Got a feeling I'm going to enjoy this week's issue:
Why exactly? Is it really that difficult to leave the gays to celebrate their own thing and get on with your own life. If it's because of all of the corporate posturing on social media i agree with that but I can tell you that I and no other gay person I know asked for that.
I've not been to a Pride event for at least 40 years. I've nothing against them but I know of no gay friends who'd dream of going . I don't believe they reflect the reality of life for most gay people.
I think I said this yesterday but of my gay friends the ones who are most attached to Pride are the slightly older ones for whom it is still intensely liberating to be out and proud amongst crowds who celebrate that fact. It means more if you've spent a lot of your adult life having to downplay your sexuality for fear of abuse.
Of mine the oldies, like me just aren't interested
Got a feeling I'm going to enjoy this week's issue:
Why exactly? Is it really that difficult to leave the gays to celebrate their own thing and get on with your own life. If it's because of all of the corporate posturing on social media i agree with that but I can tell you that I and no other gay person I know asked for that.
I've not been to a Pride event for at least 40 years. I've nothing against them but I know of no gay friends who'd dream of going . I don't believe they reflect the reality of life for most gay people.
I think I said this yesterday but of my gay friends the ones who are most attached to Pride are the slightly older ones for whom it is still intensely liberating to be out and proud amongst crowds who celebrate that fact. It means more if you've spent a lot of your adult life having to downplay your sexuality for fear of abuse.
Of mine the oldies, like me just aren't interested
I guess everyone's different. I sometimes march in the London one with colleagues but I can take it or leave it. I'm beginning to get slightly annoyed at it being lined up as the next culture war battlefield though. Both on here and amongst newly minted Reform councils. No-one complains about all of the other parades and celebrations that cost the public purse a small amount of money to police.
We don't bang on about those all Summer though in every meeting though.
What part of people don't like being hectored or lectured to don't you get?
The bit where you are the only one who feels hectored to and everyone else doesn’t have a problem?
You are one of the least self-aware people I've ever encountered.
You work in a university. Woke Central. The ones agreeing with you on here are the pb hyperliberals. Everyone I expected to demonstrate extraordinary resistance to challenge on this ideology has, unsurprisingly, come out and demonstrated extraordinary resistance to it. Vociferously.
That doesn't mean no-one else has a problem. Polling figures alone should tell you that.
For someone working in tertiary education you are surprisingly dumb.
Got a feeling I'm going to enjoy this week's issue:
Why exactly? Is it really that difficult to leave the gays to celebrate their own thing and get on with your own life. If it's because of all of the corporate posturing on social media i agree with that but I can tell you that I and no other gay person I know asked for that.
I've not been to a Pride event for at least 40 years. I've nothing against them but I know of no gay friends who'd dream of going . I don't believe they reflect the reality of life for most gay people.
I think I said this yesterday but of my gay friends the ones who are most attached to Pride are the slightly older ones for whom it is still intensely liberating to be out and proud amongst crowds who celebrate that fact. It means more if you've spent a lot of your adult life having to downplay your sexuality for fear of abuse.
Of mine the oldies, like me just aren't interested
Got a feeling I'm going to enjoy this week's issue:
Why exactly? Is it really that difficult to leave the gays to celebrate their own thing and get on with your own life. If it's because of all of the corporate posturing on social media i agree with that but I can tell you that I and no other gay person I know asked for that.
I've not been to a Pride event for at least 40 years. I've nothing against them but I know of no gay friends who'd dream of going . I don't believe they reflect the reality of life for most gay people.
I think I said this yesterday but of my gay friends the ones who are most attached to Pride are the slightly older ones for whom it is still intensely liberating to be out and proud amongst crowds who celebrate that fact. It means more if you've spent a lot of your adult life having to downplay your sexuality for fear of abuse.
Of mine the oldies, like me just aren't interested
I guess everyone's different. I sometimes march in the London one with colleagues but I can take it or leave it. I'm beginning to get slightly annoyed at it being lined up as the next culture war battlefield though. Both on here and amongst newly minted Reform councils. No-one complains about all of the other parades and celebrations that cost the public purse a small amount of money to police.
We don't bang on about those all Summer though in every meeting though.
What part of people don't like being hectored or lectured to don't you get?
The bit where you are the only one who feels hectored to and everyone else doesn’t have a problem?
You are one of the least self-aware people I've ever encountered.
You work in a university. Woke Central. The ones agreeing with you on here are the pb hyperliberals. Everyone I expected to demonstrate extraordinary resistance to challenge on this ideology has, unsurprisingly, come out and demonstrated extraordinary resistance to it. Vociferously.
That doesn't mean no-one else has a problem. Polling figures alone should tell you that.
For someone working in tertiary education you are surprisingly dumb.
Got a feeling I'm going to enjoy this week's issue:
Why exactly? Is it really that difficult to leave the gays to celebrate their own thing and get on with your own life. If it's because of all of the corporate posturing on social media i agree with that but I can tell you that I and no other gay person I know asked for that.
I've not been to a Pride event for at least 40 years. I've nothing against them but I know of no gay friends who'd dream of going . I don't believe they reflect the reality of life for most gay people.
I think I said this yesterday but of my gay friends the ones who are most attached to Pride are the slightly older ones for whom it is still intensely liberating to be out and proud amongst crowds who celebrate that fact. It means more if you've spent a lot of your adult life having to downplay your sexuality for fear of abuse.
So, it's massively out of date then and of diminishing appeal then?
Funny it's foghorned to us all at 120dB out of ideology and then all Summer. Sometimes, all year round. You don't get that your ideology and religious fervour on this will drive a backlash.
Want to avoid it? Tone it down and rein it in, so it's proportionate again, or.. lose it all.
Farage in Footdee the other day giving his speech. We’re going to drill oil and gas. Yes Nigel, that’s already the law, to extract was is economical to extract. And we’re going to tax farmers who have solar farms! Wait, what?
No, that's not the law already. Listen to our resident expert @Richard_Tyndall
The Government have stopped new licences even if its economical.
While simultaneously investing in CCGT and Blue Hydrogen plants that will consume Qatari natural gas for decades to come. Joined-up thinking, not.
(I know I keep banging on about this, but it is ridiculous.)
Got a feeling I'm going to enjoy this week's issue:
Why exactly? Is it really that difficult to leave the gays to celebrate their own thing and get on with your own life. If it's because of all of the corporate posturing on social media i agree with that but I can tell you that I and no other gay person I know asked for that.
I've not been to a Pride event for at least 40 years. I've nothing against them but I know of no gay friends who'd dream of going . I don't believe they reflect the reality of life for most gay people.
I think I said this yesterday but of my gay friends the ones who are most attached to Pride are the slightly older ones for whom it is still intensely liberating to be out and proud amongst crowds who celebrate that fact. It means more if you've spent a lot of your adult life having to downplay your sexuality for fear of abuse.
So, it's massively out of date then and of diminishing appeal then?
Funny it's foghorned to us all at 120dB out of ideology and then all Summer. Sometimes, all year round. You don't get that your ideology and religious fervour on this will drive a backlash.
Want to avoid it? Tone it down and rein it in, so it's proportionate again, or.. lose it all.
Your choice.
Does anyone need a clearer indication of the kind of nastiness and bigotry behind all the whining on the right about "wokeness"?
Got a feeling I'm going to enjoy this week's issue:
Why exactly? Is it really that difficult to leave the gays to celebrate their own thing and get on with your own life. If it's because of all of the corporate posturing on social media i agree with that but I can tell you that I and no other gay person I know asked for that.
I've not been to a Pride event for at least 40 years. I've nothing against them but I know of no gay friends who'd dream of going . I don't believe they reflect the reality of life for most gay people.
I think I said this yesterday but of my gay friends the ones who are most attached to Pride are the slightly older ones for whom it is still intensely liberating to be out and proud amongst crowds who celebrate that fact. It means more if you've spent a lot of your adult life having to downplay your sexuality for fear of abuse.
So, it's massively out of date then and of diminishing appeal then?
Funny it's foghorned to us all at 120dB out of ideology and then all Summer. Sometimes, all year round. You don't get that your ideology and religious fervour on this will drive a backlash.
Want to avoid it? Tone it down and rein it in, so it's proportionate again, or.. lose it all.
Your choice.
Should we tone down Christmas? Or Easter?
I suggested to the local CoE reverend that we should abolish Christmas and replace it with a religious festival. He thought this was a good idea.
Got a feeling I'm going to enjoy this week's issue:
Why exactly? Is it really that difficult to leave the gays to celebrate their own thing and get on with your own life. If it's because of all of the corporate posturing on social media i agree with that but I can tell you that I and no other gay person I know asked for that.
I've not been to a Pride event for at least 40 years. I've nothing against them but I know of no gay friends who'd dream of going . I don't believe they reflect the reality of life for most gay people.
I think I said this yesterday but of my gay friends the ones who are most attached to Pride are the slightly older ones for whom it is still intensely liberating to be out and proud amongst crowds who celebrate that fact. It means more if you've spent a lot of your adult life having to downplay your sexuality for fear of abuse.
So, it's massively out of date then and of diminishing appeal then?
Funny it's foghorned to us all at 120dB out of ideology and then all Summer. Sometimes, all year round. You don't get that your ideology and religious fervour on this will drive a backlash.
Want to avoid it? Tone it down and rein it in, so it's proportionate again, or.. lose it all.
Got a feeling I'm going to enjoy this week's issue:
Why exactly? Is it really that difficult to leave the gays to celebrate their own thing and get on with your own life. If it's because of all of the corporate posturing on social media i agree with that but I can tell you that I and no other gay person I know asked for that.
I've not been to a Pride event for at least 40 years. I've nothing against them but I know of no gay friends who'd dream of going . I don't believe they reflect the reality of life for most gay people.
I think I said this yesterday but of my gay friends the ones who are most attached to Pride are the slightly older ones for whom it is still intensely liberating to be out and proud amongst crowds who celebrate that fact. It means more if you've spent a lot of your adult life having to downplay your sexuality for fear of abuse.
So, it's massively out of date then and of diminishing appeal then?
Funny it's foghorned to us all at 120dB out of ideology and then all Summer. Sometimes, all year round. You don't get that your ideology and religious fervour on this will drive a backlash.
Want to avoid it? Tone it down and rein it in, so it's proportionate again, or.. lose it all.
Your choice.
Should we tone down Christmas? Or Easter?
I suggested to the local CoE reverend that we should abolish Christmas and replace it with a religious festival. He thought this was a good idea.
Both Yule and Eostre were seasonal festivities before the birth of Christ anyway so why would we want to do that?
Is there really any correlation between deregulation and economic growth, though?
Yes, as first-year undergraduate economics teaches us.
The private sector left to itself seeks to grow, allocating resources efficiently to maximise output. This is known as the First Fundamental Theorem of Welfare Economics - the perfectly competitive outcome is Pareto optimal. Any government regulation is likely to move an economy away from this optimal outcome, reducing economic growth. This was described by Milton Friedman as the only result in the whole of economics that is neither trivial nor false. That won't always be the case in practice, though, in particular with regulation enforcing a competitive outcome (which is why every developed country has anti-monopoly legislation) or property rights. And there will always be non-economic reasons for regulation (safety, national security, etc.). But, overall, if economics teaches us anything, it's that, beyond relatively low levels, regulation reduces economic growth.
There's plenty of empirical evidence to back this up. For instance, here is a Stanford study showing that, between US states, a 10 percent increase in the number of regulatory restrictions causes GDP growth to fall by 0.37 percentage points.
The US is massively more regulated than Europe in most things, and yet has grown far quicker. That said, the area the US is more deregulated is the labour market - so maybe that's the biggest factor.
As usual with your economic posts, that's simply not true. The only reason the EU has grown slower than the US over the last three decades is America's population growth. The EU has, in fact, come closer to the US in terms of GDP per capita, from 67 percent in 1995 (the first year for which EU27 data is available) to 72 percent in 2022.
While the EU's performance has been sub-optimal, that's been driven by the disastrous decision to have a single currency amongst widely disparate countries, the rapidly ageing populations in many member states, the post-2022 energy crisis and social preferences for working fewer hours.
America's performance is also flattered by a staggering runup in debt.
Regulation increases the cost of doing business, a factor exacerbated by the modern trend of making sectors responsible for the costs of their regulator rather than meeting it out of general taxation. This discourages investment in that sector (since the return is less attractive). Attempts to offset this effect, by giving guaranteed returns as in the water industry have been little short of catastrophic, distorting spend into qualifying investment whether it is actually useful or not.
One of my favourite sayings by Ronald Reagan was that the most frightening sentence in the English language is, "I'm from the government and I am here to help." As usual, he succinctly summarised complicated arguments in a single sentence. Regulation is a tax on a service and our regulatory sector, in my view, is the most obvious place for the government to be looking for substantial savings in public spending. It will be win win if they do.
Sure, there is a regulatory cost, but we do regulate for very often valid reasons. Banking regulation to reduce the impact of speculation, environmental regulation to prevent pollution, building regulation to ensure fire safety etc, legal regulation to prevent discrimination.
We could easily deregulate the country into hell. It's a matter of regulating well to balance benefit against cost.
I am not arguing for the Wild West, if you start deregulating everything I might be out of a job and that would never do. Of course some regulation is necessary.
But in recent decades we have built up regulatory empires with mission creep and a desire to require ever more information to justify their own existence. It is why we have the most expensive nursery care in Europe, for example. It is why care homes are so expensive. It has actually failed to do its job in water and energy. It greatly adds to the cost of financial services, lawyers, accountants etc. They become barriers to entry and innovation.
We need some serious rebalancing, hopefully keeping what is essential but binning most of it.
Got a feeling I'm going to enjoy this week's issue:
Why exactly? Is it really that difficult to leave the gays to celebrate their own thing and get on with your own life. If it's because of all of the corporate posturing on social media i agree with that but I can tell you that I and no other gay person I know asked for that.
I've not been to a Pride event for at least 40 years. I've nothing against them but I know of no gay friends who'd dream of going . I don't believe they reflect the reality of life for most gay people.
I think I said this yesterday but of my gay friends the ones who are most attached to Pride are the slightly older ones for whom it is still intensely liberating to be out and proud amongst crowds who celebrate that fact. It means more if you've spent a lot of your adult life having to downplay your sexuality for fear of abuse.
So, it's massively out of date then and of diminishing appeal then?
Funny it's foghorned to us all at 120dB out of ideology and then all Summer. Sometimes, all year round. You don't get that your ideology and religious fervour on this will drive a backlash.
Want to avoid it? Tone it down and rein it in, so it's proportionate again, or.. lose it all.
Your choice.
Does anyone need a clearer indication of the kind of nastiness and bigotry behind all the whining on the right about "wokeness"?
There's nothing in that post that demonstrates any nastiness and bigotry.
Let's say Pride was celebrated all year round, constantly, and I challenged it.
On your criteria, that would qualify as nastiness and bigotry.
There is simply no level of broadcast that you would ever consider too loud or too long, and that's why you are incapable of policing your overreach - thus putting your own core values at risk.
Morning all, Some more polling to see us into Wednesday, More In Common finds
Ref 28 (-3) Lab 23 (+1) Con 21 (+2) LD 14 (=) Green 8 (=) SNP 2 (=) 31 May to 2 June
Perhaps a little more evidence Reform are coming off their high? Tories will prefer being back in the 20s (but this is their best pollster generally), Labour steady and certainly showing no sign of further leakage, LDs and Greens as you were
The chancellor has begun meeting groups of backbenchers to argue that the money, part of a £113bn investment in capital projects over the rest of the parliament including transport, homes and energy, would only have happened under Labour.
Just three Whitehall departments are still to agree their multi-year budgets with the Treasury before the spending review, the Guardian understands, with the home secretary, Yvette Cooper; the energy secretary, Ed Miliband; and the housing secretary, Angela Rayner, holding out...
Got a feeling I'm going to enjoy this week's issue:
Why exactly? Is it really that difficult to leave the gays to celebrate their own thing and get on with your own life. If it's because of all of the corporate posturing on social media i agree with that but I can tell you that I and no other gay person I know asked for that.
I've not been to a Pride event for at least 40 years. I've nothing against them but I know of no gay friends who'd dream of going . I don't believe they reflect the reality of life for most gay people.
I think I said this yesterday but of my gay friends the ones who are most attached to Pride are the slightly older ones for whom it is still intensely liberating to be out and proud amongst crowds who celebrate that fact. It means more if you've spent a lot of your adult life having to downplay your sexuality for fear of abuse.
So, it's massively out of date then and of diminishing appeal then?
Funny it's foghorned to us all at 120dB out of ideology and then all Summer. Sometimes, all year round. You don't get that your ideology and religious fervour on this will drive a backlash.
Want to avoid it? Tone it down and rein it in, so it's proportionate again, or.. lose it all.
Your choice.
Should we tone down Christmas? Or Easter?
I suggested to the local CoE reverend that we should abolish Christmas and replace it with a religious festival. He thought this was a good idea.
Both Yule and Eostre were seasonal festivities before the birth of Christ anyway so why would we want to do that?
The crass bullshit that has accreted around Christmas makes life worse for many. Time for a reset.
Got a feeling I'm going to enjoy this week's issue:
Why exactly? Is it really that difficult to leave the gays to celebrate their own thing and get on with your own life. If it's because of all of the corporate posturing on social media i agree with that but I can tell you that I and no other gay person I know asked for that.
I've not been to a Pride event for at least 40 years. I've nothing against them but I know of no gay friends who'd dream of going . I don't believe they reflect the reality of life for most gay people.
I think I said this yesterday but of my gay friends the ones who are most attached to Pride are the slightly older ones for whom it is still intensely liberating to be out and proud amongst crowds who celebrate that fact. It means more if you've spent a lot of your adult life having to downplay your sexuality for fear of abuse.
So, it's massively out of date then and of diminishing appeal then?
Funny it's foghorned to us all at 120dB out of ideology and then all Summer. Sometimes, all year round. You don't get that your ideology and religious fervour on this will drive a backlash.
Want to avoid it? Tone it down and rein it in, so it's proportionate again, or.. lose it all.
Your choice.
Should we tone down Christmas? Or Easter?
Certainly Christmas. The worst time of the year
I love Christmas for all the reasons brilliantly articulated in Tim Minchin’s song Drinking white wine in the sun. It is a time for family, friends, excess and fun. As long as you don’t let that religious stuff spoil it it is the best time of the year.
Got a feeling I'm going to enjoy this week's issue:
I don't want to disappoint but this magazine is for the fash curious not the bi curious.
I know it's confusing as quite a few Spectator contributors have some very peculiar pecadillos.
Ah, ad hominem. What a surprise.
Rubbish. It was a joke and I played the (Spectator) ball not the man, and I got several likes for it!
You got likes from the usual hyberliberal pb herd. Well done, mate!
I really, really hope that you don't talk, or act, in this sort of manner to any of your staff.
There we go, @JosiasJessop making it personal again.
It was a serious comment. I hope that PB is somewhere you come to vent, and you treat your staff - of whatever background or inclination - in a much more professional and open manner.
Got a feeling I'm going to enjoy this week's issue:
Why exactly? Is it really that difficult to leave the gays to celebrate their own thing and get on with your own life. If it's because of all of the corporate posturing on social media i agree with that but I can tell you that I and no other gay person I know asked for that.
I've not been to a Pride event for at least 40 years. I've nothing against them but I know of no gay friends who'd dream of going . I don't believe they reflect the reality of life for most gay people.
I think I said this yesterday but of my gay friends the ones who are most attached to Pride are the slightly older ones for whom it is still intensely liberating to be out and proud amongst crowds who celebrate that fact. It means more if you've spent a lot of your adult life having to downplay your sexuality for fear of abuse.
Of mine the oldies, like me just aren't interested
Got a feeling I'm going to enjoy this week's issue:
Why exactly? Is it really that difficult to leave the gays to celebrate their own thing and get on with your own life. If it's because of all of the corporate posturing on social media i agree with that but I can tell you that I and no other gay person I know asked for that.
I've not been to a Pride event for at least 40 years. I've nothing against them but I know of no gay friends who'd dream of going . I don't believe they reflect the reality of life for most gay people.
I think I said this yesterday but of my gay friends the ones who are most attached to Pride are the slightly older ones for whom it is still intensely liberating to be out and proud amongst crowds who celebrate that fact. It means more if you've spent a lot of your adult life having to downplay your sexuality for fear of abuse.
Of mine the oldies, like me just aren't interested
I guess everyone's different. I sometimes march in the London one with colleagues but I can take it or leave it. I'm beginning to get slightly annoyed at it being lined up as the next culture war battlefield though. Both on here and amongst newly minted Reform councils. No-one complains about all of the other parades and celebrations that cost the public purse a small amount of money to police.
We don't bang on about those all Summer though in every meeting though.
What part of people don't like being hectored or lectured to don't you get?
The bit where you are the only one who feels hectored to and everyone else doesn’t have a problem?
You are one of the least self-aware people I've ever encountered.
You work in a university. Woke Central. The ones agreeing with you on here are the pb hyperliberals. Everyone I expected to demonstrate extraordinary resistance to challenge on this ideology has, unsurprisingly, come out and demonstrated extraordinary resistance to it. Vociferously.
That doesn't mean no-one else has a problem. Polling figures alone should tell you that.
For someone working in tertiary education you are surprisingly dumb.
"Ah, ad hominem. What a surprise."
Your rudeness and uncivilised discourse with views you disagree with (often starting with a "nonsense" or "bollocks") is entirely responsible for reactions you get on here from me.
I've told you to rethink your style. And I hope you have.
Got a feeling I'm going to enjoy this week's issue:
I don't want to disappoint but this magazine is for the fash curious not the bi curious.
I know it's confusing as quite a few Spectator contributors have some very peculiar pecadillos.
Ah, ad hominem. What a surprise.
Rubbish. It was a joke and I played the (Spectator) ball not the man, and I got several likes for it!
You got likes from the usual hyberliberal pb herd. Well done, mate!
I really, really hope that you don't talk, or act, in this sort of manner to any of your staff.
There we go, @JosiasJessop making it personal again.
It was a serious comment. I hope that PB is somewhere you come to vent, and you treat your staff - of whatever background or inclination - in a much more professional and open manner.
Got a feeling I'm going to enjoy this week's issue:
Why exactly? Is it really that difficult to leave the gays to celebrate their own thing and get on with your own life. If it's because of all of the corporate posturing on social media i agree with that but I can tell you that I and no other gay person I know asked for that.
I've not been to a Pride event for at least 40 years. I've nothing against them but I know of no gay friends who'd dream of going . I don't believe they reflect the reality of life for most gay people.
I think I said this yesterday but of my gay friends the ones who are most attached to Pride are the slightly older ones for whom it is still intensely liberating to be out and proud amongst crowds who celebrate that fact. It means more if you've spent a lot of your adult life having to downplay your sexuality for fear of abuse.
So, it's massively out of date then and of diminishing appeal then?
Funny it's foghorned to us all at 120dB out of ideology and then all Summer. Sometimes, all year round. You don't get that your ideology and religious fervour on this will drive a backlash.
Want to avoid it? Tone it down and rein it in, so it's proportionate again, or.. lose it all.
Your choice.
Should we tone down Christmas? Or Easter?
I suggested to the local CoE reverend that we should abolish Christmas and replace it with a religious festival. He thought this was a good idea.
Both Yule and Eostre were seasonal festivities before the birth of Christ anyway so why would we want to do that?
The crass bullshit that has accreted around Christmas makes life worse for many. Time for a reset.
We've moved increasingly away from the crass bullshit of religion that has made life worse for many though and slimmed it down to its essentials of food, music, celebrations, family and friends.
Got a feeling I'm going to enjoy this week's issue:
Why exactly? Is it really that difficult to leave the gays to celebrate their own thing and get on with your own life. If it's because of all of the corporate posturing on social media i agree with that but I can tell you that I and no other gay person I know asked for that.
I've not been to a Pride event for at least 40 years. I've nothing against them but I know of no gay friends who'd dream of going . I don't believe they reflect the reality of life for most gay people.
I think I said this yesterday but of my gay friends the ones who are most attached to Pride are the slightly older ones for whom it is still intensely liberating to be out and proud amongst crowds who celebrate that fact. It means more if you've spent a lot of your adult life having to downplay your sexuality for fear of abuse.
Of mine the oldies, like me just aren't interested
Got a feeling I'm going to enjoy this week's issue:
Why exactly? Is it really that difficult to leave the gays to celebrate their own thing and get on with your own life. If it's because of all of the corporate posturing on social media i agree with that but I can tell you that I and no other gay person I know asked for that.
I've not been to a Pride event for at least 40 years. I've nothing against them but I know of no gay friends who'd dream of going . I don't believe they reflect the reality of life for most gay people.
