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Truss once again topping the CONHome ratings – politicalbetting.com

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  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,111
    TimT said:

    Carnyx said:

    Carnyx said:

    Taz said:

    There was even a calendar too.

    http://www.roundaboutsofbritain.com/

    Some of my (amateur) naturalist acquaintances like to specialise in even more obscure things.

    One studies plant galls caused by wasps, which has a society, believe it or not...
    https://www.britishplantgallsociety.org/

    Sadly this kind of thing is on the decline. Too many other distractions for oddballs these days?
    I wouldn't regard even oak apple enthusiasts as oddballs. My biology teacher was a serious researcher into galls. Quite an insight into ecology for a teenager.
    How about horse apple enthusiasts?
    Never heard of them! One learns on PB.
    Interesting, SSI. Never knew them as horse apples. Known solely as osage in these parts.
    Also for SSI -

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_apple

    Don't know if they have them in the States.
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826
    edited October 2021

    nico679 said:

    nico679 said:

    So the pig cull has started . Grown men left in tears at having to destroy their livestock and somehow what’s happening in the UK is being normalized by this cesspit of a government !

    Plenty of bacon then... think positive...
    Oh dear another from the Bozo way of thinking !
    Pigs bred for meat are being killed.

    Biggest non-story ever.
    Not entirely.

    There is a moral difference between raising a pig to be killed and eaten and one that is killed and dumped. It may not be much of a difference, and nobody is asking the pig, but there is a difference between cruelty with a purpose (even if that purpose is bacon sandwiches) and cruelty without.

    It's also worth thinking about this from the point of view of the farmer. I don't know the details, but it's likely that some farmers are going to lose a lot financially because of this. You may be OK with that, but I'm not sure I am.

    And finally, there is the point that @Cyclefree wisely made upthread. This is a waste of potential food. Those of us of a certain age remember any such waste being described as "wicked". If there's food available to feed people, you damn well make sure it gets into the bellies of people who need it. By all means taper the availability of foreign staff, if that's your policy. But if government policy leads to us destroying pigs rather than eating them, it's a bad policy, whatever point the government wishes to make.
    Completely 100% disagreed.

    If farmers can't be allowed to fail and see their stock lost then that's creating moral hazard in the market.

    Moral hazard is a bad policy.
  • CyclefreeCyclefree Posts: 25,074
    OK - I know they don't matter but more likes for a post about pigs than one about child abuse and crimes against women?

  • Cyclefree said:

    OK - I know they don't matter but more likes for a post about pigs than one about child abuse and crimes against women?

    On that I can agree with you.

    Some people's priorities are messed up.

    But I will point out that the reason I don't care about the animals dying is because its more important to raise the living standards for the people getting exploited by the system currently. Exploitation isn't as serious as crimes against women, but its more important than food waste in my eyes.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,111
    MattW said:

    dixiedean said:

    Cyclefree said:

    kle4 said:

    nico679 said:

    nico679 said:

    So the pig cull has started . Grown men left in tears at having to destroy their livestock and somehow what’s happening in the UK is being normalized by this cesspit of a government !

    Plenty of bacon then... think positive...
    Oh dear another from the Bozo way of thinking !
    Pigs bred for meat are being killed.

    Biggest non-story ever.
    If they are being wasted it is not a non-story, if hardly tragic.
    Food waste has always happened. Its not normally news, so why is this? 🤷‍♂️
    The farmers are not being paid for their pigs. So they are losing assets and income.

    Meat which could be sold to consumers here and overseas is not being sold. So others in the food supply chain are also losing income.

    And perfectly good food is wasted, which really offends me.
    It is a fair point and I regret the situation as good food going to waste is wrong

    However, I do not know the pig industry and therefore are we saying all the UK pigs are being sacrificed and their farmers or is this some and if so how much of the industry in total

    I am sure there are those in our midst who can provide a genuine an independent overview which would be helpful
    What percentage of waste would be acceptable out of interest?
    To be honest that is not the point of my question

    I said I regret good food going to waste but I am seeking to find out just how big the issue is

    Is it 100% of our pig production or 5% and what is needed to resolve the issue
    No, but it's the question I asked.
    I gave you my answer but I also want to know the extent of the problem and how to resolve it

    It is a fair question
    4.75 million pigs in UK.
    120,000 backlog according to this, growing by 12 000 per week.

    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/oct/01/uk-pig-industry-warns-butcher-shortage-mass-cull

    Is that a lot or not?
    Thank you

    It is undesirable but is nothing like I assumed it was if we have 4.75 million pigs

    I hope the visa quotas help to address the issue
    Has HMG redefined them as poultry then?
    We slaughter about 11m a year, so it is 1%.
    For the moment. More porkers are coming along. Is it going to be 1% a month, or 1% a week?

    This is a transient excursion as the nuclear engineers like to put it. The results are unclear.
  • CyclefreeCyclefree Posts: 25,074

    nico679 said:

    nico679 said:

    So the pig cull has started . Grown men left in tears at having to destroy their livestock and somehow what’s happening in the UK is being normalized by this cesspit of a government !

    Plenty of bacon then... think positive...
    Oh dear another from the Bozo way of thinking !
    Pigs bred for meat are being killed.

    Biggest non-story ever.
    Not entirely.

    There is a moral difference between raising a pig to be killed and eaten and one that is killed and dumped. It may not be much of a difference, and nobody is asking the pig, but there is a difference between cruelty with a purpose (even if that purpose is bacon sandwiches) and cruelty without.

    It's also worth thinking about this from the point of view of the farmer. I don't know the details, but it's likely that some farmers are going to lose a lot financially because of this. You may be OK with that, but I'm not sure I am.

    And finally, there is the point that @Cyclefree wisely made upthread. This is a waste of potential food. Those of us of a certain age remember any such waste being described as "wicked". If there's food available to feed people, you damn well make sure it gets into the bellies of people who need it. By all means taper the availability of foreign staff, if that's your policy. But if government policy leads to us destroying pigs rather than eating them, it's a bad policy, whatever point the government wishes to make.
    Completely 100% disagreed.

    If farmers can't be allowed to fail and see their stock lost then that's creating moral hazard in the market.

    Moral hazard is a bad policy.
    What has the farmer done wrong? It is the abattoir which has failed.
  • MattW said:

    dixiedean said:

    Cyclefree said:

    kle4 said:

    nico679 said:

    nico679 said:

    So the pig cull has started . Grown men left in tears at having to destroy their livestock and somehow what’s happening in the UK is being normalized by this cesspit of a government !

    Plenty of bacon then... think positive...
    Oh dear another from the Bozo way of thinking !
    Pigs bred for meat are being killed.

    Biggest non-story ever.
    If they are being wasted it is not a non-story, if hardly tragic.
    Food waste has always happened. Its not normally news, so why is this? 🤷‍♂️
    The farmers are not being paid for their pigs. So they are losing assets and income.

    Meat which could be sold to consumers here and overseas is not being sold. So others in the food supply chain are also losing income.

    And perfectly good food is wasted, which really offends me.
    It is a fair point and I regret the situation as good food going to waste is wrong

    However, I do not know the pig industry and therefore are we saying all the UK pigs are being sacrificed and their farmers or is this some and if so how much of the industry in total

    I am sure there are those in our midst who can provide a genuine an independent overview which would be helpful
    What percentage of waste would be acceptable out of interest?
    To be honest that is not the point of my question

    I said I regret good food going to waste but I am seeking to find out just how big the issue is

    Is it 100% of our pig production or 5% and what is needed to resolve the issue
    No, but it's the question I asked.
    I gave you my answer but I also want to know the extent of the problem and how to resolve it

    It is a fair question
    4.75 million pigs in UK.
    120,000 backlog according to this, growing by 12 000 per week.

    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/oct/01/uk-pig-industry-warns-butcher-shortage-mass-cull

    Is that a lot or not?
    Thank you

    It is undesirable but is nothing like I assumed it was if we have 4.75 million pigs

    I hope the visa quotas help to address the issue
    Has HMG redefined them as poultry then?
    We slaughter about 11m a year, so it is 1%.
    A shortfall of 12000 per week would correspond to a loss of about 17% in that case.
  • dixiedean said:

    Cyclefree said:

    kle4 said:

    nico679 said:

    nico679 said:

    So the pig cull has started . Grown men left in tears at having to destroy their livestock and somehow what’s happening in the UK is being normalized by this cesspit of a government !

    Plenty of bacon then... think positive...
    Oh dear another from the Bozo way of thinking !
    Pigs bred for meat are being killed.

    Biggest non-story ever.
    If they are being wasted it is not a non-story, if hardly tragic.
    Food waste has always happened. Its not normally news, so why is this? 🤷‍♂️
    The farmers are not being paid for their pigs. So they are losing assets and income.

    Meat which could be sold to consumers here and overseas is not being sold. So others in the food supply chain are also losing income.

    And perfectly good food is wasted, which really offends me.
    It is a fair point and I regret the situation as good food going to waste is wrong

    However, I do not know the pig industry and therefore are we saying all the UK pigs are being sacrificed and their farmers or is this some and if so how much of the industry in total

    I am sure there are those in our midst who can provide a genuine an independent overview which would be helpful
    What percentage of waste would be acceptable out of interest?
    To be honest that is not the point of my question

    I said I regret good food going to waste but I am seeking to find out just how big the issue is

    Is it 100% of our pig production or 5% and what is needed to resolve the issue
    No, but it's the question I asked.
    I gave you my answer but I also want to know the extent of the problem and how to resolve it

    It is a fair question
    4.75 million pigs in UK.
    120,000 backlog according to this, growing by 12 000 per week.

    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/oct/01/uk-pig-industry-warns-butcher-shortage-mass-cull

    Is that a lot or not?
    Thank you

    It is undesirable but is nothing like I assumed it was if we have 4.75 million pigs

    I hope the visa quotas help to address the issue
    Has HMG redefined them as poultry then?
    I assumed the visa were for agricultural workers but if poultry only then it seems strange
  • CyclefreeCyclefree Posts: 25,074
    edited October 2021
    Deleted. Duplicate.
  • gealbhangealbhan Posts: 2,362

    rcs1000 said:

    eek said:

    Have we done the EU discussions regarding offering 5000 UK HGV drivers 5 year EU work permits?

    It is worth noting that the recipients of those 5,000 work permits will have won the HGV lottery.

    They will be able to work across the EEA and the UK, taking packages from wherever to wherever. They will have much higher utilization than UK-only drivers, and somewhat higher than EEA-only drivers.

    One would expect, of course, that they'll only spend about 15% of their time in the UK. So their impact on the local HGV market will be limited.
    It is interesting that the truckers union in France is demanding talks over HGV drivers pay in view of the increasing wages in the UK as quite a gulf is developing

    France facing lorry driver crisis as Macron shamed over wages 'Look at Britain!'

    https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1501168/emmanuel-macron-french-lorry-drivers-pay-rise-ccntr-brexit-boris-johnson-france-uk-1501168#ICID=Android_ExpressNewApp_AppShare
    If Red Robbo, Scargill and Ben would have loved what Boris is doing, you saying that’s going to end well?
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,111

    dixiedean said:

    Cyclefree said:

    kle4 said:

    nico679 said:

    nico679 said:

    So the pig cull has started . Grown men left in tears at having to destroy their livestock and somehow what’s happening in the UK is being normalized by this cesspit of a government !

    Plenty of bacon then... think positive...
    Oh dear another from the Bozo way of thinking !
    Pigs bred for meat are being killed.

    Biggest non-story ever.
    If they are being wasted it is not a non-story, if hardly tragic.
    Food waste has always happened. Its not normally news, so why is this? 🤷‍♂️
    The farmers are not being paid for their pigs. So they are losing assets and income.

    Meat which could be sold to consumers here and overseas is not being sold. So others in the food supply chain are also losing income.

    And perfectly good food is wasted, which really offends me.
    It is a fair point and I regret the situation as good food going to waste is wrong

    However, I do not know the pig industry and therefore are we saying all the UK pigs are being sacrificed and their farmers or is this some and if so how much of the industry in total

    I am sure there are those in our midst who can provide a genuine an independent overview which would be helpful
    What percentage of waste would be acceptable out of interest?
    To be honest that is not the point of my question

    I said I regret good food going to waste but I am seeking to find out just how big the issue is

    Is it 100% of our pig production or 5% and what is needed to resolve the issue
    No, but it's the question I asked.
    I gave you my answer but I also want to know the extent of the problem and how to resolve it

    It is a fair question
    4.75 million pigs in UK.
    120,000 backlog according to this, growing by 12 000 per week.

    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/oct/01/uk-pig-industry-warns-butcher-shortage-mass-cull

    Is that a lot or not?
    Thank you

    It is undesirable but is nothing like I assumed it was if we have 4.75 million pigs

    I hope the visa quotas help to address the issue
    Has HMG redefined them as poultry then?
    I assumed the visa were for agricultural workers but if poultry only then it seems strange
    The Tories ar eplaying a game of chicken with their loyal voters, basically. Not to mention bullshit.
  • MattW said:

    dixiedean said:

    Cyclefree said:

    kle4 said:

    nico679 said:

    nico679 said:

    So the pig cull has started . Grown men left in tears at having to destroy their livestock and somehow what’s happening in the UK is being normalized by this cesspit of a government !

    Plenty of bacon then... think positive...
    Oh dear another from the Bozo way of thinking !
    Pigs bred for meat are being killed.

    Biggest non-story ever.
    If they are being wasted it is not a non-story, if hardly tragic.
    Food waste has always happened. Its not normally news, so why is this? 🤷‍♂️
    The farmers are not being paid for their pigs. So they are losing assets and income.

    Meat which could be sold to consumers here and overseas is not being sold. So others in the food supply chain are also losing income.

    And perfectly good food is wasted, which really offends me.
    It is a fair point and I regret the situation as good food going to waste is wrong

    However, I do not know the pig industry and therefore are we saying all the UK pigs are being sacrificed and their farmers or is this some and if so how much of the industry in total

    I am sure there are those in our midst who can provide a genuine an independent overview which would be helpful
    What percentage of waste would be acceptable out of interest?
    To be honest that is not the point of my question

    I said I regret good food going to waste but I am seeking to find out just how big the issue is

    Is it 100% of our pig production or 5% and what is needed to resolve the issue
    No, but it's the question I asked.
    I gave you my answer but I also want to know the extent of the problem and how to resolve it

    It is a fair question
    4.75 million pigs in UK.
    120,000 backlog according to this, growing by 12 000 per week.

    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/oct/01/uk-pig-industry-warns-butcher-shortage-mass-cull

    Is that a lot or not?
    Thank you

    It is undesirable but is nothing like I assumed it was if we have 4.75 million pigs

    I hope the visa quotas help to address the issue
    Has HMG redefined them as poultry then?
    We slaughter about 11m a year, so it is 1%.
    A shortfall of 12000 per week would correspond to a loss of about 17% in that case.
    Sorry, 5.7%!
  • Cyclefree said:

    nico679 said:

    nico679 said:

    So the pig cull has started . Grown men left in tears at having to destroy their livestock and somehow what’s happening in the UK is being normalized by this cesspit of a government !

    Plenty of bacon then... think positive...
    Oh dear another from the Bozo way of thinking !
    Pigs bred for meat are being killed.

    Biggest non-story ever.
    Not entirely.

    There is a moral difference between raising a pig to be killed and eaten and one that is killed and dumped. It may not be much of a difference, and nobody is asking the pig, but there is a difference between cruelty with a purpose (even if that purpose is bacon sandwiches) and cruelty without.

    It's also worth thinking about this from the point of view of the farmer. I don't know the details, but it's likely that some farmers are going to lose a lot financially because of this. You may be OK with that, but I'm not sure I am.

    And finally, there is the point that @Cyclefree wisely made upthread. This is a waste of potential food. Those of us of a certain age remember any such waste being described as "wicked". If there's food available to feed people, you damn well make sure it gets into the bellies of people who need it. By all means taper the availability of foreign staff, if that's your policy. But if government policy leads to us destroying pigs rather than eating them, it's a bad policy, whatever point the government wishes to make.
    Completely 100% disagreed.

    If farmers can't be allowed to fail and see their stock lost then that's creating moral hazard in the market.

    Moral hazard is a bad policy.
    What has the farmer done wrong? It is the abattoir which has failed.
    The farmer isn't paying the abattoir enough for the abattoir to pay their staff enough.

    If moral hazard exists in the system because the stock can't be allowed to be destroyed they've no incentive to pay the abattoirs more.

    If the farmers know the stock will be destroyed and they'll lose their revenues unless they pay enough to the abattoirs then the abattoirs can pay for staff and the system works again.
  • Cyclefree said:

    kle4 said:

    nico679 said:

    nico679 said:

    So the pig cull has started . Grown men left in tears at having to destroy their livestock and somehow what’s happening in the UK is being normalized by this cesspit of a government !

    Plenty of bacon then... think positive...
    Oh dear another from the Bozo way of thinking !
    Pigs bred for meat are being killed.

    Biggest non-story ever.
    If they are being wasted it is not a non-story, if hardly tragic.
    Food waste has always happened. Its not normally news, so why is this? 🤷‍♂️
    The farmers are not being paid for their pigs. So they are losing assets and income.

    Meat which could be sold to consumers here and overseas is not being sold. So others in the food supply chain are also losing income.

    And perfectly good food is wasted, which really offends me.
    You have the right to be offended.
    Some people are offended by foul language or sex on TV but I still enjoyed Tits & Dragons [except its last season wasn't too good]

    If the farmers wish to be paid for their pigs then they can pay a working rate for abattoirs to afford staff on a decent days wage. If they expect to hire staff for £9.12 per hour on a night shift then that offends me every bit as much as the food waste offends you.
    What abattoirs? We shut most of them down more than a decade ago because of new EU and UK regulations. There was once a network of smaller abattoirs across the country but they could not afford all the new bureaucracy and so only the big ones managed to survive and charged a hell of a lot more to meet their new regulatory requirements. They are also often much further away from the farms which increased costs even more.

  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 44,049

    As a good Muslim I'm not sure what my position should be on the pig cull.

    Surely only eating pigs is haram? Simply killing them isn't an issue, surely?
  • nico679 said:

    nico679 said:

    So the pig cull has started . Grown men left in tears at having to destroy their livestock and somehow what’s happening in the UK is being normalized by this cesspit of a government !

    Plenty of bacon then... think positive...
    Oh dear another from the Bozo way of thinking !
    Pigs bred for meat are being killed.

    Biggest non-story ever.
    Not entirely.

    There is a moral difference between raising a pig to be killed and eaten and one that is killed and dumped. It may not be much of a difference, and nobody is asking the pig, but there is a difference between cruelty with a purpose (even if that purpose is bacon sandwiches) and cruelty without.

