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So, it's massively out of date then and of diminishing appeal then?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.
Speak for yourself, I have little interest in the commercialised hype of Christmas. My main interest is the religious aspect, Midnight Mass, carol services etc
In a capitalist economic system, stringent regulation is needed to prevent corporations taking (unsafe) shortcuts in the pursuit of excessive profits. The fact that the regulations don't always work (Thames Water, Grenfell, etc.) is a separate issue that needs tackling.
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.
I remember once, after recruiting a member of staff for my team at a rail depot, central HR, who provided the CVs got in touch with my Manager and I to demand why we hadn’t considered a couple of candidates for interview.
On checking our correspondence with them, they hadn’t forwarded their CVs.
One we did have to push back on, and it’s this sort of thing I find more objectionable than the DEI stuff, was trying to be strong armed into recruiting a senior managers son for a role, purely due to who his Dad was, and he was totally unsuitable for it.
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.
That's simply not the case though. Otherwise there wouldn't be the 'happy holidays' type debate nor, using Easter as another example would we have seen children's Easter activities cancelled because of inclusion issues.
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.
That's simply not the case though. Otherwise there wouldn't be the 'happy holidays' type debate nor, using Easter as another example would we have seen children's Easter activities cancelled because of inclusion issues.
I don't know what country you live in, but here in England my kids have every year had both Christmas and Easter activities.
Both have even had bits about Jesus shoehorned into them, which I hold my tongue about and don't moan about.
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.
I remember once, after recruiting a member of staff for my team at a rail depot, central HR, who provided the CVs got in touch with my Manager and I to demand why we hadn’t considered a couple of candidates for interview.
On checking our correspondence with them, they hadn’t forwarded their CVs.
One we did have to push back on, and it’s this sort of thing I find more objectionable than the DEI stuff, was trying to be strong armed into recruiting a senior managers son for a role, purely due to who his Dad was, and he was totally unsuitable for it.
Heh, don't get me started on HR. We have a candidate currently waiting two weeks plus for a formal offer due to HR getting themselves in a muddle over DBS checks (whether required for job: yes; whether needed right now, three months before start: no; whether they'll listen to the fact that the candidate already has enhanced DBS and update service subscription: no).
Looking again at William's link, it's specifically for senior management roles, so maybe there is a specific problem there, but I'd hope - as stated - that they do a proper transparent assessment process for everyone they interview anyway.
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
On the contrary, I am given to understand it is the most wonderful time of the year. 😀
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.
There is the definite phenomenon of complex regulation obscuring the end goals. Tons of paper is generated and not read, “proving” compliance to irrelevant standards.
So on a domestic building project, you can have 20 pages on the subject of dust and small waste causing a slip hazard. No one has ever read this.
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.
That is a damn sight more than many working people get. Luckily I do not want to run a car, eat out weekly or take a 4-star foreign holiday, let alone all three.
Differences in wealth perception are not unknown in politics. Just this week, Sarah Vine's new book has reminded us of the difficulties in keeping up with the Camerons, and how Michael Gove had problems when he was reshuffled to a £36,000 a year pay cut.
A few folk on this am imploring others to be less obnoxious which is lovely. You'd think their personal examples of measured niceness would be enough but fair play to them for going the extra mile.
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.
That's simply not the case though. Otherwise there wouldn't be the 'happy holidays' type debate nor, using Easter as another example would we have seen children's Easter activities cancelled because of inclusion issues.
I don't know what country you live in, but here in England my kids have every year had both Christmas and Easter activities.
Both have even had bits about Jesus shoehorned into them, which I hold my tongue about and don't moan about.
Why would you moan? I wouldn't moan about a mention of homosexuality featuring in a pride activity
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.
That's simply not the case though. Otherwise there wouldn't be the 'happy holidays' type debate nor, using Easter as another example would we have seen children's Easter activities cancelled because of inclusion issues.
I don't know what country you live in, but here in England my kids have every year had both Christmas and Easter activities.
Both have even had bits about Jesus shoehorned into them, which I hold my tongue about and don't moan about.
Mine too. And Diwali and Eid activities. In a CofE school, with hardly any children from those religions, but I think it's great that they get to learn about other religions in a positive way.
(I am intrigued, given Christianity is taught as fact whether, when they learn about other religions, whether they it's something like, "so, Muslims believe Christ was not the son of God, but merely a prophet.... AND THEY ARE WRONG!" )
ETA: but not as wrong as my original inclusion of a grocer's apostrophe
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.
I had some flame proof insulation sheet fitted some years ago. At the time I took the precaution of digging some of the core out and trying to set fire to it. Took all of two minutes.
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.
That's simply not the case though. Otherwise there wouldn't be the 'happy holidays' type debate nor, using Easter as another example would we have seen children's Easter activities cancelled because of inclusion issues.
I don't know what country you live in, but here in England my kids have every year had both Christmas and Easter activities.
Both have even had bits about Jesus shoehorned into them, which I hold my tongue about and don't moan about.
Why would you moan? I wouldn't moan about a mention of homosexuality featuring in a pride activity
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?
(I wasn't quite a local, even when I lived in Derbyshire.)
I think spending money on grabbing one of the few decent, used things, to destroy it, is perhaps a mistake.
I would argue the other way - imagine if there was an entire network of accessible paths - everywhere, with no barriers keeping disabled and other people out, rather than just the Monsal Trail.
Then there would be more visitors, great for the economy, and they would spread out more. Done reasonably, including access routes etc, and traffic would fall.
Being a little more ambitious, imagine if that were everywhere - mobility tracks, ideally separated, as alternatives to every A and B road in the country. That's one element of what I want to see, and the road length in England is only 80k miles for A and B roads.
One practical idea I do wonder about is if some of these proposals could use narrow gauge.
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...
News reports for the money for the North East are saying there will be some private sector funding too.
I wonder how much will come from the billions in pension funds she wants to tap into ?
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.
That's simply not the case though. Otherwise there wouldn't be the 'happy holidays' type debate nor, using Easter as another example would we have seen children's Easter activities cancelled because of inclusion issues.
I don't know what country you live in, but here in England my kids have every year had both Christmas and Easter activities.
Both have even had bits about Jesus shoehorned into them, which I hold my tongue about and don't moan about.
Mine too. And Diwali and Eid activities. In a CofE school, with hardly any children from those religions, but I think it's great that they get to learn about other religions in a positive way.
