I am having a drink this evening with a friend in a Chiswick pub. Two policemen have just come into the pub and asked me to step outside. I have stepped outside and they have threatened me because I tweeted about a councillor banning seating outside pubs in Chiswick. They admit on video (watch it!) that I did not break the law at all. .
This is his own stupid fault for meekly complying. He should have just told them to fuck off.
I am having a drink this evening with a friend in a Chiswick pub. Two policemen have just come into the pub and asked me to step outside. I have stepped outside and they have threatened me because I tweeted about a councillor banning seating outside pubs in Chiswick. They admit on video (watch it!) that I did not break the law at all. .
This is his own stupid fault for meekly complying. He should have just told them to fuck off.
I hope I would at least have told them to talk to me in the pub, in front of everyone. But perhaps I would have folded too.
'Burnham set to ditch Palantir from NHS Left-wing critics have called for deal to be axed over US tech giant’s work with Israeli Defense Forces and US immigration'
As ever, Harrington makes good points, some of which may be true and/or I agree with. Let's go thru them
1: the disciplinary and control models She makes a good point: pre-21st century oppression took the form of discipline - if you do not obey I will hurt you - wheras 21st century takes the form of control - if you do not obey I will change things so you stop. The former requires treating individuals as units (or sub-units of a group), the latter requires or enables treating characteristics of individuals, not the individuals as individuals per se. I'm not sure I agree with this and put forward religious wars or slavery as counter-examples.
2: the importance of borders I agree with her but I would point out that i) this requires a re-adoption of nationalism - if you have borders, then they have to bound something - and ii) that the importance of borders is a subset of the importance of thresholds. Which brings me to...
3: the boundary between “child” and “adult” At last somebody else has pointed this out. I have been saying for years on PB that we need a bright line between "this person is a child" and "this person is a adult". Everybody disagrees with me, but blurring the line results in adultised children and infantilised adults and makes the country stupid.
4: doctor-worship In my assisted suicide article, I pointed out that you solve moral problems with judges, not doctors. But British doctor-worship results in doctors coercing outcomes against patient consent, which is exactly wrong. And her example was...
5: the draft conversion bill This bill contains a clause permitting coerced conversion if the person is a medic working in healthcare [section 1 subsection (3)]. Gender-critical people object to this because it permits doctors but not parents to convert children. Trans people object to this because it permits doctors to convert children. I object to this because everybody has forgotten that gay conversion therapy used to be permitted medical policy and this clause would have permitted Alan Turing's conversion therapy. Harrington is OK with the trans conversion but is correct with the doctor-worship bit...
Where does it say "doctors" ? All I can see is this: .. is not a conversion practice unless the person acts in a way that falls far below the standards reasonably expected of a person in their position...
Which is so broad that I'm not sure what the point of the legislation is at all.
Sorry. i took the fragment "is carried out in the course of providing health care services" [section 1 subsection (3) part (b)] to refer to doctors, but yes in theory it could be anybody in healthcare: doctors, nurses, receptionists, porters, cleaners, the cleaner's dog called Colin, carrier pigeon called Speckled Jim, etc.
"The agency has identified 270 people linked to forums where footage of coordinated sexual abuse is shared online - crimes which echo the case of Gisèle Pelicot, a French woman who was repeatedly drugged by her husband and attacked by dozens of men.
The NCA said the abuse is usually perpetrated by a long-term partner, with offending "often taking place over decades".
The forums encourage men to drug and rape women.
Hopefully, the people in question will be able to be identified and prosecuted. But (a subset of) men being complete shits is not new news, sadly.
This subset - how large a subset is the interesting question rather than the usual "0h, it's only a minority" which smacks of "I hope this is true because otherwise some very uncomfortable questions would need to be asked about the behaviour of the male sex" - includes the long-term partners of the women ie husbands and often the fathers of their children.
The breach of trust is grotesque. We should not accept this by shaking our heads saying that some men are "complete shits, sadly". We should be furious and we should be acting to try and stop this. Instead - and I make no apologies for saying this AGAIN - men's demands are treated like holy writ, any restraints on their behaviour are seen as somehow a breach of their human right to behave like complete shits and women are ethically invisible.
It should not be like this.
Err, surely the point of the investigation is to not "accept this"? The whole point is to identify and prosecute.
'Burnham set to ditch Palantir from NHS Left-wing critics have called for deal to be axed over US tech giant’s work with Israeli Defense Forces and US immigration'
Good. Not because of any IDF or US immigration work, and not because Peter Thiel is a psychopath who would burn down the world if he could make a buck from it, but simply because Palantir is not British. I am tired of the UK government treating UK assets as something to be sold off to any passing foreigner with a big chequebook and fashionable nostrums. "Buy AI or the Singularity will get you! Give me billions!" Just bugger off and try to grow your eyebrows back, you sweaty T-1000.
'Burnham set to ditch Palantir from NHS Left-wing critics have called for deal to be axed over US tech giant’s work with Israeli Defense Forces and US immigration'
'Burnham set to ditch Palantir from NHS Left-wing critics have called for deal to be axed over US tech giant’s work with Israeli Defense Forces and US immigration'
‘Complicated and expensive’: Burnham is right about the risks of nationalisation
Track record of Welsh Water shows changing ownership status is not the answer to all the woes in the utilities sector
Welsh Water is not state owned.
And would we really be worse off if zombie companies like Thames Water or (whisper it) a certain fairly large gas/leccy supplier were properly bankrupted and taken into state ownership without the enormous overhang of debt they have accumulated?
Whether they would be better managed by the government is a different matter - very probably not - but it's hard to imagine they would be much worse managed.
The utter contemptuous folly of the Blair Government was they didn't renationalised before the foreign shareholders ladelled off the cream and a huge amount of everything else too.
Renationalisation now is simply acquiring liability upon liability.
That's not really true: it's only assuming liabilities if bond holders are repaid.
If it goes into administration and the best offer is that the government acquires Thames Water at 20 cents on the pound for their debt, sending a clear message to owners of (and lenders to) privatized utilities: that you will not be bailed out by the government.
Do they actually have to pay the bond holders anything?
I understood that the terms of the public-private partnership meant that if Thames Water becomes insolvent then the state reaquires the assets and responsibilties for water and sewage provision. But does it actually take on the company and its liabilities or does it just leave Thames Water as a shell with no assets but huge debts? Does the state actually have to take on any of the liabilities?
I don't understand why the mad enthusiasm for government ownership.
Currently we have a profitable private business, but with debts it cannot service. All that needs to occur is for the shareholders to get wiped out, the debt to get written off, and the bond holders to either end up owning the business, or get to sell it for whatever they can get to someone else who fancies running a utility.
The only thing the government needs to do is to ensure that this restructuring is an orderly process, and doesn't result in dumb stuff like frontline staff going unpaid, resulting in supply outages. That's not beyond the whit of man.
Some capitalists (well, pension funds) will lose their shirts. Some other capitalists have run off with shirts for which they didn't pay. That's capitalism for you, especially if you buy or lend money to businesses without managing to read the balance sheet properly. None of this has any bearing on the actual supply of water to customers, nor yet does it provide any justification for nationalisation.
One of the things we can say with confidence is that nationalisation will make things worse. Just look at the shambles which is the MOD, and ask yourself if adding similar layers of government morons on top of another form of engineering activity* is likely to either improve services or save any money?
If true, then Sir Keir is indeed giving Andy the best possible start by enabling him to distance himself totally from the prior leadership.
Does Burnham have access to a Civil Service transition team as he would in the lead up to possibly taking power at a GE? If not, then that’s something that should be changed.
The Civil Service is unlikely to help Burnham if they think he will sack them or force them to move to Manchester.
Then they should be sacked and hire new people in Manchester to replace them.
The Civil Service exists to serve the country, not the other way around.
Aiui Burnham has been given a Civil Service transition team. This was reported over a week ago. For instance:-
England are a best-priced 6/4 to beat Mexico in 90 minutes. Tbh, with the doomsters and gloomsters proclaiming Mexico's near-invincibility at altitude, I'd been hoping for something better.
‘Complicated and expensive’: Burnham is right about the risks of nationalisation
Track record of Welsh Water shows changing ownership status is not the answer to all the woes in the utilities sector
Welsh Water is not state owned.
And would we really be worse off if zombie companies like Thames Water or (whisper it) a certain fairly large gas/leccy supplier were properly bankrupted and taken into state ownership without the enormous overhang of debt they have accumulated?
Whether they would be better managed by the government is a different matter - very probably not - but it's hard to imagine they would be much worse managed.
The utter contemptuous folly of the Blair Government was they didn't renationalised before the foreign shareholders ladelled off the cream and a huge amount of everything else too.
Renationalisation now is simply acquiring liability upon liability.
That's not really true: it's only assuming liabilities if bond holders are repaid.
If it goes into administration and the best offer is that the government acquires Thames Water at 20 cents on the pound for their debt, sending a clear message to owners of (and lenders to) privatized utilities: that you will not be bailed out by the government.
Do they actually have to pay the bond holders anything?
I understood that the terms of the public-private partnership meant that if Thames Water becomes insolvent then the state reaquires the assets and responsibilties for water and sewage provision. But does it actually take on the company and its liabilities or does it just leave Thames Water as a shell with no assets but huge debts? Does the state actually have to take on any of the liabilities?
I don't understand why the mad enthusiasm for government ownership.
Currently we have a profitable private business, but with debts it cannot service. All that needs to occur is for the shareholders to get wiped out, the debt to get written off, and the bond holders to either end up owning the business, or get to sell it for whatever they can get to someone else who fancies running a utility.
The only thing the government needs to do is to ensure that this restructuring is an orderly process, and doesn't result in dumb stuff like frontline staff going unpaid, resulting in supply outages. That's not beyond the whit of man.
Some capitalists (well, pension funds) will lose their shirts. Some other capitalists have run off with shirts for which they didn't pay. That's capitalism for you, especially if you buy or lend money to businesses without managing to read the balance sheet properly. None of this has any bearing on the actual supply of water to customers, nor yet does it provide any justification for nationalisation.
One of the things we can say with confidence is that nationalisation will make things worse. Just look at the shambles which is the MOD, and ask yourself if adding similar layers of government morons on top of another form of engineering activity* is likely to either improve services or save any money?
*modern warfare is mostly engineering.
If Thames Water is wiped out then returned to private ownership, how do you stop the same cycle happening again? Incidentally this does seem to be a growing problem across the private sector with companies (and football clubs) being bought up by private equity firms, often foreign-owned, and sucked dry.
‘Complicated and expensive’: Burnham is right about the risks of nationalisation
Track record of Welsh Water shows changing ownership status is not the answer to all the woes in the utilities sector
Welsh Water is not state owned.
And would we really be worse off if zombie companies like Thames Water or (whisper it) a certain fairly large gas/leccy supplier were properly bankrupted and taken into state ownership without the enormous overhang of debt they have accumulated?
Whether they would be better managed by the government is a different matter - very probably not - but it's hard to imagine they would be much worse managed.
The utter contemptuous folly of the Blair Government was they didn't renationalised before the foreign shareholders ladelled off the cream and a huge amount of everything else too.
Renationalisation now is simply acquiring liability upon liability.
That's not really true: it's only assuming liabilities if bond holders are repaid.
If it goes into administration and the best offer is that the government acquires Thames Water at 20 cents on the pound for their debt, sending a clear message to owners of (and lenders to) privatized utilities: that you will not be bailed out by the government.
Do they actually have to pay the bond holders anything?
I understood that the terms of the public-private partnership meant that if Thames Water becomes insolvent then the state reaquires the assets and responsibilties for water and sewage provision. But does it actually take on the company and its liabilities or does it just leave Thames Water as a shell with no assets but huge debts? Does the state actually have to take on any of the liabilities?
I don't understand why the mad enthusiasm for government ownership.
Currently we have a profitable private business, but with debts it cannot service. All that needs to occur is for the shareholders to get wiped out, the debt to get written off, and the bond holders to either end up owning the business, or get to sell it for whatever they can get to someone else who fancies running a utility.
The only thing the government needs to do is to ensure that this restructuring is an orderly process, and doesn't result in dumb stuff like frontline staff going unpaid, resulting in supply outages. That's not beyond the whit of man.
Some capitalists (well, pension funds) will lose their shirts. Some other capitalists have run off with shirts for which they didn't pay. That's capitalism for you, especially if you buy or lend money to businesses without managing to read the balance sheet properly. None of this has any bearing on the actual supply of water to customers, nor yet does it provide any justification for nationalisation.
One of the things we can say with confidence is that nationalisation will make things worse. Just look at the shambles which is the MOD, and ask yourself if adding similar layers of government morons on top of another form of engineering activity* is likely to either improve services or save any money?
*modern warfare is mostly engineering.
Of course people have forgotten, if they ever knew, just how bad the big nationalised industries actually were - when British Airways was known as Bloody Awful, when it took a year to get a new phone line from British Telecom, when British Gas arrogantly refused to supply gas to customers under the personal whim of its chairman, etc.
But I think there is benefit in remembering the practical arguments against nationalisation:
- the subjection of investment decisions to the whims of the Treasury - the politicisation of wage bargaining - the devotion of management time to sucking up to ministers, rather than running their businesses efficiently - the impossibility of effective, transparent regulation when the government has such a glaring conflict of interest since it is regulating itself - the movement of crucial management decisions to Whitehall, which has unerringly poor judgement in industrial matters - the distortion of competition - the lack of incentives to improve operating efficiency - the reduction in government revenue as less efficient businesses yield less corporate tax - the opportunity cost of government funds devoted to nationalisation
etc etc.
Some of these issues can be mitigated, and none of this is meant to idolize the private sector, whose companies often get things wrong, especially when industries are oligopolies or monopolies. But there is simply no equivalent in government to the ever-present threat of bankruptcy in industry, which acts as a powerful discipline on even the most complacent and incompetent of companies. And that is why, however flawed their performance may be, industries are generally better in the private sector than in the public sector.
Give £100k earners free childcare to boost economy, Labour urged Families should receive £7,000 vouchers to avoid punishing tax trap, think tank says
Parents earning more than £100,000 should get free childcare to help boost the economy, Labour has been urged.
A report by the Right-leaning Policy Exchange has called to replace free childcare hours with £7,000 vouchers for all families amid growing pressure to overhaul the “distorting” system.
It proposed scrapping 30 hours of free childcare in favour of a preloaded payment card for all parents regardless of income. It also proposed raising child benefit by £2,500 a year to £4,000 for children under two years old. ... Under the current system, families lose their entitlement to tax-free childcare and 30 free hours for 38 weeks of the year as soon as one parent’s annual salary goes above £100,000. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/tax/news/give-100k-earners-free-childcare-to-boost-economy/ (£££)
‘Complicated and expensive’: Burnham is right about the risks of nationalisation
Track record of Welsh Water shows changing ownership status is not the answer to all the woes in the utilities sector
Welsh Water is not state owned.
And would we really be worse off if zombie companies like Thames Water or (whisper it) a certain fairly large gas/leccy supplier were properly bankrupted and taken into state ownership without the enormous overhang of debt they have accumulated?
Whether they would be better managed by the government is a different matter - very probably not - but it's hard to imagine they would be much worse managed.
The utter contemptuous folly of the Blair Government was they didn't renationalised before the foreign shareholders ladelled off the cream and a huge amount of everything else too.
Renationalisation now is simply acquiring liability upon liability.
That's not really true: it's only assuming liabilities if bond holders are repaid.
If it goes into administration and the best offer is that the government acquires Thames Water at 20 cents on the pound for their debt, sending a clear message to owners of (and lenders to) privatized utilities: that you will not be bailed out by the government.
Do they actually have to pay the bond holders anything?
I understood that the terms of the public-private partnership meant that if Thames Water becomes insolvent then the state reaquires the assets and responsibilties for water and sewage provision. But does it actually take on the company and its liabilities or does it just leave Thames Water as a shell with no assets but huge debts? Does the state actually have to take on any of the liabilities?
I don't understand why the mad enthusiasm for government ownership.
Currently we have a profitable private business, but with debts it cannot service. All that needs to occur is for the shareholders to get wiped out, the debt to get written off, and the bond holders to either end up owning the business, or get to sell it for whatever they can get to someone else who fancies running a utility.
The only thing the government needs to do is to ensure that this restructuring is an orderly process, and doesn't result in dumb stuff like frontline staff going unpaid, resulting in supply outages. That's not beyond the whit of man.
Some capitalists (well, pension funds) will lose their shirts. Some other capitalists have run off with shirts for which they didn't pay. That's capitalism for you, especially if you buy or lend money to businesses without managing to read the balance sheet properly. None of this has any bearing on the actual supply of water to customers, nor yet does it provide any justification for nationalisation.
One of the things we can say with confidence is that nationalisation will make things worse. Just look at the shambles which is the MOD, and ask yourself if adding similar layers of government morons on top of another form of engineering activity* is likely to either improve services or save any money?
*modern warfare is mostly engineering.
Fool you twice, shame on you.
It's a basic premise, since Adam Smith delineated the basics of market capitalism, that monopolies will be abused. Free of debt, it's a profitable business (depending on pricing set by the a regulator), and ind which will be exploited in the same way all over again.
If you don't think government is up to running the business, why do you imagine it is any any way up to the probably much harder task of regulating it - something which requires understanding the business as well, or better than its managers. - from the outside ?
Just an utter logic fail.
The experiment has already cost the customers (and the country, since the money went overseas) many tens of billions. And you want to repeat the process.
‘Complicated and expensive’: Burnham is right about the risks of nationalisation
Track record of Welsh Water shows changing ownership status is not the answer to all the woes in the utilities sector
Welsh Water is not state owned.
And would we really be worse off if zombie companies like Thames Water or (whisper it) a certain fairly large gas/leccy supplier were properly bankrupted and taken into state ownership without the enormous overhang of debt they have accumulated?
Whether they would be better managed by the government is a different matter - very probably not - but it's hard to imagine they would be much worse managed.
The utter contemptuous folly of the Blair Government was they didn't renationalised before the foreign shareholders ladelled off the cream and a huge amount of everything else too.
Renationalisation now is simply acquiring liability upon liability.
That's not really true: it's only assuming liabilities if bond holders are repaid.
If it goes into administration and the best offer is that the government acquires Thames Water at 20 cents on the pound for their debt, sending a clear message to owners of (and lenders to) privatized utilities: that you will not be bailed out by the government.
Do they actually have to pay the bond holders anything?
I understood that the terms of the public-private partnership meant that if Thames Water becomes insolvent then the state reaquires the assets and responsibilties for water and sewage provision. But does it actually take on the company and its liabilities or does it just leave Thames Water as a shell with no assets but huge debts? Does the state actually have to take on any of the liabilities?
I don't understand why the mad enthusiasm for government ownership.
Currently we have a profitable private business, but with debts it cannot service. All that needs to occur is for the shareholders to get wiped out, the debt to get written off, and the bond holders to either end up owning the business, or get to sell it for whatever they can get to someone else who fancies running a utility.
The only thing the government needs to do is to ensure that this restructuring is an orderly process, and doesn't result in dumb stuff like frontline staff going unpaid, resulting in supply outages. That's not beyond the whit of man.
Some capitalists (well, pension funds) will lose their shirts. Some other capitalists have run off with shirts for which they didn't pay. That's capitalism for you, especially if you buy or lend money to businesses without managing to read the balance sheet properly. None of this has any bearing on the actual supply of water to customers, nor yet does it provide any justification for nationalisation.
One of the things we can say with confidence is that nationalisation will make things worse. Just look at the shambles which is the MOD, and ask yourself if adding similar layers of government morons on top of another form of engineering activity* is likely to either improve services or save any money?
*modern warfare is mostly engineering.