I think I said this yesterday but of my gay friends the ones who are most attached to Pride are the slightly older ones for whom it is still intensely liberating to be out and proud amongst crowds who celebrate that fact. It means more if you've spent a lot of your adult life having to downplay your sexuality for fear of abuse.
Of mine the oldies, like me just aren't interested
I guess everyone's different. I sometimes march in the London one with colleagues but I can take it or leave it. I'm beginning to get slightly annoyed at it being lined up as the next culture war battlefield though. Both on here and amongst newly minted Reform councils. No-one complains about all of the other parades and celebrations that cost the public purse a small amount of money to police.
We don't bang on about those all Summer though in every meeting though.
What part of people don't like being hectored or lectured to don't you get?
The bit where you are the only one who feels hectored to and everyone else doesn’t have a problem?
You are one of the least self-aware people I've ever encountered.
You work in a university. Woke Central. The ones agreeing with you on here are the pb hyperliberals. Everyone I expected to demonstrate extraordinary resistance to challenge on this ideology has, unsurprisingly, come out and demonstrated extraordinary resistance to it. Vociferously.
That doesn't mean no-one else has a problem. Polling figures alone should tell you that.
For someone working in tertiary education you are surprisingly dumb.
"Ah, ad hominem. What a surprise."
Your rudeness and uncivilised discourse with views you disagree with (often starting with a "nonsense" or "bollocks") is entirely responsible for reactions you get on here from me.
I've told you to rethink your style. And I hope you have.
Something to warm Casino’s cockles. The shortlist for new names is currently USS Bone Spurs, USS Suckers & Losers and USS Functioning Alcoholic. Nice Iain M. Banks vibe..
Got a feeling I'm going to enjoy this week's issue:
Why exactly? Is it really that difficult to leave the gays to celebrate their own thing and get on with your own life. If it's because of all of the corporate posturing on social media i agree with that but I can tell you that I and no other gay person I know asked for that.
I've not been to a Pride event for at least 40 years. I've nothing against them but I know of no gay friends who'd dream of going . I don't believe they reflect the reality of life for most gay people.
I think I said this yesterday but of my gay friends the ones who are most attached to Pride are the slightly older ones for whom it is still intensely liberating to be out and proud amongst crowds who celebrate that fact. It means more if you've spent a lot of your adult life having to downplay your sexuality for fear of abuse.
Of mine the oldies, like me just aren't interested
Got a feeling I'm going to enjoy this week's issue:
Why exactly? Is it really that difficult to leave the gays to celebrate their own thing and get on with your own life. If it's because of all of the corporate posturing on social media i agree with that but I can tell you that I and no other gay person I know asked for that.
I've not been to a Pride event for at least 40 years. I've nothing against them but I know of no gay friends who'd dream of going . I don't believe they reflect the reality of life for most gay people.
I think I said this yesterday but of my gay friends the ones who are most attached to Pride are the slightly older ones for whom it is still intensely liberating to be out and proud amongst crowds who celebrate that fact. It means more if you've spent a lot of your adult life having to downplay your sexuality for fear of abuse.
Of mine the oldies, like me just aren't interested
I guess everyone's different. I sometimes march in the London one with colleagues but I can take it or leave it. I'm beginning to get slightly annoyed at it being lined up as the next culture war battlefield though. Both on here and amongst newly minted Reform councils. No-one complains about all of the other parades and celebrations that cost the public purse a small amount of money to police.
We don't bang on about those all Summer though in every meeting though.
What part of people don't like being hectored or lectured to don't you get?
The bit where you are the only one who feels hectored to and everyone else doesn’t have a problem?
You are one of the least self-aware people I've ever encountered.
You work in a university. Woke Central. The ones agreeing with you on here are the pb hyperliberals. Everyone I expected to demonstrate extraordinary resistance to challenge on this ideology has, unsurprisingly, come out and demonstrated extraordinary resistance to it. Vociferously.
That doesn't mean no-one else has a problem. Polling figures alone should tell you that.
For someone working in tertiary education you are surprisingly dumb.
"Ah, ad hominem. What a surprise."
Your rudeness and uncivilised discourse with views you disagree with (often starting with a "nonsense" or "bollocks") is entirely responsible for reactions you get on here from me.
I've told you to rethink your style. And I hope you have.
Got a feeling I'm going to enjoy this week's issue:
Why exactly? Is it really that difficult to leave the gays to celebrate their own thing and get on with your own life. If it's because of all of the corporate posturing on social media i agree with that but I can tell you that I and no other gay person I know asked for that.
I've not been to a Pride event for at least 40 years. I've nothing against them but I know of no gay friends who'd dream of going . I don't believe they reflect the reality of life for most gay people.
I think I said this yesterday but of my gay friends the ones who are most attached to Pride are the slightly older ones for whom it is still intensely liberating to be out and proud amongst crowds who celebrate that fact. It means more if you've spent a lot of your adult life having to downplay your sexuality for fear of abuse.
So, it's massively out of date then and of diminishing appeal then?
Funny it's foghorned to us all at 120dB out of ideology and then all Summer. Sometimes, all year round. You don't get that your ideology and religious fervour on this will drive a backlash.
Want to avoid it? Tone it down and rein it in, so it's proportionate again, or.. lose it all.
Your choice.
Should we tone down Christmas? Or Easter?
Certainly Christmas. The worst time of the year
I love Christmas for all the reasons brilliantly articulated in Tim Minchin’s song Drinking white wine in the sun. It is a time for family, friends, excess and fun. As long as you don’t let that religious stuff spoil it it is the best time of the year.
The religious stuff is what makes it special for many people. Thats like saying Pride is great if you ignore all the gay stuff
Is there really any correlation between deregulation and economic growth, though?
Yes, as first-year undergraduate economics teaches us.
The private sector left to itself seeks to grow, allocating resources efficiently to maximise output. This is known as the First Fundamental Theorem of Welfare Economics - the perfectly competitive outcome is Pareto optimal. Any government regulation is likely to move an economy away from this optimal outcome, reducing economic growth. This was described by Milton Friedman as the only result in the whole of economics that is neither trivial nor false. That won't always be the case in practice, though, in particular with regulation enforcing a competitive outcome (which is why every developed country has anti-monopoly legislation) or property rights. And there will always be non-economic reasons for regulation (safety, national security, etc.). But, overall, if economics teaches us anything, it's that, beyond relatively low levels, regulation reduces economic growth.
There's plenty of empirical evidence to back this up. For instance, here is a Stanford study showing that, between US states, a 10 percent increase in the number of regulatory restrictions causes GDP growth to fall by 0.37 percentage points.
The US is massively more regulated than Europe in most things, and yet has grown far quicker. That said, the area the US is more deregulated is the labour market - so maybe that's the biggest factor.
As usual with your economic posts, that's simply not true. The only reason the EU has grown slower than the US over the last three decades is America's population growth. The EU has, in fact, come closer to the US in terms of GDP per capita, from 67 percent in 1995 (the first year for which EU27 data is available) to 72 percent in 2022.
While the EU's performance has been sub-optimal, that's been driven by the disastrous decision to have a single currency amongst widely disparate countries, the rapidly ageing populations in many member states, the post-2022 energy crisis and social preferences for working fewer hours.
America's performance is also flattered by a staggering runup in debt.
Regulation increases the cost of doing business, a factor exacerbated by the modern trend of making sectors responsible for the costs of their regulator rather than meeting it out of general taxation. This discourages investment in that sector (since the return is less attractive). Attempts to offset this effect, by giving guaranteed returns as in the water industry have been little short of catastrophic, distorting spend into qualifying investment whether it is actually useful or not.
One of my favourite sayings by Ronald Reagan was that the most frightening sentence in the English language is, "I'm from the government and I am here to help." As usual, he succinctly summarised complicated arguments in a single sentence. Regulation is a tax on a service and our regulatory sector, in my view, is the most obvious place for the government to be looking for substantial savings in public spending. It will be win win if they do.
Sure, there is a regulatory cost, but we do regulate for very often valid reasons. Banking regulation to reduce the impact of speculation, environmental regulation to prevent pollution, building regulation to ensure fire safety etc, legal regulation to prevent discrimination.
We could easily deregulate the country into hell. It's a matter of regulating well to balance benefit against cost.
I am not arguing for the Wild West, if you start deregulating everything I might be out of a job and that would never do. Of course some regulation is necessary.
But in recent decades we have built up regulatory empires with mission creep and a desire to require ever more information to justify their own existence. It is why we have the most expensive nursery care in Europe, for example. It is why care homes are so expensive. It has actually failed to do its job in water and energy. It greatly adds to the cost of financial services, lawyers, accountants etc. They become barriers to entry and innovation.
We need some serious rebalancing, hopefully keeping what is essential but binning most of it.
Excellent post. Essentially, we are very poor at assessing and controlling real risk.
We either don't do it at all, or use an institutionalised hammer.
Farage in Footdee the other day giving his speech. We’re going to drill oil and gas. Yes Nigel, that’s already the law, to extract was is economical to extract. And we’re going to tax farmers who have solar farms! Wait, what?
No, that's not the law already. Listen to our resident expert @Richard_Tyndall
The Government have stopped new licences even if its economical.
While simultaneously investing in CCGT and Blue Hydrogen plants that will consume Qatari natural gas for decades to come. Joined-up thinking, not.
(I know I keep banging on about this, but it is ridiculous.)
Don't wish to mess with a conversation that's been going a while, so this isn't a reply to anyone:
Just, on the Pride topic, I find it more interesting to consider the views of the LGBT people who actively repudiate what Pride stands for. The LGB Association; but I don't know whether the alt-Ts have an organisation.
The system of international law/human rights either needs to be changed or it will be overturned entirely.
The legal/activist class across Europe are like the monks and priests of the Catholic Church in northern and Western Europe circa 1500. Parasitic, doctrinaire, vain, myopic and greedy. And you can feel the resentment building and building. A Reformation is coming to sweep them away and it might be violent
That's a great analogy.
But it goes wider. Full on Pride shite at work today with some events stretching into August. A queer quiz. A gay tapestry. Marches all over the place. A fans for trans social.
Who wants this shit?
I am totally ungay, but your workplace sounds like fun.
Did you realise the company was this "right on" when you joined?
All companies are like this now. All of them.
The only acceptable response is to cheer and amplify it. To do anything else risks you being labelled as a homophobe, and we all know what that means.
So, this absurd foghorning goes on - despite most people not really caring and being somewhat fed up with it all.
That’s not my experience at double digit organisations across both engineering and law. You can delete DEI emails. You can refuse to put pronouns in email signatures. You don’t have to attend pride events. Nobody cares. It’s all in your head.
I do all of those things and nobody thinks I am a homophobe because, well, I’m not.
No, it's not all in my head - this is simple denialism by you.
It's on every call I go to, and I have to listen to it all.
You said upthread you loved this stuff, and now you say you don't do any of it.
Which one is it?
Where I've worked there's emails to 'Pride' events . . . and emails inviting to football games, basketball games, chess clubs, book clubs, craft clubs, and plenty of other things.
The general thing with social emails is to pick the ones you're interested in and ignore the rest.
So what if some people in your work want to do Pride activities? How is that affecting you whatsoever? If others are playing 5-a-side is that affecting you? Don't hear you moaning about that, but I imagine that's happening too?
If Pride is the only social stuff being organised, then it sounds like a pretty crappy place to work, but if its one amongst many, then why have a bee in your bonnet about what others choose to do?
You really don't get this, do you?
You have to be seen to champion, echo and be enthusiastic about this stuff, from a career perspective, or else you are suspect. It's a required belief. There is no choice.
This is the entire problem with Wokery. Which people like you and @Gallowgate cannot understand.
[PS. I don't have people talking to me about 5-a-side on every call for every day for a full month every year, and requiring me to applaud it or I'm seen as bigot. It's not remotely comparable.]
Why don't you resign? I've got friends who feel like this about Gaza and have turned down good jobs at arms companies as a result.
EVERY SINGLE COMPANY IS LIKE THIS. You can't escape.
The solution is political: either Woke is reined in, or it ends.
For example: Pride could go back to being a fun weekend and a march, fine, but no that wasn't enough. Now, its all of June and July and August at 110dB every single year and rainbow lanyards and flags all year round. It bores people at best and p1sses people off at worst.
Why? Because people don't like to be hectored but it's politically incorrect - and dangerous - to object so people feel even more frustrated because they can't say anything.
If you're not proportionate on anything and set rules around the right thing to say, or not say, you get a backlash.
The religious adherents can never see it, because they love it.
Companies are free to take on whatever policies they see fit; you're free to take on whatever job you fancy.
You're right that the solution is political - but I don't think you'll find much support for banning woke activity in private companies across wider society.
I'm not entirely unsympathetic. I feel this way about our lack of cycle infrastructure. Write to your MP, put up posters, make the argument here and elsewhere. Explain why it harms your business and/or society. Good luck, I guess.
That's not a real choice, though. This is universal in the corporate world now.
Thankfully, there is a pushback - but it needs a real shove to tip it out the system.
No, it isn’t.
I’ve encountered the proactive shite twice in a long career.
That and the time HR fucked up booking a resteraunt, because they had no idea of actual diversity.
Er, yes it is. And I suspect I've worked for more clients in more sectors than you have.
This is just denialism: people veer between saying the problem doesn't exist or that it does but that's your problem.
Some companies think diversity is important and spend money on it.
Some companies employ people who think it's important
My viewpoint is that it's irrelevant to me but if people think it's important that's fine by me.
I really don't see why people get worked up about it...
Then, you need to work harder to educate yourself.
You will have to enlighten me because at the moment you remind me of
I have a philosophy of live and let live and I’m the one with a blind spot?
When did I ever say I'm not live and let live?
That's not how I'm being treated. This stuff is megaphoned into my ear every year for a month or more, like Steve Bray, and if you ever objected your career would be shot.
That's not live and let live. That's live in sufferance and try not to let it get to you.
We get two months in Manchester. Pride in June, Manchester Pride in August. There's also LBGT history month in February, but that' not really caught on yet. Give it time, mind.
Yes, this stuff is essentially all year round now.
It's become a religion.
We live in a world where we are expected to celebrate for a month because someone likes it up the bum. 🌈 🤷🏼♂️
Arguably better than celebrating someone being painfully nailed to a cross
Actually a celebration of Jesus sacrificing himself for our sins and not for a month, not that I have anything against Pride particularly
And of course Jesus was a bisexual man, so he would have been celebrating Pride.
He was? Which version of the bible was that bit in?
The Gospel of John, depending upon how you interpret it.
A rather odd way, I’d wager.
The Gospel of John refers repeatedly to "the disciple whom Jesus loved" which has been interpreted by some, for hundreds of years, as being a homosexual love. That's not a modern invention.
King James I was quoted as saying it hundreds of years ago.
I think that's modernists reading "love" as "sex", which is I think more to do with their world views than the text. I am not aware even of any significant contemporaneous evidence of the King James translation (1611), never mind in the 1st Century.
There are bits and pieces (eg Christopher Marlowe made the claim at his trial - mentioned in wiki in the link below *), but the kindest thing I could say is that imo this is an unlikely peripheral interpretation. I don't think contemporaneous usage of the same phrase in the original Koine Greek in other settings. It's dangerous to rely on precise linguistic phrases from from English form of the King James, as we have a far wider range of earlier sources discovered after that translation was made.
I don't think this affects the validity of same sex relationships in Christian settings btw, imo that stands on other bases.
In one way I think the Jesus-John homosexual relationship claim is an attempt by people who want to justify same sex relationships to try and shoehorn it into a conservative Evangelical view of the Biblical text, whereas my stance would be to question parts of the framing made by the conservative Evangelical. That is a different angle, and to me is disputing at the wrong point.
The chancellor has begun meeting groups of backbenchers to argue that the money, part of a £113bn investment in capital projects over the rest of the parliament including transport, homes and energy, would only have happened under Labour.
Just three Whitehall departments are still to agree their multi-year budgets with the Treasury before the spending review, the Guardian understands, with the home secretary, Yvette Cooper; the energy secretary, Ed Miliband; and the housing secretary, Angela Rayner, holding out...
I suspect the speaker may get grumpy if she announces this in Manchester
Does anyone have any gen on how our Reform Councils are doing?
When I least heard hit-the-ground-running Kent and Notts have cancelled/postponed all of the first month's committee meetings, except perhaps one in Kent.
They all seem to be deprioritising supervision of flood defences, rolling the committees into "Environment". Is it too woke (whatever woke means today?) Good luck with that one in Lincs when it floods.
Reform councils will end up getting sued for several times more than they manage to save in all likelihood
But when that happens (and it probably will), there will be lots of Reformy snowflakery, and claims that suing Reform will just plays into their hands. And at some level "Reform could have saved you so much if it weren't for EVUL LEFTY LAWYERS" is a useful story for Nige.
why do we have to copy america like this? British DOGE. It's pathetic. It's clear US DOGE is a disaster and allegedly unlawful in various actions.
On the cancelled meetings, bylinetimes suggested that it could be because large numbers of new (Reform) councillors have to go through DBS checks. Would have been the same with an influx of new councillors from any party.
What a fucking waste, what happens if they fail. If they are disbarred because of failing or otherwise unable to discharge their duties do a dbs check to stand as candidate else you pay for a by election
That's a bizarre attitude to take. Imagine the DBS checks were waived and something horrible happened. Those checks exist for a reason regardless of whether people are on your political wavelength or not.
It's not controlling a real risk - it's controlling the perception of a real risk. This is one of our biggest problems as a society.
Firstly, you can be barred (unfairly) from lots of jobs and voluntary roles if anything shows up at all - people have lost livelihoods due to a Caution - and, secondly, lots of people with "clean" records are still right wrong-uns. I've also been asked to do another DBS check every time I've applied for a new job or a new clearance at £21.50. Which is a waste of my time and money, and theirs.
Does anyone have any gen on how our Reform Councils are doing?
When I least heard hit-the-ground-running Kent and Notts have cancelled/postponed all of the first month's committee meetings, except perhaps one in Kent.
They all seem to be deprioritising supervision of flood defences, rolling the committees into "Environment". Is it too woke (whatever woke means today?) Good luck with that one in Lincs when it floods.
Reform councils will end up getting sued for several times more than they manage to save in all likelihood
But when that happens (and it probably will), there will be lots of Reformy snowflakery, and claims that suing Reform will just plays into their hands. And at some level "Reform could have saved you so much if it weren't for EVUL LEFTY LAWYERS" is a useful story for Nige.
why do we have to copy america like this? British DOGE. It's pathetic. It's clear US DOGE is a disaster and allegedly unlawful in various actions.
On the cancelled meetings, bylinetimes suggested that it could be because large numbers of new (Reform) councillors have to go through DBS checks. Would have been the same with an influx of new councillors from any party.
What a fucking waste, what happens if they fail. If they are disbarred because of failing or otherwise unable to discharge their duties do a dbs check to stand as candidate else you pay for a by election
That's a bizarre attitude to take. Imagine the DBS checks were waived and something horrible happened. Those checks exist for a reason regardless of whether people are on your political wavelength or not.
It's not controlling a real risk - it's controlling the perception of a real risk. This is one of our biggest problems as a society.
Firstly, you can be barred (unfairly) from lots of jobs and voluntary roles if anything shows up at all - people have lost livelihoods due to a Caution - and, secondly, lots of people with "clean" records are still right wrong-uns. I've also been asked to do another DBS check every time I've applied for a new job or a new clearance at £21.50. Which is a waste of my time and money, and theirs.
It's all part of the bureaucratic process state.
DBS checks are a complete waste of time and have become a bit of a racket. They were originally an overreaction to a perceived threat and have now become part of the furniture, and difficult to remove.
This doesn't apply to all regulation of course, much of which is sensible and well directed. The bad stuff often arises as a result of moral panics created by the media for the purposes of boosting sales. That was how the DBSracket got going.
The system of international law/human rights either needs to be changed or it will be overturned entirely.
The legal/activist class across Europe are like the monks and priests of the Catholic Church in northern and Western Europe circa 1500. Parasitic, doctrinaire, vain, myopic and greedy. And you can feel the resentment building and building. A Reformation is coming to sweep them away and it might be violent
That's a great analogy.
But it goes wider. Full on Pride shite at work today with some events stretching into August. A queer quiz. A gay tapestry. Marches all over the place. A fans for trans social.
Who wants this shit?
I am totally ungay, but your workplace sounds like fun.
Did you realise the company was this "right on" when you joined?
All companies are like this now. All of them.
The only acceptable response is to cheer and amplify it. To do anything else risks you being labelled as a homophobe, and we all know what that means.
So, this absurd foghorning goes on - despite most people not really caring and being somewhat fed up with it all.
That’s not my experience at double digit organisations across both engineering and law. You can delete DEI emails. You can refuse to put pronouns in email signatures. You don’t have to attend pride events. Nobody cares. It’s all in your head.
I do all of those things and nobody thinks I am a homophobe because, well, I’m not.
No, it's not all in my head - this is simple denialism by you.
It's on every call I go to, and I have to listen to it all.
You said upthread you loved this stuff, and now you say you don't do any of it.
Which one is it?
Where I've worked there's emails to 'Pride' events . . . and emails inviting to football games, basketball games, chess clubs, book clubs, craft clubs, and plenty of other things.
The general thing with social emails is to pick the ones you're interested in and ignore the rest.
So what if some people in your work want to do Pride activities? How is that affecting you whatsoever? If others are playing 5-a-side is that affecting you? Don't hear you moaning about that, but I imagine that's happening too?
If Pride is the only social stuff being organised, then it sounds like a pretty crappy place to work, but if its one amongst many, then why have a bee in your bonnet about what others choose to do?
You really don't get this, do you?
You have to be seen to champion, echo and be enthusiastic about this stuff, from a career perspective, or else you are suspect. It's a required belief. There is no choice.
This is the entire problem with Wokery. Which people like you and @Gallowgate cannot understand.
[PS. I don't have people talking to me about 5-a-side on every call for every day for a full month every year, and requiring me to applaud it or I'm seen as bigot. It's not remotely comparable.]
Why don't you resign? I've got friends who feel like this about Gaza and have turned down good jobs at arms companies as a result.
EVERY SINGLE COMPANY IS LIKE THIS. You can't escape.
The solution is political: either Woke is reined in, or it ends.
For example: Pride could go back to being a fun weekend and a march, fine, but no that wasn't enough. Now, its all of June and July and August at 110dB every single year and rainbow lanyards and flags all year round. It bores people at best and p1sses people off at worst.
Why? Because people don't like to be hectored but it's politically incorrect - and dangerous - to object so people feel even more frustrated because they can't say anything.
If you're not proportionate on anything and set rules around the right thing to say, or not say, you get a backlash.
The religious adherents can never see it, because they love it.
Companies are free to take on whatever policies they see fit; you're free to take on whatever job you fancy.
You're right that the solution is political - but I don't think you'll find much support for banning woke activity in private companies across wider society.
I'm not entirely unsympathetic. I feel this way about our lack of cycle infrastructure. Write to your MP, put up posters, make the argument here and elsewhere. Explain why it harms your business and/or society. Good luck, I guess.
Companies are not free to take on whatever policies they see fit. They have to comply with all sorts of regulations on diversity and equality.
Like what? They have to not discriminate on protected characteristics, but I can’t think of much they have to comply with in terms of “regulations on diversity and equality”. Cite some legislation if this is true.
Don't you find the whole concept of "protected characteristics" ridiculous?
When taken alone, yes, ridiculous. But it is a clunky means to a end without which we would be a more horrible place - where you could employ 10,000 people and stipulate that they are all white, or destroy careers because women have babies, or refuse to employ them at all.
Drafting law is hard. Sometimes what you want to achieve is simple and obvious, until you try to draft laws that actually cover it. Try drafting the 'Compelling Reluctant People to Behave In A Civilized Manner Act 2025'.
Please define civillized, I am sure for example most of isis think they are civillised
Thanks for making my point. 'Civilized' will be defined in section 47 of Schedule 9 and will be further refined in the transitional provisions in Schedule 10. Schedule 14 will allow the Secretary of State following consultation with 47 named bodies to issue guidance as to how to interpret the definition, which shall not be binding.
Welcome to ways of modern statutes.
And politicians wonder why we despise them
'Despise' is quite a strong word. Do you really despise them? I sometimes find myself disappointed, annoyed, exasperated, etc. But despise - no.
Jimmy Saville - yes. That schoolteacher I remember who locked a pupil in a cupboard, forgot about them, then when they remembered opened the door and shouted so loudly in their ear and clapped them with a wooden ruler that they literally burst the pupils ear-drum - yes.
(The schoolteacher in question went on to become a Tory MP - but that's not what I despise them for)
I said despise and meant it, politicians of the last 5 decades or so have flushed most of the country down the drain and turned us into slaves in practice if not in name. In theory we can change jobs, for many though its either not an option as they can't do without the wage or in fact the only other employment they could get would be equally shitty.
