There wasn’t ever a threat. I’d have smashed Wagner. None of us were nervous at all, despite my nervy statement over the weekend. But I’ve made a deal with Wagner I intend to keep. You know, instead of smashing them like I could so easily do. But they can go to Belarus. But we’re all very united. So that’s good.
That one wont be filed under ‘coherent.’
I gather he'd just come straight from a works meeting.
Daniel Korski was in the middle of a London mayoral hustings when the Times story dropped. I'm told his aide signalled him over to deliver the bad news. He left.
London Conservatives put Steve Norris and Boris Johnson before the electorate, and would have had Jeffrey Archer if they could. Is scandalous behaviour on the person spec as a "not essential but desirable" or something?
At least people had heard of Boris and Archer, who has heard of these 3 (now likely 2?) Even Norris and Zac Goldsmith and Shaun Bailey were better known.
Of the last 2 Susan Hall is probably the best though, at least she has held elected office for the party in the London Assembly, the other candidate has never even stood for the party that I can see
I normally agree with @Stuartinromford on nearly everything, but I think I am with you on this one and maybe hindsight plays a part. I liked Steve Norris, and although my memory is blurred on the topic by recent events, I suspect I quite liked Boris in the day. It is more recent times that has turned me against him really big time.
Also after reading the Michael Crick biography of Jeffery Archer I rather have a soft spot for him, although he should never have been let anywhere near the possibility of being London Mayor (or my wallet if it comes to that)
Steve Norris was of course MP for Epping Forest before Eleanor Laing.
Archer is charismatic whatever you think of him, a real Toad of Toad Hall figure, much like Boris.
Indeed they are the characters more suited to be big city Mayors than PMs (as Boris has found)
Striking in that graph how much worse things got soon after Boris Johnson took over!
Err no, there was a sharpish drop until the pandemic took over
Wrong way round. Early pandemic lockdown = fewer Gp referrals = fewer hospital assessments = fewer new patients on the waiting list. The scale is too coarse, to be sure.
Also: covid deaths = some folk off the waiting list.
Not wrong way round. March 2020 was when the first lockdown happened. Look at the graph again.
Depends how someone made up the graph. Unless you think Mr Johnson was Jesus Christ, laying his hands on everyone in hospital and curing them?
A waiting list is a dynamic balance between input and output. We know that. We also know that GP sugeries were shifting - as indeed were many of their patients - to infection control measures in February 2020. There was a de facto lockdown before the arguably delayed one that was "official".
Neither you nor I nor OLB can judge this properly without more information. But it is clear there was a sharpish drop before the exponential (sic) rise
Looks as if that is the point covering February 1-28 - ops and so on still happening as booked, but the GP end of things beginning to shut down as people deferred visits, so that the waiting list wasn't being fed in at the in end.
Actually that chart shows little difference overall in NHS waiting times between recent Labour or Tory governments, except they were a bit lower under Labour in 2009-10 and are a bit higher under the Conservatives now (albeit Covid added to the problem).
Well done for going private though, the more higher income people take out private health insurance and use private hospitals, the less the pressure on the NHS. Best wishes for your recovery after your op.
I don't know where you learned maths but trebling is not "a bit" and being north of the worst in 30 years and accelerating is not "little difference".
Still, well done on congratulating OGH for going private, I am sure that has aided his recovery and eased the pain in his wallet no end.
What Australia does is charge higher income individuals a surcharge of 1% to 1.5% of income if they do not take out private health insurance.
The Tories should follow the example of the Coalition Howard government in Australia in 1997 which introduced that so more can follow the excellent example of OGH, go private and cut pressure on the NHS.
The Howard government in 1999 also contributed up to 30% of the private health insurance premium of people with their Medicare universal health coverage
Keir Starmer is actually praying they take this advice.
It would be the most brutal defeat of a governing, or recently governing, party since Baldwin managed to reduce Labour from 287 MPs to 50 in 1931.
It got the Howard government re elected.
There is little point being a Conservative if you don't pursue more conservative policies is there? Conservatives believe in choice in public services with private options too, in healthcare as much as anything else
I know the weather's been a bit warm recently, but I can assure you we are not in Australia.
Culturally we are probably closer to Australia than any other nation on earth except maybe New Zealand.
There is also no point the Tories fighting a battle on who will spend more on the NHS, as Labour will always win it as they are more willing to raise tax higher to pay for it.
The Tories should instead shift the argument to encouraging patient choice in healthcare too
"culturally"
Don't you mean racially? But it isn't particularly true. Just look at Ireland.
Australia and New Zealand are mainly of British origin and Protestant heritage.
The Republic of Ireland is of Celtic origin mainly and Roman Catholic heritage.
We also still share the King with Australia and New Zealand, we don't now with the Republic of Ireland.
We got trade deals with Australia and NZ post Brexit, the Republic of Ireland was pretty obstructive to our getting an EU trade deal unless on their terms
So 2/3 of Australians are not of Irish descent then (and that includes Northern Ireland not just the Republic) and most of the UK is more Anglo Saxon, Norman (plus more recent Jewish, Huguenot and non white immigrants) than Celtic except the fringe.
I've met so many people in London that are part-Jewish over the years, that particularly taking into account cities like Manchester as well, there must be a million or more. This would make sense, as there were supposedly up to three quarters of a million Jewish people, or more, in the East end and Manchester combined, by the 1930s.
Then there's also the famous Huguenots - Michael Garrick, Laurence Olivier and Sir Nigel Farage, OBE.
Then supposedly up to 12 million people with Irish ancestry somewhere.
And finally the rich tapestry of post-imperial and Eastern European minorities making up the majority of the most recent rest.
Actually that chart shows little difference overall in NHS waiting times between recent Labour or Tory governments, except they were a bit lower under Labour in 2009-10 and are a bit higher under the Conservatives now (albeit Covid added to the problem).
Well done for going private though, the more higher income people take out private health insurance and use private hospitals, the less the pressure on the NHS. Best wishes for your recovery after your op.
I don't know where you learned maths but trebling is not "a bit" and being north of the worst in 30 years and accelerating is not "little difference".
Still, well done on congratulating OGH for going private, I am sure that has aided his recovery and eased the pain in his wallet no end.
What Australia does is charge higher income individuals a surcharge of 1% to 1.5% of income if they do not take out private health insurance.
The Tories should follow the example of the Coalition Howard government in Australia in 1997 which introduced that so more can follow the excellent example of OGH, go private and cut pressure on the NHS.
The Howard government in 1999 also contributed up to 30% of the private health insurance premium of people with their Medicare universal health coverage
Keir Starmer is actually praying they take this advice.
It would be the most brutal defeat of a governing, or recently governing, party since Baldwin managed to reduce Labour from 287 MPs to 50 in 1931.
It got the Howard government re elected.
There is little point being a Conservative if you don't pursue more conservative policies is there? Conservatives believe in choice in public services with private options too, in healthcare as much as anything else
I know the weather's been a bit warm recently, but I can assure you we are not in Australia.
Culturally we are probably closer to Australia than any other nation on earth except maybe New Zealand.
There is also no point the Tories fighting a battle on who will spend more on the NHS, as Labour will always win it as they are more willing to raise tax higher to pay for it.
The Tories should instead shift the argument to encouraging patient choice in healthcare too
"culturally"
Don't you mean racially? But it isn't particularly true. Just look at Ireland.
Australia and New Zealand are mainly of British origin and Protestant heritage.
The Republic of Ireland is of Celtic origin mainly and Roman Catholic heritage.
We also still share the King with Australia and New Zealand, we don't now with the Republic of Ireland.
We got trade deals with Australia and NZ post Brexit, the Republic of Ireland was pretty obstructive to our getting an EU trade deal unless on their terms
Interesting you think that being a royalist and a member of the C of E are fundamental to "British" culture.
Well most British people are royalist still and most British people are of Protestant not Roman Catholic heritage too, even if they are now atheist or agnostic
I can tell you that more "British" people, with parents in the UK before, say, 1940, were of Roman Catholic heritage than Protestant heritage. Your "even if now" fails to allow for the fact that that applies to other categories too.
What? You are seriously suggesting that more people pre 1940 in the UK were Roman Catholic than Church of England? Let alone Protestant once you add Church of Scotland, Baptists, Methodists etc
Actually that chart shows little difference overall in NHS waiting times between recent Labour or Tory governments, except they were a bit lower under Labour in 2009-10 and are a bit higher under the Conservatives now (albeit Covid added to the problem).
Well done for going private though, the more higher income people take out private health insurance and use private hospitals, the less the pressure on the NHS. Best wishes for your recovery after your op.
I don't know where you learned maths but trebling is not "a bit" and being north of the worst in 30 years and accelerating is not "little difference".
Still, well done on congratulating OGH for going private, I am sure that has aided his recovery and eased the pain in his wallet no end.
What Australia does is charge higher income individuals a surcharge of 1% to 1.5% of income if they do not take out private health insurance.
The Tories should follow the example of the Coalition Howard government in Australia in 1997 which introduced that so more can follow the excellent example of OGH, go private and cut pressure on the NHS.
The Howard government in 1999 also contributed up to 30% of the private health insurance premium of people with their Medicare universal health coverage
Keir Starmer is actually praying they take this advice.
It would be the most brutal defeat of a governing, or recently governing, party since Baldwin managed to reduce Labour from 287 MPs to 50 in 1931.
It got the Howard government re elected.
There is little point being a Conservative if you don't pursue more conservative policies is there? Conservatives believe in choice in public services with private options too, in healthcare as much as anything else
I know the weather's been a bit warm recently, but I can assure you we are not in Australia.
Culturally we are probably closer to Australia than any other nation on earth except maybe New Zealand.
There is also no point the Tories fighting a battle on who will spend more on the NHS, as Labour will always win it as they are more willing to raise tax higher to pay for it.
The Tories should instead shift the argument to encouraging patient choice in healthcare too
"culturally"
Don't you mean racially? But it isn't particularly true. Just look at Ireland.
Australia and New Zealand are mainly of British origin and Protestant heritage.
The Republic of Ireland is of Celtic origin mainly and Roman Catholic heritage.
We also still share the King with Australia and New Zealand, we don't now with the Republic of Ireland.
We got trade deals with Australia and NZ post Brexit, the Republic of Ireland was pretty obstructive to our getting an EU trade deal unless on their terms
So 2/3 of Australians are not of Irish descent then (and that includes Northern Ireland not just the Republic) and most of the UK is more Anglo Saxon, Norman (plus more recent Jewish, Huguenot and non white immigrants) than Celtic except the fringe.
I've met so many people in London that are part-Jewish over the years, that particularly taking into account cities like Manchester as well, there must be a million or more. This would make sense, as there were supposedly up to three quarters of a million Jewish people, or more, in the East end and Manchester combined, by the the 1930s.
Then there's also the famous Hugenots - Michael Garrick, Laurence Olivier and Sir Nigel Farage, OBE.
Then supposedly up to 12 million people with Irish ancestry somewhere.
And finally the rich tapestry of post-imperial and Eastern European minorities making up the majority of the most recent rest.
I have part Huguenot ancestral heritage too, Epping Forest is within the top 20 highest Jewish areas within the UK (especially around Chigwell and Buckhurst Hill)
The Tories won’t do themselves any favours overruling independent pay bodies on public sector pay.
We are just likely to see more and more strikes and disruption and not just from the likes of the RMT who are politically motivated.
They're in a complete bind. They'll trot out the wage-price spiral excuse to justify bearing down on public sector pay, but the plain fact is that they're struggling to find politically acceptable cuts to fund extra spending in this area, borrowing is enormous and becoming ever more expensive, and so they're left with either digging their heels in and offering workers peanuts, or raising taxes on their core supporters to pay for more generous rises. There's no violin small enough.
The reality we are reaching the end game for the Blairite/Thatcher-lite model
It used to be chunky public spending and low taxes with the difference funded by clever balance sheet tricks (PFI/securitisation) or straight up borrowing. Wages were kept down by relaxed views on immigration
Cost of borrowing is going up and the markets are twitchy after all that QE
Asset price bubbles have driven a reasonable standard of living beyond the reach of many
Effectively unlimited immigration has resulted in underinvestment in business (low wages partly due to immigration and partly due to tax credits) drove down returns (cost saving) on investment and increased the strain on public services (governments didn’t invest in capacity).
The electorate has been trained to believe the government will always bail them out
We need a grown up conversation. Either taxes have to go up massively or public services need to be completely rethought.
But neither politicians or the electorate are ready to have that conversation.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
Build new towns (or refurbish old ones) in the frozen north and left-behind regions. It solves the housing problem, levelling up and rebalancing the economy away from an overheated London in one fell swoop.
Not really
There are areas in the run down north with plenty of empty housing, just look at the photo at the top of this article....
Yes, hence the new town model, even if based on refurbishment, to include attracting new jobs. Rather than dumping grounds for borderline mentally ill drug addicts and thieves.
Why on earth would any company set up in a newly created new town that no doubt has awful connections to anywhere with any sort of existing economy ?
Government subsidies, tax concessions, northern powerhouse rail? Britain has built new towns before; there's nothing new.
NPR won't land until 2045 onwards and will connect Warrington, Manchester and Marsden, no new stops planned, just linking existing populations.
So you want to create new towns, with no links to existing economies and hope that lower taxes will attract businesses there ?
Our London based media's obsession over trains is part of the problem. Over 90% of the UK travels via Road, not Rail, especially in the North.
If you want new towns then new motorway junctions, or better yet new motorways with new junctions is the way to do it quickly. Rail can catch up afterwards.
Not just in the North, in the South away from London it's very possible too. Eg build a new motorway linking Oxford to Cambridge, extended to Bristol and Norwich perhaps, and with a junction approximately every 5 miles. New towns could spring up along that route, and not in or linked to London.
Sorry but new roads don’t solve problems - and it’s probably worth watching c4 to,or row to see Ben Elton comparing rail around London and the rest of the UK.
That sort of timid, self defeating attitude is part of the problem. Of course new roads do solve problems.
I live in a fast growing new town (they do still exist, just not enough of them). We have thousands of homes being built, all of which are getting snapped up. New shops, businesses, industry opening too.
And what is the key new transport infrastructure underpinning this? One new motorway junction, with one new A road.
There's talk we might get a train station in a few years time, I'm not holding my breath, but the new motorway junction? People who get about by road are happy with that. And outside London it's roads, not rail, that truly matters. Of course London is different but WE ARE NOT LONDON.
The problem here is that what you are now making is an argument for planning, which you claim to reject. The reason why everything is working in your development is more likely than not because decades of work went in to the new trunk roads and motorway junctions, negotiated by the Council with Highways England and the government, as well as the co-siting of commercial development and community infrastructure, and finding ways to fund all this, including through Section 106 contributions by developers. That is what planning is and the value that it adds. If you get rid of planning then none of that happens, houses get built but you can't get anywhere, there are crap roads, no shops, infrastructure etc.
You could say ok, why not just zone the land through the plan making process and then have a design code rather than having to go through the pain and delay of needing planning permission. You could well do that and some countries do. The main problem is it makes it harder to go through the first stage of the process (the plan making stage) because you need to be absolutely sure that everything is solved before you can confidently rely on a design code for the purposes of delivery.
A design code is just a delivery mechanism not an alternative to having a planning system. Looking at your example of Japan, my guess is just that they are better at planning because the state is more assertive and organised at building infrastructure. I'd guess the falling prices are more to do with historic deflation than falling demand. But I've never studied the Japanese system in detail so don't feel able to authoritively comment on it.
In summary the problem is not that a planning system exists in the first place, but because the one we have isn't working very well.
Sorry that's not remotely an argument for planning, you could not be more wrong. There isn't time for decades of work as our population levels weren't the same decades ago, and if decades of work are going into it then no wonder everything is so broken as the facts decades ago are not the facts today.
If everything is planned then I'm curious where the new railway station, new schools, new GPs and everything else are. None of them exist. I still am registered at my old GP in my old town, I've not transferred my kids schooling either, and drive across the river to a different town for those.
Organic development works better. If houses are built, but no schools etc then people will vote for what they need. Unsurprisingly at the local elections the local Lib Dem (who got elected) was not campaigning on NIMBYism, but supporting new GPs to built and new schools to be built. Because that's what the new residents need and its not all there yet. Supermarkets have opened etc because businesses like Aldi and ASDA will open branches where their customers are. Thousands of people move into an area, they'll be in like a shot to get a shot at those customers.
The state is bloody useless at planning. Design transportation, sure, then let it organically grow in what's zoned there.
Ok, so you don't think there should be planning, with the exception of road building. There should be no state provision for day to day needs etc - shops, healthcare etc, because this will follow where people choose to build houses because politicians will be elected to make it happen. There would be no public realm, or town centres, just housing and roads, and supermarkets.
This all sounds like a total disaster to me.
No. I think there should be healthcare, and schools etc but it should evolve depending upon what the voters need.
Not spend decades planning what was needed decades ago, but is totally obsolete decades later as the facts have changed so much all your plans were based on faulty assumptions.
" The public primary was the size of a country school and now has 19 demountables. The closest shops were 20 minutes away; if she forgot milk, it was a 40-minute round trip, often in traffic. Trains came hourly, even at the peak. Narrow roads were choked. The hospital repeatedly promised for nearby Rouse Hill didn’t exist, and still doesn’t. Meanwhile, the population grows exponentially."... “They knew we were coming. Where did they think we were going to shop? Where did they think our children would go to school? It comes down to better planning. Stop rushing to get people into these houses.”...
But people moving into those areas say it takes more than a bunch of rapidly constructed houses to create a community. “So here’s what’s missing,” said Angela Van Dyke of the Riverstone Neighbourhood Centre and Community Aid Service. “Everything. Public education. Public transport. Good urban design. Livability.”... Michelle Rowland, the Labor federal member for the north-west seat of Greenway (and also the communications minister), said the problem was due to a long-term failure of different levels of government to coordinate. “Developers, basically, in a lot of aspects, they do have free rein,” she said. “The incentive of the developer is to maximise land use to maximise profit. Which is why you have a lot of residents complaining [about] what normally they’d call overdevelopment, but a lot of it is to do with a lack of trees, a lack of environmental controls, houses are close together, streets are narrow.”
Presumably he'd say that given the people exist, that is better to have houses and no schools, than to have neither houses nor schools.
There is something in that argument , but I don't think that is what he is saying. I think he sees the idea of town planning as being socially destructive and a massive cost with no benefits. The usual libertarian thing. But the contradiction is, that when you go and look at the libertarian societies they hold up as examples they tend to actually be quite well planned, ie Singapore and the USA, there is always an active state authority doing the zoning, brokering the economic development etc. I am pretty sure Japan will come in to this category as well.
It kind of is what I'm saying actually, yes.
As far as zoning etc is concerned, I'm perfectly fine with that. Pick your agricultural, natural and residential zones etc and the let the Council get out of the way of development within residential zones, even if natural/agricultural zones can't be developed. Which incidentally can work with 'green belt' desires, since you don't zone the green belt residential then.
Now of course personally I'd prefer the residential zones to be bigger than they are now, but that's a semi-separate debate.
Beyond that though, I am saying since we have a shortage of 3 million homes today, and we don't have 3 million homes with planning permission let alone under construction, then JFDI applies. Just frigging do it.
Get the homes built. Better to not be homeless.
Once the homes are built, of course better ideally to have commerce, schools etc - but in the mean time better to have a home than no home.
And of course since this is the UK, not Australia or Canada, even if there's no school [yet] within your area there will be schools not very far away. This isn't rural Alberta or Western Australia where your nearest town is 400 km away.
As I said, my kids go to a different school, in a different town, than the one where I live. There is a small primary and secondary school where I live, which kind of used to be a village but is now a new town [the overwhelming majority of houses in this town did not exist in 2010], but they are small and I like my kids school so we're not transferring them. My kids still have places in the school over the river and I drive them there. Oh and if I didn't drive, there are school buses that come down our road to collect kids to take them to where my kids go to school. I'm guessing we're far from unique in crossing the river to get to school, and there's an option via dedicated school buses for those who don't drive.
OK then. Your planning reform is to have residential 'zones' with planning permission granted for 3 million plus new houses. You now seem to be accepting that there is a heavy sacrifice (over and beyond what was identified in the example in linked to above) in terms of infrastructure provision, placemaking etc, but consider it is all necessary to deal with the over-riding housing need. You believe that it can and will all be worked out in some way afterwards.
I think this would be a disaster. It bakes in dependency on the car and the need for continuous expensive upgrades to roads and bridges for generations. I also think that the JFDI direction will not actually deliver much more housing. Because as I have pointed out before, the housebuilding industry deliver about 100-150 k houses a year and nothing more and all the signs are that they would continue to do this under any new policy.
There would be some SME/self building going on but the industry is small and it is not going to be at any significant scale. It won't seriously come on stream until capacity in the construction industry is massively increased. And on these projects, someone else still has to build and fund the roads, the streetlights, the drains etc.
Prices may fall because of oversupply but they would quickly hit a level where new housebuilding becomes uneconomic in many areas because of build cost inflation. So my best guess is that you would quickly end up with lots of empty plots and a recession.
If you look through the post war history of housebuilding it is very clear that the only time the government delivers 300,000 houses a year is when it builds half of them itself.
Sorry but you've got your own assumptions then have worked backwards from there.
Firstly there's no need for it all to be dependent on the car, in fact the opposite is possible too. If existing residential zones become denser and build up then that can lead to public transport becoming more efficient, not less. Not that I have any objection to the motor vehicle, but I think my proposal if implemented would see places like London seeing building up happening and I wouldn't expect those to be all homes relying upon cars.
Secondly all the evidence from around the planet is that without planning being an insurmountable obstacle is that SME/self-building should happen at a very significant scale. In almost every country with my proposed system, SME/self-builds happen at orders of magnitude more than here.
As far as funding the roads etc is concerned that needs to happen either way, planning or no planning. That's what the tax system is for. We pay our taxes, we need roads and transportation. Politicians need to do their job. If you want to put a tax on new houses that goes to a pot to pay towards new roads, then I have no philosophical objection to that, but we pay our taxes either way.
As far as prices are concerned, too much of the price of new homes currently is planning itself. If that ceases to be the case, then prices can fall without hurting development. If land becomes cheaper, but taxed more [two prongs to this] then land-banking would never happen and people are encouraged to get on with it rather than to dawdle.
Finally its very clear in the history of housebuilding around the planet, that when competition is allowed to flourish and demand is high then people can and do get on with it. The city of Tokyo alone [population 14 million] has consistently delivered more new homes than the entirety of England combined. As a former cheese loving Prime Minister might have said: That. Is. A. Disgrace.
Saying that our current system isn't working, so therefore reform is pointless, rather misses the point don't you think?
Ok. So you are now going to insist that the houses are built more densely to avoid the problem of 'suburban sprawl'. How is public transport going to work efficiently - Do the authorities put in the transit routes before the zoning or afterwards? At what point would the authorities consider something like walkways, cycle paths etc? At the point when the land is zoned, or afterwards? Regarding your comments about much of the cost of new housing being 'planning', this is true to a point, but what about other factors such as 'desirability of location'? Would you agree that the cost of land for housing (and reflected in sale prices) is also influenced by this? For instance, in that article I linked to above, the houses in the suburbs of Sydney were not cheap - the defective planning had not reduced the desirability of the location.
I would agree that the system isn't working that well and needs to be reformed, but that is an altogether different idea from 'getting rid of planning'.
FWIW your ideas are very similar to what the government (via policy exchange) actually proposed in January 2020.
Unfortunately this work basically went nowhere. The only legacy of it is a set of perplexing reforms to the use classes order, making it difficult for Council's to control changes of use.
No, I'm not going to "insist" that houses are built more densely. What part of it is it that you're struggling to understand, I don't think anyone should insist upon anything, myself included.
Let the owner of the land decide.
Where land is valuable in its own right, rather than because of planning, eg in cities then building up will probably happen not because you or I want it, but because that's the most effective use of land so people will choose to do it.
Transit routes, along with schooling and other public services should evolve over time, you might have an initial idea but it shouldn't ever be ossified. People change and adapt what they use. An area that is bought out by young people may end up becoming embraced by old people - sometimes the same ex-young people who never moved.
We need to evolve over time, not plan something based on the needs of decades ago.
Yes the 2020 reforms were a good idea, didn't go as far as I'd like but a big step in the right direction, its a shame they were dropped.
In the end I think you probably want a different system of planning, not the abolition of planning.
My criticism however is that you are presenting a superficially easy answer ("scrap planning") to a complicated question.
Zoning rather than our current Byzantine planning laws. If land is zoned residential, then let people build whatever they want on it subject to residential regulations, without input from local politicians or NIMBY neighbours.
That doesn't mean a skyscraper of apartments will be built in the middle of national parks though, since skyscrapers won't meet regulations and national parks won't be zoned residential.
Ok zoning, subject to regulations and design codes. Not a bad idea and works in many countries. I struggle to really see how it is that different to outline planning permission or permission in principle. All the same issues would come up that come up at the point when the land was zoned as would be the case in an outline planning application, IE the roads, congestion, drainage, flooding, ecological, social infrastructure, impact on landscape. The delays that people associate with Council bureaucracy are usually actually rooted in a deeper and more pathological problems with the decision making processes of the British state, the legacy of shoddy attempts at privatisation and the aversion to spend public money on the part of government. None of that gets swept away with a new planning system.
The only way you could immediately zone land for 3 million houses is to ignore the real planning consequences of doing so which would then become apparent extremely quickly.
I'm curious what particular "consequences" would become apparent? Considering you'd have a net total of approximately zero extra cars on the road, net total of approximately zero extra pupils in school etc
The thing is all the people, all the kids, all the cars etc are already here today. We aren't talking millions of extra people, just having enough homes for the people who are already here anyway.
Its not as if kids are denied school places, just because their parents can't afford a home of their own. If their parents suddenly can get a home of their own, then the kids can keep going to the same school they're already going to anyway.
