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.
Daisley is utterly feeble, desperate and wrong. As usual.
Lets say that you decide that elections to the UK Parliament are more important than elections to Holyrood. OK lets look at that then, what were the results of the last UK election in Scotland? The SNP got 48 of the 59 seats (81% of the seats available to win).
So which is it? Holyrood or Parliament? Either way, Scotland has elected the SNP and given them a democratic mandate.
The only way to deny the SNP has a democratic mandate is to say that Scotland has no say in deciding whether they wish to be a part of the UK or not. That the UK is no longer a voluntary union.
So- if this pay rise is real and sustained, what stops it all being sucked up by house price inflation?
I think we currently have two reasons why house price inflation is so high.
One is that, at least for a while, investing in buy-to-let was far superior to any other form of investment. The returns for some people have been stupendous. This has sucked in a disproportionate amount of money, away from more productive investment. This can't have any effect other than driving prices higher.
The other is that we have a culture whereby a large proportion of people will buy the most expensive house they can afford when they move house. I don't know whether this is a class thing - the importance of living in the right area - the patchiness in the Education system which has the same effect, a high degree of variability in the quality of the housing stock - so that it makes a large difference to material comfort to extend yourself to the maximum extent - or because our sense of status is primarily determined by peacocking over our housing.
The government should be able to do some more to make buy-to-let less attractive as an investment, so that less investment money is used to drive up house prices, but the second cause would still keep house prices relatively high compared to incomes. Likely the only way to tackle that issue would be by restricting mortgage lending, but I can't see that being a popular move.
If we are a culture that highly values our homes, our castles if you will, then it's inevitable that we will have high prices for them to a degree. Expecting a government to set its face against this culture is asking it to bring trouble upon itself.
I think what I would want a government to concentrate on is two things. Improving building standards, so that even homes at the bottom of the ladder were better places to live in. Making changes to investment opportunities, so that more productive investments offered better returns than buy-to-let.
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.
So- if this pay rise is real and sustained, what stops it all being sucked up by house price inflation?
I think we currently have two reasons why house price inflation is so high.
One is that, at least for a while, investing in buy-to-let was far superior to any other form of investment. The returns for some people have been stupendous. This has sucked in a disproportionate amount of money, away from more productive investment. This can't have any effect other than driving prices higher.
The other is that we have a culture whereby a large proportion of people will buy the most expensive house they can afford when they move house. I don't know whether this is a class thing - the importance of living in the right area - the patchiness in the Education system which has the same effect, a high degree of variability in the quality of the housing stock - so that it makes a large difference to material comfort to extend yourself to the maximum extent - or because our sense of status is primarily determined by peacocking over our housing.
The government should be able to do some more to make buy-to-let less attractive as an investment, so that less investment money is used to drive up house prices, but the second cause would still keep house prices relatively high compared to incomes. Likely the only way to tackle that issue would be by restricting mortgage lending, but I can't see that being a popular move.
If we are a culture that highly values our homes, our castles if you will, then it's inevitable that we will have high prices for them to a degree. Expecting a government to set its face against this culture is asking it to bring trouble upon itself.
I think what I would want a government to concentrate on is two things. Improving building standards, so that even homes at the bottom of the ladder were better places to live in. Making changes to investment opportunities, so that more productive investments offered better returns than buy-to-let.
Most people don't even understand the basics of finance or investment, are scared by the jargon and don't trust providers, often for good historical reasons. They are not equipped to say if buy to let > shares and often prefer buy to let for the tangibility more than the calculated return.
One thing we really need in the country is a basic but good level of personal finance education as the choice of low cost investment products is far better than it was a generation ago.
So- if this pay rise is real and sustained, what stops it all being sucked up by house price inflation?
I think we currently have two reasons why house price inflation is so high.
One is that, at least for a while, investing in buy-to-let was far superior to any other form of investment. The returns for some people have been stupendous. This has sucked in a disproportionate amount of money, away from more productive investment. This can't have any effect other than driving prices higher.
The other is that we have a culture whereby a large proportion of people will buy the most expensive house they can afford when they move house. I don't know whether this is a class thing - the importance of living in the right area - the patchiness in the Education system which has the same effect, a high degree of variability in the quality of the housing stock - so that it makes a large difference to material comfort to extend yourself to the maximum extent - or because our sense of status is primarily determined by peacocking over our housing.
The government should be able to do some more to make buy-to-let less attractive as an investment, so that less investment money is used to drive up house prices, but the second cause would still keep house prices relatively high compared to incomes. Likely the only way to tackle that issue would be by restricting mortgage lending, but I can't see that being a popular move.
If we are a culture that highly values our homes, our castles if you will, then it's inevitable that we will have high prices for them to a degree. Expecting a government to set its face against this culture is asking it to bring trouble upon itself.
I think what I would want a government to concentrate on is two things. Improving building standards, so that even homes at the bottom of the ladder were better places to live in. Making changes to investment opportunities, so that more productive investments offered better returns than buy-to-let.
Two excellent points but I would add a third. For far too long the number of households has been growing faster than the availability of housing. Hence why many people at the bottom of the ladder are having to essentially flatshare with other households in rented accomodation.
If housing availability increased faster than household growth, then this pressure would reverse.
So yes getting landlords out of the property market is essential, but getting more homes built is too - and the more net immigration we have, the more new homes we need.
The only point at which we'd stop needing to have new homes built bet is if we had net emigration (since for years to come increasing household growth from existing population is already baked in).
I've often thought that Britain and France are two countries with a mutual inferiority complex. A truly peculiar, maybe unique relationship.
In my experience (went to university there, own a house there) French people spend far less time thinking about England than English people imagine. They view the USA as their cultural usurper. They are just not that into you.
The obsession with France is weird isn't it. It's definitely a one-sided affair. You don't see it in Scotland, either. Seems to be mainly a thing with posh English blokes. Maybe some cultural memory of all those aristos going to the guillotine?
And yet this is the country where an MP has proposed making French the only official language of the EU in order to get rid of the Anglo-Saxons and their world view. And which got into an almighty strop over the US-Australia-U.K. deal and made a point of saying how little it thought of Britain by not removing its ambassador
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.
So here's a question for you:
My not-at-all academic daughter needs to look at universities. She's not sure she wants to go but we have to look anyway in case. If she does go she will study Fine Art. 1 year Foundation Course and the 3 years degree. Will consign her to a 9% income tax obligation on future incomes over £25k (or whatever) for 30 years as per Student Loan rules (she will never pay it off). Plus other costs of living away. plus she will also lose four years earnings in studying for this degree which is pretty much non-income enhancing I would suggest. The reasons for going to university would be non-financial.
The alternative to university is a job probably on minimum wage. Probably in hospitality.
I would just make a point to @Philip_Thompson my energy monthly direct debit rose 40% on the 1st September not 10% and that was before this present energy crisis worsened quite considerable
So- if this pay rise is real and sustained, what stops it all being sucked up by house price inflation?
I think we currently have two reasons why house price inflation is so high.
One is that, at least for a while, investing in buy-to-let was far superior to any other form of investment. The returns for some people have been stupendous. This has sucked in a disproportionate amount of money, away from more productive investment. This can't have any effect other than driving prices higher.
The other is that we have a culture whereby a large proportion of people will buy the most expensive house they can afford when they move house. I don't know whether this is a class thing - the importance of living in the right area - the patchiness in the Education system which has the same effect, a high degree of variability in the quality of the housing stock - so that it makes a large difference to material comfort to extend yourself to the maximum extent - or because our sense of status is primarily determined by peacocking over our housing.
The government should be able to do some more to make buy-to-let less attractive as an investment, so that less investment money is used to drive up house prices, but the second cause would still keep house prices relatively high compared to incomes. Likely the only way to tackle that issue would be by restricting mortgage lending, but I can't see that being a popular move.
If we are a culture that highly values our homes, our castles if you will, then it's inevitable that we will have high prices for them to a degree. Expecting a government to set its face against this culture is asking it to bring trouble upon itself.
I think what I would want a government to concentrate on is two things. Improving building standards, so that even homes at the bottom of the ladder were better places to live in. Making changes to investment opportunities, so that more productive investments offered better returns than buy-to-let.
On buying as much as you can possibly afford, another factor is that the received wisdom is that house prices will only go up. The more expensive the house, the bigger your (paper) gains over time.
When we bought our first (indeed, current) house we took a mortgage that was only about 2/3 of the agreement in principle figure we were quoted before we started house hunting. That was largely because we planned to have children in the next couple of years and wanted to be cautious wrt our finances (and also the house - well, we liked it - it needed some renovation, but we were happy to do that over time). But some family members urged us to max out anyway as an investment. We've been rather happier being financially comfortable and overpaying our mortgage voluntarily and flexibly to get the debt down, but given we've seen a 40% increase in value over 5 years (based on what we paid and an offer we received 5 years later) we could indeed have probably made bigger paper gains on a larger/more expensive house.
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.
Yeah, I've got a Grandprixweiss Carrera convertible (with the 3.8 engine and transmission out of a Carrera RS and the brakes from a Turbo in it) and a Polarsilber Carrera S slicktop with a GT wing.
They are still the best 911 for the road; just the right amount of power and very usuable.
I've also got a 6 speed manual 997 Turbo that has 'issues', a 991.2 Cup which isn't street legal and a 924 track day special with ITBs. I'm looking for a nice 996 Targa at the moment.
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.
So here's a question for you:
My not-at-all academic daughter needs to look at universities. She's not sure she wants to go but we have to look anyway in case. If she does go she will study Fine Art. 1 year Foundation Course and the 3 years degree. Will consign her to a 9% income tax obligation on future incomes over £25k (or whatever) for 30 years as per Student Loan rules (she will never pay it off). Plus other costs of living away. plus she will also lose four years earnings in studying for this degree which is pretty much non-income enhancing I would suggest. The reasons for going to university would be non-financial.
The alternative to university is a job probably on minimum wage. Probably in hospitality.
What should she do?
Why not take a year out and try hospitality or something else.
One of the twins enjoyed it and will be back next summer, the other didn't but thankfully has found a full time office based job / degree apprenticeship.
BTW from a previous thread, I too am a keen knitter. Have been since childhood when I was taught by my mother.
And I share the view of the poster (can't remember who, sorry) who said this - "It is strange. I find knitting very mathematical, which is one of its attractions to me, and was also one of the attractions of this website. So I'd think more men would be interested in knitting if it weren't for the assumptions of gender stereotypes. And I do know another software engineer who knits - he has a bias to patterns with elaborate cables."
I love the mathematical quality of it and doing cables and bobbles and very elaborate patterns.
Funnily enough the mathematical quality of Bach's music is one of the reasons why I love playing his music on the piano above all others.
Gulp! Perhaps I am more geeky than I thought.
Anyway today I am off to see an arboretum near Whitehaven. Husband has organised it. It is of course raining hard so it is wellies and anorak time as, TBF, it is most of the time between now and next spring.
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.
So here's a question for you:
My not-at-all academic daughter needs to look at universities. She's not sure she wants to go but we have to look anyway in case. If she does go she will study Fine Art. 1 year Foundation Course and the 3 years degree. Will consign her to a 9% income tax obligation on future incomes over £25k (or whatever) for 30 years as per Student Loan rules (she will never pay it off). Plus other costs of living away. plus she will also lose four years earnings in studying for this degree which is pretty much non-income enhancing I would suggest. The reasons for going to university would be non-financial.
The alternative to university is a job probably on minimum wage. Probably in hospitality.
What should she do?
RAF. The civilian branch of the armed forces. Most of the jobs are performed indoors sitting down with a cup of tea and she'd get a technical education which would have good post-service employment prospects.
.@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.
That last paragraph works both ways - until I did a bit of digging, on here Boris/Brexit haters were happy for people to think it was a UK only issue
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.
So here's a question for you:
My not-at-all academic daughter needs to look at universities. She's not sure she wants to go but we have to look anyway in case. If she does go she will study Fine Art. 1 year Foundation Course and the 3 years degree. Will consign her to a 9% income tax obligation on future incomes over £25k (or whatever) for 30 years as per Student Loan rules (she will never pay it off). Plus other costs of living away. plus she will also lose four years earnings in studying for this degree which is pretty much non-income enhancing I would suggest. The reasons for going to university would be non-financial.
The alternative to university is a job probably on minimum wage. Probably in hospitality.
What should she do?
RAF. The civilian branch of the armed forces. Most of the jobs are performed indoors sitting down with a cup of tea and she'd get a technical education which would have good post-service employment prospects.
Become an HGV driver for two years, save the bulk of the money needed for uni, and if fine art still appeals after those two years sign up guilt- and debt- free
I've often thought that Britain and France are two countries with a mutual inferiority complex. A truly peculiar, maybe unique relationship.
In my experience (went to university there, own a house there) French people spend far less time thinking about England than English people imagine. They view the USA as their cultural usurper. They are just not that into you.
The obsession with France is weird isn't it. It's definitely a one-sided affair. You don't see it in Scotland, either. Seems to be mainly a thing with posh English blokes. Maybe some cultural memory of all those aristos going to the guillotine?
And yet this is the country where an MP has proposed making French the only official language of the EU in order to get rid of the Anglo-Saxons and their world view. And which got into an almighty strop over the US-Australia-U.K. deal and made a point of saying how little it thought of Britain by not removing its ambassador
Perhaps it is not quite as one-sided as all that.
The English (or the ones on here anyway) getting aerated over what *one* French MP has proposed is decent evidence of OLB's observation. If it's two way traffic the French certainly have tons of dumbfuckery issued by individual British MPs upon which to fixate.
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.
So here's a question for you:
My not-at-all academic daughter needs to look at universities. She's not sure she wants to go but we have to look anyway in case. If she does go she will study Fine Art. 1 year Foundation Course and the 3 years degree. Will consign her to a 9% income tax obligation on future incomes over £25k (or whatever) for 30 years as per Student Loan rules (she will never pay it off). Plus other costs of living away. plus she will also lose four years earnings in studying for this degree which is pretty much non-income enhancing I would suggest. The reasons for going to university would be non-financial.
The alternative to university is a job probably on minimum wage. Probably in hospitality.
What should she do?
Why not take a year out and try hospitality or something else.
One of the twins enjoyed it and will be back next summer, the other didn't but thankfully has found a full time office based job / degree apprenticeship.
Good advice and there are lots of training schemes
I really do think far too many see university as a must do, when many would prosper without
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.
So here's a question for you:
My not-at-all academic daughter needs to look at universities. She's not sure she wants to go but we have to look anyway in case. If she does go she will study Fine Art. 1 year Foundation Course and the 3 years degree. Will consign her to a 9% income tax obligation on future incomes over £25k (or whatever) for 30 years as per Student Loan rules (she will never pay it off). Plus other costs of living away. plus she will also lose four years earnings in studying for this degree which is pretty much non-income enhancing I would suggest. The reasons for going to university would be non-financial.
The alternative to university is a job probably on minimum wage. Probably in hospitality.
What should she do?
RAF. The civilian branch of the armed forces. Most of the jobs are performed indoors sitting down with a cup of tea and she'd get a technical education which would have good post-service employment prospects.
I agree. I've suggested armed forces to her. I think she's ideal for that. And one of her A levels is PE.
I've also mentioned police or fire service to her.
She has no enthusiasm for these suggestions and TBH has no idea what she wants to be other than a chalet host and then ski instructor which may be a bit of a pipe dream. Chalet hosting for a year before degree is an option.
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.
So here's a question for you:
My not-at-all academic daughter needs to look at universities. She's not sure she wants to go but we have to look anyway in case. If she does go she will study Fine Art. 1 year Foundation Course and the 3 years degree. Will consign her to a 9% income tax obligation on future incomes over £25k (or whatever) for 30 years as per Student Loan rules (she will never pay it off). Plus other costs of living away. plus she will also lose four years earnings in studying for this degree which is pretty much non-income enhancing I would suggest. The reasons for going to university would be non-financial.
The alternative to university is a job probably on minimum wage. Probably in hospitality.
What should she do?
Do an apprenticeship, there are apprenticeships in so many things these days, you get paid to learn and end up with a trade for life. The Government pay large subsidies to employers to take on apprentices and because so many youngsters go to Uni competition for jobs is limited. We took on two apprentices one plumbing, one electrical in September. We had a total of 6 applicants for the 2 jobs, and the first 2 we offered the positions too had already taken another job. My daughters friend did an apprenticeship in Accountancy, starting 6 years ago and now earns a fortune.
Other than for Law, Medicine, Engineering etc going to UNI is a life experience choice. Doing an apprenticeship will set you up much better than a History Degree for long term employment.
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.
I can only presume that this article was written before the decision of the Supreme Court yesterday. In that decision the fact that the legislation was passed unanimously by the Scottish Parliament was of no moment in determining whether that legislation was within the devolved power of that body. In short "mandate" was not the relevant question.
Paragraph 80 of Lord Reed's judgment is also likely to be of future significance. He said:
"For all the foregoing reasons, the answer to question 4 is “Yes”. Section 6 of the Bill is outside the legislative competence of the Scottish Parliament, because it “relates to” reserved matters, contrary to section 29(2)(b) of the Scotland Act, would modify section 28(7), contrary to section 29(2)(c), and would modify the law on reserved matters, contrary to section 29(2)(c). "
If one takes the question of a consultative referendum, to take an entirely hypothetical example, the question would be whether it "relates to" the constitution of the UK. If it does, it is outside the legislative competence of the Scottish Parliament. Once again the question of mandate is overridden by the constitutional rules of the Scotland Act.
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.
So here's a question for you:
My not-at-all academic daughter needs to look at universities. She's not sure she wants to go but we have to look anyway in case. If she does go she will study Fine Art. 1 year Foundation Course and the 3 years degree. Will consign her to a 9% income tax obligation on future incomes over £25k (or whatever) for 30 years as per Student Loan rules (she will never pay it off). Plus other costs of living away. plus she will also lose four years earnings in studying for this degree which is pretty much non-income enhancing I would suggest. The reasons for going to university would be non-financial.
The alternative to university is a job probably on minimum wage. Probably in hospitality.
What should she do?
