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Labour’s Liz Truss problem x 100 – politicalbetting.com

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  • Sean_FSean_F Posts: 39,037

    Wasn't there research that said the most pro-Trump demographic was people who identified as regular churchgoers who rarely went to church?

    If the polling Leon has found identifies a growth of such identity, or Potemkin, Christians in Britain, then it could be very politically significant.

    That's certainly one way to square the circle, though an alarming one if it is what's going on. We don't have the same televangelist culture in the UK as in the US, and that's a very good thing. The massive downside of broadcast religion is that it tends to sidestep the difficult "who, exactly, is my neighbour, and who isn't?" question.

    And that leads fairly smoothly to the consequences we are currently seeing Stateside.

    (Much more likely is that using polling to identify small percentages is blooming difficult. And that calculating a change by subtracting one blurry number from another is a mug's game.)
    If it is at least part of what's going on then it will be because English-language social media is dominated by Americans.
    People adopting Christianity as a badge of political identity, without being regular attendees, is quite believable.
  • carnforthcarnforth Posts: 6,542
    Norrie through to Q finals.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 55,501
    Sean_F said:

    Wasn't there research that said the most pro-Trump demographic was people who identified as regular churchgoers who rarely went to church?

    If the polling Leon has found identifies a growth of such identity, or Potemkin, Christians in Britain, then it could be very politically significant.

    That's certainly one way to square the circle, though an alarming one if it is what's going on. We don't have the same televangelist culture in the UK as in the US, and that's a very good thing. The massive downside of broadcast religion is that it tends to sidestep the difficult "who, exactly, is my neighbour, and who isn't?" question.

    And that leads fairly smoothly to the consequences we are currently seeing Stateside.

    (Much more likely is that using polling to identify small percentages is blooming difficult. And that calculating a change by subtracting one blurry number from another is a mug's game.)
    If it is at least part of what's going on then it will be because English-language social media is dominated by Americans.
    People adopting Christianity as a badge of political identity, without being regular attendees, is quite believable.
    Quite a lot of people say they are Christian but would never bother to attend church - except for weddings and maybe baptism.
  • turbotubbsturbotubbs Posts: 19,412

    Pope gone...

    Another one! That was a short reign
    Way too late - at least three posters did that hours ago…
    But I have air conditioning where I am…
    It’s about 22 deg C here. No need for air con.
  • StillWatersStillWaters Posts: 10,311

    Sean_F said:

    Wasn't there research that said the most pro-Trump demographic was people who identified as regular churchgoers who rarely went to church?

    If the polling Leon has found identifies a growth of such identity, or Potemkin, Christians in Britain, then it could be very politically significant.

    That's certainly one way to square the circle, though an alarming one if it is what's going on. We don't have the same televangelist culture in the UK as in the US, and that's a very good thing. The massive downside of broadcast religion is that it tends to sidestep the difficult "who, exactly, is my neighbour, and who isn't?" question.

    And that leads fairly smoothly to the consequences we are currently seeing Stateside.

    (Much more likely is that using polling to identify small percentages is blooming difficult. And that calculating a change by subtracting one blurry number from another is a mug's game.)
    If it is at least part of what's going on then it will be because English-language social media is dominated by Americans.
    People adopting Christianity as a badge of political identity, without being regular attendees, is quite believable.
    Quite a lot of people say they are Christian but would never bother to attend church - except for weddings and maybe baptism.
    My father used to remind me that someone who goes to church every Christmas and Easter is a regular churchgoer…
  • AugustusCarp2AugustusCarp2 Posts: 376

    Sean_F said:

    Wasn't there research that said the most pro-Trump demographic was people who identified as regular churchgoers who rarely went to church?

    If the polling Leon has found identifies a growth of such identity, or Potemkin, Christians in Britain, then it could be very politically significant.

    That's certainly one way to square the circle, though an alarming one if it is what's going on. We don't have the same televangelist culture in the UK as in the US, and that's a very good thing. The massive downside of broadcast religion is that it tends to sidestep the difficult "who, exactly, is my neighbour, and who isn't?" question.

    And that leads fairly smoothly to the consequences we are currently seeing Stateside.

    (Much more likely is that using polling to identify small percentages is blooming difficult. And that calculating a change by subtracting one blurry number from another is a mug's game.)
    If it is at least part of what's going on then it will be because English-language social media is dominated by Americans.
    People adopting Christianity as a badge of political identity, without being regular attendees, is quite believable.
    Quite a lot of people say they are Christian but would never bother to attend church - except for weddings and maybe baptism.
    ....and for getting their children into a (perceived to be) better school.
  • StillWatersStillWaters Posts: 10,311

    Pope gone...

    Another one! That was a short reign
    Way too late - at least three posters did that hours ago…
    But I have air conditioning where I am…
    It’s about 22 deg C here. No need for air con.
    At 7pm that’s pretty hot. And London is worse
  • wooliedyedwooliedyed Posts: 12,446
    edited July 6
    stodge said:

    stodge said:

    Evening all :)

    A promotional piece in the Telegraph this morning for Laila Cunningham who defected from the Conservatives to Reform on Westminster Council. Perhaps the Telegraph think she would be a better London Mayoral candidate for Reform than Ant Middleton - she probably would.

    The big question remains whether Sadiq Khan will stand again - if he chooses not to, the Labour canddiate could well be Mete Coban but we're a very long way from that at the moment.

    I think Reform have disavowed Middletons candidacy due to his Tommy R support
    Still being quoted on the betting markets - no price yet for Cunningham who could yet be the Reform candidate.

    We'll know in the locals next year the extent to which Reform has strong popular support across London. The Fulham Town by election didn't augur well but I've no idea how much (if any) effort Reform put in.

    There's a by election on July 24th in the Bromley Common & Holwood Ward of Bromley Council which might be more informative. The vote split in 2022 was : Conservative 47%, Labour 30%, LD 16%, Green 6% so Reform have to win this from a standing start.
    Bromley in theory should be more fertile, East side of London and non central. The MiC mrp has Reform picking up Bromley, Orpington and Old Bexley (but weirdly the Tories gaining Bexleyheath and Crayford)
    From 47% in 2022 and without LD in second with Labour fading in the capital id just about back a hold on mid to high 30s but if Reform take it Id assume the Tories East Side of London seats (Croydon aside) might be goners
  • wooliedyedwooliedyed Posts: 12,446

    Sean_F said:

    Wasn't there research that said the most pro-Trump demographic was people who identified as regular churchgoers who rarely went to church?

    If the polling Leon has found identifies a growth of such identity, or Potemkin, Christians in Britain, then it could be very politically significant.

    That's certainly one way to square the circle, though an alarming one if it is what's going on. We don't have the same televangelist culture in the UK as in the US, and that's a very good thing. The massive downside of broadcast religion is that it tends to sidestep the difficult "who, exactly, is my neighbour, and who isn't?" question.

    And that leads fairly smoothly to the consequences we are currently seeing Stateside.

    (Much more likely is that using polling to identify small percentages is blooming difficult. And that calculating a change by subtracting one blurry number from another is a mug's game.)
    If it is at least part of what's going on then it will be because English-language social media is dominated by Americans.
    People adopting Christianity as a badge of political identity, without being regular attendees, is quite believable.
    Quite a lot of people say they are Christian but would never bother to attend church - except for weddings and maybe baptism.
    My father used to remind me that someone who goes to church every Christmas and Easter is a regular churchgoer…
    Like 'regulars' in the pub who show up for one pint at 12 every Christmas Day and think they keep your business afloat
  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 32,725
    IanB2 said:

    Finland looking the stronger team in the second half so far

    Is this the Women's Euros or WWIII?
  • EabhalEabhal Posts: 11,195
    edited July 6
    MaxPB said:

    Foxy said:

    Monkeys said:

    Phil said:

    MaxPB said:

    IanB2 said:

    Taz said:

    MaxPB said:

    Cyclefree said:

    Cyclefree said:

    MaxPB said:

    Battlebus said:

    MaxPB said:

    It's time to outline £100bn in spending cuts and tax rises, split 75% towards spending cuts with the majority coming from welfare and entitlements. If the government doesn't do this and continues to borrow like a drunken sailor we're heading for a bond vigilante strike and another bout of QE which will push inflation up and destroy people's disposable incomes.

    The only way out is to cut welfare spending and get people back into work. We can't afford to pay the lazy to sit at home doing nothing on benefits.

    'Benefits' according to the OBR are £150bn on Pensioners; £88bn on UC; and £74bn on other benefits. Where would you axe to get the £100bn?

    Should we get pensioners back into work?
    £20bn each out of UC and "other" benefits.

    Cut the triple lock entirely.

    £20bn out of the state pension by tapering above £40k, spend half of the saving on increasing the state pension for those who don't have any or significant private income in retirement.

    NI payable on all income types/merge NI and income tax.

    50% haircut on defined benefit public sector pensions for amounts over £40k (so a £60k DB pension becomes £50k).

    Freeze thresholds for a further 3 years.

    Cut at least 500k public sector jobs within two years, ban use of agency staff and severely limit the use of consultants and contractors. Use half of those savings to offer competitive salaries for technical roles.

    I think that would probably make a £100bn worth of closing the deficit, the resulting fall in bond yields and inflation would probably add another £20bn saving per year on the interest bill.
    And means test the NHS for the wealthy
    Define wealthy.

    Otherwise people like me will either die because they can't afford treatment (and I am already at high risk of early death because of the NHS's failures to spot stages 1, 2 or 3 of my cancer) - and I can't - or be bankrupted and made homeless.

    As for the state pension, it gets taxed if the pensioner has other income.

    One of the reasons for the deficit is the amount spent on furlough during Covid - money largely spent on those in jobs and to keep them in jobs. It was about £140 billion. They too should contribute.

    - 1p on income tax.
    - Extend VAT to food, books/newspapers & children's clothes.
    - NI for everyone who works.
    - Limit or abolish tax relief for those giving to charity and place an upper limit on the tax saved by those contributing to charity whether alive or after death.
    - Limit tax relief for pension contributions to the basic rate.
    - Extend VAT on education to all education providers, including universities.
    - Freeze thresholds.
    - Place a limit on public sector pay increases (the amount shovelled at train drivers by Reeves never gets mentioned here but it was a stupid move).
    - Abolish the WFA and other pension-specific benefits. Aim for the state pension to be the same as the tax free income as and when we can afford it.
    - Abolish the triple lock.
    - Those with assets should contribute something towards social care.
    - Introduce council tax bands for higher value houses.
    - Increase or widen the charges for council services beyond the basic.
    - Ensure that overseas visitors pay for the NHS. Other countries manage this. So can we.
    - Limit tax relief for private equity companies loading companies up with debt, taking dividends and asset stripping. (Thames Water and other companies in a similar position should be allowed to go bust and then nationalised for a £. Too often asset stripping has been presented as overseas investment. It is a gigantic con.)

    And so on.

    There is a nasty streak among some of the commentary on here. Everyone seems to want others to pay taxes and those who work on here seem to think that they should be exempt from any measures to help pay down the deficit, thinking it must all be done by the poor and the old. It also gives the impression that some welcome AD because they will be able to pressure the old and sick into killing themselves to save money or withhold treatment so that they suffer. It is disgustingly frankly. I am surprised to see @Big_G_NorthWales among their number
    Can I just say that wealthy to me include celebrities and multi millionaires who can contribute to the NHS

    As far as your list is concerned I agree with each and every one and it needs a government to accept we cannot continue borrowing, spending and taxing and think the unthinkable

    I want the NHS available to all but those with the broadest shoulders should contribute as indeed should the pension be reviewed as to just who should receive this very expensive benefit
    They do contribute - as indeed have I - through taxes. In my case for decades. But there is no justification for denying the NHS to people who are seriously or terminally ill. You are advocating for a US style system which will harm the sick. I am one of their number and I think it disgusting that you should wish to deprive me of the NHS when I need it most. You do not define what wealthy means - name a figure and let's see what this actually means.
    Indeed, means testing the NHS and barring the wealthy just seems like an odd and very mean spirited thing to do. From a practical sense I doubt it would save very much money given that the "wealthy" that BigG mentions are likely to have private health insurance and it breaks the idea that all British citizens/residents get treated equally by the health service, rich and poor alike get the same (sometimes not very good, sometimes excellent) treatment.

    The comment about those with the broadest shoulders contributing is also very off colour for BigG, I think he's been watching too much Jez on Tiktok or something. At my peak earnings a few years ago my net rate of tax was 43% and I paid well into six figures per year in tax, to suggest that the "wealthy" don't already make a huge contribution is factually incorrect. Indeed it is this anti-wealth attitude among those who call themselves conservative that resulted in the previous government just ceding the subject of wealth creation to the left.
    No one ever suggests giving a tax rebate/benefit to anyone who has private health insurance which helps take the pressure off our sainted NHS.
    Generally the choke point is the same pool of consultants and specialists that you have to see, before (and often during) getting private treatment that also give a proportion of their time to the NHS, with the private patients essentially paying to jump the queue. If there was incentive for a significant batch of people to switch to private, either private waiting times would increase dramatically, or consultants would do more private work and less NHS, making the NHS position worse.

    The governments approach of using the over capacity in the private sector to deal with the NHS backlog is the more sensible one. Continuing what the Tories were doing before.
    The absurd rationing of testing continues.

    I know more and more people who pay private facilities to get MRIs etc. XRays seem to be easier in the NHS system.

    Early detection of problems is cheaper.
    Indeed, my dad just had this issue (hence my suggestion in the previous comment). He has had a knee problem for about 15 years, it's suddenly got a lot worse so he went to see the doctor. Long story short, after about 6 months of hearing nothing back from the NHS on getting a scan he went private and got a scan done - they said his right knee is basically completely deteriorated and he needs surgery.

    He wanted to make sure that this was necessary so he arranged finally got an appointment with the NHS specialist a few months down the road who looked at the scan and said words to the effect of "we wouldn't recommend surgery at this stage because the degradation doesn't meet our requirements for it, basically you can still walk around for up to a mile or so before it starts really hurting". He then asked if he could go private would that advice change and the specialist said "yes, get this done ASAP because it will seriously improve your life quality and in 10 years when this gets to the point where the NHS will consider it degraded enough to operate you may not be eligible due to age and poor likelihood of recovery". It's a completely mental situation. They're knowingly saying no/delaying huge life improving surgery to people knowing that 10 years down the road it will cause huge issues for these people, well at least for those people who can't afford to go private.

    This is the kind of stuff that I really think is low hanging fruit for the NHS, cheap preventative care today reduces our future liability by huge amounts and that's where I would be looking for gains. They may not show immediately but in 2-3 years there would be a noticeable drop in resource demand.
    Our youngest had an ingrown toenail a couple of years ago. After going through the initial stages of treatment with our NHS GP (which consisted understandably of “give it a couple of weeks to see if it sorts itself out”) the GP referred him to get it looked at by a specialist. By the time the letter from the specialist dept had arrived to tell us we had been booked for an initial appointment another four months later we had already given up on the NHS & taken him to a private specialist who had diagnosed it as needing surgery & carried that surgery out that week - removing an impressively large chunk of toenail that had grown off sideways into the depths of his big toe in the process!

    The specialist said the likely time from initial diagnostic appointment to actual surgery on the NHS was between 9-12 months in his experience.

    The NHS is just broken for ordinary people it seems. If you fit into one of the “pathways” (cancer, stroke, heart disease) then you get treated in a timely fashion (most of the time), but those are mostly the diseases of old people. For the young, the NHS is a failure that pretends to treat them & then keeps them dangling with the hope of treatment that might manifest itself sometime, maybe.

    We need to get back to the idea that the NHS sees getting working age people back into work as quickly as reasonably possible a priority.
    I know of people waiting over two years to get access to CAMHS in Edinburgh.
    And we wonder why PIP for youngsters with mental health issues is on the rise.
    Because they're mentally weak and chronically on social media. Take away the phones and social media and the mental health problems go away.
    Phones and social media have been around for ages, and older people are on them quite a bit too, particularly the boomerslop of Facebook. I think this is the new version of the video games = school shootings nonsense. Maybe tiktok is a particular issue, but I'm not convinced.

    The big change was COVID, eyeballing the graphs. All the indicators are dreadful, from school truancy to social services referrals to petty crime. What's scary is the current generation of the PIP claimants among young people aren't even the worst affected, being in their teens or older in 2020. It's going to even worse in 8-10 years time.

    (I make my regular point that it's still older people and physical sickness that make up the vast majority of the caseload, even if the onflow distribution has changed since COVID).
  • eekeek Posts: 30,565

    Sean_F said:

    Wasn't there research that said the most pro-Trump demographic was people who identified as regular churchgoers who rarely went to church?

    If the polling Leon has found identifies a growth of such identity, or Potemkin, Christians in Britain, then it could be very politically significant.

    That's certainly one way to square the circle, though an alarming one if it is what's going on. We don't have the same televangelist culture in the UK as in the US, and that's a very good thing. The massive downside of broadcast religion is that it tends to sidestep the difficult "who, exactly, is my neighbour, and who isn't?" question.

    And that leads fairly smoothly to the consequences we are currently seeing Stateside.

    (Much more likely is that using polling to identify small percentages is blooming difficult. And that calculating a change by subtracting one blurry number from another is a mug's game.)
    If it is at least part of what's going on then it will be because English-language social media is dominated by Americans.
    People adopting Christianity as a badge of political identity, without being regular attendees, is quite believable.
    Quite a lot of people say they are Christian but would never bother to attend church - except for weddings and maybe baptism.
    My father used to remind me that someone who goes to church every Christmas and Easter is a regular churchgoer…
    Like 'regulars' in the pub who show up for one pint at 12 every Christmas Day and think they keep your business afloat
    You could go once every 4 years on Feb 29th and you would be regularly attending.

    In any business I own I want frequent customers...
  • wooliedyedwooliedyed Posts: 12,446
    eek said:

    Sean_F said:

    Wasn't there research that said the most pro-Trump demographic was people who identified as regular churchgoers who rarely went to church?

    If the polling Leon has found identifies a growth of such identity, or Potemkin, Christians in Britain, then it could be very politically significant.

    That's certainly one way to square the circle, though an alarming one if it is what's going on. We don't have the same televangelist culture in the UK as in the US, and that's a very good thing. The massive downside of broadcast religion is that it tends to sidestep the difficult "who, exactly, is my neighbour, and who isn't?" question.

    And that leads fairly smoothly to the consequences we are currently seeing Stateside.

    (Much more likely is that using polling to identify small percentages is blooming difficult. And that calculating a change by subtracting one blurry number from another is a mug's game.)
    If it is at least part of what's going on then it will be because English-language social media is dominated by Americans.
    People adopting Christianity as a badge of political identity, without being regular attendees, is quite believable.
    Quite a lot of people say they are Christian but would never bother to attend church - except for weddings and maybe baptism.
    My father used to remind me that someone who goes to church every Christmas and Easter is a regular churchgoer…
    Like 'regulars' in the pub who show up for one pint at 12 every Christmas Day and think they keep your business afloat
    You could go once every 4 years on Feb 29th and you would be regularly attending.

    In any business I own I want frequent customers...
    Indeed. Frequent and thirsty if a pub. Frequent, thirsty and docile. Rarely the third unfortunately
  • turbotubbsturbotubbs Posts: 19,412
    MaxPB said:

    DavidL said:

    Monkeys said:

    Phil said:

    MaxPB said:

    IanB2 said:

    Taz said:

    MaxPB said:

    Cyclefree said:

    Cyclefree said:

    MaxPB said:

    Battlebus said:

    MaxPB said:

    It's time to outline £100bn in spending cuts and tax rises, split 75% towards spending cuts with the majority coming from welfare and entitlements. If the government doesn't do this and continues to borrow like a drunken sailor we're heading for a bond vigilante strike and another bout of QE which will push inflation up and destroy people's disposable incomes.

    The only way out is to cut welfare spending and get people back into work. We can't afford to pay the lazy to sit at home doing nothing on benefits.

    'Benefits' according to the OBR are £150bn on Pensioners; £88bn on UC; and £74bn on other benefits. Where would you axe to get the £100bn?

    Should we get pensioners back into work?
    £20bn each out of UC and "other" benefits.

    Cut the triple lock entirely.

    £20bn out of the state pension by tapering above £40k, spend half of the saving on increasing the state pension for those who don't have any or significant private income in retirement.

    NI payable on all income types/merge NI and income tax.

    50% haircut on defined benefit public sector pensions for amounts over £40k (so a £60k DB pension becomes £50k).

    Freeze thresholds for a further 3 years.

    Cut at least 500k public sector jobs within two years, ban use of agency staff and severely limit the use of consultants and contractors. Use half of those savings to offer competitive salaries for technical roles.

    I think that would probably make a £100bn worth of closing the deficit, the resulting fall in bond yields and inflation would probably add another £20bn saving per year on the interest bill.
    And means test the NHS for the wealthy
    Define wealthy.

    Otherwise people like me will either die because they can't afford treatment (and I am already at high risk of early death because of the NHS's failures to spot stages 1, 2 or 3 of my cancer) - and I can't - or be bankrupted and made homeless.

    As for the state pension, it gets taxed if the pensioner has other income.

    One of the reasons for the deficit is the amount spent on furlough during Covid - money largely spent on those in jobs and to keep them in jobs. It was about £140 billion. They too should contribute.