(I am intrigued, given Christianity is taught as fact whether, when they learn about other religions, whether they it's something like, "so, Muslims believe Christ was not the son of God, but merely a prophet.... AND THEY ARE WRONG!" )
ETA: but not as wrong as my original inclusion of a grocer's apostrophe
Many years ago on Channel 4, I think, there were some globetrotting theology students who had spoken to an Imam who admired the fact they were learning about all the world's faiths. Of course, the punchline was that there was no need for him to do this because, as a Muslim, he was already in the correct religion.
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.
I agree with everything, except the final paragraph.
Funny how so many of us can agree in the problem but not when it hits a political diagnosis.
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.
That's simply not the case though. Otherwise there wouldn't be the 'happy holidays' type debate nor, using Easter as another example would we have seen children's Easter activities cancelled because of inclusion issues.
I don't know what country you live in, but here in England my kids have every year had both Christmas and Easter activities.
Both have even had bits about Jesus shoehorned into them, which I hold my tongue about and don't moan about.
Why would you moan? I wouldn't moan about a mention of homosexuality featuring in a pride activity
That's the point.
Blessings be upon us all for this convergence of arguments
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...
News reports for the money for the North East are saying there will be some private sector funding too.
I wonder how much will come from the billions in pension funds she wants to tap into ?
And how much will come from shady PE outfits asset-stripping the British state.
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.
Speak for yourself, I have little interest in the commercialised hype of Christmas. My main interest is the religious aspect, Midnight Mass, carol services etc
I am speaking for myself, that's generally how speaking works.
Good for you that you enjoy that quaint religious stuff.
That's the beauty of a free society, you can enjoy what you enjoy, and I can enjoy what I enjoy, and neither of us needs to stop the other from having their fun. Nor are either of us obliged to take part in the other's bits we don't want to do.
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.
Do Christians jump on calls all throughout November to spread the message of Christmas to the exclusion of everything else, with the inference of bigotry and a career black mark if you don't go along with it?
No. So it's a crap analogy.
And, for what it's worth, I agree that it starting in November is annoying. And Black Friday coming over here from the US.
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.
IIRC the ultimate problem was that the Thatcher government (? not sure about this one) took away the ultimate oversight of building fire safety from the Fire Service and gave it to ... nobody. So it was inevitable that we would end up with buildings in the UK where changes to original designs compromised the safety case for those buildings, because nobody was actually checking. Any checks that remained were regarded as box ticking exercises to be worked around by individual contractors.
A similar thing happened when Brown inadvertently took away oversight of the UK banking system (from the Treasury IIRC, but it might have been from the BoE?) and gave it to ... nobody at all. 2008 might not have been quite as bad if there had actually been someone with powers to intervene looking at the total numbers on the books.
The justification for both of these actions was almost certainly that they were bureaucracies that were “holding back Britain”. No doubt they were quite unpopular with individual companies in the parts of the economy they were responsible for. But it’s a business truism that if you don’t put a named person (or set of people) in charge of ensuring that something is taken care of, that thing will inevitably fall through the cracks between other people’s jobs.
Jaw-dropping gender split among young Koreans in the presidential exit poll.
Two conservative/centre-right candidates got 74% of the vote among 20-something men, with centre-left winner Lee Jae-Myung in a distant third. Lee got 58% of the vote among women of the same age. https://x.com/Birdyword/status/1929985932683334045
That also suggests that the 20-something vote was around 10% more conservative than the electorate as a whole.
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.
Do Christians jump on calls all throughout November to spread the message of Christmas to the exclusion of everything else, with the inference of bigotry and a career black mark if you don't go along with it?
No. So it's a crap analogy.
And, for what it's worth, I agree that it starting in November is annoying. And Black Friday coming over here from the US.
Do gays do that with Pride?
No.
In both cases people may inform you what events are going on, but you're not obliged to take part in any of them and there's no career black mark if you don't take part in one.
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.
That's simply not the case though. Otherwise there wouldn't be the 'happy holidays' type debate nor, using Easter as another example would we have seen children's Easter activities cancelled because of inclusion issues.
I don't know what country you live in, but here in England my kids have every year had both Christmas and Easter activities.
Both have even had bits about Jesus shoehorned into them, which I hold my tongue about and don't moan about.
Why would you moan? I wouldn't moan about a mention of homosexuality featuring in a pride activity
That's the point.
Blessings be upon us all for this convergence of arguments
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.
Another straw man, which you find it much easier to fight than the real issue: at no point have I suggested "the Gays" shouldn't be left alone to celebrate. In fact, several I know think it's gone way too far, and don't like the flags, lanyards and virtue signalling.
Its the corporate and institutional foghorning and ideology that goes with it I object to.
If you can't understand this point of view - and most hyperliberals can't, save the intelligent ones - then that's your problem, not mine.
Jaw-dropping gender split among young Koreans in the presidential exit poll.
Two conservative/centre-right candidates got 74% of the vote among 20-something men, with centre-left winner Lee Jae-Myung in a distant third. Lee got 58% of the vote among women of the same age. https://x.com/Birdyword/status/1929985932683334045
That also suggests that the 20-something vote was around 10% more conservative than the electorate as a whole.
Social media is a bigger threat to western democracy than Putin and Xi. Discuss.
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.
Contractors and consultants have insurance. It is just usually capped at around £10m per claim or series of claims, if you’re lucky and then you’re shit out of luck if that doesn’t cover the loss as they won’t have the assets to cover the shortfall. Of course you can only claim against the contractor/consultant in certain circumstances as an occupier and in certain time limits and only otherwise with a contractual link - that’s English privity of contract for you.
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.
Another straw man, which you find it much easier to fight than the real issue: at no point have I suggested "the Gays" shouldn't be left alone to celebrate. In fact, several I know think it's gone way too far, and don't like the flags, lanyards and virtue signalling.
Its the corporate and institutional foghorning and ideology that goes with it I object to.
If you can't understand this point of view - and most hyperliberals can't, save the intelligent ones - then that's your problem, not mine.
Corporations jump on festivities, there's nothing new with that.
They market things for Easter, for Christmas, for Halloween, for Pride, for BBQs, for whatever they can.
So what? Nobody is frogmarching you to a parade, or a service, or black marking you for not taking part.
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.
Yes, but it's also not a risk they "own" nor can own - they make products or deliver services; they can't take accountability for systematic risk.
However, what they can do, of course, is highlight how their products could be riskily or inappropriately used.
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.
Do Christians jump on calls all throughout November to spread the message of Christmas to the exclusion of everything else, with the inference of bigotry and a career black mark if you don't go along with it?
No. So it's a crap analogy.