Of course people have forgotten, if they ever knew, just how bad the big nationalised industries actually were - when British Airways was known as Bloody Awful, when it took a year to get a new phone line from British Telecom, when British Gas arrogantly refused to supply gas to customers under the personal whim of its chairman, etc.
But I think there is benefit in remembering the practical arguments against nationalisation:
- the subjection of investment decisions to the whims of the Treasury - the politicisation of wage bargaining - the devotion of management time to sucking up to ministers, rather than running their businesses efficiently - the impossibility of effective, transparent regulation when the government has such a glaring conflict of interest since it is regulating itself - the movement of crucial management decisions to Whitehall, which has unerringly poor judgement in industrial matters - the distortion of competition - the lack of incentives to improve operating efficiency - the reduction in government revenue as less efficient businesses yield less corporate tax - the opportunity cost of government funds devoted to nationalisation
etc etc.
Some of these issues can be mitigated, and none of this is meant to idolize the private sector, whose companies often get things wrong, especially when industries are oligopolies or monopolies. But there is simply no equivalent in government to the ever-present threat of bankruptcy in industry, which acts as a powerful discipline on even the most complacent and incompetent of companies. And that is why, however flawed their performance may be, industries are generally better in the private sector than in the public sector.
That was the argument for privatising water the first time round. It simply doesn't apply in any meaningful sense to an essential public service monopoly. The fact that we're *still* pondering whether it's feasible to bankrupt Thames ought to be proof enough of that.
The catastrophic projects that reveal how the MoD blows billions ... ... Each procurement disaster is unique. Yet there are common themes: a lack of transparency, shifting requirements, project management failures, a lack of in-house technical expertise and short-termism that increases costs overall. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/1af1aadfb4d6ea78
Gift link to article examining five MoD procurement failures (Type 45 destroyers; Ajax; Morpheus; Nimrod; Watchkeeper).
‘Complicated and expensive’: Burnham is right about the risks of nationalisation
Track record of Welsh Water shows changing ownership status is not the answer to all the woes in the utilities sector
Welsh Water is not state owned.
And would we really be worse off if zombie companies like Thames Water or (whisper it) a certain fairly large gas/leccy supplier were properly bankrupted and taken into state ownership without the enormous overhang of debt they have accumulated?
Whether they would be better managed by the government is a different matter - very probably not - but it's hard to imagine they would be much worse managed.
The utter contemptuous folly of the Blair Government was they didn't renationalised before the foreign shareholders ladelled off the cream and a huge amount of everything else too.
Renationalisation now is simply acquiring liability upon liability.
That's not really true: it's only assuming liabilities if bond holders are repaid.
If it goes into administration and the best offer is that the government acquires Thames Water at 20 cents on the pound for their debt, sending a clear message to owners of (and lenders to) privatized utilities: that you will not be bailed out by the government.
Do they actually have to pay the bond holders anything?
I understood that the terms of the public-private partnership meant that if Thames Water becomes insolvent then the state reaquires the assets and responsibilties for water and sewage provision. But does it actually take on the company and its liabilities or does it just leave Thames Water as a shell with no assets but huge debts? Does the state actually have to take on any of the liabilities?
I don't understand why the mad enthusiasm for government ownership.
Currently we have a profitable private business, but with debts it cannot service. All that needs to occur is for the shareholders to get wiped out, the debt to get written off, and the bond holders to either end up owning the business, or get to sell it for whatever they can get to someone else who fancies running a utility.
The only thing the government needs to do is to ensure that this restructuring is an orderly process, and doesn't result in dumb stuff like frontline staff going unpaid, resulting in supply outages. That's not beyond the whit of man.
Some capitalists (well, pension funds) will lose their shirts. Some other capitalists have run off with shirts for which they didn't pay. That's capitalism for you, especially if you buy or lend money to businesses without managing to read the balance sheet properly. None of this has any bearing on the actual supply of water to customers, nor yet does it provide any justification for nationalisation.
One of the things we can say with confidence is that nationalisation will make things worse. Just look at the shambles which is the MOD, and ask yourself if adding similar layers of government morons on top of another form of engineering activity* is likely to either improve services or save any money?
*modern warfare is mostly engineering.
If Thames Water is wiped out then returned to private ownership, how do you stop the same cycle happening again? Incidentally this does seem to be a growing problem across the private sector with companies (and football clubs) being bought up by private equity firms, often foreign-owned, and sucked dry.
Who will lend them money a second time to repeat the trick?
The catastrophic projects that reveal how the MoD blows billions ... ... Each procurement disaster is unique. Yet there are common themes: a lack of transparency, shifting requirements, project management failures, a lack of in-house technical expertise and short-termism that increases costs overall. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/1af1aadfb4d6ea78
Gift link to article examining five MoD procurement failures (Type 45 destroyers; Ajax; Morpheus; Nimrod; Watchkeeper).
To be fair, warfare is constantly changing, and lead times for weapon sysrtems long.
The water companies are not truly private businesses.
1) They do not have to find a single customer, they are provided on a state designated plate. 2) They operate as a monopoly within their area 3) Their sales price is a government function.
No other utility or business has all three elements so usefully lined up for extracting dividend with zero risk. Indeed the only risk they have taken is to load tonnes of debt on themselves in order to bleed customers and extort the regulators even more dry.
Came here 20 years ago from Somalia, did voluntary work, got a degree, worked in the public sector, became a councillor and seems like he’s done a good job.
… in reply to…
Also: the Lord Mayor isn't really 'running' the city, is he? He's a figurehead - he gets to wear the mayoral regalia. He's like a municipal constitutional monarch.
I'm right up the immigration-sceptic end of the spectrum, but I can't get exercised about this at all. He looks to me very much like he's integrating. This is what we want, surely?
Same here
I think it’s nice to see a positive story of Somali migration and integration and actual economic participation for a change
In fact, this post crystallises one of my problems with Reform. I have so many complaints about immigration. The sheer numbers of undesirable immigrants crossing in boats. The criminal elements it introduces. The refusal to deal with the criminal elements robustly. The bending-over-backwards to put the needs and in some cases wants of (some) immigrants before the needs of our own people. The sheer amount of money we’re spending on immigrants (while, simultaneously, and puzzlingly, making it very hard and expensive for immigrants from places like Canada). The sheer squalor of places like Cheetham Hill. The depression of wages. But that very much isn’t to say I have an aversion to all immigrants or all immigration. I recognise the benefits. What I want is for immigrants to buy into Britishness. This is what most of the immigrants I know do. My daughter’s football and cricket clubs are peppered with immigrants and their families. For immigrants – like this guy in Britsol, willing to don silly British clothes – who want to buy into Britishness: this is absolutely brilliant. I love it. It’s not only great for Britain, but great that Britishness is something that people like this want to adopt. I think my views on this are perfectly mainstream.
A perfectly good case could have been made opposing ‘bad’ immigration while welcoming ‘good’. I’d say it would have been popular. Once again, Reform had an electoral open goal which they’ve judiciously aimed a good 45 degrees right of.
I agree, but I think what you miss is that Reform don’t want what we want. We see an integrated immigrant becoming Lord Mayor and think, "great, more of the same please".
For at least part of Reform’s coalition, the objection isn’t just illegal immigration or failed integration. It’s demographic and cultural change itself. From that perspective, Goodwin’s post isn’t a blunder at all. It’s entirely consistent.
To want to nudge the future in a particular direction is politics. To address what has already happened WRT who is lawfully living here by attacking its foundations and opposing assimilation, and wanting to demonise and reverse it is a starting point for the genuine fascist.
Yes, exactly. Opposing future policy is one thing. Looking at someone lawfully here, visibly assimilated, civically engaged, and then objecting anyway is quite another.
At that point the issue clearly isn’t failed integration. It’s that integration has succeeded, and some people still don’t like the result. - If successful assimilation still counts as a problem, then assimilation was never really the test.
Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ · Jun 29 A citizenship that belongs to everybody belongs to no one.
If anybody can become British, or English, then Britishness & Englishness no longer exist.
If the only thing that defines a people is that they welcome others then they no longer exist, either.
What an imbecile.
Citizenship does not belong to everybody, it belongs to everybody who has it only. A French citizen living in France is not British.
If anybody living here adopts British citizenship or being English then Britishness and Englishness do not cease to exist, it just has another person who is that. With the rights and responsibilities associated with citizenship.
He's not an imbecile, he's just trying to intellectually dress up a point that he doesn't want certain people to be able to become citizens so it sounds like a grand philosophical stance rather than just that he hates and fears those people.
There's definitely been a shift online in the last 18 months, and not a happy one, from arguments about assimilation and limitations on immigration, towards an argument that even assimilation is not enough, or is impossible, or is undesirable even if it is possible.
There's a market for open racism in this country which is larger than most people would like. It's not the majority like the Lowe's and Goodwins of the world think, but it's probably still a few million, and capable of drawing in even more if disguised.
Though to.an extent, it was always there. Remember Nigel moaning about people having conversations in (gasps) not-English on the train?
There's a case- though one I'd want to interrogate- for"it doesn't matter where people are from, as long as they integrate". The reason to interrogate that is... how and how far? There's a balance between being who you were and becoming who you are. (A bit of expat experience is very salutary for exploring that.)
But if Britishness is really something you'll can't attain for a few generations, even if you play entirely by the rules, then include me out
Well I would have preferred it if the Manchester Arena bomber, for example, had chosen to integrate rather tham rejecting British culture. I like British culture. I don't want it to turn into someghing else. People are welcome to come here if they choose to adopt British culture, but if they would prefer to reject it in favour of their own, I'd rather they didn't come. I don't think this is unreasonable.
British culture? Not definable. People will give different answers as to what it is. We don't want ghetto-isation, we want mixing and matching of different backgrounds and perspectives, I agree with that. But the main obligation IMO - shared by immigrants and non-immigrants alike - is to live within the law. Agitate to change any particular one if you feel strongly about it, sure, but live within it. The Manchester bomber didn't do that. His failure in that regard was abject.
I don't find the point that British culture is not definable to be very persuasive on this issue. No culture is precisely definable as it will inevitably fall back on a level of generic or universal values - family, fairness, whatever - and/or inclusion of certain steretypical cliches - loving cricket and tea or whatever - which are not going to be shared by everyone anyway.
By that logic no country has a culture that is definable. Yet despite that changeability, I'd wager most places still insist that that culture is what is driving their policy attitudes.
So yes, there are dangers to introducing strict definitions of culture which people must meet - which is one reason people get a chuckle out of citizenship tests which existing citizens might struggle with - but many concepts, ideologies, or even the line between acceptable and unacceptable action can be hard to define, and yet they will still be real things.
British values, wokeness, fascism, art, pornography, MAGA, these might struggle to be agreed in all contexts by all people, and they will be prone to being overused and over applied, but they can still exist.
Yes you can have a discussion on what British Culture means. The very fact that it's slippery and everchanging and subjective means that it's great to discuss. Where you run into trouble (imo) is if you start to lay it down as something that people must 'adopt' or 'comply with' etc. That's a road to nowhere good at all.
I don't think it can be applied to rigidly. My joke example of if someone does not like cricket for example. But a general entreaty, even setting an expectation, that people coming from country A to country B, permanently, should seek to engage with and integrate with that culture rather than, perhaps, an expectation for country B to accommodate the language and cultural expectations of country A? More reasonable.
That would not be able to be subject to a strict test which you could then kick people out as a result if they fail of course, so would not be firm enough for many, but my answer to that would probably be that it would require, if our politics went that way, being firmer on rules of who can come in in the first place, given the impracticability of creating a fool proof 'culture' test (formal or otherwise).
I think it helps to be specific on this topic because much waffle is talked about it.
So, ok, the 'British Culture' that every resident should sign up to. My answer:
The law. That's the most important aspect.
To which I think we can add the language. Being able to communicate in English. That's the other important aspect.
That's it. Law and language.
If you disagree tell me what bespoke British (as opposed to universal) cultural necessity we are missing.
I think in trying to be specific you are losing the essence of culture. Law and language are necessary but not sufficient. Perhaps it is fair to say that nothing else is necessary but more is needed to be sufficient.
Some will be hyper local (i cycled past a corner shop that had whacked up two big TVs for the DRC England game and had attracted a hugely diverse crowd and probably plenty of unlicensed drinking). That was shared culture.
Dressing up in silly clothes and enacting pointless but rather quaint rituals (such as the Lord Mayor does) isn't uniquely British but definitely contributes to a shared culture.
Helping out at the PTA stall once every so often.
Turning up to a 'playing out' day on your street and bringing a poorly baked cupcake or two.
I agree that forcing people to adopt or comply with specific cultural traits or activities is nonsense. But equally someone (born here or not) who speaks the language, obeys the law, but doesn't otherwise participate in a shared local culture is not fulfilling their duties as a citizen imo.
From my point of view I share very fully in a shared local culture, but there are perspectives from which I could be said to be absent from it. I think communities, even rural ones, are more fragmented than you describe.
In most of rural England the traditional foci of shared culture are the pub and the church, with sporting offshoots, especially football and cricket, and the village hall as a venue, and the village school as the focus for the under 12s.
Even in villages this breaks down, so I suspect what you mean by 'shared local culture' will actually be rather up for grabs. In larger and more urban communities for example the very idea of church as focus of 'shared local culture' would be met with incomprehension even though within living memory it was.
Wholeheartedly agree. I'm not trying to specify the shared local culture, nor to imply that it is unchanging, nor to imply that a functioning citizen will participate in all (or even most) of it.
Instead I'm trying to say that in most places there will be a recognised, shared culture some description. Some, whether born here or not, will participate in some of this. Some people won't. I think those that don't are missing a contribution to society that we should all try to make. In all this the fact of you being born here or not is relatively unimportant in my view.
Came here 20 years ago from Somalia, did voluntary work, got a degree, worked in the public sector, became a councillor and seems like he’s done a good job.
… in reply to…
Also: the Lord Mayor isn't really 'running' the city, is he? He's a figurehead - he gets to wear the mayoral regalia. He's like a municipal constitutional monarch.
I'm right up the immigration-sceptic end of the spectrum, but I can't get exercised about this at all. He looks to me very much like he's integrating. This is what we want, surely?
Same here
I think it’s nice to see a positive story of Somali migration and integration and actual economic participation for a change
In fact, this post crystallises one of my problems with Reform. I have so many complaints about immigration. The sheer numbers of undesirable immigrants crossing in boats. The criminal elements it introduces. The refusal to deal with the criminal elements robustly. The bending-over-backwards to put the needs and in some cases wants of (some) immigrants before the needs of our own people. The sheer amount of money we’re spending on immigrants (while, simultaneously, and puzzlingly, making it very hard and expensive for immigrants from places like Canada). The sheer squalor of places like Cheetham Hill. The depression of wages. But that very much isn’t to say I have an aversion to all immigrants or all immigration. I recognise the benefits. What I want is for immigrants to buy into Britishness. This is what most of the immigrants I know do. My daughter’s football and cricket clubs are peppered with immigrants and their families. For immigrants – like this guy in Britsol, willing to don silly British clothes – who want to buy into Britishness: this is absolutely brilliant. I love it. It’s not only great for Britain, but great that Britishness is something that people like this want to adopt. I think my views on this are perfectly mainstream.
A perfectly good case could have been made opposing ‘bad’ immigration while welcoming ‘good’. I’d say it would have been popular. Once again, Reform had an electoral open goal which they’ve judiciously aimed a good 45 degrees right of.
I agree, but I think what you miss is that Reform don’t want what we want. We see an integrated immigrant becoming Lord Mayor and think, "great, more of the same please".
For at least part of Reform’s coalition, the objection isn’t just illegal immigration or failed integration. It’s demographic and cultural change itself. From that perspective, Goodwin’s post isn’t a blunder at all. It’s entirely consistent.
To want to nudge the future in a particular direction is politics. To address what has already happened WRT who is lawfully living here by attacking its foundations and opposing assimilation, and wanting to demonise and reverse it is a starting point for the genuine fascist.
Yes, exactly. Opposing future policy is one thing. Looking at someone lawfully here, visibly assimilated, civically engaged, and then objecting anyway is quite another.
At that point the issue clearly isn’t failed integration. It’s that integration has succeeded, and some people still don’t like the result. - If successful assimilation still counts as a problem, then assimilation was never really the test.
Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ · Jun 29 A citizenship that belongs to everybody belongs to no one.
If anybody can become British, or English, then Britishness & Englishness no longer exist.
If the only thing that defines a people is that they welcome others then they no longer exist, either.
What an imbecile.
Citizenship does not belong to everybody, it belongs to everybody who has it only. A French citizen living in France is not British.
If anybody living here adopts British citizenship or being English then Britishness and Englishness do not cease to exist, it just has another person who is that. With the rights and responsibilities associated with citizenship.
He's not an imbecile, he's just trying to intellectually dress up a point that he doesn't want certain people to be able to become citizens so it sounds like a grand philosophical stance rather than just that he hates and fears those people.
There's definitely been a shift online in the last 18 months, and not a happy one, from arguments about assimilation and limitations on immigration, towards an argument that even assimilation is not enough, or is impossible, or is undesirable even if it is possible.
There's a market for open racism in this country which is larger than most people would like. It's not the majority like the Lowe's and Goodwins of the world think, but it's probably still a few million, and capable of drawing in even more if disguised.
Though to.an extent, it was always there. Remember Nigel moaning about people having conversations in (gasps) not-English on the train?
There's a case- though one I'd want to interrogate- for"it doesn't matter where people are from, as long as they integrate". The reason to interrogate that is... how and how far? There's a balance between being who you were and becoming who you are. (A bit of expat experience is very salutary for exploring that.)
But if Britishness is really something you'll can't attain for a few generations, even if you play entirely by the rules, then include me out
Well I would have preferred it if the Manchester Arena bomber, for example, had chosen to integrate rather tham rejecting British culture. I like British culture. I don't want it to turn into someghing else. People are welcome to come here if they choose to adopt British culture, but if they would prefer to reject it in favour of their own, I'd rather they didn't come. I don't think this is unreasonable.
British culture? Not definable. People will give different answers as to what it is. We don't want ghetto-isation, we want mixing and matching of different backgrounds and perspectives, I agree with that. But the main obligation IMO - shared by immigrants and non-immigrants alike - is to live within the law. Agitate to change any particular one if you feel strongly about it, sure, but live within it. The Manchester bomber didn't do that. His failure in that regard was abject.
I don't find the point that British culture is not definable to be very persuasive on this issue. No culture is precisely definable as it will inevitably fall back on a level of generic or universal values - family, fairness, whatever - and/or inclusion of certain steretypical cliches - loving cricket and tea or whatever - which are not going to be shared by everyone anyway.
By that logic no country has a culture that is definable. Yet despite that changeability, I'd wager most places still insist that that culture is what is driving their policy attitudes.
So yes, there are dangers to introducing strict definitions of culture which people must meet - which is one reason people get a chuckle out of citizenship tests which existing citizens might struggle with - but many concepts, ideologies, or even the line between acceptable and unacceptable action can be hard to define, and yet they will still be real things.
British values, wokeness, fascism, art, pornography, MAGA, these might struggle to be agreed in all contexts by all people, and they will be prone to being overused and over applied, but they can still exist.
Yes you can have a discussion on what British Culture means. The very fact that it's slippery and everchanging and subjective means that it's great to discuss. Where you run into trouble (imo) is if you start to lay it down as something that people must 'adopt' or 'comply with' etc. That's a road to nowhere good at all.
I don't think it can be applied to rigidly. My joke example of if someone does not like cricket for example. But a general entreaty, even setting an expectation, that people coming from country A to country B, permanently, should seek to engage with and integrate with that culture rather than, perhaps, an expectation for country B to accommodate the language and cultural expectations of country A? More reasonable.
