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If like me you thought your AstroZeneca jab was second best some good news – politicalbetting.com

SystemSystem Posts: 11,002
edited March 2021 in General
If like me you thought your AstroZeneca jab was second best some good news – politicalbetting.com

Wasn’t happy with the negative press this excellent vaccine received at the start of the year. It wasn’t warranted, obviously overblown and now seems to be neck and neck with the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine in terms of efficacy.https://t.co/ZTYI7qPVXS https://t.co/mlSxujSWIV pic.twitter.com/fShCP8fcTR

Read the full story here

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Comments

  • MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 49,958
    Any of the UK's jabs seems to be the way to go.

    I really hope there is a vaccine bonus for our people. We deserve it for taking it to our hearts arms with such gusto.
  • stodgestodge Posts: 12,741
    I'm not quite sure what a "vaccine bonus for our people" means.

    Getting the whole world vaccinated seems a more laudable aim unless you want the big cruise ships to offer journeys for the vaccinated British only as Royal Caribbean has done with its Odyssey of the Seas ship which has been moved from Rome to Haifa and will do sailings only for Israeli citizens.
  • I will be voting for Khan (again). He has not been perfect and quite ineffective in many ways however he is not Shaun Bailey.
  • MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 37,603
    The final paragraph a warning against taking polls too seriously?
  • MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 49,958
    stodge said:

    I'm not quite sure what a "vaccine bonus for our people" means.

    Getting the whole world vaccinated seems a more laudable aim unless you want the big cruise ships to offer journeys for the vaccinated British only as Royal Caribbean has done with its Odyssey of the Seas ship which has been moved from Rome to Haifa and will do sailings only for Israeli citizens.

    It means an early return to those things we have all been desperately missing, because we were prepared to take a tiny risk with this vaccine. A summer that those in European capitals will have robbed their citizens of - by rubbishing a vaccine to make some petty political points against the UK.
  • Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 55,014

    I will be voting for Khan (again). He has not been perfect and quite ineffective in many ways however he is not Shaun Bailey.

    The trouble is he's Sadiq Khan.
  • I will be voting for Khan (again). He has not been perfect and quite ineffective in many ways however he is not Shaun Bailey.

    The trouble is he's Sadiq Khan.
    And he's not Shaun Bailey, who would be worse.

    Khan gets a 5/10 from me.
  • Black_RookBlack_Rook Posts: 8,905
    Just doing the catch-up on today's Covid update. Cases are cratering - checking back on my previous postings on the matter, they're down from 84.4 per 100k on Thursday, to 79.7 yesterday, to 73.1 today, so the rate continues to drop by about 5 per 100k daily.

    Cases are now below 100 per 100k in every single local authority area in southern England except Luton, along with the whole of Wales and Northern Ireland. From a personal point of view, I'm also pleased to see that both of the MSOA counting areas in my little town have now gone blank, and so have both the places where my parents live. The big question now is whether or not the motheaten blue patches on the map start spreading again next week because of the schools, and whether or not this effect turns out to be temporary.

    The deaths and hospitalisations keep on coming, but are at least down by 34% and 29% respectively this week relative to the previous one. Right now things are continuing to improve.
  • Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 55,014
  • MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 37,603

    I will be voting for Khan (again). He has not been perfect and quite ineffective in many ways however he is not Shaun Bailey.

    The trouble is he's Sadiq Khan.
    And he's not Shaun Bailey, who would be worse.

    Khan gets a 5/10 from me.
    Do what I'm doing and vote for the Lib Dem.
  • BluestBlueBluestBlue Posts: 4,556
    You should have had a little faith, Mike - @TSE always knew the Oxford vaccine would be the best...
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,770
    MaxPB said:

    kinabalu said:

    Pagan2 said:

    kinabalu said:

    Fishing said:

    kinabalu said:

    Fishing said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    Pagan2 said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.

    The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
    It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.

    But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.

    Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.

    TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
    The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.

    Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget
    Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people
    To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people

    https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/percentile-points-from-1-to-99-for-total-income-before-and-after-tax

    Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
    Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.

    A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.

    The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
    I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
    That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
    It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
    Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.

    There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -

    Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.

    BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.

    And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.

    That is a powerful argument.

    But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.

    It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
    Actually I don't think private schools are incompatible with equality of oportunity PROVIDED that the government establishes a decent number of scholarships so that poor but gifted children can get into them. That was grammar-school-educated Mrs Thatcher's policy - the Assisted Places Scheme - that public schoolbody Blair abolished in a huge victory for elitism.
    So some poor kids get into an elite public school by being very bright and beating off loads of competition but rich kids take the majority of places through parental wealth?

    That may be a benign bit of tinkering but it hardly transforms things.
    There's no point in the taxpayer paying for a first rate academic education to children who can't benefit from it, whether they are rich or poor. If parents want to do it that's their business. But providing poor kids can pass the entrance exams, the government should pay their fees.
    Ok. But you offered it as a transformational change that would make our elite private schools compatible with equal opportunities. It hardly does that,
    As one that grew up poor I will try and put it simply..,

    The biggest bar to social mobility is people with your attitude. People telling us constantly "Don't bother, it won't make a difference. The system is rigged against you. It isnt your fault". Too many believe you and do give up which makes it self fulfilling. This is why I have so much bile against that sort of thinking
    I also grew up poor. And, yes, I get that point but - deep breath and one more time - that is NOT what I think or am saying! WTF are you imputing that to me?

    I would never say to a child "don't bother, the system is rigged against you." Of course I wouldn't. The desire to see a system that is not so rigged against poor children does not mean you are right now wanting to give them carte blanche to not try because the system is rigged.

    Surely you can see how absurd that inference is? If you can't, I give up.

    Look, rather than talking to me, you seem to be talking to some generic "leftist bogeyman" onto which you wish to unload some stuff. It's kind of fascinating in a way but I've had enough now. Catch you another time.
    One thing I have observed is that credentialism works against those who have started out at a disadvantage.

    You can't get a job as an office junior without a degree now. No more barrow boys in the City....

    And it is ranked credentialism - for many places, Russell Group 2.1 or 1st will get you in. Other degrees, not so much.
    It's a weird situation because the jobs we're recruiting don't require a degree as we have the "or equivalent experience" but in reality to get the "or equivalent experience" you will have needed a degree to get into the industry in the first place.

    Definitely think people don't need a degree to do my job. I mean I did a chemistry degree which has been virtually worthless ever since I graduated except to meet the "degree or equivalent experience required" at the very start of my career.
    When I was at Goldman Sachs in the late 90s, the average age of someone who came in at graduate training level (i.e. pre-MBA) was 27 or 28. Almost no-one joined straight from University, usually spending three or four years working elsewhere.

    I mention this because - by and large - what a lot of firms want is someone who's had a couple of years to mature and get into working habits, and have something other than their degree to talk about.
  • MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 37,603
    Also on topic, I think all of the vaccines will end up at ~90-95% efficacy in the real world but one of the advantages of the AZ and J&J vaccines is that they continue to provide high levels of protection months after the first dose and the second dose will likely give very long term immunity. It means that countries can roll them out without needing to hold half of them back to achieve a very high degree of immunity as the mRNA vaccines seem to require. It means double the number of people can been immunised in the same amount of time and achieve 70-80% immunity from severe symptoms and hospitalisation, for what we and other countries need to achieve it's the single most important part of our vaccine programmes.
  • Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 55,014
    rcs1000 said:

    MaxPB said:

    kinabalu said:

    Pagan2 said:

    kinabalu said:

    Fishing said:

    kinabalu said:

    Fishing said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    Pagan2 said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.

    The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
    It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.

    But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.

    Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.

    TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
    The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.

    Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget
    Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people
    To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people

    https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/percentile-points-from-1-to-99-for-total-income-before-and-after-tax

    Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
    Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.

    A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.

    The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
    I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
    That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
    It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
    Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.

    There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -

    Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.

    BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.

    And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.

    That is a powerful argument.

    But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.

    It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
    Actually I don't think private schools are incompatible with equality of oportunity PROVIDED that the government establishes a decent number of scholarships so that poor but gifted children can get into them. That was grammar-school-educated Mrs Thatcher's policy - the Assisted Places Scheme - that public schoolbody Blair abolished in a huge victory for elitism.
    So some poor kids get into an elite public school by being very bright and beating off loads of competition but rich kids take the majority of places through parental wealth?

    That may be a benign bit of tinkering but it hardly transforms things.
    There's no point in the taxpayer paying for a first rate academic education to children who can't benefit from it, whether they are rich or poor. If parents want to do it that's their business. But providing poor kids can pass the entrance exams, the government should pay their fees.
    Ok. But you offered it as a transformational change that would make our elite private schools compatible with equal opportunities. It hardly does that,
    As one that grew up poor I will try and put it simply..,

    The biggest bar to social mobility is people with your attitude. People telling us constantly "Don't bother, it won't make a difference. The system is rigged against you. It isnt your fault". Too many believe you and do give up which makes it self fulfilling. This is why I have so much bile against that sort of thinking
    I also grew up poor. And, yes, I get that point but - deep breath and one more time - that is NOT what I think or am saying! WTF are you imputing that to me?

    I would never say to a child "don't bother, the system is rigged against you." Of course I wouldn't. The desire to see a system that is not so rigged against poor children does not mean you are right now wanting to give them carte blanche to not try because the system is rigged.

    Surely you can see how absurd that inference is? If you can't, I give up.

    Look, rather than talking to me, you seem to be talking to some generic "leftist bogeyman" onto which you wish to unload some stuff. It's kind of fascinating in a way but I've had enough now. Catch you another time.
    One thing I have observed is that credentialism works against those who have started out at a disadvantage.

    You can't get a job as an office junior without a degree now. No more barrow boys in the City....

    And it is ranked credentialism - for many places, Russell Group 2.1 or 1st will get you in. Other degrees, not so much.
    It's a weird situation because the jobs we're recruiting don't require a degree as we have the "or equivalent experience" but in reality to get the "or equivalent experience" you will have needed a degree to get into the industry in the first place.

    Definitely think people don't need a degree to do my job. I mean I did a chemistry degree which has been virtually worthless ever since I graduated except to meet the "degree or equivalent experience required" at the very start of my career.
    When I was at Goldman Sachs in the late 90s, the average age of someone who came in at graduate training level (i.e. pre-MBA) was 27 or 28. Almost no-one joined straight from University, usually spending three or four years working elsewhere.

    I mention this because - by and large - what a lot of firms want is someone who's had a couple of years to mature and get into working habits, and have something other than their degree to talk about.
    My educational and working-life career has always been about Tier 1B to be honest.

    I went Red Brick, rather than Oxbridge - I wanted 10 week terms, more fun as well as a very good degree - and I went Big4/niche consultancy, rather than McKinsey or US investment banking route because I didn't want to work all hours God sends. My wife is the same with niche mid-size law firms rather than the large US ones.

    Basically, I want a good career and a good salary but I really can't be arsed with the very very top. I like my downtime.
  • TheScreamingEaglesTheScreamingEagles Posts: 113,957
    edited March 2021
    I think Pfizer will remain the best out of the AZN but I believe they use the same methodology.

    I think J&J might turn out to be the best one as it only requires on jab.

    Although I fully expect regardless of the brand we'll all require annual jabs.

    But I'm glad I got the Pfizer one, I mean has AZN ever come up with a tablet like viagra, that's two humanity altering game changers from one company.
  • MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 37,603
    rcs1000 said:

    MaxPB said:

    kinabalu said:

    Pagan2 said:

    kinabalu said:

    Fishing said:

    kinabalu said:

    Fishing said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    Pagan2 said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.

    The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
    It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.

    But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.

    Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.

    TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
    The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.

    Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget
    Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people
    To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people

    https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/percentile-points-from-1-to-99-for-total-income-before-and-after-tax

    Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
    Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.

    A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.

    The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
    I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
    That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
    It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
    Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.

    There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -

    Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.

    BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.

    And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.

    That is a powerful argument.

    But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.

    It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
    Actually I don't think private schools are incompatible with equality of oportunity PROVIDED that the government establishes a decent number of scholarships so that poor but gifted children can get into them. That was grammar-school-educated Mrs Thatcher's policy - the Assisted Places Scheme - that public schoolbody Blair abolished in a huge victory for elitism.
    So some poor kids get into an elite public school by being very bright and beating off loads of competition but rich kids take the majority of places through parental wealth?

    That may be a benign bit of tinkering but it hardly transforms things.
    There's no point in the taxpayer paying for a first rate academic education to children who can't benefit from it, whether they are rich or poor. If parents want to do it that's their business. But providing poor kids can pass the entrance exams, the government should pay their fees.
    Ok. But you offered it as a transformational change that would make our elite private schools compatible with equal opportunities. It hardly does that,
    As one that grew up poor I will try and put it simply..,

    The biggest bar to social mobility is people with your attitude. People telling us constantly "Don't bother, it won't make a difference. The system is rigged against you. It isnt your fault". Too many believe you and do give up which makes it self fulfilling. This is why I have so much bile against that sort of thinking
    I also grew up poor. And, yes, I get that point but - deep breath and one more time - that is NOT what I think or am saying! WTF are you imputing that to me?

    I would never say to a child "don't bother, the system is rigged against you." Of course I wouldn't. The desire to see a system that is not so rigged against poor children does not mean you are right now wanting to give them carte blanche to not try because the system is rigged.

    Surely you can see how absurd that inference is? If you can't, I give up.

    Look, rather than talking to me, you seem to be talking to some generic "leftist bogeyman" onto which you wish to unload some stuff. It's kind of fascinating in a way but I've had enough now. Catch you another time.
    One thing I have observed is that credentialism works against those who have started out at a disadvantage.

    You can't get a job as an office junior without a degree now. No more barrow boys in the City....

    And it is ranked credentialism - for many places, Russell Group 2.1 or 1st will get you in. Other degrees, not so much.
    It's a weird situation because the jobs we're recruiting don't require a degree as we have the "or equivalent experience" but in reality to get the "or equivalent experience" you will have needed a degree to get into the industry in the first place.

    Definitely think people don't need a degree to do my job. I mean I did a chemistry degree which has been virtually worthless ever since I graduated except to meet the "degree or equivalent experience required" at the very start of my career.
    When I was at Goldman Sachs in the late 90s, the average age of someone who came in at graduate training level (i.e. pre-MBA) was 27 or 28. Almost no-one joined straight from University, usually spending three or four years working elsewhere.

    I mention this because - by and large - what a lot of firms want is someone who's had a couple of years to mature and get into working habits, and have something other than their degree to talk about.
    Yes, that was the same experience for me at Barclays, I already had significant experience elsewhere but my first job at Sony required a degree or equivalent experience to be a junior developer.

    However, loads of firms have got graduate programmes, we shut ours down a year or so before I joined and apparently the company has no intention of bringing it back mainly for the reasons you say.
  • stodgestodge Posts: 12,741
    MaxPB said:

    Also on topic, I think all of the vaccines will end up at ~90-95% efficacy in the real world but one of the advantages of the AZ and J&J vaccines is that they continue to provide high levels of protection months after the first dose and the second dose will likely give very long term immunity. It means that countries can roll them out without needing to hold half of them back to achieve a very high degree of immunity as the mRNA vaccines seem to require. It means double the number of people can been immunised in the same amount of time and achieve 70-80% immunity from severe symptoms and hospitalisation, for what we and other countries need to achieve it's the single most important part of our vaccine programmes.

    Do you think there will need to be a round of booster vaccinations in the autumn and, if so, should we looking at vaccines which provide a longer period of higher immunity?

    Presumably the next stage is a vaccine which offers 3-5 years of high immunity.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,770
    edited March 2021
    MaxPB said:

    Also on topic, I think all of the vaccines will end up at ~90-95% efficacy in the real world but one of the advantages of the AZ and J&J vaccines is that they continue to provide high levels of protection months after the first dose and the second dose will likely give very long term immunity. It means that countries can roll them out without needing to hold half of them back to achieve a very high degree of immunity as the mRNA vaccines seem to require. It means double the number of people can been immunised in the same amount of time and achieve 70-80% immunity from severe symptoms and hospitalisation, for what we and other countries need to achieve it's the single most important part of our vaccine programmes.

    The decision to "hold back" second doses is absurd. It may (it may) be the case that a six or eight week gap between Pfizer or Moderna doses makes them less efficacious. (But if it does, the change is likely to be negligible.)

    But it is indisputably true that getting as many first doses into arms as quickly as possible will have the biggest long term impact on the transmission of CV19 in a country.

    (And there's a second reason why holding back second doses is wrong. Vaccine supply is only rising. Novavax, J&J and Moderna's European plant are all going to be available in the coming months, as well as big production increases from Pfizer and AstraZeneca. And you know... even if this is wrong - and it's not - then the difference between a 3-4 week gap and a 5-6 week one is going to be utterly negligible. Holding back second doses - and California is as guilty as Germany here - is stupid beyond belief.)
  • MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 37,603

    rcs1000 said:

    MaxPB said:

    kinabalu said:

    Pagan2 said:

    kinabalu said:

    Fishing said:

    kinabalu said:

    Fishing said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    Pagan2 said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.

    The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
    It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.

    But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.

    Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.

    TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
    The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.

    Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget
    Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people
    To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people

    https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/percentile-points-from-1-to-99-for-total-income-before-and-after-tax

    Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
    Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.

    A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.

    The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
    I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
    That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
    It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
    Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.

    There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -

    Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.

    BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.

    And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.

    That is a powerful argument.

    But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.

    It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
    Actually I don't think private schools are incompatible with equality of oportunity PROVIDED that the government establishes a decent number of scholarships so that poor but gifted children can get into them. That was grammar-school-educated Mrs Thatcher's policy - the Assisted Places Scheme - that public schoolbody Blair abolished in a huge victory for elitism.
    So some poor kids get into an elite public school by being very bright and beating off loads of competition but rich kids take the majority of places through parental wealth?