    It's also worth thinking about this from the point of view of the farmer. I don't know the details, but it's likely that some farmers are going to lose a lot financially because of this. You may be OK with that, but I'm not sure I am.

    And finally, there is the point that @Cyclefree wisely made upthread. This is a waste of potential food. Those of us of a certain age remember any such waste being described as "wicked". If there's food available to feed people, you damn well make sure it gets into the bellies of people who need it. By all means taper the availability of foreign staff, if that's your policy. But if government policy leads to us destroying pigs rather than eating them, it's a bad policy, whatever point the government wishes to make.
    Completely 100% disagreed.

    If farmers can't be allowed to fail and see their stock lost then that's creating moral hazard in the market.

    Moral hazard is a bad policy.
    Importing all our food is worse policy.
  • gealbhangealbhan Posts: 2,362
    rcs1000 said:

    Chronologically:

    1. PB government supporters have been telling us for weeks that supply chain problems, fuel distribution problems, pig culling, and various other things are nothing to do with Brexit, as others in Europe/around the world are facing similar issues; problems are a consequence of Covid, not Brexit. Fair point, I think....

    2. As I follow this week's Tory Conference, Boris, Sunak and others tell us that short-term problems are everything to do with Brexit: they are a necessary, short-term hiccup as we restructure the economy in advance of benefiting from the sunlit uplands of Brexit. It's a deliberate and inevitable staging post following Brexit and the end of FOM.

    3. PB government supporters tell us that short-term supply chain problems, higher living costs etc. are everything to do with Brexit and are a good thing, as we restructure the economy to benefit from the sunlit uplands of Brexit through a high-wage, more productive economy. It's the pain before the gain.

    No wonder I'm confused.

    I have heard many government figures blaming the pandemic and the new economy conditions as we recover. Clearly it’s complicated, but no one should be under any illusion that it is all down to Brexit or all down to Covid. I think Brexit has magnified a situation that was coming the hgv drivers (see global shortage) and that the return to growth after Covid is also causing issues. Significantly some one suggested that the growth of home delivery in the U.K., explicitly pushed by the government during the crisis, has made things worse here. Why drive an hgv and have shitty overnight stops when you can drive for Amazon and be at home every night?
    I think that's right. There's also the inevitable issue that - historically - a British HGV driver could go from Walsall to Warsaw to Waterloo (Belgium) to Wank (Germany) to Wimbledon. Now, he's going to have a lot more empty trips if he's taking products to or from the EU. That's an absolute reduction in his productivity, and means that users of transportation will end up paying more for stuff to be shipped around.
    A wank in Germany?

    Maybe you should get off your Peleton now and go back to work? You are lowering the tone of our site. 🙂
  • IshmaelZIshmaelZ Posts: 21,830

    nico679 said:

    nico679 said:

    So the pig cull has started . Grown men left in tears at having to destroy their livestock and somehow what’s happening in the UK is being normalized by this cesspit of a government !

    Plenty of bacon then... think positive...
    Oh dear another from the Bozo way of thinking !
    Pigs bred for meat are being killed.

    Biggest non-story ever.
    Not entirely.

    There is a moral difference between raising a pig to be killed and eaten and one that is killed and dumped. It may not be much of a difference, and nobody is asking the pig, but there is a difference between cruelty with a purpose (even if that purpose is bacon sandwiches) and cruelty without.

    It's also worth thinking about this from the point of view of the farmer. I don't know the details, but it's likely that some farmers are going to lose a lot financially because of this. You may be OK with that, but I'm not sure I am.

    And finally, there is the point that @Cyclefree wisely made upthread. This is a waste of potential food. Those of us of a certain age remember any such waste being described as "wicked". If there's food available to feed people, you damn well make sure it gets into the bellies of people who need it. By all means taper the availability of foreign staff, if that's your policy. But if government policy leads to us destroying pigs rather than eating them, it's a bad policy, whatever point the government wishes to make.
    Completely 100% disagreed.

    If farmers can't be allowed to fail and see their stock lost then that's creating moral hazard in the market.

    Moral hazard is a bad policy.
    Oh FFS. Abattoirs are not part of a farmer's operation, they are an external supplier which is very very heavily regulated by the state, which therefore has an obligation to see that they work. But you are back to your default the state = Bojo and therefore needs its balls licked as assiduously as possible (I must stop reading @Dura_Ace's posts) position.
  • Cyclefree said:

    kle4 said:

    nico679 said:

    nico679 said:

    So the pig cull has started . Grown men left in tears at having to destroy their livestock and somehow what’s happening in the UK is being normalized by this cesspit of a government !

    Plenty of bacon then... think positive...
    Oh dear another from the Bozo way of thinking !
    Pigs bred for meat are being killed.

    Biggest non-story ever.
    If they are being wasted it is not a non-story, if hardly tragic.
    Food waste has always happened. Its not normally news, so why is this? 🤷‍♂️
    The farmers are not being paid for their pigs. So they are losing assets and income.

    Meat which could be sold to consumers here and overseas is not being sold. So others in the food supply chain are also losing income.

    And perfectly good food is wasted, which really offends me.
    You have the right to be offended.
    Some people are offended by foul language or sex on TV but I still enjoyed Tits & Dragons [except its last season wasn't too good]

    If the farmers wish to be paid for their pigs then they can pay a working rate for abattoirs to afford staff on a decent days wage. If they expect to hire staff for £9.12 per hour on a night shift then that offends me every bit as much as the food waste offends you.
    What abattoirs? We shut most of them down more than a decade ago because of new EU and UK regulations. There was once a network of smaller abattoirs across the country but they could not afford all the new bureaucracy and so only the big ones managed to survive and charged a hell of a lot more to meet their new regulatory requirements. They are also often much further away from the farms which increased costs even more.

    Then the high demand for abattoirs should be leading to higher prices for them and encourage investment in the sector.

    And if deregulation is needed to facilitate smaller ones then that's the sort of thing the government should be lobbied to be looking at, not getting more serf labour in.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,111

    nico679 said:

    nico679 said:

    So the pig cull has started . Grown men left in tears at having to destroy their livestock and somehow what’s happening in the UK is being normalized by this cesspit of a government !

    Plenty of bacon then... think positive...
    Oh dear another from the Bozo way of thinking !
    Pigs bred for meat are being killed.

    Biggest non-story ever.
    Not entirely.

    There is a moral difference between raising a pig to be killed and eaten and one that is killed and dumped. It may not be much of a difference, and nobody is asking the pig, but there is a difference between cruelty with a purpose (even if that purpose is bacon sandwiches) and cruelty without.

    It's also worth thinking about this from the point of view of the farmer. I don't know the details, but it's likely that some farmers are going to lose a lot financially because of this. You may be OK with that, but I'm not sure I am.

    And finally, there is the point that @Cyclefree wisely made upthread. This is a waste of potential food. Those of us of a certain age remember any such waste being described as "wicked". If there's food available to feed people, you damn well make sure it gets into the bellies of people who need it. By all means taper the availability of foreign staff, if that's your policy. But if government policy leads to us destroying pigs rather than eating them, it's a bad policy, whatever point the government wishes to make.
    Completely 100% disagreed.

    If farmers can't be allowed to fail and see their stock lost then that's creating moral hazard in the market.

    Moral hazard is a bad policy.
    Importing all our food is worse policy.
    You try telling him that. If he'd been in charge in 1900-1914, or 1920-1939, we'd be speaking German as a second language.
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 44,049
    Carnyx said:

    dixiedean said:

    Cyclefree said:

    kle4 said:

    nico679 said:

    nico679 said:

    So the pig cull has started . Grown men left in tears at having to destroy their livestock and somehow what’s happening in the UK is being normalized by this cesspit of a government !

    Plenty of bacon then... think positive...
    Oh dear another from the Bozo way of thinking !
    Pigs bred for meat are being killed.

    Biggest non-story ever.
    If they are being wasted it is not a non-story, if hardly tragic.
    Food waste has always happened. Its not normally news, so why is this? 🤷‍♂️
    The farmers are not being paid for their pigs. So they are losing assets and income.

    Meat which could be sold to consumers here and overseas is not being sold. So others in the food supply chain are also losing income.

    And perfectly good food is wasted, which really offends me.
    It is a fair point and I regret the situation as good food going to waste is wrong

    However, I do not know the pig industry and therefore are we saying all the UK pigs are being sacrificed and their farmers or is this some and if so how much of the industry in total

    I am sure there are those in our midst who can provide a genuine an independent overview which would be helpful
    What percentage of waste would be acceptable out of interest?
    To be honest that is not the point of my question

    I said I regret good food going to waste but I am seeking to find out just how big the issue is

    Is it 100% of our pig production or 5% and what is needed to resolve the issue
    No, but it's the question I asked.
    I gave you my answer but I also want to know the extent of the problem and how to resolve it

    It is a fair question
    4.75 million pigs in UK.
    120,000 backlog according to this, growing by 12 000 per week.

    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/oct/01/uk-pig-industry-warns-butcher-shortage-mass-cull

    Is that a lot or not?
    Thank you

    It is undesirable but is nothing like I assumed it was if we have 4.75 million pigs

    I hope the visa quotas help to address the issue
    Has HMG redefined them as poultry then?
    I assumed the visa were for agricultural workers but if poultry only then it seems strange
    The Tories ar eplaying a game of chicken with their loyal voters, basically. Not to mention bullshit.
    Headless chicken, maybe!
  • MattWMattW Posts: 18,080
    edited October 2021

    MattW said:

    dixiedean said:

    Cyclefree said:

    kle4 said:

    nico679 said:

    nico679 said:

    So the pig cull has started . Grown men left in tears at having to destroy their livestock and somehow what’s happening in the UK is being normalized by this cesspit of a government !

    Plenty of bacon then... think positive...
    Oh dear another from the Bozo way of thinking !
    Pigs bred for meat are being killed.

    Biggest non-story ever.
    If they are being wasted it is not a non-story, if hardly tragic.
    Food waste has always happened. Its not normally news, so why is this? 🤷‍♂️
    The farmers are not being paid for their pigs. So they are losing assets and income.

    Meat which could be sold to consumers here and overseas is not being sold. So others in the food supply chain are also losing income.

    And perfectly good food is wasted, which really offends me.
    It is a fair point and I regret the situation as good food going to waste is wrong

    However, I do not know the pig industry and therefore are we saying all the UK pigs are being sacrificed and their farmers or is this some and if so how much of the industry in total

    I am sure there are those in our midst who can provide a genuine an independent overview which would be helpful
    What percentage of waste would be acceptable out of interest?
    To be honest that is not the point of my question

    I said I regret good food going to waste but I am seeking to find out just how big the issue is

    Is it 100% of our pig production or 5% and what is needed to resolve the issue
    No, but it's the question I asked.
    I gave you my answer but I also want to know the extent of the problem and how to resolve it

    It is a fair question
    4.75 million pigs in UK.
    120,000 backlog according to this, growing by 12 000 per week.

    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/oct/01/uk-pig-industry-warns-butcher-shortage-mass-cull

    Is that a lot or not?
    Thank you

    It is undesirable but is nothing like I assumed it was if we have 4.75 million pigs

    I hope the visa quotas help to address the issue
    Has HMG redefined them as poultry then?
    We slaughter about 11m a year, so it is 1%.
    A shortfall of 12000 per week would correspond to a loss of about 17% in that case.
    Sorry, 5.7%!
    The number being slaughtered is 120k, ie approx 1% of annual production - unless you have data showing it has been happening for 52 weeks.

    Production increased by 3% in 2020, and is forecast to increase by 4% in 2021.
    https://www.pig-world.co.uk/news/2021-pork-production-forecast-to-top-1m-tonnes-for-first-time-in-two-decades-but-prices-under-pressure.html

    There's a lot of diversionary squealing going on, and obvs industry types, anti-govt types, and anti-Brexit types have an interest in making as much noise as possible.

    BTW they are not 'buried in a field'.

    They will go into other products ranging from pet food to being used as oils and fats in various ways.
    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/oct/05/fallen-stock-what-happens-now-to-the-uks-unwanted-pigs
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 44,049
    Carnyx said:

    nico679 said:

    nico679 said:

    So the pig cull has started . Grown men left in tears at having to destroy their livestock and somehow what’s happening in the UK is being normalized by this cesspit of a government !

    Plenty of bacon then... think positive...
    Oh dear another from the Bozo way of thinking !
    Pigs bred for meat are being killed.

    Biggest non-story ever.
    Not entirely.

    There is a moral difference between raising a pig to be killed and eaten and one that is killed and dumped. It may not be much of a difference, and nobody is asking the pig, but there is a difference between cruelty with a purpose (even if that purpose is bacon sandwiches) and cruelty without.

    It's also worth thinking about this from the point of view of the farmer. I don't know the details, but it's likely that some farmers are going to lose a lot financially because of this. You may be OK with that, but I'm not sure I am.

    And finally, there is the point that @Cyclefree wisely made upthread. This is a waste of potential food. Those of us of a certain age remember any such waste being described as "wicked". If there's food available to feed people, you damn well make sure it gets into the bellies of people who need it. By all means taper the availability of foreign staff, if that's your policy. But if government policy leads to us destroying pigs rather than eating them, it's a bad policy, whatever point the government wishes to make.
    Completely 100% disagreed.

    If farmers can't be allowed to fail and see their stock lost then that's creating moral hazard in the market.

    Moral hazard is a bad policy.
    Importing all our food is worse policy.
    You try telling him that. If he'd been in charge in 1900-1914, or 1920-1939, we'd be speaking German as a second language.
    To get back to the header, it won't do much for our "Pork Markets" as per the famous speech by Truss.

  • gealbhan said:

    rcs1000 said:

    eek said:

    Have we done the EU discussions regarding offering 5000 UK HGV drivers 5 year EU work permits?

    It is worth noting that the recipients of those 5,000 work permits will have won the HGV lottery.

    They will be able to work across the EEA and the UK, taking packages from wherever to wherever. They will have much higher utilization than UK-only drivers, and somewhat higher than EEA-only drivers.

    One would expect, of course, that they'll only spend about 15% of their time in the UK. So their impact on the local HGV market will be limited.
    It is interesting that the truckers union in France is demanding talks over HGV drivers pay in view of the increasing wages in the UK as quite a gulf is developing

    France facing lorry driver crisis as Macron shamed over wages 'Look at Britain!'

    https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1501168/emmanuel-macron-french-lorry-drivers-pay-rise-ccntr-brexit-boris-johnson-france-uk-1501168#ICID=Android_ExpressNewApp_AppShare
    If Red Robbo, Scargill and Ben would have loved what Boris is doing, you saying that’s going to end well?
    For UK truckers yes and many other lower paid workers

    It is the brexit dividend and with controlled worldwide visa quotas to meet our labour needs without uncontrolled immigration it heralds the start of a better future for many and increased productivity
  • IanB2IanB2 Posts: 47,080
    gealbhan said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Chronologically:

    1. PB government supporters have been telling us for weeks that supply chain problems, fuel distribution problems, pig culling, and various other things are nothing to do with Brexit, as others in Europe/around the world are facing similar issues; problems are a consequence of Covid, not Brexit. Fair point, I think....

    2. As I follow this week's Tory Conference, Boris, Sunak and others tell us that short-term problems are everything to do with Brexit: they are a necessary, short-term hiccup as we restructure the economy in advance of benefiting from the sunlit uplands of Brexit. It's a deliberate and inevitable staging post following Brexit and the end of FOM.

    3. PB government supporters tell us that short-term supply chain problems, higher living costs etc. are everything to do with Brexit and are a good thing, as we restructure the economy to benefit from the sunlit uplands of Brexit through a high-wage, more productive economy. It's the pain before the gain.

    No wonder I'm confused.

    I have heard many government figures blaming the pandemic and the new economy conditions as we recover. Clearly it’s complicated, but no one should be under any illusion that it is all down to Brexit or all down to Covid. I think Brexit has magnified a situation that was coming the hgv drivers (see global shortage) and that the return to growth after Covid is also causing issues. Significantly some one suggested that the growth of home delivery in the U.K., explicitly pushed by the government during the crisis, has made things worse here. Why drive an hgv and have shitty overnight stops when you can drive for Amazon and be at home every night?
    I think that's right. There's also the inevitable issue that - historically - a British HGV driver could go from Walsall to Warsaw to Waterloo (Belgium) to Wank (Germany) to Wimbledon. Now, he's going to have a lot more empty trips if he's taking products to or from the EU. That's an absolute reduction in his productivity, and means that users of transportation will end up paying more for stuff to be shipped around.
    A wank in Germany?

    Maybe you should get off your Peleton now and go back to work? You are lowering the tone of our site. 🙂
    I passed up the chance to climb Mount Wank just a few weeks back. A travel experience better left to our Sean, I felt.
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826
    edited October 2021

    nico679 said:

    nico679 said:

    So the pig cull has started . Grown men left in tears at having to destroy their livestock and somehow what’s happening in the UK is being normalized by this cesspit of a government !

    Plenty of bacon then... think positive...
    Oh dear another from the Bozo way of thinking !
    Pigs bred for meat are being killed.

    Biggest non-story ever.
    Not entirely.

    There is a moral difference between raising a pig to be killed and eaten and one that is killed and dumped. It may not be much of a difference, and nobody is asking the pig, but there is a difference between cruelty with a purpose (even if that purpose is bacon sandwiches) and cruelty without.

    It's also worth thinking about this from the point of view of the farmer. I don't know the details, but it's likely that some farmers are going to lose a lot financially because of this. You may be OK with that, but I'm not sure I am.

    And finally, there is the point that @Cyclefree wisely made upthread. This is a waste of potential food. Those of us of a certain age remember any such waste being described as "wicked". If there's food available to feed people, you damn well make sure it gets into the bellies of people who need it. By all means taper the availability of foreign staff, if that's your policy. But if government policy leads to us destroying pigs rather than eating them, it's a bad policy, whatever point the government wishes to make.
    Completely 100% disagreed.

    If farmers can't be allowed to fail and see their stock lost then that's creating moral hazard in the market.

    Moral hazard is a bad policy.
    Importing all our food is worse policy.
    Why?

    We imported our coal we needed for our electricity for decades. Why was that not a bad policy?

    I don't see why the NFU should be treated with any more generosity than the NUM.

    If our farmers can compete then great. If not, so be it.
  • GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,072

    nico679 said:

    nico679 said:

    So the pig cull has started . Grown men left in tears at having to destroy their livestock and somehow what’s happening in the UK is being normalized by this cesspit of a government !

    Plenty of bacon then... think positive...
    Oh dear another from the Bozo way of thinking !
    Pigs bred for meat are being killed.

    Biggest non-story ever.
    Not entirely.

    There is a moral difference between raising a pig to be killed and eaten and one that is killed and dumped. It may not be much of a difference, and nobody is asking the pig, but there is a difference between cruelty with a purpose (even if that purpose is bacon sandwiches) and cruelty without.