That would not be able to be subject to a strict test which you could then kick people out as a result if they fail of course, so would not be firm enough for many, but my answer to that would probably be that it would require, if our politics went that way, being firmer on rules of who can come in in the first place, given the impracticability of creating a fool proof 'culture' test (formal or otherwise).
I think it helps to be specific on this topic because much waffle is talked about it.
So, ok, the 'British Culture' that every resident should sign up to. My answer:
The law. That's the most important aspect.
To which I think we can add the language. Being able to communicate in English. That's the other important aspect.
That's it. Law and language.
If you disagree tell me what bespoke British (as opposed to universal) cultural necessity we are missing.
I think in trying to be specific you are losing the essence of culture. Law and language are necessary but not sufficient. Perhaps it is fair to say that nothing else is necessary but more is needed to be sufficient.
Some will be hyper local (i cycled past a corner shop that had whacked up two big TVs for the DRC England game and had attracted a hugely diverse crowd and probably plenty of unlicensed drinking). That was shared culture.
Dressing up in silly clothes and enacting pointless but rather quaint rituals (such as the Lord Mayor does) isn't uniquely British but definitely contributes to a shared culture.
Helping out at the PTA stall once every so often.
Turning up to a 'playing out' day on your street and bringing a poorly baked cupcake or two.
I agree that forcing people to adopt or comply with specific cultural traits or activities is nonsense. But equally someone (born here or not) who speaks the language, obeys the law, but doesn't otherwise participate in a shared local culture is not fulfilling their duties as a citizen imo.
From my point of view I share very fully in a shared local culture, but there are perspectives from which I could be said to be absent from it. I think communities, even rural ones, are more fragmented than you describe.
In most of rural England the traditional foci of shared culture are the pub and the church, with sporting offshoots, especially football and cricket, and the village hall as a venue, and the village school as the focus for the under 12s.
Even in villages this breaks down, so I suspect what you mean by 'shared local culture' will actually be rather up for grabs. In larger and more urban communities for example the very idea of church as focus of 'shared local culture' would be met with incomprehension even though within living memory it was.
Wholeheartedly agree. I'm not trying to specify the shared local culture, nor to imply that it is unchanging, nor to imply that a functioning citizen will participate in all (or even most) of it.
Instead I'm trying to say that in most places there will be a recognised, shared culture some description. Some, whether born here or not, will participate in some of this. Some people won't. I think those that don't are missing a contribution to society that we should all try to make. In all this the fact of you being born here or not is relatively unimportant in my view.
In any local area there are people who do not want to get involved in local events, sports teams or collective life. I do not think immigrants are any different to native Britons in this.
Give £100k earners free childcare to boost economy, Labour urged Families should receive £7,000 vouchers to avoid punishing tax trap, think tank says
Parents earning more than £100,000 should get free childcare to help boost the economy, Labour has been urged.
A report by the Right-leaning Policy Exchange has called to replace free childcare hours with £7,000 vouchers for all families amid growing pressure to overhaul the “distorting” system.
It proposed scrapping 30 hours of free childcare in favour of a preloaded payment card for all parents regardless of income. It also proposed raising child benefit by £2,500 a year to £4,000 for children under two years old. ... Under the current system, families lose their entitlement to tax-free childcare and 30 free hours for 38 weeks of the year as soon as one parent’s annual salary goes above £100,000. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/tax/news/give-100k-earners-free-childcare-to-boost-economy/ (£££)
Good morning, everyone.
It's not free childcare, it's taxpayer-funded childcare.
And the way to solve a cliff-edge isn't to throw more money which we can't afford, it's to make something more gradual.
'Tough financial decisions' and throwing £7k at wealthy households do not go together.
‘Complicated and expensive’: Burnham is right about the risks of nationalisation
Track record of Welsh Water shows changing ownership status is not the answer to all the woes in the utilities sector
Welsh Water is not state owned.
And would we really be worse off if zombie companies like Thames Water or (whisper it) a certain fairly large gas/leccy supplier were properly bankrupted and taken into state ownership without the enormous overhang of debt they have accumulated?
Whether they would be better managed by the government is a different matter - very probably not - but it's hard to imagine they would be much worse managed.
The utter contemptuous folly of the Blair Government was they didn't renationalised before the foreign shareholders ladelled off the cream and a huge amount of everything else too.
Renationalisation now is simply acquiring liability upon liability.
That's not really true: it's only assuming liabilities if bond holders are repaid.
If it goes into administration and the best offer is that the government acquires Thames Water at 20 cents on the pound for their debt, sending a clear message to owners of (and lenders to) privatized utilities: that you will not be bailed out by the government.
Do they actually have to pay the bond holders anything?
I understood that the terms of the public-private partnership meant that if Thames Water becomes insolvent then the state reaquires the assets and responsibilties for water and sewage provision. But does it actually take on the company and its liabilities or does it just leave Thames Water as a shell with no assets but huge debts? Does the state actually have to take on any of the liabilities?
I don't understand why the mad enthusiasm for government ownership.
Currently we have a profitable private business, but with debts it cannot service. All that needs to occur is for the shareholders to get wiped out, the debt to get written off, and the bond holders to either end up owning the business, or get to sell it for whatever they can get to someone else who fancies running a utility.
The only thing the government needs to do is to ensure that this restructuring is an orderly process, and doesn't result in dumb stuff like frontline staff going unpaid, resulting in supply outages. That's not beyond the whit of man.
Some capitalists (well, pension funds) will lose their shirts. Some other capitalists have run off with shirts for which they didn't pay. That's capitalism for you, especially if you buy or lend money to businesses without managing to read the balance sheet properly. None of this has any bearing on the actual supply of water to customers, nor yet does it provide any justification for nationalisation.
One of the things we can say with confidence is that nationalisation will make things worse. Just look at the shambles which is the MOD, and ask yourself if adding similar layers of government morons on top of another form of engineering activity* is likely to either improve services or save any money?
*modern warfare is mostly engineering.
If Thames Water is wiped out then returned to private ownership, how do you stop the same cycle happening again? Incidentally this does seem to be a growing problem across the private sector with companies (and football clubs) being bought up by private equity firms, often foreign-owned, and sucked dry.
Who will lend them money a second time to repeat the trick?
Assets could be sold and leased back; assets can be sold to the PE parent and leased back at exorbitant rates. It's how the modern world goes round.
Erm, hasn't Waymo recently suspended its driverless taxis on freeways and recalled thousands of cars for software updates? American freeways are a lot less complicated than London streets.
‘Complicated and expensive’: Burnham is right about the risks of nationalisation
Track record of Welsh Water shows changing ownership status is not the answer to all the woes in the utilities sector
Welsh Water is not state owned.
And would we really be worse off if zombie companies like Thames Water or (whisper it) a certain fairly large gas/leccy supplier were properly bankrupted and taken into state ownership without the enormous overhang of debt they have accumulated?
Whether they would be better managed by the government is a different matter - very probably not - but it's hard to imagine they would be much worse managed.
The utter contemptuous folly of the Blair Government was they didn't renationalised before the foreign shareholders ladelled off the cream and a huge amount of everything else too.
Renationalisation now is simply acquiring liability upon liability.
That's not really true: it's only assuming liabilities if bond holders are repaid.
If it goes into administration and the best offer is that the government acquires Thames Water at 20 cents on the pound for their debt, sending a clear message to owners of (and lenders to) privatized utilities: that you will not be bailed out by the government.
Do they actually have to pay the bond holders anything?
I understood that the terms of the public-private partnership meant that if Thames Water becomes insolvent then the state reaquires the assets and responsibilties for water and sewage provision. But does it actually take on the company and its liabilities or does it just leave Thames Water as a shell with no assets but huge debts? Does the state actually have to take on any of the liabilities?
I don't understand why the mad enthusiasm for government ownership.
Currently we have a profitable private business, but with debts it cannot service. All that needs to occur is for the shareholders to get wiped out, the debt to get written off, and the bond holders to either end up owning the business, or get to sell it for whatever they can get to someone else who fancies running a utility.
The only thing the government needs to do is to ensure that this restructuring is an orderly process, and doesn't result in dumb stuff like frontline staff going unpaid, resulting in supply outages. That's not beyond the whit of man.
Some capitalists (well, pension funds) will lose their shirts. Some other capitalists have run off with shirts for which they didn't pay. That's capitalism for you, especially if you buy or lend money to businesses without managing to read the balance sheet properly. None of this has any bearing on the actual supply of water to customers, nor yet does it provide any justification for nationalisation.
One of the things we can say with confidence is that nationalisation will make things worse. Just look at the shambles which is the MOD, and ask yourself if adding similar layers of government morons on top of another form of engineering activity* is likely to either improve services or save any money?
*modern warfare is mostly engineering.
If Thames Water is wiped out then returned to private ownership, how do you stop the same cycle happening again? Incidentally this does seem to be a growing problem across the private sector with companies (and football clubs) being bought up by private equity firms, often foreign-owned, and sucked dry.
Who will lend them money a second time to repeat the trick?
Assets could be sold and leased back; assets can be sold to the PE parent and leased back at exorbitant rates. It's how the modern world goes round.
The way PE goes round destroying viable businesses via asset stripping, financial engineering is a feature of late stage capitalism. I have seen it hollow out our local dentist, vet and private hospital. Rack up charges, turn partnership into employees, load up with debt then try to buff and turf to a bigger mug.
If true, then Sir Keir is indeed giving Andy the best possible start by enabling him to distance himself totally from the prior leadership.
Does Burnham have access to a Civil Service transition team as he would in the lead up to possibly taking power at a GE? If not, then that’s something that should be changed.
This is something the UCL Constitution Unit has been arguing. The Cabinet manual lays out how to manage a transfer of power after an election, but we have just as many transfers of power from a leadership change without arrangements being made.
Give £100k earners free childcare to boost economy, Labour urged Families should receive £7,000 vouchers to avoid punishing tax trap, think tank says
Parents earning more than £100,000 should get free childcare to help boost the economy, Labour has been urged.
A report by the Right-leaning Policy Exchange has called to replace free childcare hours with £7,000 vouchers for all families amid growing pressure to overhaul the “distorting” system.
It proposed scrapping 30 hours of free childcare in favour of a preloaded payment card for all parents regardless of income. It also proposed raising child benefit by £2,500 a year to £4,000 for children under two years old. ... Under the current system, families lose their entitlement to tax-free childcare and 30 free hours for 38 weeks of the year as soon as one parent’s annual salary goes above £100,000. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/tax/news/give-100k-earners-free-childcare-to-boost-economy/ (£££)
Good morning, everyone.
It's not free childcare, it's taxpayer-funded childcare.
And the way to solve a cliff-edge isn't to throw more money which we can't afford, it's to make something more gradual.
'Tough financial decisions' and throwing £7k at wealthy households do not go together.
The £100k hard threshold for this is sub-optimal, as is any fiscal cliff edge but this is certainly not the way to address this one.
‘Complicated and expensive’: Burnham is right about the risks of nationalisation
Track record of Welsh Water shows changing ownership status is not the answer to all the woes in the utilities sector
Welsh Water is not state owned.
And would we really be worse off if zombie companies like Thames Water or (whisper it) a certain fairly large gas/leccy supplier were properly bankrupted and taken into state ownership without the enormous overhang of debt they have accumulated?
Whether they would be better managed by the government is a different matter - very probably not - but it's hard to imagine they would be much worse managed.
The utter contemptuous folly of the Blair Government was they didn't renationalised before the foreign shareholders ladelled off the cream and a huge amount of everything else too.
Renationalisation now is simply acquiring liability upon liability.
That's not really true: it's only assuming liabilities if bond holders are repaid.
If it goes into administration and the best offer is that the government acquires Thames Water at 20 cents on the pound for their debt, sending a clear message to owners of (and lenders to) privatized utilities: that you will not be bailed out by the government.
Do they actually have to pay the bond holders anything?
I understood that the terms of the public-private partnership meant that if Thames Water becomes insolvent then the state reaquires the assets and responsibilties for water and sewage provision. But does it actually take on the company and its liabilities or does it just leave Thames Water as a shell with no assets but huge debts? Does the state actually have to take on any of the liabilities?
I don't understand why the mad enthusiasm for government ownership.
Currently we have a profitable private business, but with debts it cannot service. All that needs to occur is for the shareholders to get wiped out, the debt to get written off, and the bond holders to either end up owning the business, or get to sell it for whatever they can get to someone else who fancies running a utility.
The only thing the government needs to do is to ensure that this restructuring is an orderly process, and doesn't result in dumb stuff like frontline staff going unpaid, resulting in supply outages. That's not beyond the whit of man.
Some capitalists (well, pension funds) will lose their shirts. Some other capitalists have run off with shirts for which they didn't pay. That's capitalism for you, especially if you buy or lend money to businesses without managing to read the balance sheet properly. None of this has any bearing on the actual supply of water to customers, nor yet does it provide any justification for nationalisation.
One of the things we can say with confidence is that nationalisation will make things worse. Just look at the shambles which is the MOD, and ask yourself if adding similar layers of government morons on top of another form of engineering activity* is likely to either improve services or save any money?
*modern warfare is mostly engineering.
If Thames Water is wiped out then returned to private ownership, how do you stop the same cycle happening again? Incidentally this does seem to be a growing problem across the private sector with companies (and football clubs) being bought up by private equity firms, often foreign-owned, and sucked dry.
The capital structure of the water industry is already regulated. The regulators just got it wrong in terms of what they permitted.
So you limit the debt to, say, 5x EBITDA.
All that has happened is that Macquarie made out like bandits. So we shouldn’t approve any further investments by them in UK infrastructure until they agree a sensible settlement
Erm, hasn't Waymo recently suspended its driverless taxis on freeways and recalled thousands of cars for software updates? American freeways are a lot less complicated than London streets.
So that means we should abandon driverless cars ? One incident on a freeway and a software recall for one manufacturer. Software updates on cars are nothing new.
Waymo are not the only manufacturer either.
The rollout in London is very slow and deliberate anyway.
The positioning from Burnhams team appears just anti driverless cars. The technology is evolving and the change is coming. We should embrace it
‘Complicated and expensive’: Burnham is right about the risks of nationalisation
Track record of Welsh Water shows changing ownership status is not the answer to all the woes in the utilities sector
Welsh Water is not state owned.
And would we really be worse off if zombie companies like Thames Water or (whisper it) a certain fairly large gas/leccy supplier were properly bankrupted and taken into state ownership without the enormous overhang of debt they have accumulated?
Whether they would be better managed by the government is a different matter - very probably not - but it's hard to imagine they would be much worse managed.
The utter contemptuous folly of the Blair Government was they didn't renationalised before the foreign shareholders ladelled off the cream and a huge amount of everything else too.
Renationalisation now is simply acquiring liability upon liability.
That's not really true: it's only assuming liabilities if bond holders are repaid.
If it goes into administration and the best offer is that the government acquires Thames Water at 20 cents on the pound for their debt, sending a clear message to owners of (and lenders to) privatized utilities: that you will not be bailed out by the government.
Do they actually have to pay the bond holders anything?
I understood that the terms of the public-private partnership meant that if Thames Water becomes insolvent then the state reaquires the assets and responsibilties for water and sewage provision. But does it actually take on the company and its liabilities or does it just leave Thames Water as a shell with no assets but huge debts? Does the state actually have to take on any of the liabilities?
I don't understand why the mad enthusiasm for government ownership.
Currently we have a profitable private business, but with debts it cannot service. All that needs to occur is for the shareholders to get wiped out, the debt to get written off, and the bond holders to either end up owning the business, or get to sell it for whatever they can get to someone else who fancies running a utility.
The only thing the government needs to do is to ensure that this restructuring is an orderly process, and doesn't result in dumb stuff like frontline staff going unpaid, resulting in supply outages. That's not beyond the whit of man.
Some capitalists (well, pension funds) will lose their shirts. Some other capitalists have run off with shirts for which they didn't pay. That's capitalism for you, especially if you buy or lend money to businesses without managing to read the balance sheet properly. None of this has any bearing on the actual supply of water to customers, nor yet does it provide any justification for nationalisation.
One of the things we can say with confidence is that nationalisation will make things worse. Just look at the shambles which is the MOD, and ask yourself if adding similar layers of government morons on top of another form of engineering activity* is likely to either improve services or save any money?
*modern warfare is mostly engineering.
If Thames Water is wiped out then returned to private ownership, how do you stop the same cycle happening again? Incidentally this does seem to be a growing problem across the private sector with companies (and football clubs) being bought up by private equity firms, often foreign-owned, and sucked dry.
Who will lend them money a second time to repeat the trick?
Assets could be sold and leased back; assets can be sold to the PE parent and leased back at exorbitant rates. It's how the modern world goes round.
The way PE goes round destroying viable businesses via asset stripping, financial engineering is a feature of late stage capitalism. I have seen it hollow out our local dentist, vet and private hospital. Rack up charges, turn partnership into employees, load up with debt then try to buff and turf to a bigger mug.
Just look at what’s happened to Asda and Morrisons.
‘Complicated and expensive’: Burnham is right about the risks of nationalisation
Track record of Welsh Water shows changing ownership status is not the answer to all the woes in the utilities sector
Welsh Water is not state owned.
And would we really be worse off if zombie companies like Thames Water or (whisper it) a certain fairly large gas/leccy supplier were properly bankrupted and taken into state ownership without the enormous overhang of debt they have accumulated?
Whether they would be better managed by the government is a different matter - very probably not - but it's hard to imagine they would be much worse managed.
The utter contemptuous folly of the Blair Government was they didn't renationalised before the foreign shareholders ladelled off the cream and a huge amount of everything else too.
Renationalisation now is simply acquiring liability upon liability.
That's not really true: it's only assuming liabilities if bond holders are repaid.
If it goes into administration and the best offer is that the government acquires Thames Water at 20 cents on the pound for their debt, sending a clear message to owners of (and lenders to) privatized utilities: that you will not be bailed out by the government.
Do they actually have to pay the bond holders anything?
I understood that the terms of the public-private partnership meant that if Thames Water becomes insolvent then the state reaquires the assets and responsibilties for water and sewage provision. But does it actually take on the company and its liabilities or does it just leave Thames Water as a shell with no assets but huge debts? Does the state actually have to take on any of the liabilities?
I don't understand why the mad enthusiasm for government ownership.
Currently we have a profitable private business, but with debts it cannot service. All that needs to occur is for the shareholders to get wiped out, the debt to get written off, and the bond holders to either end up owning the business, or get to sell it for whatever they can get to someone else who fancies running a utility.
The only thing the government needs to do is to ensure that this restructuring is an orderly process, and doesn't result in dumb stuff like frontline staff going unpaid, resulting in supply outages. That's not beyond the whit of man.
Some capitalists (well, pension funds) will lose their shirts. Some other capitalists have run off with shirts for which they didn't pay. That's capitalism for you, especially if you buy or lend money to businesses without managing to read the balance sheet properly. None of this has any bearing on the actual supply of water to customers, nor yet does it provide any justification for nationalisation.
One of the things we can say with confidence is that nationalisation will make things worse. Just look at the shambles which is the MOD, and ask yourself if adding similar layers of government morons on top of another form of engineering activity* is likely to either improve services or save any money?
*modern warfare is mostly engineering.
If Thames Water is wiped out then returned to private ownership, how do you stop the same cycle happening again? Incidentally this does seem to be a growing problem across the private sector with companies (and football clubs) being bought up by private equity firms, often foreign-owned, and sucked dry.
The capital structure of the water industry is already regulated. The regulators just got it wrong in terms of what they permitted.
So you limit the debt to, say, 5x EBITDA.