But its that or be homeless
I think that we get the politicians we want rather than the politicians we need. For decades people have wanted higher living standards, higher property prices, more leisure all with less taxes and and less state spending on things that don't benefit them. As soon as a politician sticks their head above the parapet to try and change things they get shot down. See Theresa May over care and Starmer over the Winter Fuel allowance. Perfectly understandable to despise politicians but ultimately it's the voters who put them there.
We won't get the politicians we need ever though because sadly too many are wedded to handouts must continue
People even here are always going on about x,y,z are underfunded. Its even more extreme if you go btl on the guardian.
Now simple question and I doubt anyone will answer it
If we fully funded everything the government currently does plus all the infrastructure repairs necessary what do you think that (~given we know from the truss debacle we can't massively expand borrowing)
a) the basic rate of income tax would have to be b) what do you think the higher rate would have to be c) what do you think the top rate would have to be
My estimates are
a) 60 b) 80 c) 90
Yet whenever I have suggested maybe we need to be looking at what the government actually does and cut some of it while fully funding what we actually still do its howls of protest
The value of the UK housing stock is £9 trillion. The value of UK equities is about £3 trillion.
A 1% wealth tax would raise £120 billion or about 4% of GDP. That should cover it.
No it wouldnt because reality shows us every country that has tried wealth taxes has failed to raise anywhere near that
I don't get this leftie arsehole obsession with wealth taxes, its failed everywhere its been tried. It seems to have replaced the obession with socialism which also failed everywhere it was tried. Lefties doomed to failure
If the money has to come from somewhere, do you tax accumulated wealth or wealth accumulation? One has no benefit to the populace whereas the other encourages more activity.
It depends if the accumulated wealth is mobile or immobile.
Mobile wealth will just be moved so won't be taxed and will just harm the economy by its going.
Immobile wealth can be.
Taxing wealth of stocks and shares has never worked. Taxing land on the other hand ...
There is nothing inherently left or right about any tax, nor is there necessarily anything better about one particular form of tax, whether it be income, wealth, capital, sales, purchase, customs or any other form of tax. You could have any as your base and tinker with them to make them progressive, regressive, or neutral, as required.
Some taxes has a tendency to lean one way rather than another. VAT tends to be better for the rich than the poor but only because it tends to be applied as a flat rate across the board, so it eats more into a poor man's resources. You could easily alter that though by having a range of rates with luxury goods at one end and 'essentials' at the other. Since you could do much the same with any tax base it is wrong to assume that the base itself is left or right, or better/worse.
The assumption that wealth taxes are necessarily 'leftish' reflects the failure to recognise this simple principle. I suspect that many on the left do tend to think of wealth taxes as being somehow more 'socialist' (and therefore 'better') but to the extent they do they are merely reflecting widespread misapprehensions about taxes and their relationship to wealth, class, and social mobility.
Perhaps politics (or political labelling) is the wrong measure. Why not look at these taxes using an age profile. Younger people tend to have little accumulated wealth in comparison to those at the other end of the scale. Then if you look at government spending by age profile, you can match tax collected to tax spent on a age hypothecation basis.
Nice to know I’m “pond scum”. You kept that to yourself when you were DM’ing me for free legal advice. Glad to know it was appreciated.
Twat.
Haven't virtually all of us insulted virtually everyone else on here at some point, and then kissed and made up - hell, even gone for pints and meals in real-life - after?
It's an internet forum. It talks about politics. It sometimes gets a bit fruity and heated. And then we move on.
When the chips are down, this community also cares, which is why so many of us stay.
Does anyone have any gen on how our Reform Councils are doing?
When I least heard hit-the-ground-running Kent and Notts have cancelled/postponed all of the first month's committee meetings, except perhaps one in Kent.
They all seem to be deprioritising supervision of flood defences, rolling the committees into "Environment". Is it too woke (whatever woke means today?) Good luck with that one in Lincs when it floods.
Reform councils will end up getting sued for several times more than they manage to save in all likelihood
But when that happens (and it probably will), there will be lots of Reformy snowflakery, and claims that suing Reform will just plays into their hands. And at some level "Reform could have saved you so much if it weren't for EVUL LEFTY LAWYERS" is a useful story for Nige.
why do we have to copy america like this? British DOGE. It's pathetic. It's clear US DOGE is a disaster and allegedly unlawful in various actions.
On the cancelled meetings, bylinetimes suggested that it could be because large numbers of new (Reform) councillors have to go through DBS checks. Would have been the same with an influx of new councillors from any party.
What a fucking waste, what happens if they fail. If they are disbarred because of failing or otherwise unable to discharge their duties do a dbs check to stand as candidate else you pay for a by election
That's a bizarre attitude to take. Imagine the DBS checks were waived and something horrible happened. Those checks exist for a reason regardless of whether people are on your political wavelength or not.
It's not controlling a real risk - it's controlling the perception of a real risk. This is one of our biggest problems as a society.
Firstly, you can be barred (unfairly) from lots of jobs and voluntary roles if anything shows up at all - people have lost livelihoods due to a Caution - and, secondly, lots of people with "clean" records are still right wrong-uns. I've also been asked to do another DBS check every time I've applied for a new job or a new clearance at £21.50. Which is a waste of my time and money, and theirs.
It's all part of the bureaucratic process state.
I agree with this. DBS checks came in after the Soham murders, but Huntley had access to the girls via his own girlfriend. They are ridiculously cumbersome too.
Ironically the only place that I come into contact with children in my professional, charitable and church activities is the one that I have never needed a DBS for, as I was in post when the regulations came in.
I would scrap them for all posts like councillors. I can see a role for them in places where individuals have direct contact on a one to one basis with children such as children's homes.
By and large they provide false reassurance, and also distract from other protection measures, such as paying attention to who the vulnerable person is being groomed by, such as taxi drivers.
Your point about rehabilitation of offenders is a very valid one too. A member of our church congregation is a former prison inmate. Our elders are aware and supportive of him, but also watchful of him.
Is there really any correlation between deregulation and economic growth, though?
Yes, as first-year undergraduate economics teaches us.
The private sector left to itself seeks to grow, allocating resources efficiently to maximise output. This is known as the First Fundamental Theorem of Welfare Economics - the perfectly competitive outcome is Pareto optimal. Any government regulation is likely to move an economy away from this optimal outcome, reducing economic growth. This was described by Milton Friedman as the only result in the whole of economics that is neither trivial nor false. That won't always be the case in practice, though, in particular with regulation enforcing a competitive outcome (which is why every developed country has anti-monopoly legislation) or property rights. And there will always be non-economic reasons for regulation (safety, national security, etc.). But, overall, if economics teaches us anything, it's that, beyond relatively low levels, regulation reduces economic growth.
There's plenty of empirical evidence to back this up. For instance, here is a Stanford study showing that, between US states, a 10 percent increase in the number of regulatory restrictions causes GDP growth to fall by 0.37 percentage points.
The US is massively more regulated than Europe in most things, and yet has grown far quicker. That said, the area the US is more deregulated is the labour market - so maybe that's the biggest factor.
As usual with your economic posts, that's simply not true. The only reason the EU has grown slower than the US over the last three decades is America's population growth. The EU has, in fact, come closer to the US in terms of GDP per capita, from 67 percent in 1995 (the first year for which EU27 data is available) to 72 percent in 2022.
While the EU's performance has been sub-optimal, that's been driven by the disastrous decision to have a single currency amongst widely disparate countries, the rapidly ageing populations in many member states, the post-2022 energy crisis and social preferences for working fewer hours.
America's performance is also flattered by a staggering runup in debt.
Regulation increases the cost of doing business, a factor exacerbated by the modern trend of making sectors responsible for the costs of their regulator rather than meeting it out of general taxation. This discourages investment in that sector (since the return is less attractive). Attempts to offset this effect, by giving guaranteed returns as in the water industry have been little short of catastrophic, distorting spend into qualifying investment whether it is actually useful or not.
One of my favourite sayings by Ronald Reagan was that the most frightening sentence in the English language is, "I'm from the government and I am here to help." As usual, he succinctly summarised complicated arguments in a single sentence. Regulation is a tax on a service and our regulatory sector, in my view, is the most obvious place for the government to be looking for substantial savings in public spending. It will be win win if they do.
Sure, there is a regulatory cost, but we do regulate for very often valid reasons. Banking regulation to reduce the impact of speculation, environmental regulation to prevent pollution, building regulation to ensure fire safety etc, legal regulation to prevent discrimination.
We could easily deregulate the country into hell. It's a matter of regulating well to balance benefit against cost.
I am not arguing for the Wild West, if you start deregulating everything I might be out of a job and that would never do. Of course some regulation is necessary.
But in recent decades we have built up regulatory empires with mission creep and a desire to require ever more information to justify their own existence. It is why we have the most expensive nursery care in Europe, for example. It is why care homes are so expensive. It has actually failed to do its job in water and energy. It greatly adds to the cost of financial services, lawyers, accountants etc. They become barriers to entry and innovation.
We need some serious rebalancing, hopefully keeping what is essential but binning most of it.
Excellent post. Essentially, we are very poor at assessing and controlling real risk.
We either don't do it at all, or use an institutionalised hammer.
The shift from principles based regulation to a rules based approach hasn’t really worked.
For example, which is better:
- 478 pages of guidance on fire retardant cladding which no one reads and no one follows; or - A simple rule saying if your cladding kills people then you will be fined up the wazoo and get no liability shield and the directors may well go to prison
Nice to know I’m “pond scum”. You kept that to yourself when you were DM’ing me for free legal advice. Glad to know it was appreciated.
Twat.
Haven't virtually all of us insulted virtually everyone else on here at some point, and then kissed and made up - hell, even gone for pints and meals in real-life - after?
It's an internet forum. It talks about politics. It sometimes gets a bit fruity and heated. And then we move on.
When the chips are down, this community also cares, which is why so many of us stay.
Yes, and some of us give of our time free to provide a service to people on the board, which we would normally charge for and then get insulted. If you hold a group of people or a profession in such low esteem why consult one of them?
Does anyone have any gen on how our Reform Councils are doing?
When I least heard hit-the-ground-running Kent and Notts have cancelled/postponed all of the first month's committee meetings, except perhaps one in Kent.
They all seem to be deprioritising supervision of flood defences, rolling the committees into "Environment". Is it too woke (whatever woke means today?) Good luck with that one in Lincs when it floods.
Reform councils will end up getting sued for several times more than they manage to save in all likelihood
But when that happens (and it probably will), there will be lots of Reformy snowflakery, and claims that suing Reform will just plays into their hands. And at some level "Reform could have saved you so much if it weren't for EVUL LEFTY LAWYERS" is a useful story for Nige.
why do we have to copy america like this? British DOGE. It's pathetic. It's clear US DOGE is a disaster and allegedly unlawful in various actions.
On the cancelled meetings, bylinetimes suggested that it could be because large numbers of new (Reform) councillors have to go through DBS checks. Would have been the same with an influx of new councillors from any party.
What a fucking waste, what happens if they fail. If they are disbarred because of failing or otherwise unable to discharge their duties do a dbs check to stand as candidate else you pay for a by election
That's a bizarre attitude to take. Imagine the DBS checks were waived and something horrible happened. Those checks exist for a reason regardless of whether people are on your political wavelength or not.
It's not controlling a real risk - it's controlling the perception of a real risk. This is one of our biggest problems as a society.
Firstly, you can be barred (unfairly) from lots of jobs and voluntary roles if anything shows up at all - people have lost livelihoods due to a Caution - and, secondly, lots of people with "clean" records are still right wrong-uns. I've also been asked to do another DBS check every time I've applied for a new job or a new clearance at £21.50. Which is a waste of my time and money, and theirs.
It's all part of the bureaucratic process state.
Thank-you for the various replies on this wrt DB checks.
Nice to know I’m “pond scum”. You kept that to yourself when you were DM’ing me for free legal advice. Glad to know it was appreciated.
Twat.
Haven't virtually all of us insulted virtually everyone else on here at some point, and then kissed and made up - hell, even gone for pints and meals in real-life - after?
It's an internet forum. It talks about politics. It sometimes gets a bit fruity and heated. And then we move on.
When the chips are down, this community also cares, which is why so many of us stay.
Yes, and some of us give of our time free to provide a service to people on the board, which we would normally charge for and then get insulted. If you hold a group of people or a profession in such low esteem why consult one?
Go for a pint.
Say he was a bit of a twat, he'll probably admit it and apologise, and then offer to buy your pint, you'll shake hands and it'll all be good.
Is there really any correlation between deregulation and economic growth, though?
Yes, as first-year undergraduate economics teaches us.
The private sector left to itself seeks to grow, allocating resources efficiently to maximise output. This is known as the First Fundamental Theorem of Welfare Economics - the perfectly competitive outcome is Pareto optimal. Any government regulation is likely to move an economy away from this optimal outcome, reducing economic growth. This was described by Milton Friedman as the only result in the whole of economics that is neither trivial nor false. That won't always be the case in practice, though, in particular with regulation enforcing a competitive outcome (which is why every developed country has anti-monopoly legislation) or property rights. And there will always be non-economic reasons for regulation (safety, national security, etc.). But, overall, if economics teaches us anything, it's that, beyond relatively low levels, regulation reduces economic growth.
There's plenty of empirical evidence to back this up. For instance, here is a Stanford study showing that, between US states, a 10 percent increase in the number of regulatory restrictions causes GDP growth to fall by 0.37 percentage points.
The US is massively more regulated than Europe in most things, and yet has grown far quicker. That said, the area the US is more deregulated is the labour market - so maybe that's the biggest factor.
As usual with your economic posts, that's simply not true. The only reason the EU has grown slower than the US over the last three decades is America's population growth. The EU has, in fact, come closer to the US in terms of GDP per capita, from 67 percent in 1995 (the first year for which EU27 data is available) to 72 percent in 2022.
While the EU's performance has been sub-optimal, that's been driven by the disastrous decision to have a single currency amongst widely disparate countries, the rapidly ageing populations in many member states, the post-2022 energy crisis and social preferences for working fewer hours.
America's performance is also flattered by a staggering runup in debt.
Regulation increases the cost of doing business, a factor exacerbated by the modern trend of making sectors responsible for the costs of their regulator rather than meeting it out of general taxation. This discourages investment in that sector (since the return is less attractive). Attempts to offset this effect, by giving guaranteed returns as in the water industry have been little short of catastrophic, distorting spend into qualifying investment whether it is actually useful or not.
One of my favourite sayings by Ronald Reagan was that the most frightening sentence in the English language is, "I'm from the government and I am here to help." As usual, he succinctly summarised complicated arguments in a single sentence. Regulation is a tax on a service and our regulatory sector, in my view, is the most obvious place for the government to be looking for substantial savings in public spending. It will be win win if they do.
Sure, there is a regulatory cost, but we do regulate for very often valid reasons. Banking regulation to reduce the impact of speculation, environmental regulation to prevent pollution, building regulation to ensure fire safety etc, legal regulation to prevent discrimination.
We could easily deregulate the country into hell. It's a matter of regulating well to balance benefit against cost.
I am not arguing for the Wild West, if you start deregulating everything I might be out of a job and that would never do. Of course some regulation is necessary.
But in recent decades we have built up regulatory empires with mission creep and a desire to require ever more information to justify their own existence. It is why we have the most expensive nursery care in Europe, for example. It is why care homes are so expensive. It has actually failed to do its job in water and energy. It greatly adds to the cost of financial services, lawyers, accountants etc. They become barriers to entry and innovation.
We need some serious rebalancing, hopefully keeping what is essential but binning most of it.
Excellent post. Essentially, we are very poor at assessing and controlling real risk.
We either don't do it at all, or use an institutionalised hammer.
The shift from principles based regulation to a rules based approach hasn’t really worked.
For example, which is better:
- 478 pages of guidance on fire retardant cladding which no one reads and no one follows; or - A simple rule saying if your cladding kills people then you will be fined up the wazoo and get no liability shield and the directors may well go to prison
Does that work in a world where the chain of ownership and management is so tangled, or the gap between bad action and horrible consequence is potentially so long?
Does anyone have any gen on how our Reform Councils are doing?
When I least heard hit-the-ground-running Kent and Notts have cancelled/postponed all of the first month's committee meetings, except perhaps one in Kent.
They all seem to be deprioritising supervision of flood defences, rolling the committees into "Environment". Is it too woke (whatever woke means today?) Good luck with that one in Lincs when it floods.
Reform councils will end up getting sued for several times more than they manage to save in all likelihood
But when that happens (and it probably will), there will be lots of Reformy snowflakery, and claims that suing Reform will just plays into their hands. And at some level "Reform could have saved you so much if it weren't for EVUL LEFTY LAWYERS" is a useful story for Nige.
why do we have to copy america like this? British DOGE. It's pathetic. It's clear US DOGE is a disaster and allegedly unlawful in various actions.
On the cancelled meetings, bylinetimes suggested that it could be because large numbers of new (Reform) councillors have to go through DBS checks. Would have been the same with an influx of new councillors from any party.
What a fucking waste, what happens if they fail. If they are disbarred because of failing or otherwise unable to discharge their duties do a dbs check to stand as candidate else you pay for a by election
That's a bizarre attitude to take. Imagine the DBS checks were waived and something horrible happened. Those checks exist for a reason regardless of whether people are on your political wavelength or not.
It's not controlling a real risk - it's controlling the perception of a real risk. This is one of our biggest problems as a society.
Firstly, you can be barred (unfairly) from lots of jobs and voluntary roles if anything shows up at all - people have lost livelihoods due to a Caution - and, secondly, lots of people with "clean" records are still right wrong-uns. I've also been asked to do another DBS check every time I've applied for a new job or a new clearance at £21.50. Which is a waste of my time and money, and theirs.
It's all part of the bureaucratic process state.
I agree with this. DBS checks came in after the Soham murders, but Huntley had access to the girls via his own girlfriend. They are ridiculously cumbersome too.
Ironically the only place that I come into contact with children in my professional, charitable and church activities is the one that I have never needed a DBS for, as I was in post when the regulations came in.
I would scrap them for all posts like councillors. I can see a role for them in places where individuals have direct contact on a one to one basis with children such as children's homes.
By and large they provide false reassurance, and also distract from other protection measures, such as paying attention to who the vulnerable person is being groomed by, such as taxi drivers.
Your point about rehabilitation of offenders is a very valid one too. A member of our church congregation is a former prison inmate. Our elders are aware and supportive of him, but also watchful of him.
Is there really any correlation between deregulation and economic growth, though?
Yes, as first-year undergraduate economics teaches us.
The private sector left to itself seeks to grow, allocating resources efficiently to maximise output. This is known as the First Fundamental Theorem of Welfare Economics - the perfectly competitive outcome is Pareto optimal. Any government regulation is likely to move an economy away from this optimal outcome, reducing economic growth. This was described by Milton Friedman as the only result in the whole of economics that is neither trivial nor false. That won't always be the case in practice, though, in particular with regulation enforcing a competitive outcome (which is why every developed country has anti-monopoly legislation) or property rights. And there will always be non-economic reasons for regulation (safety, national security, etc.). But, overall, if economics teaches us anything, it's that, beyond relatively low levels, regulation reduces economic growth.
There's plenty of empirical evidence to back this up. For instance, here is a Stanford study showing that, between US states, a 10 percent increase in the number of regulatory restrictions causes GDP growth to fall by 0.37 percentage points.
The US is massively more regulated than Europe in most things, and yet has grown far quicker. That said, the area the US is more deregulated is the labour market - so maybe that's the biggest factor.
As usual with your economic posts, that's simply not true. The only reason the EU has grown slower than the US over the last three decades is America's population growth. The EU has, in fact, come closer to the US in terms of GDP per capita, from 67 percent in 1995 (the first year for which EU27 data is available) to 72 percent in 2022.
While the EU's performance has been sub-optimal, that's been driven by the disastrous decision to have a single currency amongst widely disparate countries, the rapidly ageing populations in many member states, the post-2022 energy crisis and social preferences for working fewer hours.
America's performance is also flattered by a staggering runup in debt.
Regulation increases the cost of doing business, a factor exacerbated by the modern trend of making sectors responsible for the costs of their regulator rather than meeting it out of general taxation. This discourages investment in that sector (since the return is less attractive). Attempts to offset this effect, by giving guaranteed returns as in the water industry have been little short of catastrophic, distorting spend into qualifying investment whether it is actually useful or not.
One of my favourite sayings by Ronald Reagan was that the most frightening sentence in the English language is, "I'm from the government and I am here to help." As usual, he succinctly summarised complicated arguments in a single sentence. Regulation is a tax on a service and our regulatory sector, in my view, is the most obvious place for the government to be looking for substantial savings in public spending. It will be win win if they do.
Sure, there is a regulatory cost, but we do regulate for very often valid reasons. Banking regulation to reduce the impact of speculation, environmental regulation to prevent pollution, building regulation to ensure fire safety etc, legal regulation to prevent discrimination.
We could easily deregulate the country into hell. It's a matter of regulating well to balance benefit against cost.
I am not arguing for the Wild West, if you start deregulating everything I might be out of a job and that would never do. Of course some regulation is necessary.
But in recent decades we have built up regulatory empires with mission creep and a desire to require ever more information to justify their own existence. It is why we have the most expensive nursery care in Europe, for example. It is why care homes are so expensive. It has actually failed to do its job in water and energy. It greatly adds to the cost of financial services, lawyers, accountants etc. They become barriers to entry and innovation.
We need some serious rebalancing, hopefully keeping what is essential but binning most of it.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but regulation would need to be removed one rule at a time. Each of those rules addresses a particular risk that would no longer be controlled after removal, with likely negative consequences. I think it would be a long exercise.
Got a feeling I'm going to enjoy this week's issue:
I don't want to disappoint but this magazine is for the fash curious not the bi curious.
I know it's confusing as quite a few Spectator contributors have some very peculiar pecadillos.
Ah, ad hominem. What a surprise.
Rubbish. It was a joke and I played the (Spectator) ball not the man, and I got several likes for it!
You got likes from the usual hyberliberal pb herd. Well done, mate!
I really, really hope that you don't talk, or act, in this sort of manner to any of your staff.
There we go, @JosiasJessop making it personal again.
It was a serious comment. I hope that PB is somewhere you come to vent, and you treat your staff - of whatever background or inclination - in a much more professional and open manner.
Fuck off.
Again, I hope you talk to, and treat, your staff in a much more tolerant and understanding manner, and that you only act like this here on PB.
Is there really any correlation between deregulation and economic growth, though?
Yes, as first-year undergraduate economics teaches us.
The private sector left to itself seeks to grow, allocating resources efficiently to maximise output. This is known as the First Fundamental Theorem of Welfare Economics - the perfectly competitive outcome is Pareto optimal. Any government regulation is likely to move an economy away from this optimal outcome, reducing economic growth. This was described by Milton Friedman as the only result in the whole of economics that is neither trivial nor false. That won't always be the case in practice, though, in particular with regulation enforcing a competitive outcome (which is why every developed country has anti-monopoly legislation) or property rights. And there will always be non-economic reasons for regulation (safety, national security, etc.). But, overall, if economics teaches us anything, it's that, beyond relatively low levels, regulation reduces economic growth.
There's plenty of empirical evidence to back this up. For instance, here is a Stanford study showing that, between US states, a 10 percent increase in the number of regulatory restrictions causes GDP growth to fall by 0.37 percentage points.
The US is massively more regulated than Europe in most things, and yet has grown far quicker. That said, the area the US is more deregulated is the labour market - so maybe that's the biggest factor.
As usual with your economic posts, that's simply not true. The only reason the EU has grown slower than the US over the last three decades is America's population growth. The EU has, in fact, come closer to the US in terms of GDP per capita, from 67 percent in 1995 (the first year for which EU27 data is available) to 72 percent in 2022.
While the EU's performance has been sub-optimal, that's been driven by the disastrous decision to have a single currency amongst widely disparate countries, the rapidly ageing populations in many member states, the post-2022 energy crisis and social preferences for working fewer hours.
America's performance is also flattered by a staggering runup in debt.
Regulation increases the cost of doing business, a factor exacerbated by the modern trend of making sectors responsible for the costs of their regulator rather than meeting it out of general taxation. This discourages investment in that sector (since the return is less attractive). Attempts to offset this effect, by giving guaranteed returns as in the water industry have been little short of catastrophic, distorting spend into qualifying investment whether it is actually useful or not.
One of my favourite sayings by Ronald Reagan was that the most frightening sentence in the English language is, "I'm from the government and I am here to help." As usual, he succinctly summarised complicated arguments in a single sentence. Regulation is a tax on a service and our regulatory sector, in my view, is the most obvious place for the government to be looking for substantial savings in public spending. It will be win win if they do.
Sure, there is a regulatory cost, but we do regulate for very often valid reasons. Banking regulation to reduce the impact of speculation, environmental regulation to prevent pollution, building regulation to ensure fire safety etc, legal regulation to prevent discrimination.