    - 1p on income tax.
    - Extend VAT to food, books/newspapers & children's clothes.
    - NI for everyone who works.
    - Limit or abolish tax relief for those giving to charity and place an upper limit on the tax saved by those contributing to charity whether alive or after death.
    - Limit tax relief for pension contributions to the basic rate.
    - Extend VAT on education to all education providers, including universities.
    - Freeze thresholds.
    - Place a limit on public sector pay increases (the amount shovelled at train drivers by Reeves never gets mentioned here but it was a stupid move).
    - Abolish the WFA and other pension-specific benefits. Aim for the state pension to be the same as the tax free income as and when we can afford it.
    - Abolish the triple lock.
    - Those with assets should contribute something towards social care.
    - Introduce council tax bands for higher value houses.
    - Increase or widen the charges for council services beyond the basic.
    - Ensure that overseas visitors pay for the NHS. Other countries manage this. So can we.
    - Limit tax relief for private equity companies loading companies up with debt, taking dividends and asset stripping. (Thames Water and other companies in a similar position should be allowed to go bust and then nationalised for a £. Too often asset stripping has been presented as overseas investment. It is a gigantic con.)

    And so on.

    There is a nasty streak among some of the commentary on here. Everyone seems to want others to pay taxes and those who work on here seem to think that they should be exempt from any measures to help pay down the deficit, thinking it must all be done by the poor and the old. It also gives the impression that some welcome AD because they will be able to pressure the old and sick into killing themselves to save money or withhold treatment so that they suffer. It is disgustingly frankly. I am surprised to see @Big_G_NorthWales among their number
    Can I just say that wealthy to me include celebrities and multi millionaires who can contribute to the NHS

    As far as your list is concerned I agree with each and every one and it needs a government to accept we cannot continue borrowing, spending and taxing and think the unthinkable

    I want the NHS available to all but those with the broadest shoulders should contribute as indeed should the pension be reviewed as to just who should receive this very expensive benefit
    They do contribute - as indeed have I - through taxes. In my case for decades. But there is no justification for denying the NHS to people who are seriously or terminally ill. You are advocating for a US style system which will harm the sick. I am one of their number and I think it disgusting that you should wish to deprive me of the NHS when I need it most. You do not define what wealthy means - name a figure and let's see what this actually means.
    Indeed, means testing the NHS and barring the wealthy just seems like an odd and very mean spirited thing to do. From a practical sense I doubt it would save very much money given that the "wealthy" that BigG mentions are likely to have private health insurance and it breaks the idea that all British citizens/residents get treated equally by the health service, rich and poor alike get the same (sometimes not very good, sometimes excellent) treatment.

    The comment about those with the broadest shoulders contributing is also very off colour for BigG, I think he's been watching too much Jez on Tiktok or something. At my peak earnings a few years ago my net rate of tax was 43% and I paid well into six figures per year in tax, to suggest that the "wealthy" don't already make a huge contribution is factually incorrect. Indeed it is this anti-wealth attitude among those who call themselves conservative that resulted in the previous government just ceding the subject of wealth creation to the left.
    No one ever suggests giving a tax rebate/benefit to anyone who has private health insurance which helps take the pressure off our sainted NHS.
    Generally the choke point is the same pool of consultants and specialists that you have to see, before (and often during) getting private treatment that also give a proportion of their time to the NHS, with the private patients essentially paying to jump the queue. If there was incentive for a significant batch of people to switch to private, either private waiting times would increase dramatically, or consultants would do more private work and less NHS, making the NHS position worse.

    The governments approach of using the over capacity in the private sector to deal with the NHS backlog is the more sensible one. Continuing what the Tories were doing before.
    The absurd rationing of testing continues.

    I know more and more people who pay private facilities to get MRIs etc. XRays seem to be easier in the NHS system.

    Early detection of problems is cheaper.
    Indeed, my dad just had this issue (hence my suggestion in the previous comment). He has had a knee problem for about 15 years, it's suddenly got a lot worse so he went to see the doctor. Long story short, after about 6 months of hearing nothing back from the NHS on getting a scan he went private and got a scan done - they said his right knee is basically completely deteriorated and he needs surgery.

    He wanted to make sure that this was necessary so he arranged finally got an appointment with the NHS specialist a few months down the road who looked at the scan and said words to the effect of "we wouldn't recommend surgery at this stage because the degradation doesn't meet our requirements for it, basically you can still walk around for up to a mile or so before it starts really hurting". He then asked if he could go private would that advice change and the specialist said "yes, get this done ASAP because it will seriously improve your life quality and in 10 years when this gets to the point where the NHS will consider it degraded enough to operate you may not be eligible due to age and poor likelihood of recovery". It's a completely mental situation. They're knowingly saying no/delaying huge life improving surgery to people knowing that 10 years down the road it will cause huge issues for these people, well at least for those people who can't afford to go private.

    This is the kind of stuff that I really think is low hanging fruit for the NHS, cheap preventative care today reduces our future liability by huge amounts and that's where I would be looking for gains. They may not show immediately but in 2-3 years there would be a noticeable drop in resource demand.
    Our youngest had an ingrown toenail a couple of years ago. After going through the initial stages of treatment with our NHS GP (which consisted understandably of “give it a couple of weeks to see if it sorts itself out”) the GP referred him to get it looked at by a specialist. By the time the letter from the specialist dept had arrived to tell us we had been booked for an initial appointment another four months later we had already given up on the NHS & taken him to a private specialist who had diagnosed it as needing surgery & carried that surgery out that week - removing an impressively large chunk of toenail that had grown off sideways into the depths of his big toe in the process!

    The specialist said the likely time from initial diagnostic appointment to actual surgery on the NHS was between 9-12 months in his experience.

    The NHS is just broken for ordinary people it seems. If you fit into one of the “pathways” (cancer, stroke, heart disease) then you get treated in a timely fashion (most of the time), but those are mostly the diseases of old people. For the young, the NHS is a failure that pretends to treat them & then keeps them dangling with the hope of treatment that might manifest itself sometime, maybe.

    We need to get back to the idea that the NHS sees getting working age people back into work as quickly as reasonably possible a priority.
    I know of people waiting over two years to get access to CAMHS in Edinburgh.
    Two years is quick, for most.
    The rape case I did last week involved a young woman whose legal guardian claimed had a mental age of 6. She was in residential care but had freedom of movement. She was raped and enormously distressed. Medical evidence said, remarkably, that she understood enough about sex to consent or withhold her consent.

    Her guardian contacted Social work the night it happened who did ...nothing. When the guardian got back from her holiday she took her to the police but it was too late to get medical support for the claim. The man was convicted by the evidence of the distress and what was said to the guardian hours after the assault. It was close, a majority verdict.

    The lack of care of such an obviously vulnerable young woman frankly made me incandescent. So many jobsworths are paid to look after people and just don't give a damn. This case involved an indigenous Scot but it demonstrated all so clearly how the victims we are not supposed to talk about get taken advantage of.

    We are spending a fortune on these services. We are not getting results.

    That's absolutely shocking and glad the jury came back with the correct decision, even by majority verdict. These are the kinds of cases why people like me suggest that burning it all down and starting again can't be worse than what we have now. People are being failed by the state at an alarming rate, whether that's cases like these which are absolutely awful, the NHS in lots of areas, the police are failing the public at large on crime, the judiciary are failing the public in deportations, politicians are failing us on all fronts.

    The UK is getting closer and closer to becoming a failed state so maybe some tough medicine is what the state needs, not more of the same.
    I have recently started ‘Who dares, win’ by Dominic Sandbrook on the early Thatcher years. The opening chapters have laid bare the state of the nation in 1979 and the radical approach that Thatchers government took, including the realisation that there would be pain for some but it would be worth it in the end.*

    There is no sense that any political party is prepared to undertake policies that might have short term pain for long term gain. Take Labour. They wanted to slash WFA soeniding and failed to hold their nerve. And again on PIP. I am not commenting on the right or wrong of either more the lack of political guts to suffer even a tiny bit of kick back from policy.

    We have to start living more within our means. Increase tax, reduce spending and find a way to economic growth. And we need to accept that it will hurt for some. No one wants to punish people unfortunate to be unable to work or look after themselves. But we risk being taken for mugs when ‘feeling a bit sad sometimes’ elicits money for free.

    Someone in the room needs to tell the country hard truths. And it’s about time we listened to them. The party is over, now it’s time to pay the bills and tidy up.

    *Opinion is divided on this.
  • JohnLilburneJohnLilburne Posts: 6,840

    Sean_F said:

    Wasn't there research that said the most pro-Trump demographic was people who identified as regular churchgoers who rarely went to church?

    If the polling Leon has found identifies a growth of such identity, or Potemkin, Christians in Britain, then it could be very politically significant.

    That's certainly one way to square the circle, though an alarming one if it is what's going on. We don't have the same televangelist culture in the UK as in the US, and that's a very good thing. The massive downside of broadcast religion is that it tends to sidestep the difficult "who, exactly, is my neighbour, and who isn't?" question.

    And that leads fairly smoothly to the consequences we are currently seeing Stateside.

    (Much more likely is that using polling to identify small percentages is blooming difficult. And that calculating a change by subtracting one blurry number from another is a mug's game.)
    If it is at least part of what's going on then it will be because English-language social media is dominated by Americans.
    People adopting Christianity as a badge of political identity, without being regular attendees, is quite believable.
    Quite a lot of people say they are Christian but would never bother to attend church - except for weddings and maybe baptism.
    My father used to remind me that someone who goes to church every Christmas and Easter is a regular churchgoer…
    Like 'regulars' in the pub who show up for one pint at 12 every Christmas Day and think they keep your business afloat
    That's what regular means, at fixed intervals. Someone who goes in every Christmas Eve is regular, someone who goes in at random 2 or 3 times a month, isn't.
  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 32,725
    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    Strange how panicked & alarmed PB is, by the mere possibility Christianity might see a revival

    Also very telling

    Anecdotally, I see some truth in this. At my daughter’s uni (St Andrew’s) “going to church” is oddly fashionable. The same way taking smack was cool in my time

    I suspect the taking smack bit was your circle rather than your peers in general. I am about your age and my circles irrespective of location were not smackheads. I even had a group of friends at UCL, and none of them were mainlining the naughty stuff.

    I suspect currently going to church is similarly niche.
    Well, religion is the opiate of the masses.
    That deserves far more than the current three "likes".

    Come on PB, quality comedy posts should be acknowledged.
  • EabhalEabhal Posts: 11,195

    Wasn't there research that said the most pro-Trump demographic was people who identified as regular churchgoers who rarely went to church?

    If the polling Leon has found identifies a growth of such identity, or Potemkin, Christians in Britain, then it could be very politically significant.

    Fascinating. Some great posts on PB this evening.
  • TheuniondivvieTheuniondivvie Posts: 44,223
    edited July 6
    rcs1000 said:

    Leon said:

    Strange how panicked & alarmed PB is, by the mere possibility Christianity might see a revival

    Also very telling

    Anecdotally, I see some truth in this. At my daughter’s uni (St Andrew’s) “going to church” is oddly fashionable. The same way taking smack was cool in my time

    I suspect the taking smack bit was your circle rather than your peers in general. I am about your age and my circles irrespective of location were not smackheads. I even had a group of friends at UCL, and none of them were mainlining the naughty stuff.

    I suspect currently going to church is similarly niche.
    Well, religion is the opiate of the masses.
    Pedantry forces me to point out that the quote is actually religion ‘is the opium of the people’. I’m sure Young L**n would have taken any old shit whatever it was called though. Plus ça change.
  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 32,725
    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Strange how panicked & alarmed PB is, by the mere possibility Christianity might see a revival

    Also very telling

    Anecdotally, I see some truth in this. At my daughter’s uni (St Andrew’s) “going to church” is oddly fashionable. The same way taking smack was cool in my time

    I suspect the taking smack bit was your circle rather than your peers in general. I am about your age and my circles irrespective of location were not smackheads. I even had a group of friends at UCL, and none of them were mainlining the naughty stuff.

    I suspect currently going to church is similarly niche.
    Nobody at UCL would have socialised with a boring sap like you. So this is just a painful suite of lies
    I can give you names and addresses, however as they were interesting top class stars they wouldn't have noticed you and your sad little bunch of Edgelords, rolling spliffs and making your halves of Carling last all night.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 79,020
    MaxPB said:

    DavidL said:

    Monkeys said:

    Phil said:

    MaxPB said:

    IanB2 said:

    Taz said:

    MaxPB said:

    Cyclefree said:

    Cyclefree said:

    MaxPB said:

    Battlebus said:

    MaxPB said:

    It's time to outline £100bn in spending cuts and tax rises, split 75% towards spending cuts with the majority coming from welfare and entitlements. If the government doesn't do this and continues to borrow like a drunken sailor we're heading for a bond vigilante strike and another bout of QE which will push inflation up and destroy people's disposable incomes.

    The only way out is to cut welfare spending and get people back into work. We can't afford to pay the lazy to sit at home doing nothing on benefits.

    'Benefits' according to the OBR are £150bn on Pensioners; £88bn on UC; and £74bn on other benefits. Where would you axe to get the £100bn?

    Should we get pensioners back into work?
    £20bn each out of UC and "other" benefits.

    Cut the triple lock entirely.

    £20bn out of the state pension by tapering above £40k, spend half of the saving on increasing the state pension for those who don't have any or significant private income in retirement.

    NI payable on all income types/merge NI and income tax.

    50% haircut on defined benefit public sector pensions for amounts over £40k (so a £60k DB pension becomes £50k).

    Freeze thresholds for a further 3 years.

    Cut at least 500k public sector jobs within two years, ban use of agency staff and severely limit the use of consultants and contractors. Use half of those savings to offer competitive salaries for technical roles.

    I think that would probably make a £100bn worth of closing the deficit, the resulting fall in bond yields and inflation would probably add another £20bn saving per year on the interest bill.
    And means test the NHS for the wealthy
    Define wealthy.

    Otherwise people like me will either die because they can't afford treatment (and I am already at high risk of early death because of the NHS's failures to spot stages 1, 2 or 3 of my cancer) - and I can't - or be bankrupted and made homeless.

    As for the state pension, it gets taxed if the pensioner has other income.

    One of the reasons for the deficit is the amount spent on furlough during Covid - money largely spent on those in jobs and to keep them in jobs. It was about £140 billion. They too should contribute.

    - 1p on income tax.
    - Extend VAT to food, books/newspapers & children's clothes.
    - NI for everyone who works.
    - Limit or abolish tax relief for those giving to charity and place an upper limit on the tax saved by those contributing to charity whether alive or after death.
    - Limit tax relief for pension contributions to the basic rate.
    - Extend VAT on education to all education providers, including universities.
    - Freeze thresholds.
    - Place a limit on public sector pay increases (the amount shovelled at train drivers by Reeves never gets mentioned here but it was a stupid move).
    - Abolish the WFA and other pension-specific benefits. Aim for the state pension to be the same as the tax free income as and when we can afford it.
    - Abolish the triple lock.
    - Those with assets should contribute something towards social care.
    - Introduce council tax bands for higher value houses.
    - Increase or widen the charges for council services beyond the basic.
    - Ensure that overseas visitors pay for the NHS. Other countries manage this. So can we.
    - Limit tax relief for private equity companies loading companies up with debt, taking dividends and asset stripping. (Thames Water and other companies in a similar position should be allowed to go bust and then nationalised for a £. Too often asset stripping has been presented as overseas investment. It is a gigantic con.)

    And so on.

    There is a nasty streak among some of the commentary on here. Everyone seems to want others to pay taxes and those who work on here seem to think that they should be exempt from any measures to help pay down the deficit, thinking it must all be done by the poor and the old. It also gives the impression that some welcome AD because they will be able to pressure the old and sick into killing themselves to save money or withhold treatment so that they suffer. It is disgustingly frankly. I am surprised to see @Big_G_NorthWales among their number
    Can I just say that wealthy to me include celebrities and multi millionaires who can contribute to the NHS

    As far as your list is concerned I agree with each and every one and it needs a government to accept we cannot continue borrowing, spending and taxing and think the unthinkable

    I want the NHS available to all but those with the broadest shoulders should contribute as indeed should the pension be reviewed as to just who should receive this very expensive benefit
    They do contribute - as indeed have I - through taxes. In my case for decades. But there is no justification for denying the NHS to people who are seriously or terminally ill. You are advocating for a US style system which will harm the sick. I am one of their number and I think it disgusting that you should wish to deprive me of the NHS when I need it most. You do not define what wealthy means - name a figure and let's see what this actually means.
    Indeed, means testing the NHS and barring the wealthy just seems like an odd and very mean spirited thing to do. From a practical sense I doubt it would save very much money given that the "wealthy" that BigG mentions are likely to have private health insurance and it breaks the idea that all British citizens/residents get treated equally by the health service, rich and poor alike get the same (sometimes not very good, sometimes excellent) treatment.

    The comment about those with the broadest shoulders contributing is also very off colour for BigG, I think he's been watching too much Jez on Tiktok or something. At my peak earnings a few years ago my net rate of tax was 43% and I paid well into six figures per year in tax, to suggest that the "wealthy" don't already make a huge contribution is factually incorrect. Indeed it is this anti-wealth attitude among those who call themselves conservative that resulted in the previous government just ceding the subject of wealth creation to the left.
    No one ever suggests giving a tax rebate/benefit to anyone who has private health insurance which helps take the pressure off our sainted NHS.
    Generally the choke point is the same pool of consultants and specialists that you have to see, before (and often during) getting private treatment that also give a proportion of their time to the NHS, with the private patients essentially paying to jump the queue. If there was incentive for a significant batch of people to switch to private, either private waiting times would increase dramatically, or consultants would do more private work and less NHS, making the NHS position worse.

    The governments approach of using the over capacity in the private sector to deal with the NHS backlog is the more sensible one. Continuing what the Tories were doing before.
    The absurd rationing of testing continues.

    I know more and more people who pay private facilities to get MRIs etc. XRays seem to be easier in the NHS system.

    Early detection of problems is cheaper.
    Indeed, my dad just had this issue (hence my suggestion in the previous comment). He has had a knee problem for about 15 years, it's suddenly got a lot worse so he went to see the doctor. Long story short, after about 6 months of hearing nothing back from the NHS on getting a scan he went private and got a scan done - they said his right knee is basically completely deteriorated and he needs surgery.

    He wanted to make sure that this was necessary so he arranged finally got an appointment with the NHS specialist a few months down the road who looked at the scan and said words to the effect of "we wouldn't recommend surgery at this stage because the degradation doesn't meet our requirements for it, basically you can still walk around for up to a mile or so before it starts really hurting". He then asked if he could go private would that advice change and the specialist said "yes, get this done ASAP because it will seriously improve your life quality and in 10 years when this gets to the point where the NHS will consider it degraded enough to operate you may not be eligible due to age and poor likelihood of recovery". It's a completely mental situation. They're knowingly saying no/delaying huge life improving surgery to people knowing that 10 years down the road it will cause huge issues for these people, well at least for those people who can't afford to go private.

    This is the kind of stuff that I really think is low hanging fruit for the NHS, cheap preventative care today reduces our future liability by huge amounts and that's where I would be looking for gains. They may not show immediately but in 2-3 years there would be a noticeable drop in resource demand.
    Our youngest had an ingrown toenail a couple of years ago. After going through the initial stages of treatment with our NHS GP (which consisted understandably of “give it a couple of weeks to see if it sorts itself out”) the GP referred him to get it looked at by a specialist. By the time the letter from the specialist dept had arrived to tell us we had been booked for an initial appointment another four months later we had already given up on the NHS & taken him to a private specialist who had diagnosed it as needing surgery & carried that surgery out that week - removing an impressively large chunk of toenail that had grown off sideways into the depths of his big toe in the process!

    The specialist said the likely time from initial diagnostic appointment to actual surgery on the NHS was between 9-12 months in his experience.

    The NHS is just broken for ordinary people it seems. If you fit into one of the “pathways” (cancer, stroke, heart disease) then you get treated in a timely fashion (most of the time), but those are mostly the diseases of old people. For the young, the NHS is a failure that pretends to treat them & then keeps them dangling with the hope of treatment that might manifest itself sometime, maybe.

    We need to get back to the idea that the NHS sees getting working age people back into work as quickly as reasonably possible a priority.
    I know of people waiting over two years to get access to CAMHS in Edinburgh.
    Two years is quick, for most.
    The rape case I did last week involved a young woman whose legal guardian claimed had a mental age of 6. She was in residential care but had freedom of movement. She was raped and enormously distressed. Medical evidence said, remarkably, that she understood enough about sex to consent or withhold her consent.

    Her guardian contacted Social work the night it happened who did ...nothing. When the guardian got back from her holiday she took her to the police but it was too late to get medical support for the claim. The man was convicted by the evidence of the distress and what was said to the guardian hours after the assault. It was close, a majority verdict.

    The lack of care of such an obviously vulnerable young woman frankly made me incandescent. So many jobsworths are paid to look after people and just don't give a damn. This case involved an indigenous Scot but it demonstrated all so clearly how the victims we are not supposed to talk about get taken advantage of.

    We are spending a fortune on these services. We are not getting results.