    That may be a benign bit of tinkering but it hardly transforms things.
    There's no point in the taxpayer paying for a first rate academic education to children who can't benefit from it, whether they are rich or poor. If parents want to do it that's their business. But providing poor kids can pass the entrance exams, the government should pay their fees.
    Ok. But you offered it as a transformational change that would make our elite private schools compatible with equal opportunities. It hardly does that,
    As one that grew up poor I will try and put it simply..,

    The biggest bar to social mobility is people with your attitude. People telling us constantly "Don't bother, it won't make a difference. The system is rigged against you. It isnt your fault". Too many believe you and do give up which makes it self fulfilling. This is why I have so much bile against that sort of thinking
    I also grew up poor. And, yes, I get that point but - deep breath and one more time - that is NOT what I think or am saying! WTF are you imputing that to me?

    I would never say to a child "don't bother, the system is rigged against you." Of course I wouldn't. The desire to see a system that is not so rigged against poor children does not mean you are right now wanting to give them carte blanche to not try because the system is rigged.

    Surely you can see how absurd that inference is? If you can't, I give up.

    Look, rather than talking to me, you seem to be talking to some generic "leftist bogeyman" onto which you wish to unload some stuff. It's kind of fascinating in a way but I've had enough now. Catch you another time.
    One thing I have observed is that credentialism works against those who have started out at a disadvantage.

    You can't get a job as an office junior without a degree now. No more barrow boys in the City....

    And it is ranked credentialism - for many places, Russell Group 2.1 or 1st will get you in. Other degrees, not so much.
    It's a weird situation because the jobs we're recruiting don't require a degree as we have the "or equivalent experience" but in reality to get the "or equivalent experience" you will have needed a degree to get into the industry in the first place.

    Definitely think people don't need a degree to do my job. I mean I did a chemistry degree which has been virtually worthless ever since I graduated except to meet the "degree or equivalent experience required" at the very start of my career.
    When I was at Goldman Sachs in the late 90s, the average age of someone who came in at graduate training level (i.e. pre-MBA) was 27 or 28. Almost no-one joined straight from University, usually spending three or four years working elsewhere.

    I mention this because - by and large - what a lot of firms want is someone who's had a couple of years to mature and get into working habits, and have something other than their degree to talk about.
    My educational and working-life career has always been about Tier 1B to be honest.

    I went Red Brick, rather than Oxbridge - I wanted 10 week terms, more fun as well as a very good degree - and I went Big4/niche consultancy, rather than McKinsey or US investment banking route because I didn't want to work all hours God sends. My wife is the same with niche mid-size law firms rather than the large US ones.

    Basically, I want a good career and a good salary but I really can't be arsed with the very very top. I like my downtime.
    This is something I wholeheartedly agree with, I spent the first part of my career at the very top of my chosen industry (games development for PlayStation) and it was incredibly demanding on my time and personal life. I don't regret it but I do wish I'd seen what the job was turning me into earlier and gone for the career change to investment a year or so earlier. The PS4 launch was basically a year of 60-70h working weeks in the run up to it to get a lot of the games into a state they could actually launch in.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,770

    rcs1000 said:

    MaxPB said:

    kinabalu said:

    Pagan2 said:

    kinabalu said:

    Fishing said:

    kinabalu said:

    Fishing said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    Pagan2 said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.

    The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
    It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.

    But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.

    Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.

    TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
    The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.

    Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget
    Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people
    To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people

    https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/percentile-points-from-1-to-99-for-total-income-before-and-after-tax

    Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
    Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.

    A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.

    The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
    I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
    That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
    It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
    Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.

    There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -

    Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.

    BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.

    And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.

    That is a powerful argument.

    But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.

    It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
    Actually I don't think private schools are incompatible with equality of oportunity PROVIDED that the government establishes a decent number of scholarships so that poor but gifted children can get into them. That was grammar-school-educated Mrs Thatcher's policy - the Assisted Places Scheme - that public schoolbody Blair abolished in a huge victory for elitism.
    So some poor kids get into an elite public school by being very bright and beating off loads of competition but rich kids take the majority of places through parental wealth?

    That may be a benign bit of tinkering but it hardly transforms things.
    There's no point in the taxpayer paying for a first rate academic education to children who can't benefit from it, whether they are rich or poor. If parents want to do it that's their business. But providing poor kids can pass the entrance exams, the government should pay their fees.
    Ok. But you offered it as a transformational change that would make our elite private schools compatible with equal opportunities. It hardly does that,
    As one that grew up poor I will try and put it simply..,

    The biggest bar to social mobility is people with your attitude. People telling us constantly "Don't bother, it won't make a difference. The system is rigged against you. It isnt your fault". Too many believe you and do give up which makes it self fulfilling. This is why I have so much bile against that sort of thinking
    I also grew up poor. And, yes, I get that point but - deep breath and one more time - that is NOT what I think or am saying! WTF are you imputing that to me?

    I would never say to a child "don't bother, the system is rigged against you." Of course I wouldn't. The desire to see a system that is not so rigged against poor children does not mean you are right now wanting to give them carte blanche to not try because the system is rigged.

    Surely you can see how absurd that inference is? If you can't, I give up.

    Look, rather than talking to me, you seem to be talking to some generic "leftist bogeyman" onto which you wish to unload some stuff. It's kind of fascinating in a way but I've had enough now. Catch you another time.
    One thing I have observed is that credentialism works against those who have started out at a disadvantage.

    You can't get a job as an office junior without a degree now. No more barrow boys in the City....

    And it is ranked credentialism - for many places, Russell Group 2.1 or 1st will get you in. Other degrees, not so much.
    It's a weird situation because the jobs we're recruiting don't require a degree as we have the "or equivalent experience" but in reality to get the "or equivalent experience" you will have needed a degree to get into the industry in the first place.

    Definitely think people don't need a degree to do my job. I mean I did a chemistry degree which has been virtually worthless ever since I graduated except to meet the "degree or equivalent experience required" at the very start of my career.
    When I was at Goldman Sachs in the late 90s, the average age of someone who came in at graduate training level (i.e. pre-MBA) was 27 or 28. Almost no-one joined straight from University, usually spending three or four years working elsewhere.

    I mention this because - by and large - what a lot of firms want is someone who's had a couple of years to mature and get into working habits, and have something other than their degree to talk about.
    My educational and working-life career has always been about Tier 1B to be honest.

    I went Red Brick, rather than Oxbridge - I wanted 10 week terms, more fun as well as a very good degree - and I went Big4/niche consultancy, rather than McKinsey or US investment banking route because I didn't want to work all hours God sends. My wife is the same with niche mid-size law firms rather than the large US ones.

    Basically, I want a good career and a good salary but I really can't be arsed with the very very top. I like my downtime.
    Interestingly, the most common route into Goldman was probably red brick followed by accounting, a tech company, law or something else, followed by the GS graduate training program.

    I, with my Cambridge philosophy degree, was definitely the outlier.
  • MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 37,603
    stodge said:

    MaxPB said:

    Also on topic, I think all of the vaccines will end up at ~90-95% efficacy in the real world but one of the advantages of the AZ and J&J vaccines is that they continue to provide high levels of protection months after the first dose and the second dose will likely give very long term immunity. It means that countries can roll them out without needing to hold half of them back to achieve a very high degree of immunity as the mRNA vaccines seem to require. It means double the number of people can been immunised in the same amount of time and achieve 70-80% immunity from severe symptoms and hospitalisation, for what we and other countries need to achieve it's the single most important part of our vaccine programmes.

    Do you think there will need to be a round of booster vaccinations in the autumn and, if so, should we looking at vaccines which provide a longer period of higher immunity?

    Presumably the next stage is a vaccine which offers 3-5 years of high immunity.
    Yes I think it is a certainty and aiui the government has already signed supply deals for that purpose.

    Whether we need to do it every year will be up for debate but I think the government won't want to take any risks this winter at all by relying on general t-cells rather than specific antibodies to fight mutations.

    Imperial are working on a non-spike based vaccine which might become a good very long term immunity vaccine but it needs a lot more development.
  • So The Sunday Times have done a piece on Boris Johnson's finances, he really is a shit negotiator.

    Johnson’s biggest likely outlay is the result of what one Old Etonian school friend describes as “his pecker problem”. The friend recalls: “Boris has always had a problem keeping his pecker in his trousers. And that’s what so often has led him into trouble.”

    Six children — those are the ones that are known about — by three women, plus two divorces and an imminent third wedding to pay for don’t come cheap.

    Johnson is still believed to help support two of his four children with his second wife, Marina Wheeler, who are all now in their twenties after expensive private schools and universities.

    Stephanie, aged 11, is Johnson’s fifth child, through his affair with Helen Macintyre, an art consultant, and Wilfred will be one next month.

    Johnson’s first divorce, from Allegra Mostyn-Owen in 1993, was not costly and they had no children. But his divorce last year from Wheeler, a human rights QC, after 25 years together, was a different matter. Having separated in the summer of 2018 after Johnson met Symonds, it took them until February 2020 to reach a financial settlement.

    Word in legal circles is that Johnson was by then desperate to finalise the divorce, because Symonds was pregnant and he was determined not to announce the pregnancy until Wheeler, and their children, had been placated.

    That gave his soon-to-be-ex-wife considerable leverage in the protracted negotiations, leading to what one QC who professes familiarity with the details describes as “one of the most devastatingly one-sided divorces in British legal history”.

    It even gave Wheeler a considerable percentage of Johnson’s future lucrative earnings after he leaves office. Might it be no wonder then that Boris needs a leg-up with the home decor?


    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/why-is-boris-johnson-so-skint-5jvvbgdxg
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,770
    stodge said:

    MaxPB said:

    Also on topic, I think all of the vaccines will end up at ~90-95% efficacy in the real world but one of the advantages of the AZ and J&J vaccines is that they continue to provide high levels of protection months after the first dose and the second dose will likely give very long term immunity. It means that countries can roll them out without needing to hold half of them back to achieve a very high degree of immunity as the mRNA vaccines seem to require. It means double the number of people can been immunised in the same amount of time and achieve 70-80% immunity from severe symptoms and hospitalisation, for what we and other countries need to achieve it's the single most important part of our vaccine programmes.

    Do you think there will need to be a round of booster vaccinations in the autumn and, if so, should we looking at vaccines which provide a longer period of higher immunity?

    Presumably the next stage is a vaccine which offers 3-5 years of high immunity.
    We don't know how long immunity will last.

    But it's a function of two things.

    Firstly, how much the virus mutates.
    Secondly, how quickly the immune system forgets.

    On the first, the more people have (at least some) immunity, the less opportunity there is for the virus to mutate. It's no coincidence that the two most dangerous CV19 strains came from places (Brazil and SA) where the virus was essentially out of control. As vaccines get rolled out, the number of hosts declines, and so we should see less mutation in future.

    On the second, we don't know yet. But we do know that for many viruses, the immune system has a *very* long memory. And this isn't a one-zero thing. You might catch it again, but the body's immune system will usually have some head start, because it's seen something like it before.

    My guess is that we'll all have booster shots for a couple of years, and it will probably get bundled with the flu shot.
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 76,274
    edited March 2021
    I don't know how anybody can afford 6 kids in this day and age.....the little monsters are more costly than my betting on Ryder Cups...
  • The other difference for Boris Johnson is that from Cherie Blair onwards the PM's other half has earned decent money whilst the spouse was PM, Symonds doesn't bring anything to the table money wise, so that's not helping.

    When he was married to Marina Wheeler, she brought the salary commensurate with a QC.
  • PulpstarPulpstar Posts: 75,842
    edited March 2021
    The most important part of these vaccines is that people get them when called. So far no nation has a *demand* problem, and our supply solution is optimal.
    We should be amongst the highest uptake in the world.
  • MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 37,603
    Pulpstar said:

    The most important part of these vaccines is that people get them when called. So far no nation has a *demand* problem, and our supply solution is optimal.
    We should be amongst the highest uptake in the world.

    Hmm, I'd suggest France and a few other European countries have a demand problem for the AZ vaccine because of irresponsible news reporting and comments from politicians.
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 76,274
    edited March 2021
    MaxPB said:

    Pulpstar said:

    The most important part of these vaccines is that people get them when called. So far no nation has a *demand* problem, and our supply solution is optimal.
    We should be amongst the highest uptake in the world.

    Hmm, I'd suggest France and a few other European countries have a demand problem for the AZ vaccine because of irresponsible news reporting and comments from politicians.
    I believe Germany has 2-3 million AZN jabs sitting doing nothing.
  • TheScreamingEaglesTheScreamingEagles Posts: 113,957
    edited March 2021

    I don't know how anybody can afford 6 kids in this day and age.....the little monsters are more costly than my betting on Ryder Cups...

    He should have put a sock on it or had the snip years ago.

    My friend has five kids, he says the money isn't the issue, it's constant worrying about them.

    Or the fact he's never had any peace and quiet since 2004.
  • PulpstarPulpstar Posts: 75,842
    edited March 2021

    MaxPB said:

    Pulpstar said:

    The most important part of these vaccines is that people get them when called. So far no nation has a *demand* problem, and our supply solution is optimal.
    We should be amongst the highest uptake in the world.

    Hmm, I'd suggest France and a few other European countries have a demand problem for the AZ vaccine because of irresponsible news reporting and comments from politicians.
    I believe Germany has 2-3 million AZN jabs sitting doing nothing.
    Surely there are people that want those jabs in Germany ?! OK They might not be in the most at risk categories, but that's their lookout.

    Europe has managed to create
    i) Supply problems (Late signing contracts, stingy on cash)
    ii) Demand problems (Macron's comments et al)
    iii) Diplomatic problems (Australia)
    iv) Gone cap in hand to Biden.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,617
    MaxPB said:

    Pulpstar said:

    The most important part of these vaccines is that people get them when called. So far no nation has a *demand* problem, and our supply solution is optimal.
    We should be amongst the highest uptake in the world.

    Hmm, I'd suggest France and a few other European countries have a demand problem for the AZ vaccine because of irresponsible news reporting and comments from politicians.
    Given that I have German and Polish friends telling me their *doctors* are rubbishing AZN on the discredited "its shit" basis.... Not sure what they are going to have to do to turn *that* around....
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,770
    Pulpstar said:

    The most important part of these vaccines is that people get them when called. So far no nation has a *demand* problem, and our supply solution is optimal.
    We should be amongst the highest uptake in the world.

    If I were Germany or France (or anyone not the UK or Israel, really), I would make it really simple.

    Every day I would announce a date. And that date would be the one that anyone born before would be able to sign up for a vaccine appointment. So, you might start with 1/1/1940, and then 12/6/1940... etc.

    I might even have them as walk ins.

    You wouldn't get to choose your vaccine type (unless you had a history of anaphylaxis) when you could avoid the mRNA vaccines.

    Super simple. I'd prioritise having as close to zero vaccine inventory as possible, and getting as many jabs into as many arms as possible.

    At some point you'd need to have two dates (with the second date being the one from which people could get second doses).

  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 76,274
    edited March 2021
    Pulpstar said:

    MaxPB said:

    Pulpstar said:

    The most important part of these vaccines is that people get them when called. So far no nation has a *demand* problem, and our supply solution is optimal.
    We should be amongst the highest uptake in the world.

    Hmm, I'd suggest France and a few other European countries have a demand problem for the AZ vaccine because of irresponsible news reporting and comments from politicians.
    I believe Germany has 2-3 million AZN jabs sitting doing nothing.
    Surely there are people that want those jabs in Germany ?! OK They might not be in the most at risk categories, but that's their lookout.
    CH4 news managed to find 1 lady.....and that was about it.

    https://youtu.be/xZT-IGErsJQ
  • MaxPB said:

    Pulpstar said:

    The most important part of these vaccines is that people get them when called. So far no nation has a *demand* problem, and our supply solution is optimal.
    We should be amongst the highest uptake in the world.

    Hmm, I'd suggest France and a few other European countries have a demand problem for the AZ vaccine because of irresponsible news reporting and comments from politicians.
    Given that I have German and Polish friends telling me their *doctors* are rubbishing AZN on the discredited "its shit" basis.... Not sure what they are going to have to do to turn *that* around....
    Mrs Macron and Mrs Merkel taking the AZN jab live on TV.
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 76,274
    edited March 2021

    I don't know how anybody can afford 6 kids in this day and age.....the little monsters are more costly than my betting on Ryder Cups...

    He should have put a sock on it or had the snip years ago.

    My friend has five kids, he says the money isn't the issue, it's constant worrying about them.

    Or the fact he's never had any peace and quiet since 2004.
    Must be like Tweak out of South Park !!!!
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,770

    MaxPB said:

    Pulpstar said:

    The most important part of these vaccines is that people get them when called. So far no nation has a *demand* problem, and our supply solution is optimal.
    We should be amongst the highest uptake in the world.

    Hmm, I'd suggest France and a few other European countries have a demand problem for the AZ vaccine because of irresponsible news reporting and comments from politicians.
    Given that I have German and Polish friends telling me their *doctors* are rubbishing AZN on the discredited "its shit" basis.... Not sure what they are going to have to do to turn *that* around....
    And Handelsblatt.

    It also doesn't help that Switzerland rejected authorization for the AstraZeneca jab, and it hasn't been authorised in America yet.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,770

    MaxPB said:

    Pulpstar said:

    The most important part of these vaccines is that people get them when called. So far no nation has a *demand* problem, and our supply solution is optimal.
    We should be amongst the highest uptake in the world.

    Hmm, I'd suggest France and a few other European countries have a demand problem for the AZ vaccine because of irresponsible news reporting and comments from politicians.
    I believe Germany has 2-3 million AZN jabs sitting doing nothing.
    Part of that is because they are doing the same thing as California and holding back second jabs. Which is retarded.
  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 24,585

    So The Sunday Times have done a piece on Boris Johnson's finances, he really is a shit negotiator.

    Johnson’s biggest likely outlay is the result of what one Old Etonian school friend describes as “his pecker problem”. The friend recalls: “Boris has always had a problem keeping his pecker in his trousers. And that’s what so often has led him into trouble.”