It is a bit like asking if a person should live in Nottingham or Cornwall? It depends mostly on personal tastes, as you say financially not going is likely better than going, but she might have a better life experience by going.
Freeing her of any societal/parental expectation that one path is better than the other and letting her make the choice with as much information as is available seems as much as a parent can do. Another thing to remember is she can always take a degree later on if she wants to, whereas the living cost debts and fee taxes get firmed up through the course.
Final on Sunday. Are Catalans Dragons too big? Dragons are 11/5, St Helens 4/11.
I think St Helens will win(I support St Helens) , its unlikely to be a walkover. The dragon are a v good team but Saints are unlikely to screw up like they did a few weeks ago....
Final on Sunday. Are Catalans Dragons too big? Dragons are 11/5, St Helens 4/11.
I think St Helens will win(I support St Helens) , its unlikely to be a walkover. The dragon are a v good team but Saints are unlikely to screw up like they did a few weeks ago....
Ok - you think St Helens will win. But what percentage chance would you apply to that outcome? 60%, 80%?
Thinking that St Helens will probably win and thinking Dragons are overpriced at 11/5 is not necessarily contradictory.
I've often thought that Britain and France are two countries with a mutual inferiority complex. A truly peculiar, maybe unique relationship.
In my experience (went to university there, own a house there) French people spend far less time thinking about England than English people imagine. They view the USA as their cultural usurper. They are just not that into you.
The obsession with France is weird isn't it. It's definitely a one-sided affair. You don't see it in Scotland, either. Seems to be mainly a thing with posh English blokes. Maybe some cultural memory of all those aristos going to the guillotine?
And yet this is the country where an MP has proposed making French the only official language of the EU in order to get rid of the Anglo-Saxons and their world view. And which got into an almighty strop over the US-Australia-U.K. deal and made a point of saying how little it thought of Britain by not removing its ambassador
Perhaps it is not quite as one-sided as all that.
The English (or the ones on here anyway) getting aerated over what *one* French MP has proposed is decent evidence of OLB's observation. If it's two way traffic the French certainly have tons of dumbfuckery issued by individual British MPs upon which to fixate.
My experience is that there is a broad-based antipathy towards the concept of 'the French' in England, counterbalanced by an obsequious enthusiasm from a small minority - the latter concentrated among the upper echelons of society, though certainly not drawn exclusively from that tier. In France, the upper echelons of society harbour a haughty disdain for the English, while the masses are broadly indifferent/mildly approving.
I would say - far more speculatively, I should stress - that the anipathy towards the French among the English is not the result of a thousand years of near-constant warfare - that should have been erased by the last 100 years of alliance. I'd put it down more to an antipathy towards our own ruling classes. This is a hangover from the Norman conquest; there is still something suspiciously interchangeable between French people and posh English people. Though the haughty disdain with which the French elite habitually dismiss England does grate rather. You really don't get the same class of withering condescension from any other country.
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.
Yeah, I've got a Grandprixweiss Carrera convertible (with the 3.8 engine and transmission out of a Carrera RS and the brakes from a Turbo in it) and a Polarsilber Carrera S slicktop with a GT wing.
They are still the best 911 for the road; just the right amount of power and very usuable.
I've also got a 6 speed manual 997 Turbo that has 'issues', a 991.2 Cup which isn't street legal and a 924 track day special with ITBs. I'm looking for a nice 996 Targa at the moment.
I thought I'd got too many Minis and 1100s ( 2 late Coopers- one from Japan, the other ex Rover Group, a Mini Mayfair earmarked as the basis for a competition car and a Crayford converted Morris 1300- your collection is way more impressive!)
Final on Sunday. Are Catalans Dragons too big? Dragons are 11/5, St Helens 4/11.
I think St Helens will win(I support St Helens) , its unlikely to be a walkover. The dragon are a v good team but Saints are unlikely to screw up like they did a few weeks ago....
Ok - you think St Helens will win. But what percentage chance would you apply to that outcome? 60%, 80%?
Thinking that St Helens will probably win and thinking Dragons are overpriced at 11/5 is not necessarily contradictory.
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.
So here's a question for you:
My not-at-all academic daughter needs to look at universities. She's not sure she wants to go but we have to look anyway in case. If she does go she will study Fine Art. 1 year Foundation Course and the 3 years degree. Will consign her to a 9% income tax obligation on future incomes over £25k (or whatever) for 30 years as per Student Loan rules (she will never pay it off). Plus other costs of living away. plus she will also lose four years earnings in studying for this degree which is pretty much non-income enhancing I would suggest. The reasons for going to university would be non-financial.
The alternative to university is a job probably on minimum wage. Probably in hospitality.
What should she do?
RAF. The civilian branch of the armed forces. Most of the jobs are performed indoors sitting down with a cup of tea and she'd get a technical education which would have good post-service employment prospects.
I agree. I've suggested armed forces to her. I think she's ideal for that. And one of her A levels is PE.
I've also mentioned police or fire service to her.
She has no enthusiasm for these suggestions and TBH has no idea what she wants to be other than a chalet host and then ski instructor which may be a bit of a pipe dream. Chalet hosting for a year before degree is an option.
The army seem to spend half the winter on the slopes! Although they have not learned how to use the chair lifts yet so have to trudge slowly up the mountains.
I've often thought that Britain and France are two countries with a mutual inferiority complex. A truly peculiar, maybe unique relationship.
In my experience (went to university there, own a house there) French people spend far less time thinking about England than English people imagine. They view the USA as their cultural usurper. They are just not that into you.
The obsession with France is weird isn't it. It's definitely a one-sided affair. You don't see it in Scotland, either. Seems to be mainly a thing with posh English blokes. Maybe some cultural memory of all those aristos going to the guillotine?
And yet this is the country where an MP has proposed making French the only official language of the EU in order to get rid of the Anglo-Saxons and their world view. And which got into an almighty strop over the US-Australia-U.K. deal and made a point of saying how little it thought of Britain by not removing its ambassador
Perhaps it is not quite as one-sided as all that.
The English (or the ones on here anyway) getting aerated over what *one* French MP has proposed is decent evidence of OLB's observation. If it's two way traffic the French certainly have tons of dumbfuckery issued by individual British MPs upon which to fixate.
I remember being in meetings with the French regulator decades ago where they talked about the Anglo-Saxons with a degree of distaste and about how they did not want Anglo-Saxon financial regulation. At one financial seminar one academic tried to claim that Compliance - as a function - had been first invented by some French King in the Middle Ages.
My point is that the obsession with competing with the Anglo-Saxon world is perhaps a bit more widespread and long-standing in France than people are assuming - and in surprising places. The French may not be obsessed with the English on a day to day level but then I don't really think the English are that obsessed with the French either - even if some PB posters are.
Not at all. It's a damn good act, and he's reached the top with it.
But it's an act with diminishing returns, and the raspberries from some people who really ought to be his supporters (see much of today's press) may indicate that it needs a bit of a refresh.
And maybe he can do that. But I suspect he's a bit too set in his ways, and being PM doesn't really give him time to try out a new character. It's hard enough if you're Leader of the Opposition.
(What he reminds me of is the sort of old-school music hall acts that the Fast Show skewered with Arthur Atkinson. Great when they could do the same show night after night to a different audience each time. Television really stuffed those guys, because then you need new material every single time.)
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.
So here's a question for you:
My not-at-all academic daughter needs to look at universities. She's not sure she wants to go but we have to look anyway in case. If she does go she will study Fine Art. 1 year Foundation Course and the 3 years degree. Will consign her to a 9% income tax obligation on future incomes over £25k (or whatever) for 30 years as per Student Loan rules (she will never pay it off). Plus other costs of living away. plus she will also lose four years earnings in studying for this degree which is pretty much non-income enhancing I would suggest. The reasons for going to university would be non-financial.
The alternative to university is a job probably on minimum wage. Probably in hospitality.
What should she do?
I suggest that she looks at post A level apprenticeship programmes run by large employers, geared for 18 year old school leavers. There are a lot out there, just do some web searches. It'll give her a decent CV and an opportunity to show what she's worth in a large organisation. The odds are that, once the apprenticeship ends if she's any good they'll have spotted that and want to keep her on in a substantive post. She should be selective and look at the qualiy of training and also typical career paths of past apprentices, and try and avoid small firms who might well just be looking for a discardable source of cheap labour for 2 years.
It is a bit like asking if a person should live in Nottingham or Cornwall? It depends mostly on personal tastes, as you say financially not going is likely better than going, but she might have a better life experience by going.
Freeing her of any societal/parental expectation that one path is better than the other and letting her make the choice with as much information as is available seems as much as a parent can do. Another thing to remember is she can always take a degree later on if she wants to, whereas the living cost debts and fee taxes get firmed up through the course.
Studying later (if at all) does work really well for some. I have a cousin who wasn't at all academic, and worked as a printer's assistant (in the days when printing was a manual thing) and a motorbike delivery person for 5-6 years. Then she got the learning bug for no apparent reason and ended up with a law degree. I'm convinced she'd have failed if she'd forced herself to do it at 18.
But if that seems unlikely, there are worse things than hospitality for a few years, even on minimum wage with UC top-up (I know, but it's still useful). Having a well-informed parent keeping her posted on what she's entitled to is a big help - I've met young people who had no clue that a wage topup was allowed or what getting on a waiting list for a flat involved.
Final on Sunday. Are Catalans Dragons too big? Dragons are 11/5, St Helens 4/11.
I think St Helens will win(I support St Helens) , its unlikely to be a walkover. The dragon are a v good team but Saints are unlikely to screw up like they did a few weeks ago....
Ok - you think St Helens will win. But what percentage chance would you apply to that outcome? 60%, 80%?
Thinking that St Helens will probably win and thinking Dragons are overpriced at 11/5 is not necessarily contradictory.
I'd love to see a model that gave a team that won the regular league only a 27% chance of victory in the grand final. Hopefully the dragons can defeat the wollybacks from across the border anyway. £20 on the dragons for me.
.@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.
That last paragraph works both ways - until I did a bit of digging, on here Boris/Brexit haters were happy for people to think it was a UK only issue
We're in a strange paradoxical universe in which the majority viewpoints can be summarised as follows:
Remoaners*: Brexit is causing shortages, project fear now reality. Wage rises are however a bad thing, even for those who voted for Brexit and are more reflective of other trends than of Brexit. Brexiteers*: Brexit is not causing shortages. There are shortages everywhere. However, despite the shortages everywhere, including in HGV drivers, increases in wages are a Brexit dividend and there are no downsides.
*Pejorative terms intentionally used. There is also a sane minority (or perhaps a silent majority? e.g. RCS, but many others) who recognise that there are many different factors at play, that wage rises are great for those receiving them but could be bad for others who will be subject to inflation but not get rises themselves as they are still open to competition from Poles in Poland/rest of the EU if not from Poles here and that the issues are a mix of factors, Covid, post-Covid demand etc...
I've often thought that Britain and France are two countries with a mutual inferiority complex. A truly peculiar, maybe unique relationship.
In my experience (went to university there, own a house there) French people spend far less time thinking about England than English people imagine. They view the USA as their cultural usurper. They are just not that into you.
The obsession with France is weird isn't it. It's definitely a one-sided affair. You don't see it in Scotland, either. Seems to be mainly a thing with posh English blokes. Maybe some cultural memory of all those aristos going to the guillotine?
And yet this is the country where an MP has proposed making French the only official language of the EU in order to get rid of the Anglo-Saxons and their world view. And which got into an almighty strop over the US-Australia-U.K. deal and made a point of saying how little it thought of Britain by not removing its ambassador
Perhaps it is not quite as one-sided as all that.
The English (or the ones on here anyway) getting aerated over what *one* French MP has proposed is decent evidence of OLB's observation. If it's two way traffic the French certainly have tons of dumbfuckery issued by individual British MPs upon which to fixate.
My experience is that there is a broad-based antipathy towards the concept of 'the French' in England, counterbalanced by an obsequious enthusiasm from a small minority - the latter concentrated among the upper echelons of society, though certainly not drawn exclusively from that tier. In France, the upper echelons of society harbour a haughty disdain for the English, while the masses are broadly indifferent/mildly approving.
I would say - far more speculatively, I should stress - that the anipathy towards the French among the English is not the result of a thousand years of near-constant warfare - that should have been erased by the last 100 years of alliance. I'd put it down more to an antipathy towards our own ruling classes. This is a hangover from the Norman conquest; there is still something suspiciously interchangeable between French people and posh English people. Though the haughty disdain with which the French elite habitually dismiss England does grate rather. You really don't get the same class of withering condescension from any other country.
Agree on this. But I think it's possible to be neither Francophone nor Francophile. I'm very neutral on the French personally - I can't speak the language, hardly ever go there, and as a vegetarian find the food underwhelming. I admire their high quality of life and good education system though. They run the English close in terms of post imperial delusions of importance - perhaps they even win that one. I file any cross-channel rivalry under 'narcissism of small differences'.
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.
So here's a question for you:
My not-at-all academic daughter needs to look at universities. She's not sure she wants to go but we have to look anyway in case. If she does go she will study Fine Art. 1 year Foundation Course and the 3 years degree. Will consign her to a 9% income tax obligation on future incomes over £25k (or whatever) for 30 years as per Student Loan rules (she will never pay it off). Plus other costs of living away. plus she will also lose four years earnings in studying for this degree which is pretty much non-income enhancing I would suggest. The reasons for going to university would be non-financial.
The alternative to university is a job probably on minimum wage. Probably in hospitality.
What should she do?
I suggest that she looks at post A level apprenticeship programmes run by large employers, geared for 18 year old school leavers. There are a lot out there, just do some web searches. It'll give her a decent CV and an opportunity to show what she's worth in a large organisation. The odds are that, once the apprenticeship ends if she's any good they'll have spotted that and want to keep her on in a substantive post. She should be selective and look at the qualiy of training and also typical career paths of past apprentices, and try and avoid small firms who might well just be looking for a discardable source of cheap labour for 2 years.
The first question I would ask is the quality of the universities she is likely to get in.
If you get a degree from a good university, the subject is almost irrelevant. Many people do a subject of their liking (very important to do something you actually like!) followed by a "conversion" Masters to "Business/IT"
So, would she be heading for a 2:1 or 1st at a Russell group (or similarly highly regarded) university?
Russell Group is not the be all and end all - do some research on the standing of the University.
I've often thought that Britain and France are two countries with a mutual inferiority complex. A truly peculiar, maybe unique relationship.
In my experience (went to university there, own a house there) French people spend far less time thinking about England than English people imagine. They view the USA as their cultural usurper. They are just not that into you.
The obsession with France is weird isn't it. It's definitely a one-sided affair. You don't see it in Scotland, either. Seems to be mainly a thing with posh English blokes. Maybe some cultural memory of all those aristos going to the guillotine?
And yet this is the country where an MP has proposed making French the only official language of the EU in order to get rid of the Anglo-Saxons and their world view. And which got into an almighty strop over the US-Australia-U.K. deal and made a point of saying how little it thought of Britain by not removing its ambassador
Perhaps it is not quite as one-sided as all that.
The English (or the ones on here anyway) getting aerated over what *one* French MP has proposed is decent evidence of OLB's observation. If it's two way traffic the French certainly have tons of dumbfuckery issued by individual British MPs upon which to fixate.
My experience is that there is a broad-based antipathy towards the concept of 'the French' in England, counterbalanced by an obsequious enthusiasm from a small minority - the latter concentrated among the upper echelons of society, though certainly not drawn exclusively from that tier. In France, the upper echelons of society harbour a haughty disdain for the English, while the masses are broadly indifferent/mildly approving.
I would say - far more speculatively, I should stress - that the anipathy towards the French among the English is not the result of a thousand years of near-constant warfare - that should have been erased by the last 100 years of alliance. I'd put it down more to an antipathy towards our own ruling classes. This is a hangover from the Norman conquest; there is still something suspiciously interchangeable between French people and posh English people. Though the haughty disdain with which the French elite habitually dismiss England does grate rather. You really don't get the same class of withering condescension from any other country.
At least the French had a decent go at culling their own posh people and have winkled them out from the legislative process. No idea if this French MP is the son of a Marseille docker or descended from ducs, don't really think it matters in what seems to be a stooshie about cultural nationalism.
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.
So here's a question for you:
My not-at-all academic daughter needs to look at universities. She's not sure she wants to go but we have to look anyway in case. If she does go she will study Fine Art. 1 year Foundation Course and the 3 years degree. Will consign her to a 9% income tax obligation on future incomes over £25k (or whatever) for 30 years as per Student Loan rules (she will never pay it off). Plus other costs of living away. plus she will also lose four years earnings in studying for this degree which is pretty much non-income enhancing I would suggest. The reasons for going to university would be non-financial.
The alternative to university is a job probably on minimum wage. Probably in hospitality.
What should she do?
I would recommend her to go in to hospitality with the view of learning the business, taking on responsibilities and aiming to move into more senior roles over time - once she's found out what she's good at and enjoys doing.
My two brothers and I all went to university, but our sister got a job in a shop on the high street. She worked her way up to managing shops, briefly moved up to regional management, didn't like it, so moved sideways into HR (probably had to do a diploma in HR practice at this point).
Now she's HR director for a company with ~300 employees.
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.
So here's a question for you:
My not-at-all academic daughter needs to look at universities. She's not sure she wants to go but we have to look anyway in case. If she does go she will study Fine Art. 1 year Foundation Course and the 3 years degree. Will consign her to a 9% income tax obligation on future incomes over £25k (or whatever) for 30 years as per Student Loan rules (she will never pay it off). Plus other costs of living away. plus she will also lose four years earnings in studying for this degree which is pretty much non-income enhancing I would suggest. The reasons for going to university would be non-financial.
The alternative to university is a job probably on minimum wage. Probably in hospitality.
What should she do?
I suggest that she looks at post A level apprenticeship programmes run by large employers, geared for 18 year old school leavers. There are a lot out there, just do some web searches. It'll give her a decent CV and an opportunity to show what she's worth in a large organisation. The odds are that, once the apprenticeship ends if she's any good they'll have spotted that and want to keep her on in a substantive post. She should be selective and look at the qualiy of training and also typical career paths of past apprentices, and try and avoid small firms who might well just be looking for a discardable source of cheap labour for 2 years.
