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The first polling has BoJo’s speech rated lower than Starmer’s – politicalbetting.com

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  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,709
    rcs1000 said:

    Andy_JS said:

    Wrt the next Tory leadership contest, if the final three are Sunak, Patel and Truss, what would the result of the final vote of MPs be? I'm guessing if either Sunak or Truss had "votes to spare" there'd be an attempt at tactical voting to make sure Priti Patel didn't get through to the final round, a bit like with Gove last time.

    Assuming the ConHome polling is correct (and it may well not be), Patel would really struggle against either of those two.

    I also don't know if Patel has a powerbase in the party. One of the slightly unique things about this government is that the three most senior Cabinet ministers (Truss, Patel, Sunak) are all fairly new to the jobs, and haven't built up loyal followings in Parliament or the country. Nor are any of them leaders of a strand of conservative thinking.
    Rees-Mogg is now more likely to be the candidate of the traditional Tory right than Patel. Though I doubt he would stand unless the Tories lost the next general election.

    Truss would be the candidate of the libertarian right, Sunak the candidate of the Tory centre and Tory left
  • Northern_AlNorthern_Al Posts: 7,459

    Alistair said:

    kle4 said:

    DavidL said:

    What I got from Boris's speech is what he wanted me to get. This is a government on a mission and with a hugely ambitious program to change this country for the better. He wants better transport, education, skills, education, law and order, the list went on and on.

    Will he be able to deliver? Who knows, certainly not on all of it but maybe on some. If he does he will have done better than most of his recent predecessors. The message from his speech is that this is not a government blundering around not knowing what it wants to do. I think he succeeded in that.

    Don't all political parties want things to be better? Has any conference speech stated they want transport and education to get worse?

    What I got from the speech was not that the Tories want to change the country for the better, but to impress upon people that they are still energetic and coming up with ideas (he talked about 'tired old Labour'), rather than a sclerotic 11 year old government paddling along.
    Yes, the entire rhetoric is remarkable. What the Tories are doing is pretending that Labour was in power until 2019, when Boris took over. Astonishingly, quite a lot of voters seem to think that this is true, and any current woes should be blamed on the Labour government 2010-2019. Things haven't got better yet because of Labour's misrule - but now Boris is in charge. It takes some brass neck, but it seems to work.

    The trick in the under the radar social media targetted ads has been to blame Labour Councils for Nationa Government policies.

    So "lack of funding for the NHS" is blamed on the local Labour Council.

    It has shown to be remarkably effective.

    Whether it can work at a second election in a row will be interesting to see...
    Yes, that was really clear from the vox pops I've seen from 'Red Wall' seats in the north and midlands. People were blaming everything on their Labour councils - hilariously, in some cases, when they didn't even have Labour councils any more.
    "I've had to wait 4 years for my hip operation, thanks to my Labour council", and stuff like that.
    I’m sure there is much of this going on. But there is also a sense that labour took Scotland’s voters for granted, until they were swept away. And then they still had the red wall in the north... until that was swept away. With too many in labour more interested in Palestine than in Peterborough they won’t win those voters back.
    I agree with your Scotland point. But your last sentence is just a facile Daily Mail-type myth. What's more, Peterborough isn't anywhere near 'the red wall in the north'.
  • Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 55,008
    kle4 said:

    I didn't see either of the speeches, and I don't care to watch them either. And I'm someone who's very interested in politics.

    No normal people will either.

    People are worried about fuel, gas, electricity, economic recovery, their jobs, Covid and Christmas.

    They couldn't give a rat's ass about party conference speeches.

    No normal people cares about any political minutiae, therefore none of it matters at all? I'd say no. Small things add up, affect party unity or morale, which impacts the actions they take which the public might notice, even if they won't on the fine details.
    These speeches don't matter in the slightest and will change absolutely nothing.

    There. Made it simple for you.

    Goodnight.
  • CarlottaVanceCarlottaVance Posts: 59,540
    kle4 said:

    Speaking of boring, saw The Dig on Netflix - one of the most tremendously dull things I've ever seen, why it was a movie at all baffled me.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYqm3-KDPjU

    Could have saved you some time...
  • BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 31,273
    edited October 2021
    Leon said:

    kle4 said:

    Speaking of boring, saw The Dig on Netflix - one of the most tremendously dull things I've ever seen, why it was a movie at all baffled me.

    Yes, seriously mediocre. No story

    Yet my older daughter liked it: she adores archaeology
    No story?! There clearly was a story: it was the find of the century.

    But much more than that were the multi-layered themes: self-taught local outwits academia, the triumph of perseverance, human, mortalility and approaching doom, death and posterity.

    Plus, it was beatifully shot and brilliantly acted.

    And if that's not enough: Lily James.

    Disappointed if none of that moved you but each to their own I guess.
  • turbotubbsturbotubbs Posts: 14,878

    Alistair said:

    kle4 said:

    DavidL said:

    What I got from Boris's speech is what he wanted me to get. This is a government on a mission and with a hugely ambitious program to change this country for the better. He wants better transport, education, skills, education, law and order, the list went on and on.

    Will he be able to deliver? Who knows, certainly not on all of it but maybe on some. If he does he will have done better than most of his recent predecessors. The message from his speech is that this is not a government blundering around not knowing what it wants to do. I think he succeeded in that.

    Don't all political parties want things to be better? Has any conference speech stated they want transport and education to get worse?

    What I got from the speech was not that the Tories want to change the country for the better, but to impress upon people that they are still energetic and coming up with ideas (he talked about 'tired old Labour'), rather than a sclerotic 11 year old government paddling along.
    Yes, the entire rhetoric is remarkable. What the Tories are doing is pretending that Labour was in power until 2019, when Boris took over. Astonishingly, quite a lot of voters seem to think that this is true, and any current woes should be blamed on the Labour government 2010-2019. Things haven't got better yet because of Labour's misrule - but now Boris is in charge. It takes some brass neck, but it seems to work.

    The trick in the under the radar social media targetted ads has been to blame Labour Councils for Nationa Government policies.

    So "lack of funding for the NHS" is blamed on the local Labour Council.

    It has shown to be remarkably effective.

    Whether it can work at a second election in a row will be interesting to see...
    Yes, that was really clear from the vox pops I've seen from 'Red Wall' seats in the north and midlands. People were blaming everything on their Labour councils - hilariously, in some cases, when they didn't even have Labour councils any more.
    "I've had to wait 4 years for my hip operation, thanks to my Labour council", and stuff like that.
    I’m sure there is much of this going on. But there is also a sense that labour took Scotland’s voters for granted, until they were swept away. And then they still had the red wall in the north... until that was swept away. With too many in labour more interested in Palestine than in Peterborough they won’t win those voters back.
    I agree with your Scotland point. But your last sentence is just a facile Daily Mail-type myth. What's more, Peterborough isn't anywhere near 'the red wall in the north'.
    I know, but I couldn’t think of a P from the red wall. Preston?
  • Northern_AlNorthern_Al Posts: 7,459
    edited October 2021
    isam said:

    kle4 said:

    DavidL said:

    What I got from Boris's speech is what he wanted me to get. This is a government on a mission and with a hugely ambitious program to change this country for the better. He wants better transport, education, skills, education, law and order, the list went on and on.

    Will he be able to deliver? Who knows, certainly not on all of it but maybe on some. If he does he will have done better than most of his recent predecessors. The message from his speech is that this is not a government blundering around not knowing what it wants to do. I think he succeeded in that.

    Don't all political parties want things to be better? Has any conference speech stated they want transport and education to get worse?

    What I got from the speech was not that the Tories want to change the country for the better, but to impress upon people that they are still energetic and coming up with ideas (he talked about 'tired old Labour'), rather than a sclerotic 11 year old government paddling along.
    Yes, the entire rhetoric is remarkable. What the Tories are doing is pretending that Labour was in power until 2019, when Boris took over. Astonishingly, quite a lot of voters seem to think that this is true, and any current woes should be blamed on the Labour government 2010-2019. Things haven't got better yet because of Labour's misrule - but now Boris is in charge. It takes some brass neck, but it seems to work.
    He is probably trying to draw a line between Leave and Remain - Sir Keir’s Labour being associated with the low wage, high immigration era whilst his Tories want to train our youngsters and see wages increase etc
    Maybe, but over the last 10 years isn't it the Cameron (and then May) Tory governments that have presided over the low wage, zero hours contracts, high immigration era? Or am I going mad?
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 27,835
    edited October 2021
    Alistair said:

    kle4 said:

    DavidL said:

    What I got from Boris's speech is what he wanted me to get. This is a government on a mission and with a hugely ambitious program to change this country for the better. He wants better transport, education, skills, education, law and order, the list went on and on.

    Will he be able to deliver? Who knows, certainly not on all of it but maybe on some. If he does he will have done better than most of his recent predecessors. The message from his speech is that this is not a government blundering around not knowing what it wants to do. I think he succeeded in that.

    Don't all political parties want things to be better? Has any conference speech stated they want transport and education to get worse?

    What I got from the speech was not that the Tories want to change the country for the better, but to impress upon people that they are still energetic and coming up with ideas (he talked about 'tired old Labour'), rather than a sclerotic 11 year old government paddling along.
    Yes, the entire rhetoric is remarkable. What the Tories are doing is pretending that Labour was in power until 2019, when Boris took over. Astonishingly, quite a lot of voters seem to think that this is true, and any current woes should be blamed on the Labour government 2010-2019. Things haven't got better yet because of Labour's misrule - but now Boris is in charge. It takes some brass neck, but it seems to work.

    The trick in the under the radar social media targetted ads has been to blame Labour Councils for Nationa Government policies.

    So "lack of funding for the NHS" is blamed on the local Labour Council.

    It has shown to be remarkably effective.

    Whether it can work at a second election in a row will be interesting to see...
    Well. Labour are running out of councils for a start. Although in many places "the Council" is code for Labour anyways. Even if it is Tory.
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 27,835

    rcs1000 said:

    Anyone like to guess how many genuinely undecided voters decided to sit through both speeches?

    I'm going with seven.

    So, that's probably four votes for Mr Starmer and three for Mr Johnson.

    Decades ago, even before Maggie, I used to spend hours while working for BBC News watching speeches like this in their entirety and trying to identify newsworthy clips. But I was getting paid.
    Not nearly enough.
  • rottenboroughrottenborough Posts: 58,038
    " Panic buying is a warning that the public does not trust the government’s ability to manage the seismic changes it seeks to visit on the economy. The fear lurking even among Tory strategists is that voters may conclude he is all destination and no map."


    https://www.ft.com/content/3746531f-3425-4d7c-bb87-45f61ce4d3c6
  • Northern_AlNorthern_Al Posts: 7,459
    edited October 2021

    Alistair said:

    kle4 said:

    DavidL said:

    What I got from Boris's speech is what he wanted me to get. This is a government on a mission and with a hugely ambitious program to change this country for the better. He wants better transport, education, skills, education, law and order, the list went on and on.

    Will he be able to deliver? Who knows, certainly not on all of it but maybe on some. If he does he will have done better than most of his recent predecessors. The message from his speech is that this is not a government blundering around not knowing what it wants to do. I think he succeeded in that.

    Don't all political parties want things to be better? Has any conference speech stated they want transport and education to get worse?

    What I got from the speech was not that the Tories want to change the country for the better, but to impress upon people that they are still energetic and coming up with ideas (he talked about 'tired old Labour'), rather than a sclerotic 11 year old government paddling along.
    Yes, the entire rhetoric is remarkable. What the Tories are doing is pretending that Labour was in power until 2019, when Boris took over. Astonishingly, quite a lot of voters seem to think that this is true, and any current woes should be blamed on the Labour government 2010-2019. Things haven't got better yet because of Labour's misrule - but now Boris is in charge. It takes some brass neck, but it seems to work.

    The trick in the under the radar social media targetted ads has been to blame Labour Councils for Nationa Government policies.

    So "lack of funding for the NHS" is blamed on the local Labour Council.

    It has shown to be remarkably effective.

    Whether it can work at a second election in a row will be interesting to see...
    Yes, that was really clear from the vox pops I've seen from 'Red Wall' seats in the north and midlands. People were blaming everything on their Labour councils - hilariously, in some cases, when they didn't even have Labour councils any more.
    "I've had to wait 4 years for my hip operation, thanks to my Labour council", and stuff like that.
    I’m sure there is much of this going on. But there is also a sense that labour took Scotland’s voters for granted, until they were swept away. And then they still had the red wall in the north... until that was swept away. With too many in labour more interested in Palestine than in Peterborough they won’t win those voters back.
    I agree with your Scotland point. But your last sentence is just a facile Daily Mail-type myth. What's more, Peterborough isn't anywhere near 'the red wall in the north'.
    I know, but I couldn’t think of a P from the red wall. Preston?
    Preston's still Labour. Try Penistone (and Stockbridge)?

    But seriously, do you really think that most Labour supporters/members are more interested in Palestine than Penistone? It just isn't true. You're being swayed by a very small, though admittedly voluble, minority.
  • isamisam Posts: 40,725

    isam said:

    kle4 said:

    DavidL said:

    What I got from Boris's speech is what he wanted me to get. This is a government on a mission and with a hugely ambitious program to change this country for the better. He wants better transport, education, skills, education, law and order, the list went on and on.

    Will he be able to deliver? Who knows, certainly not on all of it but maybe on some. If he does he will have done better than most of his recent predecessors. The message from his speech is that this is not a government blundering around not knowing what it wants to do. I think he succeeded in that.

    Don't all political parties want things to be better? Has any conference speech stated they want transport and education to get worse?

    What I got from the speech was not that the Tories want to change the country for the better, but to impress upon people that they are still energetic and coming up with ideas (he talked about 'tired old Labour'), rather than a sclerotic 11 year old government paddling along.
    Yes, the entire rhetoric is remarkable. What the Tories are doing is pretending that Labour was in power until 2019, when Boris took over. Astonishingly, quite a lot of voters seem to think that this is true, and any current woes should be blamed on the Labour government 2010-2019. Things haven't got better yet because of Labour's misrule - but now Boris is in charge. It takes some brass neck, but it seems to work.
    He is probably trying to draw a line between Leave and Remain - Sir Keir’s Labour being associated with the low wage, high immigration era whilst his Tories want to train our youngsters and see wages increase etc
    Maybe, but over the last 10 years isn't it the Cameron (and then May) Tory governments that have presided over the low wage, zero hours contracts, high immigration era? Or am I going mad?
    No, you’re not - they did. But Sir Keir was prepared to fight tooth and nail to keep that status quo going, whilst Boris won the fight to stop it, & he’s trying to keep everyone aware of that
  • BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 31,273
    Foxy said:

    kle4 said:

    DavidL said:

    What I got from Boris's speech is what he wanted me to get. This is a government on a mission and with a hugely ambitious program to change this country for the better. He wants better transport, education, skills, education, law and order, the list went on and on.

    Will he be able to deliver? Who knows, certainly not on all of it but maybe on some. If he does he will have done better than most of his recent predecessors. The message from his speech is that this is not a government blundering around not knowing what it wants to do. I think he succeeded in that.

    Don't all political parties want things to be better? Has any conference speech stated they want transport and education to get worse?

    What I got from the speech was not that the Tories want to change the country for the better, but to impress upon people that they are still energetic and coming up with ideas (he talked about 'tired old Labour'), rather than a sclerotic 11 year old government paddling along.
    I think quite a major market correction is on its way this autumn. In part domestic, but both the Chinese and American situations look dicey to me too. I have cashed in my more exposed equities until I see which way the wind is blowing.
    But where to put savings if not in equities? There are no comfortable alternatives.

    I'm currently thinking I'll sit it out a take the correction when it comes and hope for a recovery next year.
  • rottenboroughrottenborough Posts: 58,038
    Leon said:

    I am here to tell you that the Rightful King of France, Louis XX, has his own Twitter account


    https://twitter.com/louisducdanjou

    Excellent.

    He even sells his own board game. Paging @NickPalmer
  • rottenboroughrottenborough Posts: 58,038

    Foxy said:

    kle4 said:

    DavidL said:

    What I got from Boris's speech is what he wanted me to get. This is a government on a mission and with a hugely ambitious program to change this country for the better. He wants better transport, education, skills, education, law and order, the list went on and on.

    Will he be able to deliver? Who knows, certainly not on all of it but maybe on some. If he does he will have done better than most of his recent predecessors. The message from his speech is that this is not a government blundering around not knowing what it wants to do. I think he succeeded in that.

    Don't all political parties want things to be better? Has any conference speech stated they want transport and education to get worse?

    What I got from the speech was not that the Tories want to change the country for the better, but to impress upon people that they are still energetic and coming up with ideas (he talked about 'tired old Labour'), rather than a sclerotic 11 year old government paddling along.
    I think quite a major market correction is on its way this autumn. In part domestic, but both the Chinese and American situations look dicey to me too. I have cashed in my more exposed equities until I see which way the wind is blowing.
    But where to put savings if not in equities? There are no comfortable alternatives.