    Six children — those are the ones that are known about — by three women, plus two divorces and an imminent third wedding to pay for don’t come cheap.

    Johnson is still believed to help support two of his four children with his second wife, Marina Wheeler, who are all now in their twenties after expensive private schools and universities.

    Stephanie, aged 11, is Johnson’s fifth child, through his affair with Helen Macintyre, an art consultant, and Wilfred will be one next month.

    Johnson’s first divorce, from Allegra Mostyn-Owen in 1993, was not costly and they had no children. But his divorce last year from Wheeler, a human rights QC, after 25 years together, was a different matter. Having separated in the summer of 2018 after Johnson met Symonds, it took them until February 2020 to reach a financial settlement.

    Word in legal circles is that Johnson was by then desperate to finalise the divorce, because Symonds was pregnant and he was determined not to announce the pregnancy until Wheeler, and their children, had been placated.

    That gave his soon-to-be-ex-wife considerable leverage in the protracted negotiations, leading to what one QC who professes familiarity with the details describes as “one of the most devastatingly one-sided divorces in British legal history”.

    It even gave Wheeler a considerable percentage of Johnson’s future lucrative earnings after he leaves office. Might it be no wonder then that Boris needs a leg-up with the home decor?


    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/why-is-boris-johnson-so-skint-5jvvbgdxg

    It reads like the exploits of a sink estate scally rather than an Old Etonian Prime Minister.
  • Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 55,014
    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    MaxPB said:

    kinabalu said:

    Pagan2 said:

    kinabalu said:

    Fishing said:

    kinabalu said:

    Fishing said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    Pagan2 said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.

    The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
    It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.

    But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.

    Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.

    TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
    The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.

    Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget
    Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people
    To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people

    https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/percentile-points-from-1-to-99-for-total-income-before-and-after-tax

    Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
    Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.

    A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.

    The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
    I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
    That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
    It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
    Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.

    There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -

    Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.

    BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.

    And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.

    That is a powerful argument.

    But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.

    It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
    Actually I don't think private schools are incompatible with equality of oportunity PROVIDED that the government establishes a decent number of scholarships so that poor but gifted children can get into them. That was grammar-school-educated Mrs Thatcher's policy - the Assisted Places Scheme - that public schoolbody Blair abolished in a huge victory for elitism.
    So some poor kids get into an elite public school by being very bright and beating off loads of competition but rich kids take the majority of places through parental wealth?

    That may be a benign bit of tinkering but it hardly transforms things.
    There's no point in the taxpayer paying for a first rate academic education to children who can't benefit from it, whether they are rich or poor. If parents want to do it that's their business. But providing poor kids can pass the entrance exams, the government should pay their fees.
    Ok. But you offered it as a transformational change that would make our elite private schools compatible with equal opportunities. It hardly does that,
    As one that grew up poor I will try and put it simply..,

    The biggest bar to social mobility is people with your attitude. People telling us constantly "Don't bother, it won't make a difference. The system is rigged against you. It isnt your fault". Too many believe you and do give up which makes it self fulfilling. This is why I have so much bile against that sort of thinking
    I also grew up poor. And, yes, I get that point but - deep breath and one more time - that is NOT what I think or am saying! WTF are you imputing that to me?

    I would never say to a child "don't bother, the system is rigged against you." Of course I wouldn't. The desire to see a system that is not so rigged against poor children does not mean you are right now wanting to give them carte blanche to not try because the system is rigged.

    Surely you can see how absurd that inference is? If you can't, I give up.

    Look, rather than talking to me, you seem to be talking to some generic "leftist bogeyman" onto which you wish to unload some stuff. It's kind of fascinating in a way but I've had enough now. Catch you another time.
    One thing I have observed is that credentialism works against those who have started out at a disadvantage.

    You can't get a job as an office junior without a degree now. No more barrow boys in the City....

    And it is ranked credentialism - for many places, Russell Group 2.1 or 1st will get you in. Other degrees, not so much.
    It's a weird situation because the jobs we're recruiting don't require a degree as we have the "or equivalent experience" but in reality to get the "or equivalent experience" you will have needed a degree to get into the industry in the first place.

    Definitely think people don't need a degree to do my job. I mean I did a chemistry degree which has been virtually worthless ever since I graduated except to meet the "degree or equivalent experience required" at the very start of my career.
    When I was at Goldman Sachs in the late 90s, the average age of someone who came in at graduate training level (i.e. pre-MBA) was 27 or 28. Almost no-one joined straight from University, usually spending three or four years working elsewhere.

    I mention this because - by and large - what a lot of firms want is someone who's had a couple of years to mature and get into working habits, and have something other than their degree to talk about.
    My educational and working-life career has always been about Tier 1B to be honest.

    I went Red Brick, rather than Oxbridge - I wanted 10 week terms, more fun as well as a very good degree - and I went Big4/niche consultancy, rather than McKinsey or US investment banking route because I didn't want to work all hours God sends. My wife is the same with niche mid-size law firms rather than the large US ones.

    Basically, I want a good career and a good salary but I really can't be arsed with the very very top. I like my downtime.
    Interestingly, the most common route into Goldman was probably red brick followed by accounting, a tech company, law or something else, followed by the GS graduate training program.

    I, with my Cambridge philosophy degree, was definitely the outlier.
    But, it must have been quite hardcore working for Goldman, right?

    I don't think I'd have enjoyed it.
  • BluestBlueBluestBlue Posts: 4,556

    So The Sunday Times have done a piece on Boris Johnson's finances, he really is a shit negotiator.

    Johnson’s biggest likely outlay is the result of what one Old Etonian school friend describes as “his pecker problem”. The friend recalls: “Boris has always had a problem keeping his pecker in his trousers. And that’s what so often has led him into trouble.”

    Six children — those are the ones that are known about — by three women, plus two divorces and an imminent third wedding to pay for don’t come cheap.

    Johnson is still believed to help support two of his four children with his second wife, Marina Wheeler, who are all now in their twenties after expensive private schools and universities.

    Stephanie, aged 11, is Johnson’s fifth child, through his affair with Helen Macintyre, an art consultant, and Wilfred will be one next month.

    Johnson’s first divorce, from Allegra Mostyn-Owen in 1993, was not costly and they had no children. But his divorce last year from Wheeler, a human rights QC, after 25 years together, was a different matter. Having separated in the summer of 2018 after Johnson met Symonds, it took them until February 2020 to reach a financial settlement.

    Word in legal circles is that Johnson was by then desperate to finalise the divorce, because Symonds was pregnant and he was determined not to announce the pregnancy until Wheeler, and their children, had been placated.

    That gave his soon-to-be-ex-wife considerable leverage in the protracted negotiations, leading to what one QC who professes familiarity with the details describes as “one of the most devastatingly one-sided divorces in British legal history”.

    It even gave Wheeler a considerable percentage of Johnson’s future lucrative earnings after he leaves office. Might it be no wonder then that Boris needs a leg-up with the home decor?


    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/why-is-boris-johnson-so-skint-5jvvbgdxg

    Was there once a time when journalism aspired to something a little better than rummaging through the PM's dustbins for detritus? Ah well, I suppose they have bills to pay too.

    As so often, however, the historical comparisons work out rather nicely in Boris' favour:

    http://www.andrewlownie.co.uk/authors/david-lough/books/no-more-champagne-churchill-and-his-money

    Lough uses Churchill’s own most private records, many never researched before, to chronicle his family’s chronic shortage of money, his own extravagance and his recurring losses from gambling or trading in shares and currencies. Churchill tried to keep himself afloat by borrowing to the hilt, putting off bills and writing ‘all over the place’; when all else failed, he had to ask family or friends to come to the rescue. This they did on no fewer than six occasions unearthed by Lough, the last when Churchill became Prime Minister in 1940. Yet within five years he had taken advantage of his worldwide celebrity to transform his private fortunes with the same ruthlessness as he waged war, reaching 1945 with today’s equivalent of £3 million in the bank. His lucrative war memoirs were still to come.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,770
    rcs1000 said:

    Pulpstar said:

    The most important part of these vaccines is that people get them when called. So far no nation has a *demand* problem, and our supply solution is optimal.
    We should be amongst the highest uptake in the world.

    If I were Germany or France (or anyone not the UK or Israel, really), I would make it really simple.

    Every day I would announce a date. And that date would be the one that anyone born before would be able to sign up for a vaccine appointment. So, you might start with 1/1/1940, and then 12/6/1940... etc.

    I might even have them as walk ins.

    You wouldn't get to choose your vaccine type (unless you had a history of anaphylaxis) when you could avoid the mRNA vaccines.

    Super simple. I'd prioritise having as close to zero vaccine inventory as possible, and getting as many jabs into as many arms as possible.

    At some point you'd need to have two dates (with the second date being the one from which people could get second doses).

    And if people aren't taking the appointments, then you just move the date forward more aggressively.

    Zero inventory. Maximum jabs in arms. Those have to be the priority.
  • TresTres Posts: 2,162

    I will be voting for Khan (again). He has not been perfect and quite ineffective in many ways however he is not Shaun Bailey.

    I got a Shaun Bailey flyer through the post the other day. Found it most amusing that the word Conservative or the name Boris were nowhere to be found.
  • DougSealDougSeal Posts: 11,059
  • So The Sunday Times have done a piece on Boris Johnson's finances, he really is a shit negotiator.

    Johnson’s biggest likely outlay is the result of what one Old Etonian school friend describes as “his pecker problem”. The friend recalls: “Boris has always had a problem keeping his pecker in his trousers. And that’s what so often has led him into trouble.”

    Six children — those are the ones that are known about — by three women, plus two divorces and an imminent third wedding to pay for don’t come cheap.

    Johnson is still believed to help support two of his four children with his second wife, Marina Wheeler, who are all now in their twenties after expensive private schools and universities.

    Stephanie, aged 11, is Johnson’s fifth child, through his affair with Helen Macintyre, an art consultant, and Wilfred will be one next month.

    Johnson’s first divorce, from Allegra Mostyn-Owen in 1993, was not costly and they had no children. But his divorce last year from Wheeler, a human rights QC, after 25 years together, was a different matter. Having separated in the summer of 2018 after Johnson met Symonds, it took them until February 2020 to reach a financial settlement.

    Word in legal circles is that Johnson was by then desperate to finalise the divorce, because Symonds was pregnant and he was determined not to announce the pregnancy until Wheeler, and their children, had been placated.

    That gave his soon-to-be-ex-wife considerable leverage in the protracted negotiations, leading to what one QC who professes familiarity with the details describes as “one of the most devastatingly one-sided divorces in British legal history”.

    It even gave Wheeler a considerable percentage of Johnson’s future lucrative earnings after he leaves office. Might it be no wonder then that Boris needs a leg-up with the home decor?


    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/why-is-boris-johnson-so-skint-5jvvbgdxg

    It reads like the exploits of a sink estate scally rather than an Old Etonian Prime Minister.
    Indeed, and he wants the taxpayer to pay for his extravagances.
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 27,835

    So The Sunday Times have done a piece on Boris Johnson's finances, he really is a shit negotiator.

    Johnson’s biggest likely outlay is the result of what one Old Etonian school friend describes as “his pecker problem”. The friend recalls: “Boris has always had a problem keeping his pecker in his trousers. And that’s what so often has led him into trouble.”

    Six children — those are the ones that are known about — by three women, plus two divorces and an imminent third wedding to pay for don’t come cheap.

    Johnson is still believed to help support two of his four children with his second wife, Marina Wheeler, who are all now in their twenties after expensive private schools and universities.

    Stephanie, aged 11, is Johnson’s fifth child, through his affair with Helen Macintyre, an art consultant, and Wilfred will be one next month.

    Johnson’s first divorce, from Allegra Mostyn-Owen in 1993, was not costly and they had no children. But his divorce last year from Wheeler, a human rights QC, after 25 years together, was a different matter. Having separated in the summer of 2018 after Johnson met Symonds, it took them until February 2020 to reach a financial settlement.

    Word in legal circles is that Johnson was by then desperate to finalise the divorce, because Symonds was pregnant and he was determined not to announce the pregnancy until Wheeler, and their children, had been placated.

    That gave his soon-to-be-ex-wife considerable leverage in the protracted negotiations, leading to what one QC who professes familiarity with the details describes as “one of the most devastatingly one-sided divorces in British legal history”.

    It even gave Wheeler a considerable percentage of Johnson’s future lucrative earnings after he leaves office. Might it be no wonder then that Boris needs a leg-up with the home decor?


    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/why-is-boris-johnson-so-skint-5jvvbgdxg

    It reads like the exploits of a sink estate scally rather than an Old Etonian Prime Minister.
    Indeed. Memories of Tory Cabinet ministers receiving standing ovations at Conference banging on about deadbeat dads, running away from responsibility and relying on the state and charities for handouts.
  • Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 55,014
    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    MaxPB said:

    kinabalu said:

    Pagan2 said:

    kinabalu said:

    Fishing said:

    kinabalu said:

    Fishing said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    Pagan2 said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.

    The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
    It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.

    But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.

    Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.

    TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
    The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.

    Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget
    Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people
    To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people

    https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/percentile-points-from-1-to-99-for-total-income-before-and-after-tax

    Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
    Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.

    A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.

    The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
    I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
    That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
    It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
    Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.

    There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -

    Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.

    BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.

    And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.

    That is a powerful argument.

    But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.

    It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
    Actually I don't think private schools are incompatible with equality of oportunity PROVIDED that the government establishes a decent number of scholarships so that poor but gifted children can get into them. That was grammar-school-educated Mrs Thatcher's policy - the Assisted Places Scheme - that public schoolbody Blair abolished in a huge victory for elitism.
    So some poor kids get into an elite public school by being very bright and beating off loads of competition but rich kids take the majority of places through parental wealth?

    That may be a benign bit of tinkering but it hardly transforms things.
    There's no point in the taxpayer paying for a first rate academic education to children who can't benefit from it, whether they are rich or poor. If parents want to do it that's their business. But providing poor kids can pass the entrance exams, the government should pay their fees.
    Ok. But you offered it as a transformational change that would make our elite private schools compatible with equal opportunities. It hardly does that,
    As one that grew up poor I will try and put it simply..,

    The biggest bar to social mobility is people with your attitude. People telling us constantly "Don't bother, it won't make a difference. The system is rigged against you. It isnt your fault". Too many believe you and do give up which makes it self fulfilling. This is why I have so much bile against that sort of thinking
    I also grew up poor. And, yes, I get that point but - deep breath and one more time - that is NOT what I think or am saying! WTF are you imputing that to me?

    I would never say to a child "don't bother, the system is rigged against you." Of course I wouldn't. The desire to see a system that is not so rigged against poor children does not mean you are right now wanting to give them carte blanche to not try because the system is rigged.

    Surely you can see how absurd that inference is? If you can't, I give up.

    Look, rather than talking to me, you seem to be talking to some generic "leftist bogeyman" onto which you wish to unload some stuff. It's kind of fascinating in a way but I've had enough now. Catch you another time.
    One thing I have observed is that credentialism works against those who have started out at a disadvantage.

    You can't get a job as an office junior without a degree now. No more barrow boys in the City....

    And it is ranked credentialism - for many places, Russell Group 2.1 or 1st will get you in. Other degrees, not so much.
    It's a weird situation because the jobs we're recruiting don't require a degree as we have the "or equivalent experience" but in reality to get the "or equivalent experience" you will have needed a degree to get into the industry in the first place.

    Definitely think people don't need a degree to do my job. I mean I did a chemistry degree which has been virtually worthless ever since I graduated except to meet the "degree or equivalent experience required" at the very start of my career.
    When I was at Goldman Sachs in the late 90s, the average age of someone who came in at graduate training level (i.e. pre-MBA) was 27 or 28. Almost no-one joined straight from University, usually spending three or four years working elsewhere.

    I mention this because - by and large - what a lot of firms want is someone who's had a couple of years to mature and get into working habits, and have something other than their degree to talk about.
    My educational and working-life career has always been about Tier 1B to be honest.

    I went Red Brick, rather than Oxbridge - I wanted 10 week terms, more fun as well as a very good degree - and I went Big4/niche consultancy, rather than McKinsey or US investment banking route because I didn't want to work all hours God sends. My wife is the same with niche mid-size law firms rather than the large US ones.

    Basically, I want a good career and a good salary but I really can't be arsed with the very very top. I like my downtime.
    This is something I wholeheartedly agree with, I spent the first part of my career at the very top of my chosen industry (games development for PlayStation) and it was incredibly demanding on my time and personal life. I don't regret it but I do wish I'd seen what the job was turning me into earlier and gone for the career change to investment a year or so earlier. The PS4 launch was basically a year of 60-70h working weeks in the run up to it to get a lot of the games into a state they could actually launch in.
    I forgot you were a gamer!

    I've had a very interesting career: I've always worked on iconic major projects and programmes, from airports in the UK, Iraq, Russia and Saudi, the Olympics, National Grid, Crossrail, PoW restoration, NR GWR and Transpennine upgrade, and I'm currently looking at the UK Space Agency new UK satellite programme.

    It hasn't made me rich, but it's always been interesting. I don't regret it.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,141
    edited March 2021

    So The Sunday Times have done a piece on Boris Johnson's finances, he really is a shit negotiator.

    Johnson’s biggest likely outlay is the result of what one Old Etonian school friend describes as “his pecker problem”. The friend recalls: “Boris has always had a problem keeping his pecker in his trousers. And that’s what so often has led him into trouble.”

    Six children — those are the ones that are known about — by three women, plus two divorces and an imminent third wedding to pay for don’t come cheap.

    Johnson is still believed to help support two of his four children with his second wife, Marina Wheeler, who are all now in their twenties after expensive private schools and universities.

    Stephanie, aged 11, is Johnson’s fifth child, through his affair with Helen Macintyre, an art consultant, and Wilfred will be one next month.

    Johnson’s first divorce, from Allegra Mostyn-Owen in 1993, was not costly and they had no children. But his divorce last year from Wheeler, a human rights QC, after 25 years together, was a different matter. Having separated in the summer of 2018 after Johnson met Symonds, it took them until February 2020 to reach a financial settlement.