Yeah there is something in this point. But new development is assessed against an existing baseline
Off the top of my head, if you 'zone' a field to build a few hundred houses, the main issues are 1. Impact on the strategic road network through junction capacity, etc 2. Impact on Trunk Roads and other classified roads 3. Impact on the drains, sewerage systems etc. 4. Various other issues to do with the capacity of infrastructure due to lack of proactive investment by the government. 5. Impact on the landscape and character and appearance of the area including any heritage assets. 6. Impact on the environmental conditions of the site.
Then you run in to other questions 1. Is there public transport capacity 2. How does it relate to its surroundings, 3. Are there shops, services, schools etc. 4. Can people walk to a town centre, railway station etc. 5. Is it a nice place to live, are there parks, trees etc. 6. Are there employment opportunities nearby.
Then I suppose you start going in to things like 1. Is it net zero 2. Is there a biodiversity net gain.
(not an exhaustive list).
You can just ignore all the above and carry on regardless but then you just end up with problems many times worse than that of the article about Sydney's northern suburbs I linked to earlier on.
OK
1. No net change since the people driving were already about anyway. Maybe moves some traffic from one place to another, but no net change. 2. As above. 3. Mostly as above. 4. Again as above. 5. Landscape and character can evolve, like language. Heritage sites don't need to be zoned the same as residential. 6. Deal with the impact. Tax externalities. Most impact is not net.
Other questions. 1. Again no net change. 2. Not sure what point you're trying to make here. 3. Again no net change. 4. If they want to be able to walk there, then they'll get a home where they can, if there's plenty of competition. 5. Again more competition means more options for people to choose homes with this, rather than rather dump is the only thing available to them. 6. Again the same.
It seems your objection in almost all of this isn't to the homes, its to the people who live in the homes. Well, those people live here anyway. A couple and their children all living on top of each other in a one bedroom in someone else's home use pretty much the same schooling, transportation and other externalities than if that family live in a house down the road instead.
End of a stressful day. Needed to clear my father's house fast as the new owners want to complete asap and I don't want to cause any delays so I haven't replied to any comments from the last thread so:
@Mortimer - Thank you for your kind post. Appreciated. My dad died aged 96 in February. Just the selling of the house now, which has suddenly turned manic.
@Stuartinromford - I agree completely with your post re maths and eventually everyone hits the buffers in the end, it is just a matter of when. Definitely happened to me. If I had my time again I would do a joint degree of maths with economics or philosophy to put off hitting the maths buffers.
@HYUFD - Thanks for the link re philosophy degree & logic questions. I'm interested but the link didn't work - Page not found. One thing to note (and I say this without having read the link) is the logic you do in a maths degree is far more advanced than stuff you do in a philosophy degree (or in particular questions they may set in an interview) by the nature of the prerequisites. In fact the notation itself will be gibberish without the previous preparation. That is not to say a question set in an interview will not be as difficult, it might in fact be more difficult. There are plenty of everyday logic questions I can't do that an untrained but clever person can do, but which doesn't involve complex logic. And as you know, I don't have a logic degree (I don't even know if such a thing exists), but said it as a riposte to @Miklosvar, although my specialist subjects in my 2nd & 3rd year of maths were all logic topics.
@DecrepiterJohnL - Your post about many Doctors regretting their choice and moving to other careers. I agree. They are often talented in several areas and it follows from my argument of going down the science line first and then wishing they had done something they had more passion for. For most of us we do a degree, and move on, but for a Doctor it is a career. There are so many in the public eye who are ex-Doctors doing non doctoring stuff. My wife (a doctor) often feels the same.
@Miklosvar - You are an arse. When you first appeared on PB I had a pointless pedantic exchange with you and decided to avoid you. Today I made a half serious comment for comic effect that was at the expense of historians/lawyers and people like @TheScreamingEagles and @ydoethur respond accordingly, in fun. You on the other hand responded appallingly, as you nearly always do. I've noticed you have done this with others. With @kinabalu for instance. And your reaction and jumping to the wrong conclusion when I politely said I had to leave for a few hours, but would reply on my return, was an example. Would you have preferred it if I had been rude and just ignored you.
You're rude, pedantic, irrational, and tangential. You appear to be an exceedingly unpleasant person. Not bad going for someone who has only made a few hundred posts.
Commiserations re house clearance. Just been doing it as an executor for an elderly relative (made a bit easier by getting the local Men's Shed to clear out as much as they wanted of the unwanted tools, timber, unfinished firniture, and gardening tools and mower, the latter refurbished and sold for the Shede funds).
Thanks. I had great plans for it all. BHF do clearances and we have donated furniture to them before and I could have cleared out stuff myself, but the estate agents wanted it all left for marketing the house as lived in and all of a sudden it has to go NOW. BHF can't react that quickly.
It is a mess. There are 5 fridge/freezers (Don't ask why, 4 are dead and sitting in the garage). I can dump them foc. The clearance people quoted £30 per fridge because they get charged and they have to all go now and I have to get it all done before we complete so I have no choice. All pounced upon me today.
Actually that chart shows little difference overall in NHS waiting times between recent Labour or Tory governments, except they were a bit lower under Labour in 2009-10 and are a bit higher under the Conservatives now (albeit Covid added to the problem).
Well done for going private though, the more higher income people take out private health insurance and use private hospitals, the less the pressure on the NHS. Best wishes for your recovery after your op.
I don't know where you learned maths but trebling is not "a bit" and being north of the worst in 30 years and accelerating is not "little difference".
Still, well done on congratulating OGH for going private, I am sure that has aided his recovery and eased the pain in his wallet no end.
What Australia does is charge higher income individuals a surcharge of 1% to 1.5% of income if they do not take out private health insurance.
The Tories should follow the example of the Coalition Howard government in Australia in 1997 which introduced that so more can follow the excellent example of OGH, go private and cut pressure on the NHS.
The Howard government in 1999 also contributed up to 30% of the private health insurance premium of people with their Medicare universal health coverage
Keir Starmer is actually praying they take this advice.
It would be the most brutal defeat of a governing, or recently governing, party since Baldwin managed to reduce Labour from 287 MPs to 50 in 1931.
It got the Howard government re elected.
There is little point being a Conservative if you don't pursue more conservative policies is there? Conservatives believe in choice in public services with private options too, in healthcare as much as anything else
I know the weather's been a bit warm recently, but I can assure you we are not in Australia.
Culturally we are probably closer to Australia than any other nation on earth except maybe New Zealand.
There is also no point the Tories fighting a battle on who will spend more on the NHS, as Labour will always win it as they are more willing to raise tax higher to pay for it.
The Tories should instead shift the argument to encouraging patient choice in healthcare too
"culturally"
Don't you mean racially? But it isn't particularly true. Just look at Ireland.
Australia and New Zealand are mainly of British origin and Protestant heritage.
The Republic of Ireland is of Celtic origin mainly and Roman Catholic heritage.
We also still share the King with Australia and New Zealand, we don't now with the Republic of Ireland.
We got trade deals with Australia and NZ post Brexit, the Republic of Ireland was pretty obstructive to our getting an EU trade deal unless on their terms
Interesting you think that being a royalist and a member of the C of E are fundamental to "British" culture.
Well most British people are royalist still and most British people are of Protestant not Roman Catholic heritage too, even if they are now atheist or agnostic
I can tell you that more "British" people, with parents in the UK before, say, 1940, were of Roman Catholic heritage than Protestant heritage. Your "even if now" fails to allow for the fact that that applies to other categories too.
What? You are seriously suggesting that more people pre 1940 in the UK were Roman Catholic than Church of England? Let alone Protestant once you add Church of Scotland, Baptists, Methodists etc
Where do you think the Protestants came from? They're of [Roman] Catholic heritage too, at some point. You can't erase history. You can't simply say that atheists are still Protestants and then deny the reverse.
And in any case peoples' families are mixed and blended. Unless you think that a little bit of Protestant overrides everything else in people's ancestry.
Daniel Korski was in the middle of a London mayoral hustings when the Times story dropped. I'm told his aide signalled him over to deliver the bad news. He left.
London Conservatives put Steve Norris and Boris Johnson before the electorate, and would have had Jeffrey Archer if they could. Is scandalous behaviour on the person spec as a "not essential but desirable" or something?
At least people had heard of Boris and Archer, who has heard of these 3 (now likely 2?) Even Norris and Zac Goldsmith and Shaun Bailey were better known.
Of the last 2 Susan Hall is probably the best though, at least she has held elected office for the party in the London Assembly, the other candidate has never even stood for the party that I can see
I normally agree with @Stuartinromford on nearly everything, but I think I am with you on this one and maybe hindsight plays a part. I liked Steve Norris, and although my memory is blurred on the topic by recent events, I suspect I quite liked Boris in the day. It is more recent times that has turned me against him really big time.
Also after reading the Michael Crick biography of Jeffery Archer I rather have a soft spot for him, although he should never have been let anywhere near the possibility of being London Mayor (or my wallet if it comes to that)
Given how successful he appears to be as a novelist, and how crap he was in politics, it feels like Archer wasted an awful lot of time and energy on being a shameless, incompetent grifter.
End of a stressful day. Needed to clear my father's house fast as the new owners want to complete asap and I don't want to cause any delays so I haven't replied to any comments from the last thread so:
@Mortimer - Thank you for your kind post. Appreciated. My dad died aged 96 in February. Just the selling of the house now, which has suddenly turned manic.
@Stuartinromford - I agree completely with your post re maths and eventually everyone hits the buffers in the end, it is just a matter of when. Definitely happened to me. If I had my time again I would do a joint degree of maths with economics or philosophy to put off hitting the maths buffers.
@HYUFD - Thanks for the link re philosophy degree & logic questions. I'm interested but the link didn't work - Page not found. One thing to note (and I say this without having read the link) is the logic you do in a maths degree is far more advanced than stuff you do in a philosophy degree (or in particular questions they may set in an interview) by the nature of the prerequisites. In fact the notation itself will be gibberish without the previous preparation. That is not to say a question set in an interview will not be as difficult, it might in fact be more difficult. There are plenty of everyday logic questions I can't do that an untrained but clever person can do, but which doesn't involve complex logic. And as you know, I don't have a logic degree (I don't even know if such a thing exists), but said it as a riposte to @Miklosvar, although my specialist subjects in my 2nd & 3rd year of maths were all logic topics.
@DecrepiterJohnL - Your post about many Doctors regretting their choice and moving to other careers. I agree. They are often talented in several areas and it follows from my argument of going down the science line first and then wishing they had done something they had more passion for. For most of us we do a degree, and move on, but for a Doctor it is a career. There are so many in the public eye who are ex-Doctors doing non doctoring stuff. My wife (a doctor) often feels the same.
@Miklosvar - You are an arse. When you first appeared on PB I had a pointless pedantic exchange with you and decided to avoid you. Today I made a half serious comment for comic effect that was at the expense of historians/lawyers and people like @TheScreamingEagles and @ydoethur respond accordingly, in fun. You on the other hand responded appallingly, as you nearly always do. I've noticed you have done this with others. With @kinabalu for instance. And your reaction and jumping to the wrong conclusion when I politely said I had to leave for a few hours, but would reply on my return, was an example. Would you have preferred it if I had been rude and just ignored you.
You're rude, pedantic, irrational, and tangential. You appear to be an exceedingly unpleasant person. Not bad going for someone who has only made a few hundred posts.
Commiserations re house clearance. Just been doing it as an executor for an elderly relative (made a bit easier by getting the local Men's Shed to clear out as much as they wanted of the unwanted tools, timber, unfinished firniture, and gardening tools and mower, the latter refurbished and sold for the Shede funds).
Thanks. I had great plans for it all. BHF do clearances and we have donated furniture to them before and I could have cleared out stuff myself, but the estate agents wanted it all left for marketing the house as lived in and all of a sudden it has to go NOW. BHF can't react that quickly.
It is a mess. There are 5 fridge/freezers (Don't ask why, 4 are dead and sitting in the garage). I can dump them foc. The clearance people quoted £30 per fridge because they get charged and they have to all go now and I have to get it all done before we complete so I have no choice. All pounced upon me today.
We had to do the last clearance (remaining junk, gardening stuff, millions of plant pots etc) at fairly short notice but nothing quite so urgent . It was rubbish mostly so we used a skip hire firm to come in a lorry and remove the stuff on the spot, in an hour, rather than mess around with a skip (which meant delay). But that might not suit.
Actually that chart shows little difference overall in NHS waiting times between recent Labour or Tory governments, except they were a bit lower under Labour in 2009-10 and are a bit higher under the Conservatives now (albeit Covid added to the problem).
Well done for going private though, the more higher income people take out private health insurance and use private hospitals, the less the pressure on the NHS. Best wishes for your recovery after your op.
I don't know where you learned maths but trebling is not "a bit" and being north of the worst in 30 years and accelerating is not "little difference".
Still, well done on congratulating OGH for going private, I am sure that has aided his recovery and eased the pain in his wallet no end.
What Australia does is charge higher income individuals a surcharge of 1% to 1.5% of income if they do not take out private health insurance.
The Tories should follow the example of the Coalition Howard government in Australia in 1997 which introduced that so more can follow the excellent example of OGH, go private and cut pressure on the NHS.
The Howard government in 1999 also contributed up to 30% of the private health insurance premium of people with their Medicare universal health coverage
Keir Starmer is actually praying they take this advice.
It would be the most brutal defeat of a governing, or recently governing, party since Baldwin managed to reduce Labour from 287 MPs to 50 in 1931.
It got the Howard government re elected.
There is little point being a Conservative if you don't pursue more conservative policies is there? Conservatives believe in choice in public services with private options too, in healthcare as much as anything else
I know the weather's been a bit warm recently, but I can assure you we are not in Australia.
Culturally we are probably closer to Australia than any other nation on earth except maybe New Zealand.
There is also no point the Tories fighting a battle on who will spend more on the NHS, as Labour will always win it as they are more willing to raise tax higher to pay for it.
The Tories should instead shift the argument to encouraging patient choice in healthcare too
"culturally"
Don't you mean racially? But it isn't particularly true. Just look at Ireland.
I think that Scotland is culturally close to Ireland. England less so. Parts of Scotland, particularly the West Highlands and the Hebrides, are culturally closer to Ireland than they are to England. Other parts, particularly Edinburgh, are culturally closer to England. Most of the UK, except probably the South East, is culturally closer to New Zealand than to Australia. Australia seems culturally closer to the USA than the UK, except in sport.
Actually that chart shows little difference overall in NHS waiting times between recent Labour or Tory governments, except they were a bit lower under Labour in 2009-10 and are a bit higher under the Conservatives now (albeit Covid added to the problem).
Well done for going private though, the more higher income people take out private health insurance and use private hospitals, the less the pressure on the NHS. Best wishes for your recovery after your op.
I don't know where you learned maths but trebling is not "a bit" and being north of the worst in 30 years and accelerating is not "little difference".
Still, well done on congratulating OGH for going private, I am sure that has aided his recovery and eased the pain in his wallet no end.
What Australia does is charge higher income individuals a surcharge of 1% to 1.5% of income if they do not take out private health insurance.
The Tories should follow the example of the Coalition Howard government in Australia in 1997 which introduced that so more can follow the excellent example of OGH, go private and cut pressure on the NHS.
The Howard government in 1999 also contributed up to 30% of the private health insurance premium of people with their Medicare universal health coverage
Keir Starmer is actually praying they take this advice.
It would be the most brutal defeat of a governing, or recently governing, party since Baldwin managed to reduce Labour from 287 MPs to 50 in 1931.
It got the Howard government re elected.
There is little point being a Conservative if you don't pursue more conservative policies is there? Conservatives believe in choice in public services with private options too, in healthcare as much as anything else
I know the weather's been a bit warm recently, but I can assure you we are not in Australia.
Culturally we are probably closer to Australia than any other nation on earth except maybe New Zealand.
There is also no point the Tories fighting a battle on who will spend more on the NHS, as Labour will always win it as they are more willing to raise tax higher to pay for it.
The Tories should instead shift the argument to encouraging patient choice in healthcare too
"culturally"
Don't you mean racially? But it isn't particularly true. Just look at Ireland.
Australia and New Zealand are mainly of British origin and Protestant heritage.
The Republic of Ireland is of Celtic origin mainly and Roman Catholic heritage.
We also still share the King with Australia and New Zealand, we don't now with the Republic of Ireland.
We got trade deals with Australia and NZ post Brexit, the Republic of Ireland was pretty obstructive to our getting an EU trade deal unless on their terms
Interesting you think that being a royalist and a member of the C of E are fundamental to "British" culture.
Well most British people are royalist still and most British people are of Protestant not Roman Catholic heritage too, even if they are now atheist or agnostic
I can tell you that more "British" people, with parents in the UK before, say, 1940, were of Roman Catholic heritage than Protestant heritage. Your "even if now" fails to allow for the fact that that applies to other categories too.
What? You are seriously suggesting that more people pre 1940 in the UK were Roman Catholic than Church of England? Let alone Protestant once you add Church of Scotland, Baptists, Methodists etc
Where do you think the Protestants came from? They're of [Roman] Catholic heritage too, at some point. You can't erase history. You can't simply say that atheists are still Protestants and then deny the reverse.
And in any case peoples' families are mixed and blended. Unless you think that a little bit of Protestant overrides everything else in people's ancestry.
Mostly they aren't, the majority of Australians are of majority Protestant heritage even if they are irreligious now. As are the majority of British people and New Zealanders
Actually that chart shows little difference overall in NHS waiting times between recent Labour or Tory governments, except they were a bit lower under Labour in 2009-10 and are a bit higher under the Conservatives now (albeit Covid added to the problem).
Well done for going private though, the more higher income people take out private health insurance and use private hospitals, the less the pressure on the NHS. Best wishes for your recovery after your op.
I don't know where you learned maths but trebling is not "a bit" and being north of the worst in 30 years and accelerating is not "little difference".
Still, well done on congratulating OGH for going private, I am sure that has aided his recovery and eased the pain in his wallet no end.
What Australia does is charge higher income individuals a surcharge of 1% to 1.5% of income if they do not take out private health insurance.
The Tories should follow the example of the Coalition Howard government in Australia in 1997 which introduced that so more can follow the excellent example of OGH, go private and cut pressure on the NHS.
The Howard government in 1999 also contributed up to 30% of the private health insurance premium of people with their Medicare universal health coverage
Keir Starmer is actually praying they take this advice.
It would be the most brutal defeat of a governing, or recently governing, party since Baldwin managed to reduce Labour from 287 MPs to 50 in 1931.
It got the Howard government re elected.
There is little point being a Conservative if you don't pursue more conservative policies is there? Conservatives believe in choice in public services with private options too, in healthcare as much as anything else
I know the weather's been a bit warm recently, but I can assure you we are not in Australia.
Culturally we are probably closer to Australia than any other nation on earth except maybe New Zealand.
There is also no point the Tories fighting a battle on who will spend more on the NHS, as Labour will always win it as they are more willing to raise tax higher to pay for it.
The Tories should instead shift the argument to encouraging patient choice in healthcare too
"culturally"
Don't you mean racially? But it isn't particularly true. Just look at Ireland.
Australia and New Zealand are mainly of British origin and Protestant heritage.
The Republic of Ireland is of Celtic origin mainly and Roman Catholic heritage.
We also still share the King with Australia and New Zealand, we don't now with the Republic of Ireland.
We got trade deals with Australia and NZ post Brexit, the Republic of Ireland was pretty obstructive to our getting an EU trade deal unless on their terms
Interesting you think that being a royalist and a member of the C of E are fundamental to "British" culture.
Well most British people are royalist still and most British people are of Protestant not Roman Catholic heritage too, even if they are now atheist or agnostic
I can tell you that more "British" people, with parents in the UK before, say, 1940, were of Roman Catholic heritage than Protestant heritage. Your "even if now" fails to allow for the fact that that applies to other categories too.
What? You are seriously suggesting that more people pre 1940 in the UK were Roman Catholic than Church of England? Let alone Protestant once you add Church of Scotland, Baptists, Methodists etc
Where do you think the Protestants came from? They're of [Roman] Catholic heritage too, at some point. You can't erase history. You can't simply say that atheists are still Protestants and then deny the reverse.
And in any case peoples' families are mixed and blended. Unless you think that a little bit of Protestant overrides everything else in people's ancestry.
Mostly they aren't, the majority of Australians are of Protestant heritage even if they are irreligious now. As are the majority of British people
I kind of agree with this. Some people make no bones about really disliking billionaire investment in space tech instead of things they'd like, I think even Prince William got in on it, but 1) that actually seems pretty useful to me, 2) it's their money, and 3) if the problem is they have too much money, that is the issue to tackle, not to whinge that they don't give it out enough voluntarily.
Actually that chart shows little difference overall in NHS waiting times between recent Labour or Tory governments, except they were a bit lower under Labour in 2009-10 and are a bit higher under the Conservatives now (albeit Covid added to the problem).
Well done for going private though, the more higher income people take out private health insurance and use private hospitals, the less the pressure on the NHS. Best wishes for your recovery after your op.
I don't know where you learned maths but trebling is not "a bit" and being north of the worst in 30 years and accelerating is not "little difference".
Still, well done on congratulating OGH for going private, I am sure that has aided his recovery and eased the pain in his wallet no end.
What Australia does is charge higher income individuals a surcharge of 1% to 1.5% of income if they do not take out private health insurance.
The Tories should follow the example of the Coalition Howard government in Australia in 1997 which introduced that so more can follow the excellent example of OGH, go private and cut pressure on the NHS.
The Howard government in 1999 also contributed up to 30% of the private health insurance premium of people with their Medicare universal health coverage
Keir Starmer is actually praying they take this advice.
It would be the most brutal defeat of a governing, or recently governing, party since Baldwin managed to reduce Labour from 287 MPs to 50 in 1931.
It got the Howard government re elected.
There is little point being a Conservative if you don't pursue more conservative policies is there? Conservatives believe in choice in public services with private options too, in healthcare as much as anything else
I know the weather's been a bit warm recently, but I can assure you we are not in Australia.
Culturally we are probably closer to Australia than any other nation on earth except maybe New Zealand.
There is also no point the Tories fighting a battle on who will spend more on the NHS, as Labour will always win it as they are more willing to raise tax higher to pay for it.
The Tories should instead shift the argument to encouraging patient choice in healthcare too
"culturally"
Don't you mean racially? But it isn't particularly true. Just look at Ireland.
Australia and New Zealand are mainly of British origin and Protestant heritage.
The Republic of Ireland is of Celtic origin mainly and Roman Catholic heritage.
We also still share the King with Australia and New Zealand, we don't now with the Republic of Ireland.
We got trade deals with Australia and NZ post Brexit, the Republic of Ireland was pretty obstructive to our getting an EU trade deal unless on their terms
So 2/3 of Australians are not of Irish descent then (and that includes Northern Ireland not just the Republic) and most of the UK is more Anglo Saxon, Norman (plus more recent Jewish, Huguenot and non white immigrants) than Celtic except the fringe.
You’re wrong and your rather disturbing obsession with decent and race suggests that cultural and political commonality is genetic. Our western neighbours watch the same TV shows as us at the same time (U.K. channels being freely available in Ireland) read the same newspapers, generally speak the same language, live in the same time zone and inhabit a common travel areas as us, not to mention the millennia of interaction between our islands, and the often completely fucked up shared history, in your mind because we are not ethnically “Celtic” so we have more in common with people 12,000 miles away who are a bit more “Anglo-Saxon”. Scratch the surface of a Tory and you usually find that sort of ethnonationalist racial shite.
Actually that chart shows little difference overall in NHS waiting times between recent Labour or Tory governments, except they were a bit lower under Labour in 2009-10 and are a bit higher under the Conservatives now (albeit Covid added to the problem).
Well done for going private though, the more higher income people take out private health insurance and use private hospitals, the less the pressure on the NHS. Best wishes for your recovery after your op.
I don't know where you learned maths but trebling is not "a bit" and being north of the worst in 30 years and accelerating is not "little difference".
Still, well done on congratulating OGH for going private, I am sure that has aided his recovery and eased the pain in his wallet no end.
What Australia does is charge higher income individuals a surcharge of 1% to 1.5% of income if they do not take out private health insurance.
The Tories should follow the example of the Coalition Howard government in Australia in 1997 which introduced that so more can follow the excellent example of OGH, go private and cut pressure on the NHS.
The Howard government in 1999 also contributed up to 30% of the private health insurance premium of people with their Medicare universal health coverage
Keir Starmer is actually praying they take this advice.
It would be the most brutal defeat of a governing, or recently governing, party since Baldwin managed to reduce Labour from 287 MPs to 50 in 1931.
It got the Howard government re elected.
There is little point being a Conservative if you don't pursue more conservative policies is there? Conservatives believe in choice in public services with private options too, in healthcare as much as anything else
I know the weather's been a bit warm recently, but I can assure you we are not in Australia.
Culturally we are probably closer to Australia than any other nation on earth except maybe New Zealand.
There is also no point the Tories fighting a battle on who will spend more on the NHS, as Labour will always win it as they are more willing to raise tax higher to pay for it.
The Tories should instead shift the argument to encouraging patient choice in healthcare too
"culturally"
Don't you mean racially? But it isn't particularly true. Just look at Ireland.
I think that Scotland is culturally close to Ireland. England less so. Parts of Scotland, particularly the West Highlands and the Hebrides, are culturally closer to Ireland than they are to England. Other parts, particularly Edinburgh, are culturally closer to England. Most of the UK, except probably the South East, is culturally closer to New Zealand than to Australia. Australia seems culturally closer to the USA than the UK, except in sport.
Within the UK itself I think cultural distinctions are vastly inflated, and people think they are much more different than they are.
Actually that chart shows little difference overall in NHS waiting times between recent Labour or Tory governments, except they were a bit lower under Labour in 2009-10 and are a bit higher under the Conservatives now (albeit Covid added to the problem).
Well done for going private though, the more higher income people take out private health insurance and use private hospitals, the less the pressure on the NHS. Best wishes for your recovery after your op.
I don't know where you learned maths but trebling is not "a bit" and being north of the worst in 30 years and accelerating is not "little difference".