    I'm currently thinking I'll sit it out a take the correction when it comes and hope for a recovery next year.
    For what its worth: Telegraph's AEP announced the other day he had sold all his stocks and is sitting on cash as there is a correction due.
  • Alistair said:

    kle4 said:

    DavidL said:

    What I got from Boris's speech is what he wanted me to get. This is a government on a mission and with a hugely ambitious program to change this country for the better. He wants better transport, education, skills, education, law and order, the list went on and on.

    Will he be able to deliver? Who knows, certainly not on all of it but maybe on some. If he does he will have done better than most of his recent predecessors. The message from his speech is that this is not a government blundering around not knowing what it wants to do. I think he succeeded in that.

    Don't all political parties want things to be better? Has any conference speech stated they want transport and education to get worse?

    What I got from the speech was not that the Tories want to change the country for the better, but to impress upon people that they are still energetic and coming up with ideas (he talked about 'tired old Labour'), rather than a sclerotic 11 year old government paddling along.
    Yes, the entire rhetoric is remarkable. What the Tories are doing is pretending that Labour was in power until 2019, when Boris took over. Astonishingly, quite a lot of voters seem to think that this is true, and any current woes should be blamed on the Labour government 2010-2019. Things haven't got better yet because of Labour's misrule - but now Boris is in charge. It takes some brass neck, but it seems to work.

    The trick in the under the radar social media targetted ads has been to blame Labour Councils for Nationa Government policies.

    So "lack of funding for the NHS" is blamed on the local Labour Council.

    It has shown to be remarkably effective.

    Whether it can work at a second election in a row will be interesting to see...
    Yes, that was really clear from the vox pops I've seen from 'Red Wall' seats in the north and midlands. People were blaming everything on their Labour councils - hilariously, in some cases, when they didn't even have Labour councils any more.
    "I've had to wait 4 years for my hip operation, thanks to my Labour council", and stuff like that.
    I’m sure there is much of this going on. But there is also a sense that labour took Scotland’s voters for granted, until they were swept away. And then they still had the red wall in the north... until that was swept away. With too many in labour more interested in Palestine than in Peterborough they won’t win those voters back.
    I agree with your Scotland point. But your last sentence is just a facile Daily Mail-type myth. What's more, Peterborough isn't anywhere near 'the red wall in the north'.
    I know, but I couldn’t think of a P from the red wall. Preston?
    Preston's not red wall.

    All the Labour areas of Preston are in the Preston constituency and its rock solid Labour, while South Ribble is rock solid Tory.
  • GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,072
    dixiedean said:

    Alistair said:

    kle4 said:

    DavidL said:

    What I got from Boris's speech is what he wanted me to get. This is a government on a mission and with a hugely ambitious program to change this country for the better. He wants better transport, education, skills, education, law and order, the list went on and on.

    Will he be able to deliver? Who knows, certainly not on all of it but maybe on some. If he does he will have done better than most of his recent predecessors. The message from his speech is that this is not a government blundering around not knowing what it wants to do. I think he succeeded in that.

    Don't all political parties want things to be better? Has any conference speech stated they want transport and education to get worse?

    What I got from the speech was not that the Tories want to change the country for the better, but to impress upon people that they are still energetic and coming up with ideas (he talked about 'tired old Labour'), rather than a sclerotic 11 year old government paddling along.
    Yes, the entire rhetoric is remarkable. What the Tories are doing is pretending that Labour was in power until 2019, when Boris took over. Astonishingly, quite a lot of voters seem to think that this is true, and any current woes should be blamed on the Labour government 2010-2019. Things haven't got better yet because of Labour's misrule - but now Boris is in charge. It takes some brass neck, but it seems to work.

    The trick in the under the radar social media targetted ads has been to blame Labour Councils for Nationa Government policies.

    So "lack of funding for the NHS" is blamed on the local Labour Council.

    It has shown to be remarkably effective.

    Whether it can work at a second election in a row will be interesting to see...
    Well. Labour are running out of councils for a start. Although in many places "the Council" is code for Labour anyways. Even if it is Tory.
    Whereas Northumberland County Council is code for "utter useless"
  • GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,072
    Ps #cans
  • GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,072

    Alistair said:

    kle4 said:

    DavidL said:

    What I got from Boris's speech is what he wanted me to get. This is a government on a mission and with a hugely ambitious program to change this country for the better. He wants better transport, education, skills, education, law and order, the list went on and on.

    Will he be able to deliver? Who knows, certainly not on all of it but maybe on some. If he does he will have done better than most of his recent predecessors. The message from his speech is that this is not a government blundering around not knowing what it wants to do. I think he succeeded in that.

    Don't all political parties want things to be better? Has any conference speech stated they want transport and education to get worse?

    What I got from the speech was not that the Tories want to change the country for the better, but to impress upon people that they are still energetic and coming up with ideas (he talked about 'tired old Labour'), rather than a sclerotic 11 year old government paddling along.
    Yes, the entire rhetoric is remarkable. What the Tories are doing is pretending that Labour was in power until 2019, when Boris took over. Astonishingly, quite a lot of voters seem to think that this is true, and any current woes should be blamed on the Labour government 2010-2019. Things haven't got better yet because of Labour's misrule - but now Boris is in charge. It takes some brass neck, but it seems to work.

    The trick in the under the radar social media targetted ads has been to blame Labour Councils for Nationa Government policies.

    So "lack of funding for the NHS" is blamed on the local Labour Council.

    It has shown to be remarkably effective.

    Whether it can work at a second election in a row will be interesting to see...
    Yes, that was really clear from the vox pops I've seen from 'Red Wall' seats in the north and midlands. People were blaming everything on their Labour councils - hilariously, in some cases, when they didn't even have Labour councils any more.
    "I've had to wait 4 years for my hip operation, thanks to my Labour council", and stuff like that.
    I’m sure there is much of this going on. But there is also a sense that labour took Scotland’s voters for granted, until they were swept away. And then they still had the red wall in the north... until that was swept away. With too many in labour more interested in Palestine than in Peterborough they won’t win those voters back.
    I agree with your Scotland point. But your last sentence is just a facile Daily Mail-type myth. What's more, Peterborough isn't anywhere near 'the red wall in the north'.
    I know, but I couldn’t think of a P from the red wall. Preston?
    Preston's not red wall.

    All the Labour areas of Preston are in the Preston constituency and its rock solid Labour, while South Ribble is rock solid Tory.
    Aye - all those metropolitan liberal elites living in Preston
  • BHA player in his 20s arrested in Brighton

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yves_Bissouma
    "Yves Bissouma (born 30 August 1996) is a Malian professional footballer and gross sexual predator who plays as a midfielder for Premier League club Prison FC and the Mali national team."
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 27,835

    " Panic buying is a warning that the public does not trust the government’s ability to manage the seismic changes it seeks to visit on the economy. The fear lurking even among Tory strategists is that voters may conclude he is all destination and no map."


    https://www.ft.com/content/3746531f-3425-4d7c-bb87-45f61ce4d3c6

    Which may shed interesting light on why it is London and the SE worst affected.
    Maybe they have met the Boris type before in their daily life. Professional, posh, public school bullshitter who talks a great game but seldom delivers?
    That type rarely gets past first base up North.
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 27,835

    dixiedean said:

    Alistair said:

    kle4 said:

    DavidL said:

    What I got from Boris's speech is what he wanted me to get. This is a government on a mission and with a hugely ambitious program to change this country for the better. He wants better transport, education, skills, education, law and order, the list went on and on.

    Will he be able to deliver? Who knows, certainly not on all of it but maybe on some. If he does he will have done better than most of his recent predecessors. The message from his speech is that this is not a government blundering around not knowing what it wants to do. I think he succeeded in that.

    Don't all political parties want things to be better? Has any conference speech stated they want transport and education to get worse?

    What I got from the speech was not that the Tories want to change the country for the better, but to impress upon people that they are still energetic and coming up with ideas (he talked about 'tired old Labour'), rather than a sclerotic 11 year old government paddling along.
    Yes, the entire rhetoric is remarkable. What the Tories are doing is pretending that Labour was in power until 2019, when Boris took over. Astonishingly, quite a lot of voters seem to think that this is true, and any current woes should be blamed on the Labour government 2010-2019. Things haven't got better yet because of Labour's misrule - but now Boris is in charge. It takes some brass neck, but it seems to work.

    The trick in the under the radar social media targetted ads has been to blame Labour Councils for Nationa Government policies.

    So "lack of funding for the NHS" is blamed on the local Labour Council.

    It has shown to be remarkably effective.

    Whether it can work at a second election in a row will be interesting to see...
    Well. Labour are running out of councils for a start. Although in many places "the Council" is code for Labour anyways. Even if it is Tory.
    Whereas Northumberland County Council is code for "utter useless"
    Well it is. However, you'd be surprised how many think it is Labour run.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 46,220


    Leon said:

    kle4 said:

    Speaking of boring, saw The Dig on Netflix - one of the most tremendously dull things I've ever seen, why it was a movie at all baffled me.

    Yes, seriously mediocre. No story

    Yet my older daughter liked it: she adores archaeology
    No story?! There clearly was a story: it was the find of the century.

    But much more than that were the multi-layered themes: self-taught local outwits academia, the triumph of perseverance, human, mortalility and approaching doom, death and posterity.

    Plus, it was beatifully shot and brilliantly acted.

    And if that's not enough: Lily James.

    Disappointed if none of that moved you but each to their own I guess.
    The story felt contrived. It wasn't terrible. Just mediocre, as I say. Nice acting, meh script, drama tepid

    It actually reminded me of my first and only visit to Sutton Hoo last year. It's a deeply resonant place, the cradle of Englishness, but the site that remains is humdrum. A few hillocks, with all the treasures carted off to London (and fair enough, they are better seen there). Pff!

    You really have to force yourself to see the romance, the Anglo Saxon ships sweeping up the river, the king being carried in his vessel.....

    On the other hand the nearby town of Woodbridge is an absolute delight. One of the hidden gems of Britain. Gorgeously well preserved
  • LostPasswordLostPassword Posts: 14,772
    RobD said:

    Foxy said:

    Leon said:

    BUT Labour has got virtually no Conference bounce, so far - and this during a fuel shortage?

    That said, I'll be surprised if the Tories get a bounce. The entire nation is distracted, understandably. That will suit the Tories just fine. They are ahead, mid term, despite very heavy weather, and Boris has given more of a fillip to his troops than Starmer gave to his

    But there isn't a fuel shortage. I've been told that thousands of times on here. It's just panic buying.

    PS: Anecdote: my local petrol station was closed again today. No fuel. It opens for a few hours, long queues, sells out, closes again until it restocks. It is a fairly small petrol station. Same cycle now for 10 days. I must be very unlucky.
    I haven't seen my local petrol station have fuel for a week, but there is no queue a couple of miles away. So still rather patchy here.
    One of ours was closed yesterday, back open today. No real issues round here now. Annoying as it was, it was a massive over reaction to a tiny problem. Inevitably all those panic buyers who aren’t actually using their full tanks, are not needing to fill them yet.
    An interesting graph of fuel stock levels from Sky. You can see that stock levels had been falling for some time prior to the panic and that they are still nowhere near back to normal. How long until the next panic?

    https://e3.365dm.com/21/10/2048x1152/skynews-graph-fuel_5536612.png?bypass-service-worker&20211006065839
    Would be interesting to see a more extensive dataset. That could entirely be down to seasonal variations, for example.
    The BEIS data on stock levels only goes back to the start of 2020, so it's no use for that because everything is distorted by pandemic effects. However, if you look at the more extensive data for monthly deliveries of petroleum products it is hard to see any seasonal variation in deliveries at all. For example, it's not even consistent whether more fuel is delivered in September compared to August - and you'd think the change from school holidays to normal term-time would produce one of the clearest signals if there was going to be any pattern.

    So it is suggestive of there being a small deficit in deliveries, which would eventually lead to real problems.

    It will be interesting to see the BEIS data when that is released, which is due on the 14th October, as it is based on about ten times as many fuel stations, just over half the total.
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 91,392

    kle4 said:

    I didn't see either of the speeches, and I don't care to watch them either. And I'm someone who's very interested in politics.

    No normal people will either.

    People are worried about fuel, gas, electricity, economic recovery, their jobs, Covid and Christmas.

    They couldn't give a rat's ass about party conference speeches.

    No normal people cares about any political minutiae, therefore none of it matters at all? I'd say no. Small things add up, affect party unity or morale, which impacts the actions they take which the public might notice, even if they won't on the fine details.
    These speeches don't matter in the slightest and will change absolutely nothing.

    There. Made it simple for you.

    Goodnight.
    Thanks for the insight, but as I was trying to suggest by your logic, since normal people do not follow politics even closely, nothing that happens matters in the slightest or changes anything, and yet we see things do change. I think it pretty stupid to deny even the possibility of cumulative affect from very minor things - if Starmer had been enviscerated by his conference would that have been meaningless? Don't be silly - even if most people didn't notice, it would affect how the party responded to things.

    So a 'nothing matters, dat's simple' approach is, well, far too simplistic. Most things dont matter individually. I am 100% certain you will have gotten exercised about somehting that doesn't really matter and won't be noticed by the public, yet I'm equally certain you'd deny that was the case.
  • AnabobazinaAnabobazina Posts: 19,598


    Leon said:

    kle4 said:

    Speaking of boring, saw The Dig on Netflix - one of the most tremendously dull things I've ever seen, why it was a movie at all baffled me.

    Yes, seriously mediocre. No story

    Yet my older daughter liked it: she adores archaeology
    No story?! There clearly was a story: it was the find of the century.

    But much more than that were the multi-layered themes: self-taught local outwits academia, the triumph of perseverance, human, mortalility and approaching doom, death and posterity.

    Plus, it was beatifully shot and brilliantly acted.

    And if that's not enough: Lily James.

    Disappointed if none of that moved you but each to their own I guess.
    Yes, I loved it. I’m surprised it wasn’t popular on PB. The photography was especially amazing.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 46,220
    I'm having fun discovering the mad Farageistes of France

    Here's a French politician saying that Brexit is a chance for France to IMPOSE French as the sole official language in the EU. That's the word he uses. "Impose"

    "Et si nous profitions du départ des anglais de l’UE pour imposer le français comme langue officielle dans les institutions européennes ? C’est l’idée que nous défendons cet après-midi à l’AN avec mon collègue"

    https://twitter.com/FabriceBrun/status/1445691431536840705?s=20


    The Irish aren't happy

    https://twitter.com/NaomiOhReally/status/1445809417115602944?s=20

    "English is now the mother tongue of only 1% of the Union's population" Ireland and Malta crushed with a sweep of the Gallic hand"
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,766

    Foxy said:

    kle4 said:

    DavidL said:

    What I got from Boris's speech is what he wanted me to get. This is a government on a mission and with a hugely ambitious program to change this country for the better. He wants better transport, education, skills, education, law and order, the list went on and on.

    Will he be able to deliver? Who knows, certainly not on all of it but maybe on some. If he does he will have done better than most of his recent predecessors. The message from his speech is that this is not a government blundering around not knowing what it wants to do. I think he succeeded in that.

    Don't all political parties want things to be better? Has any conference speech stated they want transport and education to get worse?

    What I got from the speech was not that the Tories want to change the country for the better, but to impress upon people that they are still energetic and coming up with ideas (he talked about 'tired old Labour'), rather than a sclerotic 11 year old government paddling along.
    I think quite a major market correction is on its way this autumn. In part domestic, but both the Chinese and American situations look dicey to me too. I have cashed in my more exposed equities until I see which way the wind is blowing.
    But where to put savings if not in equities? There are no comfortable alternatives.

    I'm currently thinking I'll sit it out a take the correction when it comes and hope for a recovery next year.
    For what its worth: Telegraph's AEP announced the other day he had sold all his stocks and is sitting on cash as there is a correction due.
    Fwiw, I am also 75% cash right now.

    I mean, I'm taking a big inflation hit, but I can't help feel that stock markets (and particularly big cap US tech) are all really expensive.
  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 24,583
    dixiedean said:

    Alistair said:

    kle4 said:

    DavidL said:

    What I got from Boris's speech is what he wanted me to get. This is a government on a mission and with a hugely ambitious program to change this country for the better. He wants better transport, education, skills, education, law and order, the list went on and on.

    Will he be able to deliver? Who knows, certainly not on all of it but maybe on some. If he does he will have done better than most of his recent predecessors. The message from his speech is that this is not a government blundering around not knowing what it wants to do. I think he succeeded in that.

    Don't all political parties want things to be better? Has any conference speech stated they want transport and education to get worse?

    What I got from the speech was not that the Tories want to change the country for the better, but to impress upon people that they are still energetic and coming up with ideas (he talked about 'tired old Labour'), rather than a sclerotic 11 year old government paddling along.
    Yes, the entire rhetoric is remarkable. What the Tories are doing is pretending that Labour was in power until 2019, when Boris took over. Astonishingly, quite a lot of voters seem to think that this is true, and any current woes should be blamed on the Labour government 2010-2019. Things haven't got better yet because of Labour's misrule - but now Boris is in charge. It takes some brass neck, but it seems to work.