The first question I would ask is the quality of the universities she is likely to get in.
If you get a degree from a good university, the subject is almost irrelevant. Many people do a subject of their liking (very important to do something you actually like!) followed by a "conversion" Masters to "Business/IT"
So, would she be heading for a 2:1 or 1st at a Russell group (or similarly highly regarded) university?
Russell Group is not the be all and end all - do some research on the standing of the University.
I appreciate that the world is a lot bigger than the Civil Service, but it's worth noting that the CS operates a policy of non-disclosure regarding the university a candidate attended. It is the view of the CS that all universities are equal.
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.
So here's a question for you:
My not-at-all academic daughter needs to look at universities. She's not sure she wants to go but we have to look anyway in case. If she does go she will study Fine Art. 1 year Foundation Course and the 3 years degree. Will consign her to a 9% income tax obligation on future incomes over £25k (or whatever) for 30 years as per Student Loan rules (she will never pay it off). Plus other costs of living away. plus she will also lose four years earnings in studying for this degree which is pretty much non-income enhancing I would suggest. The reasons for going to university would be non-financial.
The alternative to university is a job probably on minimum wage. Probably in hospitality.
What should she do?
I suggest that she looks at post A level apprenticeship programmes run by large employers, geared for 18 year old school leavers. There are a lot out there, just do some web searches. It'll give her a decent CV and an opportunity to show what she's worth in a large organisation. The odds are that, once the apprenticeship ends if she's any good they'll have spotted that and want to keep her on in a substantive post. She should be selective and look at the qualiy of training and also typical career paths of past apprentices, and try and avoid small firms who might well just be looking for a discardable source of cheap labour for 2 years.
Yep - first question in any interview should be - what happens to previous apprentices. Followed by can I meet one.
If they can't do that move on to the next opportunity.
Hairdressing is renowned for its use and bin philosophy, but a lot of other industries are as well.
I've often thought that Britain and France are two countries with a mutual inferiority complex. A truly peculiar, maybe unique relationship.
In my experience (went to university there, own a house there) French people spend far less time thinking about England than English people imagine. They view the USA as their cultural usurper. They are just not that into you.
The obsession with France is weird isn't it. It's definitely a one-sided affair. You don't see it in Scotland, either. Seems to be mainly a thing with posh English blokes. Maybe some cultural memory of all those aristos going to the guillotine?
And yet this is the country where an MP has proposed making French the only official language of the EU in order to get rid of the Anglo-Saxons and their world view. And which got into an almighty strop over the US-Australia-U.K. deal and made a point of saying how little it thought of Britain by not removing its ambassador
Perhaps it is not quite as one-sided as all that.
The English (or the ones on here anyway) getting aerated over what *one* French MP has proposed is decent evidence of OLB's observation. If it's two way traffic the French certainly have tons of dumbfuckery issued by individual British MPs upon which to fixate.
I remember being in meetings with the French regulator decades ago where they talked about the Anglo-Saxons with a degree of distaste and about how they did not want Anglo-Saxon financial regulation. At one financial seminar one academic tried to claim that Compliance - as a function - had been first invented by some French King in the Middle Ages.
My point is that the obsession with competing with the Anglo-Saxon world is perhaps a bit more widespread and long-standing in France than people are assuming - and in surprising places. The French may not be obsessed with the English on a day to day level but then I don't really think the English are that obsessed with the French either - even if some PB posters are.
The simple truth is that English is embedded, worldwide as the Lingua Franca (ha!), nearly everywhere.
Ironically, in the post colonial environment, it is often seen as the "neutral" option between multiple competing languages.
What is quite startling is the way that business in much of Europe is conducted in English. I was astonished the first time I went to a meeting in Germany. Everyone else was German, but the meeting was held English.
This probably grates on French people - holding it in French would simply not be considered.
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.
So here's a question for you:
My not-at-all academic daughter needs to look at universities. She's not sure she wants to go but we have to look anyway in case. If she does go she will study Fine Art. 1 year Foundation Course and the 3 years degree. Will consign her to a 9% income tax obligation on future incomes over £25k (or whatever) for 30 years as per Student Loan rules (she will never pay it off). Plus other costs of living away. plus she will also lose four years earnings in studying for this degree which is pretty much non-income enhancing I would suggest. The reasons for going to university would be non-financial.
The alternative to university is a job probably on minimum wage. Probably in hospitality.
What should she do?
I suggest that she looks at post A level apprenticeship programmes run by large employers, geared for 18 year old school leavers. There are a lot out there, just do some web searches. It'll give her a decent CV and an opportunity to show what she's worth in a large organisation. The odds are that, once the apprenticeship ends if she's any good they'll have spotted that and want to keep her on in a substantive post. She should be selective and look at the qualiy of training and also typical career paths of past apprentices, and try and avoid small firms who might well just be looking for a discardable source of cheap labour for 2 years.
The first question I would ask is the quality of the universities she is likely to get in.
If you get a degree from a good university, the subject is almost irrelevant. Many people do a subject of their liking (very important to do something you actually like!) followed by a "conversion" Masters to "Business/IT"
So, would she be heading for a 2:1 or 1st at a Russell group (or similarly highly regarded) university?
Russell Group is not the be all and end all - do some research on the standing of the University.
A Russell group (or similarly highly regarded) university - no, unfortunately not - I would be much keener if this were so...
On Saturday we are going to look at Oxford Brooks. We may also look at Manchester Metropolitan and Central St Martins (UAL)
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.
So here's a question for you:
My not-at-all academic daughter needs to look at universities. She's not sure she wants to go but we have to look anyway in case. If she does go she will study Fine Art. 1 year Foundation Course and the 3 years degree. Will consign her to a 9% income tax obligation on future incomes over £25k (or whatever) for 30 years as per Student Loan rules (she will never pay it off). Plus other costs of living away. plus she will also lose four years earnings in studying for this degree which is pretty much non-income enhancing I would suggest. The reasons for going to university would be non-financial.
The alternative to university is a job probably on minimum wage. Probably in hospitality.
What should she do?
Why not take a year out and try hospitality or something else.
One of the twins enjoyed it and will be back next summer, the other didn't but thankfully has found a full time office based job / degree apprenticeship.
I have two daughters; we have been considering the same question. My view is that if she isn't academic, to give work a go first for a couple of years and see how she gets on. If she decides she would benefit from a degree after all, she can always apply later. Working may also give her a better idea of what to study. If she gets on well, she won't need to go, and will probably be a lot better off financially!
My elder decided to go (and got into a Russell Group Uni), and the younger one wants to work.
Incidentally, I doubt I would go to Uni myself under the current financial arrangements, and I'm not sure I would have had any financial benefit from doing so compared to leaving school with A Levels and working my way up.
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.
So here's a question for you:
My not-at-all academic daughter needs to look at universities. She's not sure she wants to go but we have to look anyway in case. If she does go she will study Fine Art. 1 year Foundation Course and the 3 years degree. Will consign her to a 9% income tax obligation on future incomes over £25k (or whatever) for 30 years as per Student Loan rules (she will never pay it off). Plus other costs of living away. plus she will also lose four years earnings in studying for this degree which is pretty much non-income enhancing I would suggest. The reasons for going to university would be non-financial.
The alternative to university is a job probably on minimum wage. Probably in hospitality.
What should she do?
RAF. The civilian branch of the armed forces. Most of the jobs are performed indoors sitting down with a cup of tea and she'd get a technical education which would have good post-service employment prospects.
I agree. I've suggested armed forces to her. I think she's ideal for that. And one of her A levels is PE.
I've also mentioned police or fire service to her.
She has no enthusiasm for these suggestions and TBH has no idea what she wants to be other than a chalet host and then ski instructor which may be a bit of a pipe dream. Chalet hosting for a year before degree is an option.
If she is good and joins HMF she can spend six months every year skiiing.
I've often thought that Britain and France are two countries with a mutual inferiority complex. A truly peculiar, maybe unique relationship.
In my experience (went to university there, own a house there) French people spend far less time thinking about England than English people imagine. They view the USA as their cultural usurper. They are just not that into you.
The obsession with France is weird isn't it. It's definitely a one-sided affair. You don't see it in Scotland, either. Seems to be mainly a thing with posh English blokes. Maybe some cultural memory of all those aristos going to the guillotine?
And yet this is the country where an MP has proposed making French the only official language of the EU in order to get rid of the Anglo-Saxons and their world view. And which got into an almighty strop over the US-Australia-U.K. deal and made a point of saying how little it thought of Britain by not removing its ambassador
Perhaps it is not quite as one-sided as all that.
The English (or the ones on here anyway) getting aerated over what *one* French MP has proposed is decent evidence of OLB's observation. If it's two way traffic the French certainly have tons of dumbfuckery issued by individual British MPs upon which to fixate.
I remember being in meetings with the French regulator decades ago where they talked about the Anglo-Saxons with a degree of distaste and about how they did not want Anglo-Saxon financial regulation. At one financial seminar one academic tried to claim that Compliance - as a function - had been first invented by some French King in the Middle Ages.
My point is that the obsession with competing with the Anglo-Saxon world is perhaps a bit more widespread and long-standing in France than people are assuming - and in surprising places. The French may not be obsessed with the English on a day to day level but then I don't really think the English are that obsessed with the French either - even if some PB posters are.
Anglo-Saxon means the US much more than the UK. That's who the French are competing with really - and why they are so focused on the EU in the way that they are. I agree with the Brexiteers that the French and UK versions of the EU were never compatible for that reason. Where I disagree with them is in believing that the French version was always going to win. I don't think it was, largely because the French obsession with America was very much a French one, not a European one.
.@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.
That last paragraph works both ways - until I did a bit of digging, on here Boris/Brexit haters were happy for people to think it was a UK only issue
We're in a strange paradoxical universe in which the majority viewpoints can be summarised as follows:
Remoaners*: Brexit is causing shortages, project fear now reality. Wage rises are however a bad thing, even for those who voted for Brexit and are more reflective of other trends than of Brexit. Brexiteers*: Brexit is not causing shortages. There are shortages everywhere. However, despite the shortages everywhere, including in HGV drivers, increases in wages are a Brexit dividend and there are no downsides.
*Pejorative terms intentionally used. There is also a sane minority (or perhaps a silent majority? e.g. RCS, but many others) who recognise that there are many different factors at play, that wage rises are great for those receiving them but could be bad for others who will be subject to inflation but not get rises themselves as they are still open to competition from Poles in Poland/rest of the EU if not from Poles here and that the issues are a mix of factors, Covid, post-Covid demand etc...
I thought that Robert's contribution this morning was excellent. I also think that it is a point that both @Philip_Thompson and I have readily acknowledged. Increased wages for those who now benefit from scarcity such as HGV drivers is not cost free. It means higher costs for the rest of us in terms of goods etc. To the extent that those who have not had these increased competitive advantage are not able to increase our earnings to compensate they will be worse off. And wage inequality in our society will reduce. Which Philip and I regard as a good thing even if (being nice we do not say because) it will reduce the standard of living of professional class remainers and, indeed, myself.
I've often thought that Britain and France are two countries with a mutual inferiority complex. A truly peculiar, maybe unique relationship.
In my experience (went to university there, own a house there) French people spend far less time thinking about England than English people imagine. They view the USA as their cultural usurper. They are just not that into you.
The obsession with France is weird isn't it. It's definitely a one-sided affair. You don't see it in Scotland, either. Seems to be mainly a thing with posh English blokes. Maybe some cultural memory of all those aristos going to the guillotine?
And yet this is the country where an MP has proposed making French the only official language of the EU in order to get rid of the Anglo-Saxons and their world view. And which got into an almighty strop over the US-Australia-U.K. deal and made a point of saying how little it thought of Britain by not removing its ambassador
Perhaps it is not quite as one-sided as all that.
I think it's more of a thing in Britain - the French tend to have an assumption of superiority but it's not directed at us in particular, and I shouldn't think the average French person gives Britain a thought from one year to the next. It's also only skin-deep both ways, like many neighbourly rivalries (Denmark/Sweden, US/Canada...) - people like making jokes about the neighbours and enjoy seeing them lose at football (like supporters of neighbouring football clubs in the same country, come to that), but they wouldn't dream of objecting if an offspring married one.
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.
So here's a question for you:
My not-at-all academic daughter needs to look at universities. She's not sure she wants to go but we have to look anyway in case. If she does go she will study Fine Art. 1 year Foundation Course and the 3 years degree. Will consign her to a 9% income tax obligation on future incomes over £25k (or whatever) for 30 years as per Student Loan rules (she will never pay it off). Plus other costs of living away. plus she will also lose four years earnings in studying for this degree which is pretty much non-income enhancing I would suggest. The reasons for going to university would be non-financial.
The alternative to university is a job probably on minimum wage. Probably in hospitality.
What should she do?
I suggest that she looks at post A level apprenticeship programmes run by large employers, geared for 18 year old school leavers. There are a lot out there, just do some web searches. It'll give her a decent CV and an opportunity to show what she's worth in a large organisation. The odds are that, once the apprenticeship ends if she's any good they'll have spotted that and want to keep her on in a substantive post. She should be selective and look at the qualiy of training and also typical career paths of past apprentices, and try and avoid small firms who might well just be looking for a discardable source of cheap labour for 2 years.
The first question I would ask is the quality of the universities she is likely to get in.
If you get a degree from a good university, the subject is almost irrelevant. Many people do a subject of their liking (very important to do something you actually like!) followed by a "conversion" Masters to "Business/IT"
So, would she be heading for a 2:1 or 1st at a Russell group (or similarly highly regarded) university?
Russell Group is not the be all and end all - do some research on the standing of the University.
A Russell group (or similarly highly regarded) university - no, unfortunately not - I would be much keener if this were so...
On Saturday we are going to look at Oxford Brooks. We may also look at Manchester Metropolitan and Central St Martins (UAL)
If not to a Russell Group university she would probably earn more post graduation and be debt free doing an apprenticeship. Although if she wants to go to university mainly for the social side and to learn for its own sake she should still go
I would just make a point to @Philip_Thompson my energy monthly direct debit rose 40% on the 1st September not 10% and that was before this present energy crisis worsened quite considerable
Going off the average bills quoted earlier
40% on a £95 bill = £38 . . . certainly not nice and not suggesting for a second that it is. £38 on a £868 bill = 4.4% . . . which is less than the 6.2% inflation that housing has been going up since 1999.
So yes the energy bill is nasty. But you know what? The very real inflation we've been having for decades is even worse than that even a 40% rise.
Now do you understand just how serious a problem this is?
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.
So here's a question for you:
My not-at-all academic daughter needs to look at universities. She's not sure she wants to go but we have to look anyway in case. If she does go she will study Fine Art. 1 year Foundation Course and the 3 years degree. Will consign her to a 9% income tax obligation on future incomes over £25k (or whatever) for 30 years as per Student Loan rules (she will never pay it off). Plus other costs of living away. plus she will also lose four years earnings in studying for this degree which is pretty much non-income enhancing I would suggest. The reasons for going to university would be non-financial.
The alternative to university is a job probably on minimum wage. Probably in hospitality.
What should she do?
'Not at all academic' may mean not particularly high in cognitive aptitude, or may mean not interested in academia. They are different.
If the first, Fine Arts is great if you are brilliant at it, because there are people in arts, music etc who don't pass exams much but are differently gifted. With the very gifted you don't have to enquire, you know already if they are that class of people. Lucky ones.
If not interested in academia, then avoid. Debt for something you neither enjoy or want is not great.
But in the end your daughter should do exactly as she likes, weighing up all the facts. That's what modern daughters do anyway. And quite right too.
It is a bit like asking if a person should live in Nottingham or Cornwall? It depends mostly on personal tastes, as you say financially not going is likely better than going, but she might have a better life experience by going.
Freeing her of any societal/parental expectation that one path is better than the other and letting her make the choice with as much information as is available seems as much as a parent can do. Another thing to remember is she can always take a degree later on if she wants to, whereas the living cost debts and fee taxes get firmed up through the course.
Studying later (if at all) does work really well for some. I have a cousin who wasn't at all academic, and worked as a printer's assistant (in the days when printing was a manual thing) and a motorbike delivery person for 5-6 years. Then she got the learning bug for no apparent reason and ended up with a law degree. I'm convinced she'd have failed if she'd forced herself to do it at 18.
But if that seems unlikely, there are worse things than hospitality for a few years, even on minimum wage with UC top-up (I know, but it's still useful). Having a well-informed parent keeping her posted on what she's entitled to is a big help - I've met young people who had no clue that a wage topup was allowed or what getting on a waiting list for a flat involved.
Nick. Don't get me started on the UC top-up.
Gordon Brown's Child Trust Fund - government grant funded - now called a JISA - and the encouragement for family members to top-up the government contribution - is turning out to be a real kick in the teeth.
With UC taking over from tax credits, individuals are (unlike with tax credits) means-tested against savings. So over £16k in a JISA = completely ineligible for UC whereas before the individual would have been completely eligible for tax credits.
This has not been reported and I'm surprised about this - I don't think people have twigged.
I've often thought that Britain and France are two countries with a mutual inferiority complex. A truly peculiar, maybe unique relationship.
In my experience (went to university there, own a house there) French people spend far less time thinking about England than English people imagine. They view the USA as their cultural usurper. They are just not that into you.
The obsession with France is weird isn't it. It's definitely a one-sided affair. You don't see it in Scotland, either. Seems to be mainly a thing with posh English blokes. Maybe some cultural memory of all those aristos going to the guillotine?
And yet this is the country where an MP has proposed making French the only official language of the EU in order to get rid of the Anglo-Saxons and their world view. And which got into an almighty strop over the US-Australia-U.K. deal and made a point of saying how little it thought of Britain by not removing its ambassador
Perhaps it is not quite as one-sided as all that.
The English (or the ones on here anyway) getting aerated over what *one* French MP has proposed is decent evidence of OLB's observation. If it's two way traffic the French certainly have tons of dumbfuckery issued by individual British MPs upon which to fixate.
