https://twitter.com/SatbirLSingh/status ... 6055948288
Even disregarding that come winter we Austrians may have ... more problems with that whole gas and light thing than we might want I can appreciate that burn.
Perpetual UK Politics Thread Part Two
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https://twitter.com/SatbirLSingh/status ... 6055948288
Even disregarding that come winter we Austrians may have ... more problems with that whole gas and light thing than we might want I can appreciate that burn.
Tho they liked one particular brand of craziness so much they forked it in order to more tightly control it: In 1532 Henry the 8th had Parliament vote out the Statute in Restraints of Appeal, making the King (henceforth actually Emperor, if one wants to be pedantic about it
) the final arbiter in realms temporal and spiritual, forbidding appeals to the Pope on religious matters and defacto forking off the Church of England from the Catholic Church, though formal schisma had to wait for two years until 1534 and the Act of Suppremacy.Just like the 1290 Edict of Expulsion had some financial convenience for the King, the acts both 'conveniently' allowed the monarch to ... decide monestaries had too much money anyway, and to dump Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn instead. In general the entire early English Reformation consists of the English not being able to make up their mind and play bunny-ears-lawyer against Rome, and to make up with Rome because having your King excommunicated made doing business pretty damn annoying.
Oh, a country can take a whole lot of NYT opinion pieces -- as long as they're printed on the right type of paper. Toilet paper.
That's pretty much endemic in much of Europe, and a lot of it is down to speculation-driven investment.
I live in Vienna. There's a big construction going on a couple hundred meters down the road with appartments; its not some skyscraper, its a set of medium-density 6 or 7 floor appartment buildings arranged around a common park. The costs of units there are pretty well publicized, so last year I sat down on a lark and ran a couple numbers:
Suppose I have a money I want to invest, and I want to invest in appartments there to rent them out.
Model parameters:
* 30 year expected RoI, valued at constant 2021 Euros under an assumed average inflation rate 2.5%. (2022 says: lolzors)
* Corporate ownership, ie proceeds are taxed as capital gains (flat 27.5%) instead of as progressive income tax. That also puts us on the corporate deductions and depreciations schedule (as far as property goes *much* better for anything except your primary dwelling)
* Capital cost is zero (cash in hand)
* 10% of yearly income set aside for renovation and repairs
* 15% of yearly income set aside for running costs (lights, sewage, water, garbage, property management and all those things)
* 20% VAT
Once I plug in the purchase price into that I'd have to charge slightly more than 3k EUR for a 85sqm appartment. 3k, for 85sqm! And no, this isn't the city core or gentrification central; the entire district is mainly middle class.
The rental market for that doesn't exist, and *cannot* exist, because 90%+ of Austrians renters couldn't afford 3k rent, and the remainder would bloody well expect more than a standard, run-of-the-mill 85sqm appartment for that amount of money. And that's before we get to small, almost trivial problems like that the inflation rate isn't 2.5% anymore.
So the investment perspective of buy-to-let just does not work. The market's just not there, because the disposable income to pay for it isn't there. The *only* investment that makes sense is speculative: Hoping that you can unload the appartments to some other schmuck at a higher price is the only way to make those numbers work.
This comes into focus even more sharply that if I levelled down the rise in land purchase prices from their actual rate to official inflation rate my monthly figure becomes ... roughly 1.2k to 1.5k; that's still quite steep locally for those appartments here, but it is possible that at least some would be willing and able to pay that price.
More houses of the *right* type. You want to curb excessive land use by single family or semidetached homes driving up infra spend.
If at all possible you want medium density (3-5 story appartment buildings with 2-6 units per floor and stair) residential, or mixed residential/light commercial. Those are pretty much the sweet spot between construction costs, density, development requirement, social implications oand so on.
The problem of course is that the Tory party currently does not seem to have a person that
1) Is not going to cost them their seats on account of rank incompetence, and
2) wants the job, and
3) should be allowed to have the job, and
4) is electable in a Tory leadership contest
In a different timeline this might be a prime opportunity to get the state some cash by throwing the book at the persons responsible, and fine and dine (insofar the word 'dining' can be applied to prison chow) them. In the present timeline, however ... :facepalm:
Since the UK's already playing the 'disposable PM' game why not get it over with and just put Jacob Rees-Mogg on it? The economy's already fucked up, so its an open question on how much worse he can do as long as you dispose of him 2-3 months later, and once you do that you're rid of him.
