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

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  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 24,587
    eek said:

    HYUFD said:

    Stocky said:

    Stocky said:

    DavidL said:

    Those who are demanding some masterplan from Boris are starting from the wrong place. Their perception is that we are in some form of existential crisis, well we must be because we Brexited.

    The reality is rather more complicated. What we have is record employment, a country that is generating jobs faster than we can fill them and a need to think about how the available labour is better utilised. We have enjoyed a sudden burst of growth triggered by the end of lockdown and some distribution problems as a result. We also have long term problems which Boris did, in fairness, talk about yesterday: the shortage of skills, the dependence on cheap labour, the lack of aspiration in some areas and the waste of talent as a result. He could also have talked about our lack of investment (although Rishi is trying to improve that), saving and excess consumption.

    I don't think this needs a masterplan or even a vision. It needs us to keep buggering on for quite a while addressing problems as they arise and trying to gradually improve things. That is what we will get from Boris (along with the odd daft idea or white elephant) and it should in fact do us fine.

    Great post, as i have said before for someone who left school in the early 80s when unemployment was 3 million, to have one of the major current issues as too many jobs is quite hard to comprehend.
    So here's a question for you:

    My not-at-all academic daughter needs to look at universities. She's not sure she wants to go but we have to look anyway in case. If she does go she will study Fine Art. 1 year Foundation Course and the 3 years degree. Will consign her to a 9% income tax obligation on future incomes over £25k (or whatever) for 30 years as per Student Loan rules (she will never pay it off). Plus other costs of living away. plus she will also lose four years earnings in studying for this degree which is pretty much non-income enhancing I would suggest. The reasons for going to university would be non-financial.

    The alternative to university is a job probably on minimum wage. Probably in hospitality.

    What should she do?
    I suggest that she looks at post A level apprenticeship programmes run by large employers, geared for 18 year old school leavers. There are a lot out there, just do some web searches. It'll give her a decent CV and an opportunity to show what she's worth in a large organisation. The odds are that, once the apprenticeship ends if she's any good they'll have spotted that and want to keep her on in a substantive post. She should be selective and look at the qualiy of training and also typical career paths of past apprentices, and try and avoid small firms who might well just be looking for a discardable source of cheap labour for 2 years.
    The first question I would ask is the quality of the universities she is likely to get in.

    If you get a degree from a good university, the subject is almost irrelevant. Many people do a subject of their liking (very important to do something you actually like!) followed by a "conversion" Masters to "Business/IT"

    So, would she be heading for a 2:1 or 1st at a Russell group (or similarly highly regarded) university?

    Russell Group is not the be all and end all - do some research on the standing of the University.
    A Russell group (or similarly highly regarded) university - no, unfortunately not - I would be much keener if this were so...

    On Saturday we are going to look at Oxford Brooks. We may also look at Manchester Metropolitan and Central St Martins (UAL)
    If not to a Russell Group university she would probably earn more post graduation and be debt free doing an apprenticeship. Although if she wants to go to university mainly for the social side and to learn for its own sake she should still go
    For someone involved with post 16 education, I have grave reservations about the delivery of apprenticeships.

    I am assessing a candidate at this very moment which tells a story. No, no, they were remiss in doing their homework so I have given them an exercise to do.
    The DWP apprentice I know of has had to restart the course as the previous provider was so bad they've had to chuck out everything "taught" last year and start again.
    That is not unusual. Funded qualifications are all about getting paid on certification. So for cynical providers, including some FE colleges, it is all about the certificate rather than what goes on before.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,625

    DavidL said:

    Selebian said:

    isam said:

    isam said:

    Scott_xP said:

    .@afneil on @LBC: "You can have more alliteration, as Mr Johnson had, than a West Coast poet from the 1960s on LSD. That's all fine.

    "But we're a country with major problems and we need to know the Government's solution to these problems and on that Mr Johnson had not a jot."

    And that is why it is getting a beating. Sunny uplit futures are great when things are on the up. When things are on the down you have to first identify why that is and map your way out to the sunny places ahead.

    The Tory position remains incoherent. There is no crisis. There is a crisis but its your fault. There isn't a crisis because look at Europe. There is a crisis but you can't blame Brexit. There isn't a crisis and we won't bring in workers. There is a crisis and we are bringing in workers. There are no downsides. There are downsides but actually they were the plan all along and aren't they marvellous.

    If the government was not the Muppet Show, if they had an Alastair Campbell / Peter Mandleson / Dominic Cummings strategist then they would have had all this laid out. This is what we are doing, these are the issues we can mitigate, these we can't mitigate but here's how we will spin them, here's the line repeat the line until people believe it. Instead we have *this*.

    Kermit the Frog.
    What are the downsides, if any, of the driver shortage on the continent?
    It is slower and more expensive to move stuff around. But remember that the driver shortage isn't universal, it is in patches. On a continent that is both a single logistics network and a single employment market. Drivers and vehicles gets filled from other countries - as an example some of the "driver shortages" in places like Poland are due to them winning contracts in Germany.

    What is a real problem is getting stuff to the UK. My clients shift refrigerated product out of Romania to places like the Netherlands without issues. To the UK? You can't shift small loads at all. You can't consolidate very easily due to caobtage and paperwork issues. I've just opened up a chilled business for them here and it took a month to plan transport.