    The trick in the under the radar social media targetted ads has been to blame Labour Councils for Nationa Government policies.

    So "lack of funding for the NHS" is blamed on the local Labour Council.

    It has shown to be remarkably effective.

    Whether it can work at a second election in a row will be interesting to see...
    Well. Labour are running out of councils for a start. Although in many places "the Council" is code for Labour anyways. Even if it is Tory.
    "Labour Councils" in Northamptonshire and Surrey of course went bang, even before the pandemic.

    The genius of Johnson's speech today, and it really is genius, was that he framed the narrative to appear he is busy clearing up his opponents' mess. He alludes to Labour as the architects of the chaos, but the opposition in question may be Cameron or May's Governments, the EU, Business or liberal elites. Basically anyone but Johnson, and his pitch is plausible, which makes him so dangerous.
  • CharlesCharles Posts: 35,758
    Farooq said:

    "Also, 40% said Mr Johnson was interesting and 22% said boring."

    "More people even thought Sir Keir was interesting, with 41% saying that about his speech."

    I find it interesting that Starmer's boring number isn't there

    28%.
    Starmer was more interesting and more boring.
    But his net less good. Bj +18% SKS +13%
  • RogerRoger Posts: 18,891
    Leon said:


    Leon said:

    kle4 said:

    Speaking of boring, saw The Dig on Netflix - one of the most tremendously dull things I've ever seen, why it was a movie at all baffled me.

    Yes, seriously mediocre. No story

    Yet my older daughter liked it: she adores archaeology
    No story?! There clearly was a story: it was the find of the century.

    But much more than that were the multi-layered themes: self-taught local outwits academia, the triumph of perseverance, human, mortalility and approaching doom, death and posterity.

    Plus, it was beatifully shot and brilliantly acted.

    And if that's not enough: Lily James.

    Disappointed if none of that moved you but each to their own I guess.
    The story felt contrived. It wasn't terrible. Just mediocre, as I say. Nice acting, meh script, drama tepid

    It actually reminded me of my first and only visit to Sutton Hoo last year. It's a deeply resonant place, the cradle of Englishness, but the site that remains is humdrum. A few hillocks, with all the treasures carted off to London (and fair enough, they are better seen there). Pff!

    You really have to force yourself to see the romance, the Anglo Saxon ships sweeping up the river, the king being carried in his vessel.....

    On the other hand the nearby town of Woodbridge is an absolute delight. One of the hidden gems of Britain. Gorgeously well preserved
    A rather tragic story involving a photographer friend of mine happened in Woodbridge last year which involved his death and his wife's. A fine looking place though.
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 27,835
    Those facing a £20 UC cut today will be delighted that the
    isam said:

    kle4 said:

    DavidL said:

    What I got from Boris's speech is what he wanted me to get. This is a government on a mission and with a hugely ambitious program to change this country for the better. He wants better transport, education, skills, education, law and order, the list went on and on.

    Will he be able to deliver? Who knows, certainly not on all of it but maybe on some. If he does he will have done better than most of his recent predecessors. The message from his speech is that this is not a government blundering around not knowing what it wants to do. I think he succeeded in that.

    Don't all political parties want things to be better? Has any conference speech stated they want transport and education to get worse?

    What I got from the speech was not that the Tories want to change the country for the better, but to impress upon people that they are still energetic and coming up with ideas (he talked about 'tired old Labour'), rather than a sclerotic 11 year old government paddling along.
    Yes, the entire rhetoric is remarkable. What the Tories are doing is pretending that Labour was in power until 2019, when Boris took over. Astonishingly, quite a lot of voters seem to think that this is true, and any current woes should be blamed on the Labour government 2010-2019. Things haven't got better yet because of Labour's misrule - but now Boris is in charge. It takes some brass neck, but it seems to work.
    He is probably trying to draw a line between Leave and Remain - Sir Keir’s Labour being associated with the low wage, high immigration era whilst his Tories want to train our youngsters and see wages increase etc
    I'd be interested in examples of what has been done to "train our youngsters", rather than what has been said.
    As someone in the FE trade, it appears to be the cube root of jack shite thus far.
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 44,053
    rcs1000 said:

    Foxy said:

    kle4 said:

    DavidL said:

    What I got from Boris's speech is what he wanted me to get. This is a government on a mission and with a hugely ambitious program to change this country for the better. He wants better transport, education, skills, education, law and order, the list went on and on.

    Will he be able to deliver? Who knows, certainly not on all of it but maybe on some. If he does he will have done better than most of his recent predecessors. The message from his speech is that this is not a government blundering around not knowing what it wants to do. I think he succeeded in that.

    Don't all political parties want things to be better? Has any conference speech stated they want transport and education to get worse?

    What I got from the speech was not that the Tories want to change the country for the better, but to impress upon people that they are still energetic and coming up with ideas (he talked about 'tired old Labour'), rather than a sclerotic 11 year old government paddling along.
    I think quite a major market correction is on its way this autumn. In part domestic, but both the Chinese and American situations look dicey to me too. I have cashed in my more exposed equities until I see which way the wind is blowing.
    But where to put savings if not in equities? There are no comfortable alternatives.

    I'm currently thinking I'll sit it out a take the correction when it comes and hope for a recovery next year.
    For what its worth: Telegraph's AEP announced the other day he had sold all his stocks and is sitting on cash as there is a correction due.
    Fwiw, I am also 75% cash right now.

    I mean, I'm taking a big inflation hit, but I can't help feel that stock markets (and particularly big cap US tech) are all really expensive.
    I am more like 40% cash, but the remainder is in fairly defensive stocks. Riding it out then buying back in the spring.
  • williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 47,786
    Leon said:

    I'm having fun discovering the mad Farageistes of France

    A Mayor from the mainstream Republicains party said yesterday that native French people are being "ethnically cleansed" from some areas.

    https://twitter.com/gillesplatret/status/1445366427033260037
  • isamisam Posts: 40,725
    dixiedean said:

    Those facing a £20 UC cut today will be delighted that the

    isam said:

    kle4 said:

    DavidL said:

    What I got from Boris's speech is what he wanted me to get. This is a government on a mission and with a hugely ambitious program to change this country for the better. He wants better transport, education, skills, education, law and order, the list went on and on.

    Will he be able to deliver? Who knows, certainly not on all of it but maybe on some. If he does he will have done better than most of his recent predecessors. The message from his speech is that this is not a government blundering around not knowing what it wants to do. I think he succeeded in that.

    Don't all political parties want things to be better? Has any conference speech stated they want transport and education to get worse?

    What I got from the speech was not that the Tories want to change the country for the better, but to impress upon people that they are still energetic and coming up with ideas (he talked about 'tired old Labour'), rather than a sclerotic 11 year old government paddling along.
    Yes, the entire rhetoric is remarkable. What the Tories are doing is pretending that Labour was in power until 2019, when Boris took over. Astonishingly, quite a lot of voters seem to think that this is true, and any current woes should be blamed on the Labour government 2010-2019. Things haven't got better yet because of Labour's misrule - but now Boris is in charge. It takes some brass neck, but it seems to work.
    He is probably trying to draw a line between Leave and Remain - Sir Keir’s Labour being associated with the low wage, high immigration era whilst his Tories want to train our youngsters and see wages increase etc
    I'd be interested in examples of what has been done to "train our youngsters", rather than what has been said.
    As someone in the FE trade, it appears to be the cube root of jack shite thus far.
    I’d have thought it was an aim for the future, in contrast to the mass importation of cheap labour, rather than something that has already been done
  • CharlesCharles Posts: 35,758
    Alistair said:

    I'm impressed at the Schleswig-Holstein Question being solved in the last thread.

    Wow! What was the answer?
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 27,835

    dixiedean said:

    Alistair said:

    kle4 said:

    DavidL said:

    What I got from Boris's speech is what he wanted me to get. This is a government on a mission and with a hugely ambitious program to change this country for the better. He wants better transport, education, skills, education, law and order, the list went on and on.

    Will he be able to deliver? Who knows, certainly not on all of it but maybe on some. If he does he will have done better than most of his recent predecessors. The message from his speech is that this is not a government blundering around not knowing what it wants to do. I think he succeeded in that.

    Don't all political parties want things to be better? Has any conference speech stated they want transport and education to get worse?

    What I got from the speech was not that the Tories want to change the country for the better, but to impress upon people that they are still energetic and coming up with ideas (he talked about 'tired old Labour'), rather than a sclerotic 11 year old government paddling along.
    Yes, the entire rhetoric is remarkable. What the Tories are doing is pretending that Labour was in power until 2019, when Boris took over. Astonishingly, quite a lot of voters seem to think that this is true, and any current woes should be blamed on the Labour government 2010-2019. Things haven't got better yet because of Labour's misrule - but now Boris is in charge. It takes some brass neck, but it seems to work.

    The trick in the under the radar social media targetted ads has been to blame Labour Councils for Nationa Government policies.

    So "lack of funding for the NHS" is blamed on the local Labour Council.

    It has shown to be remarkably effective.

    Whether it can work at a second election in a row will be interesting to see...
    Well. Labour are running out of councils for a start. Although in many places "the Council" is code for Labour anyways. Even if it is Tory.
    "Labour Councils" in Northamptonshire and Surrey of course went bang, even before the pandemic.

    The genius of Johnson's speech today, and it really is genius, was that he framed the narrative to appear he is busy clearing up his opponents' mess. He alludes to Labour as the architects of the chaos, but the opposition in question may be Cameron or May's Governments, the EU, Business or liberal elites. Basically anyone but Johnson, and his pitch is plausible, which makes him so dangerous.
    Yes. I noted this afternoon his reference to "the last 40 years." I did try to warn in 2019 he was running against the Thatcherite consensus.
    He is Harold Wilson. Inflation doesn't matter. Technology will solve stuff. Pay rises are great things. Force of personality born of intellectual superiority.
    Expect him to call a referendum on the EU in his fourth term.
  • JonathanJonathan Posts: 20,901
    Not surprised Boris tanked. Less of a speech, more of a turn. Vacuous.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 46,220
    Roger said:

    Leon said:


    Leon said:

    kle4 said:

    Speaking of boring, saw The Dig on Netflix - one of the most tremendously dull things I've ever seen, why it was a movie at all baffled me.

    Yes, seriously mediocre. No story

    Yet my older daughter liked it: she adores archaeology
    No story?! There clearly was a story: it was the find of the century.

    But much more than that were the multi-layered themes: self-taught local outwits academia, the triumph of perseverance, human, mortalility and approaching doom, death and posterity.

    Plus, it was beatifully shot and brilliantly acted.

    And if that's not enough: Lily James.

    Disappointed if none of that moved you but each to their own I guess.
    The story felt contrived. It wasn't terrible. Just mediocre, as I say. Nice acting, meh script, drama tepid

    It actually reminded me of my first and only visit to Sutton Hoo last year. It's a deeply resonant place, the cradle of Englishness, but the site that remains is humdrum. A few hillocks, with all the treasures carted off to London (and fair enough, they are better seen there). Pff!

    You really have to force yourself to see the romance, the Anglo Saxon ships sweeping up the river, the king being carried in his vessel.....

    On the other hand the nearby town of Woodbridge is an absolute delight. One of the hidden gems of Britain. Gorgeously well preserved
    A rather tragic story involving a photographer friend of mine happened in Woodbridge last year which involved his death and his wife's. A fine looking place though.
    Sorry to hear that, Rog. I believe I may have heard rumours

    Yes, a lovely town
  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 24,583

    kle4 said:

    I didn't see either of the speeches, and I don't care to watch them either. And I'm someone who's very interested in politics.

    No normal people will either.

    People are worried about fuel, gas, electricity, economic recovery, their jobs, Covid and Christmas.

    They couldn't give a rat's ass about party conference speeches.

    No normal people cares about any political minutiae, therefore none of it matters at all? I'd say no. Small things add up, affect party unity or morale, which impacts the actions they take which the public might notice, even if they won't on the fine details.
    These speeches don't matter in the slightest and will change absolutely nothing.

    There. Made it simple for you.

    Goodnight.
    Johnson will get a short term boost. Starmer got (correctly) drowned out by Wayne Couzens.

    I suspect today's speech confirmed to both Johnson lovers and Johnson sceptics what they already knew. I found it tiresome and I hated it, but then I do come across as Lord Astor when it comes to anything Johnson.
  • Northern_AlNorthern_Al Posts: 7,459

    BHA player in his 20s arrested in Brighton

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yves_Bissouma
    "Yves Bissouma (born 30 August 1996) is a Malian professional footballer and gross sexual predator who plays as a midfielder for Premier League club Prison FC and the Mali national team."

    That has already been edited out of the link. However, the local rag says that an "unnamed Brighton player" has been arrested for sexual assault at a nightclub. There were rumours that Liverpool were trying to sign Bissouma. If it's him, I'd imagine that deal is off.
  • CharlesCharles Posts: 35,758

    Alistair said:

    kle4 said:

    DavidL said:

    What I got from Boris's speech is what he wanted me to get. This is a government on a mission and with a hugely ambitious program to change this country for the better. He wants better transport, education, skills, education, law and order, the list went on and on.

    Will he be able to deliver? Who knows, certainly not on all of it but maybe on some. If he does he will have done better than most of his recent predecessors. The message from his speech is that this is not a government blundering around not knowing what it wants to do. I think he succeeded in that.

    Don't all political parties want things to be better? Has any conference speech stated they want transport and education to get worse?

    What I got from the speech was not that the Tories want to change the country for the better, but to impress upon people that they are still energetic and coming up with ideas (he talked about 'tired old Labour'), rather than a sclerotic 11 year old government paddling along.
    Yes, the entire rhetoric is remarkable. What the Tories are doing is pretending that Labour was in power until 2019, when Boris took over. Astonishingly, quite a lot of voters seem to think that this is true, and any current woes should be blamed on the Labour government 2010-2019. Things haven't got better yet because of Labour's misrule - but now Boris is in charge. It takes some brass neck, but it seems to work.

    The trick in the under the radar social media targetted ads has been to blame Labour Councils for Nationa Government policies.

    So "lack of funding for the NHS" is blamed on the local Labour Council.

    It has shown to be remarkably effective.

    Whether it can work at a second election in a row will be interesting to see...
    Yes, that was really clear from the vox pops I've seen from 'Red Wall' seats in the north and midlands. People were blaming everything on their Labour councils - hilariously, in some cases, when they didn't even have Labour councils any more.
    "I've had to wait 4 years for my hip operation, thanks to my Labour council", and stuff like that.
    I’m sure there is much of this going on. But there is also a sense that labour took Scotland’s voters for granted, until they were swept away. And then they still had the red wall in the north... until that was swept away. With too many in labour more interested in Palestine than in Peterborough they won’t win those voters back.
    I agree with your Scotland point. But your last sentence is just a facile Daily Mail-type myth. What's more, Peterborough isn't anywhere near 'the red wall in the north'.
    I know, but I couldn’t think of a P from the red wall. Preston?
    Pontefract?
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 27,835
    isam said:

    dixiedean said:

    Those facing a £20 UC cut today will be delighted that the

    isam said:

    kle4 said:

    DavidL said:

    What I got from Boris's speech is what he wanted me to get. This is a government on a mission and with a hugely ambitious program to change this country for the better. He wants better transport, education, skills, education, law and order, the list went on and on.

    Will he be able to deliver? Who knows, certainly not on all of it but maybe on some. If he does he will have done better than most of his recent predecessors. The message from his speech is that this is not a government blundering around not knowing what it wants to do. I think he succeeded in that.

    Don't all political parties want things to be better? Has any conference speech stated they want transport and education to get worse?

    What I got from the speech was not that the Tories want to change the country for the better, but to impress upon people that they are still energetic and coming up with ideas (he talked about 'tired old Labour'), rather than a sclerotic 11 year old government paddling along.
    Yes, the entire rhetoric is remarkable. What the Tories are doing is pretending that Labour was in power until 2019, when Boris took over. Astonishingly, quite a lot of voters seem to think that this is true, and any current woes should be blamed on the Labour government 2010-2019. Things haven't got better yet because of Labour's misrule - but now Boris is in charge. It takes some brass neck, but it seems to work.
    He is probably trying to draw a line between Leave and Remain - Sir Keir’s Labour being associated with the low wage, high immigration era whilst his Tories want to train our youngsters and see wages increase etc
    I'd be interested in examples of what has been done to "train our youngsters", rather than what has been said.
    As someone in the FE trade, it appears to be the cube root of jack shite thus far.
    I’d have thought it was an aim for the future, in contrast to the mass importation of cheap labour, rather than something that has already been done
    Yes but. He's been in power for 2 years plus. We all are aware of the Grand Plan.
    Yet nowt practical seems to happen.
    When will this training begin? And who will do it? And where?
  • LeonLeon Posts: 46,220

    Leon said:

    I'm having fun discovering the mad Farageistes of France

    A Mayor from the mainstream Republicains party said yesterday that native French people are being "ethnically cleansed" from some areas.

    https://twitter.com/gillesplatret/status/1445366427033260037
    I'm still down the Francophonie rabbit-hole. It is actually quite significant. There are serious moves in several African countries to ditch French altogether, in favour of English. Gabon, Congo. Morocco, and others. And it has already happened in Rwanda, which is perceived as having benefited economically.