Drawbacks include having to see his admittedly eminently punchable face in the media more often than is good for blood pressure, but it'll just be a couple months; surely it'd be worth it?
--
edit: Behind the gallows humor there's of course a different, perhaps unpalatable truth: Unless there are some significant Tory party internal changes to go with it simply convincing someone like Wallace to run won't help much; the problem isn't the PM they put in front, the problem is the party itself. Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss. No party with healthy internal mechanisms puts up a sequence of clownshows like that.
Wait a sec, you refuse to release a thesis for public dissemination in the UK? The fuq?
I mean, sure, you can put a time-limited publication hold (in .at max 5 years) on it, or it can be classified because either the research topic itself is classified, or the thesis uses classified information. But none of that applies here.
Except the quoted bit that started off the tangent had all to do with trickle down, had fuck all to do with the planning system.
Goal post move: Rejected.
Tho to be fair the clownshow is his participation, not the withdrawal of the whip.
Anyone in a position that ought to command the respect of the public, and who participates in this type of spectacle, richly deserves the boot, up as far as it goes, for conduct unbecoming.
Anyone in a position that ought to command the respect of the public, and who participates in this type of spectacle, richly deserves the boot, up as far as it goes, for conduct unbecoming.
You misspelled "do not print the same currency as the US do not have the ability to MMT the way we can". The US gets away with a lot of things economically due to being a (arguably the most) important reserve currency, and due to the petrodollar.
The UK will need to have a discussion at one point how it wants to structure the state:
Structurally, it is and remains an unitary state, but one where devolution has introduced a significant amount of federalism, which structurally is at odds with the unitary state. Some of of the totally-not-a-federal-state units (Northern Ireland) even have their own written defacto-constitutions.
Until this discussion happens there will be significant mismatch between formal power structure and dejure power allocation, which leads to all kinds of silliness like what has been posted on this page.
Structurally, it is and remains an unitary state, but one where devolution has introduced a significant amount of federalism, which structurally is at odds with the unitary state. Some of of the totally-not-a-federal-state units (Northern Ireland) even have their own written defacto-constitutions.
Until this discussion happens there will be significant mismatch between formal power structure and dejure power allocation, which leads to all kinds of silliness like what has been posted on this page.
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Legally correct but politically foolish.
The SNP will campaign next election on the basis of "a vote for us in the election is equal to a vote in a nonbinding referendum", which will allow them to claim more votes than a (binding or nonbinding) referendum would, and there is absolutely nothing that either Westminster or the Supreme Court could do about it.
This is why Sturgeon says she is okay with the ruling and will obey it -- because it still leaves open another option, one that she may have even preferred in the first place over a nonbinding referendum, because it allows to create a narrative around the following two points:
1) On the last referendum Westminster made a big deal out of continued EU membership of Scotland, then took Scotland out of the EU anyway even though the majority of Scots voted to remain within the EU. (not much editorializing there, this is pretty much an objective fact)
2) Now that they have taken us out of the EU Westminster refuses to even allow a general, non-binding polling of if that fact had any impact on how Scotish voters see their continued membership in the UK. (a lot of editorializing that gets cover by how the first part is neutral and fact-based)
I disagree. Rather hard, actually.
There's two problems with this:
1) This ruling is arguably retrofitting what went down with the Brexit referendum (which was also non-binding), and the Court did not have to go there. "While actual implementation of a referendum choice would be required to be approved by Westminster, Holyrood is free to poll their citizens if they would support such a hypothetical, especially since it is not a good use of the UK Parliament's time to debate a motion that does not accord with the will of the voters" is a perfectly viable position.
2) The consequences the ruling portrays can only come to pass if a majority of voters vote for independence, so the view of the Scottish electorate exists regardless of referendum or no referendum. If your solution to this problem burns down to "well, then we just don't give them a way to express it", then whatever other arguments you may have made afterwards about democracy or legitimacy lack any standing. If a court finds that its proposed solution violates not only first principles but first principles it seeks to uphold especially, then the court needs to find another way because a court that abandons internal consistency abandons its purpose.