My experience is that there is a broad-based antipathy towards the concept of 'the French' in England, counterbalanced by an obsequious enthusiasm from a small minority - the latter concentrated among the upper echelons of society, though certainly not drawn exclusively from that tier. In France, the upper echelons of society harbour a haughty disdain for the English, while the masses are broadly indifferent/mildly approving.
I would say - far more speculatively, I should stress - that the anipathy towards the French among the English is not the result of a thousand years of near-constant warfare - that should have been erased by the last 100 years of alliance. I'd put it down more to an antipathy towards our own ruling classes. This is a hangover from the Norman conquest; there is still something suspiciously interchangeable between French people and posh English people. Though the haughty disdain with which the French elite habitually dismiss England does grate rather. You really don't get the same class of withering condescension from any other country.
Yes, certainly it is upper middle class London Remainers who tend to be most pro French here while Leavers are more Franco sceptic.
In France the opposite it is true, it is the liberal Parisian elite Macron fans who are most anti British and anti Boris while Le Pen voters and French conservatives are rather more Anglophile and less Boris hostile
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.
Why? Our population is ageing with the proportion of working age shrinking, people are in education longer, a lot of people are reviewing their work/life balance as a result of the past two years, and we've just sent a lot of European workers home and sent a very clear message that those who are still allowed to come aren't very welcome. Plus there's an overhang of demand in many sectors as a result of the pandemic that the labour market cannot respond to. It's the "I can't get a builder for months" problem across a lot of other sectors.
I would just make a point to @Philip_Thompson my energy monthly direct debit rose 40% on the 1st September not 10% and that was before this present energy crisis worsened quite considerable
Going off the average bills quoted earlier
40% on a £95 bill = £38 . . . certainly not nice and not suggesting for a second that it is. £38 on a £868 bill = 4.4% . . . which is less than the 6.2% inflation that housing has been going up since 1999.
So yes the energy bill is nasty. But you know what? The very real inflation we've been having for decades is even worse than that even a 40% rise.
Now do you understand just how serious a problem this is?
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.
So here's a question for you:
My not-at-all academic daughter needs to look at universities. She's not sure she wants to go but we have to look anyway in case. If she does go she will study Fine Art. 1 year Foundation Course and the 3 years degree. Will consign her to a 9% income tax obligation on future incomes over £25k (or whatever) for 30 years as per Student Loan rules (she will never pay it off). Plus other costs of living away. plus she will also lose four years earnings in studying for this degree which is pretty much non-income enhancing I would suggest. The reasons for going to university would be non-financial.
The alternative to university is a job probably on minimum wage. Probably in hospitality.
What should she do?
I suggest that she looks at post A level apprenticeship programmes run by large employers, geared for 18 year old school leavers. There are a lot out there, just do some web searches. It'll give her a decent CV and an opportunity to show what she's worth in a large organisation. The odds are that, once the apprenticeship ends if she's any good they'll have spotted that and want to keep her on in a substantive post. She should be selective and look at the qualiy of training and also typical career paths of past apprentices, and try and avoid small firms who might well just be looking for a discardable source of cheap labour for 2 years.
The first question I would ask is the quality of the universities she is likely to get in.
If you get a degree from a good university, the subject is almost irrelevant. Many people do a subject of their liking (very important to do something you actually like!) followed by a "conversion" Masters to "Business/IT"
So, would she be heading for a 2:1 or 1st at a Russell group (or similarly highly regarded) university?
Russell Group is not the be all and end all - do some research on the standing of the University.
I appreciate that the world is a lot bigger than the Civil Service, but it's worth noting that the CS operates a policy of non-disclosure regarding the university a candidate attended. It is the view of the CS that all universities are equal.
True.
That is something to consider - but a "tier-1" university degree still opens doors that others do not. So it's value is much higher.
I would emphasise again - if she goes to university, it must be to do a subject she really, really likes. Nearly no-one can force themselves through 3 years of studying a degree they aren't interested in.
It is also worth considering that returning to university later is possible - there were quite a few "adult" students on my degree (back in the 90s).
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.
So here's a question for you:
My not-at-all academic daughter needs to look at universities. She's not sure she wants to go but we have to look anyway in case. If she does go she will study Fine Art. 1 year Foundation Course and the 3 years degree. Will consign her to a 9% income tax obligation on future incomes over £25k (or whatever) for 30 years as per Student Loan rules (she will never pay it off). Plus other costs of living away. plus she will also lose four years earnings in studying for this degree which is pretty much non-income enhancing I would suggest. The reasons for going to university would be non-financial.
The alternative to university is a job probably on minimum wage. Probably in hospitality.
What should she do?
'Not at all academic' may mean not particularly high in cognitive aptitude, or may mean not interested in academia. They are different.
If the first, Fine Arts is great if you are brilliant at it, because there are people in arts, music etc who don't pass exams much but are differently gifted. With the very gifted you don't have to enquire, you know already if they are that class of people. Lucky ones.
If not interested in academia, then avoid. Debt for something you neither enjoy or want is not great.
But in the end your daughter should do exactly as she likes, weighing up all the facts. That's what modern daughters do anyway. And quite right too.
I agree. I'm just trying to give her all the facts. Trouble is she doesn't know her own mind and is struggling to give adequate weight to the enduring effects of Student Loan repayments.
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.
I agree about the limitations of governments and their plans. How we do depends mainly on people and events. So I'd like to hear a lot less of this "Can-Do Government Getting XYZ Done" tosh from Johnson and his merry mob. Brexit, Social Care, Higher Wages, Skills, Opportunities, Levelled Up Infrastructure, Climate, New Paradigm New Britain, Time Travel, you name it, they give it the big "I am" and boast how they are damn well going to Get It Done. The impression being pushed is of a highly interventionist, grif ... grafting government with its sleeves rolled up and a finger in every pie. Which is the very opposite of the truth.
.@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.
That last paragraph works both ways - until I did a bit of digging, on here Boris/Brexit haters were happy for people to think it was a UK only issue
We're in a strange paradoxical universe in which the majority viewpoints can be summarised as follows:
Remoaners*: Brexit is causing shortages, project fear now reality. Wage rises are however a bad thing, even for those who voted for Brexit and are more reflective of other trends than of Brexit. Brexiteers*: Brexit is not causing shortages. There are shortages everywhere. However, despite the shortages everywhere, including in HGV drivers, increases in wages are a Brexit dividend and there are no downsides.
*Pejorative terms intentionally used. There is also a sane minority (or perhaps a silent majority? e.g. RCS, but many others) who recognise that there are many different factors at play, that wage rises are great for those receiving them but could be bad for others who will be subject to inflation but not get rises themselves as they are still open to competition from Poles in Poland/rest of the EU if not from Poles here and that the issues are a mix of factors, Covid, post-Covid demand etc...
I thought that Robert's contribution this morning was excellent. I also think that it is a point that both @Philip_Thompson and I have readily acknowledged. Increased wages for those who now benefit from scarcity such as HGV drivers is not cost free. It means higher costs for the rest of us in terms of goods etc. To the extent that those who have not had these increased competitive advantage are not able to increase our earnings to compensate they will be worse off. And wage inequality in our society will reduce. Which Philip and I regard as a good thing even if (being nice we do not say because) it will reduce the standard of living of professional class remainers and, indeed, myself.
People who can afford to pay higher prices - or can negotiate higher pay to mitigate them - will always end up being fine with higher prices. Those who can't will be less enthused, however they voted in the referendum.
It is a bit like asking if a person should live in Nottingham or Cornwall? It depends mostly on personal tastes, as you say financially not going is likely better than going, but she might have a better life experience by going.
Freeing her of any societal/parental expectation that one path is better than the other and letting her make the choice with as much information as is available seems as much as a parent can do. Another thing to remember is she can always take a degree later on if she wants to, whereas the living cost debts and fee taxes get firmed up through the course.
Studying later (if at all) does work really well for some. I have a cousin who wasn't at all academic, and worked as a printer's assistant (in the days when printing was a manual thing) and a motorbike delivery person for 5-6 years. Then she got the learning bug for no apparent reason and ended up with a law degree. I'm convinced she'd have failed if she'd forced herself to do it at 18.
But if that seems unlikely, there are worse things than hospitality for a few years, even on minimum wage with UC top-up (I know, but it's still useful). Having a well-informed parent keeping her posted on what she's entitled to is a big help - I've met young people who had no clue that a wage topup was allowed or what getting on a waiting list for a flat involved.
Daughter got into the hospitality business by just taking a job just to earn some money when she moved here. She was looking at other opportunities. Then got interested in learning about all aspects, became good at it, was promoted and now she has her own company, business, has become an employer and has had one hell of an education in business (marketing, hospitality, accounting, HR etc) in the last two years. She has probably learnt more than she would have done in a business course. Whatever she does next this will have been an invaluable experience.
One of my sons is doing the same and he too has been promoted. I don't think he wants to stay in hospitality but learning about customer service, training staff (his current role) and the financial side of it is all valuable.
I've often thought that Britain and France are two countries with a mutual inferiority complex. A truly peculiar, maybe unique relationship.
In my experience (went to university there, own a house there) French people spend far less time thinking about England than English people imagine. They view the USA as their cultural usurper. They are just not that into you.
The obsession with France is weird isn't it. It's definitely a one-sided affair. You don't see it in Scotland, either. Seems to be mainly a thing with posh English blokes. Maybe some cultural memory of all those aristos going to the guillotine?
And yet this is the country where an MP has proposed making French the only official language of the EU in order to get rid of the Anglo-Saxons and their world view. And which got into an almighty strop over the US-Australia-U.K. deal and made a point of saying how little it thought of Britain by not removing its ambassador
Perhaps it is not quite as one-sided as all that.
The English (or the ones on here anyway) getting aerated over what *one* French MP has proposed is decent evidence of OLB's observation. If it's two way traffic the French certainly have tons of dumbfuckery issued by individual British MPs upon which to fixate.
My experience is that there is a broad-based antipathy towards the concept of 'the French' in England, counterbalanced by an obsequious enthusiasm from a small minority - the latter concentrated among the upper echelons of society, though certainly not drawn exclusively from that tier. In France, the upper echelons of society harbour a haughty disdain for the English, while the masses are broadly indifferent/mildly approving.
I would say - far more speculatively, I should stress - that the anipathy towards the French among the English is not the result of a thousand years of near-constant warfare - that should have been erased by the last 100 years of alliance. I'd put it down more to an antipathy towards our own ruling classes. This is a hangover from the Norman conquest; there is still something suspiciously interchangeable between French people and posh English people. Though the haughty disdain with which the French elite habitually dismiss England does grate rather. You really don't get the same class of withering condescension from any other country.
Yes, certainly it is upper middle class London Remainers who tend to be most pro French here while Leavers are more Franco sceptic.
In France the opposite it is true, it is the liberal Parisian elite Macron fans who are most anti British and anti Boris while Le Pen voters and French conservatives are rather more Anglophile and less Boris hostile
Who is particularly pro-French on here? Plenty of us are bemused that whenever the government cocks up it can just say "Australia good, France bad" and get an immediate 3-5% poll boost, but beyond that France is just another mid sized important neighbour with its own problems.
.@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.
That last paragraph works both ways - until I did a bit of digging, on here Boris/Brexit haters were happy for people to think it was a UK only issue
Read what I have posted. "It" - shortages - is a UK only issue. A lack of drivers is in Europe as well. The difference is that the European countries with a driver shortage are able to plan logistics and drivers across the 27. So there are no empty shelves or fuel tanks. No refusal to take a pallet across the border.
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.
There's an interesting minority theory in linguistics - to counter the normal view that Middle English was Old English with some Old Norse imported into it - which posits that in many ways the structure of English owes more to Norse than Germanic roots (as one example, our word order mirrors the Scandinavian languages rather than all the German verb-at-the-end stuff). Therefore you could see Middle English as Old Norse with a lot of Old English words imported. An additional argument is that it is much more common to import vocabulary into a base language from another than to import the mechanics of sentence structure and the like, whilst keeping the old words.
The weakness of the argument is the sheer dominance of words with Old English rather than Norse roots, but it's an interesting idea nevertheless.
I would just make a point to @Philip_Thompson my energy monthly direct debit rose 40% on the 1st September not 10% and that was before this present energy crisis worsened quite considerable
Going off the average bills quoted earlier
40% on a £95 bill = £38 . . . certainly not nice and not suggesting for a second that it is. £38 on a £868 bill = 4.4% . . . which is less than the 6.2% inflation that housing has been going up since 1999.
So yes the energy bill is nasty. But you know what? The very real inflation we've been having for decades is even worse than that even a 40% rise.
Now do you understand just how serious a problem this is?
Translation needed.
For the average households bills a 40% increase in energy = a £38 increase in monthly costs. For the average households rent a 6.2% increase in rent = a £53.82 increase in monthly costs.
The latter has existed consistently for decades now - and people claim there hasn't been inflation, because rent isn't included in CPI which is based on owner occupier housing costs. As bad as a 40% increase in energy is (and it is bad), a 6.2% increase in rent is worse.
So the notion that inflation is "new" is a myth. If you want to deal with inflation, the first step would be how do we get house prices and rent back down and ensure they don't grow faster than wages again. To treat house/rent price rises as every bit as much "inflation" as energy or food or any other cost.
This may have been dealt with far upthread and apologies if so - but do we have similar stats for past PM v. LoTo speeches at this stage in the Parliament? It would seem to me unusual that the PM should score lower on the strong & agree stats, at least.
.@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.
That last paragraph works both ways - until I did a bit of digging, on here Boris/Brexit haters were happy for people to think it was a UK only issue
We're in a strange paradoxical universe in which the majority viewpoints can be summarised as follows:
Remoaners*: Brexit is causing shortages, project fear now reality. Wage rises are however a bad thing, even for those who voted for Brexit and are more reflective of other trends than of Brexit. Brexiteers*: Brexit is not causing shortages. There are shortages everywhere. However, despite the shortages everywhere, including in HGV drivers, increases in wages are a Brexit dividend and there are no downsides.
*Pejorative terms intentionally used. There is also a sane minority (or perhaps a silent majority? e.g. RCS, but many others) who recognise that there are many different factors at play, that wage rises are great for those receiving them but could be bad for others who will be subject to inflation but not get rises themselves as they are still open to competition from Poles in Poland/rest of the EU if not from Poles here and that the issues are a mix of factors, Covid, post-Covid demand etc...
I thought that Robert's contribution this morning was excellent. I also think that it is a point that both @Philip_Thompson and I have readily acknowledged. Increased wages for those who now benefit from scarcity such as HGV drivers is not cost free. It means higher costs for the rest of us in terms of goods etc. To the extent that those who have not had these increased competitive advantage are not able to increase our earnings to compensate they will be worse off. And wage inequality in our society will reduce. Which Philip and I regard as a good thing even if (being nice we do not say because) it will reduce the standard of living of professional class remainers and, indeed, myself.
People who can afford to pay higher prices - or can negotiate higher pay to mitigate them - will always end up being fine with higher prices. Those who can't will be less enthused, however they voted in the referendum.
As RCS has previously mentioned, an example of an economy with a higher wage structure for the "low end" jobs is Switzerland.
If she is good and joins HMF she can spend six months every year skiiing.
I had a bootie mate who was a very proficient skier and can confirm the vast opportunities for skiving off to the Alps/Scotland/Norway it afforded him. Karma did catch up with him eventually when he got sent to the Indian Army High Altitude Warfare school to do the Winter Warfare course. He spent 22 consecutive days on a glacier in the Himalayas eating nothing but chapatis.
.@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.
That last paragraph works both ways - until I did a bit of digging, on here Boris/Brexit haters were happy for people to think it was a UK only issue
Read what I have posted. "It" - shortages - is a UK only issue. A lack of drivers is in Europe as well. The difference is that the European countries with a driver shortage are able to plan logistics and drivers across the 27. So there are no empty shelves or fuel tanks. No refusal to take a pallet across the border.
You are continuing to live in absolute denial.
How's that fuel shortage going? Just Googled it and the most recent press reporting I can find relates to Tuesday:
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.
So here's a question for you:
My not-at-all academic daughter needs to look at universities. She's not sure she wants to go but we have to look anyway in case. If she does go she will study Fine Art. 1 year Foundation Course and the 3 years degree. Will consign her to a 9% income tax obligation on future incomes over £25k (or whatever) for 30 years as per Student Loan rules (she will never pay it off). Plus other costs of living away. plus she will also lose four years earnings in studying for this degree which is pretty much non-income enhancing I would suggest. The reasons for going to university would be non-financial.
The alternative to university is a job probably on minimum wage. Probably in hospitality.
What should she do?
I suggest that she looks at post A level apprenticeship programmes run by large employers, geared for 18 year old school leavers. There are a lot out there, just do some web searches. It'll give her a decent CV and an opportunity to show what she's worth in a large organisation. The odds are that, once the apprenticeship ends if she's any good they'll have spotted that and want to keep her on in a substantive post. She should be selective and look at the qualiy of training and also typical career paths of past apprentices, and try and avoid small firms who might well just be looking for a discardable source of cheap labour for 2 years.
The first question I would ask is the quality of the universities she is likely to get in.
If you get a degree from a good university, the subject is almost irrelevant. Many people do a subject of their liking (very important to do something you actually like!) followed by a "conversion" Masters to "Business/IT"
So, would she be heading for a 2:1 or 1st at a Russell group (or similarly highly regarded) university?
Russell Group is not the be all and end all - do some research on the standing of the University.
A Russell group (or similarly highly regarded) university - no, unfortunately not - I would be much keener if this were so...
On Saturday we are going to look at Oxford Brooks. We may also look at Manchester Metropolitan and Central St Martins (UAL)
If not to a Russell Group university she would probably earn more post graduation and be debt free doing an apprenticeship. Although if she wants to go to university mainly for the social side and to learn for its own sake she should still go
For someone involved with post 16 education, I have grave reservations about the delivery of apprenticeships.
I am assessing a candidate at this very moment which tells a story. No, no, they were remiss in doing their homework so I have given them an exercise to do.
.@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.
