NY Times had a piece yesterday arguing that Putin and Kremlin are wetting themselves because they think Trump will destroy the US as a high functioning, democratic state and that is all to the good for their schemes.
Whether Putin has engineered this or is riding his blind luck remains a moot point.
@StillWaters on your point about building consensus, I would be interested to hear your thoughts on the trans issue and if we can find some common ground as I have with others
I think consensus is fine. I like to build consensus where it can be found, obviously that won’t be the case for everything but I think on this issue there is a middle ground somewhere.
My views on this have changed some after listening to the women on here. I don’t think that a bad thing.
But surely, in order to listen to women, you have to define "women". Which leads you into a logical impasse, Shirley?
The main reason public sector productivity is so poor is the inability to move unproductive people out. The ultimate tool for increasing output per worker is to shit can the least productive ones which is something that private sector businesses do all the time. Until that attitude is brought to the public sector no amount of "investment" will help. The lazy and the feckless are attracted to the public sector because they know once they're in it's impossible to be removed regardless of how shit they are at the job.
Change this and suddenly public sector productivity will shoot up as those lazy buggers start to fear for their next salary.
Let’s presume for one moment Angela Rayners wheeze of allowing public sector workers to do the same job for four days a week comes to pass. How would this impact productivity ?
Massively increase it, because labour productivity is measured as output per hour worked.
Ed Davey was at the farmers' rally as well so does that mean he was on the same bandwagon?
Oppositions oppose - that's what they do - but there's a difference between contradiction and argument as Mr Python once demonstrated. For every tax rise they wish to reverse, both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats have to show how they would "compensate" the public finances. I suspect both may find it difficult as we approach the next election to square the circle of cutting taxes, improving services and balancing the public finances.
As we've also seen this morning, public sector productivity remains a big problem - the kneejerk response of sacking 50% of civil servants won't help that at all.
The problem is we can't have a proper conversation about tax in this country - there's a claim from some we are "over taxed" (not quite sure what that means) and there's a valid question as to whether we get any "value" from the taxes we pay but the truth is we have a deficit which needs to be closed and borrowing which needs to be reduced and there's little or no honesty from anyone about any of this.
Yes, cut spending if there is an obvious argument (and nothing, including the armed forces, should be exempt) but the Party is over and we all now need to pay the bill and if that means raising basic rate tax to 25p and higher rate to 50p and looking at property and land asset value taxation, so be it.
Your final paragraph might be fine proposals for a left of centre Labour party and the Greens albeit at the risk of losing swing voters who hate higher taxes. They certainly aren't for a right of centre Conservative party
Fair enough so back to you - what would a "right of centre" (not even sure what that means) Party propose to reduce the deficit and borrowing?
Spending cuts? If so, what and where and why weren't these enacted during the 14 years your party led the Government? A previous Conservative Prime Minister transformed the State in eleven and a half years - the five leaders you chose over a 14 year period did the sum equivalent of bugger all.
Indeed one might argue for a "right of centre" party you governed more like a "left of centre" party but you didn't even do that properly.
Well we would start by axing the payrise for GPs and train drivers.
We could also then move on to making the NHS more efficient and finding savings there rather than just shovelling money into a bottomless pit.
The pay rises for GPs and train drivers are a drop in the ocean and how would you reverse the pay increases in 2029 without triggering a wave of industrial unrest which would cost the economy - it's about what you would do when you are in power in 2029, not what you would do if you were in power now because, as I'm sure you remember, you were trounced at the General Election.
As for the NHS, I'm sure you're right but somebody in your party has to put in the hard work and identify the savings before the next election so we all know for what we would be voting. I'd also argue you had 14 years to identify these efficiencies and savings - did you?
I disagree. First of all, she needs to shore up the base. And, by the way, it's worth noting that the Lib Dems are also opposing both tax raids.
Opposing yes, but no pledge to reverse. That's what opposition parties do, oppose policies will hurt people who they would quite like to vote for them. I would be amazed if reversing this made the next Lib Dem manifesto. I would be mildly surprised if winter fuel allowance made the next Lib Dem manifesto (although I could see some complex tapering of support for those on the margin of eligibility.)
What's marking Kemi out as naive at this stage is making huge public spending commitments for a General Election in 2028/9. The landscape then will be hugely different to what it is now and all she's doing is boxing herself in. Either she can't pledge what she actually needs then, her manifesto will be less plausible than Corbyn's or she'll have to publicly screw over Britain's farmers and pensioners and look untrustworthy. What a choice.
I had no idea that farms were inheritance tax-free until the last few weeks. Never really thought about it. I guess that if there's one piece of advice to give someone it's to be born rich, and two pieces it's to be born to a rich farmer. If the farmers are smart they'll do some hard PR to us ignorant townies on how hard farming is, as it's all tax breaks in the headlines.
While Bademoch has promised to reverse the IHT changes for farmers and the VAT on school fees, she does not seem to have done the same for the end of the universal winter fuel allowance.
It is Tory policy to reverse the winter fuel cut too
It's labour's policy in Scotland - let Starmer explain that one
I'll be interested to see how Mr Sarwar promises to do that without budget cuts elsewhere, as the Barnett consequential of the DWP WFA has vanished (hence the SNP having to follow suit).
NB that this isn't grandstanding for the GE but the rather sooner Holyrood election which however isn't till May 2026, so time for him to quietly forget about it.
Also: despite the headlines, he's not promising to restore WFP but just to means test it - which isn't so far off the current Westminster proposal anyway.
I really hoped that SLab ( the forgotten nothing, learnt nothing party) would have a whack at forming a government at Holyrood just to remind voters of their quality, but it looks like it may not happen. Still an outside chance of them cobbling together something with their Unionist fellow travellers, assuming Reform don't gut the SCons.
More importantly it gives Farage's party the balance of power.
'It would also result in a situation where, unless the SNP and Labour formed a grand coalition, no combination of parties could secure a majority without Nigel Farage’s Reform UK... Curtice’s projections put the SNP on 42 MSPs, with Labour on 34, the Conservatives 18, Reform 14, the Lib Dems 11 and the Greens 10.
The main reason public sector productivity is so poor is the inability to move unproductive people out. The ultimate tool for increasing output per worker is to shit can the least productive ones which is something that private sector businesses do all the time. Until that attitude is brought to the public sector no amount of "investment" will help. The lazy and the feckless are attracted to the public sector because they know once they're in it's impossible to be removed regardless of how shit they are at the job.
Change this and suddenly public sector productivity will shoot up as those lazy buggers start to fear for their next salary.
Let’s presume for one moment Angela Rayners wheeze of allowing public sector workers to do the same job for four days a week comes to pass. How would this impact productivity ?
The wage bill of the public sector is being cut by 20% ?
The main reason public sector productivity is so poor is the inability to move unproductive people out. The ultimate tool for increasing output per worker is to shit can the least productive ones which is something that private sector businesses do all the time. Until that attitude is brought to the public sector no amount of "investment" will help. The lazy and the feckless are attracted to the public sector because they know once they're in it's impossible to be removed regardless of how shit they are at the job.
Change this and suddenly public sector productivity will shoot up as those lazy buggers start to fear for their next salary.
I get the point, but it's a ratchet: there will always be a "least productive" layer, you can't perpetually remove the last rung of a ladder. Far better to remove departments entirely: not so much "shovel shit faster", so much "stop shovelling shit and goodbye"
@StillWaters on your point about building consensus, I would be interested to hear your thoughts on the trans issue and if we can find some common ground as I have with others.
My views on this have changed some after listening to the women on here. I don’t think that a bad thing.
Have you seen the new movie on Netflix causing a stir amongst the Trans community?
"Emilia Perez" is completely demented. Imagine Mrs Doubtfire the musical played straight and reset in a Mexican cartel, with songs and choreography that make "Springtime for Hitler" look tasteful.
It's either brilliant or appalling. I can't decide.
The main reason public sector productivity is so poor is the inability to move unproductive people out. The ultimate tool for increasing output per worker is to shit can the least productive ones which is something that private sector businesses do all the time. Until that attitude is brought to the public sector no amount of "investment" will help. The lazy and the feckless are attracted to the public sector because they know once they're in it's impossible to be removed regardless of how shit they are at the job.
Change this and suddenly public sector productivity will shoot up as those lazy buggers start to fear for their next salary.
You'd probably have to boost salaries a quite bit to make up for the additional uncertainty - there would be a lot of collateral damage along the way, and the pensions aren't worth as much if you could randomly lose your job in your 40s/50s.
That's been the situation for decades, at all levels. Cleaning and security staff replaced by contractors, many libraries closed or volunteer run, music teachers and parkkeepers no longer needed, general thinning out, pension schemes downgraded (and grandfather rights to older schemes won't apply if you start afresh), and so on.
The main reason public sector productivity is so poor is the inability to move unproductive people out. The ultimate tool for increasing output per worker is to shit can the least productive ones which is something that private sector businesses do all the time. Until that attitude is brought to the public sector no amount of "investment" will help. The lazy and the feckless are attracted to the public sector because they know once they're in it's impossible to be removed regardless of how shit they are at the job.
Change this and suddenly public sector productivity will shoot up as those lazy buggers start to fear for their next salary.
Let’s presume for one moment Angela Rayners wheeze of allowing public sector workers to do the same job for four days a week comes to pass. How would this impact productivity ?
The wage bill of the public sector is being cut by 20% ?
All for it.
Lol no, same money 32h week is what's being suggested. Dropping 3-5.5h from the working week. Though @Eabhal is correct the measure of productivity will rise because for those lazy workers their output will stay the same but the denominator will go down by over 10%.
The main reason public sector productivity is so poor is the inability to move unproductive people out. The ultimate tool for increasing output per worker is to shit can the least productive ones which is something that private sector businesses do all the time. Until that attitude is brought to the public sector no amount of "investment" will help. The lazy and the feckless are attracted to the public sector because they know once they're in it's impossible to be removed regardless of how shit they are at the job.
Change this and suddenly public sector productivity will shoot up as those lazy buggers start to fear for their next salary.
If you really fail to perform then you can still be moved out of a public sector role. Plus if you aren't even productive enough for the public sector you certainly won't be for the private sector which means you just end up with a higher welfare and UC bill to support them
He does it to get a rise out of the Tory right, which seems to be his mission in life.
Best response is simply to ignore it.
He writes the headers so how can you ignore him?
There isn't much dissent from the PB Tory echo chamber at the moment so perhaps TSE is just throwing a little flavour of Devil's advocate into the mix to keep you lot on your toes.
Back to the good old days with the rabid right reminding everyone who had forgotten what the true face of the Tory/UKIPers look like. It's refreshing and for those who have been posting for a long time quite nostalgic. A pity so many changed their usernames during the recent dark days but you can't have everything
The main reason public sector productivity is so poor is the inability to move unproductive people out. The ultimate tool for increasing output per worker is to shit can the least productive ones which is something that private sector businesses do all the time. Until that attitude is brought to the public sector no amount of "investment" will help. The lazy and the feckless are attracted to the public sector because they know once they're in it's impossible to be removed regardless of how shit they are at the job.
Change this and suddenly public sector productivity will shoot up as those lazy buggers start to fear for their next salary.
Let’s presume for one moment Angela Rayners wheeze of allowing public sector workers to do the same job for four days a week comes to pass. How would this impact productivity ?
The wage bill of the public sector is being cut by 20% ?
The main reason public sector productivity is so poor is the inability to move unproductive people out. The ultimate tool for increasing output per worker is to shit can the least productive ones which is something that private sector businesses do all the time. Until that attitude is brought to the public sector no amount of "investment" will help. The lazy and the feckless are attracted to the public sector because they know once they're in it's impossible to be removed regardless of how shit they are at the job.
Change this and suddenly public sector productivity will shoot up as those lazy buggers start to fear for their next salary.
Let’s presume for one moment Angela Rayners wheeze of allowing public sector workers to do the same job for four days a week comes to pass. How would this impact productivity ?
Massively increase it, because labour productivity is measured as output per hour worked.
No, because same hours. And less time spent travelling overall/outside rush hours. A change to flexitime rules, essentially.
The main reason public sector productivity is so poor is the inability to move unproductive people out. The ultimate tool for increasing output per worker is to shit can the least productive ones which is something that private sector businesses do all the time. Until that attitude is brought to the public sector no amount of "investment" will help. The lazy and the feckless are attracted to the public sector because they know once they're in it's impossible to be removed regardless of how shit they are at the job.
Change this and suddenly public sector productivity will shoot up as those lazy buggers start to fear for their next salary.
If you really fail to perform then you can still be moved out of a public sector role. Plus if you aren't even productive enough for the public sector you certainly won't be for the private sector which means you just end up with a higher welfare and UC bill to support them
The welfare bill will be lower than keeping them in a salaried role. It may also force them to find their level, delivery driving or shelf filling etc...
The main reason public sector productivity is so poor is the inability to move unproductive people out. The ultimate tool for increasing output per worker is to shit can the least productive ones which is something that private sector businesses do all the time. Until that attitude is brought to the public sector no amount of "investment" will help. The lazy and the feckless are attracted to the public sector because they know once they're in it's impossible to be removed regardless of how shit they are at the job.
Change this and suddenly public sector productivity will shoot up as those lazy buggers start to fear for their next salary.
Let’s presume for one moment Angela Rayners wheeze of allowing public sector workers to do the same job for four days a week comes to pass. How would this impact productivity ?
The wage bill of the public sector is being cut by 20% ?
All for it.
Lol no, same money 32h week is what's being suggested. Dropping 3-5.5h from the working week. Though @Eabhal is correct the measure of productivity will rise because for those lazy workers their output will stay the same but the denominator will go down by over 10%.
Or smart, if they can run their code on Monday morning and spend the rest of the week arguing with strangers on PB.
On the basis that I want my Government to be competant even if I disagree with them on a lot of things, the Starmer reign so far really does worry me.
Three big tax policies have resulted from the Budget - Removing the Winter Fuel allowance (which I know was announced prior to the budget), Inheritence tax on family run businesses and farms, and increasing Employer's NI.
The first two of these are being done for explainable reasons (The state should not be giving money to those who don't need it just because they are old, and rich investors are using the IHT arrangments to avoid paying tax) but both have been completely ballsed up with their implementation - not the PR but the actual planned implementation.
It would have been easily possible to have devised a system to properly means test the WFA removal rather than using the blunt tool of Pension Credit and it was certainly possible to devise an IHT system that did not threaten the future of family farms and businesses whilst still closing the investment loophole. I just get the impression that, because they don't actually understand (or care?) about the collateral damage, they plough on with the most basic sledgehammer applications of their plans safe in the knowledge that they can always point to the intended target as an excuse. They are the Bomber Harris of politics.
(On the third policy of employers NI we have yet to see the effects of that but I suspect a lot of smaller businesses will be laying off staff or shutting down entirely and again there seems to be no effort to differentiate between larger companies and the small businesses which run on very low profit margins)
Meanwhile we still don't have an effective or fair tax regime for multinationals.
Isn't the problem not just the employer NI increase but also the substantial rise in the NMW making jobs much more expensive, especially in the hospitality industry
Yes I hadn't mentioned that one. That is partly me being a bit naughty because in principle I support increases in the Minimum Wage. But again it is something that should be a lot more nuanced and I get the impression Labour just don't do (or again care) about nuance.
With the Tories it is (or has been in recent years) naked self interest and feck the country, with Labour it is blind ideology and feck the country. Neither are attractive
We are already seeing unemployment starting to creep up. All Labour governments leave with higher unemployment than they inherited but it is concerning that we have started so soon.
Like you I support increases in the NMW but such decisions should never be made in a vacuum, they should be made with a very careful eye on the labour markets to ensure that too many people are not being priced out of a job.
I disagree. First of all, she needs to shore up the base. And, by the way, it's worth noting that the Lib Dems are also opposing both tax raids.
Opposing yes, but no pledge to reverse. That's what opposition parties do, oppose policies will hurt people who they would quite like to vote for them. I would be amazed if reversing this made the next Lib Dem manifesto. I would be mildly surprised if winter fuel allowance made the next Lib Dem manifesto (although I could see some complex tapering of support for those on the margin of eligibility.)
What's marking Kemi out as naive at this stage is making huge public spending commitments for a General Election in 2028/9. The landscape then will be hugely different to what it is now and all she's doing is boxing herself in. Either she can't pledge what she actually needs then, her manifesto will be less plausible than Corbyn's or she'll have to publicly screw over Britain's farmers and pensioners and look untrustworthy. What a choice.