Still, well done on congratulating OGH for going private, I am sure that has aided his recovery and eased the pain in his wallet no end.
What Australia does is charge higher income individuals a surcharge of 1% to 1.5% of income if they do not take out private health insurance.
The Tories should follow the example of the Coalition Howard government in Australia in 1997 which introduced that so more can follow the excellent example of OGH, go private and cut pressure on the NHS.
The Howard government in 1999 also contributed up to 30% of the private health insurance premium of people with their Medicare universal health coverage
Keir Starmer is actually praying they take this advice.
It would be the most brutal defeat of a governing, or recently governing, party since Baldwin managed to reduce Labour from 287 MPs to 50 in 1931.
It got the Howard government re elected.
There is little point being a Conservative if you don't pursue more conservative policies is there? Conservatives believe in choice in public services with private options too, in healthcare as much as anything else
I know the weather's been a bit warm recently, but I can assure you we are not in Australia.
Culturally we are probably closer to Australia than any other nation on earth except maybe New Zealand.
There is also no point the Tories fighting a battle on who will spend more on the NHS, as Labour will always win it as they are more willing to raise tax higher to pay for it.
The Tories should instead shift the argument to encouraging patient choice in healthcare too
"culturally"
Don't you mean racially? But it isn't particularly true. Just look at Ireland.
Australia and New Zealand are mainly of British origin and Protestant heritage.
The Republic of Ireland is of Celtic origin mainly and Roman Catholic heritage.
We also still share the King with Australia and New Zealand, we don't now with the Republic of Ireland.
We got trade deals with Australia and NZ post Brexit, the Republic of Ireland was pretty obstructive to our getting an EU trade deal unless on their terms
Interesting you think that being a royalist and a member of the C of E are fundamental to "British" culture.
Well most British people are royalist still and most British people are of Protestant not Roman Catholic heritage too, even if they are now atheist or agnostic
I can tell you that more "British" people, with parents in the UK before, say, 1940, were of Roman Catholic heritage than Protestant heritage. Your "even if now" fails to allow for the fact that that applies to other categories too.
What? You are seriously suggesting that more people pre 1940 in the UK were Roman Catholic than Church of England? Let alone Protestant once you add Church of Scotland, Baptists, Methodists etc
Where do you think the Protestants came from? They're of [Roman] Catholic heritage too, at some point. You can't erase history. You can't simply say that atheists are still Protestants and then deny the reverse.
And in any case peoples' families are mixed and blended. Unless you think that a little bit of Protestant overrides everything else in people's ancestry.
Mostly they aren't, the majority of Australians are of Protestant heritage even if they are irreligious now. As are the majority of British people
Striking in that graph how much worse things got soon after Boris Johnson took over!
Err no, there was a sharpish drop until the pandemic took over
Wrong way round. Early pandemic lockdown = fewer Gp referrals = fewer hospital assessments = fewer new patients on the waiting list. The scale is too coarse, to be sure.
Also: covid deaths = some folk off the waiting list.
Not wrong way round. March 2020 was when the first lockdown happened. Look at the graph again.
Depends how someone made up the graph. Unless you think Mr Johnson was Jesus Christ, laying his hands on everyone in hospital and curing them?
A waiting list is a dynamic balance between input and output. We know that. We also know that GP sugeries were shifting - as indeed were many of their patients - to infection control measures in February 2020. There was a de facto lockdown before the arguably delayed one that was "official".
Neither you nor I nor OLB can judge this properly without more information. But it is clear there was a sharpish drop before the exponential (sic) rise
Looks as if that is the point covering February 1-28 - ops and so on still happening as booked, but the GP end of things beginning to shut down as people deferred visits, so that the waiting list wasn't being fed in at the in end.
The drop in total numbers waiting was in the months after March 2020, and Co incident with a sharp increase in the numbers of very long waiters. It was due to a sharp drop in the number of referrals to hospital services for elective treatments.
(The graph above allows data to come from specific months if clicked on)
Actually that chart shows little difference overall in NHS waiting times between recent Labour or Tory governments, except they were a bit lower under Labour in 2009-10 and are a bit higher under the Conservatives now (albeit Covid added to the problem).
Well done for going private though, the more higher income people take out private health insurance and use private hospitals, the less the pressure on the NHS. Best wishes for your recovery after your op.
I don't know where you learned maths but trebling is not "a bit" and being north of the worst in 30 years and accelerating is not "little difference".
Still, well done on congratulating OGH for going private, I am sure that has aided his recovery and eased the pain in his wallet no end.
What Australia does is charge higher income individuals a surcharge of 1% to 1.5% of income if they do not take out private health insurance.
The Tories should follow the example of the Coalition Howard government in Australia in 1997 which introduced that so more can follow the excellent example of OGH, go private and cut pressure on the NHS.
The Howard government in 1999 also contributed up to 30% of the private health insurance premium of people with their Medicare universal health coverage
Keir Starmer is actually praying they take this advice.
It would be the most brutal defeat of a governing, or recently governing, party since Baldwin managed to reduce Labour from 287 MPs to 50 in 1931.
It got the Howard government re elected.
There is little point being a Conservative if you don't pursue more conservative policies is there? Conservatives believe in choice in public services with private options too, in healthcare as much as anything else
I know the weather's been a bit warm recently, but I can assure you we are not in Australia.
Culturally we are probably closer to Australia than any other nation on earth except maybe New Zealand.
There is also no point the Tories fighting a battle on who will spend more on the NHS, as Labour will always win it as they are more willing to raise tax higher to pay for it.
The Tories should instead shift the argument to encouraging patient choice in healthcare too
"culturally"
Don't you mean racially? But it isn't particularly true. Just look at Ireland.
I think that Scotland is culturally close to Ireland. England less so. Parts of Scotland, particularly the West Highlands and the Hebrides, are culturally closer to Ireland than they are to England. Other parts, particularly Edinburgh, are culturally closer to England. Most of the UK, except probably the South East, is culturally closer to New Zealand than to Australia. Australia seems culturally closer to the USA than the UK, except in sport.
Scotland is closer to Northern Ireland. Most Northern Irish Protestants are of Presbyterian origin.
The Republic of Ireland is closer to Catholic Europe, hence it is in the EU and Eurozone and the UK isn't.
I would say the Midlands and North and Wales and Cornwall and Essex are probably culturally closer to Australia, while most of southern England is closer to NZ or New England in the US or the Canadian Atlantic coast.
London is probably quite close to Melbourne or Sydney
I hope that Labour use that graph on posters, adverts and PPBs as a constant reminder of how this Tory government has screwed the majority of the population.
Actually that chart shows little difference overall in NHS waiting times between recent Labour or Tory governments, except they were a bit lower under Labour in 2009-10 and are a bit higher under the Conservatives now (albeit Covid added to the problem).
Well done for going private though, the more higher income people take out private health insurance and use private hospitals, the less the pressure on the NHS. Best wishes for your recovery after your op.
I don't know where you learned maths but trebling is not "a bit" and being north of the worst in 30 years and accelerating is not "little difference".
Still, well done on congratulating OGH for going private, I am sure that has aided his recovery and eased the pain in his wallet no end.
What Australia does is charge higher income individuals a surcharge of 1% to 1.5% of income if they do not take out private health insurance.
The Tories should follow the example of the Coalition Howard government in Australia in 1997 which introduced that so more can follow the excellent example of OGH, go private and cut pressure on the NHS.
The Howard government in 1999 also contributed up to 30% of the private health insurance premium of people with their Medicare universal health coverage
Keir Starmer is actually praying they take this advice.
It would be the most brutal defeat of a governing, or recently governing, party since Baldwin managed to reduce Labour from 287 MPs to 50 in 1931.
It got the Howard government re elected.
There is little point being a Conservative if you don't pursue more conservative policies is there? Conservatives believe in choice in public services with private options too, in healthcare as much as anything else
I know the weather's been a bit warm recently, but I can assure you we are not in Australia.
Culturally we are probably closer to Australia than any other nation on earth except maybe New Zealand.
There is also no point the Tories fighting a battle on who will spend more on the NHS, as Labour will always win it as they are more willing to raise tax higher to pay for it.
The Tories should instead shift the argument to encouraging patient choice in healthcare too
"culturally"
Don't you mean racially? But it isn't particularly true. Just look at Ireland.
Australia and New Zealand are mainly of British origin and Protestant heritage.
The Republic of Ireland is of Celtic origin mainly and Roman Catholic heritage.
We also still share the King with Australia and New Zealand, we don't now with the Republic of Ireland.
We got trade deals with Australia and NZ post Brexit, the Republic of Ireland was pretty obstructive to our getting an EU trade deal unless on their terms
Interesting you think that being a royalist and a member of the C of E are fundamental to "British" culture.
Well most British people are royalist still and most British people are of Protestant not Roman Catholic heritage too, even if they are now atheist or agnostic
I can tell you that more "British" people, with parents in the UK before, say, 1940, were of Roman Catholic heritage than Protestant heritage. Your "even if now" fails to allow for the fact that that applies to other categories too.
What? You are seriously suggesting that more people pre 1940 in the UK were Roman Catholic than Church of England? Let alone Protestant once you add Church of Scotland, Baptists, Methodists etc
Where do you think the Protestants came from? They're of [Roman] Catholic heritage too, at some point. You can't erase history. You can't simply say that atheists are still Protestants and then deny the reverse.
And in any case peoples' families are mixed and blended. Unless you think that a little bit of Protestant overrides everything else in people's ancestry.
Mostly they aren't, the majority of Australians are of Protestant heritage even if they are irreligious now. As are the majority of British people
Putin is putting Prigozhin in a position where he will have no choice but to try to orchestrate regime change in Russia.
Missed his (low) shot. Yesterday Prigohzin had an opportunity to truly embarrass the regime, way more than he already did.
Yevgeny Prigozhin is as likely to "orchestrate" (as opposed to possibly helping precipitate) regime change in Russia circa 2023, as was Al Capone in America circa 1923.
Note that Czar of Cicero never made it much past the Cook County line.
Whereas the Capo of Bakhmut got 3/4 of way to Red Square; of course US govt in 1920s was NOT engaged in a failed invasion of Canada.
Actually that chart shows little difference overall in NHS waiting times between recent Labour or Tory governments, except they were a bit lower under Labour in 2009-10 and are a bit higher under the Conservatives now (albeit Covid added to the problem).
Well done for going private though, the more higher income people take out private health insurance and use private hospitals, the less the pressure on the NHS. Best wishes for your recovery after your op.
I don't know where you learned maths but trebling is not "a bit" and being north of the worst in 30 years and accelerating is not "little difference".
Still, well done on congratulating OGH for going private, I am sure that has aided his recovery and eased the pain in his wallet no end.
What Australia does is charge higher income individuals a surcharge of 1% to 1.5% of income if they do not take out private health insurance.
The Tories should follow the example of the Coalition Howard government in Australia in 1997 which introduced that so more can follow the excellent example of OGH, go private and cut pressure on the NHS.
The Howard government in 1999 also contributed up to 30% of the private health insurance premium of people with their Medicare universal health coverage
Keir Starmer is actually praying they take this advice.
It would be the most brutal defeat of a governing, or recently governing, party since Baldwin managed to reduce Labour from 287 MPs to 50 in 1931.
It got the Howard government re elected.
There is little point being a Conservative if you don't pursue more conservative policies is there? Conservatives believe in choice in public services with private options too, in healthcare as much as anything else
I know the weather's been a bit warm recently, but I can assure you we are not in Australia.
Culturally we are probably closer to Australia than any other nation on earth except maybe New Zealand.
There is also no point the Tories fighting a battle on who will spend more on the NHS, as Labour will always win it as they are more willing to raise tax higher to pay for it.
The Tories should instead shift the argument to encouraging patient choice in healthcare too
"culturally"
Don't you mean racially? But it isn't particularly true. Just look at Ireland.
Australia and New Zealand are mainly of British origin and Protestant heritage.
The Republic of Ireland is of Celtic origin mainly and Roman Catholic heritage.
We also still share the King with Australia and New Zealand, we don't now with the Republic of Ireland.
We got trade deals with Australia and NZ post Brexit, the Republic of Ireland was pretty obstructive to our getting an EU trade deal unless on their terms
So 2/3 of Australians are not of Irish descent then (and that includes Northern Ireland not just the Republic) and most of the UK is more Anglo Saxon, Norman (plus more recent Jewish, Huguenot and non white immigrants) than Celtic except the fringe.
You’re wrong and your rather disturbing obsession with decent and race suggests that cultural and political commonality is genetic. Our western neighbours watch the same TV shows as us at the same time (U.K. channels being freely available in Ireland) read the same newspapers, generally speak the same language, live in the same time zone and inhabit a common travel areas as us, not to mention the millennia of interaction between our islands, and the often completely fucked up shared history, in your mind because we are not ethnically “Celtic” so we have more in common with people 12,000 miles away who are a bit more “Anglo-Saxon”. Scratch the surface of a Tory and you usually find that sort of ethnonationalist racial shite.
More British people watched Neighbours and Home and Away than ever watched Irish TV soaps and dramas.
More Australians watch British TV programmes than Irish TV programmes too.
For goodness sake, France is much closer to us than New Zealand, doesn't make us culturally closer to the French than Kiwis!!
Actually that chart shows little difference overall in NHS waiting times between recent Labour or Tory governments, except they were a bit lower under Labour in 2009-10 and are a bit higher under the Conservatives now (albeit Covid added to the problem).
Well done for going private though, the more higher income people take out private health insurance and use private hospitals, the less the pressure on the NHS. Best wishes for your recovery after your op.
I don't know where you learned maths but trebling is not "a bit" and being north of the worst in 30 years and accelerating is not "little difference".
Still, well done on congratulating OGH for going private, I am sure that has aided his recovery and eased the pain in his wallet no end.
What Australia does is charge higher income individuals a surcharge of 1% to 1.5% of income if they do not take out private health insurance.
The Tories should follow the example of the Coalition Howard government in Australia in 1997 which introduced that so more can follow the excellent example of OGH, go private and cut pressure on the NHS.
The Howard government in 1999 also contributed up to 30% of the private health insurance premium of people with their Medicare universal health coverage
Keir Starmer is actually praying they take this advice.
It would be the most brutal defeat of a governing, or recently governing, party since Baldwin managed to reduce Labour from 287 MPs to 50 in 1931.
It got the Howard government re elected.
There is little point being a Conservative if you don't pursue more conservative policies is there? Conservatives believe in choice in public services with private options too, in healthcare as much as anything else
I know the weather's been a bit warm recently, but I can assure you we are not in Australia.
Culturally we are probably closer to Australia than any other nation on earth except maybe New Zealand.
There is also no point the Tories fighting a battle on who will spend more on the NHS, as Labour will always win it as they are more willing to raise tax higher to pay for it.
The Tories should instead shift the argument to encouraging patient choice in healthcare too
"culturally"
Don't you mean racially? But it isn't particularly true. Just look at Ireland.
I think that Scotland is culturally close to Ireland. England less so. Parts of Scotland, particularly the West Highlands and the Hebrides, are culturally closer to Ireland than they are to England. Other parts, particularly Edinburgh, are culturally closer to England. Most of the UK, except probably the South East, is culturally closer to New Zealand than to Australia. Australia seems culturally closer to the USA than the UK, except in sport.
Scotland is closer to Northern Ireland. Most Northern Irish Protestants are of Presbyterian origin.
The Republic of Ireland is closer to Catholic Europe, hence it is in the EU and Eurozone and the UK isn't.
I would say the Midlands and North and Wales and Cornwall and Essex are probably culturally closer to Australia, while most of southern England is closer to NZ or New England in the US or the Canadian Atlantic coast.
London is probably quite close to Melbourne or Sydney
The EU is a Roman Catholic conspiracy? I have a Gordon Riot to sell you.
Actually that chart shows little difference overall in NHS waiting times between recent Labour or Tory governments, except they were a bit lower under Labour in 2009-10 and are a bit higher under the Conservatives now (albeit Covid added to the problem).
Well done for going private though, the more higher income people take out private health insurance and use private hospitals, the less the pressure on the NHS. Best wishes for your recovery after your op.
I don't know where you learned maths but trebling is not "a bit" and being north of the worst in 30 years and accelerating is not "little difference".
Still, well done on congratulating OGH for going private, I am sure that has aided his recovery and eased the pain in his wallet no end.
What Australia does is charge higher income individuals a surcharge of 1% to 1.5% of income if they do not take out private health insurance.
The Tories should follow the example of the Coalition Howard government in Australia in 1997 which introduced that so more can follow the excellent example of OGH, go private and cut pressure on the NHS.
The Howard government in 1999 also contributed up to 30% of the private health insurance premium of people with their Medicare universal health coverage
Keir Starmer is actually praying they take this advice.
It would be the most brutal defeat of a governing, or recently governing, party since Baldwin managed to reduce Labour from 287 MPs to 50 in 1931.
It got the Howard government re elected.
There is little point being a Conservative if you don't pursue more conservative policies is there? Conservatives believe in choice in public services with private options too, in healthcare as much as anything else
I know the weather's been a bit warm recently, but I can assure you we are not in Australia.
Culturally we are probably closer to Australia than any other nation on earth except maybe New Zealand.
There is also no point the Tories fighting a battle on who will spend more on the NHS, as Labour will always win it as they are more willing to raise tax higher to pay for it.
The Tories should instead shift the argument to encouraging patient choice in healthcare too
"culturally"
Don't you mean racially? But it isn't particularly true. Just look at Ireland.
Australia and New Zealand are mainly of British origin and Protestant heritage.
The Republic of Ireland is of Celtic origin mainly and Roman Catholic heritage.
We also still share the King with Australia and New Zealand, we don't now with the Republic of Ireland.
We got trade deals with Australia and NZ post Brexit, the Republic of Ireland was pretty obstructive to our getting an EU trade deal unless on their terms
So 2/3 of Australians are not of Irish descent then (and that includes Northern Ireland not just the Republic) and most of the UK is more Anglo Saxon, Norman (plus more recent Jewish, Huguenot and non white immigrants) than Celtic except the fringe.
You’re wrong and your rather disturbing obsession with decent and race suggests that cultural and political commonality is genetic. Our western neighbours watch the same TV shows as us at the same time (U.K. channels being freely available in Ireland) read the same newspapers, generally speak the same language, live in the same time zone and inhabit a common travel areas as us, not to mention the millennia of interaction between our islands, and the often completely fucked up shared history, in your mind because we are not ethnically “Celtic” so we have more in common with people 12,000 miles away who are a bit more “Anglo-Saxon”. Scratch the surface of a Tory and you usually find that sort of ethnonationalist racial shite.
More British people watched Neighbours and Home and Away than ever watched Irish TV soaps and dramas.
More Australians watch British TV programmes than Irish TV programmes too
Australia is a bigger country than Ireland, so makes more TV programmes ...
End of a stressful day. Needed to clear my father's house fast as the new owners want to complete asap and I don't want to cause any delays so I haven't replied to any comments from the last thread so:
@Mortimer - Thank you for your kind post. Appreciated. My dad died aged 96 in February. Just the selling of the house now, which has suddenly turned manic.
@Stuartinromford - I agree completely with your post re maths and eventually everyone hits the buffers in the end, it is just a matter of when. Definitely happened to me. If I had my time again I would do a joint degree of maths with economics or philosophy to put off hitting the maths buffers.
@HYUFD - Thanks for the link re philosophy degree & logic questions. I'm interested but the link didn't work - Page not found. One thing to note (and I say this without having read the link) is the logic you do in a maths degree is far more advanced than stuff you do in a philosophy degree (or in particular questions they may set in an interview) by the nature of the prerequisites. In fact the notation itself will be gibberish without the previous preparation. That is not to say a question set in an interview will not be as difficult, it might in fact be more difficult. There are plenty of everyday logic questions I can't do that an untrained but clever person can do, but which doesn't involve complex logic. And as you know, I don't have a logic degree (I don't even know if such a thing exists), but said it as a riposte to @Miklosvar, although my specialist subjects in my 2nd & 3rd year of maths were all logic topics.
@DecrepiterJohnL - Your post about many Doctors regretting their choice and moving to other careers. I agree. They are often talented in several areas and it follows from my argument of going down the science line first and then wishing they had done something they had more passion for. For most of us we do a degree, and move on, but for a Doctor it is a career. There are so many in the public eye who are ex-Doctors doing non doctoring stuff. My wife (a doctor) often feels the same.
@Miklosvar - You are an arse. When you first appeared on PB I had a pointless pedantic exchange with you and decided to avoid you. Today I made a half serious comment for comic effect that was at the expense of historians/lawyers and people like @TheScreamingEagles and @ydoethur respond accordingly, in fun. You on the other hand responded appallingly, as you nearly always do. I've noticed you have done this with others. With @kinabalu for instance. And your reaction and jumping to the wrong conclusion when I politely said I had to leave for a few hours, but would reply on my return, was an example. Would you have preferred it if I had been rude and just ignored you.
You're rude, pedantic, irrational, and tangential. You appear to be an exceedingly unpleasant person. Not bad going for someone who has only made a few hundred posts.
Actually that chart shows little difference overall in NHS waiting times between recent Labour or Tory governments, except they were a bit lower under Labour in 2009-10 and are a bit higher under the Conservatives now (albeit Covid added to the problem).
Well done for going private though, the more higher income people take out private health insurance and use private hospitals, the less the pressure on the NHS. Best wishes for your recovery after your op.
I don't know where you learned maths but trebling is not "a bit" and being north of the worst in 30 years and accelerating is not "little difference".
Still, well done on congratulating OGH for going private, I am sure that has aided his recovery and eased the pain in his wallet no end.
What Australia does is charge higher income individuals a surcharge of 1% to 1.5% of income if they do not take out private health insurance.
The Tories should follow the example of the Coalition Howard government in Australia in 1997 which introduced that so more can follow the excellent example of OGH, go private and cut pressure on the NHS.
The Howard government in 1999 also contributed up to 30% of the private health insurance premium of people with their Medicare universal health coverage
Keir Starmer is actually praying they take this advice.
It would be the most brutal defeat of a governing, or recently governing, party since Baldwin managed to reduce Labour from 287 MPs to 50 in 1931.
It got the Howard government re elected.
There is little point being a Conservative if you don't pursue more conservative policies is there? Conservatives believe in choice in public services with private options too, in healthcare as much as anything else
I know the weather's been a bit warm recently, but I can assure you we are not in Australia.
Culturally we are probably closer to Australia than any other nation on earth except maybe New Zealand.
There is also no point the Tories fighting a battle on who will spend more on the NHS, as Labour will always win it as they are more willing to raise tax higher to pay for it.
The Tories should instead shift the argument to encouraging patient choice in healthcare too
"culturally"
Don't you mean racially? But it isn't particularly true. Just look at Ireland.
I think that Scotland is culturally close to Ireland. England less so. Parts of Scotland, particularly the West Highlands and the Hebrides, are culturally closer to Ireland than they are to England. Other parts, particularly Edinburgh, are culturally closer to England. Most of the UK, except probably the South East, is culturally closer to New Zealand than to Australia. Australia seems culturally closer to the USA than the UK, except in sport.
Scotland is closer to Northern Ireland. Most Northern Irish Protestants are of Presbyterian origin.
The Republic of Ireland is closer to Catholic Europe, hence it is in the EU and Eurozone and the UK isn't.
I would say the Midlands and North and Wales and Cornwall and Essex are probably culturally closer to Australia, while most of southern England is closer to NZ or New England in the US or the Canadian Atlantic coast.
London is probably quite close to Melbourne or Sydney
The EU is a Roman Catholic conspiracy? I have a Gordon Riot to sell you.
Actually that chart shows little difference overall in NHS waiting times between recent Labour or Tory governments, except they were a bit lower under Labour in 2009-10 and are a bit higher under the Conservatives now (albeit Covid added to the problem).
Well done for going private though, the more higher income people take out private health insurance and use private hospitals, the less the pressure on the NHS. Best wishes for your recovery after your op.
I don't know where you learned maths but trebling is not "a bit" and being north of the worst in 30 years and accelerating is not "little difference".
Still, well done on congratulating OGH for going private, I am sure that has aided his recovery and eased the pain in his wallet no end.
What Australia does is charge higher income individuals a surcharge of 1% to 1.5% of income if they do not take out private health insurance.
The Tories should follow the example of the Coalition Howard government in Australia in 1997 which introduced that so more can follow the excellent example of OGH, go private and cut pressure on the NHS.
The Howard government in 1999 also contributed up to 30% of the private health insurance premium of people with their Medicare universal health coverage
Keir Starmer is actually praying they take this advice.
It would be the most brutal defeat of a governing, or recently governing, party since Baldwin managed to reduce Labour from 287 MPs to 50 in 1931.
It got the Howard government re elected.
There is little point being a Conservative if you don't pursue more conservative policies is there? Conservatives believe in choice in public services with private options too, in healthcare as much as anything else
I know the weather's been a bit warm recently, but I can assure you we are not in Australia.
Culturally we are probably closer to Australia than any other nation on earth except maybe New Zealand.
There is also no point the Tories fighting a battle on who will spend more on the NHS, as Labour will always win it as they are more willing to raise tax higher to pay for it.
The Tories should instead shift the argument to encouraging patient choice in healthcare too
"culturally"
Don't you mean racially? But it isn't particularly true. Just look at Ireland.
I think that Scotland is culturally close to Ireland. England less so. Parts of Scotland, particularly the West Highlands and the Hebrides, are culturally closer to Ireland than they are to England. Other parts, particularly Edinburgh, are culturally closer to England. Most of the UK, except probably the South East, is culturally closer to New Zealand than to Australia. Australia seems culturally closer to the USA than the UK, except in sport.
Scotland is closer to Northern Ireland. Most Northern Irish Protestants are of Presbyterian origin.
The Republic of Ireland is closer to Catholic Europe, hence it is in the EU and Eurozone and the UK isn't.
I would say the Midlands and North and Wales and Cornwall and Essex are probably culturally closer to Australia, while most of southern England is closer to NZ or New England in the US or the Canadian Atlantic coast.