We could easily deregulate the country into hell. It's a matter of regulating well to balance benefit against cost.
I am not arguing for the Wild West, if you start deregulating everything I might be out of a job and that would never do. Of course some regulation is necessary.
But in recent decades we have built up regulatory empires with mission creep and a desire to require ever more information to justify their own existence. It is why we have the most expensive nursery care in Europe, for example. It is why care homes are so expensive. It has actually failed to do its job in water and energy. It greatly adds to the cost of financial services, lawyers, accountants etc. They become barriers to entry and innovation.
We need some serious rebalancing, hopefully keeping what is essential but binning most of it.
Excellent post. Essentially, we are very poor at assessing and controlling real risk.
We either don't do it at all, or use an institutionalised hammer.
The shift from principles based regulation to a rules based approach hasn’t really worked.
For example, which is better:
- 478 pages of guidance on fire retardant cladding which no one reads and no one follows; or - A simple rule saying if your cladding kills people then you will be fined up the wazoo and get no liability shield and the directors may well go to prison
How does that assist a building owner who hasn’t been killed but faces a massive bill for cladding remediation? So then you need to define what “could kill people” means. What about injure people? How serious an injury? Suddenly you have 200 pages of regulations.
Got a feeling I'm going to enjoy this week's issue:
Why exactly? Is it really that difficult to leave the gays to celebrate their own thing and get on with your own life. If it's because of all of the corporate posturing on social media i agree with that but I can tell you that I and no other gay person I know asked for that.
I've not been to a Pride event for at least 40 years. I've nothing against them but I know of no gay friends who'd dream of going . I don't believe they reflect the reality of life for most gay people.
I think I said this yesterday but of my gay friends the ones who are most attached to Pride are the slightly older ones for whom it is still intensely liberating to be out and proud amongst crowds who celebrate that fact. It means more if you've spent a lot of your adult life having to downplay your sexuality for fear of abuse.
So, it's massively out of date then and of diminishing appeal then?
Funny it's foghorned to us all at 120dB out of ideology and then all Summer. Sometimes, all year round. You don't get that your ideology and religious fervour on this will drive a backlash.
Want to avoid it? Tone it down and rein it in, so it's proportionate again, or.. lose it all.
Your choice.
Should we tone down Christmas? Or Easter?
Certainly Christmas. The worst time of the year
I love Christmas for all the reasons brilliantly articulated in Tim Minchin’s song Drinking white wine in the sun. It is a time for family, friends, excess and fun. As long as you don’t let that religious stuff spoil it it is the best time of the year.
The religious stuff is what makes it special for many people. Thats like saying Pride is great if you ignore all the gay stuff
If the religious stuff floats your boat go for it. That was just a slightly provocative quip. My late MIL got huge pleasure and comfort from her religion. I accept that many do.
Is there really any correlation between deregulation and economic growth, though?
Yes, as first-year undergraduate economics teaches us.
The private sector left to itself seeks to grow, allocating resources efficiently to maximise output. This is known as the First Fundamental Theorem of Welfare Economics - the perfectly competitive outcome is Pareto optimal. Any government regulation is likely to move an economy away from this optimal outcome, reducing economic growth. This was described by Milton Friedman as the only result in the whole of economics that is neither trivial nor false. That won't always be the case in practice, though, in particular with regulation enforcing a competitive outcome (which is why every developed country has anti-monopoly legislation) or property rights. And there will always be non-economic reasons for regulation (safety, national security, etc.). But, overall, if economics teaches us anything, it's that, beyond relatively low levels, regulation reduces economic growth.
There's plenty of empirical evidence to back this up. For instance, here is a Stanford study showing that, between US states, a 10 percent increase in the number of regulatory restrictions causes GDP growth to fall by 0.37 percentage points.
The US is massively more regulated than Europe in most things, and yet has grown far quicker. That said, the area the US is more deregulated is the labour market - so maybe that's the biggest factor.
As usual with your economic posts, that's simply not true. The only reason the EU has grown slower than the US over the last three decades is America's population growth. The EU has, in fact, come closer to the US in terms of GDP per capita, from 67 percent in 1995 (the first year for which EU27 data is available) to 72 percent in 2022.
While the EU's performance has been sub-optimal, that's been driven by the disastrous decision to have a single currency amongst widely disparate countries, the rapidly ageing populations in many member states, the post-2022 energy crisis and social preferences for working fewer hours.
America's performance is also flattered by a staggering runup in debt.
Regulation increases the cost of doing business, a factor exacerbated by the modern trend of making sectors responsible for the costs of their regulator rather than meeting it out of general taxation. This discourages investment in that sector (since the return is less attractive). Attempts to offset this effect, by giving guaranteed returns as in the water industry have been little short of catastrophic, distorting spend into qualifying investment whether it is actually useful or not.
One of my favourite sayings by Ronald Reagan was that the most frightening sentence in the English language is, "I'm from the government and I am here to help." As usual, he succinctly summarised complicated arguments in a single sentence. Regulation is a tax on a service and our regulatory sector, in my view, is the most obvious place for the government to be looking for substantial savings in public spending. It will be win win if they do.
Sure, there is a regulatory cost, but we do regulate for very often valid reasons. Banking regulation to reduce the impact of speculation, environmental regulation to prevent pollution, building regulation to ensure fire safety etc, legal regulation to prevent discrimination.
We could easily deregulate the country into hell. It's a matter of regulating well to balance benefit against cost.
I am not arguing for the Wild West, if you start deregulating everything I might be out of a job and that would never do. Of course some regulation is necessary.
But in recent decades we have built up regulatory empires with mission creep and a desire to require ever more information to justify their own existence. It is why we have the most expensive nursery care in Europe, for example. It is why care homes are so expensive. It has actually failed to do its job in water and energy. It greatly adds to the cost of financial services, lawyers, accountants etc. They become barriers to entry and innovation.
We need some serious rebalancing, hopefully keeping what is essential but binning most of it.
Excellent post. Essentially, we are very poor at assessing and controlling real risk.
We either don't do it at all, or use an institutionalised hammer.
The problem is the Process State
Which is, ultimately a misunderstanding of physics.
The world, in general, is nearly alway non-linear. That is, the outcome is not perfectly predictable, even given detailed inputs. See long range weather forecasting.
Humans are non-linear. As are their social structures.
The Process State is the attempt to control outcomes by increasingly complex linear rule sets (laws and regulations). As anyone with a brief study of Chaos Theory (another name for the non-linearity, which really frightens people) will tell you, this can’t work
What can work is rules and regulations that work with the non-linearity. So you can’t just have a table of inputs and outputs. At the higher levels, simple rules - in construction, don’t clad building in firelighters… at the lower levels, common sense, compassion, and empathy for the human condition.
Something to consider - Costal construction and management has evolved. Once, linear attempts at control repeatedly failed - often increasing erosion. Modern methods allow much better prediction and operation in the complex *non-linear* environment.
Is there really any correlation between deregulation and economic growth, though?
Yes, as first-year undergraduate economics teaches us.
The private sector left to itself seeks to grow, allocating resources efficiently to maximise output. This is known as the First Fundamental Theorem of Welfare Economics - the perfectly competitive outcome is Pareto optimal. Any government regulation is likely to move an economy away from this optimal outcome, reducing economic growth. This was described by Milton Friedman as the only result in the whole of economics that is neither trivial nor false. That won't always be the case in practice, though, in particular with regulation enforcing a competitive outcome (which is why every developed country has anti-monopoly legislation) or property rights. And there will always be non-economic reasons for regulation (safety, national security, etc.). But, overall, if economics teaches us anything, it's that, beyond relatively low levels, regulation reduces economic growth.
There's plenty of empirical evidence to back this up. For instance, here is a Stanford study showing that, between US states, a 10 percent increase in the number of regulatory restrictions causes GDP growth to fall by 0.37 percentage points.
The US is massively more regulated than Europe in most things, and yet has grown far quicker. That said, the area the US is more deregulated is the labour market - so maybe that's the biggest factor.
As usual with your economic posts, that's simply not true. The only reason the EU has grown slower than the US over the last three decades is America's population growth. The EU has, in fact, come closer to the US in terms of GDP per capita, from 67 percent in 1995 (the first year for which EU27 data is available) to 72 percent in 2022.
While the EU's performance has been sub-optimal, that's been driven by the disastrous decision to have a single currency amongst widely disparate countries, the rapidly ageing populations in many member states, the post-2022 energy crisis and social preferences for working fewer hours.
America's performance is also flattered by a staggering runup in debt.
Regulation increases the cost of doing business, a factor exacerbated by the modern trend of making sectors responsible for the costs of their regulator rather than meeting it out of general taxation. This discourages investment in that sector (since the return is less attractive). Attempts to offset this effect, by giving guaranteed returns as in the water industry have been little short of catastrophic, distorting spend into qualifying investment whether it is actually useful or not.
One of my favourite sayings by Ronald Reagan was that the most frightening sentence in the English language is, "I'm from the government and I am here to help." As usual, he succinctly summarised complicated arguments in a single sentence. Regulation is a tax on a service and our regulatory sector, in my view, is the most obvious place for the government to be looking for substantial savings in public spending. It will be win win if they do.
Sure, there is a regulatory cost, but we do regulate for very often valid reasons. Banking regulation to reduce the impact of speculation, environmental regulation to prevent pollution, building regulation to ensure fire safety etc, legal regulation to prevent discrimination.
We could easily deregulate the country into hell. It's a matter of regulating well to balance benefit against cost.
I am not arguing for the Wild West, if you start deregulating everything I might be out of a job and that would never do. Of course some regulation is necessary.
But in recent decades we have built up regulatory empires with mission creep and a desire to require ever more information to justify their own existence. It is why we have the most expensive nursery care in Europe, for example. It is why care homes are so expensive. It has actually failed to do its job in water and energy. It greatly adds to the cost of financial services, lawyers, accountants etc. They become barriers to entry and innovation.
We need some serious rebalancing, hopefully keeping what is essential but binning most of it.
Excellent post. Essentially, we are very poor at assessing and controlling real risk.
We either don't do it at all, or use an institutionalised hammer.
The shift from principles based regulation to a rules based approach hasn’t really worked.
For example, which is better:
- 478 pages of guidance on fire retardant cladding which no one reads and no one follows; or - A simple rule saying if your cladding kills people then you will be fined up the wazoo and get no liability shield and the directors may well go to prison
How does that assist a building owner who hasn’t been killed but faces a massive bill for cladding remediation? So then you need to define what “could kill people” means. What about injure people? How serious an injury? Suddenly you have 200 pages of regulations.
Grenfell fundamentally happened because no-one was accountable for how the building performed as a system.
The focus was on aesthetics (making 1960s tower blocks look nicer) and energy savings (insulation) and not the safety case of the building "system" as a whole, and how it could catastrophically fail. This was no-one's "fault" and the blame diagram of Grenfell - with everyone point to everyone else - is something else.
We need to get much better at assessing systems, ultimately that sits with a capable owner/intelligent client, and assuring ourselves risk has been properly allocated with the right liabilities to the right parties.
The chancellor has begun meeting groups of backbenchers to argue that the money, part of a £113bn investment in capital projects over the rest of the parliament including transport, homes and energy, would only have happened under Labour.
Just three Whitehall departments are still to agree their multi-year budgets with the Treasury before the spending review, the Guardian understands, with the home secretary, Yvette Cooper; the energy secretary, Ed Miliband; and the housing secretary, Angela Rayner, holding out...
That £15bn for trains and trams outside London looks very positive. A big chunk of it needs to be trams and light rail.
But there will be a few battles around groups such as Transport 2000 (whatever they are called now) trying to nick multiuser rail-trails back). We had an attempted mugging to grab the Monsal Trail in Derbyshire for a proposed railway, despite it being used by 300-600k people per annum. When I last heard it had been fought off, but I am not fully up to date - they will be back.
Rail Trails of course being ideal accessible (and safe family cycling) trails, like towpaths.
I can see RefUK Councils (and TBH others) falling for that one - oooh, big exciting machines - if they get around to doing any projects, and not being especially good at listening to different stakeholders. They like easy answers.
That's why he need the whole damn lot of Local Authority managed trails made into Public Rights of Way by statute. I have not won that one yet !
Is there really any correlation between deregulation and economic growth, though?
Yes, as first-year undergraduate economics teaches us.
The private sector left to itself seeks to grow, allocating resources efficiently to maximise output. This is known as the First Fundamental Theorem of Welfare Economics - the perfectly competitive outcome is Pareto optimal. Any government regulation is likely to move an economy away from this optimal outcome, reducing economic growth. This was described by Milton Friedman as the only result in the whole of economics that is neither trivial nor false. That won't always be the case in practice, though, in particular with regulation enforcing a competitive outcome (which is why every developed country has anti-monopoly legislation) or property rights. And there will always be non-economic reasons for regulation (safety, national security, etc.). But, overall, if economics teaches us anything, it's that, beyond relatively low levels, regulation reduces economic growth.
There's plenty of empirical evidence to back this up. For instance, here is a Stanford study showing that, between US states, a 10 percent increase in the number of regulatory restrictions causes GDP growth to fall by 0.37 percentage points.
The US is massively more regulated than Europe in most things, and yet has grown far quicker. That said, the area the US is more deregulated is the labour market - so maybe that's the biggest factor.
As usual with your economic posts, that's simply not true. The only reason the EU has grown slower than the US over the last three decades is America's population growth. The EU has, in fact, come closer to the US in terms of GDP per capita, from 67 percent in 1995 (the first year for which EU27 data is available) to 72 percent in 2022.
While the EU's performance has been sub-optimal, that's been driven by the disastrous decision to have a single currency amongst widely disparate countries, the rapidly ageing populations in many member states, the post-2022 energy crisis and social preferences for working fewer hours.
America's performance is also flattered by a staggering runup in debt.
Regulation increases the cost of doing business, a factor exacerbated by the modern trend of making sectors responsible for the costs of their regulator rather than meeting it out of general taxation. This discourages investment in that sector (since the return is less attractive). Attempts to offset this effect, by giving guaranteed returns as in the water industry have been little short of catastrophic, distorting spend into qualifying investment whether it is actually useful or not.
One of my favourite sayings by Ronald Reagan was that the most frightening sentence in the English language is, "I'm from the government and I am here to help." As usual, he succinctly summarised complicated arguments in a single sentence. Regulation is a tax on a service and our regulatory sector, in my view, is the most obvious place for the government to be looking for substantial savings in public spending. It will be win win if they do.
Sure, there is a regulatory cost, but we do regulate for very often valid reasons. Banking regulation to reduce the impact of speculation, environmental regulation to prevent pollution, building regulation to ensure fire safety etc, legal regulation to prevent discrimination.
We could easily deregulate the country into hell. It's a matter of regulating well to balance benefit against cost.
I am not arguing for the Wild West, if you start deregulating everything I might be out of a job and that would never do. Of course some regulation is necessary.
But in recent decades we have built up regulatory empires with mission creep and a desire to require ever more information to justify their own existence. It is why we have the most expensive nursery care in Europe, for example. It is why care homes are so expensive. It has actually failed to do its job in water and energy. It greatly adds to the cost of financial services, lawyers, accountants etc. They become barriers to entry and innovation.
We need some serious rebalancing, hopefully keeping what is essential but binning most of it.
I've highlighted one aspect of your response because I don't think it's all about "regulation" which has become an almost pejorative term.
In my experience, it was all about information and accountability. The desire for information was always from senior levels where managers "needed to know what was going on" which translated either into micro-management or a simple lack of trust, confidence, faith if you like in qualified people below them doing their job and getting results.
As an example, when I was in local Government, the Project Managers spent more time completing an overly complex tracker showing the process of projects than actually out on site or dealing with the lead Contractor. The administration of the tracker became a huge task utilising half a dozen staff who would run reports, attend weekly monitoring and progress meetings and this was often finance-driven.
Councillors and Senior Officers became so obsessed with monitoring project expenditure it got in the way of doing the project. The biggest problem was never regulation but information and the belief management by information was required rather than management by professional competence.
In truth, the greater part of what the much-derided "public sector admin" workers do is to provide information up the line, the vast majority of which is neither used nor understood.
The cost of everything, the value of nothing, the greatest failure of our current capitalist and governance model.
The chancellor has begun meeting groups of backbenchers to argue that the money, part of a £113bn investment in capital projects over the rest of the parliament including transport, homes and energy, would only have happened under Labour.
Just three Whitehall departments are still to agree their multi-year budgets with the Treasury before the spending review, the Guardian understands, with the home secretary, Yvette Cooper; the energy secretary, Ed Miliband; and the housing secretary, Angela Rayner, holding out...
That £15bn for trains and trams outside London looks very positive. A big chunk of it needs to be trams and light rail.
But there will be a few battles about groups such as Transport 2000 (whatever they are called now) trying to nick multiuser rail-trails back). We had an attempted mugging to grab the Monsal Trail for a proposed railway, despite it being used by 300-600k people per annum.
Rail Trails of course being ideal accessible trails.
I can see RefUK Councils (and TBH others) falling for that one - oooh, big exciting machines - if they get around to doing any projects, and not being especially good at listening to different stakeholders. They like easy answers.
That's why he need the whole damn lot of Local Authority managed trails made into Public Rights of Way by statute. I have not won that one yet !
Ahem. The Monsal Trail *should* go back to being a railway. Beeching didn't even want it closed, and it would form a massively vital link.
Is there really any correlation between deregulation and economic growth, though?
Yes, as first-year undergraduate economics teaches us.
The private sector left to itself seeks to grow, allocating resources efficiently to maximise output. This is known as the First Fundamental Theorem of Welfare Economics - the perfectly competitive outcome is Pareto optimal. Any government regulation is likely to move an economy away from this optimal outcome, reducing economic growth. This was described by Milton Friedman as the only result in the whole of economics that is neither trivial nor false. That won't always be the case in practice, though, in particular with regulation enforcing a competitive outcome (which is why every developed country has anti-monopoly legislation) or property rights. And there will always be non-economic reasons for regulation (safety, national security, etc.). But, overall, if economics teaches us anything, it's that, beyond relatively low levels, regulation reduces economic growth.
There's plenty of empirical evidence to back this up. For instance, here is a Stanford study showing that, between US states, a 10 percent increase in the number of regulatory restrictions causes GDP growth to fall by 0.37 percentage points.
The US is massively more regulated than Europe in most things, and yet has grown far quicker. That said, the area the US is more deregulated is the labour market - so maybe that's the biggest factor.
As usual with your economic posts, that's simply not true. The only reason the EU has grown slower than the US over the last three decades is America's population growth. The EU has, in fact, come closer to the US in terms of GDP per capita, from 67 percent in 1995 (the first year for which EU27 data is available) to 72 percent in 2022.
While the EU's performance has been sub-optimal, that's been driven by the disastrous decision to have a single currency amongst widely disparate countries, the rapidly ageing populations in many member states, the post-2022 energy crisis and social preferences for working fewer hours.
America's performance is also flattered by a staggering runup in debt.
Regulation increases the cost of doing business, a factor exacerbated by the modern trend of making sectors responsible for the costs of their regulator rather than meeting it out of general taxation. This discourages investment in that sector (since the return is less attractive). Attempts to offset this effect, by giving guaranteed returns as in the water industry have been little short of catastrophic, distorting spend into qualifying investment whether it is actually useful or not.
One of my favourite sayings by Ronald Reagan was that the most frightening sentence in the English language is, "I'm from the government and I am here to help." As usual, he succinctly summarised complicated arguments in a single sentence. Regulation is a tax on a service and our regulatory sector, in my view, is the most obvious place for the government to be looking for substantial savings in public spending. It will be win win if they do.
Sure, there is a regulatory cost, but we do regulate for very often valid reasons. Banking regulation to reduce the impact of speculation, environmental regulation to prevent pollution, building regulation to ensure fire safety etc, legal regulation to prevent discrimination.
We could easily deregulate the country into hell. It's a matter of regulating well to balance benefit against cost.
I am not arguing for the Wild West, if you start deregulating everything I might be out of a job and that would never do. Of course some regulation is necessary.
But in recent decades we have built up regulatory empires with mission creep and a desire to require ever more information to justify their own existence. It is why we have the most expensive nursery care in Europe, for example. It is why care homes are so expensive. It has actually failed to do its job in water and energy. It greatly adds to the cost of financial services, lawyers, accountants etc. They become barriers to entry and innovation.
We need some serious rebalancing, hopefully keeping what is essential but binning most of it.
Excellent post. Essentially, we are very poor at assessing and controlling real risk.
We either don't do it at all, or use an institutionalised hammer.
The shift from principles based regulation to a rules based approach hasn’t really worked.
For example, which is better:
- 478 pages of guidance on fire retardant cladding which no one reads and no one follows; or - A simple rule saying if your cladding kills people then you will be fined up the wazoo and get no liability shield and the directors may well go to prison
How does that assist a building owner who hasn’t been killed but faces a massive bill for cladding remediation? So then you need to define what “could kill people” means. What about injure people? How serious an injury? Suddenly you have 200 pages of regulations.
Grenfell fundamentally happened because no-one was accountable for how the building performed as a system.
The focus was on aesthetics (making 1960s tower blocks look nicer) and energy savings (insulation) and not the safety case of the building "system" as a whole, and how it could catastrophically fail. This was no-one's "fault" and the blame diagram of Grenfell - with everyone point to everyone else - is something else.
We need to get much better at assessing systems, ultimately that sits with a capable owner/intelligent client, and assuring ourselves risk has been properly allocated with the right liabilities to the right parties.
I suggest that we are good at assessing systems, but poor at implementing initial requirements, and continuing adequate monitoring over time.
Much of that is to do with capacity reduction in local authorities. It comes down to good regulation.
We may also need to consider the existence, or regulation, of Private Building Inspection. AIUI Scotland manages without it, so so can England.
With regards to Pride and the kerfuffle. I find the performative WE SUPPORT YOU cosplay from businesses to be patronising - a little less pride and a little more actual CSR policy would be preferable.
I also find that much of the complaining about pride - especially the really loud stuff - is where people feel that they can't say what they really think. It's turned into culture war not because of cosplaying brands going rainbow. It's culture war because a generation of mainly WWC men have been gaslit to think that they are an endangered species and anyone who isn't them is their enemy.
Remember that we have pride marches because in the good old days people like me stayed in the closet in fear of the abusive reaction that would come from coming out. We need pride because for many objectors "why do we have to have pride rammed down our throats" is only a step away from "why do we have to have these benders rammed down our throats" to "lets make promotion of benders illegal again"
Is there really any correlation between deregulation and economic growth, though?
Yes, as first-year undergraduate economics teaches us.
The private sector left to itself seeks to grow, allocating resources efficiently to maximise output. This is known as the First Fundamental Theorem of Welfare Economics - the perfectly competitive outcome is Pareto optimal. Any government regulation is likely to move an economy away from this optimal outcome, reducing economic growth. This was described by Milton Friedman as the only result in the whole of economics that is neither trivial nor false. That won't always be the case in practice, though, in particular with regulation enforcing a competitive outcome (which is why every developed country has anti-monopoly legislation) or property rights. And there will always be non-economic reasons for regulation (safety, national security, etc.). But, overall, if economics teaches us anything, it's that, beyond relatively low levels, regulation reduces economic growth.
There's plenty of empirical evidence to back this up. For instance, here is a Stanford study showing that, between US states, a 10 percent increase in the number of regulatory restrictions causes GDP growth to fall by 0.37 percentage points.
The US is massively more regulated than Europe in most things, and yet has grown far quicker. That said, the area the US is more deregulated is the labour market - so maybe that's the biggest factor.
As usual with your economic posts, that's simply not true. The only reason the EU has grown slower than the US over the last three decades is America's population growth. The EU has, in fact, come closer to the US in terms of GDP per capita, from 67 percent in 1995 (the first year for which EU27 data is available) to 72 percent in 2022.
While the EU's performance has been sub-optimal, that's been driven by the disastrous decision to have a single currency amongst widely disparate countries, the rapidly ageing populations in many member states, the post-2022 energy crisis and social preferences for working fewer hours.
America's performance is also flattered by a staggering runup in debt.
Regulation increases the cost of doing business, a factor exacerbated by the modern trend of making sectors responsible for the costs of their regulator rather than meeting it out of general taxation. This discourages investment in that sector (since the return is less attractive). Attempts to offset this effect, by giving guaranteed returns as in the water industry have been little short of catastrophic, distorting spend into qualifying investment whether it is actually useful or not.
One of my favourite sayings by Ronald Reagan was that the most frightening sentence in the English language is, "I'm from the government and I am here to help." As usual, he succinctly summarised complicated arguments in a single sentence. Regulation is a tax on a service and our regulatory sector, in my view, is the most obvious place for the government to be looking for substantial savings in public spending. It will be win win if they do.
