I think it's time to cut £40bn from welfare and build a properly independent nuclear deterrent and properly fund defence. We can no longer rely on the US regardless of who is in the White House. The Trident programme made sense in an era when the UK and US were inseparable in terms of our global aims but now that is no longer the case. We cannot be beholden to what I would term as an informal ally for such a crucial part of our defence posture.
It's a truly sad state of affairs when the US and UK can no longer say they have the same outlook on the world regardless of who occupies No 10 or the White House. That partnership has been the cornerstone of the post war consensus and now it seems to be broken beyond repair. I think America is going to quickly realise it's a cold world out there and even though it maintains defence primacy, life without friends and allies is much tougher than MAGA and other isolationists realise. Thralldom may suit some countries but I think we need to start planning for a world in which we will need to defend our own interests without an implicit guarantee from American military might.
Welfare and pensions are not affordable in this new era and both will need substantial cuts.
On you final point we can't just let the old, the infirmed, the disabled, the poor to live in abject poverty. We have to offer voluntary euthanasia like we would an old dog or cat at the end of their life.
Alternatively the World and more specifically Britain could operate a society where the top one percent don't own 90% of wealth, or whatever the figure is these days.
The peasants need to revolt like they did in the French, the Russian and the Iranian revolutions. The outcomes of each may not have been optimal after the revolutions but your remedy is no better.
The UK has one of the biggest welfare states in the world and the top 10% only own 43% of UK wealth not 90% (whereas in the US now the top 10% own 67% of the nation's wealth)
Have I ever suggested that the UK welfare state is not expensive and overburdens the middle income tax payer? No I haven't.
What I said in a nutshell is if you are going to ensure the poorest are even poorer you need to offer them a way out.
I would much prefer as Robert suggested people are given the opportunity to make their own way in life.
What is the point of Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg owning everything and the rest of us living in the gutter?
The argument isn't about closing libraries in Wolverhampton, it is about overhauling the current capitalist system.
The three very wealthy men named all derive that wealth from shares in companies they founded, and worked bloody hard at for decades before they ever made a profit.
The problem isn’t a few rich people, it’s governments robbing Peter to pay Paul, and their being enough Pauls to keep voting for the handouts.
UK government also hasn’t balanced their budget since 2001, when one Gordon Brown divorced Prudence and turned on the spending taps hard. There’s now effectively a mortgage to be serviced, a debt of 2.5x annual government income of money that’s already been spent.
The only solution is a serious reduction in the scope of government and serious cuts in what remains. See Javier Millei in Argentina, for perhaps the only recent example of a large economy doing what’s required without the IMF getting involved.
I'm genuinely fascinated by those who are able to hold the viewpoints that Sandpit and Fishing shared on the last thread.
I know it is economic orthodoxy to argue this way but it also appears to me highly blinkered.
Just to take the first paragraph of the post above: the logic of it is that anyone could become a Musk, Bezos or Zuckerberg if only they got off their arses. This is patently false; whilst these three did work bloody hard they were also bloody lucky. There are many, many more multitudes of people who found companies that fold.
The thing about that luck is that you have to make use of it. That takes talent and balls. But it also requires either (a) the security of knowing that you have a genuine safety net if it fails or (b) an attitude to risk that may not be optimal for the social value of the asset you create.
Fishing's argument is equally blinkered: 'people's money is their own'. No it isn't. It is taking advantage of enormously valuable public goods such as education, health, roads and the rule of law to leverage a quite ludicrous accrual of personal wealth. Remove eg laws protecting that wealth and that person would have their wealth forcibly removed from them (or spend significant proportions of it on a private army to defend their wealth).
One interesting social policy question is how to create the sort of safety net that will allow more talented people to take risks, without creating a handout culture that reduces people's propensity to take risks.
One interesting economic policy question is how to reorient the economy to reward productive risk taking rather than just speculation.
What I find blinkered is that almost everyone who argues the way Sandpit and Fishing do come from relative wealth, and so don't really understand the risk side of the risk/reward balance that an entrepreneur makes.
(This is not a comment on Sandpit or Fishing personally as I don't know enough about their backgrounds to make such a comment).
My comment isn’t that anyone could be a Musk or a Bezos if only they worked harder, it’s that these particular people, with their particular skills, became wealthy because they founded successful companies. As you say there are many more entrepreneurs that take the risk and it doesn’t work out.
The very wealthy don’t have billions in the bank though, it’s in their own company shares which would likely crash if they sold them in any significant number.
That doesn’t make the successful ones just lucky, it means that their particular ideas were the ones which worked best.
The way to orientate the economy towards risk-taking is to have an attitude that failure doesn’t taint you for life (very different UK vs US attitudes on this one), and for taxes and regulations to encourage people to be entrepreneurs rather than work salaried jobs.
I’ve worked for myself before, studied some economics, and currently have a middle-class job as an IT manager, definitely not wealthy and not from wealth either.
Leaving the aside the earnt or moral arguments, the other side is how does it impact the broader society?
Extreme wealth isn't recycled into the economy as efficiently as normal wealth, it massively drives up asset inflation and is a key driver of media and political manipulation. It should be taxed as a social harm just as we do with tobacco, alcohol and gambling, not from a moral viewpoint, but a practical one.
My point is that ‘extreme wealth’ is not a massive bank account balance, although they will have considerably more than most, it’s simply their shares in the companies they founded. Elon Musk owning $400bn of Tesla shares at today’s market price doesn’t drive inflation, because he’s not spending it.
Moreover, treating extreme success as a bad thing leads to less investment in new businesses and markets. When 90% of private VC investments fail, those that succeed have to really succeed.
We agree that money in politics is a huge problem, especially in the US where there are more lobbyists that congress members, those members spend half their time looking for more donors, and a handful of Elon Musks and George Soroses have a disproportionate effect on the discourse. UK is better at regulating direct political donations, but indirect lobbying and funding NGOs is the same. It’s difficult to change it without restrictions on freedom of speech, so the best answer is sunlight and publishing as much financial information as possible.
Well done for entering George Soros into the conversation.
Can't beat a bit of whataboutery when you don't have a leg to stand on.
I think it's time to cut £40bn from welfare and build a properly independent nuclear deterrent and properly fund defence. We can no longer rely on the US regardless of who is in the White House. The Trident programme made sense in an era when the UK and US were inseparable in terms of our global aims but now that is no longer the case. We cannot be beholden to what I would term as an informal ally for such a crucial part of our defence posture.
It's a truly sad state of affairs when the US and UK can no longer say they have the same outlook on the world regardless of who occupies No 10 or the White House. That partnership has been the cornerstone of the post war consensus and now it seems to be broken beyond repair. I think America is going to quickly realise it's a cold world out there and even though it maintains defence primacy, life without friends and allies is much tougher than MAGA and other isolationists realise. Thralldom may suit some countries but I think we need to start planning for a world in which we will need to defend our own interests without an implicit guarantee from American military might.
Welfare and pensions are not affordable in this new era and both will need substantial cuts.
On you final point we can't just let the old, the infirmed, the disabled, the poor to live in abject poverty. We have to offer voluntary euthanasia like we would an old dog or cat at the end of their life.
Alternatively the World and more specifically Britain could operate a society where the top one percent don't own 90% of wealth, or whatever the figure is these days.
The peasants need to revolt like they did in the French, the Russian and the Iranian revolutions. The outcomes of each may not have been optimal after the revolutions but your remedy is no better.
The UK has one of the biggest welfare states in the world and the top 10% only own 43% of UK wealth not 90% (whereas in the US now the top 10% own 67% of the nation's wealth)
Have I ever suggested that the UK welfare state is not expensive and overburdens the middle income tax payer? No I haven't.
What I said in a nutshell is if you are going to ensure the poorest are even poorer you need to offer them a way out.
I would much prefer as Robert suggested people are given the opportunity to make their own way in life.
What is the point of Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg owning everything and the rest of us living in the gutter?
The argument isn't about closing libraries in Wolverhampton, it is about overhauling the current capitalist system.
The three very wealthy men named all derive that wealth from shares in companies they founded, and worked bloody hard at for decades before they ever made a profit.
The problem isn’t a few rich people, it’s governments robbing Peter to pay Paul, and their being enough Pauls to keep voting for the handouts.
UK government also hasn’t balanced their budget since 2001, when one Gordon Brown divorced Prudence and turned on the spending taps hard. There’s now effectively a mortgage to be serviced, a debt of 2.5x annual government income of money that’s already been spent.
The only solution is a serious reduction in the scope of government and serious cuts in what remains. See Javier Millei in Argentina, for perhaps the only recent example of a large economy doing what’s required without the IMF getting involved.
I'm genuinely fascinated by those who are able to hold the viewpoints that Sandpit and Fishing shared on the last thread.
I know it is economic orthodoxy to argue this way but it also appears to me highly blinkered.
Just to take the first paragraph of the post above: the logic of it is that anyone could become a Musk, Bezos or Zuckerberg if only they got off their arses. This is patently false; whilst these three did work bloody hard they were also bloody lucky. There are many, many more multitudes of people who found companies that fold.
The thing about that luck is that you have to make use of it. That takes talent and balls. But it also requires either (a) the security of knowing that you have a genuine safety net if it fails or (b) an attitude to risk that may not be optimal for the social value of the asset you create.
Fishing's argument is equally blinkered: 'people's money is their own'. No it isn't. It is taking advantage of enormously valuable public goods such as education, health, roads and the rule of law to leverage a quite ludicrous accrual of personal wealth. Remove eg laws protecting that wealth and that person would have their wealth forcibly removed from them (or spend significant proportions of it on a private army to defend their wealth).
One interesting social policy question is how to create the sort of safety net that will allow more talented people to take risks, without creating a handout culture that reduces people's propensity to take risks.
One interesting economic policy question is how to reorient the economy to reward productive risk taking rather than just speculation.
What I find blinkered is that almost everyone who argues the way Sandpit and Fishing do come from relative wealth, and so don't really understand the risk side of the risk/reward balance that an entrepreneur makes.
(This is not a comment on Sandpit or Fishing personally as I don't know enough about their backgrounds to make such a comment).
My comment isn’t that anyone could be a Musk or a Bezos if only they worked harder, it’s that these particular people, with their particular skills, became wealthy because they founded successful companies. As you say there are many more entrepreneurs that take the risk and it doesn’t work out.
The very wealthy don’t have billions in the bank though, it’s in their own company shares which would likely crash if they sold them in any significant number.
That doesn’t make the successful ones just lucky, it means that their particular ideas were the ones which worked best.
The way to orientate the economy towards risk-taking is to have an attitude that failure doesn’t taint you for life (very different UK vs US attitudes on this one), and for taxes and regulations to encourage people to be entrepreneurs rather than work salaried jobs.
I’ve worked for myself before, studied some economics, and currently have a middle-class job as an IT manager, definitely not wealthy and not from wealth either.
Leaving the aside the earnt or moral arguments, the other side is how does it impact the broader society?
Extreme wealth isn't recycled into the economy as efficiently as normal wealth, it massively drives up asset inflation and is a key driver of media and political manipulation. It should be taxed as a social harm just as we do with tobacco, alcohol and gambling, not from a moral viewpoint, but a practical one.
My point is that ‘extreme wealth’ is not a massive bank account balance, although they will have considerably more than most, it’s simply their shares in the companies they founded. Elon Musk owning $400bn of Tesla shares at today’s market price doesn’t drive inflation, because he’s not spending it...