Personally I think that the case of Scottish Independence reeks of stupidity that is only eclipsed by the stupidity of how the Tory governments, with the help of people like Lord Reed, since and including Cameron have dealt with the matter. Conservative and Unionist Party, my ass.
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On the matter of a binding referendum I do not disagree that the position they chose is legally correct, and that there's not much they could've done otherwise, except perhaps than to refuse to issue a judgement.
On the matter of a nonbinding referendum I do not dispute that the position of the court is legally incorrect, I dispute that this is the only legally correct position they could have chosen. I also do argue that they chose poorly.
Take the "even non-binding referenda can have authority and hence are impermisible" angle, which is both pretty obviously motivated by the Brexit aftermath and central to the Court's argument on nonbinding referenda: I think it is legal but IMHO stupid. It is also internally inconsistent in a way that may come back to haunt both Parliament and the Court, but because the inconsistency lies within political/ethical premises and the conclusion's implications this does not make it legally incorrect.
Regardless of how advisable the argument it is it is also (AFAICT) entirely novel, so they'd not have needed to go there and were free to search for other solutions.
And even if they chose to go, there they could have also tried to account at least a little bit for the legitimacy problems created by the "we can avoid giving authority to people's preferences on Scottish independence by simply not asking them about it"idiocy approach by stating that all referendum options must either be things Holyrood can do themselves, or that they must of the form "that Holyrood shall work with Westminster in order to obtain/propose a mechanism for X".
On the matter of a nonbinding referendum I do not dispute that the position of the court is legally incorrect, I dispute that this is the only legally correct position they could have chosen. I also do argue that they chose poorly.
Take the "even non-binding referenda can have authority and hence are impermisible" angle, which is both pretty obviously motivated by the Brexit aftermath and central to the Court's argument on nonbinding referenda: I think it is legal but IMHO stupid. It is also internally inconsistent in a way that may come back to haunt both Parliament and the Court, but because the inconsistency lies within political/ethical premises and the conclusion's implications this does not make it legally incorrect.
Regardless of how advisable the argument it is it is also (AFAICT) entirely novel, so they'd not have needed to go there and were free to search for other solutions.
And even if they chose to go, there they could have also tried to account at least a little bit for the legitimacy problems created by the "we can avoid giving authority to people's preferences on Scottish independence by simply not asking them about it"
And said unification is unlikely to happen for the next 10 to 15 years: The majority of people in Eire that support unification have a preference -- a very, very strong preference -- for it to happen not now but in 10 to 15 years, and they have very good reasons related to the economy of Northern Ireland and internal peace for this.
Even if the British electorate were to choose to undo Brexit, it isn't entirety up to them. The EU, and ultimately 27 other countries, also have a say in it.
The question "under what circumstances should the UK be allowed to rejoin the EU" is actually a quite hard one. Just take the currency question: Does the UK get to revive its Euro opt-out, or will it have to commit to eventually join the Eurozone?
From the perspective of the EU, there are good cohesion arguments on why a rejoining UK should have to commit to joining the Euro. On the other side this is very obviously is a question of national pride. Given the circumstances I don't see how any UK politician could get to say yes to this and have their career survive.
And, as previously has been discussed, there's a caregiving shortage in all of Europe. Salaries are increasingly competitive, and you often benefit from much lower costs of living, especially if your baseline comparison is London (just to take public transit: a yearly pass for London is more expensive than a yearly transit pass for Vienna plus a yearly railpass for all of Austria ... )
Of course credentialing and language may be a problem, but if you lot keep driving away qualified staff for long enough maybe we can sort that one out, too. So go ahead, solve our staffing problems. Please?
No, it isn't silent/internal resignation. People that work to rule do not necessarily intend to quit.
It is more like malicious compliance weaponized as a negotiation tactic:
You only do duties your contract requires you to do, and exactly to the level specified there; even if you have an "and other duties assigned" clause you can always insist on the assignment being made in writing, and for each specific instance.