    It's also worth thinking about this from the point of view of the farmer. I don't know the details, but it's likely that some farmers are going to lose a lot financially because of this. You may be OK with that, but I'm not sure I am.

    And finally, there is the point that @Cyclefree wisely made upthread. This is a waste of potential food. Those of us of a certain age remember any such waste being described as "wicked". If there's food available to feed people, you damn well make sure it gets into the bellies of people who need it. By all means taper the availability of foreign staff, if that's your policy. But if government policy leads to us destroying pigs rather than eating them, it's a bad policy, whatever point the government wishes to make.
    Completely 100% disagreed.

    If farmers can't be allowed to fail and see their stock lost then that's creating moral hazard in the market.

    Moral hazard is a bad policy.
    Importing all our food is worse policy.
    Why?

    We imported our coal we needed for our electricity for decades. Why was that not a bad policy?

    I don't see why the NFU should be treated with any more generosity than the NUM.
    It was a bad policy.
  • CyclefreeCyclefree Posts: 25,074

    Cyclefree said:

    nico679 said:

    nico679 said:

    So the pig cull has started . Grown men left in tears at having to destroy their livestock and somehow what’s happening in the UK is being normalized by this cesspit of a government !

    Plenty of bacon then... think positive...
    Oh dear another from the Bozo way of thinking !
    Pigs bred for meat are being killed.

    Biggest non-story ever.
    Not entirely.

    There is a moral difference between raising a pig to be killed and eaten and one that is killed and dumped. It may not be much of a difference, and nobody is asking the pig, but there is a difference between cruelty with a purpose (even if that purpose is bacon sandwiches) and cruelty without.

    It's also worth thinking about this from the point of view of the farmer. I don't know the details, but it's likely that some farmers are going to lose a lot financially because of this. You may be OK with that, but I'm not sure I am.

    And finally, there is the point that @Cyclefree wisely made upthread. This is a waste of potential food. Those of us of a certain age remember any such waste being described as "wicked". If there's food available to feed people, you damn well make sure it gets into the bellies of people who need it. By all means taper the availability of foreign staff, if that's your policy. But if government policy leads to us destroying pigs rather than eating them, it's a bad policy, whatever point the government wishes to make.
    Completely 100% disagreed.

    If farmers can't be allowed to fail and see their stock lost then that's creating moral hazard in the market.

    Moral hazard is a bad policy.
    What has the farmer done wrong? It is the abattoir which has failed.
    The farmer isn't paying the abattoir enough for the abattoir to pay their staff enough.

    If moral hazard exists in the system because the stock can't be allowed to be destroyed they've no incentive to pay the abattoirs more.

    If the farmers know the stock will be destroyed and they'll lose their revenues unless they pay enough to the abattoirs then the abattoirs can pay for staff and the system works again.
    You are making assumptions unsupported by any evidence, as other posters have already pointed out.
  • Carnyx said:

    dixiedean said:

    Cyclefree said:

    kle4 said:

    nico679 said:

    nico679 said:

    So the pig cull has started . Grown men left in tears at having to destroy their livestock and somehow what’s happening in the UK is being normalized by this cesspit of a government !

    Plenty of bacon then... think positive...
    Oh dear another from the Bozo way of thinking !
    Pigs bred for meat are being killed.

    Biggest non-story ever.
    If they are being wasted it is not a non-story, if hardly tragic.
    Food waste has always happened. Its not normally news, so why is this? 🤷‍♂️
    The farmers are not being paid for their pigs. So they are losing assets and income.

    Meat which could be sold to consumers here and overseas is not being sold. So others in the food supply chain are also losing income.

    And perfectly good food is wasted, which really offends me.
    It is a fair point and I regret the situation as good food going to waste is wrong

    However, I do not know the pig industry and therefore are we saying all the UK pigs are being sacrificed and their farmers or is this some and if so how much of the industry in total

    I am sure there are those in our midst who can provide a genuine an independent overview which would be helpful
    What percentage of waste would be acceptable out of interest?
    To be honest that is not the point of my question

    I said I regret good food going to waste but I am seeking to find out just how big the issue is

    Is it 100% of our pig production or 5% and what is needed to resolve the issue
    No, but it's the question I asked.
    I gave you my answer but I also want to know the extent of the problem and how to resolve it

    It is a fair question
    4.75 million pigs in UK.
    120,000 backlog according to this, growing by 12 000 per week.

    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/oct/01/uk-pig-industry-warns-butcher-shortage-mass-cull

    Is that a lot or not?
    Thank you

    It is undesirable but is nothing like I assumed it was if we have 4.75 million pigs

    I hope the visa quotas help to address the issue
    Has HMG redefined them as poultry then?
    I assumed the visa were for agricultural workers but if poultry only then it seems strange
    The Tories ar eplaying a game of chicken with their loyal voters, basically. Not to mention bullshit.
    Not really

    This is the essence of Brexit which 35% of Scots believe is a success in today's poll
  • GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,072

    Carnyx said:

    dixiedean said:

    Cyclefree said:

    kle4 said:

    nico679 said:

    nico679 said:

    So the pig cull has started . Grown men left in tears at having to destroy their livestock and somehow what’s happening in the UK is being normalized by this cesspit of a government !

    Plenty of bacon then... think positive...
    Oh dear another from the Bozo way of thinking !
    Pigs bred for meat are being killed.

    Biggest non-story ever.
    If they are being wasted it is not a non-story, if hardly tragic.
    Food waste has always happened. Its not normally news, so why is this? 🤷‍♂️
    The farmers are not being paid for their pigs. So they are losing assets and income.

    Meat which could be sold to consumers here and overseas is not being sold. So others in the food supply chain are also losing income.

    And perfectly good food is wasted, which really offends me.
    It is a fair point and I regret the situation as good food going to waste is wrong

    However, I do not know the pig industry and therefore are we saying all the UK pigs are being sacrificed and their farmers or is this some and if so how much of the industry in total

    I am sure there are those in our midst who can provide a genuine an independent overview which would be helpful
    What percentage of waste would be acceptable out of interest?
    To be honest that is not the point of my question

    I said I regret good food going to waste but I am seeking to find out just how big the issue is

    Is it 100% of our pig production or 5% and what is needed to resolve the issue
    No, but it's the question I asked.
    I gave you my answer but I also want to know the extent of the problem and how to resolve it

    It is a fair question
    4.75 million pigs in UK.
    120,000 backlog according to this, growing by 12 000 per week.

    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/oct/01/uk-pig-industry-warns-butcher-shortage-mass-cull

    Is that a lot or not?
    Thank you

    It is undesirable but is nothing like I assumed it was if we have 4.75 million pigs

    I hope the visa quotas help to address the issue
    Has HMG redefined them as poultry then?
    I assumed the visa were for agricultural workers but if poultry only then it seems strange
    The Tories ar eplaying a game of chicken with their loyal voters, basically. Not to mention bullshit.
    Not really

    This is the essence of Brexit which 35% of Scots believe is a success in today's poll
    Wasting pigs is the essence of Brexit?

    Christ it changes every week.
  • Cyclefree said:

    kle4 said:

    nico679 said:

    nico679 said:

    So the pig cull has started . Grown men left in tears at having to destroy their livestock and somehow what’s happening in the UK is being normalized by this cesspit of a government !

    Plenty of bacon then... think positive...
    Oh dear another from the Bozo way of thinking !
    Pigs bred for meat are being killed.

    Biggest non-story ever.
    If they are being wasted it is not a non-story, if hardly tragic.
    Food waste has always happened. Its not normally news, so why is this? 🤷‍♂️
    The farmers are not being paid for their pigs. So they are losing assets and income.

    Meat which could be sold to consumers here and overseas is not being sold. So others in the food supply chain are also losing income.

    And perfectly good food is wasted, which really offends me.
    You have the right to be offended.
    Some people are offended by foul language or sex on TV but I still enjoyed Tits & Dragons [except its last season wasn't too good]

    If the farmers wish to be paid for their pigs then they can pay a working rate for abattoirs to afford staff on a decent days wage. If they expect to hire staff for £9.12 per hour on a night shift then that offends me every bit as much as the food waste offends you.
    What abattoirs? We shut most of them down more than a decade ago because of new EU and UK regulations. There was once a network of smaller abattoirs across the country but they could not afford all the new bureaucracy and so only the big ones managed to survive and charged a hell of a lot more to meet their new regulatory requirements. They are also often much further away from the farms which increased costs even more.

    Then the high demand for abattoirs should be leading to higher prices for them and encourage investment in the sector.

    And if deregulation is needed to facilitate smaller ones then that's the sort of thing the government should be lobbied to be looking at, not getting more serf labour in.
    Investment in the sector takes time. And of course it is not in the interests of the existing big abattoirs. In the 1970s there were almost 2000 abattoirs in Britain. Most of them small, local and serving a need. There are now less than 250, almost of of them large, centralised and failing to serve that same need. The cause of that is the huge costs imposed by regulation, not by labour costs.

    One way to help all of this would be to introduce mobile abattoirs which would travel to the farms to do their business. Currently that is illegal because the EU and UK regulations dictate that each location needs a separate licence which costs a huge amount of money. There are no mobile abattoirs in the UK for that reason.

    If you want to argue about this stuff it is worth knowing at least a bit about it before you start.
  • gealbhangealbhan Posts: 2,362
    Carnyx said:

    dixiedean said:

    Cyclefree said:

    kle4 said:

    nico679 said:

    nico679 said:

    So the pig cull has started . Grown men left in tears at having to destroy their livestock and somehow what’s happening in the UK is being normalized by this cesspit of a government !

    Plenty of bacon then... think positive...
    Oh dear another from the Bozo way of thinking !
    Pigs bred for meat are being killed.

    Biggest non-story ever.
    If they are being wasted it is not a non-story, if hardly tragic.
    Food waste has always happened. Its not normally news, so why is this? 🤷‍♂️
    The farmers are not being paid for their pigs. So they are losing assets and income.

    Meat which could be sold to consumers here and overseas is not being sold. So others in the food supply chain are also losing income.

    And perfectly good food is wasted, which really offends me.
    It is a fair point and I regret the situation as good food going to waste is wrong

    However, I do not know the pig industry and therefore are we saying all the UK pigs are being sacrificed and their farmers or is this some and if so how much of the industry in total

    I am sure there are those in our midst who can provide a genuine an independent overview which would be helpful
    What percentage of waste would be acceptable out of interest?
    To be honest that is not the point of my question

    I said I regret good food going to waste but I am seeking to find out just how big the issue is

    Is it 100% of our pig production or 5% and what is needed to resolve the issue
    No, but it's the question I asked.
    I gave you my answer but I also want to know the extent of the problem and how to resolve it

    It is a fair question
    4.75 million pigs in UK.
    120,000 backlog according to this, growing by 12 000 per week.

    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/oct/01/uk-pig-industry-warns-butcher-shortage-mass-cull

    Is that a lot or not?
    Thank you

    It is undesirable but is nothing like I assumed it was if we have 4.75 million pigs

    I hope the visa quotas help to address the issue
    Has HMG redefined them as poultry then?
    I assumed the visa were for agricultural workers but if poultry only then it seems strange
    The Tories ar eplaying a game of chicken with their loyal voters, basically. Not to mention bullshit.
    I disagree. To suggest game implies they have it all worked out - I just see reaction to what is happening, like people still working out how to deliver the promised benefits of Brexit, or even how Brexit works commercially.

    Business didn’t drive Brexit, EU membership did make a lot of sense in many commercial aspects. Those benefits which drove Brexit, freedom, sovereignty, democracy, is currently struggling to cohabit with the facts of business life. Decisions here are being taken through the prism of asking: is this Brexit?
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 44,049

    gealbhan said:

    rcs1000 said:

    eek said:

    Have we done the EU discussions regarding offering 5000 UK HGV drivers 5 year EU work permits?

    It is worth noting that the recipients of those 5,000 work permits will have won the HGV lottery.

    They will be able to work across the EEA and the UK, taking packages from wherever to wherever. They will have much higher utilization than UK-only drivers, and somewhat higher than EEA-only drivers.

    One would expect, of course, that they'll only spend about 15% of their time in the UK. So their impact on the local HGV market will be limited.
    It is interesting that the truckers union in France is demanding talks over HGV drivers pay in view of the increasing wages in the UK as quite a gulf is developing

    France facing lorry driver crisis as Macron shamed over wages 'Look at Britain!'

    https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1501168/emmanuel-macron-french-lorry-drivers-pay-rise-ccntr-brexit-boris-johnson-france-uk-1501168#ICID=Android_ExpressNewApp_AppShare
    If Red Robbo, Scargill and Ben would have loved what Boris is doing, you saying that’s going to end well?
    For UK truckers yes and many other lower paid workers

    It is the brexit dividend and with controlled worldwide visa quotas to meet our labour needs without uncontrolled immigration it heralds the start of a better future for many and increased productivity
    Doing the same job for more money (or reduced work for the same money) isn't an increase in productivity, it is an increase in cost. Better for the individual, but not for the overall economy. Same goes for abattoir workers too.

    Increased productivity is possible, for example reducing abattoir standards to American standards, where lines move twice as fast. Hence fecal contamination and chlorine washes etc. Notably too that American abattoirs do seem full of illegal migrants on starvation wages, going by some prominent covid outbreaks last year.
  • Carnyx said:

    dixiedean said:

    Cyclefree said:

    kle4 said:

    nico679 said:

    nico679 said:

    So the pig cull has started . Grown men left in tears at having to destroy their livestock and somehow what’s happening in the UK is being normalized by this cesspit of a government !

    Plenty of bacon then... think positive...
    Oh dear another from the Bozo way of thinking !
    Pigs bred for meat are being killed.

    Biggest non-story ever.
    If they are being wasted it is not a non-story, if hardly tragic.
    Food waste has always happened. Its not normally news, so why is this? 🤷‍♂️
    The farmers are not being paid for their pigs. So they are losing assets and income.

    Meat which could be sold to consumers here and overseas is not being sold. So others in the food supply chain are also losing income.

    And perfectly good food is wasted, which really offends me.
    It is a fair point and I regret the situation as good food going to waste is wrong

    However, I do not know the pig industry and therefore are we saying all the UK pigs are being sacrificed and their farmers or is this some and if so how much of the industry in total

    I am sure there are those in our midst who can provide a genuine an independent overview which would be helpful
    What percentage of waste would be acceptable out of interest?
    To be honest that is not the point of my question

    I said I regret good food going to waste but I am seeking to find out just how big the issue is

    Is it 100% of our pig production or 5% and what is needed to resolve the issue
    No, but it's the question I asked.
    I gave you my answer but I also want to know the extent of the problem and how to resolve it

    It is a fair question
    4.75 million pigs in UK.
    120,000 backlog according to this, growing by 12 000 per week.

    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/oct/01/uk-pig-industry-warns-butcher-shortage-mass-cull

    Is that a lot or not?
    Thank you

    It is undesirable but is nothing like I assumed it was if we have 4.75 million pigs

    I hope the visa quotas help to address the issue
    Has HMG redefined them as poultry then?
    I assumed the visa were for agricultural workers but if poultry only then it seems strange
    The Tories ar eplaying a game of chicken with their loyal voters, basically. Not to mention bullshit.
    Not really

    This is the essence of Brexit which 35% of Scots believe is a success in today's poll
    Is that more or less than the % of Scots who think it's a failure?
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 44,049
    IanB2 said:

    gealbhan said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Chronologically:

    1. PB government supporters have been telling us for weeks that supply chain problems, fuel distribution problems, pig culling, and various other things are nothing to do with Brexit, as others in Europe/around the world are facing similar issues; problems are a consequence of Covid, not Brexit. Fair point, I think....

    2. As I follow this week's Tory Conference, Boris, Sunak and others tell us that short-term problems are everything to do with Brexit: they are a necessary, short-term hiccup as we restructure the economy in advance of benefiting from the sunlit uplands of Brexit. It's a deliberate and inevitable staging post following Brexit and the end of FOM.

    3. PB government supporters tell us that short-term supply chain problems, higher living costs etc. are everything to do with Brexit and are a good thing, as we restructure the economy to benefit from the sunlit uplands of Brexit through a high-wage, more productive economy. It's the pain before the gain.

    No wonder I'm confused.

    I have heard many government figures blaming the pandemic and the new economy conditions as we recover. Clearly it’s complicated, but no one should be under any illusion that it is all down to Brexit or all down to Covid. I think Brexit has magnified a situation that was coming the hgv drivers (see global shortage) and that the return to growth after Covid is also causing issues. Significantly some one suggested that the growth of home delivery in the U.K., explicitly pushed by the government during the crisis, has made things worse here. Why drive an hgv and have shitty overnight stops when you can drive for Amazon and be at home every night?
    I think that's right. There's also the inevitable issue that - historically - a British HGV driver could go from Walsall to Warsaw to Waterloo (Belgium) to Wank (Germany) to Wimbledon. Now, he's going to have a lot more empty trips if he's taking products to or from the EU. That's an absolute reduction in his productivity, and means that users of transportation will end up paying more for stuff to be shipped around.
    A wank in Germany?

    Maybe you should get off your Peleton now and go back to work? You are lowering the tone of our site. 🙂
    I passed up the chance to climb Mount Wank just a few weeks back. A travel experience better left to our Sean, I felt.
    I think it best approached as do it yourself.
  • Carnyx said:

    dixiedean said:

    Cyclefree said:

    kle4 said:

    nico679 said:

    nico679 said:

    So the pig cull has started . Grown men left in tears at having to destroy their livestock and somehow what’s happening in the UK is being normalized by this cesspit of a government !

    Plenty of bacon then... think positive...
    Oh dear another from the Bozo way of thinking !
    Pigs bred for meat are being killed.

    Biggest non-story ever.
    If they are being wasted it is not a non-story, if hardly tragic.
    Food waste has always happened. Its not normally news, so why is this? 🤷‍♂️
    The farmers are not being paid for their pigs. So they are losing assets and income.

    Meat which could be sold to consumers here and overseas is not being sold. So others in the food supply chain are also losing income.

    And perfectly good food is wasted, which really offends me.
    It is a fair point and I regret the situation as good food going to waste is wrong

    However, I do not know the pig industry and therefore are we saying all the UK pigs are being sacrificed and their farmers or is this some and if so how much of the industry in total

    I am sure there are those in our midst who can provide a genuine an independent overview which would be helpful
    What percentage of waste would be acceptable out of interest?
    To be honest that is not the point of my question

    I said I regret good food going to waste but I am seeking to find out just how big the issue is

    Is it 100% of our pig production or 5% and what is needed to resolve the issue
    No, but it's the question I asked.
    I gave you my answer but I also want to know the extent of the problem and how to resolve it

    It is a fair question
    4.75 million pigs in UK.
    120,000 backlog according to this, growing by 12 000 per week.