    And yet fools and outright liars try to tell people that there is no UK-only issue, that Europe has a driver shortage therefore its the same there. It isn't, they know it isn't, they hope that some people will just accept what they are told without question.
    That last paragraph works both ways - until I did a bit of digging, on here Boris/Brexit haters were happy for people to think it was a UK only issue
    We're in a strange paradoxical universe in which the majority viewpoints can be summarised as follows:

    Remoaners*: Brexit is causing shortages, project fear now reality. Wage rises are however a bad thing, even for those who voted for Brexit and are more reflective of other trends than of Brexit.
    Brexiteers*: Brexit is not causing shortages. There are shortages everywhere. However, despite the shortages everywhere, including in HGV drivers, increases in wages are a Brexit dividend and there are no downsides.

    *Pejorative terms intentionally used. There is also a sane minority (or perhaps a silent majority? e.g. RCS, but many others) who recognise that there are many different factors at play, that wage rises are great for those receiving them but could be bad for others who will be subject to inflation but not get rises themselves as they are still open to competition from Poles in Poland/rest of the EU if not from Poles here and that the issues are a mix of factors, Covid, post-Covid demand etc...
    I thought that Robert's contribution this morning was excellent. I also think that it is a point that both @Philip_Thompson and I have readily acknowledged. Increased wages for those who now benefit from scarcity such as HGV drivers is not cost free. It means higher costs for the rest of us in terms of goods etc. To the extent that those who have not had these increased competitive advantage are not able to increase our earnings to compensate they will be worse off. And wage inequality in our society will reduce. Which Philip and I regard as a good thing even if (being nice we do not say because) it will reduce the standard of living of professional class remainers and, indeed, myself.

    People who can afford to pay higher prices - or can negotiate higher pay to mitigate them - will always end up being fine with higher prices. Those who can't will be less enthused, however they voted in the referendum.

    As RCS has previously mentioned, an example of an economy with a higher wage structure for the "low end" jobs is Switzerland.

    I wonder how many Swiss people do those jobs.

    IIRC You need to speak both French and German and have a 2 year local Swiss qualification to work in a restaurant or some such.

    That's going to lock out a lot of people.

    RCS would be the one to speak to on that, though
  • OldKingColeOldKingCole Posts: 31,718
    DavidL said:

    DavidL said:

    Selebian said:

    isam said:

    isam said:

    Scott_xP said:

    .@afneil on @LBC: "You can have more alliteration, as Mr Johnson had, than a West Coast poet from the 1960s on LSD. That's all fine.

    "But we're a country with major problems and we need to know the Government's solution to these problems and on that Mr Johnson had not a jot."

    And that is why it is getting a beating. Sunny uplit futures are great when things are on the up. When things are on the down you have to first identify why that is and map your way out to the sunny places ahead.

    The Tory position remains incoherent. There is no crisis. There is a crisis but its your fault. There isn't a crisis because look at Europe. There is a crisis but you can't blame Brexit. There isn't a crisis and we won't bring in workers. There is a crisis and we are bringing in workers. There are no downsides. There are downsides but actually they were the plan all along and aren't they marvellous.

    If the government was not the Muppet Show, if they had an Alastair Campbell / Peter Mandleson / Dominic Cummings strategist then they would have had all this laid out. This is what we are doing, these are the issues we can mitigate, these we can't mitigate but here's how we will spin them, here's the line repeat the line until people believe it. Instead we have *this*.

    Kermit the Frog.
    What are the downsides, if any, of the driver shortage on the continent?
    It is slower and more expensive to move stuff around. But remember that the driver shortage isn't universal, it is in patches. On a continent that is both a single logistics network and a single employment market. Drivers and vehicles gets filled from other countries - as an example some of the "driver shortages" in places like Poland are due to them winning contracts in Germany.

    What is a real problem is getting stuff to the UK. My clients shift refrigerated product out of Romania to places like the Netherlands without issues. To the UK? You can't shift small loads at all. You can't consolidate very easily due to caobtage and paperwork issues. I've just opened up a chilled business for them here and it took a month to plan transport.

    And yet fools and outright liars try to tell people that there is no UK-only issue, that Europe has a driver shortage therefore its the same there. It isn't, they know it isn't, they hope that some people will just accept what they are told without question.
    That last paragraph works both ways - until I did a bit of digging, on here Boris/Brexit haters were happy for people to think it was a UK only issue
    We're in a strange paradoxical universe in which the majority viewpoints can be summarised as follows:

    Remoaners*: Brexit is causing shortages, project fear now reality. Wage rises are however a bad thing, even for those who voted for Brexit and are more reflective of other trends than of Brexit.
    Brexiteers*: Brexit is not causing shortages. There are shortages everywhere. However, despite the shortages everywhere, including in HGV drivers, increases in wages are a Brexit dividend and there are no downsides.