    That's absolutely shocking and glad the jury came back with the correct decision, even by majority verdict. These are the kinds of cases why people like me suggest that burning it all down and starting again can't be worse than what we have now. People are being failed by the state at an alarming rate, whether that's cases like these which are absolutely awful, the NHS in lots of areas, the police are failing the public at large on crime, the judiciary are failing the public in deportations, politicians are failing us on all fronts.

    The UK is getting closer and closer to becoming a failed state so maybe some tough medicine is what the state needs, not more of the same.
    What does "burning it all down" mean for those in care ?
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 55,501
    Nigelb said:

    MaxPB said:

    DavidL said:

    Monkeys said:

    Phil said:

    MaxPB said:

    IanB2 said:

    Taz said:

    MaxPB said:

    Cyclefree said:

    Cyclefree said:

    MaxPB said:

    Battlebus said:

    MaxPB said:

    It's time to outline £100bn in spending cuts and tax rises, split 75% towards spending cuts with the majority coming from welfare and entitlements. If the government doesn't do this and continues to borrow like a drunken sailor we're heading for a bond vigilante strike and another bout of QE which will push inflation up and destroy people's disposable incomes.

    The only way out is to cut welfare spending and get people back into work. We can't afford to pay the lazy to sit at home doing nothing on benefits.

    'Benefits' according to the OBR are £150bn on Pensioners; £88bn on UC; and £74bn on other benefits. Where would you axe to get the £100bn?

    Should we get pensioners back into work?
    £20bn each out of UC and "other" benefits.

    Cut the triple lock entirely.

    £20bn out of the state pension by tapering above £40k, spend half of the saving on increasing the state pension for those who don't have any or significant private income in retirement.

    NI payable on all income types/merge NI and income tax.

    50% haircut on defined benefit public sector pensions for amounts over £40k (so a £60k DB pension becomes £50k).

    Freeze thresholds for a further 3 years.

    Cut at least 500k public sector jobs within two years, ban use of agency staff and severely limit the use of consultants and contractors. Use half of those savings to offer competitive salaries for technical roles.

    I think that would probably make a £100bn worth of closing the deficit, the resulting fall in bond yields and inflation would probably add another £20bn saving per year on the interest bill.
    And means test the NHS for the wealthy
    Define wealthy.

    Otherwise people like me will either die because they can't afford treatment (and I am already at high risk of early death because of the NHS's failures to spot stages 1, 2 or 3 of my cancer) - and I can't - or be bankrupted and made homeless.

    As for the state pension, it gets taxed if the pensioner has other income.

    One of the reasons for the deficit is the amount spent on furlough during Covid - money largely spent on those in jobs and to keep them in jobs. It was about £140 billion. They too should contribute.

    - 1p on income tax.
    - Extend VAT to food, books/newspapers & children's clothes.
    - NI for everyone who works.
    - Limit or abolish tax relief for those giving to charity and place an upper limit on the tax saved by those contributing to charity whether alive or after death.
    - Limit tax relief for pension contributions to the basic rate.
    - Extend VAT on education to all education providers, including universities.
    - Freeze thresholds.
    - Place a limit on public sector pay increases (the amount shovelled at train drivers by Reeves never gets mentioned here but it was a stupid move).
    - Abolish the WFA and other pension-specific benefits. Aim for the state pension to be the same as the tax free income as and when we can afford it.
    - Abolish the triple lock.
    - Those with assets should contribute something towards social care.
    - Introduce council tax bands for higher value houses.
    - Increase or widen the charges for council services beyond the basic.
    - Ensure that overseas visitors pay for the NHS. Other countries manage this. So can we.
    - Limit tax relief for private equity companies loading companies up with debt, taking dividends and asset stripping. (Thames Water and other companies in a similar position should be allowed to go bust and then nationalised for a £. Too often asset stripping has been presented as overseas investment. It is a gigantic con.)

    And so on.

    There is a nasty streak among some of the commentary on here. Everyone seems to want others to pay taxes and those who work on here seem to think that they should be exempt from any measures to help pay down the deficit, thinking it must all be done by the poor and the old. It also gives the impression that some welcome AD because they will be able to pressure the old and sick into killing themselves to save money or withhold treatment so that they suffer. It is disgustingly frankly. I am surprised to see @Big_G_NorthWales among their number
    Can I just say that wealthy to me include celebrities and multi millionaires who can contribute to the NHS

    As far as your list is concerned I agree with each and every one and it needs a government to accept we cannot continue borrowing, spending and taxing and think the unthinkable

    I want the NHS available to all but those with the broadest shoulders should contribute as indeed should the pension be reviewed as to just who should receive this very expensive benefit
    They do contribute - as indeed have I - through taxes. In my case for decades. But there is no justification for denying the NHS to people who are seriously or terminally ill. You are advocating for a US style system which will harm the sick. I am one of their number and I think it disgusting that you should wish to deprive me of the NHS when I need it most. You do not define what wealthy means - name a figure and let's see what this actually means.
    Indeed, means testing the NHS and barring the wealthy just seems like an odd and very mean spirited thing to do. From a practical sense I doubt it would save very much money given that the "wealthy" that BigG mentions are likely to have private health insurance and it breaks the idea that all British citizens/residents get treated equally by the health service, rich and poor alike get the same (sometimes not very good, sometimes excellent) treatment.

    The comment about those with the broadest shoulders contributing is also very off colour for BigG, I think he's been watching too much Jez on Tiktok or something. At my peak earnings a few years ago my net rate of tax was 43% and I paid well into six figures per year in tax, to suggest that the "wealthy" don't already make a huge contribution is factually incorrect. Indeed it is this anti-wealth attitude among those who call themselves conservative that resulted in the previous government just ceding the subject of wealth creation to the left.
    No one ever suggests giving a tax rebate/benefit to anyone who has private health insurance which helps take the pressure off our sainted NHS.
    Generally the choke point is the same pool of consultants and specialists that you have to see, before (and often during) getting private treatment that also give a proportion of their time to the NHS, with the private patients essentially paying to jump the queue. If there was incentive for a significant batch of people to switch to private, either private waiting times would increase dramatically, or consultants would do more private work and less NHS, making the NHS position worse.

    The governments approach of using the over capacity in the private sector to deal with the NHS backlog is the more sensible one. Continuing what the Tories were doing before.
    The absurd rationing of testing continues.

    I know more and more people who pay private facilities to get MRIs etc. XRays seem to be easier in the NHS system.

    Early detection of problems is cheaper.
    Indeed, my dad just had this issue (hence my suggestion in the previous comment). He has had a knee problem for about 15 years, it's suddenly got a lot worse so he went to see the doctor. Long story short, after about 6 months of hearing nothing back from the NHS on getting a scan he went private and got a scan done - they said his right knee is basically completely deteriorated and he needs surgery.

    He wanted to make sure that this was necessary so he arranged finally got an appointment with the NHS specialist a few months down the road who looked at the scan and said words to the effect of "we wouldn't recommend surgery at this stage because the degradation doesn't meet our requirements for it, basically you can still walk around for up to a mile or so before it starts really hurting". He then asked if he could go private would that advice change and the specialist said "yes, get this done ASAP because it will seriously improve your life quality and in 10 years when this gets to the point where the NHS will consider it degraded enough to operate you may not be eligible due to age and poor likelihood of recovery". It's a completely mental situation. They're knowingly saying no/delaying huge life improving surgery to people knowing that 10 years down the road it will cause huge issues for these people, well at least for those people who can't afford to go private.

    This is the kind of stuff that I really think is low hanging fruit for the NHS, cheap preventative care today reduces our future liability by huge amounts and that's where I would be looking for gains. They may not show immediately but in 2-3 years there would be a noticeable drop in resource demand.
    Our youngest had an ingrown toenail a couple of years ago. After going through the initial stages of treatment with our NHS GP (which consisted understandably of “give it a couple of weeks to see if it sorts itself out”) the GP referred him to get it looked at by a specialist. By the time the letter from the specialist dept had arrived to tell us we had been booked for an initial appointment another four months later we had already given up on the NHS & taken him to a private specialist who had diagnosed it as needing surgery & carried that surgery out that week - removing an impressively large chunk of toenail that had grown off sideways into the depths of his big toe in the process!

    The specialist said the likely time from initial diagnostic appointment to actual surgery on the NHS was between 9-12 months in his experience.

    The NHS is just broken for ordinary people it seems. If you fit into one of the “pathways” (cancer, stroke, heart disease) then you get treated in a timely fashion (most of the time), but those are mostly the diseases of old people. For the young, the NHS is a failure that pretends to treat them & then keeps them dangling with the hope of treatment that might manifest itself sometime, maybe.

    We need to get back to the idea that the NHS sees getting working age people back into work as quickly as reasonably possible a priority.
    I know of people waiting over two years to get access to CAMHS in Edinburgh.
    Two years is quick, for most.
    The rape case I did last week involved a young woman whose legal guardian claimed had a mental age of 6. She was in residential care but had freedom of movement. She was raped and enormously distressed. Medical evidence said, remarkably, that she understood enough about sex to consent or withhold her consent.

    Her guardian contacted Social work the night it happened who did ...nothing. When the guardian got back from her holiday she took her to the police but it was too late to get medical support for the claim. The man was convicted by the evidence of the distress and what was said to the guardian hours after the assault. It was close, a majority verdict.

    The lack of care of such an obviously vulnerable young woman frankly made me incandescent. So many jobsworths are paid to look after people and just don't give a damn. This case involved an indigenous Scot but it demonstrated all so clearly how the victims we are not supposed to talk about get taken advantage of.

    We are spending a fortune on these services. We are not getting results.

    That's absolutely shocking and glad the jury came back with the correct decision, even by majority verdict. These are the kinds of cases why people like me suggest that burning it all down and starting again can't be worse than what we have now. People are being failed by the state at an alarming rate, whether that's cases like these which are absolutely awful, the NHS in lots of areas, the police are failing the public at large on crime, the judiciary are failing the public in deportations, politicians are failing us on all fronts.

    The UK is getting closer and closer to becoming a failed state so maybe some tough medicine is what the state needs, not more of the same.
    What does "burning it all down" mean for those in care ?
    Probably subjecting them to an arbitrary standard of care that puts them at risk of abuse.

    No. Wait.....
  • DavidLDavidL Posts: 55,750
    eek said:

    Sean_F said:

    Wasn't there research that said the most pro-Trump demographic was people who identified as regular churchgoers who rarely went to church?

    If the polling Leon has found identifies a growth of such identity, or Potemkin, Christians in Britain, then it could be very politically significant.

    That's certainly one way to square the circle, though an alarming one if it is what's going on. We don't have the same televangelist culture in the UK as in the US, and that's a very good thing. The massive downside of broadcast religion is that it tends to sidestep the difficult "who, exactly, is my neighbour, and who isn't?" question.

    And that leads fairly smoothly to the consequences we are currently seeing Stateside.

    (Much more likely is that using polling to identify small percentages is blooming difficult. And that calculating a change by subtracting one blurry number from another is a mug's game.)
    If it is at least part of what's going on then it will be because English-language social media is dominated by Americans.
    People adopting Christianity as a badge of political identity, without being regular attendees, is quite believable.
    Quite a lot of people say they are Christian but would never bother to attend church - except for weddings and maybe baptism.
    My father used to remind me that someone who goes to church every Christmas and Easter is a regular churchgoer…
    Like 'regulars' in the pub who show up for one pint at 12 every Christmas Day and think they keep your business afloat
    You could go once every 4 years on Feb 29th and you would be regularly attending.

    In any business I own I want frequent customers...
    Is it not @Big_G_NorthWales that has had 20 "proper" birthdays on the 29th of February? Regular, certainly. Frequent, not so much.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 55,501

    eek said:

    Sean_F said:

    Wasn't there research that said the most pro-Trump demographic was people who identified as regular churchgoers who rarely went to church?

    If the polling Leon has found identifies a growth of such identity, or Potemkin, Christians in Britain, then it could be very politically significant.

    That's certainly one way to square the circle, though an alarming one if it is what's going on. We don't have the same televangelist culture in the UK as in the US, and that's a very good thing. The massive downside of broadcast religion is that it tends to sidestep the difficult "who, exactly, is my neighbour, and who isn't?" question.

    And that leads fairly smoothly to the consequences we are currently seeing Stateside.

    (Much more likely is that using polling to identify small percentages is blooming difficult. And that calculating a change by subtracting one blurry number from another is a mug's game.)
    If it is at least part of what's going on then it will be because English-language social media is dominated by Americans.
    People adopting Christianity as a badge of political identity, without being regular attendees, is quite believable.
    Quite a lot of people say they are Christian but would never bother to attend church - except for weddings and maybe baptism.
    My father used to remind me that someone who goes to church every Christmas and Easter is a regular churchgoer…
    Like 'regulars' in the pub who show up for one pint at 12 every Christmas Day and think they keep your business afloat
    You could go once every 4 years on Feb 29th and you would be regularly attending.

    In any business I own I want frequent customers...
    Indeed. Frequent and thirsty if a pub. Frequent, thirsty and docile. Rarely the third unfortunately
    When I was a student, I drank in a local pub that had an actual pool room - a good, full sized table and enough space to play and sit. Was packed all week with people waiting to play. Who tended to drink lots, feed the juke box and cause very little trouble.

    Then a genius from the brewery got rid of the pool table to have more tables for food. In Bloomsbury, the market for badly reheated burgers was pretty low. So now the pub is dead - even years later. I actually met the idiot responsible, at the time, who told me that it was all according to the course on pub management he had done.
  • rottenboroughrottenborough Posts: 66,658
    Gotta hand it to the Observer if this Salt Path stands up then they are looking at awards for investigative journo stuff.
  • Scott_xPScott_xP Posts: 39,169

    Wasn't there research that said the most pro-Trump demographic was people who identified as regular churchgoers who rarely went to church?

    Yes

    Specifically areas where the church had closed voted Trump. If the church was still open, not so much
  • algarkirkalgarkirk Posts: 14,838

    Sean_F said:

    Wasn't there research that said the most pro-Trump demographic was people who identified as regular churchgoers who rarely went to church?

    If the polling Leon has found identifies a growth of such identity, or Potemkin, Christians in Britain, then it could be very politically significant.

    That's certainly one way to square the circle, though an alarming one if it is what's going on. We don't have the same televangelist culture in the UK as in the US, and that's a very good thing. The massive downside of broadcast religion is that it tends to sidestep the difficult "who, exactly, is my neighbour, and who isn't?" question.

    And that leads fairly smoothly to the consequences we are currently seeing Stateside.

    (Much more likely is that using polling to identify small percentages is blooming difficult. And that calculating a change by subtracting one blurry number from another is a mug's game.)
    If it is at least part of what's going on then it will be because English-language social media is dominated by Americans.
    People adopting Christianity as a badge of political identity, without being regular attendees, is quite believable.
    Quite a lot of people say they are Christian but would never bother to attend church - except for weddings and maybe baptism.
    This issue is complicated. (Full disclosure: lifelong always church attender (eg today), in liberal CoE tradition.) Being 'Christian' is among other things our culture's way of expressing various things about the existence of God, the niceness of Jesus, the importance of values etc. Nothing at all, if you think about it, links belief in God, values, the decency of Jesus, the significance of conscience, being christened etc with actually showing up to church on a Sunday, either every week or at all.

    Link that with the simplistic rubbish frequently on offer and the growth of marginal fundamentalism into the mainstream as zealots plug away, and the complexities are clear.

    BTW just as with sexual matters I don't trust any statistics about church attendance except those produced by professionals with the greatest care and caution. The CoE ones are reasonably reliable. So far they show no signs whatsoever of billions of young men hammering at the doors.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 79,020

    Nigelb said:

    MaxPB said:

    DavidL said:

    Monkeys said:

    Phil said:

    MaxPB said:

    IanB2 said:

    Taz said:

    MaxPB said:

    Cyclefree said:

    Cyclefree said:

    MaxPB said:

    Battlebus said:

    MaxPB said:

    It's time to outline £100bn in spending cuts and tax rises, split 75% towards spending cuts with the majority coming from welfare and entitlements. If the government doesn't do this and continues to borrow like a drunken sailor we're heading for a bond vigilante strike and another bout of QE which will push inflation up and destroy people's disposable incomes.

    The only way out is to cut welfare spending and get people back into work. We can't afford to pay the lazy to sit at home doing nothing on benefits.

    'Benefits' according to the OBR are £150bn on Pensioners; £88bn on UC; and £74bn on other benefits. Where would you axe to get the £100bn?

    Should we get pensioners back into work?
    £20bn each out of UC and "other" benefits.

    Cut the triple lock entirely.

    £20bn out of the state pension by tapering above £40k, spend half of the saving on increasing the state pension for those who don't have any or significant private income in retirement.

    NI payable on all income types/merge NI and income tax.

    50% haircut on defined benefit public sector pensions for amounts over £40k (so a £60k DB pension becomes £50k).

    Freeze thresholds for a further 3 years.

    Cut at least 500k public sector jobs within two years, ban use of agency staff and severely limit the use of consultants and contractors. Use half of those savings to offer competitive salaries for technical roles.

    I think that would probably make a £100bn worth of closing the deficit, the resulting fall in bond yields and inflation would probably add another £20bn saving per year on the interest bill.
    And means test the NHS for the wealthy
    Define wealthy.

    Otherwise people like me will either die because they can't afford treatment (and I am already at high risk of early death because of the NHS's failures to spot stages 1, 2 or 3 of my cancer) - and I can't - or be bankrupted and made homeless.

    As for the state pension, it gets taxed if the pensioner has other income.

    One of the reasons for the deficit is the amount spent on furlough during Covid - money largely spent on those in jobs and to keep them in jobs. It was about £140 billion. They too should contribute.

    - 1p on income tax.
    - Extend VAT to food, books/newspapers & children's clothes.
    - NI for everyone who works.
    - Limit or abolish tax relief for those giving to charity and place an upper limit on the tax saved by those contributing to charity whether alive or after death.
    - Limit tax relief for pension contributions to the basic rate.
    - Extend VAT on education to all education providers, including universities.
    - Freeze thresholds.
    - Place a limit on public sector pay increases (the amount shovelled at train drivers by Reeves never gets mentioned here but it was a stupid move).
    - Abolish the WFA and other pension-specific benefits. Aim for the state pension to be the same as the tax free income as and when we can afford it.
    - Abolish the triple lock.
    - Those with assets should contribute something towards social care.
    - Introduce council tax bands for higher value houses.
    - Increase or widen the charges for council services beyond the basic.
    - Ensure that overseas visitors pay for the NHS. Other countries manage this. So can we.
    - Limit tax relief for private equity companies loading companies up with debt, taking dividends and asset stripping. (Thames Water and other companies in a similar position should be allowed to go bust and then nationalised for a £. Too often asset stripping has been presented as overseas investment. It is a gigantic con.)

    And so on.

    There is a nasty streak among some of the commentary on here. Everyone seems to want others to pay taxes and those who work on here seem to think that they should be exempt from any measures to help pay down the deficit, thinking it must all be done by the poor and the old. It also gives the impression that some welcome AD because they will be able to pressure the old and sick into killing themselves to save money or withhold treatment so that they suffer. It is disgustingly frankly. I am surprised to see @Big_G_NorthWales among their number
    Can I just say that wealthy to me include celebrities and multi millionaires who can contribute to the NHS

    As far as your list is concerned I agree with each and every one and it needs a government to accept we cannot continue borrowing, spending and taxing and think the unthinkable

    I want the NHS available to all but those with the broadest shoulders should contribute as indeed should the pension be reviewed as to just who should receive this very expensive benefit
    They do contribute - as indeed have I - through taxes. In my case for decades. But there is no justification for denying the NHS to people who are seriously or terminally ill. You are advocating for a US style system which will harm the sick. I am one of their number and I think it disgusting that you should wish to deprive me of the NHS when I need it most. You do not define what wealthy means - name a figure and let's see what this actually means.
    Indeed, means testing the NHS and barring the wealthy just seems like an odd and very mean spirited thing to do. From a practical sense I doubt it would save very much money given that the "wealthy" that BigG mentions are likely to have private health insurance and it breaks the idea that all British citizens/residents get treated equally by the health service, rich and poor alike get the same (sometimes not very good, sometimes excellent) treatment.

    The comment about those with the broadest shoulders contributing is also very off colour for BigG, I think he's been watching too much Jez on Tiktok or something. At my peak earnings a few years ago my net rate of tax was 43% and I paid well into six figures per year in tax, to suggest that the "wealthy" don't already make a huge contribution is factually incorrect. Indeed it is this anti-wealth attitude among those who call themselves conservative that resulted in the previous government just ceding the subject of wealth creation to the left.
    No one ever suggests giving a tax rebate/benefit to anyone who has private health insurance which helps take the pressure off our sainted NHS.
    Generally the choke point is the same pool of consultants and specialists that you have to see, before (and often during) getting private treatment that also give a proportion of their time to the NHS, with the private patients essentially paying to jump the queue. If there was incentive for a significant batch of people to switch to private, either private waiting times would increase dramatically, or consultants would do more private work and less NHS, making the NHS position worse.

    The governments approach of using the over capacity in the private sector to deal with the NHS backlog is the more sensible one. Continuing what the Tories were doing before.
    The absurd rationing of testing continues.

    I know more and more people who pay private facilities to get MRIs etc. XRays seem to be easier in the NHS system.