I had no idea that farms were inheritance tax-free until the last few weeks. Never really thought about it. I guess that if there's one piece of advice to give someone it's to be born rich, and two pieces it's to be born to a rich farmer. If the farmers are smart they'll do some hard PR to us ignorant townies on how hard farming is, as it's all tax breaks in the headlines.
I suspect that behind the scenes in government there's some furious thinking about some sort of tapered Winter Fuel Payment.
And Good Morning one and all. Clear and cold here this morning.
On the basis that I want my Government to be competant even if I disagree with them on a lot of things, the Starmer reign so far really does worry me.
Three big tax policies have resulted from the Budget - Removing the Winter Fuel allowance (which I know was announced prior to the budget), Inheritence tax on family run businesses and farms, and increasing Employer's NI.
The first two of these are being done for explainable reasons (The state should not be giving money to those who don't need it just because they are old, and rich investors are using the IHT arrangments to avoid paying tax) but both have been completely ballsed up with their implementation - not the PR but the actual planned implementation.
It would have been easily possible to have devised a system to properly means test the WFA removal rather than using the blunt tool of Pension Credit and it was certainly possible to devise an IHT system that did not threaten the future of family farms and businesses whilst still closing the investment loophole. I just get the impression that, because they don't actually understand (or care?) about the collateral damage, they plough on with the most basic sledgehammer applications of their plans safe in the knowledge that they can always point to the intended target as an excuse. They are the Bomber Harris of politics.
(On the third policy of employers NI we have yet to see the effects of that but I suspect a lot of smaller businesses will be laying off staff or shutting down entirely and again there seems to be no effort to differentiate between larger companies and the small businesses which run on very low profit margins)
Meanwhile we still don't have an effective or fair tax regime for multinationals.
Exactly this. In answer to questions about the detailed implementation of the policy, the minister several times repeated the "it's important they pay their share for the NHS" mantra. And nothing else. Had they given the policy any thought, they'd have better rationale.
And yes, the tax treatment of multinationals is of far more financial significance - but it's difficult. That it's not on the agenda also suggests a lack of fundamental competence.
The main reason public sector productivity is so poor is the inability to move unproductive people out. The ultimate tool for increasing output per worker is to shit can the least productive ones which is something that private sector businesses do all the time. Until that attitude is brought to the public sector no amount of "investment" will help. The lazy and the feckless are attracted to the public sector because they know once they're in it's impossible to be removed regardless of how shit they are at the job.
Change this and suddenly public sector productivity will shoot up as those lazy buggers start to fear for their next salary.
Let’s presume for one moment Angela Rayners wheeze of allowing public sector workers to do the same job for four days a week comes to pass. How would this impact productivity ?
Work done per hour worked, the usual definition of productivity, would likely get slightly better.
However, work done per pound spent, and total work done overall, both likely get worse.
The main reason public sector productivity is so poor is the inability to move unproductive people out. The ultimate tool for increasing output per worker is to shit can the least productive ones which is something that private sector businesses do all the time. Until that attitude is brought to the public sector no amount of "investment" will help. The lazy and the feckless are attracted to the public sector because they know once they're in it's impossible to be removed regardless of how shit they are at the job.
Change this and suddenly public sector productivity will shoot up as those lazy buggers start to fear for their next salary.
Let’s presume for one moment Angela Rayners wheeze of allowing public sector workers to do the same job for four days a week comes to pass. How would this impact productivity ?
The wage bill of the public sector is being cut by 20% ?
The main reason public sector productivity is so poor is the inability to move unproductive people out. The ultimate tool for increasing output per worker is to shit can the least productive ones which is something that private sector businesses do all the time. Until that attitude is brought to the public sector no amount of "investment" will help. The lazy and the feckless are attracted to the public sector because they know once they're in it's impossible to be removed regardless of how shit they are at the job.
Change this and suddenly public sector productivity will shoot up as those lazy buggers start to fear for their next salary.
Let’s presume for one moment Angela Rayners wheeze of allowing public sector workers to do the same job for four days a week comes to pass. How would this impact productivity ?
Massively increase it, because labour productivity is measured as output per hour worked.
No, because same hours. And less time spent travelling overall/outside rush hours. A change to flexitime rules, essentially.
The suggestion is, aiui, moving to an 8h working day vs the current 7-7.5h working day so there is a net reduction in hours worked.
The main reason public sector productivity is so poor is the inability to move unproductive people out. The ultimate tool for increasing output per worker is to shit can the least productive ones which is something that private sector businesses do all the time. Until that attitude is brought to the public sector no amount of "investment" will help. The lazy and the feckless are attracted to the public sector because they know once they're in it's impossible to be removed regardless of how shit they are at the job.
Change this and suddenly public sector productivity will shoot up as those lazy buggers start to fear for their next salary.
Let’s presume for one moment Angela Rayners wheeze of allowing public sector workers to do the same job for four days a week comes to pass. How would this impact productivity ?
Massively increase it, because labour productivity is measured as output per hour worked.
LOL. That must be one of those wild wheezes that academics come up with.
We are getting less done but because we have cut the hours worked our productivty has gone up! Surely be that reckoning if we want to have soaring productivity we should just cut to a 1 day week. We would have the best productivity in the Western world by that measure.
The main reason public sector productivity is so poor is the inability to move unproductive people out. The ultimate tool for increasing output per worker is to shit can the least productive ones which is something that private sector businesses do all the time. Until that attitude is brought to the public sector no amount of "investment" will help. The lazy and the feckless are attracted to the public sector because they know once they're in it's impossible to be removed regardless of how shit they are at the job.
Change this and suddenly public sector productivity will shoot up as those lazy buggers start to fear for their next salary.
Not true. No such thing as a permanent job. Hasn't been for decades. Just reorganise and make everyone apply for the new jobs.
Of course but you get Conservatives like @MaxPB whose view of local Government in particular has been influenced by decades of Mail propaganda and who hasn't got the faintest idea of how the sector works or what it does.
Local Government has lost more than a million posts since 2012 and restructures (or re-organisations) are a fact of life. When I worked in local Government, I went through at least half a dozen - indeed, I'd argue the constant restructuring and the need to cut costs was often counter-productive as a disproportionate amount of officer time and money is wasted on said restructures.
I can't speak for other parts of the "public sector" (however you choose to define that and we can include the blue light sectors and the armed forces if we're being accurate) but there's no job security in local Government - even the Councillors (especially the Tory ones) don't feel as secure as they once did.
@ONS Public service productivity in Quarter 2 2024 is estimated to be 8.5% below its pre-#COVID19 pandemic peak in Quarter 4 (Oct to Dec) 2019.
And this is our problem in a nutshell. Our public services are falling apart, not because of cuts in spending which have been modest to non existent) but because we are getting less and less for our money. That is the problem the last government largely ducked and which this government has to come to terms with. If they don't no amount of additional taxation will be enough.
And the multi billion pound question is... why?
Is it about a lack of the smack of firm management, is it the money spent on diversity consultants, or is it that we have solved bottlenecks with the short term fix of extra bodies rather than equipping staff with better tools to achieve more?
My guess (based on the way that capital budgets always get raided to fix crises, and have been for decades, and we're going to be under Hunt) is that the last diagnosis is the main problem.
I think from my limited experience that there is a lack of quality management, that WFH has in fact reduced people's output despite all the claims to the contrary, that it has encouraged a mind set that this job is for my benefit rather than the benefit of the people to whom the service that is being provided, that it is my mental health and work life balance that is important, not the quality of life of the service users I am supposedly working for and, perhaps above all, the never ending multiplication of emails to masses of people who don't need to receive them but get interrupted anyway.
None of this will stop me from WFH today, of course.
I’ve found it made me more efficient at delivering existing work, and less efficient at winning new work. I’m back in most of the time now.
It’s definitely a challenge for our new joiners and graduate entry too.
My daughter, who qualified as a solicitor last week, had a job whilst at University with the SSSC which is a regulator of the care sector in Scotland. All the time she was working for them (admittedly during Covid) she was WFH and only rarely met her colleagues.
They offered her a traineeship but she, rightly in my view, came to the conclusion that she would not learn from that in the same way as she would in the office and she went for a private firm instead. Her current job has her in court pretty much every day and has given her a vast range of experience she simply would not have got with the SSSC who were offering her more money. The management there were genuinely surprised when she turned them down.
For young people yes being in the office 4/5 days a week or indeed 5 out of 5 may be a benefit as they get to know their team and do work in person.
For parents, especially mothers, wfh however is a godsend as it gives them time to do the school run, do the washing, cooking, cleaning etc in breaks from work at home in the day which they couldn't so easily with the daily commute and also saves on travel costs
The attractions for those mothers are obvious and it no doubt improves their work life balance enormously. The ONS seem to be indicating, however, that it is not doing a lot for their output.
Yes well given our below replacement fertility rate we could do with a few more women having an output of children as mothers with more work life balance making that easier than just being measured on their output of workplace productivity
If you want to improve fertility rates then tax cuts for 30 somethings not Farmers would be a good idea. Yet Kemi thinks statutory maternity pay should go.
"Yet Kemi thinks statutory maternity pay should go".
Not true.
She did for a while, but couldn't stick with her principles.
No she didn't. Part of the smear campaign. She said it is an example of benefits being excessive. (Many would agree, but that's besides the point.) She never said it 'should go' which is what you said.
The main reason public sector productivity is so poor is the inability to move unproductive people out. The ultimate tool for increasing output per worker is to shit can the least productive ones which is something that private sector businesses do all the time. Until that attitude is brought to the public sector no amount of "investment" will help. The lazy and the feckless are attracted to the public sector because they know once they're in it's impossible to be removed regardless of how shit they are at the job.
Change this and suddenly public sector productivity will shoot up as those lazy buggers start to fear for their next salary.
Let’s presume for one moment Angela Rayners wheeze of allowing public sector workers to do the same job for four days a week comes to pass. How would this impact productivity ?
Massively increase it, because labour productivity is measured as output per hour worked.
LOL. That must be one of those wild wheezes that academics come up with.
We are getting less done but because we have cut the hours worked our productivty has gone up! Surely be that reckoning if we want to have soaring productivity we should just cut to a 1 day week. We would have the best productivity in the Western world by that measure.
The main reason public sector productivity is so poor is the inability to move unproductive people out. The ultimate tool for increasing output per worker is to shit can the least productive ones which is something that private sector businesses do all the time. Until that attitude is brought to the public sector no amount of "investment" will help. The lazy and the feckless are attracted to the public sector because they know once they're in it's impossible to be removed regardless of how shit they are at the job.
Change this and suddenly public sector productivity will shoot up as those lazy buggers start to fear for their next salary.
That really doesn't account for an 8.5% fall in productivity in the space of only five years, though, does it ?
I'm not arguing with your thesis, but something else was going on there, if the ONS numbers are accurate.
As usual the best way to defeat right wing populists is to put them in power and let them destroy themselves - but at what cost to the rest of us???
*cough*BREXIT*cough*
Brexit came about due to centrist Dad Call me Dave.
Yep, never should have called the referendum.
Calling the EU referendum was not the problem. The trouble is Cameron is a lousy campaigner who ran a lousy campaign, but thought he was great at it.
All referendums are prone to populist protest votes, personally I would never have a referendum on any topic ever again.
We are a representative democracy, we elect MPs to make our laws. In any case it wasn't the EU referendum Leave vote that delivered Brexit, Parliament voted Brexit down for 3 years after 2016 after all, it was Boris winning a majority of Conservative MPs at the December 2019 GE
The main reason public sector productivity is so poor is the inability to move unproductive people out. The ultimate tool for increasing output per worker is to shit can the least productive ones which is something that private sector businesses do all the time. Until that attitude is brought to the public sector no amount of "investment" will help. The lazy and the feckless are attracted to the public sector because they know once they're in it's impossible to be removed regardless of how shit they are at the job.
Change this and suddenly public sector productivity will shoot up as those lazy buggers start to fear for their next salary.
Let’s presume for one moment Angela Rayners wheeze of allowing public sector workers to do the same job for four days a week comes to pass. How would this impact productivity ?
The wage bill of the public sector is being cut by 20% ?
All for it.
That might actually make a difference - but sadly it’s not what’s been proposed.
The main reason public sector productivity is so poor is the inability to move unproductive people out. The ultimate tool for increasing output per worker is to shit can the least productive ones which is something that private sector businesses do all the time. Until that attitude is brought to the public sector no amount of "investment" will help. The lazy and the feckless are attracted to the public sector because they know once they're in it's impossible to be removed regardless of how shit they are at the job.
Change this and suddenly public sector productivity will shoot up as those lazy buggers start to fear for their next salary.
Let’s presume for one moment Angela Rayners wheeze of allowing public sector workers to do the same job for four days a week comes to pass. How would this impact productivity ?
Massively increase it, because labour productivity is measured as output per hour worked.
LOL. That must be one of those wild wheezes that academics come up with.
We are getting less done but because we have cut the hours worked our productivty has gone up! Surely be that reckoning if we want to have soaring productivity we should just cut to a 1 day week. We would have the best productivity in the Western world by that measure.
That's precisely what happened over the course of the 19th/20th Century. We used to have a 6 day working week with people down mines for 12 hours a day.
It's an important distinction. Productivity growth is brilliant because it can both improve economic output and improve our standards of living - the balance between the two varies over time.
Torsten's Bell tweet is idiotic. Agricultural land is a tool of a trade. A house is not.
What has been less noticed is that the tax changes affect all family owned businesses. Not just farms. So the idea that this is just about closing off a loophole is nonsense. It is a tax change which will harm all family owned businesses. What is the justification for doing so?
The answers are all over the place: one minute it's "well very few will be affected" and the next "well the NHS will collapse without the money". These are incoherent and inconsistent. And frankly - though I imagine I will get a lot of grief for saying so - I don't think the purpose of our economy or tax policy should be to keep the NHS afloat. Even if it were other Budget decisions completely undermine that anyway - not least the NIC changes which will harm GP surgeries and care homes. A proper social care policy would do more to help the NHS than anything else - but on that we have once again got tumbleweed and a tax change which will, if anything, make matters worse.
The main reason public sector productivity is so poor is the inability to move unproductive people out. The ultimate tool for increasing output per worker is to shit can the least productive ones which is something that private sector businesses do all the time. Until that attitude is brought to the public sector no amount of "investment" will help. The lazy and the feckless are attracted to the public sector because they know once they're in it's impossible to be removed regardless of how shit they are at the job.
Change this and suddenly public sector productivity will shoot up as those lazy buggers start to fear for their next salary.
If you really fail to perform then you can still be moved out of a public sector role. Plus if you aren't even productive enough for the public sector you certainly won't be for the private sector which means you just end up with a higher welfare and UC bill to support them
The welfare bill will be lower than keeping them in a salaried role. It may also force them to find their level, delivery driving or shelf filling etc...
Not necessarily, depends on the wage, a low public sector wage may not be much higher than the welfare bill.
Delivery driving for example often has very demanding targets so they may not be able to do that either. Indeed the targets are often a disaster in my view, frequently we get delivery drivers ring the bell and dump parcels on the door 5 secs later rather than wait for us to pick them up. Targets which don't include quality of service are equally poor
I disagree. First of all, she needs to shore up the base. And, by the way, it's worth noting that the Lib Dems are also opposing both tax raids.
Opposing yes, but no pledge to reverse. That's what opposition parties do, oppose policies will hurt people who they would quite like to vote for them. I would be amazed if reversing this made the next Lib Dem manifesto. I would be mildly surprised if winter fuel allowance made the next Lib Dem manifesto (although I could see some complex tapering of support for those on the margin of eligibility.)
What's marking Kemi out as naive at this stage is making huge public spending commitments for a General Election in 2028/9. The landscape then will be hugely different to what it is now and all she's doing is boxing herself in. Either she can't pledge what she actually needs then, her manifesto will be less plausible than Corbyn's or she'll have to publicly screw over Britain's farmers and pensioners and look untrustworthy. What a choice.
I had no idea that farms were inheritance tax-free until the last few weeks. Never really thought about it. I guess that if there's one piece of advice to give someone it's to be born rich, and two pieces it's to be born to a rich farmer. If the farmers are smart they'll do some hard PR to us ignorant townies on how hard farming is, as it's all tax breaks in the headlines.
I suspect that behind the scenes in government there's some furious thinking about some sort of tapered Winter Fuel Payment.
And Good Morning one and all. Clear and cold here this morning.