    *Pejorative terms intentionally used. There is also a sane minority (or perhaps a silent majority? e.g. RCS, but many others) who recognise that there are many different factors at play, that wage rises are great for those receiving them but could be bad for others who will be subject to inflation but not get rises themselves as they are still open to competition from Poles in Poland/rest of the EU if not from Poles here and that the issues are a mix of factors, Covid, post-Covid demand etc...
    I thought that Robert's contribution this morning was excellent. I also think that it is a point that both @Philip_Thompson and I have readily acknowledged. Increased wages for those who now benefit from scarcity such as HGV drivers is not cost free. It means higher costs for the rest of us in terms of goods etc. To the extent that those who have not had these increased competitive advantage are not able to increase our earnings to compensate they will be worse off. And wage inequality in our society will reduce. Which Philip and I regard as a good thing even if (being nice we do not say because) it will reduce the standard of living of professional class remainers and, indeed, myself.

    People who can afford to pay higher prices - or can negotiate higher pay to mitigate them - will always end up being fine with higher prices. Those who can't will be less enthused, however they voted in the referendum.

    A fair point but not a complete answer. The question is whether delivery drivers, care workers, cleaners, hospitality workers etc are entitled to a larger share of the cake than they had hitherto. I say yes. It utterly bemuses me that SKS's answer is so much more equivocal and that it takes an Etonian Tory PM to call him out on it.

    We are in the Lake district today which sadly is reminding us quite where these beautiful lakes come from. There is a clear shortage of staff in the hotel and the majority of those who are there are foreign, as they would have been for much of the last 20 years. If they want the locals to work in places like this with unattractive split shifts and the like they are going to have to pay more.

    In Banbury, Oxford and York on this trip we have seen the same. Almost all hospitality and many, many retailers are looking for staff. Banbury and Oxford in particular were clearly booming with barely a single empty shopping unit and a much higher proportion of small businesses than chains. It frankly makes me a bit depressed about what we will see when we return home to Dundee. No doubt there are parts of England struggling too but in many parts that I have seen in this trip things are going very well.

    On our recent trip we noted staff shortages in hospitality in both NE England and NW Wales.
  • DavidL said:

    Selebian said:

    isam said:

    isam said:

    Scott_xP said:

    .@afneil on @LBC: "You can have more alliteration, as Mr Johnson had, than a West Coast poet from the 1960s on LSD. That's all fine.

    "But we're a country with major problems and we need to know the Government's solution to these problems and on that Mr Johnson had not a jot."

    And that is why it is getting a beating. Sunny uplit futures are great when things are on the up. When things are on the down you have to first identify why that is and map your way out to the sunny places ahead.

    The Tory position remains incoherent. There is no crisis. There is a crisis but its your fault. There isn't a crisis because look at Europe. There is a crisis but you can't blame Brexit. There isn't a crisis and we won't bring in workers. There is a crisis and we are bringing in workers. There are no downsides. There are downsides but actually they were the plan all along and aren't they marvellous.

    If the government was not the Muppet Show, if they had an Alastair Campbell / Peter Mandleson / Dominic Cummings strategist then they would have had all this laid out. This is what we are doing, these are the issues we can mitigate, these we can't mitigate but here's how we will spin them, here's the line repeat the line until people believe it. Instead we have *this*.

    Kermit the Frog.
    What are the downsides, if any, of the driver shortage on the continent?
    It is slower and more expensive to move stuff around. But remember that the driver shortage isn't universal, it is in patches. On a continent that is both a single logistics network and a single employment market. Drivers and vehicles gets filled from other countries - as an example some of the "driver shortages" in places like Poland are due to them winning contracts in Germany.

    What is a real problem is getting stuff to the UK. My clients shift refrigerated product out of Romania to places like the Netherlands without issues. To the UK? You can't shift small loads at all. You can't consolidate very easily due to caobtage and paperwork issues. I've just opened up a chilled business for them here and it took a month to plan transport.

    And yet fools and outright liars try to tell people that there is no UK-only issue, that Europe has a driver shortage therefore its the same there. It isn't, they know it isn't, they hope that some people will just accept what they are told without question.
    That last paragraph works both ways - until I did a bit of digging, on here Boris/Brexit haters were happy for people to think it was a UK only issue
    We're in a strange paradoxical universe in which the majority viewpoints can be summarised as follows:

    Remoaners*: Brexit is causing shortages, project fear now reality. Wage rises are however a bad thing, even for those who voted for Brexit and are more reflective of other trends than of Brexit.
    Brexiteers*: Brexit is not causing shortages. There are shortages everywhere. However, despite the shortages everywhere, including in HGV drivers, increases in wages are a Brexit dividend and there are no downsides.

    *Pejorative terms intentionally used. There is also a sane minority (or perhaps a silent majority? e.g. RCS, but many others) who recognise that there are many different factors at play, that wage rises are great for those receiving them but could be bad for others who will be subject to inflation but not get rises themselves as they are still open to competition from Poles in Poland/rest of the EU if not from Poles here and that the issues are a mix of factors, Covid, post-Covid demand etc...
    I thought that Robert's contribution this morning was excellent. I also think that it is a point that both @Philip_Thompson and I have readily acknowledged. Increased wages for those who now benefit from scarcity such as HGV drivers is not cost free. It means higher costs for the rest of us in terms of goods etc. To the extent that those who have not had these increased competitive advantage are not able to increase our earnings to compensate they will be worse off. And wage inequality in our society will reduce. Which Philip and I regard as a good thing even if (being nice we do not say because) it will reduce the standard of living of professional class remainers and, indeed, myself.