And, for what it's worth, I agree that it starting in November is annoying. And Black Friday coming over here from the US.
Do gay people actually do that about Pride or is it the institution that you work for pandering? Also what do you mean by going along with it? If someone is forcing you to actively do something around Pride that you don't want to do then I'd agree that's awful. If by 'going along with it' you mean just ignoring it and letting other people do their thing then that's just good manners surely? To go back to the Christmas analogy, no-one would blame you for not going to the office Christmas party but you'd rightly come into criticism for trying to get it cancelled for other people.
A few folk on this am imploring others to be less obnoxious which is lovely. You'd think their personal examples of measured niceness would be enough but fair play to them for going the extra mile.
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.
It's my job too. You take a legal view, and I take an advisory one.
The client needs to be capable and intelligent. It can't just rely entirely on its supply chain or insurers, because firstly, they will never be able to take all the risk, and secondly, the client needs to be able to ask the right questions and do the right checking and assurance for the risks they own.
Ultimately, the buck stops with them. Far too many issues occur because we think the client can be 'anyone' with any level of training with sole reliance for risk being on the supply chain.
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.
I remember writing in about 2009 to Martin Narey when he was CEO of Barnardo's. He'd given an interview where he said
“If the vetting and barring scheme stops just one child ending up a victim of a paedophile then it will be worth it.”
I suggested to him that was a very irresponsible thing to say, as the amount of money it was costing to implement, and the parent/helper goodwill being lost through greater bureaucracy, could save or improve very many children's lives if used more intelligently.
To my surprise and admiration he wrote back promptly agreeing that it was the wrong thing to say and that the cost/benefit of all these things did need to be considered relative to other uses of resources.
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.
IIRC the ultimate problem was that the Thatcher government (? not sure about this one) took away the ultimate oversight of building fire safety from the Fire Service and gave it to ... nobody. So it was inevitable that we would end up with buildings in the UK where changes to original designs compromised the safety case for those buildings, because nobody was actually checking. Any checks that remained were regarded as box ticking exercises to be worked around by individual contractors.
A similar thing happened when Brown inadvertently took away oversight of the UK banking system (from the Treasury IIRC, but it might have been from the BoE?) and gave it to ... nobody at all. 2008 might not have been quite as bad if there had actually been someone with powers to intervene looking at the total numbers on the books.
The justification for both of these actions was almost certainly that they were bureaucracies that were “holding back Britain”. No doubt they were quite unpopular with individual companies in the parts of the economy they were responsible for. But it’s a business truism that if you don’t put a named person (or set of people) in charge of ensuring that something is taken care of, that thing will inevitably fall through the cracks between other people’s jobs.
I know we all want easy answers, but this is a bit more complex than just "Fatch".
Products, services and systems - natural, built and digital - have got far more complex and intricate in the last 20-30 years.
A few folk on this am imploring others to be less obnoxious which is lovely. You'd think their personal examples of measured niceness would be enough but fair play to them for going the extra mile.
Show, don't tell, as my mother used to, erm, tell me.
What specifically are they making you personally do in that call to mark Pride?
Or are they just informing you about what events are going on and then letting you choose whether to take part or not, just as would happen with Christmas or any other time of year?
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.
Either: 1 Politely pretend to listen, whilst turning the call into that "mwah mwah" noise the teacher made in the Charlie Brown TV cartoons and counting the amount your silly bosses are paying to to listen to this nonsense.
Or
2 Decide that your principles are worth more than that, and get out.
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.
That's simply not the case though. Otherwise there wouldn't be the 'happy holidays' type debate nor, using Easter as another example would we have seen children's Easter activities cancelled because of inclusion issues.
I don't know what country you live in, but here in England my kids have every year had both Christmas and Easter activities.
Both have even had bits about Jesus shoehorned into them, which I hold my tongue about and don't moan about.
Why would you moan? I wouldn't moan about a mention of homosexuality featuring in a pride activity
That's the point.
I thought London Pride was a festival of the celebration of various sub-brands of international conglomerates.
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?
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.
The cladding remediation is drive by government fiat.
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.
No good deed goes unpunished.
It was a very generalised slur* against lawyers in general, rather than aimed specifically at our resident marine mammal.
I could fall seriously out of love with Casino and Max if I took their comments on woke civil servants and academics personally
*If, indeed, slur it was. Pond scum has been shown to be extremely fascinating and full of vibrant life, of course.
Every year I go to a couple of local ponds and take some mud from the bottom and put it into a couple of plastic bowls in the garden to see what grows.
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.
It's my job too. You take a legal view, and I take an advisory one.
The client needs to be capable and intelligent. It can't just rely entirely on its supply chain or insurers, because firstly, they will never be able to take all the risk, and secondly, the client needs to be able to ask the right questions and do the right checking and assurance for the risks they own.
Ultimately, the buck stops with them. Far too many issues occur because we think the client can be 'anyone' with any level of training with sole reliance for risk being on the supply chain.
That doesn't work. Because it can't.
But the client is not (usually) a construction expert and therefore pays an expert for their advice. Paying for that advice from an architect or engineering firm should be no different than employing an expert directly.
We cannot expect everyone who procures building work to understand the Building Regulations or good building practice. That’s completely unrealistic.
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.
The cladding remediation is drive by government fiat.
I don’t follow what you mean? If you live in a high rise that’s covered in flammable cladding you are going to want to remove it, I imagine.
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.
That's simply not the case though. Otherwise there wouldn't be the 'happy holidays' type debate nor, using Easter as another example would we have seen children's Easter activities cancelled because of inclusion issues.
I don't know what country you live in, but here in England my kids have every year had both Christmas and Easter activities.
Both have even had bits about Jesus shoehorned into them, which I hold my tongue about and don't moan about.
Why would you moan? I wouldn't moan about a mention of homosexuality featuring in a pride activity
That's the point.
I thought London Pride was a festival of the celebration of various sub-brands of international conglomerates.
Now you say there is a gay theme? Where?
To me London Pride will always be a decent pint of bitter.
Either: 1 Politely pretend to listen, whilst turning the call into that "mwah mwah" noise the teacher made in the Charlie Brown TV cartoons and counting the amount your silly bosses are paying to to listen to this nonsense.
Or
2 Decide that your principles are worth more than that, and get out.
3 Quote the relevant scripture back to the “trainers”, being careful to appear sincere and completely onside. Doing this while taking the piss keeps me from falling asleep during such training.
NEW: Chris Philp telling people at a private event this week that Kemi B is doing a big speech on Friday which is the start of her and the party ‘beginning their policy production phase of the rebuild’.