All that has happened is that Macquarie made out like bandits. So we shouldn’t approve any further investments by them in UK infrastructure until they agree a sensible settlement
It is not just water, it's everything from Boots to Manchester United via Foxy's vet. But yes, we do need stricter regulation for monopolies and oligopolies as any classical economist would agree, we also need new measures to constrain what is euphemistically described as financial engineering.
‘Complicated and expensive’: Burnham is right about the risks of nationalisation
Track record of Welsh Water shows changing ownership status is not the answer to all the woes in the utilities sector
Welsh Water is not state owned.
And would we really be worse off if zombie companies like Thames Water or (whisper it) a certain fairly large gas/leccy supplier were properly bankrupted and taken into state ownership without the enormous overhang of debt they have accumulated?
Whether they would be better managed by the government is a different matter - very probably not - but it's hard to imagine they would be much worse managed.
The utter contemptuous folly of the Blair Government was they didn't renationalised before the foreign shareholders ladelled off the cream and a huge amount of everything else too.
Renationalisation now is simply acquiring liability upon liability.
That's not really true: it's only assuming liabilities if bond holders are repaid.
If it goes into administration and the best offer is that the government acquires Thames Water at 20 cents on the pound for their debt, sending a clear message to owners of (and lenders to) privatized utilities: that you will not be bailed out by the government.
Do they actually have to pay the bond holders anything?
I understood that the terms of the public-private partnership meant that if Thames Water becomes insolvent then the state reaquires the assets and responsibilties for water and sewage provision. But does it actually take on the company and its liabilities or does it just leave Thames Water as a shell with no assets but huge debts? Does the state actually have to take on any of the liabilities?
I don't understand why the mad enthusiasm for government ownership.
Currently we have a profitable private business, but with debts it cannot service. All that needs to occur is for the shareholders to get wiped out, the debt to get written off, and the bond holders to either end up owning the business, or get to sell it for whatever they can get to someone else who fancies running a utility.
The only thing the government needs to do is to ensure that this restructuring is an orderly process, and doesn't result in dumb stuff like frontline staff going unpaid, resulting in supply outages. That's not beyond the whit of man.
Some capitalists (well, pension funds) will lose their shirts. Some other capitalists have run off with shirts for which they didn't pay. That's capitalism for you, especially if you buy or lend money to businesses without managing to read the balance sheet properly. None of this has any bearing on the actual supply of water to customers, nor yet does it provide any justification for nationalisation.
One of the things we can say with confidence is that nationalisation will make things worse. Just look at the shambles which is the MOD, and ask yourself if adding similar layers of government morons on top of another form of engineering activity* is likely to either improve services or save any money?
*modern warfare is mostly engineering.
If Thames Water is wiped out then returned to private ownership, how do you stop the same cycle happening again? Incidentally this does seem to be a growing problem across the private sector with companies (and football clubs) being bought up by private equity firms, often foreign-owned, and sucked dry.
Who will lend them money a second time to repeat the trick?
Assets could be sold and leased back; assets can be sold to the PE parent and leased back at exorbitant rates. It's how the modern world goes round.
The way PE goes round destroying viable businesses via asset stripping, financial engineering is a feature of late stage capitalism. I have seen it hollow out our local dentist, vet and private hospital. Rack up charges, turn partnership into employees, load up with debt then try to buff and turf to a bigger mug.
1 There will always be ways of extracting money unfairly from prudenty-run companies.
2 The bigger and more prudently-run the company, the bigger the cash pile and the more worthwhile it will be to find a novel way of extracting that cash.
3 The more aggressive end of capitalism will always be at least one step ahead of less aggressive capitalism, let alone the public sector, in finding those ways.
Erm, hasn't Waymo recently suspended its driverless taxis on freeways and recalled thousands of cars for software updates? American freeways are a lot less complicated than London streets.
So that means we should abandon driverless cars ? One incident on a freeway and a software recall for one manufacturer. Software updates on cars are nothing new.
Waymo are not the only manufacturer either.
The rollout in London is very slow and deliberate anyway.
The positioning from Burnhams team appears just anti driverless cars. The technology is evolving and the change is coming. We should embrace it
No, but it does mean we should stop regarding driverless cars as a panacea arriving any time soon. If we are serious, then perhaps we should look for constrained routes that might be suitable for driverless cars acting as shuttles.
Someone posted it earlier, including the extraordinary claim that 13000 hours of government time was spent rehabilitating it. I wonder if it's 1300, plus Chinese whispers.
Given how useless they are it is likely to be accurate.
‘Complicated and expensive’: Burnham is right about the risks of nationalisation
Track record of Welsh Water shows changing ownership status is not the answer to all the woes in the utilities sector
Welsh Water is not state owned.
And would we really be worse off if zombie companies like Thames Water or (whisper it) a certain fairly large gas/leccy supplier were properly bankrupted and taken into state ownership without the enormous overhang of debt they have accumulated?
Whether they would be better managed by the government is a different matter - very probably not - but it's hard to imagine they would be much worse managed.
The utter contemptuous folly of the Blair Government was they didn't renationalised before the foreign shareholders ladelled off the cream and a huge amount of everything else too.
Renationalisation now is simply acquiring liability upon liability.
That's not really true: it's only assuming liabilities if bond holders are repaid.
If it goes into administration and the best offer is that the government acquires Thames Water at 20 cents on the pound for their debt, sending a clear message to owners of (and lenders to) privatized utilities: that you will not be bailed out by the government.
Do they actually have to pay the bond holders anything?
I understood that the terms of the public-private partnership meant that if Thames Water becomes insolvent then the state reaquires the assets and responsibilties for water and sewage provision. But does it actually take on the company and its liabilities or does it just leave Thames Water as a shell with no assets but huge debts? Does the state actually have to take on any of the liabilities?
I don't understand why the mad enthusiasm for government ownership.
Currently we have a profitable private business, but with debts it cannot service. All that needs to occur is for the shareholders to get wiped out, the debt to get written off, and the bond holders to either end up owning the business, or get to sell it for whatever they can get to someone else who fancies running a utility.
The only thing the government needs to do is to ensure that this restructuring is an orderly process, and doesn't result in dumb stuff like frontline staff going unpaid, resulting in supply outages. That's not beyond the whit of man.
Some capitalists (well, pension funds) will lose their shirts. Some other capitalists have run off with shirts for which they didn't pay. That's capitalism for you, especially if you buy or lend money to businesses without managing to read the balance sheet properly. None of this has any bearing on the actual supply of water to customers, nor yet does it provide any justification for nationalisation.
One of the things we can say with confidence is that nationalisation will make things worse. Just look at the shambles which is the MOD, and ask yourself if adding similar layers of government morons on top of another form of engineering activity* is likely to either improve services or save any money?
*modern warfare is mostly engineering.
If Thames Water is wiped out then returned to private ownership, how do you stop the same cycle happening again? Incidentally this does seem to be a growing problem across the private sector with companies (and football clubs) being bought up by private equity firms, often foreign-owned, and sucked dry.
The capital structure of the water industry is already regulated. The regulators just got it wrong in terms of what they permitted.
So you limit the debt to, say, 5x EBITDA.
All that has happened is that Macquarie made out like bandits. So we shouldn’t approve any further investments by them in UK infrastructure until they agree a sensible settlement
That closes that particular stable door. But I fear that these stables were designed by David Hilbert before he got into the business of planning infinite hotels.
‘Complicated and expensive’: Burnham is right about the risks of nationalisation
Track record of Welsh Water shows changing ownership status is not the answer to all the woes in the utilities sector
Welsh Water is not state owned.
And would we really be worse off if zombie companies like Thames Water or (whisper it) a certain fairly large gas/leccy supplier were properly bankrupted and taken into state ownership without the enormous overhang of debt they have accumulated?
Whether they would be better managed by the government is a different matter - very probably not - but it's hard to imagine they would be much worse managed.
The utter contemptuous folly of the Blair Government was they didn't renationalised before the foreign shareholders ladelled off the cream and a huge amount of everything else too.
Renationalisation now is simply acquiring liability upon liability.
That's not really true: it's only assuming liabilities if bond holders are repaid.
If it goes into administration and the best offer is that the government acquires Thames Water at 20 cents on the pound for their debt, sending a clear message to owners of (and lenders to) privatized utilities: that you will not be bailed out by the government.
Do they actually have to pay the bond holders anything?
I understood that the terms of the public-private partnership meant that if Thames Water becomes insolvent then the state reaquires the assets and responsibilties for water and sewage provision. But does it actually take on the company and its liabilities or does it just leave Thames Water as a shell with no assets but huge debts? Does the state actually have to take on any of the liabilities?
I don't understand why the mad enthusiasm for government ownership.
Currently we have a profitable private business, but with debts it cannot service. All that needs to occur is for the shareholders to get wiped out, the debt to get written off, and the bond holders to either end up owning the business, or get to sell it for whatever they can get to someone else who fancies running a utility.
The only thing the government needs to do is to ensure that this restructuring is an orderly process, and doesn't result in dumb stuff like frontline staff going unpaid, resulting in supply outages. That's not beyond the whit of man.
Some capitalists (well, pension funds) will lose their shirts. Some other capitalists have run off with shirts for which they didn't pay. That's capitalism for you, especially if you buy or lend money to businesses without managing to read the balance sheet properly. None of this has any bearing on the actual supply of water to customers, nor yet does it provide any justification for nationalisation.
One of the things we can say with confidence is that nationalisation will make things worse. Just look at the shambles which is the MOD, and ask yourself if adding similar layers of government morons on top of another form of engineering activity* is likely to either improve services or save any money?
*modern warfare is mostly engineering.
If Thames Water is wiped out then returned to private ownership, how do you stop the same cycle happening again? Incidentally this does seem to be a growing problem across the private sector with companies (and football clubs) being bought up by private equity firms, often foreign-owned, and sucked dry.
Who will lend them money a second time to repeat the trick?
Assets could be sold and leased back; assets can be sold to the PE parent and leased back at exorbitant rates. It's how the modern world goes round.
The way PE goes round destroying viable businesses via asset stripping, financial engineering is a feature of late stage capitalism. I have seen it hollow out our local dentist, vet and private hospital. Rack up charges, turn partnership into employees, load up with debt then try to buff and turf to a bigger mug.
1 There will always be ways of extracting money unfairly from prudenty-run companies.
2 The bigger and more prudently-run the company, the bigger the cash pile and the more worthwhile it will be to find a novel way of extracting that cash.
3 The more aggressive end of capitalism will always be at least one step ahead of less aggressive capitalism, let alone the public sector, in finding those ways.
I'm not sure what the answer is.
It is one of several factors that have hollowed out our High Streets. Zombie retail chains renting shops from over leveraged property companies.
‘Complicated and expensive’: Burnham is right about the risks of nationalisation
Track record of Welsh Water shows changing ownership status is not the answer to all the woes in the utilities sector
Welsh Water is not state owned.
And would we really be worse off if zombie companies like Thames Water or (whisper it) a certain fairly large gas/leccy supplier were properly bankrupted and taken into state ownership without the enormous overhang of debt they have accumulated?
Whether they would be better managed by the government is a different matter - very probably not - but it's hard to imagine they would be much worse managed.
The utter contemptuous folly of the Blair Government was they didn't renationalised before the foreign shareholders ladelled off the cream and a huge amount of everything else too.
Renationalisation now is simply acquiring liability upon liability.
That's not really true: it's only assuming liabilities if bond holders are repaid.
If it goes into administration and the best offer is that the government acquires Thames Water at 20 cents on the pound for their debt, sending a clear message to owners of (and lenders to) privatized utilities: that you will not be bailed out by the government.
Do they actually have to pay the bond holders anything?
I understood that the terms of the public-private partnership meant that if Thames Water becomes insolvent then the state reaquires the assets and responsibilties for water and sewage provision. But does it actually take on the company and its liabilities or does it just leave Thames Water as a shell with no assets but huge debts? Does the state actually have to take on any of the liabilities?
I don't understand why the mad enthusiasm for government ownership.
Currently we have a profitable private business, but with debts it cannot service. All that needs to occur is for the shareholders to get wiped out, the debt to get written off, and the bond holders to either end up owning the business, or get to sell it for whatever they can get to someone else who fancies running a utility.
The only thing the government needs to do is to ensure that this restructuring is an orderly process, and doesn't result in dumb stuff like frontline staff going unpaid, resulting in supply outages. That's not beyond the whit of man.
Some capitalists (well, pension funds) will lose their shirts. Some other capitalists have run off with shirts for which they didn't pay. That's capitalism for you, especially if you buy or lend money to businesses without managing to read the balance sheet properly. None of this has any bearing on the actual supply of water to customers, nor yet does it provide any justification for nationalisation.
One of the things we can say with confidence is that nationalisation will make things worse. Just look at the shambles which is the MOD, and ask yourself if adding similar layers of government morons on top of another form of engineering activity* is likely to either improve services or save any money?
*modern warfare is mostly engineering.
If Thames Water is wiped out then returned to private ownership, how do you stop the same cycle happening again? Incidentally this does seem to be a growing problem across the private sector with companies (and football clubs) being bought up by private equity firms, often foreign-owned, and sucked dry.
Who will lend them money a second time to repeat the trick?
Assets could be sold and leased back; assets can be sold to the PE parent and leased back at exorbitant rates. It's how the modern world goes round.
The way PE goes round destroying viable businesses via asset stripping, financial engineering is a feature of late stage capitalism. I have seen it hollow out our local dentist, vet and private hospital. Rack up charges, turn partnership into employees, load up with debt then try to buff and turf to a bigger mug.
1 There will always be ways of extracting money unfairly from prudenty-run companies.
2 The bigger and more prudently-run the company, the bigger the cash pile and the more worthwhile it will be to find a novel way of extracting that cash.
3 The more aggressive end of capitalism will always be at least one step ahead of less aggressive capitalism, let alone the public sector, in finding those ways.
I'm not sure what the answer is.
Indeed, although Gordon Brown's tax changes are often blamed for the death of private sector defined benefit pension schemes, people forget that in the 1980s, many corporate takeovers were driven by the desire to raid pension funds, both here and in the United States.
‘Complicated and expensive’: Burnham is right about the risks of nationalisation
Track record of Welsh Water shows changing ownership status is not the answer to all the woes in the utilities sector
Welsh Water is not state owned.
And would we really be worse off if zombie companies like Thames Water or (whisper it) a certain fairly large gas/leccy supplier were properly bankrupted and taken into state ownership without the enormous overhang of debt they have accumulated?
Whether they would be better managed by the government is a different matter - very probably not - but it's hard to imagine they would be much worse managed.
The utter contemptuous folly of the Blair Government was they didn't renationalised before the foreign shareholders ladelled off the cream and a huge amount of everything else too.
Renationalisation now is simply acquiring liability upon liability.
That's not really true: it's only assuming liabilities if bond holders are repaid.
If it goes into administration and the best offer is that the government acquires Thames Water at 20 cents on the pound for their debt, sending a clear message to owners of (and lenders to) privatized utilities: that you will not be bailed out by the government.
Do they actually have to pay the bond holders anything?
I understood that the terms of the public-private partnership meant that if Thames Water becomes insolvent then the state reaquires the assets and responsibilties for water and sewage provision. But does it actually take on the company and its liabilities or does it just leave Thames Water as a shell with no assets but huge debts? Does the state actually have to take on any of the liabilities?
I don't understand why the mad enthusiasm for government ownership.
Currently we have a profitable private business, but with debts it cannot service. All that needs to occur is for the shareholders to get wiped out, the debt to get written off, and the bond holders to either end up owning the business, or get to sell it for whatever they can get to someone else who fancies running a utility.
The only thing the government needs to do is to ensure that this restructuring is an orderly process, and doesn't result in dumb stuff like frontline staff going unpaid, resulting in supply outages. That's not beyond the whit of man.
Some capitalists (well, pension funds) will lose their shirts. Some other capitalists have run off with shirts for which they didn't pay. That's capitalism for you, especially if you buy or lend money to businesses without managing to read the balance sheet properly. None of this has any bearing on the actual supply of water to customers, nor yet does it provide any justification for nationalisation.
One of the things we can say with confidence is that nationalisation will make things worse. Just look at the shambles which is the MOD, and ask yourself if adding similar layers of government morons on top of another form of engineering activity* is likely to either improve services or save any money?
*modern warfare is mostly engineering.
If Thames Water is wiped out then returned to private ownership, how do you stop the same cycle happening again? Incidentally this does seem to be a growing problem across the private sector with companies (and football clubs) being bought up by private equity firms, often foreign-owned, and sucked dry.
Who will lend them money a second time to repeat the trick?
Assets could be sold and leased back; assets can be sold to the PE parent and leased back at exorbitant rates. It's how the modern world goes round.
The way PE goes round destroying viable businesses via asset stripping, financial engineering is a feature of late stage capitalism. I have seen it hollow out our local dentist, vet and private hospital. Rack up charges, turn partnership into employees, load up with debt then try to buff and turf to a bigger mug.
1 There will always be ways of extracting money unfairly from prudenty-run companies.
2 The bigger and more prudently-run the company, the bigger the cash pile and the more worthwhile it will be to find a novel way of extracting that cash.
3 The more aggressive end of capitalism will always be at least one step ahead of less aggressive capitalism, let alone the public sector, in finding those ways.
I'm not sure what the answer is.
It is one of several factors that have hollowed out our High Streets. Zombie retail chains renting shops from over leveraged property companies.
I don't disagree with private equity comments made on this thread but I think the High Street dying is very much down to the internet.
‘Complicated and expensive’: Burnham is right about the risks of nationalisation
Track record of Welsh Water shows changing ownership status is not the answer to all the woes in the utilities sector
Welsh Water is not state owned.
And would we really be worse off if zombie companies like Thames Water or (whisper it) a certain fairly large gas/leccy supplier were properly bankrupted and taken into state ownership without the enormous overhang of debt they have accumulated?
Whether they would be better managed by the government is a different matter - very probably not - but it's hard to imagine they would be much worse managed.
The utter contemptuous folly of the Blair Government was they didn't renationalised before the foreign shareholders ladelled off the cream and a huge amount of everything else too.
Renationalisation now is simply acquiring liability upon liability.
That's not really true: it's only assuming liabilities if bond holders are repaid.
If it goes into administration and the best offer is that the government acquires Thames Water at 20 cents on the pound for their debt, sending a clear message to owners of (and lenders to) privatized utilities: that you will not be bailed out by the government.
Do they actually have to pay the bond holders anything?
I understood that the terms of the public-private partnership meant that if Thames Water becomes insolvent then the state reaquires the assets and responsibilties for water and sewage provision. But does it actually take on the company and its liabilities or does it just leave Thames Water as a shell with no assets but huge debts? Does the state actually have to take on any of the liabilities?
I don't understand why the mad enthusiasm for government ownership.
Currently we have a profitable private business, but with debts it cannot service. All that needs to occur is for the shareholders to get wiped out, the debt to get written off, and the bond holders to either end up owning the business, or get to sell it for whatever they can get to someone else who fancies running a utility.
The only thing the government needs to do is to ensure that this restructuring is an orderly process, and doesn't result in dumb stuff like frontline staff going unpaid, resulting in supply outages. That's not beyond the whit of man.
Some capitalists (well, pension funds) will lose their shirts. Some other capitalists have run off with shirts for which they didn't pay. That's capitalism for you, especially if you buy or lend money to businesses without managing to read the balance sheet properly. None of this has any bearing on the actual supply of water to customers, nor yet does it provide any justification for nationalisation.
One of the things we can say with confidence is that nationalisation will make things worse. Just look at the shambles which is the MOD, and ask yourself if adding similar layers of government morons on top of another form of engineering activity* is likely to either improve services or save any money?
*modern warfare is mostly engineering.