Sure, there is a regulatory cost, but we do regulate for very often valid reasons. Banking regulation to reduce the impact of speculation, environmental regulation to prevent pollution, building regulation to ensure fire safety etc, legal regulation to prevent discrimination.
We could easily deregulate the country into hell. It's a matter of regulating well to balance benefit against cost.
I am not arguing for the Wild West, if you start deregulating everything I might be out of a job and that would never do. Of course some regulation is necessary.
But in recent decades we have built up regulatory empires with mission creep and a desire to require ever more information to justify their own existence. It is why we have the most expensive nursery care in Europe, for example. It is why care homes are so expensive. It has actually failed to do its job in water and energy. It greatly adds to the cost of financial services, lawyers, accountants etc. They become barriers to entry and innovation.
We need some serious rebalancing, hopefully keeping what is essential but binning most of it.
Excellent post. Essentially, we are very poor at assessing and controlling real risk.
We either don't do it at all, or use an institutionalised hammer.
The shift from principles based regulation to a rules based approach hasn’t really worked.
For example, which is better:
- 478 pages of guidance on fire retardant cladding which no one reads and no one follows; or - A simple rule saying if your cladding kills people then you will be fined up the wazoo and get no liability shield and the directors may well go to prison
How does that assist a building owner who hasn’t been killed but faces a massive bill for cladding remediation? So then you need to define what “could kill people” means. What about injure people? How serious an injury? Suddenly you have 200 pages of regulations.
Grenfell fundamentally happened because no-one was accountable for how the building performed as a system.
The focus was on aesthetics (making 1960s tower blocks look nicer) and energy savings (insulation) and not the safety case of the building "system" as a whole, and how it could catastrophically fail. This was no-one's "fault" and the blame diagram of Grenfell - with everyone point to everyone else - is something else.
We need to get much better at assessing systems, ultimately that sits with a capable owner/intelligent client, and assuring ourselves risk has been properly allocated with the right liabilities to the right parties.
I am aware of this (as its my job) but ultimately the client is often acting under advice from its contractor and/or the design team (design and build for you) and if you rely on the contractural structure alone you have no recourse after 12 years as an owner (if they have even breached the duty to take reasonable skill and care) and often none as the tenant. Hence you have “regulations” like the BSA to extend limitation and impose obligations. Otherwise you’re just at the whim of the “market” detached from the consequences and professional indemnity insurers.
The cost of a comfortable retirement has surpassed £60,000 a year for the first time, according to pension industry figures released today.
Two retirees running one small car, eating out weekly and taking a four star foreign holiday each year would now need an income of almost £35,000 each before tax to retire comfortably, rising to £52,000 if they live alone.
Got a feeling I'm going to enjoy this week's issue:
Why exactly? Is it really that difficult to leave the gays to celebrate their own thing and get on with your own life. If it's because of all of the corporate posturing on social media i agree with that but I can tell you that I and no other gay person I know asked for that.
I've not been to a Pride event for at least 40 years. I've nothing against them but I know of no gay friends who'd dream of going . I don't believe they reflect the reality of life for most gay people.
I think I said this yesterday but of my gay friends the ones who are most attached to Pride are the slightly older ones for whom it is still intensely liberating to be out and proud amongst crowds who celebrate that fact. It means more if you've spent a lot of your adult life having to downplay your sexuality for fear of abuse.
So, it's massively out of date then and of diminishing appeal then?
Funny it's foghorned to us all at 120dB out of ideology and then all Summer. Sometimes, all year round. You don't get that your ideology and religious fervour on this will drive a backlash.
Want to avoid it? Tone it down and rein it in, so it's proportionate again, or.. lose it all.
Your choice.
Should we tone down Christmas? Or Easter?
Certainly Christmas. The worst time of the year
I love Christmas for all the reasons brilliantly articulated in Tim Minchin’s song Drinking white wine in the sun. It is a time for family, friends, excess and fun. As long as you don’t let that religious stuff spoil it it is the best time of the year.
Tim Minchin is very clever, funny and all that, but a little of him goes a long way. He has a deeply annoying side.
BBTW, for me Christmas without its extraordinary theological aspect about the humaning of god in the form of a baby, and the fabulous narrative the church weaves from the New Testament legitimating myths would be pretty dull.
Is there really any correlation between deregulation and economic growth, though?
Yes, as first-year undergraduate economics teaches us.
The private sector left to itself seeks to grow, allocating resources efficiently to maximise output. This is known as the First Fundamental Theorem of Welfare Economics - the perfectly competitive outcome is Pareto optimal. Any government regulation is likely to move an economy away from this optimal outcome, reducing economic growth. This was described by Milton Friedman as the only result in the whole of economics that is neither trivial nor false. That won't always be the case in practice, though, in particular with regulation enforcing a competitive outcome (which is why every developed country has anti-monopoly legislation) or property rights. And there will always be non-economic reasons for regulation (safety, national security, etc.). But, overall, if economics teaches us anything, it's that, beyond relatively low levels, regulation reduces economic growth.
There's plenty of empirical evidence to back this up. For instance, here is a Stanford study showing that, between US states, a 10 percent increase in the number of regulatory restrictions causes GDP growth to fall by 0.37 percentage points.
The US is massively more regulated than Europe in most things, and yet has grown far quicker. That said, the area the US is more deregulated is the labour market - so maybe that's the biggest factor.
As usual with your economic posts, that's simply not true. The only reason the EU has grown slower than the US over the last three decades is America's population growth. The EU has, in fact, come closer to the US in terms of GDP per capita, from 67 percent in 1995 (the first year for which EU27 data is available) to 72 percent in 2022.
While the EU's performance has been sub-optimal, that's been driven by the disastrous decision to have a single currency amongst widely disparate countries, the rapidly ageing populations in many member states, the post-2022 energy crisis and social preferences for working fewer hours.
America's performance is also flattered by a staggering runup in debt.
Regulation increases the cost of doing business, a factor exacerbated by the modern trend of making sectors responsible for the costs of their regulator rather than meeting it out of general taxation. This discourages investment in that sector (since the return is less attractive). Attempts to offset this effect, by giving guaranteed returns as in the water industry have been little short of catastrophic, distorting spend into qualifying investment whether it is actually useful or not.
One of my favourite sayings by Ronald Reagan was that the most frightening sentence in the English language is, "I'm from the government and I am here to help." As usual, he succinctly summarised complicated arguments in a single sentence. Regulation is a tax on a service and our regulatory sector, in my view, is the most obvious place for the government to be looking for substantial savings in public spending. It will be win win if they do.
Sure, there is a regulatory cost, but we do regulate for very often valid reasons. Banking regulation to reduce the impact of speculation, environmental regulation to prevent pollution, building regulation to ensure fire safety etc, legal regulation to prevent discrimination.
We could easily deregulate the country into hell. It's a matter of regulating well to balance benefit against cost.
I am not arguing for the Wild West, if you start deregulating everything I might be out of a job and that would never do. Of course some regulation is necessary.
But in recent decades we have built up regulatory empires with mission creep and a desire to require ever more information to justify their own existence. It is why we have the most expensive nursery care in Europe, for example. It is why care homes are so expensive. It has actually failed to do its job in water and energy. It greatly adds to the cost of financial services, lawyers, accountants etc. They become barriers to entry and innovation.
We need some serious rebalancing, hopefully keeping what is essential but binning most of it.
Excellent post. Essentially, we are very poor at assessing and controlling real risk.
We either don't do it at all, or use an institutionalised hammer.
The shift from principles based regulation to a rules based approach hasn’t really worked.
For example, which is better:
- 478 pages of guidance on fire retardant cladding which no one reads and no one follows; or - A simple rule saying if your cladding kills people then you will be fined up the wazoo and get no liability shield and the directors may well go to prison
How does that assist a building owner who hasn’t been killed but faces a massive bill for cladding remediation? So then you need to define what “could kill people” means. What about injure people? How serious an injury? Suddenly you have 200 pages of regulations.
Grenfell fundamentally happened because no-one was accountable for how the building performed as a system.
The focus was on aesthetics (making 1960s tower blocks look nicer) and energy savings (insulation) and not the safety case of the building "system" as a whole, and how it could catastrophically fail. This was no-one's "fault" and the blame diagram of Grenfell - with everyone point to everyone else - is something else.
We need to get much better at assessing systems, ultimately that sits with a capable owner/intelligent client, and assuring ourselves risk has been properly allocated with the right liabilities to the right parties.
I suggest that we are good at assessing systems, but poor at implementing initial requirements, and continuing adequate monitoring over time.
Much of that is to do with capacity reduction in local authorities. It comes down to good regulation.
We may also need to consider the existence, or regulation, of Private Building Inspection. AIUI Scotland manages without it, so so can England.
The BSA removed private building inspection for higher risk buildings in England…
Is there really any correlation between deregulation and economic growth, though?
Yes, as first-year undergraduate economics teaches us.
The private sector left to itself seeks to grow, allocating resources efficiently to maximise output. This is known as the First Fundamental Theorem of Welfare Economics - the perfectly competitive outcome is Pareto optimal. Any government regulation is likely to move an economy away from this optimal outcome, reducing economic growth. This was described by Milton Friedman as the only result in the whole of economics that is neither trivial nor false. That won't always be the case in practice, though, in particular with regulation enforcing a competitive outcome (which is why every developed country has anti-monopoly legislation) or property rights. And there will always be non-economic reasons for regulation (safety, national security, etc.). But, overall, if economics teaches us anything, it's that, beyond relatively low levels, regulation reduces economic growth.
There's plenty of empirical evidence to back this up. For instance, here is a Stanford study showing that, between US states, a 10 percent increase in the number of regulatory restrictions causes GDP growth to fall by 0.37 percentage points.
The US is massively more regulated than Europe in most things, and yet has grown far quicker. That said, the area the US is more deregulated is the labour market - so maybe that's the biggest factor.
As usual with your economic posts, that's simply not true. The only reason the EU has grown slower than the US over the last three decades is America's population growth. The EU has, in fact, come closer to the US in terms of GDP per capita, from 67 percent in 1995 (the first year for which EU27 data is available) to 72 percent in 2022.
While the EU's performance has been sub-optimal, that's been driven by the disastrous decision to have a single currency amongst widely disparate countries, the rapidly ageing populations in many member states, the post-2022 energy crisis and social preferences for working fewer hours.
America's performance is also flattered by a staggering runup in debt.
Regulation increases the cost of doing business, a factor exacerbated by the modern trend of making sectors responsible for the costs of their regulator rather than meeting it out of general taxation. This discourages investment in that sector (since the return is less attractive). Attempts to offset this effect, by giving guaranteed returns as in the water industry have been little short of catastrophic, distorting spend into qualifying investment whether it is actually useful or not.
One of my favourite sayings by Ronald Reagan was that the most frightening sentence in the English language is, "I'm from the government and I am here to help." As usual, he succinctly summarised complicated arguments in a single sentence. Regulation is a tax on a service and our regulatory sector, in my view, is the most obvious place for the government to be looking for substantial savings in public spending. It will be win win if they do.
Sure, there is a regulatory cost, but we do regulate for very often valid reasons. Banking regulation to reduce the impact of speculation, environmental regulation to prevent pollution, building regulation to ensure fire safety etc, legal regulation to prevent discrimination.
We could easily deregulate the country into hell. It's a matter of regulating well to balance benefit against cost.
I am not arguing for the Wild West, if you start deregulating everything I might be out of a job and that would never do. Of course some regulation is necessary.
But in recent decades we have built up regulatory empires with mission creep and a desire to require ever more information to justify their own existence. It is why we have the most expensive nursery care in Europe, for example. It is why care homes are so expensive. It has actually failed to do its job in water and energy. It greatly adds to the cost of financial services, lawyers, accountants etc. They become barriers to entry and innovation.
We need some serious rebalancing, hopefully keeping what is essential but binning most of it.
Excellent post. Essentially, we are very poor at assessing and controlling real risk.
We either don't do it at all, or use an institutionalised hammer.
The shift from principles based regulation to a rules based approach hasn’t really worked.
For example, which is better:
- 478 pages of guidance on fire retardant cladding which no one reads and no one follows; or - A simple rule saying if your cladding kills people then you will be fined up the wazoo and get no liability shield and the directors may well go to prison
How does that assist a building owner who hasn’t been killed but faces a massive bill for cladding remediation? So then you need to define what “could kill people” means. What about injure people? How serious an injury? Suddenly you have 200 pages of regulations.
Grenfell fundamentally happened because no-one was accountable for how the building performed as a system.
The focus was on aesthetics (making 1960s tower blocks look nicer) and energy savings (insulation) and not the safety case of the building "system" as a whole, and how it could catastrophically fail. This was no-one's "fault" and the blame diagram of Grenfell - with everyone point to everyone else - is something else.
We need to get much better at assessing systems, ultimately that sits with a capable owner/intelligent client, and assuring ourselves risk has been properly allocated with the right liabilities to the right parties.
Very much this. Companies were going around stating that their products were fine and safe. Which they may have been, *in isolation*. When put together as part of a system - even a system they were designed to fit into - then they may have been far from fine and safe. And no-one cared, or particularly checked. Because that is expensive, time-consuming, and potentially bad for business.
The cost of a comfortable retirement has surpassed £60,000 a year for the first time, according to pension industry figures released today.
Two retirees running one small car, eating out weekly and taking a four star foreign holiday each year would now need an income of almost £35,000 each before tax to retire comfortably, rising to £52,000 if they live alone.
The cost of a comfortable retirement has surpassed £60,000 a year for the first time, according to pension industry figures released today.
Two retirees running one small car, eating out weekly and taking a four star foreign holiday each year would now need an income of almost £35,000 each before tax to retire comfortably, rising to £52,000 if they live alone.
As ever, the Telegraph is talking utter nonsense to its affluent readers. £70k for a couple and £52K for a single? That's not comfortable. That's luxury. I/we have a privileged retirement on considerably less than that.
Is there really any correlation between deregulation and economic growth, though?
Yes, as first-year undergraduate economics teaches us.
The private sector left to itself seeks to grow, allocating resources efficiently to maximise output. This is known as the First Fundamental Theorem of Welfare Economics - the perfectly competitive outcome is Pareto optimal. Any government regulation is likely to move an economy away from this optimal outcome, reducing economic growth. This was described by Milton Friedman as the only result in the whole of economics that is neither trivial nor false. That won't always be the case in practice, though, in particular with regulation enforcing a competitive outcome (which is why every developed country has anti-monopoly legislation) or property rights. And there will always be non-economic reasons for regulation (safety, national security, etc.). But, overall, if economics teaches us anything, it's that, beyond relatively low levels, regulation reduces economic growth.
There's plenty of empirical evidence to back this up. For instance, here is a Stanford study showing that, between US states, a 10 percent increase in the number of regulatory restrictions causes GDP growth to fall by 0.37 percentage points.
The US is massively more regulated than Europe in most things, and yet has grown far quicker. That said, the area the US is more deregulated is the labour market - so maybe that's the biggest factor.
As usual with your economic posts, that's simply not true. The only reason the EU has grown slower than the US over the last three decades is America's population growth. The EU has, in fact, come closer to the US in terms of GDP per capita, from 67 percent in 1995 (the first year for which EU27 data is available) to 72 percent in 2022.
While the EU's performance has been sub-optimal, that's been driven by the disastrous decision to have a single currency amongst widely disparate countries, the rapidly ageing populations in many member states, the post-2022 energy crisis and social preferences for working fewer hours.
America's performance is also flattered by a staggering runup in debt.
Regulation increases the cost of doing business, a factor exacerbated by the modern trend of making sectors responsible for the costs of their regulator rather than meeting it out of general taxation. This discourages investment in that sector (since the return is less attractive). Attempts to offset this effect, by giving guaranteed returns as in the water industry have been little short of catastrophic, distorting spend into qualifying investment whether it is actually useful or not.
One of my favourite sayings by Ronald Reagan was that the most frightening sentence in the English language is, "I'm from the government and I am here to help." As usual, he succinctly summarised complicated arguments in a single sentence. Regulation is a tax on a service and our regulatory sector, in my view, is the most obvious place for the government to be looking for substantial savings in public spending. It will be win win if they do.
Sure, there is a regulatory cost, but we do regulate for very often valid reasons. Banking regulation to reduce the impact of speculation, environmental regulation to prevent pollution, building regulation to ensure fire safety etc, legal regulation to prevent discrimination.
We could easily deregulate the country into hell. It's a matter of regulating well to balance benefit against cost.
I am not arguing for the Wild West, if you start deregulating everything I might be out of a job and that would never do. Of course some regulation is necessary.
But in recent decades we have built up regulatory empires with mission creep and a desire to require ever more information to justify their own existence. It is why we have the most expensive nursery care in Europe, for example. It is why care homes are so expensive. It has actually failed to do its job in water and energy. It greatly adds to the cost of financial services, lawyers, accountants etc. They become barriers to entry and innovation.
We need some serious rebalancing, hopefully keeping what is essential but binning most of it.
Excellent post. Essentially, we are very poor at assessing and controlling real risk.
We either don't do it at all, or use an institutionalised hammer.
The shift from principles based regulation to a rules based approach hasn’t really worked.
For example, which is better:
- 478 pages of guidance on fire retardant cladding which no one reads and no one follows; or - A simple rule saying if your cladding kills people then you will be fined up the wazoo and get no liability shield and the directors may well go to prison
How does that assist a building owner who hasn’t been killed but faces a massive bill for cladding remediation? So then you need to define what “could kill people” means. What about injure people? How serious an injury? Suddenly you have 200 pages of regulations.
Gallowgate is right. The mixture of technical ability to do very complex things, a culture which deplores being killed by mistake or whole cities burning down, a litigious society, a democratically elected law maker called parliament, the rule of law and the ability to create complex corporate structures of unaccountability together trend only in one direction.
Got a feeling I'm going to enjoy this week's issue:
Why exactly? Is it really that difficult to leave the gays to celebrate their own thing and get on with your own life. If it's because of all of the corporate posturing on social media i agree with that but I can tell you that I and no other gay person I know asked for that.
I've not been to a Pride event for at least 40 years. I've nothing against them but I know of no gay friends who'd dream of going . I don't believe they reflect the reality of life for most gay people.
I think I said this yesterday but of my gay friends the ones who are most attached to Pride are the slightly older ones for whom it is still intensely liberating to be out and proud amongst crowds who celebrate that fact. It means more if you've spent a lot of your adult life having to downplay your sexuality for fear of abuse.
So, it's massively out of date then and of diminishing appeal then?
Funny it's foghorned to us all at 120dB out of ideology and then all Summer. Sometimes, all year round. You don't get that your ideology and religious fervour on this will drive a backlash.
Want to avoid it? Tone it down and rein it in, so it's proportionate again, or.. lose it all.
Your choice.
Should we tone down Christmas? Or Easter?
I suggested to the local CoE reverend that we should abolish Christmas and replace it with a religious festival. He thought this was a good idea.
Winterval?
I think one of the issues critics of "woke" have in the USA, is that some of their thought leaders have raised it to the status of an alternative religion, and so an existential enemy - as shown by the invocation of woke as the enemy in a short opening prayer at a NATCON conference below. It really shows the unbalanced nature of some Trump's Evangelical supporters. There are some trying to promote that perception here; I don't think it will work.
If you define something as an existential enemy, it reduces your own room for manoeuvre.
Is there really any correlation between deregulation and economic growth, though?
Yes, as first-year undergraduate economics teaches us.
The private sector left to itself seeks to grow, allocating resources efficiently to maximise output. This is known as the First Fundamental Theorem of Welfare Economics - the perfectly competitive outcome is Pareto optimal. Any government regulation is likely to move an economy away from this optimal outcome, reducing economic growth. This was described by Milton Friedman as the only result in the whole of economics that is neither trivial nor false. That won't always be the case in practice, though, in particular with regulation enforcing a competitive outcome (which is why every developed country has anti-monopoly legislation) or property rights. And there will always be non-economic reasons for regulation (safety, national security, etc.). But, overall, if economics teaches us anything, it's that, beyond relatively low levels, regulation reduces economic growth.
There's plenty of empirical evidence to back this up. For instance, here is a Stanford study showing that, between US states, a 10 percent increase in the number of regulatory restrictions causes GDP growth to fall by 0.37 percentage points.
The US is massively more regulated than Europe in most things, and yet has grown far quicker. That said, the area the US is more deregulated is the labour market - so maybe that's the biggest factor.
As usual with your economic posts, that's simply not true. The only reason the EU has grown slower than the US over the last three decades is America's population growth. The EU has, in fact, come closer to the US in terms of GDP per capita, from 67 percent in 1995 (the first year for which EU27 data is available) to 72 percent in 2022.
While the EU's performance has been sub-optimal, that's been driven by the disastrous decision to have a single currency amongst widely disparate countries, the rapidly ageing populations in many member states, the post-2022 energy crisis and social preferences for working fewer hours.
America's performance is also flattered by a staggering runup in debt.
Regulation increases the cost of doing business, a factor exacerbated by the modern trend of making sectors responsible for the costs of their regulator rather than meeting it out of general taxation. This discourages investment in that sector (since the return is less attractive). Attempts to offset this effect, by giving guaranteed returns as in the water industry have been little short of catastrophic, distorting spend into qualifying investment whether it is actually useful or not.
One of my favourite sayings by Ronald Reagan was that the most frightening sentence in the English language is, "I'm from the government and I am here to help." As usual, he succinctly summarised complicated arguments in a single sentence. Regulation is a tax on a service and our regulatory sector, in my view, is the most obvious place for the government to be looking for substantial savings in public spending. It will be win win if they do.
Sure, there is a regulatory cost, but we do regulate for very often valid reasons. Banking regulation to reduce the impact of speculation, environmental regulation to prevent pollution, building regulation to ensure fire safety etc, legal regulation to prevent discrimination.
We could easily deregulate the country into hell. It's a matter of regulating well to balance benefit against cost.
I am not arguing for the Wild West, if you start deregulating everything I might be out of a job and that would never do. Of course some regulation is necessary.
But in recent decades we have built up regulatory empires with mission creep and a desire to require ever more information to justify their own existence. It is why we have the most expensive nursery care in Europe, for example. It is why care homes are so expensive. It has actually failed to do its job in water and energy. It greatly adds to the cost of financial services, lawyers, accountants etc. They become barriers to entry and innovation.
We need some serious rebalancing, hopefully keeping what is essential but binning most of it.
Excellent post. Essentially, we are very poor at assessing and controlling real risk.
We either don't do it at all, or use an institutionalised hammer.
The shift from principles based regulation to a rules based approach hasn’t really worked.
For example, which is better:
- 478 pages of guidance on fire retardant cladding which no one reads and no one follows; or - A simple rule saying if your cladding kills people then you will be fined up the wazoo and get no liability shield and the directors may well go to prison
How does that assist a building owner who hasn’t been killed but faces a massive bill for cladding remediation? So then you need to define what “could kill people” means. What about injure people? How serious an injury? Suddenly you have 200 pages of regulations.
Grenfell fundamentally happened because no-one was accountable for how the building performed as a system.
The focus was on aesthetics (making 1960s tower blocks look nicer) and energy savings (insulation) and not the safety case of the building "system" as a whole, and how it could catastrophically fail. This was no-one's "fault" and the blame diagram of Grenfell - with everyone point to everyone else - is something else.
We need to get much better at assessing systems, ultimately that sits with a capable owner/intelligent client, and assuring ourselves risk has been properly allocated with the right liabilities to the right parties.
Very much this. Companies were going around stating that their products were fine and safe. Which they may have been, *in isolation*. When put together as part of a system - even a system they were designed to fit into - then they may have been far from fine and safe. And no-one cared, or particularly checked. Because that is expensive, time-consuming, and potentially bad for business.
Highly flammable insulation panels were never fine or safe as cladding. That was known many years before Grenfell.
The chancellor has begun meeting groups of backbenchers to argue that the money, part of a £113bn investment in capital projects over the rest of the parliament including transport, homes and energy, would only have happened under Labour.
Just three Whitehall departments are still to agree their multi-year budgets with the Treasury before the spending review, the Guardian understands, with the home secretary, Yvette Cooper; the energy secretary, Ed Miliband; and the housing secretary, Angela Rayner, holding out...
That £15bn for trains and trams outside London looks very positive. A big chunk of it needs to be trams and light rail.
But there will be a few battles around groups such as Transport 2000 (whatever they are called now) trying to nick multiuser rail-trails back). We had an attempted mugging to grab the Monsal Trail in Derbyshire for a proposed railway, despite it being used by 300-600k people per annum. When I last heard it had been fought off, but I am not fully up to date - they will be back.
Rail Trails of course being ideal accessible (and safe family cycling) trails, like towpaths.
I can see RefUK Councils (and TBH others) falling for that one - oooh, big exciting machines - if they get around to doing any projects, and not being especially good at listening to different stakeholders. They like easy answers.