    Early detection of problems is cheaper.
    Indeed, my dad just had this issue (hence my suggestion in the previous comment). He has had a knee problem for about 15 years, it's suddenly got a lot worse so he went to see the doctor. Long story short, after about 6 months of hearing nothing back from the NHS on getting a scan he went private and got a scan done - they said his right knee is basically completely deteriorated and he needs surgery.

    He wanted to make sure that this was necessary so he arranged finally got an appointment with the NHS specialist a few months down the road who looked at the scan and said words to the effect of "we wouldn't recommend surgery at this stage because the degradation doesn't meet our requirements for it, basically you can still walk around for up to a mile or so before it starts really hurting". He then asked if he could go private would that advice change and the specialist said "yes, get this done ASAP because it will seriously improve your life quality and in 10 years when this gets to the point where the NHS will consider it degraded enough to operate you may not be eligible due to age and poor likelihood of recovery". It's a completely mental situation. They're knowingly saying no/delaying huge life improving surgery to people knowing that 10 years down the road it will cause huge issues for these people, well at least for those people who can't afford to go private.

    This is the kind of stuff that I really think is low hanging fruit for the NHS, cheap preventative care today reduces our future liability by huge amounts and that's where I would be looking for gains. They may not show immediately but in 2-3 years there would be a noticeable drop in resource demand.
    Our youngest had an ingrown toenail a couple of years ago. After going through the initial stages of treatment with our NHS GP (which consisted understandably of “give it a couple of weeks to see if it sorts itself out”) the GP referred him to get it looked at by a specialist. By the time the letter from the specialist dept had arrived to tell us we had been booked for an initial appointment another four months later we had already given up on the NHS & taken him to a private specialist who had diagnosed it as needing surgery & carried that surgery out that week - removing an impressively large chunk of toenail that had grown off sideways into the depths of his big toe in the process!

    The specialist said the likely time from initial diagnostic appointment to actual surgery on the NHS was between 9-12 months in his experience.

    The NHS is just broken for ordinary people it seems. If you fit into one of the “pathways” (cancer, stroke, heart disease) then you get treated in a timely fashion (most of the time), but those are mostly the diseases of old people. For the young, the NHS is a failure that pretends to treat them & then keeps them dangling with the hope of treatment that might manifest itself sometime, maybe.

    We need to get back to the idea that the NHS sees getting working age people back into work as quickly as reasonably possible a priority.
    I know of people waiting over two years to get access to CAMHS in Edinburgh.
    Two years is quick, for most.
    The rape case I did last week involved a young woman whose legal guardian claimed had a mental age of 6. She was in residential care but had freedom of movement. She was raped and enormously distressed. Medical evidence said, remarkably, that she understood enough about sex to consent or withhold her consent.

    Her guardian contacted Social work the night it happened who did ...nothing. When the guardian got back from her holiday she took her to the police but it was too late to get medical support for the claim. The man was convicted by the evidence of the distress and what was said to the guardian hours after the assault. It was close, a majority verdict.

    The lack of care of such an obviously vulnerable young woman frankly made me incandescent. So many jobsworths are paid to look after people and just don't give a damn. This case involved an indigenous Scot but it demonstrated all so clearly how the victims we are not supposed to talk about get taken advantage of.

    We are spending a fortune on these services. We are not getting results.

    That's absolutely shocking and glad the jury came back with the correct decision, even by majority verdict. These are the kinds of cases why people like me suggest that burning it all down and starting again can't be worse than what we have now. People are being failed by the state at an alarming rate, whether that's cases like these which are absolutely awful, the NHS in lots of areas, the police are failing the public at large on crime, the judiciary are failing the public in deportations, politicians are failing us on all fronts.

    The UK is getting closer and closer to becoming a failed state so maybe some tough medicine is what the state needs, not more of the same.
    What does "burning it all down" mean for those in care ?
    Probably subjecting them to an arbitrary standard of care that puts them at risk of abuse.

    No. Wait.....
    The care system tends to fail those in care, at considerable expense, undeniably.
    I've yet to see any real solutions proposed, let alone easy ones.
  • MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 40,292
    Nigelb said:

    MaxPB said:

    DavidL said:

    Monkeys said:

    Phil said:

    MaxPB said:

    IanB2 said:

    Taz said:

    MaxPB said:

    Cyclefree said:

    Cyclefree said:

    MaxPB said:

    Battlebus said:

    MaxPB said:

    It's time to outline £100bn in spending cuts and tax rises, split 75% towards spending cuts with the majority coming from welfare and entitlements. If the government doesn't do this and continues to borrow like a drunken sailor we're heading for a bond vigilante strike and another bout of QE which will push inflation up and destroy people's disposable incomes.

    The only way out is to cut welfare spending and get people back into work. We can't afford to pay the lazy to sit at home doing nothing on benefits.

    'Benefits' according to the OBR are £150bn on Pensioners; £88bn on UC; and £74bn on other benefits. Where would you axe to get the £100bn?

    Should we get pensioners back into work?
    £20bn each out of UC and "other" benefits.

    Cut the triple lock entirely.

    £20bn out of the state pension by tapering above £40k, spend half of the saving on increasing the state pension for those who don't have any or significant private income in retirement.

    NI payable on all income types/merge NI and income tax.

    50% haircut on defined benefit public sector pensions for amounts over £40k (so a £60k DB pension becomes £50k).

    Freeze thresholds for a further 3 years.

    Cut at least 500k public sector jobs within two years, ban use of agency staff and severely limit the use of consultants and contractors. Use half of those savings to offer competitive salaries for technical roles.

    I think that would probably make a £100bn worth of closing the deficit, the resulting fall in bond yields and inflation would probably add another £20bn saving per year on the interest bill.
    And means test the NHS for the wealthy
    Define wealthy.

    Otherwise people like me will either die because they can't afford treatment (and I am already at high risk of early death because of the NHS's failures to spot stages 1, 2 or 3 of my cancer) - and I can't - or be bankrupted and made homeless.

    As for the state pension, it gets taxed if the pensioner has other income.

    One of the reasons for the deficit is the amount spent on furlough during Covid - money largely spent on those in jobs and to keep them in jobs. It was about £140 billion. They too should contribute.

    - 1p on income tax.
    - Extend VAT to food, books/newspapers & children's clothes.
    - NI for everyone who works.
    - Limit or abolish tax relief for those giving to charity and place an upper limit on the tax saved by those contributing to charity whether alive or after death.
    - Limit tax relief for pension contributions to the basic rate.
    - Extend VAT on education to all education providers, including universities.
    - Freeze thresholds.
    - Place a limit on public sector pay increases (the amount shovelled at train drivers by Reeves never gets mentioned here but it was a stupid move).
    - Abolish the WFA and other pension-specific benefits. Aim for the state pension to be the same as the tax free income as and when we can afford it.
    - Abolish the triple lock.
    - Those with assets should contribute something towards social care.
    - Introduce council tax bands for higher value houses.
    - Increase or widen the charges for council services beyond the basic.
    - Ensure that overseas visitors pay for the NHS. Other countries manage this. So can we.
    - Limit tax relief for private equity companies loading companies up with debt, taking dividends and asset stripping. (Thames Water and other companies in a similar position should be allowed to go bust and then nationalised for a £. Too often asset stripping has been presented as overseas investment. It is a gigantic con.)

    And so on.

    There is a nasty streak among some of the commentary on here. Everyone seems to want others to pay taxes and those who work on here seem to think that they should be exempt from any measures to help pay down the deficit, thinking it must all be done by the poor and the old. It also gives the impression that some welcome AD because they will be able to pressure the old and sick into killing themselves to save money or withhold treatment so that they suffer. It is disgustingly frankly. I am surprised to see @Big_G_NorthWales among their number
    Can I just say that wealthy to me include celebrities and multi millionaires who can contribute to the NHS

    As far as your list is concerned I agree with each and every one and it needs a government to accept we cannot continue borrowing, spending and taxing and think the unthinkable

    I want the NHS available to all but those with the broadest shoulders should contribute as indeed should the pension be reviewed as to just who should receive this very expensive benefit
    They do contribute - as indeed have I - through taxes. In my case for decades. But there is no justification for denying the NHS to people who are seriously or terminally ill. You are advocating for a US style system which will harm the sick. I am one of their number and I think it disgusting that you should wish to deprive me of the NHS when I need it most. You do not define what wealthy means - name a figure and let's see what this actually means.
    Indeed, means testing the NHS and barring the wealthy just seems like an odd and very mean spirited thing to do. From a practical sense I doubt it would save very much money given that the "wealthy" that BigG mentions are likely to have private health insurance and it breaks the idea that all British citizens/residents get treated equally by the health service, rich and poor alike get the same (sometimes not very good, sometimes excellent) treatment.

    The comment about those with the broadest shoulders contributing is also very off colour for BigG, I think he's been watching too much Jez on Tiktok or something. At my peak earnings a few years ago my net rate of tax was 43% and I paid well into six figures per year in tax, to suggest that the "wealthy" don't already make a huge contribution is factually incorrect. Indeed it is this anti-wealth attitude among those who call themselves conservative that resulted in the previous government just ceding the subject of wealth creation to the left.
    No one ever suggests giving a tax rebate/benefit to anyone who has private health insurance which helps take the pressure off our sainted NHS.
    Generally the choke point is the same pool of consultants and specialists that you have to see, before (and often during) getting private treatment that also give a proportion of their time to the NHS, with the private patients essentially paying to jump the queue. If there was incentive for a significant batch of people to switch to private, either private waiting times would increase dramatically, or consultants would do more private work and less NHS, making the NHS position worse.

    The governments approach of using the over capacity in the private sector to deal with the NHS backlog is the more sensible one. Continuing what the Tories were doing before.
    The absurd rationing of testing continues.

    I know more and more people who pay private facilities to get MRIs etc. XRays seem to be easier in the NHS system.

    Early detection of problems is cheaper.
    Indeed, my dad just had this issue (hence my suggestion in the previous comment). He has had a knee problem for about 15 years, it's suddenly got a lot worse so he went to see the doctor. Long story short, after about 6 months of hearing nothing back from the NHS on getting a scan he went private and got a scan done - they said his right knee is basically completely deteriorated and he needs surgery.

    He wanted to make sure that this was necessary so he arranged finally got an appointment with the NHS specialist a few months down the road who looked at the scan and said words to the effect of "we wouldn't recommend surgery at this stage because the degradation doesn't meet our requirements for it, basically you can still walk around for up to a mile or so before it starts really hurting". He then asked if he could go private would that advice change and the specialist said "yes, get this done ASAP because it will seriously improve your life quality and in 10 years when this gets to the point where the NHS will consider it degraded enough to operate you may not be eligible due to age and poor likelihood of recovery". It's a completely mental situation. They're knowingly saying no/delaying huge life improving surgery to people knowing that 10 years down the road it will cause huge issues for these people, well at least for those people who can't afford to go private.

    This is the kind of stuff that I really think is low hanging fruit for the NHS, cheap preventative care today reduces our future liability by huge amounts and that's where I would be looking for gains. They may not show immediately but in 2-3 years there would be a noticeable drop in resource demand.
    Our youngest had an ingrown toenail a couple of years ago. After going through the initial stages of treatment with our NHS GP (which consisted understandably of “give it a couple of weeks to see if it sorts itself out”) the GP referred him to get it looked at by a specialist. By the time the letter from the specialist dept had arrived to tell us we had been booked for an initial appointment another four months later we had already given up on the NHS & taken him to a private specialist who had diagnosed it as needing surgery & carried that surgery out that week - removing an impressively large chunk of toenail that had grown off sideways into the depths of his big toe in the process!

    The specialist said the likely time from initial diagnostic appointment to actual surgery on the NHS was between 9-12 months in his experience.

    The NHS is just broken for ordinary people it seems. If you fit into one of the “pathways” (cancer, stroke, heart disease) then you get treated in a timely fashion (most of the time), but those are mostly the diseases of old people. For the young, the NHS is a failure that pretends to treat them & then keeps them dangling with the hope of treatment that might manifest itself sometime, maybe.

    We need to get back to the idea that the NHS sees getting working age people back into work as quickly as reasonably possible a priority.
    I know of people waiting over two years to get access to CAMHS in Edinburgh.
    Two years is quick, for most.
    The rape case I did last week involved a young woman whose legal guardian claimed had a mental age of 6. She was in residential care but had freedom of movement. She was raped and enormously distressed. Medical evidence said, remarkably, that she understood enough about sex to consent or withhold her consent.

    Her guardian contacted Social work the night it happened who did ...nothing. When the guardian got back from her holiday she took her to the police but it was too late to get medical support for the claim. The man was convicted by the evidence of the distress and what was said to the guardian hours after the assault. It was close, a majority verdict.

    The lack of care of such an obviously vulnerable young woman frankly made me incandescent. So many jobsworths are paid to look after people and just don't give a damn. This case involved an indigenous Scot but it demonstrated all so clearly how the victims we are not supposed to talk about get taken advantage of.

    We are spending a fortune on these services. We are not getting results.

    That's absolutely shocking and glad the jury came back with the correct decision, even by majority verdict. These are the kinds of cases why people like me suggest that burning it all down and starting again can't be worse than what we have now. People are being failed by the state at an alarming rate, whether that's cases like these which are absolutely awful, the NHS in lots of areas, the police are failing the public at large on crime, the judiciary are failing the public in deportations, politicians are failing us on all fronts.

    The UK is getting closer and closer to becoming a failed state so maybe some tough medicine is what the state needs, not more of the same.
    What does "burning it all down" mean for those in care ?
    I don't know, but how could it be worse than today, knowing everything we know about what has already happened.
  • carnforthcarnforth Posts: 6,542

    Gotta hand it to the Observer if this Salt Path stands up then they are looking at awards for investigative journo stuff.

    I note they have not gone near claiming the walk didn't happen or was nowhere near 640 miles. That could be the next shoe to drop...
  • algarkirkalgarkirk Posts: 14,838

    MaxPB said:

    DavidL said:

    Monkeys said:

    Phil said:

    MaxPB said:

    IanB2 said:

    Taz said:

    MaxPB said:

    Cyclefree said:

    Cyclefree said:

    MaxPB said:

    Battlebus said:

    MaxPB said:

    It's time to outline £100bn in spending cuts and tax rises, split 75% towards spending cuts with the majority coming from welfare and entitlements. If the government doesn't do this and continues to borrow like a drunken sailor we're heading for a bond vigilante strike and another bout of QE which will push inflation up and destroy people's disposable incomes.

    The only way out is to cut welfare spending and get people back into work. We can't afford to pay the lazy to sit at home doing nothing on benefits.

    'Benefits' according to the OBR are £150bn on Pensioners; £88bn on UC; and £74bn on other benefits. Where would you axe to get the £100bn?

    Should we get pensioners back into work?
    £20bn each out of UC and "other" benefits.

    Cut the triple lock entirely.

    £20bn out of the state pension by tapering above £40k, spend half of the saving on increasing the state pension for those who don't have any or significant private income in retirement.

    NI payable on all income types/merge NI and income tax.

    50% haircut on defined benefit public sector pensions for amounts over £40k (so a £60k DB pension becomes £50k).

    Freeze thresholds for a further 3 years.

    Cut at least 500k public sector jobs within two years, ban use of agency staff and severely limit the use of consultants and contractors. Use half of those savings to offer competitive salaries for technical roles.

    I think that would probably make a £100bn worth of closing the deficit, the resulting fall in bond yields and inflation would probably add another £20bn saving per year on the interest bill.
    And means test the NHS for the wealthy
    Define wealthy.

    Otherwise people like me will either die because they can't afford treatment (and I am already at high risk of early death because of the NHS's failures to spot stages 1, 2 or 3 of my cancer) - and I can't - or be bankrupted and made homeless.

    As for the state pension, it gets taxed if the pensioner has other income.

    One of the reasons for the deficit is the amount spent on furlough during Covid - money largely spent on those in jobs and to keep them in jobs. It was about £140 billion. They too should contribute.

    - 1p on income tax.
    - Extend VAT to food, books/newspapers & children's clothes.
    - NI for everyone who works.
    - Limit or abolish tax relief for those giving to charity and place an upper limit on the tax saved by those contributing to charity whether alive or after death.
    - Limit tax relief for pension contributions to the basic rate.
    - Extend VAT on education to all education providers, including universities.
    - Freeze thresholds.
    - Place a limit on public sector pay increases (the amount shovelled at train drivers by Reeves never gets mentioned here but it was a stupid move).
    - Abolish the WFA and other pension-specific benefits. Aim for the state pension to be the same as the tax free income as and when we can afford it.
    - Abolish the triple lock.
    - Those with assets should contribute something towards social care.
    - Introduce council tax bands for higher value houses.
    - Increase or widen the charges for council services beyond the basic.
    - Ensure that overseas visitors pay for the NHS. Other countries manage this. So can we.
    - Limit tax relief for private equity companies loading companies up with debt, taking dividends and asset stripping. (Thames Water and other companies in a similar position should be allowed to go bust and then nationalised for a £. Too often asset stripping has been presented as overseas investment. It is a gigantic con.)

    And so on.

    There is a nasty streak among some of the commentary on here. Everyone seems to want others to pay taxes and those who work on here seem to think that they should be exempt from any measures to help pay down the deficit, thinking it must all be done by the poor and the old. It also gives the impression that some welcome AD because they will be able to pressure the old and sick into killing themselves to save money or withhold treatment so that they suffer. It is disgustingly frankly. I am surprised to see @Big_G_NorthWales among their number
    Can I just say that wealthy to me include celebrities and multi millionaires who can contribute to the NHS

    As far as your list is concerned I agree with each and every one and it needs a government to accept we cannot continue borrowing, spending and taxing and think the unthinkable

    I want the NHS available to all but those with the broadest shoulders should contribute as indeed should the pension be reviewed as to just who should receive this very expensive benefit
    They do contribute - as indeed have I - through taxes. In my case for decades. But there is no justification for denying the NHS to people who are seriously or terminally ill. You are advocating for a US style system which will harm the sick. I am one of their number and I think it disgusting that you should wish to deprive me of the NHS when I need it most. You do not define what wealthy means - name a figure and let's see what this actually means.
    Indeed, means testing the NHS and barring the wealthy just seems like an odd and very mean spirited thing to do. From a practical sense I doubt it would save very much money given that the "wealthy" that BigG mentions are likely to have private health insurance and it breaks the idea that all British citizens/residents get treated equally by the health service, rich and poor alike get the same (sometimes not very good, sometimes excellent) treatment.

    The comment about those with the broadest shoulders contributing is also very off colour for BigG, I think he's been watching too much Jez on Tiktok or something. At my peak earnings a few years ago my net rate of tax was 43% and I paid well into six figures per year in tax, to suggest that the "wealthy" don't already make a huge contribution is factually incorrect. Indeed it is this anti-wealth attitude among those who call themselves conservative that resulted in the previous government just ceding the subject of wealth creation to the left.
    No one ever suggests giving a tax rebate/benefit to anyone who has private health insurance which helps take the pressure off our sainted NHS.
    Generally the choke point is the same pool of consultants and specialists that you have to see, before (and often during) getting private treatment that also give a proportion of their time to the NHS, with the private patients essentially paying to jump the queue. If there was incentive for a significant batch of people to switch to private, either private waiting times would increase dramatically, or consultants would do more private work and less NHS, making the NHS position worse.

    The governments approach of using the over capacity in the private sector to deal with the NHS backlog is the more sensible one. Continuing what the Tories were doing before.
    The absurd rationing of testing continues.

    I know more and more people who pay private facilities to get MRIs etc. XRays seem to be easier in the NHS system.

    Early detection of problems is cheaper.
    Indeed, my dad just had this issue (hence my suggestion in the previous comment). He has had a knee problem for about 15 years, it's suddenly got a lot worse so he went to see the doctor. Long story short, after about 6 months of hearing nothing back from the NHS on getting a scan he went private and got a scan done - they said his right knee is basically completely deteriorated and he needs surgery.

    He wanted to make sure that this was necessary so he arranged finally got an appointment with the NHS specialist a few months down the road who looked at the scan and said words to the effect of "we wouldn't recommend surgery at this stage because the degradation doesn't meet our requirements for it, basically you can still walk around for up to a mile or so before it starts really hurting". He then asked if he could go private would that advice change and the specialist said "yes, get this done ASAP because it will seriously improve your life quality and in 10 years when this gets to the point where the NHS will consider it degraded enough to operate you may not be eligible due to age and poor likelihood of recovery". It's a completely mental situation. They're knowingly saying no/delaying huge life improving surgery to people knowing that 10 years down the road it will cause huge issues for these people, well at least for those people who can't afford to go private.

    This is the kind of stuff that I really think is low hanging fruit for the NHS, cheap preventative care today reduces our future liability by huge amounts and that's where I would be looking for gains. They may not show immediately but in 2-3 years there would be a noticeable drop in resource demand.
    Our youngest had an ingrown toenail a couple of years ago. After going through the initial stages of treatment with our NHS GP (which consisted understandably of “give it a couple of weeks to see if it sorts itself out”) the GP referred him to get it looked at by a specialist. By the time the letter from the specialist dept had arrived to tell us we had been booked for an initial appointment another four months later we had already given up on the NHS & taken him to a private specialist who had diagnosed it as needing surgery & carried that surgery out that week - removing an impressively large chunk of toenail that had grown off sideways into the depths of his big toe in the process!

    The specialist said the likely time from initial diagnostic appointment to actual surgery on the NHS was between 9-12 months in his experience.