London is probably quite close to Melbourne or Sydney
The EU is a Roman Catholic conspiracy? I have a Gordon Riot to sell you.
Striking in that graph how much worse things got soon after Boris Johnson took over!
Err no, there was a sharpish drop until the pandemic took over
Wrong way round. Early pandemic lockdown = fewer Gp referrals = fewer hospital assessments = fewer new patients on the waiting list. The scale is too coarse, to be sure.
Also: covid deaths = some folk off the waiting list.
Not wrong way round. March 2020 was when the first lockdown happened. Look at the graph again.
Depends how someone made up the graph. Unless you think Mr Johnson was Jesus Christ, laying his hands on everyone in hospital and curing them?
A waiting list is a dynamic balance between input and output. We know that. We also know that GP sugeries were shifting - as indeed were many of their patients - to infection control measures in February 2020. There was a de facto lockdown before the arguably delayed one that was "official".
Neither you nor I nor OLB can judge this properly without more information. But it is clear there was a sharpish drop before the exponential (sic) rise
Looks as if that is the point covering February 1-28 - ops and so on still happening as booked, but the GP end of things beginning to shut down as people deferred visits, so that the waiting list wasn't being fed in at the in end.
The drop in total numbers waiting was in the months after March 2020, and Co incident with a sharp increase in the numbers of very long waiters. It was due to a sharp drop in the number of referrals to hospital services for elective treatments.
(The graph above allows data to come from specific months if clicked on)
It's kind of annoying when people sneeringly dismiss what is obvious and common sense, and which is also backed up by the data, as "your supposition..."
Actually that chart shows little difference overall in NHS waiting times between recent Labour or Tory governments, except they were a bit lower under Labour in 2009-10 and are a bit higher under the Conservatives now (albeit Covid added to the problem).
Well done for going private though, the more higher income people take out private health insurance and use private hospitals, the less the pressure on the NHS. Best wishes for your recovery after your op.
I don't know where you learned maths but trebling is not "a bit" and being north of the worst in 30 years and accelerating is not "little difference".
Still, well done on congratulating OGH for going private, I am sure that has aided his recovery and eased the pain in his wallet no end.
What Australia does is charge higher income individuals a surcharge of 1% to 1.5% of income if they do not take out private health insurance.
The Tories should follow the example of the Coalition Howard government in Australia in 1997 which introduced that so more can follow the excellent example of OGH, go private and cut pressure on the NHS.
The Howard government in 1999 also contributed up to 30% of the private health insurance premium of people with their Medicare universal health coverage
Keir Starmer is actually praying they take this advice.
It would be the most brutal defeat of a governing, or recently governing, party since Baldwin managed to reduce Labour from 287 MPs to 50 in 1931.
It got the Howard government re elected.
There is little point being a Conservative if you don't pursue more conservative policies is there? Conservatives believe in choice in public services with private options too, in healthcare as much as anything else
I know the weather's been a bit warm recently, but I can assure you we are not in Australia.
Culturally we are probably closer to Australia than any other nation on earth except maybe New Zealand.
There is also no point the Tories fighting a battle on who will spend more on the NHS, as Labour will always win it as they are more willing to raise tax higher to pay for it.
The Tories should instead shift the argument to encouraging patient choice in healthcare too
"culturally"
Don't you mean racially? But it isn't particularly true. Just look at Ireland.
Australia and New Zealand are mainly of British origin and Protestant heritage.
The Republic of Ireland is of Celtic origin mainly and Roman Catholic heritage.
We also still share the King with Australia and New Zealand, we don't now with the Republic of Ireland.
We got trade deals with Australia and NZ post Brexit, the Republic of Ireland was pretty obstructive to our getting an EU trade deal unless on their terms
Interesting you think that being a royalist and a member of the C of E are fundamental to "British" culture.
Well most British people are royalist still and most British people are of Protestant not Roman Catholic heritage too, even if they are now atheist or agnostic
I can tell you that more "British" people, with parents in the UK before, say, 1940, were of Roman Catholic heritage than Protestant heritage. Your "even if now" fails to allow for the fact that that applies to other categories too.
What? You are seriously suggesting that more people pre 1940 in the UK were Roman Catholic than Church of England? Let alone Protestant once you add Church of Scotland, Baptists, Methodists etc
You make it seem that being Roman Catholic is A Bad Thing! I didn’t realise you were sectarian. I’m very disappointed.
End of a stressful day. Needed to clear my father's house fast as the new owners want to complete asap and I don't want to cause any delays so I haven't replied to any comments from the last thread so:
@Mortimer - Thank you for your kind post. Appreciated. My dad died aged 96 in February. Just the selling of the house now, which has suddenly turned manic.
@Stuartinromford - I agree completely with your post re maths and eventually everyone hits the buffers in the end, it is just a matter of when. Definitely happened to me. If I had my time again I would do a joint degree of maths with economics or philosophy to put off hitting the maths buffers.
@HYUFD - Thanks for the link re philosophy degree & logic questions. I'm interested but the link didn't work - Page not found. One thing to note (and I say this without having read the link) is the logic you do in a maths degree is far more advanced than stuff you do in a philosophy degree (or in particular questions they may set in an interview) by the nature of the prerequisites. In fact the notation itself will be gibberish without the previous preparation. That is not to say a question set in an interview will not be as difficult, it might in fact be more difficult. There are plenty of everyday logic questions I can't do that an untrained but clever person can do, but which doesn't involve complex logic. And as you know, I don't have a logic degree (I don't even know if such a thing exists), but said it as a riposte to @Miklosvar, although my specialist subjects in my 2nd & 3rd year of maths were all logic topics.
@DecrepiterJohnL - Your post about many Doctors regretting their choice and moving to other careers. I agree. They are often talented in several areas and it follows from my argument of going down the science line first and then wishing they had done something they had more passion for. For most of us we do a degree, and move on, but for a Doctor it is a career. There are so many in the public eye who are ex-Doctors doing non doctoring stuff. My wife (a doctor) often feels the same.
@Miklosvar - You are an arse. When you first appeared on PB I had a pointless pedantic exchange with you and decided to avoid you. Today I made a half serious comment for comic effect that was at the expense of historians/lawyers and people like @TheScreamingEagles and @ydoethur respond accordingly, in fun. You on the other hand responded appallingly, as you nearly always do. I've noticed you have done this with others. With @kinabalu for instance. And your reaction and jumping to the wrong conclusion when I politely said I had to leave for a few hours, but would reply on my return, was an example. Would you have preferred it if I had been rude and just ignored you.
You're rude, pedantic, irrational, and tangential. You appear to be an exceedingly unpleasant person. Not bad going for someone who has only made a few hundred posts.
Commiserations re house clearance. Just been doing it as an executor for an elderly relative (made a bit easier by getting the local Men's Shed to clear out as much as they wanted of the unwanted tools, timber, unfinished firniture, and gardening tools and mower, the latter refurbished and sold for the Shede funds).
Thanks. I had great plans for it all. BHF do clearances and we have donated furniture to them before and I could have cleared out stuff myself, but the estate agents wanted it all left for marketing the house as lived in and all of a sudden it has to go NOW. BHF can't react that quickly.
It is a mess. There are 5 fridge/freezers (Don't ask why, 4 are dead and sitting in the garage). I can dump them foc. The clearance people quoted £30 per fridge because they get charged and they have to all go now and I have to get it all done before we complete so I have no choice. All pounced upon me today.
We had to do the last clearance (remaining junk, gardening stuff, millions of plant pots etc) at fairly short notice but nothing quite so urgent . It was rubbish mostly so we used a skip hire firm to come in a lorry and remove the stuff on the spot, in an hour, rather than mess around with a skip (which meant delay). But that might not suit.
That is what I am doing. 2 quotes today from scratch (£800 and £1700) and both can do it before the completion day (thank goodness). I had to delay exchange today because I didn't know if I could clear in time if I set a completion date without clearance organised. The pressure is on because the new owners need to leave their rental home so it is tight completion date. Hopefully I exchange tomorrow. I'm the blockage but I didn't want to find I had agreed a completion date and couldn't clear the property. It is stuffed full of junk.
Striking in that graph how much worse things got soon after Boris Johnson took over!
Err no, there was a sharpish drop until the pandemic took over
Wrong way round. Early pandemic lockdown = fewer Gp referrals = fewer hospital assessments = fewer new patients on the waiting list. The scale is too coarse, to be sure.
Also: covid deaths = some folk off the waiting list.
Not wrong way round. March 2020 was when the first lockdown happened. Look at the graph again.
Depends how someone made up the graph. Unless you think Mr Johnson was Jesus Christ, laying his hands on everyone in hospital and curing them?
A waiting list is a dynamic balance between input and output. We know that. We also know that GP sugeries were shifting - as indeed were many of their patients - to infection control measures in February 2020. There was a de facto lockdown before the arguably delayed one that was "official".
Neither you nor I nor OLB can judge this properly without more information. But it is clear there was a sharpish drop before the exponential (sic) rise
Looks as if that is the point covering February 1-28 - ops and so on still happening as booked, but the GP end of things beginning to shut down as people deferred visits, so that the waiting list wasn't being fed in at the in end.
The drop in total numbers waiting was in the months after March 2020, and Co incident with a sharp increase in the numbers of very long waiters. It was due to a sharp drop in the number of referrals to hospital services for elective treatments.
(The graph above allows data to come from specific months if clicked on)
That's very nice - much clearer and breaks the waiters down into categories.
Actually that chart shows little difference overall in NHS waiting times between recent Labour or Tory governments, except they were a bit lower under Labour in 2009-10 and are a bit higher under the Conservatives now (albeit Covid added to the problem).
Well done for going private though, the more higher income people take out private health insurance and use private hospitals, the less the pressure on the NHS. Best wishes for your recovery after your op.
I don't know where you learned maths but trebling is not "a bit" and being north of the worst in 30 years and accelerating is not "little difference".
Still, well done on congratulating OGH for going private, I am sure that has aided his recovery and eased the pain in his wallet no end.
What Australia does is charge higher income individuals a surcharge of 1% to 1.5% of income if they do not take out private health insurance.
The Tories should follow the example of the Coalition Howard government in Australia in 1997 which introduced that so more can follow the excellent example of OGH, go private and cut pressure on the NHS.
The Howard government in 1999 also contributed up to 30% of the private health insurance premium of people with their Medicare universal health coverage
Keir Starmer is actually praying they take this advice.
It would be the most brutal defeat of a governing, or recently governing, party since Baldwin managed to reduce Labour from 287 MPs to 50 in 1931.
It got the Howard government re elected.
There is little point being a Conservative if you don't pursue more conservative policies is there? Conservatives believe in choice in public services with private options too, in healthcare as much as anything else
I know the weather's been a bit warm recently, but I can assure you we are not in Australia.
Culturally we are probably closer to Australia than any other nation on earth except maybe New Zealand.
There is also no point the Tories fighting a battle on who will spend more on the NHS, as Labour will always win it as they are more willing to raise tax higher to pay for it.
The Tories should instead shift the argument to encouraging patient choice in healthcare too
"culturally"
Don't you mean racially? But it isn't particularly true. Just look at Ireland.
I think that Scotland is culturally close to Ireland. England less so. Parts of Scotland, particularly the West Highlands and the Hebrides, are culturally closer to Ireland than they are to England. Other parts, particularly Edinburgh, are culturally closer to England. Most of the UK, except probably the South East, is culturally closer to New Zealand than to Australia. Australia seems culturally closer to the USA than the UK, except in sport.
Scotland is closer to Northern Ireland. Most Northern Irish Protestants are of Presbyterian origin.
The Republic of Ireland is closer to Catholic Europe, hence it is in the EU and Eurozone and the UK isn't.
I would say the Midlands and North and Wales and Cornwall and Essex are probably culturally closer to Australia, while most of southern England is closer to NZ or New England in the US or the Canadian Atlantic coast.
London is probably quite close to Melbourne or Sydney
The EU is a Roman Catholic conspiracy? I have a Gordon Riot to sell you.
A baby hidden in a warming pan, for Sir?
That caused a bit of a stew at court.
Do you serve stew in a warming pan, at your house? Talk about rich n' rare!
Actually that chart shows little difference overall in NHS waiting times between recent Labour or Tory governments, except they were a bit lower under Labour in 2009-10 and are a bit higher under the Conservatives now (albeit Covid added to the problem).
Well done for going private though, the more higher income people take out private health insurance and use private hospitals, the less the pressure on the NHS. Best wishes for your recovery after your op.
I don't know where you learned maths but trebling is not "a bit" and being north of the worst in 30 years and accelerating is not "little difference".
Still, well done on congratulating OGH for going private, I am sure that has aided his recovery and eased the pain in his wallet no end.
What Australia does is charge higher income individuals a surcharge of 1% to 1.5% of income if they do not take out private health insurance.
The Tories should follow the example of the Coalition Howard government in Australia in 1997 which introduced that so more can follow the excellent example of OGH, go private and cut pressure on the NHS.
The Howard government in 1999 also contributed up to 30% of the private health insurance premium of people with their Medicare universal health coverage
Keir Starmer is actually praying they take this advice.
It would be the most brutal defeat of a governing, or recently governing, party since Baldwin managed to reduce Labour from 287 MPs to 50 in 1931.
It got the Howard government re elected.
There is little point being a Conservative if you don't pursue more conservative policies is there? Conservatives believe in choice in public services with private options too, in healthcare as much as anything else
I know the weather's been a bit warm recently, but I can assure you we are not in Australia.
Culturally we are probably closer to Australia than any other nation on earth except maybe New Zealand.
There is also no point the Tories fighting a battle on who will spend more on the NHS, as Labour will always win it as they are more willing to raise tax higher to pay for it.
The Tories should instead shift the argument to encouraging patient choice in healthcare too
"culturally"
Don't you mean racially? But it isn't particularly true. Just look at Ireland.
I think that Scotland is culturally close to Ireland. England less so. Parts of Scotland, particularly the West Highlands and the Hebrides, are culturally closer to Ireland than they are to England. Other parts, particularly Edinburgh, are culturally closer to England. Most of the UK, except probably the South East, is culturally closer to New Zealand than to Australia. Australia seems culturally closer to the USA than the UK, except in sport.
If you ignore that more than a quarter of New Zealanders are Polynesian. Or do the non-white ones not count, like the Australian Aborigines, native Americans, Black Americans or Hispanic Americans?
Striking in that graph how much worse things got soon after Boris Johnson took over!
Err no, there was a sharpish drop until the pandemic took over
Wrong way round. Early pandemic lockdown = fewer Gp referrals = fewer hospital assessments = fewer new patients on the waiting list. The scale is too coarse, to be sure.
Also: covid deaths = some folk off the waiting list.
Not wrong way round. March 2020 was when the first lockdown happened. Look at the graph again.
Depends how someone made up the graph. Unless you think Mr Johnson was Jesus Christ, laying his hands on everyone in hospital and curing them?
A waiting list is a dynamic balance between input and output. We know that. We also know that GP sugeries were shifting - as indeed were many of their patients - to infection control measures in February 2020. There was a de facto lockdown before the arguably delayed one that was "official".
Neither you nor I nor OLB can judge this properly without more information. But it is clear there was a sharpish drop before the exponential (sic) rise
Looks as if that is the point covering February 1-28 - ops and so on still happening as booked, but the GP end of things beginning to shut down as people deferred visits, so that the waiting list wasn't being fed in at the in end.
The drop in total numbers waiting was in the months after March 2020, and Co incident with a sharp increase in the numbers of very long waiters. It was due to a sharp drop in the number of referrals to hospital services for elective treatments.
(The graph above allows data to come from specific months if clicked on)
Ta Foxy, this is indeed a useful graph to resolve this. Point conceded
Actually that chart shows little difference overall in NHS waiting times between recent Labour or Tory governments, except they were a bit lower under Labour in 2009-10 and are a bit higher under the Conservatives now (albeit Covid added to the problem).
Well done for going private though, the more higher income people take out private health insurance and use private hospitals, the less the pressure on the NHS. Best wishes for your recovery after your op.
I don't know where you learned maths but trebling is not "a bit" and being north of the worst in 30 years and accelerating is not "little difference".
Still, well done on congratulating OGH for going private, I am sure that has aided his recovery and eased the pain in his wallet no end.
What Australia does is charge higher income individuals a surcharge of 1% to 1.5% of income if they do not take out private health insurance.
The Tories should follow the example of the Coalition Howard government in Australia in 1997 which introduced that so more can follow the excellent example of OGH, go private and cut pressure on the NHS.
The Howard government in 1999 also contributed up to 30% of the private health insurance premium of people with their Medicare universal health coverage
Keir Starmer is actually praying they take this advice.
It would be the most brutal defeat of a governing, or recently governing, party since Baldwin managed to reduce Labour from 287 MPs to 50 in 1931.
It got the Howard government re elected.
There is little point being a Conservative if you don't pursue more conservative policies is there? Conservatives believe in choice in public services with private options too, in healthcare as much as anything else
I know the weather's been a bit warm recently, but I can assure you we are not in Australia.
Culturally we are probably closer to Australia than any other nation on earth except maybe New Zealand.
There is also no point the Tories fighting a battle on who will spend more on the NHS, as Labour will always win it as they are more willing to raise tax higher to pay for it.
The Tories should instead shift the argument to encouraging patient choice in healthcare too
"culturally"
Don't you mean racially? But it isn't particularly true. Just look at Ireland.
Australia and New Zealand are mainly of British origin and Protestant heritage.
The Republic of Ireland is of Celtic origin mainly and Roman Catholic heritage.
We also still share the King with Australia and New Zealand, we don't now with the Republic of Ireland.
We got trade deals with Australia and NZ post Brexit, the Republic of Ireland was pretty obstructive to our getting an EU trade deal unless on their terms
Interesting you think that being a royalist and a member of the C of E are fundamental to "British" culture.
Well most British people are royalist still and most British people are of Protestant not Roman Catholic heritage too, even if they are now atheist or agnostic
I can tell you that more "British" people, with parents in the UK before, say, 1940, were of Roman Catholic heritage than Protestant heritage. Your "even if now" fails to allow for the fact that that applies to other categories too.
What? You are seriously suggesting that more people pre 1940 in the UK were Roman Catholic than Church of England? Let alone Protestant once you add Church of Scotland, Baptists, Methodists etc
You make it seem that being Roman Catholic is A Bad Thing! I didn’t realise you were sectarian. I’m very disappointed.
Conversely, I would say modern Britain is much more similar to New Zealand than Australia, with touches of Canada and the U.S on the one side, and NorthWest Continental Europe on the other.
Australia is increasingly American in style, I think.
Have you been to Oz? Or, indeed, the USA?
Oz really isn't like the USA. It is in the US/Anglosphere, militarily, but culturally it is much more Anglo, indeed European in general (welfare state, no guns, no abortion stuff, low level religiosity, etc)
Actually that chart shows little difference overall in NHS waiting times between recent Labour or Tory governments, except they were a bit lower under Labour in 2009-10 and are a bit higher under the Conservatives now (albeit Covid added to the problem).
Well done for going private though, the more higher income people take out private health insurance and use private hospitals, the less the pressure on the NHS. Best wishes for your recovery after your op.
I don't know where you learned maths but trebling is not "a bit" and being north of the worst in 30 years and accelerating is not "little difference".
Still, well done on congratulating OGH for going private, I am sure that has aided his recovery and eased the pain in his wallet no end.
What Australia does is charge higher income individuals a surcharge of 1% to 1.5% of income if they do not take out private health insurance.
The Tories should follow the example of the Coalition Howard government in Australia in 1997 which introduced that so more can follow the excellent example of OGH, go private and cut pressure on the NHS.
The Howard government in 1999 also contributed up to 30% of the private health insurance premium of people with their Medicare universal health coverage
Keir Starmer is actually praying they take this advice.
It would be the most brutal defeat of a governing, or recently governing, party since Baldwin managed to reduce Labour from 287 MPs to 50 in 1931.
It got the Howard government re elected.
There is little point being a Conservative if you don't pursue more conservative policies is there? Conservatives believe in choice in public services with private options too, in healthcare as much as anything else
I know the weather's been a bit warm recently, but I can assure you we are not in Australia.
Culturally we are probably closer to Australia than any other nation on earth except maybe New Zealand.
There is also no point the Tories fighting a battle on who will spend more on the NHS, as Labour will always win it as they are more willing to raise tax higher to pay for it.
The Tories should instead shift the argument to encouraging patient choice in healthcare too
"culturally"
Don't you mean racially? But it isn't particularly true. Just look at Ireland.
I think that Scotland is culturally close to Ireland. England less so. Parts of Scotland, particularly the West Highlands and the Hebrides, are culturally closer to Ireland than they are to England. Other parts, particularly Edinburgh, are culturally closer to England. Most of the UK, except probably the South East, is culturally closer to New Zealand than to Australia. Australia seems culturally closer to the USA than the UK, except in sport.
Scotland is closer to Northern Ireland. Most Northern Irish Protestants are of Presbyterian origin.
The Republic of Ireland is closer to Catholic Europe, hence it is in the EU and Eurozone and the UK isn't.
I would say the Midlands and North and Wales and Cornwall and Essex are probably culturally closer to Australia, while most of southern England is closer to NZ or New England in the US or the Canadian Atlantic coast.
London is probably quite close to Melbourne or Sydney
The EU is a Roman Catholic conspiracy? I have a Gordon Riot to sell you.
A baby hidden in a warming pan, for Sir?
That caused a bit of a stew at court.
Do you serve stew in a warming pan, at your house? Talk about rich n' rare!
Putin is putting Prigozhin in a position where he will have no choice but to try to orchestrate regime change in Russia.
Missed his (low) shot. Yesterday Prigohzin had an opportunity to truly embarrass the regime, way more than he already did.
Yevgeny Prigozhin is as likely to "orchestrate" (as opposed to possibly helping precipitate) regime change in Russia circa 2023, as was Al Capone in America circa 1923.
Note that Czar of Cicero never made it much past the Cook County line.
Whereas the Capo of Bakhmut got 3/4 of way to Red Square; of course US govt in 1920s was NOT engaged in a failed invasion of Canada.
Actually that chart shows little difference overall in NHS waiting times between recent Labour or Tory governments, except they were a bit lower under Labour in 2009-10 and are a bit higher under the Conservatives now (albeit Covid added to the problem).
Well done for going private though, the more higher income people take out private health insurance and use private hospitals, the less the pressure on the NHS. Best wishes for your recovery after your op.
I don't know where you learned maths but trebling is not "a bit" and being north of the worst in 30 years and accelerating is not "little difference".
Still, well done on congratulating OGH for going private, I am sure that has aided his recovery and eased the pain in his wallet no end.
What Australia does is charge higher income individuals a surcharge of 1% to 1.5% of income if they do not take out private health insurance.
The Tories should follow the example of the Coalition Howard government in Australia in 1997 which introduced that so more can follow the excellent example of OGH, go private and cut pressure on the NHS.
The Howard government in 1999 also contributed up to 30% of the private health insurance premium of people with their Medicare universal health coverage
Keir Starmer is actually praying they take this advice.
It would be the most brutal defeat of a governing, or recently governing, party since Baldwin managed to reduce Labour from 287 MPs to 50 in 1931.
It got the Howard government re elected.
There is little point being a Conservative if you don't pursue more conservative policies is there? Conservatives believe in choice in public services with private options too, in healthcare as much as anything else
I know the weather's been a bit warm recently, but I can assure you we are not in Australia.
Culturally we are probably closer to Australia than any other nation on earth except maybe New Zealand.
There is also no point the Tories fighting a battle on who will spend more on the NHS, as Labour will always win it as they are more willing to raise tax higher to pay for it.
The Tories should instead shift the argument to encouraging patient choice in healthcare too
"culturally"
Don't you mean racially? But it isn't particularly true. Just look at Ireland.
I think that Scotland is culturally close to Ireland. England less so. Parts of Scotland, particularly the West Highlands and the Hebrides, are culturally closer to Ireland than they are to England. Other parts, particularly Edinburgh, are culturally closer to England. Most of the UK, except probably the South East, is culturally closer to New Zealand than to Australia. Australia seems culturally closer to the USA than the UK, except in sport.
Scotland is closer to Northern Ireland. Most Northern Irish Protestants are of Presbyterian origin.
The Republic of Ireland is closer to Catholic Europe, hence it is in the EU and Eurozone and the UK isn't.
I would say the Midlands and North and Wales and Cornwall and Essex are probably culturally closer to Australia, while most of southern England is closer to NZ or New England in the US or the Canadian Atlantic coast.
London is probably quite close to Melbourne or Sydney
The EU is a Roman Catholic conspiracy? I have a Gordon Riot to sell you.
Most of the Eurozone are majority Catholic heritage nations. The founding nations of the EEC (except West Germany and the Netherlands) were all majority Roman Catholic and even Germany and Holland now have more Roman Catholics than Protestants (Bavaria of course always majority Catholic).
Of the majority Protestant heritage nations in Europe, the UK, Switzerland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden and Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands and Finland, only the Dutch, Germans and Finns are in the Eurozone and EU
Actually that chart shows little difference overall in NHS waiting times between recent Labour or Tory governments, except they were a bit lower under Labour in 2009-10 and are a bit higher under the Conservatives now (albeit Covid added to the problem).
Well done for going private though, the more higher income people take out private health insurance and use private hospitals, the less the pressure on the NHS. Best wishes for your recovery after your op.
I don't know where you learned maths but trebling is not "a bit" and being north of the worst in 30 years and accelerating is not "little difference".
Still, well done on congratulating OGH for going private, I am sure that has aided his recovery and eased the pain in his wallet no end.
What Australia does is charge higher income individuals a surcharge of 1% to 1.5% of income if they do not take out private health insurance.
The Tories should follow the example of the Coalition Howard government in Australia in 1997 which introduced that so more can follow the excellent example of OGH, go private and cut pressure on the NHS.
The Howard government in 1999 also contributed up to 30% of the private health insurance premium of people with their Medicare universal health coverage
Keir Starmer is actually praying they take this advice.