That's why he need the whole damn lot of Local Authority managed trails made into Public Rights of Way by statute. I have not won that one yet !
We have a similar upcoming battle in Edinburgh. The principle should always to put trams on roads, not paths, if the intention is to reduce car use. Learn the lesson from Dublin - they don't work as well if hidden away down an embankment.
For railways, I think it's harder to make that argument. 600,000 is a lot of people though, so you'd hope that alternative provision is put in place - the Australians manage to do this with new infrastructure, and so did HS2.
Got a feeling I'm going to enjoy this week's issue:
Why exactly? Is it really that difficult to leave the gays to celebrate their own thing and get on with your own life. If it's because of all of the corporate posturing on social media i agree with that but I can tell you that I and no other gay person I know asked for that.
I've not been to a Pride event for at least 40 years. I've nothing against them but I know of no gay friends who'd dream of going . I don't believe they reflect the reality of life for most gay people.
I think I said this yesterday but of my gay friends the ones who are most attached to Pride are the slightly older ones for whom it is still intensely liberating to be out and proud amongst crowds who celebrate that fact. It means more if you've spent a lot of your adult life having to downplay your sexuality for fear of abuse.
So, it's massively out of date then and of diminishing appeal then?
Funny it's foghorned to us all at 120dB out of ideology and then all Summer. Sometimes, all year round. You don't get that your ideology and religious fervour on this will drive a backlash.
Want to avoid it? Tone it down and rein it in, so it's proportionate again, or.. lose it all.
Your choice.
Should we tone down Christmas? Or Easter?
I suggested to the local CoE reverend that we should abolish Christmas and replace it with a religious festival. He thought this was a good idea.
Winterval?
I think one of the issues critics of "woke" have in the USA, is that some of their thought leaders have raised it to the status of an alternative religion, and so an existential enemy - as shown by the invocation of woke as the enemy in a short opening prayer at a NATCON conference below. It really shows the unbalanced nature of some Trump's Evangelical supporters. There are some trying to promote that perception here; I don't think it will work.
If you define something as an existential enemy, it reduces your own room for manoeuvre.
Is there really any correlation between deregulation and economic growth, though?
Yes, as first-year undergraduate economics teaches us.
The private sector left to itself seeks to grow, allocating resources efficiently to maximise output. This is known as the First Fundamental Theorem of Welfare Economics - the perfectly competitive outcome is Pareto optimal. Any government regulation is likely to move an economy away from this optimal outcome, reducing economic growth. This was described by Milton Friedman as the only result in the whole of economics that is neither trivial nor false. That won't always be the case in practice, though, in particular with regulation enforcing a competitive outcome (which is why every developed country has anti-monopoly legislation) or property rights. And there will always be non-economic reasons for regulation (safety, national security, etc.). But, overall, if economics teaches us anything, it's that, beyond relatively low levels, regulation reduces economic growth.
There's plenty of empirical evidence to back this up. For instance, here is a Stanford study showing that, between US states, a 10 percent increase in the number of regulatory restrictions causes GDP growth to fall by 0.37 percentage points.
The US is massively more regulated than Europe in most things, and yet has grown far quicker. That said, the area the US is more deregulated is the labour market - so maybe that's the biggest factor.
As usual with your economic posts, that's simply not true. The only reason the EU has grown slower than the US over the last three decades is America's population growth. The EU has, in fact, come closer to the US in terms of GDP per capita, from 67 percent in 1995 (the first year for which EU27 data is available) to 72 percent in 2022.
While the EU's performance has been sub-optimal, that's been driven by the disastrous decision to have a single currency amongst widely disparate countries, the rapidly ageing populations in many member states, the post-2022 energy crisis and social preferences for working fewer hours.
America's performance is also flattered by a staggering runup in debt.
Regulation increases the cost of doing business, a factor exacerbated by the modern trend of making sectors responsible for the costs of their regulator rather than meeting it out of general taxation. This discourages investment in that sector (since the return is less attractive). Attempts to offset this effect, by giving guaranteed returns as in the water industry have been little short of catastrophic, distorting spend into qualifying investment whether it is actually useful or not.
One of my favourite sayings by Ronald Reagan was that the most frightening sentence in the English language is, "I'm from the government and I am here to help." As usual, he succinctly summarised complicated arguments in a single sentence. Regulation is a tax on a service and our regulatory sector, in my view, is the most obvious place for the government to be looking for substantial savings in public spending. It will be win win if they do.
Sure, there is a regulatory cost, but we do regulate for very often valid reasons. Banking regulation to reduce the impact of speculation, environmental regulation to prevent pollution, building regulation to ensure fire safety etc, legal regulation to prevent discrimination.
We could easily deregulate the country into hell. It's a matter of regulating well to balance benefit against cost.
I am not arguing for the Wild West, if you start deregulating everything I might be out of a job and that would never do. Of course some regulation is necessary.
But in recent decades we have built up regulatory empires with mission creep and a desire to require ever more information to justify their own existence. It is why we have the most expensive nursery care in Europe, for example. It is why care homes are so expensive. It has actually failed to do its job in water and energy. It greatly adds to the cost of financial services, lawyers, accountants etc. They become barriers to entry and innovation.
We need some serious rebalancing, hopefully keeping what is essential but binning most of it.
Excellent post. Essentially, we are very poor at assessing and controlling real risk.
We either don't do it at all, or use an institutionalised hammer.
The shift from principles based regulation to a rules based approach hasn’t really worked.
For example, which is better:
- 478 pages of guidance on fire retardant cladding which no one reads and no one follows; or - A simple rule saying if your cladding kills people then you will be fined up the wazoo and get no liability shield and the directors may well go to prison
How does that assist a building owner who hasn’t been killed but faces a massive bill for cladding remediation? So then you need to define what “could kill people” means. What about injure people? How serious an injury? Suddenly you have 200 pages of regulations.
Gallowgate is right. The mixture of technical ability to do very complex things, a culture which deplores being killed by mistake or whole cities burning down, a litigious society, a democratically elected law maker called parliament, the rule of law and the ability to create complex corporate structures of unaccountability together trend only in one direction.
How about the Highway Code as a good example? We all take on a very dangerous task each day - driving or mixing with multi-tonne vehicles. Yet, the death and serious injury rate is very low.
There are a number of rules for which breach can result in prosecution. There are many more that constitute guidance only, but they can contribute to a prosecution in the event someone is killed or injured. The whole thing is simple and common sense - we follow it instinctively.
It's flexible too. The government recognised that the biggest deterrent to cycling is fear of being killed (hence the gender/age imbalance). So the new version includes a hierarchy of road user, putting more responsibility on those in charge of larger vehicles than pedestrians and cyclists. Nice.
Got a feeling I'm going to enjoy this week's issue:
Why exactly? Is it really that difficult to leave the gays to celebrate their own thing and get on with your own life. If it's because of all of the corporate posturing on social media i agree with that but I can tell you that I and no other gay person I know asked for that.
I've not been to a Pride event for at least 40 years. I've nothing against them but I know of no gay friends who'd dream of going . I don't believe they reflect the reality of life for most gay people.
I think I said this yesterday but of my gay friends the ones who are most attached to Pride are the slightly older ones for whom it is still intensely liberating to be out and proud amongst crowds who celebrate that fact. It means more if you've spent a lot of your adult life having to downplay your sexuality for fear of abuse.
So, it's massively out of date then and of diminishing appeal then?
Funny it's foghorned to us all at 120dB out of ideology and then all Summer. Sometimes, all year round. You don't get that your ideology and religious fervour on this will drive a backlash.
Want to avoid it? Tone it down and rein it in, so it's proportionate again, or.. lose it all.
Your choice.
Actually it's not my choice because I don't control whatever institutions it is that have annoyed you by making a big deal out of Pride.
Gay people have a right to celebrate and hold events just like every religion, folk festival, community association, scout troop and every other group of like minded people in this country. I'm sure there are pacifists who get very annoyed at all of the events planned around Armed Forces Day but no sane person would treat that as part of some culture war.
There are many gay people who also get annoyed at corporations and institutions latching on to Pride. Complain to them or boycott them but leave the Gays alone to celebrate.
Is there really any correlation between deregulation and economic growth, though?
Yes, as first-year undergraduate economics teaches us.
The private sector left to itself seeks to grow, allocating resources efficiently to maximise output. This is known as the First Fundamental Theorem of Welfare Economics - the perfectly competitive outcome is Pareto optimal. Any government regulation is likely to move an economy away from this optimal outcome, reducing economic growth. This was described by Milton Friedman as the only result in the whole of economics that is neither trivial nor false. That won't always be the case in practice, though, in particular with regulation enforcing a competitive outcome (which is why every developed country has anti-monopoly legislation) or property rights. And there will always be non-economic reasons for regulation (safety, national security, etc.). But, overall, if economics teaches us anything, it's that, beyond relatively low levels, regulation reduces economic growth.
There's plenty of empirical evidence to back this up. For instance, here is a Stanford study showing that, between US states, a 10 percent increase in the number of regulatory restrictions causes GDP growth to fall by 0.37 percentage points.
The US is massively more regulated than Europe in most things, and yet has grown far quicker. That said, the area the US is more deregulated is the labour market - so maybe that's the biggest factor.
As usual with your economic posts, that's simply not true. The only reason the EU has grown slower than the US over the last three decades is America's population growth. The EU has, in fact, come closer to the US in terms of GDP per capita, from 67 percent in 1995 (the first year for which EU27 data is available) to 72 percent in 2022.
While the EU's performance has been sub-optimal, that's been driven by the disastrous decision to have a single currency amongst widely disparate countries, the rapidly ageing populations in many member states, the post-2022 energy crisis and social preferences for working fewer hours.
America's performance is also flattered by a staggering runup in debt.
Regulation increases the cost of doing business, a factor exacerbated by the modern trend of making sectors responsible for the costs of their regulator rather than meeting it out of general taxation. This discourages investment in that sector (since the return is less attractive). Attempts to offset this effect, by giving guaranteed returns as in the water industry have been little short of catastrophic, distorting spend into qualifying investment whether it is actually useful or not.
One of my favourite sayings by Ronald Reagan was that the most frightening sentence in the English language is, "I'm from the government and I am here to help." As usual, he succinctly summarised complicated arguments in a single sentence. Regulation is a tax on a service and our regulatory sector, in my view, is the most obvious place for the government to be looking for substantial savings in public spending. It will be win win if they do.
Sure, there is a regulatory cost, but we do regulate for very often valid reasons. Banking regulation to reduce the impact of speculation, environmental regulation to prevent pollution, building regulation to ensure fire safety etc, legal regulation to prevent discrimination.
We could easily deregulate the country into hell. It's a matter of regulating well to balance benefit against cost.
I am not arguing for the Wild West, if you start deregulating everything I might be out of a job and that would never do. Of course some regulation is necessary.
But in recent decades we have built up regulatory empires with mission creep and a desire to require ever more information to justify their own existence. It is why we have the most expensive nursery care in Europe, for example. It is why care homes are so expensive. It has actually failed to do its job in water and energy. It greatly adds to the cost of financial services, lawyers, accountants etc. They become barriers to entry and innovation.
We need some serious rebalancing, hopefully keeping what is essential but binning most of it.
Excellent post. Essentially, we are very poor at assessing and controlling real risk.
We either don't do it at all, or use an institutionalised hammer.
The shift from principles based regulation to a rules based approach hasn’t really worked.
For example, which is better:
- 478 pages of guidance on fire retardant cladding which no one reads and no one follows; or - A simple rule saying if your cladding kills people then you will be fined up the wazoo and get no liability shield and the directors may well go to prison
How does that assist a building owner who hasn’t been killed but faces a massive bill for cladding remediation? So then you need to define what “could kill people” means. What about injure people? How serious an injury? Suddenly you have 200 pages of regulations.
Gallowgate is right. The mixture of technical ability to do very complex things, a culture which deplores being killed by mistake or whole cities burning down, a litigious society, a democratically elected law maker called parliament, the rule of law and the ability to create complex corporate structures of unaccountability together trend only in one direction.
How about the Highway Code as a good example? We all take on a very dangerous task each day - driving or mixing with multi-tonne vehicles. Yet, the death and serious injury rate is very low.
There are a number of rules for which breach of which can result in prosecution. There are many more that constitute guidance only, but they can contribute to a prosecution in the event someone is killed or injured. The whole thing is simple and common sense - we follow it instinctively.
It's flexible too. The government recognised that the biggest deterrent to cycling is fear of being killed (hence the gender/age imbalance). So the new version includes a hierarchy of road user, putting more responsibility on those in charge of larger vehicles than pedestrians and cyclists. Nice.
Because regulations are not just about criminal responsibility. They are also about civil responsibility. The post-grenfell fallout in the Construction industry is more about civil liability than criminal responsibility for building safety - who pays the millions of pounds?
Is there really any correlation between deregulation and economic growth, though?
Yes, as first-year undergraduate economics teaches us.
The private sector left to itself seeks to grow, allocating resources efficiently to maximise output. This is known as the First Fundamental Theorem of Welfare Economics - the perfectly competitive outcome is Pareto optimal. Any government regulation is likely to move an economy away from this optimal outcome, reducing economic growth. This was described by Milton Friedman as the only result in the whole of economics that is neither trivial nor false. That won't always be the case in practice, though, in particular with regulation enforcing a competitive outcome (which is why every developed country has anti-monopoly legislation) or property rights. And there will always be non-economic reasons for regulation (safety, national security, etc.). But, overall, if economics teaches us anything, it's that, beyond relatively low levels, regulation reduces economic growth.
There's plenty of empirical evidence to back this up. For instance, here is a Stanford study showing that, between US states, a 10 percent increase in the number of regulatory restrictions causes GDP growth to fall by 0.37 percentage points.
The US is massively more regulated than Europe in most things, and yet has grown far quicker. That said, the area the US is more deregulated is the labour market - so maybe that's the biggest factor.
As usual with your economic posts, that's simply not true. The only reason the EU has grown slower than the US over the last three decades is America's population growth. The EU has, in fact, come closer to the US in terms of GDP per capita, from 67 percent in 1995 (the first year for which EU27 data is available) to 72 percent in 2022.
While the EU's performance has been sub-optimal, that's been driven by the disastrous decision to have a single currency amongst widely disparate countries, the rapidly ageing populations in many member states, the post-2022 energy crisis and social preferences for working fewer hours.
America's performance is also flattered by a staggering runup in debt.
Regulation increases the cost of doing business, a factor exacerbated by the modern trend of making sectors responsible for the costs of their regulator rather than meeting it out of general taxation. This discourages investment in that sector (since the return is less attractive). Attempts to offset this effect, by giving guaranteed returns as in the water industry have been little short of catastrophic, distorting spend into qualifying investment whether it is actually useful or not.
One of my favourite sayings by Ronald Reagan was that the most frightening sentence in the English language is, "I'm from the government and I am here to help." As usual, he succinctly summarised complicated arguments in a single sentence. Regulation is a tax on a service and our regulatory sector, in my view, is the most obvious place for the government to be looking for substantial savings in public spending. It will be win win if they do.
Sure, there is a regulatory cost, but we do regulate for very often valid reasons. Banking regulation to reduce the impact of speculation, environmental regulation to prevent pollution, building regulation to ensure fire safety etc, legal regulation to prevent discrimination.
We could easily deregulate the country into hell. It's a matter of regulating well to balance benefit against cost.
I am not arguing for the Wild West, if you start deregulating everything I might be out of a job and that would never do. Of course some regulation is necessary.
But in recent decades we have built up regulatory empires with mission creep and a desire to require ever more information to justify their own existence. It is why we have the most expensive nursery care in Europe, for example. It is why care homes are so expensive. It has actually failed to do its job in water and energy. It greatly adds to the cost of financial services, lawyers, accountants etc. They become barriers to entry and innovation.
We need some serious rebalancing, hopefully keeping what is essential but binning most of it.
Excellent post. Essentially, we are very poor at assessing and controlling real risk.
We either don't do it at all, or use an institutionalised hammer.
The shift from principles based regulation to a rules based approach hasn’t really worked.
For example, which is better:
- 478 pages of guidance on fire retardant cladding which no one reads and no one follows; or - A simple rule saying if your cladding kills people then you will be fined up the wazoo and get no liability shield and the directors may well go to prison
How does that assist a building owner who hasn’t been killed but faces a massive bill for cladding remediation? So then you need to define what “could kill people” means. What about injure people? How serious an injury? Suddenly you have 200 pages of regulations.
Gallowgate is right. The mixture of technical ability to do very complex things, a culture which deplores being killed by mistake or whole cities burning down, a litigious society, a democratically elected law maker called parliament, the rule of law and the ability to create complex corporate structures of unaccountability together trend only in one direction.
But also... Humanity has got richer by specialising and co-operating to get big jobs done. That's a good thing.
But it does mean that the traditional humane ways of managing organisations and communities don't work as well- our brains aren't evolved to cope. (See all the stuff about how we can know a dozen people well, a hundred people superficially and beyond a thousand, it all becomes a blur.)
How we manage that- the tension between not liking the vibes of modern society but very much liking the riches it generates- is the problem that nobody has really answered satisfactorily.
With regards to Pride and the kerfuffle. I find the performative WE SUPPORT YOU cosplay from businesses to be patronising - a little less pride and a little more actual CSR policy would be preferable.
I also find that much of the complaining about pride - especially the really loud stuff - is where people feel that they can't say what they really think. It's turned into culture war not because of cosplaying brands going rainbow. It's culture war because a generation of mainly WWC men have been gaslit to think that they are an endangered species and anyone who isn't them is their enemy.
Remember that we have pride marches because in the good old days people like me stayed in the closet in fear of the abusive reaction that would come from coming out. We need pride because for many objectors "why do we have to have pride rammed down our throats" is only a step away from "why do we have to have these benders rammed down our throats" to "lets make promotion of benders illegal again"
I have never been to a Pride event, though my boys go. To me it is all part of the same rich tapestry of life with Caribbean carnival, marathons, Passion Plays, Sikh festivals, Diwali, Remembrance and Eid events.
It's part of the belief in freedom that I accept minor inconveniences like occasional road closures so people can be who they want to be. The quid pro quo is that I get to live as I choose. By and large I only encounter these events as a casual spectator whilst out running errands but all seem to be quite positive for the participants, and carried out in good humour, just not my cup of tea.
The chancellor has begun meeting groups of backbenchers to argue that the money, part of a £113bn investment in capital projects over the rest of the parliament including transport, homes and energy, would only have happened under Labour.
Just three Whitehall departments are still to agree their multi-year budgets with the Treasury before the spending review, the Guardian understands, with the home secretary, Yvette Cooper; the energy secretary, Ed Miliband; and the housing secretary, Angela Rayner, holding out...
That £15bn for trains and trams outside London looks very positive. A big chunk of it needs to be trams and light rail.
But there will be a few battles around groups such as Transport 2000 (whatever they are called now) trying to nick multiuser rail-trails back). We had an attempted mugging to grab the Monsal Trail in Derbyshire for a proposed railway, despite it being used by 300-600k people per annum. When I last heard it had been fought off, but I am not fully up to date - they will be back.
Rail Trails of course being ideal accessible (and safe family cycling) trails, like towpaths.
I can see RefUK Councils (and TBH others) falling for that one - oooh, big exciting machines - if they get around to doing any projects, and not being especially good at listening to different stakeholders. They like easy answers.
That's why he need the whole damn lot of Local Authority managed trails made into Public Rights of Way by statute. I have not won that one yet !
We have a similar upcoming battle in Edinburgh. The principle should always to put trams on roads, not paths, if the intention is to reduce car use. Learn the lesson from Dublin - they don't work as well if hidden away down an embankment.
For railways, I think it's harder to make that argument. 600,000 is a lot of people though, so you'd hope that alternative provision is put in place - the Australians manage to do this with new infrastructure, and so did HS2.
It is fine for public transport to use paths, especially when the routes were originally used for public transport.
However, other alternative routes should be found for walkers and cyclists.
The Monsal Trail follows the line that was closed in 1968 between Matlock and (near) Buxton, and which was a vital artery. Incidentally, it was never mentioned for closure by Beeching; it was closed as the western region wanted the traffic on its newly-electrified route (after the Peak Line was used as a diversionary route during electrification...)
The cost of a comfortable retirement has surpassed £60,000 a year for the first time, according to pension industry figures released today.
Two retirees running one small car, eating out weekly and taking a four star foreign holiday each year would now need an income of almost £35,000 each before tax to retire comfortably, rising to £52,000 if they live alone.
Is there really any correlation between deregulation and economic growth, though?
Yes, as first-year undergraduate economics teaches us.
The private sector left to itself seeks to grow, allocating resources efficiently to maximise output. This is known as the First Fundamental Theorem of Welfare Economics - the perfectly competitive outcome is Pareto optimal. Any government regulation is likely to move an economy away from this optimal outcome, reducing economic growth. This was described by Milton Friedman as the only result in the whole of economics that is neither trivial nor false. That won't always be the case in practice, though, in particular with regulation enforcing a competitive outcome (which is why every developed country has anti-monopoly legislation) or property rights. And there will always be non-economic reasons for regulation (safety, national security, etc.). But, overall, if economics teaches us anything, it's that, beyond relatively low levels, regulation reduces economic growth.
There's plenty of empirical evidence to back this up. For instance, here is a Stanford study showing that, between US states, a 10 percent increase in the number of regulatory restrictions causes GDP growth to fall by 0.37 percentage points.
The US is massively more regulated than Europe in most things, and yet has grown far quicker. That said, the area the US is more deregulated is the labour market - so maybe that's the biggest factor.
As usual with your economic posts, that's simply not true. The only reason the EU has grown slower than the US over the last three decades is America's population growth. The EU has, in fact, come closer to the US in terms of GDP per capita, from 67 percent in 1995 (the first year for which EU27 data is available) to 72 percent in 2022.
While the EU's performance has been sub-optimal, that's been driven by the disastrous decision to have a single currency amongst widely disparate countries, the rapidly ageing populations in many member states, the post-2022 energy crisis and social preferences for working fewer hours.
America's performance is also flattered by a staggering runup in debt.
Regulation increases the cost of doing business, a factor exacerbated by the modern trend of making sectors responsible for the costs of their regulator rather than meeting it out of general taxation. This discourages investment in that sector (since the return is less attractive). Attempts to offset this effect, by giving guaranteed returns as in the water industry have been little short of catastrophic, distorting spend into qualifying investment whether it is actually useful or not.
One of my favourite sayings by Ronald Reagan was that the most frightening sentence in the English language is, "I'm from the government and I am here to help." As usual, he succinctly summarised complicated arguments in a single sentence. Regulation is a tax on a service and our regulatory sector, in my view, is the most obvious place for the government to be looking for substantial savings in public spending. It will be win win if they do.
Sure, there is a regulatory cost, but we do regulate for very often valid reasons. Banking regulation to reduce the impact of speculation, environmental regulation to prevent pollution, building regulation to ensure fire safety etc, legal regulation to prevent discrimination.
We could easily deregulate the country into hell. It's a matter of regulating well to balance benefit against cost.
I am not arguing for the Wild West, if you start deregulating everything I might be out of a job and that would never do. Of course some regulation is necessary.
But in recent decades we have built up regulatory empires with mission creep and a desire to require ever more information to justify their own existence. It is why we have the most expensive nursery care in Europe, for example. It is why care homes are so expensive. It has actually failed to do its job in water and energy. It greatly adds to the cost of financial services, lawyers, accountants etc. They become barriers to entry and innovation.
We need some serious rebalancing, hopefully keeping what is essential but binning most of it.
Excellent post. Essentially, we are very poor at assessing and controlling real risk.
We either don't do it at all, or use an institutionalised hammer.
The shift from principles based regulation to a rules based approach hasn’t really worked.
For example, which is better:
- 478 pages of guidance on fire retardant cladding which no one reads and no one follows; or - A simple rule saying if your cladding kills people then you will be fined up the wazoo and get no liability shield and the directors may well go to prison
How does that assist a building owner who hasn’t been killed but faces a massive bill for cladding remediation? So then you need to define what “could kill people” means. What about injure people? How serious an injury? Suddenly you have 200 pages of regulations.
Grenfell fundamentally happened because no-one was accountable for how the building performed as a system.
The focus was on aesthetics (making 1960s tower blocks look nicer) and energy savings (insulation) and not the safety case of the building "system" as a whole, and how it could catastrophically fail. This was no-one's "fault" and the blame diagram of Grenfell - with everyone point to everyone else - is something else.
We need to get much better at assessing systems, ultimately that sits with a capable owner/intelligent client, and assuring ourselves risk has been properly allocated with the right liabilities to the right parties.
Very much this. Companies were going around stating that their products were fine and safe. Which they may have been, *in isolation*. When put together as part of a system - even a system they were designed to fit into - then they may have been far from fine and safe. And no-one cared, or particularly checked. Because that is expensive, time-consuming, and potentially bad for business.