That's not entirely true, though is it ? Musk uses his various companies as piggy banks for whatever his current venture is. One of those things is massive investment into AI data centres, so he's one of those people partly responsible for the big increase in memory prices. OTOH he's driven down the cost of spaceflight quite dramatically.
An arguably much larger social consequence is the media concentration we've seen in the last couple of years, so that the vast majority of US media is in the hands of a very few individuals (who also contribute hundreds of millions to political parties).
That link about autism not being a spectrum is interesting. I laugh because it’s a symptom of this country’s inability to say no.
I have a question. I have been told by a few people that they think I am autistic. I have a degree from Oxford (I know!), have a job (albeit in the public sector) etc. I had no SEN help as a child. I just got on with it. So, the question is, are the people saying this to me simply wrong and falling into the trap of thinking autism is a spectrum. Or, could they be right and some children with autism don’t need help.
Ukraine just opened its first drone production plant in Britain. That matters for 3 reasons: • it moves part of Ukraine’s war industry into NATO space • it creates industrial spillover inside Europe • it shows Ukrainian defense tech is no longer just “surviving” — it is scaling 🧵👇 https://x.com/MagellanQuest/status/2039418671718682671
We have as a Nation have to have very serious questions about the definition of SEND, the causes for the rise in more moderate conditions and to ensure those who VERY clearly need help and support get it, but that (as is increasingly the case across welfare) those who see it as a cash cow or easy life, cannot piggy back at great cost to the detriment of those most in need.
Personally, I think that Bridget Phillipsone with her background, is doing an excellent job overall and far better than some Education Secretaries. I would actually question IF this very topic though sits more within the NHS / Health remit rather than Education. I do understand that some conversations were had about that.
The big missing for me is PARENTING!
Parenting Skills are not taught in Schools. Parenting Skills didn't used to be needed to be taught in Schools as Parents would teach their children having been taught by their parents and grand-parents were always on hand to support their children and their grandchildren.
If society (not any political party or affilaition to any political party) is happy to allow 4 and 5 year olds to have to be to be blunt, shit and piss in a toilet as opposed to a nappy, what chance have we got. This issue is a fundamental part of parenting and also nusery education and Phillipsons valiant efforts to recreate a version of Sure Start (the criminal destruction of which by Cameron and Osborne in 2010 was a heinous act) is to be warmly applaued but parenting begins at home, and it is time to actually teach those skills to ALL as a curriculum subject at 13 or 14 onwards. One of many real life skills like ( home budgeting, basic home economics skills) that are far more relevant than Latin, Greek, some obscure language of some sciences.
If children can be assesed at 3 or 4 at the latest, as opposed to 5 and 6, we may better understand the issues , better channel the resources, better reduce the waste and cost and better help those who really need the most support, the most support.
The cross Party support for a significant reduction in screen time - especially for under 5-6 year old may also see a linked improvement. If they are shitting in a nappy at 4 or 5, they should surely be taught those skills before being taught how to log on!
There is one word in "parenting" that seems to have been completely lost.
NO NO NO
Too often the opt out is to allow kids to do what they want because it's easier than saying NO - back to parenting skills or the lack of them.
I 100% respect the knowledge of the author and the article but we have to go right back to basics I believe TOUGH LOVE as a way to identify real problems early and not allow bad parenting to lead to some who are on SEND and shouldn't be or needn't be to be pigeonholed before they ever start proper main stream education.
Try finding a state school that teaches Latin let alone Greek beyond a grammar otherwise good points
The point I'm making is some subjects need totally removing. Greek and Latin more obscure examples.
Home Economics Parenting Skills Home Financing Behaviour and respect
Clearly need to be now taught at at school as parenting skills as parenting skills handed down generation to generation is clearly not happening.
I'd definitely be in favour of broad Home and Family management lessons. I was lucky enough to learn stuff like that at home when younger but had I not, i'd be buggered now.
It's pretty shocking what a lot of people don't know. Smart people with decent jobs.
My wife was astonished when she had a balance on her credit card and was charged interest as she thought she'd 'done the right thing' by making the specified minimum payments and didn't get why she was,as she saw it, being fined. She has a first class degree and PhD.
We could do with teaching people then basics of loans, inflation, mortgages etc and basic family finances.
Cooking and basic home maintenance, for sure.
Parenting we could probably cover too, but it's a lot less one size fits all. My mother in law's solution to all problems is a star chart - it has solved precisely no problems (first child it came into potty training, he soon learned to game the system with tactical wees; second child it did nothing to avert panic attack style pre-swimming-lesson meltdowns). In both cases, the real solutions differed and varied between the children. There probably are some basics though, but maybe could be covered as an extension of ante-natal classes - nearer to the time, more relevant, more remembered.
It is right though, that a lot of this should really come from parents, but where that's not happening, it probably makes sense to fill the gap.
Definitely agree on home mamagement front etc, get the basics drummed in. Parenting i cant really offer any thought on as i've not had any offspring
Come on, when has a lack of experience ever stopped anyone on PB?
The Temporal Investigations team are going to hate this.
In a piece of Genius recruitment NBC bring in former U.S.S Enterprise Transporter Chief and Deep Space Nine Chief Engineer Miles O'Brien as Science Correspondent for The Artemis Launch.
SEND - a subject close to my family as we have a grandson who is autistic. I fully relate to the comments about going to court. We are lucky in that we could afford to pay a lawyer and educational psychologist to force the local council to open a place at a special school. We have always felt a bit guilty as many parents could not afford the £5000 it cost us.
The school he attends is great but we wonder if we will have the same issues when he is 11.
Many thanks for the header. I endorse this message. Modern schools are designed to produce two outputs, (GCSE passes in English and Maths). Which are pre 1986 O levels. Unfortunately. Many of the inputs (the children) are no more suited to passing these than they ever were. This leads to frustration, anger and disillusion amongst both pupils and staff. Many of both are just giving up.
Heating. lighting, regimentation, timings, dress, funding and everything else all flow from being designed around the marginal pupil who may or may not obtain a pass. The non marginal at both ends lose out.
We spend an inordinate amount of time arguing about the structure of education, but almost none about what it is for.
Trouble with discussions on education is that we've all been to school, and therefore most of us have n=1 experiences. Those who teach, or are otherwise involved in education (parents) have, perhaps, wider views, but unless they're teachers their experience is still heavily affected by their own experience. Result is that anyone outside practical teaching commenting on a thread like this has to be very careful when doing so. My uncle, and two aunts were teachers, as was my father originally, before he went into business, but that didn't stop him commenting forcefully and aggressively on all aspects of education long after he'd ceased to have any current practical experience. Watching and listening to him (and being subject to his advice) when discussing education has made me very wary of such 'experts' on the subject, a feeling reinforced by being married to a teacher!
The only things I would add are (1) from family experience (great nieces and nephews) , having a child with Special Needs means entering a field full of obstacles, and, quite often, apparently bloody-minded obstructionism. (2) Ofsted inspections, from the experience long ago of my wife and now my Deputy Head grandson can be positive experiences.
A vaguely similar thought occurred to me when I heard a pilot discussing the difficulties of shooting down a relatively low speed drone in a fast jet. There seems to be a lot of very expensive tech being used to counter $40k drones.
‘There's a real irony that one of the worst aircraft of WWII would be ideal for shooting down Shahed drones today. The Boulton-Paul Defiant was 90 years ahead of its time’
My experience I am afraid is that if anything the problems are underdiagnosed.
The government claims otherwise because it doesn't want to spend the money.
Again, therefore, we come back to, should we not rather be asking why there's so damn much SEND about and why it's so expensive, and whether the fault is in the actual system?
Edit - which is actually not far off what the review says, once the government spin has been stripped out. They say schools are increasingly becoming intolerably stressful environments, and the preferred way (indeed the only way, in many cases) of treating that has been a medical diagnosis.
Would it not be more sensible to treat the cause rather than suppress the symptom?
You have to wonder why we have such numbers compared to other countries , something far wrong and no-one seems able to explain it. Back in the day when you were just referred to as a dunce or a troublemaker there were very very limited numbers , nowadays it is huge % of children, far too many acronyms been invented for lack of/bad parenting I think and answer seems to be give them all PIP and hire thousands of taxis. The ones with real problems then suffer.
I think it's time to cut £40bn from welfare and build a properly independent nuclear deterrent and properly fund defence. We can no longer rely on the US regardless of who is in the White House. The Trident programme made sense in an era when the UK and US were inseparable in terms of our global aims but now that is no longer the case. We cannot be beholden to what I would term as an informal ally for such a crucial part of our defence posture.
It's a truly sad state of affairs when the US and UK can no longer say they have the same outlook on the world regardless of who occupies No 10 or the White House. That partnership has been the cornerstone of the post war consensus and now it seems to be broken beyond repair. I think America is going to quickly realise it's a cold world out there and even though it maintains defence primacy, life without friends and allies is much tougher than MAGA and other isolationists realise. Thralldom may suit some countries but I think we need to start planning for a world in which we will need to defend our own interests without an implicit guarantee from American military might.
Welfare and pensions are not affordable in this new era and both will need substantial cuts.
On you final point we can't just let the old, the infirmed, the disabled, the poor to live in abject poverty. We have to offer voluntary euthanasia like we would an old dog or cat at the end of their life.
Alternatively the World and more specifically Britain could operate a society where the top one percent don't own 90% of wealth, or whatever the figure is these days.
The peasants need to revolt like they did in the French, the Russian and the Iranian revolutions. The outcomes of each may not have been optimal after the revolutions but your remedy is no better.
The UK has one of the biggest welfare states in the world and the top 10% only own 43% of UK wealth not 90% (whereas in the US now the top 10% own 67% of the nation's wealth)
Have I ever suggested that the UK welfare state is not expensive and overburdens the middle income tax payer? No I haven't.
What I said in a nutshell is if you are going to ensure the poorest are even poorer you need to offer them a way out.
I would much prefer as Robert suggested people are given the opportunity to make their own way in life.
What is the point of Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg owning everything and the rest of us living in the gutter?
The argument isn't about closing libraries in Wolverhampton, it is about overhauling the current capitalist system.
The three very wealthy men named all derive that wealth from shares in companies they founded, and worked bloody hard at for decades before they ever made a profit.
The problem isn’t a few rich people, it’s governments robbing Peter to pay Paul, and their being enough Pauls to keep voting for the handouts.
UK government also hasn’t balanced their budget since 2001, when one Gordon Brown divorced Prudence and turned on the spending taps hard. There’s now effectively a mortgage to be serviced, a debt of 2.5x annual government income of money that’s already been spent.
The only solution is a serious reduction in the scope of government and serious cuts in what remains. See Javier Millei in Argentina, for perhaps the only recent example of a large economy doing what’s required without the IMF getting involved.
I'm genuinely fascinated by those who are able to hold the viewpoints that Sandpit and Fishing shared on the last thread.
I know it is economic orthodoxy to argue this way but it also appears to me highly blinkered.
Just to take the first paragraph of the post above: the logic of it is that anyone could become a Musk, Bezos or Zuckerberg if only they got off their arses. This is patently false; whilst these three did work bloody hard they were also bloody lucky. There are many, many more multitudes of people who found companies that fold.
The thing about that luck is that you have to make use of it. That takes talent and balls. But it also requires either (a) the security of knowing that you have a genuine safety net if it fails or (b) an attitude to risk that may not be optimal for the social value of the asset you create.
