights of way as they do on English maps. I don't know if this is a consequence of the open access scheme or not but it makes actually planning walks bloody difficult. The fact that you are allowed to walk where you like doesn't help if you can't actually see where you can practically walk.
What is a real problem is getting stuff to the UK. My clients shift refrigerated product out of Romania to places like the Netherlands without issues. To the UK? You can't shift small loads at all. You can't consolidate very easily due to caobtage and paperwork issues. I've just opened up a chilled business for them here and it took a month to plan transport.
And yet fools and outright liars try to tell people that there is no UK-only issue, that Europe has a driver shortage therefore its the same there. It isn't, they know it isn't, they hope that some people will just accept what they are told without question.
I'd much rather the UK had a R&D centre than a fab, or an HQ ideally. But giving such corporations huge amounts of tax payer money to open fabs is peverse.
Even for those on UC housing payments are capped (and quite rightly) so a very large proportion of UC claimants will still be paying for housing costs and the differential between claim and bills is probably over £95 per month.
Plus of course for anyone working UC is tapered so they won't be getting the full housing element anyway.
Your final factor sums up why the media is so much more concerned with energy inflation rather than the devastating housing inflation the nation has suffered for decades. They've viewed housing inflation as a good thing, while energy inflation affects them.
https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/media/2010/passenger-rail-usage-2021-22-q1.pdf
And sometimes it is just hard getting a job even when there are jobs to be had. I spent years on the dole getting knockback after knockback because I was too inexperienced or too highly educated. And it is always safer to give the job to someone already doing the same job for the company down the road.
It might have been significant that Amazon's recent job adverts explicitly said you do not need experience or qualifications to work there.
If it is either/or then getting the taper down (and not just below 50% but very far below that ideally) should be the top priority.
The more people feel they can keep, the more effort people put in.
But people have complained for as long as I remember about that short-termism.
Now we have the beginning of business being forced to end short-termism and think in terms of investment and upskilling the workforce.
And we have an effortless shift from 'short-termism bad, investment good' to 'investment bad, short-termism good' among opponents.
One reason why the taper is so high is because you want to be sure once people are earning above X, there is no universal credit payment.
Otherwise house price inflation (if you are looking to buy a first home, or renting) is just bad.
Though if we went with my preferred solution of merging UC, NI, Income Tax, Student Loans etc all into a single "negative income tax" aka a UBI + a single rate of tax then this issue would never arise. Your tax/benefits would automatically adjust based on a single rate based on real time reporting of wages and you'd never need to sign for anything ever again ideally.
Here’s a £70k 996 GT3, that’s unlikely to ever depreciate. https://www.pistonheads.com/news/ph-spottedykywt/porsche-911-gt3-9961-spotted/44768
The reality is rather more complicated. What we have is record employment, a country that is generating jobs faster than we can fill them and a need to think about how the available labour is better utilised. We have enjoyed a sudden burst of growth triggered by the end of lockdown and some distribution problems as a result. We also have long term problems which Boris did, in fairness, talk about yesterday: the shortage of skills, the dependence on cheap labour, the lack of aspiration in some areas and the waste of talent as a result. He could also have talked about our lack of investment (although Rishi is trying to improve that), saving and excess consumption.
I don't think this needs a masterplan or even a vision. It needs us to keep buggering on for quite a while addressing problems as they arise and trying to gradually improve things. That is what we will get from Boris (along with the odd daft idea or white elephant) and it should in fact do us fine.
If prices are going up, then anyone seeking to climb the property ladder is disadvantaged similarly to first time buyers.
The only real long-term winners are those who can downsize, or those who own multiple properties. Everyone else really loses.
Testers - civil servants who have Health and Safety requirements and unions ensuring they are enforced.
Why should a democratic principle apply only to constitutional affairs? Does the referendum precedent apply across all devolved legislatures? Does it apply to other democratically-elected bodies, such as councils?
Whether one sincerely believes in this moveable feast of popular democracy, is just eager for Britain to get its just deserts for Brexit – or merely wants to see Boris Johnson come a cropper – these questions and others must be wrestled with. If pro-independence parties win a majority of seats at the next Holyrood election on manifestos promising a referendum on removing the nuclear deterrent from the Clyde, is it democratically offensive to deny such a vote? True, defence is a reserved matter but, then, so is the constitution.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-boris-is-losing-his-fight-against-sturgeon
Even in England, footpath/bridleway provision is very patchy. IMO your ?home area? of Lincolnshire is very poorly catered for.
Much better to go down the Ireland route, of saying that taxes on companies are low for everyone.
The problem with people wandering across land is that 99% are fine, but there are 1% who are determined to cause problems.
A number of years ago, when I was out horse riding, an idiot of the shouty type with a dog off the lead decided that, his dog having chased the farmers cows, he would have a go at us.
He was shouting about hunting - presumably unaware that 99% of people who ride horses have never been to hunt, much less participated.
He concluded the matter by hitting my horse with a stick to try and make it bolt. The horse I was riding was a hard case. He looked round with a gleam in his eye and kicked the idiot in question into low earth orbit....
Its going to be a process akin to evolutionary change in a general direction with many uncertainties rather than a roadmap with a precise process and endpoint.
The driving instructors - many of whom are self employed but contracted to the big driving instruction outfits - were not happy.
The last thing we need is the state to get involved in picking winners and losers.
The state needs to set out a general vision and clear the hurdles to get there as much as possible - let people do the detail.
In this sense democracy is always going to be subordinate to the exercise of power, which as always is never freely given away by those who have it.
Final on Sunday. Are Catalans Dragons too big? Dragons are 11/5, St Helens 4/11.