Why we need more 80s and 90s music in our lives – politicalbetting.com
Why we need more 80s and 90s music in our lives – politicalbetting.com
What can 40 years of song lyrics tell us about society?I analysed the lyrics of 1,600 pop songs going back to 1985. Our music appears to be getting gloomier, less future-looking and more self-obsessed1/6
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Around 1.7 million people had to wait over a month for an appointment in November, the analysis from the Liberal Democrats claims, 246,625 higher than when Labour took office in July last year.
The research also finds that 7.6 million patients had to wait more than four weeks to see a GP over the autumn (between September and November), up by over 300,000 since the same period last year.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/gp-nhs-waiting-time-doctor-appointments-labour-b2891647.html
My GP has been busy texting me for the last month or two basically saying don't bother trying to book appointments (luckily I haven't needed to).
I know those working in health are facing some really tough challenges but damn, the stereotype of the overly aggressive gatekeeper is real.
Either last year's Panto season is running late, or next year's is starting early.
This is Barnet - just like the good old days of Brian Coleman. *
The Barnet Conservative group leader moved house to Wales in 2022, and stayed on as a Councillor. He left the Blues for Reform UK in May/June 2024.
He resigned from the Council on Dec 31st, leaving his residents unrepresented until elections in May, to .. er .. "spend more time with his family".
What IS going on ? Could he not have left early enough to allow a By-election? Or stayed on for 5 months until the election, having stayed on for the previous 3 years?
https://barnetpost.co.uk/2026/01/01/former-leader-slams-former-party-as-he-departs-council/
* Don't say: "Oh shut up you odious little toad", or emulate The Winter's Tale Act III Scene III: "Coleman made an angry acceptance speech at the count in which he announced that "the king of bling is back" before storming out, accompanied by his mother."
(Script: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Coleman)
It's not so much that we are subsiding wages for out-of-work households - we are subsidying salaries for low-wage employers. The kind of employer that can provide cheap cups of coffee, or low supermarket prices.
"....and I suppose you get up with the cows?"
"No Sir. The wife"
(Benny Hill)
Less honesty, more spin I suppose
The winner of the New Year's Day Hurdle at Windsor was LISTENTOYOURHEART at 6/1.
You are no longer sad and accepting and longing, you are now a victim, have been wronged, will get revenge.
I will stick to the Cure and sad songs about Caterpillars, Heads on Doors and Albert Camus stories.
If anyone navigates this minefield, could you let me know !
Of course the Wilson Government heralded the British invasion of America and punk was a product of antithesis towards the Callaghan government and authority in general. What did Heath bring to the party? Glam rock!
Lyrics attached.
https://www.thewurzels.com/lyricscombine.htm
On a parallel note it also seems to be the same in business with organisations and marketing etc reinventing itself every few years. And here is a classic example:
I worked with a business putting on their annual customer event. At one point they completely cleared out their marketing department and I was working with a new group of individuals. They promoted their next event as the biggest ever, yet it was a 1 day event and in previous years it had been a two day event and they booked a key note speaker that they were really proud of getting. We had used him 2 years beforehand. To any customer who had been around for 2 or more years it was clear they hadn't a clue. All they had to do was check on what had been done before and I did try telling them.
I wondered about the connection with the change from 'victim' to 'survivor' and whether that was part of the shift isam had identified.
Maybe people are resisting the label of a victim when it does apply, and adopting it when it doesn't?
It comes down to priorities. Do you think child poverty is a blight on society? Do you think the government should take practical steps to alleviate it? If the answer to both those questions is yes, then removing the two child cap is by far the most cost effective step the government can take. After that it comes down to priorities. If government spending is constrained, and it always is, what do you rank lower and dispense with?
"The lyrics aren't supposed to mean that much
They're just a vehicle for a lovely voice..."
When, in later years, the lyrics to my favourite tunes did begin to percolate into my conscious mind I was often surprised that the subject matter was not as wholesome as I had supposed.
Some never progress beyond the first stage unfortunately. But labelling them as stuck in it in perpetuity has obvious downsides.
I was a classmate and reasonably close friend of the son of one of the co-writers of "Mistletoe & Wine".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-PyWfVkjZc
The Government should force through the online booking systems that are being opposed by the BMA. As I have said many times before our GP surgery uses the 'Ask My GP' system and it works brilliantly. I have never had to wait more than 1 working day for an appointment if necessary and generally get a response from the GP well before midday with arrangements - pharmacy, phone diagnosis or in person appointment. And this is for a GP surgery which has seen a 60% increase in patients in the last decade.
These systems are not perfect but generally they work very well. The BMA should be ashamed for leading resistance to them.
So regrettably to any aspiring lyricists out there I think they need to temper their expectations of what people will get out of their words.
The 'Long Seventies' (1968-1982) was by far the best era of music. It has been all downhill since then even if there have been rare hummocks of decent music.
Firstly, it's founded on the idea that inequality as a result of economic outcomes doesn't matter, because the government can even up the balance a bit after the fact. Something along the lines of, "we don't care if people get filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes." But rich people are increasingly not willing to pay their taxes, and especially not to pay for fiscal transfers, and so the policy is a failure in its own terms.
Secondly, the policy has unintended consequences. It results in subsidising unproductive low-wage work, reducing the competitive pressure to invest in productivity, making the country as a whole poorer in the long-term.