One possibility, to avoid accusations of a U-turn, and to control the overall cost, would be an expansion of the cold weather payments scheme.
He does it to get a rise out of the Tory right, which seems to be his mission in life.
Best response is simply to ignore it.
He writes the headers so how can you ignore him?
There isn't much dissent from the PB Tory echo chamber at the moment so perhaps TSE is just throwing a little flavour of Devil's advocate into the mix to keep you lot on your toes.
Back to the good old days with the rabid right reminding everyone who had forgotten what the true face of the Tory/UKIPers look like. It's refreshing and for those who have been posting for a long time quite nostalgic. A pity so many changed their usernames during the recent dark days but you can't have everything
On TSE headers: his headers, so he can write what he likes. And he has a bit of a tendency to troll the right – again, he can write what he likes. Worth noting that he did write a header yesterday which was uncharacteristically Kemi-positive, though.
But on this particular issue, as a right-wing voice I agree with TSE. I’m still broadly Kemi positive, but she needs to avoid the tendency to oppose EVERYTHING the government does; or at least to nuance her opposition. WFA was a cynical Brown-era tactic and made no sense then and should definitely be abolished, if for no other reason on the principle of simplification of the jungle of the benefit system. And farmers’ IHT: yes, it appears, like the private school tax, part of an assault on Labours’ enemies – but it wasn’t really performing the job it was designed to. At the very least, we need to consider a better situation.
At the very least, KB makes herself a hostage to fortune by opposing EVERYTHING – in the (unlikely, in my view) event that she wins power, she has given herself some very expensive millstones.
In Kemi's defence, she hasn't gone full "The UK needs a TRUMP", Liz Truss style.
A thoughful column from Sunder Katwala (@Sundersays on both Twitter and Bluesky):
Comment: Britain is not America, so how do we keep it that way?
"..I was reflecting on Britain and America in giving the Migration Museum’s annual lecture last week, exploring how the history of migration might influence the future. America has had a much clearer idea of itself as a “nation of immigrants” – symbolised by the Statue of Liberty. But that did not prevent Trump winning while pledging the biggest deportation effort in American history. Trump’s return strengthens the case for clear blue Transatlantic water – keeping a distance from America’s culture wars as we navigate our own identity challenges in a changing Britain."
Ed Davey was at the farmers' rally as well so does that mean he was on the same bandwagon?
Oppositions oppose - that's what they do - but there's a difference between contradiction and argument as Mr Python once demonstrated. For every tax rise they wish to reverse, both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats have to show how they would "compensate" the public finances. I suspect both may find it difficult as we approach the next election to square the circle of cutting taxes, improving services and balancing the public finances.
As we've also seen this morning, public sector productivity remains a big problem - the kneejerk response of sacking 50% of civil servants won't help that at all.
The problem is we can't have a proper conversation about tax in this country - there's a claim from some we are "over taxed" (not quite sure what that means) and there's a valid question as to whether we get any "value" from the taxes we pay but the truth is we have a deficit which needs to be closed and borrowing which needs to be reduced and there's little or no honesty from anyone about any of this.
Yes, cut spending if there is an obvious argument (and nothing, including the armed forces, should be exempt) but the Party is over and we all now need to pay the bill and if that means raising basic rate tax to 25p and higher rate to 50p and looking at property and land asset value taxation, so be it.
Your final paragraph might be fine proposals for a left of centre Labour party and the Greens albeit at the risk of losing swing voters who hate higher taxes. They certainly aren't for a right of centre Conservative party
Fair enough so back to you - what would a "right of centre" (not even sure what that means) Party propose to reduce the deficit and borrowing?
Spending cuts? If so, what and where and why weren't these enacted during the 14 years your party led the Government? A previous Conservative Prime Minister transformed the State in eleven and a half years - the five leaders you chose over a 14 year period did the sum equivalent of bugger all.
Indeed one might argue for a "right of centre" party you governed more like a "left of centre" party but you didn't even do that properly.
Well we would start by axing the payrise for GPs and train drivers.
We could also then move on to making the NHS more efficient and finding savings there rather than just shovelling money into a bottomless pit.
The pay rises for GPs and train drivers are a drop in the ocean and how would you reverse the pay increases in 2029 without triggering a wave of industrial unrest which would cost the economy - it's about what you would do when you are in power in 2029, not what you would do if you were in power now because, as I'm sure you remember, you were trounced at the General Election.
As for the NHS, I'm sure you're right but somebody in your party has to put in the hard work and identify the savings before the next election so we all know for what we would be voting. I'd also argue you had 14 years to identify these efficiencies and savings - did you?
Labour are clearly willing to hammer small business, farmers and pensioners and the unrest that follows. If GPs and train drivers want unrest tough, they aren't getting massive above inflation rises from a Tory government.
The NHS was too sacred a cow under the last Tory government, there are savings that can be made in it while protecting those who need it
The main reason public sector productivity is so poor is the inability to move unproductive people out. The ultimate tool for increasing output per worker is to shit can the least productive ones which is something that private sector businesses do all the time. Until that attitude is brought to the public sector no amount of "investment" will help. The lazy and the feckless are attracted to the public sector because they know once they're in it's impossible to be removed regardless of how shit they are at the job.
Change this and suddenly public sector productivity will shoot up as those lazy buggers start to fear for their next salary.
That really doesn't account for an 8.5% fall in productivity in the space of only five years, though, does it ?
I'm not arguing with your thesis, but something else was going on there, if the ONS numbers are accurate.
It's more that there is little interest in productivity. I think a large chunk of the problem is interacting processes - it is quite common to hear that people have no work, followed by an avalanche, followed by no work.. And no, the work itself shouldn't be episodic. This pattern is common in systems where the structure isn't aligned with the workload.
It's a bit like the aligning of traffic lights with traffic speeds - you can create a system where everyone stops and starts all the time. Or you can tune it, so that, at the legal speed, you go through one green light and cruise through all the others on green.
@StillWaters on your point about building consensus, I would be interested to hear your thoughts on the trans issue and if we can find some common ground as I have with others.
My views on this have changed some after listening to the women on here. I don’t think that a bad thing.
Have you seen the new movie on Netflix causing a stir amongst the Trans community?
"Emilia Perez" is completely demented. Imagine Mrs Doubtfire the musical played straight and reset in a Mexican cartel, with songs and choreography that make "Springtime for Hitler" look tasteful.
It's either brilliant or appalling. I can't decide.
The main reason public sector productivity is so poor is the inability to move unproductive people out. The ultimate tool for increasing output per worker is to shit can the least productive ones which is something that private sector businesses do all the time. Until that attitude is brought to the public sector no amount of "investment" will help. The lazy and the feckless are attracted to the public sector because they know once they're in it's impossible to be removed regardless of how shit they are at the job.
Change this and suddenly public sector productivity will shoot up as those lazy buggers start to fear for their next salary.
Let’s presume for one moment Angela Rayners wheeze of allowing public sector workers to do the same job for four days a week comes to pass. How would this impact productivity ?
The wage bill of the public sector is being cut by 20% ?
All for it.
Lol no, same money 32h week is what's being suggested. Dropping 3-5.5h from the working week. Though @Eabhal is correct the measure of productivity will rise because for those lazy workers their output will stay the same but the denominator will go down by over 10%.
Or smart, if they can run their code on Monday morning and spend the rest of the week arguing with strangers on PB.
Ahem.
Or the amount of work down will go down in line with the reduction in hours worked.
The main reason public sector productivity is so poor is the inability to move unproductive people out. The ultimate tool for increasing output per worker is to shit can the least productive ones which is something that private sector businesses do all the time. Until that attitude is brought to the public sector no amount of "investment" will help. The lazy and the feckless are attracted to the public sector because they know once they're in it's impossible to be removed regardless of how shit they are at the job.
Change this and suddenly public sector productivity will shoot up as those lazy buggers start to fear for their next salary.
Not true. No such thing as a permanent job. Hasn't been for decades. Just reorganise and make everyone apply for the new jobs.
Of course but you get Conservatives like @MaxPB whose view of local Government in particular has been influenced by decades of Mail propaganda and who hasn't got the faintest idea of how the sector works or what it does.
Local Government has lost more than a million posts since 2012 and restructures (or re-organisations) are a fact of life. When I worked in local Government, I went through at least half a dozen - indeed, I'd argue the constant restructuring and the need to cut costs was often counter-productive as a disproportionate amount of officer time and money is wasted on said restructures.
I can't speak for other parts of the "public sector" (however you choose to define that and we can include the blue light sectors and the armed forces if we're being accurate) but there's no job security in local Government - even the Councillors (especially the Tory ones) don't feel as secure as they once did.
Very much the same experience in my government agency. Including the heaps of bumf generated during restructures. And Mrs C and my collaborators in universities. Ditto added to by the periodic research quality assessment.
Torsten's Bell tweet is idiotic. Agricultural land is a tool of a trade. A house is not.
What has been less noticed is that the tax changes affect all family owned businesses. Not just farms. So the idea that this is just about closing off a loophole is nonsense. It is a tax change which will harm all family owned businesses. What is the justification for doing so?
The answers are all over the place: one minute it's "well very few will be affected" and the next "well the NHS will collapse without the money". These are incoherent and inconsistent. And frankly - though I imagine I will get a lot of grief for saying so - I don't think the purpose of our economy or tax policy should be to keep the NHS afloat. Even if it were other Budget decisions completely undermine that anyway - not least the NIC changes which will harm GP surgeries and care homes. A proper social care policy would do more to help the NHS than anything else - but on that we have once again got tumbleweed and a tax change which will, if anything, make matters worse.
On social care it could be even worse than you describe. The current plan seems to be set a mechanism to allow higher/fairer levels of pay across the whole sector, yet with no indication whatsoever how local councils will fund the whacking increase in fees required.
Laura K claims there is a big meeting scheduled for this coming Monday between chancellor, PM and NHS ministers to finally thrash this out.
Ed Davey was at the farmers' rally as well so does that mean he was on the same bandwagon?
Oppositions oppose - that's what they do - but there's a difference between contradiction and argument as Mr Python once demonstrated. For every tax rise they wish to reverse, both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats have to show how they would "compensate" the public finances. I suspect both may find it difficult as we approach the next election to square the circle of cutting taxes, improving services and balancing the public finances.
As we've also seen this morning, public sector productivity remains a big problem - the kneejerk response of sacking 50% of civil servants won't help that at all.
The problem is we can't have a proper conversation about tax in this country - there's a claim from some we are "over taxed" (not quite sure what that means) and there's a valid question as to whether we get any "value" from the taxes we pay but the truth is we have a deficit which needs to be closed and borrowing which needs to be reduced and there's little or no honesty from anyone about any of this.
Yes, cut spending if there is an obvious argument (and nothing, including the armed forces, should be exempt) but the Party is over and we all now need to pay the bill and if that means raising basic rate tax to 25p and higher rate to 50p and looking at property and land asset value taxation, so be it.
Your final paragraph might be fine proposals for a left of centre Labour party and the Greens albeit at the risk of losing swing voters who hate higher taxes. They certainly aren't for a right of centre Conservative party
Fair enough so back to you - what would a "right of centre" (not even sure what that means) Party propose to reduce the deficit and borrowing?
Spending cuts? If so, what and where and why weren't these enacted during the 14 years your party led the Government? A previous Conservative Prime Minister transformed the State in eleven and a half years - the five leaders you chose over a 14 year period did the sum equivalent of bugger all.
Indeed one might argue for a "right of centre" party you governed more like a "left of centre" party but you didn't even do that properly.
Well we would start by axing the payrise for GPs and train drivers.
We could also then move on to making the NHS more efficient and finding savings there rather than just shovelling money into a bottomless pit.
The pay rises for GPs and train drivers are a drop in the ocean and how would you reverse the pay increases in 2029 without triggering a wave of industrial unrest which would cost the economy - it's about what you would do when you are in power in 2029, not what you would do if you were in power now because, as I'm sure you remember, you were trounced at the General Election.
As for the NHS, I'm sure you're right but somebody in your party has to put in the hard work and identify the savings before the next election so we all know for what we would be voting. I'd also argue you had 14 years to identify these efficiencies and savings - did you?
Labour are clearly willing to hammer small business, farmers and pensioners and the unrest that follows. If GPs and train drivers want unrest tough, they aren't getting massive above inflation rises from a Tory government.
The NHS was too sacred a cow under the last Tory government, there are savings that can be made in it while protecting those who need it
Well, the Review Body on Doctors and Dentists Remuneration (set up by a Conservative Government in 1960) publishes a report annually and normally the Government agrees to its findings as an independent body. Would you advocate the abolition of the review body or only if it makes recommendations you don't like?
While Bademoch has promised to reverse the IHT changes for farmers and the VAT on school fees, she does not seem to have done the same for the end of the universal winter fuel allowance.
It is Tory policy to reverse the winter fuel cut too
It's labour's policy in Scotland - let Starmer explain that one
I'll be interested to see how Mr Sarwar promises to do that without budget cuts elsewhere, as the Barnett consequential of the DWP WFA has vanished (hence the SNP having to follow suit).
NB that this isn't grandstanding for the GE but the rather sooner Holyrood election which however isn't till May 2026, so time for him to quietly forget about it.
Also: despite the headlines, he's not promising to restore WFP but just to means test it - which isn't so far off the current Westminster proposal anyway.
I really hoped that SLab ( the forgotten nothing, learnt nothing party) would have a whack at forming a government at Holyrood just to remind voters of their quality, but it looks like it may not happen. Still an outside chance of them cobbling together something with their Unionist fellow travellers, assuming Reform don't gut the SCons.
More importantly it gives Farage's party the balance of power.
'It would also result in a situation where, unless the SNP and Labour formed a grand coalition, no combination of parties could secure a majority without Nigel Farage’s Reform UK... Curtice’s projections put the SNP on 42 MSPs, with Labour on 34, the Conservatives 18, Reform 14, the Lib Dems 11 and the Greens 10.
Firstly, it isn't true that "unless the SNP and Labour formed a grand coalition, no combination of parties could secure a majority without Nigel Farage’s Reform UK." Whilst unlikely in different ways, Lab+Con+LD+Greeen, SNP+Con+LD, or SNP+Con+Green would all have majorities.
Secondly, a Scottish government doesn't require a majority and on several occasions, including now, has governed without one. The numbers in the projection don't make that especially easy, but in terms of getting a budget through, Scottish politics doesn't split down unionism/independence lines - for example, there is a deal to be done between Tories and SNP on funding for rural communities (which are an important part of the electoral coalition for both).
Torsten's Bell tweet is idiotic. Agricultural land is a tool of a trade. A house is not.
What has been less noticed is that the tax changes affect all family owned businesses. Not just farms. So the idea that this is just about closing off a loophole is nonsense. It is a tax change which will harm all family owned businesses. What is the justification for doing so?
The justification is that these people should be paying IHT just like the the rest of us: Why should they escape being taxed just because they can wrap the family wealth up in a box marked “family business” ?
As to why people aren’t outraged: a couple can pass on £2.6million tax free (combination of family business & the nil rate band). The kinds of “family business“ that ordinary people feel shouldn’t be taxed are going to worth less than that as a going concern - you don’t pay £2million for a corner shop do you?
Torsten's Bell tweet is idiotic. Agricultural land is a tool of a trade. A house is not.
What has been less noticed is that the tax changes affect all family owned businesses. Not just farms. So the idea that this is just about closing off a loophole is nonsense. It is a tax change which will harm all family owned businesses. What is the justification for doing so?
The answers are all over the place: one minute it's "well very few will be affected" and the next "well the NHS will collapse without the money". These are incoherent and inconsistent. And frankly - though I imagine I will get a lot of grief for saying so - I don't think the purpose of our economy or tax policy should be to keep the NHS afloat. Even if it were other Budget decisions completely undermine that anyway - not least the NIC changes which will harm GP surgeries and care homes. A proper social care policy would do more to help the NHS than anything else - but on that we have once again got tumbleweed and a tax change which will, if anything, make matters worse.
Agreed re Bell’s tweet - a £3m house is comparable to a £3m farm if the homeowner can only make any income from activity done at the house and no other job, that the home has to hire or buy very expensive machinery to allow that activity and very expensive items that the expensive. Machinery works with to make even that small income.
I’m guessing Torsten’s parents don’t do this with their home and instead were able to leave it daily to go to other jobs which earner far more than the farmer will earn.
I would also be surprised if there were more people out there who would take on the massive burden of a £3m farm than would want to buy a £3m house.