That last paragraph works both ways - until I did a bit of digging, on here Boris/Brexit haters were happy for people to think it was a UK only issue
We're in a strange paradoxical universe in which the majority viewpoints can be summarised as follows:
Remoaners*: Brexit is causing shortages, project fear now reality. Wage rises are however a bad thing, even for those who voted for Brexit and are more reflective of other trends than of Brexit. Brexiteers*: Brexit is not causing shortages. There are shortages everywhere. However, despite the shortages everywhere, including in HGV drivers, increases in wages are a Brexit dividend and there are no downsides.
*Pejorative terms intentionally used. There is also a sane minority (or perhaps a silent majority? e.g. RCS, but many others) who recognise that there are many different factors at play, that wage rises are great for those receiving them but could be bad for others who will be subject to inflation but not get rises themselves as they are still open to competition from Poles in Poland/rest of the EU if not from Poles here and that the issues are a mix of factors, Covid, post-Covid demand etc...
I thought that Robert's contribution this morning was excellent. I also think that it is a point that both @Philip_Thompson and I have readily acknowledged. Increased wages for those who now benefit from scarcity such as HGV drivers is not cost free. It means higher costs for the rest of us in terms of goods etc. To the extent that those who have not had these increased competitive advantage are not able to increase our earnings to compensate they will be worse off. And wage inequality in our society will reduce. Which Philip and I regard as a good thing even if (being nice we do not say because) it will reduce the standard of living of professional class remainers and, indeed, myself.
People who can afford to pay higher prices - or can negotiate higher pay to mitigate them - will always end up being fine with higher prices. Those who can't will be less enthused, however they voted in the referendum.
As RCS has previously mentioned, an example of an economy with a higher wage structure for the "low end" jobs is Switzerland.
.@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.
That last paragraph works both ways - until I did a bit of digging, on here Boris/Brexit haters were happy for people to think it was a UK only issue
We're in a strange paradoxical universe in which the majority viewpoints can be summarised as follows:
Remoaners*: Brexit is causing shortages, project fear now reality. Wage rises are however a bad thing, even for those who voted for Brexit and are more reflective of other trends than of Brexit. Brexiteers*: Brexit is not causing shortages. There are shortages everywhere. However, despite the shortages everywhere, including in HGV drivers, increases in wages are a Brexit dividend and there are no downsides.
*Pejorative terms intentionally used. There is also a sane minority (or perhaps a silent majority? e.g. RCS, but many others) who recognise that there are many different factors at play, that wage rises are great for those receiving them but could be bad for others who will be subject to inflation but not get rises themselves as they are still open to competition from Poles in Poland/rest of the EU if not from Poles here and that the issues are a mix of factors, Covid, post-Covid demand etc...
I thought that Robert's contribution this morning was excellent. I also think that it is a point that both @Philip_Thompson and I have readily acknowledged. Increased wages for those who now benefit from scarcity such as HGV drivers is not cost free. It means higher costs for the rest of us in terms of goods etc. To the extent that those who have not had these increased competitive advantage are not able to increase our earnings to compensate they will be worse off. And wage inequality in our society will reduce. Which Philip and I regard as a good thing even if (being nice we do not say because) it will reduce the standard of living of professional class remainers and, indeed, myself.
People who can afford to pay higher prices - or can negotiate higher pay to mitigate them - will always end up being fine with higher prices. Those who can't will be less enthused, however they voted in the referendum.
As RCS has previously mentioned, an example of an economy with a higher wage structure for the "low end" jobs is Switzerland.
I wonder how many Swiss people do those jobs.
Probably the overwhelming majority of people doing the jobs are Swiss.
Just as the overwhelming majority of people doing the jobs in the UK are British.
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.
So here's a question for you:
My not-at-all academic daughter needs to look at universities. She's not sure she wants to go but we have to look anyway in case. If she does go she will study Fine Art. 1 year Foundation Course and the 3 years degree. Will consign her to a 9% income tax obligation on future incomes over £25k (or whatever) for 30 years as per Student Loan rules (she will never pay it off). Plus other costs of living away. plus she will also lose four years earnings in studying for this degree which is pretty much non-income enhancing I would suggest. The reasons for going to university would be non-financial.
The alternative to university is a job probably on minimum wage. Probably in hospitality.
What should she do?
I suggest that she looks at post A level apprenticeship programmes run by large employers, geared for 18 year old school leavers. There are a lot out there, just do some web searches. It'll give her a decent CV and an opportunity to show what she's worth in a large organisation. The odds are that, once the apprenticeship ends if she's any good they'll have spotted that and want to keep her on in a substantive post. She should be selective and look at the qualiy of training and also typical career paths of past apprentices, and try and avoid small firms who might well just be looking for a discardable source of cheap labour for 2 years.
The first question I would ask is the quality of the universities she is likely to get in.
If you get a degree from a good university, the subject is almost irrelevant. Many people do a subject of their liking (very important to do something you actually like!) followed by a "conversion" Masters to "Business/IT"
So, would she be heading for a 2:1 or 1st at a Russell group (or similarly highly regarded) university?
Russell Group is not the be all and end all - do some research on the standing of the University.
A Russell group (or similarly highly regarded) university - no, unfortunately not - I would be much keener if this were so...
On Saturday we are going to look at Oxford Brooks. We may also look at Manchester Metropolitan and Central St Martins (UAL)
Oxford Brook is a very good quality institution - a relative went there and did well. I think they were very smart to resist the attempted takeover by Oxford University in the early days.
It is also worth considering that if she gets a good first degree, she might want to do a conversion masters afterwards to business (a lot of the people I knew who did English Literature/Art did this). In the case that she gets a good degree at somewhere like Brooks, she would find it possible to do that Masters at a range of prestigious places.
In general you are your last degree.
A friend did a part time masters at Oxford - his first degree was in-complete and he returned to education after a number of years of working. On the job market he is now an "Oxford Graduate".
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.
So here's a question for you:
My not-at-all academic daughter needs to look at universities. She's not sure she wants to go but we have to look anyway in case. If she does go she will study Fine Art. 1 year Foundation Course and the 3 years degree. Will consign her to a 9% income tax obligation on future incomes over £25k (or whatever) for 30 years as per Student Loan rules (she will never pay it off). Plus other costs of living away. plus she will also lose four years earnings in studying for this degree which is pretty much non-income enhancing I would suggest. The reasons for going to university would be non-financial.
The alternative to university is a job probably on minimum wage. Probably in hospitality.
What should she do?
A young relative has a Fine Arts degree. She had a bit of a rocky employment time for 18 months or so after Uni, including 'volunteer' working .... intern in a museum .... but now has a job which she enjoyed in University Admin.
.@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.
That last paragraph works both ways - until I did a bit of digging, on here Boris/Brexit haters were happy for people to think it was a UK only issue
We're in a strange paradoxical universe in which the majority viewpoints can be summarised as follows:
Remoaners*: Brexit is causing shortages, project fear now reality. Wage rises are however a bad thing, even for those who voted for Brexit and are more reflective of other trends than of Brexit. Brexiteers*: Brexit is not causing shortages. There are shortages everywhere. However, despite the shortages everywhere, including in HGV drivers, increases in wages are a Brexit dividend and there are no downsides.
*Pejorative terms intentionally used. There is also a sane minority (or perhaps a silent majority? e.g. RCS, but many others) who recognise that there are many different factors at play, that wage rises are great for those receiving them but could be bad for others who will be subject to inflation but not get rises themselves as they are still open to competition from Poles in Poland/rest of the EU if not from Poles here and that the issues are a mix of factors, Covid, post-Covid demand etc...
I thought that Robert's contribution this morning was excellent. I also think that it is a point that both @Philip_Thompson and I have readily acknowledged. Increased wages for those who now benefit from scarcity such as HGV drivers is not cost free. It means higher costs for the rest of us in terms of goods etc. To the extent that those who have not had these increased competitive advantage are not able to increase our earnings to compensate they will be worse off. And wage inequality in our society will reduce. Which Philip and I regard as a good thing even if (being nice we do not say because) it will reduce the standard of living of professional class remainers and, indeed, myself.
People who can afford to pay higher prices - or can negotiate higher pay to mitigate them - will always end up being fine with higher prices. Those who can't will be less enthused, however they voted in the referendum.
As RCS has previously mentioned, an example of an economy with a higher wage structure for the "low end" jobs is Switzerland.
A good comparison for us and where we are? Switzerland?
Did the UK twice vote, 16 & 19, to pull up a drawbridge on immigration, or to take back control of immigration policy?
Can’t we now both control migration and allow migrants to fill skill gaps? pass a law where it says to business, you have to pay the going rate for foreign worker as for UK worker plus a small % tax on the visa to get the visa?
Is there evidence that immigration lowers living standards for native workers?
Strapping yourself to Boris economic illiterate political history rewriting big idea, you are embarrassing yourself - I don’t just mean you Mal but all of you.
Pirate Libertarians excepted, they actually believe in this stuff, and if we had PR wouldn’t even vote Tory.
This may have been dealt with far upthread and apologies if so - but do we have similar stats for past PM v. LoTo speeches at this stage in the Parliament? It would seem to me unusual that the PM should score lower on the strong & agree stats, at least.
The polling is slightly surprising and perhaps a first sign of problems for the next election.
Johnson's sunny optimism has worked well in opposition, and also (in polling terms) during a covid crisis. Will it work when peoples financial experiences are very volatile, many winners but just as many if not more losers?
Perhaps not, especially if there is a continued refusal to admit that there are any losers in all this (that is the government position in interviews, even if most Tory posters on here admit there are both winners and losers).
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.
So here's a question for you:
My not-at-all academic daughter needs to look at universities. She's not sure she wants to go but we have to look anyway in case. If she does go she will study Fine Art. 1 year Foundation Course and the 3 years degree. Will consign her to a 9% income tax obligation on future incomes over £25k (or whatever) for 30 years as per Student Loan rules (she will never pay it off). Plus other costs of living away. plus she will also lose four years earnings in studying for this degree which is pretty much non-income enhancing I would suggest. The reasons for going to university would be non-financial.
The alternative to university is a job probably on minimum wage. Probably in hospitality.
What should she do?
I suggest that she looks at post A level apprenticeship programmes run by large employers, geared for 18 year old school leavers. There are a lot out there, just do some web searches. It'll give her a decent CV and an opportunity to show what she's worth in a large organisation. The odds are that, once the apprenticeship ends if she's any good they'll have spotted that and want to keep her on in a substantive post. She should be selective and look at the qualiy of training and also typical career paths of past apprentices, and try and avoid small firms who might well just be looking for a discardable source of cheap labour for 2 years.
The first question I would ask is the quality of the universities she is likely to get in.
If you get a degree from a good university, the subject is almost irrelevant. Many people do a subject of their liking (very important to do something you actually like!) followed by a "conversion" Masters to "Business/IT"
So, would she be heading for a 2:1 or 1st at a Russell group (or similarly highly regarded) university?
Russell Group is not the be all and end all - do some research on the standing of the University.
A Russell group (or similarly highly regarded) university - no, unfortunately not - I would be much keener if this were so...
On Saturday we are going to look at Oxford Brooks. We may also look at Manchester Metropolitan and Central St Martins (UAL)
If not to a Russell Group university she would probably earn more post graduation and be debt free doing an apprenticeship. Although if she wants to go to university mainly for the social side and to learn for its own sake she should still go
For someone involved with post 16 education, I have grave reservations about the delivery of apprenticeships.
I am assessing a candidate at this very moment which tells a story. No, no, they were remiss in doing their homework so I have given them an exercise to do.
The DWP apprentice I know of has had to restart the course as the previous provider was so bad they've had to chuck out everything "taught" last year and start again.
This may have been dealt with far upthread and apologies if so - but do we have similar stats for past PM v. LoTo speeches at this stage in the Parliament? It would seem to me unusual that the PM should score lower on the strong & agree stats, at least.
Doesn't strike me as odd in midterm polling.
Half the country like the PM, half the country dislike him, so it doesn't matter what the PM says that'll be the case.
The LOTO has a much easier ride - much lower expectations, no need to deliver, can just say vague nice sounding things without having to be held to account.
I'd expect that if such polling does exist it would show Miliband consistently beating Cameron.
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.
So here's a question for you:
My not-at-all academic daughter needs to look at universities. She's not sure she wants to go but we have to look anyway in case. If she does go she will study Fine Art. 1 year Foundation Course and the 3 years degree. Will consign her to a 9% income tax obligation on future incomes over £25k (or whatever) for 30 years as per Student Loan rules (she will never pay it off). Plus other costs of living away. plus she will also lose four years earnings in studying for this degree which is pretty much non-income enhancing I would suggest. The reasons for going to university would be non-financial.
The alternative to university is a job probably on minimum wage. Probably in hospitality.
What should she do?
I suggest that she looks at post A level apprenticeship programmes run by large employers, geared for 18 year old school leavers. There are a lot out there, just do some web searches. It'll give her a decent CV and an opportunity to show what she's worth in a large organisation. The odds are that, once the apprenticeship ends if she's any good they'll have spotted that and want to keep her on in a substantive post. She should be selective and look at the qualiy of training and also typical career paths of past apprentices, and try and avoid small firms who might well just be looking for a discardable source of cheap labour for 2 years.
The first question I would ask is the quality of the universities she is likely to get in.
If you get a degree from a good university, the subject is almost irrelevant. Many people do a subject of their liking (very important to do something you actually like!) followed by a "conversion" Masters to "Business/IT"
So, would she be heading for a 2:1 or 1st at a Russell group (or similarly highly regarded) university?
Russell Group is not the be all and end all - do some research on the standing of the University.
Be careful because the pecking order for art schools may well be different from any universities to which they might be attached. Is there any sense of vocation to study art, or a slightly anachronistic view of art school as a finishing school before joining a rock band?
Re ski instructors, was there not a Brexit-related spoke in that wheel?
.@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.
That last paragraph works both ways - until I did a bit of digging, on here Boris/Brexit haters were happy for people to think it was a UK only issue
We're in a strange paradoxical universe in which the majority viewpoints can be summarised as follows:
Remoaners*: Brexit is causing shortages, project fear now reality. Wage rises are however a bad thing, even for those who voted for Brexit and are more reflective of other trends than of Brexit. Brexiteers*: Brexit is not causing shortages. There are shortages everywhere. However, despite the shortages everywhere, including in HGV drivers, increases in wages are a Brexit dividend and there are no downsides.
*Pejorative terms intentionally used. There is also a sane minority (or perhaps a silent majority? e.g. RCS, but many others) who recognise that there are many different factors at play, that wage rises are great for those receiving them but could be bad for others who will be subject to inflation but not get rises themselves as they are still open to competition from Poles in Poland/rest of the EU if not from Poles here and that the issues are a mix of factors, Covid, post-Covid demand etc...
I thought that Robert's contribution this morning was excellent. I also think that it is a point that both @Philip_Thompson and I have readily acknowledged. Increased wages for those who now benefit from scarcity such as HGV drivers is not cost free. It means higher costs for the rest of us in terms of goods etc. To the extent that those who have not had these increased competitive advantage are not able to increase our earnings to compensate they will be worse off. And wage inequality in our society will reduce. Which Philip and I regard as a good thing even if (being nice we do not say because) it will reduce the standard of living of professional class remainers and, indeed, myself.
Yep (I wasn't targeting you at all, btw - indeed, my comment was beyond this site to the press/MPs too - the government are doing it, opposition MPs are doing it).
If I have to pay more for food etc, no big deal (although I buy more expensive food, so I'm probably hit less hard than people buying the cheapest food as transport is likely a smaller share of my food costs than theirs). If the people involved in getting it to me get more pay, then great. I lived for a while in Sweden and that's more the model there; I have no problem with it.
What some people are missing is that HGV drivers were not, in population terms, low paid. Poorly paid for the skills and the deprivations of the job, very possibly (compare to long distance train drivers and pilots) but they were at or around median wage, I believe. I'm happy for them to get more - like Philip, I've no moral problem with the £100k HGV driver* - but I have concerns for people like someone I've got to know quite well in our local supermarket who stacks the shelves and works the checkouts. She has poor sight and cannot drive. She takes the bus to work. She is low paid, in population terms. So she might see higher transport costs getting to work, higher food prices and perhaps no increase in wages (maybe labour shortages will cascade down and shop workers will become drivers and wages will go up for them too - if so, great, but some other jobs may simply go offshore if wages make keeping them here noncompetitive, eventually an equilibrium will be found for where wages will be out of the EU, maybe it will be higher with less wage inequality - I hope so).
So, all I'm trying to say is that it's complicated. Both in the causes and in the short, medium and long term effects. Long term could be great and short term shit (could also be true of Brexit as a whole) or, indeed, the other way round.
*At sustained very high wages we surely see changes in practice and productivity - different transport modes, different distribution patterns as there will be cheaper ways of doing it. Great for the economy if productivity rises, but not necessarily good for those who have switched to HGV driving if demand falls.
.@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.
That last paragraph works both ways - until I did a bit of digging, on here Boris/Brexit haters were happy for people to think it was a UK only issue
We're in a strange paradoxical universe in which the majority viewpoints can be summarised as follows:
Remoaners*: Brexit is causing shortages, project fear now reality. Wage rises are however a bad thing, even for those who voted for Brexit and are more reflective of other trends than of Brexit. Brexiteers*: Brexit is not causing shortages. There are shortages everywhere. However, despite the shortages everywhere, including in HGV drivers, increases in wages are a Brexit dividend and there are no downsides.
*Pejorative terms intentionally used. There is also a sane minority (or perhaps a silent majority? e.g. RCS, but many others) who recognise that there are many different factors at play, that wage rises are great for those receiving them but could be bad for others who will be subject to inflation but not get rises themselves as they are still open to competition from Poles in Poland/rest of the EU if not from Poles here and that the issues are a mix of factors, Covid, post-Covid demand etc...
I thought that Robert's contribution this morning was excellent. I also think that it is a point that both @Philip_Thompson and I have readily acknowledged. Increased wages for those who now benefit from scarcity such as HGV drivers is not cost free. It means higher costs for the rest of us in terms of goods etc. To the extent that those who have not had these increased competitive advantage are not able to increase our earnings to compensate they will be worse off. And wage inequality in our society will reduce. Which Philip and I regard as a good thing even if (being nice we do not say because) it will reduce the standard of living of professional class remainers and, indeed, myself.