In addition and contrary to what some people delude themselves into, most workplace rules are not intended for perfect (self-) enforcement. Consequently staff that opts for perfect self-enforcement of all rules they are subject to can grind work to a halt without exposing themselves to disciplinary consequences: After all they are just trying to be good employees and follow, to the letter, all policies given to them by their employer.
I'm going to be very disappointed if this doesn't end up with 'Discussions about Rwanda' becoming an euphemism for kickbacks/graft.
The compounding problem is that healthworkers already had a decade of below-inflation increases with the corresponding loss in living standards. Hence the demand for above-inflation payrise.
The problem for the government to say it cannot afford this is of course the implicit admission that the UK no longer can afford the healthcare system it used to be able to afford a decade ago, which could lead to all sorts of awkward questions.
... and due to the massive success of the current NHS strategy it seems like it'll get a sequel with the police forces:
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/home-office-suella-braverman-police-england-wales-b1047204.html
and
Tesco -- a supermarket company so vile the only areas it managed to stick around outside the UK are places like Hungary or the Czech Republic, and let me tell you that Hungarians will shop at any other supermarket that's near them before going to Tesco -- pays a bloody cashier about the same per hour as an average UK police officer gets base (sans things like nighttime or hazard awards) pay, roughly 14 quid.
I foresee certain difficulties in enacting the staffing plan the Home Office has in mind under those circumstances.
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/home-office-suella-braverman-police-england-wales-b1047204.html
and
Has anyone talked with the Home Office about little details like if you want to have 20k additional police officers you will need to hire 20k additional police officers, which in return will require an additional 20k qualified personnel willing to work for the wages you are offering.
Tesco -- a supermarket company so vile the only areas it managed to stick around outside the UK are places like Hungary or the Czech Republic, and let me tell you that Hungarians will shop at any other supermarket that's near them before going to Tesco -- pays a bloody cashier about the same per hour as an average UK police officer gets base (sans things like nighttime or hazard awards) pay, roughly 14 quid.
I foresee certain difficulties in enacting the staffing plan the Home Office has in mind under those circumstances.
You mean like Thatcher, except the other (and, from the perspective of the government getting its way) wrong way around?
There are two reasons Thatcher followed Edmund Davies suggestion on police pay in 1979, raising it by 45%:
- Thatcher had already to content with public discontent and was following policies that were bound to increase it. She needed the police force to be on her side, so she essentially bought them.
- Police at that time was one of the parts (if not the part) of the public sector that had the most public sympathy on their side w.r.t. pay. By giving in to their demand she suceeded in breaking them off from a united front, thereby preventing other parts of the public sector, with less public sympathy, to 'borrow' it from the police through solidarity.
Once you end up on the bottom end of the economic spectrum your limit isn't necessarily your aspirations or innate potential, but instead that the demands placed on you to get through today and tomorrow consumes so much of your limited resources that there is little to none at all left over to pursue longer term objectives.
An ability to empathize and understand people less economically fortunate would be a nice thing to have in a national leader. Not only out of compassion, but also from the more general observation that a leader who can understand the nature of a problem is going to be more effective.
In this, Sunak failed completely.
Agree that the personal finance stuff probably is better as a separate thread in the boardroom.
The Boxy part of the problem is that of wages and cost of living in the UK. I don't know if those 10.23 GBP/hour are pre- or post-tax, but considering that the UK has higher costs of living than say Austria, that seems low...ish?
Locally, Aldi (it is called Hofer in Austria, for reasons) is constantly looking for cashiers at a minimum salary of ~ 2000 GBP/month, plus a month's pay as tax-advantaged bonus every half year, plus fully paid sick-leave (if you're sick you draw full salary for a certain amount of time; not that they have a choice, as this is a legal requirement), plus lots of other labour protection that's significantly better than in the UK.
For example in the UK, IIRC, an employer can cancel vacation if they cancel it at least twice the time of the vacation in advance (so 2*7+1=15 days for a 7-day vacation), and (this type of cost externalization continues to amaze me. wtf.) is not legally on the hook for cancellation costs incurred by the employee. In Austria a once-granted vacation can only be revoced in very limited circumstances, and the employer becomes liable for consequential costs of the cancellation.