It would be the most brutal defeat of a governing, or recently governing, party since Baldwin managed to reduce Labour from 287 MPs to 50 in 1931.
It got the Howard government re elected.
There is little point being a Conservative if you don't pursue more conservative policies is there? Conservatives believe in choice in public services with private options too, in healthcare as much as anything else
I know the weather's been a bit warm recently, but I can assure you we are not in Australia.
Culturally we are probably closer to Australia than any other nation on earth except maybe New Zealand.
There is also no point the Tories fighting a battle on who will spend more on the NHS, as Labour will always win it as they are more willing to raise tax higher to pay for it.
The Tories should instead shift the argument to encouraging patient choice in healthcare too
"culturally"
Don't you mean racially? But it isn't particularly true. Just look at Ireland.
I think that Scotland is culturally close to Ireland. England less so. Parts of Scotland, particularly the West Highlands and the Hebrides, are culturally closer to Ireland than they are to England. Other parts, particularly Edinburgh, are culturally closer to England. Most of the UK, except probably the South East, is culturally closer to New Zealand than to Australia. Australia seems culturally closer to the USA than the UK, except in sport.
Scotland is closer to Northern Ireland. Most Northern Irish Protestants are of Presbyterian origin.
The Republic of Ireland is closer to Catholic Europe, hence it is in the EU and Eurozone and the UK isn't.
I would say the Midlands and North and Wales and Cornwall and Essex are probably culturally closer to Australia, while most of southern England is closer to NZ or New England in the US or the Canadian Atlantic coast.
London is probably quite close to Melbourne or Sydney
Not all Scots are close to Northern Ireland. Not all Scots are presbyterian. However, not all Northern Irish are presbyterian either.
Striking in that graph how much worse things got soon after Boris Johnson took over!
Err no, there was a sharpish drop until the pandemic took over
Wrong way round. Early pandemic lockdown = fewer Gp referrals = fewer hospital assessments = fewer new patients on the waiting list. The scale is too coarse, to be sure.
Also: covid deaths = some folk off the waiting list.
Not wrong way round. March 2020 was when the first lockdown happened. Look at the graph again.
Depends how someone made up the graph. Unless you think Mr Johnson was Jesus Christ, laying his hands on everyone in hospital and curing them?
A waiting list is a dynamic balance between input and output. We know that. We also know that GP sugeries were shifting - as indeed were many of their patients - to infection control measures in February 2020. There was a de facto lockdown before the arguably delayed one that was "official".
Neither you nor I nor OLB can judge this properly without more information. But it is clear there was a sharpish drop before the exponential (sic) rise
Looks as if that is the point covering February 1-28 - ops and so on still happening as booked, but the GP end of things beginning to shut down as people deferred visits, so that the waiting list wasn't being fed in at the in end.
The drop in total numbers waiting was in the months after March 2020, and Co incident with a sharp increase in the numbers of very long waiters. It was due to a sharp drop in the number of referrals to hospital services for elective treatments.
(The graph above allows data to come from specific months if clicked on)
That's very nice - much clearer and breaks the waiters down into categories.
RTT (waiting list management) is a very strong priority at the moment, with particular cut offs to get 52+ week waiters down by the end of the quarter by X amount etc.
Actually that chart shows little difference overall in NHS waiting times between recent Labour or Tory governments, except they were a bit lower under Labour in 2009-10 and are a bit higher under the Conservatives now (albeit Covid added to the problem).
Well done for going private though, the more higher income people take out private health insurance and use private hospitals, the less the pressure on the NHS. Best wishes for your recovery after your op.
I don't know where you learned maths but trebling is not "a bit" and being north of the worst in 30 years and accelerating is not "little difference".
Still, well done on congratulating OGH for going private, I am sure that has aided his recovery and eased the pain in his wallet no end.
What Australia does is charge higher income individuals a surcharge of 1% to 1.5% of income if they do not take out private health insurance.
The Tories should follow the example of the Coalition Howard government in Australia in 1997 which introduced that so more can follow the excellent example of OGH, go private and cut pressure on the NHS.
The Howard government in 1999 also contributed up to 30% of the private health insurance premium of people with their Medicare universal health coverage
Keir Starmer is actually praying they take this advice.
It would be the most brutal defeat of a governing, or recently governing, party since Baldwin managed to reduce Labour from 287 MPs to 50 in 1931.
It got the Howard government re elected.
There is little point being a Conservative if you don't pursue more conservative policies is there? Conservatives believe in choice in public services with private options too, in healthcare as much as anything else
I know the weather's been a bit warm recently, but I can assure you we are not in Australia.
Culturally we are probably closer to Australia than any other nation on earth except maybe New Zealand.
There is also no point the Tories fighting a battle on who will spend more on the NHS, as Labour will always win it as they are more willing to raise tax higher to pay for it.
The Tories should instead shift the argument to encouraging patient choice in healthcare too
"culturally"
Don't you mean racially? But it isn't particularly true. Just look at Ireland.
I think that Scotland is culturally close to Ireland. England less so. Parts of Scotland, particularly the West Highlands and the Hebrides, are culturally closer to Ireland than they are to England. Other parts, particularly Edinburgh, are culturally closer to England. Most of the UK, except probably the South East, is culturally closer to New Zealand than to Australia. Australia seems culturally closer to the USA than the UK, except in sport.
Within the UK itself I think cultural distinctions are vastly inflated, and people think they are much more different than they are.
Depends. I've often heard on here (not so much recently mind) that the EU referendum was a huge epoch defining exercise in UK democracy; constituent countries of the UK voted one way while others voted very much another way. Those countries also have had very different attitudes to eg the Tories, Thatcher, Johnson etc, so unless one thinks politics is relatively unimportant, I'd classify these as quite definite distinctions.
Daniel Korski was in the middle of a London mayoral hustings when the Times story dropped. I'm told his aide signalled him over to deliver the bad news. He left.
London Conservatives put Steve Norris and Boris Johnson before the electorate, and would have had Jeffrey Archer if they could. Is scandalous behaviour on the person spec as a "not essential but desirable" or something?
At least people had heard of Boris and Archer, who has heard of these 3 (now likely 2?) Even Norris and Zac Goldsmith and Shaun Bailey were better known.
Of the last 2 Susan Hall is probably the best though, at least she has held elected office for the party in the London Assembly, the other candidate has never even stood for the party that I can see
I normally agree with @Stuartinromford on nearly everything, but I think I am with you on this one and maybe hindsight plays a part. I liked Steve Norris, and although my memory is blurred on the topic by recent events, I suspect I quite liked Boris in the day. It is more recent times that has turned me against him really big time.
Also after reading the Michael Crick biography of Jeffery Archer I rather have a soft spot for him, although he should never have been let anywhere near the possibility of being London Mayor (or my wallet if it comes to that)
Given how successful he appears to be as a novelist, and how crap he was in politics, it feels like Archer wasted an awful lot of time and energy on being a shameless, incompetent grifter.
I was quite disappointed when I read the biography. I wanted to read about an absolute scoundrel, but he wasn't as bad as I had previously thought. He clearly had/has talents and he actually works hard exploiting them. I have worked with a couple of people (one in particular) who were dishonest and thought if you put as much effort into working honestly you might be just as successful if not more and not risk being fired or worse going to jail.
Actually that chart shows little difference overall in NHS waiting times between recent Labour or Tory governments, except they were a bit lower under Labour in 2009-10 and are a bit higher under the Conservatives now (albeit Covid added to the problem).
Well done for going private though, the more higher income people take out private health insurance and use private hospitals, the less the pressure on the NHS. Best wishes for your recovery after your op.
I don't know where you learned maths but trebling is not "a bit" and being north of the worst in 30 years and accelerating is not "little difference".
Still, well done on congratulating OGH for going private, I am sure that has aided his recovery and eased the pain in his wallet no end.
What Australia does is charge higher income individuals a surcharge of 1% to 1.5% of income if they do not take out private health insurance.
The Tories should follow the example of the Coalition Howard government in Australia in 1997 which introduced that so more can follow the excellent example of OGH, go private and cut pressure on the NHS.
The Howard government in 1999 also contributed up to 30% of the private health insurance premium of people with their Medicare universal health coverage
Keir Starmer is actually praying they take this advice.
It would be the most brutal defeat of a governing, or recently governing, party since Baldwin managed to reduce Labour from 287 MPs to 50 in 1931.
It got the Howard government re elected.
There is little point being a Conservative if you don't pursue more conservative policies is there? Conservatives believe in choice in public services with private options too, in healthcare as much as anything else
I know the weather's been a bit warm recently, but I can assure you we are not in Australia.
Culturally we are probably closer to Australia than any other nation on earth except maybe New Zealand.
There is also no point the Tories fighting a battle on who will spend more on the NHS, as Labour will always win it as they are more willing to raise tax higher to pay for it.
The Tories should instead shift the argument to encouraging patient choice in healthcare too
"culturally"
Don't you mean racially? But it isn't particularly true. Just look at Ireland.
I think that Scotland is culturally close to Ireland. England less so. Parts of Scotland, particularly the West Highlands and the Hebrides, are culturally closer to Ireland than they are to England. Other parts, particularly Edinburgh, are culturally closer to England. Most of the UK, except probably the South East, is culturally closer to New Zealand than to Australia. Australia seems culturally closer to the USA than the UK, except in sport.
Scotland is closer to Northern Ireland. Most Northern Irish Protestants are of Presbyterian origin.
The Republic of Ireland is closer to Catholic Europe, hence it is in the EU and Eurozone and the UK isn't.
I would say the Midlands and North and Wales and Cornwall and Essex are probably culturally closer to Australia, while most of southern England is closer to NZ or New England in the US or the Canadian Atlantic coast.
London is probably quite close to Melbourne or Sydney
The EU is a Roman Catholic conspiracy? I have a Gordon Riot to sell you.
A baby hidden in a warming pan, for Sir?
That caused a bit of a stew at court.
A man who knows his onions, eh? And his Oates, no doubt….
Actually that chart shows little difference overall in NHS waiting times between recent Labour or Tory governments, except they were a bit lower under Labour in 2009-10 and are a bit higher under the Conservatives now (albeit Covid added to the problem).
Well done for going private though, the more higher income people take out private health insurance and use private hospitals, the less the pressure on the NHS. Best wishes for your recovery after your op.
I don't know where you learned maths but trebling is not "a bit" and being north of the worst in 30 years and accelerating is not "little difference".
Still, well done on congratulating OGH for going private, I am sure that has aided his recovery and eased the pain in his wallet no end.
What Australia does is charge higher income individuals a surcharge of 1% to 1.5% of income if they do not take out private health insurance.
The Tories should follow the example of the Coalition Howard government in Australia in 1997 which introduced that so more can follow the excellent example of OGH, go private and cut pressure on the NHS.
The Howard government in 1999 also contributed up to 30% of the private health insurance premium of people with their Medicare universal health coverage
Keir Starmer is actually praying they take this advice.
It would be the most brutal defeat of a governing, or recently governing, party since Baldwin managed to reduce Labour from 287 MPs to 50 in 1931.
It got the Howard government re elected.
There is little point being a Conservative if you don't pursue more conservative policies is there? Conservatives believe in choice in public services with private options too, in healthcare as much as anything else
I know the weather's been a bit warm recently, but I can assure you we are not in Australia.
Culturally we are probably closer to Australia than any other nation on earth except maybe New Zealand.
There is also no point the Tories fighting a battle on who will spend more on the NHS, as Labour will always win it as they are more willing to raise tax higher to pay for it.
The Tories should instead shift the argument to encouraging patient choice in healthcare too
"culturally"
Don't you mean racially? But it isn't particularly true. Just look at Ireland.
I think that Scotland is culturally close to Ireland. England less so. Parts of Scotland, particularly the West Highlands and the Hebrides, are culturally closer to Ireland than they are to England. Other parts, particularly Edinburgh, are culturally closer to England. Most of the UK, except probably the South East, is culturally closer to New Zealand than to Australia. Australia seems culturally closer to the USA than the UK, except in sport.
If you ignore that more than a quarter of New Zealanders are Polynesian. Or do the non-white ones not count, like the Australian Aborigines, native Americans, Black Americans or Hispanic Americans?
Actually that chart shows little difference overall in NHS waiting times between recent Labour or Tory governments, except they were a bit lower under Labour in 2009-10 and are a bit higher under the Conservatives now (albeit Covid added to the problem).
Well done for going private though, the more higher income people take out private health insurance and use private hospitals, the less the pressure on the NHS. Best wishes for your recovery after your op.
I don't know where you learned maths but trebling is not "a bit" and being north of the worst in 30 years and accelerating is not "little difference".
Still, well done on congratulating OGH for going private, I am sure that has aided his recovery and eased the pain in his wallet no end.
What Australia does is charge higher income individuals a surcharge of 1% to 1.5% of income if they do not take out private health insurance.
The Tories should follow the example of the Coalition Howard government in Australia in 1997 which introduced that so more can follow the excellent example of OGH, go private and cut pressure on the NHS.
The Howard government in 1999 also contributed up to 30% of the private health insurance premium of people with their Medicare universal health coverage
Keir Starmer is actually praying they take this advice.
It would be the most brutal defeat of a governing, or recently governing, party since Baldwin managed to reduce Labour from 287 MPs to 50 in 1931.
It got the Howard government re elected.
There is little point being a Conservative if you don't pursue more conservative policies is there? Conservatives believe in choice in public services with private options too, in healthcare as much as anything else
I know the weather's been a bit warm recently, but I can assure you we are not in Australia.
Culturally we are probably closer to Australia than any other nation on earth except maybe New Zealand.
There is also no point the Tories fighting a battle on who will spend more on the NHS, as Labour will always win it as they are more willing to raise tax higher to pay for it.
The Tories should instead shift the argument to encouraging patient choice in healthcare too
"culturally"
Don't you mean racially? But it isn't particularly true. Just look at Ireland.
I think that Scotland is culturally close to Ireland. England less so. Parts of Scotland, particularly the West Highlands and the Hebrides, are culturally closer to Ireland than they are to England. Other parts, particularly Edinburgh, are culturally closer to England. Most of the UK, except probably the South East, is culturally closer to New Zealand than to Australia. Australia seems culturally closer to the USA than the UK, except in sport.
If you ignore that more than a quarter of New Zealanders are Polynesian. Or do the non-white ones not count, like the Australian Aborigines, native Americans, Black Americans or Hispanic Americans?
Actually that chart shows little difference overall in NHS waiting times between recent Labour or Tory governments, except they were a bit lower under Labour in 2009-10 and are a bit higher under the Conservatives now (albeit Covid added to the problem).
Well done for going private though, the more higher income people take out private health insurance and use private hospitals, the less the pressure on the NHS. Best wishes for your recovery after your op.
I don't know where you learned maths but trebling is not "a bit" and being north of the worst in 30 years and accelerating is not "little difference".
Still, well done on congratulating OGH for going private, I am sure that has aided his recovery and eased the pain in his wallet no end.
What Australia does is charge higher income individuals a surcharge of 1% to 1.5% of income if they do not take out private health insurance.
The Tories should follow the example of the Coalition Howard government in Australia in 1997 which introduced that so more can follow the excellent example of OGH, go private and cut pressure on the NHS.
The Howard government in 1999 also contributed up to 30% of the private health insurance premium of people with their Medicare universal health coverage
Keir Starmer is actually praying they take this advice.
It would be the most brutal defeat of a governing, or recently governing, party since Baldwin managed to reduce Labour from 287 MPs to 50 in 1931.
It got the Howard government re elected.
There is little point being a Conservative if you don't pursue more conservative policies is there? Conservatives believe in choice in public services with private options too, in healthcare as much as anything else
I know the weather's been a bit warm recently, but I can assure you we are not in Australia.
Culturally we are probably closer to Australia than any other nation on earth except maybe New Zealand.
There is also no point the Tories fighting a battle on who will spend more on the NHS, as Labour will always win it as they are more willing to raise tax higher to pay for it.
The Tories should instead shift the argument to encouraging patient choice in healthcare too
"culturally"
Don't you mean racially? But it isn't particularly true. Just look at Ireland.
I think that Scotland is culturally close to Ireland. England less so. Parts of Scotland, particularly the West Highlands and the Hebrides, are culturally closer to Ireland than they are to England. Other parts, particularly Edinburgh, are culturally closer to England. Most of the UK, except probably the South East, is culturally closer to New Zealand than to Australia. Australia seems culturally closer to the USA than the UK, except in sport.
If you ignore that more than a quarter of New Zealanders are Polynesian. Or do the non-white ones not count, like the Australian Aborigines, native Americans, Black Americans or Hispanic Americans?
So 74% are not Maori then and over 10% of our population are now non white too, we even have a non white PM
Actually that chart shows little difference overall in NHS waiting times between recent Labour or Tory governments, except they were a bit lower under Labour in 2009-10 and are a bit higher under the Conservatives now (albeit Covid added to the problem).
Well done for going private though, the more higher income people take out private health insurance and use private hospitals, the less the pressure on the NHS. Best wishes for your recovery after your op.
I don't know where you learned maths but trebling is not "a bit" and being north of the worst in 30 years and accelerating is not "little difference".
Still, well done on congratulating OGH for going private, I am sure that has aided his recovery and eased the pain in his wallet no end.
What Australia does is charge higher income individuals a surcharge of 1% to 1.5% of income if they do not take out private health insurance.
The Tories should follow the example of the Coalition Howard government in Australia in 1997 which introduced that so more can follow the excellent example of OGH, go private and cut pressure on the NHS.
The Howard government in 1999 also contributed up to 30% of the private health insurance premium of people with their Medicare universal health coverage
Keir Starmer is actually praying they take this advice.
It would be the most brutal defeat of a governing, or recently governing, party since Baldwin managed to reduce Labour from 287 MPs to 50 in 1931.
It got the Howard government re elected.
There is little point being a Conservative if you don't pursue more conservative policies is there? Conservatives believe in choice in public services with private options too, in healthcare as much as anything else
I know the weather's been a bit warm recently, but I can assure you we are not in Australia.
Culturally we are probably closer to Australia than any other nation on earth except maybe New Zealand.
There is also no point the Tories fighting a battle on who will spend more on the NHS, as Labour will always win it as they are more willing to raise tax higher to pay for it.
The Tories should instead shift the argument to encouraging patient choice in healthcare too
"culturally"
Don't you mean racially? But it isn't particularly true. Just look at Ireland.
Australia and New Zealand are mainly of British origin and Protestant heritage.
The Republic of Ireland is of Celtic origin mainly and Roman Catholic heritage.
We also still share the King with Australia and New Zealand, we don't now with the Republic of Ireland.
We got trade deals with Australia and NZ post Brexit, the Republic of Ireland was pretty obstructive to our getting an EU trade deal unless on their terms
Interesting you think that being a royalist and a member of the C of E are fundamental to "British" culture.
Well most British people are royalist still and most British people are of Protestant not Roman Catholic heritage too, even if they are now atheist or agnostic
I can tell you that more "British" people, with parents in the UK before, say, 1940, were of Roman Catholic heritage than Protestant heritage. Your "even if now" fails to allow for the fact that that applies to other categories too.
What? You are seriously suggesting that more people pre 1940 in the UK were Roman Catholic than Church of England? Let alone Protestant once you add Church of Scotland, Baptists, Methodists etc
You make it seem that being Roman Catholic is A Bad Thing! I didn’t realise you were sectarian. I’m very disappointed.
On a forced choice I would be more likely to be Roman Catholic than evangelical Protestant, I am more liberal Catholic Anglican than either.
End of a stressful day. Needed to clear my father's house fast as the new owners want to complete asap and I don't want to cause any delays so I haven't replied to any comments from the last thread so:
@Mortimer - Thank you for your kind post. Appreciated. My dad died aged 96 in February. Just the selling of the house now, which has suddenly turned manic.
@Stuartinromford - I agree completely with your post re maths and eventually everyone hits the buffers in the end, it is just a matter of when. Definitely happened to me. If I had my time again I would do a joint degree of maths with economics or philosophy to put off hitting the maths buffers.
@HYUFD - Thanks for the link re philosophy degree & logic questions. I'm interested but the link didn't work - Page not found. One thing to note (and I say this without having read the link) is the logic you do in a maths degree is far more advanced than stuff you do in a philosophy degree (or in particular questions they may set in an interview) by the nature of the prerequisites. In fact the notation itself will be gibberish without the previous preparation. That is not to say a question set in an interview will not be as difficult, it might in fact be more difficult. There are plenty of everyday logic questions I can't do that an untrained but clever person can do, but which doesn't involve complex logic. And as you know, I don't have a logic degree (I don't even know if such a thing exists), but said it as a riposte to @Miklosvar, although my specialist subjects in my 2nd & 3rd year of maths were all logic topics.
@DecrepiterJohnL - Your post about many Doctors regretting their choice and moving to other careers. I agree. They are often talented in several areas and it follows from my argument of going down the science line first and then wishing they had done something they had more passion for. For most of us we do a degree, and move on, but for a Doctor it is a career. There are so many in the public eye who are ex-Doctors doing non doctoring stuff. My wife (a doctor) often feels the same.
@Miklosvar - You are an arse. When you first appeared on PB I had a pointless pedantic exchange with you and decided to avoid you. Today I made a half serious comment for comic effect that was at the expense of historians/lawyers and people like @TheScreamingEagles and @ydoethur respond accordingly, in fun. You on the other hand responded appallingly, as you nearly always do. I've noticed you have done this with others. With @kinabalu for instance. And your reaction and jumping to the wrong conclusion when I politely said I had to leave for a few hours, but would reply on my return, was an example. Would you have preferred it if I had been rude and just ignored you.
You're rude, pedantic, irrational, and tangential. You appear to be an exceedingly unpleasant person. Not bad going for someone who has only made a few hundred posts.
That being said, he is funnier than you
Are you all right @Leon? That is not up to your usual standard. Even when I disagree with you I still really enjoy your prose; but that?
Our country has fallen so far, so fast, that just a few months ago the Japanese Prime Minister actually said he felt "sympathy" for the United States. Sympathy! When I am your President, the rest, the rest of the world won't look down on us with pity but up to us with respect again.
What the fuck is relationship between that quote, and Putin's most recent bilge pumping?
Besides pro-Trump sophistry, that is?
I was just mocking your knee-jerk allusion to Trump, as if nobody else has ever used rhetoric along the lines of MAGA.
Well, while I jerk my knee, you can keep on jerking on Trump's . . .
The fact is that MAGA-style rhetoric has been used by many politicians including ones you’ve probably supported in your time. It’s juvenile to try to link it to “Putinism”.
Is it ? Half of them have spent the last couple of years celebrating him.
Actually that chart shows little difference overall in NHS waiting times between recent Labour or Tory governments, except they were a bit lower under Labour in 2009-10 and are a bit higher under the Conservatives now (albeit Covid added to the problem).
Well done for going private though, the more higher income people take out private health insurance and use private hospitals, the less the pressure on the NHS. Best wishes for your recovery after your op.
I don't know where you learned maths but trebling is not "a bit" and being north of the worst in 30 years and accelerating is not "little difference".
Still, well done on congratulating OGH for going private, I am sure that has aided his recovery and eased the pain in his wallet no end.
What Australia does is charge higher income individuals a surcharge of 1% to 1.5% of income if they do not take out private health insurance.
The Tories should follow the example of the Coalition Howard government in Australia in 1997 which introduced that so more can follow the excellent example of OGH, go private and cut pressure on the NHS.
The Howard government in 1999 also contributed up to 30% of the private health insurance premium of people with their Medicare universal health coverage
Keir Starmer is actually praying they take this advice.
It would be the most brutal defeat of a governing, or recently governing, party since Baldwin managed to reduce Labour from 287 MPs to 50 in 1931.
It got the Howard government re elected.
There is little point being a Conservative if you don't pursue more conservative policies is there? Conservatives believe in choice in public services with private options too, in healthcare as much as anything else
I know the weather's been a bit warm recently, but I can assure you we are not in Australia.
Culturally we are probably closer to Australia than any other nation on earth except maybe New Zealand.
There is also no point the Tories fighting a battle on who will spend more on the NHS, as Labour will always win it as they are more willing to raise tax higher to pay for it.
The Tories should instead shift the argument to encouraging patient choice in healthcare too
"culturally"
Don't you mean racially? But it isn't particularly true. Just look at Ireland.
I think that Scotland is culturally close to Ireland. England less so. Parts of Scotland, particularly the West Highlands and the Hebrides, are culturally closer to Ireland than they are to England. Other parts, particularly Edinburgh, are culturally closer to England. Most of the UK, except probably the South East, is culturally closer to New Zealand than to Australia. Australia seems culturally closer to the USA than the UK, except in sport.
If you ignore that more than a quarter of New Zealanders are Polynesian. Or do the non-white ones not count, like the Australian Aborigines, native Americans, Black Americans or Hispanic Americans?
So 74% are not Maori then and over 10% of our population are now non white too, we even have a non white PM
You don't work in a bank do you? I hope so. I look forward to comijng in and collecting £1000 cash and leaving you a cheque for £501 on the grounds that that is full repayment.
Daniel Korski was in the middle of a London mayoral hustings when the Times story dropped. I'm told his aide signalled him over to deliver the bad news. He left.
London Conservatives put Steve Norris and Boris Johnson before the electorate, and would have had Jeffrey Archer if they could. Is scandalous behaviour on the person spec as a "not essential but desirable" or something?
At least people had heard of Boris and Archer, who has heard of these 3 (now likely 2?) Even Norris and Zac Goldsmith and Shaun Bailey were better known.
Of the last 2 Susan Hall is probably the best though, at least she has held elected office for the party in the London Assembly, the other candidate has never even stood for the party that I can see
I normally agree with @Stuartinromford on nearly everything, but I think I am with you on this one and maybe hindsight plays a part. I liked Steve Norris, and although my memory is blurred on the topic by recent events, I suspect I quite liked Boris in the day. It is more recent times that has turned me against him really big time.