Highly flammable insulation panels were never fine or safe as cladding. That was known many years before Grenfell.
This, all 3 insulation firms were found to have engaged in "systematic dishonesty", mainly not disclosing or misrepresenting fire tests, demonstrating that, even where there are regulations, companies will attempt to circumvent them in pursuit of profit, regardless of safety.
At the risk of being accused of copium, the polls whilst still very poor for Labour hardly look unrecoverable?
Same for the Tories.
Agree about Labour. They are possibly the favourite for the 2029 race, but cunningly hanging back a few lengths. They may still be the least worst in four years. That's FPTP for you. A rubbish horse win rubbish races.
I still think the Tories are squeezed back markers, unlikely to recover.
The chancellor has begun meeting groups of backbenchers to argue that the money, part of a £113bn investment in capital projects over the rest of the parliament including transport, homes and energy, would only have happened under Labour.
Just three Whitehall departments are still to agree their multi-year budgets with the Treasury before the spending review, the Guardian understands, with the home secretary, Yvette Cooper; the energy secretary, Ed Miliband; and the housing secretary, Angela Rayner, holding out...
That £15bn for trains and trams outside London looks very positive. A big chunk of it needs to be trams and light rail.
But there will be a few battles around groups such as Transport 2000 (whatever they are called now) trying to nick multiuser rail-trails back). We had an attempted mugging to grab the Monsal Trail in Derbyshire for a proposed railway, despite it being used by 300-600k people per annum. When I last heard it had been fought off, but I am not fully up to date - they will be back.
Rail Trails of course being ideal accessible (and safe family cycling) trails, like towpaths.
I can see RefUK Councils (and TBH others) falling for that one - oooh, big exciting machines - if they get around to doing any projects, and not being especially good at listening to different stakeholders. They like easy answers.
That's why he need the whole damn lot of Local Authority managed trails made into Public Rights of Way by statute. I have not won that one yet !
We have a similar upcoming battle in Edinburgh. The principle should always to put trams on roads, not paths, if the intention is to reduce car use. Learn the lesson from Dublin - they don't work as well if hidden away down an embankment.
For railways, I think it's harder to make that argument. 600,000 is a lot of people though, so you'd hope that alternative provision is put in place - the Australians manage to do this with new infrastructure, and so did HS2.
The trams work better on roads because that is where people are is an interesting argument. Nottingham has in general done this really well imo, but they already had "green corridors" in a number of places in the early 20c or 19C - I'm not sure of reasons why.
It's in the Peak National Park, which should help - so I think the Local Planning authority is the Peak Park itself.
It's one question around us still needing to be developing decent networks of separated or safe mobility tracks in a country with chaotic transport policy. Defending an existing network would be easier, but here we are.
And Equal Rights to transport services (including accessible trails) are presumably on the Farage list of things to destroy by killing the Equalities Act 2010. I'm not sure if they are on the DOLGE list of "inefficiencies".
With regards to Pride and the kerfuffle. I find the performative WE SUPPORT YOU cosplay from businesses to be patronising - a little less pride and a little more actual CSR policy would be preferable.
I also find that much of the complaining about pride - especially the really loud stuff - is where people feel that they can't say what they really think. It's turned into culture war not because of cosplaying brands going rainbow. It's culture war because a generation of mainly WWC men have been gaslit to think that they are an endangered species and anyone who isn't them is their enemy.
Remember that we have pride marches because in the good old days people like me stayed in the closet in fear of the abusive reaction that would come from coming out. We need pride because for many objectors "why do we have to have pride rammed down our throats" is only a step away from "why do we have to have these benders rammed down our throats" to "lets make promotion of benders illegal again"
I have never been to a Pride event, though my boys go. To me it is all part of the same rich tapestry of life with Caribbean carnival, marathons, Passion Plays, Sikh festivals, Diwali, Remembrance and Eid events.
It's part of the belief in freedom that I accept minor inconveniences like occasional road closures so people can be who they want to be. The quid pro quo is that I get to live as I choose. By and large I only encounter these events as a casual spectator whilst out running errands but all seem to be quite positive for the participants, and carried out in good humour, just not my cup of tea.
The thing that seems to wind some up more than anything else is that it can be spread out over a month and why can't it just be a weekend?
Why does Christmas have to take December and most of November? Why does Lent have to be 40 days? Why does Ramadan have to be a month? Why does Halloween have to last the whole of October? Why do poppies have to be out from about Bonfire night onwards rather than just Remembrance Sunday?
If we enjoy activities, or if they mean something to us, we spread activities those activities out over a period of time. Nothing unique about Pride in that.
If it doesn't mean anything to you, ignore it. Nobody makes you wear a poppy in October, or listen to Mariah Carey in November, or take part in Lent, or watch a horror film in early October if you don't want to. No reason to stop others from doing so though.
At the risk of being accused of copium, the polls whilst still very poor for Labour hardly look unrecoverable?
Same for the Tories.
The Tories recovered from 30 plus points behind to 10 behind after 14 years of them 'doing Tory stuff'. Nothing is unrecoverable. The concern for them is they are both at either side of '100 seat' levels and trailing a new guy who majors on the things people are seemingly most agitated about. There are additional concerns for both - not least Reform are much more capable of eating into Labour heartlands So it's not just numbers, its the nature of the numbers and who has them. But yes, you're right essentially.
Is there really any correlation between deregulation and economic growth, though?
Yes, as first-year undergraduate economics teaches us.
The private sector left to itself seeks to grow, allocating resources efficiently to maximise output. This is known as the First Fundamental Theorem of Welfare Economics - the perfectly competitive outcome is Pareto optimal. Any government regulation is likely to move an economy away from this optimal outcome, reducing economic growth. This was described by Milton Friedman as the only result in the whole of economics that is neither trivial nor false. That won't always be the case in practice, though, in particular with regulation enforcing a competitive outcome (which is why every developed country has anti-monopoly legislation) or property rights. And there will always be non-economic reasons for regulation (safety, national security, etc.). But, overall, if economics teaches us anything, it's that, beyond relatively low levels, regulation reduces economic growth.
There's plenty of empirical evidence to back this up. For instance, here is a Stanford study showing that, between US states, a 10 percent increase in the number of regulatory restrictions causes GDP growth to fall by 0.37 percentage points.
The US is massively more regulated than Europe in most things, and yet has grown far quicker. That said, the area the US is more deregulated is the labour market - so maybe that's the biggest factor.
As usual with your economic posts, that's simply not true. The only reason the EU has grown slower than the US over the last three decades is America's population growth. The EU has, in fact, come closer to the US in terms of GDP per capita, from 67 percent in 1995 (the first year for which EU27 data is available) to 72 percent in 2022.
While the EU's performance has been sub-optimal, that's been driven by the disastrous decision to have a single currency amongst widely disparate countries, the rapidly ageing populations in many member states, the post-2022 energy crisis and social preferences for working fewer hours.
America's performance is also flattered by a staggering runup in debt.
Regulation increases the cost of doing business, a factor exacerbated by the modern trend of making sectors responsible for the costs of their regulator rather than meeting it out of general taxation. This discourages investment in that sector (since the return is less attractive). Attempts to offset this effect, by giving guaranteed returns as in the water industry have been little short of catastrophic, distorting spend into qualifying investment whether it is actually useful or not.
One of my favourite sayings by Ronald Reagan was that the most frightening sentence in the English language is, "I'm from the government and I am here to help." As usual, he succinctly summarised complicated arguments in a single sentence. Regulation is a tax on a service and our regulatory sector, in my view, is the most obvious place for the government to be looking for substantial savings in public spending. It will be win win if they do.
Sure, there is a regulatory cost, but we do regulate for very often valid reasons. Banking regulation to reduce the impact of speculation, environmental regulation to prevent pollution, building regulation to ensure fire safety etc, legal regulation to prevent discrimination.
We could easily deregulate the country into hell. It's a matter of regulating well to balance benefit against cost.
I am not arguing for the Wild West, if you start deregulating everything I might be out of a job and that would never do. Of course some regulation is necessary.
But in recent decades we have built up regulatory empires with mission creep and a desire to require ever more information to justify their own existence. It is why we have the most expensive nursery care in Europe, for example. It is why care homes are so expensive. It has actually failed to do its job in water and energy. It greatly adds to the cost of financial services, lawyers, accountants etc. They become barriers to entry and innovation.
We need some serious rebalancing, hopefully keeping what is essential but binning most of it.
Excellent post. Essentially, we are very poor at assessing and controlling real risk.
We either don't do it at all, or use an institutionalised hammer.
The shift from principles based regulation to a rules based approach hasn’t really worked.
For example, which is better:
- 478 pages of guidance on fire retardant cladding which no one reads and no one follows; or - A simple rule saying if your cladding kills people then you will be fined up the wazoo and get no liability shield and the directors may well go to prison
How does that assist a building owner who hasn’t been killed but faces a massive bill for cladding remediation? So then you need to define what “could kill people” means. What about injure people? How serious an injury? Suddenly you have 200 pages of regulations.
Grenfell fundamentally happened because no-one was accountable for how the building performed as a system.
The focus was on aesthetics (making 1960s tower blocks look nicer) and energy savings (insulation) and not the safety case of the building "system" as a whole, and how it could catastrophically fail. This was no-one's "fault" and the blame diagram of Grenfell - with everyone point to everyone else - is something else.
We need to get much better at assessing systems, ultimately that sits with a capable owner/intelligent client, and assuring ourselves risk has been properly allocated with the right liabilities to the right parties.
Very much this. Companies were going around stating that their products were fine and safe. Which they may have been, *in isolation*. When put together as part of a system - even a system they were designed to fit into - then they may have been far from fine and safe. And no-one cared, or particularly checked. Because that is expensive, time-consuming, and potentially bad for business.
Highly flammable insulation panels were never fine or safe as cladding. That was known many years before Grenfell.
This, all 3 insulation firms were found to have engaged in "systematic dishonesty", mainly not disclosing or misrepresenting fire tests, demonstrating that, even where there are regulations, companies will attempt to circumvent them in pursuit of profit, regardless of safety.
The really clever trick is to incentivise good practice for commercial reasons. Our food industry very rarely poisons people, but there are hundreds of millions of chances to do so daily. Why? Brands, reputations, customers, loyalty, risk. It's actually an amazing feat of the invisible hand. Can it be spread outwards?
Official guidance from NHS England. All shortlisting and interview panels must include a BME candidate. And if the BME candidate isn't appointed, the panel must write to the chairman of the organisation explaining itself.
The tweet mentions "DEI is out of control" which, as an ordinary person, made me think 'nutter'. But I had a very quick skim of the NHS England recruitment documents and couldn't find a match.
Which surprised me. Almost by 0%.
Maybe William you can dig out the referring material from the official docs seeing as the tweet doesn't link to them?
It's interesting wording; singling out reasons for not appointing a BME candidate seems odd. But in my organisation we have to provide HR with both our shortlisting form for all applicants (outlining how each met/did not meet the essential and desirable criteria and how that led to shortlisting for interview - all meeting essential get interviewed unless we have too many in which case desirable come into play) and then a much more detailed assessment on every candidate we interview.
So, our standard processes would meet this, but for all candidates, not just BME ones. Not doing this (implied?) for non-BME candidates would enable all kinds of other discrimination (age, sex etc), so it would be interesting to see policies on that.
The cost of a comfortable retirement has surpassed £60,000 a year for the first time, according to pension industry figures released today.
Two retirees running one small car, eating out weekly and taking a four star foreign holiday each year would now need an income of almost £35,000 each before tax to retire comfortably, rising to £52,000 if they live alone.
Labour got a higher voteshare in the Hamilton Holyrood and Westminster seats than it did Scotland wide in 2021 and 2024.
So it is not impossible Labour could win the by election if they hold most of their vote and get a few Tory and LD tactical votes and most of the protest vote goes Reform not SNP
Got a feeling I'm going to enjoy this week's issue:
I don't want to disappoint but this magazine is for the fash curious not the bi curious.
I know it's confusing as quite a few Spectator contributors have some very peculiar pecadillos.
Ah, ad hominem. What a surprise.
Rubbish. It was a joke and I played the (Spectator) ball not the man, and I got several likes for it!
You got likes from the usual hyberliberal pb herd. Well done, mate!
I really, really hope that you don't talk, or act, in this sort of manner to any of your staff.
There we go, @JosiasJessop making it personal again.
It was a serious comment. I hope that PB is somewhere you come to vent, and you treat your staff - of whatever background or inclination - in a much more professional and open manner.
Fuck off.
Again, I hope you talk to, and treat, your staff in a much more tolerant and understanding manner, and that you only act like this here on PB.
Ironic given your occasional propensity for being obnoxious
Is there really any correlation between deregulation and economic growth, though?
Yes, as first-year undergraduate economics teaches us.
The private sector left to itself seeks to grow, allocating resources efficiently to maximise output. This is known as the First Fundamental Theorem of Welfare Economics - the perfectly competitive outcome is Pareto optimal. Any government regulation is likely to move an economy away from this optimal outcome, reducing economic growth. This was described by Milton Friedman as the only result in the whole of economics that is neither trivial nor false. That won't always be the case in practice, though, in particular with regulation enforcing a competitive outcome (which is why every developed country has anti-monopoly legislation) or property rights. And there will always be non-economic reasons for regulation (safety, national security, etc.). But, overall, if economics teaches us anything, it's that, beyond relatively low levels, regulation reduces economic growth.
There's plenty of empirical evidence to back this up. For instance, here is a Stanford study showing that, between US states, a 10 percent increase in the number of regulatory restrictions causes GDP growth to fall by 0.37 percentage points.
The US is massively more regulated than Europe in most things, and yet has grown far quicker. That said, the area the US is more deregulated is the labour market - so maybe that's the biggest factor.
As usual with your economic posts, that's simply not true. The only reason the EU has grown slower than the US over the last three decades is America's population growth. The EU has, in fact, come closer to the US in terms of GDP per capita, from 67 percent in 1995 (the first year for which EU27 data is available) to 72 percent in 2022.
While the EU's performance has been sub-optimal, that's been driven by the disastrous decision to have a single currency amongst widely disparate countries, the rapidly ageing populations in many member states, the post-2022 energy crisis and social preferences for working fewer hours.
America's performance is also flattered by a staggering runup in debt.
Regulation increases the cost of doing business, a factor exacerbated by the modern trend of making sectors responsible for the costs of their regulator rather than meeting it out of general taxation. This discourages investment in that sector (since the return is less attractive). Attempts to offset this effect, by giving guaranteed returns as in the water industry have been little short of catastrophic, distorting spend into qualifying investment whether it is actually useful or not.
One of my favourite sayings by Ronald Reagan was that the most frightening sentence in the English language is, "I'm from the government and I am here to help." As usual, he succinctly summarised complicated arguments in a single sentence. Regulation is a tax on a service and our regulatory sector, in my view, is the most obvious place for the government to be looking for substantial savings in public spending. It will be win win if they do.
Sure, there is a regulatory cost, but we do regulate for very often valid reasons. Banking regulation to reduce the impact of speculation, environmental regulation to prevent pollution, building regulation to ensure fire safety etc, legal regulation to prevent discrimination.
We could easily deregulate the country into hell. It's a matter of regulating well to balance benefit against cost.
I am not arguing for the Wild West, if you start deregulating everything I might be out of a job and that would never do. Of course some regulation is necessary.
But in recent decades we have built up regulatory empires with mission creep and a desire to require ever more information to justify their own existence. It is why we have the most expensive nursery care in Europe, for example. It is why care homes are so expensive. It has actually failed to do its job in water and energy. It greatly adds to the cost of financial services, lawyers, accountants etc. They become barriers to entry and innovation.
We need some serious rebalancing, hopefully keeping what is essential but binning most of it.
Excellent post. Essentially, we are very poor at assessing and controlling real risk.
We either don't do it at all, or use an institutionalised hammer.
The shift from principles based regulation to a rules based approach hasn’t really worked.
For example, which is better:
- 478 pages of guidance on fire retardant cladding which no one reads and no one follows; or - A simple rule saying if your cladding kills people then you will be fined up the wazoo and get no liability shield and the directors may well go to prison
How does that assist a building owner who hasn’t been killed but faces a massive bill for cladding remediation? So then you need to define what “could kill people” means. What about injure people? How serious an injury? Suddenly you have 200 pages of regulations.
Gallowgate is right. The mixture of technical ability to do very complex things, a culture which deplores being killed by mistake or whole cities burning down, a litigious society, a democratically elected law maker called parliament, the rule of law and the ability to create complex corporate structures of unaccountability together trend only in one direction.
How about the Highway Code as a good example? We all take on a very dangerous task each day - driving or mixing with multi-tonne vehicles. Yet, the death and serious injury rate is very low.
There are a number of rules for which breach of which can result in prosecution. There are many more that constitute guidance only, but they can contribute to a prosecution in the event someone is killed or injured. The whole thing is simple and common sense - we follow it instinctively.
It's flexible too. The government recognised that the biggest deterrent to cycling is fear of being killed (hence the gender/age imbalance). So the new version includes a hierarchy of road user, putting more responsibility on those in charge of larger vehicles than pedestrians and cyclists. Nice.
Because regulations are not just about criminal responsibility. They are also about civil responsibility. The post-grenfell fallout in the Construction industry is more about civil liability than criminal responsibility for building safety - who pays the millions of pounds?
My partner got a significant settlement from a driver's insurance as a result of them breaching the Highway Code. I'm not a lawyer so don't really understand how it all interacts - just pointing out that this particular part of lives appears to work quite well.
Grenfell really isn't a good example to use to argue for less regulation. More effective regulation, yes.
Grenfell had literal metric tons of documents associated with the refurbishment. It was the awesomest, biggle-est refurbishment ever.
According to the documents, Grenfell was so fireproof that lighting a match in the building wouldn’t work. It exceeded every possible standard, regulation and law. According to the documents.
In an act of gross contempt for regulation, Reality ignored the documentation.
The chancellor has begun meeting groups of backbenchers to argue that the money, part of a £113bn investment in capital projects over the rest of the parliament including transport, homes and energy, would only have happened under Labour.
Just three Whitehall departments are still to agree their multi-year budgets with the Treasury before the spending review, the Guardian understands, with the home secretary, Yvette Cooper; the energy secretary, Ed Miliband; and the housing secretary, Angela Rayner, holding out...
That £15bn for trains and trams outside London looks very positive. A big chunk of it needs to be trams and light rail.
But there will be a few battles around groups such as Transport 2000 (whatever they are called now) trying to nick multiuser rail-trails back). We had an attempted mugging to grab the Monsal Trail in Derbyshire for a proposed railway, despite it being used by 300-600k people per annum. When I last heard it had been fought off, but I am not fully up to date - they will be back.
Rail Trails of course being ideal accessible (and safe family cycling) trails, like towpaths.
I can see RefUK Councils (and TBH others) falling for that one - oooh, big exciting machines - if they get around to doing any projects, and not being especially good at listening to different stakeholders. They like easy answers.
That's why he need the whole damn lot of Local Authority managed trails made into Public Rights of Way by statute. I have not won that one yet !
We have a similar upcoming battle in Edinburgh. The principle should always to put trams on roads, not paths, if the intention is to reduce car use. Learn the lesson from Dublin - they don't work as well if hidden away down an embankment.
For railways, I think it's harder to make that argument. 600,000 is a lot of people though, so you'd hope that alternative provision is put in place - the Australians manage to do this with new infrastructure, and so did HS2.
The trams work better on roads because that is where people are is an interesting argument. Nottingham has in general done this really well imo, but they already had "green corridors" in a number of places in the early 20c or 19C - I'm not sure of reasons why.
It's in the Peak National Park, which should help - so I think the Local Planning authority is the Peak Park itself.
It's one question around us till need to be developing decent networks of separated mobility tracks in a country with chaotic transport policy. Defending an existing network would be easier, but here we are.
And Equal Rights to transport services (including accessible trails) are presumably on the Farage list of things to destroy by killing the Equalities Act 2010. I'm not sure if they are on the DOLGE list of "inefficiencies".
Many locals do not actually like the Monsal Trail - or at least bits that are not *their* bit. The area is already very busy in summer, with sometimes massive traffic queues. The trail has just acted as a draw for more people to come, increasing the traffic problems.
Imagine if there was a nice railway line that could bring people up into the very heart of the Peak District from Sheffield, Manchester, or even London, as the Hope Valley line does for the area further north?
Got a feeling I'm going to enjoy this week's issue:
I don't want to disappoint but this magazine is for the fash curious not the bi curious.
I know it's confusing as quite a few Spectator contributors have some very peculiar pecadillos.
Ah, ad hominem. What a surprise.
Rubbish. It was a joke and I played the (Spectator) ball not the man, and I got several likes for it!
You got likes from the usual hyberliberal pb herd. Well done, mate!
I really, really hope that you don't talk, or act, in this sort of manner to any of your staff.
There we go, @JosiasJessop making it personal again.
It was a serious comment. I hope that PB is somewhere you come to vent, and you treat your staff - of whatever background or inclination - in a much more professional and open manner.
Fuck off.
Again, I hope you talk to, and treat, your staff in a much more tolerant and understanding manner, and that you only act like this here on PB.
Ironic given your occasional propensity for being obnoxious
Grenfell really isn't a good example to use to argue for less regulation. More effective regulation, yes.
Or maybe more enforcement? Governments like to pass laws, but not fund bodies to enforce them.
Possibly. Grenfell amongst other things was a failure of regulation. We need to do the analysis - I've not followed this so I don't know what the conclusions are, but they are likely to be a combination of missing regulation, poorly targeted regulation and weak enforcement. Regulation is unlikely to have failed simply because there's too much of it.
Labour got a higher voteshare in the Hamilton Holyrood and Westminster seats than it did Scotland wide in 2021 and 2024.
So it is not impossible Labour could win the by election if they hold most of their vote and get a few Tory and LD tactical votes and most of the protest vote goes Reform not SNP
Future editors note - they came third
Joking aside, cannot see it. They'd have joined the tv debate if they felt they had a chance
Grenfell really isn't a good example to use to argue for less regulation. More effective regulation, yes.
Well quite. Putting aside Grenfell of which I know little we tend to get situations where something has to be done so they do something. Whether it works or not seems secondary to being seen to be taking action.
With regards to Pride and the kerfuffle. I find the performative WE SUPPORT YOU cosplay from businesses to be patronising - a little less pride and a little more actual CSR policy would be preferable.
I also find that much of the complaining about pride - especially the really loud stuff - is where people feel that they can't say what they really think. It's turned into culture war not because of cosplaying brands going rainbow. It's culture war because a generation of mainly WWC men have been gaslit to think that they are an endangered species and anyone who isn't them is their enemy.
Remember that we have pride marches because in the good old days people like me stayed in the closet in fear of the abusive reaction that would come from coming out. We need pride because for many objectors "why do we have to have pride rammed down our throats" is only a step away from "why do we have to have these benders rammed down our throats" to "lets make promotion of benders illegal again"
I have never been to a Pride event, though my boys go. To me it is all part of the same rich tapestry of life with Caribbean carnival, marathons, Passion Plays, Sikh festivals, Diwali, Remembrance and Eid events.
It's part of the belief in freedom that I accept minor inconveniences like occasional road closures so people can be who they want to be. The quid pro quo is that I get to live as I choose. By and large I only encounter these events as a casual spectator whilst out running errands but all seem to be quite positive for the participants, and carried out in good humour, just not my cup of tea.
The thing that seems to wind some up more than anything else is that it can be spread out over a month and why can't it just be a weekend?
Why does Christmas have to take December and most of November? Why does Lent have to be 40 days? Why does Ramadan have to be a month? Why does Halloween have to last the whole of October? Why do poppies have to be out from about Bonfire night onwards rather than just Remembrance Sunday?
If we enjoy activities, or if they mean something to us, we spread activities those activities out over a period of time. Nothing unique about Pride in that.
If it doesn't mean anything to you, ignore it. Nobody makes you wear a poppy in October, or listen to Mariah Carey in November, or take part in Lent, or watch a horror film in early October if you don't want to. No reason to stop others from doing so though.
Christmas is the perfect analogy. Loads of people grumble about it starting too early and that's it's too commercial which is totally legitimate. No-one says that the Christians really need to tone down their ideology otherwise it'll provoke a backlash.
Is there really any correlation between deregulation and economic growth, though?
Yes, as first-year undergraduate economics teaches us.
The private sector left to itself seeks to grow, allocating resources efficiently to maximise output. This is known as the First Fundamental Theorem of Welfare Economics - the perfectly competitive outcome is Pareto optimal. Any government regulation is likely to move an economy away from this optimal outcome, reducing economic growth. This was described by Milton Friedman as the only result in the whole of economics that is neither trivial nor false. That won't always be the case in practice, though, in particular with regulation enforcing a competitive outcome (which is why every developed country has anti-monopoly legislation) or property rights. And there will always be non-economic reasons for regulation (safety, national security, etc.). But, overall, if economics teaches us anything, it's that, beyond relatively low levels, regulation reduces economic growth.