But you shouldn’t tell anyone because it’s apparently ‘confidential’ for now
What specifically are they making you personally do in that call to mark Pride?
Or are they just informing you about what events are going on and then letting you choose whether to take part or not, just as would happen with Christmas or any other time of year?
The way he's carrying on, he must have to gape his arsehole on camera while singing 'Glitter and be Gay' (toughest song on Broadway) from Candide.
NEW: Chris Philp telling people at a private event this week that Kemi B is doing a big speech on Friday which is the start of her and the party ‘beginning their policy production phase of the rebuild’.
But you shouldn’t tell anyone because it’s apparently ‘confidential’ for now
Funny, I'm sure a handsome guy on here yesterday said it seemed like the Tories were moving from licking their wounds onto their next phase
Either: 1 Politely pretend to listen, whilst turning the call into that "mwah mwah" noise the teacher made in the Charlie Brown TV cartoons and counting the amount your silly bosses are paying to to listen to this nonsense.
Or
2 Decide that your principles are worth more than that, and get out.
No escape. Every major public and private institution does this now.
We can see from the conversation on here this morning why it continues, because its become political/religious and all sense of nuance has been lost.
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.
That's simply not the case though. Otherwise there wouldn't be the 'happy holidays' type debate nor, using Easter as another example would we have seen children's Easter activities cancelled because of inclusion issues.
I don't know what country you live in, but here in England my kids have every year had both Christmas and Easter activities.
Both have even had bits about Jesus shoehorned into them, which I hold my tongue about and don't moan about.
Why would you moan? I wouldn't moan about a mention of homosexuality featuring in a pride activity
That's the point.
I thought London Pride was a festival of the celebration of various sub-brands of international conglomerates.
Now you say there is a gay theme? Where?
To me London Pride will always be a decent pint of bitter.
What specifically are they making you personally do in that call to mark Pride?
Or are they just informing you about what events are going on and then letting you choose whether to take part or not, just as would happen with Christmas or any other time of year?
The way he's carrying on, he must have to gape his arsehole on camera while singing 'Glitter and be Gay' (toughest song on Broadway) from Candide.
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.
It's my job too. You take a legal view, and I take an advisory one.
The client needs to be capable and intelligent. It can't just rely entirely on its supply chain or insurers, because firstly, they will never be able to take all the risk, and secondly, the client needs to be able to ask the right questions and do the right checking and assurance for the risks they own.
Ultimately, the buck stops with them. Far too many issues occur because we think the client can be 'anyone' with any level of training with sole reliance for risk being on the supply chain.
That doesn't work. Because it can't.
But the client is not (usually) a construction expert and therefore pays an expert for their advice. Paying for that advice from an architect or engineering firm should be no different than employing an expert directly.
We cannot expect everyone who procures building work to understand the Building Regulations or good building practice. That’s completely unrealistic.
They should be a suitably competent and experienced person to do that role.
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.
That's simply not the case though. Otherwise there wouldn't be the 'happy holidays' type debate nor, using Easter as another example would we have seen children's Easter activities cancelled because of inclusion issues.
I don't know what country you live in, but here in England my kids have every year had both Christmas and Easter activities.
Both have even had bits about Jesus shoehorned into them, which I hold my tongue about and don't moan about.
Why would you moan? I wouldn't moan about a mention of homosexuality featuring in a pride activity
That's the point.
I thought London Pride was a festival of the celebration of various sub-brands of international conglomerates.
Now you say there is a gay theme? Where?
To me London Pride will always be a decent pint of bitter.
Song by that red blooded confirmed batchelor Noël Coward for me.
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.
That's simply not the case though. Otherwise there wouldn't be the 'happy holidays' type debate nor, using Easter as another example would we have seen children's Easter activities cancelled because of inclusion issues.
I don't know what country you live in, but here in England my kids have every year had both Christmas and Easter activities.
Both have even had bits about Jesus shoehorned into them, which I hold my tongue about and don't moan about.
Mine too. And Diwali and Eid activities. In a CofE school, with hardly any children from those religions, but I think it's great that they get to learn about other religions in a positive way.
(I am intrigued, given Christianity is taught as fact whether, when they learn about other religions, whether they it's something like, "so, Muslims believe Christ was not the son of God, but merely a prophet.... AND THEY ARE WRONG!" )
ETA: but not as wrong as my original inclusion of a grocer's apostrophe
On the point you highlight - Christianity taught as fact - I am also intrigued.
I would suggest that "fact", as understood in the modern West, is far too narrow a category to be used for a religion. Emotion, motivation, conduct, ethics, growth of character, maturing as a human being, dealing with death, forming principles leading to opinions and all the rest, are all within the compass of a religion.
I'd be interested to know their definition of "fact".
There are a lot of options and models within Christianity itself - even in the Bible - for avoiding a black-and-white categorisation along the lines of "This is true" and "That is false".
Imo one of Dawkins' rhetorical tricks has been along those lines - he pretends that 'reality' can only be derived from the sub-category of human thought he limits himself to. IMO it makes his argument sort of two-dimensional. The same happens when a verse is quote-mined from somewhere in the Hebraic law, and asserted as proof of something, without interrogating either the context, or the three millennia of development of the religion between then and now; it's a faulty reference frame.
But these are philosophical debates as old as the hills. One of the principles Biship Lesslie Newbigin used to argue in his apologetics was that the modernist perception of "facts" was too narrow; but even in philosophy that division, where accepted, has dissolved over the subsequent decades.
In a way it's part of the pilgrimage in life; the friend I visited in Oldham last weekend with a cancer diagnosis and his wife started out as Elim Pentecostals, and ended up 25 years later as inclusiveness activists in the Church of England running conferences supporting campaigns for full LGBT inclusion. And that's not loss of faith, it's growth of faith through experience.
NEW: Chris Philp telling people at a private event this week that Kemi B is doing a big speech on Friday which is the start of her and the party ‘beginning their policy production phase of the rebuild’.
But you shouldn’t tell anyone because it’s apparently ‘confidential’ for now
Funny, I'm sure a handsome guy on here yesterday said it seemed like the Tories were moving from licking their wounds onto their next phase
A pre-silly season relaunch feels destined to fade away before it gains any momentum.
Either: 1 Politely pretend to listen, whilst turning the call into that "mwah mwah" noise the teacher made in the Charlie Brown TV cartoons and counting the amount your silly bosses are paying to to listen to this nonsense.