    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/oct/01/uk-pig-industry-warns-butcher-shortage-mass-cull

    Is that a lot or not?
    Thank you

    It is undesirable but is nothing like I assumed it was if we have 4.75 million pigs

    I hope the visa quotas help to address the issue
    Has HMG redefined them as poultry then?
    I assumed the visa were for agricultural workers but if poultry only then it seems strange
    The Tories ar eplaying a game of chicken with their loyal voters, basically. Not to mention bullshit.
    Not really

    This is the essence of Brexit which 35% of Scots believe is a success in today's poll
    Wasting pigs is the essence of Brexit?

    Christ it changes every week.
    It is a far bigger picture than the immediate issue with the current position on pigs
  • gealbhangealbhan Posts: 2,362
    IanB2 said:

    gealbhan said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Chronologically:

    1. PB government supporters have been telling us for weeks that supply chain problems, fuel distribution problems, pig culling, and various other things are nothing to do with Brexit, as others in Europe/around the world are facing similar issues; problems are a consequence of Covid, not Brexit. Fair point, I think....

    2. As I follow this week's Tory Conference, Boris, Sunak and others tell us that short-term problems are everything to do with Brexit: they are a necessary, short-term hiccup as we restructure the economy in advance of benefiting from the sunlit uplands of Brexit. It's a deliberate and inevitable staging post following Brexit and the end of FOM.

    3. PB government supporters tell us that short-term supply chain problems, higher living costs etc. are everything to do with Brexit and are a good thing, as we restructure the economy to benefit from the sunlit uplands of Brexit through a high-wage, more productive economy. It's the pain before the gain.

    No wonder I'm confused.

    I have heard many government figures blaming the pandemic and the new economy conditions as we recover. Clearly it’s complicated, but no one should be under any illusion that it is all down to Brexit or all down to Covid. I think Brexit has magnified a situation that was coming the hgv drivers (see global shortage) and that the return to growth after Covid is also causing issues. Significantly some one suggested that the growth of home delivery in the U.K., explicitly pushed by the government during the crisis, has made things worse here. Why drive an hgv and have shitty overnight stops when you can drive for Amazon and be at home every night?
    I think that's right. There's also the inevitable issue that - historically - a British HGV driver could go from Walsall to Warsaw to Waterloo (Belgium) to Wank (Germany) to Wimbledon. Now, he's going to have a lot more empty trips if he's taking products to or from the EU. That's an absolute reduction in his productivity, and means that users of transportation will end up paying more for stuff to be shipped around.
    A wank in Germany?

    Maybe you should get off your Peleton now and go back to work? You are lowering the tone of our site. 🙂
    I passed up the chance to climb Mount Wank just a few weeks back. A travel experience better left to our Sean, I felt.
    Probably a stiff climb.

    Today is the day the Tory Chairman said, get OFF your bikes and look for work.
  • Foxy said:

    IanB2 said:

    gealbhan said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Chronologically:

    1. PB government supporters have been telling us for weeks that supply chain problems, fuel distribution problems, pig culling, and various other things are nothing to do with Brexit, as others in Europe/around the world are facing similar issues; problems are a consequence of Covid, not Brexit. Fair point, I think....

    2. As I follow this week's Tory Conference, Boris, Sunak and others tell us that short-term problems are everything to do with Brexit: they are a necessary, short-term hiccup as we restructure the economy in advance of benefiting from the sunlit uplands of Brexit. It's a deliberate and inevitable staging post following Brexit and the end of FOM.

    3. PB government supporters tell us that short-term supply chain problems, higher living costs etc. are everything to do with Brexit and are a good thing, as we restructure the economy to benefit from the sunlit uplands of Brexit through a high-wage, more productive economy. It's the pain before the gain.

    No wonder I'm confused.

    I have heard many government figures blaming the pandemic and the new economy conditions as we recover. Clearly it’s complicated, but no one should be under any illusion that it is all down to Brexit or all down to Covid. I think Brexit has magnified a situation that was coming the hgv drivers (see global shortage) and that the return to growth after Covid is also causing issues. Significantly some one suggested that the growth of home delivery in the U.K., explicitly pushed by the government during the crisis, has made things worse here. Why drive an hgv and have shitty overnight stops when you can drive for Amazon and be at home every night?
    I think that's right. There's also the inevitable issue that - historically - a British HGV driver could go from Walsall to Warsaw to Waterloo (Belgium) to Wank (Germany) to Wimbledon. Now, he's going to have a lot more empty trips if he's taking products to or from the EU. That's an absolute reduction in his productivity, and means that users of transportation will end up paying more for stuff to be shipped around.
    A wank in Germany?

    Maybe you should get off your Peleton now and go back to work? You are lowering the tone of our site. 🙂
    I passed up the chance to climb Mount Wank just a few weeks back. A travel experience better left to our Sean, I felt.
    I think it best approached as do it yourself.
    Get to base camp.
    Stop.
  • nico679 said:

    nico679 said:

    So the pig cull has started . Grown men left in tears at having to destroy their livestock and somehow what’s happening in the UK is being normalized by this cesspit of a government !

    Plenty of bacon then... think positive...
    Oh dear another from the Bozo way of thinking !
    Pigs bred for meat are being killed.

    Biggest non-story ever.
    Not entirely.

    There is a moral difference between raising a pig to be killed and eaten and one that is killed and dumped. It may not be much of a difference, and nobody is asking the pig, but there is a difference between cruelty with a purpose (even if that purpose is bacon sandwiches) and cruelty without.

    It's also worth thinking about this from the point of view of the farmer. I don't know the details, but it's likely that some farmers are going to lose a lot financially because of this. You may be OK with that, but I'm not sure I am.

    And finally, there is the point that @Cyclefree wisely made upthread. This is a waste of potential food. Those of us of a certain age remember any such waste being described as "wicked". If there's food available to feed people, you damn well make sure it gets into the bellies of people who need it. By all means taper the availability of foreign staff, if that's your policy. But if government policy leads to us destroying pigs rather than eating them, it's a bad policy, whatever point the government wishes to make.
    Completely 100% disagreed.

    If farmers can't be allowed to fail and see their stock lost then that's creating moral hazard in the market.

    Moral hazard is a bad policy.
    Importing all our food is worse policy.
    Why?

    We imported our coal we needed for our electricity for decades. Why was that not a bad policy?

    I don't see why the NFU should be treated with any more generosity than the NUM.

    If our farmers can compete then great. If not, so be it.
    Um no we didn't. We replaced almost all UK coal with UK gas and oil, not with foreign coal.

    And replying on imports for any basic essentials is a really really stupid thing to do because eventually that means you rely on the countries that are supplying those essentials.

    In case you missed it this is why everyone is so unhappy about Europe being reliant on Russian gas. It is why the US got into such a mess in the 70s with Arabian oil.
  • Cyclefree said:

    OK - I know they don't matter but more likes for a post about pigs than one about child abuse and crimes against women?

    You said quite a lot in the post about abuse.

    I really wanted to like it, but I didn't agree with all of it. I don't think making misogyny a crime would be particularly helpful. And I'd certainly be uncomfortable with making it a crime without also making misandry one. Having different laws for men and women feels a bit, well, Sharia to me.
  • Carnyx said:

    dixiedean said:

    Cyclefree said:

    kle4 said:

    nico679 said:

    nico679 said:

    So the pig cull has started . Grown men left in tears at having to destroy their livestock and somehow what’s happening in the UK is being normalized by this cesspit of a government !

    Plenty of bacon then... think positive...
    Oh dear another from the Bozo way of thinking !
    Pigs bred for meat are being killed.

    Biggest non-story ever.
    If they are being wasted it is not a non-story, if hardly tragic.
    Food waste has always happened. Its not normally news, so why is this? 🤷‍♂️
    The farmers are not being paid for their pigs. So they are losing assets and income.

    Meat which could be sold to consumers here and overseas is not being sold. So others in the food supply chain are also losing income.

    And perfectly good food is wasted, which really offends me.
    It is a fair point and I regret the situation as good food going to waste is wrong

    However, I do not know the pig industry and therefore are we saying all the UK pigs are being sacrificed and their farmers or is this some and if so how much of the industry in total

    I am sure there are those in our midst who can provide a genuine an independent overview which would be helpful
    What percentage of waste would be acceptable out of interest?
    To be honest that is not the point of my question

    I said I regret good food going to waste but I am seeking to find out just how big the issue is

    Is it 100% of our pig production or 5% and what is needed to resolve the issue
    No, but it's the question I asked.
    I gave you my answer but I also want to know the extent of the problem and how to resolve it

    It is a fair question
    4.75 million pigs in UK.
    120,000 backlog according to this, growing by 12 000 per week.

    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/oct/01/uk-pig-industry-warns-butcher-shortage-mass-cull

    Is that a lot or not?
    Thank you

    It is undesirable but is nothing like I assumed it was if we have 4.75 million pigs

    I hope the visa quotas help to address the issue
    Has HMG redefined them as poultry then?
    I assumed the visa were for agricultural workers but if poultry only then it seems strange
    The Tories ar eplaying a game of chicken with their loyal voters, basically. Not to mention bullshit.
    Not really

    This is the essence of Brexit which 35% of Scots believe is a success in today's poll
    Is that more or less than the % of Scots who think it's a failure?
    It is surprisingly high considering how much we hear from the SNP
  • squareroot2squareroot2 Posts: 6,287
    IshmaelZ said:

    Cyclefree said:

    nico679 said:

    So the pig cull has started . Grown men left in tears at having to destroy their livestock and somehow what’s happening in the UK is being normalized by this cesspit of a government !

    Plenty of bacon then... think positive...
    The culled pigs won't go into the food chain. They'll be incinerated or rendered. A criminal waste of good food.
    I know.. its just i was baulking against the endless negativity on this site.
    You the guy who keeps whining that peeps aren't saying nice fings about Bowis?.
    I dont whine. I just point out the constant negativity. If that's whining in your world,then so be it.
  • Scott_xPScott_xP Posts: 32,727
    Thursday’s METRO: “Can He Fix It? No, He Can’t!’ #TomorrowsPapersToday https://twitter.com/AllieHBNews/status/1445485380141076484/photo/1
  • gealbhangealbhan Posts: 2,362

    gealbhan said:

    rcs1000 said:

    eek said:

    Have we done the EU discussions regarding offering 5000 UK HGV drivers 5 year EU work permits?

    It is worth noting that the recipients of those 5,000 work permits will have won the HGV lottery.

    They will be able to work across the EEA and the UK, taking packages from wherever to wherever. They will have much higher utilization than UK-only drivers, and somewhat higher than EEA-only drivers.

    One would expect, of course, that they'll only spend about 15% of their time in the UK. So their impact on the local HGV market will be limited.
    It is interesting that the truckers union in France is demanding talks over HGV drivers pay in view of the increasing wages in the UK as quite a gulf is developing

    France facing lorry driver crisis as Macron shamed over wages 'Look at Britain!'

    https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1501168/emmanuel-macron-french-lorry-drivers-pay-rise-ccntr-brexit-boris-johnson-france-uk-1501168#ICID=Android_ExpressNewApp_AppShare
    If Red Robbo, Scargill and Ben would have loved what Boris is doing, you saying that’s going to end well?
    For UK truckers yes and many other lower paid workers

    It is the brexit dividend and with controlled worldwide visa quotas to meet our labour needs without uncontrolled immigration it heralds the start of a better future for many and increased productivity
    Exactly. It’s another of the reasons why, starting from a popular position in 2019, the Boris premiership is going to be so short lived. One of the questions asked to shape the best policy is: is this levelling up.

    It’s a PM and a government utterly lost. The Tory Party isn’t, the party is watching on quietly scratching its head. Soon as Boris gets the knife the party will flip back to what is sensible and works. The next Tory leader will give his first conference address with “the party of business, the party of business, the party of business.”

  • nico679 said:

    nico679 said:

    So the pig cull has started . Grown men left in tears at having to destroy their livestock and somehow what’s happening in the UK is being normalized by this cesspit of a government !

    Plenty of bacon then... think positive...
    Oh dear another from the Bozo way of thinking !
    Pigs bred for meat are being killed.

    Biggest non-story ever.
    Not entirely.

    There is a moral difference between raising a pig to be killed and eaten and one that is killed and dumped. It may not be much of a difference, and nobody is asking the pig, but there is a difference between cruelty with a purpose (even if that purpose is bacon sandwiches) and cruelty without.

    It's also worth thinking about this from the point of view of the farmer. I don't know the details, but it's likely that some farmers are going to lose a lot financially because of this. You may be OK with that, but I'm not sure I am.

    And finally, there is the point that @Cyclefree wisely made upthread. This is a waste of potential food. Those of us of a certain age remember any such waste being described as "wicked". If there's food available to feed people, you damn well make sure it gets into the bellies of people who need it. By all means taper the availability of foreign staff, if that's your policy. But if government policy leads to us destroying pigs rather than eating them, it's a bad policy, whatever point the government wishes to make.
    Completely 100% disagreed.

    If farmers can't be allowed to fail and see their stock lost then that's creating moral hazard in the market.

    Moral hazard is a bad policy.
    Importing all our food is worse policy.
    Why?

    We imported our coal we needed for our electricity for decades. Why was that not a bad policy?

    I don't see why the NFU should be treated with any more generosity than the NUM.

    If our farmers can compete then great. If not, so be it.
    Um no we didn't. We replaced almost all UK coal with UK gas and oil, not with foreign coal.

    And replying on imports for any basic essentials is a really really stupid thing to do because eventually that means you rely on the countries that are supplying those essentials.

    In case you missed it this is why everyone is so unhappy about Europe being reliant on Russian gas. It is why the US got into such a mess in the 70s with Arabian oil.
    Oh really? 42% of our electricity in 2012 was from coal, versus 27% from gas.

    If we weren't importing that coal, where was it coming from?
  • Foxy said:

    gealbhan said:

    rcs1000 said:

    eek said:

    Have we done the EU discussions regarding offering 5000 UK HGV drivers 5 year EU work permits?

    It is worth noting that the recipients of those 5,000 work permits will have won the HGV lottery.

    They will be able to work across the EEA and the UK, taking packages from wherever to wherever. They will have much higher utilization than UK-only drivers, and somewhat higher than EEA-only drivers.

    One would expect, of course, that they'll only spend about 15% of their time in the UK. So their impact on the local HGV market will be limited.
    It is interesting that the truckers union in France is demanding talks over HGV drivers pay in view of the increasing wages in the UK as quite a gulf is developing

    France facing lorry driver crisis as Macron shamed over wages 'Look at Britain!'

    https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1501168/emmanuel-macron-french-lorry-drivers-pay-rise-ccntr-brexit-boris-johnson-france-uk-1501168#ICID=Android_ExpressNewApp_AppShare
    If Red Robbo, Scargill and Ben would have loved what Boris is doing, you saying that’s going to end well?
    For UK truckers yes and many other lower paid workers

    It is the brexit dividend and with controlled worldwide visa quotas to meet our labour needs without uncontrolled immigration it heralds the start of a better future for many and increased productivity
    Doing the same job for more money (or reduced work for the same money) isn't an increase in productivity, it is an increase in cost. Better for the individual, but not for the overall economy. Same goes for abattoir workers too.

    Increased productivity is possible, for example reducing abattoir standards to American standards, where lines move twice as fast. Hence fecal contamination and chlorine washes etc. Notably too that American abattoirs do seem full of illegal migrants on starvation wages, going by some prominent covid outbreaks last year.
    Its amazing that this concern about pay and productivity only arises when it comes to low paid workers.

    Perhaps you'd like to explain to Leicester's footballers that they should reduce their pay to the level Frank Worthington received given that their productivity isn't any higher.
  • Cyclefree said:

    kle4 said:

    nico679 said:

    nico679 said:

    So the pig cull has started . Grown men left in tears at having to destroy their livestock and somehow what’s happening in the UK is being normalized by this cesspit of a government !

    Plenty of bacon then... think positive...
    Oh dear another from the Bozo way of thinking !
    Pigs bred for meat are being killed.

    Biggest non-story ever.
    If they are being wasted it is not a non-story, if hardly tragic.
    Food waste has always happened. Its not normally news, so why is this? 🤷‍♂️
    The farmers are not being paid for their pigs. So they are losing assets and income.

    Meat which could be sold to consumers here and overseas is not being sold. So others in the food supply chain are also losing income.

    And perfectly good food is wasted, which really offends me.
    You have the right to be offended.
    Some people are offended by foul language or sex on TV but I still enjoyed Tits & Dragons [except its last season wasn't too good]

    If the farmers wish to be paid for their pigs then they can pay a working rate for abattoirs to afford staff on a decent days wage. If they expect to hire staff for £9.12 per hour on a night shift then that offends me every bit as much as the food waste offends you.
    What abattoirs? We shut most of them down more than a decade ago because of new EU and UK regulations. There was once a network of smaller abattoirs across the country but they could not afford all the new bureaucracy and so only the big ones managed to survive and charged a hell of a lot more to meet their new regulatory requirements. They are also often much further away from the farms which increased costs even more.

    Then the high demand for abattoirs should be leading to higher prices for them and encourage investment in the sector.

    And if deregulation is needed to facilitate smaller ones then that's the sort of thing the government should be lobbied to be looking at, not getting more serf labour in.
    Investment in the sector takes time. And of course it is not in the interests of the existing big abattoirs. In the 1970s there were almost 2000 abattoirs in Britain. Most of them small, local and serving a need. There are now less than 250, almost of of them large, centralised and failing to serve that same need. The cause of that is the huge costs imposed by regulation, not by labour costs.

    One way to help all of this would be to introduce mobile abattoirs which would travel to the farms to do their business. Currently that is illegal because the EU and UK regulations dictate that each location needs a separate licence which costs a huge amount of money. There are no mobile abattoirs in the UK for that reason.

    If you want to argue about this stuff it is worth knowing at least a bit about it before you start.
    It takes time? We voted to leave the EU more than five years ago and we actually left well over a year ago. How much more time was needed?

    If the sector is incapable of sorting itself out then allow it to fail and make investment a priority. In the meantime we can rely on imports. The land isn't going anywhere if those who've failed to invest sufficiently manage to do so in the future it will still be here available ready to be used for domestic production.
  • FarooqFarooq Posts: 10,775
    gealbhan said:

    gealbhan said:

    rcs1000 said:

    eek said:

    Have we done the EU discussions regarding offering 5000 UK HGV drivers 5 year EU work permits?

    It is worth noting that the recipients of those 5,000 work permits will have won the HGV lottery.

    They will be able to work across the EEA and the UK, taking packages from wherever to wherever. They will have much higher utilization than UK-only drivers, and somewhat higher than EEA-only drivers.