    People who can afford to pay higher prices - or can negotiate higher pay to mitigate them - will always end up being fine with higher prices. Those who can't will be less enthused, however they voted in the referendum.

    As RCS has previously mentioned, an example of an economy with a higher wage structure for the "low end" jobs is Switzerland.

    I wonder how many Swiss people do those jobs.

    Probably the overwhelming majority of people doing the jobs are Swiss.

    Just as the overwhelming majority of people doing the jobs in the UK are British.

    Immigration levels are much higher in Switzerland:

    https://www.thelocal.ch/20200922/explained-switzerlands-foreign-population-in-numbers/#:~:text=EU immigration: Switzerland’s foreign workers in numbers. Foreigners,a lot of interesting facts about these people.

    Assuming most immigrants are young, they would form a far higher percentage of the overall workforce than they do here.

    Indeed but Switzerland has worked hard to ensure it attracts higher skilled migrants, instead of low skilled migrants like the UK has incentivised by offering them housing benefits, tax credits, minimum wage and no barriers.

    So the migrants there might be biased more to working in Credit Suisse and not Pret.

    Doesn't look like it:

    https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/business/employment-and-migration_foreigners-arriving-in-switzerland-more-likely-to-be-highly-skilled/43606836#:~:text=As in most developed countries, immigrants in Switzerland,immigrants can be higher than 70% of workers.

  • isamisam Posts: 40,731

    mwadams said:

    This may have been dealt with far upthread and apologies if so - but do we have similar stats for past PM v. LoTo speeches at this stage in the Parliament? It would seem to me unusual that the PM should score lower on the strong & agree stats, at least.

    Doesn't strike me as odd in midterm polling.

    Half the country like the PM, half the country dislike him, so it doesn't matter what the PM says that'll be the case.

    The LOTO has a much easier ride - much lower expectations, no need to deliver, can just say vague nice sounding things without having to be held to account.

    I'd expect that if such polling does exist it would show Miliband consistently beating Cameron.
    Miliband was beating Cameron on Both Net Satisfaction & Gross Positives, whilst Labour led on VI mid term. The Tories went from coalition partners to outright majority at the following GE

    Dark Blue Cam GP lead
    Light Blue Cam Net Sat lead
    Red Con VI lead


  • DavidLDavidL Posts: 50,772

    IanB2 said:

    Mr. B2, there's a fair amount of truth in that.

    As an aside, I can strongly recommend Marc Morris' book The Norman Conquest, which is very good indeed and covers both the preceding and succeeding times as well as the Conquest itself.

    There's an interesting minority theory in linguistics - to counter the normal view that Middle English was Old English with some Old Norse imported into it - which posits that in many ways the structure of English owes more to Norse than Germanic roots (as one example, our word order mirrors the Scandinavian languages rather than all the German verb-at-the-end stuff). Therefore you could see Middle English as Old Norse with a lot of Old English words imported. An additional argument is that it is much more common to import vocabulary into a base language from another than to import the mechanics of sentence structure and the like, whilst keeping the old words.

    The weakness of the argument is the sheer dominance of words with Old English rather than Norse roots, but it's an interesting idea nevertheless.
    When did the somewhat eccentric Germanic verb-at-the-end system start. Can't think of another language that does that.

    As an aside an old acquaintance, a fluent German speaker who was a Military Policeman in WWII used to say that, late in the war, when they captured German officers, it took until the end of their statement to know whether they were actually surrendering or not!
    IIRC Latin used to put the verb in odd places and rely upon endings to make clear the meaning of the sentence. I don't think modern Italian does the same?
  • Morris_DancerMorris_Dancer Posts: 60,933
    Mr. B2, that is quite interesting.

    Still amuses me that kecks (trousers) used in Yorkshire is Viking-era slang. And lekkin' (which I've only ever seen written as laking, but always heard pronounced lekkin(g)) for playing.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,625

    I would just make a point to @Philip_Thompson my energy monthly direct debit rose 40% on the 1st September not 10% and that was before this present energy crisis worsened quite considerable

    Going off the average bills quoted earlier

    40% on a £95 bill = £38 . . . certainly not nice and not suggesting for a second that it is.
    £38 on a £868 bill = 4.4% . . . which is less than the 6.2% inflation that housing has been going up since 1999.

    So yes the energy bill is nasty. But you know what? The very real inflation we've been having for decades is even worse than that even a 40% rise.

    Now do you understand just how serious a problem this is?
    It's a serious problem, but it's also an Other Person's Problem.

    If you already have a mortgage, then your house price isn't subject to house price inflation; it's frozen at whenever-you-bought. And since the limiting step in house buying tends to be the deposit rather than the monthly repayments house price inflation tends to help you go up the ladder. When I bought my first house in 2001, house price inflation turned a £7000 deposit into £40000 equity in 3 years. It's not something I sought, but it made moving up the ladder much easier.

    This is all a moral disgrace and an economic absurdity. Sorting it out would, I suspect, do more for the long term productive capacity of the country than any of the stuff we've been arguing about for the last five years.

    But to make a meaningful dent in house prices would be political Kryptonite. And I'm not sure a "general inflation / flat house prices" scenario works; in that case, I'd expect interest rates to have to rise (at least to keep up with inflation) which would clobber house prices. And that would clobber people- mostly those who have bought more recently, at higher prices and with less paid off. If house prices fell 50% tomorrow, I personally could shrug it off, but many millions couldn't.