Or
2 Decide that your principles are worth more than that, and get out.
No escape. Every major public and private institution does this now.
We can see from the conversation on here this morning why it continues, because its become political/religious and all sense of nuance has been lost.
Does what exactly?
You seem to object to it even being mentioned, but haven't named a single thing you've been obliged to do yourself other than listen to what's going on, which happens all the time.
I sit politely and tune out references to Christmas, Easter, Ramadan, Diwali and all sorts of other stuff that comes up and is mentioned regularly. I don't moan "oh Ramadan again" or "oh Christmas again" for an entire month every time it comes up.
You mentioned a 'gay tapestry' thing the other day which sounds interesting. What were you personally compelled to do with regards to the gay tapestry? Or how were you black marked for not doing it? Or was it just mentioned, you thought "not for me" and that was the end of it? Just as it is for Christmas, Ramadan and a million other things throughout the year?
NEW: Chris Philp telling people at a private event this week that Kemi B is doing a big speech on Friday which is the start of her and the party ‘beginning their policy production phase of the rebuild’.
But you shouldn’t tell anyone because it’s apparently ‘confidential’ for now
Funny, I'm sure a handsome guy on here yesterday said it seemed like the Tories were moving from licking their wounds onto their next phase
A pre-silly season relaunch feels destined to fade away before it gains any momentum.
Launch rather than relaunch, they've been in dock licking wounds for a year.
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.
It's my job too. You take a legal view, and I take an advisory one.
The client needs to be capable and intelligent. It can't just rely entirely on its supply chain or insurers, because firstly, they will never be able to take all the risk, and secondly, the client needs to be able to ask the right questions and do the right checking and assurance for the risks they own.
Ultimately, the buck stops with them. Far too many issues occur because we think the client can be 'anyone' with any level of training with sole reliance for risk being on the supply chain.
That doesn't work. Because it can't.
But the client is not (usually) a construction expert and therefore pays an expert for their advice. Paying for that advice from an architect or engineering firm should be no different than employing an expert directly.
We cannot expect everyone who procures building work to understand the Building Regulations or good building practice. That’s completely unrealistic.
They should be a suitably competent and experienced person to do that role.
And, if not, trained to be so.
From a commercial perspective what difference is there between paying for your staff to be trained or paying a group of people who have already been trained?
This is how commerce (and construction) has been done in England for hundreds of years. You pay someone for their expertise and you sue them if they are negligent. The same way someone would sue me if I give negligent legal advice.
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.
I'm not entirely convinced by the criteria eg food:
Food
Minimum Retirement
Around £50 a week on groceries, £25 a month on food out of the home, £15 per fortnight on takeaways.
Moderate Retirement
Around £55 a week on groceries, £30 a week on food out of the home, £10 a week on takeaways, £100 a month to take others out for a monthly meal.
Comfortable Retirement - the 60k for a couple one
Around £70 a week on food, £40 a week on food out of the home, £20 a week on takeaways, £100 a month to take others out for a monthly meal.
I don't know that it's so far out. I worked out how much I would need to be able to retire some years ago based on actual historic expenditure (which I had to manage very carefully at the time) on a similar basis - run a modest car, one holiday abroad per year, a bit of spending money so we could do things but certainly not eating out weekly. All food/bills for a couple but not including my wife's personal expenditure which I assumed she would cover herself.
My tracker currently shows it as just a touch over £40k (net of tax).
Either: 1 Politely pretend to listen, whilst turning the call into that "mwah mwah" noise the teacher made in the Charlie Brown TV cartoons and counting the amount your silly bosses are paying to to listen to this nonsense.
Or
2 Decide that your principles are worth more than that, and get out.
No escape. Every major public and private institution does this now.
We can see from the conversation on here this morning why it continues, because its become political/religious and all sense of nuance has been lost.
Does what exactly?
You seem to object to it even being mentioned, but haven't named a single thing you've been obliged to do yourself other than listen to what's going on, which happens all the time.
I sit politely and tune out references to Christmas, Easter, Ramadan, Diwali and all sorts of other stuff that comes up and is mentioned regularly. I don't moan "oh Ramadan again" or "oh Christmas again" for an entire month every time it comes up.
You mentioned a 'gay tapestry' thing the other day which sounds interesting. What were you personally compelled to do with regards to the gay tapestry? Or how were you black marked for not doing it? Or was it just mentioned, you thought "not for me" and that was the end of it? Just as it is for Christmas, Ramadan and a million other things throughout the year?
The new Barty is surprisingly "right-on". More power to his elbow.
NEW: Chris Philp telling people at a private event this week that Kemi B is doing a big speech on Friday which is the start of her and the party ‘beginning their policy production phase of the rebuild’.
But you shouldn’t tell anyone because it’s apparently ‘confidential’ for now
Is there something coming up on Thursday that requires them to flood the media to hide bad news?
The pride pushback sits alongside the "DEI" pushback - in essence its why do we have to do these positive discrimination things?
We do them because people hire people, and it's very easy for people to hire people like themselves. Which is how we end up with industries which are white and male.
"Woke" people recognise this basic societal and sociological fact and look to do something about it. The anti-woke warriors also recognise it, but decry it because it means less jobs for people like them and more jobs for better qualified people who otherwise get missed because of their gender or race or sexuality or disability.
Back when I was a recruiting manager in a mid-level commercial role I made the point of hiring the best candidate. That made my team stand out from the norm because I hired some people who didn't look like me. At one point I had two women join the team. Women traditionally did the admin roles or category marketing, yet here I was hiring brilliant candidates who bucked this "tradition".
An anti-woke warrior manager asked why I "kept hiring young blonds". Knowing that he had a real problem with women getting promoted I just observed that it's because "I'm Hugh Heffner" as there can't be any other reason. He tried to put in a complaint with HR. And had his arse handed to him.
So we celebrate pride and we focus on women in business leadership or engineering and we try to hire to ensure that we have some diversity in the police. Because the alternative is that everyone is white and everyone is male. And if people don't like that, they need to look in the mirror.
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.
That's simply not the case though. Otherwise there wouldn't be the 'happy holidays' type debate nor, using Easter as another example would we have seen children's Easter activities cancelled because of inclusion issues.
I don't know what country you live in, but here in England my kids have every year had both Christmas and Easter activities.
Both have even had bits about Jesus shoehorned into them, which I hold my tongue about and don't moan about.
Mine too. And Diwali and Eid activities. In a CofE school, with hardly any children from those religions, but I think it's great that they get to learn about other religions in a positive way.