Also after reading the Michael Crick biography of Jeffery Archer I rather have a soft spot for him, although he should never have been let anywhere near the possibility of being London Mayor (or my wallet if it comes to that)
Given how successful he appears to be as a novelist, and how crap he was in politics, it feels like Archer wasted an awful lot of time and energy on being a shameless, incompetent grifter.
I was quite disappointed when I read the biography. I wanted to read about an absolute scoundrel, but he wasn't as bad as I had previously thought. He clearly had/has talents and he actually works hard exploiting them. I have worked with a couple of people (one in particular) who were dishonest and thought if you put as much effort into working honestly you might be just as successful if not more and not risk being fired or worse going to jail.
Archer of course did go to jail but bounced back as he always does and does a lot for prison reform
On topic, I disagree with the premise of the thread header. The Government is not mean. We spend about the OECD average for health care as a % of GDP, slightly more if you discount the monstrously expensive American system.
Our issues are that:
- GDP hasn't grown enough to enable the government to spend more, which is true but a whole different debate - the healthcare system, designed around a 1940s Stalinist monolith, is no longer appropriate and captured by producer interests, giving us lousy value for the money we DO spend - we disastrously overreacted to the pandemic, turning the NHS into the National COVID service, instead of letting it work its way through the healthy population with sensible but voluntarily social distancing measures to protect the vulnerable until vaccines arrived.
But calling for more resources without saying where they'd come from (schools? police? army? the already overtaxed?) I don't think is particularly realistic.
Of course best wishes to OGH for his future health.
A sample: "When backed into a corner, Putin saves himself. In the West, we worry about Putin's feelings. What might he do if he feels threatened? Might he do something terrible to us? Putin encourages this line of thinking with constant bluster about "escalation" and the like. On Saturday Putin gave another speech full of threats, this time directed against Prigozhin and Wagner. Then he got into a plane and flew away to another city. And then he made a deal with Prigozhin. And then all legal charges against Prigozhin were dropped. And then Putin's propagandists explained that all of this was perfectly normal.
So long as Putin is in power, this is what he will do. He will threaten and hope that those threats will change the behaviour of his enemies. When that fails, he will change the story. His regime rests on propaganda, and in the end the spectacle generated by the military is there to serve the propaganda. Even when that spectacle is as humiliating as can be possibly be imagined, as it was on Saturday when Russian rebels marched on Moscow and Putin fled, his response will be to try to change the subject. "
End of a stressful day. Needed to clear my father's house fast as the new owners want to complete asap and I don't want to cause any delays so I haven't replied to any comments from the last thread so:
@Mortimer - Thank you for your kind post. Appreciated. My dad died aged 96 in February. Just the selling of the house now, which has suddenly turned manic.
@Stuartinromford - I agree completely with your post re maths and eventually everyone hits the buffers in the end, it is just a matter of when. Definitely happened to me. If I had my time again I would do a joint degree of maths with economics or philosophy to put off hitting the maths buffers.
@HYUFD - Thanks for the link re philosophy degree & logic questions. I'm interested but the link didn't work - Page not found. One thing to note (and I say this without having read the link) is the logic you do in a maths degree is far more advanced than stuff you do in a philosophy degree (or in particular questions they may set in an interview) by the nature of the prerequisites. In fact the notation itself will be gibberish without the previous preparation. That is not to say a question set in an interview will not be as difficult, it might in fact be more difficult. There are plenty of everyday logic questions I can't do that an untrained but clever person can do, but which doesn't involve complex logic. And as you know, I don't have a logic degree (I don't even know if such a thing exists), but said it as a riposte to @Miklosvar, although my specialist subjects in my 2nd & 3rd year of maths were all logic topics.
@DecrepiterJohnL - Your post about many Doctors regretting their choice and moving to other careers. I agree. They are often talented in several areas and it follows from my argument of going down the science line first and then wishing they had done something they had more passion for. For most of us we do a degree, and move on, but for a Doctor it is a career. There are so many in the public eye who are ex-Doctors doing non doctoring stuff. My wife (a doctor) often feels the same.
@Miklosvar - You are an arse. When you first appeared on PB I had a pointless pedantic exchange with you and decided to avoid you. Today I made a half serious comment for comic effect that was at the expense of historians/lawyers and people like @TheScreamingEagles and @ydoethur respond accordingly, in fun. You on the other hand responded appallingly, as you nearly always do. I've noticed you have done this with others. With @kinabalu for instance. And your reaction and jumping to the wrong conclusion when I politely said I had to leave for a few hours, but would reply on my return, was an example. Would you have preferred it if I had been rude and just ignored you.
You're rude, pedantic, irrational, and tangential. You appear to be an exceedingly unpleasant person. Not bad going for someone who has only made a few hundred posts.
That being said, he is funnier than you
Are you all right @Leon? That is not up to your usual standard. Even when I disagree with you I still really enjoy your prose; but that?
I wasn't trying to be clever, or witty, or indeed anything - simply pointing out a relevant truth you had carelessly omitted in your 19 paragraph Screed of Tedium
Actually that chart shows little difference overall in NHS waiting times between recent Labour or Tory governments, except they were a bit lower under Labour in 2009-10 and are a bit higher under the Conservatives now (albeit Covid added to the problem).
Well done for going private though, the more higher income people take out private health insurance and use private hospitals, the less the pressure on the NHS. Best wishes for your recovery after your op.
I don't know where you learned maths but trebling is not "a bit" and being north of the worst in 30 years and accelerating is not "little difference".
Still, well done on congratulating OGH for going private, I am sure that has aided his recovery and eased the pain in his wallet no end.
What Australia does is charge higher income individuals a surcharge of 1% to 1.5% of income if they do not take out private health insurance.
The Tories should follow the example of the Coalition Howard government in Australia in 1997 which introduced that so more can follow the excellent example of OGH, go private and cut pressure on the NHS.
The Howard government in 1999 also contributed up to 30% of the private health insurance premium of people with their Medicare universal health coverage
Keir Starmer is actually praying they take this advice.
It would be the most brutal defeat of a governing, or recently governing, party since Baldwin managed to reduce Labour from 287 MPs to 50 in 1931.
It got the Howard government re elected.
There is little point being a Conservative if you don't pursue more conservative policies is there? Conservatives believe in choice in public services with private options too, in healthcare as much as anything else
I know the weather's been a bit warm recently, but I can assure you we are not in Australia.
Culturally we are probably closer to Australia than any other nation on earth except maybe New Zealand.
There is also no point the Tories fighting a battle on who will spend more on the NHS, as Labour will always win it as they are more willing to raise tax higher to pay for it.
The Tories should instead shift the argument to encouraging patient choice in healthcare too
"culturally"
Don't you mean racially? But it isn't particularly true. Just look at Ireland.
Australia and New Zealand are mainly of British origin and Protestant heritage.
The Republic of Ireland is of Celtic origin mainly and Roman Catholic heritage.
We also still share the King with Australia and New Zealand, we don't now with the Republic of Ireland.
We got trade deals with Australia and NZ post Brexit, the Republic of Ireland was pretty obstructive to our getting an EU trade deal unless on their terms
Interesting you think that being a royalist and a member of the C of E are fundamental to "British" culture.
Well most British people are royalist still and most British people are of Protestant not Roman Catholic heritage too, even if they are now atheist or agnostic
I can tell you that more "British" people, with parents in the UK before, say, 1940, were of Roman Catholic heritage than Protestant heritage. Your "even if now" fails to allow for the fact that that applies to other categories too.
What? You are seriously suggesting that more people pre 1940 in the UK were Roman Catholic than Church of England? Let alone Protestant once you add Church of Scotland, Baptists, Methodists etc
You make it seem that being Roman Catholic is A Bad Thing! I didn’t realise you were sectarian. I’m very disappointed.
You tar with too broad a brush. For doubt he thinks the kind Roman Catholics depicted in "Brideshead Revisited" are splendid!
As for unwashed masses of all-too common (in more ways than one?) UKer RCs with Irish, Italian, etc., etc. ancestry from Beyond the Pale, well . . .
Daniel Korski was in the middle of a London mayoral hustings when the Times story dropped. I'm told his aide signalled him over to deliver the bad news. He left.
London Conservatives put Steve Norris and Boris Johnson before the electorate, and would have had Jeffrey Archer if they could. Is scandalous behaviour on the person spec as a "not essential but desirable" or something?
At least people had heard of Boris and Archer, who has heard of these 3 (now likely 2?) Even Norris and Zac Goldsmith and Shaun Bailey were better known.
Of the last 2 Susan Hall is probably the best though, at least she has held elected office for the party in the London Assembly, the other candidate has never even stood for the party that I can see
I normally agree with @Stuartinromford on nearly everything, but I think I am with you on this one and maybe hindsight plays a part. I liked Steve Norris, and although my memory is blurred on the topic by recent events, I suspect I quite liked Boris in the day. It is more recent times that has turned me against him really big time.
Also after reading the Michael Crick biography of Jeffery Archer I rather have a soft spot for him, although he should never have been let anywhere near the possibility of being London Mayor (or my wallet if it comes to that)
Given how successful he appears to be as a novelist, and how crap he was in politics, it feels like Archer wasted an awful lot of time and energy on being a shameless, incompetent grifter.
I was quite disappointed when I read the biography. I wanted to read about an absolute scoundrel, but he wasn't as bad as I had previously thought. He clearly had/has talents and he actually works hard exploiting them. I have worked with a couple of people (one in particular) who were dishonest and thought if you put as much effort into working honestly you might be just as successful if not more and not risk being fired or worse going to jail.
Archer of course did go to jail but bounced back as he always does and does a lot for prison reform
Yes he did and I felt sorry for him for that as well, and good on him for bouncing back. There were things that he arguable should have been punished for, but I didn't think it was any of the presses business if he was seeing a prostitute and the tabloids needed/need taking down a peg or two as is now happening, but perjury is perjury and the ends unfortunately don't justify the means as he and Chris Huhne found out.
Daniel Korski was in the middle of a London mayoral hustings when the Times story dropped. I'm told his aide signalled him over to deliver the bad news. He left.
London Conservatives put Steve Norris and Boris Johnson before the electorate, and would have had Jeffrey Archer if they could. Is scandalous behaviour on the person spec as a "not essential but desirable" or something?
At least people had heard of Boris and Archer, who has heard of these 3 (now likely 2?) Even Norris and Zac Goldsmith and Shaun Bailey were better known.
Of the last 2 Susan Hall is probably the best though, at least she has held elected office for the party in the London Assembly, the other candidate has never even stood for the party that I can see
I normally agree with @Stuartinromford on nearly everything, but I think I am with you on this one and maybe hindsight plays a part. I liked Steve Norris, and although my memory is blurred on the topic by recent events, I suspect I quite liked Boris in the day. It is more recent times that has turned me against him really big time.
Also after reading the Michael Crick biography of Jeffery Archer I rather have a soft spot for him, although he should never have been let anywhere near the possibility of being London Mayor (or my wallet if it comes to that)
Given how successful he appears to be as a novelist, and how crap he was in politics, it feels like Archer wasted an awful lot of time and energy on being a shameless, incompetent grifter.
I was quite disappointed when I read the biography. I wanted to read about an absolute scoundrel, but he wasn't as bad as I had previously thought. He clearly had/has talents and he actually works hard exploiting them. I have worked with a couple of people (one in particular) who were dishonest and thought if you put as much effort into working honestly you might be just as successful if not more and not risk being fired or worse going to jail.
There's a wonderful bit towards the end, where Crick is asked by one of Archer's associates something like "Do you like him?" And the best Crick can come up with is "He's hard to dislike..."
And that's a fair point. I've been in a room he was working politically, and the charisma was tangible. Had he stuck to being a prep school sports master, he'd have been a terrifying opponent and would probably have retired with the (low key) glory and adulation he has sought. But that was never going to happen.
Desnarking my earlier question- why do London Conservatives keep going for charismatic chancers as their mayoral standard bearers? Because it's too frequent to just be coincidence, and it means they pick candidates who are prone to scandals. Two guesses.
One is that to put in a bid to be a Conservative Mayor of London, you do need balls and ego. Somehow, you have to think that you can turn the table of the city's demographics or you are heading for a loss. The other is that the Conservative conception of Mayor is pretty PT Barnum; going round hyping the city. The other big bit- managing public transport- isn't the sort of thing that Conservatives are that interested in as a matter of principle. So you get showman candidates and that's always a risk.
Actually that chart shows little difference overall in NHS waiting times between recent Labour or Tory governments, except they were a bit lower under Labour in 2009-10 and are a bit higher under the Conservatives now (albeit Covid added to the problem).
Well done for going private though, the more higher income people take out private health insurance and use private hospitals, the less the pressure on the NHS. Best wishes for your recovery after your op.
I don't know where you learned maths but trebling is not "a bit" and being north of the worst in 30 years and accelerating is not "little difference".
Still, well done on congratulating OGH for going private, I am sure that has aided his recovery and eased the pain in his wallet no end.
What Australia does is charge higher income individuals a surcharge of 1% to 1.5% of income if they do not take out private health insurance.
The Tories should follow the example of the Coalition Howard government in Australia in 1997 which introduced that so more can follow the excellent example of OGH, go private and cut pressure on the NHS.
The Howard government in 1999 also contributed up to 30% of the private health insurance premium of people with their Medicare universal health coverage
Keir Starmer is actually praying they take this advice.
It would be the most brutal defeat of a governing, or recently governing, party since Baldwin managed to reduce Labour from 287 MPs to 50 in 1931.
It got the Howard government re elected.
There is little point being a Conservative if you don't pursue more conservative policies is there? Conservatives believe in choice in public services with private options too, in healthcare as much as anything else
I know the weather's been a bit warm recently, but I can assure you we are not in Australia.
Culturally we are probably closer to Australia than any other nation on earth except maybe New Zealand.
There is also no point the Tories fighting a battle on who will spend more on the NHS, as Labour will always win it as they are more willing to raise tax higher to pay for it.
The Tories should instead shift the argument to encouraging patient choice in healthcare too
"culturally"
Don't you mean racially? But it isn't particularly true. Just look at Ireland.
I think that Scotland is culturally close to Ireland. England less so. Parts of Scotland, particularly the West Highlands and the Hebrides, are culturally closer to Ireland than they are to England. Other parts, particularly Edinburgh, are culturally closer to England. Most of the UK, except probably the South East, is culturally closer to New Zealand than to Australia. Australia seems culturally closer to the USA than the UK, except in sport.
Scotland is closer to Northern Ireland. Most Northern Irish Protestants are of Presbyterian origin.
The Republic of Ireland is closer to Catholic Europe, hence it is in the EU and Eurozone and the UK isn't.
I would say the Midlands and North and Wales and Cornwall and Essex are probably culturally closer to Australia, while most of southern England is closer to NZ or New England in the US or the Canadian Atlantic coast.
London is probably quite close to Melbourne or Sydney
The EU is a Roman Catholic conspiracy? I have a Gordon Riot to sell you.
A baby hidden in a warming pan, for Sir?
That caused a bit of a stew at court.
A man who knows his onions, eh? And his Oates, no doubt….
Actually that chart shows little difference overall in NHS waiting times between recent Labour or Tory governments, except they were a bit lower under Labour in 2009-10 and are a bit higher under the Conservatives now (albeit Covid added to the problem).
Well done for going private though, the more higher income people take out private health insurance and use private hospitals, the less the pressure on the NHS. Best wishes for your recovery after your op.
I don't know where you learned maths but trebling is not "a bit" and being north of the worst in 30 years and accelerating is not "little difference".
Still, well done on congratulating OGH for going private, I am sure that has aided his recovery and eased the pain in his wallet no end.
What Australia does is charge higher income individuals a surcharge of 1% to 1.5% of income if they do not take out private health insurance.
The Tories should follow the example of the Coalition Howard government in Australia in 1997 which introduced that so more can follow the excellent example of OGH, go private and cut pressure on the NHS.
The Howard government in 1999 also contributed up to 30% of the private health insurance premium of people with their Medicare universal health coverage
Keir Starmer is actually praying they take this advice.
It would be the most brutal defeat of a governing, or recently governing, party since Baldwin managed to reduce Labour from 287 MPs to 50 in 1931.
It got the Howard government re elected.
There is little point being a Conservative if you don't pursue more conservative policies is there? Conservatives believe in choice in public services with private options too, in healthcare as much as anything else
I know the weather's been a bit warm recently, but I can assure you we are not in Australia.
Culturally we are probably closer to Australia than any other nation on earth except maybe New Zealand.
There is also no point the Tories fighting a battle on who will spend more on the NHS, as Labour will always win it as they are more willing to raise tax higher to pay for it.
The Tories should instead shift the argument to encouraging patient choice in healthcare too
"culturally"
Don't you mean racially? But it isn't particularly true. Just look at Ireland.
I think that Scotland is culturally close to Ireland. England less so. Parts of Scotland, particularly the West Highlands and the Hebrides, are culturally closer to Ireland than they are to England. Other parts, particularly Edinburgh, are culturally closer to England. Most of the UK, except probably the South East, is culturally closer to New Zealand than to Australia. Australia seems culturally closer to the USA than the UK, except in sport.
Scotland is closer to Northern Ireland. Most Northern Irish Protestants are of Presbyterian origin.
The Republic of Ireland is closer to Catholic Europe, hence it is in the EU and Eurozone and the UK isn't.
I would say the Midlands and North and Wales and Cornwall and Essex are probably culturally closer to Australia, while most of southern England is closer to NZ or New England in the US or the Canadian Atlantic coast.
London is probably quite close to Melbourne or Sydney
The EU is a Roman Catholic conspiracy? I have a Gordon Riot to sell you.
Most of the Eurozone are majority Catholic heritage nations. The founding nations of the EEC (except West Germany and the Netherlands) were all majority Roman Catholic and even Germany and Holland now have more Roman Catholics than Protestants (Bavaria of course always majority Catholic).
Of the majority Protestant heritage nations in Europe, the UK, Switzerland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden and Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands and Finland, only the Dutch, Germans and Finns are in the Eurozone and EU
Forgetting the historically Lutheran Estonia and Latvia there.
Actually that chart shows little difference overall in NHS waiting times between recent Labour or Tory governments, except they were a bit lower under Labour in 2009-10 and are a bit higher under the Conservatives now (albeit Covid added to the problem).
Well done for going private though, the more higher income people take out private health insurance and use private hospitals, the less the pressure on the NHS. Best wishes for your recovery after your op.
I don't know where you learned maths but trebling is not "a bit" and being north of the worst in 30 years and accelerating is not "little difference".
Still, well done on congratulating OGH for going private, I am sure that has aided his recovery and eased the pain in his wallet no end.
What Australia does is charge higher income individuals a surcharge of 1% to 1.5% of income if they do not take out private health insurance.
The Tories should follow the example of the Coalition Howard government in Australia in 1997 which introduced that so more can follow the excellent example of OGH, go private and cut pressure on the NHS.
The Howard government in 1999 also contributed up to 30% of the private health insurance premium of people with their Medicare universal health coverage
Keir Starmer is actually praying they take this advice.
It would be the most brutal defeat of a governing, or recently governing, party since Baldwin managed to reduce Labour from 287 MPs to 50 in 1931.
It got the Howard government re elected.
There is little point being a Conservative if you don't pursue more conservative policies is there? Conservatives believe in choice in public services with private options too, in healthcare as much as anything else
I know the weather's been a bit warm recently, but I can assure you we are not in Australia.
Culturally we are probably closer to Australia than any other nation on earth except maybe New Zealand.
There is also no point the Tories fighting a battle on who will spend more on the NHS, as Labour will always win it as they are more willing to raise tax higher to pay for it.
The Tories should instead shift the argument to encouraging patient choice in healthcare too
"culturally"
Don't you mean racially? But it isn't particularly true. Just look at Ireland.
I think that Scotland is culturally close to Ireland. England less so. Parts of Scotland, particularly the West Highlands and the Hebrides, are culturally closer to Ireland than they are to England. Other parts, particularly Edinburgh, are culturally closer to England. Most of the UK, except probably the South East, is culturally closer to New Zealand than to Australia. Australia seems culturally closer to the USA than the UK, except in sport.
Scotland is closer to Northern Ireland. Most Northern Irish Protestants are of Presbyterian origin.
The Republic of Ireland is closer to Catholic Europe, hence it is in the EU and Eurozone and the UK isn't.
I would say the Midlands and North and Wales and Cornwall and Essex are probably culturally closer to Australia, while most of southern England is closer to NZ or New England in the US or the Canadian Atlantic coast.
London is probably quite close to Melbourne or Sydney
The EU is a Roman Catholic conspiracy? I have a Gordon Riot to sell you.
Daniel Korski was in the middle of a London mayoral hustings when the Times story dropped. I'm told his aide signalled him over to deliver the bad news. He left.
London Conservatives put Steve Norris and Boris Johnson before the electorate, and would have had Jeffrey Archer if they could. Is scandalous behaviour on the person spec as a "not essential but desirable" or something?
At least people had heard of Boris and Archer, who has heard of these 3 (now likely 2?) Even Norris and Zac Goldsmith and Shaun Bailey were better known.
Of the last 2 Susan Hall is probably the best though, at least she has held elected office for the party in the London Assembly, the other candidate has never even stood for the party that I can see
I normally agree with @Stuartinromford on nearly everything, but I think I am with you on this one and maybe hindsight plays a part. I liked Steve Norris, and although my memory is blurred on the topic by recent events, I suspect I quite liked Boris in the day. It is more recent times that has turned me against him really big time.
Also after reading the Michael Crick biography of Jeffery Archer I rather have a soft spot for him, although he should never have been let anywhere near the possibility of being London Mayor (or my wallet if it comes to that)
Given how successful he appears to be as a novelist, and how crap he was in politics, it feels like Archer wasted an awful lot of time and energy on being a shameless, incompetent grifter.
I was quite disappointed when I read the biography. I wanted to read about an absolute scoundrel, but he wasn't as bad as I had previously thought. He clearly had/has talents and he actually works hard exploiting them. I have worked with a couple of people (one in particular) who were dishonest and thought if you put as much effort into working honestly you might be just as successful if not more and not risk being fired or worse going to jail.
There's a wonderful bit towards the end, where Crick is asked by one of Archer's associates something like "Do you like him?" And the best Crick can come up with is "He's hard to dislike..."
And that's a fair point. I've been in a room he was working politically, and the charisma was tangible. Had he stuck to being a prep school sports master, he'd have been a terrifying opponent and would probably have retired with the (low key) glory and adulation he has sought. But that was never going to happen.
Desnarking my earlier question- why do London Conservatives keep going for charismatic chancers as their mayoral standard bearers? Because it's too frequent to just be coincidence, and it means they pick candidates who are prone to scandals. Two guesses.
One is that to put in a bid to be a Conservative Mayor of London, you do need balls and ego. Somehow, you have to think that you can turn the table of the city's demographics or you are heading for a loss. The other is that the Conservative conception of Mayor is pretty PT Barnum; going round hyping the city. The other big bit- managing public transport- isn't the sort of thing that Conservatives are that interested in as a matter of principle. So you get showman candidates and that's always a risk.
Actually that chart shows little difference overall in NHS waiting times between recent Labour or Tory governments, except they were a bit lower under Labour in 2009-10 and are a bit higher under the Conservatives now (albeit Covid added to the problem).
Well done for going private though, the more higher income people take out private health insurance and use private hospitals, the less the pressure on the NHS. Best wishes for your recovery after your op.
I don't know where you learned maths but trebling is not "a bit" and being north of the worst in 30 years and accelerating is not "little difference".
Still, well done on congratulating OGH for going private, I am sure that has aided his recovery and eased the pain in his wallet no end.
What Australia does is charge higher income individuals a surcharge of 1% to 1.5% of income if they do not take out private health insurance.
The Tories should follow the example of the Coalition Howard government in Australia in 1997 which introduced that so more can follow the excellent example of OGH, go private and cut pressure on the NHS.
The Howard government in 1999 also contributed up to 30% of the private health insurance premium of people with their Medicare universal health coverage
Keir Starmer is actually praying they take this advice.
It would be the most brutal defeat of a governing, or recently governing, party since Baldwin managed to reduce Labour from 287 MPs to 50 in 1931.
It got the Howard government re elected.
There is little point being a Conservative if you don't pursue more conservative policies is there? Conservatives believe in choice in public services with private options too, in healthcare as much as anything else
I know the weather's been a bit warm recently, but I can assure you we are not in Australia.
Culturally we are probably closer to Australia than any other nation on earth except maybe New Zealand.
There is also no point the Tories fighting a battle on who will spend more on the NHS, as Labour will always win it as they are more willing to raise tax higher to pay for it.
The Tories should instead shift the argument to encouraging patient choice in healthcare too
"culturally"
Don't you mean racially? But it isn't particularly true. Just look at Ireland.
I think that Scotland is culturally close to Ireland. England less so. Parts of Scotland, particularly the West Highlands and the Hebrides, are culturally closer to Ireland than they are to England. Other parts, particularly Edinburgh, are culturally closer to England. Most of the UK, except probably the South East, is culturally closer to New Zealand than to Australia. Australia seems culturally closer to the USA than the UK, except in sport.
Scotland is closer to Northern Ireland. Most Northern Irish Protestants are of Presbyterian origin.
The Republic of Ireland is closer to Catholic Europe, hence it is in the EU and Eurozone and the UK isn't.
I would say the Midlands and North and Wales and Cornwall and Essex are probably culturally closer to Australia, while most of southern England is closer to NZ or New England in the US or the Canadian Atlantic coast.
London is probably quite close to Melbourne or Sydney
The EU is a Roman Catholic conspiracy? I have a Gordon Riot to sell you.
A baby hidden in a warming pan, for Sir?
That caused a bit of a stew at court.
A man who knows his onions, eh? And his Oates, no doubt….
I've not touched a drop tonight, so I'm not as Titus Oates.
Did people see that rather hilarious Canary article about Corbynism? There's some great lines in it, from the author saying they are 400 miles to the left of Corbyn, that they are not a weird spiky separatist or poseur, calling those reliving the Corbyn years as cranky militants and maniacally conspiracist, and ultimately that 'it's time to move the f*ck on'.