    So what you're looking for is a politician prepared to accept the hospital pass of having the house price boom burst on their watch. Prepared to go down to a landslide defeat at the next election, knowing in their heart that they've done the necessary thing...

    Who is this politician?
    A politician who actually genuinely cared about people struggling to pay bills.

    Yes I know. Easier to find a unicorn.
    Most politicians I have met are genuinely trying to improve things. But you have to be in power to improve things. So you have to compromise.

    Deflating house prices rapidly would have you throw out in a matter of months. And the whatever you did to deflate house prices rapidly reversed. Leaving you with no opportunity to fix other things.

    So politicians think of house prices like the NHS - Don't touch the Third Rail. You can talk about it. Sure. Doing stuff......
  • NerysHughesNerysHughes Posts: 3,346
    IanB2 said:

    DavidL said:

    Those who are demanding some masterplan from Boris are starting from the wrong place. Their perception is that we are in some form of existential crisis, well we must be because we Brexited.

    The reality is rather more complicated. What we have is record employment, a country that is generating jobs faster than we can fill them and a need to think about how the available labour is better utilised. We have enjoyed a sudden burst of growth triggered by the end of lockdown and some distribution problems as a result. We also have long term problems which Boris did, in fairness, talk about yesterday: the shortage of skills, the dependence on cheap labour, the lack of aspiration in some areas and the waste of talent as a result. He could also have talked about our lack of investment (although Rishi is trying to improve that), saving and excess consumption.

    I don't think this needs a masterplan or even a vision. It needs us to keep buggering on for quite a while addressing problems as they arise and trying to gradually improve things. That is what we will get from Boris (along with the odd daft idea or white elephant) and it should in fact do us fine.

    Great post, as i have said before for someone who left school in the early 80s when unemployment was 3 million, to have one of the major current issues as too many jobs is quite hard to comprehend.
    Why? Our population is ageing with the proportion of working age shrinking, people are in education longer, a lot of people are reviewing their work/life balance as a result of the past two years, and we've just sent a lot of European workers home and sent a very clear message that those who are still allowed to come aren't very welcome. Plus there's an overhang of demand in many sectors as a result of the pandemic that the labour market cannot respond to. It's the "I can't get a builder for months" problem across a lot of other sectors.
    Its just odd, unemployment in the 70,s, 80s and 90s was the biggest political issue,the Labour isnt working poster of the late 70s summed up Britain for decades. For long periods in these decades getting and retaining a job was a real challenge. The situation now is the complete reverse. For someone bought up on Grange Hill and Tucker's Luck when you left school and joined the dole queue to have too many jobs in an economy across all sectors for the available workforce is something I never thought would happen.
  • Northern_AlNorthern_Al Posts: 7,461
    eek said:

    Stocky said:

    DavidL said:

    Those who are demanding some masterplan from Boris are starting from the wrong place. Their perception is that we are in some form of existential crisis, well we must be because we Brexited.

    The reality is rather more complicated. What we have is record employment, a country that is generating jobs faster than we can fill them and a need to think about how the available labour is better utilised. We have enjoyed a sudden burst of growth triggered by the end of lockdown and some distribution problems as a result. We also have long term problems which Boris did, in fairness, talk about yesterday: the shortage of skills, the dependence on cheap labour, the lack of aspiration in some areas and the waste of talent as a result. He could also have talked about our lack of investment (although Rishi is trying to improve that), saving and excess consumption.

    I don't think this needs a masterplan or even a vision. It needs us to keep buggering on for quite a while addressing problems as they arise and trying to gradually improve things. That is what we will get from Boris (along with the odd daft idea or white elephant) and it should in fact do us fine.

    Great post, as i have said before for someone who left school in the early 80s when unemployment was 3 million, to have one of the major current issues as too many jobs is quite hard to comprehend.
    So here's a question for you:

    My not-at-all academic daughter needs to look at universities. She's not sure she wants to go but we have to look anyway in case. If she does go she will study Fine Art. 1 year Foundation Course and the 3 years degree. Will consign her to a 9% income tax obligation on future incomes over £25k (or whatever) for 30 years as per Student Loan rules (she will never pay it off). Plus other costs of living away. plus she will also lose four years earnings in studying for this degree which is pretty much non-income enhancing I would suggest. The reasons for going to university would be non-financial.

    The alternative to university is a job probably on minimum wage. Probably in hospitality.

    What should she do?
    I suggest that she looks at post A level apprenticeship programmes run by large employers, geared for 18 year old school leavers. There are a lot out there, just do some web searches. It'll give her a decent CV and an opportunity to show what she's worth in a large organisation. The odds are that, once the apprenticeship ends if she's any good they'll have spotted that and want to keep her on in a substantive post. She should be selective and look at the qualiy of training and also typical career paths of past apprentices, and try and avoid small firms who might well just be looking for a discardable source of cheap labour for 2 years.
    Yep - first question in any interview should be - what happens to previous apprentices. Followed by can I meet one.

    If they can't do that move on to the next opportunity.