    Word in legal circles is that Johnson was by then desperate to finalise the divorce, because Symonds was pregnant and he was determined not to announce the pregnancy until Wheeler, and their children, had been placated.

    That gave his soon-to-be-ex-wife considerable leverage in the protracted negotiations, leading to what one QC who professes familiarity with the details describes as “one of the most devastatingly one-sided divorces in British legal history”.

    It even gave Wheeler a considerable percentage of Johnson’s future lucrative earnings after he leaves office. Might it be no wonder then that Boris needs a leg-up with the home decor?


    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/why-is-boris-johnson-so-skint-5jvvbgdxg

    It reads like the exploits of a sink estate scally rather than an Old Etonian Prime Minister.
    It does, doesn't it? He'll be off to the food bank next and the Tory backbenchers will be making the obligatory remarks about "benefits".

  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,141
    IanB2 said:

    Good news as this time tomorrow I will have the AZN chimp virus coursing through my veins

    Ook!
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,141

    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    MaxPB said:

    kinabalu said:

    Pagan2 said:

    kinabalu said:

    Fishing said:

    kinabalu said:

    Fishing said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    Pagan2 said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.

    The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
    It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.

    But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.

    Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.

    TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
    The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.

    Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget
    Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people
    To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people

    https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/percentile-points-from-1-to-99-for-total-income-before-and-after-tax

    Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
    Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.

    A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.

    The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
    I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
    That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
    It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
    Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.

    There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -

    Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.

    BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.

    And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.

    That is a powerful argument.

    But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.

    It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
    Actually I don't think private schools are incompatible with equality of oportunity PROVIDED that the government establishes a decent number of scholarships so that poor but gifted children can get into them. That was grammar-school-educated Mrs Thatcher's policy - the Assisted Places Scheme - that public schoolbody Blair abolished in a huge victory for elitism.
    So some poor kids get into an elite public school by being very bright and beating off loads of competition but rich kids take the majority of places through parental wealth?

    That may be a benign bit of tinkering but it hardly transforms things.
    There's no point in the taxpayer paying for a first rate academic education to children who can't benefit from it, whether they are rich or poor. If parents want to do it that's their business. But providing poor kids can pass the entrance exams, the government should pay their fees.
    Ok. But you offered it as a transformational change that would make our elite private schools compatible with equal opportunities. It hardly does that,
    As one that grew up poor I will try and put it simply..,

    The biggest bar to social mobility is people with your attitude. People telling us constantly "Don't bother, it won't make a difference. The system is rigged against you. It isnt your fault". Too many believe you and do give up which makes it self fulfilling. This is why I have so much bile against that sort of thinking
    I also grew up poor. And, yes, I get that point but - deep breath and one more time - that is NOT what I think or am saying! WTF are you imputing that to me?

    I would never say to a child "don't bother, the system is rigged against you." Of course I wouldn't. The desire to see a system that is not so rigged against poor children does not mean you are right now wanting to give them carte blanche to not try because the system is rigged.

    Surely you can see how absurd that inference is? If you can't, I give up.

    Look, rather than talking to me, you seem to be talking to some generic "leftist bogeyman" onto which you wish to unload some stuff. It's kind of fascinating in a way but I've had enough now. Catch you another time.
    One thing I have observed is that credentialism works against those who have started out at a disadvantage.

    You can't get a job as an office junior without a degree now. No more barrow boys in the City....

    And it is ranked credentialism - for many places, Russell Group 2.1 or 1st will get you in. Other degrees, not so much.
    It's a weird situation because the jobs we're recruiting don't require a degree as we have the "or equivalent experience" but in reality to get the "or equivalent experience" you will have needed a degree to get into the industry in the first place.

    Definitely think people don't need a degree to do my job. I mean I did a chemistry degree which has been virtually worthless ever since I graduated except to meet the "degree or equivalent experience required" at the very start of my career.
    When I was at Goldman Sachs in the late 90s, the average age of someone who came in at graduate training level (i.e. pre-MBA) was 27 or 28. Almost no-one joined straight from University, usually spending three or four years working elsewhere.

    I mention this because - by and large - what a lot of firms want is someone who's had a couple of years to mature and get into working habits, and have something other than their degree to talk about.
    My educational and working-life career has always been about Tier 1B to be honest.

    I went Red Brick, rather than Oxbridge - I wanted 10 week terms, more fun as well as a very good degree - and I went Big4/niche consultancy, rather than McKinsey or US investment banking route because I didn't want to work all hours God sends. My wife is the same with niche mid-size law firms rather than the large US ones.

    Basically, I want a good career and a good salary but I really can't be arsed with the very very top. I like my downtime.
    This is something I wholeheartedly agree with, I spent the first part of my career at the very top of my chosen industry (games development for PlayStation) and it was incredibly demanding on my time and personal life. I don't regret it but I do wish I'd seen what the job was turning me into earlier and gone for the career change to investment a year or so earlier. The PS4 launch was basically a year of 60-70h working weeks in the run up to it to get a lot of the games into a state they could actually launch in.
    I forgot you were a gamer!

    I've had a very interesting career: I've always worked on iconic major projects and programmes, from airports in the UK, Iraq, Russia and Saudi, the Olympics, National Grid, Crossrail, PoW restoration, NR GWR and Transpennine upgrade, and I'm currently looking at the UK Space Agency new UK satellite programme.

    It hasn't made me rich, but it's always been interesting. I don't regret it.
    PoW? Palace of Westminster rather than the carrier? Oh dear ...
  • PulpstarPulpstar Posts: 75,842
    If ever a man deserved to be rinsed through the divorce courts, it's Boris.
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 76,274
    DougSeal said:
    They aren't exactly planning to.blow the bloody doors off....

    https://twitter.com/john_lichfield/status/1368152875256459266?s=19
  • Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 55,014
    Carnyx said:

    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    MaxPB said:

    kinabalu said:

    Pagan2 said:

    kinabalu said:

    Fishing said:

    kinabalu said:

    Fishing said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    Pagan2 said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.

    The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
    It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.

    But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.

    Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.

    TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
    The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.

    Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget
    Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people
    To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people

    https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/percentile-points-from-1-to-99-for-total-income-before-and-after-tax

    Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
    Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.

    A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.

    The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
    I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
    That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
    It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
    Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.

    There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -

    Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.

    BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.

    And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.

    That is a powerful argument.

    But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.

    It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
    Actually I don't think private schools are incompatible with equality of oportunity PROVIDED that the government establishes a decent number of scholarships so that poor but gifted children can get into them. That was grammar-school-educated Mrs Thatcher's policy - the Assisted Places Scheme - that public schoolbody Blair abolished in a huge victory for elitism.
    So some poor kids get into an elite public school by being very bright and beating off loads of competition but rich kids take the majority of places through parental wealth?

    That may be a benign bit of tinkering but it hardly transforms things.
    There's no point in the taxpayer paying for a first rate academic education to children who can't benefit from it, whether they are rich or poor. If parents want to do it that's their business. But providing poor kids can pass the entrance exams, the government should pay their fees.
    Ok. But you offered it as a transformational change that would make our elite private schools compatible with equal opportunities. It hardly does that,
    As one that grew up poor I will try and put it simply..,

    The biggest bar to social mobility is people with your attitude. People telling us constantly "Don't bother, it won't make a difference. The system is rigged against you. It isnt your fault". Too many believe you and do give up which makes it self fulfilling. This is why I have so much bile against that sort of thinking
    I also grew up poor. And, yes, I get that point but - deep breath and one more time - that is NOT what I think or am saying! WTF are you imputing that to me?

    I would never say to a child "don't bother, the system is rigged against you." Of course I wouldn't. The desire to see a system that is not so rigged against poor children does not mean you are right now wanting to give them carte blanche to not try because the system is rigged.

    Surely you can see how absurd that inference is? If you can't, I give up.

    Look, rather than talking to me, you seem to be talking to some generic "leftist bogeyman" onto which you wish to unload some stuff. It's kind of fascinating in a way but I've had enough now. Catch you another time.
    One thing I have observed is that credentialism works against those who have started out at a disadvantage.

    You can't get a job as an office junior without a degree now. No more barrow boys in the City....

    And it is ranked credentialism - for many places, Russell Group 2.1 or 1st will get you in. Other degrees, not so much.
    It's a weird situation because the jobs we're recruiting don't require a degree as we have the "or equivalent experience" but in reality to get the "or equivalent experience" you will have needed a degree to get into the industry in the first place.

    Definitely think people don't need a degree to do my job. I mean I did a chemistry degree which has been virtually worthless ever since I graduated except to meet the "degree or equivalent experience required" at the very start of my career.
    When I was at Goldman Sachs in the late 90s, the average age of someone who came in at graduate training level (i.e. pre-MBA) was 27 or 28. Almost no-one joined straight from University, usually spending three or four years working elsewhere.

    I mention this because - by and large - what a lot of firms want is someone who's had a couple of years to mature and get into working habits, and have something other than their degree to talk about.
    My educational and working-life career has always been about Tier 1B to be honest.

    I went Red Brick, rather than Oxbridge - I wanted 10 week terms, more fun as well as a very good degree - and I went Big4/niche consultancy, rather than McKinsey or US investment banking route because I didn't want to work all hours God sends. My wife is the same with niche mid-size law firms rather than the large US ones.

    Basically, I want a good career and a good salary but I really can't be arsed with the very very top. I like my downtime.
    This is something I wholeheartedly agree with, I spent the first part of my career at the very top of my chosen industry (games development for PlayStation) and it was incredibly demanding on my time and personal life. I don't regret it but I do wish I'd seen what the job was turning me into earlier and gone for the career change to investment a year or so earlier. The PS4 launch was basically a year of 60-70h working weeks in the run up to it to get a lot of the games into a state they could actually launch in.
    I forgot you were a gamer!

    I've had a very interesting career: I've always worked on iconic major projects and programmes, from airports in the UK, Iraq, Russia and Saudi, the Olympics, National Grid, Crossrail, PoW restoration, NR GWR and Transpennine upgrade, and I'm currently looking at the UK Space Agency new UK satellite programme.

    It hasn't made me rich, but it's always been interesting. I don't regret it.
    PoW? Palace of Westminster rather than the carrier? Oh dear ...
    Yep, that's the one. I only had a six-month contract on it though. The politics means they're allergic to consultants.

    The guy who led the Prince of Wales carrier build is one of my clients at the moment actually.
  • IanB2IanB2 Posts: 47,081
    The NHS vaccine website has been updated to throw the invitation to book open to everyone aged 56 and above. Which is a little odd as the priority groups as published on gov.uk says that group 8 is everyone aged over 55, which leaves 55 year olds in limbo.
  • DougSealDougSeal Posts: 11,059

    DougSeal said:
    They aren't exactly planning to.blow the bloody doors off....

    https://twitter.com/john_lichfield/status/1368152875256459266?s=19
    Encouraging, not mind blowing
  • FishingFishing Posts: 4,555
    FPT
    kinabalu said:

    Fishing said:



    It does for children who can benefit from them. And for other children, what's the point?

    But there will be room only for a small fraction of the bright and poor kids who could benefit. Most places will be taken by kids, whether bright or not so bright, from families who can afford the fees.
    In the very short term maybe. But the private sector can expand easily enough.
  • PulpstarPulpstar Posts: 75,842
    IanB2 said:

    The NHS vaccine website has been updated to throw the invitation to book open to everyone aged 56 and above. Which is a little odd as the priority groups as published on gov.uk says that group 8 is everyone aged over 55, which leaves 55 year olds in limbo.

    Surely a journalist will ask abou that at the next presser ?
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 76,274
    edited March 2021
    IanB2 said:

    The NHS vaccine website has been updated to throw the invitation to book open to everyone aged 56 and above. Which is a little odd as the priority groups as published on gov.uk says that group 8 is everyone aged over 55, which leaves 55 year olds in limbo.

    What did I say yesterday.....i bet there will be reported in the Sunday / Monday papers, with story of invite letters arriving etc.

    It is clear the quietly update the backend of a new cohort. So when it is close to your turn, well worth trying to see if you can get an appointment.
  • justin124justin124 Posts: 11,527
    I see there are suggestions of holding a 'slow handclap in support of NHS nurses' next week. Interesting to see if that takes off at all.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,770

    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    MaxPB said:

    kinabalu said:

    Pagan2 said:

    kinabalu said:

    Fishing said:

    kinabalu said:

    Fishing said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    Pagan2 said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.

    The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
    It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.

    But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.

    Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.

    TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
    The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.

    Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget
    Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people
    To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people

    https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/percentile-points-from-1-to-99-for-total-income-before-and-after-tax

    Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
    Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.

    A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.

    The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
    I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
    That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
    It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
    Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.

    There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -

    Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.

    BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.

    And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.

    That is a powerful argument.

    But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.

    It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
    Actually I don't think private schools are incompatible with equality of oportunity PROVIDED that the government establishes a decent number of scholarships so that poor but gifted children can get into them. That was grammar-school-educated Mrs Thatcher's policy - the Assisted Places Scheme - that public schoolbody Blair abolished in a huge victory for elitism.
    So some poor kids get into an elite public school by being very bright and beating off loads of competition but rich kids take the majority of places through parental wealth?

    That may be a benign bit of tinkering but it hardly transforms things.
    There's no point in the taxpayer paying for a first rate academic education to children who can't benefit from it, whether they are rich or poor. If parents want to do it that's their business. But providing poor kids can pass the entrance exams, the government should pay their fees.
    Ok. But you offered it as a transformational change that would make our elite private schools compatible with equal opportunities. It hardly does that,
    As one that grew up poor I will try and put it simply..,

    The biggest bar to social mobility is people with your attitude. People telling us constantly "Don't bother, it won't make a difference. The system is rigged against you. It isnt your fault". Too many believe you and do give up which makes it self fulfilling. This is why I have so much bile against that sort of thinking
    I also grew up poor. And, yes, I get that point but - deep breath and one more time - that is NOT what I think or am saying! WTF are you imputing that to me?

    I would never say to a child "don't bother, the system is rigged against you." Of course I wouldn't. The desire to see a system that is not so rigged against poor children does not mean you are right now wanting to give them carte blanche to not try because the system is rigged.

    Surely you can see how absurd that inference is? If you can't, I give up.

    Look, rather than talking to me, you seem to be talking to some generic "leftist bogeyman" onto which you wish to unload some stuff. It's kind of fascinating in a way but I've had enough now. Catch you another time.
    One thing I have observed is that credentialism works against those who have started out at a disadvantage.

    You can't get a job as an office junior without a degree now. No more barrow boys in the City....

    And it is ranked credentialism - for many places, Russell Group 2.1 or 1st will get you in. Other degrees, not so much.
    It's a weird situation because the jobs we're recruiting don't require a degree as we have the "or equivalent experience" but in reality to get the "or equivalent experience" you will have needed a degree to get into the industry in the first place.

    Definitely think people don't need a degree to do my job. I mean I did a chemistry degree which has been virtually worthless ever since I graduated except to meet the "degree or equivalent experience required" at the very start of my career.
    When I was at Goldman Sachs in the late 90s, the average age of someone who came in at graduate training level (i.e. pre-MBA) was 27 or 28. Almost no-one joined straight from University, usually spending three or four years working elsewhere.

    I mention this because - by and large - what a lot of firms want is someone who's had a couple of years to mature and get into working habits, and have something other than their degree to talk about.
    My educational and working-life career has always been about Tier 1B to be honest.

    I went Red Brick, rather than Oxbridge - I wanted 10 week terms, more fun as well as a very good degree - and I went Big4/niche consultancy, rather than McKinsey or US investment banking route because I didn't want to work all hours God sends. My wife is the same with niche mid-size law firms rather than the large US ones.

    Basically, I want a good career and a good salary but I really can't be arsed with the very very top. I like my downtime.
    Interestingly, the most common route into Goldman was probably red brick followed by accounting, a tech company, law or something else, followed by the GS graduate training program.

    I, with my Cambridge philosophy degree, was definitely the outlier.
    But, it must have been quite hardcore working for Goldman, right?

    I don't think I'd have enjoyed it.
    Like many large organisations, it depended on who you worked for. Goldman was, in many ways, a bunch of small independent units. My unit was technology equity research, and when I started there were two Executive Directors, one secretary and me. My job was update models and serve as an intelligent Super Assistant to my bosses.

    In many teams, the junior analyst (i.e, me) was abused. They were tied to their desk basically doing all the grunt work for their bosses.

    My bosses - by contrast - gave a shit about my professional development and from day one took me to meet investors and company management, and helped me along. I remain good friends with them both to this day.

    So while most junior analysts left after two years to go and do an MBA, I was promoted to Associate, and then left with one of my bosses to start a business with him a few years later.

    Was it hard work? Yes, sure. I worked until 7 or 8 most days, and was often in on Sundays.

    But it was also fun, and I got to meet lots of interesting people and do interesting things.
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 76,274
    edited March 2021
    This latest NFT stuff is making the original round of NFT madness ime. Crypto Kitties look like small beer.

    BBC News - Jack Dorsey: Bids reach $2.5m for Twitter co-founder's first post
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-56307153
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,141
    edited March 2021

    Carnyx said:

    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    MaxPB said:

    kinabalu said:

    Pagan2 said:

    kinabalu said:

    Fishing said:

    kinabalu said:

    Fishing said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    Pagan2 said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.

    The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
    It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.

    But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.

    Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.

    TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
    The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.

    Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget
    Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people
    To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people

    https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/percentile-points-from-1-to-99-for-total-income-before-and-after-tax

    Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
    Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.

    A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.

    The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
    I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
    That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
    It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
    Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.

    There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -

    Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.

    BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.

    And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.

    That is a powerful argument.

    But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.

    It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
    Actually I don't think private schools are incompatible with equality of oportunity PROVIDED that the government establishes a decent number of scholarships so that poor but gifted children can get into them. That was grammar-school-educated Mrs Thatcher's policy - the Assisted Places Scheme - that public schoolbody Blair abolished in a huge victory for elitism.
    So some poor kids get into an elite public school by being very bright and beating off loads of competition but rich kids take the majority of places through parental wealth?