With three kids Doomlord's family would also receive a monthly (non-taxable, non-creditable to income calculation for the purposes of benefits) cash award of roughly 550 GBP and an income tax credit of ~ 150 GBP/month. Depending on financial situation there may also be a negative income tax (certain tax credits that, if they can't be fully consumed because you paid too little income tax, become cash awards) of up to 400 GBP/year/kid.
So the take-away from this is that compared to UK's economic peers in Europe the UK has a culture of depressed wages in the lower income strata and a weird tax system that is actively hostile to low-income familities with kids.
The Boxy part of the problem is that of wages and cost of living in the UK. I don't know if those 10.23 GBP/hour are pre- or post-tax, but considering that the UK has higher costs of living than say Austria, that seems low...ish?
Locally, Aldi (it is called Hofer in Austria, for reasons) is constantly looking for cashiers at a minimum salary of ~ 2000 GBP/month, plus a month's pay as tax-advantaged bonus every half year, plus fully paid sick-leave (if you're sick you draw full salary for a certain amount of time; not that they have a choice, as this is a legal requirement), plus lots of other labour protection that's significantly better than in the UK.
For example in the UK, IIRC, an employer can cancel vacation if they cancel it at least twice the time of the vacation in advance (so 2*7+1=15 days for a 7-day vacation), and (this type of cost externalization continues to amaze me. wtf.) is not legally on the hook for cancellation costs incurred by the employee. In Austria a once-granted vacation can only be revoced in very limited circumstances, and the employer becomes liable for consequential costs of the cancellation.
With three kids Doomlord's family would also receive a monthly (non-taxable, non-creditable to income calculation for the purposes of benefits) cash award of roughly 550 GBP and an income tax credit of ~ 150 GBP/month. Depending on financial situation there may also be a negative income tax (certain tax credits that, if they can't be fully consumed because you paid too little income tax, become cash awards) of up to 400 GBP/year/kid.
So the take-away from this is that compared to UK's economic peers in Europe the UK has a culture of depressed wages in the lower income strata and a weird tax system that is actively hostile to low-income familities with kids.
Austria doesn't really have a unified national minimum wage. We have a sectoral collective bargaining agreements that define wages (dependent on specific occupation) for that specific sector, which then forms the defacto minimum wage for the relevant sector. Those agreements are negotiated yearly between the relevant sections of the Chamber of Commerce and unions, and they can do more than just set pay (but of course cannot contradict law) -- but once negotiated they bind every business in that sector as if they were law.
That bit tends to always confuse especially British and US posters, who look at the official, nation-wide minimum wage without realizing that for 95%+ of the economy they're looking at the wrong law -- almost dead law, tbh -- because there's a different legal context that also applies and carries higher minima.
Assuming that Doomlord would've had some years (say 5) of experience and using the relevant bargaining agreement for a place like Aldi (retail commerce) and the appropriate group for cashier, the minimum wage would be 1780 GBP per month; since the agreement also arranges for a bi-yearly bonus of a month's wage to take advantage of some tax provisions, distributing this over months would lead to ~ 2136 GBP/month.
Assuming a 160 workhour month this works out to ~ 13.35 GBP/hour as legal minimum.
The numbers I've given in my previous post (which work out to ~ 15 GBP/hour after integrating the bonus) were based on job adverts, and you can walk up to many Aldis and apply for those offers. Aldi has decided to voluntarily advertise positions at a minimum pay higher than the minimum per sectoral bargaining, in order to attract better staff.
It probably depends very much on location: UK rural vs Austrian rural, 10% is probably a good approximation -- unless you need to commute on train, then the UK is going to considerably more expensive.
Comparable rural areas, say London vs Vienna: Yeah, you're going to pay considerably more in the UK. How does unlimited city-wide transport pass (including tubes) for 365 Euroquid/year and 1.2k rent for a 120m2 flat in good location (subway station is 5 mins on foot, lots of shopping available with 5-10 mins walk, quiet enough to sleep with open window, garden access plus balcony over garden) sound?
I think we can agree on that.
Per the above I don't think I agree that the wage suppression doesn't apply to lower-wage workers.