    The NHS is just broken for ordinary people it seems. If you fit into one of the “pathways” (cancer, stroke, heart disease) then you get treated in a timely fashion (most of the time), but those are mostly the diseases of old people. For the young, the NHS is a failure that pretends to treat them & then keeps them dangling with the hope of treatment that might manifest itself sometime, maybe.

    We need to get back to the idea that the NHS sees getting working age people back into work as quickly as reasonably possible a priority.
    I know of people waiting over two years to get access to CAMHS in Edinburgh.
    Two years is quick, for most.
    The rape case I did last week involved a young woman whose legal guardian claimed had a mental age of 6. She was in residential care but had freedom of movement. She was raped and enormously distressed. Medical evidence said, remarkably, that she understood enough about sex to consent or withhold her consent.

    Her guardian contacted Social work the night it happened who did ...nothing. When the guardian got back from her holiday she took her to the police but it was too late to get medical support for the claim. The man was convicted by the evidence of the distress and what was said to the guardian hours after the assault. It was close, a majority verdict.

    The lack of care of such an obviously vulnerable young woman frankly made me incandescent. So many jobsworths are paid to look after people and just don't give a damn. This case involved an indigenous Scot but it demonstrated all so clearly how the victims we are not supposed to talk about get taken advantage of.

    We are spending a fortune on these services. We are not getting results.

    That's absolutely shocking and glad the jury came back with the correct decision, even by majority verdict. These are the kinds of cases why people like me suggest that burning it all down and starting again can't be worse than what we have now. People are being failed by the state at an alarming rate, whether that's cases like these which are absolutely awful, the NHS in lots of areas, the police are failing the public at large on crime, the judiciary are failing the public in deportations, politicians are failing us on all fronts.

    The UK is getting closer and closer to becoming a failed state so maybe some tough medicine is what the state needs, not more of the same.
    I have recently started ‘Who dares, win’ by Dominic Sandbrook on the early Thatcher years. The opening chapters have laid bare the state of the nation in 1979 and the radical approach that Thatchers government took, including the realisation that there would be pain for some but it would be worth it in the end.*

    There is no sense that any political party is prepared to undertake policies that might have short term pain for long term gain. Take Labour. They wanted to slash WFA soeniding and failed to hold their nerve. And again on PIP. I am not commenting on the right or wrong of either more the lack of political guts to suffer even a tiny bit of kick back from policy.

    We have to start living more within our means. Increase tax, reduce spending and find a way to economic growth. And we need to accept that it will hurt for some. No one wants to punish people unfortunate to be unable to work or look after themselves. But we risk being taken for mugs when ‘feeling a bit sad sometimes’ elicits money for free.

    Someone in the room needs to tell the country hard truths. And it’s about time we listened to them. The party is over, now it’s time to pay the bills and tidy up.

    *Opinion is divided on this.
    I think also that Britain probably needs a Prime Minister who is willing to say that they aren't going to try and fix every problem in the country, because such a task is not something that government can do alone.

    I'm not old enough to remember in detail what it was like before Blair, but Blair always gave the impression that he was going to personally intervene to fix every problem - hence czars and the PM's office monitoring targets.

    That doesn't work. When the centre tries to run everything not only is that a problem when a complete nutter takes over the centre, but it leads to the centre promulgating set procedures for workers to follow, and targets to ensure that they are. This creates legions of people afraid to think for themselves and use their own judgement, and working only towards the target, following procedure, and blind to the negative consequences to the real people involved.

    Britain needs a leader who will inspire people to work hard to improve things, who will delegate power to allow them to do so.

    I can understand Max's frustration, but I think he's very wrong to think that it can't get worse. What is happening in the US should demonstrate that it can get a lot worse indeed. My impression is that there are a lot of things that are only just holding together due to the efforts of a minority of committed people. If you sweep those people aside with a year zero plan then you'll really see how bad they can get.
    Totally agree that government should not try to fix every problem. They can't. However, a realistic and proper and minimum expectation is that as and when government undertakes to perform tasks at our expense - often having a monopoly positiuon in these things - (eg NHS, state education, public order, regulating banks and a million other activities border control, justice, running essential infrastructure etc etc) they should do it all very well.
  • Big_G_NorthWalesBig_G_NorthWales Posts: 66,018
    DavidL said:

    eek said:

    Sean_F said:

    Wasn't there research that said the most pro-Trump demographic was people who identified as regular churchgoers who rarely went to church?

    If the polling Leon has found identifies a growth of such identity, or Potemkin, Christians in Britain, then it could be very politically significant.

    That's certainly one way to square the circle, though an alarming one if it is what's going on. We don't have the same televangelist culture in the UK as in the US, and that's a very good thing. The massive downside of broadcast religion is that it tends to sidestep the difficult "who, exactly, is my neighbour, and who isn't?" question.

    And that leads fairly smoothly to the consequences we are currently seeing Stateside.

    (Much more likely is that using polling to identify small percentages is blooming difficult. And that calculating a change by subtracting one blurry number from another is a mug's game.)
    If it is at least part of what's going on then it will be because English-language social media is dominated by Americans.
    People adopting Christianity as a badge of political identity, without being regular attendees, is quite believable.
    Quite a lot of people say they are Christian but would never bother to attend church - except for weddings and maybe baptism.
    My father used to remind me that someone who goes to church every Christmas and Easter is a regular churchgoer…
    Like 'regulars' in the pub who show up for one pint at 12 every Christmas Day and think they keep your business afloat
    You could go once every 4 years on Feb 29th and you would be regularly attending.

    In any business I own I want frequent customers...
    Is it not @Big_G_NorthWales that has had 20 "proper" birthdays on the 29th of February? Regular, certainly. Frequent, not so much.
    Yes and 21 in 2028
  • StereodogStereodog Posts: 1,066

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Strange how panicked & alarmed PB is, by the mere possibility Christianity might see a revival

    Also very telling

    Anecdotally, I see some truth in this. At my daughter’s uni (St Andrew’s) “going to church” is oddly fashionable. The same way taking smack was cool in my time

    I suspect the taking smack bit was your circle rather than your peers in general. I am about your age and my circles irrespective of location were not smackheads. I even had a group of friends at UCL, and none of them were mainlining the naughty stuff.

    I suspect currently going to church is similarly niche.
    Nobody at UCL would have socialised with a boring sap like you. So this is just a painful suite of lies
    I can give you names and addresses, however as they were interesting top class stars they wouldn't have noticed you and your sad little bunch of Edgelords, rolling spliffs and making your halves of Carling last all night.
    When I was at University, 'going to Church on Sunday' meant going to an particular strip club in the wee small hours of Sunday morning after a long Saturday binge. I was not a regular attendee.
  • MonkeysMonkeys Posts: 790
    Leon said:

    Strange how panicked & alarmed PB is, by the mere possibility Christianity might see a revival

    Also very telling

    Anecdotally, I see some truth in this. At my daughter’s uni (St Andrew’s) “going to church” is oddly fashionable. The same way taking smack was cool in my time

    There's something about the set and setting.
  • StuartinromfordStuartinromford Posts: 19,063

    DavidL said:

    eek said:

    Sean_F said:

    Wasn't there research that said the most pro-Trump demographic was people who identified as regular churchgoers who rarely went to church?

    If the polling Leon has found identifies a growth of such identity, or Potemkin, Christians in Britain, then it could be very politically significant.

    That's certainly one way to square the circle, though an alarming one if it is what's going on. We don't have the same televangelist culture in the UK as in the US, and that's a very good thing. The massive downside of broadcast religion is that it tends to sidestep the difficult "who, exactly, is my neighbour, and who isn't?" question.

    And that leads fairly smoothly to the consequences we are currently seeing Stateside.

    (Much more likely is that using polling to identify small percentages is blooming difficult. And that calculating a change by subtracting one blurry number from another is a mug's game.)
    If it is at least part of what's going on then it will be because English-language social media is dominated by Americans.
    People adopting Christianity as a badge of political identity, without being regular attendees, is quite believable.
    Quite a lot of people say they are Christian but would never bother to attend church - except for weddings and maybe baptism.
    My father used to remind me that someone who goes to church every Christmas and Easter is a regular churchgoer…
    Like 'regulars' in the pub who show up for one pint at 12 every Christmas Day and think they keep your business afloat
    You could go once every 4 years on Feb 29th and you would be regularly attending.

    In any business I own I want frequent customers...
    Is it not @Big_G_NorthWales that has had 20 "proper" birthdays on the 29th of February? Regular, certainly. Frequent, not so much.
    Yes and 21 in 2028
    And at last, your piratical indenture will be over.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 79,020

    MaxPB said:

    DavidL said:

    Monkeys said:

    Phil said:

    MaxPB said:

    IanB2 said:

    Taz said:

    MaxPB said:

    Cyclefree said:

    Cyclefree said:

    MaxPB said:

    Battlebus said:

    MaxPB said:

    It's time to outline £100bn in spending cuts and tax rises, split 75% towards spending cuts with the majority coming from welfare and entitlements. If the government doesn't do this and continues to borrow like a drunken sailor we're heading for a bond vigilante strike and another bout of QE which will push inflation up and destroy people's disposable incomes.

    The only way out is to cut welfare spending and get people back into work. We can't afford to pay the lazy to sit at home doing nothing on benefits.

    'Benefits' according to the OBR are £150bn on Pensioners; £88bn on UC; and £74bn on other benefits. Where would you axe to get the £100bn?

    Should we get pensioners back into work?
    £20bn each out of UC and "other" benefits.

    Cut the triple lock entirely.

    £20bn out of the state pension by tapering above £40k, spend half of the saving on increasing the state pension for those who don't have any or significant private income in retirement.

    NI payable on all income types/merge NI and income tax.

    50% haircut on defined benefit public sector pensions for amounts over £40k (so a £60k DB pension becomes £50k).

    Freeze thresholds for a further 3 years.

    Cut at least 500k public sector jobs within two years, ban use of agency staff and severely limit the use of consultants and contractors. Use half of those savings to offer competitive salaries for technical roles.

    I think that would probably make a £100bn worth of closing the deficit, the resulting fall in bond yields and inflation would probably add another £20bn saving per year on the interest bill.
    And means test the NHS for the wealthy
    Define wealthy.

    Otherwise people like me will either die because they can't afford treatment (and I am already at high risk of early death because of the NHS's failures to spot stages 1, 2 or 3 of my cancer) - and I can't - or be bankrupted and made homeless.

    As for the state pension, it gets taxed if the pensioner has other income.

    One of the reasons for the deficit is the amount spent on furlough during Covid - money largely spent on those in jobs and to keep them in jobs. It was about £140 billion. They too should contribute.

    - 1p on income tax.
    - Extend VAT to food, books/newspapers & children's clothes.
    - NI for everyone who works.
    - Limit or abolish tax relief for those giving to charity and place an upper limit on the tax saved by those contributing to charity whether alive or after death.
    - Limit tax relief for pension contributions to the basic rate.
    - Extend VAT on education to all education providers, including universities.
    - Freeze thresholds.
    - Place a limit on public sector pay increases (the amount shovelled at train drivers by Reeves never gets mentioned here but it was a stupid move).
    - Abolish the WFA and other pension-specific benefits. Aim for the state pension to be the same as the tax free income as and when we can afford it.
    - Abolish the triple lock.
    - Those with assets should contribute something towards social care.
    - Introduce council tax bands for higher value houses.
    - Increase or widen the charges for council services beyond the basic.
    - Ensure that overseas visitors pay for the NHS. Other countries manage this. So can we.
    - Limit tax relief for private equity companies loading companies up with debt, taking dividends and asset stripping. (Thames Water and other companies in a similar position should be allowed to go bust and then nationalised for a £. Too often asset stripping has been presented as overseas investment. It is a gigantic con.)

    And so on.

    There is a nasty streak among some of the commentary on here. Everyone seems to want others to pay taxes and those who work on here seem to think that they should be exempt from any measures to help pay down the deficit, thinking it must all be done by the poor and the old. It also gives the impression that some welcome AD because they will be able to pressure the old and sick into killing themselves to save money or withhold treatment so that they suffer. It is disgustingly frankly. I am surprised to see @Big_G_NorthWales among their number
    Can I just say that wealthy to me include celebrities and multi millionaires who can contribute to the NHS

    As far as your list is concerned I agree with each and every one and it needs a government to accept we cannot continue borrowing, spending and taxing and think the unthinkable

    I want the NHS available to all but those with the broadest shoulders should contribute as indeed should the pension be reviewed as to just who should receive this very expensive benefit
    They do contribute - as indeed have I - through taxes. In my case for decades. But there is no justification for denying the NHS to people who are seriously or terminally ill. You are advocating for a US style system which will harm the sick. I am one of their number and I think it disgusting that you should wish to deprive me of the NHS when I need it most. You do not define what wealthy means - name a figure and let's see what this actually means.
    Indeed, means testing the NHS and barring the wealthy just seems like an odd and very mean spirited thing to do. From a practical sense I doubt it would save very much money given that the "wealthy" that BigG mentions are likely to have private health insurance and it breaks the idea that all British citizens/residents get treated equally by the health service, rich and poor alike get the same (sometimes not very good, sometimes excellent) treatment.

    The comment about those with the broadest shoulders contributing is also very off colour for BigG, I think he's been watching too much Jez on Tiktok or something. At my peak earnings a few years ago my net rate of tax was 43% and I paid well into six figures per year in tax, to suggest that the "wealthy" don't already make a huge contribution is factually incorrect. Indeed it is this anti-wealth attitude among those who call themselves conservative that resulted in the previous government just ceding the subject of wealth creation to the left.
    No one ever suggests giving a tax rebate/benefit to anyone who has private health insurance which helps take the pressure off our sainted NHS.
    Generally the choke point is the same pool of consultants and specialists that you have to see, before (and often during) getting private treatment that also give a proportion of their time to the NHS, with the private patients essentially paying to jump the queue. If there was incentive for a significant batch of people to switch to private, either private waiting times would increase dramatically, or consultants would do more private work and less NHS, making the NHS position worse.

    The governments approach of using the over capacity in the private sector to deal with the NHS backlog is the more sensible one. Continuing what the Tories were doing before.
    The absurd rationing of testing continues.

    I know more and more people who pay private facilities to get MRIs etc. XRays seem to be easier in the NHS system.

    Early detection of problems is cheaper.
    Indeed, my dad just had this issue (hence my suggestion in the previous comment). He has had a knee problem for about 15 years, it's suddenly got a lot worse so he went to see the doctor. Long story short, after about 6 months of hearing nothing back from the NHS on getting a scan he went private and got a scan done - they said his right knee is basically completely deteriorated and he needs surgery.

    He wanted to make sure that this was necessary so he arranged finally got an appointment with the NHS specialist a few months down the road who looked at the scan and said words to the effect of "we wouldn't recommend surgery at this stage because the degradation doesn't meet our requirements for it, basically you can still walk around for up to a mile or so before it starts really hurting". He then asked if he could go private would that advice change and the specialist said "yes, get this done ASAP because it will seriously improve your life quality and in 10 years when this gets to the point where the NHS will consider it degraded enough to operate you may not be eligible due to age and poor likelihood of recovery". It's a completely mental situation. They're knowingly saying no/delaying huge life improving surgery to people knowing that 10 years down the road it will cause huge issues for these people, well at least for those people who can't afford to go private.

    This is the kind of stuff that I really think is low hanging fruit for the NHS, cheap preventative care today reduces our future liability by huge amounts and that's where I would be looking for gains. They may not show immediately but in 2-3 years there would be a noticeable drop in resource demand.
    Our youngest had an ingrown toenail a couple of years ago. After going through the initial stages of treatment with our NHS GP (which consisted understandably of “give it a couple of weeks to see if it sorts itself out”) the GP referred him to get it looked at by a specialist. By the time the letter from the specialist dept had arrived to tell us we had been booked for an initial appointment another four months later we had already given up on the NHS & taken him to a private specialist who had diagnosed it as needing surgery & carried that surgery out that week - removing an impressively large chunk of toenail that had grown off sideways into the depths of his big toe in the process!

    The specialist said the likely time from initial diagnostic appointment to actual surgery on the NHS was between 9-12 months in his experience.

    The NHS is just broken for ordinary people it seems. If you fit into one of the “pathways” (cancer, stroke, heart disease) then you get treated in a timely fashion (most of the time), but those are mostly the diseases of old people. For the young, the NHS is a failure that pretends to treat them & then keeps them dangling with the hope of treatment that might manifest itself sometime, maybe.

    We need to get back to the idea that the NHS sees getting working age people back into work as quickly as reasonably possible a priority.
    I know of people waiting over two years to get access to CAMHS in Edinburgh.
    Two years is quick, for most.
    The rape case I did last week involved a young woman whose legal guardian claimed had a mental age of 6. She was in residential care but had freedom of movement. She was raped and enormously distressed. Medical evidence said, remarkably, that she understood enough about sex to consent or withhold her consent.

    Her guardian contacted Social work the night it happened who did ...nothing. When the guardian got back from her holiday she took her to the police but it was too late to get medical support for the claim. The man was convicted by the evidence of the distress and what was said to the guardian hours after the assault. It was close, a majority verdict.

    The lack of care of such an obviously vulnerable young woman frankly made me incandescent. So many jobsworths are paid to look after people and just don't give a damn. This case involved an indigenous Scot but it demonstrated all so clearly how the victims we are not supposed to talk about get taken advantage of.

    We are spending a fortune on these services. We are not getting results.

    That's absolutely shocking and glad the jury came back with the correct decision, even by majority verdict. These are the kinds of cases why people like me suggest that burning it all down and starting again can't be worse than what we have now. People are being failed by the state at an alarming rate, whether that's cases like these which are absolutely awful, the NHS in lots of areas, the police are failing the public at large on crime, the judiciary are failing the public in deportations, politicians are failing us on all fronts.

    The UK is getting closer and closer to becoming a failed state so maybe some tough medicine is what the state needs, not more of the same.
    I have recently started ‘Who dares, win’ by Dominic Sandbrook on the early Thatcher years. The opening chapters have laid bare the state of the nation in 1979 and the radical approach that Thatchers government took, including the realisation that there would be pain for some but it would be worth it in the end.*

    There is no sense that any political party is prepared to undertake policies that might have short term pain for long term gain. Take Labour. They wanted to slash WFA soeniding and failed to hold their nerve. And again on PIP. I am not commenting on the right or wrong of either more the lack of political guts to suffer even a tiny bit of kick back from policy.

    We have to start living more within our means. Increase tax, reduce spending and find a way to economic growth. And we need to accept that it will hurt for some. No one wants to punish people unfortunate to be unable to work or look after themselves. But we risk being taken for mugs when ‘feeling a bit sad sometimes’ elicits money for free.

    Someone in the room needs to tell the country hard truths. And it’s about time we listened to them. The party is over, now it’s time to pay the bills and tidy up.

    *Opinion is divided on this.
    I think also that Britain probably needs a Prime Minister who is willing to say that they aren't going to try and fix every problem in the country, because such a task is not something that government can do alone..
    I strongly agree with this.
    And trashing everything to start again would simply multiply the number of problems.

    But for incremental change to work, it does require honestly trying to improve stuff.
  • wooliedyedwooliedyed Posts: 12,446

    eek said:

    Sean_F said:

    Wasn't there research that said the most pro-Trump demographic was people who identified as regular churchgoers who rarely went to church?

    If the polling Leon has found identifies a growth of such identity, or Potemkin, Christians in Britain, then it could be very politically significant.

    That's certainly one way to square the circle, though an alarming one if it is what's going on. We don't have the same televangelist culture in the UK as in the US, and that's a very good thing. The massive downside of broadcast religion is that it tends to sidestep the difficult "who, exactly, is my neighbour, and who isn't?" question.

    And that leads fairly smoothly to the consequences we are currently seeing Stateside.

    (Much more likely is that using polling to identify small percentages is blooming difficult. And that calculating a change by subtracting one blurry number from another is a mug's game.)
    If it is at least part of what's going on then it will be because English-language social media is dominated by Americans.
    People adopting Christianity as a badge of political identity, without being regular attendees, is quite believable.
    Quite a lot of people say they are Christian but would never bother to attend church - except for weddings and maybe baptism.
    My father used to remind me that someone who goes to church every Christmas and Easter is a regular churchgoer…
    Like 'regulars' in the pub who show up for one pint at 12 every Christmas Day and think they keep your business afloat
    You could go once every 4 years on Feb 29th and you would be regularly attending.

    In any business I own I want frequent customers...
    Indeed. Frequent and thirsty if a pub. Frequent, thirsty and docile. Rarely the third unfortunately
    When I was a student, I drank in a local pub that had an actual pool room - a good, full sized table and enough space to play and sit. Was packed all week with people waiting to play. Who tended to drink lots, feed the juke box and cause very little trouble.

    Then a genius from the brewery got rid of the pool table to have more tables for food. In Bloomsbury, the market for badly reheated burgers was pretty low. So now the pub is dead - even years later. I actually met the idiot responsible, at the time, who told me that it was all according to the course on pub management he had done.
    Pubs were finished when the pubCos took over. At least when the breweries exclusively owned them they had an interest in keeping people drinking. Once the beer orders came about in 1989 it hived off pubs to the PubCos who merely existed to grift off of Landlords with the ludicrous ties etc and exorbitant rent/punatuve leaseholds.
    The loosening of licensing hours in 1988 started the rot tbf, and changing habits and the availability of cheap alcohol everywhere but in pubs has done the rest
  • algarkirkalgarkirk Posts: 14,838

    Pope gone...