If Thames Water is wiped out then returned to private ownership, how do you stop the same cycle happening again? Incidentally this does seem to be a growing problem across the private sector with companies (and football clubs) being bought up by private equity firms, often foreign-owned, and sucked dry.
Who will lend them money a second time to repeat the trick?
Assets could be sold and leased back; assets can be sold to the PE parent and leased back at exorbitant rates. It's how the modern world goes round.
The way PE goes round destroying viable businesses via asset stripping, financial engineering is a feature of late stage capitalism. I have seen it hollow out our local dentist, vet and private hospital. Rack up charges, turn partnership into employees, load up with debt then try to buff and turf to a bigger mug.
1 There will always be ways of extracting money unfairly from prudenty-run companies.
2 The bigger and more prudently-run the company, the bigger the cash pile and the more worthwhile it will be to find a novel way of extracting that cash.
3 The more aggressive end of capitalism will always be at least one step ahead of less aggressive capitalism, let alone the public sector, in finding those ways.
I'm not sure what the answer is.
It is one of several factors that have hollowed out our High Streets. Zombie retail chains renting shops from over leveraged property companies.
I don't disagree with private equity comments made on this thread but I think the High Street dying is very much down to the internet.
That is clearly a big factor but not the only one.
‘Complicated and expensive’: Burnham is right about the risks of nationalisation
Track record of Welsh Water shows changing ownership status is not the answer to all the woes in the utilities sector
Welsh Water is not state owned.
And would we really be worse off if zombie companies like Thames Water or (whisper it) a certain fairly large gas/leccy supplier were properly bankrupted and taken into state ownership without the enormous overhang of debt they have accumulated?
Whether they would be better managed by the government is a different matter - very probably not - but it's hard to imagine they would be much worse managed.
The utter contemptuous folly of the Blair Government was they didn't renationalised before the foreign shareholders ladelled off the cream and a huge amount of everything else too.
Renationalisation now is simply acquiring liability upon liability.
That's not really true: it's only assuming liabilities if bond holders are repaid.
If it goes into administration and the best offer is that the government acquires Thames Water at 20 cents on the pound for their debt, sending a clear message to owners of (and lenders to) privatized utilities: that you will not be bailed out by the government.
Do they actually have to pay the bond holders anything?
I understood that the terms of the public-private partnership meant that if Thames Water becomes insolvent then the state reaquires the assets and responsibilties for water and sewage provision. But does it actually take on the company and its liabilities or does it just leave Thames Water as a shell with no assets but huge debts? Does the state actually have to take on any of the liabilities?
I don't understand why the mad enthusiasm for government ownership.
Currently we have a profitable private business, but with debts it cannot service. All that needs to occur is for the shareholders to get wiped out, the debt to get written off, and the bond holders to either end up owning the business, or get to sell it for whatever they can get to someone else who fancies running a utility.
The only thing the government needs to do is to ensure that this restructuring is an orderly process, and doesn't result in dumb stuff like frontline staff going unpaid, resulting in supply outages. That's not beyond the whit of man.
Some capitalists (well, pension funds) will lose their shirts. Some other capitalists have run off with shirts for which they didn't pay. That's capitalism for you, especially if you buy or lend money to businesses without managing to read the balance sheet properly. None of this has any bearing on the actual supply of water to customers, nor yet does it provide any justification for nationalisation.
One of the things we can say with confidence is that nationalisation will make things worse. Just look at the shambles which is the MOD, and ask yourself if adding similar layers of government morons on top of another form of engineering activity* is likely to either improve services or save any money?
*modern warfare is mostly engineering.
If Thames Water is wiped out then returned to private ownership, how do you stop the same cycle happening again? Incidentally this does seem to be a growing problem across the private sector with companies (and football clubs) being bought up by private equity firms, often foreign-owned, and sucked dry.
Who will lend them money a second time to repeat the trick?
Assets could be sold and leased back; assets can be sold to the PE parent and leased back at exorbitant rates. It's how the modern world goes round.
The way PE goes round destroying viable businesses via asset stripping, financial engineering is a feature of late stage capitalism. I have seen it hollow out our local dentist, vet and private hospital. Rack up charges, turn partnership into employees, load up with debt then try to buff and turf to a bigger mug.
1 There will always be ways of extracting money unfairly from prudenty-run companies.
2 The bigger and more prudently-run the company, the bigger the cash pile and the more worthwhile it will be to find a novel way of extracting that cash.
3 The more aggressive end of capitalism will always be at least one step ahead of less aggressive capitalism, let alone the public sector, in finding those ways.
I'm not sure what the answer is.
It is one of several factors that have hollowed out our High Streets. Zombie retail chains renting shops from over leveraged property companies.
I don't disagree with private equity comments made on this thread but I think the High Street dying is very much down to the internet.
Out of town shopping centres and retail parks are more likely given the timescales, often exacerbated by well-meaning town centre parking restrictions, and even supermarkets killing off independent butchers, greengrocers and fishmongers if we go back far enough, although as you say, internet shopping is the latest aggravating factor but there it is more specialist shops that have been driven out.
I am having a drink this evening with a friend in a Chiswick pub. Two policemen have just come into the pub and asked me to step outside. I have stepped outside and they have threatened me because I tweeted about a councillor banning seating outside pubs in Chiswick. They admit on video (watch it!) that I did not break the law at all. .
This is his own stupid fault for meekly complying. He should have just told them to fuck off.
I suspect the original poster got what he wanted, going by the rest of his X feed
Someone posted it earlier, including the extraordinary claim that 13000 hours of government time was spent rehabilitating it. I wonder if it's 1300, plus Chinese whispers.
Given how useless they are it is likely to be accurate.
Probably 1,000 hours spent cleaning and the other 12,000 hours testing and monitoring for a couple of years, just in case.
Give £100k earners free childcare to boost economy, Labour urged Families should receive £7,000 vouchers to avoid punishing tax trap, think tank says
Parents earning more than £100,000 should get free childcare to help boost the economy, Labour has been urged.
A report by the Right-leaning Policy Exchange has called to replace free childcare hours with £7,000 vouchers for all families amid growing pressure to overhaul the “distorting” system.
It proposed scrapping 30 hours of free childcare in favour of a preloaded payment card for all parents regardless of income. It also proposed raising child benefit by £2,500 a year to £4,000 for children under two years old. ... Under the current system, families lose their entitlement to tax-free childcare and 30 free hours for 38 weeks of the year as soon as one parent’s annual salary goes above £100,000. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/tax/news/give-100k-earners-free-childcare-to-boost-economy/ (£££)
Good morning, everyone.
It's not free childcare, it's taxpayer-funded childcare.
And the way to solve a cliff-edge isn't to throw more money which we can't afford, it's to make something more gradual.
'Tough financial decisions' and throwing £7k at wealthy households do not go together.
Amazing how every greedy grasping arse rates it as free money when in fact some poor sod has to work their butt off to give these greedy shits the "free money". It used to be called theft. If you cannot afford children on £100K don't bloody expect others to pay for them.
‘Complicated and expensive’: Burnham is right about the risks of nationalisation
Track record of Welsh Water shows changing ownership status is not the answer to all the woes in the utilities sector
Welsh Water is not state owned.
And would we really be worse off if zombie companies like Thames Water or (whisper it) a certain fairly large gas/leccy supplier were properly bankrupted and taken into state ownership without the enormous overhang of debt they have accumulated?
Whether they would be better managed by the government is a different matter - very probably not - but it's hard to imagine they would be much worse managed.
The utter contemptuous folly of the Blair Government was they didn't renationalised before the foreign shareholders ladelled off the cream and a huge amount of everything else too.
Renationalisation now is simply acquiring liability upon liability.
That's not really true: it's only assuming liabilities if bond holders are repaid.
If it goes into administration and the best offer is that the government acquires Thames Water at 20 cents on the pound for their debt, sending a clear message to owners of (and lenders to) privatized utilities: that you will not be bailed out by the government.
Do they actually have to pay the bond holders anything?
I understood that the terms of the public-private partnership meant that if Thames Water becomes insolvent then the state reaquires the assets and responsibilties for water and sewage provision. But does it actually take on the company and its liabilities or does it just leave Thames Water as a shell with no assets but huge debts? Does the state actually have to take on any of the liabilities?
I don't understand why the mad enthusiasm for government ownership.
Currently we have a profitable private business, but with debts it cannot service. All that needs to occur is for the shareholders to get wiped out, the debt to get written off, and the bond holders to either end up owning the business, or get to sell it for whatever they can get to someone else who fancies running a utility.
The only thing the government needs to do is to ensure that this restructuring is an orderly process, and doesn't result in dumb stuff like frontline staff going unpaid, resulting in supply outages. That's not beyond the whit of man.
Some capitalists (well, pension funds) will lose their shirts. Some other capitalists have run off with shirts for which they didn't pay. That's capitalism for you, especially if you buy or lend money to businesses without managing to read the balance sheet properly. None of this has any bearing on the actual supply of water to customers, nor yet does it provide any justification for nationalisation.
One of the things we can say with confidence is that nationalisation will make things worse. Just look at the shambles which is the MOD, and ask yourself if adding similar layers of government morons on top of another form of engineering activity* is likely to either improve services or save any money?
*modern warfare is mostly engineering.
If Thames Water is wiped out then returned to private ownership, how do you stop the same cycle happening again? Incidentally this does seem to be a growing problem across the private sector with companies (and football clubs) being bought up by private equity firms, often foreign-owned, and sucked dry.
I'm not sure why I should care if it does? As I've noted, it's really just shirts being reallocated between various different colours of capitalist rather than anything more significant that affects the (highly regulated) underlying business.
So long as the regulator isn't so weak as to let them increase prices to fill in their self inflicted black holes, it's all a non-issue really.
‘Complicated and expensive’: Burnham is right about the risks of nationalisation
Track record of Welsh Water shows changing ownership status is not the answer to all the woes in the utilities sector
Welsh Water is not state owned.
And would we really be worse off if zombie companies like Thames Water or (whisper it) a certain fairly large gas/leccy supplier were properly bankrupted and taken into state ownership without the enormous overhang of debt they have accumulated?
Whether they would be better managed by the government is a different matter - very probably not - but it's hard to imagine they would be much worse managed.
The utter contemptuous folly of the Blair Government was they didn't renationalised before the foreign shareholders ladelled off the cream and a huge amount of everything else too.
Renationalisation now is simply acquiring liability upon liability.
That's not really true: it's only assuming liabilities if bond holders are repaid.
If it goes into administration and the best offer is that the government acquires Thames Water at 20 cents on the pound for their debt, sending a clear message to owners of (and lenders to) privatized utilities: that you will not be bailed out by the government.
Do they actually have to pay the bond holders anything?
I understood that the terms of the public-private partnership meant that if Thames Water becomes insolvent then the state reaquires the assets and responsibilties for water and sewage provision. But does it actually take on the company and its liabilities or does it just leave Thames Water as a shell with no assets but huge debts? Does the state actually have to take on any of the liabilities?
I don't understand why the mad enthusiasm for government ownership.
Currently we have a profitable private business, but with debts it cannot service. All that needs to occur is for the shareholders to get wiped out, the debt to get written off, and the bond holders to either end up owning the business, or get to sell it for whatever they can get to someone else who fancies running a utility.
The only thing the government needs to do is to ensure that this restructuring is an orderly process, and doesn't result in dumb stuff like frontline staff going unpaid, resulting in supply outages. That's not beyond the whit of man.
Some capitalists (well, pension funds) will lose their shirts. Some other capitalists have run off with shirts for which they didn't pay. That's capitalism for you, especially if you buy or lend money to businesses without managing to read the balance sheet properly. None of this has any bearing on the actual supply of water to customers, nor yet does it provide any justification for nationalisation.
One of the things we can say with confidence is that nationalisation will make things worse. Just look at the shambles which is the MOD, and ask yourself if adding similar layers of government morons on top of another form of engineering activity* is likely to either improve services or save any money?
*modern warfare is mostly engineering.
If Thames Water is wiped out then returned to private ownership, how do you stop the same cycle happening again? Incidentally this does seem to be a growing problem across the private sector with companies (and football clubs) being bought up by private equity firms, often foreign-owned, and sucked dry.
Who will lend them money a second time to repeat the trick?
Assets could be sold and leased back; assets can be sold to the PE parent and leased back at exorbitant rates. It's how the modern world goes round.
The way PE goes round destroying viable businesses via asset stripping, financial engineering is a feature of late stage capitalism. I have seen it hollow out our local dentist, vet and private hospital. Rack up charges, turn partnership into employees, load up with debt then try to buff and turf to a bigger mug.
1 There will always be ways of extracting money unfairly from prudenty-run companies.
2 The bigger and more prudently-run the company, the bigger the cash pile and the more worthwhile it will be to find a novel way of extracting that cash.
3 The more aggressive end of capitalism will always be at least one step ahead of less aggressive capitalism, let alone the public sector, in finding those ways.
I'm not sure what the answer is.
It is one of several factors that have hollowed out our High Streets. Zombie retail chains renting shops from over leveraged property companies.
I don't disagree with private equity comments made on this thread but I think the High Street dying is very much down to the internet.
MD I was in London recently and it was booming , fancy shops and cafes / restaurants etc everywhere. Nothing dying there for sure.
Erm, hasn't Waymo recently suspended its driverless taxis on freeways and recalled thousands of cars for software updates? American freeways are a lot less complicated than London streets.
So that means we should abandon driverless cars ? One incident on a freeway and a software recall for one manufacturer. Software updates on cars are nothing new.
Waymo are not the only manufacturer either.
The rollout in London is very slow and deliberate anyway.
The positioning from Burnhams team appears just anti driverless cars. The technology is evolving and the change is coming. We should embrace it
No, but it does mean we should stop regarding driverless cars as a panacea arriving any time soon. If we are serious, then perhaps we should look for constrained routes that might be suitable for driverless cars acting as shuttles.
It will kill hundreds of thousands of jobs and make a few billionaires even richer. People will have even less interaction with the world and get even dumber than they are now.
‘Complicated and expensive’: Burnham is right about the risks of nationalisation
Track record of Welsh Water shows changing ownership status is not the answer to all the woes in the utilities sector
Welsh Water is not state owned.
And would we really be worse off if zombie companies like Thames Water or (whisper it) a certain fairly large gas/leccy supplier were properly bankrupted and taken into state ownership without the enormous overhang of debt they have accumulated?
Whether they would be better managed by the government is a different matter - very probably not - but it's hard to imagine they would be much worse managed.
The utter contemptuous folly of the Blair Government was they didn't renationalised before the foreign shareholders ladelled off the cream and a huge amount of everything else too.
Renationalisation now is simply acquiring liability upon liability.
That's not really true: it's only assuming liabilities if bond holders are repaid.
If it goes into administration and the best offer is that the government acquires Thames Water at 20 cents on the pound for their debt, sending a clear message to owners of (and lenders to) privatized utilities: that you will not be bailed out by the government.
Do they actually have to pay the bond holders anything?
I understood that the terms of the public-private partnership meant that if Thames Water becomes insolvent then the state reaquires the assets and responsibilties for water and sewage provision. But does it actually take on the company and its liabilities or does it just leave Thames Water as a shell with no assets but huge debts? Does the state actually have to take on any of the liabilities?
I don't understand why the mad enthusiasm for government ownership.
Currently we have a profitable private business, but with debts it cannot service. All that needs to occur is for the shareholders to get wiped out, the debt to get written off, and the bond holders to either end up owning the business, or get to sell it for whatever they can get to someone else who fancies running a utility.
The only thing the government needs to do is to ensure that this restructuring is an orderly process, and doesn't result in dumb stuff like frontline staff going unpaid, resulting in supply outages. That's not beyond the whit of man.
Some capitalists (well, pension funds) will lose their shirts. Some other capitalists have run off with shirts for which they didn't pay. That's capitalism for you, especially if you buy or lend money to businesses without managing to read the balance sheet properly. None of this has any bearing on the actual supply of water to customers, nor yet does it provide any justification for nationalisation.
One of the things we can say with confidence is that nationalisation will make things worse. Just look at the shambles which is the MOD, and ask yourself if adding similar layers of government morons on top of another form of engineering activity* is likely to either improve services or save any money?
*modern warfare is mostly engineering.
If Thames Water is wiped out then returned to private ownership, how do you stop the same cycle happening again? Incidentally this does seem to be a growing problem across the private sector with companies (and football clubs) being bought up by private equity firms, often foreign-owned, and sucked dry.
Who will lend them money a second time to repeat the trick?
Assets could be sold and leased back; assets can be sold to the PE parent and leased back at exorbitant rates. It's how the modern world goes round.
The way PE goes round destroying viable businesses via asset stripping, financial engineering is a feature of late stage capitalism. I have seen it hollow out our local dentist, vet and private hospital. Rack up charges, turn partnership into employees, load up with debt then try to buff and turf to a bigger mug.
1 There will always be ways of extracting money unfairly from prudenty-run companies.
2 The bigger and more prudently-run the company, the bigger the cash pile and the more worthwhile it will be to find a novel way of extracting that cash.
3 The more aggressive end of capitalism will always be at least one step ahead of less aggressive capitalism, let alone the public sector, in finding those ways.
I'm not sure what the answer is.
It is one of several factors that have hollowed out our High Streets. Zombie retail chains renting shops from over leveraged property companies.
I don't disagree with private equity comments made on this thread but I think the High Street dying is very much down to the internet.
That is clearly a big factor but not the only one.
Large numbers of people don’t enjoy shopping and will take the quickest option to get it done. That’s it. That’s why the high street died and the retail park is not what it was.
‘Complicated and expensive’: Burnham is right about the risks of nationalisation
Track record of Welsh Water shows changing ownership status is not the answer to all the woes in the utilities sector
Welsh Water is not state owned.
And would we really be worse off if zombie companies like Thames Water or (whisper it) a certain fairly large gas/leccy supplier were properly bankrupted and taken into state ownership without the enormous overhang of debt they have accumulated?
Whether they would be better managed by the government is a different matter - very probably not - but it's hard to imagine they would be much worse managed.
The utter contemptuous folly of the Blair Government was they didn't renationalised before the foreign shareholders ladelled off the cream and a huge amount of everything else too.
Renationalisation now is simply acquiring liability upon liability.
That's not really true: it's only assuming liabilities if bond holders are repaid.
If it goes into administration and the best offer is that the government acquires Thames Water at 20 cents on the pound for their debt, sending a clear message to owners of (and lenders to) privatized utilities: that you will not be bailed out by the government.
Do they actually have to pay the bond holders anything?
I understood that the terms of the public-private partnership meant that if Thames Water becomes insolvent then the state reaquires the assets and responsibilties for water and sewage provision. But does it actually take on the company and its liabilities or does it just leave Thames Water as a shell with no assets but huge debts? Does the state actually have to take on any of the liabilities?
I don't understand why the mad enthusiasm for government ownership.
Currently we have a profitable private business, but with debts it cannot service. All that needs to occur is for the shareholders to get wiped out, the debt to get written off, and the bond holders to either end up owning the business, or get to sell it for whatever they can get to someone else who fancies running a utility.
The only thing the government needs to do is to ensure that this restructuring is an orderly process, and doesn't result in dumb stuff like frontline staff going unpaid, resulting in supply outages. That's not beyond the whit of man.
Some capitalists (well, pension funds) will lose their shirts. Some other capitalists have run off with shirts for which they didn't pay. That's capitalism for you, especially if you buy or lend money to businesses without managing to read the balance sheet properly. None of this has any bearing on the actual supply of water to customers, nor yet does it provide any justification for nationalisation.
One of the things we can say with confidence is that nationalisation will make things worse. Just look at the shambles which is the MOD, and ask yourself if adding similar layers of government morons on top of another form of engineering activity* is likely to either improve services or save any money?