It is admittedly a bit of a mess for non-Englishspeakers. This is the relevant salary table: https://www.wko.at/service/kollektivvertrag/gehaltstabelle-angestellte-handel-2023.pdf
Cashiers would be Group C, numbers are monthly pre-tax wages, yearly pretax is the monthly wage times 14 (12 regular wages, 2 bonus payments)
That's true, I suppose.
The size is different, and London clientele is obviously much more cosmopolitan, but from a density perspective they're actually quite similar. City politics are widely divergent, of course, and that's what is ultimately defining the city:
If you scaled London to the size of Vienna, its politics would simply ... reproduce a smaller London. The other way around of course has the uncertainty if the politics and urban planning approaches used would scale to that extend, but in any case it would be a different city from London.
If it scaled, though, I happen to think that Vienna would produce the better outcome even at scale due to different government, just on the housing aspect alone: Public housing is something the city is very much still doing, and it specifically choses not to make public housing into social benefit.
The income cut-off for public housing for a two-adults/two-kids family is roughly 100k EUR after tax, which obviously is way beyond where the family would require public housing as a social benefit. There's social good in preventing ghettoization by having doctors live next door to supermarket cashiers, but for that to happen you have to create this as matter of public policy. Ensuring that seamless at-scale housing between families with large wage differentials is possible isn't something that's particularly amenable to pure private sector/free market solutions.
Austria isn't the best place on the world, and it has many faults, but as far as creating an equitable society goes, it arguably got more things right that the UK did over the last 20 years.
Whut? it is more like 25k ...
It is a completely bonkers cost/risk externalization that transfers business risks from the employer to the employee, in much of the same way zero-hour contracts transfer business risks.
Middle- and upper-income sure, certainly, because if you have enough negotiation power to command a higher income then it is pretty clear that "we cancel a pre-approved leave, and not only not pay a 'we are sorry award' to the empoyee but also not compensate them for cancellation costs incurred" is going to be a resume-generating event, precisely because that negotiation power also allows the employee to much more easily go elsewhere.
For people on min-wage ... yeah, I do think that things are slightly different there. You think someone working at on min-wage and a zero hour contract is going to successfully push back against this? Sure, in this case the unintended side effect of the zero hour contract is that they could just post their availability at zero hours during their vacation, but its pretty certain they won't have many further hours of employment under that contract in their future ...
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So back to compelled labor?
The lack of actual genuine negotiation offers is also telling. I think someone needs to have a sit down and explain to Sunak that if the negotiation climate has gotten to this level talk about "could get a substantial pay increase" isn't worth the oxygen needed to say it. You need to put a concrete offer on the table.
Regarding the changes to strike laws:
This isn't an attempt to find a way to strike a balance between interests, this is just a brute force attempt to force through one side while giving zero fucks about the other side.
If this becomes law frankly the UK deserves half of the NHS to simply walk out on them, as the government clealy does not think a working health system is something the UK needs to place any value on.
If the minimum service level compels individuals instead of compelling the organization, which in turn works with volunteers, then yes I do think that there's at least a sensible argument that this would be the case.
Additionally, IRC nurses and other care-givers are subject to legal (and not only contractual) restrictions on when and how they may quit that aren't present for most other workers.
Yeah, given that they've been frankly less than honest about the government's ability to interfere with pay review body decisions (they've done so in the past, usually when the review body awarded more than they wanted), and the fact that the budget earmarked for the NHS so far would not allow for an award in excess of 3% in 2023, I don't think that one is being considered an offer worth a toss.
It certainly is not a concrete offer, even if one was inclined to give the government the benefit of the doubt.
Which I frankly wouldn't. They've already on record to have lied several times about how the government can (and in the last 10 years did!) interact with pay review body "rulings", treating them more like recommendations, and the matter about available NHS budget sure doesn't help the government wrt credence.
Turns out that once you've squandered your trustworthiness it is difficult to get it back.
It of course doesn't help that other parts of the government aren't ... particularly doing well in their communications:
https://www.theguardian.com/busines...-across-england-on-thursday-as-drivers-strike
Well, that's certainly a blunt statement, especially if you're talking to people who did not have pay rises the last two years and are now supposed to receive only 3%.
The obvious answer to this is of course: "We're more than open to end this damaging dispute. Pay up, bucko."