Actually that chart shows little difference overall in NHS waiting times between recent Labour or Tory governments, except they were a bit lower under Labour in 2009-10 and are a bit higher under the Conservatives now (albeit Covid added to the problem).
Well done for going private though, the more higher income people take out private health insurance and use private hospitals, the less the pressure on the NHS. Best wishes for your recovery after your op.
I don't know where you learned maths but trebling is not "a bit" and being north of the worst in 30 years and accelerating is not "little difference".
Still, well done on congratulating OGH for going private, I am sure that has aided his recovery and eased the pain in his wallet no end.
What Australia does is charge higher income individuals a surcharge of 1% to 1.5% of income if they do not take out private health insurance.
The Tories should follow the example of the Coalition Howard government in Australia in 1997 which introduced that so more can follow the excellent example of OGH, go private and cut pressure on the NHS.
The Howard government in 1999 also contributed up to 30% of the private health insurance premium of people with their Medicare universal health coverage
Keir Starmer is actually praying they take this advice.
It would be the most brutal defeat of a governing, or recently governing, party since Baldwin managed to reduce Labour from 287 MPs to 50 in 1931.
It got the Howard government re elected.
There is little point being a Conservative if you don't pursue more conservative policies is there? Conservatives believe in choice in public services with private options too, in healthcare as much as anything else
I know the weather's been a bit warm recently, but I can assure you we are not in Australia.
Culturally we are probably closer to Australia than any other nation on earth except maybe New Zealand.
There is also no point the Tories fighting a battle on who will spend more on the NHS, as Labour will always win it as they are more willing to raise tax higher to pay for it.
The Tories should instead shift the argument to encouraging patient choice in healthcare too
"culturally"
Don't you mean racially? But it isn't particularly true. Just look at Ireland.
I think that Scotland is culturally close to Ireland. England less so. Parts of Scotland, particularly the West Highlands and the Hebrides, are culturally closer to Ireland than they are to England. Other parts, particularly Edinburgh, are culturally closer to England. Most of the UK, except probably the South East, is culturally closer to New Zealand than to Australia. Australia seems culturally closer to the USA than the UK, except in sport.
Within the UK itself I think cultural distinctions are vastly inflated, and people think they are much more different than they are.
Depends. I've often heard on here (not so much recently mind) that the EU referendum was a huge epoch defining exercise in UK democracy; constituent countries of the UK voted one way while others voted very much another way. Those countries also have had very different attitudes to eg the Tories, Thatcher, Johnson etc, so unless one thinks politics is relatively unimportant, I'd classify these as quite definite distinctions.
Fair point, but I was thinking more about general values and principles, where people may perceive the nations to be different, when in fact differences are trivial.
Daniel Korski was in the middle of a London mayoral hustings when the Times story dropped. I'm told his aide signalled him over to deliver the bad news. He left.
London Conservatives put Steve Norris and Boris Johnson before the electorate, and would have had Jeffrey Archer if they could. Is scandalous behaviour on the person spec as a "not essential but desirable" or something?
At least people had heard of Boris and Archer, who has heard of these 3 (now likely 2?) Even Norris and Zac Goldsmith and Shaun Bailey were better known.
Of the last 2 Susan Hall is probably the best though, at least she has held elected office for the party in the London Assembly, the other candidate has never even stood for the party that I can see
I normally agree with @Stuartinromford on nearly everything, but I think I am with you on this one and maybe hindsight plays a part. I liked Steve Norris, and although my memory is blurred on the topic by recent events, I suspect I quite liked Boris in the day. It is more recent times that has turned me against him really big time.
Also after reading the Michael Crick biography of Jeffery Archer I rather have a soft spot for him, although he should never have been let anywhere near the possibility of being London Mayor (or my wallet if it comes to that)
Given how successful he appears to be as a novelist, and how crap he was in politics, it feels like Archer wasted an awful lot of time and energy on being a shameless, incompetent grifter.
I was quite disappointed when I read the biography. I wanted to read about an absolute scoundrel, but he wasn't as bad as I had previously thought. He clearly had/has talents and he actually works hard exploiting them. I have worked with a couple of people (one in particular) who were dishonest and thought if you put as much effort into working honestly you might be just as successful if not more and not risk being fired or worse going to jail.
There's a wonderful bit towards the end, where Crick is asked by one of Archer's associates something like "Do you like him?" And the best Crick can come up with is "He's hard to dislike..."
And that's a fair point. I've been in a room he was working politically, and the charisma was tangible. Had he stuck to being a prep school sports master, he'd have been a terrifying opponent and would probably have retired with the (low key) glory and adulation he has sought. But that was never going to happen.
Desnarking my earlier question- why do London Conservatives keep going for charismatic chancers as their mayoral standard bearers? Because it's too frequent to just be coincidence, and it means they pick candidates who are prone to scandals. Two guesses.
One is that to put in a bid to be a Conservative Mayor of London, you do need balls and ego. Somehow, you have to think that you can turn the table of the city's demographics or you are heading for a loss. The other is that the Conservative conception of Mayor is pretty PT Barnum; going round hyping the city. The other big bit- managing public transport- isn't the sort of thing that Conservatives are that interested in as a matter of principle. So you get showman candidates and that's always a risk.
End of a stressful day. Needed to clear my father's house fast as the new owners want to complete asap and I don't want to cause any delays so I haven't replied to any comments from the last thread so:
@Mortimer - Thank you for your kind post. Appreciated. My dad died aged 96 in February. Just the selling of the house now, which has suddenly turned manic.
@Stuartinromford - I agree completely with your post re maths and eventually everyone hits the buffers in the end, it is just a matter of when. Definitely happened to me. If I had my time again I would do a joint degree of maths with economics or philosophy to put off hitting the maths buffers.
@HYUFD - Thanks for the link re philosophy degree & logic questions. I'm interested but the link didn't work - Page not found. One thing to note (and I say this without having read the link) is the logic you do in a maths degree is far more advanced than stuff you do in a philosophy degree (or in particular questions they may set in an interview) by the nature of the prerequisites. In fact the notation itself will be gibberish without the previous preparation. That is not to say a question set in an interview will not be as difficult, it might in fact be more difficult. There are plenty of everyday logic questions I can't do that an untrained but clever person can do, but which doesn't involve complex logic. And as you know, I don't have a logic degree (I don't even know if such a thing exists), but said it as a riposte to @Miklosvar, although my specialist subjects in my 2nd & 3rd year of maths were all logic topics.
@DecrepiterJohnL - Your post about many Doctors regretting their choice and moving to other careers. I agree. They are often talented in several areas and it follows from my argument of going down the science line first and then wishing they had done something they had more passion for. For most of us we do a degree, and move on, but for a Doctor it is a career. There are so many in the public eye who are ex-Doctors doing non doctoring stuff. My wife (a doctor) often feels the same.
@Miklosvar - You are an arse. When you first appeared on PB I had a pointless pedantic exchange with you and decided to avoid you. Today I made a half serious comment for comic effect that was at the expense of historians/lawyers and people like @TheScreamingEagles and @ydoethur respond accordingly, in fun. You on the other hand responded appallingly, as you nearly always do. I've noticed you have done this with others. With @kinabalu for instance. And your reaction and jumping to the wrong conclusion when I politely said I had to leave for a few hours, but would reply on my return, was an example. Would you have preferred it if I had been rude and just ignored you.
You're rude, pedantic, irrational, and tangential. You appear to be an exceedingly unpleasant person. Not bad going for someone who has only made a few hundred posts.
That being said, he is funnier than you
Are you all right @Leon? That is not up to your usual standard. Even when I disagree with you I still really enjoy your prose; but that?
I wasn't trying to be clever, or witty, or indeed anything - simply pointing out a relevant truth you had carelessly omitted in your 19 paragraph Screed of Tedium
You mean that tedium that has got more likes than any of your posts for the last few days. Just saying.
Actually that chart shows little difference overall in NHS waiting times between recent Labour or Tory governments, except they were a bit lower under Labour in 2009-10 and are a bit higher under the Conservatives now (albeit Covid added to the problem).
Well done for going private though, the more higher income people take out private health insurance and use private hospitals, the less the pressure on the NHS. Best wishes for your recovery after your op.
I don't know where you learned maths but trebling is not "a bit" and being north of the worst in 30 years and accelerating is not "little difference".
Still, well done on congratulating OGH for going private, I am sure that has aided his recovery and eased the pain in his wallet no end.
What Australia does is charge higher income individuals a surcharge of 1% to 1.5% of income if they do not take out private health insurance.
The Tories should follow the example of the Coalition Howard government in Australia in 1997 which introduced that so more can follow the excellent example of OGH, go private and cut pressure on the NHS.
The Howard government in 1999 also contributed up to 30% of the private health insurance premium of people with their Medicare universal health coverage
Keir Starmer is actually praying they take this advice.
It would be the most brutal defeat of a governing, or recently governing, party since Baldwin managed to reduce Labour from 287 MPs to 50 in 1931.
It got the Howard government re elected.
There is little point being a Conservative if you don't pursue more conservative policies is there? Conservatives believe in choice in public services with private options too, in healthcare as much as anything else
I know the weather's been a bit warm recently, but I can assure you we are not in Australia.
Culturally we are probably closer to Australia than any other nation on earth except maybe New Zealand.
There is also no point the Tories fighting a battle on who will spend more on the NHS, as Labour will always win it as they are more willing to raise tax higher to pay for it.
The Tories should instead shift the argument to encouraging patient choice in healthcare too
"culturally"
Don't you mean racially? But it isn't particularly true. Just look at Ireland.
I think that Scotland is culturally close to Ireland. England less so. Parts of Scotland, particularly the West Highlands and the Hebrides, are culturally closer to Ireland than they are to England. Other parts, particularly Edinburgh, are culturally closer to England. Most of the UK, except probably the South East, is culturally closer to New Zealand than to Australia. Australia seems culturally closer to the USA than the UK, except in sport.
Scotland is closer to Northern Ireland. Most Northern Irish Protestants are of Presbyterian origin.
The Republic of Ireland is closer to Catholic Europe, hence it is in the EU and Eurozone and the UK isn't.
I would say the Midlands and North and Wales and Cornwall and Essex are probably culturally closer to Australia, while most of southern England is closer to NZ or New England in the US or the Canadian Atlantic coast.
London is probably quite close to Melbourne or Sydney
The EU is a Roman Catholic conspiracy? I have a Gordon Riot to sell you.
Most of the Eurozone are majority Catholic heritage nations. The founding nations of the EEC (except West Germany and the Netherlands) were all majority Roman Catholic and even Germany and Holland now have more Roman Catholics than Protestants (Bavaria of course always majority Catholic).
Of the majority Protestant heritage nations in Europe, the UK, Switzerland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden and Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands and Finland, only the Dutch, Germans and Finns are in the Eurozone and EU
Forgetting the historically Lutheran Estonia and Latvia there.
Even adding them the majority of Protestant heritage nations are outside the Eurozone, the majority of the Eurozone is Catholic.
Plus more Estonians are now Eastern Orthodox than Lutheran
Conversely, I would say modern Britain is much more similar to New Zealand than Australia, with touches of Canada and the U.S on the one side, and NorthWest Continental Europe on the other.
Australia is increasingly American in style, I think.
Have you been to Oz? Or, indeed, the USA?
Oz really isn't like the USA. It is in the US/Anglosphere, militarily, but culturally it is much more Anglo, indeed European in general (welfare state, no guns, no abortion stuff, low level religiosity, etc)
I have indeed been to both places, although Australia longer ago. Since the enormous influence of the Australian-American Murdoch, particularly, Australia just seems different to me. The species of "posh Australian" I used to meet, for instance, seems almost extinct.
It just seems, from a negative point of view, brasher and with less of a sub-class aspiring to refinement or culture, and, from a more positive interpretation, more expansively, noisily egalitarian, in a geograohically large and young country way, and which reminds me more of the U.S. New Zealand just still seems noticeably more similar to us here in the UK, I think.
Daniel Korski was in the middle of a London mayoral hustings when the Times story dropped. I'm told his aide signalled him over to deliver the bad news. He left.
London Conservatives put Steve Norris and Boris Johnson before the electorate, and would have had Jeffrey Archer if they could. Is scandalous behaviour on the person spec as a "not essential but desirable" or something?
At least people had heard of Boris and Archer, who has heard of these 3 (now likely 2?) Even Norris and Zac Goldsmith and Shaun Bailey were better known.
Of the last 2 Susan Hall is probably the best though, at least she has held elected office for the party in the London Assembly, the other candidate has never even stood for the party that I can see
I normally agree with @Stuartinromford on nearly everything, but I think I am with you on this one and maybe hindsight plays a part. I liked Steve Norris, and although my memory is blurred on the topic by recent events, I suspect I quite liked Boris in the day. It is more recent times that has turned me against him really big time.
Also after reading the Michael Crick biography of Jeffery Archer I rather have a soft spot for him, although he should never have been let anywhere near the possibility of being London Mayor (or my wallet if it comes to that)
Given how successful he appears to be as a novelist, and how crap he was in politics, it feels like Archer wasted an awful lot of time and energy on being a shameless, incompetent grifter.
I was quite disappointed when I read the biography. I wanted to read about an absolute scoundrel, but he wasn't as bad as I had previously thought. He clearly had/has talents and he actually works hard exploiting them. I have worked with a couple of people (one in particular) who were dishonest and thought if you put as much effort into working honestly you might be just as successful if not more and not risk being fired or worse going to jail.
There's a wonderful bit towards the end, where Crick is asked by one of Archer's associates something like "Do you like him?" And the best Crick can come up with is "He's hard to dislike..."
And that's a fair point. I've been in a room he was working politically, and the charisma was tangible. Had he stuck to being a prep school sports master, he'd have been a terrifying opponent and would probably have retired with the (low key) glory and adulation he has sought. But that was never going to happen.
Desnarking my earlier question- why do London Conservatives keep going for charismatic chancers as their mayoral standard bearers? Because it's too frequent to just be coincidence, and it means they pick candidates who are prone to scandals. Two guesses.
One is that to put in a bid to be a Conservative Mayor of London, you do need balls and ego. Somehow, you have to think that you can turn the table of the city's demographics or you are heading for a loss. The other is that the Conservative conception of Mayor is pretty PT Barnum; going round hyping the city. The other big bit- managing public transport- isn't the sort of thing that Conservatives are that interested in as a matter of principle. So you get showman candidates and that's always a risk.
For what it's worth (in name-dropping anyhow) yours truly spoke with Michael Crick AND saw Jeremy Archer in the flesh . . . at the latter's trial for suborning the course of justice (think that was charge).
MC did NOT appear too filled with admiration of MC at that point in time.
As for His Lordship, I observed him in the dock, from courtroom visitor's gallery, on several days. Old Bailey being best theater in London, and with cheapest seats.
View of the dock from my perch was far better than what the journos could see from their seats.
At one point during the trial, story was published, that Archer was talking careful notes of trial testimony. When (as I could see with my own eyes) he was really going though his appointment book (diary in UKese) scratching out appointments.
Got the feeling that he was sensing what the outcome was likely to be . . .
Did people see that rather hilarious Canary article about Corbynism? There's some great lines in it, from the author saying they are 400 miles to the left of Corbyn, that they are not a weird spiky separatist or poseur, calling those reliving the Corbyn years as cranky militants and maniacally conspiracist, and ultimately that 'it's time to move the f*ck on'.
The fact the Canary is still going is news to me. Is Rachael from Swindon (or whatever she was called) still tweeting 100s of times a day about how great Jezza is?
Actually that chart shows little difference overall in NHS waiting times between recent Labour or Tory governments, except they were a bit lower under Labour in 2009-10 and are a bit higher under the Conservatives now (albeit Covid added to the problem).
Well done for going private though, the more higher income people take out private health insurance and use private hospitals, the less the pressure on the NHS. Best wishes for your recovery after your op.
I don't know where you learned maths but trebling is not "a bit" and being north of the worst in 30 years and accelerating is not "little difference".
Still, well done on congratulating OGH for going private, I am sure that has aided his recovery and eased the pain in his wallet no end.
What Australia does is charge higher income individuals a surcharge of 1% to 1.5% of income if they do not take out private health insurance.
The Tories should follow the example of the Coalition Howard government in Australia in 1997 which introduced that so more can follow the excellent example of OGH, go private and cut pressure on the NHS.
The Howard government in 1999 also contributed up to 30% of the private health insurance premium of people with their Medicare universal health coverage
Keir Starmer is actually praying they take this advice.
It would be the most brutal defeat of a governing, or recently governing, party since Baldwin managed to reduce Labour from 287 MPs to 50 in 1931.
It got the Howard government re elected.
There is little point being a Conservative if you don't pursue more conservative policies is there? Conservatives believe in choice in public services with private options too, in healthcare as much as anything else
I know the weather's been a bit warm recently, but I can assure you we are not in Australia.
Culturally we are probably closer to Australia than any other nation on earth except maybe New Zealand.
There is also no point the Tories fighting a battle on who will spend more on the NHS, as Labour will always win it as they are more willing to raise tax higher to pay for it.
The Tories should instead shift the argument to encouraging patient choice in healthcare too
"culturally"
Don't you mean racially? But it isn't particularly true. Just look at Ireland.
I think that Scotland is culturally close to Ireland. England less so. Parts of Scotland, particularly the West Highlands and the Hebrides, are culturally closer to Ireland than they are to England. Other parts, particularly Edinburgh, are culturally closer to England. Most of the UK, except probably the South East, is culturally closer to New Zealand than to Australia. Australia seems culturally closer to the USA than the UK, except in sport.
If you ignore that more than a quarter of New Zealanders are Polynesian. Or do the non-white ones not count, like the Australian Aborigines, native Americans, Black Americans or Hispanic Americans?
So 74% are not Maori then and over 10% of our population are now non white too, we even have a non white PM
About half the Polynesian in NZ are not Maori.
I wouldn't suggest that East African Asians were much like Maori either! Indeed the ethnic minorities here are quite dissimilar to ethnic minorities in other Commonwealth countries.
Did people see that rather hilarious Canary article about Corbynism? There's some great lines in it, from the author saying they are 400 miles to the left of Corbyn, that they are not a weird spiky separatist or poseur, calling those reliving the Corbyn years as cranky militants and maniacally conspiracist, and ultimately that 'it's time to move the f*ck on'.
The fact the Canary is still going is news to me. Is Rachael from Swindon (or whatever she was called) still tweeting 100s of times a day about how great Jezza is?
There are dark corners of the internet - I'm prepared to dip into it from time to time, but some things are too much.
End of a stressful day. Needed to clear my father's house fast as the new owners want to complete asap and I don't want to cause any delays so I haven't replied to any comments from the last thread so:
@Mortimer - Thank you for your kind post. Appreciated. My dad died aged 96 in February. Just the selling of the house now, which has suddenly turned manic.
@Stuartinromford - I agree completely with your post re maths and eventually everyone hits the buffers in the end, it is just a matter of when. Definitely happened to me. If I had my time again I would do a joint degree of maths with economics or philosophy to put off hitting the maths buffers.
@HYUFD - Thanks for the link re philosophy degree & logic questions. I'm interested but the link didn't work - Page not found. One thing to note (and I say this without having read the link) is the logic you do in a maths degree is far more advanced than stuff you do in a philosophy degree (or in particular questions they may set in an interview) by the nature of the prerequisites. In fact the notation itself will be gibberish without the previous preparation. That is not to say a question set in an interview will not be as difficult, it might in fact be more difficult. There are plenty of everyday logic questions I can't do that an untrained but clever person can do, but which doesn't involve complex logic. And as you know, I don't have a logic degree (I don't even know if such a thing exists), but said it as a riposte to @Miklosvar, although my specialist subjects in my 2nd & 3rd year of maths were all logic topics.
@DecrepiterJohnL - Your post about many Doctors regretting their choice and moving to other careers. I agree. They are often talented in several areas and it follows from my argument of going down the science line first and then wishing they had done something they had more passion for. For most of us we do a degree, and move on, but for a Doctor it is a career. There are so many in the public eye who are ex-Doctors doing non doctoring stuff. My wife (a doctor) often feels the same.
@Miklosvar - You are an arse. When you first appeared on PB I had a pointless pedantic exchange with you and decided to avoid you. Today I made a half serious comment for comic effect that was at the expense of historians/lawyers and people like @TheScreamingEagles and @ydoethur respond accordingly, in fun. You on the other hand responded appallingly, as you nearly always do. I've noticed you have done this with others. With @kinabalu for instance. And your reaction and jumping to the wrong conclusion when I politely said I had to leave for a few hours, but would reply on my return, was an example. Would you have preferred it if I had been rude and just ignored you.
You're rude, pedantic, irrational, and tangential. You appear to be an exceedingly unpleasant person. Not bad going for someone who has only made a few hundred posts.
That being said, he is funnier than you
Are you all right @Leon? That is not up to your usual standard. Even when I disagree with you I still really enjoy your prose; but that?
I wasn't trying to be clever, or witty, or indeed anything - simply pointing out a relevant truth you had carelessly omitted in your 19 paragraph Screed of Tedium
You mean that tedium that has got more likes than any of your posts for the last few days. Just saying.
The definition of Tragedy is: adding up your likes
This is why I asked @rcs1000 to remove the LIKE button. Likes encourage cant, and banal emotion, and the herd mentality, and sad, crowdpleasing drivel, they are scout badges for inadequate morons, but, you know, well done
Actually that chart shows little difference overall in NHS waiting times between recent Labour or Tory governments, except they were a bit lower under Labour in 2009-10 and are a bit higher under the Conservatives now (albeit Covid added to the problem).
Well done for going private though, the more higher income people take out private health insurance and use private hospitals, the less the pressure on the NHS. Best wishes for your recovery after your op.
I don't know where you learned maths but trebling is not "a bit" and being north of the worst in 30 years and accelerating is not "little difference".
Still, well done on congratulating OGH for going private, I am sure that has aided his recovery and eased the pain in his wallet no end.
What Australia does is charge higher income individuals a surcharge of 1% to 1.5% of income if they do not take out private health insurance.
The Tories should follow the example of the Coalition Howard government in Australia in 1997 which introduced that so more can follow the excellent example of OGH, go private and cut pressure on the NHS.
The Howard government in 1999 also contributed up to 30% of the private health insurance premium of people with their Medicare universal health coverage
Keir Starmer is actually praying they take this advice.
It would be the most brutal defeat of a governing, or recently governing, party since Baldwin managed to reduce Labour from 287 MPs to 50 in 1931.
It got the Howard government re elected.
There is little point being a Conservative if you don't pursue more conservative policies is there? Conservatives believe in choice in public services with private options too, in healthcare as much as anything else
I know the weather's been a bit warm recently, but I can assure you we are not in Australia.
Culturally we are probably closer to Australia than any other nation on earth except maybe New Zealand.
There is also no point the Tories fighting a battle on who will spend more on the NHS, as Labour will always win it as they are more willing to raise tax higher to pay for it.
The Tories should instead shift the argument to encouraging patient choice in healthcare too
"culturally"
Don't you mean racially? But it isn't particularly true. Just look at Ireland.
I think that Scotland is culturally close to Ireland. England less so. Parts of Scotland, particularly the West Highlands and the Hebrides, are culturally closer to Ireland than they are to England. Other parts, particularly Edinburgh, are culturally closer to England. Most of the UK, except probably the South East, is culturally closer to New Zealand than to Australia. Australia seems culturally closer to the USA than the UK, except in sport.
Within the UK itself I think cultural distinctions are vastly inflated, and people think they are much more different than they are.
Depends. I've often heard on here (not so much recently mind) that the EU referendum was a huge epoch defining exercise in UK democracy; constituent countries of the UK voted one way while others voted very much another way. Those countries also have had very different attitudes to eg the Tories, Thatcher, Johnson etc, so unless one thinks politics is relatively unimportant, I'd classify these as quite definite distinctions.
Fair point, but I was thinking more about general values and principles, where people may perceive the nations to be different, when in fact differences are trivial.
I think the differences that manifest at the ballot box are profoundly important. This is what people think about how everything should be run, and it's the most honest expression because people vote in the context of a debate and give their verdict in secret. If a person with a clipboard comes up to you and asks you your feelings on this and that subject, you might give one answer to their face and a different one if you anonymously.
Some people say that "culture" is the way people behave when nobody's looking. That's a narrow view, but it holds an important truth: in the polling station, only you know what you put and that's where you can be really honest.
Did people see that rather hilarious Canary article about Corbynism? There's some great lines in it, from the author saying they are 400 miles to the left of Corbyn, that they are not a weird spiky separatist or poseur, calling those reliving the Corbyn years as cranky militants and maniacally conspiracist, and ultimately that 'it's time to move the f*ck on'.
It’s not very well written, not least because it’s actually quite hard to understand what he means by moving on.
My understanding of it though is something that I’ve often said to disgruntled Corbynites (and tbh other people who who have despaired at times of the unending crapness of our government) - there are many ways to make a real, practical difference to our society. A fandom around magic grandad is not the be-all-end-all, and in fact you can go out right now and do stuff that makes positive, practical difference without a thought for the ballot box. Not in a ‘do things that should be paid work for free cheers Dave’ Big Society way, but the way a functioning society has always relied on contributory action.
That can mean political action; it can mean volunteering, it can mean simple stuff like doing your gardening in a responsible way or whatever.
End of a stressful day. Needed to clear my father's house fast as the new owners want to complete asap and I don't want to cause any delays so I haven't replied to any comments from the last thread so:
@Mortimer - Thank you for your kind post. Appreciated. My dad died aged 96 in February. Just the selling of the house now, which has suddenly turned manic.
@Stuartinromford - I agree completely with your post re maths and eventually everyone hits the buffers in the end, it is just a matter of when. Definitely happened to me. If I had my time again I would do a joint degree of maths with economics or philosophy to put off hitting the maths buffers.