    One would expect, of course, that they'll only spend about 15% of their time in the UK. So their impact on the local HGV market will be limited.
    It is interesting that the truckers union in France is demanding talks over HGV drivers pay in view of the increasing wages in the UK as quite a gulf is developing

    France facing lorry driver crisis as Macron shamed over wages 'Look at Britain!'

    https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1501168/emmanuel-macron-french-lorry-drivers-pay-rise-ccntr-brexit-boris-johnson-france-uk-1501168#ICID=Android_ExpressNewApp_AppShare
    If Red Robbo, Scargill and Ben would have loved what Boris is doing, you saying that’s going to end well?
    For UK truckers yes and many other lower paid workers

    It is the brexit dividend and with controlled worldwide visa quotas to meet our labour needs without uncontrolled immigration it heralds the start of a better future for many and increased productivity
    Exactly. It’s another of the reasons why, starting from a popular position in 2019, the Boris premiership is going to be so short lived. One of the questions asked to shape the best policy is: is this levelling up.

    It’s a PM and a government utterly lost. The Tory Party isn’t, the party is watching on quietly scratching its head. Soon as Boris gets the knife the party will flip back to what is sensible and works. The next Tory leader will give his first conference address with “the party of business, the party of business, the party of business.”

    God I hope so
  • another_richardanother_richard Posts: 24,967
    edited October 2021

    Foxy said:

    gealbhan said:

    rcs1000 said:

    eek said:

    Have we done the EU discussions regarding offering 5000 UK HGV drivers 5 year EU work permits?

    It is worth noting that the recipients of those 5,000 work permits will have won the HGV lottery.

    They will be able to work across the EEA and the UK, taking packages from wherever to wherever. They will have much higher utilization than UK-only drivers, and somewhat higher than EEA-only drivers.

    One would expect, of course, that they'll only spend about 15% of their time in the UK. So their impact on the local HGV market will be limited.
    It is interesting that the truckers union in France is demanding talks over HGV drivers pay in view of the increasing wages in the UK as quite a gulf is developing

    France facing lorry driver crisis as Macron shamed over wages 'Look at Britain!'

    https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1501168/emmanuel-macron-french-lorry-drivers-pay-rise-ccntr-brexit-boris-johnson-france-uk-1501168#ICID=Android_ExpressNewApp_AppShare
    If Red Robbo, Scargill and Ben would have loved what Boris is doing, you saying that’s going to end well?
    For UK truckers yes and many other lower paid workers

    It is the brexit dividend and with controlled worldwide visa quotas to meet our labour needs without uncontrolled immigration it heralds the start of a better future for many and increased productivity
    Doing the same job for more money (or reduced work for the same money) isn't an increase in productivity, it is an increase in cost. Better for the individual, but not for the overall economy. Same goes for abattoir workers too.

    Increased productivity is possible, for example reducing abattoir standards to American standards, where lines move twice as fast. Hence fecal contamination and chlorine washes etc. Notably too that American abattoirs do seem full of illegal migrants on starvation wages, going by some prominent covid outbreaks last year.
    Its amazing that this concern about pay and productivity only arises when it comes to low paid workers.

    Perhaps you'd like to explain to Leicester's footballers that they should reduce their pay to the level Frank Worthington received given that their productivity isn't any higher.
    And the reason pay can increase without productivity gains:

    Baumol's cost disease (or the Baumol effect) is the rise of salaries in jobs that have experienced no or low increase of labor productivity, in response to rising salaries in other jobs that have experienced higher labor productivity growth. The phenomenon was described by William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen in the 1960s [1] and is an example of cross elasticity of demand.

    The rise of wages in jobs without productivity gains derives from the requirement to compete for employees with jobs that have experienced gains and so can naturally pay higher salaries, just as classical economics predicts. For instance, if the retail sector pays its managers 19th-century-style salaries, the managers may decide to quit to get a job at an automobile factory, where salaries are higher because of high labor productivity. Thus, managers' salaries are increased not by labor productivity increases in the retail sector but by productivity and corresponding wage increases in other industries.


    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol's_cost_disease

    The example Baumol used was the pay of musicians playing Beethoven string quartets rather than Leicester City footballers.

    I doubt the pay of those musicians has risen anything like as fast as that of footballers :wink:
  • Carnyx said:

    dixiedean said:

    Cyclefree said:

    kle4 said:

    nico679 said:

    nico679 said:

    So the pig cull has started . Grown men left in tears at having to destroy their livestock and somehow what’s happening in the UK is being normalized by this cesspit of a government !

    Plenty of bacon then... think positive...
    Oh dear another from the Bozo way of thinking !
    Pigs bred for meat are being killed.

    Biggest non-story ever.
    If they are being wasted it is not a non-story, if hardly tragic.
    Food waste has always happened. Its not normally news, so why is this? 🤷‍♂️
    The farmers are not being paid for their pigs. So they are losing assets and income.

    Meat which could be sold to consumers here and overseas is not being sold. So others in the food supply chain are also losing income.

    And perfectly good food is wasted, which really offends me.
    It is a fair point and I regret the situation as good food going to waste is wrong

    However, I do not know the pig industry and therefore are we saying all the UK pigs are being sacrificed and their farmers or is this some and if so how much of the industry in total

    I am sure there are those in our midst who can provide a genuine an independent overview which would be helpful
    What percentage of waste would be acceptable out of interest?
    To be honest that is not the point of my question

    I said I regret good food going to waste but I am seeking to find out just how big the issue is

    Is it 100% of our pig production or 5% and what is needed to resolve the issue
    No, but it's the question I asked.
    I gave you my answer but I also want to know the extent of the problem and how to resolve it

    It is a fair question
    4.75 million pigs in UK.
    120,000 backlog according to this, growing by 12 000 per week.

    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/oct/01/uk-pig-industry-warns-butcher-shortage-mass-cull

    Is that a lot or not?
    Thank you

    It is undesirable but is nothing like I assumed it was if we have 4.75 million pigs

    I hope the visa quotas help to address the issue
    Has HMG redefined them as poultry then?
    I assumed the visa were for agricultural workers but if poultry only then it seems strange
    The Tories ar eplaying a game of chicken with their loyal voters, basically. Not to mention bullshit.
    Not really

    This is the essence of Brexit which 35% of Scots believe is a success in today's poll
    Is that more or less than the % of Scots who think it's a failure?
    It is surprisingly high considering how much we hear from the SNP
    We must respect the views of the 52% regardless of our own opinion.

    We must respect the views of the 35% in a subsample regardless of our own opinion.

  • Carnyx said:

    dixiedean said:

    Cyclefree said:

    kle4 said:

    nico679 said:

    nico679 said:

    So the pig cull has started . Grown men left in tears at having to destroy their livestock and somehow what’s happening in the UK is being normalized by this cesspit of a government !

    Plenty of bacon then... think positive...
    Oh dear another from the Bozo way of thinking !
    Pigs bred for meat are being killed.

    Biggest non-story ever.
    If they are being wasted it is not a non-story, if hardly tragic.
    Food waste has always happened. Its not normally news, so why is this? 🤷‍♂️
    The farmers are not being paid for their pigs. So they are losing assets and income.

    Meat which could be sold to consumers here and overseas is not being sold. So others in the food supply chain are also losing income.

    And perfectly good food is wasted, which really offends me.
    It is a fair point and I regret the situation as good food going to waste is wrong

    However, I do not know the pig industry and therefore are we saying all the UK pigs are being sacrificed and their farmers or is this some and if so how much of the industry in total

    I am sure there are those in our midst who can provide a genuine an independent overview which would be helpful
    What percentage of waste would be acceptable out of interest?
    To be honest that is not the point of my question

    I said I regret good food going to waste but I am seeking to find out just how big the issue is

    Is it 100% of our pig production or 5% and what is needed to resolve the issue
    No, but it's the question I asked.
    I gave you my answer but I also want to know the extent of the problem and how to resolve it

    It is a fair question
    4.75 million pigs in UK.
    120,000 backlog according to this, growing by 12 000 per week.

    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/oct/01/uk-pig-industry-warns-butcher-shortage-mass-cull

    Is that a lot or not?
    Thank you

    It is undesirable but is nothing like I assumed it was if we have 4.75 million pigs

    I hope the visa quotas help to address the issue
    Has HMG redefined them as poultry then?
    I assumed the visa were for agricultural workers but if poultry only then it seems strange
    The Tories ar eplaying a game of chicken with their loyal voters, basically. Not to mention bullshit.
    Not really

    This is the essence of Brexit which 35% of Scots believe is a success in today's poll
    Is that more or less than the % of Scots who think it's a failure?
    It is surprisingly high considering how much we hear from the SNP
    We must respect the views of the 52% regardless of our own opinion.

    We must respect the views of the 35% in a subsample regardless of our own opinion.

    You protest too much
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 44,049

    Foxy said:

    gealbhan said:

    rcs1000 said:

    eek said:

    Have we done the EU discussions regarding offering 5000 UK HGV drivers 5 year EU work permits?

    It is worth noting that the recipients of those 5,000 work permits will have won the HGV lottery.

    They will be able to work across the EEA and the UK, taking packages from wherever to wherever. They will have much higher utilization than UK-only drivers, and somewhat higher than EEA-only drivers.

    One would expect, of course, that they'll only spend about 15% of their time in the UK. So their impact on the local HGV market will be limited.
    It is interesting that the truckers union in France is demanding talks over HGV drivers pay in view of the increasing wages in the UK as quite a gulf is developing

    France facing lorry driver crisis as Macron shamed over wages 'Look at Britain!'

    https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1501168/emmanuel-macron-french-lorry-drivers-pay-rise-ccntr-brexit-boris-johnson-france-uk-1501168#ICID=Android_ExpressNewApp_AppShare
    If Red Robbo, Scargill and Ben would have loved what Boris is doing, you saying that’s going to end well?
    For UK truckers yes and many other lower paid workers

    It is the brexit dividend and with controlled worldwide visa quotas to meet our labour needs without uncontrolled immigration it heralds the start of a better future for many and increased productivity
    Doing the same job for more money (or reduced work for the same money) isn't an increase in productivity, it is an increase in cost. Better for the individual, but not for the overall economy. Same goes for abattoir workers too.

    Increased productivity is possible, for example reducing abattoir standards to American standards, where lines move twice as fast. Hence fecal contamination and chlorine washes etc. Notably too that American abattoirs do seem full of illegal migrants on starvation wages, going by some prominent covid outbreaks last year.
    Its amazing that this concern about pay and productivity only arises when it comes to low paid workers.

    Perhaps you'd like to explain to Leicester's footballers that they should reduce their pay to the level Frank Worthington received given that their productivity isn't any higher.
    On the contrary, I am happy for the low paid to get pay rises, but we shouldn't pretend that is increased productivity in sectors like transport or food production where there is a measurable output. It may well be redistribution within an economy, but it isn't growing the economy. There is a net reduction, albeit small, for the rest of the population.

    Judging productivity of Footballers, or other entertainment workers is quite an interesting issue. Service worker productivity is generally measured in terms of earnings for themselves and their employers. So Jamie Vardy is worth more than Frank Worthington because he sells more tickets, TV subscriptions and merchandise than Frank, and a a higher price. In economics terms the productivity of footballers is a lot more than 50 years ago. Having won both the title and the FA Cup, better footballers in simple terms too.
  • gealbhan said:

    gealbhan said:

    rcs1000 said:

    eek said:

    Have we done the EU discussions regarding offering 5000 UK HGV drivers 5 year EU work permits?

    It is worth noting that the recipients of those 5,000 work permits will have won the HGV lottery.

    They will be able to work across the EEA and the UK, taking packages from wherever to wherever. They will have much higher utilization than UK-only drivers, and somewhat higher than EEA-only drivers.

    One would expect, of course, that they'll only spend about 15% of their time in the UK. So their impact on the local HGV market will be limited.
    It is interesting that the truckers union in France is demanding talks over HGV drivers pay in view of the increasing wages in the UK as quite a gulf is developing

    France facing lorry driver crisis as Macron shamed over wages 'Look at Britain!'

    https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1501168/emmanuel-macron-french-lorry-drivers-pay-rise-ccntr-brexit-boris-johnson-france-uk-1501168#ICID=Android_ExpressNewApp_AppShare
    If Red Robbo, Scargill and Ben would have loved what Boris is doing, you saying that’s going to end well?
    For UK truckers yes and many other lower paid workers

    It is the brexit dividend and with controlled worldwide visa quotas to meet our labour needs without uncontrolled immigration it heralds the start of a better future for many and increased productivity
    Exactly. It’s another of the reasons why, starting from a popular position in 2019, the Boris premiership is going to be so short lived. One of the questions asked to shape the best policy is: is this levelling up.

    It’s a PM and a government utterly lost. The Tory Party isn’t, the party is watching on quietly scratching its head. Soon as Boris gets the knife the party will flip back to what is sensible and works. The next Tory leader will give his first conference address with “the party of business, the party of business, the party of business.”

    Only if it is paying it's staff properly and not using cheap overseas labour to depress UK wages
  • nico679 said:

    nico679 said:

    So the pig cull has started . Grown men left in tears at having to destroy their livestock and somehow what’s happening in the UK is being normalized by this cesspit of a government !

    Plenty of bacon then... think positive...
    Oh dear another from the Bozo way of thinking !
    Pigs bred for meat are being killed.

    Biggest non-story ever.
    Not entirely.

    There is a moral difference between raising a pig to be killed and eaten and one that is killed and dumped. It may not be much of a difference, and nobody is asking the pig, but there is a difference between cruelty with a purpose (even if that purpose is bacon sandwiches) and cruelty without.

    It's also worth thinking about this from the point of view of the farmer. I don't know the details, but it's likely that some farmers are going to lose a lot financially because of this. You may be OK with that, but I'm not sure I am.

    And finally, there is the point that @Cyclefree wisely made upthread. This is a waste of potential food. Those of us of a certain age remember any such waste being described as "wicked". If there's food available to feed people, you damn well make sure it gets into the bellies of people who need it. By all means taper the availability of foreign staff, if that's your policy. But if government policy leads to us destroying pigs rather than eating them, it's a bad policy, whatever point the government wishes to make.
    Completely 100% disagreed.

    If farmers can't be allowed to fail and see their stock lost then that's creating moral hazard in the market.

    Moral hazard is a bad policy.
    Importing all our food is worse policy.
    Why?

    We imported our coal we needed for our electricity for decades. Why was that not a bad policy?

    I don't see why the NFU should be treated with any more generosity than the NUM.

    If our farmers can compete then great. If not, so be it.
    Um no we didn't. We replaced almost all UK coal with UK gas and oil, not with foreign coal.

    And replying on imports for any basic essentials is a really really stupid thing to do because eventually that means you rely on the countries that are supplying those essentials.

    In case you missed it this is why everyone is so unhappy about Europe being reliant on Russian gas. It is why the US got into such a mess in the 70s with Arabian oil.
    Oh really? 42% of our electricity in 2012 was from coal, versus 27% from gas.

    If we weren't importing that coal, where was it coming from?
    Well over a third of it was still coming from our own coal fields. And it was only 2002 that we started importing more than we produced. We went through a transition from 67% of our electricity supply being from coal in 1990 to 8% in 2016. So no, the idea that we were moving to using imported coal as a replacement for our own coal 'for decades' as you claim is complete bullshit. No one, apart from you apparently, would be that dumb.
  • AlistairAlistair Posts: 23,670
    isam said:

    I quite fancy a bacon sandwich at the moment. No sauce though 👍

    Is it even a bacon sandwich if there's no red sauce?
    Brown sauce for me. I must have eaten thousands of bacon sandwiches, and never even considered having red sauce with one.
    But at least you have sauce.
  • While I've been away we've had a new lady from Kyrgyzstan start work in the office. This inevitably led me to the wiki page for her country, where I learned of the extremely misogynistic sounding traditions of Ala Kachuu (bride kidnapping) and Kyz Kuumai (girl chasing; a horseback game where the man tries to catch the woman before the finish line and kiss her - at speed on horseback - in a nice twist, if he doesn't catch her by the finish line she's allowed to chase him back to the start line with a horsewhip!).

    Apparently I've asked her more about Kyrgyzstan in the two days I've been back than she's been asked by everyone else in the six months she's worked there. Am I weird, or are they all depressingly uninterested?
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 44,049

    Foxy said:

    gealbhan said:

    rcs1000 said:

    eek said:

    Have we done the EU discussions regarding offering 5000 UK HGV drivers 5 year EU work permits?

    It is worth noting that the recipients of those 5,000 work permits will have won the HGV lottery.

    They will be able to work across the EEA and the UK, taking packages from wherever to wherever. They will have much higher utilization than UK-only drivers, and somewhat higher than EEA-only drivers.

    One would expect, of course, that they'll only spend about 15% of their time in the UK. So their impact on the local HGV market will be limited.
    It is interesting that the truckers union in France is demanding talks over HGV drivers pay in view of the increasing wages in the UK as quite a gulf is developing

    France facing lorry driver crisis as Macron shamed over wages 'Look at Britain!'

    https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1501168/emmanuel-macron-french-lorry-drivers-pay-rise-ccntr-brexit-boris-johnson-france-uk-1501168#ICID=Android_ExpressNewApp_AppShare
    If Red Robbo, Scargill and Ben would have loved what Boris is doing, you saying that’s going to end well?
    For UK truckers yes and many other lower paid workers

    It is the brexit dividend and with controlled worldwide visa quotas to meet our labour needs without uncontrolled immigration it heralds the start of a better future for many and increased productivity
    Doing the same job for more money (or reduced work for the same money) isn't an increase in productivity, it is an increase in cost. Better for the individual, but not for the overall economy. Same goes for abattoir workers too.

    Increased productivity is possible, for example reducing abattoir standards to American standards, where lines move twice as fast. Hence fecal contamination and chlorine washes etc. Notably too that American abattoirs do seem full of illegal migrants on starvation wages, going by some prominent covid outbreaks last year.
    Its amazing that this concern about pay and productivity only arises when it comes to low paid workers.

    Perhaps you'd like to explain to Leicester's footballers that they should reduce their pay to the level Frank Worthington received given that their productivity isn't any higher.
    And the reason pay can increase without productivity gains:

    Baumol's cost disease (or the Baumol effect) is the rise of salaries in jobs that have experienced no or low increase of labor productivity, in response to rising salaries in other jobs that have experienced higher labor productivity growth. The phenomenon was described by William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen in the 1960s [1] and is an example of cross elasticity of demand.

    The rise of wages in jobs without productivity gains derives from the requirement to compete for employees with jobs that have experienced gains and so can naturally pay higher salaries, just as classical economics predicts. For instance, if the retail sector pays its managers 19th-century-style salaries, the managers may decide to quit to get a job at an automobile factory, where salaries are higher because of high labor productivity. Thus, managers' salaries are increased not by labor productivity increases in the retail sector but by productivity and corresponding wage increases in other industries.