The main reason public sector productivity is so poor is the inability to move unproductive people out. The ultimate tool for increasing output per worker is to shit can the least productive ones which is something that private sector businesses do all the time. Until that attitude is brought to the public sector no amount of "investment" will help. The lazy and the feckless are attracted to the public sector because they know once they're in it's impossible to be removed regardless of how shit they are at the job.
Change this and suddenly public sector productivity will shoot up as those lazy buggers start to fear for their next salary.
Let’s presume for one moment Angela Rayners wheeze of allowing public sector workers to do the same job for four days a week comes to pass. How would this impact productivity ?
Massively increase it, because labour productivity is measured as output per hour worked.
LOL. That must be one of those wild wheezes that academics come up with.
We are getting less done but because we have cut the hours worked our productivty has gone up! Surely be that reckoning if we want to have soaring productivity we should just cut to a 1 day week. We would have the best productivity in the Western world by that measure.
To try to bring some context to the debate, a lot of local Government workers (often female) work part time so they might do an 18 hour week rather than the standard 36 but it's my experience their managers often cram a week's work into half a week and I've witnesses some heated exchanges in meeting where part time staff can feel they are being over worked.
Productivity isn't just about working long hours which might be how it works in the culture of some private sector companies where if you're not working a 60 hour week you're not considered "loyal" to the company (I know it's not like that). How people work and how they are managed is a much bigger factor in determining productivity than the number of hours.
So, if it’s true that this farm tax will only affect several hundred people per year, and only raise several hundred million in extra tax (before the accountants and lawyers have a good go at it), why are the government prepared to waste so much political capital on such a small change?
Surely you save your political capital for major taxation changes that raise tens of billions? It comes across as ideological as a result, that the government are at best ambivalent to farming and rural communities. I suspect there will a revival of the Countryside Alliance as there was under Bair’s government, but this time with some newly very famous farmers leading the protests.
It's precisely the same situation as we saw with the Winter Fuel Payments. It's all about desperately scraping around for small change here and there, because they've ruled out most of the big ticket items (either in the manifesto or by filing them in the bin marked "too difficult.") They're burning through all their political capital on tax rises that are questionable or simply wrong headed, failing to raise enough money to shore up the state and provide the benefits and services that will help to convince people they're worth a second term, and relying on their image of toughness looking like decisive action in the national interest, when it often looks more like clumsy errors compounded by a stubborn refusal to admit as much.
This Government is in real danger of falling between two stools: making changes that are just enough to irritate the wealthy whilst being wholly insufficient (and, in the case of the NI raid and the refusal to support local government, positively harmful) to the interests of the less well off. The obvious risk is that, on five years' time, we shall have seen modest improvements in the health service whilst living standards continue to decline and the rest of the public realm keeps on decaying and shutting down. The Government risks going to the country trying to get re-elected on the basis that granny now only has to wait one year rather than three for a hip replacement, only to find itself condemned for making most of the country poorer, against a backdrop of cratered roads, closed libraries and bankrupt councils that collect the bins once every two months and spend everything else on social care services that still fail because of the weight of demand.
The nation requires emergency surgery; what it's going to get is another box of Elastoplast. If this all ends with Drs Badenoch and Farage diagnosing gangrene and cutting off both legs and an arm a few years down the road then the lack of decisive action now will have been to blame.
I think the political capital argument is the best one as to why SKS has a good chance of falling.
I have been trying to wrap my head around the approach, which many will answer there isn’t one. But SKS sticks doggedly to one approach as we saw with his role as LOTO.
My feeling is that they know there are no popular decisions to make so they are trying to get them all out the way in one go.
The idea then I guess is to get positive stories over the next five years around immigration and house building.
It seems very high risk to me. And tends towards failure.
Torsten's Bell tweet is idiotic. Agricultural land is a tool of a trade. A house is not.
What has been less noticed is that the tax changes affect all family owned businesses. Not just farms. So the idea that this is just about closing off a loophole is nonsense. It is a tax change which will harm all family owned businesses. What is the justification for doing so?
The answers are all over the place: one minute it's "well very few will be affected" and the next "well the NHS will collapse without the money". These are incoherent and inconsistent. And frankly - though I imagine I will get a lot of grief for saying so - I don't think the purpose of our economy or tax policy should be to keep the NHS afloat. Even if it were other Budget decisions completely undermine that anyway - not least the NIC changes which will harm GP surgeries and care homes. A proper social care policy would do more to help the NHS than anything else - but on that we have once again got tumbleweed and a tax change which will, if anything, make matters worse.
On social care it could be even worse than you describe. The current plan seems to be set a mechanism to allow higher/fairer levels of pay across the whole sector, yet with no indication whatsoever how local councils will fund the whacking increase in fees required.
Laura K claims there is a big meeting scheduled for this coming Monday between chancellor, PM and NHS ministers to finally thrash this out.
I expect more tumbleweed sadly.
I know you, like me, are knee deep in this.
An illustration of the waste:
My father is still at home with regular carer visits. He falls from time to time. Inevitable given his condition. No biggee. Check he's OK, help him up on sofa and make him a cuppa you might think.
But no. The carers will not apply common sense. They immediately call 999. Ambulance is booked but may be 4 - 6 hours. Dad expected to sit on floor for all this time, waiting to be helped up.So I (in another part of the country) get a call from the care agency, looking to be relieved. WTF do they expect me to do? I ring around best I can and - with luck - get a neighbour on phone who goes and helps him up. So I tell carer to cancel the ambulance. 'No' I'm told they can't do that. So now we have an ambulance coming at some point for an emergency which never existed. This has happened six times over last couple of months.
What a waste of time for the ambulance service. How many times is this scenario being played out across the country?
Ukraine builds a bridge to Trumpland Gone are appeals to democratic values. Ukraine’s new strategy for surviving Trump’s America centers on deals, strategic assets, and a surprising China card.
https://euromaidanpress.com/2024/11/19/ukraines-trump-strategy-inside-kyivs-plan-b/ ..The Financial Times, citing its sources, reported that two points in Zelenskyy’s “victory plan” were written for that exact purpose and with Trump’s possible coming to power in mind. One idea involves replacing some of the US troops stationed in Europe with Ukrainian troops after the war is over.
The second point was proposed by Trump’s ally Senator Lindsey Graham and refers to joint control of Ukraine and the West over the country’s most important natural resources. According to sources, Trump became interested in these two points after reading the plan when Zelenskyy presented it to American top officials, including Trump, in late September...
Torsten's Bell tweet is idiotic. Agricultural land is a tool of a trade. A house is not.
What has been less noticed is that the tax changes affect all family owned businesses. Not just farms. So the idea that this is just about closing off a loophole is nonsense. It is a tax change which will harm all family owned businesses. What is the justification for doing so?
The answers are all over the place: one minute it's "well very few will be affected" and the next "well the NHS will collapse without the money". These are incoherent and inconsistent. And frankly - though I imagine I will get a lot of grief for saying so - I don't think the purpose of our economy or tax policy should be to keep the NHS afloat. Even if it were other Budget decisions completely undermine that anyway - not least the NIC changes which will harm GP surgeries and care homes. A proper social care policy would do more to help the NHS than anything else - but on that we have once again got tumbleweed and a tax change which will, if anything, make matters worse.
On social care it could be even worse than you describe. The current plan seems to be set a mechanism to allow higher/fairer levels of pay across the whole sector, yet with no indication whatsoever how local councils will fund the whacking increase in fees required.
Laura K claims there is a big meeting scheduled for this coming Monday between chancellor, PM and NHS ministers to finally thrash this out.
I expect more tumbleweed sadly.
Social care is the real destroyer of inheritances, not IHT.
So, if it’s true that this farm tax will only affect several hundred people per year, and only raise several hundred million in extra tax (before the accountants and lawyers have a good go at it), why are the government prepared to waste so much political capital on such a small change?
Surely you save your political capital for major taxation changes that raise tens of billions? It comes across as ideological as a result, that the government are at best ambivalent to farming and rural communities. I suspect there will a revival of the Countryside Alliance as there was under Bair’s government, but this time with some newly very famous farmers leading the protests.
It's precisely the same situation as we saw with the Winter Fuel Payments. It's all about desperately scraping around for small change here and there, because they've ruled out most of the big ticket items (either in the manifesto or by filing them in the bin marked "too difficult.") They're burning through all their political capital on tax rises that are questionable or simply wrong headed, failing to raise enough money to shore up the state and provide the benefits and services that will help to convince people they're worth a second term, and relying on their image of toughness looking like decisive action in the national interest, when it often looks more like clumsy errors compounded by a stubborn refusal to admit as much.
This Government is in real danger of falling between two stools: making changes that are just enough to irritate the wealthy whilst being wholly insufficient (and, in the case of the NI raid and the refusal to support local government, positively harmful) to the interests of the less well off. The obvious risk is that, on five years' time, we shall have seen modest improvements in the health service whilst living standards continue to decline and the rest of the public realm keeps on decaying and shutting down. The Government risks going to the country trying to get re-elected on the basis that granny now only has to wait one year rather than three for a hip replacement, only to find itself condemned for making most of the country poorer, against a backdrop of cratered roads, closed libraries and bankrupt councils that collect the bins once every two months and spend everything else on social care services that still fail because of the weight of demand.
The nation requires emergency surgery; what it's going to get is another box of Elastoplast. If this all ends with Drs Badenoch and Farage diagnosing gangrene and cutting off both legs and an arm a few years down the road then the lack of decisive action now will have been to blame.
I think the political capital argument is the best one as to why SKS has a good chance of falling.
I have been trying to wrap my head around the approach, which many will answer there isn’t one. But SKS sticks doggedly to one approach as we saw with his role as LOTO.
My feeling is that they know there are no popular decisions to make so they are trying to get them all out the way in one go.
The idea then I guess is to get positive stories over the next five years around immigration and house building.
It seems very high risk to me. And tends towards failure.
There is next to chance of a change in house building, without using drastic measure (primary legislation for new towns, say)
This is because if you announce a new town now, the "planning process" (actually a whole bunch of things, but put it in the general bag of "planning") will take 5 years. Plus. The if you wanted to do something stupid, like provide public transport, you might want a railway connection. Ha Ha ha....
So, unless Starmer does something really radical, there no chance of a change.
And using primary legislation to bludgeon a plan through is nearly unthinkable for a lawyer. It means abrogation of the entire process. There would be howling. Accusations of Trumpian behaviour.
Torsten's Bell tweet is idiotic. Agricultural land is a tool of a trade. A house is not.
What has been less noticed is that the tax changes affect all family owned businesses. Not just farms. So the idea that this is just about closing off a loophole is nonsense. It is a tax change which will harm all family owned businesses. What is the justification for doing so?
The answers are all over the place: one minute it's "well very few will be affected" and the next "well the NHS will collapse without the money". These are incoherent and inconsistent. And frankly - though I imagine I will get a lot of grief for saying so - I don't think the purpose of our economy or tax policy should be to keep the NHS afloat. Even if it were other Budget decisions completely undermine that anyway - not least the NIC changes which will harm GP surgeries and care homes. A proper social care policy would do more to help the NHS than anything else - but on that we have once again got tumbleweed and a tax change which will, if anything, make matters worse.
On social care it could be even worse than you describe. The current plan seems to be set a mechanism to allow higher/fairer levels of pay across the whole sector, yet with no indication whatsoever how local councils will fund the whacking increase in fees required.
Laura K claims there is a big meeting scheduled for this coming Monday between chancellor, PM and NHS ministers to finally thrash this out.
I expect more tumbleweed sadly.
I know you, like me, are knee deep in this.
An illustration of the waste:
My father is still at home with regular carer visits. He falls from time to time. Inevitable given his condition. No biggee. Check he's OK, help him up on sofa and make him a cuppa you might think.
But no. The carers will not apply common sense. They immediately call 999. Ambulance is booked but may be 4 - 6 hours. So I (in another part of the country) get a call from the care agency, looking to be relieved. WTF do they expect me to do? I ring around best I can and - with luck - get a neighbour on phone who goes and helps him up. So I tell carer to cancel the ambulance. 'No' I'm told they can't do that. So now we have an ambulance coming at some point for an emergency which never existed.
What a waste of time for the ambulance service. How many times is this scenario being played out across the country?
In such circumstances usually it is a paramedic who arrives and checks the patient over for breaks and underlying issues, then notifies the GP. They would only go to ED if significant concerns.
As usual the best way to defeat right wing populists is to put them in power and let them destroy themselves - but at what cost to the rest of us???
*cough*BREXIT*cough*
Brexit came about due to centrist Dad Call me Dave.
Yep, never should have called the referendum.
Calling the EU referendum was not the problem. The trouble is Cameron is a lousy campaigner who ran a lousy campaign, but thought he was great at it.
The real problem was timing.
If the vote had been held under the coalition government, it would have been an easy win.
There were a number of problems with the EU referendum.
Cameron is a lousy campaigner who in 2010 after the GFC converted poll leads into a hung parliament, and almost lost Scotland, again after starting with a healthy lead.
Cameron ran a lousy campaign, basically saying the EU is dangerous but leaving might be worse.
Cameron imo was more Eurosceptic than Boris.
Cameron had not forced Leave to come up with a coherent programme, so left them free to campaign (and win) on any number of incompatible snowflake Brexits.
Ukraine builds a bridge to Trumpland Gone are appeals to democratic values. Ukraine’s new strategy for surviving Trump’s America centers on deals, strategic assets, and a surprising China card.
https://euromaidanpress.com/2024/11/19/ukraines-trump-strategy-inside-kyivs-plan-b/ ..The Financial Times, citing its sources, reported that two points in Zelenskyy’s “victory plan” were written for that exact purpose and with Trump’s possible coming to power in mind. One idea involves replacing some of the US troops stationed in Europe with Ukrainian troops after the war is over.
The second point was proposed by Trump’s ally Senator Lindsey Graham and refers to joint control of Ukraine and the West over the country’s most important natural resources. According to sources, Trump became interested in these two points after reading the plan when Zelenskyy presented it to American top officials, including Trump, in late September...
Ukrainian troops in Germany? That would be hilarious, just from the heads exploding in certain quarters.
The main reason public sector productivity is so poor is the inability to move unproductive people out. The ultimate tool for increasing output per worker is to shit can the least productive ones which is something that private sector businesses do all the time. Until that attitude is brought to the public sector no amount of "investment" will help. The lazy and the feckless are attracted to the public sector because they know once they're in it's impossible to be removed regardless of how shit they are at the job.
Change this and suddenly public sector productivity will shoot up as those lazy buggers start to fear for their next salary.
If you really fail to perform then you can still be moved out of a public sector role. Plus if you aren't even productive enough for the public sector you certainly won't be for the private sector which means you just end up with a higher welfare and UC bill to support them
The welfare bill will be lower than keeping them in a salaried role. It may also force them to find their level, delivery driving or shelf filling etc...
Not necessarily, depends on the wage, a low public sector wage may not be much higher than the welfare bill.
Delivery driving for example often has very demanding targets so they may not be able to do that either. Indeed the targets are often a disaster in my view, frequently we get delivery drivers ring the bell and dump parcels on the door 5 secs later rather than wait for us to pick them up. Targets which don't include quality of service are equally poor
Delivery drivers and burglars have a shared interest in houses having an obvious visual clue as to whether someone is currently home.
So, if it’s true that this farm tax will only affect several hundred people per year, and only raise several hundred million in extra tax (before the accountants and lawyers have a good go at it), why are the government prepared to waste so much political capital on such a small change?
Surely you save your political capital for major taxation changes that raise tens of billions? It comes across as ideological as a result, that the government are at best ambivalent to farming and rural communities. I suspect there will a revival of the Countryside Alliance as there was under Bair’s government, but this time with some newly very famous farmers leading the protests.
It's precisely the same situation as we saw with the Winter Fuel Payments. It's all about desperately scraping around for small change here and there, because they've ruled out most of the big ticket items (either in the manifesto or by filing them in the bin marked "too difficult.") They're burning through all their political capital on tax rises that are questionable or simply wrong headed, failing to raise enough money to shore up the state and provide the benefits and services that will help to convince people they're worth a second term, and relying on their image of toughness looking like decisive action in the national interest, when it often looks more like clumsy errors compounded by a stubborn refusal to admit as much.