    This would be quite a cultural tilt, for the world. The weird thing is that everything Macron tries to do, to reverse the tide, seems to make it worse. He returned some stolen cultural treasures, for instance - notably unlike Britain - yet that just made African people angrier. The stuff about "crossbreeding" and "love between France and Africa" was a minor disaster.

    It passes as autumn evening quite pleasantly.
  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 24,583

    BHA player in his 20s arrested in Brighton

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yves_Bissouma
    "Yves Bissouma (born 30 August 1996) is a Malian professional footballer and gross sexual predator who plays as a midfielder for Premier League club Prison FC and the Mali national team."

    That has already been edited out of the link. However, the local rag says that an "unnamed Brighton player" has been arrested for sexual assault at a nightclub. There were rumours that Liverpool were trying to sign Bissouma. If it's him, I'd imagine that deal is off.
    A more interesting football related story today is Gary Neville's takedown of Edwina Curry.
  • Northern_AlNorthern_Al Posts: 7,459
    Charles said:

    Alistair said:

    kle4 said:

    DavidL said:

    What I got from Boris's speech is what he wanted me to get. This is a government on a mission and with a hugely ambitious program to change this country for the better. He wants better transport, education, skills, education, law and order, the list went on and on.

    Will he be able to deliver? Who knows, certainly not on all of it but maybe on some. If he does he will have done better than most of his recent predecessors. The message from his speech is that this is not a government blundering around not knowing what it wants to do. I think he succeeded in that.

    Don't all political parties want things to be better? Has any conference speech stated they want transport and education to get worse?

    What I got from the speech was not that the Tories want to change the country for the better, but to impress upon people that they are still energetic and coming up with ideas (he talked about 'tired old Labour'), rather than a sclerotic 11 year old government paddling along.
    Yes, the entire rhetoric is remarkable. What the Tories are doing is pretending that Labour was in power until 2019, when Boris took over. Astonishingly, quite a lot of voters seem to think that this is true, and any current woes should be blamed on the Labour government 2010-2019. Things haven't got better yet because of Labour's misrule - but now Boris is in charge. It takes some brass neck, but it seems to work.

    The trick in the under the radar social media targetted ads has been to blame Labour Councils for Nationa Government policies.

    So "lack of funding for the NHS" is blamed on the local Labour Council.

    It has shown to be remarkably effective.

    Whether it can work at a second election in a row will be interesting to see...
    Yes, that was really clear from the vox pops I've seen from 'Red Wall' seats in the north and midlands. People were blaming everything on their Labour councils - hilariously, in some cases, when they didn't even have Labour councils any more.
    "I've had to wait 4 years for my hip operation, thanks to my Labour council", and stuff like that.
    I’m sure there is much of this going on. But there is also a sense that labour took Scotland’s voters for granted, until they were swept away. And then they still had the red wall in the north... until that was swept away. With too many in labour more interested in Palestine than in Peterborough they won’t win those voters back.
    I agree with your Scotland point. But your last sentence is just a facile Daily Mail-type myth. What's more, Peterborough isn't anywhere near 'the red wall in the north'.
    I know, but I couldn’t think of a P from the red wall. Preston?
    Pontefract?
    No. Yvette Cooper. Must try harder.
  • isamisam Posts: 40,725
    dixiedean said:

    isam said:

    dixiedean said:

    Those facing a £20 UC cut today will be delighted that the

    isam said:

    kle4 said:

    DavidL said:

    What I got from Boris's speech is what he wanted me to get. This is a government on a mission and with a hugely ambitious program to change this country for the better. He wants better transport, education, skills, education, law and order, the list went on and on.

    Will he be able to deliver? Who knows, certainly not on all of it but maybe on some. If he does he will have done better than most of his recent predecessors. The message from his speech is that this is not a government blundering around not knowing what it wants to do. I think he succeeded in that.

    Don't all political parties want things to be better? Has any conference speech stated they want transport and education to get worse?

    What I got from the speech was not that the Tories want to change the country for the better, but to impress upon people that they are still energetic and coming up with ideas (he talked about 'tired old Labour'), rather than a sclerotic 11 year old government paddling along.
    Yes, the entire rhetoric is remarkable. What the Tories are doing is pretending that Labour was in power until 2019, when Boris took over. Astonishingly, quite a lot of voters seem to think that this is true, and any current woes should be blamed on the Labour government 2010-2019. Things haven't got better yet because of Labour's misrule - but now Boris is in charge. It takes some brass neck, but it seems to work.
    He is probably trying to draw a line between Leave and Remain - Sir Keir’s Labour being associated with the low wage, high immigration era whilst his Tories want to train our youngsters and see wages increase etc
    I'd be interested in examples of what has been done to "train our youngsters", rather than what has been said.
    As someone in the FE trade, it appears to be the cube root of jack shite thus far.
    I’d have thought it was an aim for the future, in contrast to the mass importation of cheap labour, rather than something that has already been done
    Yes but. He's been in power for 2 years plus. We all are aware of the Grand Plan.
    Yet nowt practical seems to happen.
    When will this training begin? And who will do it? And where?
    The pandemic probably hasn’t helped. That’s been most of the time since he won the election, before that he didn’t have a majority, and Brexit wasn’t done. So in reality he’s had 22 months of which at least 18 have been dominated by Covid
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 91,392
    edited October 2021
    I'm sure much politics is being made from it around trampling of the Scottish Parliament, and fine legal minds will be making more measured analysis of the judgment today about legislative competency and political implications that may arise, but I did like some of the gentle legal snark that seems common in judgements when courts are not impressed by an argument.

    In his written submissions, counsel also emphasised that the Bill had been passed unanimously by the Scottish Parliament. The court understands that. It is, of course, entirely respectful of the Scottish Parliament, whatever the size of the majority by which its enactments have been passed. But the fact that an enactment has been passed by the Scottish Parliament, even unanimously, has no bearing on the legal questions which this court has to decide. Section 33 of the Scotland Act only applies where an enactment has been passed by the Scottish Parliament. The question which the court is required to answer is whether the provision in question would be outside the Parliament’s legislative competence. The answer to that question does not depend on the number of MSPs who voted for it

    Or

    Counsel for the Lord Advocate argued, however, that the fact that the scope of section 20(10)(a)(ii) is restricted to Acts of Parliament enacted before section 20 comes into force renders it within competence. This argument assumes that “the power of the Parliament of the United Kingdom to make laws for Scotland”, within the meaning of section 28(7) of the Scotland Act, is confined to the future enactment of Acts of Parliament, as from a date which can be selected by the Scottish Parliament or the Scottish Ministers. So understood, section 28(7) provides no protection to the body of legislation which Parliament enacted prior to the selected date, and permits such legislation to be deprived of effect by the Scottish courts.

    It is difficult to accept that section 28(7) was intended to be given such a narrow interpretation
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 27,835
    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    I'm having fun discovering the mad Farageistes of France

    A Mayor from the mainstream Republicains party said yesterday that native French people are being "ethnically cleansed" from some areas.

    https://twitter.com/gillesplatret/status/1445366427033260037
    I'm still down the Francophonie rabbit-hole. It is actually quite significant. There are serious moves in several African countries to ditch French altogether, in favour of English. Gabon, Congo. Morocco, and others. And it has already happened in Rwanda, which is perceived as having benefited economically.

    This would be quite a cultural tilt, for the world. The weird thing is that everything Macron tries to do, to reverse the tide, seems to make it worse. He returned some stolen cultural treasures, for instance - notably unlike Britain - yet that just made African people angrier. The stuff about "crossbreeding" and "love between France and Africa" was a minor disaster.

    It passes as autumn evening quite pleasantly.
    Thanks to prominent supporters of Leave for their regular updates on the minutiae of EU politics.
    They seem to be more interested than when we were members.
  • AnabobazinaAnabobazina Posts: 19,598
    Charles said:

    Alistair said:

    I'm impressed at the Schleswig-Holstein Question being solved in the last thread.

    Wow! What was the answer?
    We have all forgotten all about it.
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 27,835
    isam said:

    dixiedean said:

    isam said:

    dixiedean said:

    Those facing a £20 UC cut today will be delighted that the

    isam said:

    kle4 said:

    DavidL said:

    What I got from Boris's speech is what he wanted me to get. This is a government on a mission and with a hugely ambitious program to change this country for the better. He wants better transport, education, skills, education, law and order, the list went on and on.

    Will he be able to deliver? Who knows, certainly not on all of it but maybe on some. If he does he will have done better than most of his recent predecessors. The message from his speech is that this is not a government blundering around not knowing what it wants to do. I think he succeeded in that.

    Don't all political parties want things to be better? Has any conference speech stated they want transport and education to get worse?

    What I got from the speech was not that the Tories want to change the country for the better, but to impress upon people that they are still energetic and coming up with ideas (he talked about 'tired old Labour'), rather than a sclerotic 11 year old government paddling along.
    Yes, the entire rhetoric is remarkable. What the Tories are doing is pretending that Labour was in power until 2019, when Boris took over. Astonishingly, quite a lot of voters seem to think that this is true, and any current woes should be blamed on the Labour government 2010-2019. Things haven't got better yet because of Labour's misrule - but now Boris is in charge. It takes some brass neck, but it seems to work.
    He is probably trying to draw a line between Leave and Remain - Sir Keir’s Labour being associated with the low wage, high immigration era whilst his Tories want to train our youngsters and see wages increase etc
    I'd be interested in examples of what has been done to "train our youngsters", rather than what has been said.
    As someone in the FE trade, it appears to be the cube root of jack shite thus far.
    I’d have thought it was an aim for the future, in contrast to the mass importation of cheap labour, rather than something that has already been done
    Yes but. He's been in power for 2 years plus. We all are aware of the Grand Plan.
    Yet nowt practical seems to happen.
    When will this training begin? And who will do it? And where?
    The pandemic probably hasn’t helped. That’s been most of the time since he won the election, before that he didn’t have a majority, and Brexit wasn’t done. So in reality he’s had 22 months of which at least 18 have been dominated by Covid
    Surely then a speech to Conference would be the ideal time to outline some specifics?
    Apparently not.
  • isamisam Posts: 40,725
    dixiedean said:

    isam said:

    dixiedean said:

    isam said:

    dixiedean said:

    Those facing a £20 UC cut today will be delighted that the

    isam said:

    kle4 said:

    DavidL said:

    What I got from Boris's speech is what he wanted me to get. This is a government on a mission and with a hugely ambitious program to change this country for the better. He wants better transport, education, skills, education, law and order, the list went on and on.

    Will he be able to deliver? Who knows, certainly not on all of it but maybe on some. If he does he will have done better than most of his recent predecessors. The message from his speech is that this is not a government blundering around not knowing what it wants to do. I think he succeeded in that.

    Don't all political parties want things to be better? Has any conference speech stated they want transport and education to get worse?

    What I got from the speech was not that the Tories want to change the country for the better, but to impress upon people that they are still energetic and coming up with ideas (he talked about 'tired old Labour'), rather than a sclerotic 11 year old government paddling along.
    Yes, the entire rhetoric is remarkable. What the Tories are doing is pretending that Labour was in power until 2019, when Boris took over. Astonishingly, quite a lot of voters seem to think that this is true, and any current woes should be blamed on the Labour government 2010-2019. Things haven't got better yet because of Labour's misrule - but now Boris is in charge. It takes some brass neck, but it seems to work.
    He is probably trying to draw a line between Leave and Remain - Sir Keir’s Labour being associated with the low wage, high immigration era whilst his Tories want to train our youngsters and see wages increase etc
    I'd be interested in examples of what has been done to "train our youngsters", rather than what has been said.
    As someone in the FE trade, it appears to be the cube root of jack shite thus far.
    I’d have thought it was an aim for the future, in contrast to the mass importation of cheap labour, rather than something that has already been done
    Yes but. He's been in power for 2 years plus. We all are aware of the Grand Plan.
    Yet nowt practical seems to happen.
    When will this training begin? And who will do it? And where?
    The pandemic probably hasn’t helped. That’s been most of the time since he won the election, before that he didn’t have a majority, and Brexit wasn’t done. So in reality he’s had 22 months of which at least 18 have been dominated by Covid
    Surely then a speech to Conference would be the ideal time to outline some specifics?
    Apparently not.
    Wouldn’t know, I didn’t listen to it
  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 24,583
    isam said:

    dixiedean said:

    isam said:

    dixiedean said:

    Those facing a £20 UC cut today will be delighted that the

    isam said:

    kle4 said:

    DavidL said:

    What I got from Boris's speech is what he wanted me to get. This is a government on a mission and with a hugely ambitious program to change this country for the better. He wants better transport, education, skills, education, law and order, the list went on and on.

    Will he be able to deliver? Who knows, certainly not on all of it but maybe on some. If he does he will have done better than most of his recent predecessors. The message from his speech is that this is not a government blundering around not knowing what it wants to do. I think he succeeded in that.

    Don't all political parties want things to be better? Has any conference speech stated they want transport and education to get worse?

    What I got from the speech was not that the Tories want to change the country for the better, but to impress upon people that they are still energetic and coming up with ideas (he talked about 'tired old Labour'), rather than a sclerotic 11 year old government paddling along.
    Yes, the entire rhetoric is remarkable. What the Tories are doing is pretending that Labour was in power until 2019, when Boris took over. Astonishingly, quite a lot of voters seem to think that this is true, and any current woes should be blamed on the Labour government 2010-2019. Things haven't got better yet because of Labour's misrule - but now Boris is in charge. It takes some brass neck, but it seems to work.
    He is probably trying to draw a line between Leave and Remain - Sir Keir’s Labour being associated with the low wage, high immigration era whilst his Tories want to train our youngsters and see wages increase etc
    I'd be interested in examples of what has been done to "train our youngsters", rather than what has been said.
    As someone in the FE trade, it appears to be the cube root of jack shite thus far.
    I’d have thought it was an aim for the future, in contrast to the mass importation of cheap labour, rather than something that has already been done
    Yes but. He's been in power for 2 years plus. We all are aware of the Grand Plan.
    Yet nowt practical seems to happen.
    When will this training begin? And who will do it? And where?
    The pandemic probably hasn’t helped. That’s been most of the time since he won the election, before that he didn’t have a majority, and Brexit wasn’t done. So in reality he’s had 22 months of which at least 18 have been dominated by Covid
    Johnson the ultimate showman is riding a whole herd of unicorns.

    Nothing tangible will be achieved.

    It's a circus, and when the circus leaves town someone else will have to clear the residual debris away.
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 91,392
    kle4 said:

    I'm sure much politics is being made from it around trampling of the Scottish Parliament, and fine legal minds will be making more measured analysis of the judgment today about legislative competency and political implications that may arise, but I did like some of the gentle legal snark that seems common in judgements when courts are not impressed by an argument.

    In his written submissions, counsel also emphasised that the Bill had been passed unanimously by the Scottish Parliament. The court understands that. It is, of course, entirely respectful of the Scottish Parliament, whatever the size of the majority by which its enactments have been passed. But the fact that an enactment has been passed by the Scottish Parliament, even unanimously, has no bearing on the legal questions which this court has to decide. Section 33 of the Scotland Act only applies where an enactment has been passed by the Scottish Parliament. The question which the court is required to answer is whether the provision in question would be outside the Parliament’s legislative competence. The answer to that question does not depend on the number of MSPs who voted for it

    Or

    Counsel for the Lord Advocate argued, however, that the fact that the scope of section 20(10)(a)(ii) is restricted to Acts of Parliament enacted before section 20 comes into force renders it within competence. This argument assumes that “the power of the Parliament of the United Kingdom to make laws for Scotland”, within the meaning of section 28(7) of the Scotland Act, is confined to the future enactment of Acts of Parliament, as from a date which can be selected by the Scottish Parliament or the Scottish Ministers. So understood, section 28(7) provides no protection to the body of legislation which Parliament enacted prior to the selected date, and permits such legislation to be deprived of effect by the Scottish courts.