    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol's_cost_disease

    The example Baumol used was the pay of musicians playing Beethoven string quartets rather than Leicester City footballers.

    I doubt the pay of those musicians has risen anything like as fast as that of footballers :wink:
    A very good argument why state employees such as nurses, teachers and even PC plod will get payrises too.
  • Cyclefree said:

    kle4 said:

    nico679 said:

    nico679 said:

    So the pig cull has started . Grown men left in tears at having to destroy their livestock and somehow what’s happening in the UK is being normalized by this cesspit of a government !

    Plenty of bacon then... think positive...
    Oh dear another from the Bozo way of thinking !
    Pigs bred for meat are being killed.

    Biggest non-story ever.
    If they are being wasted it is not a non-story, if hardly tragic.
    Food waste has always happened. Its not normally news, so why is this? 🤷‍♂️
    The farmers are not being paid for their pigs. So they are losing assets and income.

    Meat which could be sold to consumers here and overseas is not being sold. So others in the food supply chain are also losing income.

    And perfectly good food is wasted, which really offends me.
    You have the right to be offended.
    Some people are offended by foul language or sex on TV but I still enjoyed Tits & Dragons [except its last season wasn't too good]

    If the farmers wish to be paid for their pigs then they can pay a working rate for abattoirs to afford staff on a decent days wage. If they expect to hire staff for £9.12 per hour on a night shift then that offends me every bit as much as the food waste offends you.
    What abattoirs? We shut most of them down more than a decade ago because of new EU and UK regulations. There was once a network of smaller abattoirs across the country but they could not afford all the new bureaucracy and so only the big ones managed to survive and charged a hell of a lot more to meet their new regulatory requirements. They are also often much further away from the farms which increased costs even more.

    Then the high demand for abattoirs should be leading to higher prices for them and encourage investment in the sector.

    And if deregulation is needed to facilitate smaller ones then that's the sort of thing the government should be lobbied to be looking at, not getting more serf labour in.
    Investment in the sector takes time. And of course it is not in the interests of the existing big abattoirs. In the 1970s there were almost 2000 abattoirs in Britain. Most of them small, local and serving a need. There are now less than 250, almost of of them large, centralised and failing to serve that same need. The cause of that is the huge costs imposed by regulation, not by labour costs.

    One way to help all of this would be to introduce mobile abattoirs which would travel to the farms to do their business. Currently that is illegal because the EU and UK regulations dictate that each location needs a separate licence which costs a huge amount of money. There are no mobile abattoirs in the UK for that reason.

    If you want to argue about this stuff it is worth knowing at least a bit about it before you start.
    It takes time? We voted to leave the EU more than five years ago and we actually left well over a year ago. How much more time was needed?

    If the sector is incapable of sorting itself out then allow it to fail and make investment a priority. In the meantime we can rely on imports. The land isn't going anywhere if those who've failed to invest sufficiently manage to do so in the future it will still be here available ready to be used for domestic production.
    It is not the sector that is causing the issues it is the Government. Given we were still following the EU regulations even after we left and they still haven't got round to replacing them even now, I find it strange that you are blaming the farmers and the meat industry for something that is out of their control. But then you have shown many times before you don't know the first thing about farming. Have you actually ever travelled outside of a city?
  • Foxy said:

    Foxy said:

    gealbhan said:

    rcs1000 said:

    eek said:

    Have we done the EU discussions regarding offering 5000 UK HGV drivers 5 year EU work permits?

    It is worth noting that the recipients of those 5,000 work permits will have won the HGV lottery.

    They will be able to work across the EEA and the UK, taking packages from wherever to wherever. They will have much higher utilization than UK-only drivers, and somewhat higher than EEA-only drivers.

    One would expect, of course, that they'll only spend about 15% of their time in the UK. So their impact on the local HGV market will be limited.
    It is interesting that the truckers union in France is demanding talks over HGV drivers pay in view of the increasing wages in the UK as quite a gulf is developing

    France facing lorry driver crisis as Macron shamed over wages 'Look at Britain!'

    https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1501168/emmanuel-macron-french-lorry-drivers-pay-rise-ccntr-brexit-boris-johnson-france-uk-1501168#ICID=Android_ExpressNewApp_AppShare
    If Red Robbo, Scargill and Ben would have loved what Boris is doing, you saying that’s going to end well?
    For UK truckers yes and many other lower paid workers

    It is the brexit dividend and with controlled worldwide visa quotas to meet our labour needs without uncontrolled immigration it heralds the start of a better future for many and increased productivity
    Doing the same job for more money (or reduced work for the same money) isn't an increase in productivity, it is an increase in cost. Better for the individual, but not for the overall economy. Same goes for abattoir workers too.

    Increased productivity is possible, for example reducing abattoir standards to American standards, where lines move twice as fast. Hence fecal contamination and chlorine washes etc. Notably too that American abattoirs do seem full of illegal migrants on starvation wages, going by some prominent covid outbreaks last year.
    Its amazing that this concern about pay and productivity only arises when it comes to low paid workers.

    Perhaps you'd like to explain to Leicester's footballers that they should reduce their pay to the level Frank Worthington received given that their productivity isn't any higher.
    On the contrary, I am happy for the low paid to get pay rises, but we shouldn't pretend that is increased productivity in sectors like transport or food production where there is a measurable output. It may well be redistribution within an economy, but it isn't growing the economy. There is a net reduction, albeit small, for the rest of the population.

    Judging productivity of Footballers, or other entertainment workers is quite an interesting issue. Service worker productivity is generally measured in terms of earnings for themselves and their employers. So Jamie Vardy is worth more than Frank Worthington because he sells more tickets, TV subscriptions and merchandise than Frank, and a a higher price. In economics terms the productivity of footballers is a lot more than 50 years ago. Having won both the title and the FA Cup, better footballers in simple terms too.
    Except it will improve productivity in those sectors. As wages go up people have incentives to invest in newer technology to aid improved service. If wages are on the floor, its cheaper to pay for more people instead of technology.

    We can see such investment already happening in hospitality. Its can go to different extremes, McDonalds for instance removing most of their till staff and having self-service tills is one example.

    I went out to a nice restaurant recently and the waitress took our drinks order which she entered into her handheld device and then we said we were ready to order our food and she took the food order. Before we finished placing our food order, there was already someone else arriving to give us our drinks. That provided improved customer service not worse but wouldn't have happened if everyone was still relying on pencil and paper and meant the waitress could then go on to serve another table and wasn't going back and forth and could just stay with her customers (and probably look after more tables as a result).
  • Cyclefree said:

    Cyclefree said:

    OK - I know they don't matter but more likes for a post about pigs than one about child abuse and crimes against women?

    You said quite a lot in the post about abuse.

    I really wanted to like it, but I didn't agree with all of it. I don't think making misogyny a crime would be particularly helpful. And I'd certainly be uncomfortable with making it a crime without also making misandry one. Having different laws for men and women feels a bit, well, Sharia to me.
    Well that's why I don't really like the whole hate crime category. But my point is that since we have it by deliberately leaving out women we are making clear how little we value women by comparison with others.

    98% of crimes of violence against women are by men. 98% of crimes against by men are not by women. Misandry - deplorable as it is - simply does not have anything like the same consequences.

    Personally I would simply have crimes but allow the judge to adjust the sentence to take account of aggravating factors rather than have this Top Trumps "hate" bingo.

    Whatever one's position on this, crimes against women are simply not taken seriously enough. They should be.
    That's a post I can 100% agree with.
  • eekeek Posts: 24,797

    Cyclefree said:

    kle4 said:

    nico679 said:

    nico679 said:

    So the pig cull has started . Grown men left in tears at having to destroy their livestock and somehow what’s happening in the UK is being normalized by this cesspit of a government !

    Plenty of bacon then... think positive...
    Oh dear another from the Bozo way of thinking !
    Pigs bred for meat are being killed.

    Biggest non-story ever.
    If they are being wasted it is not a non-story, if hardly tragic.
    Food waste has always happened. Its not normally news, so why is this? 🤷‍♂️
    The farmers are not being paid for their pigs. So they are losing assets and income.

    Meat which could be sold to consumers here and overseas is not being sold. So others in the food supply chain are also losing income.

    And perfectly good food is wasted, which really offends me.
    You have the right to be offended.
    Some people are offended by foul language or sex on TV but I still enjoyed Tits & Dragons [except its last season wasn't too good]

    If the farmers wish to be paid for their pigs then they can pay a working rate for abattoirs to afford staff on a decent days wage. If they expect to hire staff for £9.12 per hour on a night shift then that offends me every bit as much as the food waste offends you.
    What abattoirs? We shut most of them down more than a decade ago because of new EU and UK regulations. There was once a network of smaller abattoirs across the country but they could not afford all the new bureaucracy and so only the big ones managed to survive and charged a hell of a lot more to meet their new regulatory requirements. They are also often much further away from the farms which increased costs even more.

    Then the high demand for abattoirs should be leading to higher prices for them and encourage investment in the sector.

    And if deregulation is needed to facilitate smaller ones then that's the sort of thing the government should be lobbied to be looking at, not getting more serf labour in.
    Investment in the sector takes time. And of course it is not in the interests of the existing big abattoirs. In the 1970s there were almost 2000 abattoirs in Britain. Most of them small, local and serving a need. There are now less than 250, almost of of them large, centralised and failing to serve that same need. The cause of that is the huge costs imposed by regulation, not by labour costs.

    One way to help all of this would be to introduce mobile abattoirs which would travel to the farms to do their business. Currently that is illegal because the EU and UK regulations dictate that each location needs a separate licence which costs a huge amount of money. There are no mobile abattoirs in the UK for that reason.

    If you want to argue about this stuff it is worth knowing at least a bit about it before you start.
    It takes time? We voted to leave the EU more than five years ago and we actually left well over a year ago. How much more time was needed?

    If the sector is incapable of sorting itself out then allow it to fail and make investment a priority. In the meantime we can rely on imports. The land isn't going anywhere if those who've failed to invest sufficiently manage to do so in the future it will still be here available ready to be used for domestic production.
    It’s a regulation / legal change that is required to produce mobile abattoirs. And the one thing this government isn’t good at is fixing this sort of issue.

    The sad thing is that you could have given Michael Gove the idea and he would be running with it instantly. Zero stress premium meat is a market that is easy to explain.
  • Foxy said:

    Foxy said:

    gealbhan said:

    rcs1000 said:

    eek said:

    Have we done the EU discussions regarding offering 5000 UK HGV drivers 5 year EU work permits?

    It is worth noting that the recipients of those 5,000 work permits will have won the HGV lottery.

    They will be able to work across the EEA and the UK, taking packages from wherever to wherever. They will have much higher utilization than UK-only drivers, and somewhat higher than EEA-only drivers.

    One would expect, of course, that they'll only spend about 15% of their time in the UK. So their impact on the local HGV market will be limited.
    It is interesting that the truckers union in France is demanding talks over HGV drivers pay in view of the increasing wages in the UK as quite a gulf is developing

    France facing lorry driver crisis as Macron shamed over wages 'Look at Britain!'

    https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1501168/emmanuel-macron-french-lorry-drivers-pay-rise-ccntr-brexit-boris-johnson-france-uk-1501168#ICID=Android_ExpressNewApp_AppShare
    If Red Robbo, Scargill and Ben would have loved what Boris is doing, you saying that’s going to end well?
    For UK truckers yes and many other lower paid workers

    It is the brexit dividend and with controlled worldwide visa quotas to meet our labour needs without uncontrolled immigration it heralds the start of a better future for many and increased productivity
    Doing the same job for more money (or reduced work for the same money) isn't an increase in productivity, it is an increase in cost. Better for the individual, but not for the overall economy. Same goes for abattoir workers too.

    Increased productivity is possible, for example reducing abattoir standards to American standards, where lines move twice as fast. Hence fecal contamination and chlorine washes etc. Notably too that American abattoirs do seem full of illegal migrants on starvation wages, going by some prominent covid outbreaks last year.
    Its amazing that this concern about pay and productivity only arises when it comes to low paid workers.

    Perhaps you'd like to explain to Leicester's footballers that they should reduce their pay to the level Frank Worthington received given that their productivity isn't any higher.
    And the reason pay can increase without productivity gains:

    Baumol's cost disease (or the Baumol effect) is the rise of salaries in jobs that have experienced no or low increase of labor productivity, in response to rising salaries in other jobs that have experienced higher labor productivity growth. The phenomenon was described by William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen in the 1960s [1] and is an example of cross elasticity of demand.

    The rise of wages in jobs without productivity gains derives from the requirement to compete for employees with jobs that have experienced gains and so can naturally pay higher salaries, just as classical economics predicts. For instance, if the retail sector pays its managers 19th-century-style salaries, the managers may decide to quit to get a job at an automobile factory, where salaries are higher because of high labor productivity. Thus, managers' salaries are increased not by labor productivity increases in the retail sector but by productivity and corresponding wage increases in other industries.


    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol's_cost_disease

    The example Baumol used was the pay of musicians playing Beethoven string quartets rather than Leicester City footballers.

    I doubt the pay of those musicians has risen anything like as fast as that of footballers :wink:
    A very good argument why state employees such as nurses, teachers and even PC plod will get payrises too.
    Indeed, it will all work through.

    But better that it applies to everyone equally than what has been happening in the last couple of decades.

    Namely that the pay of those towards the bottom of the ladder must be reduced to the lowest possible equivalent while for those at the top it must be increased to the highest possible equivalent.
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 44,049
    Cyclefree said:

    Cyclefree said:

    OK - I know they don't matter but more likes for a post about pigs than one about child abuse and crimes against women?

    You said quite a lot in the post about abuse.

    I really wanted to like it, but I didn't agree with all of it. I don't think making misogyny a crime would be particularly helpful. And I'd certainly be uncomfortable with making it a crime without also making misandry one. Having different laws for men and women feels a bit, well, Sharia to me.
    Well that's why I don't really like the whole hate crime category. But my point is that since we have it by deliberately leaving out women we are making clear how little we value women by comparison with others.

    98% of crimes of violence against women are by men. 98% of crimes against by men are not by women. Misandry - deplorable as it is - simply does not have anything like the same consequences.

    Personally I would simply have crimes but allow the judge to adjust the sentence to take account of aggravating factors rather than have this Top Trumps "hate" bingo.

    Whatever one's position on this, crimes against women are simply not taken seriously enough. They should be.
    Yes, quite apart from treating different hates in a hierarchy, it must make evidencing it more strongly. So not only must the CPS prove that Johnny beat up Frankie, but that he did it because Frankie was black, gay, female or whatever.

    Treating hate as an exacerbating factor in sentencing seems more rational, and is in part a way of dealing with the risk of re-offending.
  • nico679 said:

    nico679 said:

    So the pig cull has started . Grown men left in tears at having to destroy their livestock and somehow what’s happening in the UK is being normalized by this cesspit of a government !

    Plenty of bacon then... think positive...
    Oh dear another from the Bozo way of thinking !
    Pigs bred for meat are being killed.

    Biggest non-story ever.
    Not entirely.

    There is a moral difference between raising a pig to be killed and eaten and one that is killed and dumped. It may not be much of a difference, and nobody is asking the pig, but there is a difference between cruelty with a purpose (even if that purpose is bacon sandwiches) and cruelty without.

    It's also worth thinking about this from the point of view of the farmer. I don't know the details, but it's likely that some farmers are going to lose a lot financially because of this. You may be OK with that, but I'm not sure I am.

    And finally, there is the point that @Cyclefree wisely made upthread. This is a waste of potential food. Those of us of a certain age remember any such waste being described as "wicked". If there's food available to feed people, you damn well make sure it gets into the bellies of people who need it. By all means taper the availability of foreign staff, if that's your policy. But if government policy leads to us destroying pigs rather than eating them, it's a bad policy, whatever point the government wishes to make.
    Completely 100% disagreed.

    If farmers can't be allowed to fail and see their stock lost then that's creating moral hazard in the market.

    Moral hazard is a bad policy.
    Importing all our food is worse policy.
    Why?

    We imported our coal we needed for our electricity for decades. Why was that not a bad policy?

    I don't see why the NFU should be treated with any more generosity than the NUM.

    If our farmers can compete then great. If not, so be it.
    Um no we didn't. We replaced almost all UK coal with UK gas and oil, not with foreign coal.

    And replying on imports for any basic essentials is a really really stupid thing to do because eventually that means you rely on the countries that are supplying those essentials.

    In case you missed it this is why everyone is so unhappy about Europe being reliant on Russian gas. It is why the US got into such a mess in the 70s with Arabian oil.
    Oh really? 42% of our electricity in 2012 was from coal, versus 27% from gas.

    If we weren't importing that coal, where was it coming from?
    Well over a third of it was still coming from our own coal fields. And it was only 2002 that we started importing more than we produced. We went through a transition from 67% of our electricity supply being from coal in 1990 to 8% in 2016. So no, the idea that we were moving to using imported coal as a replacement for our own coal 'for decades' as you claim is complete bullshit. No one, apart from you apparently, would be that dumb.
    Sorry but you're categorically wrong on that. The fact that we produced more than we imported didn't prevent us from importing coal, nor did it mean we weren't relying upon imports. We absolutely did rely upon imports unless you think we could have coped without the imports for some reason?

    In 1990 the UK imported 14.783 million metric tonnes of coal and exported just 2.3 million metric tonnes of it. Unless you think we could have coped without the 14.783 million metric tonnes we needed to import then yes we absolutely were reliant upon it even then.
  • While I've been away we've had a new lady from Kyrgyzstan start work in the office. This inevitably led me to the wiki page for her country, where I learned of the extremely misogynistic sounding traditions of Ala Kachuu (bride kidnapping) and Kyz Kuumai (girl chasing; a horseback game where the man tries to catch the woman before the finish line and kiss her - at speed on horseback - in a nice twist, if he doesn't catch her by the finish line she's allowed to chase him back to the start line with a horsewhip!).

    Apparently I've asked her more about Kyrgyzstan in the two days I've been back than she's been asked by everyone else in the six months she's worked there. Am I weird, or are they all depressingly uninterested?

    You're a PBer.
  • TimTTimT Posts: 6,328

    Cyclefree said:

    kle4 said:

    nico679 said:

    nico679 said:

    So the pig cull has started . Grown men left in tears at having to destroy their livestock and somehow what’s happening in the UK is being normalized by this cesspit of a government !

    Plenty of bacon then... think positive...
    Oh dear another from the Bozo way of thinking !
    Pigs bred for meat are being killed.

    Biggest non-story ever.
    If they are being wasted it is not a non-story, if hardly tragic.
    Food waste has always happened. Its not normally news, so why is this? 🤷‍♂️
    The farmers are not being paid for their pigs. So they are losing assets and income.