*modern warfare is mostly engineering.
If Thames Water is wiped out then returned to private ownership, how do you stop the same cycle happening again? Incidentally this does seem to be a growing problem across the private sector with companies (and football clubs) being bought up by private equity firms, often foreign-owned, and sucked dry.
Who will lend them money a second time to repeat the trick?
Assets could be sold and leased back; assets can be sold to the PE parent and leased back at exorbitant rates. It's how the modern world goes round.
The way PE goes round destroying viable businesses via asset stripping, financial engineering is a feature of late stage capitalism. I have seen it hollow out our local dentist, vet and private hospital. Rack up charges, turn partnership into employees, load up with debt then try to buff and turf to a bigger mug.
1 There will always be ways of extracting money unfairly from prudenty-run companies.
2 The bigger and more prudently-run the company, the bigger the cash pile and the more worthwhile it will be to find a novel way of extracting that cash.
3 The more aggressive end of capitalism will always be at least one step ahead of less aggressive capitalism, let alone the public sector, in finding those ways.
I'm not sure what the answer is.
It is one of several factors that have hollowed out our High Streets. Zombie retail chains renting shops from over leveraged property companies.
I don't disagree with private equity comments made on this thread but I think the High Street dying is very much down to the internet.
MD I was in London recently and it was booming , fancy shops and cafes / restaurants etc everywhere. Nothing dying there for sure.
Largely, perhaps, the benefits of always having money for public transport projects, a disproportionate number of museums and art galleries, and so on and so forth.
‘Complicated and expensive’: Burnham is right about the risks of nationalisation
Track record of Welsh Water shows changing ownership status is not the answer to all the woes in the utilities sector
Welsh Water is not state owned.
And would we really be worse off if zombie companies like Thames Water or (whisper it) a certain fairly large gas/leccy supplier were properly bankrupted and taken into state ownership without the enormous overhang of debt they have accumulated?
Whether they would be better managed by the government is a different matter - very probably not - but it's hard to imagine they would be much worse managed.
The utter contemptuous folly of the Blair Government was they didn't renationalised before the foreign shareholders ladelled off the cream and a huge amount of everything else too.
Renationalisation now is simply acquiring liability upon liability.
That's not really true: it's only assuming liabilities if bond holders are repaid.
If it goes into administration and the best offer is that the government acquires Thames Water at 20 cents on the pound for their debt, sending a clear message to owners of (and lenders to) privatized utilities: that you will not be bailed out by the government.
Do they actually have to pay the bond holders anything?
I understood that the terms of the public-private partnership meant that if Thames Water becomes insolvent then the state reaquires the assets and responsibilties for water and sewage provision. But does it actually take on the company and its liabilities or does it just leave Thames Water as a shell with no assets but huge debts? Does the state actually have to take on any of the liabilities?
I don't understand why the mad enthusiasm for government ownership.
Currently we have a profitable private business, but with debts it cannot service. All that needs to occur is for the shareholders to get wiped out, the debt to get written off, and the bond holders to either end up owning the business, or get to sell it for whatever they can get to someone else who fancies running a utility.
The only thing the government needs to do is to ensure that this restructuring is an orderly process, and doesn't result in dumb stuff like frontline staff going unpaid, resulting in supply outages. That's not beyond the whit of man.
Some capitalists (well, pension funds) will lose their shirts. Some other capitalists have run off with shirts for which they didn't pay. That's capitalism for you, especially if you buy or lend money to businesses without managing to read the balance sheet properly. None of this has any bearing on the actual supply of water to customers, nor yet does it provide any justification for nationalisation.
One of the things we can say with confidence is that nationalisation will make things worse. Just look at the shambles which is the MOD, and ask yourself if adding similar layers of government morons on top of another form of engineering activity* is likely to either improve services or save any money?
*modern warfare is mostly engineering.
If Thames Water is wiped out then returned to private ownership, how do you stop the same cycle happening again? Incidentally this does seem to be a growing problem across the private sector with companies (and football clubs) being bought up by private equity firms, often foreign-owned, and sucked dry.
Who will lend them money a second time to repeat the trick?
Assets could be sold and leased back; assets can be sold to the PE parent and leased back at exorbitant rates. It's how the modern world goes round.
The way PE goes round destroying viable businesses via asset stripping, financial engineering is a feature of late stage capitalism. I have seen it hollow out our local dentist, vet and private hospital. Rack up charges, turn partnership into employees, load up with debt then try to buff and turf to a bigger mug.
1 There will always be ways of extracting money unfairly from prudenty-run companies.
2 The bigger and more prudently-run the company, the bigger the cash pile and the more worthwhile it will be to find a novel way of extracting that cash.
3 The more aggressive end of capitalism will always be at least one step ahead of less aggressive capitalism, let alone the public sector, in finding those ways.
I'm not sure what the answer is.
It is one of several factors that have hollowed out our High Streets. Zombie retail chains renting shops from over leveraged property companies.
I don't disagree with private equity comments made on this thread but I think the High Street dying is very much down to the internet.
That is clearly a big factor but not the only one.
Large numbers of people don’t enjoy shopping and will take the quickest option to get it done. That’s it. That’s why the high street died and the retail park is not what it was.
Also compared to Amazon, the high street offers a limited range - there has been a number of times recently where having gone round the shops I've ended up back online because even in my reasonably sized town I couldn't find what I wanted.
Previously you would compromise and buy the best of a bad selection but you don't need to nowadays.
Erm, hasn't Waymo recently suspended its driverless taxis on freeways and recalled thousands of cars for software updates? American freeways are a lot less complicated than London streets.
So that means we should abandon driverless cars ? One incident on a freeway and a software recall for one manufacturer. Software updates on cars are nothing new.
Waymo are not the only manufacturer either.
The rollout in London is very slow and deliberate anyway.
The positioning from Burnhams team appears just anti driverless cars. The technology is evolving and the change is coming. We should embrace it
Oh, I don't know - we could end up with a tourist attraction like travelling in rickshaws.
‘Complicated and expensive’: Burnham is right about the risks of nationalisation
Track record of Welsh Water shows changing ownership status is not the answer to all the woes in the utilities sector
Welsh Water is not state owned.
And would we really be worse off if zombie companies like Thames Water or (whisper it) a certain fairly large gas/leccy supplier were properly bankrupted and taken into state ownership without the enormous overhang of debt they have accumulated?
Whether they would be better managed by the government is a different matter - very probably not - but it's hard to imagine they would be much worse managed.
The utter contemptuous folly of the Blair Government was they didn't renationalised before the foreign shareholders ladelled off the cream and a huge amount of everything else too.
Renationalisation now is simply acquiring liability upon liability.
That's not really true: it's only assuming liabilities if bond holders are repaid.
If it goes into administration and the best offer is that the government acquires Thames Water at 20 cents on the pound for their debt, sending a clear message to owners of (and lenders to) privatized utilities: that you will not be bailed out by the government.
Do they actually have to pay the bond holders anything?
I understood that the terms of the public-private partnership meant that if Thames Water becomes insolvent then the state reaquires the assets and responsibilties for water and sewage provision. But does it actually take on the company and its liabilities or does it just leave Thames Water as a shell with no assets but huge debts? Does the state actually have to take on any of the liabilities?
I don't understand why the mad enthusiasm for government ownership.
Currently we have a profitable private business, but with debts it cannot service. All that needs to occur is for the shareholders to get wiped out, the debt to get written off, and the bond holders to either end up owning the business, or get to sell it for whatever they can get to someone else who fancies running a utility.
The only thing the government needs to do is to ensure that this restructuring is an orderly process, and doesn't result in dumb stuff like frontline staff going unpaid, resulting in supply outages. That's not beyond the whit of man.
Some capitalists (well, pension funds) will lose their shirts. Some other capitalists have run off with shirts for which they didn't pay. That's capitalism for you, especially if you buy or lend money to businesses without managing to read the balance sheet properly. None of this has any bearing on the actual supply of water to customers, nor yet does it provide any justification for nationalisation.
One of the things we can say with confidence is that nationalisation will make things worse. Just look at the shambles which is the MOD, and ask yourself if adding similar layers of government morons on top of another form of engineering activity* is likely to either improve services or save any money?
*modern warfare is mostly engineering.
If Thames Water is wiped out then returned to private ownership, how do you stop the same cycle happening again? Incidentally this does seem to be a growing problem across the private sector with companies (and football clubs) being bought up by private equity firms, often foreign-owned, and sucked dry.
Who will lend them money a second time to repeat the trick?
Assets could be sold and leased back; assets can be sold to the PE parent and leased back at exorbitant rates. It's how the modern world goes round.
The way PE goes round destroying viable businesses via asset stripping, financial engineering is a feature of late stage capitalism. I have seen it hollow out our local dentist, vet and private hospital. Rack up charges, turn partnership into employees, load up with debt then try to buff and turf to a bigger mug.
1 There will always be ways of extracting money unfairly from prudenty-run companies.
2 The bigger and more prudently-run the company, the bigger the cash pile and the more worthwhile it will be to find a novel way of extracting that cash.
3 The more aggressive end of capitalism will always be at least one step ahead of less aggressive capitalism, let alone the public sector, in finding those ways.
I'm not sure what the answer is.
It is one of several factors that have hollowed out our High Streets. Zombie retail chains renting shops from over leveraged property companies.
I don't disagree with private equity comments made on this thread but I think the High Street dying is very much down to the internet.
One of the main reasons for the death of retail stores is the lack of stock. A massive Amazon warehouse can stock everything in every size and colour. It will have it delivered to your home within 24 hours. High street retail is now a compromise on what you are looking for; Amazon/the internet is not.
‘Complicated and expensive’: Burnham is right about the risks of nationalisation
Track record of Welsh Water shows changing ownership status is not the answer to all the woes in the utilities sector
Welsh Water is not state owned.
And would we really be worse off if zombie companies like Thames Water or (whisper it) a certain fairly large gas/leccy supplier were properly bankrupted and taken into state ownership without the enormous overhang of debt they have accumulated?
Whether they would be better managed by the government is a different matter - very probably not - but it's hard to imagine they would be much worse managed.
The utter contemptuous folly of the Blair Government was they didn't renationalised before the foreign shareholders ladelled off the cream and a huge amount of everything else too.
Renationalisation now is simply acquiring liability upon liability.
That's not really true: it's only assuming liabilities if bond holders are repaid.
If it goes into administration and the best offer is that the government acquires Thames Water at 20 cents on the pound for their debt, sending a clear message to owners of (and lenders to) privatized utilities: that you will not be bailed out by the government.
Do they actually have to pay the bond holders anything?
I understood that the terms of the public-private partnership meant that if Thames Water becomes insolvent then the state reaquires the assets and responsibilties for water and sewage provision. But does it actually take on the company and its liabilities or does it just leave Thames Water as a shell with no assets but huge debts? Does the state actually have to take on any of the liabilities?
I don't understand why the mad enthusiasm for government ownership.
Currently we have a profitable private business, but with debts it cannot service. All that needs to occur is for the shareholders to get wiped out, the debt to get written off, and the bond holders to either end up owning the business, or get to sell it for whatever they can get to someone else who fancies running a utility.
The only thing the government needs to do is to ensure that this restructuring is an orderly process, and doesn't result in dumb stuff like frontline staff going unpaid, resulting in supply outages. That's not beyond the whit of man.
Some capitalists (well, pension funds) will lose their shirts. Some other capitalists have run off with shirts for which they didn't pay. That's capitalism for you, especially if you buy or lend money to businesses without managing to read the balance sheet properly. None of this has any bearing on the actual supply of water to customers, nor yet does it provide any justification for nationalisation.
One of the things we can say with confidence is that nationalisation will make things worse. Just look at the shambles which is the MOD, and ask yourself if adding similar layers of government morons on top of another form of engineering activity* is likely to either improve services or save any money?
*modern warfare is mostly engineering.
If Thames Water is wiped out then returned to private ownership, how do you stop the same cycle happening again? Incidentally this does seem to be a growing problem across the private sector with companies (and football clubs) being bought up by private equity firms, often foreign-owned, and sucked dry.
Who will lend them money a second time to repeat the trick?
Assets could be sold and leased back; assets can be sold to the PE parent and leased back at exorbitant rates. It's how the modern world goes round.
The way PE goes round destroying viable businesses via asset stripping, financial engineering is a feature of late stage capitalism. I have seen it hollow out our local dentist, vet and private hospital. Rack up charges, turn partnership into employees, load up with debt then try to buff and turf to a bigger mug.
1 There will always be ways of extracting money unfairly from prudenty-run companies.
2 The bigger and more prudently-run the company, the bigger the cash pile and the more worthwhile it will be to find a novel way of extracting that cash.
3 The more aggressive end of capitalism will always be at least one step ahead of less aggressive capitalism, let alone the public sector, in finding those ways.
I'm not sure what the answer is.
It is one of several factors that have hollowed out our High Streets. Zombie retail chains renting shops from over leveraged property companies.
I don't disagree with private equity comments made on this thread but I think the High Street dying is very much down to the internet.
Out of town shopping centres and retail parks are more likely given the timescales, often exacerbated by well-meaning town centre parking restrictions, and even supermarkets killing off independent butchers, greengrocers and fishmongers if we go back far enough, although as you say, internet shopping is the latest aggravating factor but there it is more specialist shops that have been driven out.
Question is whether there's a level of rent which would leave space for small retail businesses to thrive. If so, that ought to be where the willing landlord/willing tennant equilibrium ought to settle... shouldn't it?
‘Complicated and expensive’: Burnham is right about the risks of nationalisation
Track record of Welsh Water shows changing ownership status is not the answer to all the woes in the utilities sector
Welsh Water is not state owned.
And would we really be worse off if zombie companies like Thames Water or (whisper it) a certain fairly large gas/leccy supplier were properly bankrupted and taken into state ownership without the enormous overhang of debt they have accumulated?
Whether they would be better managed by the government is a different matter - very probably not - but it's hard to imagine they would be much worse managed.
The utter contemptuous folly of the Blair Government was they didn't renationalised before the foreign shareholders ladelled off the cream and a huge amount of everything else too.
Renationalisation now is simply acquiring liability upon liability.
That's not really true: it's only assuming liabilities if bond holders are repaid.
If it goes into administration and the best offer is that the government acquires Thames Water at 20 cents on the pound for their debt, sending a clear message to owners of (and lenders to) privatized utilities: that you will not be bailed out by the government.
Do they actually have to pay the bond holders anything?
I understood that the terms of the public-private partnership meant that if Thames Water becomes insolvent then the state reaquires the assets and responsibilties for water and sewage provision. But does it actually take on the company and its liabilities or does it just leave Thames Water as a shell with no assets but huge debts? Does the state actually have to take on any of the liabilities?
I don't understand why the mad enthusiasm for government ownership.
Currently we have a profitable private business, but with debts it cannot service. All that needs to occur is for the shareholders to get wiped out, the debt to get written off, and the bond holders to either end up owning the business, or get to sell it for whatever they can get to someone else who fancies running a utility.
The only thing the government needs to do is to ensure that this restructuring is an orderly process, and doesn't result in dumb stuff like frontline staff going unpaid, resulting in supply outages. That's not beyond the whit of man.
Some capitalists (well, pension funds) will lose their shirts. Some other capitalists have run off with shirts for which they didn't pay. That's capitalism for you, especially if you buy or lend money to businesses without managing to read the balance sheet properly. None of this has any bearing on the actual supply of water to customers, nor yet does it provide any justification for nationalisation.
One of the things we can say with confidence is that nationalisation will make things worse. Just look at the shambles which is the MOD, and ask yourself if adding similar layers of government morons on top of another form of engineering activity* is likely to either improve services or save any money?
*modern warfare is mostly engineering.
If Thames Water is wiped out then returned to private ownership, how do you stop the same cycle happening again? Incidentally this does seem to be a growing problem across the private sector with companies (and football clubs) being bought up by private equity firms, often foreign-owned, and sucked dry.
Who will lend them money a second time to repeat the trick?
Assets could be sold and leased back; assets can be sold to the PE parent and leased back at exorbitant rates. It's how the modern world goes round.
The way PE goes round destroying viable businesses via asset stripping, financial engineering is a feature of late stage capitalism. I have seen it hollow out our local dentist, vet and private hospital. Rack up charges, turn partnership into employees, load up with debt then try to buff and turf to a bigger mug.
1 There will always be ways of extracting money unfairly from prudenty-run companies.
2 The bigger and more prudently-run the company, the bigger the cash pile and the more worthwhile it will be to find a novel way of extracting that cash.
3 The more aggressive end of capitalism will always be at least one step ahead of less aggressive capitalism, let alone the public sector, in finding those ways.
I'm not sure what the answer is.
It is one of several factors that have hollowed out our High Streets. Zombie retail chains renting shops from over leveraged property companies.
I don't disagree with private equity comments made on this thread but I think the High Street dying is very much down to the internet.
One of the main reasons for the death of retail stores is the lack of stock. A massive Amazon warehouse can stock everything in every size and colour. It will have it delivered to your home within 24 hours. High street retail is now a compromise on what you are looking for; Amazon/the internet is not.
I'm less likely to care too much about that sort of thing, the problem I have with irl shopping is it costs me a minimum of a fiver and a couple of hours travelling. Staying at home browsing the internet does not. And if I decide to do something else or have to wait for a parcel, I can do that.
‘Complicated and expensive’: Burnham is right about the risks of nationalisation
Track record of Welsh Water shows changing ownership status is not the answer to all the woes in the utilities sector
Welsh Water is not state owned.
And would we really be worse off if zombie companies like Thames Water or (whisper it) a certain fairly large gas/leccy supplier were properly bankrupted and taken into state ownership without the enormous overhang of debt they have accumulated?
Whether they would be better managed by the government is a different matter - very probably not - but it's hard to imagine they would be much worse managed.
The utter contemptuous folly of the Blair Government was they didn't renationalised before the foreign shareholders ladelled off the cream and a huge amount of everything else too.
Renationalisation now is simply acquiring liability upon liability.
That's not really true: it's only assuming liabilities if bond holders are repaid.
If it goes into administration and the best offer is that the government acquires Thames Water at 20 cents on the pound for their debt, sending a clear message to owners of (and lenders to) privatized utilities: that you will not be bailed out by the government.
Do they actually have to pay the bond holders anything?
I understood that the terms of the public-private partnership meant that if Thames Water becomes insolvent then the state reaquires the assets and responsibilties for water and sewage provision. But does it actually take on the company and its liabilities or does it just leave Thames Water as a shell with no assets but huge debts? Does the state actually have to take on any of the liabilities?
I don't understand why the mad enthusiasm for government ownership.
Currently we have a profitable private business, but with debts it cannot service. All that needs to occur is for the shareholders to get wiped out, the debt to get written off, and the bond holders to either end up owning the business, or get to sell it for whatever they can get to someone else who fancies running a utility.
The only thing the government needs to do is to ensure that this restructuring is an orderly process, and doesn't result in dumb stuff like frontline staff going unpaid, resulting in supply outages. That's not beyond the whit of man.
Some capitalists (well, pension funds) will lose their shirts. Some other capitalists have run off with shirts for which they didn't pay. That's capitalism for you, especially if you buy or lend money to businesses without managing to read the balance sheet properly. None of this has any bearing on the actual supply of water to customers, nor yet does it provide any justification for nationalisation.
One of the things we can say with confidence is that nationalisation will make things worse. Just look at the shambles which is the MOD, and ask yourself if adding similar layers of government morons on top of another form of engineering activity* is likely to either improve services or save any money?
*modern warfare is mostly engineering.