    Hairdressing is renowned for its use and bin philosophy, but a lot of other industries are as well.
    Ofsted inspects all funded apprenticeship providers (except degree level). It's well worth hunting down the most recent inspection report as part of the decision-making process. Some apprenticeship providers are very poor and to be avoided.
  • FarooqFarooq Posts: 10,775
    IanB2 said:

    Mr. B2, there's a fair amount of truth in that.

    As an aside, I can strongly recommend Marc Morris' book The Norman Conquest, which is very good indeed and covers both the preceding and succeeding times as well as the Conquest itself.

    There's an interesting minority theory in linguistics - to counter the normal view that Middle English was Old English with some Old Norse imported into it - which posits that in many ways the structure of English owes more to Norse than Germanic roots (as one example, our word order mirrors the Scandinavian languages rather than all the German verb-at-the-end stuff). Therefore you could see Middle English as Old Norse with a lot of Old English words imported. An additional argument is that it is much more common to import vocabulary into a base language from another than to import the mechanics of sentence structure and the like, whilst keeping the old words.

    The weakness of the argument is the sheer dominance of words with Old English rather than Norse roots, but it's an interesting idea nevertheless.
    Middle English is best viewed as a pidgin language that formed at the interface between Old English, Old Norse, and Norman French. I don't think the vocabulary angle (pun intended) is the most important one. What really changed was the dropping of inflections. That actually drove the importation of words, since relatively uninflected languages need more words to express the same nuance. That's why we've got three ways of saying just about anything.
  • GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,072
    TNT and Fedex have suspended all domestic courier services 🤦‍♂️
  • AlistairMAlistairM Posts: 2,004

    Cyclefree said:

    Cyclefree said:

    Dura_Ace said:

    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.
    The obsession with France is weird isn't it. It's definitely a one-sided affair. You don't see it in Scotland, either. Seems to be mainly a thing with posh English blokes. Maybe some cultural memory of all those aristos going to the guillotine?
    And yet this is the country where an MP has proposed making French the only official language of the EU in order to get rid of the Anglo-Saxons and their world view. And which got into an almighty strop over the US-Australia-U.K. deal and made a point of saying how little it thought of Britain by not removing its ambassador

    Perhaps it is not quite as one-sided as all that.
    The English (or the ones on here anyway) getting aerated over what *one* French MP has proposed is decent evidence of OLB's observation. If it's two way traffic the French certainly have tons of dumbfuckery issued by individual British MPs upon which to fixate.
    I remember being in meetings with the French regulator decades ago where they talked about the Anglo-Saxons with a degree of distaste and about how they did not want Anglo-Saxon financial regulation. At one financial seminar one academic tried to claim that Compliance - as a function - had been first invented by some French King in the Middle Ages.

    My point is that the obsession with competing with the Anglo-Saxon world is perhaps a bit more widespread and long-standing in France than people are assuming - and in surprising places. The French may not be obsessed with the English on a day to day level but then I don't really think the English are that obsessed with the French either - even if some PB posters are.
    The simple truth is that English is embedded, worldwide as the Lingua Franca (ha!), nearly everywhere.

    Ironically, in the post colonial environment, it is often seen as the "neutral" option between multiple competing languages.

    What is quite startling is the way that business in much of Europe is conducted in English. I was astonished the first time I went to a meeting in Germany. Everyone else was German, but the meeting was held English.

    This probably grates on French people - holding it in French would simply not be considered.
    I used to work for a very large French multi-national that everyone would have heard of. About 10 or so years ago they mandated that all international meetings would have to be held in English. You would still find that the native French speakers would sometimes switch to French if they were in a majority. I remember this used to really annoy a native Polish speaking colleague of mine who would berate them and demand they start speaking English.

    I'm not very good at speaking French but can understand most of what is being said. I never used to let on though as it was often useful to understand what they were saying if they didn't think you could could!
  • OldKingColeOldKingCole Posts: 31,718

    IanB2 said:

    DavidL said:

    Those who are demanding some masterplan from Boris are starting from the wrong place. Their perception is that we are in some form of existential crisis, well we must be because we Brexited.

    The reality is rather more complicated. What we have is record employment, a country that is generating jobs faster than we can fill them and a need to think about how the available labour is better utilised. We have enjoyed a sudden burst of growth triggered by the end of lockdown and some distribution problems as a result. We also have long term problems which Boris did, in fairness, talk about yesterday: the shortage of skills, the dependence on cheap labour, the lack of aspiration in some areas and the waste of talent as a result. He could also have talked about our lack of investment (although Rishi is trying to improve that), saving and excess consumption.

    I don't think this needs a masterplan or even a vision. It needs us to keep buggering on for quite a while addressing problems as they arise and trying to gradually improve things. That is what we will get from Boris (along with the odd daft idea or white elephant) and it should in fact do us fine.