This Government is in real danger of falling between two stools: making changes that are just enough to irritate the wealthy whilst being wholly insufficient (and, in the case of the NI raid and the refusal to support local government, positively harmful) to the interests of the less well off. The obvious risk is that, on five years' time, we shall have seen modest improvements in the health service whilst living standards continue to decline and the rest of the public realm keeps on decaying and shutting down. The Government risks going to the country trying to get re-elected on the basis that granny now only has to wait one year rather than three for a hip replacement, only to find itself condemned for making most of the country poorer, against a backdrop of cratered roads, closed libraries and bankrupt councils that collect the bins once every two months and spend everything else on social care services that still fail because of the weight of demand.
The nation requires emergency surgery; what it's going to get is another box of Elastoplast. If this all ends with Drs Badenoch and Farage diagnosing gangrene and cutting off both legs and an arm a few years down the road then the lack of decisive action now will have been to blame.
I think the political capital argument is the best one as to why SKS has a good chance of falling.
I have been trying to wrap my head around the approach, which many will answer there isn’t one. But SKS sticks doggedly to one approach as we saw with his role as LOTO.
My feeling is that they know there are no popular decisions to make so they are trying to get them all out the way in one go.
The idea then I guess is to get positive stories over the next five years around immigration and house building.
It seems very high risk to me. And tends towards failure.
There is next to chance of a change in house building, without using drastic measure (primary legislation for new towns, say)
This is because if you announce a new town now, the "planning process" (actually a whole bunch of things, but put it in the general bag of "planning") will take 5 years. Plus. The if you wanted to do something stupid, like provide public transport, you might want a railway connection. Ha Ha ha....
So, unless Starmer does something really radical, there no chance of a change.
And using primary legislation to bludgeon a plan through is nearly unthinkable for a lawyer. It means abrogation of the entire process. There would be howling. Accusations of Trumpian behaviour.
At the moment their idea seems to be calling in existing applications and approving them. But I assume these numbers wouldn’t even touch the sides.
Immigration is something he could make more tangible moves on. Based on a report I read the other day, they know they are vulnerable on that.
Is there anything they could do in five years that they can point to as being better? Ultimately that’s why they’ll get voted out, if people say “no”.
Laughable that Badenoch shouldn't oppose and promise to rescind unpopular, ideological tax increases that raise very little cash (£200M a year maybe on farming/probably negative on private schools) and cause disproportionate harm to people, the country and it's way of life.
Our Rural Affairs Minister Daniel Zeichner managed to convey the Labour logic on farming perfectly 'tens of thousands of family farms across the country will not be affected by this and of course, with a bit of planning, no inheritance tax will be paid at all......Everyone else has to pay inheritance tax and we think we should clamp down on these tax avoidance.'
Torsten's Bell tweet is idiotic. Agricultural land is a tool of a trade. A house is not.
What has been less noticed is that the tax changes affect all family owned businesses. Not just farms. So the idea that this is just about closing off a loophole is nonsense. It is a tax change which will harm all family owned businesses. What is the justification for doing so?
The answers are all over the place: one minute it's "well very few will be affected" and the next "well the NHS will collapse without the money". These are incoherent and inconsistent. And frankly - though I imagine I will get a lot of grief for saying so - I don't think the purpose of our economy or tax policy should be to keep the NHS afloat. Even if it were other Budget decisions completely undermine that anyway - not least the NIC changes which will harm GP surgeries and care homes. A proper social care policy would do more to help the NHS than anything else - but on that we have once again got tumbleweed and a tax change which will, if anything, make matters worse.
Agreed re Bell’s tweet - a £3m house is comparable to a £3m farm if the homeowner can only make any income from activity done at the house and no other job, that the home has to hire or buy very expensive machinery to allow that activity and very expensive items that the expensive. Machinery works with to make even that small income.
I’m guessing Torsten’s parents don’t do this with their home and instead were able to leave it daily to go to other jobs which earner far more than the farmer will earn.
I would also be surprised if there were more people out there who would take on the massive burden of a £3m farm than would want to buy a £3m house.
I presume a £3m farm is worth the same as a £3m home... because that's how money works! It's fungible.
The idea that a £3m farm is more burden than a £3m home... well, possibly, but it's also more reward. It can't just be more burden, because then it wouldn't be worth the same.
Torsten's Bell tweet is idiotic. Agricultural land is a tool of a trade. A house is not.
What has been less noticed is that the tax changes affect all family owned businesses. Not just farms. So the idea that this is just about closing off a loophole is nonsense. It is a tax change which will harm all family owned businesses. What is the justification for doing so?
The answers are all over the place: one minute it's "well very few will be affected" and the next "well the NHS will collapse without the money". These are incoherent and inconsistent. And frankly - though I imagine I will get a lot of grief for saying so - I don't think the purpose of our economy or tax policy should be to keep the NHS afloat. Even if it were other Budget decisions completely undermine that anyway - not least the NIC changes which will harm GP surgeries and care homes. A proper social care policy would do more to help the NHS than anything else - but on that we have once again got tumbleweed and a tax change which will, if anything, make matters worse.
On social care it could be even worse than you describe. The current plan seems to be set a mechanism to allow higher/fairer levels of pay across the whole sector, yet with no indication whatsoever how local councils will fund the whacking increase in fees required.
Laura K claims there is a big meeting scheduled for this coming Monday between chancellor, PM and NHS ministers to finally thrash this out.
I expect more tumbleweed sadly.
I know you, like me, are knee deep in this.
An illustration of the waste:
My father is still at home with regular carer visits. He falls from time to time. Inevitable given his condition. No biggee. Check he's OK, help him up on sofa and make him a cuppa you might think.
But no. The carers will not apply common sense. They immediately call 999. Ambulance is booked but may be 4 - 6 hours. Dad expected to sit on floor for all this time, waiting to be helped up.So I (in another part of the country) get a call from the care agency, looking to be relieved. WTF do they expect me to do? I ring around best I can and - with luck - get a neighbour on phone who goes and helps him up. So I tell carer to cancel the ambulance. 'No' I'm told they can't do that. So now we have an ambulance coming at some point for an emergency which never existed. This has happened six times over last couple of months.
What a waste of time for the ambulance service. How many times is this scenario being played out across the country?
It's about discretion. A relative was working in care facility. She lifted a patient, by herself. Just off the bed, patient still over the bed. 6 inches or so. The patient was a little old lady. My relative likes to bench far more than the patients weight, at the gym. Risk to patient zero. Risk to my relative zero. Patient was in distress.....
It never ceases to amaze me how many very highly-paid private sector workers who work ridiculously long hours and berate their unproductive, lazy public sector counterparts nevertheless manage to make significant contributions to PB throughout the week. It's impressive.
For the record, I only started to contribute to PB once I'd retired, because the Civil Service would have taken a very dim view of me taking out any time to read and write on this august forum in working hours. And I was too knackered to join in in evenings or at weekends.
The main reason public sector productivity is so poor is the inability to move unproductive people out. The ultimate tool for increasing output per worker is to shit can the least productive ones which is something that private sector businesses do all the time. Until that attitude is brought to the public sector no amount of "investment" will help. The lazy and the feckless are attracted to the public sector because they know once they're in it's impossible to be removed regardless of how shit they are at the job.
Change this and suddenly public sector productivity will shoot up as those lazy buggers start to fear for their next salary.
If you really fail to perform then you can still be moved out of a public sector role. Plus if you aren't even productive enough for the public sector you certainly won't be for the private sector which means you just end up with a higher welfare and UC bill to support them
The welfare bill will be lower than keeping them in a salaried role. It may also force them to find their level, delivery driving or shelf filling etc...
Not necessarily, depends on the wage, a low public sector wage may not be much higher than the welfare bill.
Delivery driving for example often has very demanding targets so they may not be able to do that either. Indeed the targets are often a disaster in my view, frequently we get delivery drivers ring the bell and dump parcels on the door 5 secs later rather than wait for us to pick them up. Targets which don't include quality of service are equally poor
I think with parcel delivery part of the problem is the same as with airlines -- customers might gripe about the service, but on aggregate they all go for the free delivery/cheapest plane ticket, so what most firms provide is the absolute cheapest most cost cutting service possible. You can get decent service in delivery with nice features like a pre announced hour window and online GPS tracking of the van, but it's more expensive. DPD have been good in my experience.
(Though I generally get parcels delivered to work -- more convenient all round.)
Torsten's Bell tweet is idiotic. Agricultural land is a tool of a trade. A house is not.
What has been less noticed is that the tax changes affect all family owned businesses. Not just farms. So the idea that this is just about closing off a loophole is nonsense. It is a tax change which will harm all family owned businesses. What is the justification for doing so?
The answers are all over the place: one minute it's "well very few will be affected" and the next "well the NHS will collapse without the money". These are incoherent and inconsistent. And frankly - though I imagine I will get a lot of grief for saying so - I don't think the purpose of our economy or tax policy should be to keep the NHS afloat. Even if it were other Budget decisions completely undermine that anyway - not least the NIC changes which will harm GP surgeries and care homes. A proper social care policy would do more to help the NHS than anything else - but on that we have once again got tumbleweed and a tax change which will, if anything, make matters worse.
On social care it could be even worse than you describe. The current plan seems to be set a mechanism to allow higher/fairer levels of pay across the whole sector, yet with no indication whatsoever how local councils will fund the whacking increase in fees required.
Laura K claims there is a big meeting scheduled for this coming Monday between chancellor, PM and NHS ministers to finally thrash this out.
I expect more tumbleweed sadly.
Social care is the real destroyer of inheritances, not IHT.
If you do the care yourself - taking the burden off the state - then you do potentially get hit by IHT.
Propping elderly people up at an effective 40% tax rate doesn't seem like a terribly fair deal.
I really wish this war against employees by other employees would end.
I don’t know what organisations people have worked for but I’d find it hard to believe Vodafone where I was for many years is any less bureaucratic than the public sector. Every decision or change I wanted to make had to go through five layers of management.
Perhaps it’s just that large organisations in general are like tankers? I hear much the same from friends at Apple and Google.
Torsten's Bell tweet is idiotic. Agricultural land is a tool of a trade. A house is not.
What has been less noticed is that the tax changes affect all family owned businesses. Not just farms. So the idea that this is just about closing off a loophole is nonsense. It is a tax change which will harm all family owned businesses. What is the justification for doing so?
The answers are all over the place: one minute it's "well very few will be affected" and the next "well the NHS will collapse without the money". These are incoherent and inconsistent. And frankly - though I imagine I will get a lot of grief for saying so - I don't think the purpose of our economy or tax policy should be to keep the NHS afloat. Even if it were other Budget decisions completely undermine that anyway - not least the NIC changes which will harm GP surgeries and care homes. A proper social care policy would do more to help the NHS than anything else - but on that we have once again got tumbleweed and a tax change which will, if anything, make matters worse.
On social care it could be even worse than you describe. The current plan seems to be set a mechanism to allow higher/fairer levels of pay across the whole sector, yet with no indication whatsoever how local councils will fund the whacking increase in fees required.
Laura K claims there is a big meeting scheduled for this coming Monday between chancellor, PM and NHS ministers to finally thrash this out.
I expect more tumbleweed sadly.
I know you, like me, are knee deep in this.
An illustration of the waste:
My father is still at home with regular carer visits. He falls from time to time. Inevitable given his condition. No biggee. Check he's OK, help him up on sofa and make him a cuppa you might think.
But no. The carers will not apply common sense. They immediately call 999. Ambulance is booked but may be 4 - 6 hours. So I (in another part of the country) get a call from the care agency, looking to be relieved. WTF do they expect me to do? I ring around best I can and - with luck - get a neighbour on phone who goes and helps him up. So I tell carer to cancel the ambulance. 'No' I'm told they can't do that. So now we have an ambulance coming at some point for an emergency which never existed.
What a waste of time for the ambulance service. How many times is this scenario being played out across the country?
In such circumstances usually it is a paramedic who arrives and checks the patient over for breaks and underlying issues, then notifies the GP. They would only go to ED if significant concerns.
Matters not whether it is paramedics or ambulance (they arrive in an ambulance I think) - the point stands, someone's time is being wasted No common sense is being applied. He's fallen over a couple of times when I've actually been there. (Missed the sofa.) He's not in pain, he's 87. Who wouldn't help him on sofa rather than leaving him sat on the floor for all those hours? The carers are not acting out of these concerns anyway - they know he is ok - they are just performing their set protocol which is motivated by protecting their own imagined liability.
So, if it’s true that this farm tax will only affect several hundred people per year, and only raise several hundred million in extra tax (before the accountants and lawyers have a good go at it), why are the government prepared to waste so much political capital on such a small change?
Surely you save your political capital for major taxation changes that raise tens of billions? It comes across as ideological as a result, that the government are at best ambivalent to farming and rural communities. I suspect there will a revival of the Countryside Alliance as there was under Bair’s government, but this time with some newly very famous farmers leading the protests.
It's precisely the same situation as we saw with the Winter Fuel Payments. It's all about desperately scraping around for small change here and there, because they've ruled out most of the big ticket items (either in the manifesto or by filing them in the bin marked "too difficult.") They're burning through all their political capital on tax rises that are questionable or simply wrong headed, failing to raise enough money to shore up the state and provide the benefits and services that will help to convince people they're worth a second term, and relying on their image of toughness looking like decisive action in the national interest, when it often looks more like clumsy errors compounded by a stubborn refusal to admit as much.
This Government is in real danger of falling between two stools: making changes that are just enough to irritate the wealthy whilst being wholly insufficient (and, in the case of the NI raid and the refusal to support local government, positively harmful) to the interests of the less well off. The obvious risk is that, on five years' time, we shall have seen modest improvements in the health service whilst living standards continue to decline and the rest of the public realm keeps on decaying and shutting down. The Government risks going to the country trying to get re-elected on the basis that granny now only has to wait one year rather than three for a hip replacement, only to find itself condemned for making most of the country poorer, against a backdrop of cratered roads, closed libraries and bankrupt councils that collect the bins once every two months and spend everything else on social care services that still fail because of the weight of demand.
The nation requires emergency surgery; what it's going to get is another box of Elastoplast. If this all ends with Drs Badenoch and Farage diagnosing gangrene and cutting off both legs and an arm a few years down the road then the lack of decisive action now will have been to blame.
I think the political capital argument is the best one as to why SKS has a good chance of falling.
I have been trying to wrap my head around the approach, which many will answer there isn’t one. But SKS sticks doggedly to one approach as we saw with his role as LOTO.
My feeling is that they know there are no popular decisions to make so they are trying to get them all out the way in one go.
The idea then I guess is to get positive stories over the next five years around immigration and house building.
It seems very high risk to me. And tends towards failure.
There is next to chance of a change in house building, without using drastic measure (primary legislation for new towns, say)
This is because if you announce a new town now, the "planning process" (actually a whole bunch of things, but put it in the general bag of "planning") will take 5 years. Plus. The if you wanted to do something stupid, like provide public transport, you might want a railway connection. Ha Ha ha....
So, unless Starmer does something really radical, there no chance of a change.
And using primary legislation to bludgeon a plan through is nearly unthinkable for a lawyer. It means abrogation of the entire process. There would be howling. Accusations of Trumpian behaviour.
At the moment their idea seems to be calling in existing applications and approving them. But I assume these numbers wouldn’t even touch the sides.
Immigration is something he could make more tangible moves on. Based on a report I read the other day, they know they are vulnerable on that.
Is there anything they could do in five years that they can point to as being better? Ultimately that’s why they’ll get voted out, if people say “no”.
They could plan some new towns and use primary legislation to put them through, in an afternoon.
That would lead to the most massive row in law and politics - I could see it turning into a mini-Brexit. MPs voting down their own government to preserve what they see as vital.
"Who governs Britain?" - an interesting slogan....
Torsten's Bell tweet is idiotic. Agricultural land is a tool of a trade. A house is not.
What has been less noticed is that the tax changes affect all family owned businesses. Not just farms. So the idea that this is just about closing off a loophole is nonsense. It is a tax change which will harm all family owned businesses. What is the justification for doing so?
The answers are all over the place: one minute it's "well very few will be affected" and the next "well the NHS will collapse without the money". These are incoherent and inconsistent. And frankly - though I imagine I will get a lot of grief for saying so - I don't think the purpose of our economy or tax policy should be to keep the NHS afloat. Even if it were other Budget decisions completely undermine that anyway - not least the NIC changes which will harm GP surgeries and care homes. A proper social care policy would do more to help the NHS than anything else - but on that we have once again got tumbleweed and a tax change which will, if anything, make matters worse.