A better policy mix would be to improve the incentives for businesses to invest to improve productivity and to strengthen the ability of workers to bargain for higher pay, so that the benefit from improved productivity is shared with workers.
The country as a whole becomes richer, inequality is reduced, and poverty is reduced without the reliance on government fiscal transfers that are ever vulnerable to the next Chancellor Osborne.
As a point of reference Mrs Eek and her mum are in Kent because someone didn't pick up that they cold had turned into pneumonia with added sepsis shes now in Hospital with DNR attached to her notes because her lungs are suspected to be irreparable,.
Which is why the online consultation forms are only available at times when someone is around to quickly triage them so things like that don't wait 72 hours before being picked up.
Now what would be sensible here is for that initial triage to be centralised and made 24/7 but that would require changes to the GP system and they like their independence.
New data released by the Home Office shows that fire brigades are struggling to hire younger staff and many are working for longer after pension changes
https://inews.co.uk/news/fire-brigades-struggle-recruit-young-firefighters-risk-4142790
My GP surgery assigns one doctor every morning from 7am to 9am to triage all the requests that have come in overnight. They assign stuff to the relevant departments (pharmacy, nurse etc) and then prioritise the cases that need a face to face appointment. As I say, it means you are rarelty waiting more than 1 working day for a face to face if needed. And for me persobnaly I have always been able to get a same day appointment if the doc thinks it necessary.
The system works. It has done since well before covid.
Avoids the phonecalls and receptionists entirely.
Eg the Hollies Gasoline Alley Bred (which I absolutely love) kicks off with the rousing exhortation "Woman get your head out of curlers".
At first, following enlightenment, I worried I'd have to jettison this song. That opening line sounded harsh and patriarchal. However when I studied the song as a whole there was no problem. Quite the opposite - it's a poignant reflection on a relationship based on empathy and mutual respect.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/cricket/articles/c87rx244lnno
Well he isn't a f##king good player then is he. Its like saying well he looks great bowling at 95mph but most of the balls are too short of a length and / or wide of the wickets. Or great golf swing, brilliant from tee to green but 3 putts every other hole.
If you want to move to London with nothing but youth, talent and a dream, where the heck do you try to live these days?
(Not quite Housing Theory Of Everything, but pretty close.)
We need to address that problem at source.
Jona Lewie was interviewed recently in the ThisisMoney page and said ‘Stop the Cavalry’ is worth about £100K a year.
Nice
But just about a week ago I got a awful fright,
I had to get dressed quickly in the middle of the night.
And with my little ukulele in my hand, I ran along the road for Dr. Brand
It didn't take him long to get his little bag of tools.
I held his hat and coat and let him have my book of rules.
Out of the bedroom door he looked and smiled
He said, "Come inside and meet your wife and child."
My heart it jumped with joy, I could see it was a boy
For he had his ukulele in his hand
Haul America up before the Security Council. Get a NATO meeting called and let America boycott or walk out if it chooses to. Put pressure on them.
Trump and his cronies believe they can do what they like and we will just acquiesce. We need to show that isn't true.
I was looking at doing a shop job over Xmas at one of the retailers on the Arnison, couldn’t be bothered in the end,
All of them had 16 hour and full time opportunities.
It’s easy to claim it is just poor paying employers but the system is also geared up to encourage it.
a) The past decades were periods where money to invest in productive technology had never been cheaper
b) It was also a period when immigration increased rapidly.
If UK plc had been committed to investment, immigration should not have increased as it did and productivity would have scaled at a much higher level but didn't. So with more expensive capital and returns more difficult to find, what was the reason for this missed opportunity?
The rest is interesting but only comes into play if you can stay at the crease.
Conversely had Hick played for his native Zimbabwe he’d have had a far better batting average I’d suspect.
Cameron and Osborne led by example and the example was work what you have until it falls apart because you don't want to invest in making things better.
There's a TV channel called "That's 80s Music", hopefully self-explanatory.
The system has to somehow force people into crap work with crap wages while not starving too many people who don't cooperate, and not costing an absolute fortune. It's balancing all those imperatives that produces the mess we have.
Improve productivity and improve pay and a lot of those problems fall away.
I bet it’s more than Jona Lewie.
Suspect that big city commuters squeeze out penniless artists out of anywhere close to the big city scene, though.
I hate moral blackmail, but it's hard to avoid here because the issue is quite simple at its core. If government can lift significant numbers of children out of poverty at a relatively low cost, why wouldn't you want it to do so?
But maybe we're taking past each other.
Hundreds of British buses have Chinese ‘kill switch’
Security services discover SIM card technology in 700 Yutong buses could be used to disable vehicles
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/british-buses-chinese-kill-switch-b1264854.html
As I recall, that is brought down rather a lot by single mothers - if you strip them out the average is quite a bit higher.
It could mean something much more minimal. Food stamps; energy stamps; bus travel stamps; compulsory attendance 9-5 at an education centre; no right to remain in your current housing situation. Non compliance = losing your children etc.
BTW I am not advocating this. But something more like this could be on the way if you look how rapidly the liberal/left have switched in migration for example.
That FT work at lower pay levels sometimes gives you few economic advantages over you neighbour is a scandal. I note that it is a repeated refrain of Matt Goodwin.
Writing it is the key.