Fishing's argument is equally blinkered: 'people's money is their own'. No it isn't. It is taking advantage of enormously valuable public goods such as education, health, roads and the rule of law to leverage a quite ludicrous accrual of personal wealth. Remove eg laws protecting that wealth and that person would have their wealth forcibly removed from them (or spend significant proportions of it on a private army to defend their wealth).
One interesting social policy question is how to create the sort of safety net that will allow more talented people to take risks, without creating a handout culture that reduces people's propensity to take risks.
One interesting economic policy question is how to reorient the economy to reward productive risk taking rather than just speculation.
What I find blinkered is that almost everyone who argues the way Sandpit and Fishing do come from relative wealth, and so don't really understand the risk side of the risk/reward balance that an entrepreneur makes.
(This is not a comment on Sandpit or Fishing personally as I don't know enough about their backgrounds to make such a comment).
My comment isn’t that anyone could be a Musk or a Bezos if only they worked harder, it’s that these particular people, with their particular skills, became wealthy because they founded successful companies. As you say there are many more entrepreneurs that take the risk and it doesn’t work out.
The very wealthy don’t have billions in the bank though, it’s in their own company shares which would likely crash if they sold them in any significant number.
That doesn’t make the successful ones just lucky, it means that their particular ideas were the ones which worked best.
The way to orientate the economy towards risk-taking is to have an attitude that failure doesn’t taint you for life (very different UK vs US attitudes on this one), and for taxes and regulations to encourage people to be entrepreneurs rather than work salaried jobs.
I’ve worked for myself before, studied some economics, and currently have a middle-class job as an IT manager, definitely not wealthy and not from wealth either.
Leaving the aside the earnt or moral arguments, the other side is how does it impact the broader society?
Extreme wealth isn't recycled into the economy as efficiently as normal wealth, it massively drives up asset inflation and is a key driver of media and political manipulation. It should be taxed as a social harm just as we do with tobacco, alcohol and gambling, not from a moral viewpoint, but a practical one.
My point is that ‘extreme wealth’ is not a massive bank account balance, although they will have considerably more than most, it’s simply their shares in the companies they founded. Elon Musk owning $400bn of Tesla shares at today’s market price doesn’t drive inflation, because he’s not spending it...
That's not entirely true, though is it ? Musk uses his various companies as piggy banks for whatever his current venture is. One of those things is massive investment into AI data centres, so he's one of those people partly responsible for the big increase in memory prices. OTOH he's driven down the cost of spaceflight quite dramatically.
An arguably much larger social consequence is the media concentration we've seen in the last couple of years, so that the vast majority of US media is in the hands of a very few individuals (who also contribute hundreds of millions to political parties).
A vaguely similar thought occurred to me when I heard a pilot discussing the difficulties of shooting down a relatively low speed drone in a fast jet. There seems to be a lot of very expensive tech being used to counter $40k drones.
‘There's a real irony that one of the worst aircraft of WWII would be ideal for shooting down Shahed drones today. The Boulton-Paul Defiant was 90 years ahead of its time’
R4 seeming to have been sent into a state of perpetual orgasm about the Artemis launch, I thought I’d check Mr Spaceman Elon’s twitter for gracious comments on the great human effort to return to the moon. Went down quite far and nada, mostly whining about Newsom and going ‘wow’ at other people’s tweets. What a small man he is.
My experience I am afraid is that if anything the problems are underdiagnosed.
The government claims otherwise because it doesn't want to spend the money.
Again, therefore, we come back to, should we not rather be asking why there's so damn much SEND about and why it's so expensive, and whether the fault is in the actual system?
Edit - which is actually not far off what the review says, once the government spin has been stripped out. They say schools are increasingly becoming intolerably stressful environments, and the preferred way (indeed the only way, in many cases) of treating that has been a medical diagnosis.
Would it not be more sensible to treat the cause rather than suppress the symptom?
You have to wonder why we have such numbers compared to other countries , something far wrong and no-one seems able to explain it. Back in the day when you were just referred to as a dunce or a troublemaker there were very very limited numbers , nowadays it is huge % of children, far too many acronyms been invented for lack of/bad parenting I think and answer seems to be give them all PIP and hire thousands of taxis. The ones with real problems then suffer.
Many years ago, when responsible for medicines supply to a specialist out-patient unit, I realised we suddenly were using a great more of a medication used to 'treat' autism. Apparently we had a new consultant with a special interest in the subject.
A vaguely similar thought occurred to me when I heard a pilot discussing the difficulties of shooting down a relatively low speed drone in a fast jet. There seems to be a lot of very expensive tech being used to counter $40k drones.
‘There's a real irony that one of the worst aircraft of WWII would be ideal for shooting down Shahed drones today. The Boulton-Paul Defiant was 90 years ahead of its time’
Bit unfair on the Defiant. There were lots of worse aircraft.
The Shahed drones fly at 100kts, it’s really difficult to shoot them down with a fast jet which doesn’t like anything below about 300kts.
The Ukranians are doing things like flying around in light aircraft with a shotgun hanging out of the window, chasing them with helicopters, or shooting at them from the ground with guns. The best option so far appears to be small $2,000 quadcoptor drones, a fast version of a hobby DJI-type with a small explosive charge.
That link about autism not being a spectrum is interesting. I laugh because it’s a symptom of this country’s inability to say no.
I have a question. I have been told by a few people that they think I am autistic. I have a degree from Oxford (I know!), have a job (albeit in the public sector) etc. I had no SEN help as a child. I just got on with it. So, the question is, are the people saying this to me simply wrong and falling into the trap of thinking autism is a spectrum. Or, could they be right and some children with autism don’t need help.
Great header and one that is close to home as we're a family gifted with autism. Our failings in education are barely believable - a system which is both fragmented and thus high cost *and* centrally dictated.
Worse are the parallel failings in health. A literal postcode lottery in diagnosis where the difference in reaction time from one street to the next across a boundary can be measured in years.
There is a political narrative that "all these extra SEND kids must be faking it / parents on the take / it's just woke". Or - radically - it was always there, we can now actively do something to help, and we have broken a whole generation of kids with lockdown.
That, at least so far as SEND is concerned, is something not borne out by my experience. Rather, what lockdown did was demonstrate to rather large numbers of children who don't fit into the DfE's little boxes that there was a better way to learn than being forced into a noisy, confused, badly heated environment. And when they were told they had to give this better way up, they decided, entirely logically, that they wouldn't.
I'm working with eight children right now who have refused to go back into school since lockdown (now five years in the past). All of them were doing appallingly badly in school and all of them in home schooling are now doing extremely well despite a variety of complex needs. As in, couldn't read or write before lockdown and now we're considering which unis they should go to.
So my question - I'm quite happy to work with these children and take the somewhat north of forty grand a year their LEAs are paying me, but wouldn't it be better to sort out the school environments so they could reintegrate and that money be shared among maybe 15 children rather than just spent on eight?
Typical largesse with public funds by idiots who are not fit for their jobs. Just splash cash about , we are run by lazy incompetent donkeys.
Ukraine just opened its first drone production plant in Britain. That matters for 3 reasons: • it moves part of Ukraine’s war industry into NATO space • it creates industrial spillover inside Europe • it shows Ukrainian defense tech is no longer just “surviving” — it is scaling 🧵👇 https://x.com/MagellanQuest/status/2039418671718682671
It also creates an independent U.K. capability.
The MoD will, of course deny that such drones are useful. They are good for “the wrong kind of war”
But when the fuck up happens (as it will), some Lance Corporal on the Home Guard will be summoned to bring them into use.
The Temporal Investigations team are going to hate this.
In a piece of Genius recruitment NBC bring in former U.S.S Enterprise Transporter Chief and Deep Space Nine Chief Engineer Miles O'Brien as Science Correspondent for The Artemis Launch.
Canonically, Chief O'Brien is The Most Important Man in Starfleet
The problem with the current oligarchic system of capitalism, it breaks the social contract. If a small number of extremely rich capitalists control both the economy and the political system and the vast majority of people aren't also sharing in growth or wealth, people will not buy into that system, which deserves to be overthrown.
A vaguely similar thought occurred to me when I heard a pilot discussing the difficulties of shooting down a relatively low speed drone in a fast jet. There seems to be a lot of very expensive tech being used to counter $40k drones.
‘There's a real irony that one of the worst aircraft of WWII would be ideal for shooting down Shahed drones today. The Boulton-Paul Defiant was 90 years ahead of its time’
Bit unfair on the Defiant. There were lots of worse aircraft.
The Shahed drones fly at 100kts, it’s really difficult to shoot them down with a fast jet which doesn’t like anything below about 300kts.
The Ukranians are doing things like flying around in light aircraft with a shotgun hanging out of the window, chasing them with helicopters, or shooting at them from the ground with guns. The best option so far appears to be small $2,000 quadcoptor drones, a fast version of a hobby DJI-type with a small explosive charge.
One of my sons is involved in selling drones, and equipment for them. I must make the time to have an 'in depth' chat with him. Although he's VERY busy at the moment.
A vaguely similar thought occurred to me when I heard a pilot discussing the difficulties of shooting down a relatively low speed drone in a fast jet. There seems to be a lot of very expensive tech being used to counter $40k drones.
‘There's a real irony that one of the worst aircraft of WWII would be ideal for shooting down Shahed drones today. The Boulton-Paul Defiant was 90 years ahead of its time’
My insight into this (such as it is) comes form the other side of the argument, so to speak.
The "solution" (smaller class sizes) seems the most obvious but it's not.
Let me start with an obvious comment - schools cost. It's not just the education, indeed, far from it, but the infrastructure, the bricks and mortar, the facilities, the need to constantly maintain which is the problem.
The temptation for local councils (and indeed academy trusts) at a time of falling school rolls isn't to go for fewer pupils in each class but for fewer schools as that is economically efficient and effective. Fewer schools means more can be spent on the surviving schools including on maintenance, adaptation of class room spaces for SEN provision etc.
Redundant or unnecessary school buildings aren't mothballed - does anyone see a surge in birth rates on the horizon? Old schools are demolished or sold off or made available for residential redevelopment, land for the dwellings I'm told we so desperately need. You can fit a lot of houses or flats on a primary school site.
We did this before of course in the 90s but were blindsided by the rise in school rolls which was the product of mass immigration in the 2000s and beyond and even now those who entered post-2020 are having children so the demise of schools may be overstated. The problem is once you have closed and sold off a school, you can't quickly rebuild it so the solution becomes modern extensions to existing 60s and 70s (both 18 and 19) schools which may look aesthetically horrendous but serve a purpose.
There's a lot of information on school capacity and suitability criteria which is gathered every year by councils and others for central Government to inform current and future spending and education place planning. Most Academies are on 125 year leases so if the Academy moves out, the land reverts to the local Council for alternative uses.
My experience I am afraid is that if anything the problems are underdiagnosed.
The government claims otherwise because it doesn't want to spend the money.
Again, therefore, we come back to, should we not rather be asking why there's so damn much SEND about and why it's so expensive, and whether the fault is in the actual system?
Edit - which is actually not far off what the review says, once the government spin has been stripped out. They say schools are increasingly becoming intolerably stressful environments, and the preferred way (indeed the only way, in many cases) of treating that has been a medical diagnosis.
Would it not be more sensible to treat the cause rather than suppress the symptom?
You have to wonder why we have such numbers compared to other countries , something far wrong and no-one seems able to explain it. Back in the day when you were just referred to as a dunce or a troublemaker there were very very limited numbers , nowadays it is huge % of children, far too many acronyms been invented for lack of/bad parenting I think and answer seems to be give them all PIP and hire thousands of taxis. The ones with real problems then suffer.