    That may be a benign bit of tinkering but it hardly transforms things.
    There's no point in the taxpayer paying for a first rate academic education to children who can't benefit from it, whether they are rich or poor. If parents want to do it that's their business. But providing poor kids can pass the entrance exams, the government should pay their fees.
    Ok. But you offered it as a transformational change that would make our elite private schools compatible with equal opportunities. It hardly does that,
    As one that grew up poor I will try and put it simply..,

    The biggest bar to social mobility is people with your attitude. People telling us constantly "Don't bother, it won't make a difference. The system is rigged against you. It isnt your fault". Too many believe you and do give up which makes it self fulfilling. This is why I have so much bile against that sort of thinking
    I also grew up poor. And, yes, I get that point but - deep breath and one more time - that is NOT what I think or am saying! WTF are you imputing that to me?

    I would never say to a child "don't bother, the system is rigged against you." Of course I wouldn't. The desire to see a system that is not so rigged against poor children does not mean you are right now wanting to give them carte blanche to not try because the system is rigged.

    Surely you can see how absurd that inference is? If you can't, I give up.

    Look, rather than talking to me, you seem to be talking to some generic "leftist bogeyman" onto which you wish to unload some stuff. It's kind of fascinating in a way but I've had enough now. Catch you another time.
    One thing I have observed is that credentialism works against those who have started out at a disadvantage.

    You can't get a job as an office junior without a degree now. No more barrow boys in the City....

    And it is ranked credentialism - for many places, Russell Group 2.1 or 1st will get you in. Other degrees, not so much.
    It's a weird situation because the jobs we're recruiting don't require a degree as we have the "or equivalent experience" but in reality to get the "or equivalent experience" you will have needed a degree to get into the industry in the first place.

    Definitely think people don't need a degree to do my job. I mean I did a chemistry degree which has been virtually worthless ever since I graduated except to meet the "degree or equivalent experience required" at the very start of my career.
    When I was at Goldman Sachs in the late 90s, the average age of someone who came in at graduate training level (i.e. pre-MBA) was 27 or 28. Almost no-one joined straight from University, usually spending three or four years working elsewhere.

    I mention this because - by and large - what a lot of firms want is someone who's had a couple of years to mature and get into working habits, and have something other than their degree to talk about.
    My educational and working-life career has always been about Tier 1B to be honest.

    I went Red Brick, rather than Oxbridge - I wanted 10 week terms, more fun as well as a very good degree - and I went Big4/niche consultancy, rather than McKinsey or US investment banking route because I didn't want to work all hours God sends. My wife is the same with niche mid-size law firms rather than the large US ones.

    Basically, I want a good career and a good salary but I really can't be arsed with the very very top. I like my downtime.
    This is something I wholeheartedly agree with, I spent the first part of my career at the very top of my chosen industry (games development for PlayStation) and it was incredibly demanding on my time and personal life. I don't regret it but I do wish I'd seen what the job was turning me into earlier and gone for the career change to investment a year or so earlier. The PS4 launch was basically a year of 60-70h working weeks in the run up to it to get a lot of the games into a state they could actually launch in.
    I forgot you were a gamer!

    I've had a very interesting career: I've always worked on iconic major projects and programmes, from airports in the UK, Iraq, Russia and Saudi, the Olympics, National Grid, Crossrail, PoW restoration, NR GWR and Transpennine upgrade, and I'm currently looking at the UK Space Agency new UK satellite programme.

    It hasn't made me rich, but it's always been interesting. I don't regret it.
    PoW? Palace of Westminster rather than the carrier? Oh dear ...
    Yep, that's the one. I only had a six-month contract on it though. The politics means they're allergic to consultants.

    The guy who led the Prince of Wales carrier build is one of my clients at the moment actually.
    I did wonder momentarily if the battlecruiser in the South China Sea was being salvaged!
  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 24,585

    I don't know how anybody can afford 6 kids in this day and age.....the little monsters are more costly than my betting on Ryder Cups...

    Most people of my acquaintance carry out a back of a fag packet cost-benefit analysis before embarking on each round of parenthood. Otherwise it is a case of investing in the products of the former London Rubber Company.

    Maybe Stanley Johnson was remiss in advising Alexander of this nugget of reality during his "birds and bees" discussion.
  • This latest NFT stuff is making the original round of NFT madness ime. Crypto Kitties look like small beer.

    BBC News - Jack Dorsey: Bids reach $2.5m for Twitter co-founder's first post
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-56307153

    At work that would set off the anti money laundering protocols.
  • MattWMattW Posts: 18,080
    edited March 2021
    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    MaxPB said:

    kinabalu said:

    Pagan2 said:

    kinabalu said:

    Fishing said:

    kinabalu said:

    Fishing said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    Pagan2 said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.

    The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
    It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.

    But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.

    Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.

    TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
    The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.

    Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget
    Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people
    To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people

    https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/percentile-points-from-1-to-99-for-total-income-before-and-after-tax

    Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
    Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.

    A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.

    The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
    I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
    That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
    It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
    Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.

    There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -

    Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.

    BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.

    And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.

    That is a powerful argument.

    But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.

    It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
    Actually I don't think private schools are incompatible with equality of oportunity PROVIDED that the government establishes a decent number of scholarships so that poor but gifted children can get into them. That was grammar-school-educated Mrs Thatcher's policy - the Assisted Places Scheme - that public schoolbody Blair abolished in a huge victory for elitism.
    So some poor kids get into an elite public school by being very bright and beating off loads of competition but rich kids take the majority of places through parental wealth?

    That may be a benign bit of tinkering but it hardly transforms things.
    There's no point in the taxpayer paying for a first rate academic education to children who can't benefit from it, whether they are rich or poor. If parents want to do it that's their business. But providing poor kids can pass the entrance exams, the government should pay their fees.
    Ok. But you offered it as a transformational change that would make our elite private schools compatible with equal opportunities. It hardly does that,
    As one that grew up poor I will try and put it simply..,

    The biggest bar to social mobility is people with your attitude. People telling us constantly "Don't bother, it won't make a difference. The system is rigged against you. It isnt your fault". Too many believe you and do give up which makes it self fulfilling. This is why I have so much bile against that sort of thinking
    I also grew up poor. And, yes, I get that point but - deep breath and one more time - that is NOT what I think or am saying! WTF are you imputing that to me?

    I would never say to a child "don't bother, the system is rigged against you." Of course I wouldn't. The desire to see a system that is not so rigged against poor children does not mean you are right now wanting to give them carte blanche to not try because the system is rigged.

    Surely you can see how absurd that inference is? If you can't, I give up.

    Look, rather than talking to me, you seem to be talking to some generic "leftist bogeyman" onto which you wish to unload some stuff. It's kind of fascinating in a way but I've had enough now. Catch you another time.
    One thing I have observed is that credentialism works against those who have started out at a disadvantage.

    You can't get a job as an office junior without a degree now. No more barrow boys in the City....

    And it is ranked credentialism - for many places, Russell Group 2.1 or 1st will get you in. Other degrees, not so much.
    It's a weird situation because the jobs we're recruiting don't require a degree as we have the "or equivalent experience" but in reality to get the "or equivalent experience" you will have needed a degree to get into the industry in the first place.

    Definitely think people don't need a degree to do my job. I mean I did a chemistry degree which has been virtually worthless ever since I graduated except to meet the "degree or equivalent experience required" at the very start of my career.
    When I was at Goldman Sachs in the late 90s, the average age of someone who came in at graduate training level (i.e. pre-MBA) was 27 or 28. Almost no-one joined straight from University, usually spending three or four years working elsewhere.

    I mention this because - by and large - what a lot of firms want is someone who's had a couple of years to mature and get into working habits, and have something other than their degree to talk about.
    Yes, that was the same experience for me at Barclays, I already had significant experience elsewhere but my first job at Sony required a degree or equivalent experience to be a junior developer.

    However, loads of firms have got graduate programmes, we shut ours down a year or so before I joined and apparently the company has no intention of bringing it back mainly for the reasons you say.
    IHT is interesting. It is an ultra-focused wealth tax on only 25k estates per year, each of which pays an average of £200k. Even if multiplied up by 30 to allow for the length of a generation, that is only 700k people, or just over 1% of the population.

    Yet it is hated.

    So why do some think that very narrow Wealth Taxes will work, or be acceptable to the general populus?

    The only place afaik that raises genuinely significant amounts through a Wealth Tax is Switzerland, and that does it by application to a significant proportion of the population, and raises about 4% of tax revenue. All the narrow wealth taxes in Europe (France, Spain, Norway iirc) only raise around 1% of tax revenue at best.

    IHT raises £5bn a year, which is 0.7% of tax reveue. Ish.

    I won't engage with the "Independent Schools can't ever help Equality of Opportunity" bollocks, because it is even more bollocks currently than it has been in the past. Anyone thinking that first needs to move their head out of 1893. :smile:

    Have a nice evening.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,770
    MattW said:

    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    MaxPB said:

    kinabalu said:

    Pagan2 said:

    kinabalu said:

    Fishing said:

    kinabalu said:

    Fishing said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    Pagan2 said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.

    The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
    It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.

    But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.

    Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.

    TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
    The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.

    Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget
    Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people
    To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people

    https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/percentile-points-from-1-to-99-for-total-income-before-and-after-tax

    Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
    Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.

    A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.

    The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
    I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
    That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
    It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
    Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.

    There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -

    Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.

    BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.

    And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.

    That is a powerful argument.

    But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.

    It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
    Actually I don't think private schools are incompatible with equality of oportunity PROVIDED that the government establishes a decent number of scholarships so that poor but gifted children can get into them. That was grammar-school-educated Mrs Thatcher's policy - the Assisted Places Scheme - that public schoolbody Blair abolished in a huge victory for elitism.
    So some poor kids get into an elite public school by being very bright and beating off loads of competition but rich kids take the majority of places through parental wealth?

    That may be a benign bit of tinkering but it hardly transforms things.
    There's no point in the taxpayer paying for a first rate academic education to children who can't benefit from it, whether they are rich or poor. If parents want to do it that's their business. But providing poor kids can pass the entrance exams, the government should pay their fees.
    Ok. But you offered it as a transformational change that would make our elite private schools compatible with equal opportunities. It hardly does that,
    As one that grew up poor I will try and put it simply..,

    The biggest bar to social mobility is people with your attitude. People telling us constantly "Don't bother, it won't make a difference. The system is rigged against you. It isnt your fault". Too many believe you and do give up which makes it self fulfilling. This is why I have so much bile against that sort of thinking
    I also grew up poor. And, yes, I get that point but - deep breath and one more time - that is NOT what I think or am saying! WTF are you imputing that to me?

    I would never say to a child "don't bother, the system is rigged against you." Of course I wouldn't. The desire to see a system that is not so rigged against poor children does not mean you are right now wanting to give them carte blanche to not try because the system is rigged.

    Surely you can see how absurd that inference is? If you can't, I give up.

    Look, rather than talking to me, you seem to be talking to some generic "leftist bogeyman" onto which you wish to unload some stuff. It's kind of fascinating in a way but I've had enough now. Catch you another time.
    One thing I have observed is that credentialism works against those who have started out at a disadvantage.

    You can't get a job as an office junior without a degree now. No more barrow boys in the City....

    And it is ranked credentialism - for many places, Russell Group 2.1 or 1st will get you in. Other degrees, not so much.
    It's a weird situation because the jobs we're recruiting don't require a degree as we have the "or equivalent experience" but in reality to get the "or equivalent experience" you will have needed a degree to get into the industry in the first place.

    Definitely think people don't need a degree to do my job. I mean I did a chemistry degree which has been virtually worthless ever since I graduated except to meet the "degree or equivalent experience required" at the very start of my career.
    When I was at Goldman Sachs in the late 90s, the average age of someone who came in at graduate training level (i.e. pre-MBA) was 27 or 28. Almost no-one joined straight from University, usually spending three or four years working elsewhere.

    I mention this because - by and large - what a lot of firms want is someone who's had a couple of years to mature and get into working habits, and have something other than their degree to talk about.
    Yes, that was the same experience for me at Barclays, I already had significant experience elsewhere but my first job at Sony required a degree or equivalent experience to be a junior developer.

    However, loads of firms have got graduate programmes, we shut ours down a year or so before I joined and apparently the company has no intention of bringing it back mainly for the reasons you say.
    IHT is interesting. It is an ultra-focused wealth tax on only 25k estates per year, each of which pays an average of £200k. Even if multiplied up by 30 to allow for the length of a generation, that is only 700k people, or just over 1% of the population.

    Yet it is hated.

    So why do some think that very narrow Wealth Taxes will work, or be acceptable to the general populus?

    The only place afaik that raises genuinely significant amounts through a Wealth Tax is Switzerland, and that does it by application to a significant proportion of the population, and raises about 4% of tax revenue. All the narrow wealth taxes in Europe (France, Spain, Norway iirc) only raise around 1% of tax revenue at best.

    IHT raises £5bn a year, which is 0.7% of tax reveue. Ish.

    I won't engage with the "Independent Schools can't ever help Equality of Opportunity" bollocks, because it is even more bollocks currently than it has been in the past. Anyone thinking that first needs to move their head out of 1893. :smile:

    Have a nice evening.
    I think France got rid of its wealth tax a few years ago.

    Personally I prefer a gross assets levy, as it would discourage people from leveraging up.
  • Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 26,279
    "‘After a year we’re back to square one’: Milan locked in Covid’s grasp
    Twelve months on from Europe’s first coronavirus lockdown, restrictions still dominate life in Italian city"

    https://www.ft.com/content/881fac79-5515-421d-be60-3e1c3a74673e

  • Black_RookBlack_Rook Posts: 8,905

    DougSeal said:
    They aren't exactly planning to.blow the bloody doors off....

    https://twitter.com/john_lichfield/status/1368152875256459266?s=19
    Yep - a reported target, if correct, of 20m first doses by mid-May (the UK already being past 20m and with a case rate about one-fifth of that in France, and yet still under lockdown,) with one-third of France's existing stockpile of vaccines sitting unused on shelves. France has also devoted a lot of its rather limited effort to administering second doses - if that pattern continues then it will further compromise their attempts to give protection to a wider proportion of the population.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,770
    MattW said:

    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    MaxPB said:

    kinabalu said:

    Pagan2 said:

    kinabalu said:

    Fishing said:

    kinabalu said:

    Fishing said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    Pagan2 said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.

    The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
    It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.

    But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.

    Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.

    TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
    The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.

    Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget
    Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people
    To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people

    https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/percentile-points-from-1-to-99-for-total-income-before-and-after-tax

    Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
    Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.

    A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.

    The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
    I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
    That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
    It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
    Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.

    There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -

    Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.

    BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.

    And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.

    That is a powerful argument.

    But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.

    It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
    Actually I don't think private schools are incompatible with equality of oportunity PROVIDED that the government establishes a decent number of scholarships so that poor but gifted children can get into them. That was grammar-school-educated Mrs Thatcher's policy - the Assisted Places Scheme - that public schoolbody Blair abolished in a huge victory for elitism.
    So some poor kids get into an elite public school by being very bright and beating off loads of competition but rich kids take the majority of places through parental wealth?

    That may be a benign bit of tinkering but it hardly transforms things.
    There's no point in the taxpayer paying for a first rate academic education to children who can't benefit from it, whether they are rich or poor. If parents want to do it that's their business. But providing poor kids can pass the entrance exams, the government should pay their fees.
    Ok. But you offered it as a transformational change that would make our elite private schools compatible with equal opportunities. It hardly does that,
    As one that grew up poor I will try and put it simply..,

    The biggest bar to social mobility is people with your attitude. People telling us constantly "Don't bother, it won't make a difference. The system is rigged against you. It isnt your fault". Too many believe you and do give up which makes it self fulfilling. This is why I have so much bile against that sort of thinking
    I also grew up poor. And, yes, I get that point but - deep breath and one more time - that is NOT what I think or am saying! WTF are you imputing that to me?

    I would never say to a child "don't bother, the system is rigged against you." Of course I wouldn't. The desire to see a system that is not so rigged against poor children does not mean you are right now wanting to give them carte blanche to not try because the system is rigged.

    Surely you can see how absurd that inference is? If you can't, I give up.

    Look, rather than talking to me, you seem to be talking to some generic "leftist bogeyman" onto which you wish to unload some stuff. It's kind of fascinating in a way but I've had enough now. Catch you another time.
    One thing I have observed is that credentialism works against those who have started out at a disadvantage.

    You can't get a job as an office junior without a degree now. No more barrow boys in the City....

    And it is ranked credentialism - for many places, Russell Group 2.1 or 1st will get you in. Other degrees, not so much.
    It's a weird situation because the jobs we're recruiting don't require a degree as we have the "or equivalent experience" but in reality to get the "or equivalent experience" you will have needed a degree to get into the industry in the first place.

    Definitely think people don't need a degree to do my job. I mean I did a chemistry degree which has been virtually worthless ever since I graduated except to meet the "degree or equivalent experience required" at the very start of my career.
    When I was at Goldman Sachs in the late 90s, the average age of someone who came in at graduate training level (i.e. pre-MBA) was 27 or 28. Almost no-one joined straight from University, usually spending three or four years working elsewhere.

    I mention this because - by and large - what a lot of firms want is someone who's had a couple of years to mature and get into working habits, and have something other than their degree to talk about.
    Yes, that was the same experience for me at Barclays, I already had significant experience elsewhere but my first job at Sony required a degree or equivalent experience to be a junior developer.

    However, loads of firms have got graduate programmes, we shut ours down a year or so before I joined and apparently the company has no intention of bringing it back mainly for the reasons you say.
    IHT is interesting. It is an ultra-focused wealth tax on only 25k estates per year, each of which pays an average of £200k. Even if multiplied up by 30 to allow for the length of a generation, that is only 700k people, or just over 1% of the population.

    Yet it is hated.