Agreed re Bell’s tweet - a £3m house is comparable to a £3m farm if the homeowner can only make any income from activity done at the house and no other job, that the home has to hire or buy very expensive machinery to allow that activity and very expensive items that the expensive. Machinery works with to make even that small income.
I’m guessing Torsten’s parents don’t do this with their home and instead were able to leave it daily to go to other jobs which earner far more than the farmer will earn.
I would also be surprised if there were more people out there who would take on the massive burden of a £3m farm than would want to buy a £3m house.
I presume a £3m farm is worth the same as a £3m home... because that's how money works! It's fungible.
The idea that a £3m farm is more burden than a £3m home... well, possibly, but it's also more reward. It can't just be more burden, because then it wouldn't be worth the same.
A £3m diamond is worth the same as a £3m house - there are very few people who will splash out £3m on a diamond compared to a house the same value.
A £3m farm is likely to have a lot more land than a £3m house - should the house then be slashed in value because it has less land or are these two very different things where the monetary value is based on many different factors.
I really wish this war against employees by other employees would end.
I don’t know what organisations people have worked for but I’d find it hard to believe Vodafone where I was for many years is any less bureaucratic than the public sector. Every decision or change I wanted to make had to go through five layers of management.
Perhaps it’s just that large organisations in general are like tankers? I hear much the same from friends at Apple and Google.
True. Everything needing to be passed through 5 layers with noone prepared to make a decision. The larger the organisation the worse they are to deal with as a supplier or customer.
The inefficiencies can exist in large orgs so long as they're making profits though...
I really wish this war against employees by other employees would end.
I don’t know what organisations people have worked for but I’d find it hard to believe Vodafone where I was for many years is any less bureaucratic than the public sector. Every decision or change I wanted to make had to go through five layers of management.
Perhaps it’s just that large organisations in general are like tankers? I hear much the same from friends at Apple and Google.
Everything needing to be passed through 5 layers with noone prepared to make a decision. The larger the organisation the worse they are to deal with as a supplier or customer.
@ONS Public service productivity in Quarter 2 2024 is estimated to be 8.5% below its pre-#COVID19 pandemic peak in Quarter 4 (Oct to Dec) 2019.
And this is our problem in a nutshell. Our public services are falling apart, not because of cuts in spending which have been modest to non existent) but because we are getting less and less for our money. That is the problem the last government largely ducked and which this government has to come to terms with. If they don't no amount of additional taxation will be enough.
And the multi billion pound question is... why?
Is it about a lack of the smack of firm management, is it the money spent on diversity consultants, or is it that we have solved bottlenecks with the short term fix of extra bodies rather than equipping staff with better tools to achieve more?
My guess (based on the way that capital budgets always get raided to fix crises, and have been for decades, and we're going to be under Hunt) is that the last diagnosis is the main problem.
I think from my limited experience that there is a lack of quality management, that WFH has in fact reduced people's output despite all the claims to the contrary, that it has encouraged a mind set that this job is for my benefit rather than the benefit of the people to whom the service that is being provided, that it is my mental health and work life balance that is important, not the quality of life of the service users I am supposedly working for and, perhaps above all, the never ending multiplication of emails to masses of people who don't need to receive them but get interrupted anyway.
None of this will stop me from WFH today, of course.
David, you could have just said the inherently lazy barstewards will take the piss when allowed to work at home. The diligent productive people will do even more work.
I really wish this war against employees by other employees would end.
I don’t know what organisations people have worked for but I’d find it hard to believe Vodafone where I was for many years is any less bureaucratic than the public sector. Every decision or change I wanted to make had to go through five layers of management.
Perhaps it’s just that large organisations in general are like tankers? I hear much the same from friends at Apple and Google.
All large organisation trend towards the same end state. The small advatange of private companies is that they can go bust - this limits the accumulation of crud.
On reading the Mitrokhin Archive, the thing that struck me, was the description of how by the end, the KGB was 100,000s of people in tower block offices, arguing about whose budget the biscuits for the meeting to discuss the biscuit budget....
I really wish this war against employees by other employees would end.
I don’t know what organisations people have worked for but I’d find it hard to believe Vodafone where I was for many years is any less bureaucratic than the public sector. Every decision or change I wanted to make had to go through five layers of management.
Perhaps it’s just that large organisations in general are like tankers? I hear much the same from friends at Apple and Google.
All large organisation trend towards the same end state. The small advatange of private companies is that they can go bust - this limits the accumulation of crud.
On reading the Mitrokhin Archive, the thing that struck me, was the description of how by the end, the KGB was 100,000s of people in tower block offices, arguing about whose budget the biscuits for the meeting to discuss the biscuit budget....
It struck me, because I think I worked there.
I recall there had to be a large consultation exercise on changing the times the car park was open.
@ONS Public service productivity in Quarter 2 2024 is estimated to be 8.5% below its pre-#COVID19 pandemic peak in Quarter 4 (Oct to Dec) 2019.
And this is our problem in a nutshell. Our public services are falling apart, not because of cuts in spending which have been modest to non existent) but because we are getting less and less for our money. That is the problem the last government largely ducked and which this government has to come to terms with. If they don't no amount of additional taxation will be enough.
And the multi billion pound question is... why?
Is it about a lack of the smack of firm management, is it the money spent on diversity consultants, or is it that we have solved bottlenecks with the short term fix of extra bodies rather than equipping staff with better tools to achieve more?
My guess (based on the way that capital budgets always get raided to fix crises, and have been for decades, and we're going to be under Hunt) is that the last diagnosis is the main problem.
I think from my limited experience that there is a lack of quality management, that WFH has in fact reduced people's output despite all the claims to the contrary, that it has encouraged a mind set that this job is for my benefit rather than the benefit of the people to whom the service that is being provided, that it is my mental health and work life balance that is important, not the quality of life of the service users I am supposedly working for and, perhaps above all, the never ending multiplication of emails to masses of people who don't need to receive them but get interrupted anyway.
None of this will stop me from WFH today, of course.
I’ve found it made me more efficient at delivering existing work, and less efficient at winning new work. I’m back in most of the time now.
It’s definitely a challenge for our new joiners and graduate entry too.
My daughter, who qualified as a solicitor last week, had a job whilst at University with the SSSC which is a regulator of the care sector in Scotland. All the time she was working for them (admittedly during Covid) she was WFH and only rarely met her colleagues.
They offered her a traineeship but she, rightly in my view, came to the conclusion that she would not learn from that in the same way as she would in the office and she went for a private firm instead. Her current job has her in court pretty much every day and has given her a vast range of experience she simply would not have got with the SSSC who were offering her more money. The management there were genuinely surprised when she turned them down.
I thought the private sector paid more than the public sector and all public sector were underpaid and overworked. Public sector home working will be a boost for sofa sales.
So, if it’s true that this farm tax will only affect several hundred people per year, and only raise several hundred million in extra tax (before the accountants and lawyers have a good go at it), why are the government prepared to waste so much political capital on such a small change?
Surely you save your political capital for major taxation changes that raise tens of billions? It comes across as ideological as a result, that the government are at best ambivalent to farming and rural communities. I suspect there will a revival of the Countryside Alliance as there was under Bair’s government, but this time with some newly very famous farmers leading the protests.
It's precisely the same situation as we saw with the Winter Fuel Payments. It's all about desperately scraping around for small change here and there, because they've ruled out most of the big ticket items (either in the manifesto or by filing them in the bin marked "too difficult.") They're burning through all their political capital on tax rises that are questionable or simply wrong headed, failing to raise enough money to shore up the state and provide the benefits and services that will help to convince people they're worth a second term, and relying on their image of toughness looking like decisive action in the national interest, when it often looks more like clumsy errors compounded by a stubborn refusal to admit as much.
This Government is in real danger of falling between two stools: making changes that are just enough to irritate the wealthy whilst being wholly insufficient (and, in the case of the NI raid and the refusal to support local government, positively harmful) to the interests of the less well off. The obvious risk is that, on five years' time, we shall have seen modest improvements in the health service whilst living standards continue to decline and the rest of the public realm keeps on decaying and shutting down. The Government risks going to the country trying to get re-elected on the basis that granny now only has to wait one year rather than three for a hip replacement, only to find itself condemned for making most of the country poorer, against a backdrop of cratered roads, closed libraries and bankrupt councils that collect the bins once every two months and spend everything else on social care services that still fail because of the weight of demand.
The nation requires emergency surgery; what it's going to get is another box of Elastoplast. If this all ends with Drs Badenoch and Farage diagnosing gangrene and cutting off both legs and an arm a few years down the road then the lack of decisive action now will have been to blame.
I think the political capital argument is the best one as to why SKS has a good chance of falling.
I have been trying to wrap my head around the approach, which many will answer there isn’t one. But SKS sticks doggedly to one approach as we saw with his role as LOTO.
My feeling is that they know there are no popular decisions to make so they are trying to get them all out the way in one go.
The idea then I guess is to get positive stories over the next five years around immigration and house building.
It seems very high risk to me. And tends towards failure.
We all expected unpopular decisions of the first six months of this government. That's not a surprise. But they're spending political capital on stuff which won't show a positive return.
I really wish this war against employees by other employees would end.
I don’t know what organisations people have worked for but I’d find it hard to believe Vodafone where I was for many years is any less bureaucratic than the public sector. Every decision or change I wanted to make had to go through five layers of management.
Perhaps it’s just that large organisations in general are like tankers? I hear much the same from friends at Apple and Google.
True. Everything needing to be passed through 5 layers with noone prepared to make a decision. The larger the organisation the worse they are to deal with as a supplier or customer.
The inefficiencies can exist in large orgs so long as they're making profits though...
I agree totally that the size of the organisation is correlated with inefficiency. I work for a large private sector corporation and they really aren't terribly good at a lot of things, particularly internally.
There are portions that work well when there is an accidental alignment of the right people, but a lot of the time doing stuff requires a lot of treacle wading.
Of course, many small organisations can also have problems, but the advantage there is that they don't last long.
So, if it’s true that this farm tax will only affect several hundred people per year, and only raise several hundred million in extra tax (before the accountants and lawyers have a good go at it), why are the government prepared to waste so much political capital on such a small change?
Surely you save your political capital for major taxation changes that raise tens of billions? It comes across as ideological as a result, that the government are at best ambivalent to farming and rural communities. I suspect there will a revival of the Countryside Alliance as there was under Bair’s government, but this time with some newly very famous farmers leading the protests.
It's precisely the same situation as we saw with the Winter Fuel Payments. It's all about desperately scraping around for small change here and there, because they've ruled out most of the big ticket items (either in the manifesto or by filing them in the bin marked "too difficult.") They're burning through all their political capital on tax rises that are questionable or simply wrong headed, failing to raise enough money to shore up the state and provide the benefits and services that will help to convince people they're worth a second term, and relying on their image of toughness looking like decisive action in the national interest, when it often looks more like clumsy errors compounded by a stubborn refusal to admit as much.
This Government is in real danger of falling between two stools: making changes that are just enough to irritate the wealthy whilst being wholly insufficient (and, in the case of the NI raid and the refusal to support local government, positively harmful) to the interests of the less well off. The obvious risk is that, on five years' time, we shall have seen modest improvements in the health service whilst living standards continue to decline and the rest of the public realm keeps on decaying and shutting down. The Government risks going to the country trying to get re-elected on the basis that granny now only has to wait one year rather than three for a hip replacement, only to find itself condemned for making most of the country poorer, against a backdrop of cratered roads, closed libraries and bankrupt councils that collect the bins once every two months and spend everything else on social care services that still fail because of the weight of demand.
The nation requires emergency surgery; what it's going to get is another box of Elastoplast. If this all ends with Drs Badenoch and Farage diagnosing gangrene and cutting off both legs and an arm a few years down the road then the lack of decisive action now will have been to blame.
I think the political capital argument is the best one as to why SKS has a good chance of falling.
I have been trying to wrap my head around the approach, which many will answer there isn’t one. But SKS sticks doggedly to one approach as we saw with his role as LOTO.
My feeling is that they know there are no popular decisions to make so they are trying to get them all out the way in one go.
The idea then I guess is to get positive stories over the next five years around immigration and house building.
It seems very high risk to me. And tends towards failure.
We all expected unpopular decisions of the first six months of this government. That's not a surprise. But they're spending political capital on stuff which won't show a positive return.
This is the bit I don’t really understand. But I wonder if there’s more unpopular stuff to come so they want to make these changes now and hope they get drowned out?
I really wish this war against employees by other employees would end.
I don’t know what organisations people have worked for but I’d find it hard to believe Vodafone where I was for many years is any less bureaucratic than the public sector. Every decision or change I wanted to make had to go through five layers of management.
Perhaps it’s just that large organisations in general are like tankers? I hear much the same from friends at Apple and Google.
True. Everything needing to be passed through 5 layers with noone prepared to make a decision. The larger the organisation the worse they are to deal with as a supplier or customer.
The inefficiencies can exist in large orgs so long as they're making profits though...
I've previously described working as a contractor at Citi, as the financial crash happened. Some vignettes...
- A BA, from the same company as me, did more work than a whole floor of the BAs, pre crash - People whose job it was to attend meetings, and construct personations from those meetings, that they would give at other meetings. Some people were 2 jobs away from both top management and the people who actually did banking. - A manager screaming "Does anyone know our exposure to fucking Lehmans?" - After the crash, they binned whole floors of people in the tower in Canary wharf. It was Kung Fu mixed with Jenga....
In Kemi's defence, she hasn't gone full "The UK needs a TRUMP", Liz Truss style.
A thoughful column from Sunder Katwala (@Sundersays on both Twitter and Bluesky):
Comment: Britain is not America, so how do we keep it that way?
"..I was reflecting on Britain and America in giving the Migration Museum’s annual lecture last week, exploring how the history of migration might influence the future. America has had a much clearer idea of itself as a “nation of immigrants” – symbolised by the Statue of Liberty. But that did not prevent Trump winning while pledging the biggest deportation effort in American history. Trump’s return strengthens the case for clear blue Transatlantic water – keeping a distance from America’s culture wars as we navigate our own identity challenges in a changing Britain."
Torsten's Bell tweet is idiotic. Agricultural land is a tool of a trade. A house is not.
What has been less noticed is that the tax changes affect all family owned businesses. Not just farms. So the idea that this is just about closing off a loophole is nonsense. It is a tax change which will harm all family owned businesses. What is the justification for doing so?
The answers are all over the place: one minute it's "well very few will be affected" and the next "well the NHS will collapse without the money". These are incoherent and inconsistent. And frankly - though I imagine I will get a lot of grief for saying so - I don't think the purpose of our economy or tax policy should be to keep the NHS afloat. Even if it were other Budget decisions completely undermine that anyway - not least the NIC changes which will harm GP surgeries and care homes. A proper social care policy would do more to help the NHS than anything else - but on that we have once again got tumbleweed and a tax change which will, if anything, make matters worse.
On social care it could be even worse than you describe. The current plan seems to be set a mechanism to allow higher/fairer levels of pay across the whole sector, yet with no indication whatsoever how local councils will fund the whacking increase in fees required.
Laura K claims there is a big meeting scheduled for this coming Monday between chancellor, PM and NHS ministers to finally thrash this out.
I expect more tumbleweed sadly.
I know you, like me, are knee deep in this.
An illustration of the waste:
My father is still at home with regular carer visits. He falls from time to time. Inevitable given his condition. No biggee. Check he's OK, help him up on sofa and make him a cuppa you might think.
But no. The carers will not apply common sense. They immediately call 999. Ambulance is booked but may be 4 - 6 hours. Dad expected to sit on floor for all this time, waiting to be helped up.So I (in another part of the country) get a call from the care agency, looking to be relieved. WTF do they expect me to do? I ring around best I can and - with luck - get a neighbour on phone who goes and helps him up. So I tell carer to cancel the ambulance. 'No' I'm told they can't do that. So now we have an ambulance coming at some point for an emergency which never existed. This has happened six times over last couple of months.
What a waste of time for the ambulance service. How many times is this scenario being played out across the country?
This is presumably because of an incident where someone fell, fractured a hip, and the carer in question missed it, leaving the old man in massive pain for days.
I have an Aussie friend who identified quite a few of these sorts of things in Britain, where something once went wrong and there's subsequently a massive overreaction to absolutely prevent any possibility of a repeat.
That's why the carer insists on the ambulance. They can't possibly be blamed for making a mistake if they call the ambulance. This is also one reason why I'm a bit worried about "AI" use in Britain. The dominant culture will simply love the opportunity to offload responsibility for decision-making to a computer algorithm, even if the decision-making is poor, because they can then escape the blame when it goes wrong.