Do we? France has a lower incidence, but then they have a very poor education system and it is quite hard to diagnose children with anything. Scandinavia has a lower incidence, around a quarter of ours, but they have much smaller main class sizes* (which brings me back to my point). Hong Kong and China have barely any but there is a fearsome social stigma attached to any sort of SEND diagnosis so it's almost impossible to find doctors/psychiatrists that will diagnose it.
So I'm not sure that gets us much further. We do have a higher incidence but that may be due to the internal issues of our education system.
*Our figure looks similar on paper, but is somewhat distorted by offering rather smaller class sizes for various subjects at GCSE and A-level.
The problem with the current oligarchic system of capitalism, it breaks the social contract. If a small number of extremely rich capitalists control both the economy and the political system and the vast majority of people aren't also sharing in growth or wealth, people will not buy into that system, which deserves to be overthrown.
There's also this overlap between oligarchic capitalism and social media. Those who control social media have an even more outsized influence on society. One could, perhaps, rein in some of the toxic influence on social media without having to embrace a Communist revolutionary overthrow of our economic model.
Aren’t we in danger of over diagnosing children , similarly the huge increase in adults being diagnosed with mental health issues .
It’s of course good that there’s less stigma now but it seems to have gone too far the other way .
Maybe the NHS should prescribe “ Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning “ by Viktor Frankl as many seem to be suffering from existential neurosis .
It’s not a surprise that we can correlate the huge increase in mental health problems with the similar increase in social media and the internet in general.
In a desperate attempt to put people in boxes , and people seeking others to reinforce their view that they have a mental health problem .
It feeds itself and as a nation we’re in danger of talking ourselves into a mental health crisis .
It is a feeding frenzy for benefits in many cases by useless parents who are too lazy or stupid or dumb with regard to bringing up a child. There are too many stupid , lazy , money grubbing , entitled people in this country , all encouraged/produced by crap government and far too much largesse. Hence why you do not see it in other countries , if you have freebies then they will eb abused big time by unsscrupulous and lazy people.
My insight into this (such as it is) comes form the other side of the argument, so to speak.
The "solution" (smaller class sizes) seems the most obvious but it's not.
Let me start with an obvious comment - schools cost. It's not just the education, indeed, far from it, but the infrastructure, the bricks and mortar, the facilities, the need to constantly maintain which is the problem.
The temptation for local councils (and indeed academy trusts) at a time of falling school rolls isn't to go for fewer pupils in each class but for fewer schools as that is economically efficient and effective. Fewer schools means more can be spent on the surviving schools including on maintenance, adaptation of class room spaces for SEN provision etc.
Redundant or unnecessary school buildings aren't mothballed - does anyone see a surge in birth rates on the horizon? Old schools are demolished or sold off or made available for residential redevelopment, land for the dwellings I'm told we so desperately need. You can fit a lot of houses or flats on a primary school site.
We did this before of course in the 90s but were blindsided by the rise in school rolls which was the product of mass immigration in the 2000s and beyond and even now those who entered post-2020 are having children so the demise of schools may be overstated. The problem is once you have closed and sold off a school, you can't quickly rebuild it so the solution becomes modern extensions to existing 60s and 70s (both 18 and 19) schools which may look aesthetically horrendous but serve a purpose.
There's a lot of information on school capacity and suitability criteria which is gathered every year by councils and others for central Government to inform current and future spending and education place planning. Most Academies are on 125 year leases so if the Academy moves out, the land reverts to the local Council for alternative uses.
I know they cost. I am pointing out that making them smaller may cost less even in the short term than trying to play whack-a-mole with the other issues we have, of which SEND is one.
And I am suggesting that those schools that are being closed imminently should instead be kept open with smaller class sizes and it would help.
It won't happen because beancounters in the Treasury will look at the headline figure and claim it's not worth it.
I think it's time to cut £40bn from welfare and build a properly independent nuclear deterrent and properly fund defence. We can no longer rely on the US regardless of who is in the White House. The Trident programme made sense in an era when the UK and US were inseparable in terms of our global aims but now that is no longer the case. We cannot be beholden to what I would term as an informal ally for such a crucial part of our defence posture.
It's a truly sad state of affairs when the US and UK can no longer say they have the same outlook on the world regardless of who occupies No 10 or the White House. That partnership has been the cornerstone of the post war consensus and now it seems to be broken beyond repair. I think America is going to quickly realise it's a cold world out there and even though it maintains defence primacy, life without friends and allies is much tougher than MAGA and other isolationists realise. Thralldom may suit some countries but I think we need to start planning for a world in which we will need to defend our own interests without an implicit guarantee from American military might.
Welfare and pensions are not affordable in this new era and both will need substantial cuts.
On you final point we can't just let the old, the infirmed, the disabled, the poor to live in abject poverty. We have to offer voluntary euthanasia like we would an old dog or cat at the end of their life.
Alternatively the World and more specifically Britain could operate a society where the top one percent don't own 90% of wealth, or whatever the figure is these days.
The peasants need to revolt like they did in the French, the Russian and the Iranian revolutions. The outcomes of each may not have been optimal after the revolutions but your remedy is no better.
The UK has one of the biggest welfare states in the world and the top 10% only own 43% of UK wealth not 90% (whereas in the US now the top 10% own 67% of the nation's wealth)
Have I ever suggested that the UK welfare state is not expensive and overburdens the middle income tax payer? No I haven't.
What I said in a nutshell is if you are going to ensure the poorest are even poorer you need to offer them a way out.
I would much prefer as Robert suggested people are given the opportunity to make their own way in life.
What is the point of Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg owning everything and the rest of us living in the gutter?
The argument isn't about closing libraries in Wolverhampton, it is about overhauling the current capitalist system.
The three very wealthy men named all derive that wealth from shares in companies they founded, and worked bloody hard at for decades before they ever made a profit.
The problem isn’t a few rich people, it’s governments robbing Peter to pay Paul, and their being enough Pauls to keep voting for the handouts.
UK government also hasn’t balanced their budget since 2001, when one Gordon Brown divorced Prudence and turned on the spending taps hard. There’s now effectively a mortgage to be serviced, a debt of 2.5x annual government income of money that’s already been spent.
The only solution is a serious reduction in the scope of government and serious cuts in what remains. See Javier Millei in Argentina, for perhaps the only recent example of a large economy doing what’s required without the IMF getting involved.
I'm genuinely fascinated by those who are able to hold the viewpoints that Sandpit and Fishing shared on the last thread.
I know it is economic orthodoxy to argue this way but it also appears to me highly blinkered.
Just to take the first paragraph of the post above: the logic of it is that anyone could become a Musk, Bezos or Zuckerberg if only they got off their arses. This is patently false; whilst these three did work bloody hard they were also bloody lucky. There are many, many more multitudes of people who found companies that fold.
The thing about that luck is that you have to make use of it. That takes talent and balls. But it also requires either (a) the security of knowing that you have a genuine safety net if it fails or (b) an attitude to risk that may not be optimal for the social value of the asset you create.
Fishing's argument is equally blinkered: 'people's money is their own'. No it isn't. It is taking advantage of enormously valuable public goods such as education, health, roads and the rule of law to leverage a quite ludicrous accrual of personal wealth. Remove eg laws protecting that wealth and that person would have their wealth forcibly removed from them (or spend significant proportions of it on a private army to defend their wealth).
One interesting social policy question is how to create the sort of safety net that will allow more talented people to take risks, without creating a handout culture that reduces people's propensity to take risks.
One interesting economic policy question is how to reorient the economy to reward productive risk taking rather than just speculation.
What I find blinkered is that almost everyone who argues the way Sandpit and Fishing do come from relative wealth, and so don't really understand the risk side of the risk/reward balance that an entrepreneur makes.
(This is not a comment on Sandpit or Fishing personally as I don't know enough about their backgrounds to make such a comment).
My comment isn’t that anyone could be a Musk or a Bezos if only they worked harder, it’s that these particular people, with their particular skills, became wealthy because they founded successful companies. As you say there are many more entrepreneurs that take the risk and it doesn’t work out for whatever reason, and usually unconnected to the amount of work put in.
The very wealthy don’t have billions in the bank though, it’s in their own company shares which would likely crash if they sold them in any significant number.
That doesn’t make the successful ones just lucky, it means that their particular ideas were the ones which worked best.
The way to orientate the economy towards risk-taking is to have an attitude that failure doesn’t taint you for life (very different UK vs US attitudes on this one), and for taxes and regulations to encourage people to be entrepreneurs rather than work salaried jobs.
I’ve worked for myself before, studied some economics, and currently have a middle-class job as an IT manager, definitely not wealthy and not from wealth either.
@Sandpit thanks for the considered response. I realised after I posted that you and Fishing were making quite different points and I should have really responded to Fishing not you.
Nevertheless I think you are still very much underestimating the impact of the economic and social context that gives rise to a Musk, Bezos or Zuckerberg.
If we add to the bit in bold "and they happened to have access to resources (both private wealth and public goods), legal protection, markets and social institutions that enabled them to monetise their ideas" then we'd be closer to agreement.
My insight into this (such as it is) comes form the other side of the argument, so to speak.
The "solution" (smaller class sizes) seems the most obvious but it's not.
I work in higher education. Money is tight. One solution our management has imposed is to move to bigger class sizes. Instead of MSc classes of ~25 students (which was my experience doing an MSc) or of ~5 students (which was my best friend's experience in the humanities), we now have programmes with 40 students, or 90 students, or 130 students. Guess what? The student experience is not as good.
A vaguely similar thought occurred to me when I heard a pilot discussing the difficulties of shooting down a relatively low speed drone in a fast jet. There seems to be a lot of very expensive tech being used to counter $40k drones.
‘There's a real irony that one of the worst aircraft of WWII would be ideal for shooting down Shahed drones today. The Boulton-Paul Defiant was 90 years ahead of its time’
The moon's surface average daytime temperature is 250F (120C). I had always assumed that it was constantly cold - it certainly is at night, or in the shade, but apparently not when the sun shines on it.
Also shows how lucky we are to have an atmosphere to even the daytime and nighttime fluctuations out.
My insight into this (such as it is) comes form the other side of the argument, so to speak.
The "solution" (smaller class sizes) seems the most obvious but it's not.
Let me start with an obvious comment - schools cost. It's not just the education, indeed, far from it, but the infrastructure, the bricks and mortar, the facilities, the need to constantly maintain which is the problem.
The temptation for local councils (and indeed academy trusts) at a time of falling school rolls isn't to go for fewer pupils in each class but for fewer schools as that is economically efficient and effective. Fewer schools means more can be spent on the surviving schools including on maintenance, adaptation of class room spaces for SEN provision etc.
Redundant or unnecessary school buildings aren't mothballed - does anyone see a surge in birth rates on the horizon? Old schools are demolished or sold off or made available for residential redevelopment, land for the dwellings I'm told we so desperately need. You can fit a lot of houses or flats on a primary school site.
We did this before of course in the 90s but were blindsided by the rise in school rolls which was the product of mass immigration in the 2000s and beyond and even now those who entered post-2020 are having children so the demise of schools may be overstated. The problem is once you have closed and sold off a school, you can't quickly rebuild it so the solution becomes modern extensions to existing 60s and 70s (both 18 and 19) schools which may look aesthetically horrendous but serve a purpose.
There's a lot of information on school capacity and suitability criteria which is gathered every year by councils and others for central Government to inform current and future spending and education place planning. Most Academies are on 125 year leases so if the Academy moves out, the land reverts to the local Council for alternative uses.