People who can afford to pay higher prices - or can negotiate higher pay to mitigate them - will always end up being fine with higher prices. Those who can't will be less enthused, however they voted in the referendum.
As RCS has previously mentioned, an example of an economy with a higher wage structure for the "low end" jobs is Switzerland.
I wonder how many Swiss people do those jobs.
Probably the overwhelming majority of people doing the jobs are Swiss.
Just as the overwhelming majority of people doing the jobs in the UK are British.
Immigration levels are much higher in Switzerland:
.@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.
That last paragraph works both ways - until I did a bit of digging, on here Boris/Brexit haters were happy for people to think it was a UK only issue
We're in a strange paradoxical universe in which the majority viewpoints can be summarised as follows:
Remoaners*: Brexit is causing shortages, project fear now reality. Wage rises are however a bad thing, even for those who voted for Brexit and are more reflective of other trends than of Brexit. Brexiteers*: Brexit is not causing shortages. There are shortages everywhere. However, despite the shortages everywhere, including in HGV drivers, increases in wages are a Brexit dividend and there are no downsides.
*Pejorative terms intentionally used. There is also a sane minority (or perhaps a silent majority? e.g. RCS, but many others) who recognise that there are many different factors at play, that wage rises are great for those receiving them but could be bad for others who will be subject to inflation but not get rises themselves as they are still open to competition from Poles in Poland/rest of the EU if not from Poles here and that the issues are a mix of factors, Covid, post-Covid demand etc...
I thought that Robert's contribution this morning was excellent. I also think that it is a point that both @Philip_Thompson and I have readily acknowledged. Increased wages for those who now benefit from scarcity such as HGV drivers is not cost free. It means higher costs for the rest of us in terms of goods etc. To the extent that those who have not had these increased competitive advantage are not able to increase our earnings to compensate they will be worse off. And wage inequality in our society will reduce. Which Philip and I regard as a good thing even if (being nice we do not say because) it will reduce the standard of living of professional class remainers and, indeed, myself.
People who can afford to pay higher prices - or can negotiate higher pay to mitigate them - will always end up being fine with higher prices. Those who can't will be less enthused, however they voted in the referendum.
As RCS has previously mentioned, an example of an economy with a higher wage structure for the "low end" jobs is Switzerland.
A good comparison for us and where we are? Switzerland?
Did the UK twice vote, 16 & 19, to pull up a drawbridge on immigration, or to take back control of immigration policy?
Can’t we now both control migration and allow migrants to fill skill gaps? pass a law where it says to business, you have to pay the going rate for foreign worker as for UK worker plus a small % tax on the visa to get the visa?
Is there evidence that immigration lowers living standards for native workers?
Strapping yourself to Boris economic illiterate political history rewriting big idea, you are embarrassing yourself - I don’t just mean you Mal but all of you.
Pirate Libertarians excepted, they actually believe in this stuff, and if we had PR wouldn’t even vote Tory.
The idea you can "pass a law where it says to business, you have to pay the going rate for foreign worker as for UK worker" is utterly fallacious. What is the going rate and is that the same with or without the workers?
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle applies to the wages too by doing this.
.@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.
That last paragraph works both ways - until I did a bit of digging, on here Boris/Brexit haters were happy for people to think it was a UK only issue
We're in a strange paradoxical universe in which the majority viewpoints can be summarised as follows:
Remoaners*: Brexit is causing shortages, project fear now reality. Wage rises are however a bad thing, even for those who voted for Brexit and are more reflective of other trends than of Brexit. Brexiteers*: Brexit is not causing shortages. There are shortages everywhere. However, despite the shortages everywhere, including in HGV drivers, increases in wages are a Brexit dividend and there are no downsides.
*Pejorative terms intentionally used. There is also a sane minority (or perhaps a silent majority? e.g. RCS, but many others) who recognise that there are many different factors at play, that wage rises are great for those receiving them but could be bad for others who will be subject to inflation but not get rises themselves as they are still open to competition from Poles in Poland/rest of the EU if not from Poles here and that the issues are a mix of factors, Covid, post-Covid demand etc...
I thought that Robert's contribution this morning was excellent. I also think that it is a point that both @Philip_Thompson and I have readily acknowledged. Increased wages for those who now benefit from scarcity such as HGV drivers is not cost free. It means higher costs for the rest of us in terms of goods etc. To the extent that those who have not had these increased competitive advantage are not able to increase our earnings to compensate they will be worse off. And wage inequality in our society will reduce. Which Philip and I regard as a good thing even if (being nice we do not say because) it will reduce the standard of living of professional class remainers and, indeed, myself.
People who can afford to pay higher prices - or can negotiate higher pay to mitigate them - will always end up being fine with higher prices. Those who can't will be less enthused, however they voted in the referendum.
A fair point but not a complete answer. The question is whether delivery drivers, care workers, cleaners, hospitality workers etc are entitled to a larger share of the cake than they had hitherto. I say yes. It utterly bemuses me that SKS's answer is so much more equivocal and that it takes an Etonian Tory PM to call him out on it.
We are in the Lake district today which sadly is reminding us quite where these beautiful lakes come from. There is a clear shortage of staff in the hotel and the majority of those who are there are foreign, as they would have been for much of the last 20 years. If they want the locals to work in places like this with unattractive split shifts and the like they are going to have to pay more.
In Banbury, Oxford and York on this trip we have seen the same. Almost all hospitality and many, many retailers are looking for staff. Banbury and Oxford in particular were clearly booming with barely a single empty shopping unit and a much higher proportion of small businesses than chains. It frankly makes me a bit depressed about what we will see when we return home to Dundee. No doubt there are parts of England struggling too but in many parts that I have seen in this trip things are going very well.
I would just make a point to @Philip_Thompson my energy monthly direct debit rose 40% on the 1st September not 10% and that was before this present energy crisis worsened quite considerable
Going off the average bills quoted earlier
40% on a £95 bill = £38 . . . certainly not nice and not suggesting for a second that it is. £38 on a £868 bill = 4.4% . . . which is less than the 6.2% inflation that housing has been going up since 1999.
So yes the energy bill is nasty. But you know what? The very real inflation we've been having for decades is even worse than that even a 40% rise.
Now do you understand just how serious a problem this is?
It's a serious problem, but it's also an Other Person's Problem.
If you already have a mortgage, then your house price isn't subject to house price inflation; it's frozen at whenever-you-bought. And since the limiting step in house buying tends to be the deposit rather than the monthly repayments house price inflation tends to help you go up the ladder. When I bought my first house in 2001, house price inflation turned a £7000 deposit into £40000 equity in 3 years. It's not something I sought, but it made moving up the ladder much easier.
This is all a moral disgrace and an economic absurdity. Sorting it out would, I suspect, do more for the long term productive capacity of the country than any of the stuff we've been arguing about for the last five years.
But to make a meaningful dent in house prices would be political Kryptonite. And I'm not sure a "general inflation / flat house prices" scenario works; in that case, I'd expect interest rates to have to rise (at least to keep up with inflation) which would clobber house prices. And that would clobber people- mostly those who have bought more recently, at higher prices and with less paid off. If house prices fell 50% tomorrow, I personally could shrug it off, but many millions couldn't.
So what you're looking for is a politician prepared to accept the hospital pass of having the house price boom burst on their watch. Prepared to go down to a landslide defeat at the next election, knowing in their heart that they've done the necessary thing...
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.
So here's a question for you:
My not-at-all academic daughter needs to look at universities. She's not sure she wants to go but we have to look anyway in case. If she does go she will study Fine Art. 1 year Foundation Course and the 3 years degree. Will consign her to a 9% income tax obligation on future incomes over £25k (or whatever) for 30 years as per Student Loan rules (she will never pay it off). Plus other costs of living away. plus she will also lose four years earnings in studying for this degree which is pretty much non-income enhancing I would suggest. The reasons for going to university would be non-financial.
The alternative to university is a job probably on minimum wage. Probably in hospitality.
What should she do?
'Not at all academic' may mean not particularly high in cognitive aptitude, or may mean not interested in academia. They are different.
If the first, Fine Arts is great if you are brilliant at it, because there are people in arts, music etc who don't pass exams much but are differently gifted. With the very gifted you don't have to enquire, you know already if they are that class of people. Lucky ones.
If not interested in academia, then avoid. Debt for something you neither enjoy or want is not great.
But in the end your daughter should do exactly as she likes, weighing up all the facts. That's what modern daughters do anyway. And quite right too.
I agree. I'm just trying to give her all the facts. Trouble is she doesn't know her own mind and is struggling to give adequate weight to the enduring effects of Student Loan repayments.
If she earns £30k, the payment is £450 per year as a permanent tax. The cost of a cheap week’s holiday in Spain. In exchange for four years of interest and fun? Sounds like a good swap.
Bear in mind that she can pick up 10-20 hours of min wage retail work per week too, if she likes.
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.
There's an interesting minority theory in linguistics - to counter the normal view that Middle English was Old English with some Old Norse imported into it - which posits that in many ways the structure of English owes more to Norse than Germanic roots (as one example, our word order mirrors the Scandinavian languages rather than all the German verb-at-the-end stuff). Therefore you could see Middle English as Old Norse with a lot of Old English words imported. An additional argument is that it is much more common to import vocabulary into a base language from another than to import the mechanics of sentence structure and the like, whilst keeping the old words.
The weakness of the argument is the sheer dominance of words with Old English rather than Norse roots, but it's an interesting idea nevertheless.
When did the somewhat eccentric Germanic verb-at-the-end system start. Can't think of another language that does that.
As an aside an old acquaintance, a fluent German speaker who was a Military Policeman in WWII used to say that, late in the war, when they captured German officers, it took until the end of their statement to know whether they were actually surrendering or not!
.@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.
That last paragraph works both ways - until I did a bit of digging, on here Boris/Brexit haters were happy for people to think it was a UK only issue
We're in a strange paradoxical universe in which the majority viewpoints can be summarised as follows:
Remoaners*: Brexit is causing shortages, project fear now reality. Wage rises are however a bad thing, even for those who voted for Brexit and are more reflective of other trends than of Brexit. Brexiteers*: Brexit is not causing shortages. There are shortages everywhere. However, despite the shortages everywhere, including in HGV drivers, increases in wages are a Brexit dividend and there are no downsides.
*Pejorative terms intentionally used. There is also a sane minority (or perhaps a silent majority? e.g. RCS, but many others) who recognise that there are many different factors at play, that wage rises are great for those receiving them but could be bad for others who will be subject to inflation but not get rises themselves as they are still open to competition from Poles in Poland/rest of the EU if not from Poles here and that the issues are a mix of factors, Covid, post-Covid demand etc...
I thought that Robert's contribution this morning was excellent. I also think that it is a point that both @Philip_Thompson and I have readily acknowledged. Increased wages for those who now benefit from scarcity such as HGV drivers is not cost free. It means higher costs for the rest of us in terms of goods etc. To the extent that those who have not had these increased competitive advantage are not able to increase our earnings to compensate they will be worse off. And wage inequality in our society will reduce. Which Philip and I regard as a good thing even if (being nice we do not say because) it will reduce the standard of living of professional class remainers and, indeed, myself.
People who can afford to pay higher prices - or can negotiate higher pay to mitigate them - will always end up being fine with higher prices. Those who can't will be less enthused, however they voted in the referendum.
As RCS has previously mentioned, an example of an economy with a higher wage structure for the "low end" jobs is Switzerland.
I wonder how many Swiss people do those jobs.
Probably the overwhelming majority of people doing the jobs are Swiss.
Just as the overwhelming majority of people doing the jobs in the UK are British.
About 30% of all workers in Switzerland are not Swiss, so there will definitely be sectors where the "overwhelming majority" are not Swiss, and it would not be at all surprising to find lower paid sectors where the Swiss are in a minority.
.@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.
That last paragraph works both ways - until I did a bit of digging, on here Boris/Brexit haters were happy for people to think it was a UK only issue
We're in a strange paradoxical universe in which the majority viewpoints can be summarised as follows:
Remoaners*: Brexit is causing shortages, project fear now reality. Wage rises are however a bad thing, even for those who voted for Brexit and are more reflective of other trends than of Brexit. Brexiteers*: Brexit is not causing shortages. There are shortages everywhere. However, despite the shortages everywhere, including in HGV drivers, increases in wages are a Brexit dividend and there are no downsides.
*Pejorative terms intentionally used. There is also a sane minority (or perhaps a silent majority? e.g. RCS, but many others) who recognise that there are many different factors at play, that wage rises are great for those receiving them but could be bad for others who will be subject to inflation but not get rises themselves as they are still open to competition from Poles in Poland/rest of the EU if not from Poles here and that the issues are a mix of factors, Covid, post-Covid demand etc...
I thought that Robert's contribution this morning was excellent. I also think that it is a point that both @Philip_Thompson and I have readily acknowledged. Increased wages for those who now benefit from scarcity such as HGV drivers is not cost free. It means higher costs for the rest of us in terms of goods etc. To the extent that those who have not had these increased competitive advantage are not able to increase our earnings to compensate they will be worse off. And wage inequality in our society will reduce. Which Philip and I regard as a good thing even if (being nice we do not say because) it will reduce the standard of living of professional class remainers and, indeed, myself.
People who can afford to pay higher prices - or can negotiate higher pay to mitigate them - will always end up being fine with higher prices. Those who can't will be less enthused, however they voted in the referendum.
As RCS has previously mentioned, an example of an economy with a higher wage structure for the "low end" jobs is Switzerland.
I wonder how many Swiss people do those jobs.
Probably the overwhelming majority of people doing the jobs are Swiss.
Just as the overwhelming majority of people doing the jobs in the UK are British.
Immigration levels are much higher in Switzerland:
Assuming most immigrants are young, they would form a far higher percentage of the overall workforce than they do here.
Indeed but Switzerland has worked hard to ensure it attracts higher skilled migrants, instead of low skilled migrants like the UK has incentivised by offering them housing benefits, tax credits, minimum wage and no barriers.
So the migrants there might be biased more to working in Credit Suisse and not Pret.
.@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.
That last paragraph works both ways - until I did a bit of digging, on here Boris/Brexit haters were happy for people to think it was a UK only issue
We're in a strange paradoxical universe in which the majority viewpoints can be summarised as follows:
Remoaners*: Brexit is causing shortages, project fear now reality. Wage rises are however a bad thing, even for those who voted for Brexit and are more reflective of other trends than of Brexit. Brexiteers*: Brexit is not causing shortages. There are shortages everywhere. However, despite the shortages everywhere, including in HGV drivers, increases in wages are a Brexit dividend and there are no downsides.
*Pejorative terms intentionally used. There is also a sane minority (or perhaps a silent majority? e.g. RCS, but many others) who recognise that there are many different factors at play, that wage rises are great for those receiving them but could be bad for others who will be subject to inflation but not get rises themselves as they are still open to competition from Poles in Poland/rest of the EU if not from Poles here and that the issues are a mix of factors, Covid, post-Covid demand etc...
I thought that Robert's contribution this morning was excellent. I also think that it is a point that both @Philip_Thompson and I have readily acknowledged. Increased wages for those who now benefit from scarcity such as HGV drivers is not cost free. It means higher costs for the rest of us in terms of goods etc. To the extent that those who have not had these increased competitive advantage are not able to increase our earnings to compensate they will be worse off. And wage inequality in our society will reduce. Which Philip and I regard as a good thing even if (being nice we do not say because) it will reduce the standard of living of professional class remainers and, indeed, myself.
People who can afford to pay higher prices - or can negotiate higher pay to mitigate them - will always end up being fine with higher prices. Those who can't will be less enthused, however they voted in the referendum.
As RCS has previously mentioned, an example of an economy with a higher wage structure for the "low end" jobs is Switzerland.
A good comparison for us and where we are? Switzerland?
Did the UK twice vote, 16 & 19, to pull up a drawbridge on immigration, or to take back control of immigration policy?
Can’t we now both control migration and allow migrants to fill skill gaps? pass a law where it says to business, you have to pay the going rate for foreign worker as for UK worker plus a small % tax on the visa to get the visa?
Is there evidence that immigration lowers living standards for native workers?
Strapping yourself to Boris economic illiterate political history rewriting big idea, you are embarrassing yourself - I don’t just mean you Mal but all of you.
Pirate Libertarians excepted, they actually believe in this stuff, and if we had PR wouldn’t even vote Tory.
Sigh.
I am pointing out that we have an example of an economy where, deliberately, they chose to "protect" the locals in low paid jobs against competition in the wage market.
Part of this protection is the language(s), but the Swiss system of demanding local qualifications has a big part in this.
A free international market in labour will cause wages for some to rise - more activity possible in areas where there are skill shortages, and due to the international skill shortage there will be little downward pressure
For those where there is a skill surplus, wages will fall. There may well be more jobs, but they will be lower paid.
This difference is why the credentialed groups find freedom of movement to be good for them. The un-credentialed (or less credentialed) don't.
I've often thought that Britain and France are two countries with a mutual inferiority complex. A truly peculiar, maybe unique relationship.
In my experience (went to university there, own a house there) French people spend far less time thinking about England than English people imagine. They view the USA as their cultural usurper. They are just not that into you.
The obsession with France is weird isn't it. It's definitely a one-sided affair. You don't see it in Scotland, either. Seems to be mainly a thing with posh English blokes. Maybe some cultural memory of all those aristos going to the guillotine?
And yet this is the country where an MP has proposed making French the only official language of the EU in order to get rid of the Anglo-Saxons and their world view. And which got into an almighty strop over the US-Australia-U.K. deal and made a point of saying how little it thought of Britain by not removing its ambassador
Perhaps it is not quite as one-sided as all that.
The English (or the ones on here anyway) getting aerated over what *one* French MP has proposed is decent evidence of OLB's observation. If it's two way traffic the French certainly have tons of dumbfuckery issued by individual British MPs upon which to fixate.