    Great post, as i have said before for someone who left school in the early 80s when unemployment was 3 million, to have one of the major current issues as too many jobs is quite hard to comprehend.
    Why? Our population is ageing with the proportion of working age shrinking, people are in education longer, a lot of people are reviewing their work/life balance as a result of the past two years, and we've just sent a lot of European workers home and sent a very clear message that those who are still allowed to come aren't very welcome. Plus there's an overhang of demand in many sectors as a result of the pandemic that the labour market cannot respond to. It's the "I can't get a builder for months" problem across a lot of other sectors.
    Its just odd, unemployment in the 70,s, 80s and 90s was the biggest political issue,the Labour isnt working poster of the late 70s summed up Britain for decades. For long periods in these decades getting and retaining a job was a real challenge. The situation now is the complete reverse. For someone bought up on Grange Hill and Tucker's Luck when you left school and joined the dole queue to have too many jobs in an economy across all sectors for the available workforce is something I never thought would happen.
    Back to the late 50's/early 60's. Of course, for many of us entering the workplace then there were grim tales of the thirties from our fathers and uncles.
    Not so much from our mothers because jobs for girls, and more especially for married women, were seen as liberating.
  • eekeek Posts: 24,797
    AlistairM said:

    Cyclefree said:

    Cyclefree said:

    Dura_Ace said:

    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.
    The obsession with France is weird isn't it. It's definitely a one-sided affair. You don't see it in Scotland, either. Seems to be mainly a thing with posh English blokes. Maybe some cultural memory of all those aristos going to the guillotine?
    And yet this is the country where an MP has proposed making French the only official language of the EU in order to get rid of the Anglo-Saxons and their world view. And which got into an almighty strop over the US-Australia-U.K. deal and made a point of saying how little it thought of Britain by not removing its ambassador

    Perhaps it is not quite as one-sided as all that.
    The English (or the ones on here anyway) getting aerated over what *one* French MP has proposed is decent evidence of OLB's observation. If it's two way traffic the French certainly have tons of dumbfuckery issued by individual British MPs upon which to fixate.
    I remember being in meetings with the French regulator decades ago where they talked about the Anglo-Saxons with a degree of distaste and about how they did not want Anglo-Saxon financial regulation. At one financial seminar one academic tried to claim that Compliance - as a function - had been first invented by some French King in the Middle Ages.

    My point is that the obsession with competing with the Anglo-Saxon world is perhaps a bit more widespread and long-standing in France than people are assuming - and in surprising places. The French may not be obsessed with the English on a day to day level but then I don't really think the English are that obsessed with the French either - even if some PB posters are.
    The simple truth is that English is embedded, worldwide as the Lingua Franca (ha!), nearly everywhere.

    Ironically, in the post colonial environment, it is often seen as the "neutral" option between multiple competing languages.

    What is quite startling is the way that business in much of Europe is conducted in English. I was astonished the first time I went to a meeting in Germany. Everyone else was German, but the meeting was held English.

    This probably grates on French people - holding it in French would simply not be considered.
    I used to work for a very large French multi-national that everyone would have heard of. About 10 or so years ago they mandated that all international meetings would have to be held in English. You would still find that the native French speakers would sometimes switch to French if they were in a majority. I remember this used to really annoy a native Polish speaking colleague of mine who would berate them and demand they start speaking English.

    I'm not very good at speaking French but can understand most of what is being said. I never used to let on though as it was often useful to understand what they were saying if they didn't think you could could!
    I spent a good year pretending to be useless at Germany (I am) because it meant I could grasp exactly what was being said in sidechats (I can't speak German for toffee but I understand it awfully well).
  • OldKingColeOldKingCole Posts: 31,718
    Farooq said:

    IanB2 said:

    Mr. B2, there's a fair amount of truth in that.

    As an aside, I can strongly recommend Marc Morris' book The Norman Conquest, which is very good indeed and covers both the preceding and succeeding times as well as the Conquest itself.

    There's an interesting minority theory in linguistics - to counter the normal view that Middle English was Old English with some Old Norse imported into it - which posits that in many ways the structure of English owes more to Norse than Germanic roots (as one example, our word order mirrors the Scandinavian languages rather than all the German verb-at-the-end stuff). Therefore you could see Middle English as Old Norse with a lot of Old English words imported. An additional argument is that it is much more common to import vocabulary into a base language from another than to import the mechanics of sentence structure and the like, whilst keeping the old words.

    The weakness of the argument is the sheer dominance of words with Old English rather than Norse roots, but it's an interesting idea nevertheless.
    Middle English is best viewed as a pidgin language that formed at the interface between Old English, Old Norse, and Norman French. I don't think the vocabulary angle (pun intended) is the most important one. What really changed was the dropping of inflections. That actually drove the importation of words, since relatively uninflected languages need more words to express the same nuance. That's why we've got three ways of saying just about anything.
    Was that something to do with the dominance of London over any provincial cities? I recall reading somewhere that mediaeval England was odd in having no universities other than Oxford and Cambridge, both within reach of London, and the Law Courts were based there too.
    There were bishoprics elsewhere but none of them seemed to want to have centres of learning associated with them. Not even the Prince-Bishop of Durham.
  • LostPasswordLostPassword Posts: 14,772
    Stocky said:

    algarkirk said:

    Stocky said:

    DavidL said:

    Those who are demanding some masterplan from Boris are starting from the wrong place. Their perception is that we are in some form of existential crisis, well we must be because we Brexited.

    The reality is rather more complicated. What we have is record employment, a country that is generating jobs faster than we can fill them and a need to think about how the available labour is better utilised. We have enjoyed a sudden burst of growth triggered by the end of lockdown and some distribution problems as a result. We also have long term problems which Boris did, in fairness, talk about yesterday: the shortage of skills, the dependence on cheap labour, the lack of aspiration in some areas and the waste of talent as a result. He could also have talked about our lack of investment (although Rishi is trying to improve that), saving and excess consumption.