I know they cost. I am pointing out that making them smaller may cost less even in the short term than trying to play whack-a-mole with the other issues we have, of which SEND is one.
And I am suggesting that those schools that are being closed imminently should instead be kept open with smaller class sizes and it would help.
It won't happen because beancounters in the Treasury will look at the headline figure and claim it's not worth it.
Beancounters in the Treasury have a lot to answer for!
My insight into this (such as it is) comes form the other side of the argument, so to speak.
The "solution" (smaller class sizes) seems the most obvious but it's not.
Let me start with an obvious comment - schools cost. It's not just the education, indeed, far from it, but the infrastructure, the bricks and mortar, the facilities, the need to constantly maintain which is the problem.
The temptation for local councils (and indeed academy trusts) at a time of falling school rolls isn't to go for fewer pupils in each class but for fewer schools as that is economically efficient and effective. Fewer schools means more can be spent on the surviving schools including on maintenance, adaptation of class room spaces for SEN provision etc.
Redundant or unnecessary school buildings aren't mothballed - does anyone see a surge in birth rates on the horizon? Old schools are demolished or sold off or made available for residential redevelopment, land for the dwellings I'm told we so desperately need. You can fit a lot of houses or flats on a primary school site.
We did this before of course in the 90s but were blindsided by the rise in school rolls which was the product of mass immigration in the 2000s and beyond and even now those who entered post-2020 are having children so the demise of schools may be overstated. The problem is once you have closed and sold off a school, you can't quickly rebuild it so the solution becomes modern extensions to existing 60s and 70s (both 18 and 19) schools which may look aesthetically horrendous but serve a purpose.
There's a lot of information on school capacity and suitability criteria which is gathered every year by councils and others for central Government to inform current and future spending and education place planning. Most Academies are on 125 year leases so if the Academy moves out, the land reverts to the local Council for alternative uses.
I know they cost. I am pointing out that making them smaller may cost less even in the short term than trying to play whack-a-mole with the other issues we have, of which SEND is one.
And I am suggesting that those schools that are being closed imminently should instead be kept open with smaller class sizes and it would help.
It won't happen because beancounters in the Treasury will look at the headline figure and claim it's not worth it.
Beancounters in the Treasury have a lot to answer for!
Almost as much as certain has-beens in other departments.
Many thanks for the header. I endorse this message. Modern schools are designed to produce two outputs, (GCSE passes in English and Maths). Which are pre 1986 O levels. Unfortunately. Many of the inputs (the children) are no more suited to passing these than they ever were. This leads to frustration, anger and disillusion amongst both pupils and staff. Many of both are just giving up.
Heating. lighting, regimentation, timings, dress, funding and everything else all flow from being designed around the marginal pupil who may or may not obtain a pass. The non marginal at both ends lose out.
We spend an inordinate amount of time arguing about the structure of education, but almost none about what it is for.
I'd put it slightly differently. Before 1990 or so, the system did let go of a lot of children too quickly and too easily. Ensuring that everyone stuck around to the very end and left with something to show for eleven years in formal education was a good thing all round, and a lot of it was fairly low-hanging fruit.
More recently (2005ish?), the focus switched to much more marginal gains, because they were the only gains left to be squeezed out of the system. And they, as you say, are much more painful for everyone involved. (Which I suspect is why we've got more MH issues in schools now than in the past. The constant tracking, with the expectation of assertive intervention following any deviation, can't be good for anyone's peace of mind. One also has to wonder how much it costs in management time and resource.
Thank you for the very informative header. I'm in no position to comment, partly because I've had nothing to do with schools since leaving my own comprehensive, but more so because I'm suffering from great despair at everything. I'm just glad they aren't my problems to resolve.
Good morning, everyone.
“I am suffering from great despair at everything” is, however, a magnificent line @AnneJGP. Seriously. You can cheer yourself with the knowledge I am going to steal it
When I get a Knappers Gazette editor snapping at me about deadlines I shall simply and quietly say “I am suffering from great despair at everything”
"The last two World Cups that Italy qualified for were in 2010 and 2014. On both occasions, the Azzurri were knocked out in the group stages. It means the last World Cup knockout match that Italy played in was the 2006 World Cup final, which it won on penalties."
I think it's time to cut £40bn from welfare and build a properly independent nuclear deterrent and properly fund defence. We can no longer rely on the US regardless of who is in the White House. The Trident programme made sense in an era when the UK and US were inseparable in terms of our global aims but now that is no longer the case. We cannot be beholden to what I would term as an informal ally for such a crucial part of our defence posture.
It's a truly sad state of affairs when the US and UK can no longer say they have the same outlook on the world regardless of who occupies No 10 or the White House. That partnership has been the cornerstone of the post war consensus and now it seems to be broken beyond repair. I think America is going to quickly realise it's a cold world out there and even though it maintains defence primacy, life without friends and allies is much tougher than MAGA and other isolationists realise. Thralldom may suit some countries but I think we need to start planning for a world in which we will need to defend our own interests without an implicit guarantee from American military might.
Welfare and pensions are not affordable in this new era and both will need substantial cuts.
On you final point we can't just let the old, the infirmed, the disabled, the poor to live in abject poverty. We have to offer voluntary euthanasia like we would an old dog or cat at the end of their life.
Alternatively the World and more specifically Britain could operate a society where the top one percent don't own 90% of wealth, or whatever the figure is these days.
The peasants need to revolt like they did in the French, the Russian and the Iranian revolutions. The outcomes of each may not have been optimal after the revolutions but your remedy is no better.
The UK has one of the biggest welfare states in the world and the top 10% only own 43% of UK wealth not 90% (whereas in the US now the top 10% own 67% of the nation's wealth)
Have I ever suggested that the UK welfare state is not expensive and overburdens the middle income tax payer? No I haven't.
What I said in a nutshell is if you are going to ensure the poorest are even poorer you need to offer them a way out.
I would much prefer as Robert suggested people are given the opportunity to make their own way in life.
What is the point of Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg owning everything and the rest of us living in the gutter?
The argument isn't about closing libraries in Wolverhampton, it is about overhauling the current capitalist system.
The three very wealthy men named all derive that wealth from shares in companies they founded, and worked bloody hard at for decades before they ever made a profit.
The problem isn’t a few rich people, it’s governments robbing Peter to pay Paul, and their being enough Pauls to keep voting for the handouts.
UK government also hasn’t balanced their budget since 2001, when one Gordon Brown divorced Prudence and turned on the spending taps hard. There’s now effectively a mortgage to be serviced, a debt of 2.5x annual government income of money that’s already been spent.
The only solution is a serious reduction in the scope of government and serious cuts in what remains. See Javier Millei in Argentina, for perhaps the only recent example of a large economy doing what’s required without the IMF getting involved.
I'm genuinely fascinated by those who are able to hold the viewpoints that Sandpit and Fishing shared on the last thread.
I know it is economic orthodoxy to argue this way but it also appears to me highly blinkered.
Just to take the first paragraph of the post above: the logic of it is that anyone could become a Musk, Bezos or Zuckerberg if only they got off their arses. This is patently false; whilst these three did work bloody hard they were also bloody lucky. There are many, many more multitudes of people who found companies that fold.
The thing about that luck is that you have to make use of it. That takes talent and balls. But it also requires either (a) the security of knowing that you have a genuine safety net if it fails or (b) an attitude to risk that may not be optimal for the social value of the asset you create.
Fishing's argument is equally blinkered: 'people's money is their own'. No it isn't. It is taking advantage of enormously valuable public goods such as education, health, roads and the rule of law to leverage a quite ludicrous accrual of personal wealth. Remove eg laws protecting that wealth and that person would have their wealth forcibly removed from them (or spend significant proportions of it on a private army to defend their wealth).
One interesting social policy question is how to create the sort of safety net that will allow more talented people to take risks, without creating a handout culture that reduces people's propensity to take risks.
One interesting economic policy question is how to reorient the economy to reward productive risk taking rather than just speculation.
What I find blinkered is that almost everyone who argues the way Sandpit and Fishing do come from relative wealth, and so don't really understand the risk side of the risk/reward balance that an entrepreneur makes.
(This is not a comment on Sandpit or Fishing personally as I don't know enough about their backgrounds to make such a comment).
My comment isn’t that anyone could be a Musk or a Bezos if only they worked harder, it’s that these particular people, with their particular skills, became wealthy because they founded successful companies. As you say there are many more entrepreneurs that take the risk and it doesn’t work out.
The very wealthy don’t have billions in the bank though, it’s in their own company shares which would likely crash if they sold them in any significant number.
That doesn’t make the successful ones just lucky, it means that their particular ideas were the ones which worked best.
The way to orientate the economy towards risk-taking is to have an attitude that failure doesn’t taint you for life (very different UK vs US attitudes on this one), and for taxes and regulations to encourage people to be entrepreneurs rather than work salaried jobs.
I’ve worked for myself before, studied some economics, and currently have a middle-class job as an IT manager, definitely not wealthy and not from wealth either.
Leaving the aside the earnt or moral arguments, the other side is how does it impact the broader society?
Extreme wealth isn't recycled into the economy as efficiently as normal wealth, it massively drives up asset inflation and is a key driver of media and political manipulation. It should be taxed as a social harm just as we do with tobacco, alcohol and gambling, not from a moral viewpoint, but a practical one.
My point is that ‘extreme wealth’ is not a massive bank account balance, although they will have considerably more than most, it’s simply their shares in the companies they founded. Elon Musk owning $400bn of Tesla shares at today’s market price doesn’t drive inflation, because he’s not spending it...
That's not entirely true, though is it ? Musk uses his various companies as piggy banks for whatever his current venture is. One of those things is massive investment into AI data centres, so he's one of those people partly responsible for the big increase in memory prices. OTOH he's driven down the cost of spaceflight quite dramatically.
An arguably much larger social consequence is the media concentration we've seen in the last couple of years, so that the vast majority of US media is in the hands of a very few individuals (who also contribute hundreds of millions to political parties).
With the exception of Twitter, most of his companies have grown organically. His first big income was $100m from the sale of PayPal, both SpaceX and Tesla grew from a shed and were both pretty close to bankruptcy before they really took off (sic).
We agree on the media concentration, although I will argue that said concentration makes Elon’s purchase of Twitter so important to the media landscape. Yes, big money in US politics is generally a bad thing for everyone, except the politicans themselves and the media companies that take billions in advertising.
My insight into this (such as it is) comes form the other side of the argument, so to speak.
The "solution" (smaller class sizes) seems the most obvious but it's not.
Let me start with an obvious comment - schools cost. It's not just the education, indeed, far from it, but the infrastructure, the bricks and mortar, the facilities, the need to constantly maintain which is the problem.
The temptation for local councils (and indeed academy trusts) at a time of falling school rolls isn't to go for fewer pupils in each class but for fewer schools as that is economically efficient and effective. Fewer schools means more can be spent on the surviving schools including on maintenance, adaptation of class room spaces for SEN provision etc.
Redundant or unnecessary school buildings aren't mothballed - does anyone see a surge in birth rates on the horizon? Old schools are demolished or sold off or made available for residential redevelopment, land for the dwellings I'm told we so desperately need. You can fit a lot of houses or flats on a primary school site.
We did this before of course in the 90s but were blindsided by the rise in school rolls which was the product of mass immigration in the 2000s and beyond and even now those who entered post-2020 are having children so the demise of schools may be overstated. The problem is once you have closed and sold off a school, you can't quickly rebuild it so the solution becomes modern extensions to existing 60s and 70s (both 18 and 19) schools which may look aesthetically horrendous but serve a purpose.