    It is difficult to accept that section 28(7) was intended to be given such a narrow interpretation

    Actually, this bit isn't very gentle

    This objective[law being accessible/intelligible etc] is not always fully attained in practice. But what is striking in the present case is that there has been no attempt to draft section 6 of the Bill in such a way as to provide a clear and accessible statement of the law. On the contrary, there has been a decision to draft and enact a provision whose plain meaning does not accurately represent the law, and to rely on the courts, applying section 101(2) of the Scotland Act, subsequently to impose a variety of qualifications upon the provision, on a case by case basis, so as to give it a different effect which is lawful. For the reasons which I have explained in paras 69-76 above, that cannot be how Parliament intended section 101(2) to be interpreted and applied.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 46,220
    dixiedean said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    I'm having fun discovering the mad Farageistes of France

    A Mayor from the mainstream Republicains party said yesterday that native French people are being "ethnically cleansed" from some areas.

    https://twitter.com/gillesplatret/status/1445366427033260037
    I'm still down the Francophonie rabbit-hole. It is actually quite significant. There are serious moves in several African countries to ditch French altogether, in favour of English. Gabon, Congo. Morocco, and others. And it has already happened in Rwanda, which is perceived as having benefited economically.

    This would be quite a cultural tilt, for the world. The weird thing is that everything Macron tries to do, to reverse the tide, seems to make it worse. He returned some stolen cultural treasures, for instance - notably unlike Britain - yet that just made African people angrier. The stuff about "crossbreeding" and "love between France and Africa" was a minor disaster.

    It passes as autumn evening quite pleasantly.
    Thanks to prominent supporters of Leave for their regular updates on the minutiae of EU politics.
    They seem to be more interested than when we were members.
    Fuck all to do with the EU. I am interested in Anglo-French rivalry which dates back to about the 9th century AD, preceding the EU by about 1150 years

    It's always nice to see the French getting their arses kicked, and right now, linguistically, they are in headlong retreat to an extent I did not realise.

    if Francophone Africa switches to English in the next decades, that will be quite a shift for the world
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 91,392

    dixiedean said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    I'm having fun discovering the mad Farageistes of France

    A Mayor from the mainstream Republicains party said yesterday that native French people are being "ethnically cleansed" from some areas.

    https://twitter.com/gillesplatret/status/1445366427033260037
    I'm still down the Francophonie rabbit-hole. It is actually quite significant. There are serious moves in several African countries to ditch French altogether, in favour of English. Gabon, Congo. Morocco, and others. And it has already happened in Rwanda, which is perceived as having benefited economically.

    This would be quite a cultural tilt, for the world. The weird thing is that everything Macron tries to do, to reverse the tide, seems to make it worse. He returned some stolen cultural treasures, for instance - notably unlike Britain - yet that just made African people angrier. The stuff about "crossbreeding" and "love between France and Africa" was a minor disaster.

    It passes as autumn evening quite pleasantly.
    Thanks to prominent supporters of Leave for their regular updates on the minutiae of EU politics.
    They seem to be more interested than when we were members.
    Is this the political equivalent of stalking an ex?
    Amusing idea, but I don't quite get the implication that people in the UK should not be interested in the minutiae of EU politics now we are out of it, or indeed the reverse, that people in the EU should not be interested in the minutiae of UK politics.

    We're right next to each other, the politics of each will impact on the other even now we are gone, perhaps more so since they happen without direct input anymore.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 46,220
    kle4 said:

    dixiedean said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    I'm having fun discovering the mad Farageistes of France

    A Mayor from the mainstream Republicains party said yesterday that native French people are being "ethnically cleansed" from some areas.

    https://twitter.com/gillesplatret/status/1445366427033260037
    I'm still down the Francophonie rabbit-hole. It is actually quite significant. There are serious moves in several African countries to ditch French altogether, in favour of English. Gabon, Congo. Morocco, and others. And it has already happened in Rwanda, which is perceived as having benefited economically.

    This would be quite a cultural tilt, for the world. The weird thing is that everything Macron tries to do, to reverse the tide, seems to make it worse. He returned some stolen cultural treasures, for instance - notably unlike Britain - yet that just made African people angrier. The stuff about "crossbreeding" and "love between France and Africa" was a minor disaster.

    It passes as autumn evening quite pleasantly.
    Thanks to prominent supporters of Leave for their regular updates on the minutiae of EU politics.
    They seem to be more interested than when we were members.
    Is this the political equivalent of stalking an ex?
    Amusing idea, but I don't quite get the implication that people in the UK should not be interested in the minutiae of EU politics now we are out of it, or indeed the reverse, that people in the EU should not be interested in the minutiae of UK politics.

    We're right next to each other, the politics of each will impact on the other even now we are gone, perhaps more so since they happen without direct input anymore.
    Also, this has nowt to do with France as an EU member. This is the duel between French and English as dominant languages, which English is comprehensively winning, to an extent that the English-speakers don't really care any more (apart from me, tonight), which just enrages the French even more

    What's not to like?

    I will happily admit to admiring, even envying the French for many things. Bigger country, handsome landscape, better weather, a certain flair?, blah de blah. But it is a two way street and we punch them shitless at other aspects

    I've often thought that Britain and France are two countries with a mutual inferiority complex. A truly peculiar, maybe unique relationship.
  • AnabobazinaAnabobazina Posts: 19,598

    BHA player in his 20s arrested in Brighton

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yves_Bissouma
    "Yves Bissouma (born 30 August 1996) is a Malian professional footballer and gross sexual predator who plays as a midfielder for Premier League club Prison FC and the Mali national team."

    That has already been edited out of the link. However, the local rag says that an "unnamed Brighton player" has been arrested for sexual assault at a nightclub. There were rumours that Liverpool were trying to sign Bissouma. If it's him, I'd imagine that deal is off.
    A more interesting football related story today is Gary Neville's takedown of Edwina Curry.
    Just looked that up, quite hilarious lolz.
  • NickPalmerNickPalmer Posts: 21,263
    dixiedean said:

    isam said:

    dixiedean said:

    isam said:

    dixiedean said:

    Those facing a £20 UC cut today will be delighted that the

    isam said:

    kle4 said:

    DavidL said:

    What I got from Boris's speech is what he wanted me to get. This is a government on a mission and with a hugely ambitious program to change this country for the better. He wants better transport, education, skills, education, law and order, the list went on and on.

    Will he be able to deliver? Who knows, certainly not on all of it but maybe on some. If he does he will have done better than most of his recent predecessors. The message from his speech is that this is not a government blundering around not knowing what it wants to do. I think he succeeded in that.

    Don't all political parties want things to be better? Has any conference speech stated they want transport and education to get worse?

    What I got from the speech was not that the Tories want to change the country for the better, but to impress upon people that they are still energetic and coming up with ideas (he talked about 'tired old Labour'), rather than a sclerotic 11 year old government paddling along.
    Yes, the entire rhetoric is remarkable. What the Tories are doing is pretending that Labour was in power until 2019, when Boris took over. Astonishingly, quite a lot of voters seem to think that this is true, and any current woes should be blamed on the Labour government 2010-2019. Things haven't got better yet because of Labour's misrule - but now Boris is in charge. It takes some brass neck, but it seems to work.
    He is probably trying to draw a line between Leave and Remain - Sir Keir’s Labour being associated with the low wage, high immigration era whilst his Tories want to train our youngsters and see wages increase etc
    I'd be interested in examples of what has been done to "train our youngsters", rather than what has been said.
    As someone in the FE trade, it appears to be the cube root of jack shite thus far.
    I’d have thought it was an aim for the future, in contrast to the mass importation of cheap labour, rather than something that has already been done
    Yes but. He's been in power for 2 years plus. We all are aware of the Grand Plan.
    Yet nowt practical seems to happen.
    When will this training begin? And who will do it? And where?
    The pandemic probably hasn’t helped. That’s been most of the time since he won the election, before that he didn’t have a majority, and Brexit wasn’t done. So in reality he’s had 22 months of which at least 18 have been dominated by Covid
    Surely then a speech to Conference would be the ideal time to outline some specifics?
    Apparently not.
    Yes, I thought that Labour's conference was a bit light on policy, but the Conservatives are actually in Government - you'd think they'd have had something to say. For the first 3 days the journalists were told it was all being saved up for Johnson's speech, which turned out to be about nothing in particular. Just odd - why did they bother to get into politics if they don't want to do anything?
  • theProletheProle Posts: 948
    edited October 2021
    Lots of talk on here about pay rises leading to inflation, and whether or not that's a good thing, but isn't it all just a bit more complicated than that?

    Not everyone is getting pay rises right now.

    Skilled/semi-skilled manual workers, care workers, wagon drivers, building site labourers are getting big rises.

    The white collar and middle class types - accountants, administrators, design engineers, project managers aren't suffering from a sudden reduction in their part of the workforce, so their wages are going to be static.

    This means that after allowing for the effect of the inflation caused by rising wages in some sectors, we'll actually see a rebalancing - the working class will generally earn more than before, and everyone else less.

    This is seriously good news for the working class types who voted for Brext as its exactly what they expected to happen. So it's no good for the lefty-remainery types to screech and moan about it to them - Brext has done what it said on the tin.

    I get why there is a lot of screeching and moaning on here - posters here tend to be well off white collar types or posher, rather than digger drivers or steel erectors. Even I'm not a typical specimen of the working class (I'm a SME owner now!) although I'm probably closer to the action there than most.

    I suspect that the biggest medium term challenge for the government is going to be public sector pay. They'll have to pay the manual workers more, or they'll all drift to the private sector. They don't need to (and won't be able to afford to) pay the planning officers, NHS managers, etc a similar rise. But how on earth do they do one without the other?

    (this is the public sector teacher problem on a massive scale - maths teachers have more real world value in alternative careers than history or art teachers, but they are usually on identical pay scales - so hiring good art and history teachers is easy, but good maths teachers nearly impossible).

  • gealbhangealbhan Posts: 2,362
    “ The message from his speech is that this is not a government blundering around not knowing what it wants to do. “.

    Seriously?

    So you are going to say, level up a very unlevel nation? No more levelling down? No more London and Home Counties with streets paved with gold while up north they sleep 8 to each jam jar, and have to leave room for the jam. High wages for everyone, whilst no more getting ravaged by globalisation?

    No. This is a football manager at your club, mugging a wage and enjoying the ride whilst brushing off abysmal results with, no pain without gain, it’s getting there just need a few more matches - until sacked with one of the worst records in the clubs history.
  • gealbhangealbhan Posts: 2,362
    That sky polling win has very little to do with the magic of Starmer. It’s got everything to do with the magic of Boris wearing off.
  • Dura_AceDura_Ace Posts: 12,880
    Leon said:



    I've often thought that Britain and France are two countries with a mutual inferiority complex. A truly peculiar, maybe unique relationship.

    In my experience (went to university there, own a house there) French people spend far less time thinking about England than English people imagine. They view the USA as their cultural usurper. They are just not that into you.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,766
    theProle said:

    Lots of talk on here about pay rises leading to inflation, and whether or not that's a good thing, but isn't it all just a bit more complicated than that?

    Not everyone is getting pay rises right now.

    Skilled/semi-skilled manual workers, care workers, wagon drivers, building site labourers are getting big rises.

    The white collar and middle class types - accountants, administrators, design engineers, project managers aren't suffering from a sudden reduction in their part of the workforce, so their wages are going to be static.

    This means that after allowing for the effect of the inflation caused by rising wages in some sectors, we'll actually see a rebalancing - the working class will generally earn more than before, and everyone else less.

    This is seriously good news for the working class types who voted for Brext as its exactly what they expected to happen. So it's no good for the lefty-remainery types to screech and moan about it to them - Brext has done what it said on the tin.

    I get why there is a lot of screeching and moaning on here - posters here tend to be well off white collar types or posher, rather than digger drivers or steel erectors. Even I'm not a typical specimen of the working class (I'm a SME owner now!) although I'm probably closer to the action there than most.

    I suspect that the biggest medium term challenge for the government is going to be public sector pay. They'll have to pay the manual workers more, or they'll all drift to the private sector. They don't need to (and won't be able to afford to) pay the planning officers, NHS managers, etc a similar rise. But how on earth do they do one without the other?

    (this is the public sector teacher problem on a massive scale - maths teachers have more real world value in alternative careers than history or art teachers, but they are usually on identical pay scales - so hiring good art and history teachers is easy, but good maths teachers nearly impossible).

    I'm not sure it's all Brexit related - there's tremendous wage inflation in the US and even the Eurozone* right now as demand bounces back post pandemic.

    I have been in Vegas at a conference the last three days (and Vegas was utterly rammed, which is staggering for a Monday to Wednesday in early October). In the cab heading back to the airport, the driver told me he used to be an HGV driver. I asked him if he'd been tempted to go back, as there is a shortage. He told me his old firm had offered him a $10,000 sign on bonus - but that he wasn't tempted because he could earn really well doing taxi and food delivery.

    * German wage growth in June was the highest since the early 90s
  • Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 26,279
    "Tory Sir Peter Bottomley describes the 'desperately difficult' financial woes faced by MPs living on £82,000-a-year - and calls for an increase to more than £100,000

    Bottomley says he is not sure how MPs 'manage' on current salary
    He told the New Statesman he wanted to see salary rise to match those of GPs
    MPs are currently paid £82,000-a-year and get help for costs through expenses
    The average Britain meanwhile earned £31,000 a year last year, figures show"

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10066255/Tory-Sir-Peter-Bottomley-calls-MPs-paid-100-000-year.html
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,766
    rcs1000 said:

    theProle said:

    Lots of talk on here about pay rises leading to inflation, and whether or not that's a good thing, but isn't it all just a bit more complicated than that?

    Not everyone is getting pay rises right now.

    Skilled/semi-skilled manual workers, care workers, wagon drivers, building site labourers are getting big rises.

    The white collar and middle class types - accountants, administrators, design engineers, project managers aren't suffering from a sudden reduction in their part of the workforce, so their wages are going to be static.

    This means that after allowing for the effect of the inflation caused by rising wages in some sectors, we'll actually see a rebalancing - the working class will generally earn more than before, and everyone else less.

    This is seriously good news for the working class types who voted for Brext as its exactly what they expected to happen. So it's no good for the lefty-remainery types to screech and moan about it to them - Brext has done what it said on the tin.

    I get why there is a lot of screeching and moaning on here - posters here tend to be well off white collar types or posher, rather than digger drivers or steel erectors. Even I'm not a typical specimen of the working class (I'm a SME owner now!) although I'm probably closer to the action there than most.

    I suspect that the biggest medium term challenge for the government is going to be public sector pay. They'll have to pay the manual workers more, or they'll all drift to the private sector. They don't need to (and won't be able to afford to) pay the planning officers, NHS managers, etc a similar rise. But how on earth do they do one without the other?

    (this is the public sector teacher problem on a massive scale - maths teachers have more real world value in alternative careers than history or art teachers, but they are usually on identical pay scales - so hiring good art and history teachers is easy, but good maths teachers nearly impossible).

    I'm not sure it's all Brexit related - there's tremendous wage inflation in the US and even the Eurozone* right now as demand bounces back post pandemic.

    I have been in Vegas at a conference the last three days (and Vegas was utterly rammed, which is staggering for a Monday to Wednesday in early October). In the cab heading back to the airport, the driver told me he used to be an HGV driver. I asked him if he'd been tempted to go back, as there is a shortage. He told me his old firm had offered him a $10,000 sign on bonus - but that he wasn't tempted because he could earn really well doing taxi and food delivery.

    * German wage growth in June was the highest since the early 90s
    Looking at Trading Economics, I see UK wage growth is running around 8%, the US is north of 10%, and Spain (presumably bouncing back from a torrid 2020) was 17%.

    Interestingly, France appears to be the laggard - annualized wage growth seems to only be about 2%.
  • rcs1000 said:

    theProle said:

    Lots of talk on here about pay rises leading to inflation, and whether or not that's a good thing, but isn't it all just a bit more complicated than that?

    Not everyone is getting pay rises right now.

    Skilled/semi-skilled manual workers, care workers, wagon drivers, building site labourers are getting big rises.

    The white collar and middle class types - accountants, administrators, design engineers, project managers aren't suffering from a sudden reduction in their part of the workforce, so their wages are going to be static.

    This means that after allowing for the effect of the inflation caused by rising wages in some sectors, we'll actually see a rebalancing - the working class will generally earn more than before, and everyone else less.

    This is seriously good news for the working class types who voted for Brext as its exactly what they expected to happen. So it's no good for the lefty-remainery types to screech and moan about it to them - Brext has done what it said on the tin.

    I get why there is a lot of screeching and moaning on here - posters here tend to be well off white collar types or posher, rather than digger drivers or steel erectors. Even I'm not a typical specimen of the working class (I'm a SME owner now!) although I'm probably closer to the action there than most.

    I suspect that the biggest medium term challenge for the government is going to be public sector pay. They'll have to pay the manual workers more, or they'll all drift to the private sector. They don't need to (and won't be able to afford to) pay the planning officers, NHS managers, etc a similar rise. But how on earth do they do one without the other?

    (this is the public sector teacher problem on a massive scale - maths teachers have more real world value in alternative careers than history or art teachers, but they are usually on identical pay scales - so hiring good art and history teachers is easy, but good maths teachers nearly impossible).

    I'm not sure it's all Brexit related - there's tremendous wage inflation in the US and even the Eurozone* right now as demand bounces back post pandemic.