    So why do some think that very narrow Wealth Taxes will work, or be acceptable to the general populus?

    The only place afaik that raises genuinely significant amounts through a Wealth Tax is Switzerland, and that does it by application to a significant proportion of the population, and raises about 4% of tax revenue. All the narrow wealth taxes in Europe (France, Spain, Norway iirc) only raise around 1% of tax revenue at best.

    IHT raises £5bn a year, which is 0.7% of tax reveue. Ish.

    I won't engage with the "Independent Schools can't ever help Equality of Opportunity" bollocks, because it is even more bollocks currently than it has been in the past. Anyone thinking that first needs to move their head out of 1893. :smile:

    Have a nice evening.
    From t'internet. Wealth taxes in Europe:

    Net Wealth Taxes
    Norway levies a net wealth tax of 0.85 percent on individuals’ wealth stocks exceeding NOK1.5 million (€152,000 or US $170,000), with 0.7 percent going to municipalities and 0.15 percent to the central government. Norway’s net wealth tax dates to 1892. Under COVID-19-related measures, individual business owners and shareholders who realize a loss in 2020 are eligible for a one-year deferred payment of the wealth tax.

    Spain’s net wealth tax is a progressive tax ranging from 0.2 percent to 3.75 percent on wealth stocks above €700,000 ($784,000; lower in some regions), with rates varying substantially across Spain’s autonomous regions (Madrid offers a 100 percent relief). Spanish residents are subject to the tax on a worldwide basis while nonresidents pay the tax only on assets located in Spain.

    Switzerland levies its net wealth tax at the cantonal level and covers worldwide assets (except real estate and permanent establishments located abroad). The tax rates and allowances vary significantly across cantons. The Swiss net wealth tax was first implemented in 1840.
  • BalrogBalrog Posts: 207

    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    MaxPB said:

    kinabalu said:

    Pagan2 said:

    kinabalu said:

    Fishing said:

    kinabalu said:

    Fishing said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    Pagan2 said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.

    The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
    It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.

    But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.

    Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.

    TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
    The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.

    Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget
    Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people
    To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people

    https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/percentile-points-from-1-to-99-for-total-income-before-and-after-tax

    Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
    Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.

    A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.

    The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
    I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
    That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
    It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
    Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.

    There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -

    Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.

    BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.

    And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.

    That is a powerful argument.

    But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.

    It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
    Actually I don't think private schools are incompatible with equality of oportunity PROVIDED that the government establishes a decent number of scholarships so that poor but gifted children can get into them. That was grammar-school-educated Mrs Thatcher's policy - the Assisted Places Scheme - that public schoolbody Blair abolished in a huge victory for elitism.
    So some poor kids get into an elite public school by being very bright and beating off loads of competition but rich kids take the majority of places through parental wealth?

    That may be a benign bit of tinkering but it hardly transforms things.
    There's no point in the taxpayer paying for a first rate academic education to children who can't benefit from it, whether they are rich or poor. If parents want to do it that's their business. But providing poor kids can pass the entrance exams, the government should pay their fees.
    Ok. But you offered it as a transformational change that would make our elite private schools compatible with equal opportunities. It hardly does that,
    As one that grew up poor I will try and put it simply..,

    The biggest bar to social mobility is people with your attitude. People telling us constantly "Don't bother, it won't make a difference. The system is rigged against you. It isnt your fault". Too many believe you and do give up which makes it self fulfilling. This is why I have so much bile against that sort of thinking
    I also grew up poor. And, yes, I get that point but - deep breath and one more time - that is NOT what I think or am saying! WTF are you imputing that to me?

    I would never say to a child "don't bother, the system is rigged against you." Of course I wouldn't. The desire to see a system that is not so rigged against poor children does not mean you are right now wanting to give them carte blanche to not try because the system is rigged.

    Surely you can see how absurd that inference is? If you can't, I give up.

    Look, rather than talking to me, you seem to be talking to some generic "leftist bogeyman" onto which you wish to unload some stuff. It's kind of fascinating in a way but I've had enough now. Catch you another time.
    One thing I have observed is that credentialism works against those who have started out at a disadvantage.

    You can't get a job as an office junior without a degree now. No more barrow boys in the City....

    And it is ranked credentialism - for many places, Russell Group 2.1 or 1st will get you in. Other degrees, not so much.
    It's a weird situation because the jobs we're recruiting don't require a degree as we have the "or equivalent experience" but in reality to get the "or equivalent experience" you will have needed a degree to get into the industry in the first place.

    Definitely think people don't need a degree to do my job. I mean I did a chemistry degree which has been virtually worthless ever since I graduated except to meet the "degree or equivalent experience required" at the very start of my career.
    When I was at Goldman Sachs in the late 90s, the average age of someone who came in at graduate training level (i.e. pre-MBA) was 27 or 28. Almost no-one joined straight from University, usually spending three or four years working elsewhere.

    I mention this because - by and large - what a lot of firms want is someone who's had a couple of years to mature and get into working habits, and have something other than their degree to talk about.
    My educational and working-life career has always been about Tier 1B to be honest.

    I went Red Brick, rather than Oxbridge - I wanted 10 week terms, more fun as well as a very good degree - and I went Big4/niche consultancy, rather than McKinsey or US investment banking route because I didn't want to work all hours God sends. My wife is the same with niche mid-size law firms rather than the large US ones.

    Basically, I want a good career and a good salary but I really can't be arsed with the very very top. I like my downtime.
    This is something I wholeheartedly agree with, I spent the first part of my career at the very top of my chosen industry (games development for PlayStation) and it was incredibly demanding on my time and personal life. I don't regret it but I do wish I'd seen what the job was turning me into earlier and gone for the career change to investment a year or so earlier. The PS4 launch was basically a year of 60-70h working weeks in the run up to it to get a lot of the games into a state they could actually launch in.
    I forgot you were a gamer!

    I've had a very interesting career: I've always worked on iconic major projects and programmes, from airports in the UK, Iraq, Russia and Saudi, the Olympics, National Grid, Crossrail, PoW restoration, NR GWR and Transpennine upgrade, and I'm currently looking at the UK Space Agency new UK satellite programme.

    It hasn't made me rich, but it's always been interesting. I don't regret it.
    Really? I did some work on PoW restoration, or rather I had a team working for me working on it. An interesting project. I have tended to work on large scale public sector IT projects, including recommending stopping a few before they became car crashes.

    There is a lot of interesting work around.
  • tlg86tlg86 Posts: 25,164
    edited March 2021
    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    MaxPB said:

    kinabalu said:

    Pagan2 said:

    kinabalu said:

    Fishing said:

    kinabalu said:

    Fishing said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    Pagan2 said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.

    The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
    It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.

    But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.

    Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.

    TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
    The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.

    Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget
    Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people
    To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people

    https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/percentile-points-from-1-to-99-for-total-income-before-and-after-tax

    Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
    Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.

    A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.

    The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
    I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
    That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
    It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
    Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.

    There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -

    Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.

    BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.

    And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.

    That is a powerful argument.

    But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.

    It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
    Actually I don't think private schools are incompatible with equality of oportunity PROVIDED that the government establishes a decent number of scholarships so that poor but gifted children can get into them. That was grammar-school-educated Mrs Thatcher's policy - the Assisted Places Scheme - that public schoolbody Blair abolished in a huge victory for elitism.
    So some poor kids get into an elite public school by being very bright and beating off loads of competition but rich kids take the majority of places through parental wealth?

    That may be a benign bit of tinkering but it hardly transforms things.
    There's no point in the taxpayer paying for a first rate academic education to children who can't benefit from it, whether they are rich or poor. If parents want to do it that's their business. But providing poor kids can pass the entrance exams, the government should pay their fees.
    Ok. But you offered it as a transformational change that would make our elite private schools compatible with equal opportunities. It hardly does that,
    As one that grew up poor I will try and put it simply..,

    The biggest bar to social mobility is people with your attitude. People telling us constantly "Don't bother, it won't make a difference. The system is rigged against you. It isnt your fault". Too many believe you and do give up which makes it self fulfilling. This is why I have so much bile against that sort of thinking
    I also grew up poor. And, yes, I get that point but - deep breath and one more time - that is NOT what I think or am saying! WTF are you imputing that to me?

    I would never say to a child "don't bother, the system is rigged against you." Of course I wouldn't. The desire to see a system that is not so rigged against poor children does not mean you are right now wanting to give them carte blanche to not try because the system is rigged.

    Surely you can see how absurd that inference is? If you can't, I give up.

    Look, rather than talking to me, you seem to be talking to some generic "leftist bogeyman" onto which you wish to unload some stuff. It's kind of fascinating in a way but I've had enough now. Catch you another time.
    One thing I have observed is that credentialism works against those who have started out at a disadvantage.

    You can't get a job as an office junior without a degree now. No more barrow boys in the City....

    And it is ranked credentialism - for many places, Russell Group 2.1 or 1st will get you in. Other degrees, not so much.
    It's a weird situation because the jobs we're recruiting don't require a degree as we have the "or equivalent experience" but in reality to get the "or equivalent experience" you will have needed a degree to get into the industry in the first place.

    Definitely think people don't need a degree to do my job. I mean I did a chemistry degree which has been virtually worthless ever since I graduated except to meet the "degree or equivalent experience required" at the very start of my career.
    When I was at Goldman Sachs in the late 90s, the average age of someone who came in at graduate training level (i.e. pre-MBA) was 27 or 28. Almost no-one joined straight from University, usually spending three or four years working elsewhere.

    I mention this because - by and large - what a lot of firms want is someone who's had a couple of years to mature and get into working habits, and have something other than their degree to talk about.
    My educational and working-life career has always been about Tier 1B to be honest.

    I went Red Brick, rather than Oxbridge - I wanted 10 week terms, more fun as well as a very good degree - and I went Big4/niche consultancy, rather than McKinsey or US investment banking route because I didn't want to work all hours God sends. My wife is the same with niche mid-size law firms rather than the large US ones.

    Basically, I want a good career and a good salary but I really can't be arsed with the very very top. I like my downtime.
    Interestingly, the most common route into Goldman was probably red brick followed by accounting, a tech company, law or something else, followed by the GS graduate training program.

    I, with my Cambridge philosophy degree, was definitely the outlier.
    But, it must have been quite hardcore working for Goldman, right?

    I don't think I'd have enjoyed it.
    Like many large organisations, it depended on who you worked for. Goldman was, in many ways, a bunch of small independent units. My unit was technology equity research, and when I started there were two Executive Directors, one secretary and me. My job was update models and serve as an intelligent Super Assistant to my bosses.

    In many teams, the junior analyst (i.e, me) was abused. They were tied to their desk basically doing all the grunt work for their bosses.

    My bosses - by contrast - gave a shit about my professional development and from day one took me to meet investors and company management, and helped me along. I remain good friends with them both to this day.

    So while most junior analysts left after two years to go and do an MBA, I was promoted to Associate, and then left with one of my bosses to start a business with him a few years later.

    Was it hard work? Yes, sure. I worked until 7 or 8 most days, and was often in on Sundays.

    But it was also fun, and I got to meet lots of interesting people and do interesting things.
    My sister was at Goldman c.2006-2009. First as a temp in their business continuity section which was brilliant, as her colleagues were fantastic many of whom she is friends with to this day.

    Then she got a permanent job in their legal department (she has a law degree). Suffice to say it ended with a stint at a psychiatric unit. If I had known just how badly she had been treated by the scum that work in that department, I'd taken matters into my own hands.
  • DavidLDavidL Posts: 50,763

    So The Sunday Times have done a piece on Boris Johnson's finances, he really is a shit negotiator.

    Johnson’s biggest likely outlay is the result of what one Old Etonian school friend describes as “his pecker problem”. The friend recalls: “Boris has always had a problem keeping his pecker in his trousers. And that’s what so often has led him into trouble.”

    Six children — those are the ones that are known about — by three women, plus two divorces and an imminent third wedding to pay for don’t come cheap.

    Johnson is still believed to help support two of his four children with his second wife, Marina Wheeler, who are all now in their twenties after expensive private schools and universities.

    Stephanie, aged 11, is Johnson’s fifth child, through his affair with Helen Macintyre, an art consultant, and Wilfred will be one next month.

    Johnson’s first divorce, from Allegra Mostyn-Owen in 1993, was not costly and they had no children. But his divorce last year from Wheeler, a human rights QC, after 25 years together, was a different matter. Having separated in the summer of 2018 after Johnson met Symonds, it took them until February 2020 to reach a financial settlement.

    Word in legal circles is that Johnson was by then desperate to finalise the divorce, because Symonds was pregnant and he was determined not to announce the pregnancy until Wheeler, and their children, had been placated.

    That gave his soon-to-be-ex-wife considerable leverage in the protracted negotiations, leading to what one QC who professes familiarity with the details describes as “one of the most devastatingly one-sided divorces in British legal history”.

    It even gave Wheeler a considerable percentage of Johnson’s future lucrative earnings after he leaves office. Might it be no wonder then that Boris needs a leg-up with the home decor?


    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/why-is-boris-johnson-so-skint-5jvvbgdxg

    Why the hell does a QC need any money from her ex? She should be supporting him.
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 38,851
    Fishing said:

    FPT

    kinabalu said:

    Fishing said:



    It does for children who can benefit from them. And for other children, what's the point?

    But there will be room only for a small fraction of the bright and poor kids who could benefit. Most places will be taken by kids, whether bright or not so bright, from families who can afford the fees.
    In the very short term maybe. But the private sector can expand easily enough.
    I see what you're doing here. An expanded private sector taking loads of bright kids from poor backgrounds and the state picking up their fees. It's back to the future with grammars! Very sneaky.
  • RobDRobD Posts: 58,941
    edited March 2021
    I wonder if anyone in the Élysée is reading PB? ;)
  • MattWMattW Posts: 18,080
    rcs1000 said:

    MattW said:

    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    MaxPB said:

    kinabalu said:

    Pagan2 said:

    kinabalu said:

    Fishing said:

    kinabalu said:

    Fishing said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    Pagan2 said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.

    The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
    It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.

    But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.

    Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.

    TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
    The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.

    Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget
    Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people
    To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people

    https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/percentile-points-from-1-to-99-for-total-income-before-and-after-tax

    Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
    Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.

    A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.

    The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
    I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
    That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
    It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
    Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.

    There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -

    Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.

    BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.

    And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.

    That is a powerful argument.

    But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.

    It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
    Actually I don't think private schools are incompatible with equality of oportunity PROVIDED that the government establishes a decent number of scholarships so that poor but gifted children can get into them. That was grammar-school-educated Mrs Thatcher's policy - the Assisted Places Scheme - that public schoolbody Blair abolished in a huge victory for elitism.
    So some poor kids get into an elite public school by being very bright and beating off loads of competition but rich kids take the majority of places through parental wealth?

    That may be a benign bit of tinkering but it hardly transforms things.
    There's no point in the taxpayer paying for a first rate academic education to children who can't benefit from it, whether they are rich or poor. If parents want to do it that's their business. But providing poor kids can pass the entrance exams, the government should pay their fees.
    Ok. But you offered it as a transformational change that would make our elite private schools compatible with equal opportunities. It hardly does that,
    As one that grew up poor I will try and put it simply..,

    The biggest bar to social mobility is people with your attitude. People telling us constantly "Don't bother, it won't make a difference. The system is rigged against you. It isnt your fault". Too many believe you and do give up which makes it self fulfilling. This is why I have so much bile against that sort of thinking
    I also grew up poor. And, yes, I get that point but - deep breath and one more time - that is NOT what I think or am saying! WTF are you imputing that to me?

    I would never say to a child "don't bother, the system is rigged against you." Of course I wouldn't. The desire to see a system that is not so rigged against poor children does not mean you are right now wanting to give them carte blanche to not try because the system is rigged.

    Surely you can see how absurd that inference is? If you can't, I give up.

    Look, rather than talking to me, you seem to be talking to some generic "leftist bogeyman" onto which you wish to unload some stuff. It's kind of fascinating in a way but I've had enough now. Catch you another time.
    One thing I have observed is that credentialism works against those who have started out at a disadvantage.

    You can't get a job as an office junior without a degree now. No more barrow boys in the City....

    And it is ranked credentialism - for many places, Russell Group 2.1 or 1st will get you in. Other degrees, not so much.
    It's a weird situation because the jobs we're recruiting don't require a degree as we have the "or equivalent experience" but in reality to get the "or equivalent experience" you will have needed a degree to get into the industry in the first place.

    Definitely think people don't need a degree to do my job. I mean I did a chemistry degree which has been virtually worthless ever since I graduated except to meet the "degree or equivalent experience required" at the very start of my career.
    When I was at Goldman Sachs in the late 90s, the average age of someone who came in at graduate training level (i.e. pre-MBA) was 27 or 28. Almost no-one joined straight from University, usually spending three or four years working elsewhere.

    I mention this because - by and large - what a lot of firms want is someone who's had a couple of years to mature and get into working habits, and have something other than their degree to talk about.
    Yes, that was the same experience for me at Barclays, I already had significant experience elsewhere but my first job at Sony required a degree or equivalent experience to be a junior developer.

    However, loads of firms have got graduate programmes, we shut ours down a year or so before I joined and apparently the company has no intention of bringing it back mainly for the reasons you say.
    IHT is interesting. It is an ultra-focused wealth tax on only 25k estates per year, each of which pays an average of £200k. Even if multiplied up by 30 to allow for the length of a generation, that is only 700k people, or just over 1% of the population.

    Yet it is hated.

    So why do some think that very narrow Wealth Taxes will work, or be acceptable to the general populus?

    The only place afaik that raises genuinely significant amounts through a Wealth Tax is Switzerland, and that does it by application to a significant proportion of the population, and raises about 4% of tax revenue. All the narrow wealth taxes in Europe (France, Spain, Norway iirc) only raise around 1% of tax revenue at best.

    IHT raises £5bn a year, which is 0.7% of tax reveue. Ish.