If Thames Water is wiped out then returned to private ownership, how do you stop the same cycle happening again? Incidentally this does seem to be a growing problem across the private sector with companies (and football clubs) being bought up by private equity firms, often foreign-owned, and sucked dry.
Who will lend them money a second time to repeat the trick?
Assets could be sold and leased back; assets can be sold to the PE parent and leased back at exorbitant rates. It's how the modern world goes round.
The way PE goes round destroying viable businesses via asset stripping, financial engineering is a feature of late stage capitalism. I have seen it hollow out our local dentist, vet and private hospital. Rack up charges, turn partnership into employees, load up with debt then try to buff and turf to a bigger mug.
1 There will always be ways of extracting money unfairly from prudenty-run companies.
2 The bigger and more prudently-run the company, the bigger the cash pile and the more worthwhile it will be to find a novel way of extracting that cash.
3 The more aggressive end of capitalism will always be at least one step ahead of less aggressive capitalism, let alone the public sector, in finding those ways.
I'm not sure what the answer is.
It is one of several factors that have hollowed out our High Streets. Zombie retail chains renting shops from over leveraged property companies.
I don't disagree with private equity comments made on this thread but I think the High Street dying is very much down to the internet.
Out of town shopping centres and retail parks are more likely given the timescales, often exacerbated by well-meaning town centre parking restrictions, and even supermarkets killing off independent butchers, greengrocers and fishmongers if we go back far enough, although as you say, internet shopping is the latest aggravating factor but there it is more specialist shops that have been driven out.
Question is whether there's a level of rent which would leave space for small retail businesses to thrive. If so, that ought to be where the willing landlord/willing tennant equilibrium ought to settle... shouldn't it?
Perhaps but that ignores the greater buying power of supermarkets and internet giants that mean Tesco can sell jam cheaper than your local one-shop grocer can buy it. Some small shops near me have been turned into flats.
Erm, hasn't Waymo recently suspended its driverless taxis on freeways and recalled thousands of cars for software updates? American freeways are a lot less complicated than London streets.
So that means we should abandon driverless cars ? One incident on a freeway and a software recall for one manufacturer. Software updates on cars are nothing new.
Waymo are not the only manufacturer either.
The rollout in London is very slow and deliberate anyway.
The positioning from Burnhams team appears just anti driverless cars. The technology is evolving and the change is coming. We should embrace it
No, but it does mean we should stop regarding driverless cars as a panacea arriving any time soon. If we are serious, then perhaps we should look for constrained routes that might be suitable for driverless cars acting as shuttles.
They’ve already arrived in other parts of the world. We need to be serious and not rowing back on it because of some concern about taxi drivers jobs.
There’s also plenty of evidence, early stage mind, that driverless cars are safer than cars with drivers.
You either embrace new technology and make it work or you don’t and get left behind.
‘Complicated and expensive’: Burnham is right about the risks of nationalisation
Track record of Welsh Water shows changing ownership status is not the answer to all the woes in the utilities sector
Welsh Water is not state owned.
And would we really be worse off if zombie companies like Thames Water or (whisper it) a certain fairly large gas/leccy supplier were properly bankrupted and taken into state ownership without the enormous overhang of debt they have accumulated?
Whether they would be better managed by the government is a different matter - very probably not - but it's hard to imagine they would be much worse managed.
The utter contemptuous folly of the Blair Government was they didn't renationalised before the foreign shareholders ladelled off the cream and a huge amount of everything else too.
Renationalisation now is simply acquiring liability upon liability.
That's not really true: it's only assuming liabilities if bond holders are repaid.
If it goes into administration and the best offer is that the government acquires Thames Water at 20 cents on the pound for their debt, sending a clear message to owners of (and lenders to) privatized utilities: that you will not be bailed out by the government.
Do they actually have to pay the bond holders anything?
I understood that the terms of the public-private partnership meant that if Thames Water becomes insolvent then the state reaquires the assets and responsibilties for water and sewage provision. But does it actually take on the company and its liabilities or does it just leave Thames Water as a shell with no assets but huge debts? Does the state actually have to take on any of the liabilities?
I don't understand why the mad enthusiasm for government ownership.
Currently we have a profitable private business, but with debts it cannot service. All that needs to occur is for the shareholders to get wiped out, the debt to get written off, and the bond holders to either end up owning the business, or get to sell it for whatever they can get to someone else who fancies running a utility.
The only thing the government needs to do is to ensure that this restructuring is an orderly process, and doesn't result in dumb stuff like frontline staff going unpaid, resulting in supply outages. That's not beyond the whit of man.
Some capitalists (well, pension funds) will lose their shirts. Some other capitalists have run off with shirts for which they didn't pay. That's capitalism for you, especially if you buy or lend money to businesses without managing to read the balance sheet properly. None of this has any bearing on the actual supply of water to customers, nor yet does it provide any justification for nationalisation.
One of the things we can say with confidence is that nationalisation will make things worse. Just look at the shambles which is the MOD, and ask yourself if adding similar layers of government morons on top of another form of engineering activity* is likely to either improve services or save any money?
*modern warfare is mostly engineering.
If Thames Water is wiped out then returned to private ownership, how do you stop the same cycle happening again? Incidentally this does seem to be a growing problem across the private sector with companies (and football clubs) being bought up by private equity firms, often foreign-owned, and sucked dry.
Who will lend them money a second time to repeat the trick?
Assets could be sold and leased back; assets can be sold to the PE parent and leased back at exorbitant rates. It's how the modern world goes round.
The way PE goes round destroying viable businesses via asset stripping, financial engineering is a feature of late stage capitalism. I have seen it hollow out our local dentist, vet and private hospital. Rack up charges, turn partnership into employees, load up with debt then try to buff and turf to a bigger mug.
1 There will always be ways of extracting money unfairly from prudenty-run companies.
2 The bigger and more prudently-run the company, the bigger the cash pile and the more worthwhile it will be to find a novel way of extracting that cash.
3 The more aggressive end of capitalism will always be at least one step ahead of less aggressive capitalism, let alone the public sector, in finding those ways.
I'm not sure what the answer is.
It is one of several factors that have hollowed out our High Streets. Zombie retail chains renting shops from over leveraged property companies.
I don't disagree with private equity comments made on this thread but I think the High Street dying is very much down to the internet.
MD I was in London recently and it was booming , fancy shops and cafes / restaurants etc everywhere. Nothing dying there for sure.
Largely, perhaps, the benefits of always having money for public transport projects, a disproportionate number of museums and art galleries, and so on and so forth.
Yes it gets all the investment, most public money spent there and all the benefits that that brings, not rocket science.
Erm, hasn't Waymo recently suspended its driverless taxis on freeways and recalled thousands of cars for software updates? American freeways are a lot less complicated than London streets.
So that means we should abandon driverless cars ? One incident on a freeway and a software recall for one manufacturer. Software updates on cars are nothing new.
Waymo are not the only manufacturer either.
The rollout in London is very slow and deliberate anyway.
The positioning from Burnhams team appears just anti driverless cars. The technology is evolving and the change is coming. We should embrace it
Oh, I don't know - we could end up with a tourist attraction like travelling in rickshaws.
Erm, hasn't Waymo recently suspended its driverless taxis on freeways and recalled thousands of cars for software updates? American freeways are a lot less complicated than London streets.
So that means we should abandon driverless cars ? One incident on a freeway and a software recall for one manufacturer. Software updates on cars are nothing new.
Waymo are not the only manufacturer either.
The rollout in London is very slow and deliberate anyway.
The positioning from Burnhams team appears just anti driverless cars. The technology is evolving and the change is coming. We should embrace it
No, but it does mean we should stop regarding driverless cars as a panacea arriving any time soon. If we are serious, then perhaps we should look for constrained routes that might be suitable for driverless cars acting as shuttles.
They’ve already arrived in other parts of the world. We need to be serious and not rowing back on it because of some concern about taxi drivers jobs.
There’s also plenty of evidence, early stage mind, that driverless cars are safer than cars with drivers.
You either embrace new technology and make it work or you don’t and get left behind.
And private spaces are superior to forced public interaction.
Erm, hasn't Waymo recently suspended its driverless taxis on freeways and recalled thousands of cars for software updates? American freeways are a lot less complicated than London streets.
So that means we should abandon driverless cars ? One incident on a freeway and a software recall for one manufacturer. Software updates on cars are nothing new.
Waymo are not the only manufacturer either.
The rollout in London is very slow and deliberate anyway.
The positioning from Burnhams team appears just anti driverless cars. The technology is evolving and the change is coming. We should embrace it
No, but it does mean we should stop regarding driverless cars as a panacea arriving any time soon. If we are serious, then perhaps we should look for constrained routes that might be suitable for driverless cars acting as shuttles.
They’ve already arrived in other parts of the world. We need to be serious and not rowing back on it because of some concern about taxi drivers jobs.
There’s also plenty of evidence, early stage mind, that driverless cars are safer than cars with drivers.
You either embrace new technology and make it work or you don’t and get left behind.
And private spaces are superior to forced public interaction.
But where would journalists and former contributors to this site get their news stories?
Erm, hasn't Waymo recently suspended its driverless taxis on freeways and recalled thousands of cars for software updates? American freeways are a lot less complicated than London streets.
So that means we should abandon driverless cars ? One incident on a freeway and a software recall for one manufacturer. Software updates on cars are nothing new.
Waymo are not the only manufacturer either.
The rollout in London is very slow and deliberate anyway.
The positioning from Burnhams team appears just anti driverless cars. The technology is evolving and the change is coming. We should embrace it
No, but it does mean we should stop regarding driverless cars as a panacea arriving any time soon. If we are serious, then perhaps we should look for constrained routes that might be suitable for driverless cars acting as shuttles.
They’ve already arrived in other parts of the world. We need to be serious and not rowing back on it because of some concern about taxi drivers jobs.
There’s also plenty of evidence, early stage mind, that driverless cars are safer than cars with drivers.
You either embrace new technology and make it work or you don’t and get left behind.
Taz, I have to disagree, just look at us blindly following US ideas and ending up a shit hole like there with Europe keeping to their own ways , places are nicer , shopping areas lovely , no litter , etc. Meanwhile we have shitty cookie cutter concrete lookalike shitholes in the main.
‘Complicated and expensive’: Burnham is right about the risks of nationalisation
Track record of Welsh Water shows changing ownership status is not the answer to all the woes in the utilities sector
Welsh Water is not state owned.
And would we really be worse off if zombie companies like Thames Water or (whisper it) a certain fairly large gas/leccy supplier were properly bankrupted and taken into state ownership without the enormous overhang of debt they have accumulated?
Whether they would be better managed by the government is a different matter - very probably not - but it's hard to imagine they would be much worse managed.
The utter contemptuous folly of the Blair Government was they didn't renationalised before the foreign shareholders ladelled off the cream and a huge amount of everything else too.
Renationalisation now is simply acquiring liability upon liability.
That's not really true: it's only assuming liabilities if bond holders are repaid.
If it goes into administration and the best offer is that the government acquires Thames Water at 20 cents on the pound for their debt, sending a clear message to owners of (and lenders to) privatized utilities: that you will not be bailed out by the government.
Do they actually have to pay the bond holders anything?
I understood that the terms of the public-private partnership meant that if Thames Water becomes insolvent then the state reaquires the assets and responsibilties for water and sewage provision. But does it actually take on the company and its liabilities or does it just leave Thames Water as a shell with no assets but huge debts? Does the state actually have to take on any of the liabilities?
I don't understand why the mad enthusiasm for government ownership.
Currently we have a profitable private business, but with debts it cannot service. All that needs to occur is for the shareholders to get wiped out, the debt to get written off, and the bond holders to either end up owning the business, or get to sell it for whatever they can get to someone else who fancies running a utility.
The only thing the government needs to do is to ensure that this restructuring is an orderly process, and doesn't result in dumb stuff like frontline staff going unpaid, resulting in supply outages. That's not beyond the whit of man.
Some capitalists (well, pension funds) will lose their shirts. Some other capitalists have run off with shirts for which they didn't pay. That's capitalism for you, especially if you buy or lend money to businesses without managing to read the balance sheet properly. None of this has any bearing on the actual supply of water to customers, nor yet does it provide any justification for nationalisation.
One of the things we can say with confidence is that nationalisation will make things worse. Just look at the shambles which is the MOD, and ask yourself if adding similar layers of government morons on top of another form of engineering activity* is likely to either improve services or save any money?
*modern warfare is mostly engineering.
If Thames Water is wiped out then returned to private ownership, how do you stop the same cycle happening again? Incidentally this does seem to be a growing problem across the private sector with companies (and football clubs) being bought up by private equity firms, often foreign-owned, and sucked dry.
Who will lend them money a second time to repeat the trick?
Assets could be sold and leased back; assets can be sold to the PE parent and leased back at exorbitant rates. It's how the modern world goes round.
The way PE goes round destroying viable businesses via asset stripping, financial engineering is a feature of late stage capitalism. I have seen it hollow out our local dentist, vet and private hospital. Rack up charges, turn partnership into employees, load up with debt then try to buff and turf to a bigger mug.
1 There will always be ways of extracting money unfairly from prudenty-run companies.
2 The bigger and more prudently-run the company, the bigger the cash pile and the more worthwhile it will be to find a novel way of extracting that cash.
3 The more aggressive end of capitalism will always be at least one step ahead of less aggressive capitalism, let alone the public sector, in finding those ways.
I'm not sure what the answer is.
Indeed, although Gordon Brown's tax changes are often blamed for the death of private sector defined benefit pension schemes, people forget that in the 1980s, many corporate takeovers were driven by the desire to raid pension funds, both here and in the United States.
Browns changes certainly were the final nail in the coffin. Certainly the one I was a part of at the time. But it was a long journey.
But lessons were supposed to be learned after Maxwell and nothing happened. Before then companies could cream off surpluses.
Pensions in this country have been poorly served by politicians of all parties. One noble exception is Steve Webb.
'Burnham set to ditch Palantir from NHS Left-wing critics have called for deal to be axed over US tech giant’s work with Israeli Defense Forces and US immigration'
Good. Not because of any IDF or US immigration work, and not because Peter Thiel is a psychopath who would burn down the world if he could make a buck from it, but simply because Palantir is not British. I am tired of the UK government treating UK assets as something to be sold off to any passing foreigner with a big chequebook and fashionable nostrums. "Buy AI or the Singularity will get you! Give me billions!" Just bugger off and try to grow your eyebrows back, you sweaty T-1000.
Setting in place and using structures to allow sovereignty from the USA eg cloud services, email services (eg Proton), excluding Microsoft or other tech companies, payment systems etc has been quite a trend for EU countries - though not dominant yet.
I'm trying to shift from Google to Proton myself, after 20 years.
One example is that France is replacing Microsoft products with Linux-based alternatives across their public sector, which is about 2.5 million seats.
It seems the UK is trailing here, I guess due to our position as more absorbed into the US economy.
Erm, hasn't Waymo recently suspended its driverless taxis on freeways and recalled thousands of cars for software updates? American freeways are a lot less complicated than London streets.
So that means we should abandon driverless cars ? One incident on a freeway and a software recall for one manufacturer. Software updates on cars are nothing new.
Waymo are not the only manufacturer either.
The rollout in London is very slow and deliberate anyway.
The positioning from Burnhams team appears just anti driverless cars. The technology is evolving and the change is coming. We should embrace it
No, but it does mean we should stop regarding driverless cars as a panacea arriving any time soon. If we are serious, then perhaps we should look for constrained routes that might be suitable for driverless cars acting as shuttles.
They’ve already arrived in other parts of the world. We need to be serious and not rowing back on it because of some concern about taxi drivers jobs.
There’s also plenty of evidence, early stage mind, that driverless cars are safer than cars with drivers.
You either embrace new technology and make it work or you don’t and get left behind.
And private spaces are superior to forced public interaction.
We caught a cab back from the Toon. Driver was a lovely chap. Wouldn’t shut up.
‘Complicated and expensive’: Burnham is right about the risks of nationalisation
Track record of Welsh Water shows changing ownership status is not the answer to all the woes in the utilities sector
Welsh Water is not state owned.
And would we really be worse off if zombie companies like Thames Water or (whisper it) a certain fairly large gas/leccy supplier were properly bankrupted and taken into state ownership without the enormous overhang of debt they have accumulated?
Whether they would be better managed by the government is a different matter - very probably not - but it's hard to imagine they would be much worse managed.
The utter contemptuous folly of the Blair Government was they didn't renationalised before the foreign shareholders ladelled off the cream and a huge amount of everything else too.
Renationalisation now is simply acquiring liability upon liability.
That's not really true: it's only assuming liabilities if bond holders are repaid.
If it goes into administration and the best offer is that the government acquires Thames Water at 20 cents on the pound for their debt, sending a clear message to owners of (and lenders to) privatized utilities: that you will not be bailed out by the government.
Do they actually have to pay the bond holders anything?
I understood that the terms of the public-private partnership meant that if Thames Water becomes insolvent then the state reaquires the assets and responsibilties for water and sewage provision. But does it actually take on the company and its liabilities or does it just leave Thames Water as a shell with no assets but huge debts? Does the state actually have to take on any of the liabilities?
I don't understand why the mad enthusiasm for government ownership.
Currently we have a profitable private business, but with debts it cannot service. All that needs to occur is for the shareholders to get wiped out, the debt to get written off, and the bond holders to either end up owning the business, or get to sell it for whatever they can get to someone else who fancies running a utility.
The only thing the government needs to do is to ensure that this restructuring is an orderly process, and doesn't result in dumb stuff like frontline staff going unpaid, resulting in supply outages. That's not beyond the whit of man.
Some capitalists (well, pension funds) will lose their shirts. Some other capitalists have run off with shirts for which they didn't pay. That's capitalism for you, especially if you buy or lend money to businesses without managing to read the balance sheet properly. None of this has any bearing on the actual supply of water to customers, nor yet does it provide any justification for nationalisation.
One of the things we can say with confidence is that nationalisation will make things worse. Just look at the shambles which is the MOD, and ask yourself if adding similar layers of government morons on top of another form of engineering activity* is likely to either improve services or save any money?
*modern warfare is mostly engineering.
If Thames Water is wiped out then returned to private ownership, how do you stop the same cycle happening again? Incidentally this does seem to be a growing problem across the private sector with companies (and football clubs) being bought up by private equity firms, often foreign-owned, and sucked dry.
Who will lend them money a second time to repeat the trick?
Assets could be sold and leased back; assets can be sold to the PE parent and leased back at exorbitant rates. It's how the modern world goes round.
The way PE goes round destroying viable businesses via asset stripping, financial engineering is a feature of late stage capitalism. I have seen it hollow out our local dentist, vet and private hospital. Rack up charges, turn partnership into employees, load up with debt then try to buff and turf to a bigger mug.
1 There will always be ways of extracting money unfairly from prudenty-run companies.
2 The bigger and more prudently-run the company, the bigger the cash pile and the more worthwhile it will be to find a novel way of extracting that cash.
3 The more aggressive end of capitalism will always be at least one step ahead of less aggressive capitalism, let alone the public sector, in finding those ways.
I'm not sure what the answer is.
Indeed, although Gordon Brown's tax changes are often blamed for the death of private sector defined benefit pension schemes, people forget that in the 1980s, many corporate takeovers were driven by the desire to raid pension funds, both here and in the United States.
Browns changes certainly were the final nail in the coffin. Certainly the one I was a part of at the time. But it was a long journey.
But lessons were supposed to be learned after Maxwell and nothing happened. Before then companies could cream off surpluses.
Pensions in this country have been poorly served by politicians of all parties. One noble exception is Steve Webb.