My experience is that there is a broad-based antipathy towards the concept of 'the French' in England, counterbalanced by an obsequious enthusiasm from a small minority - the latter concentrated among the upper echelons of society, though certainly not drawn exclusively from that tier. In France, the upper echelons of society harbour a haughty disdain for the English, while the masses are broadly indifferent/mildly approving.
I would say - far more speculatively, I should stress - that the anipathy towards the French among the English is not the result of a thousand years of near-constant warfare - that should have been erased by the last 100 years of alliance. I'd put it down more to an antipathy towards our own ruling classes. This is a hangover from the Norman conquest; there is still something suspiciously interchangeable between French people and posh English people. Though the haughty disdain with which the French elite habitually dismiss England does grate rather. You really don't get the same class of withering condescension from any other country.
Yes, certainly it is upper middle class London Remainers who tend to be most pro French here while Leavers are more Franco sceptic.
In France the opposite it is true, it is the liberal Parisian elite Macron fans who are most anti British and anti Boris while Le Pen voters and French conservatives are rather more Anglophile and less Boris hostile
Who is particularly pro-French on here? Plenty of us are bemused that whenever the government cocks up it can just say "Australia good, France bad" and get an immediate 3-5% poll boost, but beyond that France is just another mid sized important neighbour with its own problems.
I have to say I am pro French/France. I even love the way they cock things up.
I've often thought that Britain and France are two countries with a mutual inferiority complex. A truly peculiar, maybe unique relationship.
In my experience (went to university there, own a house there) French people spend far less time thinking about England than English people imagine. They view the USA as their cultural usurper. They are just not that into you.
The obsession with France is weird isn't it. It's definitely a one-sided affair. You don't see it in Scotland, either. Seems to be mainly a thing with posh English blokes. Maybe some cultural memory of all those aristos going to the guillotine?
And yet this is the country where an MP has proposed making French the only official language of the EU in order to get rid of the Anglo-Saxons and their world view. And which got into an almighty strop over the US-Australia-U.K. deal and made a point of saying how little it thought of Britain by not removing its ambassador
Perhaps it is not quite as one-sided as all that.
The English (or the ones on here anyway) getting aerated over what *one* French MP has proposed is decent evidence of OLB's observation. If it's two way traffic the French certainly have tons of dumbfuckery issued by individual British MPs upon which to fixate.
My experience is that there is a broad-based antipathy towards the concept of 'the French' in England, counterbalanced by an obsequious enthusiasm from a small minority - the latter concentrated among the upper echelons of society, though certainly not drawn exclusively from that tier. In France, the upper echelons of society harbour a haughty disdain for the English, while the masses are broadly indifferent/mildly approving.
I would say - far more speculatively, I should stress - that the anipathy towards the French among the English is not the result of a thousand years of near-constant warfare - that should have been erased by the last 100 years of alliance. I'd put it down more to an antipathy towards our own ruling classes. This is a hangover from the Norman conquest; there is still something suspiciously interchangeable between French people and posh English people. Though the haughty disdain with which the French elite habitually dismiss England does grate rather. You really don't get the same class of withering condescension from any other country.
Yes, certainly it is upper middle class London Remainers who tend to be most pro French here while Leavers are more Franco sceptic.
In France the opposite it is true, it is the liberal Parisian elite Macron fans who are most anti British and anti Boris while Le Pen voters and French conservatives are rather more Anglophile and less Boris hostile
Who is particularly pro-French on here? Plenty of us are bemused that whenever the government cocks up it can just say "Australia good, France bad" and get an immediate 3-5% poll boost, but beyond that France is just another mid sized important neighbour with its own problems.
I am relatively pro French.
As I said before while I support AUKUS France is actually in global terms roughly our equal, we are the only 2 nations other than the US in the G7 and G20 and also permanent members of the UN Security Council. We also need France to be partners with us in NATO to contain Putin and help tackle Islamic jihadi extremism. We also should not ignore that France has a presence in the Pacific too where some French overseas territories are based.
Plus of course France is our nearest neighbour so we want reasonable relations with it
I would just make a point to @Philip_Thompson my energy monthly direct debit rose 40% on the 1st September not 10% and that was before this present energy crisis worsened quite considerable
Going off the average bills quoted earlier
40% on a £95 bill = £38 . . . certainly not nice and not suggesting for a second that it is. £38 on a £868 bill = 4.4% . . . which is less than the 6.2% inflation that housing has been going up since 1999.
So yes the energy bill is nasty. But you know what? The very real inflation we've been having for decades is even worse than that even a 40% rise.
Now do you understand just how serious a problem this is?
It's a serious problem, but it's also an Other Person's Problem.
If you already have a mortgage, then your house price isn't subject to house price inflation; it's frozen at whenever-you-bought. And since the limiting step in house buying tends to be the deposit rather than the monthly repayments house price inflation tends to help you go up the ladder. When I bought my first house in 2001, house price inflation turned a £7000 deposit into £40000 equity in 3 years. It's not something I sought, but it made moving up the ladder much easier.
This is all a moral disgrace and an economic absurdity. Sorting it out would, I suspect, do more for the long term productive capacity of the country than any of the stuff we've been arguing about for the last five years.
But to make a meaningful dent in house prices would be political Kryptonite. And I'm not sure a "general inflation / flat house prices" scenario works; in that case, I'd expect interest rates to have to rise (at least to keep up with inflation) which would clobber house prices. And that would clobber people- mostly those who have bought more recently, at higher prices and with less paid off. If house prices fell 50% tomorrow, I personally could shrug it off, but many millions couldn't.
So what you're looking for is a politician prepared to accept the hospital pass of having the house price boom burst on their watch. Prepared to go down to a landslide defeat at the next election, knowing in their heart that they've done the necessary thing...
Who is this politician?
A politician who actually genuinely cared about people struggling to pay bills.
I would just make a point to @Philip_Thompson my energy monthly direct debit rose 40% on the 1st September not 10% and that was before this present energy crisis worsened quite considerable
Going off the average bills quoted earlier
40% on a £95 bill = £38 . . . certainly not nice and not suggesting for a second that it is. £38 on a £868 bill = 4.4% . . . which is less than the 6.2% inflation that housing has been going up since 1999.
So yes the energy bill is nasty. But you know what? The very real inflation we've been having for decades is even worse than that even a 40% rise.
Now do you understand just how serious a problem this is?
It's a serious problem, but it's also an Other Person's Problem.
If you already have a mortgage, then your house price isn't subject to house price inflation; it's frozen at whenever-you-bought. And since the limiting step in house buying tends to be the deposit rather than the monthly repayments house price inflation tends to help you go up the ladder. When I bought my first house in 2001, house price inflation turned a £7000 deposit into £40000 equity in 3 years. It's not something I sought, but it made moving up the ladder much easier.
This is all a moral disgrace and an economic absurdity. Sorting it out would, I suspect, do more for the long term productive capacity of the country than any of the stuff we've been arguing about for the last five years.
But to make a meaningful dent in house prices would be political Kryptonite. And I'm not sure a "general inflation / flat house prices" scenario works; in that case, I'd expect interest rates to have to rise (at least to keep up with inflation) which would clobber house prices. And that would clobber people- mostly those who have bought more recently, at higher prices and with less paid off. If house prices fell 50% tomorrow, I personally could shrug it off, but many millions couldn't.
So what you're looking for is a politician prepared to accept the hospital pass of having the house price boom burst on their watch. Prepared to go down to a landslide defeat at the next election, knowing in their heart that they've done the necessary thing...
Who is this politician?
Sooner or later the bubble will pop because of global issues, not what is decided in Westminster or the BoE.
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.
So here's a question for you:
My not-at-all academic daughter needs to look at universities. She's not sure she wants to go but we have to look anyway in case. If she does go she will study Fine Art. 1 year Foundation Course and the 3 years degree. Will consign her to a 9% income tax obligation on future incomes over £25k (or whatever) for 30 years as per Student Loan rules (she will never pay it off). Plus other costs of living away. plus she will also lose four years earnings in studying for this degree which is pretty much non-income enhancing I would suggest. The reasons for going to university would be non-financial.
The alternative to university is a job probably on minimum wage. Probably in hospitality.
What should she do?
I suggest that she looks at post A level apprenticeship programmes run by large employers, geared for 18 year old school leavers. There are a lot out there, just do some web searches. It'll give her a decent CV and an opportunity to show what she's worth in a large organisation. The odds are that, once the apprenticeship ends if she's any good they'll have spotted that and want to keep her on in a substantive post. She should be selective and look at the qualiy of training and also typical career paths of past apprentices, and try and avoid small firms who might well just be looking for a discardable source of cheap labour for 2 years.
The first question I would ask is the quality of the universities she is likely to get in.
If you get a degree from a good university, the subject is almost irrelevant. Many people do a subject of their liking (very important to do something you actually like!) followed by a "conversion" Masters to "Business/IT"
So, would she be heading for a 2:1 or 1st at a Russell group (or similarly highly regarded) university?
Russell Group is not the be all and end all - do some research on the standing of the University.
A Russell group (or similarly highly regarded) university - no, unfortunately not - I would be much keener if this were so...
On Saturday we are going to look at Oxford Brooks. We may also look at Manchester Metropolitan and Central St Martins (UAL)
If not to a Russell Group university she would probably earn more post graduation and be debt free doing an apprenticeship. Although if she wants to go to university mainly for the social side and to learn for its own sake she should still go
For someone involved with post 16 education, I have grave reservations about the delivery of apprenticeships.
I am assessing a candidate at this very moment which tells a story. No, no, they were remiss in doing their homework so I have given them an exercise to do.
The DWP apprentice I know of has had to restart the course as the previous provider was so bad they've had to chuck out everything "taught" last year and start again.
That is not unusual. Funded qualifications are all about getting paid on certification. So for cynical providers, including some FE colleges, it is all about the certificate rather than what goes on before.
.@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.
That last paragraph works both ways - until I did a bit of digging, on here Boris/Brexit haters were happy for people to think it was a UK only issue
We're in a strange paradoxical universe in which the majority viewpoints can be summarised as follows:
Remoaners*: Brexit is causing shortages, project fear now reality. Wage rises are however a bad thing, even for those who voted for Brexit and are more reflective of other trends than of Brexit. Brexiteers*: Brexit is not causing shortages. There are shortages everywhere. However, despite the shortages everywhere, including in HGV drivers, increases in wages are a Brexit dividend and there are no downsides.
*Pejorative terms intentionally used. There is also a sane minority (or perhaps a silent majority? e.g. RCS, but many others) who recognise that there are many different factors at play, that wage rises are great for those receiving them but could be bad for others who will be subject to inflation but not get rises themselves as they are still open to competition from Poles in Poland/rest of the EU if not from Poles here and that the issues are a mix of factors, Covid, post-Covid demand etc...
I thought that Robert's contribution this morning was excellent. I also think that it is a point that both @Philip_Thompson and I have readily acknowledged. Increased wages for those who now benefit from scarcity such as HGV drivers is not cost free. It means higher costs for the rest of us in terms of goods etc. To the extent that those who have not had these increased competitive advantage are not able to increase our earnings to compensate they will be worse off. And wage inequality in our society will reduce. Which Philip and I regard as a good thing even if (being nice we do not say because) it will reduce the standard of living of professional class remainers and, indeed, myself.
People who can afford to pay higher prices - or can negotiate higher pay to mitigate them - will always end up being fine with higher prices. Those who can't will be less enthused, however they voted in the referendum.
As RCS has previously mentioned, an example of an economy with a higher wage structure for the "low end" jobs is Switzerland.
I wonder how many Swiss people do those jobs.
IIRC You need to speak both French and German and have a 2 year local Swiss qualification to work in a restaurant or some such.
.@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.
That last paragraph works both ways - until I did a bit of digging, on here Boris/Brexit haters were happy for people to think it was a UK only issue
We're in a strange paradoxical universe in which the majority viewpoints can be summarised as follows:
Remoaners*: Brexit is causing shortages, project fear now reality. Wage rises are however a bad thing, even for those who voted for Brexit and are more reflective of other trends than of Brexit. Brexiteers*: Brexit is not causing shortages. There are shortages everywhere. However, despite the shortages everywhere, including in HGV drivers, increases in wages are a Brexit dividend and there are no downsides.
*Pejorative terms intentionally used. There is also a sane minority (or perhaps a silent majority? e.g. RCS, but many others) who recognise that there are many different factors at play, that wage rises are great for those receiving them but could be bad for others who will be subject to inflation but not get rises themselves as they are still open to competition from Poles in Poland/rest of the EU if not from Poles here and that the issues are a mix of factors, Covid, post-Covid demand etc...
I thought that Robert's contribution this morning was excellent. I also think that it is a point that both @Philip_Thompson and I have readily acknowledged. Increased wages for those who now benefit from scarcity such as HGV drivers is not cost free. It means higher costs for the rest of us in terms of goods etc. To the extent that those who have not had these increased competitive advantage are not able to increase our earnings to compensate they will be worse off. And wage inequality in our society will reduce. Which Philip and I regard as a good thing even if (being nice we do not say because) it will reduce the standard of living of professional class remainers and, indeed, myself.
People who can afford to pay higher prices - or can negotiate higher pay to mitigate them - will always end up being fine with higher prices. Those who can't will be less enthused, however they voted in the referendum.
A fair point but not a complete answer. The question is whether delivery drivers, care workers, cleaners, hospitality workers etc are entitled to a larger share of the cake than they had hitherto. I say yes. It utterly bemuses me that SKS's answer is so much more equivocal and that it takes an Etonian Tory PM to call him out on it.
We are in the Lake district today which sadly is reminding us quite where these beautiful lakes come from. There is a clear shortage of staff in the hotel and the majority of those who are there are foreign, as they would have been for much of the last 20 years. If they want the locals to work in places like this with unattractive split shifts and the like they are going to have to pay more.
In Banbury, Oxford and York on this trip we have seen the same. Almost all hospitality and many, many retailers are looking for staff. Banbury and Oxford in particular were clearly booming with barely a single empty shopping unit and a much higher proportion of small businesses than chains. It frankly makes me a bit depressed about what we will see when we return home to Dundee. No doubt there are parts of England struggling too but in many parts that I have seen in this trip things are going very well.
On our recent trip we noted staff shortages in hospitality in both NE England and NW Wales.
.@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.
That last paragraph works both ways - until I did a bit of digging, on here Boris/Brexit haters were happy for people to think it was a UK only issue
We're in a strange paradoxical universe in which the majority viewpoints can be summarised as follows:
Remoaners*: Brexit is causing shortages, project fear now reality. Wage rises are however a bad thing, even for those who voted for Brexit and are more reflective of other trends than of Brexit. Brexiteers*: Brexit is not causing shortages. There are shortages everywhere. However, despite the shortages everywhere, including in HGV drivers, increases in wages are a Brexit dividend and there are no downsides.
*Pejorative terms intentionally used. There is also a sane minority (or perhaps a silent majority? e.g. RCS, but many others) who recognise that there are many different factors at play, that wage rises are great for those receiving them but could be bad for others who will be subject to inflation but not get rises themselves as they are still open to competition from Poles in Poland/rest of the EU if not from Poles here and that the issues are a mix of factors, Covid, post-Covid demand etc...
I thought that Robert's contribution this morning was excellent. I also think that it is a point that both @Philip_Thompson and I have readily acknowledged. Increased wages for those who now benefit from scarcity such as HGV drivers is not cost free. It means higher costs for the rest of us in terms of goods etc. To the extent that those who have not had these increased competitive advantage are not able to increase our earnings to compensate they will be worse off. And wage inequality in our society will reduce. Which Philip and I regard as a good thing even if (being nice we do not say because) it will reduce the standard of living of professional class remainers and, indeed, myself.
People who can afford to pay higher prices - or can negotiate higher pay to mitigate them - will always end up being fine with higher prices. Those who can't will be less enthused, however they voted in the referendum.
As RCS has previously mentioned, an example of an economy with a higher wage structure for the "low end" jobs is Switzerland.
I wonder how many Swiss people do those jobs.
Probably the overwhelming majority of people doing the jobs are Swiss.
Just as the overwhelming majority of people doing the jobs in the UK are British.
Immigration levels are much higher in Switzerland:
Assuming most immigrants are young, they would form a far higher percentage of the overall workforce than they do here.
Indeed but Switzerland has worked hard to ensure it attracts higher skilled migrants, instead of low skilled migrants like the UK has incentivised by offering them housing benefits, tax credits, minimum wage and no barriers.
So the migrants there might be biased more to working in Credit Suisse and not Pret.
Comments
Lets say that you decide that elections to the UK Parliament are more important than elections to Holyrood. OK lets look at that then, what were the results of the last UK election in Scotland? The SNP got 48 of the 59 seats (81% of the seats available to win).
So which is it? Holyrood or Parliament? Either way, Scotland has elected the SNP and given them a democratic mandate.
The only way to deny the SNP has a democratic mandate is to say that Scotland has no say in deciding whether they wish to be a part of the UK or not. That the UK is no longer a voluntary union.
One is that, at least for a while, investing in buy-to-let was far superior to any other form of investment. The returns for some people have been stupendous. This has sucked in a disproportionate amount of money, away from more productive investment. This can't have any effect other than driving prices higher.
The other is that we have a culture whereby a large proportion of people will buy the most expensive house they can afford when they move house. I don't know whether this is a class thing - the importance of living in the right area - the patchiness in the Education system which has the same effect, a high degree of variability in the quality of the housing stock - so that it makes a large difference to material comfort to extend yourself to the maximum extent - or because our sense of status is primarily determined by peacocking over our housing.
The government should be able to do some more to make buy-to-let less attractive as an investment, so that less investment money is used to drive up house prices, but the second cause would still keep house prices relatively high compared to incomes. Likely the only way to tackle that issue would be by restricting mortgage lending, but I can't see that being a popular move.
If we are a culture that highly values our homes, our castles if you will, then it's inevitable that we will have high prices for them to a degree. Expecting a government to set its face against this culture is asking it to bring trouble upon itself.