    I don't think this needs a masterplan or even a vision. It needs us to keep buggering on for quite a while addressing problems as they arise and trying to gradually improve things. That is what we will get from Boris (along with the odd daft idea or white elephant) and it should in fact do us fine.

    Great post, as i have said before for someone who left school in the early 80s when unemployment was 3 million, to have one of the major current issues as too many jobs is quite hard to comprehend.
    So here's a question for you:

    My not-at-all academic daughter needs to look at universities. She's not sure she wants to go but we have to look anyway in case. If she does go she will study Fine Art. 1 year Foundation Course and the 3 years degree. Will consign her to a 9% income tax obligation on future incomes over £25k (or whatever) for 30 years as per Student Loan rules (she will never pay it off). Plus other costs of living away. plus she will also lose four years earnings in studying for this degree which is pretty much non-income enhancing I would suggest. The reasons for going to university would be non-financial.

    The alternative to university is a job probably on minimum wage. Probably in hospitality.

    What should she do?
    'Not at all academic' may mean not particularly high in cognitive aptitude, or may mean not interested in academia. They are different.

    If the first, Fine Arts is great if you are brilliant at it, because there are people in arts, music etc who don't pass exams much but are differently gifted. With the very gifted you don't have to enquire, you know already if they are that class of people. Lucky ones.

    If not interested in academia, then avoid. Debt for something you neither enjoy or want is not great.

    But in the end your daughter should do exactly as she likes, weighing up all the facts. That's what modern daughters do anyway. And quite right too.

    I agree. I'm just trying to give her all the facts. Trouble is she doesn't know her own mind and is struggling to give adequate weight to the enduring effects of Student Loan repayments.
    One of the attractions of university can be the sense that it puts off a real decision for three years, which can be very attractive for those unsure what to do.

    She's more likely to have an idea of what she wants to do in three years time if she spends that time working than at university.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 61,575

    IanB2 said:

    Mr. B2, there's a fair amount of truth in that.

    As an aside, I can strongly recommend Marc Morris' book The Norman Conquest, which is very good indeed and covers both the preceding and succeeding times as well as the Conquest itself.

    There's an interesting minority theory in linguistics - to counter the normal view that Middle English was Old English with some Old Norse imported into it - which posits that in many ways the structure of English owes more to Norse than Germanic roots (as one example, our word order mirrors the Scandinavian languages rather than all the German verb-at-the-end stuff). Therefore you could see Middle English as Old Norse with a lot of Old English words imported. An additional argument is that it is much more common to import vocabulary into a base language from another than to import the mechanics of sentence structure and the like, whilst keeping the old words.

    The weakness of the argument is the sheer dominance of words with Old English rather than Norse roots, but it's an interesting idea nevertheless.
    When did the somewhat eccentric Germanic verb-at-the-end system start. Can't think of another language that does that.

    As an aside an old acquaintance, a fluent German speaker who was a Military Policeman in WWII used to say that, late in the war, when they captured German officers, it took until the end of their statement to know whether they were actually surrendering or not!
    Wikipedia tells me that SOV is the most common arrangement if you're counting numbers of languages (as opposed to numbers of speakers).
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_order
  • FarooqFarooq Posts: 10,775

    Farooq said:

    IanB2 said:

    Mr. B2, there's a fair amount of truth in that.

    As an aside, I can strongly recommend Marc Morris' book The Norman Conquest, which is very good indeed and covers both the preceding and succeeding times as well as the Conquest itself.

    There's an interesting minority theory in linguistics - to counter the normal view that Middle English was Old English with some Old Norse imported into it - which posits that in many ways the structure of English owes more to Norse than Germanic roots (as one example, our word order mirrors the Scandinavian languages rather than all the German verb-at-the-end stuff). Therefore you could see Middle English as Old Norse with a lot of Old English words imported. An additional argument is that it is much more common to import vocabulary into a base language from another than to import the mechanics of sentence structure and the like, whilst keeping the old words.

    The weakness of the argument is the sheer dominance of words with Old English rather than Norse roots, but it's an interesting idea nevertheless.
    Middle English is best viewed as a pidgin language that formed at the interface between Old English, Old Norse, and Norman French. I don't think the vocabulary angle (pun intended) is the most important one. What really changed was the dropping of inflections. That actually drove the importation of words, since relatively uninflected languages need more words to express the same nuance. That's why we've got three ways of saying just about anything.
    Was that something to do with the dominance of London over any provincial cities? I recall reading somewhere that mediaeval England was odd in having no universities other than Oxford and Cambridge, both within reach of London, and the Law Courts were based there too.
    There were bishoprics elsewhere but none of them seemed to want to have centres of learning associated with them. Not even the Prince-Bishop of Durham.
    London had the advantage of being at the interface of the Old English and Old Norse worlds, as well as being the commercial hub. Linguistic synthesis tends to happen most quickly in that sort of place.
    I'd be surprised if universities had much influence at all, especially as they appeared during this process. Written language developed under the influence of scribes and the church, but the driving force of the linguistic change was in spoken language.
  • gealbhangealbhan Posts: 2,362
    Scott_xP said:

    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

    Don’t you ever sleep?
This discussion has been closed.