    I won't engage with the "Independent Schools can't ever help Equality of Opportunity" bollocks, because it is even more bollocks currently than it has been in the past. Anyone thinking that first needs to move their head out of 1893. :smile:

    Have a nice evening.
    I think France got rid of its wealth tax a few years ago.

    Personally I prefer a gross assets levy, as it would discourage people from leveraging up.
    I think that there are two involved there.

    There's a thing called the IST, which is 0.5-1.5% on assets over approx 1m Euro, and brings in about 2bn Euro per year.

    It was Monsieur Hollande's who brought in a 75% Supertax on income over 1m Euro as a great white hope, which went flipperty-flapperty-flop when they all started leaving. Any 1970s footballer could have told him that. Raised about £100m a year before they killed it.

    Mons. Hollande was the invisible French President with the ginormous forehead who was caught going to to see his mistress on a moped.
  • RobDRobD Posts: 58,941
    DavidL said:

    So The Sunday Times have done a piece on Boris Johnson's finances, he really is a shit negotiator.

    Johnson’s biggest likely outlay is the result of what one Old Etonian school friend describes as “his pecker problem”. The friend recalls: “Boris has always had a problem keeping his pecker in his trousers. And that’s what so often has led him into trouble.”

    Six children — those are the ones that are known about — by three women, plus two divorces and an imminent third wedding to pay for don’t come cheap.

    Johnson is still believed to help support two of his four children with his second wife, Marina Wheeler, who are all now in their twenties after expensive private schools and universities.

    Stephanie, aged 11, is Johnson’s fifth child, through his affair with Helen Macintyre, an art consultant, and Wilfred will be one next month.

    Johnson’s first divorce, from Allegra Mostyn-Owen in 1993, was not costly and they had no children. But his divorce last year from Wheeler, a human rights QC, after 25 years together, was a different matter. Having separated in the summer of 2018 after Johnson met Symonds, it took them until February 2020 to reach a financial settlement.

    Word in legal circles is that Johnson was by then desperate to finalise the divorce, because Symonds was pregnant and he was determined not to announce the pregnancy until Wheeler, and their children, had been placated.

    That gave his soon-to-be-ex-wife considerable leverage in the protracted negotiations, leading to what one QC who professes familiarity with the details describes as “one of the most devastatingly one-sided divorces in British legal history”.

    It even gave Wheeler a considerable percentage of Johnson’s future lucrative earnings after he leaves office. Might it be no wonder then that Boris needs a leg-up with the home decor?


    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/why-is-boris-johnson-so-skint-5jvvbgdxg

    Why the hell does a QC need any money from her ex? She should be supporting him.
    Also why does he have to support children in their twenties?
  • FairlieredFairliered Posts: 3,869
    When we are all vaccinated, I hope we are going to close our borders to all those infectious Europeans.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,770
    MattW said:

    rcs1000 said:

    MattW said:

    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    MaxPB said:

    kinabalu said:

    Pagan2 said:

    kinabalu said:

    Fishing said:

    kinabalu said:

    Fishing said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    Pagan2 said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.

    The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
    It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.

    But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.

    Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.

    TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
    The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.

    Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget
    Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people
    To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people

    https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/percentile-points-from-1-to-99-for-total-income-before-and-after-tax

    Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
    Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.

    A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.

    The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
    I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
    That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
    It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
    Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.

    There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -

    Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.

    BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.

    And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.

    That is a powerful argument.

    But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.

    It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
    Actually I don't think private schools are incompatible with equality of oportunity PROVIDED that the government establishes a decent number of scholarships so that poor but gifted children can get into them. That was grammar-school-educated Mrs Thatcher's policy - the Assisted Places Scheme - that public schoolbody Blair abolished in a huge victory for elitism.
    So some poor kids get into an elite public school by being very bright and beating off loads of competition but rich kids take the majority of places through parental wealth?

    That may be a benign bit of tinkering but it hardly transforms things.
    There's no point in the taxpayer paying for a first rate academic education to children who can't benefit from it, whether they are rich or poor. If parents want to do it that's their business. But providing poor kids can pass the entrance exams, the government should pay their fees.
    Ok. But you offered it as a transformational change that would make our elite private schools compatible with equal opportunities. It hardly does that,
    As one that grew up poor I will try and put it simply..,

    The biggest bar to social mobility is people with your attitude. People telling us constantly "Don't bother, it won't make a difference. The system is rigged against you. It isnt your fault". Too many believe you and do give up which makes it self fulfilling. This is why I have so much bile against that sort of thinking
    I also grew up poor. And, yes, I get that point but - deep breath and one more time - that is NOT what I think or am saying! WTF are you imputing that to me?

    I would never say to a child "don't bother, the system is rigged against you." Of course I wouldn't. The desire to see a system that is not so rigged against poor children does not mean you are right now wanting to give them carte blanche to not try because the system is rigged.

    Surely you can see how absurd that inference is? If you can't, I give up.

    Look, rather than talking to me, you seem to be talking to some generic "leftist bogeyman" onto which you wish to unload some stuff. It's kind of fascinating in a way but I've had enough now. Catch you another time.
    One thing I have observed is that credentialism works against those who have started out at a disadvantage.

    You can't get a job as an office junior without a degree now. No more barrow boys in the City....

    And it is ranked credentialism - for many places, Russell Group 2.1 or 1st will get you in. Other degrees, not so much.
    It's a weird situation because the jobs we're recruiting don't require a degree as we have the "or equivalent experience" but in reality to get the "or equivalent experience" you will have needed a degree to get into the industry in the first place.

    Definitely think people don't need a degree to do my job. I mean I did a chemistry degree which has been virtually worthless ever since I graduated except to meet the "degree or equivalent experience required" at the very start of my career.
    When I was at Goldman Sachs in the late 90s, the average age of someone who came in at graduate training level (i.e. pre-MBA) was 27 or 28. Almost no-one joined straight from University, usually spending three or four years working elsewhere.

    I mention this because - by and large - what a lot of firms want is someone who's had a couple of years to mature and get into working habits, and have something other than their degree to talk about.
    Yes, that was the same experience for me at Barclays, I already had significant experience elsewhere but my first job at Sony required a degree or equivalent experience to be a junior developer.

    However, loads of firms have got graduate programmes, we shut ours down a year or so before I joined and apparently the company has no intention of bringing it back mainly for the reasons you say.
    IHT is interesting. It is an ultra-focused wealth tax on only 25k estates per year, each of which pays an average of £200k. Even if multiplied up by 30 to allow for the length of a generation, that is only 700k people, or just over 1% of the population.

    Yet it is hated.

    So why do some think that very narrow Wealth Taxes will work, or be acceptable to the general populus?

    The only place afaik that raises genuinely significant amounts through a Wealth Tax is Switzerland, and that does it by application to a significant proportion of the population, and raises about 4% of tax revenue. All the narrow wealth taxes in Europe (France, Spain, Norway iirc) only raise around 1% of tax revenue at best.

    IHT raises £5bn a year, which is 0.7% of tax reveue. Ish.

    I won't engage with the "Independent Schools can't ever help Equality of Opportunity" bollocks, because it is even more bollocks currently than it has been in the past. Anyone thinking that first needs to move their head out of 1893. :smile:

    Have a nice evening.
    I think France got rid of its wealth tax a few years ago.

    Personally I prefer a gross assets levy, as it would discourage people from leveraging up.
    I think that there are two involved there.

    There's a thing called the IST, which is 0.5-1.5% on assets over approx 1m Euro, and brings in about 2bn Euro per year.

    It was Monsieur Hollande's who brought in a 75% Supertax on income over 1m Euro as a great white hope, which went flipperty-flapperty-flop when they all started leaving. Any 1970s footballer could have told him that. Raised about £100m a year before they killed it.

    Mons. Hollande was the invisible French President with the ginormous forehead who was caught going to to see his mistress on a moped.
    According to Wikipedia:

    Wealth Tax
    It was abolished by the French government in September 2017.

    Wealth Tax (solidarity tax on wealth), in French impôt de solidarité sur la fortune (ISF) was an annual tax payable by individuals the net value of whose wealth exceeds a certain amount.


    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_France#Taxes_on_wealth
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,770

    When we are all vaccinated, I hope we are going to close our borders to all those infectious Europeans.

    When we are all vaccinated, why would we need to?
  • DavidLDavidL Posts: 50,763
    justin124 said:

    I see there are suggestions of holding a 'slow handclap in support of NHS nurses' next week. Interesting to see if that takes off at all.

    Washing my hair (and worrying myself sick about the tax bill). Sorry!
  • MattWMattW Posts: 18,080
    rcs1000 said:

    MattW said:

    rcs1000 said:

    MattW said:

    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    MaxPB said:

    kinabalu said:

    Pagan2 said:

    kinabalu said:

    Fishing said:

    kinabalu said:

    Fishing said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    Pagan2 said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.

    The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
    It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.

    But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.

    Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.

    TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
    The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.

    Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget
    Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people
    To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people

    https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/percentile-points-from-1-to-99-for-total-income-before-and-after-tax

    Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
    Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.

    A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.

    The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
    I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
    That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
    It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
    Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.

    There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -

    Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.

    BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.

    And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.

    That is a powerful argument.

    But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.

    It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
    Actually I don't think private schools are incompatible with equality of oportunity PROVIDED that the government establishes a decent number of scholarships so that poor but gifted children can get into them. That was grammar-school-educated Mrs Thatcher's policy - the Assisted Places Scheme - that public schoolbody Blair abolished in a huge victory for elitism.
    So some poor kids get into an elite public school by being very bright and beating off loads of competition but rich kids take the majority of places through parental wealth?

    That may be a benign bit of tinkering but it hardly transforms things.
    There's no point in the taxpayer paying for a first rate academic education to children who can't benefit from it, whether they are rich or poor. If parents want to do it that's their business. But providing poor kids can pass the entrance exams, the government should pay their fees.
    Ok. But you offered it as a transformational change that would make our elite private schools compatible with equal opportunities. It hardly does that,
    As one that grew up poor I will try and put it simply..,

    The biggest bar to social mobility is people with your attitude. People telling us constantly "Don't bother, it won't make a difference. The system is rigged against you. It isnt your fault". Too many believe you and do give up which makes it self fulfilling. This is why I have so much bile against that sort of thinking
    I also grew up poor. And, yes, I get that point but - deep breath and one more time - that is NOT what I think or am saying! WTF are you imputing that to me?

    I would never say to a child "don't bother, the system is rigged against you." Of course I wouldn't. The desire to see a system that is not so rigged against poor children does not mean you are right now wanting to give them carte blanche to not try because the system is rigged.

    Surely you can see how absurd that inference is? If you can't, I give up.

    Look, rather than talking to me, you seem to be talking to some generic "leftist bogeyman" onto which you wish to unload some stuff. It's kind of fascinating in a way but I've had enough now. Catch you another time.
    One thing I have observed is that credentialism works against those who have started out at a disadvantage.

    You can't get a job as an office junior without a degree now. No more barrow boys in the City....

    And it is ranked credentialism - for many places, Russell Group 2.1 or 1st will get you in. Other degrees, not so much.
    It's a weird situation because the jobs we're recruiting don't require a degree as we have the "or equivalent experience" but in reality to get the "or equivalent experience" you will have needed a degree to get into the industry in the first place.

    Definitely think people don't need a degree to do my job. I mean I did a chemistry degree which has been virtually worthless ever since I graduated except to meet the "degree or equivalent experience required" at the very start of my career.
    When I was at Goldman Sachs in the late 90s, the average age of someone who came in at graduate training level (i.e. pre-MBA) was 27 or 28. Almost no-one joined straight from University, usually spending three or four years working elsewhere.

    I mention this because - by and large - what a lot of firms want is someone who's had a couple of years to mature and get into working habits, and have something other than their degree to talk about.
    Yes, that was the same experience for me at Barclays, I already had significant experience elsewhere but my first job at Sony required a degree or equivalent experience to be a junior developer.

    However, loads of firms have got graduate programmes, we shut ours down a year or so before I joined and apparently the company has no intention of bringing it back mainly for the reasons you say.
    IHT is interesting. It is an ultra-focused wealth tax on only 25k estates per year, each of which pays an average of £200k. Even if multiplied up by 30 to allow for the length of a generation, that is only 700k people, or just over 1% of the population.

    Yet it is hated.

    So why do some think that very narrow Wealth Taxes will work, or be acceptable to the general populus?

    The only place afaik that raises genuinely significant amounts through a Wealth Tax is Switzerland, and that does it by application to a significant proportion of the population, and raises about 4% of tax revenue. All the narrow wealth taxes in Europe (France, Spain, Norway iirc) only raise around 1% of tax revenue at best.

    IHT raises £5bn a year, which is 0.7% of tax reveue. Ish.

    I won't engage with the "Independent Schools can't ever help Equality of Opportunity" bollocks, because it is even more bollocks currently than it has been in the past. Anyone thinking that first needs to move their head out of 1893. :smile:

    Have a nice evening.
    I think France got rid of its wealth tax a few years ago.

    Personally I prefer a gross assets levy, as it would discourage people from leveraging up.
    I think that there are two involved there.

    There's a thing called the IST, which is 0.5-1.5% on assets over approx 1m Euro, and brings in about 2bn Euro per year.

    It was Monsieur Hollande's who brought in a 75% Supertax on income over 1m Euro as a great white hope, which went flipperty-flapperty-flop when they all started leaving. Any 1970s footballer could have told him that. Raised about £100m a year before they killed it.

    Mons. Hollande was the invisible French President with the ginormous forehead who was caught going to to see his mistress on a moped.
    According to Wikipedia:

    Wealth Tax
    It was abolished by the French government in September 2017.

    Wealth Tax (solidarity tax on wealth), in French impôt de solidarité sur la fortune (ISF) was an annual tax payable by individuals the net value of whose wealth exceeds a certain amount.


    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_France#Taxes_on_wealth
    Thank-you for that. My ref did not mention the abolition.
  • solarflaresolarflare Posts: 3,623
    Ballpark, what fraction of the UK adult population do we have to first-dose crack through before basically the average public health person is going to feel comfortable throwing caution (relatively speaking) to the wind?

    OK, being wary of new variants etc., but surely at some point we will have vaccinated a sufficient proportion that they will feel the can breathe a sigh of relief, and presumably that fraction is not 100% of all UK adults?
  • DougSealDougSeal Posts: 11,059

    When we are all vaccinated, I hope we are going to close our borders to all those infectious Europeans.

    If we are all vaccinated there is really no point in doing so given we won’t catch it off them.
  • MattWMattW Posts: 18,080
    RobD said:

    DavidL said:

    So The Sunday Times have done a piece on Boris Johnson's finances, he really is a shit negotiator.

    Johnson’s biggest likely outlay is the result of what one Old Etonian school friend describes as “his pecker problem”. The friend recalls: “Boris has always had a problem keeping his pecker in his trousers. And that’s what so often has led him into trouble.”

    Six children — those are the ones that are known about — by three women, plus two divorces and an imminent third wedding to pay for don’t come cheap.

    Johnson is still believed to help support two of his four children with his second wife, Marina Wheeler, who are all now in their twenties after expensive private schools and universities.

    Stephanie, aged 11, is Johnson’s fifth child, through his affair with Helen Macintyre, an art consultant, and Wilfred will be one next month.

    Johnson’s first divorce, from Allegra Mostyn-Owen in 1993, was not costly and they had no children. But his divorce last year from Wheeler, a human rights QC, after 25 years together, was a different matter. Having separated in the summer of 2018 after Johnson met Symonds, it took them until February 2020 to reach a financial settlement.

    Word in legal circles is that Johnson was by then desperate to finalise the divorce, because Symonds was pregnant and he was determined not to announce the pregnancy until Wheeler, and their children, had been placated.

    That gave his soon-to-be-ex-wife considerable leverage in the protracted negotiations, leading to what one QC who professes familiarity with the details describes as “one of the most devastatingly one-sided divorces in British legal history”.

    It even gave Wheeler a considerable percentage of Johnson’s future lucrative earnings after he leaves office. Might it be no wonder then that Boris needs a leg-up with the home decor?


    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/why-is-boris-johnson-so-skint-5jvvbgdxg

    Why the hell does a QC need any money from her ex? She should be supporting him.
    Also why does he have to support children in their twenties?
    Never marry a lawyer...
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,770
    RobD said:
    While that is true (and is deeply hypocritical given the EU's behaviour towards Australia), I do think we tend to give the US a bit of a pass here. They implemented a vaccine export ban at the end of December, and they haven't really been criticized for it. (This has been a very big political deal in Canada, who had relied on orders from the US, and has had to get them from Europe instead.)
  • DavidL said:

    So The Sunday Times have done a piece on Boris Johnson's finances, he really is a shit negotiator.

    Johnson’s biggest likely outlay is the result of what one Old Etonian school friend describes as “his pecker problem”. The friend recalls: “Boris has always had a problem keeping his pecker in his trousers. And that’s what so often has led him into trouble.”

    Six children — those are the ones that are known about — by three women, plus two divorces and an imminent third wedding to pay for don’t come cheap.

    Johnson is still believed to help support two of his four children with his second wife, Marina Wheeler, who are all now in their twenties after expensive private schools and universities.

    Stephanie, aged 11, is Johnson’s fifth child, through his affair with Helen Macintyre, an art consultant, and Wilfred will be one next month.

    Johnson’s first divorce, from Allegra Mostyn-Owen in 1993, was not costly and they had no children. But his divorce last year from Wheeler, a human rights QC, after 25 years together, was a different matter. Having separated in the summer of 2018 after Johnson met Symonds, it took them until February 2020 to reach a financial settlement.

    Word in legal circles is that Johnson was by then desperate to finalise the divorce, because Symonds was pregnant and he was determined not to announce the pregnancy until Wheeler, and their children, had been placated.

    That gave his soon-to-be-ex-wife considerable leverage in the protracted negotiations, leading to what one QC who professes familiarity with the details describes as “one of the most devastatingly one-sided divorces in British legal history”.

    It even gave Wheeler a considerable percentage of Johnson’s future lucrative earnings after he leaves office. Might it be no wonder then that Boris needs a leg-up with the home decor?