I think what I would want a government to concentrate on is two things. Improving building standards, so that even homes at the bottom of the ladder were better places to live in. Making changes to investment opportunities, so that more productive investments offered better returns than buy-to-let.
https://twitter.com/julianhjessop/status/1446025648397602821
One thing we really need in the country is a basic but good level of personal finance education as the choice of low cost investment products is far better than it was a generation ago.
If housing availability increased faster than household growth, then this pressure would reverse.
So yes getting landlords out of the property market is essential, but getting more homes built is too - and the more net immigration we have, the more new homes we need.
The only point at which we'd stop needing to have new homes built bet is if we had net emigration (since for years to come increasing household growth from existing population is already baked in).
Perhaps it is not quite as one-sided as all that.
My not-at-all academic daughter needs to look at universities. She's not sure she wants to go but we have to look anyway in case. If she does go she will study Fine Art. 1 year Foundation Course and the 3 years degree. Will consign her to a 9% income tax obligation on future incomes over £25k (or whatever) for 30 years as per Student Loan rules (she will never pay it off). Plus other costs of living away. plus she will also lose four years earnings in studying for this degree which is pretty much non-income enhancing I would suggest. The reasons for going to university would be non-financial.
The alternative to university is a job probably on minimum wage. Probably in hospitality.
What should she do?
When we bought our first (indeed, current) house we took a mortgage that was only about 2/3 of the agreement in principle figure we were quoted before we started house hunting. That was largely because we planned to have children in the next couple of years and wanted to be cautious wrt our finances (and also the house - well, we liked it - it needed some renovation, but we were happy to do that over time). But some family members urged us to max out anyway as an investment. We've been rather happier being financially comfortable and overpaying our mortgage voluntarily and flexibly to get the debt down, but given we've seen a 40% increase in value over 5 years (based on what we paid and an offer we received 5 years later) we could indeed have probably made bigger paper gains on a larger/more expensive house.
They are still the best 911 for the road; just the right amount of power and very usuable.
I've also got a 6 speed manual 997 Turbo that has 'issues', a 991.2 Cup which isn't street legal and a 924 track day special with ITBs. I'm looking for a nice 996 Targa at the moment.
One of the twins enjoyed it and will be back next summer, the other didn't but thankfully has found a full time office based job / degree apprenticeship.
And I share the view of the poster (can't remember who, sorry) who said this - "It is strange. I find knitting very mathematical, which is one of its attractions to me, and was also one of the attractions of this website. So I'd think more men would be interested in knitting if it weren't for the assumptions of gender stereotypes. And I do know another software engineer who knits - he has a bias to patterns with elaborate cables."
I love the mathematical quality of it and doing cables and bobbles and very elaborate patterns.
Funnily enough the mathematical quality of Bach's music is one of the reasons why I love playing his music on the piano above all others.
Gulp! Perhaps I am more geeky than I thought.
Anyway today I am off to see an arboretum near Whitehaven. Husband has organised it. It is of course raining hard so it is wellies and anorak time as, TBF, it is most of the time between now and next spring.
I really do think far too many see university as a must do, when many would prosper without
I've also mentioned police or fire service to her.
She has no enthusiasm for these suggestions and TBH has no idea what she wants to be other than a chalet host and then ski instructor which may be a bit of a pipe dream. Chalet hosting for a year before degree is an option.
Has the clown act all been for nothing, then?
Other than for Law, Medicine, Engineering etc going to UNI is a life experience choice. Doing an apprenticeship will set you up much better than a History Degree for long term employment.
Paragraph 80 of Lord Reed's judgment is also likely to be of future significance. He said:
"For all the foregoing reasons, the answer to question 4 is “Yes”. Section 6 of
the Bill is outside the legislative competence of the Scottish Parliament, because it
“relates to” reserved matters, contrary to section 29(2)(b) of the Scotland Act, would
modify section 28(7), contrary to section 29(2)(c), and would modify the law on
reserved matters, contrary to section 29(2)(c). "
If one takes the question of a consultative referendum, to take an entirely hypothetical example, the question would be whether it "relates to" the constitution of the UK. If it does, it is outside the legislative competence of the Scottish Parliament. Once again the question of mandate is overridden by the constitutional rules of the Scotland Act.
Freeing her of any societal/parental expectation that one path is better than the other and letting her make the choice with as much information as is available seems as much as a parent can do. Another thing to remember is she can always take a degree later on if she wants to, whereas the living cost debts and fee taxes get firmed up through the course.
Thinking that St Helens will probably win and thinking Dragons are overpriced at 11/5 is not necessarily contradictory.
I would say - far more speculatively, I should stress - that the anipathy towards the French among the English is not the result of a thousand years of near-constant warfare - that should have been erased by the last 100 years of alliance. I'd put it down more to an antipathy towards our own ruling classes. This is a hangover from the Norman conquest; there is still something suspiciously interchangeable between French people and posh English people. Though the haughty disdain with which the French elite habitually dismiss England does grate rather. You really don't get the same class of withering condescension from any other country.
My point is that the obsession with competing with the Anglo-Saxon world is perhaps a bit more widespread and long-standing in France than people are assuming - and in surprising places. The French may not be obsessed with the English on a day to day level but then I don't really think the English are that obsessed with the French either - even if some PB posters are.
But it's an act with diminishing returns, and the raspberries from some people who really ought to be his supporters (see much of today's press) may indicate that it needs a bit of a refresh.
And maybe he can do that. But I suspect he's a bit too set in his ways, and being PM doesn't really give him time to try out a new character. It's hard enough if you're Leader of the Opposition.
(What he reminds me of is the sort of old-school music hall acts that the Fast Show skewered with Arthur Atkinson. Great when they could do the same show night after night to a different audience each time. Television really stuffed those guys, because then you need new material every single time.)
But if that seems unlikely, there are worse things than hospitality for a few years, even on minimum wage with UC top-up (I know, but it's still useful). Having a well-informed parent keeping her posted on what she's entitled to is a big help - I've met young people who had no clue that a wage topup was allowed or what getting on a waiting list for a flat involved.
£20 on the dragons for me.
Remoaners*: Brexit is causing shortages, project fear now reality. Wage rises are however a bad thing, even for those who voted for Brexit and are more reflective of other trends than of Brexit.
Brexiteers*: Brexit is not causing shortages. There are shortages everywhere. However, despite the shortages everywhere, including in HGV drivers, increases in wages are a Brexit dividend and there are no downsides.
*Pejorative terms intentionally used. There is also a sane minority (or perhaps a silent majority? e.g. RCS, but many others) who recognise that there are many different factors at play, that wage rises are great for those receiving them but could be bad for others who will be subject to inflation but not get rises themselves as they are still open to competition from Poles in Poland/rest of the EU if not from Poles here and that the issues are a mix of factors, Covid, post-Covid demand etc...
If you get a degree from a good university, the subject is almost irrelevant. Many people do a subject of their liking (very important to do something you actually like!) followed by a "conversion" Masters to "Business/IT"
So, would she be heading for a 2:1 or 1st at a Russell group (or similarly highly regarded) university?
Russell Group is not the be all and end all - do some research on the standing of the University.
No idea if this French MP is the son of a Marseille docker or descended from ducs, don't really think it matters in what seems to be a stooshie about cultural nationalism.
My two brothers and I all went to university, but our sister got a job in a shop on the high street. She worked her way up to managing shops, briefly moved up to regional management, didn't like it, so moved sideways into HR (probably had to do a diploma in HR practice at this point).
Now she's HR director for a company with ~300 employees.
If they can't do that move on to the next opportunity.
Hairdressing is renowned for its use and bin philosophy, but a lot of other industries are as well.
Ironically, in the post colonial environment, it is often seen as the "neutral" option between multiple competing languages.
What is quite startling is the way that business in much of Europe is conducted in English. I was astonished the first time I went to a meeting in Germany. Everyone else was German, but the meeting was held English.
This probably grates on French people - holding it in French would simply not be considered.
On Saturday we are going to look at Oxford Brooks. We may also look at Manchester Metropolitan and Central St Martins (UAL)
If she gets on well, she won't need to go, and will probably be a lot better off financially!
My elder decided to go (and got into a Russell Group Uni), and the younger one wants to work.
Incidentally, I doubt I would go to Uni myself under the current financial arrangements, and I'm not sure I would have had any financial benefit from doing so compared to leaving school with A Levels and working my way up.
40% on a £95 bill = £38 . . . certainly not nice and not suggesting for a second that it is.
£38 on a £868 bill = 4.4% . . . which is less than the 6.2% inflation that housing has been going up since 1999.
So yes the energy bill is nasty. But you know what? The very real inflation we've been having for decades is even worse than that even a 40% rise.
Now do you understand just how serious a problem this is?
If the first, Fine Arts is great if you are brilliant at it, because there are people in arts, music etc who don't pass exams much but are differently gifted. With the very gifted you don't have to enquire, you know already if they are that class of people. Lucky ones.
If not interested in academia, then avoid. Debt for something you neither enjoy or want is not great.
But in the end your daughter should do exactly as she likes, weighing up all the facts. That's what modern daughters do anyway. And quite right too.
Gordon Brown's Child Trust Fund - government grant funded - now called a JISA - and the encouragement for family members to top-up the government contribution - is turning out to be a real kick in the teeth.
With UC taking over from tax credits, individuals are (unlike with tax credits) means-tested against savings. So over £16k in a JISA = completely ineligible for UC whereas before the individual would have been completely eligible for tax credits.
This has not been reported and I'm surprised about this - I don't think people have twigged.
In France the opposite it is true, it is the liberal Parisian elite Macron fans who are most anti British and anti Boris while Le Pen voters and French conservatives are rather more Anglophile and less Boris hostile
That is something to consider - but a "tier-1" university degree still opens doors that others do not. So it's value is much higher.
I would emphasise again - if she goes to university, it must be to do a subject she really, really likes. Nearly no-one can force themselves through 3 years of studying a degree they aren't interested in.
It is also worth considering that returning to university later is possible - there were quite a few "adult" students on my degree (back in the 90s).
One of my sons is doing the same and he too has been promoted. I don't think he wants to stay in hospitality but learning about customer service, training staff (his current role) and the financial side of it is all valuable.
You are continuing to live in absolute denial.
The weakness of the argument is the sheer dominance of words with Old English rather than Norse roots, but it's an interesting idea nevertheless.
For the average households rent a 6.2% increase in rent = a £53.82 increase in monthly costs.
The latter has existed consistently for decades now - and people claim there hasn't been inflation, because rent isn't included in CPI which is based on owner occupier housing costs. As bad as a 40% increase in energy is (and it is bad), a 6.2% increase in rent is worse.
So the notion that inflation is "new" is a myth. If you want to deal with inflation, the first step would be how do we get house prices and rent back down and ensure they don't grow faster than wages again. To treat house/rent price rises as every bit as much "inflation" as energy or food or any other cost.
https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/live-surrey-petrol-station-shortage-21747058
Anyone still struggling to fill up?
I am assessing a candidate at this very moment which tells a story. No, no, they were remiss in doing their homework so I have given them an exercise to do.
Just as the overwhelming majority of people doing the jobs in the UK are British.
It is also worth considering that if she gets a good first degree, she might want to do a conversion masters afterwards to business (a lot of the people I knew who did English Literature/Art did this). In the case that she gets a good degree at somewhere like Brooks, she would find it possible to do that Masters at a range of prestigious places.
In general you are your last degree.
A friend did a part time masters at Oxford - his first degree was in-complete and he returned to education after a number of years of working. On the job market he is now an "Oxford Graduate".
https://twitter.com/holyroodmandy/status/1445693381389152265?s=20
Did the UK twice vote, 16 & 19, to pull up a drawbridge on immigration, or to take back control of immigration policy?
Can’t we now both control migration and allow migrants to fill skill gaps? pass a law where it says to business, you have to pay the going rate for foreign worker as for UK worker plus a small % tax on the visa to get the visa?
Is there evidence that immigration lowers living standards for native workers?
Strapping yourself to Boris economic illiterate political history rewriting big idea, you are embarrassing yourself - I don’t just mean you Mal but all of you.
Pirate Libertarians excepted, they actually believe in this stuff, and if we had PR wouldn’t even vote Tory.
Johnson's sunny optimism has worked well in opposition, and also (in polling terms) during a covid crisis. Will it work when peoples financial experiences are very volatile, many winners but just as many if not more losers?
Perhaps not, especially if there is a continued refusal to admit that there are any losers in all this (that is the government position in interviews, even if most Tory posters on here admit there are both winners and losers).
Half the country like the PM, half the country dislike him, so it doesn't matter what the PM says that'll be the case.
The LOTO has a much easier ride - much lower expectations, no need to deliver, can just say vague nice sounding things without having to be held to account.
I'd expect that if such polling does exist it would show Miliband consistently beating Cameron.
Re ski instructors, was there not a Brexit-related spoke in that wheel?
If I have to pay more for food etc, no big deal (although I buy more expensive food, so I'm probably hit less hard than people buying the cheapest food as transport is likely a smaller share of my food costs than theirs). If the people involved in getting it to me get more pay, then great. I lived for a while in Sweden and that's more the model there; I have no problem with it.
What some people are missing is that HGV drivers were not, in population terms, low paid. Poorly paid for the skills and the deprivations of the job, very possibly (compare to long distance train drivers and pilots) but they were at or around median wage, I believe. I'm happy for them to get more - like Philip, I've no moral problem with the £100k HGV driver* - but I have concerns for people like someone I've got to know quite well in our local supermarket who stacks the shelves and works the checkouts. She has poor sight and cannot drive. She takes the bus to work. She is low paid, in population terms. So she might see higher transport costs getting to work, higher food prices and perhaps no increase in wages (maybe labour shortages will cascade down and shop workers will become drivers and wages will go up for them too - if so, great, but some other jobs may simply go offshore if wages make keeping them here noncompetitive, eventually an equilibrium will be found for where wages will be out of the EU, maybe it will be higher with less wage inequality - I hope so).
So, all I'm trying to say is that it's complicated. Both in the causes and in the short, medium and long term effects. Long term could be great and short term shit (could also be true of Brexit as a whole) or, indeed, the other way round.
*At sustained very high wages we surely see changes in practice and productivity - different transport modes, different distribution patterns as there will be cheaper ways of doing it. Great for the economy if productivity rises, but not necessarily good for those who have switched to HGV driving if demand falls.
https://www.thelocal.ch/20200922/explained-switzerlands-foreign-population-in-numbers/#:~:text=EU immigration: Switzerland’s foreign workers in numbers. Foreigners,a lot of interesting facts about these people.
Assuming most immigrants are young, they would form a far higher percentage of the overall workforce than they do here.
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle applies to the wages too by doing this.
https://www.routledge.com/Supernatural-Encounters-Demons-and-the-Restless-Dead-in-Medieval-England/Gordon/p/book/9781032082448
His most regular employment has been with Manc Uni's career advice service
We are in the Lake district today which sadly is reminding us quite where these beautiful lakes come from. There is a clear shortage of staff in the hotel and the majority of those who are there are foreign, as they would have been for much of the last 20 years. If they want the locals to work in places like this with unattractive split shifts and the like they are going to have to pay more.
In Banbury, Oxford and York on this trip we have seen the same. Almost all hospitality and many, many retailers are looking for staff. Banbury and Oxford in particular were clearly booming with barely a single empty shopping unit and a much higher proportion of small businesses than chains. It frankly makes me a bit depressed about what we will see when we return home to Dundee. No doubt there are parts of England struggling too but in many parts that I have seen in this trip things are going very well.
If you already have a mortgage, then your house price isn't subject to house price inflation; it's frozen at whenever-you-bought. And since the limiting step in house buying tends to be the deposit rather than the monthly repayments house price inflation tends to help you go up the ladder. When I bought my first house in 2001, house price inflation turned a £7000 deposit into £40000 equity in 3 years. It's not something I sought, but it made moving up the ladder much easier.
This is all a moral disgrace and an economic absurdity. Sorting it out would, I suspect, do more for the long term productive capacity of the country than any of the stuff we've been arguing about for the last five years.
But to make a meaningful dent in house prices would be political Kryptonite. And I'm not sure a "general inflation / flat house prices" scenario works; in that case, I'd expect interest rates to have to rise (at least to keep up with inflation) which would clobber house prices. And that would clobber people- mostly those who have bought more recently, at higher prices and with less paid off. If house prices fell 50% tomorrow, I personally could shrug it off, but many millions couldn't.
So what you're looking for is a politician prepared to accept the hospital pass of having the house price boom burst on their watch. Prepared to go down to a landslide defeat at the next election, knowing in their heart that they've done the necessary thing...
Who is this politician?
Bear in mind that she can pick up 10-20 hours of min wage retail work per week too, if she likes.
As an aside an old acquaintance, a fluent German speaker who was a Military Policeman in WWII used to say that, late in the war, when they captured German officers, it took until the end of their statement to know whether they were actually surrendering or not!
So the migrants there might be biased more to working in Credit Suisse and not Pret.
I am pointing out that we have an example of an economy where, deliberately, they chose to "protect" the locals in low paid jobs against competition in the wage market.
Part of this protection is the language(s), but the Swiss system of demanding local qualifications has a big part in this.
A free international market in labour will cause wages for some to rise - more activity possible in areas where there are skill shortages, and due to the international skill shortage there will be little downward pressure
For those where there is a skill surplus, wages will fall. There may well be more jobs, but they will be lower paid.
This difference is why the credentialed groups find freedom of movement to be good for them. The un-credentialed (or less credentialed) don't.
As I said before while I support AUKUS France is actually in global terms roughly our equal, we are the only 2 nations other than the US in the G7 and G20 and also permanent members of the UN Security Council. We also need France to be partners with us in NATO to contain Putin and help tackle Islamic jihadi extremism. We also should not ignore that France has a presence in the Pacific too where some French overseas territories are based.
Plus of course France is our nearest neighbour so we want reasonable relations with it
Yes I know. Easier to find a unicorn.
That's going to lock out a lot of people.
RCS would be the one to speak to on that, though
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/business/employment-and-migration_foreigners-arriving-in-switzerland-more-likely-to-be-highly-skilled/43606836#:~:text=As in most developed countries, immigrants in Switzerland,immigrants can be higher than 70% of workers.