There's a lot of information on school capacity and suitability criteria which is gathered every year by councils and others for central Government to inform current and future spending and education place planning. Most Academies are on 125 year leases so if the Academy moves out, the land reverts to the local Council for alternative uses.
I know they cost. I am pointing out that making them smaller may cost less even in the short term than trying to play whack-a-mole with the other issues we have, of which SEND is one.
And I am suggesting that those schools that are being closed imminently should instead be kept open with smaller class sizes and it would help.
It won't happen because beancounters in the Treasury will look at the headline figure and claim it's not worth it.
I'm probably being over-Eeyoreish here, but when was the last time the British body politic (however you want to define that) accepted an "this will cost more upfront but be worth it in a few years' time" argument?
Thank you for the very informative header. I'm in no position to comment, partly because I've had nothing to do with schools since leaving my own comprehensive, but more so because I'm suffering from great despair at everything. I'm just glad they aren't my problems to resolve.
Good morning, everyone.
“I am suffering from great despair at everything” is, however, a magnificent line @AnneJGP. Seriously. You can cheer yourself with the knowledge I am going to steal it
When I get a Knappers Gazette editor snapping at me about deadlines I shall simply and quietly say “I am suffering from great despair at everything”
Your stalker’s article in the Telegraph about Heathrow was a very amusing read. He’s a rather good writer.
Us residents of Dubai are used to the sharp contrast between LHR T3 and DXB T3 when making the journey on a regular basis!
Thank you for the very informative header. I'm in no position to comment, partly because I've had nothing to do with schools since leaving my own comprehensive, but more so because I'm suffering from great despair at everything. I'm just glad they aren't my problems to resolve.
Good morning, everyone.
“I am suffering from great despair at everything” is, however, a magnificent line @AnneJGP. Seriously. You can cheer yourself with the knowledge I am going to steal it
When I get a Knappers Gazette editor snapping at me about deadlines I shall simply and quietly say “I am suffering from great despair at everything”
That's pretty much the editorial policy of the Gazette, isn't it?
My insight into this (such as it is) comes form the other side of the argument, so to speak.
The "solution" (smaller class sizes) seems the most obvious but it's not.
Let me start with an obvious comment - schools cost. It's not just the education, indeed, far from it, but the infrastructure, the bricks and mortar, the facilities, the need to constantly maintain which is the problem.
The temptation for local councils (and indeed academy trusts) at a time of falling school rolls isn't to go for fewer pupils in each class but for fewer schools as that is economically efficient and effective. Fewer schools means more can be spent on the surviving schools including on maintenance, adaptation of class room spaces for SEN provision etc.
Redundant or unnecessary school buildings aren't mothballed - does anyone see a surge in birth rates on the horizon? Old schools are demolished or sold off or made available for residential redevelopment, land for the dwellings I'm told we so desperately need. You can fit a lot of houses or flats on a primary school site.
We did this before of course in the 90s but were blindsided by the rise in school rolls which was the product of mass immigration in the 2000s and beyond and even now those who entered post-2020 are having children so the demise of schools may be overstated. The problem is once you have closed and sold off a school, you can't quickly rebuild it so the solution becomes modern extensions to existing 60s and 70s (both 18 and 19) schools which may look aesthetically horrendous but serve a purpose.
There's a lot of information on school capacity and suitability criteria which is gathered every year by councils and others for central Government to inform current and future spending and education place planning. Most Academies are on 125 year leases so if the Academy moves out, the land reverts to the local Council for alternative uses.
I know they cost. I am pointing out that making them smaller may cost less even in the short term than trying to play whack-a-mole with the other issues we have, of which SEND is one.
And I am suggesting that those schools that are being closed imminently should instead be kept open with smaller class sizes and it would help.
It won't happen because beancounters in the Treasury will look at the headline figure and claim it's not worth it.
I'm probably being over-Eeyoreish here, but when was the last time the British body politic (however you want to define that) accepted an "this will cost more upfront but be worth it in a few years' time" argument?
My insight into this (such as it is) comes form the other side of the argument, so to speak.
The "solution" (smaller class sizes) seems the most obvious but it's not.
Let me start with an obvious comment - schools cost. It's not just the education, indeed, far from it, but the infrastructure, the bricks and mortar, the facilities, the need to constantly maintain which is the problem.
The temptation for local councils (and indeed academy trusts) at a time of falling school rolls isn't to go for fewer pupils in each class but for fewer schools as that is economically efficient and effective. Fewer schools means more can be spent on the surviving schools including on maintenance, adaptation of class room spaces for SEN provision etc.
Redundant or unnecessary school buildings aren't mothballed - does anyone see a surge in birth rates on the horizon? Old schools are demolished or sold off or made available for residential redevelopment, land for the dwellings I'm told we so desperately need. You can fit a lot of houses or flats on a primary school site.
We did this before of course in the 90s but were blindsided by the rise in school rolls which was the product of mass immigration in the 2000s and beyond and even now those who entered post-2020 are having children so the demise of schools may be overstated. The problem is once you have closed and sold off a school, you can't quickly rebuild it so the solution becomes modern extensions to existing 60s and 70s (both 18 and 19) schools which may look aesthetically horrendous but serve a purpose.
There's a lot of information on school capacity and suitability criteria which is gathered every year by councils and others for central Government to inform current and future spending and education place planning. Most Academies are on 125 year leases so if the Academy moves out, the land reverts to the local Council for alternative uses.
I know they cost. I am pointing out that making them smaller may cost less even in the short term than trying to play whack-a-mole with the other issues we have, of which SEND is one.
And I am suggesting that those schools that are being closed imminently should instead be kept open with smaller class sizes and it would help.
It won't happen because beancounters in the Treasury will look at the headline figure and claim it's not worth it.
I'm probably being over-Eeyoreish here, but when was the last time the British body politic (however you want to define that) accepted an "this will cost more upfront but be worth it in a few years' time" argument?
HS2?
They haven't though, have they? They've been constantly cutting it back on grounds of economy.
I'm guessing the Liberal reforms of 1908 coupled with the Navy League programme?
Many thanks for the header. I endorse this message. Modern schools are designed to produce two outputs, (GCSE passes in English and Maths). Which are pre 1986 O levels. Unfortunately. Many of the inputs (the children) are no more suited to passing these than they ever were. This leads to frustration, anger and disillusion amongst both pupils and staff. Many of both are just giving up.
Heating. lighting, regimentation, timings, dress, funding and everything else all flow from being designed around the marginal pupil who may or may not obtain a pass. The non marginal at both ends lose out.
We spend an inordinate amount of time arguing about the structure of education, but almost none about what it is for.
I'd put it slightly differently. Before 1990 or so, the system did let go of a lot of children too quickly and too easily. Ensuring that everyone stuck around to the very end and left with something to show for eleven years in formal education was a good thing all round, and a lot of it was fairly low-hanging fruit.
More recently (2005ish?), the focus switched to much more marginal gains, because they were the only gains left to be squeezed out of the system. And they, as you say, are much more painful for everyone involved. (Which I suspect is why we've got more MH issues in schools now than in the past. The constant tracking, with the expectation of assertive intervention following any deviation, can't be good for anyone's peace of mind. One also has to wonder how much it costs in management time and resource.
In the Goode Olde Days* we dumped all the kids through the process. This found a tiny number of ones who were bright, could learn using the structure available (or were self taught). They went on to become the egg heads.
So every now and then, the son of Robin the Dung Gatherer became an academic success and Chief Constructor (designer of ships) to the Royal Navy.
The rest were given a shovel and collected dung for a living (horses shit a lot)
Now we aspire to 50% of the population being - not exactly egg heads, but something above dung gatherer. If nothing else, dung gathering, as a profession, is a tiny fraction of what it once was.
So instead of just dumping the ones who don’t fit, we notice that lots don’t fit.
Thank you for the very informative header. I'm in no position to comment, partly because I've had nothing to do with schools since leaving my own comprehensive, but more so because I'm suffering from great despair at everything. I'm just glad they aren't my problems to resolve.
Good morning, everyone.
“I am suffering from great despair at everything” is, however, a magnificent line @AnneJGP. Seriously. You can cheer yourself with the knowledge I am going to steal it
When I get a Knappers Gazette editor snapping at me about deadlines I shall simply and quietly say “I am suffering from great despair at everything”
That's pretty much the editorial policy of the Gazette, isn't it?
Only 2 minutes, and gives a good insight into how the Americans are working. And he’s a lot more articulate and considered than Trump!
I agree that's the best articulation I have heard for the war so. Low bar but important to hear it nonetheless. Question is it good enough? (1) Has America achieved its specific aim of reducing Iran's nuclear threat? (2) Is the world better off overall than it was before?
(1) Is questionable and (2) is definitely no from what I can tell.
Thank you for the very informative header. I'm in no position to comment, partly because I've had nothing to do with schools since leaving my own comprehensive, but more so because I'm suffering from great despair at everything. I'm just glad they aren't my problems to resolve.
Good morning, everyone.
“I am suffering from great despair at everything” is, however, a magnificent line @AnneJGP. Seriously. You can cheer yourself with the knowledge I am going to steal it
When I get a Knappers Gazette editor snapping at me about deadlines I shall simply and quietly say “I am suffering from great despair at everything”
Your stalker’s article in the Telegraph about Heathrow was a very amusing read. He’s a rather good writer.
Us residents of Dubai are used to the sharp contrast between LHR T3 and DXB T3 when making the journey on a regular basis!
If I ever meet him, I shall pass on your kind compliments
Thank you for the very informative header. I'm in no position to comment, partly because I've had nothing to do with schools since leaving my own comprehensive, but more so because I'm suffering from great despair at everything. I'm just glad they aren't my problems to resolve.
Good morning, everyone.
“I am suffering from great despair at everything” is, however, a magnificent line @AnneJGP. Seriously. You can cheer yourself with the knowledge I am going to steal it
When I get a Knappers Gazette editor snapping at me about deadlines I shall simply and quietly say “I am suffering from great despair at everything”
Your stalker’s article in the Telegraph about Heathrow was a very amusing read. He’s a rather good writer.
Us residents of Dubai are used to the sharp contrast between LHR T3 and DXB T3 when making the journey on a regular basis!
I have not read said article, but have to say that I really enjoy T3 at Heathrow. For some reason, flights to Stuttgart still seem to depart there. Which means my annual trip is prefaced by the rather pleasant BA lounge. My fave is definitely Edinburgh, mind (tablet and several single malts, what is not to like!).
My insight into this (such as it is) comes form the other side of the argument, so to speak.
The "solution" (smaller class sizes) seems the most obvious but it's not.
Let me start with an obvious comment - schools cost. It's not just the education, indeed, far from it, but the infrastructure, the bricks and mortar, the facilities, the need to constantly maintain which is the problem.
The temptation for local councils (and indeed academy trusts) at a time of falling school rolls isn't to go for fewer pupils in each class but for fewer schools as that is economically efficient and effective. Fewer schools means more can be spent on the surviving schools including on maintenance, adaptation of class room spaces for SEN provision etc.
Redundant or unnecessary school buildings aren't mothballed - does anyone see a surge in birth rates on the horizon? Old schools are demolished or sold off or made available for residential redevelopment, land for the dwellings I'm told we so desperately need. You can fit a lot of houses or flats on a primary school site.