    Another one! That was a short reign
    Way too late - at least three posters did that hours ago…
    But I have air conditioning where I am…
    It’s about 22 deg C here. No need for air con.
    At 7pm that’s pretty hot. And London is worse
    Second jumper gone on in the house and thinking the heating might go on tomorrow if it gets cooler in Cumberland. Raining. Bleak. Grey. Evenings drawing in. Lights on.
  • viewcodeviewcode Posts: 25,120
    MaxPB said:

    In other news I have accepted a new job for a British startup at C-Level, I start in September and I'm very excited at the prospect. There are only ~30 people at the company, I'll be the second person in at exec level. I've obviously taken a pretty drastic pay cut to do this from my finance and fintech days but for the first time in ages I'm really looking forwards to going back to work.

    I think it will be about 11 months off in total spent with the family, which is the best year I've had since the year my then girlfriend (now wife) and I went travelling together for six months and got married a few months after we got back. If you can afford to take the time off, I'd highly recommend doing a year(ish) long career break and just spending the time with family and not worrying about work stuff. I'm obviously very lucky that I have earned well in my previous roles and that my wife also has a high income so I do recognise that not everyone would be able to do it.

    Congratulations. What does "C-level" mean?
  • williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 56,094
    viewcode said:

    MaxPB said:

    In other news I have accepted a new job for a British startup at C-Level, I start in September and I'm very excited at the prospect. There are only ~30 people at the company, I'll be the second person in at exec level. I've obviously taken a pretty drastic pay cut to do this from my finance and fintech days but for the first time in ages I'm really looking forwards to going back to work.

    I think it will be about 11 months off in total spent with the family, which is the best year I've had since the year my then girlfriend (now wife) and I went travelling together for six months and got married a few months after we got back. If you can afford to take the time off, I'd highly recommend doing a year(ish) long career break and just spending the time with family and not worrying about work stuff. I'm obviously very lucky that I have earned well in my previous roles and that my wife also has a high income so I do recognise that not everyone would be able to do it.

    Congratulations. What does "C-level" mean?
    Below A- and B- level.
  • Scott_xPScott_xP Posts: 39,169
    viewcode said:

    MaxPB said:

    In other news I have accepted a new job for a British startup at C-Level, I start in September and I'm very excited at the prospect. There are only ~30 people at the company, I'll be the second person in at exec level. I've obviously taken a pretty drastic pay cut to do this from my finance and fintech days but for the first time in ages I'm really looking forwards to going back to work.

    I think it will be about 11 months off in total spent with the family, which is the best year I've had since the year my then girlfriend (now wife) and I went travelling together for six months and got married a few months after we got back. If you can afford to take the time off, I'd highly recommend doing a year(ish) long career break and just spending the time with family and not worrying about work stuff. I'm obviously very lucky that I have earned well in my previous roles and that my wife also has a high income so I do recognise that not everyone would be able to do it.

    Congratulations. What does "C-level" mean?
    Chief

    CEO, CFO, CIO, CISO, etc...
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 79,020
    MaxPB said:

    Nigelb said:

    MaxPB said:

    DavidL said:

    Monkeys said:

    Phil said:

    MaxPB said:

    IanB2 said:

    Taz said:

    MaxPB said:

    Cyclefree said:

    Cyclefree said:

    MaxPB said:

    Battlebus said:

    MaxPB said:

    It's time to outline £100bn in spending cuts and tax rises, split 75% towards spending cuts with the majority coming from welfare and entitlements. If the government doesn't do this and continues to borrow like a drunken sailor we're heading for a bond vigilante strike and another bout of QE which will push inflation up and destroy people's disposable incomes.

    The only way out is to cut welfare spending and get people back into work. We can't afford to pay the lazy to sit at home doing nothing on benefits.

    'Benefits' according to the OBR are £150bn on Pensioners; £88bn on UC; and £74bn on other benefits. Where would you axe to get the £100bn?

    Should we get pensioners back into work?
    £20bn each out of UC and "other" benefits.

    Cut the triple lock entirely.

    £20bn out of the state pension by tapering above £40k, spend half of the saving on increasing the state pension for those who don't have any or significant private income in retirement.

    NI payable on all income types/merge NI and income tax.

    50% haircut on defined benefit public sector pensions for amounts over £40k (so a £60k DB pension becomes £50k).

    Freeze thresholds for a further 3 years.

    Cut at least 500k public sector jobs within two years, ban use of agency staff and severely limit the use of consultants and contractors. Use half of those savings to offer competitive salaries for technical roles.

    I think that would probably make a £100bn worth of closing the deficit, the resulting fall in bond yields and inflation would probably add another £20bn saving per year on the interest bill.
    And means test the NHS for the wealthy
    Define wealthy.

    Otherwise people like me will either die because they can't afford treatment (and I am already at high risk of early death because of the NHS's failures to spot stages 1, 2 or 3 of my cancer) - and I can't - or be bankrupted and made homeless.

    As for the state pension, it gets taxed if the pensioner has other income.

    One of the reasons for the deficit is the amount spent on furlough during Covid - money largely spent on those in jobs and to keep them in jobs. It was about £140 billion. They too should contribute.

    - 1p on income tax.
    - Extend VAT to food, books/newspapers & children's clothes.
    - NI for everyone who works.
    - Limit or abolish tax relief for those giving to charity and place an upper limit on the tax saved by those contributing to charity whether alive or after death.
    - Limit tax relief for pension contributions to the basic rate.
    - Extend VAT on education to all education providers, including universities.
    - Freeze thresholds.
    - Place a limit on public sector pay increases (the amount shovelled at train drivers by Reeves never gets mentioned here but it was a stupid move).
    - Abolish the WFA and other pension-specific benefits. Aim for the state pension to be the same as the tax free income as and when we can afford it.
    - Abolish the triple lock.
    - Those with assets should contribute something towards social care.
    - Introduce council tax bands for higher value houses.
    - Increase or widen the charges for council services beyond the basic.
    - Ensure that overseas visitors pay for the NHS. Other countries manage this. So can we.
    - Limit tax relief for private equity companies loading companies up with debt, taking dividends and asset stripping. (Thames Water and other companies in a similar position should be allowed to go bust and then nationalised for a £. Too often asset stripping has been presented as overseas investment. It is a gigantic con.)

    And so on.

    There is a nasty streak among some of the commentary on here. Everyone seems to want others to pay taxes and those who work on here seem to think that they should be exempt from any measures to help pay down the deficit, thinking it must all be done by the poor and the old. It also gives the impression that some welcome AD because they will be able to pressure the old and sick into killing themselves to save money or withhold treatment so that they suffer. It is disgustingly frankly. I am surprised to see @Big_G_NorthWales among their number
    Can I just say that wealthy to me include celebrities and multi millionaires who can contribute to the NHS

    As far as your list is concerned I agree with each and every one and it needs a government to accept we cannot continue borrowing, spending and taxing and think the unthinkable

    I want the NHS available to all but those with the broadest shoulders should contribute as indeed should the pension be reviewed as to just who should receive this very expensive benefit
    They do contribute - as indeed have I - through taxes. In my case for decades. But there is no justification for denying the NHS to people who are seriously or terminally ill. You are advocating for a US style system which will harm the sick. I am one of their number and I think it disgusting that you should wish to deprive me of the NHS when I need it most. You do not define what wealthy means - name a figure and let's see what this actually means.
    Indeed, means testing the NHS and barring the wealthy just seems like an odd and very mean spirited thing to do. From a practical sense I doubt it would save very much money given that the "wealthy" that BigG mentions are likely to have private health insurance and it breaks the idea that all British citizens/residents get treated equally by the health service, rich and poor alike get the same (sometimes not very good, sometimes excellent) treatment.

    The comment about those with the broadest shoulders contributing is also very off colour for BigG, I think he's been watching too much Jez on Tiktok or something. At my peak earnings a few years ago my net rate of tax was 43% and I paid well into six figures per year in tax, to suggest that the "wealthy" don't already make a huge contribution is factually incorrect. Indeed it is this anti-wealth attitude among those who call themselves conservative that resulted in the previous government just ceding the subject of wealth creation to the left.
    No one ever suggests giving a tax rebate/benefit to anyone who has private health insurance which helps take the pressure off our sainted NHS.
    Generally the choke point is the same pool of consultants and specialists that you have to see, before (and often during) getting private treatment that also give a proportion of their time to the NHS, with the private patients essentially paying to jump the queue. If there was incentive for a significant batch of people to switch to private, either private waiting times would increase dramatically, or consultants would do more private work and less NHS, making the NHS position worse.

    The governments approach of using the over capacity in the private sector to deal with the NHS backlog is the more sensible one. Continuing what the Tories were doing before.
    The absurd rationing of testing continues.

    I know more and more people who pay private facilities to get MRIs etc. XRays seem to be easier in the NHS system.

    Early detection of problems is cheaper.
    Indeed, my dad just had this issue (hence my suggestion in the previous comment). He has had a knee problem for about 15 years, it's suddenly got a lot worse so he went to see the doctor. Long story short, after about 6 months of hearing nothing back from the NHS on getting a scan he went private and got a scan done - they said his right knee is basically completely deteriorated and he needs surgery.

    He wanted to make sure that this was necessary so he arranged finally got an appointment with the NHS specialist a few months down the road who looked at the scan and said words to the effect of "we wouldn't recommend surgery at this stage because the degradation doesn't meet our requirements for it, basically you can still walk around for up to a mile or so before it starts really hurting". He then asked if he could go private would that advice change and the specialist said "yes, get this done ASAP because it will seriously improve your life quality and in 10 years when this gets to the point where the NHS will consider it degraded enough to operate you may not be eligible due to age and poor likelihood of recovery". It's a completely mental situation. They're knowingly saying no/delaying huge life improving surgery to people knowing that 10 years down the road it will cause huge issues for these people, well at least for those people who can't afford to go private.

    This is the kind of stuff that I really think is low hanging fruit for the NHS, cheap preventative care today reduces our future liability by huge amounts and that's where I would be looking for gains. They may not show immediately but in 2-3 years there would be a noticeable drop in resource demand.
    Our youngest had an ingrown toenail a couple of years ago. After going through the initial stages of treatment with our NHS GP (which consisted understandably of “give it a couple of weeks to see if it sorts itself out”) the GP referred him to get it looked at by a specialist. By the time the letter from the specialist dept had arrived to tell us we had been booked for an initial appointment another four months later we had already given up on the NHS & taken him to a private specialist who had diagnosed it as needing surgery & carried that surgery out that week - removing an impressively large chunk of toenail that had grown off sideways into the depths of his big toe in the process!

    The specialist said the likely time from initial diagnostic appointment to actual surgery on the NHS was between 9-12 months in his experience.

    The NHS is just broken for ordinary people it seems. If you fit into one of the “pathways” (cancer, stroke, heart disease) then you get treated in a timely fashion (most of the time), but those are mostly the diseases of old people. For the young, the NHS is a failure that pretends to treat them & then keeps them dangling with the hope of treatment that might manifest itself sometime, maybe.

    We need to get back to the idea that the NHS sees getting working age people back into work as quickly as reasonably possible a priority.
    I know of people waiting over two years to get access to CAMHS in Edinburgh.
    Two years is quick, for most.
    The rape case I did last week involved a young woman whose legal guardian claimed had a mental age of 6. She was in residential care but had freedom of movement. She was raped and enormously distressed. Medical evidence said, remarkably, that she understood enough about sex to consent or withhold her consent.

    Her guardian contacted Social work the night it happened who did ...nothing. When the guardian got back from her holiday she took her to the police but it was too late to get medical support for the claim. The man was convicted by the evidence of the distress and what was said to the guardian hours after the assault. It was close, a majority verdict.

    The lack of care of such an obviously vulnerable young woman frankly made me incandescent. So many jobsworths are paid to look after people and just don't give a damn. This case involved an indigenous Scot but it demonstrated all so clearly how the victims we are not supposed to talk about get taken advantage of.

    We are spending a fortune on these services. We are not getting results.

    That's absolutely shocking and glad the jury came back with the correct decision, even by majority verdict. These are the kinds of cases why people like me suggest that burning it all down and starting again can't be worse than what we have now. People are being failed by the state at an alarming rate, whether that's cases like these which are absolutely awful, the NHS in lots of areas, the police are failing the public at large on crime, the judiciary are failing the public in deportations, politicians are failing us on all fronts.

    The UK is getting closer and closer to becoming a failed state so maybe some tough medicine is what the state needs, not more of the same.
    What does "burning it all down" mean for those in care ?
    I don't know, but how could it be worse than today, knowing everything we know about what has already happened.
    Some Cyclefrees in the system would help.

    Trying to reconstruct it from scratch might just replicate the problems we have now - and what happens to the children while that is being done ?
  • TheScreamingEaglesTheScreamingEagles Posts: 122,633
    viewcode said:

    MaxPB said:

    In other news I have accepted a new job for a British startup at C-Level, I start in September and I'm very excited at the prospect. There are only ~30 people at the company, I'll be the second person in at exec level. I've obviously taken a pretty drastic pay cut to do this from my finance and fintech days but for the first time in ages I'm really looking forwards to going back to work.

    I think it will be about 11 months off in total spent with the family, which is the best year I've had since the year my then girlfriend (now wife) and I went travelling together for six months and got married a few months after we got back. If you can afford to take the time off, I'd highly recommend doing a year(ish) long career break and just spending the time with family and not worrying about work stuff. I'm obviously very lucky that I have earned well in my previous roles and that my wife also has a high income so I do recognise that not everyone would be able to do it.

    Congratulations. What does "C-level" mean?
    Chief level.

    Chief Executive, Chief Operating Officer, Chief Financial Officer etc.

    Anyhoo, the best people have General in their title, such as General Counsel.
  • ChrisChris Posts: 12,040

    Sean_F said:

    Wasn't there research that said the most pro-Trump demographic was people who identified as regular churchgoers who rarely went to church?

    If the polling Leon has found identifies a growth of such identity, or Potemkin, Christians in Britain, then it could be very politically significant.

    That's certainly one way to square the circle, though an alarming one if it is what's going on. We don't have the same televangelist culture in the UK as in the US, and that's a very good thing. The massive downside of broadcast religion is that it tends to sidestep the difficult "who, exactly, is my neighbour, and who isn't?" question.

    And that leads fairly smoothly to the consequences we are currently seeing Stateside.

    (Much more likely is that using polling to identify small percentages is blooming difficult. And that calculating a change by subtracting one blurry number from another is a mug's game.)
    If it is at least part of what's going on then it will be because English-language social media is dominated by Americans.
    People adopting Christianity as a badge of political identity, without being regular attendees, is quite believable.
    Quite a lot of people say they are Christian but would never bother to attend church - except for weddings and maybe baptism.
    And about 100% of people who go to church would never dream of selling all their possessions and giving the money to the poor.
  • Scott_xPScott_xP Posts: 39,169

    viewcode said:

    MaxPB said:

    In other news I have accepted a new job for a British startup at C-Level, I start in September and I'm very excited at the prospect. There are only ~30 people at the company, I'll be the second person in at exec level. I've obviously taken a pretty drastic pay cut to do this from my finance and fintech days but for the first time in ages I'm really looking forwards to going back to work.

    I think it will be about 11 months off in total spent with the family, which is the best year I've had since the year my then girlfriend (now wife) and I went travelling together for six months and got married a few months after we got back. If you can afford to take the time off, I'd highly recommend doing a year(ish) long career break and just spending the time with family and not worrying about work stuff. I'm obviously very lucky that I have earned well in my previous roles and that my wife also has a high income so I do recognise that not everyone would be able to do it.

    Congratulations. What does "C-level" mean?
    Chief level.

    Chief Executive, Chief Operating Officer, Chief Financial Officer etc.

    Anyhoo, the best people have General in their title, such as General Counsel.
    Nah

    Analyst is better
  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 32,725

    viewcode said:

    MaxPB said:

    In other news I have accepted a new job for a British startup at C-Level, I start in September and I'm very excited at the prospect. There are only ~30 people at the company, I'll be the second person in at exec level. I've obviously taken a pretty drastic pay cut to do this from my finance and fintech days but for the first time in ages I'm really looking forwards to going back to work.

    I think it will be about 11 months off in total spent with the family, which is the best year I've had since the year my then girlfriend (now wife) and I went travelling together for six months and got married a few months after we got back. If you can afford to take the time off, I'd highly recommend doing a year(ish) long career break and just spending the time with family and not worrying about work stuff. I'm obviously very lucky that I have earned well in my previous roles and that my wife also has a high income so I do recognise that not everyone would be able to do it.

    Congratulations. What does "C-level" mean?
    Chief level.

    Chief Executive, Chief Operating Officer, Chief Financial Officer etc.

    Anyhoo, the best people have General in their title, such as General Counsel.
    General Dogsbody?
  • MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 55,348
    Some stunning tennis in the Alcarazv v Rublev match.
  • williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 56,094

    viewcode said:

    MaxPB said:

    In other news I have accepted a new job for a British startup at C-Level, I start in September and I'm very excited at the prospect. There are only ~30 people at the company, I'll be the second person in at exec level. I've obviously taken a pretty drastic pay cut to do this from my finance and fintech days but for the first time in ages I'm really looking forwards to going back to work.

    I think it will be about 11 months off in total spent with the family, which is the best year I've had since the year my then girlfriend (now wife) and I went travelling together for six months and got married a few months after we got back. If you can afford to take the time off, I'd highly recommend doing a year(ish) long career break and just spending the time with family and not worrying about work stuff. I'm obviously very lucky that I have earned well in my previous roles and that my wife also has a high income so I do recognise that not everyone would be able to do it.

    Congratulations. What does "C-level" mean?
    Chief level.

    Chief Executive, Chief Operating Officer, Chief Financial Officer etc.

    Anyhoo, the best people have General in their title, such as General Counsel.
    General Dogsbody?
    General Ripper.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 79,020

    Phil said:

    The NHS is just broken for ordinary people it seems. If you fit into one of the “pathways” (cancer, stroke, heart disease) then you get treated in a timely fashion (most of the time), but those are mostly the diseases of old people. For the young, the NHS is a failure that pretends to treat them & then keeps them dangling with the hope of treatment that might manifest itself sometime, maybe.

    I'm currently awaiting eye surgery for the second time. First it was the left eye which took three years from initial referral to surgery. Now with the right eye I'm told it's likely to be over a year just to get an initial consultation and two and a half to three years after that for surgery.

    So in total I'll likely have spent seven or more years partially sighted because of a condition that is easily treated with a fairly minor, if delicate, procedure. I'm lucky, I've always had one functioning eye and can keep on working. But I wonder just how much of our bloated benefits bill is due to people who can't work because the NHS is incapable of fixing their problems in any reasonable time frame.

    That surprises me.
    I was favourably impressed with the speed and efficiency of my surgery, which took a few months from diagnosis at a Specsavers checkup, rather than years.
  • EabhalEabhal Posts: 11,195
    edited July 6

    Gotta hand it to the Observer if this Salt Path stands up then they are looking at awards for investigative journo stuff.

    I was looking at the South West coast path and it's got 35,000 metres of ascent. That's ridiculous, and a reminder that these coastal walks are just as hard as high level ones in mountainous areas, but with constant changes in gradient.

    Personally I don't really fancy them but I know JosiasJessop enjoyed his epic coastal walk.
  • MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 55,348
    edited July 6
    Scott_xP said:

    viewcode said:

    MaxPB said:

    In other news I have accepted a new job for a British startup at C-Level, I start in September and I'm very excited at the prospect. There are only ~30 people at the company, I'll be the second person in at exec level. I've obviously taken a pretty drastic pay cut to do this from my finance and fintech days but for the first time in ages I'm really looking forwards to going back to work.

    I think it will be about 11 months off in total spent with the family, which is the best year I've had since the year my then girlfriend (now wife) and I went travelling together for six months and got married a few months after we got back. If you can afford to take the time off, I'd highly recommend doing a year(ish) long career break and just spending the time with family and not worrying about work stuff. I'm obviously very lucky that I have earned well in my previous roles and that my wife also has a high income so I do recognise that not everyone would be able to do it.

    Congratulations. What does "C-level" mean?
    Chief level.

    Chief Executive, Chief Operating Officer, Chief Financial Officer etc.

    Anyhoo, the best people have General in their title, such as General Counsel.
    Nah

    Analyst is better
    Best title I have heard of was a guy at Shell.

    He was Head of Knowledge.

    Fucking know-it-all... But you'd want him on your pub quiz team.
  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 32,725

    viewcode said:

    MaxPB said:

    In other news I have accepted a new job for a British startup at C-Level, I start in September and I'm very excited at the prospect. There are only ~30 people at the company, I'll be the second person in at exec level. I've obviously taken a pretty drastic pay cut to do this from my finance and fintech days but for the first time in ages I'm really looking forwards to going back to work.

    I think it will be about 11 months off in total spent with the family, which is the best year I've had since the year my then girlfriend (now wife) and I went travelling together for six months and got married a few months after we got back. If you can afford to take the time off, I'd highly recommend doing a year(ish) long career break and just spending the time with family and not worrying about work stuff. I'm obviously very lucky that I have earned well in my previous roles and that my wife also has a high income so I do recognise that not everyone would be able to do it.