@HYUFD - Thanks for the link re philosophy degree & logic questions. I'm interested but the link didn't work - Page not found. One thing to note (and I say this without having read the link) is the logic you do in a maths degree is far more advanced than stuff you do in a philosophy degree (or in particular questions they may set in an interview) by the nature of the prerequisites. In fact the notation itself will be gibberish without the previous preparation. That is not to say a question set in an interview will not be as difficult, it might in fact be more difficult. There are plenty of everyday logic questions I can't do that an untrained but clever person can do, but which doesn't involve complex logic. And as you know, I don't have a logic degree (I don't even know if such a thing exists), but said it as a riposte to @Miklosvar, although my specialist subjects in my 2nd & 3rd year of maths were all logic topics.
@DecrepiterJohnL - Your post about many Doctors regretting their choice and moving to other careers. I agree. They are often talented in several areas and it follows from my argument of going down the science line first and then wishing they had done something they had more passion for. For most of us we do a degree, and move on, but for a Doctor it is a career. There are so many in the public eye who are ex-Doctors doing non doctoring stuff. My wife (a doctor) often feels the same.
@Miklosvar - You are an arse. When you first appeared on PB I had a pointless pedantic exchange with you and decided to avoid you. Today I made a half serious comment for comic effect that was at the expense of historians/lawyers and people like @TheScreamingEagles and @ydoethur respond accordingly, in fun. You on the other hand responded appallingly, as you nearly always do. I've noticed you have done this with others. With @kinabalu for instance. And your reaction and jumping to the wrong conclusion when I politely said I had to leave for a few hours, but would reply on my return, was an example. Would you have preferred it if I had been rude and just ignored you.
You're rude, pedantic, irrational, and tangential. You appear to be an exceedingly unpleasant person. Not bad going for someone who has only made a few hundred posts.
That being said, he is funnier than you
Are you all right @Leon? That is not up to your usual standard. Even when I disagree with you I still really enjoy your prose; but that?
I wasn't trying to be clever, or witty, or indeed anything - simply pointing out a relevant truth you had carelessly omitted in your 19 paragraph Screed of Tedium
You mean that tedium that has got more likes than any of your posts for the last few days. Just saying.
The definition of Tragedy is: adding up your likes
This is why I asked @rcs1000 to remove the LIKE button. Likes encourage cant, and banal emotion, and the herd mentality, and sad, crowdpleasing drivel, they are scout badges for inadequate morons, but, you know, well done
Perhaps, as a matter of policy, we should all grow up and stop chasing cheap 'likes.'
If you agree, like this post to show your approval and send a message.
Conversely, I would say modern Britain is much more similar to New Zealand than Australia, with touches of Canada and the U.S on the one side, and NorthWest Continental Europe on the other.
Australia is increasingly American in style, I think.
Have you been to Oz? Or, indeed, the USA?
Oz really isn't like the USA. It is in the US/Anglosphere, militarily, but culturally it is much more Anglo, indeed European in general (welfare state, no guns, no abortion stuff, low level religiosity, etc)
I have indeed been to both places, although Australia longer ago. Since the enormous influence of the Australian-American Murdoch, particularly, Australia just seems different to me. The species of "posh Australian" I used to meet, for instance, seems almost extinct.
It just seems, from a negative point of view, brasher and with less of a sub-class aspiring to refinement or culture, and, from a more positive interpretation, more expansively, noisily egalitarian, in a geograohically large and young country way, and which reminds me more of the U.S. New Zealand just still seems noticeably more similar to us here in the UK, I think.
Depends where you go, plenty of intellectual, high culture, chardonnay drinking Australians in the most expensive parts of Melbourne, Canberra and Sydney.
New England is also probably closer to the UK and New Zealand than Australia and most of the rest of the USA
Politico - Freedom Caucus takes key vote on Marjorie Taylor Greene’s future
It’s not yet clear whether the conservative group will formally eject her, but people familiar with the matter pointed to a consensus against her.
House Freedom Caucus members took a momentous vote Friday on Marjorie Taylor Greene’s future with the group, according to three people familiar with the matter — but it’s not yet clear whether she’s been officially ejected.
The right-flank group took up Greene’s status amid an internal push, first reported by POLITICO, to consider purging members who are inactive or at odds with the Freedom Caucus. Greene’s close alliance with Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and her accompanying criticism of colleagues in the group, has put her on the opposite side of a bloc that made its name opposing GOP leadership.
While her formal status in the conservative group remains in limbo, the 8 a.m. Friday vote — which sources said ended with a consensus against her — points to, at least, continued strong anti-Greene sentiment.
SSI - wrap yer heads around THIS concept: MTG too woke for REAL wack-jobs.
Daniel Korski was in the middle of a London mayoral hustings when the Times story dropped. I'm told his aide signalled him over to deliver the bad news. He left.
London Conservatives put Steve Norris and Boris Johnson before the electorate, and would have had Jeffrey Archer if they could. Is scandalous behaviour on the person spec as a "not essential but desirable" or something?
At least people had heard of Boris and Archer, who has heard of these 3 (now likely 2?) Even Norris and Zac Goldsmith and Shaun Bailey were better known.
Of the last 2 Susan Hall is probably the best though, at least she has held elected office for the party in the London Assembly, the other candidate has never even stood for the party that I can see
I normally agree with @Stuartinromford on nearly everything, but I think I am with you on this one and maybe hindsight plays a part. I liked Steve Norris, and although my memory is blurred on the topic by recent events, I suspect I quite liked Boris in the day. It is more recent times that has turned me against him really big time.
Also after reading the Michael Crick biography of Jeffery Archer I rather have a soft spot for him, although he should never have been let anywhere near the possibility of being London Mayor (or my wallet if it comes to that)
Given how successful he appears to be as a novelist, and how crap he was in politics, it feels like Archer wasted an awful lot of time and energy on being a shameless, incompetent grifter.
I was quite disappointed when I read the biography. I wanted to read about an absolute scoundrel, but he wasn't as bad as I had previously thought. He clearly had/has talents and he actually works hard exploiting them. I have worked with a couple of people (one in particular) who were dishonest and thought if you put as much effort into working honestly you might be just as successful if not more and not risk being fired or worse going to jail.
There's a wonderful bit towards the end, where Crick is asked by one of Archer's associates something like "Do you like him?" And the best Crick can come up with is "He's hard to dislike..."
And that's a fair point. I've been in a room he was working politically, and the charisma was tangible. Had he stuck to being a prep school sports master, he'd have been a terrifying opponent and would probably have retired with the (low key) glory and adulation he has sought. But that was never going to happen.
Desnarking my earlier question- why do London Conservatives keep going for charismatic chancers as their mayoral standard bearers? Because it's too frequent to just be coincidence, and it means they pick candidates who are prone to scandals. Two guesses.
One is that to put in a bid to be a Conservative Mayor of London, you do need balls and ego. Somehow, you have to think that you can turn the table of the city's demographics or you are heading for a loss. The other is that the Conservative conception of Mayor is pretty PT Barnum; going round hyping the city. The other big bit- managing public transport- isn't the sort of thing that Conservatives are that interested in as a matter of principle. So you get showman candidates and that's always a risk.
Actually that chart shows little difference overall in NHS waiting times between recent Labour or Tory governments, except they were a bit lower under Labour in 2009-10 and are a bit higher under the Conservatives now (albeit Covid added to the problem).
Well done for going private though, the more higher income people take out private health insurance and use private hospitals, the less the pressure on the NHS. Best wishes for your recovery after your op.
I don't know where you learned maths but trebling is not "a bit" and being north of the worst in 30 years and accelerating is not "little difference".
Still, well done on congratulating OGH for going private, I am sure that has aided his recovery and eased the pain in his wallet no end.
What Australia does is charge higher income individuals a surcharge of 1% to 1.5% of income if they do not take out private health insurance.
The Tories should follow the example of the Coalition Howard government in Australia in 1997 which introduced that so more can follow the excellent example of OGH, go private and cut pressure on the NHS.
The Howard government in 1999 also contributed up to 30% of the private health insurance premium of people with their Medicare universal health coverage
Keir Starmer is actually praying they take this advice.
It would be the most brutal defeat of a governing, or recently governing, party since Baldwin managed to reduce Labour from 287 MPs to 50 in 1931.
It got the Howard government re elected.
There is little point being a Conservative if you don't pursue more conservative policies is there? Conservatives believe in choice in public services with private options too, in healthcare as much as anything else
I know the weather's been a bit warm recently, but I can assure you we are not in Australia.
Culturally we are probably closer to Australia than any other nation on earth except maybe New Zealand.
There is also no point the Tories fighting a battle on who will spend more on the NHS, as Labour will always win it as they are more willing to raise tax higher to pay for it.
The Tories should instead shift the argument to encouraging patient choice in healthcare too
"culturally"
Don't you mean racially? But it isn't particularly true. Just look at Ireland.
I think that Scotland is culturally close to Ireland. England less so. Parts of Scotland, particularly the West Highlands and the Hebrides, are culturally closer to Ireland than they are to England. Other parts, particularly Edinburgh, are culturally closer to England. Most of the UK, except probably the South East, is culturally closer to New Zealand than to Australia. Australia seems culturally closer to the USA than the UK, except in sport.
Scotland is closer to Northern Ireland. Most Northern Irish Protestants are of Presbyterian origin.
The Republic of Ireland is closer to Catholic Europe, hence it is in the EU and Eurozone and the UK isn't.
I would say the Midlands and North and Wales and Cornwall and Essex are probably culturally closer to Australia, while most of southern England is closer to NZ or New England in the US or the Canadian Atlantic coast.
London is probably quite close to Melbourne or Sydney
The EU is a Roman Catholic conspiracy? I have a Gordon Riot to sell you.
Most of the Eurozone are majority Catholic heritage nations. The founding nations of the EEC (except West Germany and the Netherlands) were all majority Roman Catholic and even Germany and Holland now have more Roman Catholics than Protestants (Bavaria of course always majority Catholic).
Of the majority Protestant heritage nations in Europe, the UK, Switzerland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden and Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands and Finland, only the Dutch, Germans and Finns are in the Eurozone and EU
Forgetting the historically Lutheran Estonia and Latvia there.
Lutheranism is something Estonia, Latvia and the northern Germans (who often controlled the area) had in common.
Politico - Freedom Caucus takes key vote on Marjorie Taylor Greene’s future
It’s not yet clear whether the conservative group will formally eject her, but people familiar with the matter pointed to a consensus against her.
House Freedom Caucus members took a momentous vote Friday on Marjorie Taylor Greene’s future with the group, according to three people familiar with the matter — but it’s not yet clear whether she’s been officially ejected.
The right-flank group took up Greene’s status amid an internal push, first reported by POLITICO, to consider purging members who are inactive or at odds with the Freedom Caucus. Greene’s close alliance with Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and her accompanying criticism of colleagues in the group, has put her on the opposite side of a bloc that made its name opposing GOP leadership.
While her formal status in the conservative group remains in limbo, the 8 a.m. Friday vote — which sources said ended with a consensus against her — points to, at least, continued strong anti-Greene sentiment.
SSI - wrap yer heads around THIS concept: MTG too woke for REAL wack-jobs.
That's a bit like being threatened with dismissal from the DfE for being drunk and incompetent.
Actually that chart shows little difference overall in NHS waiting times between recent Labour or Tory governments, except they were a bit lower under Labour in 2009-10 and are a bit higher under the Conservatives now (albeit Covid added to the problem).
Well done for going private though, the more higher income people take out private health insurance and use private hospitals, the less the pressure on the NHS. Best wishes for your recovery after your op.
I don't know where you learned maths but trebling is not "a bit" and being north of the worst in 30 years and accelerating is not "little difference".
Still, well done on congratulating OGH for going private, I am sure that has aided his recovery and eased the pain in his wallet no end.
What Australia does is charge higher income individuals a surcharge of 1% to 1.5% of income if they do not take out private health insurance.
The Tories should follow the example of the Coalition Howard government in Australia in 1997 which introduced that so more can follow the excellent example of OGH, go private and cut pressure on the NHS.
The Howard government in 1999 also contributed up to 30% of the private health insurance premium of people with their Medicare universal health coverage
Keir Starmer is actually praying they take this advice.
It would be the most brutal defeat of a governing, or recently governing, party since Baldwin managed to reduce Labour from 287 MPs to 50 in 1931.
It got the Howard government re elected.
There is little point being a Conservative if you don't pursue more conservative policies is there? Conservatives believe in choice in public services with private options too, in healthcare as much as anything else
I know the weather's been a bit warm recently, but I can assure you we are not in Australia.
Culturally we are probably closer to Australia than any other nation on earth except maybe New Zealand.
There is also no point the Tories fighting a battle on who will spend more on the NHS, as Labour will always win it as they are more willing to raise tax higher to pay for it.
The Tories should instead shift the argument to encouraging patient choice in healthcare too
"culturally"
Don't you mean racially? But it isn't particularly true. Just look at Ireland.
I think that Scotland is culturally close to Ireland. England less so. Parts of Scotland, particularly the West Highlands and the Hebrides, are culturally closer to Ireland than they are to England. Other parts, particularly Edinburgh, are culturally closer to England. Most of the UK, except probably the South East, is culturally closer to New Zealand than to Australia. Australia seems culturally closer to the USA than the UK, except in sport.
Within the UK itself I think cultural distinctions are vastly inflated, and people think they are much more different than they are.
Depends. I've often heard on here (not so much recently mind) that the EU referendum was a huge epoch defining exercise in UK democracy; constituent countries of the UK voted one way while others voted very much another way. Those countries also have had very different attitudes to eg the Tories, Thatcher, Johnson etc, so unless one thinks politics is relatively unimportant, I'd classify these as quite definite distinctions.
Fair point, but I was thinking more about general values and principles, where people may perceive the nations to be different, when in fact differences are trivial.
Not sure on that basis that there are many non trivial differences in the general values and principles of most people in Western Europe, much as a certain kind of PBer likes to fixate upon them.
End of a stressful day. Needed to clear my father's house fast as the new owners want to complete asap and I don't want to cause any delays so I haven't replied to any comments from the last thread so:
@Mortimer - Thank you for your kind post. Appreciated. My dad died aged 96 in February. Just the selling of the house now, which has suddenly turned manic.
@Stuartinromford - I agree completely with your post re maths and eventually everyone hits the buffers in the end, it is just a matter of when. Definitely happened to me. If I had my time again I would do a joint degree of maths with economics or philosophy to put off hitting the maths buffers.
@HYUFD - Thanks for the link re philosophy degree & logic questions. I'm interested but the link didn't work - Page not found. One thing to note (and I say this without having read the link) is the logic you do in a maths degree is far more advanced than stuff you do in a philosophy degree (or in particular questions they may set in an interview) by the nature of the prerequisites. In fact the notation itself will be gibberish without the previous preparation. That is not to say a question set in an interview will not be as difficult, it might in fact be more difficult. There are plenty of everyday logic questions I can't do that an untrained but clever person can do, but which doesn't involve complex logic. And as you know, I don't have a logic degree (I don't even know if such a thing exists), but said it as a riposte to @Miklosvar, although my specialist subjects in my 2nd & 3rd year of maths were all logic topics.
@DecrepiterJohnL - Your post about many Doctors regretting their choice and moving to other careers. I agree. They are often talented in several areas and it follows from my argument of going down the science line first and then wishing they had done something they had more passion for. For most of us we do a degree, and move on, but for a Doctor it is a career. There are so many in the public eye who are ex-Doctors doing non doctoring stuff. My wife (a doctor) often feels the same.
@Miklosvar - You are an arse. When you first appeared on PB I had a pointless pedantic exchange with you and decided to avoid you. Today I made a half serious comment for comic effect that was at the expense of historians/lawyers and people like @TheScreamingEagles and @ydoethur respond accordingly, in fun. You on the other hand responded appallingly, as you nearly always do. I've noticed you have done this with others. With @kinabalu for instance. And your reaction and jumping to the wrong conclusion when I politely said I had to leave for a few hours, but would reply on my return, was an example. Would you have preferred it if I had been rude and just ignored you.
You're rude, pedantic, irrational, and tangential. You appear to be an exceedingly unpleasant person. Not bad going for someone who has only made a few hundred posts.
That being said, he is funnier than you
Are you all right @Leon? That is not up to your usual standard. Even when I disagree with you I still really enjoy your prose; but that?
I wasn't trying to be clever, or witty, or indeed anything - simply pointing out a relevant truth you had carelessly omitted in your 19 paragraph Screed of Tedium
You mean that tedium that has got more likes than any of your posts for the last few days. Just saying.
The definition of Tragedy is: adding up your likes
This is why I asked @rcs1000 to remove the LIKE button. Likes encourage cant, and banal emotion, and the herd mentality, and sad, crowdpleasing drivel, they are scout badges for inadequate morons, but, you know, well done
Oh look you have got more 'likes' than me. What can that mean? You are a twit aren't you falling for that one.
Comments
Archer is charismatic whatever you think of him, a real Toad of Toad Hall figure, much like Boris.
Indeed they are the characters more suited to be big city Mayors than PMs (as Boris has found)
Then there's also the famous Huguenots - Michael Garrick, Laurence Olivier and Sir Nigel Farage, OBE.
Then supposedly up to 12 million people with Irish ancestry somewhere.
And finally the rich tapestry of post-imperial and Eastern European minorities making up the majority of the most recent rest.
OK
1. No net change since the people driving were already about anyway. Maybe moves some traffic from one place to another, but no net change.
2. As above.
3. Mostly as above.
4. Again as above.
5. Landscape and character can evolve, like language. Heritage sites don't need to be zoned the same as residential.
6. Deal with the impact. Tax externalities. Most impact is not net.
Other questions.
1. Again no net change.
2. Not sure what point you're trying to make here.
3. Again no net change.
4. If they want to be able to walk there, then they'll get a home where they can, if there's plenty of competition.
5. Again more competition means more options for people to choose homes with this, rather than rather dump is the only thing available to them.
6. Again the same.
It seems your objection in almost all of this isn't to the homes, its to the people who live in the homes. Well, those people live here anyway. A couple and their children all living on top of each other in a one bedroom in someone else's home use pretty much the same schooling, transportation and other externalities than if that family live in a house down the road instead.
It is a mess. There are 5 fridge/freezers (Don't ask why, 4 are dead and sitting in the garage). I can dump them foc. The clearance people quoted £30 per fridge because they get charged and they have to all go now and I have to get it all done before we complete so I have no choice. All pounced upon me today.
And in any case peoples' families are mixed and blended. Unless you think that a little bit of Protestant overrides everything else in people's ancestry.
https://ifs.org.uk/collections/nhs-waiting-lists
The drop in total numbers waiting was in the months after March 2020, and Co incident with a sharp increase in the numbers of very long waiters. It was due to a sharp drop in the number of referrals to hospital services for elective treatments.
(The graph above allows data to come from specific months if clicked on)
The Republic of Ireland is closer to Catholic Europe, hence it is in the EU and Eurozone and the UK isn't.
I would say the Midlands and North and Wales and Cornwall and Essex are probably culturally closer to Australia, while most of southern England is closer to NZ or New England in the US or the Canadian Atlantic coast.
London is probably quite close to Melbourne or Sydney
Note that Czar of Cicero never made it much past the Cook County line.
Whereas the Capo of Bakhmut got 3/4 of way to Red Square; of course US govt in 1920s was NOT engaged in a failed invasion of Canada.
More Australians watch British TV programmes than Irish TV programmes too.
For goodness sake, France is much closer to us than New Zealand, doesn't make us culturally closer to the French than Kiwis!!
Oz really isn't like the USA. It is in the US/Anglosphere, militarily, but culturally it is much more Anglo, indeed European in general (welfare state, no guns, no abortion stuff, low level religiosity, etc)
Except for the 'heart of a lion' business.
Of the majority Protestant heritage nations in Europe, the UK, Switzerland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden and Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands and Finland, only the Dutch, Germans and Finns are in the Eurozone and EU
I've often heard on here (not so much recently mind) that the EU referendum was a huge epoch defining exercise in UK democracy; constituent countries of the UK voted one way while others voted very much another way. Those countries also have had very different attitudes to eg the Tories, Thatcher, Johnson etc, so unless one thinks politics is relatively unimportant, I'd classify these as quite definite distinctions.
Half of them have spent the last couple of years celebrating him.
It’s wilful blindness to both-sides that.
Our issues are that:
- GDP hasn't grown enough to enable the government to spend more, which is true but a whole different debate
- the healthcare system, designed around a 1940s Stalinist monolith, is no longer appropriate and captured by producer interests, giving us lousy value for the money we DO spend
- we disastrously overreacted to the pandemic, turning the NHS into the National COVID service, instead of letting it work its way through the healthy population with sensible but voluntarily social distancing measures to protect the vulnerable until vaccines arrived.
But calling for more resources without saying where they'd come from (schools? police? army? the already overtaxed?) I don't think is particularly realistic.
Of course best wishes to OGH for his future health.
https://snyder.substack.com/p/prigozhins-march-on-moscow
A sample: "When backed into a corner, Putin saves himself. In the West, we worry about Putin's feelings. What might he do if he feels threatened? Might he do something terrible to us? Putin encourages this line of thinking with constant bluster about "escalation" and the like. On Saturday Putin gave another speech full of threats, this time directed against Prigozhin and Wagner. Then he got into a plane and flew away to another city. And then he made a deal with Prigozhin. And then all legal charges against Prigozhin were dropped. And then Putin's propagandists explained that all of this was perfectly normal.
So long as Putin is in power, this is what he will do. He will threaten and hope that those threats will change the behaviour of his enemies. When that fails, he will change the story. His regime rests on propaganda, and in the end the spectacle generated by the military is there to serve the propaganda. Even when that spectacle is as humiliating as can be possibly be imagined, as it was on Saturday when Russian rebels marched on Moscow and Putin fled, his response will be to try to change the subject. "
As for unwashed masses of all-too common (in more ways than one?) UKer RCs with Irish, Italian, etc., etc. ancestry from Beyond the Pale, well . . .
And that's a fair point. I've been in a room he was working politically, and the charisma was tangible. Had he stuck to being a prep school sports master, he'd have been a terrifying opponent and would probably have retired with the (low key) glory and adulation he has sought. But that was never going to happen.
Desnarking my earlier question- why do London Conservatives keep going for charismatic chancers as their mayoral standard bearers? Because it's too frequent to just be coincidence, and it means they pick candidates who are prone to scandals. Two guesses.
One is that to put in a bid to be a Conservative Mayor of London, you do need balls and ego. Somehow, you have to think that you can turn the table of the city's demographics or you are heading for a loss. The other is that the Conservative conception of Mayor is pretty PT Barnum; going round hyping the city. The other big bit- managing public transport- isn't the sort of thing that Conservatives are that interested in as a matter of principle. So you get showman candidates and that's always a risk.
1m
Fourth SNP MP not seeking re-election
See also Ian Blackford, Peter Grant and Angela Crawley
https://twitter.com/GlennBBC/status/1673429098369110017
Plus more Estonians are now Eastern Orthodox than Lutheran
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Estonia#:~:text=Estonia, historically a Lutheran Christian,part of their daily life.
It just seems, from a negative point of view, brasher and with less of a sub-class aspiring to refinement or culture, and, from a more positive interpretation, more expansively, noisily egalitarian, in a geograohically large and young country way, and which reminds me more of the U.S. New Zealand just still seems noticeably more similar to us here in the UK, I think.
MC did NOT appear too filled with admiration of MC at that point in time.
As for His Lordship, I observed him in the dock, from courtroom visitor's gallery, on several days. Old Bailey being best theater in London, and with cheapest seats.
View of the dock from my perch was far better than what the journos could see from their seats.
At one point during the trial, story was published, that Archer was talking careful notes of trial testimony. When (as I could see with my own eyes) he was really going though his appointment book (diary in UKese) scratching out appointments.
Got the feeling that he was sensing what the outcome was likely to be . . .
I wouldn't suggest that East African Asians were much like Maori either! Indeed the ethnic minorities here are quite dissimilar to ethnic minorities in other Commonwealth countries.
This is why I asked @rcs1000 to remove the LIKE button. Likes encourage cant, and banal emotion, and the herd mentality, and sad, crowdpleasing drivel, they are scout badges for inadequate morons, but, you know, well done
If a person with a clipboard comes up to you and asks you your feelings on this and that subject, you might give one answer to their face and a different one if you anonymously.
Some people say that "culture" is the way people behave when nobody's looking. That's a narrow view, but it holds an important truth: in the polling station, only you know what you put and that's where you can be really honest.
It’s not very well written, not least because it’s actually quite hard to understand what he means by moving on.
My understanding of it though is something that I’ve often said to disgruntled Corbynites (and tbh other people who who have despaired at times of the unending crapness of our government) - there are many ways to make a real, practical difference to our society. A fandom around magic grandad is not the be-all-end-all, and in fact you can go out right now and do stuff that makes positive, practical difference without a thought for the ballot box. Not in a ‘do things that should be paid work for free cheers Dave’ Big Society way, but the way a functioning society has always relied on contributory action.
That can mean political action; it can mean volunteering, it can mean simple stuff like doing your gardening in a responsible way or whatever.
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New England is also probably closer to the UK and New Zealand than Australia and most of the rest of the USA
It’s not yet clear whether the conservative group will formally eject her, but people familiar with the matter pointed to a consensus against her.
House Freedom Caucus members took a momentous vote Friday on Marjorie Taylor Greene’s future with the group, according to three people familiar with the matter — but it’s not yet clear whether she’s been officially ejected.
The right-flank group took up Greene’s status amid an internal push, first reported by POLITICO, to consider purging members who are inactive or at odds with the Freedom Caucus. Greene’s close alliance with Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and her accompanying criticism of colleagues in the group, has put her on the opposite side of a bloc that made its name opposing GOP leadership.
While her formal status in the conservative group remains in limbo, the 8 a.m. Friday vote — which sources said ended with a consensus against her — points to, at least, continued strong anti-Greene sentiment.
SSI - wrap yer heads around THIS concept: MTG too woke for REAL wack-jobs.