We did this before of course in the 90s but were blindsided by the rise in school rolls which was the product of mass immigration in the 2000s and beyond and even now those who entered post-2020 are having children so the demise of schools may be overstated. The problem is once you have closed and sold off a school, you can't quickly rebuild it so the solution becomes modern extensions to existing 60s and 70s (both 18 and 19) schools which may look aesthetically horrendous but serve a purpose.
There's a lot of information on school capacity and suitability criteria which is gathered every year by councils and others for central Government to inform current and future spending and education place planning. Most Academies are on 125 year leases so if the Academy moves out, the land reverts to the local Council for alternative uses.
I know they cost. I am pointing out that making them smaller may cost less even in the short term than trying to play whack-a-mole with the other issues we have, of which SEND is one.
And I am suggesting that those schools that are being closed imminently should instead be kept open with smaller class sizes and it would help.
It won't happen because beancounters in the Treasury will look at the headline figure and claim it's not worth it.
I'm probably being over-Eeyoreish here, but when was the last time the British body politic (however you want to define that) accepted an "this will cost more upfront but be worth it in a few years' time" argument?
HS2?
They haven't though, have they? They've been constantly cutting it back on grounds of economy.
I'm guessing the Liberal reforms of 1908 coupled with the Navy League programme?
I was wondering about Sure Start, but again- lots of quibbling while it was there, and rapidly amputated once the opportunity arose.
"The last two World Cups that Italy qualified for were in 2010 and 2014. On both occasions, the Azzurri were knocked out in the group stages. It means the last World Cup knockout match that Italy played in was the 2006 World Cup final, which it won on penalties."
They have put in an appeal to FIFA complaining that it was unfair that they had to play Bosnia and Herzegovina at the same time as no way they could win vs 22 men.
Thanks to ydoethur for the (VG) header. The suggested silver bullet of smaller class sizes sounds good to me. I'm opposed to private schools and whenever I argue for their abolition you can bet your bottom dollar the following is said by somebody in response: "Just improve state schools so private schools aren't needed." This sounds lovely and positive, who could say no to it, however it's a platitude not a real argument unless accompanied by a willingness to close the funding/pupil gap between the two. The header is about a specific aspect of schooling (special needs) but the point applies to schools generally imo.
Regarding Terminal 3, once you've been to airports with the high roofs/ceilings, when you encounter the old style buildings with the low ceilings like T3 it seems incredibly claustrophic by comparison.
Thank you for the very informative header. I'm in no position to comment, partly because I've had nothing to do with schools since leaving my own comprehensive, but more so because I'm suffering from great despair at everything. I'm just glad they aren't my problems to resolve.
Good morning, everyone.
“I am suffering from great despair at everything” is, however, a magnificent line @AnneJGP. Seriously. You can cheer yourself with the knowledge I am going to steal it
When I get a Knappers Gazette editor snapping at me about deadlines I shall simply and quietly say “I am suffering from great despair at everything”
Your stalker’s article in the Telegraph about Heathrow was a very amusing read. He’s a rather good writer.
Us residents of Dubai are used to the sharp contrast between LHR T3 and DXB T3 when making the journey on a regular basis!
I have not read said article, but have to say that I really enjoy T3 at Heathrow. For some reason, flights to Stuttgart still seem to depart there. Which means my annual trip is prefaced by the rather pleasant BA lounge. My fave is definitely Edinburgh, mind (tablet and several single malts, what is not to like!).
Heathrow, as the article correctly notes, is schizophrenic
T5 is great and Queen’s Terminal quite lush. T4 is depressing and T3, ugh
But you’re right about the lounges. They can be quite randomly great or terrible. In a crap terminal with a second rank airline you’ll suddenly find a brilliant lounge serving fresh sushi and Pouilly Fusse. High profile lounges in the best terminals can be more crowded and distressing than the public areas beyond. Weird
Only 2 minutes, and gives a good insight into how the Americans are working. And he’s a lot more articulate and considered than Trump!
I agree that's the best articulation I have heard for the war so. Low bar but important to hear it nonetheless. Question is it good enough? (1) Has America achieved its specific aim of reducing Iran's nuclear threat? (2) Is the world better off overall than it was before?
(1) Is questionable and (2) is definitely no from what I can tell.
Yes, it’s excellent
It’s just a shame the odious fuckwit Trump is president not Rubio
Imagine if the war had begun with Rubio making that calm, clear explanation. We could have avoided 79% of the angst which is all to do with Trump’s early onset toddler-brain
I think getting screens out of classrooms (both the ones in kids' pockets and the ones at the front) would also do a great deal for kids educational outcomes - and that really would save money. Education via screen is a failed expermint. And seems nothing more than a huge bung to the US-tech sector to me. Get rid.
Anyway, thanks for a very interesting and readable thread Ydoether.
"With all the noise about energy policy, it is worth boiling the arguments down to these essentials.
British people use energy. We are worse off when there is an energy shock. Labour wants everyone to pay except the poor. The Conservatives and Reform UK want private investors to pay. The Lib Dems and Greens want the country’s children to pay. It really is that simple."
🚨 WATCH: Nigel Farage formally commits to the state pension triple lock if Reform UK win the next election
"The people to whom pensions are being paid, certainly compared to a younger generation today, are those who have actually worked and paid into a system"
🚨 WATCH: Nigel Farage formally commits to the state pension triple lock if Reform UK win the next election
"The people to whom pensions are being paid, certainly compared to a younger generation today, are those who have actually worked and paid into a system"
Once again, Nigel is a pro surrounded by nasty idiots. The question of why Nigel is surrounded by nasty idiots is left as an exercise for the reader.
His comments could have been worded better, but they're absolutely spot on. This country is being brought to a halt by single issues not being addressed and weighed in the balance with other issues, but being given overriding importance and addressed with knee jerk legislation with legal teeth, piling another straw on the camel's back. Example: Covid, when the whole country went into the service of people not dying of covid. See also bat tunnels. See also equality legislation that means administrators must be paid the same as binmen. To be convulsed by knee jerk reactions to single issues is no way to run a country - it runs the country into the ground, and long term will cause more misery and suffering than it avoids.
"With all the noise about energy policy, it is worth boiling the arguments down to these essentials.
British people use energy. We are worse off when there is an energy shock. Labour wants everyone to pay except the poor. The Conservatives and Reform UK want private investors to pay. The Lib Dems and Greens want the country’s children to pay. It really is that simple."
Just read the header around a busy day. As a teacher I wholeheartedly agree, and don't have much to add, except to say thanks for writing it and to offer an anecdote in support of ydoethur's solution of smaller class sizes.
A few years back I taught a class of 12 in a mainstream setting. Most had significant SEND. I ignored all the EHCP suggestions and just got to know them all as individuals, built trust to overcome their fear of trying hard but still failing, and got all but one of them through their maths GCSE.
With a class of 33 (my current Y11) those with SEND just have to fend for themselves basically.
Smaller classes would cure a huge number of ills, and could be (partly) paid for by having a hard cap of e.g. 3% of a school's budget that could be taken to fund the trust running that school.
Once again, Nigel is a pro surrounded by nasty idiots. The question of why Nigel is surrounded by nasty idiots is left as an exercise for the reader.
Simon Dudley said “everyone dies in the end” and “fires happen”.
So at 5pm, Farage will be resolving the issue by burning him at the stake...
Whoops!
He has half a point about reactions to single incidents leading to a load of bad law or regulation, but one needs to be a little more careful about one’s language when referring to a fire in which dozens of people actually died.
Of course, as we have discussed here many times before, the required mountain of paperwork to certify Grenfell Tower’s cladding as fireproof was all in place. It was perfect, except for the fact that the tower’s cladding wasn’t actually fireproof.
2. Iran puts in place a series of tariffs for transport of vessels through the Gulf of Trump
3. Iran gives Trump personally 20% of those tariffs.
4. America guarantees safe transport throught the Gulf of Trump.
5. Iran with nukes? Meh - who cares?
Honestly, we laugh but Step 3 is all that is needed for Trump to order the US military to stand down. He's just a gangster. Pay him money and he'll do whatever you ask of him.
"With all the noise about energy policy, it is worth boiling the arguments down to these essentials.
British people use energy. We are worse off when there is an energy shock. Labour wants everyone to pay except the poor. The Conservatives and Reform UK want private investors to pay. The Lib Dems and Greens want the country’s children to pay. It really is that simple."
"With all the noise about energy policy, it is worth boiling the arguments down to these essentials.
British people use energy. We are worse off when there is an energy shock. Labour wants everyone to pay except the poor. The Conservatives and Reform UK want private investors to pay. The Lib Dems and Greens want the country’s children to pay. It really is that simple."
"With all the noise about energy policy, it is worth boiling the arguments down to these essentials.
British people use energy. We are worse off when there is an energy shock. Labour wants everyone to pay except the poor. The Conservatives and Reform UK want private investors to pay. The Lib Dems and Greens want the country’s children to pay. It really is that simple."
Thankfully, the moves that we have already made towards net zero mean that the bill is a lot lower than it would otherwise have been.
No they don't. Even at its elevated levels, it would still be cheaper if we were fully powered by gas with no renewables.
Bollocks. As RCS1000 pointed out yesterday, energy tends to be cheaper in those countries that use more renewable sources. If we were fully powered by gas, we'd be completely hamstrung now and looking into an even bleaker future.
"With all the noise about energy policy, it is worth boiling the arguments down to these essentials.
British people use energy. We are worse off when there is an energy shock. Labour wants everyone to pay except the poor. The Conservatives and Reform UK want private investors to pay. The Lib Dems and Greens want the country’s children to pay. It really is that simple."
"With all the noise about energy policy, it is worth boiling the arguments down to these essentials.
British people use energy. We are worse off when there is an energy shock. Labour wants everyone to pay except the poor. The Conservatives and Reform UK want private investors to pay. The Lib Dems and Greens want the country’s children to pay. It really is that simple."
Thankfully, the moves that we have already made towards net zero mean that the bill is a lot lower than it would otherwise have been.
No they don't. Even at its elevated levels, it would still be cheaper if we were fully powered by gas with no renewables.
Was it on here that someone posted the electricity price versus % renewables across Europe and maybe beyond chart.
Now, I know correlation != causation, but it's a hell of a coincidence...
China has the best energy policy imo, it is not ideologically for or against any particular energy source - the trend is toward solar simply due to economics but if they had say the north sea O&G reservoir they'd be using it right now.
I'm with Eabhal on this. Universal subsidy is nuts. Targeted support, uncoupled from fuel/energy consumption, maybe (everything will be getting more expensive and will hit poorer households hardest anyway).
Otherwise we just hide what should be another clear signal to those who can afford them that there are benefits to EVs over ICEVs.
ETA: I've defined myself as a liberal for a long time and I feel further and further away from the lib Dems - it used to be I'd lend my vote to other parties, now my vote is looking for a home
Comments
Musk uses his various companies as piggy banks for whatever his current venture is.
One of those things is massive investment into AI data centres, so he's one of those people partly responsible for the big increase in memory prices.
OTOH he's driven down the cost of spaceflight quite dramatically.
An arguably much larger social consequence is the media concentration we've seen in the last couple of years, so that the vast majority of US media is in the hands of a very few individuals (who also contribute hundreds of millions to political parties).
That link about autism not being a spectrum is interesting. I laugh because it’s a symptom of this country’s inability to say no.
I have a question. I have been told by a few people that they think I am autistic. I have a degree from Oxford (I know!), have a job (albeit in the public sector) etc. I had no SEN help as a child. I just got on with it. So, the question is, are the people saying this to me simply wrong and falling into the trap of thinking autism is a spectrum. Or, could they be right and some children with autism don’t need help.