(I am intrigued, given Christianity is taught as fact whether, when they learn about other religions, whether they it's something like, "so, Muslims believe Christ was not the son of God, but merely a prophet.... AND THEY ARE WRONG!" )
ETA: but not as wrong as my original inclusion of a grocer's apostrophe
On the point you highlight - Christianity taught as fact - I am also intrigued.
I would suggest that "fact", as understood in the modern West, is far too narrow a category to be used for a religion. Emotion, motivation, conduct, ethics, growth of character, maturing as a human being, dealing with death, forming principles leading to opinions and all the rest, are all within the compass of a religion.
I'd be interested to know their definition of "fact".
There are a lot of options and models within Christianity itself - even in the Bible - for avoiding a black-and-white categorisation along the lines of "This is true" and "That is false".
Imo one of Dawkins' rhetorical tricks has been along those lines - he pretends that 'reality' can only be derived from the sub-category of human thought he limits himself to. IMO it makes his argument sort of two-dimensional. The same happens when a verse is quote-mined from somewhere in the Hebraic law, and asserted as proof of something, without interrogating either the context, or the three millennia of development of the religion between then and now; it's a faulty reference frame.
But these are philosophical debates as old as the hills. One of the principles Biship Lesslie Newbigin used to argue in his apologetics was that the modernist perception of "facts" was too narrow; but even in philosophy that division, where accepted, has dissolved over the subsequent decades.
In a way it's part of the pilgrimage in life; the friend I visited in Oldham last weekend with a cancer diagnosis and his wife started out as Elim Pentecostals, and ended up 25 years later as inclusiveness activists in the Church of England running conferences supporting campaigns for full LGBT inclusion.
I'd agree.
It's a Christian school and so the key bits of Christianity are taught as facts - it's not 'Christian's believe...' in the way it is when discussing other religions (e.g. 'Muslims believe...'. Jesus is the son of God, he died on the cross and rose again, etc, etc. It's a Christian school - I wish it wasn't, but it is, so I accept that. But I have had some interesting conversations with my seven year old where he is wondering how some of this stuff works, most recent was about the age of the earth and dinosaurs etc (he's into dinosaurs) and how that squares with the whole seven day creation thing. I normally just say to him that "Christian's believe..." and also that there's science that looks at things in a different way and comes to different conclusions. He knows that I am a non-believer and that his mother has some faith, although not a literal belief in the bible and he's quite capable/will be quite capable of making his own mind up (I've been careful to put across my sincerely held view that believing there is no God is, in many ways, logically equivalent to believing in God - it's a faith thing/belief either way - and my own view is more agnostic; I don't believe there is a God, but I don't have a strong belief that there is not a God, if that makes sense.
I'm fascinated by how the teachers handle it, many of whom, I expect, have faith about as strong as mine,* particularly when a more literal belief in Christianity clashes with science that they are also teaching. It's part of the reason I'd prefer a general separation of religion and education in this country - kids should be taught about religion and the major religions' beliefs, but I don't think we should have state schools teaching any religion as fact.
*his present teacher, whom I rate very highly, is the ex-wife of the ex-local-vicar (which is a whole extra story) and, I assume, a true believer.
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.
I'm not entirely convinced by the criteria eg food:
Food
Minimum Retirement
Around £50 a week on groceries, £25 a month on food out of the home, £15 per fortnight on takeaways.
Moderate Retirement
Around £55 a week on groceries, £30 a week on food out of the home, £10 a week on takeaways, £100 a month to take others out for a monthly meal.
Comfortable Retirement - the 60k for a couple one
Around £70 a week on food, £40 a week on food out of the home, £20 a week on takeaways, £100 a month to take others out for a monthly meal.
I don't know that it's so far out. I worked out how much I would need to be able to retire some years ago based on actual historic expenditure (which I had to manage very carefully at the time) on a similar basis - run a modest car, one holiday abroad per year, a bit of spending money so we could do things but certainly not eating out weekly. All food/bills for a couple but not including my wife's personal expenditure which I assumed she would cover herself.
My tracker currently shows it as just a touch over £40k (net of tax).
I don't eat out much but can easily spend £500 a month on beer and associated expenses (public transport, fast food, etc). I travel, but not 4*. I reckon I can live fairly comfortably on £1500 per month but the travel budget is on top.
The pride pushback sits alongside the "DEI" pushback - in essence its why do we have to do these positive discrimination things?
We do them because people hire people, and it's very easy for people to hire people like themselves. Which is how we end up with industries which are white and male.
"Woke" people recognise this basic societal and sociological fact and look to do something about it. The anti-woke warriors also recognise it, but decry it because it means less jobs for people like them and more jobs for better qualified people who otherwise get missed because of their gender or race or sexuality or disability.
Back when I was a recruiting manager in a mid-level commercial role I made the point of hiring the best candidate. That made my team stand out from the norm because I hired some people who didn't look like me. At one point I had two women join the team. Women traditionally did the admin roles or category marketing, yet here I was hiring brilliant candidates who bucked this "tradition".
An anti-woke warrior manager asked why I "kept hiring young blonds". Knowing that he had a real problem with women getting promoted I just observed that it's because "I'm Hugh Heffner" as there can't be any other reason. He tried to put in a complaint with HR. And had his arse handed to him.
So we celebrate pride and we focus on women in business leadership or engineering and we try to hire to ensure that we have some diversity in the police. Because the alternative is that everyone is white and everyone is male. And if people don't like that, they need to look in the mirror.
As an employee of an organisation that takes its DEI obligations seriously, occasionally you speculate so and so got the role because it helps balance the demographic profile. They are entirely qualified for the job but as they are a rare example of an identifiable social group they have a better chance than the over-represented groups in getting the role. But if you don't accept that these social groups being under-represented is the root cause of the problem you're not going to understand why they are getting the special treatment.
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?
(I wasn't quite a local, even when I lived in Derbyshire.)
I think spending money on grabbing one of the few decent, used things, to destroy it, is perhaps a mistake.
I would argue the other way - imagine if there was an entire network of accessible paths - everywhere, with no barriers keeping disabled and other people out, rather than just the Monsal Trail.
Then there would be more visitors, great for the economy, and they would spread out more. Done reasonably, including access routes etc, and traffic would fall.
Being a little more ambitious, imagine if that were everywhere - mobility tracks, ideally separated, as alternatives to every A and B road in the country. That's one element of what I want to see, and the road length in England is only 80k miles for A and B roads.
One practical idea I do wonder about is if some of these proposals could use narrow gauge.