    Congratulations. What does "C-level" mean?
    Chief level.

    Chief Executive, Chief Operating Officer, Chief Financial Officer etc.

    Anyhoo, the best people have General in their title, such as General Counsel.
    General Dogsbody?
    General Ripper.
    Another Dr Strangelove connection?
  • TheScreamingEaglesTheScreamingEagles Posts: 122,633
    Titles are important, after uni I nearly joined the Foreign Office to become an ambassador so I would be addressed by everybody as 'Your Excellency' and eventually a GCMG (God Calls Me God).
  • carnforthcarnforth Posts: 6,542

    Titles are important, after uni I nearly joined the Foreign Office to become an ambassador so I would be addressed by everybody as 'Your Excellency' and eventually a GCMG (God Calls Me God).

    Royal titles especially :smiley:
  • TheScreamingEaglesTheScreamingEagles Posts: 122,633

    Scott_xP said:

    viewcode said:

    MaxPB said:

    In other news I have accepted a new job for a British startup at C-Level, I start in September and I'm very excited at the prospect. There are only ~30 people at the company, I'll be the second person in at exec level. I've obviously taken a pretty drastic pay cut to do this from my finance and fintech days but for the first time in ages I'm really looking forwards to going back to work.

    I think it will be about 11 months off in total spent with the family, which is the best year I've had since the year my then girlfriend (now wife) and I went travelling together for six months and got married a few months after we got back. If you can afford to take the time off, I'd highly recommend doing a year(ish) long career break and just spending the time with family and not worrying about work stuff. I'm obviously very lucky that I have earned well in my previous roles and that my wife also has a high income so I do recognise that not everyone would be able to do it.

    Congratulations. What does "C-level" mean?
    Chief level.

    Chief Executive, Chief Operating Officer, Chief Financial Officer etc.

    Anyhoo, the best people have General in their title, such as General Counsel.
    Nah

    Analyst is better
    Best title I have heard of was a guy at Shell.

    He was Head of Knowledge.

    Fucking know-it-all... But you'd want him on your pub quiz team.
    I once visited a company that had a Chief Happiness Officer.

    I am glad I didn't work there because inevitability I would have made a joke about happy endings and HR would have got involved.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 62,566

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Strange how panicked & alarmed PB is, by the mere possibility Christianity might see a revival

    Also very telling

    Anecdotally, I see some truth in this. At my daughter’s uni (St Andrew’s) “going to church” is oddly fashionable. The same way taking smack was cool in my time

    I suspect the taking smack bit was your circle rather than your peers in general. I am about your age and my circles irrespective of location were not smackheads. I even had a group of friends at UCL, and none of them were mainlining the naughty stuff.

    I suspect currently going to church is similarly niche.
    Nobody at UCL would have socialised with a boring sap like you. So this is just a painful suite of lies
    I can give you names and addresses, however as they were interesting top class stars they wouldn't have noticed you and your sad little bunch of Edgelords, rolling spliffs and making your halves of Carling last all night.
    *spliffs*?

    “Carling”??

    lol

    DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?
  • williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 56,094
    Owen Jones hits back at JK Rowling over claims that he was on drugs:

    https://x.com/owenjonesjourno/status/1941882645027151973
  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 32,725
    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Strange how panicked & alarmed PB is, by the mere possibility Christianity might see a revival

    Also very telling

    Anecdotally, I see some truth in this. At my daughter’s uni (St Andrew’s) “going to church” is oddly fashionable. The same way taking smack was cool in my time

    I suspect the taking smack bit was your circle rather than your peers in general. I am about your age and my circles irrespective of location were not smackheads. I even had a group of friends at UCL, and none of them were mainlining the naughty stuff.

    I suspect currently going to church is similarly niche.
    Nobody at UCL would have socialised with a boring sap like you. So this is just a painful suite of lies
    I can give you names and addresses, however as they were interesting top class stars they wouldn't have noticed you and your sad little bunch of Edgelords, rolling spliffs and making your halves of Carling last all night.
    *spliffs*?

    “Carling”??

    lol

    DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?
    Byronic, Eadric, LadyG, Leon? Oh I give up.
  • wooliedyedwooliedyed Posts: 12,446
    Having a title, fair enough
    Using your title, wazzock
  • IanB2IanB2 Posts: 52,021

    It's funny, the a person who racially/religious abused me a few years ago was adorned with symbols of Christianity.

    They were really enraged by me having a white girlfriend, see we get criticised for not integrating, and then we get criticised for integrating.

    I think it would have blown their mind that St George never stepped foot in England or the fact that Jesus was a tanned chap from the Middle East and was born a Jew.

    God’s fault for giving those ancients such a narrow perspective, telling them stuff only about the area in which they already lived, despite having knowledge of all space and all time. He could at least have told them the world was round and shared some tales of polar bears and kangaroos.
  • TheScreamingEaglesTheScreamingEagles Posts: 122,633

    Having a title, fair enough
    Using your title, wazzock

    I used to work with a Lord, he used to get quite upset when I chaired meetings and all the formal notes and reports used his full title.

    He found it very embarrassing although he did insist we address his wife as Lady
  • wooliedyedwooliedyed Posts: 12,446
    edited July 6

    Having a title, fair enough
    Using your title, wazzock

    I used to work with a Lord, he used to get quite upset when I chaired meetings and all the formal notes and reports used his full title.

    He found it very embarrassing although he did insist we address his wife as Lady
    Good for him.
    Job titles can go on your office door, gongs and noble 'titles' belong in the past
  • IanB2IanB2 Posts: 52,021
    This middle part of Norway, the adjacent middle part of Sweden, and south western Finland, all fairly sparsely populated, are supposed to be the only parts of the world where over 80% of people are naturally blonde.
  • Big_G_NorthWalesBig_G_NorthWales Posts: 66,018
    As we say a silent prayer for our lost family member and everyone else, many who remain missing to this day
  • algarkirkalgarkirk Posts: 14,838
    Chris said:

    Sean_F said:

    Wasn't there research that said the most pro-Trump demographic was people who identified as regular churchgoers who rarely went to church?

    If the polling Leon has found identifies a growth of such identity, or Potemkin, Christians in Britain, then it could be very politically significant.

    That's certainly one way to square the circle, though an alarming one if it is what's going on. We don't have the same televangelist culture in the UK as in the US, and that's a very good thing. The massive downside of broadcast religion is that it tends to sidestep the difficult "who, exactly, is my neighbour, and who isn't?" question.

    And that leads fairly smoothly to the consequences we are currently seeing Stateside.

    (Much more likely is that using polling to identify small percentages is blooming difficult. And that calculating a change by subtracting one blurry number from another is a mug's game.)
    If it is at least part of what's going on then it will be because English-language social media is dominated by Americans.
    People adopting Christianity as a badge of political identity, without being regular attendees, is quite believable.
    Quite a lot of people say they are Christian but would never bother to attend church - except for weddings and maybe baptism.
    And about 100% of people who go to church would never dream of selling all their possessions and giving the money to the poor.
    Some of them show their slackness about divine orders so clearly that they can't even manage to slaughter all the Amalekites. The bishops should get a grip.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 128,645
    Chris said:

    Sean_F said:

    Wasn't there research that said the most pro-Trump demographic was people who identified as regular churchgoers who rarely went to church?

    If the polling Leon has found identifies a growth of such identity, or Potemkin, Christians in Britain, then it could be very politically significant.

    That's certainly one way to square the circle, though an alarming one if it is what's going on. We don't have the same televangelist culture in the UK as in the US, and that's a very good thing. The massive downside of broadcast religion is that it tends to sidestep the difficult "who, exactly, is my neighbour, and who isn't?" question.

    And that leads fairly smoothly to the consequences we are currently seeing Stateside.

    (Much more likely is that using polling to identify small percentages is blooming difficult. And that calculating a change by subtracting one blurry number from another is a mug's game.)
    If it is at least part of what's going on then it will be because English-language social media is dominated by Americans.
    People adopting Christianity as a badge of political identity, without being regular attendees, is quite believable.
    Quite a lot of people say they are Christian but would never bother to attend church - except for weddings and maybe baptism.
    And about 100% of people who go to church would never dream of selling all their possessions and giving the money to the poor.
    Roman Catholic priests and nuns effectively do exactly that, give up their worldly goods and take a lifetime vow of poverty. Only getting housing from the church and pocket money for food and basic necessities from their congregation
  • Scott_xPScott_xP Posts: 39,169
    Should have had a bet on the number of cards in the Switzerland game
  • ohnotnowohnotnow Posts: 5,019
    "You must log in to continue. Allow all cookies?"
  • Jim_MillerJim_Miller Posts: 3,391
    edited July 6
    Follow-up: I celebrated the Seattle Storm victory over the New York Liberty by eating some home made cornbread -- with Canadian maple syrup. Good stuff.

    (Please don't tell Dr. Foxy.)
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 74,074

    viewcode said:

    MaxPB said:

    In other news I have accepted a new job for a British startup at C-Level, I start in September and I'm very excited at the prospect. There are only ~30 people at the company, I'll be the second person in at exec level. I've obviously taken a pretty drastic pay cut to do this from my finance and fintech days but for the first time in ages I'm really looking forwards to going back to work.

    I think it will be about 11 months off in total spent with the family, which is the best year I've had since the year my then girlfriend (now wife) and I went travelling together for six months and got married a few months after we got back. If you can afford to take the time off, I'd highly recommend doing a year(ish) long career break and just spending the time with family and not worrying about work stuff. I'm obviously very lucky that I have earned well in my previous roles and that my wife also has a high income so I do recognise that not everyone would be able to do it.

    Congratulations. What does "C-level" mean?
    Chief level.

    Chief Executive, Chief Operating Officer, Chief Financial Officer etc.

    Anyhoo, the best people have General in their title, such as General Counsel.
    General Dogsbody?
    General Ripper.
    Another Dr Strangelove connection?
    Only in a preverted sense.
  • ohnotnowohnotnow Posts: 5,019

    Scott_xP said:

    viewcode said:

    MaxPB said:

    In other news I have accepted a new job for a British startup at C-Level, I start in September and I'm very excited at the prospect. There are only ~30 people at the company, I'll be the second person in at exec level. I've obviously taken a pretty drastic pay cut to do this from my finance and fintech days but for the first time in ages I'm really looking forwards to going back to work.

    I think it will be about 11 months off in total spent with the family, which is the best year I've had since the year my then girlfriend (now wife) and I went travelling together for six months and got married a few months after we got back. If you can afford to take the time off, I'd highly recommend doing a year(ish) long career break and just spending the time with family and not worrying about work stuff. I'm obviously very lucky that I have earned well in my previous roles and that my wife also has a high income so I do recognise that not everyone would be able to do it.

    Congratulations. What does "C-level" mean?
    Chief level.

    Chief Executive, Chief Operating Officer, Chief Financial Officer etc.

    Anyhoo, the best people have General in their title, such as General Counsel.
    Nah

    Analyst is better
    Best title I have heard of was a guy at Shell.

    He was Head of Knowledge.

    Fucking know-it-all... But you'd want him on your pub quiz team.
    I once met a guy at a party who's job title was something like "Chief Crossword Setter". He didn't believe me when I got all excited and thought I was taking the p*ss.
  • StillWatersStillWaters Posts: 10,311
    viewcode said:

    MaxPB said:

    In other news I have accepted a new job for a British startup at C-Level, I start in September and I'm very excited at the prospect. There are only ~30 people at the company, I'll be the second person in at exec level. I've obviously taken a pretty drastic pay cut to do this from my finance and fintech days but for the first time in ages I'm really looking forwards to going back to work.

    I think it will be about 11 months off in total spent with the family, which is the best year I've had since the year my then girlfriend (now wife) and I went travelling together for six months and got married a few months after we got back. If you can afford to take the time off, I'd highly recommend doing a year(ish) long career break and just spending the time with family and not worrying about work stuff. I'm obviously very lucky that I have earned well in my previous roles and that my wife also has a high income so I do recognise that not everyone would be able to do it.

    Congratulations. What does "C-level"
    mean?
    It means he’s a chief. (C-level is still better than C-suite though!)

    CEO, COO, CFO also CSO, CMO, CTO, CAO and CBO.

    I’m sure there are others I have forgotten…

  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 74,074
    ohnotnow said:

    Scott_xP said:

    viewcode said:

    MaxPB said:

    In other news I have accepted a new job for a British startup at C-Level, I start in September and I'm very excited at the prospect. There are only ~30 people at the company, I'll be the second person in at exec level. I've obviously taken a pretty drastic pay cut to do this from my finance and fintech days but for the first time in ages I'm really looking forwards to going back to work.

    I think it will be about 11 months off in total spent with the family, which is the best year I've had since the year my then girlfriend (now wife) and I went travelling together for six months and got married a few months after we got back. If you can afford to take the time off, I'd highly recommend doing a year(ish) long career break and just spending the time with family and not worrying about work stuff. I'm obviously very lucky that I have earned well in my previous roles and that my wife also has a high income so I do recognise that not everyone would be able to do it.

    Congratulations. What does "C-level" mean?
    Chief level.

    Chief Executive, Chief Operating Officer, Chief Financial Officer etc.

    Anyhoo, the best people have General in their title, such as General Counsel.
    Nah

    Analyst is better
    Best title I have heard of was a guy at Shell.

    He was Head of Knowledge.

    Fucking know-it-all... But you'd want him on your pub quiz team.
    I once met a guy at a party whose job title was something like "Chief Crossword Setter". He didn't believe me when I got all excited and thought I was taking the p*ss.
    He thought you were two down on him?
  • Big_G_NorthWalesBig_G_NorthWales Posts: 66,018
    ohnotnow said:

    "You must log in to continue. Allow all cookies?"
    10pm tonight is the 37th anniversary of the Piper Alpha tragedy and this explains the disaster
  • williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 56,094
    ohnotnow said:

    "You must log in to continue. Allow all cookies?"
    Facebook cookies should be called Zuckies.
  • ohnotnowohnotnow Posts: 5,019
    Nigelb said:

    Phil said:

    The NHS is just broken for ordinary people it seems. If you fit into one of the “pathways” (cancer, stroke, heart disease) then you get treated in a timely fashion (most of the time), but those are mostly the diseases of old people. For the young, the NHS is a failure that pretends to treat them & then keeps them dangling with the hope of treatment that might manifest itself sometime, maybe.

    I'm currently awaiting eye surgery for the second time. First it was the left eye which took three years from initial referral to surgery. Now with the right eye I'm told it's likely to be over a year just to get an initial consultation and two and a half to three years after that for surgery.

    So in total I'll likely have spent seven or more years partially sighted because of a condition that is easily treated with a fairly minor, if delicate, procedure. I'm lucky, I've always had one functioning eye and can keep on working. But I wonder just how much of our bloated benefits bill is due to people who can't work because the NHS is incapable of fixing their problems in any reasonable time frame.

    That surprises me.
    I was favourably impressed with the speed and efficiency of my surgery, which took a few months from diagnosis at a Specsavers checkup, rather than years.
    I sometimes wonder if the GP/NHS is like the Police (of which I have somewhat more family experience).

    If you're good at your job, you get to work in a 'posh' area, lower workload, spend more time on the job helping the somewhat affluent avoid the ills of affluence.

    If you're bad at it - get transferred to Scumsville and continue failing where it "doesn't matter" in the least.



  • TheuniondivvieTheuniondivvie Posts: 44,223

    ohnotnow said:

    "You must log in to continue. Allow all cookies?"
    Facebook cookies should be called Zuckies.
    Cuckies surely?
  • solarflaresolarflare Posts: 4,025
    ohnotnow said:

    Scott_xP said:

    viewcode said:

    MaxPB said:

    In other news I have accepted a new job for a British startup at C-Level, I start in September and I'm very excited at the prospect. There are only ~30 people at the company, I'll be the second person in at exec level. I've obviously taken a pretty drastic pay cut to do this from my finance and fintech days but for the first time in ages I'm really looking forwards to going back to work.

    I think it will be about 11 months off in total spent with the family, which is the best year I've had since the year my then girlfriend (now wife) and I went travelling together for six months and got married a few months after we got back. If you can afford to take the time off, I'd highly recommend doing a year(ish) long career break and just spending the time with family and not worrying about work stuff. I'm obviously very lucky that I have earned well in my previous roles and that my wife also has a high income so I do recognise that not everyone would be able to do it.

    Congratulations. What does "C-level" mean?
    Chief level.

    Chief Executive, Chief Operating Officer, Chief Financial Officer etc.

    Anyhoo, the best people have General in their title, such as General Counsel.
    Nah

    Analyst is better
    Best title I have heard of was a guy at Shell.

    He was Head of Knowledge.

    Fucking know-it-all... But you'd want him on your pub quiz team.
    I once met a guy at a party who's job title was something like "Chief Crossword Setter". He didn't believe me when I got all excited and thought I was taking the p*ss.
    Promoted from Chief Sudoku Setter?
  • ohnotnowohnotnow Posts: 5,019
    Scott_xP said:

    viewcode said:

    MaxPB said:

    In other news I have accepted a new job for a British startup at C-Level, I start in September and I'm very excited at the prospect. There are only ~30 people at the company, I'll be the second person in at exec level. I've obviously taken a pretty drastic pay cut to do this from my finance and fintech days but for the first time in ages I'm really looking forwards to going back to work.

    I think it will be about 11 months off in total spent with the family, which is the best year I've had since the year my then girlfriend (now wife) and I went travelling together for six months and got married a few months after we got back. If you can afford to take the time off, I'd highly recommend doing a year(ish) long career break and just spending the time with family and not worrying about work stuff. I'm obviously very lucky that I have earned well in my previous roles and that my wife also has a high income so I do recognise that not everyone would be able to do it.

    Congratulations. What does "C-level" mean?
    Chief

    CEO, CFO, CIO, CISO, etc...
    That's very much not how we refer to C-level.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 62,566
    edited July 6
    Remarkable interview with a guy who managed an asylum hotel

    https://x.com/djemedia_/status/1941807478519345438?s=61&t=GGp3Vs1t1kTWDiyA-odnZg

    I defy anyone to watch this and NOT conclude the system is irretrievably broken, is being gamed against us, and will have to be smashed so we can start again
  • ohnotnowohnotnow Posts: 5,019
    algarkirk said:

    Pope gone...

    Another one! That was a short reign
    Way too late - at least three posters did that hours ago…
    But I have air conditioning where I am…
    It’s about 22 deg C here. No need for air con.
    At 7pm that’s pretty hot. And London is worse
    Second jumper gone on in the house and thinking the heating might go on tomorrow if it gets cooler in Cumberland. Raining. Bleak. Grey. Evenings drawing in. Lights on.
    My heating (a bit to the North of you) kicked in today. Thankfully before my cat had a chance to guilt-trip me into turning it on myself.
  • carnforthcarnforth Posts: 6,542
    ohnotnow said:

    algarkirk said:

    Pope gone...

    Another one! That was a short reign
    Way too late - at least three posters did that hours ago…
    But I have air conditioning where I am…
    It’s about 22 deg C here. No need for air con.
    At 7pm that’s pretty hot. And London is worse
    Second jumper gone on in the house and thinking the heating might go on tomorrow if it gets cooler in Cumberland. Raining. Bleak. Grey. Evenings drawing in. Lights on.
    My heating (a bit to the North of you) kicked in today. Thankfully before my cat had a chance to guilt-trip me into turning it on myself.
    22.5° in the flat when I woke up here. No heating for six weeks. In the delightful south west.
  • JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 46,133
    Eabhal said:

    Gotta hand it to the Observer if this Salt Path stands up then they are looking at awards for investigative journo stuff.

    I was looking at the South West coast path and it's got 35,000 metres of ascent. That's ridiculous, and a reminder that these coastal walks are just as hard as high level ones in mountainous areas, but with constant changes in gradient.

    Personally I don't really fancy them but I know JosiasJessop enjoyed his epic coastal walk.
    Heh. I did the SWCP in winter (though my gf drove a motorhome), and I chose to walk up every estuary to the first crossing point. From memory, it added about 200 miles onto the SWCP.

    I've walked much of the SWCP twice, and it feels very different in winter to summer. Much preferable - aside from campsites and caravansites closing for the season...
  • ohnotnowohnotnow Posts: 5,019

    ohnotnow said:

    "You must log in to continue. Allow all cookies?"
    10pm tonight is the 37th anniversary of the Piper Alpha tragedy and this explains the disaster
    Ahhhh! Ok. Grim times - some of my cousins were involved.
  • Big_G_NorthWalesBig_G_NorthWales Posts: 66,018
    ohnotnow said:

    ohnotnow said:

    "You must log in to continue. Allow all cookies?"
    10pm tonight is the 37th anniversary of the Piper Alpha tragedy and this explains the disaster
    Ahhhh! Ok. Grim times - some of my cousins were involved.
    My wife lost her cousin's son
  • MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 40,292
    Nigelb said:

    MaxPB said:

    Nigelb said:

    MaxPB said:

    DavidL said:

    Monkeys said:

    Phil said:

    MaxPB said:

    IanB2 said:

    Taz said:

    MaxPB said:

    Cyclefree said:

    Cyclefree said:

    MaxPB said:

    Battlebus said:

    MaxPB said:

    It's time to outline £100bn in spending cuts and tax rises, split 75% towards spending cuts with the majority coming from welfare and entitlements. If the government doesn't do this and continues to borrow like a drunken sailor we're heading for a bond vigilante strike and another bout of QE which will push inflation up and destroy people's disposable incomes.