    Meat which could be sold to consumers here and overseas is not being sold. So others in the food supply chain are also losing income.

    And perfectly good food is wasted, which really offends me.
    You have the right to be offended.
    Some people are offended by foul language or sex on TV but I still enjoyed Tits & Dragons [except its last season wasn't too good]

    If the farmers wish to be paid for their pigs then they can pay a working rate for abattoirs to afford staff on a decent days wage. If they expect to hire staff for £9.12 per hour on a night shift then that offends me every bit as much as the food waste offends you.
    What abattoirs? We shut most of them down more than a decade ago because of new EU and UK regulations. There was once a network of smaller abattoirs across the country but they could not afford all the new bureaucracy and so only the big ones managed to survive and charged a hell of a lot more to meet their new regulatory requirements. They are also often much further away from the farms which increased costs even more.

    Then the high demand for abattoirs should be leading to higher prices for them and encourage investment in the sector.

    And if deregulation is needed to facilitate smaller ones then that's the sort of thing the government should be lobbied to be looking at, not getting more serf labour in.
    Investment in the sector takes time. And of course it is not in the interests of the existing big abattoirs. In the 1970s there were almost 2000 abattoirs in Britain. Most of them small, local and serving a need. There are now less than 250, almost of of them large, centralised and failing to serve that same need. The cause of that is the huge costs imposed by regulation, not by labour costs.

    One way to help all of this would be to introduce mobile abattoirs which would travel to the farms to do their business. Currently that is illegal because the EU and UK regulations dictate that each location needs a separate licence which costs a huge amount of money. There are no mobile abattoirs in the UK for that reason.

    If you want to argue about this stuff it is worth knowing at least a bit about it before you start.
    It takes time? We voted to leave the EU more than five years ago and we actually left well over a year ago. How much more time was needed?

    If the sector is incapable of sorting itself out then allow it to fail and make investment a priority. In the meantime we can rely on imports. The land isn't going anywhere if those who've failed to invest sufficiently manage to do so in the future it will still be here available ready to be used for domestic production.
    Totally free market approaches often don't work well for sectors where there are differing time lags in the various parts of the entire production chain. It is easy to see a situation were a marginal fail in abattoir capacity impoverishes farmers producing to very small margins, so many farmers go bust, eliminating the demand for abattoirs, who then have to up their prices to stay in business, which then forces the next set of farmers out of business until you have eliminated an entire sector that used to be profitable and could still have been but for a lack of some modest market intervention.

    I am a free marketer. But markets do fail, particularly in agriculture.
  • MattW said:

    MattW said:

    dixiedean said:

    Cyclefree said:

    kle4 said:

    nico679 said:

    nico679 said:

    So the pig cull has started . Grown men left in tears at having to destroy their livestock and somehow what’s happening in the UK is being normalized by this cesspit of a government !

    Plenty of bacon then... think positive...
    Oh dear another from the Bozo way of thinking !
    Pigs bred for meat are being killed.

    Biggest non-story ever.
    If they are being wasted it is not a non-story, if hardly tragic.
    Food waste has always happened. Its not normally news, so why is this? 🤷‍♂️
    The farmers are not being paid for their pigs. So they are losing assets and income.

    Meat which could be sold to consumers here and overseas is not being sold. So others in the food supply chain are also losing income.

    And perfectly good food is wasted, which really offends me.
    It is a fair point and I regret the situation as good food going to waste is wrong

    However, I do not know the pig industry and therefore are we saying all the UK pigs are being sacrificed and their farmers or is this some and if so how much of the industry in total

    I am sure there are those in our midst who can provide a genuine an independent overview which would be helpful
    What percentage of waste would be acceptable out of interest?
    To be honest that is not the point of my question

    I said I regret good food going to waste but I am seeking to find out just how big the issue is

    Is it 100% of our pig production or 5% and what is needed to resolve the issue
    No, but it's the question I asked.
    I gave you my answer but I also want to know the extent of the problem and how to resolve it

    It is a fair question
    4.75 million pigs in UK.
    120,000 backlog according to this, growing by 12 000 per week.

    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/oct/01/uk-pig-industry-warns-butcher-shortage-mass-cull

    Is that a lot or not?
    Thank you

    It is undesirable but is nothing like I assumed it was if we have 4.75 million pigs

    I hope the visa quotas help to address the issue
    Has HMG redefined them as poultry then?
    We slaughter about 11m a year, so it is 1%.
    A shortfall of 12000 per week would correspond to a loss of about 17% in that case.
    Sorry, 5.7%!
    The number being slaughtered is 120k, ie approx 1% of annual production - unless you have data showing it has been happening for 52 weeks.

    Production increased by 3% in 2020, and is forecast to increase by 4% in 2021.
    https://www.pig-world.co.uk/news/2021-pork-production-forecast-to-top-1m-tonnes-for-first-time-in-two-decades-but-prices-under-pressure.html

    There's a lot of diversionary squealing going on, and obvs industry types, anti-govt types, and anti-Brexit types have an interest in making as much noise as possible.

    BTW they are not 'buried in a field'.

    They will go into other products ranging from pet food to being used as oils and fats in various ways.
    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/oct/05/fallen-stock-what-happens-now-to-the-uks-unwanted-pigs
    It is meaningless to compare a number and a rate. What you need is the ratio of the shortfall in pigs slaughtered per week to the number of pigs normally normally slaughtered per week, which is currently 5.7%. This number could, of course, change over time.
  • Northern_AlNorthern_Al Posts: 7,457
    edited October 2021

    Cyclefree said:

    kle4 said:

    nico679 said:

    nico679 said:

    So the pig cull has started . Grown men left in tears at having to destroy their livestock and somehow what’s happening in the UK is being normalized by this cesspit of a government !

    Plenty of bacon then... think positive...
    Oh dear another from the Bozo way of thinking !
    Pigs bred for meat are being killed.

    Biggest non-story ever.
    If they are being wasted it is not a non-story, if hardly tragic.
    Food waste has always happened. Its not normally news, so why is this? 🤷‍♂️
    The farmers are not being paid for their pigs. So they are losing assets and income.

    Meat which could be sold to consumers here and overseas is not being sold. So others in the food supply chain are also losing income.

    And perfectly good food is wasted, which really offends me.
    You have the right to be offended.
    Some people are offended by foul language or sex on TV but I still enjoyed Tits & Dragons [except its last season wasn't too good]

    If the farmers wish to be paid for their pigs then they can pay a working rate for abattoirs to afford staff on a decent days wage. If they expect to hire staff for £9.12 per hour on a night shift then that offends me every bit as much as the food waste offends you.
    What abattoirs? We shut most of them down more than a decade ago because of new EU and UK regulations. There was once a network of smaller abattoirs across the country but they could not afford all the new bureaucracy and so only the big ones managed to survive and charged a hell of a lot more to meet their new regulatory requirements. They are also often much further away from the farms which increased costs even more.

    Then the high demand for abattoirs should be leading to higher prices for them and encourage investment in the sector.

    And if deregulation is needed to facilitate smaller ones then that's the sort of thing the government should be lobbied to be looking at, not getting more serf labour in.
    Investment in the sector takes time. And of course it is not in the interests of the existing big abattoirs. In the 1970s there were almost 2000 abattoirs in Britain. Most of them small, local and serving a need. There are now less than 250, almost of of them large, centralised and failing to serve that same need. The cause of that is the huge costs imposed by regulation, not by labour costs.

    One way to help all of this would be to introduce mobile abattoirs which would travel to the farms to do their business. Currently that is illegal because the EU and UK regulations dictate that each location needs a separate licence which costs a huge amount of money. There are no mobile abattoirs in the UK for that reason.

    If you want to argue about this stuff it is worth knowing at least a bit about it before you start.
    It takes time? We voted to leave the EU more than five years ago and we actually left well over a year ago. How much more time was needed?

    If the sector is incapable of sorting itself out then allow it to fail and make investment a priority. In the meantime we can rely on imports. The land isn't going anywhere if those who've failed to invest sufficiently manage to do so in the future it will still be here available ready to be used for domestic production.
    It is not the sector that is causing the issues it is the Government. Given we were still following the EU regulations even after we left and they still haven't got round to replacing them even now, I find it strange that you are blaming the farmers and the meat industry for something that is out of their control. But then you have shown many times before you don't know the first thing about farming. Have you actually ever travelled outside of a city?
    Or even listened to The Archers?

    (Well, it's been quite sharp in recent months on the problems facing farmers. And PT wouldn't have to leave home).
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826
    edited October 2021

    Cyclefree said:

    kle4 said:

    nico679 said:

    nico679 said:

    So the pig cull has started . Grown men left in tears at having to destroy their livestock and somehow what’s happening in the UK is being normalized by this cesspit of a government !

    Plenty of bacon then... think positive...
    Oh dear another from the Bozo way of thinking !
    Pigs bred for meat are being killed.

    Biggest non-story ever.
    If they are being wasted it is not a non-story, if hardly tragic.
    Food waste has always happened. Its not normally news, so why is this? 🤷‍♂️
    The farmers are not being paid for their pigs. So they are losing assets and income.

    Meat which could be sold to consumers here and overseas is not being sold. So others in the food supply chain are also losing income.

    And perfectly good food is wasted, which really offends me.
    You have the right to be offended.
    Some people are offended by foul language or sex on TV but I still enjoyed Tits & Dragons [except its last season wasn't too good]

    If the farmers wish to be paid for their pigs then they can pay a working rate for abattoirs to afford staff on a decent days wage. If they expect to hire staff for £9.12 per hour on a night shift then that offends me every bit as much as the food waste offends you.
    What abattoirs? We shut most of them down more than a decade ago because of new EU and UK regulations. There was once a network of smaller abattoirs across the country but they could not afford all the new bureaucracy and so only the big ones managed to survive and charged a hell of a lot more to meet their new regulatory requirements. They are also often much further away from the farms which increased costs even more.

    Then the high demand for abattoirs should be leading to higher prices for them and encourage investment in the sector.

    And if deregulation is needed to facilitate smaller ones then that's the sort of thing the government should be lobbied to be looking at, not getting more serf labour in.
    Investment in the sector takes time. And of course it is not in the interests of the existing big abattoirs. In the 1970s there were almost 2000 abattoirs in Britain. Most of them small, local and serving a need. There are now less than 250, almost of of them large, centralised and failing to serve that same need. The cause of that is the huge costs imposed by regulation, not by labour costs.

    One way to help all of this would be to introduce mobile abattoirs which would travel to the farms to do their business. Currently that is illegal because the EU and UK regulations dictate that each location needs a separate licence which costs a huge amount of money. There are no mobile abattoirs in the UK for that reason.

    If you want to argue about this stuff it is worth knowing at least a bit about it before you start.
    It takes time? We voted to leave the EU more than five years ago and we actually left well over a year ago. How much more time was needed?

    If the sector is incapable of sorting itself out then allow it to fail and make investment a priority. In the meantime we can rely on imports. The land isn't going anywhere if those who've failed to invest sufficiently manage to do so in the future it will still be here available ready to be used for domestic production.
    It is not the sector that is causing the issues it is the Government. Given we were still following the EU regulations even after we left and they still haven't got round to replacing them even now, I find it strange that you are blaming the farmers and the meat industry for something that is out of their control. But then you have shown many times before you don't know the first thing about farming. Have you actually ever travelled outside of a city?
    That's funny that its not the sector causing the issues given the sector's own representatives are constantly on TV crying that they need more immigrants to fill the jobs as people don't want to do them. And yet those vacancies as shown here tend to be for things like a difficult night shift job at £9.12 per hour. Having unfilled vacancies absolutely is the sector's own responsibility to fix - improve pay and conditions.

    Now if the sector's representatives were on TV saying that certain regulations were an issue and the regulations need fixing . . . that I would be OK with completely.

    You're trying to conflate two entirely separate issues.
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 44,049

    MattW said:

    MattW said:

    dixiedean said:

    Cyclefree said:

    kle4 said:

    nico679 said:

    nico679 said:

    So the pig cull has started . Grown men left in tears at having to destroy their livestock and somehow what’s happening in the UK is being normalized by this cesspit of a government !

    Plenty of bacon then... think positive...
    Oh dear another from the Bozo way of thinking !
    Pigs bred for meat are being killed.

    Biggest non-story ever.
    If they are being wasted it is not a non-story, if hardly tragic.
    Food waste has always happened. Its not normally news, so why is this? 🤷‍♂️
    The farmers are not being paid for their pigs. So they are losing assets and income.

    Meat which could be sold to consumers here and overseas is not being sold. So others in the food supply chain are also losing income.

    And perfectly good food is wasted, which really offends me.
    It is a fair point and I regret the situation as good food going to waste is wrong

    However, I do not know the pig industry and therefore are we saying all the UK pigs are being sacrificed and their farmers or is this some and if so how much of the industry in total

    I am sure there are those in our midst who can provide a genuine an independent overview which would be helpful
    What percentage of waste would be acceptable out of interest?
    To be honest that is not the point of my question

    I said I regret good food going to waste but I am seeking to find out just how big the issue is

    Is it 100% of our pig production or 5% and what is needed to resolve the issue
    No, but it's the question I asked.
    I gave you my answer but I also want to know the extent of the problem and how to resolve it

    It is a fair question
    4.75 million pigs in UK.
    120,000 backlog according to this, growing by 12 000 per week.

    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/oct/01/uk-pig-industry-warns-butcher-shortage-mass-cull

    Is that a lot or not?
    Thank you

    It is undesirable but is nothing like I assumed it was if we have 4.75 million pigs

    I hope the visa quotas help to address the issue
    Has HMG redefined them as poultry then?
    We slaughter about 11m a year, so it is 1%.
    A shortfall of 12000 per week would correspond to a loss of about 17% in that case.
    Sorry, 5.7%!
    The number being slaughtered is 120k, ie approx 1% of annual production - unless you have data showing it has been happening for 52 weeks.

    Production increased by 3% in 2020, and is forecast to increase by 4% in 2021.
    https://www.pig-world.co.uk/news/2021-pork-production-forecast-to-top-1m-tonnes-for-first-time-in-two-decades-but-prices-under-pressure.html

    There's a lot of diversionary squealing going on, and obvs industry types, anti-govt types, and anti-Brexit types have an interest in making as much noise as possible.

    BTW they are not 'buried in a field'.

    They will go into other products ranging from pet food to being used as oils and fats in various ways.
    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/oct/05/fallen-stock-what-happens-now-to-the-uks-unwanted-pigs
    It is meaningless to compare a number and a rate. What you need is the ratio of the shortfall in pigs slaughtered per week to the number of pigs normally normally slaughtered per week, which is currently 5.7%. This number could, of course, change over time.
    Doesn't the farmer have to pay the rendering company to take away the pig corpses*? Rather than being paid by the abattoir? So not only is it lost as an income, it is a cost too?

    *fairly sure this was the fate of two sheep on Clarksons farm.
  • TimTTimT Posts: 6,328
    Foxy said:

    MattW said:

    MattW said:

    dixiedean said:

    Cyclefree said:

    kle4 said:

    nico679 said:

    nico679 said:

    So the pig cull has started . Grown men left in tears at having to destroy their livestock and somehow what’s happening in the UK is being normalized by this cesspit of a government !

    Plenty of bacon then... think positive...
    Oh dear another from the Bozo way of thinking !
    Pigs bred for meat are being killed.

    Biggest non-story ever.
    If they are being wasted it is not a non-story, if hardly tragic.
    Food waste has always happened. Its not normally news, so why is this? 🤷‍♂️
    The farmers are not being paid for their pigs. So they are losing assets and income.

    Meat which could be sold to consumers here and overseas is not being sold. So others in the food supply chain are also losing income.

    And perfectly good food is wasted, which really offends me.
    It is a fair point and I regret the situation as good food going to waste is wrong

    However, I do not know the pig industry and therefore are we saying all the UK pigs are being sacrificed and their farmers or is this some and if so how much of the industry in total

    I am sure there are those in our midst who can provide a genuine an independent overview which would be helpful
    What percentage of waste would be acceptable out of interest?
    To be honest that is not the point of my question

    I said I regret good food going to waste but I am seeking to find out just how big the issue is

    Is it 100% of our pig production or 5% and what is needed to resolve the issue
    No, but it's the question I asked.
    I gave you my answer but I also want to know the extent of the problem and how to resolve it

    It is a fair question
    4.75 million pigs in UK.
    120,000 backlog according to this, growing by 12 000 per week.

    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/oct/01/uk-pig-industry-warns-butcher-shortage-mass-cull

    Is that a lot or not?
    Thank you

    It is undesirable but is nothing like I assumed it was if we have 4.75 million pigs

    I hope the visa quotas help to address the issue
    Has HMG redefined them as poultry then?
    We slaughter about 11m a year, so it is 1%.
    A shortfall of 12000 per week would correspond to a loss of about 17% in that case.
    Sorry, 5.7%!
    The number being slaughtered is 120k, ie approx 1% of annual production - unless you have data showing it has been happening for 52 weeks.

    Production increased by 3% in 2020, and is forecast to increase by 4% in 2021.
    https://www.pig-world.co.uk/news/2021-pork-production-forecast-to-top-1m-tonnes-for-first-time-in-two-decades-but-prices-under-pressure.html

    There's a lot of diversionary squealing going on, and obvs industry types, anti-govt types, and anti-Brexit types have an interest in making as much noise as possible.

    BTW they are not 'buried in a field'.

    They will go into other products ranging from pet food to being used as oils and fats in various ways.
    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/oct/05/fallen-stock-what-happens-now-to-the-uks-unwanted-pigs
    It is meaningless to compare a number and a rate. What you need is the ratio of the shortfall in pigs slaughtered per week to the number of pigs normally normally slaughtered per week, which is currently 5.7%. This number could, of course, change over time.
    Doesn't the farmer have to pay the rendering company to take away the pig corpses*? Rather than being paid by the abattoir? So not only is it lost as an income, it is a cost too?

    *fairly sure this was the fate of two sheep on Clarksons farm.
    We certainly have to pay a handsome sum to have horses removed by the renderer when they die.
  • geoffwgeoffw Posts: 8,092
     
    TimT said:

    kinabalu said:

    Stocky said:

    GDP is a measure of total economic output (i.e. overall domestic production). Not value added.

    Can you calculate "value added" for a country?
    GDP = C + I + G

    i.e. consumption, investment and government spending.

    So it is well beyond value-added (or corporate profits/EBITDA). 100% of wages end up as one of those 3, as do investment income and government deficit borrowing (unless I am wrong on this last point).
    You need to go back to school, @TimT.
    GDP is the sum of value added in the economy (on the output definition).
    You are using the expenditure definition, but have omitted X - M + ∆H (exports minus imports plus stockbuilding). The income definition is the third way to calculate GDP.