It is not one of the "few decent, used things". Nearby are two other, very long, active travel routes along disused railways - the Tissington Trail and the High Peak Trail. The entire area is crisscrossed with routes, including the Pennine Bridleway. The area has many routes for cyclists and walkers.
Also, unless they've opened the extension towards Matlock, the trail starts in the middle of nowhere and ends even more in the middle of nowhere. It is not like an active travel route in a city, used by commuters: it is a *destination*. People travel - by car - to use it.
It makes the transport situation far worse, not better.
No, narrow gauge would be f-all use. As you well know for cyclists, we need *networks*, not disjointed sections.
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.
It creates the illusion of control and consistency but not the reality. It removes judgement and inserts form filling. There are so many examples of this and very few of them good.
Comments
On checking our correspondence with them, they hadn’t forwarded their CVs.
One we did have to push back on, and it’s this sort of thing I find more objectionable than the DEI stuff, was trying to be strong armed into recruiting a senior managers son for a role, purely due to who his Dad was, and he was totally unsuitable for it.
Both have even had bits about Jesus shoehorned into them, which I hold my tongue about and don't moan about.
Looking again at William's link, it's specifically for senior management roles, so maybe there is a specific problem there, but I'd hope - as stated - that they do a proper transparent assessment process for everyone they interview anyway.
So on a domestic building project, you can have 20 pages on the subject of dust and small waste causing a slip hazard. No one has ever read this.
Differences in wealth perception are not unknown in politics. Just this week, Sarah Vine's new book has reminded us of the difficulties in keeping up with the Camerons, and how Michael Gove had problems when he was reshuffled to a £36,000 a year pay cut.
(I am intrigued, given Christianity is taught as fact whether, when they learn about other religions, whether they it's something like, "so, Muslims believe Christ was not the son of God, but merely a prophet.... AND THEY ARE WRONG!"
ETA: but not as wrong as my original inclusion of a grocer's apostrophe
At the time I took the precaution of digging some of the core out and trying to set fire to it. Took all of two minutes.
I think spending money on grabbing one of the few decent, used things, to destroy it, is perhaps a mistake.
I would argue the other way - imagine if there was an entire network of accessible paths - everywhere, with no barriers keeping disabled and other people out, rather than just the Monsal Trail.
Then there would be more visitors, great for the economy, and they would spread out more. Done reasonably, including access routes etc, and traffic would fall.
Being a little more ambitious, imagine if that were everywhere - mobility tracks, ideally separated, as alternatives to every A and B road in the country. That's one element of what I want to see, and the road length in England is only 80k miles for A and B roads.
One practical idea I do wonder about is if some of these proposals could use narrow gauge.
I wonder how much will come from the billions in pension funds she wants to tap into ?
Funny how so many of us can agree in the problem but not when it hits a political diagnosis.
Good for you that you enjoy that quaint religious stuff.
That's the beauty of a free society, you can enjoy what you enjoy, and I can enjoy what I enjoy, and neither of us needs to stop the other from having their fun. Nor are either of us obliged to take part in the other's bits we don't want to do.
No. So it's a crap analogy.
And, for what it's worth, I agree that it starting in November is annoying. And Black Friday coming over here from the US.
A similar thing happened when Brown inadvertently took away oversight of the UK banking system (from the Treasury IIRC, but it might have been from the BoE?) and gave it to ... nobody at all. 2008 might not have been quite as bad if there had actually been someone with powers to intervene looking at the total numbers on the books.
The justification for both of these actions was almost certainly that they were bureaucracies that were “holding back Britain”. No doubt they were quite unpopular with individual companies in the parts of the economy they were responsible for. But it’s a business truism that if you don’t put a named person (or set of people) in charge of ensuring that something is taken care of, that thing will inevitably fall through the cracks between other people’s jobs.
Two conservative/centre-right candidates got 74% of the vote among 20-something men, with centre-left winner Lee Jae-Myung in a distant third. Lee got 58% of the vote among women of the same age.
https://x.com/Birdyword/status/1929985932683334045
That also suggests that the 20-something vote was around 10% more conservative than the electorate as a whole.
No.
In both cases people may inform you what events are going on, but you're not obliged to take part in any of them and there's no career black mark if you don't take part in one.
"Bless us and splash us, my precious."
Its the corporate and institutional foghorning and ideology that goes with it I object to.
If you can't understand this point of view - and most hyperliberals can't, save the intelligent ones - then that's your problem, not mine.
They market things for Easter, for Christmas, for Halloween, for Pride, for BBQs, for whatever they can.
So what? Nobody is frogmarching you to a parade, or a service, or black marking you for not taking part.
However, what they can do, of course, is highlight how their products could be riskily or inappropriately used.
I could fall seriously out of love with Casino and Max if I took their comments on woke civil servants and academics personally
*If, indeed, slur it was. Pond scum has been shown to be extremely fascinating and full of vibrant life, of course.
The client needs to be capable and intelligent. It can't just rely entirely on its supply chain or insurers, because firstly, they will never be able to take all the risk, and secondly, the client needs to be able to ask the right questions and do the right checking and assurance for the risks they own.
Ultimately, the buck stops with them. Far too many issues occur because we think the client can be 'anyone' with any level of training with sole reliance for risk being on the supply chain.
That doesn't work. Because it can't.
Jesus.
https://youtu.be/27cN2_k0JF0?si=yDq8uiAJTqNlGEDt
'We could buy Haiti.'
'Or Belgium, those chocolatey assholes.'
Edit: bugger, only just got the Mountainhead pun. I'm slowing up..
“If the vetting and barring scheme stops just one child ending up a victim of a paedophile then it will be worth it.”
(https://www.politics.co.uk/news/2009/09/11/parent-drivers-face-paedophile-checks/)
I suggested to him that was a very irresponsible thing to say, as the amount of money it was costing to implement, and the parent/helper goodwill being lost through greater bureaucracy, could save or improve very many children's lives if used more intelligently.
To my surprise and admiration he wrote back promptly agreeing that it was the wrong thing to say and that the cost/benefit of all these things did need to be considered relative to other uses of resources.
Products, services and systems - natural, built and digital - have got far more complex and intricate in the last 20-30 years.
And we don't understand them.
Or are they just informing you about what events are going on and then letting you choose whether to take part or not, just as would happen with Christmas or any other time of year?
Food
Minimum Retirement
Around £50 a week on groceries, £25 a month on food out of the home, £15 per fortnight on takeaways.
Moderate Retirement
Around £55 a week on groceries, £30 a week on food out of the home, £10 a week on takeaways, £100 a month to take others out for a monthly meal.