Pension schemes are massively and expensively regulated in this country. Whether that regulation does much good is another question. In addition to their fees to the regulator Pension funds have to contribute to a life boat which is available to assist members of schemes that run into difficulties. For smaller pension schemes with a few hundred members, like the one I was a trustee of, it is significant money. The amount you pay depends to some degree on your own solvency ratio (so the ones already in trouble pay the most) but the way that they calculate the liabilities is little short of bizarre.
After 2008 interest rates and base rates collapsed. This meant the amount of capital that a pension had to have to pay a pension rocketed. This created massive deficits on even the best run schemes and required UK industry to give up investing in new equipment and plough available profits into the pension scheme instead with significant adverse consequences for growth. By about 2020 almost all the remaining final salary schemes had closed because the cost of funding these "deficits" was simply unsustainable. The scheme I was a trustee of was closed for this reason.
What is more than a bit annoying is that it was blindingly obvious that these "deficits" were no more than a consequence of the extremely low gilt rates and as gilt rates recovered they magically disappeared in most cases. I first resisted paying in any more money shortly after 2020 and the pension moved from a multimillion deficit to a multimillion surplus without any contributions at all.
The long and short of this rant is that yet again utterly incompetent regulation destroyed a very good thing leaving the risk of what their final pension was going to be on the individuals rather than on a pension fund backed by an employer. Their incompetence caused millions to miss out but its okay because their final salary scheme was underwritten by the taxpayer and they were not affected.
"The agency has identified 270 people linked to forums where footage of coordinated sexual abuse is shared online - crimes which echo the case of Gisèle Pelicot, a French woman who was repeatedly drugged by her husband and attacked by dozens of men.
The NCA said the abuse is usually perpetrated by a long-term partner, with offending "often taking place over decades".
The forums encourage men to drug and rape women.
Hopefully, the people in question will be able to be identified and prosecuted. But (a subset of) men being complete shits is not new news, sadly.
This subset - how large a subset is the interesting question rather than the usual "0h, it's only a minority" which smacks of "I hope this is true because otherwise some very uncomfortable questions would need to be asked about the behaviour of the male sex" - includes the long-term partners of the women ie husbands and often the fathers of their children.
The breach of trust is grotesque. We should not accept this by shaking our heads saying that some men are "complete shits, sadly". We should be furious and we should be acting to try and stop this. Instead - and I make no apologies for saying this AGAIN - men's demands are treated like holy writ, any restraints on their behaviour are seen as somehow a breach of their human right to behave like complete shits and women are ethically invisible.
It should not be like this.
I agree with you about male nature, and I am a male. I have three daughters, three granddaughters and am married - to the same person for 47 years. I don't agree that my demands are holy writ, that women are ethically invisible or that the demands of decent behaviour breach my human rights.
What would you like me to do next to 'try and stop this'? Serious question.
"The agency has identified 270 people linked to forums where footage of coordinated sexual abuse is shared online - crimes which echo the case of Gisèle Pelicot, a French woman who was repeatedly drugged by her husband and attacked by dozens of men.
The NCA said the abuse is usually perpetrated by a long-term partner, with offending "often taking place over decades".
The forums encourage men to drug and rape women.
Hopefully, the people in question will be able to be identified and prosecuted. But (a subset of) men being complete shits is not new news, sadly.
This subset - how large a subset is the interesting question rather than the usual "0h, it's only a minority" which smacks of "I hope this is true because otherwise some very uncomfortable questions would need to be asked about the behaviour of the male sex" - includes the long-term partners of the women ie husbands and often the fathers of their children.
The breach of trust is grotesque. We should not accept this by shaking our heads saying that some men are "complete shits, sadly". We should be furious and we should be acting to try and stop this. Instead - and I make no apologies for saying this AGAIN - men's demands are treated like holy writ, any restraints on their behaviour are seen as somehow a breach of their human right to behave like complete shits and women are ethically invisible.
It should not be like this.
Err, surely the point of the investigation is to not "accept this"? The whole point is to identify and prosecute.
I was talking about how we change the attitudes that lead to this. What action can be taken against the sites hosting such forums? Is decriminalising drugs - including the date rape drug - a policy the Greens are considering - a good idea? What are we teaching boys and young men about sex? The widespread availability of porn etc. It is not enough to prosecute a few men when the story here is that these networks are widespread, international and accessed by a lot of men. Maybe simply accessing the forums should be a criminal offence and a few men doing just that imprisoned pour encourager les autres? I dunno.
Or we could just go - yeah, a subset, some men are total shits, whatever. And move on. Much as we do with the men in possession of child abuse images, relatively few of whom are imprisoned, because of their previous "good character", mental health, stress etc so that some of the more famous of them can try and rehabilitate themselves, the poor "victims".
Someone posted it earlier, including the extraordinary claim that 13000 hours of government time was spent rehabilitating it. I wonder if it's 1300, plus Chinese whispers.
Given how useless they are it is likely to be accurate.
Probably 1,000 hours spent cleaning and the other 12,000 hours testing and monitoring for a couple of years, just in case.
I’ve explained this upthread. Tens of thousands of swabs all needing testing.
‘Complicated and expensive’: Burnham is right about the risks of nationalisation
Track record of Welsh Water shows changing ownership status is not the answer to all the woes in the utilities sector
Welsh Water is not state owned.
And would we really be worse off if zombie companies like Thames Water or (whisper it) a certain fairly large gas/leccy supplier were properly bankrupted and taken into state ownership without the enormous overhang of debt they have accumulated?
Whether they would be better managed by the government is a different matter - very probably not - but it's hard to imagine they would be much worse managed.
The utter contemptuous folly of the Blair Government was they didn't renationalised before the foreign shareholders ladelled off the cream and a huge amount of everything else too.
Renationalisation now is simply acquiring liability upon liability.
That's not really true: it's only assuming liabilities if bond holders are repaid.
If it goes into administration and the best offer is that the government acquires Thames Water at 20 cents on the pound for their debt, sending a clear message to owners of (and lenders to) privatized utilities: that you will not be bailed out by the government.
Do they actually have to pay the bond holders anything?
I understood that the terms of the public-private partnership meant that if Thames Water becomes insolvent then the state reaquires the assets and responsibilties for water and sewage provision. But does it actually take on the company and its liabilities or does it just leave Thames Water as a shell with no assets but huge debts? Does the state actually have to take on any of the liabilities?
I don't understand why the mad enthusiasm for government ownership.
Currently we have a profitable private business, but with debts it cannot service. All that needs to occur is for the shareholders to get wiped out, the debt to get written off, and the bond holders to either end up owning the business, or get to sell it for whatever they can get to someone else who fancies running a utility.
The only thing the government needs to do is to ensure that this restructuring is an orderly process, and doesn't result in dumb stuff like frontline staff going unpaid, resulting in supply outages. That's not beyond the whit of man.
Some capitalists (well, pension funds) will lose their shirts. Some other capitalists have run off with shirts for which they didn't pay. That's capitalism for you, especially if you buy or lend money to businesses without managing to read the balance sheet properly. None of this has any bearing on the actual supply of water to customers, nor yet does it provide any justification for nationalisation.
One of the things we can say with confidence is that nationalisation will make things worse. Just look at the shambles which is the MOD, and ask yourself if adding similar layers of government morons on top of another form of engineering activity* is likely to either improve services or save any money?
*modern warfare is mostly engineering.
If Thames Water is wiped out then returned to private ownership, how do you stop the same cycle happening again? Incidentally this does seem to be a growing problem across the private sector with companies (and football clubs) being bought up by private equity firms, often foreign-owned, and sucked dry.
Who will lend them money a second time to repeat the trick?
Assets could be sold and leased back; assets can be sold to the PE parent and leased back at exorbitant rates. It's how the modern world goes round.
The way PE goes round destroying viable businesses via asset stripping, financial engineering is a feature of late stage capitalism. I have seen it hollow out our local dentist, vet and private hospital. Rack up charges, turn partnership into employees, load up with debt then try to buff and turf to a bigger mug.
1 There will always be ways of extracting money unfairly from prudenty-run companies.
2 The bigger and more prudently-run the company, the bigger the cash pile and the more worthwhile it will be to find a novel way of extracting that cash.
3 The more aggressive end of capitalism will always be at least one step ahead of less aggressive capitalism, let alone the public sector, in finding those ways.
I'm not sure what the answer is.
Indeed, although Gordon Brown's tax changes are often blamed for the death of private sector defined benefit pension schemes, people forget that in the 1980s, many corporate takeovers were driven by the desire to raid pension funds, both here and in the United States.
Browns changes certainly were the final nail in the coffin. Certainly the one I was a part of at the time. But it was a long journey.
But lessons were supposed to be learned after Maxwell and nothing happened. Before then companies could cream off surpluses.
Pensions in this country have been poorly served by politicians of all parties. One noble exception is Steve Webb.
Pension schemes are massively and expensively regulated in this country. Whether that regulation does much good is another question. In addition to their fees to the regulator Pension funds have to contribute to a life boat which is available to assist members of schemes that run into difficulties. For smaller pension schemes with a few hundred members, like the one I was a trustee of, it is significant money. The amount you pay depends to some degree on your own solvency ratio (so the ones already in trouble pay the most) but the way that they calculate the liabilities is little short of bizarre.
After 2008 interest rates and base rates collapsed. This meant the amount of capital that a pension had to have to pay a pension rocketed. This created massive deficits on even the best run schemes and required UK industry to give up investing in new equipment and plough available profits into the pension scheme instead with significant adverse consequences for growth. By about 2020 almost all the remaining final salary schemes had closed because the cost of funding these "deficits" was simply unsustainable. The scheme I was a trustee of was closed for this reason.
What is more than a bit annoying is that it was blindingly obvious that these "deficits" were no more than a consequence of the extremely low gilt rates and as gilt rates recovered they magically disappeared in most cases. I first resisted paying in any more money shortly after 2020 and the pension moved from a multimillion deficit to a multimillion surplus without any contributions at all.
The long and short of this rant is that yet again utterly incompetent regulation destroyed a very good thing leaving the risk of what their final pension was going to be on the individuals rather than on a pension fund backed by an employer. Their incompetence caused millions to miss out but its okay because their final salary scheme was underwritten by the taxpayer and they were not affected.
Some on here will remember the USS pension issue where they proposed cutting pensions due to the 'deficit'. The USS is now having a clear out at the top which might be argued didn't come early enough
Comments
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6snGqZnBGo
https://bsky.app/profile/mikegalsworthy.bsky.social/post/3mplybewva22j
Quite right too. We should not expand the anti-democratic power of the Broligarchy.
https://bsky.app/profile/mikegalsworthy.bsky.social/post/3mplybewva22j
Quite right too. We should not expand the anti-democratic power of the Broligarchy.
Croatia 1
94 mins
Currently we have a profitable private business, but with debts it cannot service.
All that needs to occur is for the shareholders to get wiped out, the debt to get written off, and the bond holders to either end up owning the business, or get to sell it for whatever they can get to someone else who fancies running a utility.
The only thing the government needs to do is to ensure that this restructuring is an orderly process, and doesn't result in dumb stuff like frontline staff going unpaid, resulting in supply outages. That's not beyond the whit of man.
Some capitalists (well, pension funds) will lose their shirts. Some other capitalists have run off with shirts for which they didn't pay. That's capitalism for you, especially if you buy or lend money to businesses without managing to read the balance sheet properly. None of this has any bearing on the actual supply of water to customers, nor yet does it provide any justification for nationalisation.
One of the things we can say with confidence is that nationalisation will make things worse. Just look at the shambles which is the MOD, and ask yourself if adding similar layers of government morons on top of another form of engineering activity* is likely to either improve services or save any money?
*modern warfare is mostly engineering.
Burnham and Starmer hold ‘frosty’ meeting to thrash out transition of power
With Burnham and his team potentially having only weeks before he becomes PM, Starmer has agreed to give him access to civil service
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jun/23/burnham-and-starmer-hold-frosty-meeting-to-thrash-out-transition-of-power
https://www.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/1uls1lw/andy_burnham_here_ama/
But I think there is benefit in remembering the practical arguments against nationalisation:
- the subjection of investment decisions to the whims of the Treasury
- the politicisation of wage bargaining
- the devotion of management time to sucking up to ministers, rather than running their businesses efficiently
- the impossibility of effective, transparent regulation when the government has such a glaring conflict of interest since it is regulating itself
- the movement of crucial management decisions to Whitehall, which has unerringly poor judgement in industrial matters
- the distortion of competition
- the lack of incentives to improve operating efficiency
- the reduction in government revenue as less efficient businesses yield less corporate tax
- the opportunity cost of government funds devoted to nationalisation
etc etc.
Some of these issues can be mitigated, and none of this is meant to idolize the private sector, whose companies often get things wrong, especially when industries are oligopolies or monopolies. But there is simply no equivalent in government to the ever-present threat of bankruptcy in industry, which acts as a powerful discipline on even the most complacent and incompetent of companies. And that is why, however flawed their performance may be, industries are generally better in the private sector than in the public sector.
Families should receive £7,000 vouchers to avoid punishing tax trap, think tank says
Parents earning more than £100,000 should get free childcare to help boost the economy, Labour has been urged.
A report by the Right-leaning Policy Exchange has called to replace free childcare hours with £7,000 vouchers for all families amid growing pressure to overhaul the “distorting” system.
It proposed scrapping 30 hours of free childcare in favour of a preloaded payment card for all parents regardless of income. It also proposed raising child benefit by £2,500 a year to £4,000 for children under two years old.
...
Under the current system, families lose their entitlement to tax-free childcare and 30 free hours for 38 weeks of the year as soon as one parent’s annual salary goes above £100,000.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/tax/news/give-100k-earners-free-childcare-to-boost-economy/ (£££)
Luxury cars pile up at a site operated by car thieves who now ‘steal to order’
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/consumer-affairs/track-down-stolen-cars-as-police-give-up/ (£££)
It's not just the BBC and Channel 4 donning their bat capes.
It's a basic premise, since Adam Smith delineated the basics of market capitalism, that monopolies will be abused.
Free of debt, it's a profitable business (depending on pricing set by the a regulator), and ind which will be exploited in the same way all over again.
If you don't think government is up to running the business, why do you imagine it is any any way up to the probably much harder task of regulating it - something which requires understanding the business as well, or better than its managers. - from the outside ?
Just an utter logic fail.
The experiment has already cost the customers (and the country, since the money went overseas) many tens of billions. And you want to repeat the process.
It simply doesn't apply in any meaningful sense to an essential public service monopoly. The fact that we're *still* pondering whether it's feasible to bankrupt Thames ought to be proof enough of that.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/b81744a54c80eb3b
Gift link as balance of payments is a recurring PB topic.
Moscow launches weapons capable of reaching 500kmph to exploit gaps in Kyiv’s air defence
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2026/07/02/russias-jet-powered-drones-outpace-ukrainian-interceptors/ (£££)
...
...
Each procurement disaster is unique. Yet there are common themes: a lack of transparency, shifting requirements, project management failures, a lack of in-house technical expertise and short-termism that increases costs overall.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/1af1aadfb4d6ea78
Gift link to article examining five MoD procurement failures (Type 45 destroyers; Ajax; Morpheus; Nimrod; Watchkeeper).
1) They do not have to find a single customer, they are provided on a state designated plate.
2) They operate as a monopoly within their area
3) Their sales price is a government function.
No other utility or business has all three elements so usefully lined up for extracting dividend with zero risk. Indeed the only risk they have taken is to load tonnes of debt on themselves in order to bleed customers and extort the regulators even more dry.
He blames Democrats.
https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/2072763354528251992
Ferguson: I think it’s awesome when people succeed. He keeps doing business with his family. There’s nothing wrong with this.
Phillip: So you would’ve been ok with the so called Biden Crime Family if Biden had just been transparent?
Ferguson: Burisma was corruption. He didn’t know anything about the industry.
Phillip: What do the Trump sons know about mining rare earth minerals? What do they know about robotics?
Ferguson: A lot clearly. They made a lot of money off of it.
https://x.com/Acyn/status/2072866768620752925
Unlikely to tackle burgeoning welfare bill
Seems to be against driverless cars too. We’re rushing headlong into it. Really ! It is all a bit ‘smash the spinning Jenny’.
The technology is here. We need to embrace it for taxis and for Lorries
https://x.com/rowlsmanthorpe/status/2072626990947946773?s=61
Instead I'm trying to say that in most places there will be a recognised, shared culture some description. Some, whether born here or not, will participate in some of this. Some people won't. I think those that don't are missing a contribution to society that we should all try to make. In all this the fact of you being born here or not is relatively unimportant in my view.
It's not free childcare, it's taxpayer-funded childcare.
And the way to solve a cliff-edge isn't to throw more money which we can't afford, it's to make something more gradual.
'Tough financial decisions' and throwing £7k at wealthy households do not go together.
So you limit the debt to, say, 5x EBITDA.
All that has happened is that Macquarie made out like bandits. So we shouldn’t approve any further investments by them in UK infrastructure until they agree a sensible settlement
Waymo are not the only manufacturer either.
The rollout in London is very slow and deliberate anyway.
The positioning from Burnhams team appears just anti driverless cars. The technology is evolving and the change is coming. We should embrace it
2 The bigger and more prudently-run the company, the bigger the cash pile and the more worthwhile it will be to find a novel way of extracting that cash.
3 The more aggressive end of capitalism will always be at least one step ahead of less aggressive capitalism, let alone the public sector, in finding those ways.
I'm not sure what the answer is.
So long as the regulator isn't so weak as to let them increase prices to fill in their self inflicted black holes, it's all a non-issue really.
Previously you would compromise and buy the best of a bad selection but you don't need to nowadays.
There’s also plenty of evidence, early stage mind, that driverless cars are safer than cars with drivers.
You either embrace new technology and make it work or you don’t and get left behind.
But lessons were supposed to be learned after Maxwell and nothing happened. Before then companies could cream off surpluses.
Pensions in this country have been poorly served by politicians of all parties. One noble exception is Steve Webb.
I'm trying to shift from Google to Proton myself, after 20 years.
One example is that France is replacing Microsoft products with Linux-based alternatives across their public sector, which is about 2.5 million seats.
It seems the UK is trailing here, I guess due to our position as more absorbed into the US economy.
After 2008 interest rates and base rates collapsed. This meant the amount of capital that a pension had to have to pay a pension rocketed. This created massive deficits on even the best run schemes and required UK industry to give up investing in new equipment and plough available profits into the pension scheme instead with significant adverse consequences for growth. By about 2020 almost all the remaining final salary schemes had closed because the cost of funding these "deficits" was simply unsustainable. The scheme I was a trustee of was closed for this reason.
What is more than a bit annoying is that it was blindingly obvious that these "deficits" were no more than a consequence of the extremely low gilt rates and as gilt rates recovered they magically disappeared in most cases. I first resisted paying in any more money shortly after 2020 and the pension moved from a multimillion deficit to a multimillion surplus without any contributions at all.
The long and short of this rant is that yet again utterly incompetent regulation destroyed a very good thing leaving the risk of what their final pension was going to be on the individuals rather than on a pension fund backed by an employer. Their incompetence caused millions to miss out but its okay because their final salary scheme was underwritten by the taxpayer and they were not affected.
What would you like me to do next to 'try and stop this'? Serious question.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bydBWsES4c
Or we could just go - yeah, a subset, some men are total shits, whatever. And move on. Much as we do with the men in possession of child abuse images, relatively few of whom are imprisoned, because of their previous "good character", mental health, stress etc so that some of the more famous of them can try and rehabilitate themselves, the poor "victims".
That wouldn’t put me off. This would
30% shared ownership !!
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/no-regrets-uss-set-reverse-pension-cuts-and-payment-hikes
https://www.ipe.com/news/people-moves-universities-superannuation-scheme-chairs-to-stand-down/10137468.article