    The only way out is to cut welfare spending and get people back into work. We can't afford to pay the lazy to sit at home doing nothing on benefits.

    'Benefits' according to the OBR are £150bn on Pensioners; £88bn on UC; and £74bn on other benefits. Where would you axe to get the £100bn?

    Should we get pensioners back into work?
    £20bn each out of UC and "other" benefits.

    Cut the triple lock entirely.

    £20bn out of the state pension by tapering above £40k, spend half of the saving on increasing the state pension for those who don't have any or significant private income in retirement.

    NI payable on all income types/merge NI and income tax.

    50% haircut on defined benefit public sector pensions for amounts over £40k (so a £60k DB pension becomes £50k).

    Freeze thresholds for a further 3 years.

    Cut at least 500k public sector jobs within two years, ban use of agency staff and severely limit the use of consultants and contractors. Use half of those savings to offer competitive salaries for technical roles.

    I think that would probably make a £100bn worth of closing the deficit, the resulting fall in bond yields and inflation would probably add another £20bn saving per year on the interest bill.
    And means test the NHS for the wealthy
    Define wealthy.

    Otherwise people like me will either die because they can't afford treatment (and I am already at high risk of early death because of the NHS's failures to spot stages 1, 2 or 3 of my cancer) - and I can't - or be bankrupted and made homeless.

    As for the state pension, it gets taxed if the pensioner has other income.

    One of the reasons for the deficit is the amount spent on furlough during Covid - money largely spent on those in jobs and to keep them in jobs. It was about £140 billion. They too should contribute.

    - 1p on income tax.
    - Extend VAT to food, books/newspapers & children's clothes.
    - NI for everyone who works.
    - Limit or abolish tax relief for those giving to charity and place an upper limit on the tax saved by those contributing to charity whether alive or after death.
    - Limit tax relief for pension contributions to the basic rate.
    - Extend VAT on education to all education providers, including universities.
    - Freeze thresholds.
    - Place a limit on public sector pay increases (the amount shovelled at train drivers by Reeves never gets mentioned here but it was a stupid move).
    - Abolish the WFA and other pension-specific benefits. Aim for the state pension to be the same as the tax free income as and when we can afford it.
    - Abolish the triple lock.
    - Those with assets should contribute something towards social care.
    - Introduce council tax bands for higher value houses.
    - Increase or widen the charges for council services beyond the basic.
    - Ensure that overseas visitors pay for the NHS. Other countries manage this. So can we.
    - Limit tax relief for private equity companies loading companies up with debt, taking dividends and asset stripping. (Thames Water and other companies in a similar position should be allowed to go bust and then nationalised for a £. Too often asset stripping has been presented as overseas investment. It is a gigantic con.)

    And so on.

    There is a nasty streak among some of the commentary on here. Everyone seems to want others to pay taxes and those who work on here seem to think that they should be exempt from any measures to help pay down the deficit, thinking it must all be done by the poor and the old. It also gives the impression that some welcome AD because they will be able to pressure the old and sick into killing themselves to save money or withhold treatment so that they suffer. It is disgustingly frankly. I am surprised to see @Big_G_NorthWales among their number
    Can I just say that wealthy to me include celebrities and multi millionaires who can contribute to the NHS

    As far as your list is concerned I agree with each and every one and it needs a government to accept we cannot continue borrowing, spending and taxing and think the unthinkable

    I want the NHS available to all but those with the broadest shoulders should contribute as indeed should the pension be reviewed as to just who should receive this very expensive benefit
    They do contribute - as indeed have I - through taxes. In my case for decades. But there is no justification for denying the NHS to people who are seriously or terminally ill. You are advocating for a US style system which will harm the sick. I am one of their number and I think it disgusting that you should wish to deprive me of the NHS when I need it most. You do not define what wealthy means - name a figure and let's see what this actually means.
    Indeed, means testing the NHS and barring the wealthy just seems like an odd and very mean spirited thing to do. From a practical sense I doubt it would save very much money given that the "wealthy" that BigG mentions are likely to have private health insurance and it breaks the idea that all British citizens/residents get treated equally by the health service, rich and poor alike get the same (sometimes not very good, sometimes excellent) treatment.

    The comment about those with the broadest shoulders contributing is also very off colour for BigG, I think he's been watching too much Jez on Tiktok or something. At my peak earnings a few years ago my net rate of tax was 43% and I paid well into six figures per year in tax, to suggest that the "wealthy" don't already make a huge contribution is factually incorrect. Indeed it is this anti-wealth attitude among those who call themselves conservative that resulted in the previous government just ceding the subject of wealth creation to the left.
    No one ever suggests giving a tax rebate/benefit to anyone who has private health insurance which helps take the pressure off our sainted NHS.
    Generally the choke point is the same pool of consultants and specialists that you have to see, before (and often during) getting private treatment that also give a proportion of their time to the NHS, with the private patients essentially paying to jump the queue. If there was incentive for a significant batch of people to switch to private, either private waiting times would increase dramatically, or consultants would do more private work and less NHS, making the NHS position worse.

    The governments approach of using the over capacity in the private sector to deal with the NHS backlog is the more sensible one. Continuing what the Tories were doing before.
    The absurd rationing of testing continues.

    I know more and more people who pay private facilities to get MRIs etc. XRays seem to be easier in the NHS system.

    Early detection of problems is cheaper.
    Indeed, my dad just had this issue (hence my suggestion in the previous comment). He has had a knee problem for about 15 years, it's suddenly got a lot worse so he went to see the doctor. Long story short, after about 6 months of hearing nothing back from the NHS on getting a scan he went private and got a scan done - they said his right knee is basically completely deteriorated and he needs surgery.

    He wanted to make sure that this was necessary so he arranged finally got an appointment with the NHS specialist a few months down the road who looked at the scan and said words to the effect of "we wouldn't recommend surgery at this stage because the degradation doesn't meet our requirements for it, basically you can still walk around for up to a mile or so before it starts really hurting". He then asked if he could go private would that advice change and the specialist said "yes, get this done ASAP because it will seriously improve your life quality and in 10 years when this gets to the point where the NHS will consider it degraded enough to operate you may not be eligible due to age and poor likelihood of recovery". It's a completely mental situation. They're knowingly saying no/delaying huge life improving surgery to people knowing that 10 years down the road it will cause huge issues for these people, well at least for those people who can't afford to go private.

    This is the kind of stuff that I really think is low hanging fruit for the NHS, cheap preventative care today reduces our future liability by huge amounts and that's where I would be looking for gains. They may not show immediately but in 2-3 years there would be a noticeable drop in resource demand.
    Our youngest had an ingrown toenail a couple of years ago. After going through the initial stages of treatment with our NHS GP (which consisted understandably of “give it a couple of weeks to see if it sorts itself out”) the GP referred him to get it looked at by a specialist. By the time the letter from the specialist dept had arrived to tell us we had been booked for an initial appointment another four months later we had already given up on the NHS & taken him to a private specialist who had diagnosed it as needing surgery & carried that surgery out that week - removing an impressively large chunk of toenail that had grown off sideways into the depths of his big toe in the process!

    The specialist said the likely time from initial diagnostic appointment to actual surgery on the NHS was between 9-12 months in his experience.

    The NHS is just broken for ordinary people it seems. If you fit into one of the “pathways” (cancer, stroke, heart disease) then you get treated in a timely fashion (most of the time), but those are mostly the diseases of old people. For the young, the NHS is a failure that pretends to treat them & then keeps them dangling with the hope of treatment that might manifest itself sometime, maybe.

    We need to get back to the idea that the NHS sees getting working age people back into work as quickly as reasonably possible a priority.
    I know of people waiting over two years to get access to CAMHS in Edinburgh.
    Two years is quick, for most.
    The rape case I did last week involved a young woman whose legal guardian claimed had a mental age of 6. She was in residential care but had freedom of movement. She was raped and enormously distressed. Medical evidence said, remarkably, that she understood enough about sex to consent or withhold her consent.

    Her guardian contacted Social work the night it happened who did ...nothing. When the guardian got back from her holiday she took her to the police but it was too late to get medical support for the claim. The man was convicted by the evidence of the distress and what was said to the guardian hours after the assault. It was close, a majority verdict.

    The lack of care of such an obviously vulnerable young woman frankly made me incandescent. So many jobsworths are paid to look after people and just don't give a damn. This case involved an indigenous Scot but it demonstrated all so clearly how the victims we are not supposed to talk about get taken advantage of.

    We are spending a fortune on these services. We are not getting results.

    That's absolutely shocking and glad the jury came back with the correct decision, even by majority verdict. These are the kinds of cases why people like me suggest that burning it all down and starting again can't be worse than what we have now. People are being failed by the state at an alarming rate, whether that's cases like these which are absolutely awful, the NHS in lots of areas, the police are failing the public at large on crime, the judiciary are failing the public in deportations, politicians are failing us on all fronts.

    The UK is getting closer and closer to becoming a failed state so maybe some tough medicine is what the state needs, not more of the same.
    What does "burning it all down" mean for those in care ?
    I don't know, but how could it be worse than today, knowing everything we know about what has already happened.
    Some Cyclefrees in the system would help.

    Trying to reconstruct it from scratch might just replicate the problems we have now - and what happens to the children while that is being done ?
    Again, knowing everything we know about the current failures in the system. Everything that happened in the 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s and even today in the case mentioned by David it's got to be worth a try.

    As with everything we do in this country more needs to be done with preventative measures. Why does the UK have such a large proportion of it's child population in care, why are there so many delinquent parents and what can be done to ensure that children's residential care homes aren't staffed by abusers or those who simply look aside when the abuse takes place. I don't think those are easy questions to answer, of course, but it doesn't feel as though anyone in power is trying to find them. Instead it's cover ups and protecting the system at the expense of the kids, every single time. How many times have we seen horrific cases where social workers handed kids back to clearly unfit parents who then beat and murdered the kids? How many institutional failures have we seen with sexual abuse and rape within residential services for children? How many scandals do we need to read about in the news where whistleblowers were not only ignored but threatened by management for raising serious failings within protective services?

    I don't know the answer to the question, but I do know that the current system isn't it. Surely admitting there's a problem is the first step to actually solving it. Simply continuing as if nothing is wrong will just allow the rot to depeen (not that I think it's possible).
  • ydoethurydoethur Posts: 74,074
    edited July 6
    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    Strange how panicked & alarmed PB is, by the mere possibility Christianity might see a revival

    Also very telling

    Anecdotally, I see some truth in this. At my daughter’s uni (St Andrew’s) “going to church” is oddly fashionable. The same way taking smack was cool in my time

    I suspect the taking smack bit was your circle rather than your peers in general. I am about your age and my circles irrespective of location were not smackheads. I even had a group of friends at UCL, and none of them were mainlining the naughty stuff.

    I suspect currently going to church is similarly niche.
    Nobody at UCL would have socialised with a boring sap like you. So this is just a painful suite of lies
    I can give you names and addresses, however as they were interesting top class stars they wouldn't have noticed you and your sad little bunch of Edgelords, rolling spliffs and making your halves of Carling last all night.
    *spliffs*?

    “Carling”??

    lol

    DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?
    Absolutely.

    When shorn of the verbiage, it's obvious.
  • williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 56,094
    Leon said:

    Remarkable interview with a guy who managed an asylum hotel

    https://x.com/djemedia_/status/1941807478519345438?s=61&t=GGp3Vs1t1kTWDiyA-odnZg

    I defy anyone to watch this and NOT conclude the system is irretrievably broken, is being gamed against us, and will have to be smashed so we can start again

    There's plenty of material there for a mainstream TV documentary to pick up. Why isn't it on Panorama?
  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 32,725

    Pope gone...

    Another one! That was a short reign
    Way too late - at least three posters did that hours ago…
    Why?

    We are allowed to post, repost and repost favourable RefCon polls to our hearts content., or at least until the next poll by the same pollster.
  • MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 40,292
    Leon said:

    Remarkable interview with a guy who managed an asylum hotel

    https://x.com/djemedia_/status/1941807478519345438?s=61&t=GGp3Vs1t1kTWDiyA-odnZg

    I defy anyone to watch this and NOT conclude the system is irretrievably broken, is being gamed against us, and will have to be smashed so we can start again

    This is why people will take a punt with Reform in 2029. It's clear that the two major parties don't have the answers and don't have the stomach for mass deportations of illegals and halting asylum seeking. Going into the election I think if the Tories want to get anywhere they will need to make manifesto commitments to halt all asylum seeking except for those who are specifically invited to apply and deport all current and failed asylum seekers from nations who were not invited to apply with economic sanctions on the likes of Pakistan, Egypt, Nigeria etc... who don't take back their citizens including blocking all visitor visa applications and halting direct and some common indirect routes to/from those countries.

    Reform are surely going to make ending asylum seeking and deporting illegal immigrants the centre of their manifesto and I have no doubt that in the privacy of the polling booth it is going to be extremely popular. The government is no longer able to control the narrative on this subject now.
  • Sunil_PrasannanSunil_Prasannan Posts: 54,879

    viewcode said:

    MaxPB said:

    In other news I have accepted a new job for a British startup at C-Level, I start in September and I'm very excited at the prospect. There are only ~30 people at the company, I'll be the second person in at exec level. I've obviously taken a pretty drastic pay cut to do this from my finance and fintech days but for the first time in ages I'm really looking forwards to going back to work.

    I think it will be about 11 months off in total spent with the family, which is the best year I've had since the year my then girlfriend (now wife) and I went travelling together for six months and got married a few months after we got back. If you can afford to take the time off, I'd highly recommend doing a year(ish) long career break and just spending the time with family and not worrying about work stuff. I'm obviously very lucky that I have earned well in my previous roles and that my wife also has a high income so I do recognise that not everyone would be able to do it.

    Congratulations. What does "C-level" mean?
    Chief level.

    Chief Executive, Chief Operating Officer, Chief Financial Officer etc.

    Anyhoo, the best people have General in their title, such as General Counsel.
    General Dogsbody?
    General Waste - inventor of the dust bin!
  • StillWatersStillWaters Posts: 10,311
    ohnotnow said:

    Nigelb said:

    Phil said:

    The NHS is just broken for ordinary people it seems. If you fit into one of the “pathways” (cancer, stroke, heart disease) then you get treated in a timely fashion (most of the time), but those are mostly the diseases of old people. For the young, the NHS is a failure that pretends to treat them & then keeps them dangling with the hope of treatment that might manifest itself sometime, maybe.

    I'm currently awaiting eye surgery for the second time. First it was the left eye which took three years from initial referral to surgery. Now with the right eye I'm told it's likely to be over a year just to get an initial consultation and two and a half to three years after that for surgery.

    So in total I'll likely have spent seven or more years partially sighted because of a condition that is easily treated with a fairly minor, if delicate, procedure. I'm lucky, I've always had one functioning eye and can keep on working. But I wonder just how much of our bloated benefits bill is due to people who can't work because the NHS is incapable of fixing their problems in any reasonable time frame.

    That surprises me.
    I was favourably impressed with the speed and efficiency of my surgery, which took a few months from diagnosis at a Specsavers checkup, rather than years.
    I sometimes wonder if the GP/NHS is like the Police (of which I have somewhat more family experience).

    If you're good at your job, you get to work in a 'posh' area, lower workload, spend more time on the job helping the somewhat affluent avoid the ills of affluence.

    If you're bad at it - get transferred to Scumsville and continue failing where it "doesn't matter" in the least.

    I think you are right in outcome not motivation.

    If you are good at your job you will disproportionately apply for / secure jobs in better areas for the reasons you articulate.

    Less nice areas find it harder to recruit and therefore lower their standards to fill positions.

    If only someone hadn’t thought that national wage scales were a good idea…

  • LeonLeon Posts: 62,566
    MaxPB said:

    Leon said:

    Remarkable interview with a guy who managed an asylum hotel

    https://x.com/djemedia_/status/1941807478519345438?s=61&t=GGp3Vs1t1kTWDiyA-odnZg

    I defy anyone to watch this and NOT conclude the system is irretrievably broken, is being gamed against us, and will have to be smashed so we can start again

    This is why people will take a punt with Reform in 2029. It's clear that the two major parties don't have the answers and don't have the stomach for mass deportations of illegals and halting asylum seeking. Going into the election I think if the Tories want to get anywhere they will need to make manifesto commitments to halt all asylum seeking except for those who are specifically invited to apply and deport all current and failed asylum seekers from nations who were not invited to apply with economic sanctions on the likes of Pakistan, Egypt, Nigeria etc... who don't take back their citizens including blocking all visitor visa applications and halting direct and some common indirect routes to/from those countries.

    Reform are surely going to make ending asylum seeking and deporting illegal immigrants the centre of their manifesto and I have no doubt that in the privacy of the polling booth it is going to be extremely popular. The government is no longer able to control the narrative on this subject now.
    I wonder if Reform have the stomach for it. Millions need to go home, and that, in the end, is what will happen

    But my fear is that Reform will also flinch and then a new party will arise and it might all get much darker
  • ohnotnowohnotnow Posts: 5,019
    Leon said:

    MaxPB said:

    Leon said:

    Remarkable interview with a guy who managed an asylum hotel

    https://x.com/djemedia_/status/1941807478519345438?s=61&t=GGp3Vs1t1kTWDiyA-odnZg

    I defy anyone to watch this and NOT conclude the system is irretrievably broken, is being gamed against us, and will have to be smashed so we can start again

    This is why people will take a punt with Reform in 2029. It's clear that the two major parties don't have the answers and don't have the stomach for mass deportations of illegals and halting asylum seeking. Going into the election I think if the Tories want to get anywhere they will need to make manifesto commitments to halt all asylum seeking except for those who are specifically invited to apply and deport all current and failed asylum seekers from nations who were not invited to apply with economic sanctions on the likes of Pakistan, Egypt, Nigeria etc... who don't take back their citizens including blocking all visitor visa applications and halting direct and some common indirect routes to/from those countries.

    Reform are surely going to make ending asylum seeking and deporting illegal immigrants the centre of their manifesto and I have no doubt that in the privacy of the polling booth it is going to be extremely popular. The government is no longer able to control the narrative on this subject now.
    I wonder if Reform have the stomach for it. Millions need to go home, and that, in the end, is what will happen

    But my fear is that Reform will also flinch and then a new party will arise and it might all get much darker
    I sometimes think we're destined for a mix of "The Knights of God" and "The Guardians". Politically inept, bit of a muddle, low-level corruption and a lot of mincing about in uniforms. It feels like Britain’s happy place.

    "1990" as a programme always felt too well organised for the UK - despite being very good (in some ways).
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 46,055
    Leon said:

    MaxPB said:

    Leon said:

    Remarkable interview with a guy who managed an asylum hotel

    https://x.com/djemedia_/status/1941807478519345438?s=61&t=GGp3Vs1t1kTWDiyA-odnZg

    I defy anyone to watch this and NOT conclude the system is irretrievably broken, is being gamed against us, and will have to be smashed so we can start again

    This is why people will take a punt with Reform in 2029. It's clear that the two major parties don't have the answers and don't have the stomach for mass deportations of illegals and halting asylum seeking. Going into the election I think if the Tories want to get anywhere they will need to make manifesto commitments to halt all asylum seeking except for those who are specifically invited to apply and deport all current and failed asylum seekers from nations who were not invited to apply with economic sanctions on the likes of Pakistan, Egypt, Nigeria etc... who don't take back their citizens including blocking all visitor visa applications and halting direct and some common indirect routes to/from those countries.

    Reform are surely going to make ending asylum seeking and deporting illegal immigrants the centre of their manifesto and I have no doubt that in the privacy of the polling booth it is going to be extremely popular. The government is no longer able to control the narrative on this subject now.
    I wonder if Reform have the stomach for it. Millions need to go home, and that, in the end, is what will happen

    But my fear is that Reform will also flinch and then a new party will arise and it might all get much darker
    You always seem to be fearing that if we don't do what you want we'll end up doing even more of what you want.
  • ohnotnowohnotnow Posts: 5,019

    viewcode said:

    MaxPB said:

    In other news I have accepted a new job for a British startup at C-Level, I start in September and I'm very excited at the prospect. There are only ~30 people at the company, I'll be the second person in at exec level. I've obviously taken a pretty drastic pay cut to do this from my finance and fintech days but for the first time in ages I'm really looking forwards to going back to work.

    I think it will be about 11 months off in total spent with the family, which is the best year I've had since the year my then girlfriend (now wife) and I went travelling together for six months and got married a few months after we got back. If you can afford to take the time off, I'd highly recommend doing a year(ish) long career break and just spending the time with family and not worrying about work stuff. I'm obviously very lucky that I have earned well in my previous roles and that my wife also has a high income so I do recognise that not everyone would be able to do it.

    Congratulations. What does "C-level" mean?
    Chief level.

    Chief Executive, Chief Operating Officer, Chief Financial Officer etc.

    Anyhoo, the best people have General in their title, such as General Counsel.
    General Dogsbody?
    General Waste - inventor of the dust bin!
    Now I've remembered another British hero - "Dusty Bin"! Right up there with "Metal Mickey".
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