    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/why-is-boris-johnson-so-skint-5jvvbgdxg

    Why the hell does a QC need any money from her ex? She should be supporting him.
    His persistent adultery and the fact he didn't contribute to the mortgage as much as her means he's on the hook for the money.

    Oh and the fact he's a terrible negotiator.
  • RobDRobD Posts: 58,941
    rcs1000 said:

    RobD said:
    While that is true (and is deeply hypocritical given the EU's behaviour towards Australia), I do think we tend to give the US a bit of a pass here. They implemented a vaccine export ban at the end of December, and they haven't really been criticized for it. (This has been a very big political deal in Canada, who had relied on orders from the US, and has had to get them from Europe instead.)
    That was under Trump, the mad former president. I think they get a free pass on that. ;)
  • DougSealDougSeal Posts: 11,059
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 91,392
    RobD said:

    DavidL said:

    So The Sunday Times have done a piece on Boris Johnson's finances, he really is a shit negotiator.

    Johnson’s biggest likely outlay is the result of what one Old Etonian school friend describes as “his pecker problem”. The friend recalls: “Boris has always had a problem keeping his pecker in his trousers. And that’s what so often has led him into trouble.”

    Six children — those are the ones that are known about — by three women, plus two divorces and an imminent third wedding to pay for don’t come cheap.

    Johnson is still believed to help support two of his four children with his second wife, Marina Wheeler, who are all now in their twenties after expensive private schools and universities.

    Stephanie, aged 11, is Johnson’s fifth child, through his affair with Helen Macintyre, an art consultant, and Wilfred will be one next month.

    Johnson’s first divorce, from Allegra Mostyn-Owen in 1993, was not costly and they had no children. But his divorce last year from Wheeler, a human rights QC, after 25 years together, was a different matter. Having separated in the summer of 2018 after Johnson met Symonds, it took them until February 2020 to reach a financial settlement.

    Word in legal circles is that Johnson was by then desperate to finalise the divorce, because Symonds was pregnant and he was determined not to announce the pregnancy until Wheeler, and their children, had been placated.

    That gave his soon-to-be-ex-wife considerable leverage in the protracted negotiations, leading to what one QC who professes familiarity with the details describes as “one of the most devastatingly one-sided divorces in British legal history”.

    It even gave Wheeler a considerable percentage of Johnson’s future lucrative earnings after he leaves office. Might it be no wonder then that Boris needs a leg-up with the home decor?


    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/why-is-boris-johnson-so-skint-5jvvbgdxg

    Why the hell does a QC need any money from her ex? She should be supporting him.
    Also why does he have to support children in their twenties?
    Because otherwise they might have some juicy tales to tell.
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 38,851
    MattW said:

    MaxPB said:

    rcs1000 said:

    MaxPB said:

    kinabalu said:

    Pagan2 said:

    kinabalu said:

    Fishing said:

    kinabalu said:

    Fishing said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    Pagan2 said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    It's crystal clear to me what Labour's line should be. Balance the books, yes, but this time the broadest shoulders really should bear the burden. Tax the arse off those who can afford to pay. Details tbc.

    The problem here is the media narrative would be Tories give you free stuff, Labour just take away your hard earned. It's a difficult conundrum to beat.
    It's difficult for Labour because they don't know what the Tory theme will be. But whatever it is, I think Labour should be positioning to the fiscal left of it. This sounds obvious but it's less so in these days of cross dressing economic populism.

    But first of all, mirror the Tories on "sound money". If the Tories are abandoning that principle, Labour should too. It would be an electoral own goal to embrace hairshirt voluntarily. And if the Tories are sticking to it, to sound money, Labour should too, and to the same extent. Goal is to remove that "Labour equals feckless deficits, Tories are the grown ups" talking point.

    Then within that framework Labour should be offering higher spending and higher tax to fund it, compared with the Tories. And make a virtue of this. Make sure the spending is on wildly popular things, and the tax is hitting the better off, personal and corporate, hard. I think the time is right for this. I know there's a danger, "Labour's tax bombshell bla bla" but I think it's a risk worth taking.

    TLDR: Fight right populism with left populism.
    The trouble with that theory is voters instinctively know it doesn't make sense and that the extra tax will have of necessity have to be levied on the basic rate payers too.

    Giving you an example 50 billion extra spending in the budget
    Top 10% of earners is about 5 million people
    To balance the extra spending you need to take an average of 10,000 pounds of extra tax off each one every year. Bear in mind that the income for the top decile doesn't cross 100,000 until about you being in the top 2 to 3% and to make that average of 10000 you will need to be taking eye watering sums off about 500,000 people

    https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/percentile-points-from-1-to-99-for-total-income-before-and-after-tax

    Labour budgets that propose such a paltry sum as a mere 50billion are as rare as rocking horse poo.Hell that wouldn't even cover the waspi women from the 2019 manifesto
    Yes, it's dishonest to pretend everything can be funded by taxing the affluent. But you can skew it heavily in that direction. There's plenty of scope.

    A wealth tax should imo be part of this if we were being purely rational but the politics of that is toxic. The one we have now - IHT - is as popular as a cup of sick even with people who will not in a million years be subject to it.

    The peculiar attachment to privilege we have developed these days (also see private schools) is a great handicap to any party of the left here. This is why a GE win for Labour in a sense counts more than one for the Cons. It's a greater achievement.
    I think "the left" has a problem with voters with these issues because a lot of people recognise that a large amount of lefties motivation is so often hypocritical and/or based on envy and sometimes complete irrationality. I am obviously a little more to the right of you, but I see no difference between wanting the best advantage for your children (private schooling) and choosing a holiday to the Maldives, or an expensive dinner out that average person can't afford. A lot of people who do not choose private schools understand this. Left wingers froth about it though, often while they are booking their green offset holiday to the said Maldives!
    That's not a great comparison. The schooling feeds through to prospects in a way that fancy holidays etc don't.
    It is an illustration of how people should be allowed to spend (or waste if that is your view) their money how they choose. And why is wanting better prospects for your own kids a bad thing? Many well off left wingers just do it differently. They simply buy a house in the right catchment or buy private tuition. In many respects these virtue signallers (particularly the very well off ones) are simply denying places in the best schools to people who cant compete with them for housing. The left's obsession with private schooling is one of their worst hypocrisies
    Yawn. People always reduce and personalize like that on this issue because they can't make the macro argument that private schools are compatible with any semblance of equal opportunities. They can't make that argument because it is palpably ludicrous.

    There is an honest case for private schools and it goes like this -

    Yes, they violate in grievous fashion the principle of equal opportunities and allow the affluent to purchase further and significant advantage for their already advantaged offspring. And yes, this hard codes and propagates inequality down the generations.

    BUT, it's a fundamental right of people to spend their own money how they choose. And it's intrinsic to human nature, and a good thing on the micro level, for people to want to give their kids the best start in life they can. Which is what they are doing when they fork out for school fees.

    And the second outweighs the first. The contribution of the private opt out in education to inequality is not sufficient to justify the serious infringement of personal liberty involved in removing it.

    That is a powerful argument.

    But all of this "lefty hypocrisy" and "but you'd still have selection by house price" and "we should make state schools so good that nobody wants to go private" bla bla bla is just a way of avoiding the issue or trying to nitpick out of addressing it.

    It's all utter hogwash, Nigel, is my point. So please don't torture me with it.
    Actually I don't think private schools are incompatible with equality of oportunity PROVIDED that the government establishes a decent number of scholarships so that poor but gifted children can get into them. That was grammar-school-educated Mrs Thatcher's policy - the Assisted Places Scheme - that public schoolbody Blair abolished in a huge victory for elitism.
    So some poor kids get into an elite public school by being very bright and beating off loads of competition but rich kids take the majority of places through parental wealth?

    That may be a benign bit of tinkering but it hardly transforms things.
    There's no point in the taxpayer paying for a first rate academic education to children who can't benefit from it, whether they are rich or poor. If parents want to do it that's their business. But providing poor kids can pass the entrance exams, the government should pay their fees.
    Ok. But you offered it as a transformational change that would make our elite private schools compatible with equal opportunities. It hardly does that,
    As one that grew up poor I will try and put it simply..,

    The biggest bar to social mobility is people with your attitude. People telling us constantly "Don't bother, it won't make a difference. The system is rigged against you. It isnt your fault". Too many believe you and do give up which makes it self fulfilling. This is why I have so much bile against that sort of thinking
    I also grew up poor. And, yes, I get that point but - deep breath and one more time - that is NOT what I think or am saying! WTF are you imputing that to me?

    I would never say to a child "don't bother, the system is rigged against you." Of course I wouldn't. The desire to see a system that is not so rigged against poor children does not mean you are right now wanting to give them carte blanche to not try because the system is rigged.

    Surely you can see how absurd that inference is? If you can't, I give up.

    Look, rather than talking to me, you seem to be talking to some generic "leftist bogeyman" onto which you wish to unload some stuff. It's kind of fascinating in a way but I've had enough now. Catch you another time.
    One thing I have observed is that credentialism works against those who have started out at a disadvantage.

    You can't get a job as an office junior without a degree now. No more barrow boys in the City....

    And it is ranked credentialism - for many places, Russell Group 2.1 or 1st will get you in. Other degrees, not so much.
    It's a weird situation because the jobs we're recruiting don't require a degree as we have the "or equivalent experience" but in reality to get the "or equivalent experience" you will have needed a degree to get into the industry in the first place.

    Definitely think people don't need a degree to do my job. I mean I did a chemistry degree which has been virtually worthless ever since I graduated except to meet the "degree or equivalent experience required" at the very start of my career.
    When I was at Goldman Sachs in the late 90s, the average age of someone who came in at graduate training level (i.e. pre-MBA) was 27 or 28. Almost no-one joined straight from University, usually spending three or four years working elsewhere.

    I mention this because - by and large - what a lot of firms want is someone who's had a couple of years to mature and get into working habits, and have something other than their degree to talk about.
    Yes, that was the same experience for me at Barclays, I already had significant experience elsewhere but my first job at Sony required a degree or equivalent experience to be a junior developer.

    However, loads of firms have got graduate programmes, we shut ours down a year or so before I joined and apparently the company has no intention of bringing it back mainly for the reasons you say.
    IHT is interesting. It is an ultra-focused wealth tax on only 25k estates per year, each of which pays an average of £200k. Even if multiplied up by 30 to allow for the length of a generation, that is only 700k people, or just over 1% of the population.

    Yet it is hated.

    So why do some think that very narrow Wealth Taxes will work, or be acceptable to the general populus?

    The only place afaik that raises genuinely significant amounts through a Wealth Tax is Switzerland, and that does it by application to a significant proportion of the population, and raises about 4% of tax revenue. All the narrow wealth taxes in Europe (France, Spain, Norway iirc) only raise around 1% of tax revenue at best.

    IHT raises £5bn a year, which is 0.7% of tax reveue. Ish.

    I won't engage with the "Independent Schools can't ever help Equality of Opportunity" bollocks, because it is even more bollocks currently than it has been in the past. Anyone thinking that first needs to move their head out of 1893. :smile:

    Have a nice evening.
    Not to relitigate but there is at the very least a strong case that private schools are incompatible with equal opportunities in education. To call that argument outdated bollocks is er ... bollocks. If that's the level of your thinking on the topic you are wise to not engage.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,770
    RobD said:

    rcs1000 said:

    RobD said:
    While that is true (and is deeply hypocritical given the EU's behaviour towards Australia), I do think we tend to give the US a bit of a pass here. They implemented a vaccine export ban at the end of December, and they haven't really been criticized for it. (This has been a very big political deal in Canada, who had relied on orders from the US, and has had to get them from Europe instead.)
    That was under Trump, the mad former president. I think they get a free pass on that. ;)
    I was just reading the Canadian press, and they have had to get shipments of Pfizer from the EU instead. I wonder if the US ban has affected vaccine availability, because it's required Pfizer to redirect doses from Europe to Canada (and maybe other places too).
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 91,392
    rcs1000 said:

    RobD said:
    While that is true (and is deeply hypocritical given the EU's behaviour towards Australia), I do think we tend to give the US a bit of a pass here. They implemented a vaccine export ban at the end of December, and they haven't really been criticized for it. (This has been a very big political deal in Canada, who had relied on orders from the US, and has had to get them from Europe instead.)
    The USA doesn't rely on appearing to hold the moral high ground quite as much.
  • RobD said:

    DavidL said:

    So The Sunday Times have done a piece on Boris Johnson's finances, he really is a shit negotiator.

    Johnson’s biggest likely outlay is the result of what one Old Etonian school friend describes as “his pecker problem”. The friend recalls: “Boris has always had a problem keeping his pecker in his trousers. And that’s what so often has led him into trouble.”

    Six children — those are the ones that are known about — by three women, plus two divorces and an imminent third wedding to pay for don’t come cheap.

    Johnson is still believed to help support two of his four children with his second wife, Marina Wheeler, who are all now in their twenties after expensive private schools and universities.

    Stephanie, aged 11, is Johnson’s fifth child, through his affair with Helen Macintyre, an art consultant, and Wilfred will be one next month.

    Johnson’s first divorce, from Allegra Mostyn-Owen in 1993, was not costly and they had no children. But his divorce last year from Wheeler, a human rights QC, after 25 years together, was a different matter. Having separated in the summer of 2018 after Johnson met Symonds, it took them until February 2020 to reach a financial settlement.

    Word in legal circles is that Johnson was by then desperate to finalise the divorce, because Symonds was pregnant and he was determined not to announce the pregnancy until Wheeler, and their children, had been placated.

    That gave his soon-to-be-ex-wife considerable leverage in the protracted negotiations, leading to what one QC who professes familiarity with the details describes as “one of the most devastatingly one-sided divorces in British legal history”.

    It even gave Wheeler a considerable percentage of Johnson’s future lucrative earnings after he leaves office. Might it be no wonder then that Boris needs a leg-up with the home decor?


    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/why-is-boris-johnson-so-skint-5jvvbgdxg

    Why the hell does a QC need any money from her ex? She should be supporting him.
    Also why does he have to support children in their twenties?
    Because he promised the support beforehand and this is to ensure he honours it.

    I mean who would trust the word of Boris Johnson, much better to get it down in writing via a court order.
  • DougSealDougSeal Posts: 11,059

    Ballpark, what fraction of the UK adult population do we have to first-dose crack through before basically the average public health person is going to feel comfortable throwing caution (relatively speaking) to the wind?

    OK, being wary of new variants etc., but surely at some point we will have vaccinated a sufficient proportion that they will feel the can breathe a sigh of relief, and presumably that fraction is not 100% of all UK adults?

    I think the timetable has deliberately been set so that restrictions end three weeks after the last eligible and willing adult had been vaccinated with a first dose i.e. 21 June if it all goes to plan. So then. But people are already starting to let their guard down after vaccination if the ONS is to be believed.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,770
    DougSeal said:
    And with J&J coming on stream there, they stand a really good chance of not being far behind the UK. (Albeit some states are going to be doing better than others.)
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 27,835
    See Lozza has thrown his hat into the ring.

    https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/mar/06/laurence-fox-joins-london-mayoral-race-on-anti-lockdown-ticket

    What's the over/under for his share?
  • RobDRobD Posts: 58,941

    RobD said:

    DavidL said:

    So The Sunday Times have done a piece on Boris Johnson's finances, he really is a shit negotiator.

    Johnson’s biggest likely outlay is the result of what one Old Etonian school friend describes as “his pecker problem”. The friend recalls: “Boris has always had a problem keeping his pecker in his trousers. And that’s what so often has led him into trouble.”

    Six children — those are the ones that are known about — by three women, plus two divorces and an imminent third wedding to pay for don’t come cheap.

    Johnson is still believed to help support two of his four children with his second wife, Marina Wheeler, who are all now in their twenties after expensive private schools and universities.

    Stephanie, aged 11, is Johnson’s fifth child, through his affair with Helen Macintyre, an art consultant, and Wilfred will be one next month.

    Johnson’s first divorce, from Allegra Mostyn-Owen in 1993, was not costly and they had no children. But his divorce last year from Wheeler, a human rights QC, after 25 years together, was a different matter. Having separated in the summer of 2018 after Johnson met Symonds, it took them until February 2020 to reach a financial settlement.

    Word in legal circles is that Johnson was by then desperate to finalise the divorce, because Symonds was pregnant and he was determined not to announce the pregnancy until Wheeler, and their children, had been placated.

    That gave his soon-to-be-ex-wife considerable leverage in the protracted negotiations, leading to what one QC who professes familiarity with the details describes as “one of the most devastatingly one-sided divorces in British legal history”.

    It even gave Wheeler a considerable percentage of Johnson’s future lucrative earnings after he leaves office. Might it be no wonder then that Boris needs a leg-up with the home decor?


    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/why-is-boris-johnson-so-skint-5jvvbgdxg

    Why the hell does a QC need any money from her ex? She should be supporting him.
    Also why does he have to support children in their twenties?
    Because he promised the support beforehand and this is to ensure he honours it.

    I mean who would trust the word of Boris Johnson, much better to get it down in writing via a court order.
    OK, perhaps my question is why do adults in their twenties who went to private school and university need any sort of financial support?
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,770
    DougSeal said:

    Ballpark, what fraction of the UK adult population do we have to first-dose crack through before basically the average public health person is going to feel comfortable throwing caution (relatively speaking) to the wind?

    OK, being wary of new variants etc., but surely at some point we will have vaccinated a sufficient proportion that they will feel the can breathe a sigh of relief, and presumably that fraction is not 100% of all UK adults?

    I think the timetable has deliberately been set so that restrictions end three weeks after the last eligible and willing adult had been vaccinated with a first dose i.e. 21 June if it all goes to plan. So then. But people are already starting to let their guard down after vaccination if the ONS is to be believed.
    CV19 Infection rates spike in the week after first vaccine dose, as people let their guards down despite not being protected yet.
This discussion has been closed.