  • Foxy said:

    MattW said:

    MattW said:

    dixiedean said:

    Cyclefree said:

    kle4 said:

    nico679 said:

    nico679 said:

    So the pig cull has started . Grown men left in tears at having to destroy their livestock and somehow what’s happening in the UK is being normalized by this cesspit of a government !

    Plenty of bacon then... think positive...
    Oh dear another from the Bozo way of thinking !
    Pigs bred for meat are being killed.

    Biggest non-story ever.
    If they are being wasted it is not a non-story, if hardly tragic.
    Food waste has always happened. Its not normally news, so why is this? 🤷‍♂️
    The farmers are not being paid for their pigs. So they are losing assets and income.

    Meat which could be sold to consumers here and overseas is not being sold. So others in the food supply chain are also losing income.

    And perfectly good food is wasted, which really offends me.
    It is a fair point and I regret the situation as good food going to waste is wrong

    However, I do not know the pig industry and therefore are we saying all the UK pigs are being sacrificed and their farmers or is this some and if so how much of the industry in total

    I am sure there are those in our midst who can provide a genuine an independent overview which would be helpful
    What percentage of waste would be acceptable out of interest?
    To be honest that is not the point of my question

    I said I regret good food going to waste but I am seeking to find out just how big the issue is

    Is it 100% of our pig production or 5% and what is needed to resolve the issue
    No, but it's the question I asked.
    I gave you my answer but I also want to know the extent of the problem and how to resolve it

    It is a fair question
    4.75 million pigs in UK.
    120,000 backlog according to this, growing by 12 000 per week.

    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/oct/01/uk-pig-industry-warns-butcher-shortage-mass-cull

    Is that a lot or not?
    Thank you

    It is undesirable but is nothing like I assumed it was if we have 4.75 million pigs

    I hope the visa quotas help to address the issue
    Has HMG redefined them as poultry then?
    We slaughter about 11m a year, so it is 1%.
    A shortfall of 12000 per week would correspond to a loss of about 17% in that case.
    Sorry, 5.7%!
    The number being slaughtered is 120k, ie approx 1% of annual production - unless you have data showing it has been happening for 52 weeks.

    Production increased by 3% in 2020, and is forecast to increase by 4% in 2021.
    https://www.pig-world.co.uk/news/2021-pork-production-forecast-to-top-1m-tonnes-for-first-time-in-two-decades-but-prices-under-pressure.html

    There's a lot of diversionary squealing going on, and obvs industry types, anti-govt types, and anti-Brexit types have an interest in making as much noise as possible.

    BTW they are not 'buried in a field'.

    They will go into other products ranging from pet food to being used as oils and fats in various ways.
    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/oct/05/fallen-stock-what-happens-now-to-the-uks-unwanted-pigs
    It is meaningless to compare a number and a rate. What you need is the ratio of the shortfall in pigs slaughtered per week to the number of pigs normally normally slaughtered per week, which is currently 5.7%. This number could, of course, change over time.
    Doesn't the farmer have to pay the rendering company to take away the pig corpses*? Rather than being paid by the abattoir? So not only is it lost as an income, it is a cost too?

    *fairly sure this was the fate of two sheep on Clarksons farm.
    I can't imagine that the rendering company are doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. And diverting high-value products into lower value uses is the kind of thing we used to point and laugh at Commies for doing.

    But there are voices- not just bitter Remainers- who are expressing doubts about Bozzanomics;

    Meanwhile, a senior Tory said they worried that areas with more vacancies in jobs previously filled by migrant workers, like London, would benefit from wage growth, while workers in towns that need “levelling up” are hit with the resulting higher prices.

    “It could be the exact opposite of levelling up,” they said.

    Chancellor Rishi Sunak is also understood to be privately concerned that wage increases need to be driven by productivity growth rather than labour shortages, or the UK risks being caught in an inflation spiral which could see earnings growth wiped out by higher prices.


    https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/senior-tories-warn-boris-johnsons-post-brexit-wage-boost-plan-could-backfire-1234371?ito=twitter_share_article-top

    It might be fine. But it might be a helluva gamble. Are there any examples elsewhere of this working without bad side effects?
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 38,836

    Cyclefree said:

    OK - I know they don't matter but more likes for a post about pigs than one about child abuse and crimes against women?

    You said quite a lot in the post about abuse.

    I really wanted to like it, but I didn't agree with all of it. I don't think making misogyny a crime would be particularly helpful. And I'd certainly be uncomfortable with making it a crime without also making misandry one. Having different laws for men and women feels a bit, well, Sharia to me.
    It's a bit misleading, I think, how this is being reported. The proposition isn't to create a new crime of misogyny. It's to allow misogyny - like racism, which is not a crime - to be an aggravating factor in crime sentencing. Possibly also a ramification in the area of "hate speech" but I'm not sure about that.
  • TimTTimT Posts: 6,328

    While I've been away we've had a new lady from Kyrgyzstan start work in the office. This inevitably led me to the wiki page for her country, where I learned of the extremely misogynistic sounding traditions of Ala Kachuu (bride kidnapping) and Kyz Kuumai (girl chasing; a horseback game where the man tries to catch the woman before the finish line and kiss her - at speed on horseback - in a nice twist, if he doesn't catch her by the finish line she's allowed to chase him back to the start line with a horsewhip!).

    Apparently I've asked her more about Kyrgyzstan in the two days I've been back than she's been asked by everyone else in the six months she's worked there. Am I weird, or are they all depressingly uninterested?

    I lived 8 years in Cyprus as a kid prior to returning to the UK to finish my secondary education. I soon learned that no-one at all was interested in my life experiences in Cyprus and, indeed, actively shut down anything I had to say about it. If I wanted to be friends, I just had to not mention any of my life prior to returning to the UK.
  • geoffwgeoffw Posts: 8,092
    TimT said:

    Cyclefree said:

    kle4 said:

    nico679 said:

    nico679 said:

    So the pig cull has started . Grown men left in tears at having to destroy their livestock and somehow what’s happening in the UK is being normalized by this cesspit of a government !

    Plenty of bacon then... think positive...
    Oh dear another from the Bozo way of thinking !
    Pigs bred for meat are being killed.

    Biggest non-story ever.
    If they are being wasted it is not a non-story, if hardly tragic.
    Food waste has always happened. Its not normally news, so why is this? 🤷‍♂️
    The farmers are not being paid for their pigs. So they are losing assets and income.

    Meat which could be sold to consumers here and overseas is not being sold. So others in the food supply chain are also losing income.

    And perfectly good food is wasted, which really offends me.
    You have the right to be offended.
    Some people are offended by foul language or sex on TV but I still enjoyed Tits & Dragons [except its last season wasn't too good]

    If the farmers wish to be paid for their pigs then they can pay a working rate for abattoirs to afford staff on a decent days wage. If they expect to hire staff for £9.12 per hour on a night shift then that offends me every bit as much as the food waste offends you.
    What abattoirs? We shut most of them down more than a decade ago because of new EU and UK regulations. There was once a network of smaller abattoirs across the country but they could not afford all the new bureaucracy and so only the big ones managed to survive and charged a hell of a lot more to meet their new regulatory requirements. They are also often much further away from the farms which increased costs even more.

    Then the high demand for abattoirs should be leading to higher prices for them and encourage investment in the sector.

    And if deregulation is needed to facilitate smaller ones then that's the sort of thing the government should be lobbied to be looking at, not getting more serf labour in.
    Investment in the sector takes time. And of course it is not in the interests of the existing big abattoirs. In the 1970s there were almost 2000 abattoirs in Britain. Most of them small, local and serving a need. There are now less than 250, almost of of them large, centralised and failing to serve that same need. The cause of that is the huge costs imposed by regulation, not by labour costs.

    One way to help all of this would be to introduce mobile abattoirs which would travel to the farms to do their business. Currently that is illegal because the EU and UK regulations dictate that each location needs a separate licence which costs a huge amount of money. There are no mobile abattoirs in the UK for that reason.

    If you want to argue about this stuff it is worth knowing at least a bit about it before you start.
    It takes time? We voted to leave the EU more than five years ago and we actually left well over a year ago. How much more time was needed?

    If the sector is incapable of sorting itself out then allow it to fail and make investment a priority. In the meantime we can rely on imports. The land isn't going anywhere if those who've failed to invest sufficiently manage to do so in the future it will still be here available ready to be used for domestic production.
    Totally free market approaches often don't work well for sectors where there are differing time lags in the various parts of the entire production chain. It is easy to see a situation were a marginal fail in abattoir capacity impoverishes farmers producing to very small margins, so many farmers go bust, eliminating the demand for abattoirs, who then have to up their prices to stay in business, which then forces the next set of farmers out of business until you have eliminated an entire sector that used to be profitable and could still have been but for a lack of some modest market intervention.

    I am a free marketer. But markets do fail, particularly in agriculture.
    Yup, a nice example of Ezekiel's cobweb process.

  • TimTTimT Posts: 6,328
    geoffw said:

     

    TimT said:

    kinabalu said:

    Stocky said:

    GDP is a measure of total economic output (i.e. overall domestic production). Not value added.

    Can you calculate "value added" for a country?
    GDP = C + I + G

    i.e. consumption, investment and government spending.

    So it is well beyond value-added (or corporate profits/EBITDA). 100% of wages end up as one of those 3, as do investment income and government deficit borrowing (unless I am wrong on this last point).
    You need to go back to school, @TimT.
    GDP is the sum of value added in the economy (on the output definition).
    You are using the expenditure definition, but have omitted X - M + ∆H (exports minus imports plus stockbuilding). The income definition is the third way to calculate GDP.

    Yeah, I knew I'd forgotten X and M the moment the edit window closed. You are right, back to school for me. :tired_face:
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 27,835
    Am learning more than I ever imagined or wished about pig killing economics.
    Be that as it may. One dead pig not fed to a human is one too many for me.
  • Scott_xPScott_xP Posts: 32,727
    Tomorrow 4.4 million households, with 5.1m adults and 3.5m children, will see their incomes fall by £1,000 overnight. For 1 million households that will mean an immediate loss of over 10% of their income as we take the basic rate of benefits to its lowest level since 1990

    Whatever this is, it’s not building back better.

    https://twitter.com/TorstenBell/status/1445496111423098888
  • RobDRobD Posts: 58,941
    Scott_xP said:

    Tomorrow 4.4 million households, with 5.1m adults and 3.5m children, will see their incomes fall by £1,000 overnight. For 1 million households that will mean an immediate loss of over 10% of their income as we take the basic rate of benefits to its lowest level since 1990

    Whatever this is, it’s not building back better.

    https://twitter.com/TorstenBell/status/1445496111423098888

    Wouldn’t it be taking the rate back to what it was in 2019?
  • New thread.
  • CyclefreeCyclefree Posts: 25,074
    TimT said:

    While I've been away we've had a new lady from Kyrgyzstan start work in the office. This inevitably led me to the wiki page for her country, where I learned of the extremely misogynistic sounding traditions of Ala Kachuu (bride kidnapping) and Kyz Kuumai (girl chasing; a horseback game where the man tries to catch the woman before the finish line and kiss her - at speed on horseback - in a nice twist, if he doesn't catch her by the finish line she's allowed to chase him back to the start line with a horsewhip!).

    Apparently I've asked her more about Kyrgyzstan in the two days I've been back than she's been asked by everyone else in the six months she's worked there. Am I weird, or are they all depressingly uninterested?

    I lived 8 years in Cyprus as a kid prior to returning to the UK to finish my secondary education. I soon learned that no-one at all was interested in my life experiences in Cyprus and, indeed, actively shut down anything I had to say about it. If I wanted to be friends, I just had to not mention any of my life prior to returning to the UK.
    Much the same for me. Absolutely no-one was interested in my life in Italy. I had very few of the same cultural references others in school had. The books I read, the food I ate, even the language spoken at home - all marked me out as odd and different. It was quite lonely in many ways. So I spent my time observing - which possibly explains why I have ended up doing jobs where observation skills are a prerequisite.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 61,544
    .

    nico679 said:

    nico679 said:

    So the pig cull has started . Grown men left in tears at having to destroy their livestock and somehow what’s happening in the UK is being normalized by this cesspit of a government !

    Plenty of bacon then... think positive...
    Oh dear another from the Bozo way of thinking !
    Pigs bred for meat are being killed.

    Biggest non-story ever.
    Not entirely.

    There is a moral difference between raising a pig to be killed and eaten and one that is killed and dumped. It may not be much of a difference, and nobody is asking the pig, but there is a difference between cruelty with a purpose (even if that purpose is bacon sandwiches) and cruelty without.

    It's also worth thinking about this from the point of view of the farmer. I don't know the details, but it's likely that some farmers are going to lose a lot financially because of this. You may be OK with that, but I'm not sure I am.

    And finally, there is the point that @Cyclefree wisely made upthread. This is a waste of potential food. Those of us of a certain age remember any such waste being described as "wicked". If there's food available to feed people, you damn well make sure it gets into the bellies of people who need it. By all means taper the availability of foreign staff, if that's your policy. But if government policy leads to us destroying pigs rather than eating them, it's a bad policy, whatever point the government wishes to make.
    Completely 100% disagreed.

    If farmers can't be allowed to fail and see their stock lost then that's creating moral hazard in the market.

    Moral hazard is a bad policy.
    Importing all our food is worse policy.
    Why?

    We imported our coal we needed for our electricity for decades. Why was that not a bad policy?

    I don't see why the NFU should be treated with any more generosity than the NUM.

    If our farmers can compete then great. If not, so be it.
    Um no we didn't. We replaced almost all UK coal with UK gas and oil, not with foreign coal.

    And replying on imports for any basic essentials is a really really stupid thing to do because eventually that means you rely on the countries that are supplying those essentials.

    In case you missed it this is why everyone is so unhappy about Europe being reliant on Russian gas. It is why the US got into such a mess in the 70s with Arabian oil.
    Oh really? 42% of our electricity in 2012 was from coal, versus 27% from gas.

    If we weren't importing that coal, where was it coming from?
    Well over a third of it was still coming from our own coal fields. And it was only 2002 that we started importing more than we produced. We went through a transition from 67% of our electricity supply being from coal in 1990 to 8% in 2016. So no, the idea that we were moving to using imported coal as a replacement for our own coal 'for decades' as you claim is complete bullshit. No one, apart from you apparently, would be that dumb.
    It would produce more light, and a great deal less heat if Philip more often fact checked his arguments before posting them.
  • malcolmgmalcolmg Posts: 41,670

    Carnyx said:

    dixiedean said:

    Cyclefree said:

    kle4 said:

    nico679 said:

    nico679 said:

    So the pig cull has started . Grown men left in tears at having to destroy their livestock and somehow what’s happening in the UK is being normalized by this cesspit of a government !

    Plenty of bacon then... think positive...
    Oh dear another from the Bozo way of thinking !
    Pigs bred for meat are being killed.

    Biggest non-story ever.
    If they are being wasted it is not a non-story, if hardly tragic.
    Food waste has always happened. Its not normally news, so why is this? 🤷‍♂️
    The farmers are not being paid for their pigs. So they are losing assets and income.

    Meat which could be sold to consumers here and overseas is not being sold. So others in the food supply chain are also losing income.

    And perfectly good food is wasted, which really offends me.
    It is a fair point and I regret the situation as good food going to waste is wrong

    However, I do not know the pig industry and therefore are we saying all the UK pigs are being sacrificed and their farmers or is this some and if so how much of the industry in total

    I am sure there are those in our midst who can provide a genuine an independent overview which would be helpful
    What percentage of waste would be acceptable out of interest?
    To be honest that is not the point of my question

    I said I regret good food going to waste but I am seeking to find out just how big the issue is

    Is it 100% of our pig production or 5% and what is needed to resolve the issue
    No, but it's the question I asked.
    I gave you my answer but I also want to know the extent of the problem and how to resolve it

    It is a fair question
    4.75 million pigs in UK.
    120,000 backlog according to this, growing by 12 000 per week.

    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/oct/01/uk-pig-industry-warns-butcher-shortage-mass-cull

    Is that a lot or not?
    Thank you

    It is undesirable but is nothing like I assumed it was if we have 4.75 million pigs

    I hope the visa quotas help to address the issue
    Has HMG redefined them as poultry then?
    I assumed the visa were for agricultural workers but if poultry only then it seems strange
    The Tories ar eplaying a game of chicken with their loyal voters, basically. Not to mention bullshit.
    Not really

    This is the essence of Brexit which 35% of Scots believe is a success in today's poll
    @Big_G_NorthWales
    Oh dear I have seen some bad posts on here but that takes the biscuit
  • malcolmg said:

    Carnyx said:

    dixiedean said:

    Cyclefree said:

    kle4 said:

    nico679 said:

    nico679 said:

    So the pig cull has started . Grown men left in tears at having to destroy their livestock and somehow what’s happening in the UK is being normalized by this cesspit of a government !

    Plenty of bacon then... think positive...
    Oh dear another from the Bozo way of thinking !
    Pigs bred for meat are being killed.

    Biggest non-story ever.
    If they are being wasted it is not a non-story, if hardly tragic.
    Food waste has always happened. Its not normally news, so why is this? 🤷‍♂️
    The farmers are not being paid for their pigs. So they are losing assets and income.

    Meat which could be sold to consumers here and overseas is not being sold. So others in the food supply chain are also losing income.

    And perfectly good food is wasted, which really offends me.
    It is a fair point and I regret the situation as good food going to waste is wrong

    However, I do not know the pig industry and therefore are we saying all the UK pigs are being sacrificed and their farmers or is this some and if so how much of the industry in total

    I am sure there are those in our midst who can provide a genuine an independent overview which would be helpful
    What percentage of waste would be acceptable out of interest?
    To be honest that is not the point of my question

    I said I regret good food going to waste but I am seeking to find out just how big the issue is

    Is it 100% of our pig production or 5% and what is needed to resolve the issue
    No, but it's the question I asked.
    I gave you my answer but I also want to know the extent of the problem and how to resolve it

    It is a fair question
    4.75 million pigs in UK.
    120,000 backlog according to this, growing by 12 000 per week.

    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/oct/01/uk-pig-industry-warns-butcher-shortage-mass-cull

    Is that a lot or not?
    Thank you

    It is undesirable but is nothing like I assumed it was if we have 4.75 million pigs

    I hope the visa quotas help to address the issue
    Has HMG redefined them as poultry then?
    I assumed the visa were for agricultural workers but if poultry only then it seems strange
    The Tories ar eplaying a game of chicken with their loyal voters, basically. Not to mention bullshit.
    Not really

    This is the essence of Brexit which 35% of Scots believe is a success in today's poll
    @Big_G_NorthWales
    Oh dear I have seen some bad posts on here but that takes the biscuit
    Morning Malc

    Independence sailing into the sunset must be a worry for you
This discussion has been closed.