    I have been in Vegas at a conference the last three days (and Vegas was utterly rammed, which is staggering for a Monday to Wednesday in early October). In the cab heading back to the airport, the driver told me he used to be an HGV driver. I asked him if he'd been tempted to go back, as there is a shortage. He told me his old firm had offered him a $10,000 sign on bonus - but that he wasn't tempted because he could earn really well doing taxi and food delivery.

    * German wage growth in June was the highest since the early 90s
    I use Deliveroo every day and more than half the time, it arrives by car, with the stereotypical scooter coming second, and the (usually electric) bike rarely. So yes, food and parcel deliveries are taking drivers from whatever they'd otherwise be doing, though I suspect in a few cases they are, or were, furloughed office workers. Almost entirely male, for reasons I do not really understand and had not thought about before I started typing. You can see that women might not want to go out alone late at night but most of my deliveries are around midday.
  • Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 26,279

    dixiedean said:

    isam said:

    dixiedean said:

    isam said:

    dixiedean said:

    Those facing a £20 UC cut today will be delighted that the

    isam said:

    kle4 said:

    DavidL said:

    What I got from Boris's speech is what he wanted me to get. This is a government on a mission and with a hugely ambitious program to change this country for the better. He wants better transport, education, skills, education, law and order, the list went on and on.

    Will he be able to deliver? Who knows, certainly not on all of it but maybe on some. If he does he will have done better than most of his recent predecessors. The message from his speech is that this is not a government blundering around not knowing what it wants to do. I think he succeeded in that.

    Don't all political parties want things to be better? Has any conference speech stated they want transport and education to get worse?

    What I got from the speech was not that the Tories want to change the country for the better, but to impress upon people that they are still energetic and coming up with ideas (he talked about 'tired old Labour'), rather than a sclerotic 11 year old government paddling along.
    Yes, the entire rhetoric is remarkable. What the Tories are doing is pretending that Labour was in power until 2019, when Boris took over. Astonishingly, quite a lot of voters seem to think that this is true, and any current woes should be blamed on the Labour government 2010-2019. Things haven't got better yet because of Labour's misrule - but now Boris is in charge. It takes some brass neck, but it seems to work.
    He is probably trying to draw a line between Leave and Remain - Sir Keir’s Labour being associated with the low wage, high immigration era whilst his Tories want to train our youngsters and see wages increase etc
    I'd be interested in examples of what has been done to "train our youngsters", rather than what has been said.
    As someone in the FE trade, it appears to be the cube root of jack shite thus far.
    I’d have thought it was an aim for the future, in contrast to the mass importation of cheap labour, rather than something that has already been done
    Yes but. He's been in power for 2 years plus. We all are aware of the Grand Plan.
    Yet nowt practical seems to happen.
    When will this training begin? And who will do it? And where?
    The pandemic probably hasn’t helped. That’s been most of the time since he won the election, before that he didn’t have a majority, and Brexit wasn’t done. So in reality he’s had 22 months of which at least 18 have been dominated by Covid
    Surely then a speech to Conference would be the ideal time to outline some specifics?
    Apparently not.
    Yes, I thought that Labour's conference was a bit light on policy, but the Conservatives are actually in Government - you'd think they'd have had something to say. For the first 3 days the journalists were told it was all being saved up for Johnson's speech, which turned out to be about nothing in particular. Just odd - why did they bother to get into politics if they don't want to do anything?
    We didn't seem to get much in the way of defections either.
  • gealbhangealbhan Posts: 2,362
    edited October 2021
    theProle said:

    Lots of talk on here about pay rises leading to inflation, and whether or not that's a good thing, but isn't it all just a bit more complicated than that?

    Not everyone is getting pay rises right now.

    Skilled/semi-skilled manual workers, care workers, wagon drivers, building site labourers are getting big rises.

    The white collar and middle class types - accountants, administrators, design engineers, project managers aren't suffering from a sudden reduction in their part of the workforce, so their wages are going to be static.

    This means that after allowing for the effect of the inflation caused by rising wages in some sectors, we'll actually see a rebalancing - the working class will generally earn more than before, and everyone else less.

    This is seriously good news for the working class types who voted for Brext as its exactly what they expected to happen. So it's no good for the lefty-remainery types to screech and moan about it to them - Brext has done what it said on the tin.

    I get why there is a lot of screeching and moaning on here - posters here tend to be well off white collar types or posher, rather than digger drivers or steel erectors. Even I'm not a typical specimen of the working class (I'm a SME owner now!) although I'm probably closer to the action there than most.

    I suspect that the biggest medium term challenge for the government is going to be public sector pay. They'll have to pay the manual workers more, or they'll all drift to the private sector. They don't need to (and won't be able to afford to) pay the planning officers, NHS managers, etc a similar rise. But how on earth do they do one without the other?

    (this is the public sector teacher problem on a massive scale - maths teachers have more real world value in alternative careers than history or art teachers, but they are usually on identical pay scales - so hiring good art and history teachers is easy, but good maths teachers nearly impossible).

    Gibberish. I’m afraid, Prole.

    Firstly I agree with RCS already replied to a point, this doesn’t have to happen to a Brexit nation, it’s flaws in government policy they don’t have to make. Yes international inflation looks on the cards, not just a problem here, the problem here is self inflicted inflation and hardship on top of that.

    Let me explain.

    One. The shortages problem is not an issue about wages, but shortage of people available to do the work in the low wage economy. If Boris thinks he can get round this domestically simply paying higher wages, he’s insane.

    Two. No. Brexit was not about completely stopping immigration by pulling up a draw bridge. Christ. How many leavers like Boris don’t even understand Brexit? it was about taking back control. If a government now cares about low wage immigration undermining wages and opportunities for British workers, it merely needs to use that control to pass a law where it says to business, you have to pay the going rate for foreign worker as for UK worker plus a small % tax on the visa to get the visa. Bingo! Both people Shortages and the undermining of pay are both solved by a more sane policy than Boris daft policy that will prove unable to solve both these issues simultaneously.

    Three. Increase wages without increased prices? Seriously? If it’s a people issue not a low wage issue, and you start chasing that limited pool of people with extra wage, there’s only one place prices are going to permanently go. That’s the big idea at the heart of this government? It’s economic insanity. To raise prices to raise wages doesn’t make everyone better off, it actually leads to winners, and losers who get into extreme hardship.

    The think tanks who growled at the Torys today that this is economic gibberish are right.

    The problem is a Brexit government either too thick to know how to properly implement brexit, or feeling too constrained by promises it has made. Or both.
  • Scott_xPScott_xP Posts: 32,735
    Iain Martin, former Brexit and BoZo fanboi, reviews the speech in the Times

    He sounded at times like a man standing at the bar in the first-class lounge of the Titanic ordering another round of drinks and regaling his fellow-passengers with funny stories shortly after midnight when it is just about to become clear there aren’t enough lifeboats.

    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/boris-johnsons-speech-tough-times-merit-more-than-boris-the-clown-5llbjgbb3
  • squareroot2squareroot2 Posts: 6,287
    Andy_JS said:

    dixiedean said:

    isam said:

    dixiedean said:

    isam said:

    dixiedean said:

    Those facing a £20 UC cut today will be delighted that the

    isam said:

    kle4 said:

    DavidL said:

    What I got from Boris's speech is what he wanted me to get. This is a government on a mission and with a hugely ambitious program to change this country for the better. He wants better transport, education, skills, education, law and order, the list went on and on.

    Will he be able to deliver? Who knows, certainly not on all of it but maybe on some. If he does he will have done better than most of his recent predecessors. The message from his speech is that this is not a government blundering around not knowing what it wants to do. I think he succeeded in that.

    Don't all political parties want things to be better? Has any conference speech stated they want transport and education to get worse?

    What I got from the speech was not that the Tories want to change the country for the better, but to impress upon people that they are still energetic and coming up with ideas (he talked about 'tired old Labour'), rather than a sclerotic 11 year old government paddling along.
    Yes, the entire rhetoric is remarkable. What the Tories are doing is pretending that Labour was in power until 2019, when Boris took over. Astonishingly, quite a lot of voters seem to think that this is true, and any current woes should be blamed on the Labour government 2010-2019. Things haven't got better yet because of Labour's misrule - but now Boris is in charge. It takes some brass neck, but it seems to work.
    He is probably trying to draw a line between Leave and Remain - Sir Keir’s Labour being associated with the low wage, high immigration era whilst his Tories want to train our youngsters and see wages increase etc
    I'd be interested in examples of what has been done to "train our youngsters", rather than what has been said.
    As someone in the FE trade, it appears to be the cube root of jack shite thus far.
    I’d have thought it was an aim for the future, in contrast to the mass importation of cheap labour, rather than something that has already been done
    Yes but. He's been in power for 2 years plus. We all are aware of the Grand Plan.
    Yet nowt practical seems to happen.
    When will this training begin? And who will do it? And where?
    The pandemic probably hasn’t helped. That’s been most of the time since he won the election, before that he didn’t have a majority, and Brexit wasn’t done. So in reality he’s had 22 months of which at least 18 have been dominated by Covid
    Surely then a speech to Conference would be the ideal time to outline some specifics?
    Apparently not.
    Yes, I thought that Labour's conference was a bit light on policy, but the Conservatives are actually in Government - you'd think they'd have had something to say. For the first 3 days the journalists were told it was all being saved up for Johnson's speech, which turned out to be about nothing in particular. Just odd - why did they bother to get into politics if they don't want to do anything?
    We didn't seem to get much in the way of defections either.
    Mr Palmer wasnt saying that when Labour 3had nothing to say, which was often in their yrs in Office and whilst they were destroying the Economy. Granted it took 13 yrs before they
    destroyed the ecomomy but they got there in the end.....
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,766
    This is worth reading on the Taiwan - China airspace thing:

    https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/10/chinese-military-taiwan-airspace.html
  • rpjsrpjs Posts: 3,787
    rcs1000 said:

    theProle said:

    Lots of talk on here about pay rises leading to inflation, and whether or not that's a good thing, but isn't it all just a bit more complicated than that?

    Not everyone is getting pay rises right now.

    Skilled/semi-skilled manual workers, care workers, wagon drivers, building site labourers are getting big rises.

    The white collar and middle class types - accountants, administrators, design engineers, project managers aren't suffering from a sudden reduction in their part of the workforce, so their wages are going to be static.

    This means that after allowing for the effect of the inflation caused by rising wages in some sectors, we'll actually see a rebalancing - the working class will generally earn more than before, and everyone else less.

    This is seriously good news for the working class types who voted for Brext as its exactly what they expected to happen. So it's no good for the lefty-remainery types to screech and moan about it to them - Brext has done what it said on the tin.

    I get why there is a lot of screeching and moaning on here - posters here tend to be well off white collar types or posher, rather than digger drivers or steel erectors. Even I'm not a typical specimen of the working class (I'm a SME owner now!) although I'm probably closer to the action there than most.

    I suspect that the biggest medium term challenge for the government is going to be public sector pay. They'll have to pay the manual workers more, or they'll all drift to the private sector. They don't need to (and won't be able to afford to) pay the planning officers, NHS managers, etc a similar rise. But how on earth do they do one without the other?

    (this is the public sector teacher problem on a massive scale - maths teachers have more real world value in alternative careers than history or art teachers, but they are usually on identical pay scales - so hiring good art and history teachers is easy, but good maths teachers nearly impossible).

    I'm not sure it's all Brexit related - there's tremendous wage inflation in the US and even the Eurozone* right now as demand bounces back post pandemic.

    I have been in Vegas at a conference the last three days (and Vegas was utterly rammed, which is staggering for a Monday to Wednesday in early October). In the cab heading back to the airport, the driver told me he used to be an HGV driver. I asked him if he'd been tempted to go back, as there is a shortage. He told me his old firm had offered him a $10,000 sign on bonus - but that he wasn't tempted because he could earn really well doing taxi and food delivery.

    * German wage growth in June was the highest since the early 90s
    Saw a 18-wheeler on I-287 the other day bearing a big sign advertising rates for drivers of $2,500+ a week.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,766
    rpjs said:

    rcs1000 said:

    theProle said:

    Lots of talk on here about pay rises leading to inflation, and whether or not that's a good thing, but isn't it all just a bit more complicated than that?

    Not everyone is getting pay rises right now.

    Skilled/semi-skilled manual workers, care workers, wagon drivers, building site labourers are getting big rises.

    The white collar and middle class types - accountants, administrators, design engineers, project managers aren't suffering from a sudden reduction in their part of the workforce, so their wages are going to be static.

    This means that after allowing for the effect of the inflation caused by rising wages in some sectors, we'll actually see a rebalancing - the working class will generally earn more than before, and everyone else less.

    This is seriously good news for the working class types who voted for Brext as its exactly what they expected to happen. So it's no good for the lefty-remainery types to screech and moan about it to them - Brext has done what it said on the tin.

    I get why there is a lot of screeching and moaning on here - posters here tend to be well off white collar types or posher, rather than digger drivers or steel erectors. Even I'm not a typical specimen of the working class (I'm a SME owner now!) although I'm probably closer to the action there than most.

    I suspect that the biggest medium term challenge for the government is going to be public sector pay. They'll have to pay the manual workers more, or they'll all drift to the private sector. They don't need to (and won't be able to afford to) pay the planning officers, NHS managers, etc a similar rise. But how on earth do they do one without the other?

    (this is the public sector teacher problem on a massive scale - maths teachers have more real world value in alternative careers than history or art teachers, but they are usually on identical pay scales - so hiring good art and history teachers is easy, but good maths teachers nearly impossible).

    I'm not sure it's all Brexit related - there's tremendous wage inflation in the US and even the Eurozone* right now as demand bounces back post pandemic.

    I have been in Vegas at a conference the last three days (and Vegas was utterly rammed, which is staggering for a Monday to Wednesday in early October). In the cab heading back to the airport, the driver told me he used to be an HGV driver. I asked him if he'd been tempted to go back, as there is a shortage. He told me his old firm had offered him a $10,000 sign on bonus - but that he wasn't tempted because he could earn really well doing taxi and food delivery.

    * German wage growth in June was the highest since the early 90s
    Saw a 18-wheeler on I-287 the other day bearing a big sign advertising rates for drivers of $2,500+ a week.
    Based on my conversation with a taxi driver, you can now earn nearly as much driving Ubers/cabs/food delivery as an HGV driver. And you get to sleep in your own bed every night, not in the cramped cabin of a truck.

    The other problem, I suspect, is that people think that a lot of long distance driving is going away with the rise of autonomous vehicles. So why go into a business where wages are likely to be a lot lower in the future?
  • paulyork64paulyork64 Posts: 2,461
    rcs1000 said:

    rpjs said:

    rcs1000 said:

    theProle said:

    Lots of talk on here about pay rises leading to inflation, and whether or not that's a good thing, but isn't it all just a bit more complicated than that?

    Not everyone is getting pay rises right now.

    Skilled/semi-skilled manual workers, care workers, wagon drivers, building site labourers are getting big rises.

    The white collar and middle class types - accountants, administrators, design engineers, project managers aren't suffering from a sudden reduction in their part of the workforce, so their wages are going to be static.

    This means that after allowing for the effect of the inflation caused by rising wages in some sectors, we'll actually see a rebalancing - the working class will generally earn more than before, and everyone else less.

    This is seriously good news for the working class types who voted for Brext as its exactly what they expected to happen. So it's no good for the lefty-remainery types to screech and moan about it to them - Brext has done what it said on the tin.

    I get why there is a lot of screeching and moaning on here - posters here tend to be well off white collar types or posher, rather than digger drivers or steel erectors. Even I'm not a typical specimen of the working class (I'm a SME owner now!) although I'm probably closer to the action there than most.

    I suspect that the biggest medium term challenge for the government is going to be public sector pay. They'll have to pay the manual workers more, or they'll all drift to the private sector. They don't need to (and won't be able to afford to) pay the planning officers, NHS managers, etc a similar rise. But how on earth do they do one without the other?

    (this is the public sector teacher problem on a massive scale - maths teachers have more real world value in alternative careers than history or art teachers, but they are usually on identical pay scales - so hiring good art and history teachers is easy, but good maths teachers nearly impossible).

    I'm not sure it's all Brexit related - there's tremendous wage inflation in the US and even the Eurozone* right now as demand bounces back post pandemic.

    I have been in Vegas at a conference the last three days (and Vegas was utterly rammed, which is staggering for a Monday to Wednesday in early October). In the cab heading back to the airport, the driver told me he used to be an HGV driver. I asked him if he'd been tempted to go back, as there is a shortage. He told me his old firm had offered him a $10,000 sign on bonus - but that he wasn't tempted because he could earn really well doing taxi and food delivery.

    * German wage growth in June was the highest since the early 90s
    Saw a 18-wheeler on I-287 the other day bearing a big sign advertising rates for drivers of $2,500+ a week.
    Based on my conversation with a taxi driver, you can now earn nearly as much driving Ubers/cabs/food delivery as an HGV driver. And you get to sleep in your own bed every night, not in the cramped cabin of a truck.