So, if it’s true that this farm tax will only affect several hundred people per year, and only raise several hundred million in extra tax (before the accountants and lawyers have a good go at it), why are the government prepared to waste so much political capital on such a small change?
Surely you save your political capital for major taxation changes that raise tens of billions? It comes across as ideological as a result, that the government are at best ambivalent to farming and rural communities. I suspect there will a revival of the Countryside Alliance as there was under Bair’s government, but this time with some newly very famous farmers leading the protests.
It's precisely the same situation as we saw with the Winter Fuel Payments. It's all about desperately scraping around for small change here and there, because they've ruled out most of the big ticket items (either in the manifesto or by filing them in the bin marked "too difficult.") They're burning through all their political capital on tax rises that are questionable or simply wrong headed, failing to raise enough money to shore up the state and provide the benefits and services that will help to convince people they're worth a second term, and relying on their image of toughness looking like decisive action in the national interest, when it often looks more like clumsy errors compounded by a stubborn refusal to admit as much.
This Government is in real danger of falling between two stools: making changes that are just enough to irritate the wealthy whilst being wholly insufficient (and, in the case of the NI raid and the refusal to support local government, positively harmful) to the interests of the less well off. The obvious risk is that, on five years' time, we shall have seen modest improvements in the health service whilst living standards continue to decline and the rest of the public realm keeps on decaying and shutting down. The Government risks going to the country trying to get re-elected on the basis that granny now only has to wait one year rather than three for a hip replacement, only to find itself condemned for making most of the country poorer, against a backdrop of cratered roads, closed libraries and bankrupt councils that collect the bins once every two months and spend everything else on social care services that still fail because of the weight of demand.
The nation requires emergency surgery; what it's going to get is another box of Elastoplast. If this all ends with Drs Badenoch and Farage diagnosing gangrene and cutting off both legs and an arm a few years down the road then the lack of decisive action now will have been to blame.
I think the political capital argument is the best one as to why SKS has a good chance of falling.
I have been trying to wrap my head around the approach, which many will answer there isn’t one. But SKS sticks doggedly to one approach as we saw with his role as LOTO.
My feeling is that they know there are no popular decisions to make so they are trying to get them all out the way in one go.
The idea then I guess is to get positive stories over the next five years around immigration and house building.
It seems very high risk to me. And tends towards failure.
We all expected unpopular decisions of the first six months of this government. That's not a surprise. But they're spending political capital on stuff which won't show a positive return.
This is the bit I don’t really understand. But I wonder if there’s more unpopular stuff to come so they want to make these changes now and hope they get drowned out?
The alternative is simply that they're a bit crap. Heart in the right place, perhaps, but not very good at running things.
So, if it’s true that this farm tax will only affect several hundred people per year, and only raise several hundred million in extra tax (before the accountants and lawyers have a good go at it), why are the government prepared to waste so much political capital on such a small change?
Surely you save your political capital for major taxation changes that raise tens of billions? It comes across as ideological as a result, that the government are at best ambivalent to farming and rural communities. I suspect there will a revival of the Countryside Alliance as there was under Bair’s government, but this time with some newly very famous farmers leading the protests.
It's precisely the same situation as we saw with the Winter Fuel Payments. It's all about desperately scraping around for small change here and there, because they've ruled out most of the big ticket items (either in the manifesto or by filing them in the bin marked "too difficult.") They're burning through all their political capital on tax rises that are questionable or simply wrong headed, failing to raise enough money to shore up the state and provide the benefits and services that will help to convince people they're worth a second term, and relying on their image of toughness looking like decisive action in the national interest, when it often looks more like clumsy errors compounded by a stubborn refusal to admit as much.
This Government is in real danger of falling between two stools: making changes that are just enough to irritate the wealthy whilst being wholly insufficient (and, in the case of the NI raid and the refusal to support local government, positively harmful) to the interests of the less well off. The obvious risk is that, on five years' time, we shall have seen modest improvements in the health service whilst living standards continue to decline and the rest of the public realm keeps on decaying and shutting down. The Government risks going to the country trying to get re-elected on the basis that granny now only has to wait one year rather than three for a hip replacement, only to find itself condemned for making most of the country poorer, against a backdrop of cratered roads, closed libraries and bankrupt councils that collect the bins once every two months and spend everything else on social care services that still fail because of the weight of demand.
The nation requires emergency surgery; what it's going to get is another box of Elastoplast. If this all ends with Drs Badenoch and Farage diagnosing gangrene and cutting off both legs and an arm a few years down the road then the lack of decisive action now will have been to blame.
I think the political capital argument is the best one as to why SKS has a good chance of falling.
I have been trying to wrap my head around the approach, which many will answer there isn’t one. But SKS sticks doggedly to one approach as we saw with his role as LOTO.
My feeling is that they know there are no popular decisions to make so they are trying to get them all out the way in one go.
The idea then I guess is to get positive stories over the next five years around immigration and house building.
It seems very high risk to me. And tends towards failure.
We all expected unpopular decisions of the first six months of this government. That's not a surprise. But they're spending political capital on stuff which won't show a positive return.
Exactly
I would be using primary legislation to smash through some new towns. And some new railways to match.
I really wish this war against employees by other employees would end.
I don’t know what organisations people have worked for but I’d find it hard to believe Vodafone where I was for many years is any less bureaucratic than the public sector. Every decision or change I wanted to make had to go through five layers of management.
Perhaps it’s just that large organisations in general are like tankers? I hear much the same from friends at Apple and Google.
Most public sector organisations have no idea how many employees they have at anytime. This has become much worse since COVID. I know for a fact that the cabinet office found 100s of people who were still salaried in 2021/2 who had been given no work for months and this will have been much worse in other departments.
It's not just the insane Bureaucracy, it's the fact that there is little grip on what the purpose of each department is and what the overall goal is. This lack of direction and grip means the public sector is terrible at driving down costs and removing useless processes.
So, if it’s true that this farm tax will only affect several hundred people per year, and only raise several hundred million in extra tax (before the accountants and lawyers have a good go at it), why are the government prepared to waste so much political capital on such a small change?
Surely you save your political capital for major taxation changes that raise tens of billions? It comes across as ideological as a result, that the government are at best ambivalent to farming and rural communities. I suspect there will a revival of the Countryside Alliance as there was under Bair’s government, but this time with some newly very famous farmers leading the protests.
It's precisely the same situation as we saw with the Winter Fuel Payments. It's all about desperately scraping around for small change here and there, because they've ruled out most of the big ticket items (either in the manifesto or by filing them in the bin marked "too difficult.") They're burning through all their political capital on tax rises that are questionable or simply wrong headed, failing to raise enough money to shore up the state and provide the benefits and services that will help to convince people they're worth a second term, and relying on their image of toughness looking like decisive action in the national interest, when it often looks more like clumsy errors compounded by a stubborn refusal to admit as much.
This Government is in real danger of falling between two stools: making changes that are just enough to irritate the wealthy whilst being wholly insufficient (and, in the case of the NI raid and the refusal to support local government, positively harmful) to the interests of the less well off. The obvious risk is that, on five years' time, we shall have seen modest improvements in the health service whilst living standards continue to decline and the rest of the public realm keeps on decaying and shutting down. The Government risks going to the country trying to get re-elected on the basis that granny now only has to wait one year rather than three for a hip replacement, only to find itself condemned for making most of the country poorer, against a backdrop of cratered roads, closed libraries and bankrupt councils that collect the bins once every two months and spend everything else on social care services that still fail because of the weight of demand.
The nation requires emergency surgery; what it's going to get is another box of Elastoplast. If this all ends with Drs Badenoch and Farage diagnosing gangrene and cutting off both legs and an arm a few years down the road then the lack of decisive action now will have been to blame.
I think the political capital argument is the best one as to why SKS has a good chance of falling.
I have been trying to wrap my head around the approach, which many will answer there isn’t one. But SKS sticks doggedly to one approach as we saw with his role as LOTO.
My feeling is that they know there are no popular decisions to make so they are trying to get them all out the way in one go.
The idea then I guess is to get positive stories over the next five years around immigration and house building.
It seems very high risk to me. And tends towards failure.
We all expected unpopular decisions of the first six months of this government. That's not a surprise. But they're spending political capital on stuff which won't show a positive return.
This is the bit I don’t really understand. But I wonder if there’s more unpopular stuff to come so they want to make these changes now and hope they get drowned out?
The alternative is simply that they're a bit crap. Heart in the right place, perhaps, but not very good at running things.
I am still to be convinced that they are crap but I will say that I am tending to that view.
The reason I am not there yet is that this all said in the 2020-2024 period and it turns out that they basically followed one strategy from 2020 onwards and never diverged from it, which in the end was successful.
Torsten's Bell tweet is idiotic. Agricultural land is a tool of a trade. A house is not.
What has been less noticed is that the tax changes affect all family owned businesses. Not just farms. So the idea that this is just about closing off a loophole is nonsense. It is a tax change which will harm all family owned businesses. What is the justification for doing so?
The answers are all over the place: one minute it's "well very few will be affected" and the next "well the NHS will collapse without the money". These are incoherent and inconsistent. And frankly - though I imagine I will get a lot of grief for saying so - I don't think the purpose of our economy or tax policy should be to keep the NHS afloat. Even if it were other Budget decisions completely undermine that anyway - not least the NIC changes which will harm GP surgeries and care homes. A proper social care policy would do more to help the NHS than anything else - but on that we have once again got tumbleweed and a tax change which will, if anything, make matters worse.
On social care it could be even worse than you describe. The current plan seems to be set a mechanism to allow higher/fairer levels of pay across the whole sector, yet with no indication whatsoever how local councils will fund the whacking increase in fees required.
Laura K claims there is a big meeting scheduled for this coming Monday between chancellor, PM and NHS ministers to finally thrash this out.
I expect more tumbleweed sadly.
I know you, like me, are knee deep in this.
An illustration of the waste:
My father is still at home with regular carer visits. He falls from time to time. Inevitable given his condition. No biggee. Check he's OK, help him up on sofa and make him a cuppa you might think.
But no. The carers will not apply common sense. They immediately call 999. Ambulance is booked but may be 4 - 6 hours. Dad expected to sit on floor for all this time, waiting to be helped up.So I (in another part of the country) get a call from the care agency, looking to be relieved. WTF do they expect me to do? I ring around best I can and - with luck - get a neighbour on phone who goes and helps him up. So I tell carer to cancel the ambulance. 'No' I'm told they can't do that. So now we have an ambulance coming at some point for an emergency which never existed. This has happened six times over last couple of months.
What a waste of time for the ambulance service. How many times is this scenario being played out across the country?
It's about discretion. A relative was working in care facility. She lifted a patient, by herself. Just off the bed, patient still over the bed. 6 inches or so. The patient was a little old lady. My relative likes to bench far more than the patients weight, at the gym. Risk to patient zero. Risk to my relative zero. Patient was in distress.....
Fired of course.
This is a huge issue. I have the same with ambulances being called.
The crew tell me they spend half the day dealing with this kind of stuff. No wonder wait times are 8 hours etc etc.
Agencies refuse to pick people off the floor. I even have equipment which I use myself to get relative off floor (i can provide details if anyone is interested).
They wont use that.
I assume this is all to do with modern insurance and risk and legal liability and all that shite.
Torsten's Bell tweet is idiotic. Agricultural land is a tool of a trade. A house is not.
What has been less noticed is that the tax changes affect all family owned businesses. Not just farms. So the idea that this is just about closing off a loophole is nonsense. It is a tax change which will harm all family owned businesses. What is the justification for doing so?
The answers are all over the place: one minute it's "well very few will be affected" and the next "well the NHS will collapse without the money". These are incoherent and inconsistent. And frankly - though I imagine I will get a lot of grief for saying so - I don't think the purpose of our economy or tax policy should be to keep the NHS afloat. Even if it were other Budget decisions completely undermine that anyway - not least the NIC changes which will harm GP surgeries and care homes. A proper social care policy would do more to help the NHS than anything else - but on that we have once again got tumbleweed and a tax change which will, if anything, make matters worse.
Agreed re Bell’s tweet - a £3m house is comparable to a £3m farm if the homeowner can only make any income from activity done at the house and no other job, that the home has to hire or buy very expensive machinery to allow that activity and very expensive items that the expensive. Machinery works with to make even that small income.
I’m guessing Torsten’s parents don’t do this with their home and instead were able to leave it daily to go to other jobs which earner far more than the farmer will earn.
I would also be surprised if there were more people out there who would take on the massive burden of a £3m farm than would want to buy a £3m house.
I presume a £3m farm is worth the same as a £3m home... because that's how money works! It's fungible.
The idea that a £3m farm is more burden than a £3m home... well, possibly, but it's also more reward. It can't just be more burden, because then it wouldn't be worth the same.
A £3m diamond is worth the same as a £3m house - there are very few people who will splash out £3m on a diamond compared to a house the same value.
A £3m farm is likely to have a lot more land than a £3m house - should the house then be slashed in value because it has less land or are these two very different things where the monetary value is based on many different factors.
A £3m diamond is worth the same as a £3m house. There are indeed very few people who will splash out £3m on a diamond compared to a house the same value, but that's because we all make different choices what to spend our money on. A £3m diamond is still worth the same as a £3m house.
If someone paid me for some work with a £3m diamond, I should pay the same tax as if they paid with a £3m house.
Without doubt one of the worst thread headers TSE has ever done.
No party wins general elections without shoring up their core vote first and for Tories they include private school parents and farmers. Voters also want a choice not an echo, if you want to hammer farmers with inheritance tax and hit private school parents with VAT you vote Labour anyway and if the Tories don't stand up for farmers and private school parents they will leak voters to Reform and the LDs who will.
Plus 57% of voters oppose the hated tractor tax anyway
Not to mention VAT on school fees will just reduce the scholarships they provide and hit smaller schools most making them even more exclusive. While we need family farms to produce our food, you can't make food from houses. Most farms may be asset rich but they are income poor
If you are asset rich but income poor, you can get a mortgage or similar sort of loan. It’s not difficult.
We need houses to live in. You can’t make houses from food (pace Hansel & Gretel).
Can you explain how you pay a mortgage from a poor income. The whole point is they will need to sell at least part of farm to pay it so making it even poorer income etc. Idiocy thought up by morons. It should be tax applied when any sale is made , inheriting land is worth nothing unless you sell.
Torsten's Bell tweet is idiotic. Agricultural land is a tool of a trade. A house is not.
What has been less noticed is that the tax changes affect all family owned businesses. Not just farms. So the idea that this is just about closing off a loophole is nonsense. It is a tax change which will harm all family owned businesses. What is the justification for doing so?
The answers are all over the place: one minute it's "well very few will be affected" and the next "well the NHS will collapse without the money". These are incoherent and inconsistent. And frankly - though I imagine I will get a lot of grief for saying so - I don't think the purpose of our economy or tax policy should be to keep the NHS afloat. Even if it were other Budget decisions completely undermine that anyway - not least the NIC changes which will harm GP surgeries and care homes. A proper social care policy would do more to help the NHS than anything else - but on that we have once again got tumbleweed and a tax change which will, if anything, make matters worse.
Agreed re Bell’s tweet - a £3m house is comparable to a £3m farm if the homeowner can only make any income from activity done at the house and no other job, that the home has to hire or buy very expensive machinery to allow that activity and very expensive items that the expensive. Machinery works with to make even that small income.
I’m guessing Torsten’s parents don’t do this with their home and instead were able to leave it daily to go to other jobs which earner far more than the farmer will earn.
I would also be surprised if there were more people out there who would take on the massive burden of a £3m farm than would want to buy a £3m house.
I presume a £3m farm is worth the same as a £3m home... because that's how money works! It's fungible.
The idea that a £3m farm is more burden than a £3m home... well, possibly, but it's also more reward. It can't just be more burden, because then it wouldn't be worth the same.
A £3m diamond is worth the same as a £3m house - there are very few people who will splash out £3m on a diamond compared to a house the same value.
A £3m farm is likely to have a lot more land than a £3m house - should the house then be slashed in value because it has less land or are these two very different things where the monetary value is based on many different factors.
Again, we surely go down different routes depending what happens after inheritance.
Someone inherits their parents' £3m house and sells it, gets hit with IHT. Someone inherits their parents' £3m farm and sells it... well, why should they not pay the same* IHT? Someone inherits their parents £3m farm and farms it - we can have a discussion.