There's plenty of empirical evidence to back this up. For instance, here is a Stanford study showing that, between US states, a 10 percent increase in the number of regulatory restrictions causes GDP growth to fall by 0.37 percentage points.
The US is massively more regulated than Europe in most things, and yet has grown far quicker. That said, the area the US is more deregulated is the labour market - so maybe that's the biggest factor.
As usual with your economic posts, that's simply not true. The only reason the EU has grown slower than the US over the last three decades is America's population growth. The EU has, in fact, come closer to the US in terms of GDP per capita, from 67 percent in 1995 (the first year for which EU27 data is available) to 72 percent in 2022.
While the EU's performance has been sub-optimal, that's been driven by the disastrous decision to have a single currency amongst widely disparate countries, the rapidly ageing populations in many member states, the post-2022 energy crisis and social preferences for working fewer hours.
America's performance is also flattered by a staggering runup in debt.
Regulation increases the cost of doing business, a factor exacerbated by the modern trend of making sectors responsible for the costs of their regulator rather than meeting it out of general taxation. This discourages investment in that sector (since the return is less attractive). Attempts to offset this effect, by giving guaranteed returns as in the water industry have been little short of catastrophic, distorting spend into qualifying investment whether it is actually useful or not.
One of my favourite sayings by Ronald Reagan was that the most frightening sentence in the English language is, "I'm from the government and I am here to help." As usual, he succinctly summarised complicated arguments in a single sentence. Regulation is a tax on a service and our regulatory sector, in my view, is the most obvious place for the government to be looking for substantial savings in public spending. It will be win win if they do.
Sure, there is a regulatory cost, but we do regulate for very often valid reasons. Banking regulation to reduce the impact of speculation, environmental regulation to prevent pollution, building regulation to ensure fire safety etc, legal regulation to prevent discrimination.
We could easily deregulate the country into hell. It's a matter of regulating well to balance benefit against cost.
I am not arguing for the Wild West, if you start deregulating everything I might be out of a job and that would never do. Of course some regulation is necessary.
But in recent decades we have built up regulatory empires with mission creep and a desire to require ever more information to justify their own existence. It is why we have the most expensive nursery care in Europe, for example. It is why care homes are so expensive. It has actually failed to do its job in water and energy. It greatly adds to the cost of financial services, lawyers, accountants etc. They become barriers to entry and innovation.
We need some serious rebalancing, hopefully keeping what is essential but binning most of it.
Excellent post. Essentially, we are very poor at assessing and controlling real risk.
We either don't do it at all, or use an institutionalised hammer.
The shift from principles based regulation to a rules based approach hasn’t really worked.
For example, which is better:
- 478 pages of guidance on fire retardant cladding which no one reads and no one follows; or - A simple rule saying if your cladding kills people then you will be fined up the wazoo and get no liability shield and the directors may well go to prison
How does that assist a building owner who hasn’t been killed but faces a massive bill for cladding remediation? So then you need to define what “could kill people” means. What about injure people? How serious an injury? Suddenly you have 200 pages of regulations.
Grenfell fundamentally happened because no-one was accountable for how the building performed as a system.
The focus was on aesthetics (making 1960s tower blocks look nicer) and energy savings (insulation) and not the safety case of the building "system" as a whole, and how it could catastrophically fail. This was no-one's "fault" and the blame diagram of Grenfell - with everyone point to everyone else - is something else.
We need to get much better at assessing systems, ultimately that sits with a capable owner/intelligent client, and assuring ourselves risk has been properly allocated with the right liabilities to the right parties.
Very much this. Companies were going around stating that their products were fine and safe. Which they may have been, *in isolation*. When put together as part of a system - even a system they were designed to fit into - then they may have been far from fine and safe. And no-one cared, or particularly checked. Because that is expensive, time-consuming, and potentially bad for business.
Highly flammable insulation panels were never fine or safe as cladding. That was known many years before Grenfell.
This, all 3 insulation firms were found to have engaged in "systematic dishonesty", mainly not disclosing or misrepresenting fire tests, demonstrating that, even where there are regulations, companies will attempt to circumvent them in pursuit of profit, regardless of safety.
The really clever trick is to incentivise good practice for commercial reasons. Our food industry very rarely poisons people, but there are hundreds of millions of chances to do so daily. Why? Brands, reputations, customers, loyalty, risk. It's actually an amazing feat of the invisible hand. Can it be spread outwards?
That's a time and liability thing, I think. Grenfell problems did not happen for a number of years, or for nearly half a century if you count it from the time of build.
Food unfit for human consumption will poison someone within a short time - a few days or weeks at most, unless there is long term freezing or storage happening.
Is there really any correlation between deregulation and economic growth, though?
Yes, as first-year undergraduate economics teaches us.
The private sector left to itself seeks to grow, allocating resources efficiently to maximise output. This is known as the First Fundamental Theorem of Welfare Economics - the perfectly competitive outcome is Pareto optimal. Any government regulation is likely to move an economy away from this optimal outcome, reducing economic growth. This was described by Milton Friedman as the only result in the whole of economics that is neither trivial nor false. That won't always be the case in practice, though, in particular with regulation enforcing a competitive outcome (which is why every developed country has anti-monopoly legislation) or property rights. And there will always be non-economic reasons for regulation (safety, national security, etc.). But, overall, if economics teaches us anything, it's that, beyond relatively low levels, regulation reduces economic growth.
There's plenty of empirical evidence to back this up. For instance, here is a Stanford study showing that, between US states, a 10 percent increase in the number of regulatory restrictions causes GDP growth to fall by 0.37 percentage points.
The US is massively more regulated than Europe in most things, and yet has grown far quicker. That said, the area the US is more deregulated is the labour market - so maybe that's the biggest factor.
As usual with your economic posts, that's simply not true. The only reason the EU has grown slower than the US over the last three decades is America's population growth. The EU has, in fact, come closer to the US in terms of GDP per capita, from 67 percent in 1995 (the first year for which EU27 data is available) to 72 percent in 2022.
While the EU's performance has been sub-optimal, that's been driven by the disastrous decision to have a single currency amongst widely disparate countries, the rapidly ageing populations in many member states, the post-2022 energy crisis and social preferences for working fewer hours.
America's performance is also flattered by a staggering runup in debt.
Regulation increases the cost of doing business, a factor exacerbated by the modern trend of making sectors responsible for the costs of their regulator rather than meeting it out of general taxation. This discourages investment in that sector (since the return is less attractive). Attempts to offset this effect, by giving guaranteed returns as in the water industry have been little short of catastrophic, distorting spend into qualifying investment whether it is actually useful or not.
One of my favourite sayings by Ronald Reagan was that the most frightening sentence in the English language is, "I'm from the government and I am here to help." As usual, he succinctly summarised complicated arguments in a single sentence. Regulation is a tax on a service and our regulatory sector, in my view, is the most obvious place for the government to be looking for substantial savings in public spending. It will be win win if they do.
Sure, there is a regulatory cost, but we do regulate for very often valid reasons. Banking regulation to reduce the impact of speculation, environmental regulation to prevent pollution, building regulation to ensure fire safety etc, legal regulation to prevent discrimination.
We could easily deregulate the country into hell. It's a matter of regulating well to balance benefit against cost.
I am not arguing for the Wild West, if you start deregulating everything I might be out of a job and that would never do. Of course some regulation is necessary.
But in recent decades we have built up regulatory empires with mission creep and a desire to require ever more information to justify their own existence. It is why we have the most expensive nursery care in Europe, for example. It is why care homes are so expensive. It has actually failed to do its job in water and energy. It greatly adds to the cost of financial services, lawyers, accountants etc. They become barriers to entry and innovation.
We need some serious rebalancing, hopefully keeping what is essential but binning most of it.
Excellent post. Essentially, we are very poor at assessing and controlling real risk.
We either don't do it at all, or use an institutionalised hammer.
The shift from principles based regulation to a rules based approach hasn’t really worked.
For example, which is better:
- 478 pages of guidance on fire retardant cladding which no one reads and no one follows; or - A simple rule saying if your cladding kills people then you will be fined up the wazoo and get no liability shield and the directors may well go to prison
How does that assist a building owner who hasn’t been killed but faces a massive bill for cladding remediation? So then you need to define what “could kill people” means. What about injure people? How serious an injury? Suddenly you have 200 pages of regulations.
Grenfell fundamentally happened because no-one was accountable for how the building performed as a system.
The focus was on aesthetics (making 1960s tower blocks look nicer) and energy savings (insulation) and not the safety case of the building "system" as a whole, and how it could catastrophically fail. This was no-one's "fault" and the blame diagram of Grenfell - with everyone point to everyone else - is something else.
We need to get much better at assessing systems, ultimately that sits with a capable owner/intelligent client, and assuring ourselves risk has been properly allocated with the right liabilities to the right parties.
Very much this. Companies were going around stating that their products were fine and safe. Which they may have been, *in isolation*. When put together as part of a system - even a system they were designed to fit into - then they may have been far from fine and safe. And no-one cared, or particularly checked. Because that is expensive, time-consuming, and potentially bad for business.
Highly flammable insulation panels were never fine or safe as cladding. That was known many years before Grenfell.
This, all 3 insulation firms were found to have engaged in "systematic dishonesty", mainly not disclosing or misrepresenting fire tests, demonstrating that, even where there are regulations, companies will attempt to circumvent them in pursuit of profit, regardless of safety.
The really clever trick is to incentivise good practice for commercial reasons. Our food industry very rarely poisons people, but there are hundreds of millions of chances to do so daily. Why? Brands, reputations, customers, loyalty, risk. It's actually an amazing feat of the invisible hand. Can it be spread outwards?
See also: airlines.
(It's a bit less effective for aircraftmanufacturers where there's much less choice and it's much more expensive and time consuming to change)
Meanwhile Nigel Farage still has the highest net (dis) approval rating at (-7) just above Ed Davey (-9), Kemi Badenoch hits a personal low (-27) this week above Starmer (-35).
Comments
You work in a university. Woke Central. The ones agreeing with you on here are the pb hyperliberals. Everyone I expected to demonstrate extraordinary resistance to challenge on this ideology has, unsurprisingly, come out and demonstrated extraordinary resistance to it. Vociferously.
That doesn't mean no-one else has a problem. Polling figures alone should tell you that.
For someone working in tertiary education you are surprisingly dumb.
(I know I keep banging on about this, but it is ridiculous.)
But in recent decades we have built up regulatory empires with mission creep and a desire to require ever more information to justify their own existence. It is why we have the most expensive nursery care in Europe, for example. It is why care homes are so expensive. It has actually failed to do its job in water and energy. It greatly adds to the cost of financial services, lawyers, accountants etc. They become barriers to entry and innovation.
We need some serious rebalancing, hopefully keeping what is essential but binning most of it.
Let's say Pride was celebrated all year round, constantly, and I challenged it.
On your criteria, that would qualify as nastiness and bigotry.
There is simply no level of broadcast that you would ever consider too loud or too long, and that's why you are incapable of policing your overreach - thus putting your own core values at risk.
Some more polling to see us into Wednesday, More In Common finds
Ref 28 (-3)
Lab 23 (+1)
Con 21 (+2)
LD 14 (=)
Green 8 (=)
SNP 2 (=)
31 May to 2 June
Perhaps a little more evidence Reform are coming off their high? Tories will prefer being back in the 20s (but this is their best pollster generally), Labour steady and certainly showing no sign of further leakage, LDs and Greens as you were
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jun/04/rachel-reeves-unveils-15bn-for-trams-trains-and-buses-outside-london
..Rachel Reeves is announcing £15bn for trams, trains and buses outside London as she launches a charm offensive to persuade fractious Labour MPs that her spending review will not be a return to austerity.
The chancellor has begun meeting groups of backbenchers to argue that the money, part of a £113bn investment in capital projects over the rest of the parliament including transport, homes and energy, would only have happened under Labour.
Just three Whitehall departments are still to agree their multi-year budgets with the Treasury before the spending review, the Guardian understands, with the home secretary, Yvette Cooper; the energy secretary, Ed Miliband; and the housing secretary, Angela Rayner, holding out...
I've told you to rethink your style. And I hope you have.
You're better than this, Casino.
The shortlist for new names is currently USS Bone Spurs, USS Suckers & Losers and USS Functioning Alcoholic. Nice Iain M. Banks vibe..
https://x.com/abc/status/1929978717683552314?s=61&t=LYVEHh2mqFy1oUJAdCfe-Q
Thats like saying Pride is great if you ignore all the gay stuff
We either don't do it at all, or use an institutionalised hammer.
Don't wish to mess with a conversation that's been going a while, so this isn't a reply to anyone:
Just, on the Pride topic, I find it more interesting to consider the views of the LGBT people who actively repudiate what Pride stands for. The LGB Association; but I don't know whether the alt-Ts have an organisation.
Nice to know I’m “pond scum”. You kept that to yourself when you were DM’ing me for free legal advice. Glad to know it was appreciated.
Twat.
There are bits and pieces (eg Christopher Marlowe made the claim at his trial - mentioned in wiki in the link below *), but the kindest thing I could say is that imo this is an unlikely peripheral interpretation. I don't think contemporaneous usage of the same phrase in the original Koine Greek in other settings. It's dangerous to rely on precise linguistic phrases from from English form of the King James, as we have a far wider range of earlier sources discovered after that translation was made.
I don't think this affects the validity of same sex relationships in Christian settings btw, imo that stands on other bases.
In one way I think the Jesus-John homosexual relationship claim is an attempt by people who want to justify same sex relationships to try and shoehorn it into a conservative Evangelical view of the Biblical text, whereas my stance would be to question parts of the framing made by the conservative Evangelical. That is a different angle, and to me is disputing at the wrong point.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disciple_whom_Jesus_loved
This doesn't apply to all regulation of course, much of which is sensible and well directed. The bad stuff often arises as a result of moral panics created by the media for the purposes of boosting sales. That was how the DBSracket got going.
Labelling does a lot of damage to discourse.
It's an internet forum. It talks about politics. It sometimes gets a bit fruity and heated. And then we move on.
When the chips are down, this community also cares, which is why so many of us stay.
Ironically the only place that I come into contact with children in my professional, charitable and church activities is the one that I have never needed a DBS for, as I was in post when the regulations came in.
I would scrap them for all posts like councillors. I can see a role for them in places where individuals have direct contact on a one to one basis with children such as children's homes.
By and large they provide false reassurance, and also distract from other protection measures, such as paying attention to who the vulnerable person is being groomed by, such as taxi drivers.
Your point about rehabilitation of offenders is a very valid one too. A member of our church congregation is a former prison inmate. Our elders are aware and supportive of him, but also watchful of him.
For example, which is better:
- 478 pages of guidance on fire retardant cladding which no one reads and no one follows; or
- A simple rule saying if your cladding kills people then you will be fined up the wazoo and get no liability shield and the directors may well go to prison
The US isn't going to be the essential customer forever.
Apple iPhone revenue set to be passed by AI server revenue in 2025 at supplier Foxconn, Reuters reports:
https://x.com/dnystedt/status/1926525563868512664
Say he was a bit of a twat, he'll probably admit it and apologise, and then offer to buy your pint, you'll shake hands and it'll all be good.
Which is, ultimately a misunderstanding of physics.
The world, in general, is nearly alway non-linear. That is, the outcome is not perfectly predictable, even given detailed inputs. See long range weather forecasting.
Humans are non-linear. As are their social structures.
The Process State is the attempt to control outcomes by increasingly complex linear rule sets (laws and regulations). As anyone with a brief study of Chaos Theory (another name for the non-linearity, which really frightens people) will tell you, this can’t work
What can work is rules and regulations that work with the non-linearity. So you can’t just have a table of inputs and outputs. At the higher levels, simple rules - in construction, don’t clad building in firelighters… at the lower levels, common sense, compassion, and empathy for the human condition.
Something to consider - Costal construction and management has evolved. Once, linear attempts at control repeatedly failed - often increasing erosion. Modern methods allow much better prediction and operation in the complex *non-linear* environment.
The focus was on aesthetics (making 1960s tower blocks look nicer) and energy savings (insulation) and not the safety case of the building "system" as a whole, and how it could catastrophically fail. This was no-one's "fault" and the blame diagram of Grenfell - with everyone point to everyone else - is something else.
We need to get much better at assessing systems, ultimately that sits with a capable owner/intelligent client, and assuring ourselves risk has been properly allocated with the right liabilities to the right parties.
But there will be a few battles around groups such as Transport 2000 (whatever they are called now) trying to nick multiuser rail-trails back). We had an attempted mugging to grab the Monsal Trail in Derbyshire for a proposed railway, despite it being used by 300-600k people per annum. When I last heard it had been fought off, but I am not fully up to date - they will be back.
Rail Trails of course being ideal accessible (and safe family cycling) trails, like towpaths.
I can see RefUK Councils (and TBH others) falling for that one - oooh, big exciting machines - if they get around to doing any projects, and not being especially good at listening to different stakeholders. They like easy answers.
That's why he need the whole damn lot of Local Authority managed trails made into Public Rights of Way by statute. I have not won that one yet !
In my experience, it was all about information and accountability. The desire for information was always from senior levels where managers "needed to know what was going on" which translated either into micro-management or a simple lack of trust, confidence, faith if you like in qualified people below them doing their job and getting results.
As an example, when I was in local Government, the Project Managers spent more time completing an overly complex tracker showing the process of projects than actually out on site or dealing with the lead Contractor. The administration of the tracker became a huge task utilising half a dozen staff who would run reports, attend weekly monitoring and progress meetings and this was often finance-driven.
Councillors and Senior Officers became so obsessed with monitoring project expenditure it got in the way of doing the project. The biggest problem was never regulation but information and the belief management by information was required rather than management by professional competence.
In truth, the greater part of what the much-derided "public sector admin" workers do is to provide information up the line, the vast majority of which is neither used nor understood.
The cost of everything, the value of nothing, the greatest failure of our current capitalist and governance model.
Much of that is to do with capacity reduction in local authorities. It comes down to good regulation.
We may also need to consider the existence, or regulation, of Private Building Inspection. AIUI Scotland manages without it, so so can England.
I also find that much of the complaining about pride - especially the really loud stuff - is where people feel that they can't say what they really think. It's turned into culture war not because of cosplaying brands going rainbow. It's culture war because a generation of mainly WWC men have been gaslit to think that they are an endangered species and anyone who isn't them is their enemy.
Remember that we have pride marches because in the good old days people like me stayed in the closet in fear of the abusive reaction that would come from coming out. We need pride because for many objectors "why do we have to have pride rammed down our throats" is only a step away from "why do we have to have these benders rammed down our throats" to "lets make promotion of benders illegal again"
Two retirees running one small car, eating out weekly and taking a four star foreign holiday each year would now need an income of almost £35,000 each before tax to retire comfortably, rising to £52,000 if they live alone.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/retirement/cost-comfortable-retirement-surpasses-60k-year
BBTW, for me Christmas without its extraordinary theological aspect about the humaning of god in the form of a baby, and the fabulous narrative the church weaves from the New Testament legitimating myths would be pretty dull.
Can we have that nice banker family, Al and Alexandra, and their children Ali, Harry and Barry, back?
I think one of the issues critics of "woke" have in the USA, is that some of their thought leaders have raised it to the status of an alternative religion, and so an existential enemy - as shown by the invocation of woke as the enemy in a short opening prayer at a NATCON conference below. It really shows the unbalanced nature of some Trump's Evangelical supporters. There are some trying to promote that perception here; I don't think it will work.
If you define something as an existential enemy, it reduces your own room for manoeuvre.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1M3FDegD9E
November 24 +4% for Harris
June 25 +45% for Scott
He is a 24 year old. Dems learning they need new blood.
Republicans learning they are toast under MAGA.
For railways, I think it's harder to make that argument. 600,000 is a lot of people though, so you'd hope that alternative provision is put in place - the Australians manage to do this with new infrastructure, and so did HS2.
Same for the Tories.
I don't think you can read a huge amount into such results, though obviously it's a good one.
There are a number of rules for which breach can result in prosecution. There are many more that constitute guidance only, but they can contribute to a prosecution in the event someone is killed or injured. The whole thing is simple and common sense - we follow it instinctively.
It's flexible too. The government recognised that the biggest deterrent to cycling is fear of being killed (hence the gender/age imbalance). So the new version includes a hierarchy of road user, putting more responsibility on those in charge of larger vehicles than pedestrians and cyclists. Nice.
Gay people have a right to celebrate and hold events just like every religion, folk festival, community association, scout troop and every other group of like minded people in this country. I'm sure there are pacifists who get very annoyed at all of the events planned around Armed Forces Day but no sane person would treat that as part of some culture war.
There are many gay people who also get annoyed at corporations and institutions latching on to Pride. Complain to them or boycott them but leave the Gays alone to celebrate.
But it does mean that the traditional humane ways of managing organisations and communities don't work as well- our brains aren't evolved to cope. (See all the stuff about how we can know a dozen people well, a hundred people superficially and beyond a thousand, it all becomes a blur.)
How we manage that- the tension between not liking the vibes of modern society but very much liking the riches it generates- is the problem that nobody has really answered satisfactorily.
It's part of the belief in freedom that I accept minor inconveniences like occasional road closures so people can be who they want to be. The quid pro quo is that I get to live as I choose. By and large I only encounter these events as a casual spectator whilst out running errands but all seem to be quite positive for the participants, and carried out in good humour, just not my cup of tea.
However, other alternative routes should be found for walkers and cyclists.
The Monsal Trail follows the line that was closed in 1968 between Matlock and (near) Buxton, and which was a vital artery. Incidentally, it was never mentioned for closure by Beeching; it was closed as the western region wanted the traffic on its newly-electrified route (after the Peak Line was used as a diversionary route during electrification...)
That makes a difference.
Those figures make little sense to me having just retired.
I still think the Tories are squeezed back markers, unlikely to recover.
It's in the Peak National Park, which should help - so I think the Local Planning authority is the Peak Park itself.
It's one question around us still needing to be developing decent networks of separated or safe mobility tracks in a country with chaotic transport policy. Defending an existing network would be easier, but here we are.
And Equal Rights to transport services (including accessible trails) are presumably on the Farage list of things to destroy by killing the Equalities Act 2010. I'm not sure if they are on the DOLGE list of "inefficiencies".
Why does Christmas have to take December and most of November?
Why does Lent have to be 40 days?
Why does Ramadan have to be a month?
Why does Halloween have to last the whole of October?
Why do poppies have to be out from about Bonfire night onwards rather than just Remembrance Sunday?
If we enjoy activities, or if they mean something to us, we spread activities those activities out over a period of time. Nothing unique about Pride in that.
If it doesn't mean anything to you, ignore it. Nobody makes you wear a poppy in October, or listen to Mariah Carey in November, or take part in Lent, or watch a horror film in early October if you don't want to. No reason to stop others from doing so though.
So it's not just numbers, its the nature of the numbers and who has them.
But yes, you're right essentially.
So, our standard processes would meet this, but for all candidates, not just BME ones. Not doing this (implied?) for non-BME candidates would enable all kinds of other discrimination (age, sex etc), so it would be interesting to see policies on that.
So it is not impossible Labour could win the by election if they hold most of their vote and get a few Tory and LD tactical votes and most of the protest vote goes Reform not SNP
Physician, heal thyself.
According to the documents, Grenfell was so fireproof that lighting a match in the building wouldn’t work. It exceeded every possible standard, regulation and law. According to the documents.
In an act of gross contempt for regulation, Reality ignored the documentation.
Imagine if there was a nice railway line that could bring people up into the very heart of the Peak District from Sheffield, Manchester, or even London, as the Hope Valley line does for the area further north?
Joking aside, cannot see it. They'd have joined the tv debate if they felt they had a chance
Food unfit for human consumption will poison someone within a short time - a few days or weeks at most, unless there is long term freezing or storage happening.
(It's a bit less effective for aircraftmanufacturers where there's much less choice and it's much more expensive and time consuming to change)
➡️ REF UK 28% (-3)
🌹 LAB 23% (+1)
🌳 CON 21% (+2)
🔶 LIB DEM 14% (nc)
🌍 GREEN 8% (nc)
🟡 SNP 2% (nc)
N: 2,016| Dates: 30/5 - 2/6 |Change w 26/5
https://x.com/luketryl/status/1930157861297946958?s=46&t=CW4pL-mMpTqsJXCdjW0Z6Q
Meanwhile Nigel Farage still has the highest net (dis) approval rating at (-7) just above Ed Davey (-9), Kemi Badenoch hits a personal low (-27) this week above Starmer (-35).
https://x.com/luketryl/status/1930157879220142316?s=46&t=CW4pL-mMpTqsJXCdjW0Z6Q