    The other problem, I suspect, is that people think that a lot of long distance driving is going away with the rise of autonomous vehicles. So why go into a business where wages are likely to be a lot lower in the future?
    Arent higher wages in food delivery likely to be driven down as more entrants are attracted into the sector? The barriers to entry cant be that high.

    Before the pandemic Uber drivers, albeit taxi not food, were complaining they were taking home less than minimum wage (in Leeds at least).
  • paulyork64paulyork64 Posts: 2,461

    kle4 said:

    DavidL said:

    What I got from Boris's speech is what he wanted me to get. This is a government on a mission and with a hugely ambitious program to change this country for the better. He wants better transport, education, skills, education, law and order, the list went on and on.

    Will he be able to deliver? Who knows, certainly not on all of it but maybe on some. If he does he will have done better than most of his recent predecessors. The message from his speech is that this is not a government blundering around not knowing what it wants to do. I think he succeeded in that.

    Don't all political parties want things to be better? Has any conference speech stated they want transport and education to get worse?

    What I got from the speech was not that the Tories want to change the country for the better, but to impress upon people that they are still energetic and coming up with ideas (he talked about 'tired old Labour'), rather than a sclerotic 11 year old government paddling along.
    Yes, the entire rhetoric is remarkable. What the Tories are doing is pretending that Labour was in power until 2019, when Boris took over. Astonishingly, quite a lot of voters seem to think that this is true, and any current woes should be blamed on the Labour government 2010-2019. Things haven't got better yet because of Labour's misrule - but now Boris is in charge. It takes some brass neck, but it seems to work.
    And it didn't even need a bus.
  • rpjsrpjs Posts: 3,787
    rcs1000 said:

    rpjs said:

    rcs1000 said:



    I'm not sure it's all Brexit related - there's tremendous wage inflation in the US and even the Eurozone* right now as demand bounces back post pandemic.

    I have been in Vegas at a conference the last three days (and Vegas was utterly rammed, which is staggering for a Monday to Wednesday in early October). In the cab heading back to the airport, the driver told me he used to be an HGV driver. I asked him if he'd been tempted to go back, as there is a shortage. He told me his old firm had offered him a $10,000 sign on bonus - but that he wasn't tempted because he could earn really well doing taxi and food delivery.

    * German wage growth in June was the highest since the early 90s

    Saw a 18-wheeler on I-287 the other day bearing a big sign advertising rates for drivers of $2,500+ a week.
    Based on my conversation with a taxi driver, you can now earn nearly as much driving Ubers/cabs/food delivery as an HGV driver. And you get to sleep in your own bed every night, not in the cramped cabin of a truck.
    Indeed, although I should imagine there are plenty of rural areas of the US where there simply isn’t the demand for Uber/delivery drivers that could generate that sort of money.

    $2,500 a week is pretty good money even for a high wage, high cost of living area like Westchester County, NY, but yes, there are more attractive alternatives at similar pay to long-distance trucking on offer here. That probably isn’t true even a few counties further upstate, let alone large swathes of “flyover country”.
  • paulyork64paulyork64 Posts: 2,461
    dixiedean said:

    isam said:

    dixiedean said:

    isam said:

    dixiedean said:

    Those facing a £20 UC cut today will be delighted that the

    isam said:

    kle4 said:

    DavidL said:

    What I got from Boris's speech is what he wanted me to get. This is a government on a mission and with a hugely ambitious program to change this country for the better. He wants better transport, education, skills, education, law and order, the list went on and on.

    Will he be able to deliver? Who knows, certainly not on all of it but maybe on some. If he does he will have done better than most of his recent predecessors. The message from his speech is that this is not a government blundering around not knowing what it wants to do. I think he succeeded in that.

    Don't all political parties want things to be better? Has any conference speech stated they want transport and education to get worse?

    What I got from the speech was not that the Tories want to change the country for the better, but to impress upon people that they are still energetic and coming up with ideas (he talked about 'tired old Labour'), rather than a sclerotic 11 year old government paddling along.
    Yes, the entire rhetoric is remarkable. What the Tories are doing is pretending that Labour was in power until 2019, when Boris took over. Astonishingly, quite a lot of voters seem to think that this is true, and any current woes should be blamed on the Labour government 2010-2019. Things haven't got better yet because of Labour's misrule - but now Boris is in charge. It takes some brass neck, but it seems to work.
    He is probably trying to draw a line between Leave and Remain - Sir Keir’s Labour being associated with the low wage, high immigration era whilst his Tories want to train our youngsters and see wages increase etc
    I'd be interested in examples of what has been done to "train our youngsters", rather than what has been said.
    As someone in the FE trade, it appears to be the cube root of jack shite thus far.
    I’d have thought it was an aim for the future, in contrast to the mass importation of cheap labour, rather than something that has already been done
    Yes but. He's been in power for 2 years plus. We all are aware of the Grand Plan.
    Yet nowt practical seems to happen.
    When will this training begin? And who will do it? And where?
    The pandemic probably hasn’t helped. That’s been most of the time since he won the election, before that he didn’t have a majority, and Brexit wasn’t done. So in reality he’s had 22 months of which at least 18 have been dominated by Covid
    Surely then a speech to Conference would be the ideal time to outline some specifics?
    Apparently not.
    Hasn't the Speaker told Johnson that policy announcements must be made to the House first, not to the media?

    How specific have previous PMs been on policy? They're in charge. If they have a policy do it, dont just wait til a day in October to say you're thinking about one.
  • RobDRobD Posts: 58,941

    dixiedean said:

    isam said:

    dixiedean said:

    isam said:

    dixiedean said:

    Those facing a £20 UC cut today will be delighted that the

    isam said:

    kle4 said:

    DavidL said:

    What I got from Boris's speech is what he wanted me to get. This is a government on a mission and with a hugely ambitious program to change this country for the better. He wants better transport, education, skills, education, law and order, the list went on and on.

    Will he be able to deliver? Who knows, certainly not on all of it but maybe on some. If he does he will have done better than most of his recent predecessors. The message from his speech is that this is not a government blundering around not knowing what it wants to do. I think he succeeded in that.

    Don't all political parties want things to be better? Has any conference speech stated they want transport and education to get worse?

    What I got from the speech was not that the Tories want to change the country for the better, but to impress upon people that they are still energetic and coming up with ideas (he talked about 'tired old Labour'), rather than a sclerotic 11 year old government paddling along.
    Yes, the entire rhetoric is remarkable. What the Tories are doing is pretending that Labour was in power until 2019, when Boris took over. Astonishingly, quite a lot of voters seem to think that this is true, and any current woes should be blamed on the Labour government 2010-2019. Things haven't got better yet because of Labour's misrule - but now Boris is in charge. It takes some brass neck, but it seems to work.
    He is probably trying to draw a line between Leave and Remain - Sir Keir’s Labour being associated with the low wage, high immigration era whilst his Tories want to train our youngsters and see wages increase etc
    I'd be interested in examples of what has been done to "train our youngsters", rather than what has been said.
    As someone in the FE trade, it appears to be the cube root of jack shite thus far.
    I’d have thought it was an aim for the future, in contrast to the mass importation of cheap labour, rather than something that has already been done
    Yes but. He's been in power for 2 years plus. We all are aware of the Grand Plan.
    Yet nowt practical seems to happen.
    When will this training begin? And who will do it? And where?
    The pandemic probably hasn’t helped. That’s been most of the time since he won the election, before that he didn’t have a majority, and Brexit wasn’t done. So in reality he’s had 22 months of which at least 18 have been dominated by Covid
    Surely then a speech to Conference would be the ideal time to outline some specifics?
    Apparently not.
    Hasn't the Speaker told Johnson that policy announcements must be made to the House first, not to the media?

    How specific have previous PMs been on policy? They're in charge. If they have a policy do it, dont just wait til a day in October to say you're thinking about one.
    I think that complaint was relating to very specific changes to Covid regs (amongst others). I don’t think it amounts to a ban on announcing broad policy objectives.
  • felixfelix Posts: 15,122
    rpjs said:

    rcs1000 said:

    theProle said:

    Lots of talk on here about pay rises leading to inflation, and whether or not that's a good thing, but isn't it all just a bit more complicated than that?

    Not everyone is getting pay rises right now.

    Skilled/semi-skilled manual workers, care workers, wagon drivers, building site labourers are getting big rises.

    The white collar and middle class types - accountants, administrators, design engineers, project managers aren't suffering from a sudden reduction in their part of the workforce, so their wages are going to be static.

    This means that after allowing for the effect of the inflation caused by rising wages in some sectors, we'll actually see a rebalancing - the working class will generally earn more than before, and everyone else less.

    This is seriously good news for the working class types who voted for Brext as its exactly what they expected to happen. So it's no good for the lefty-remainery types to screech and moan about it to them - Brext has done what it said on the tin.

    I get why there is a lot of screeching and moaning on here - posters here tend to be well off white collar types or posher, rather than digger drivers or steel erectors. Even I'm not a typical specimen of the working class (I'm a SME owner now!) although I'm probably closer to the action there than most.

    I suspect that the biggest medium term challenge for the government is going to be public sector pay. They'll have to pay the manual workers more, or they'll all drift to the private sector. They don't need to (and won't be able to afford to) pay the planning officers, NHS managers, etc a similar rise. But how on earth do they do one without the other?

    (this is the public sector teacher problem on a massive scale - maths teachers have more real world value in alternative careers than history or art teachers, but they are usually on identical pay scales - so hiring good art and history teachers is easy, but good maths teachers nearly impossible).

    I'm not sure it's all Brexit related - there's tremendous wage inflation in the US and even the Eurozone* right now as demand bounces back post pandemic.

    I have been in Vegas at a conference the last three days (and Vegas was utterly rammed, which is staggering for a Monday to Wednesday in early October). In the cab heading back to the airport, the driver told me he used to be an HGV driver. I asked him if he'd been tempted to go back, as there is a shortage. He told me his old firm had offered him a $10,000 sign on bonus - but that he wasn't tempted because he could earn really well doing taxi and food delivery.

    * German wage growth in June was the highest since the early 90s
    Saw a 18-wheeler on I-287 the other day bearing a big sign advertising rates for drivers of $2,500+ a week.
    https://elpais.com/internacional/2021-10-03/la-falta-de-camioneros-amenaza-el-suministro-global.html?utm_source=Facebook&ssm=FB_CM_INT&fbclid=IwAR3QKfbLNRoDK_4WOMz2nevFH83R7nUBsekya2tsQm0mKANS_PRRDnm0lpo#Echobox=1633252584

    Clearly 400k driver shortage in Europe has been caused by Brexit!
  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 49,614
    rcs1000 said:

    This is worth reading on the Taiwan - China airspace thing:

    https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/10/chinese-military-taiwan-airspace.html

    Yes, it’s not quite as provocative as some have made out.

    More worrying, is the news that China spent the second half of 2019 buying up PCR testing equipment. It’s almost as if they knew there was going to be a need for it several months later.
    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-04/china-pcr-purchases-spiked-in-months-before-first-known-covid-cases-firm-says
  • Morris_DancerMorris_Dancer Posts: 60,933
    Good morning, everyone.

    Mr. Sandpit, that's a rather telling finding on PCR equipment.
  • rcs1000 said:

    rpjs said:

    rcs1000 said:

    theProle said:

    Lots of talk on here about pay rises leading to inflation, and whether or not that's a good thing, but isn't it all just a bit more complicated than that?

    Not everyone is getting pay rises right now.

    Skilled/semi-skilled manual workers, care workers, wagon drivers, building site labourers are getting big rises.

    The white collar and middle class types - accountants, administrators, design engineers, project managers aren't suffering from a sudden reduction in their part of the workforce, so their wages are going to be static.

    This means that after allowing for the effect of the inflation caused by rising wages in some sectors, we'll actually see a rebalancing - the working class will generally earn more than before, and everyone else less.

    This is seriously good news for the working class types who voted for Brext as its exactly what they expected to happen. So it's no good for the lefty-remainery types to screech and moan about it to them - Brext has done what it said on the tin.

    I get why there is a lot of screeching and moaning on here - posters here tend to be well off white collar types or posher, rather than digger drivers or steel erectors. Even I'm not a typical specimen of the working class (I'm a SME owner now!) although I'm probably closer to the action there than most.

    I suspect that the biggest medium term challenge for the government is going to be public sector pay. They'll have to pay the manual workers more, or they'll all drift to the private sector. They don't need to (and won't be able to afford to) pay the planning officers, NHS managers, etc a similar rise. But how on earth do they do one without the other?

    (this is the public sector teacher problem on a massive scale - maths teachers have more real world value in alternative careers than history or art teachers, but they are usually on identical pay scales - so hiring good art and history teachers is easy, but good maths teachers nearly impossible).

    I'm not sure it's all Brexit related - there's tremendous wage inflation in the US and even the Eurozone* right now as demand bounces back post pandemic.

    I have been in Vegas at a conference the last three days (and Vegas was utterly rammed, which is staggering for a Monday to Wednesday in early October). In the cab heading back to the airport, the driver told me he used to be an HGV driver. I asked him if he'd been tempted to go back, as there is a shortage. He told me his old firm had offered him a $10,000 sign on bonus - but that he wasn't tempted because he could earn really well doing taxi and food delivery.

    * German wage growth in June was the highest since the early 90s
    Saw a 18-wheeler on I-287 the other day bearing a big sign advertising rates for drivers of $2,500+ a week.
    Based on my conversation with a taxi driver, you can now earn nearly as much driving Ubers/cabs/food delivery as an HGV driver. And you get to sleep in your own bed every night, not in the cramped cabin of a truck.

    The other problem, I suspect, is that people think that a lot of long distance driving is going away with the rise of autonomous vehicles. So why go into a business where wages are likely to be a lot lower in the future?
    Arent higher wages in food delivery likely to be driven down as more entrants are attracted into the sector? The barriers to entry cant be that high.

    Before the pandemic Uber drivers, albeit taxi not food, were complaining they were taking home less than minimum wage (in Leeds at least).
    You'd have thought so. The other day my fish and chips turned up in a 68-plate Mercedes, and not an A-class. I can only imagine its day job is as a posh Uber. If we assume £3 to £4 a delivery, 4 deliveries and £5 tips an hour, that is £30 gross an hour which is not bad but at quieter times, £15 an hour before tax and before expenses like petrol is better than a poke in the eye with a hot chip but not by much.
  • Andy_JS said:

    dixiedean said:

    isam said:

    dixiedean said:

    isam said:

    dixiedean said:

    Those facing a £20 UC cut today will be delighted that the

    isam said:

    kle4 said:

    DavidL said:

    What I got from Boris's speech is what he wanted me to get. This is a government on a mission and with a hugely ambitious program to change this country for the better. He wants better transport, education, skills, education, law and order, the list went on and on.

    Will he be able to deliver? Who knows, certainly not on all of it but maybe on some. If he does he will have done better than most of his recent predecessors. The message from his speech is that this is not a government blundering around not knowing what it wants to do. I think he succeeded in that.

    Don't all political parties want things to be better? Has any conference speech stated they want transport and education to get worse?

    What I got from the speech was not that the Tories want to change the country for the better, but to impress upon people that they are still energetic and coming up with ideas (he talked about 'tired old Labour'), rather than a sclerotic 11 year old government paddling along.
    Yes, the entire rhetoric is remarkable. What the Tories are doing is pretending that Labour was in power until 2019, when Boris took over. Astonishingly, quite a lot of voters seem to think that this is true, and any current woes should be blamed on the Labour government 2010-2019. Things haven't got better yet because of Labour's misrule - but now Boris is in charge. It takes some brass neck, but it seems to work.
    He is probably trying to draw a line between Leave and Remain - Sir Keir’s Labour being associated with the low wage, high immigration era whilst his Tories want to train our youngsters and see wages increase etc
    I'd be interested in examples of what has been done to "train our youngsters", rather than what has been said.
    As someone in the FE trade, it appears to be the cube root of jack shite thus far.
    I’d have thought it was an aim for the future, in contrast to the mass importation of cheap labour, rather than something that has already been done
    Yes but. He's been in power for 2 years plus. We all are aware of the Grand Plan.
    Yet nowt practical seems to happen.
    When will this training begin? And who will do it? And where?
    The pandemic probably hasn’t helped. That’s been most of the time since he won the election, before that he didn’t have a majority, and Brexit wasn’t done. So in reality he’s had 22 months of which at least 18 have been dominated by Covid
    Surely then a speech to Conference would be the ideal time to outline some specifics?
    Apparently not.
    Yes, I thought that Labour's conference was a bit light on policy, but the Conservatives are actually in Government - you'd think they'd have had something to say. For the first 3 days the journalists were told it was all being saved up for Johnson's speech, which turned out to be about nothing in particular. Just odd - why did they bother to get into politics if they don't want to do anything?
    We didn't seem to get much in the way of defections either.
    Mr Palmer wasnt saying that when Labour 3had nothing to say, which was often in their yrs in Office and whilst they were destroying the Economy. Granted it took 13 yrs before they
    destroyed the ecomomy but they got there in the end.....
    Labour did not destroy the economy, the GFC did. The economy was recovering under Labour but that halfwit Osborne flatlined it. Boris, you will note, ran against the austerity economics of Cameron/Osborne even before the pandemic.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 61,565
    Sandpit said:

    rcs1000 said:

    This is worth reading on the Taiwan - China airspace thing:

    https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/10/chinese-military-taiwan-airspace.html

    Yes, it’s not quite as provocative as some have made out.