There's a further complication to the second two scenarios, if inheritor has lived on and worked on farm all their life then they have contributed to the value of the inheritance, in a way in which most people inheriting a house have not (unless they've spent a lot of time doing it up for their parents). But perhaps that aspect needs to be recognised either in simple, IHT-free partial transfers before death without retained benefit rules or some formal reduction in IHT recognising the contribution to value.
*under the present proposals, they don't anyway, I think?
I really wish this war against employees by other employees would end.
I don’t know what organisations people have worked for but I’d find it hard to believe Vodafone where I was for many years is any less bureaucratic than the public sector. Every decision or change I wanted to make had to go through five layers of management.
Perhaps it’s just that large organisations in general are like tankers? I hear much the same from friends at Apple and Google.
Most public sector organisations have no idea how many employees they have at anytime. This has become much worse since COVID. I know for a fact that the cabinet office found 100s of people who were still salaried in 2021/2 who had been given no work for months and this will have been much worse in other departments.
It's not just the insane Bureaucracy, it's the fact that there is little grip on what the purpose of each department is and what the overall goal is. This lack of direction and grip means the public sector is terrible at driving down costs and removing useless processes.
You could apply all of this to private sector organisations though. I’m not saying that the public sector is a bastion of efficiency, just that I’m not seeing this amazing private sector efficiency people keep talking about.
At start ups, yes. But that’s not really what we are talking about here.
Comments
Whether Putin has engineered this or is riding his blind luck remains a moot point.
As for the NHS, I'm sure you're right but somebody in your party has to put in the hard work and identify the savings before the next election so we all know for what we would be voting. I'd also argue you had 14 years to identify these efficiencies and savings - did you?
What's marking Kemi out as naive at this stage is making huge public spending commitments for a General Election in 2028/9. The landscape then will be hugely different to what it is now and all she's doing is boxing herself in. Either she can't pledge what she actually needs then, her manifesto will be less plausible than Corbyn's or she'll have to publicly screw over Britain's farmers and pensioners and look untrustworthy. What a choice.
I had no idea that farms were inheritance tax-free until the last few weeks. Never really thought about it. I guess that if there's one piece of advice to give someone it's to be born rich, and two pieces it's to be born to a rich farmer. If the farmers are smart they'll do some hard PR to us ignorant townies on how hard farming is, as it's all tax breaks in the headlines.
'It would also result in a situation where, unless the SNP and Labour formed a grand coalition, no combination of parties could secure a majority without Nigel Farage’s Reform UK...
Curtice’s projections put the SNP on 42 MSPs, with Labour on 34, the Conservatives 18, Reform 14, the Lib Dems 11 and the Greens 10.
This would leave the SNP and Greens 13 seats short of a pro-independence majority, and a potential coalition of Labour and the Lib Dems 20 short. Even if the Tories joined the other two sitting unionist parties, they would be two seats shy of having control of the chamber.'
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/scotland/article/scottish-labour-pledges-to-restore-winter-fuel-payment-psr8vjc3l
All for it.
"Emilia Perez" is completely demented. Imagine Mrs Doubtfire the musical played straight and reset in a Mexican cartel, with songs and choreography that make "Springtime for Hitler" look tasteful.
It's either brilliant or appalling. I can't decide.
Ahem.
Like you I support increases in the NMW but such decisions should never be made in a vacuum, they should be made with a very careful eye on the labour markets to ensure that too many people are not being priced out of a job.
And Good Morning one and all. Clear and cold here this morning.
In answer to questions about the detailed implementation of the policy, the minister several times repeated the "it's important they pay their share for the NHS" mantra. And nothing else.
Had they given the policy any thought, they'd have better rationale.
And yes, the tax treatment of multinationals is of far more financial significance - but it's difficult. That it's not on the agenda also suggests a lack of fundamental competence.
However, work done per pound spent, and total work done overall, both likely get worse.
We are getting less done but because we have cut the hours worked our productivty has gone up! Surely be that reckoning if we want to have soaring productivity we should just cut to a 1 day week. We would have the best productivity in the Western world by that measure.
Local Government has lost more than a million posts since 2012 and restructures (or re-organisations) are a fact of life. When I worked in local Government, I went through at least half a dozen - indeed, I'd argue the constant restructuring and the need to cut costs was often counter-productive as a disproportionate amount of officer time and money is wasted on said restructures.
I can't speak for other parts of the "public sector" (however you choose to define that and we can include the blue light sectors and the armed forces if we're being accurate) but there's no job security in local Government - even the Councillors (especially the Tory ones) don't feel as secure as they once did.
I'm not arguing with your thesis, but something else was going on there, if the ONS numbers are accurate.
We are a representative democracy, we elect MPs to make our laws. In any case it wasn't the EU referendum Leave vote that delivered Brexit, Parliament voted Brexit down for 3 years after 2016 after all, it was Boris winning a majority of Conservative MPs at the December 2019 GE
It's an important distinction. Productivity growth is brilliant because it can both improve economic output and improve our standards of living - the balance between the two varies over time.
If the vote had been held under the coalition government, it would have been an easy win.
What has been less noticed is that the tax changes affect all family owned businesses. Not just farms. So the idea that this is just about closing off a loophole is nonsense. It is a tax change which will harm all family owned businesses. What is the justification for doing so?
The answers are all over the place: one minute it's "well very few will be affected" and the next "well the NHS will collapse without the money". These are incoherent and inconsistent. And frankly - though I imagine I will get a lot of grief for saying so - I don't think the purpose of our economy or tax policy should be to keep the NHS afloat. Even if it were other Budget decisions completely undermine that anyway - not least the NIC changes which will harm GP surgeries and care homes. A proper social care policy would do more to help the NHS than anything else - but on that we have once again got tumbleweed and a tax change which will, if anything, make matters worse.
Delivery driving for example often has very demanding targets so they may not be able to do that either. Indeed the targets are often a disaster in my view, frequently we get delivery drivers ring the bell and dump parcels on the door 5 secs later rather than wait for us to pick them up. Targets which don't include quality of service are equally poor
But on this particular issue, as a right-wing voice I agree with TSE. I’m still broadly Kemi positive, but she needs to avoid the tendency to oppose EVERYTHING the government does; or at least to nuance her opposition. WFA was a cynical Brown-era tactic and made no sense then and should definitely be abolished, if for no other reason on the principle of simplification of the jungle of the benefit system. And farmers’ IHT: yes, it appears, like the private school tax, part of an assault on Labours’ enemies – but it wasn’t really performing the job it was designed to. At the very least, we need to consider a better situation.
At the very least, KB makes herself a hostage to fortune by opposing EVERYTHING – in the (unlikely, in my view) event that she wins power, she has given herself some very expensive millstones.
A thoughful column from Sunder Katwala (@Sundersays on both Twitter and Bluesky):
Comment: Britain is not America, so how do we keep it that way?
"..I was reflecting on Britain and America in giving the Migration Museum’s annual lecture last week, exploring how the history of migration might influence the future. America has had a much clearer idea of itself as a “nation of immigrants” – symbolised by the Statue of Liberty. But that did not prevent Trump winning while pledging the biggest deportation effort in American history. Trump’s return strengthens the case for clear blue Transatlantic water – keeping a distance from America’s culture wars as we navigate our own identity challenges in a changing Britain."
https://www.easterneye.biz/britain-and-america-political-polarisation/
The NHS was too sacred a cow under the last Tory government, there are savings that can be made in it while protecting those who need it
They could not have produced a more generic, bandwagon jumping advert if they tried. Literally says nothing about the brand they actually
havehad.It's a bit like the aligning of traffic lights with traffic speeds - you can create a system where everyone stops and starts all the time. Or you can tune it, so that, at the legal speed, you go through one green light and cruise through all the others on green.
Hence the whole field of Queueing Theory.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4T22z96LSU
I'd watch it but it is described as a musical. I couldn't stomach it if it's a musical.
Laura K claims there is a big meeting scheduled for this coming Monday between chancellor, PM and NHS ministers to finally thrash this out.
I expect more tumbleweed sadly.
Secondly, a Scottish government doesn't require a majority and on several occasions, including now, has governed without one. The numbers in the projection don't make that especially easy, but in terms of getting a budget through, Scottish politics doesn't split down unionism/independence lines - for example, there is a deal to be done between Tories and SNP on funding for rural communities (which are an important part of the electoral coalition for both).
As to why people aren’t outraged: a couple can pass on £2.6million tax free (combination of family business & the nil rate band). The kinds of “family business“ that ordinary people feel shouldn’t be taxed are going to worth less than that as a going concern - you don’t pay £2million for a corner shop do you?
Farmers have better PR basically.
I’m guessing Torsten’s parents don’t do this with their home and instead were able to leave it daily to go to other jobs which earner far more than the farmer will earn.
I would also be surprised if there were more people out there who would take on the massive burden of a £3m farm than would want to buy a £3m house.
Productivity isn't just about working long hours which might be how it works in the culture of some private sector companies where if you're not working a 60 hour week you're not considered "loyal" to the company (I know it's not like that). How people work and how they are managed is a much bigger factor in determining productivity than the number of hours.
I have been trying to wrap my head around the approach, which many will answer there isn’t one. But SKS sticks doggedly to one approach as we saw with his role as LOTO.
My feeling is that they know there are no popular decisions to make so they are trying to get them all out the way in one go.
The idea then I guess is to get positive stories over the next five years around immigration and house building.
It seems very high risk to me. And tends towards failure.
An illustration of the waste:
My father is still at home with regular carer visits. He falls from time to time. Inevitable given his condition. No biggee. Check he's OK, help him up on sofa and make him a cuppa you might think.
But no. The carers will not apply common sense. They immediately call 999. Ambulance is booked but may be 4 - 6 hours. Dad expected to sit on floor for all this time, waiting to be helped up.So I (in another part of the country) get a call from the care agency, looking to be relieved. WTF do they expect me to do? I ring around best I can and - with luck - get a neighbour on phone who goes and helps him up. So I tell carer to cancel the ambulance. 'No' I'm told they can't do that. So now we have an ambulance coming at some point for an emergency which never existed. This has happened six times over last couple of months.
What a waste of time for the ambulance service. How many times is this scenario being played out across the country?
I am not any less productive by working 36 hours than 40. Okay in practice I might work a few more but it’s still less than I used to.
Gone are appeals to democratic values. Ukraine’s new strategy for surviving Trump’s America centers on deals, strategic assets, and a surprising China card.
https://euromaidanpress.com/2024/11/19/ukraines-trump-strategy-inside-kyivs-plan-b/
..The Financial Times, citing its sources, reported that two points in Zelenskyy’s “victory plan” were written for that exact purpose and with Trump’s possible coming to power in mind. One idea involves replacing some of the US troops stationed in Europe with Ukrainian troops after the war is over.
The second point was proposed by Trump’s ally Senator Lindsey Graham and refers to joint control of Ukraine and the West over the country’s most important natural resources. According to sources, Trump became interested in these two points after reading the plan when Zelenskyy presented it to American top officials, including Trump, in late September...
This is because if you announce a new town now, the "planning process" (actually a whole bunch of things, but put it in the general bag of "planning") will take 5 years. Plus. The if you wanted to do something stupid, like provide public transport, you might want a railway connection. Ha Ha ha....
So, unless Starmer does something really radical, there no chance of a change.
And using primary legislation to bludgeon a plan through is nearly unthinkable for a lawyer. It means abrogation of the entire process. There would be howling. Accusations of Trumpian behaviour.
Immigration is something he could make more tangible moves on. Based on a report I read the other day, they know they are vulnerable on that.
Is there anything they could do in five years that they can point to as being better? Ultimately that’s why they’ll get voted out, if people say “no”.
Our Rural Affairs Minister Daniel Zeichner managed to convey the Labour logic on farming perfectly 'tens of thousands of family farms across the country will not be affected by this and of course, with a bit of planning, no inheritance tax will be paid at all......Everyone else has to pay inheritance tax and we think we should clamp down on these tax avoidance.'
The idea that a £3m farm is more burden than a £3m home... well, possibly, but it's also more reward. It can't just be more burden, because then it wouldn't be worth the same.
Fired of course.
For the record, I only started to contribute to PB once I'd retired, because the Civil Service would have taken a very dim view of me taking out any time to read and write on this august forum in working hours. And I was too knackered to join in in evenings or at weekends.
(Though I generally get parcels delivered to work -- more convenient all round.)
Propping elderly people up at an effective 40% tax rate doesn't seem like a terribly fair deal.
I don’t know what organisations people have worked for but I’d find it hard to believe Vodafone where I was for many years is any less bureaucratic than the public sector. Every decision or change I wanted to make had to go through five layers of management.
Perhaps it’s just that large organisations in general are like tankers? I hear much the same from friends at Apple and Google.
UPS are one of the few that are different, so I understand it.
That would lead to the most massive row in law and politics - I could see it turning into a mini-Brexit. MPs voting down their own government to preserve what they see as vital.
"Who governs Britain?" - an interesting slogan....
A £3m farm is likely to have a lot more land than a £3m house - should the house then be slashed in value because it has less land or are these two very different things where the monetary value is based on many different factors.
Everything needing to be passed through 5 layers with noone prepared to make a decision. The larger the organisation the worse they are to deal with as a supplier or customer.
The inefficiencies can exist in large orgs so long as they're making profits though...
On reading the Mitrokhin Archive, the thing that struck me, was the description of how by the end, the KGB was 100,000s of people in tower block offices, arguing about whose budget the biscuits for the meeting to discuss the biscuit budget....
It struck me, because I think I worked there.
But they're spending political capital on stuff which won't show a positive return.
There are portions that work well when there is an accidental alignment of the right people, but a lot of the time doing stuff requires a lot of treacle wading.
Of course, many small organisations can also have problems, but the advantage there is that they don't last long.
- A BA, from the same company as me, did more work than a whole floor of the BAs, pre crash
- People whose job it was to attend meetings, and construct personations from those meetings, that they would give at other meetings. Some people were 2 jobs away from both top management and the people who actually did banking.
- A manager screaming "Does anyone know our exposure to fucking Lehmans?"
- After the crash, they binned whole floors of people in the tower in Canary wharf. It was Kung Fu mixed with Jenga....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5n0DLYbYqc
I have an Aussie friend who identified quite a few of these sorts of things in Britain, where something once went wrong and there's subsequently a massive overreaction to absolutely prevent any possibility of a repeat.
That's why the carer insists on the ambulance. They can't possibly be blamed for making a mistake if they call the ambulance. This is also one reason why I'm a bit worried about "AI" use in Britain. The dominant culture will simply love the opportunity to offload responsibility for decision-making to a computer algorithm, even if the decision-making is poor, because they can then escape the blame when it goes wrong.
Heart in the right place, perhaps, but not very good at running things.
I would be using primary legislation to smash through some new towns. And some new railways to match.
Go big or go home.
It's not just the insane Bureaucracy, it's the fact that there is little grip on what the purpose of each department is and what the overall goal is. This lack of direction and grip means the public sector is terrible at driving down costs and removing useless processes.
The reason I am not there yet is that this all said in the 2020-2024 period and it turns out that they basically followed one strategy from 2020 onwards and never diverged from it, which in the end was successful.
Time will tell if they just got lucky.
The crew tell me they spend half the day dealing with this kind of stuff. No wonder wait times are 8 hours etc etc.
Agencies refuse to pick people off the floor. I even have equipment which I use myself to get relative off floor (i can provide details if anyone is interested).
They wont use that.
I assume this is all to do with modern insurance and risk and legal liability and all that shite.
But the nhs is picking up the pieces.
If someone paid me for some work with a £3m diamond, I should pay the same tax as if they paid with a £3m house.
Idiocy thought up by morons. It should be tax applied when any sale is made , inheriting land is worth nothing unless you sell.
Someone inherits their parents' £3m house and sells it, gets hit with IHT.
Someone inherits their parents' £3m farm and sells it... well, why should they not pay the same* IHT?
Someone inherits their parents £3m farm and farms it - we can have a discussion.
There's a further complication to the second two scenarios, if inheritor has lived on and worked on farm all their life then they have contributed to the value of the inheritance, in a way in which most people inheriting a house have not (unless they've spent a lot of time doing it up for their parents). But perhaps that aspect needs to be recognised either in simple, IHT-free partial transfers before death without retained benefit rules or some formal reduction in IHT recognising the contribution to value.
*under the present proposals, they don't anyway, I think?
At start ups, yes. But that’s not really what we are talking about here.