Comfortable Retirement - the 60k for a couple one
Around £70 a week on food, £40 a week on food out of the home, £20 a week on takeaways, £100 a month to take others out for a monthly meal.
Either:
1 Politely pretend to listen, whilst turning the call into that "mwah mwah" noise the teacher made in the Charlie Brown TV cartoons and counting the amount your silly bosses are paying to to listen to this nonsense.
Or
2 Decide that your principles are worth more than that, and get out.
Now you say there is a gay theme? Where?
It’s fascinating.
Inspired by a YouTube channel, Life in Jars.
We cannot expect everyone who procures building work to understand the Building Regulations or good building practice. That’s completely unrealistic.
4 learn the cant and become Brigadny Komissar
NEW: Chris Philp telling people at a private event this week that Kemi B is doing a big speech on Friday which is the start of her and the party ‘beginning their policy production phase of the rebuild’.
But you shouldn’t tell anyone because it’s apparently ‘confidential’ for now
We can see from the conversation on here this morning why it continues, because its become political/religious and all sense of nuance has been lost.
I never served in the Royal Navy.
And, if not, trained to be so.
https://youtu.be/27cN2_k0JF0?si=yDq8uiAJTqNlGEDt
I would suggest that "fact", as understood in the modern West, is far too narrow a category to be used for a religion. Emotion, motivation, conduct, ethics, growth of character, maturing as a human being, dealing with death, forming principles leading to opinions and all the rest, are all within the compass of a religion.
I'd be interested to know their definition of "fact".
There are a lot of options and models within Christianity itself - even in the Bible - for avoiding a black-and-white categorisation along the lines of "This is true" and "That is false".
Imo one of Dawkins' rhetorical tricks has been along those lines - he pretends that 'reality' can only be derived from the sub-category of human thought he limits himself to. IMO it makes his argument sort of two-dimensional. The same happens when a verse is quote-mined from somewhere in the Hebraic law, and asserted as proof of something, without interrogating either the context, or the three millennia of development of the religion between then and now; it's a faulty reference frame.
But these are philosophical debates as old as the hills. One of the principles Biship Lesslie Newbigin used to argue in his apologetics was that the modernist perception of "facts" was too narrow; but even in philosophy that division, where accepted, has dissolved over the subsequent decades.
In a way it's part of the pilgrimage in life; the friend I visited in Oldham last weekend with a cancer diagnosis and his wife started out as Elim Pentecostals, and ended up 25 years later as inclusiveness activists in the Church of England running conferences supporting campaigns for full LGBT inclusion. And that's not loss of faith, it's growth of faith through experience.
You seem to object to it even being mentioned, but haven't named a single thing you've been obliged to do yourself other than listen to what's going on, which happens all the time.
I sit politely and tune out references to Christmas, Easter, Ramadan, Diwali and all sorts of other stuff that comes up and is mentioned regularly. I don't moan "oh Ramadan again" or "oh Christmas again" for an entire month every time it comes up.
You mentioned a 'gay tapestry' thing the other day which sounds interesting. What were you personally compelled to do with regards to the gay tapestry? Or how were you black marked for not doing it? Or was it just mentioned, you thought "not for me" and that was the end of it? Just as it is for Christmas, Ramadan and a million other things throughout the year?
This is how commerce (and construction) has been done in England for hundreds of years. You pay someone for their expertise and you sue them if they are negligent. The same way someone would sue me if I give negligent legal advice.
My tracker currently shows it as just a touch over £40k (net of tax).
We do them because people hire people, and it's very easy for people to hire people like themselves. Which is how we end up with industries which are white and male.
"Woke" people recognise this basic societal and sociological fact and look to do something about it. The anti-woke warriors also recognise it, but decry it because it means less jobs for people like them and more jobs for better qualified people who otherwise get missed because of their gender or race or sexuality or disability.
Back when I was a recruiting manager in a mid-level commercial role I made the point of hiring the best candidate. That made my team stand out from the norm because I hired some people who didn't look like me. At one point I had two women join the team. Women traditionally did the admin roles or category marketing, yet here I was hiring brilliant candidates who bucked this "tradition".
An anti-woke warrior manager asked why I "kept hiring young blonds". Knowing that he had a real problem with women getting promoted I just observed that it's because "I'm Hugh Heffner" as there can't be any other reason. He tried to put in a complaint with HR. And had his arse handed to him.
So we celebrate pride and we focus on women in business leadership or engineering and we try to hire to ensure that we have some diversity in the police. Because the alternative is that everyone is white and everyone is male. And if people don't like that, they need to look in the mirror.
It's a Christian school and so the key bits of Christianity are taught as facts - it's not 'Christian's believe...' in the way it is when discussing other religions (e.g. 'Muslims believe...'. Jesus is the son of God, he died on the cross and rose again, etc, etc. It's a Christian school - I wish it wasn't, but it is, so I accept that. But I have had some interesting conversations with my seven year old where he is wondering how some of this stuff works, most recent was about the age of the earth and dinosaurs etc (he's into dinosaurs) and how that squares with the whole seven day creation thing. I normally just say to him that "Christian's believe..." and also that there's science that looks at things in a different way and comes to different conclusions. He knows that I am a non-believer and that his mother has some faith, although not a literal belief in the bible and he's quite capable/will be quite capable of making his own mind up (I've been careful to put across my sincerely held view that believing there is no God is, in many ways, logically equivalent to believing in God - it's a faith thing/belief either way - and my own view is more agnostic; I don't believe there is a God, but I don't have a strong belief that there is not a God, if that makes sense.
I'm fascinated by how the teachers handle it, many of whom, I expect, have faith about as strong as mine,* particularly when a more literal belief in Christianity clashes with science that they are also teaching. It's part of the reason I'd prefer a general separation of religion and education in this country - kids should be taught about religion and the major religions' beliefs, but I don't think we should have state schools teaching any religion as fact.
*his present teacher, whom I rate very highly, is the ex-wife of the ex-local-vicar (which is a whole extra story) and, I assume, a true believer.
NATO'S RUTTE: UKRAINE IS INVITED TO NATO SUMMIT IN THE HAGUE
Also, unless they've opened the extension towards Matlock, the trail starts in the middle of nowhere and ends even more in the middle of nowhere. It is not like an active travel route in a city, used by commuters: it is a *destination*. People travel - by car - to use it.
It makes the transport situation far worse, not better.
No, narrow gauge would be f-all use. As you well know for cyclists, we need *networks*, not disjointed sections.