    More worrying, is the news that China spent the second half of 2019 buying up PCR testing equipment. It’s almost as if they knew there was going to be a need for it several months later.
    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-04/china-pcr-purchases-spiked-in-months-before-first-known-covid-cases-firm-says
    Couldn’t that graph just show an exponential growth in PCR testing over the last decade ?
    A significantly earlier start for the pandemic wouldn’t really match the infectiousness of the virus, either, which throws up a lot of other questions.
  • GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,072
    Even if @theProle is correct I dont think further erosion of the middle class will prove to be a fruitful political strategy in the long run - especially as many middle aged “working class” red wallers are actually in what PB tories would consider as middle class jobs
  • theProle said:

    Lots of talk on here about pay rises leading to inflation, and whether or not that's a good thing, but isn't it all just a bit more complicated than that?

    Not everyone is getting pay rises right now.

    Skilled/semi-skilled manual workers, care workers, wagon drivers, building site labourers are getting big rises.

    The white collar and middle class types - accountants, administrators, design engineers, project managers aren't suffering from a sudden reduction in their part of the workforce, so their wages are going to be static.

    This means that after allowing for the effect of the inflation caused by rising wages in some sectors, we'll actually see a rebalancing - the working class will generally earn more than before, and everyone else less.

    This is seriously good news for the working class types who voted for Brext as its exactly what they expected to happen. So it's no good for the lefty-remainery types to screech and moan about it to them - Brext has done what it said on the tin.

    I get why there is a lot of screeching and moaning on here - posters here tend to be well off white collar types or posher, rather than digger drivers or steel erectors. Even I'm not a typical specimen of the working class (I'm a SME owner now!) although I'm probably closer to the action there than most.

    I suspect that the biggest medium term challenge for the government is going to be public sector pay. They'll have to pay the manual workers more, or they'll all drift to the private sector. They don't need to (and won't be able to afford to) pay the planning officers, NHS managers, etc a similar rise. But how on earth do they do one without the other?

    (this is the public sector teacher problem on a massive scale - maths teachers have more real world value in alternative careers than history or art teachers, but they are usually on identical pay scales - so hiring good art and history teachers is easy, but good maths teachers nearly impossible).

    Is the section about teachers quite right? Surely one issue with maths teachers is that schools require more of them than history teachers, while many art teachers moonlight as commercial artists. This leaves aside the question of how effective they are as teachers. Government rhetoric suggests a better class of degree means a better teacher but it is not obvious this should be the case.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,766
    Nigelb said:

    Sandpit said:

    rcs1000 said:

    This is worth reading on the Taiwan - China airspace thing:

    https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/10/chinese-military-taiwan-airspace.html

    Yes, it’s not quite as provocative as some have made out.

    More worrying, is the news that China spent the second half of 2019 buying up PCR testing equipment. It’s almost as if they knew there was going to be a need for it several months later.
    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-04/china-pcr-purchases-spiked-in-months-before-first-known-covid-cases-firm-says
    Couldn’t that graph just show an exponential growth in PCR testing over the last decade ?
    A significantly earlier start for the pandemic wouldn’t really match the infectiousness of the virus, either, which throws up a lot of other questions.
    Without long term data, we don't know if this is a sudden unexplained increase, or simply part of a trend.
  • GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,072
    15 hour workday yesterday and cannot get out of bed this morning
  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 49,614

    rcs1000 said:

    rpjs said:

    rcs1000 said:

    theProle said:

    Lots of talk on here about pay rises leading to inflation, and whether or not that's a good thing, but isn't it all just a bit more complicated than that?

    Not everyone is getting pay rises right now.

    Skilled/semi-skilled manual workers, care workers, wagon drivers, building site labourers are getting big rises.

    The white collar and middle class types - accountants, administrators, design engineers, project managers aren't suffering from a sudden reduction in their part of the workforce, so their wages are going to be static.

    This means that after allowing for the effect of the inflation caused by rising wages in some sectors, we'll actually see a rebalancing - the working class will generally earn more than before, and everyone else less.

    This is seriously good news for the working class types who voted for Brext as its exactly what they expected to happen. So it's no good for the lefty-remainery types to screech and moan about it to them - Brext has done what it said on the tin.

    I get why there is a lot of screeching and moaning on here - posters here tend to be well off white collar types or posher, rather than digger drivers or steel erectors. Even I'm not a typical specimen of the working class (I'm a SME owner now!) although I'm probably closer to the action there than most.

    I suspect that the biggest medium term challenge for the government is going to be public sector pay. They'll have to pay the manual workers more, or they'll all drift to the private sector. They don't need to (and won't be able to afford to) pay the planning officers, NHS managers, etc a similar rise. But how on earth do they do one without the other?

    (this is the public sector teacher problem on a massive scale - maths teachers have more real world value in alternative careers than history or art teachers, but they are usually on identical pay scales - so hiring good art and history teachers is easy, but good maths teachers nearly impossible).

    I'm not sure it's all Brexit related - there's tremendous wage inflation in the US and even the Eurozone* right now as demand bounces back post pandemic.

    I have been in Vegas at a conference the last three days (and Vegas was utterly rammed, which is staggering for a Monday to Wednesday in early October). In the cab heading back to the airport, the driver told me he used to be an HGV driver. I asked him if he'd been tempted to go back, as there is a shortage. He told me his old firm had offered him a $10,000 sign on bonus - but that he wasn't tempted because he could earn really well doing taxi and food delivery.

    * German wage growth in June was the highest since the early 90s
    Saw a 18-wheeler on I-287 the other day bearing a big sign advertising rates for drivers of $2,500+ a week.
    Based on my conversation with a taxi driver, you can now earn nearly as much driving Ubers/cabs/food delivery as an HGV driver. And you get to sleep in your own bed every night, not in the cramped cabin of a truck.

    The other problem, I suspect, is that people think that a lot of long distance driving is going away with the rise of autonomous vehicles. So why go into a business where wages are likely to be a lot lower in the future?
    Arent higher wages in food delivery likely to be driven down as more entrants are attracted into the sector? The barriers to entry cant be that high.

    Before the pandemic Uber drivers, albeit taxi not food, were complaining they were taking home less than minimum wage (in Leeds at least).
    You'd have thought so. The other day my fish and chips turned up in a 68-plate Mercedes, and not an A-class. I can only imagine its day job is as a posh Uber. If we assume £3 to £4 a delivery, 4 deliveries and £5 tips an hour, that is £30 gross an hour which is not bad but at quieter times, £15 an hour before tax and before expenses like petrol is better than a poke in the eye with a hot chip but not by much.
    Using an expensive car to make short deliveries is a very false economy.

    People only look at the immediate marginal cost of operating the car (time and petrol), and miss the depreciation, finance and servicing costs that make it quite uneconomical. It you’re unemployed and with a lease commitment on the car though, you likely don’t have much choice.

    Or maybe it was just that his airport run got cancelled that day, and he found himself with time on his hands.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 61,565
    .
    rcs1000 said:

    Nigelb said:

    Sandpit said:

    rcs1000 said:

    This is worth reading on the Taiwan - China airspace thing:

    https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/10/chinese-military-taiwan-airspace.html

    Yes, it’s not quite as provocative as some have made out.

    More worrying, is the news that China spent the second half of 2019 buying up PCR testing equipment. It’s almost as if they knew there was going to be a need for it several months later.
    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-04/china-pcr-purchases-spiked-in-months-before-first-known-covid-cases-firm-says
    Couldn’t that graph just show an exponential growth in PCR testing over the last decade ?
    A significantly earlier start for the pandemic wouldn’t really match the infectiousness of the virus, either, which throws up a lot of other questions.
    Without long term data, we don't know if this is a sudden unexplained increase, or simply part of a trend.
    There is long term data in that graph on the link. What's lacking is a lot of contextual data.
    There's certainly been a rapid increase in PCR testing everywhere, which is as much technology determined as demand determined.
    Either could be true, but if the pandemic started months earlier, it doesn't really match what we know about the epidemiology of the virus - which might imply a significantly less infectious precursor.
  • 15 hour workday yesterday and cannot get out of bed this morning

    Hard work, digging coal. You sort-of signed up for at least occasional long days but don't make a habit of it. Get up, shower, breakfast, coffee. You can catch up with Coronation Street at the weekend. Try to develop a flexible routine that can incorporate long days, and an understanding partner. Little things like picking out shirts in advance and always keeping your keys, pass and other work detritus in the same place so you do not waste time making decisions in the morning.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,766
    Sandpit said:

    rcs1000 said:

    rpjs said:

    rcs1000 said:

    theProle said:

    Lots of talk on here about pay rises leading to inflation, and whether or not that's a good thing, but isn't it all just a bit more complicated than that?

    Not everyone is getting pay rises right now.

    Skilled/semi-skilled manual workers, care workers, wagon drivers, building site labourers are getting big rises.

    The white collar and middle class types - accountants, administrators, design engineers, project managers aren't suffering from a sudden reduction in their part of the workforce, so their wages are going to be static.

    This means that after allowing for the effect of the inflation caused by rising wages in some sectors, we'll actually see a rebalancing - the working class will generally earn more than before, and everyone else less.

    This is seriously good news for the working class types who voted for Brext as its exactly what they expected to happen. So it's no good for the lefty-remainery types to screech and moan about it to them - Brext has done what it said on the tin.

    I get why there is a lot of screeching and moaning on here - posters here tend to be well off white collar types or posher, rather than digger drivers or steel erectors. Even I'm not a typical specimen of the working class (I'm a SME owner now!) although I'm probably closer to the action there than most.

    I suspect that the biggest medium term challenge for the government is going to be public sector pay. They'll have to pay the manual workers more, or they'll all drift to the private sector. They don't need to (and won't be able to afford to) pay the planning officers, NHS managers, etc a similar rise. But how on earth do they do one without the other?

    (this is the public sector teacher problem on a massive scale - maths teachers have more real world value in alternative careers than history or art teachers, but they are usually on identical pay scales - so hiring good art and history teachers is easy, but good maths teachers nearly impossible).

    I'm not sure it's all Brexit related - there's tremendous wage inflation in the US and even the Eurozone* right now as demand bounces back post pandemic.

    I have been in Vegas at a conference the last three days (and Vegas was utterly rammed, which is staggering for a Monday to Wednesday in early October). In the cab heading back to the airport, the driver told me he used to be an HGV driver. I asked him if he'd been tempted to go back, as there is a shortage. He told me his old firm had offered him a $10,000 sign on bonus - but that he wasn't tempted because he could earn really well doing taxi and food delivery.

    * German wage growth in June was the highest since the early 90s
    Saw a 18-wheeler on I-287 the other day bearing a big sign advertising rates for drivers of $2,500+ a week.
    Based on my conversation with a taxi driver, you can now earn nearly as much driving Ubers/cabs/food delivery as an HGV driver. And you get to sleep in your own bed every night, not in the cramped cabin of a truck.

    The other problem, I suspect, is that people think that a lot of long distance driving is going away with the rise of autonomous vehicles. So why go into a business where wages are likely to be a lot lower in the future?
    Arent higher wages in food delivery likely to be driven down as more entrants are attracted into the sector? The barriers to entry cant be that high.

    Before the pandemic Uber drivers, albeit taxi not food, were complaining they were taking home less than minimum wage (in Leeds at least).
    You'd have thought so. The other day my fish and chips turned up in a 68-plate Mercedes, and not an A-class. I can only imagine its day job is as a posh Uber. If we assume £3 to £4 a delivery, 4 deliveries and £5 tips an hour, that is £30 gross an hour which is not bad but at quieter times, £15 an hour before tax and before expenses like petrol is better than a poke in the eye with a hot chip but not by much.
    Using an expensive car to make short deliveries is a very false economy.

    People only look at the immediate marginal cost of operating the car (time and petrol), and miss the depreciation, finance and servicing costs that make it quite uneconomical. It you’re unemployed and with a lease commitment on the car though, you likely don’t have much choice.

    Or maybe it was just that his airport run got cancelled that day, and he found himself with time on his hands.
    Spot on.

    Someone doing a Deliveroo job in a Mercedes E Class is likely to be losing money once depreciation is taken into account. It's why the ride share leasing companies use such a narrow range of vehicles.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,766

    15 hour workday yesterday and cannot get out of bed this morning

    Hard work, digging coal. You sort-of signed up for at least occasional long days but don't make a habit of it. Get up, shower, breakfast, coffee. You can catch up with Coronation Street at the weekend. Try to develop a flexible routine that can incorporate long days, and an understanding partner. Little things like picking out shirts in advance and always keeping your keys, pass and other work detritus in the same place so you do not waste time making decisions in the morning.
    Dump the partner.

    Frankly, they're not good enough for the person you'll be.
  • AlistairAlistair Posts: 23,670
    rcs1000 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Copied from the previous thread - sorry!

    I see the usual Scottish Independence Referendum arguments are being rehashed again. As long as Sturgeon continues to lead the SNP, there won’t be a referendum, or even a request for one.

    Assuming Sturgeon is still SNP leader at the time of the next General Election, I can forsee three things happening.
    Some SNP voters will switch to Alba.
    Some will return to Labour.
    Some will stay at home.

    If this happens, how many seats will the SNP lose? My estimate is that they will lose around 10 seats to Labour and fail to win any seats from any of the other parties.

    Would it be enough for Sturgeon to be replaced?

    Would it be enough to prevent another Conservative government?

    Will Alba field General Election candidates? It's performance at the Scottish elections was pretty execrable, so I'm far from convinced they'll still be a thing.
    I would expect Alba to at least contest the seats they currently hold, East Lothian and Kirkcaldy. I would hope they would stand candidates against Pete Wishart in Perth, John Nicolson in Ochil, Alyn Smyth in Stirling, Kirsty Blackman in Aberdeen North, Alison Thewliss in Glasgow Central and Patrick Grady in Glasgow North, as they are the most extreme Sturgeon loyalists.
    Well, we'll see. Personally I wouldn't be surprised if Alba disbanded before the next GE.
    Alba exists as a revenge vehicle for Salmond to destroy Sturgeon. It will keep going as long as it serves that purpose.

    It has attracted SNP members who also want to destroy Sturgeon and "her woke agenda", funnily enough the above list of MPs are all on the wokeyier end of the political spectrum.
  • IanB2IanB2 Posts: 47,080
    edited October 2021

    I took part in this poll and we were shown parts of the speech.

    I trust they offered you counselling afterwards? For some folk, the sudden discovery that the country is being run by a fool could be quite traumatic.
  • rcs1000 said:

    15 hour workday yesterday and cannot get out of bed this morning

    Hard work, digging coal. You sort-of signed up for at least occasional long days but don't make a habit of it. Get up, shower, breakfast, coffee. You can catch up with Coronation Street at the weekend. Try to develop a flexible routine that can incorporate long days, and an understanding partner. Little things like picking out shirts in advance and always keeping your keys, pass and other work detritus in the same place so you do not waste time making decisions in the morning.
    Dump the partner.

    Frankly, they're not good enough for the person you'll be.
    Someone's got to make coffee in the morning so either it's the understanding partner, one of those machines, or swinging by the drive-through McDonalds for coffee and a Sausage McMuffin for breakfast (as eaten by American celebrity billionaire Warren Buffet). The trick is to have made these decisions, or contingency plans, in advance.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,766
    rcs1000 said:

    Even if @theProle is correct I dont think further erosion of the middle class will prove to be a fruitful political strategy in the long run - especially as many middle aged “working class” red wallers are actually in what PB tories would consider as middle class jobs

    It's important to understand that - ultimately - the money that gets shared out among the workers and shareholders is a consequence of the productivity of employees and firms.

    Paying an HGV driver twice as much to haul the same amount of cargo, the same number of miles, is not increasing the size of the pie, it is merely redistributing who gets what.

    Now, it may be that the middle classes (or perhaps I should say the owners of capital), have had it away at the expense of workers due to immigration. (Although that doesn't explain why the same trends have been seen across the developed world irrespective of levels of net migration.) And it may be that a rebalancing is due. But it is important to realise that unless the size of the pie grows, it is a zero sum game.

    Governments would be well advised to concentrate more on growing the pie, than on dividing the spoils. Why? Because if the pie is growing, then nobody need become absolutely poorer. But if it isn't, then someone is going to be losing out.
    Just to add: that is the essence of the supply side reforms that Reagan, Thatcher and Schroder did in the US, the UK and Germany. They implemented policies that enabled the labour market to work more smoothly, increasing the size of the pie.
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