Interceptor drones next.
Ukraine just opened its first drone production plant in Britain.
That matters for 3 reasons:
• it moves part of Ukraine’s war industry into NATO space
• it creates industrial spillover inside Europe
• it shows Ukrainian defense tech is no longer just “surviving” — it is scaling
🧵👇
https://x.com/MagellanQuest/status/2039418671718682671
"Everyone in the UK would be speaking German if not for the United States."
"People truly overestimate the ability of the British to learn different languages."
In a piece of Genius recruitment NBC bring in former U.S.S Enterprise Transporter Chief and Deep Space Nine Chief Engineer Miles O'Brien as Science Correspondent for The Artemis Launch.
The school he attends is great but we wonder if we will have the same issues when he is 11.
I endorse this message.
Modern schools are designed to produce two outputs, (GCSE passes in English and Maths). Which are pre 1986 O levels.
Unfortunately. Many of the inputs (the children) are no more suited to passing these than they ever were.
This leads to frustration, anger and disillusion amongst both pupils and staff.
Many of both are just giving up.
Heating. lighting, regimentation, timings, dress, funding and everything else all flow from being designed around the marginal pupil who may or may not obtain a pass.
The non marginal at both ends lose out.
We spend an inordinate amount of time arguing about the structure of education, but almost none about what it is for.
Result is that anyone outside practical teaching commenting on a thread like this has to be very careful when doing so. My uncle, and two aunts were teachers, as was my father originally, before he went into business, but that didn't stop him commenting forcefully and aggressively on all aspects of education long after he'd ceased to have any current practical experience. Watching and listening to him (and being subject to his advice) when discussing education has made me very wary of such 'experts' on the subject, a feeling reinforced by being married to a teacher!
The only things I would add are
(1) from family experience (great nieces and nephews) , having a child with Special Needs means entering a field full of obstacles, and, quite often, apparently bloody-minded obstructionism.
(2) Ofsted inspections, from the experience long ago of my wife and now my Deputy Head grandson can be positive experiences.
https://x.com/MarcinRogowsk14/status/2039464390643118347
‘There's a real irony that one of the worst aircraft of WWII would be ideal for shooting down Shahed drones today. The Boulton-Paul Defiant was 90 years ahead of its time’
https://x.com/brynntannehill/status/2039415701354459579?s=61&t=LYVEHh2mqFy1oUJAdCfe-Q
Bit unfair on the Defiant.
There were lots of worse aircraft.
Back in the day when you were just referred to as a dunce or a troublemaker there were very very limited numbers , nowadays it is huge % of children, far too many acronyms been invented for lack of/bad parenting I think and answer seems to be give them all PIP and hire thousands of taxis. The ones with real problems then suffer.
https://www.ft.com/content/6fcddd67-c990-4090-bed3-0a0fac7c9224?syn-25a6b1a6=1
In 2014 and 2022 the Democratic Presidents asked the networks to carry a primetime address. The networks said no -- both times:
https://x.com/EricSchultz/status/2039335437274128602
Cost per flight hour approximately the same as the cost of the drone...
I wondered, I still wonder!
Be appropriate when he blows his top...
The Ukranians are doing things like flying around in light aircraft with a shotgun hanging out of the window, chasing them with helicopters, or shooting at them from the ground with guns. The best option so far appears to be small $2,000 quadcoptor drones, a fast version of a hobby DJI-type with a small explosive charge.
The MoD will, of course deny that such drones are useful. They are good for “the wrong kind of war”
But when the fuck up happens (as it will), some Lance Corporal on the Home Guard will be summoned to bring them into use.
https://www.startrek.com/en-un/news/below-decks-with-lower-decks-miles-obrien
See APKWS
My insight into this (such as it is) comes form the other side of the argument, so to speak.
The "solution" (smaller class sizes) seems the most obvious but it's not.
Let me start with an obvious comment - schools cost. It's not just the education, indeed, far from it, but the infrastructure, the bricks and mortar, the facilities, the need to constantly maintain which is the problem.
The temptation for local councils (and indeed academy trusts) at a time of falling school rolls isn't to go for fewer pupils in each class but for fewer schools as that is economically efficient and effective. Fewer schools means more can be spent on the surviving schools including on maintenance, adaptation of class room spaces for SEN provision etc.
Redundant or unnecessary school buildings aren't mothballed - does anyone see a surge in birth rates on the horizon? Old schools are demolished or sold off or made available for residential redevelopment, land for the dwellings I'm told we so desperately need. You can fit a lot of houses or flats on a primary school site.
We did this before of course in the 90s but were blindsided by the rise in school rolls which was the product of mass immigration in the 2000s and beyond and even now those who entered post-2020 are having children so the demise of schools may be overstated. The problem is once you have closed and sold off a school, you can't quickly rebuild it so the solution becomes modern extensions to existing 60s and 70s (both 18 and 19) schools which may look aesthetically horrendous but serve a purpose.
There's a lot of information on school capacity and suitability criteria which is gathered every year by councils and others for central Government to inform current and future spending and education place planning. Most Academies are on 125 year leases so if the Academy moves out, the land reverts to the local Council for alternative uses.
So I'm not sure that gets us much further. We do have a higher incidence but that may be due to the internal issues of our education system.
*Our figure looks similar on paper, but is somewhat distorted by offering rather smaller class sizes for various subjects at GCSE and A-level.
And I am suggesting that those schools that are being closed imminently should instead be kept open with smaller class sizes and it would help.
It won't happen because beancounters in the Treasury will look at the headline figure and claim it's not worth it.
Nevertheless I think you are still very much underestimating the impact of the economic and social context that gives rise to a Musk, Bezos or Zuckerberg.
If we add to the bit in bold "and they happened to have access to resources (both private wealth and public goods), legal protection, markets and social institutions that enabled them to monetise their ideas" then we'd be closer to agreement.
The moon's surface average daytime temperature is 250F (120C). I had always assumed that it was constantly cold - it certainly is at night, or in the shade, but apparently not when the sun shines on it.
Also shows how lucky we are to have an atmosphere to even the daytime and nighttime fluctuations out.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/GjI7DZ3AHss
More recently (2005ish?), the focus switched to much more marginal gains, because they were the only gains left to be squeezed out of the system. And they, as you say, are much more painful for everyone involved. (Which I suspect is why we've got more MH issues in schools now than in the past. The constant tracking, with the expectation of assertive intervention following any deviation, can't be good for anyone's peace of mind. One also has to wonder how much it costs in management time and resource.
When I get a Knappers Gazette editor snapping at me about deadlines I shall simply and quietly say “I am suffering from great despair at everything”
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/04/01/sport/italian-soccer-nightmare-italy-world-cup
"The last two World Cups that Italy qualified for were in 2010 and 2014. On both occasions, the Azzurri were knocked out in the group stages. It means the last World Cup knockout match that Italy played in was the 2006 World Cup final, which it won on penalties."
Everyone in the United States would be living in wigwams if it were not for the UK
We agree on the media concentration, although I will argue that said concentration makes Elon’s purchase of Twitter so important to the media landscape. Yes, big money in US politics is generally a bad thing for everyone, except the politicans themselves and the media companies that take billions in advertising.
Us residents of Dubai are used to the sharp contrast between LHR T3 and DXB T3 when making the journey on a regular basis!
I'm guessing the Liberal reforms of 1908 coupled with the Navy League programme?
So every now and then, the son of Robin the Dung Gatherer became an academic success and Chief Constructor (designer of ships) to the Royal Navy.
The rest were given a shovel and collected dung for a living (horses shit a lot)
Now we aspire to 50% of the population being - not exactly egg heads, but something above dung gatherer. If nothing else, dung gathering, as a profession, is a tiny fraction of what it once was.
So instead of just dumping the ones who don’t fit, we notice that lots don’t fit.
*That weren’t Good.
(1) Is questionable and (2) is definitely no from what I can tell.
https://andrewspreviews.substack.com/p/previewing-the-four-local-by-elections-6cf
T5 is great and Queen’s Terminal quite lush. T4 is depressing and T3, ugh
But you’re right about the lounges. They can be quite randomly great or terrible. In a crap terminal with a second rank airline you’ll suddenly find a brilliant lounge serving fresh sushi and Pouilly Fusse. High profile lounges in the best terminals can be more crowded and distressing than the public areas beyond. Weird
It’s just a shame the odious fuckwit Trump is president not Rubio
Imagine if the war had begun with Rubio making that calm, clear explanation. We could have avoided 79% of the angst which is all to do with Trump’s early onset toddler-brain
https://x.com/barstoolsports/status/2039469070840418582
Anyway, thanks for a very interesting and readable thread Ydoether.
"With all the noise about energy policy, it is worth boiling the arguments down to these essentials.
British people use energy. We are worse off when there is an energy shock. Labour wants everyone to pay except the poor. The Conservatives and Reform UK want private investors to pay. The Lib Dems and Greens want the country’s children to pay. It really is that simple."
https://www.ft.com/content/c8bd9631-39e2-4fec-b6e7-0600eff869f7?syn-25a6b1a6=1
https://x.com/visegrad24/status/2039496831843868923
https://youtu.be/goh2x_G0ct4?si=Isi73j8WTusFWZhE
https://bsky.app/profile/kevinschofied.bsky.social/post/3miiycd6ois2s
Once again, Nigel is a pro surrounded by nasty idiots. The question of why Nigel is surrounded by nasty idiots is left as an exercise for the reader.
🚨 WATCH: Nigel Farage formally commits to the state pension triple lock if Reform UK win the next election
"The people to whom pensions are being paid, certainly compared to a younger generation today, are those who have actually worked and paid into a system"
https://bsky.app/profile/politicsuk.com/post/3miixnrskas27
The art of being a reactionary shock jock is knowing who you can offend and exactly how much.
So at 5pm, Farage will be resolving the issue by burning him at the stake...
There were 3 million unemployed for years and years in the Eighties.
Many of those are now drawing State pensions.
A few years back I taught a class of 12 in a mainstream setting. Most had significant SEND. I ignored all the EHCP suggestions and just got to know them all as individuals, built trust to overcome their fear of trying hard but still failing, and got all but one of them through their maths GCSE.
With a class of 33 (my current Y11) those with SEND just have to fend for themselves basically.
Smaller classes would cure a huge number of ills, and could be (partly) paid for by having a hard cap of e.g. 3% of a school's budget that could be taken to fund the trust running that school.
@rentouljohn.bsky.social
Extraordinary that Labour has the most responsible approach to protecting consumers against oil price shock – Chris Giles ep.ft.com/permalink/em...
https://bsky.app/profile/rentouljohn.bsky.social/post/3miiwcnnkxc2b
He has half a point about reactions to single incidents leading to a load of bad law or regulation, but one needs to be a little more careful about one’s language when referring to a fire in which dozens of people actually died.
Of course, as we have discussed here many times before, the required mountain of paperwork to certify Grenfell Tower’s cladding as fireproof was all in place. It was perfect, except for the fact that the tower’s cladding wasn’t actually fireproof.
He's just a gangster. Pay him money and he'll do whatever you ask of him.
Now, I know correlation != causation, but it's a hell of a coincidence...
Otherwise we just hide what should be another clear signal to those who can afford them that there are benefits to EVs over ICEVs.
ETA: I've defined myself as a liberal for a long time and I feel further and further away from the lib Dems - it used to be I'd lend my vote to other parties, now my vote is looking for a home