Ultimately, if the government cannot afford to award pay rises even close to legislation, it will need to come up with compelling answers to two questions:
- If wages are not allowed to rise because that'd feed back into inflationary pressure, what beyond trying to depress wages is the government doing to curb inflation? If the only part of inflationary pressure you're concerned about are wages, but everything else is just market forces and can't be helped, then you're both meddling in the market (in one particular area) while at the same time claiming that government shouldn't meddle with the market, which is an approach that should see you laughed out the room.
- If nurses and other public sector employees must accept lower purchasing power in order to get the UK's economy back on track, what are other parts of the country contributing? It is going to be hard to argue that, say, the nurses that care for other people should make that sacrifice but the other people not.
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Seems like my memory played tricks on me there. Apologies.
You mean the PRB recommendations where everyone aware of the gov's history with them? Where everyone with half a clue either already knew, or went and have a looksie, the moment Barclay's opened his mouth and waxed lyrically about how sacrosanct and inviolable by the government those recommendations are, and found out -- no doubt that must have come as a considerable shock -- that the most Honourable Secretary is full of it? Those recommendations?
Yeah, I think everyone understands the idea behind the precedent setting, and understands that the PRB in the current context is only a figleaf not even a particularly credulous five-year old will be impressed by. Given that I believe it would be in everyone's interest if the government would just quit doing worthless Kabuki dances.
Thatcher was awful, but at least she stood by it. She was also smart enough to understand that she couldn't pick a fight with all the unions -- which is why she bought off the police, both because she needed the police as her enforcers and because there was genuine public support for increased police pay demands.
As for getting through the next month, I think that a delaying tactic is only going to either lead to further strikes or mass walkouts. The UK already had 25k avoidable deaths -- someone who's waiting for a cancer treatment won't be killed immediately by the wait, but the time lost might mean the difference between curable and incurable -- per year before this whole episode due to NHS waiting times.
I don't think that this will help the situation.
Given that the alternative, telling nurses -- who by the way had, like everyone else in the NHS, 2.5 absolute shit years due to the pandemic -- to just suck it up and bear more of the costs than societal average will likely result in an even more defuct NHS, for entirely predictable reasons, I'd strongly suggest that the government try the impossible then.
Well, unless you believe the UK doesn't need a working healthcare system.
It is not like they have something to loose -- if they can't get it sorted they're fucked anyway; well, more fucked than they already are -- and who knows, if they actually did try and did their best maybe the other side could be brought to understand that this really is the best that they can do, and settle for more long-term concessions.
I didn't realize this predated his standing for election, so thanks for the correction and clarifications
I'm certainly no expert on UK taxation law, and in most countries it's a fine line between which transgressions are considered a civil infraction with at most a fine, and which are criminal, resulting in a criminal record and possible prison time.
Still, generally speaking, this is an area where I think good governance should trump freedom of occupation.
What would be interesting to know how much a penalty fee is usual to be assessed for the type of ... oversight that Zahawi committed.
1.3 million penalty on a 3.7 million tax liability does seem to be a bit on the low side for me -- for us negligence for penalty goes from 30% to 100% of the incurred liability, and from 100% to 200% plus prison for outright fraud -- especially if HMRC is suspecting something more than an easy mistake but I am not sure what is customary in the UK.
There's also a distinct possibility -- which would be the most damning of all explanations -- that Sunak and a bunch of other people either just didn't see it as wrong, or only notionally wrong but not a big deal.
The reason it sticks so easily to the Tories in general and to Sunak in particular is not that those 4.5k are necessarily unexplainable; it is because alternative yet unfortunate explanations ("junkets for everyone!") are, considering the characters, so easily believable.
The funny thing about legitimacy is that you only really notice its value once you've lost it.
The funny thing about legitimacy is that you only really notice its value once you've lost it.
That is true in a strict, literal reading of the GFA.
One of the reason no one wants the hard border back is because creating it would produce the sort of tempting target that ... people with a thrill-oriented lifestance could still get funny ideas about. This in turn would, in order to discourage such "thrill-seeking", require security installations in excess of what is common between democratic countries .
And that is something the GFA does say something about.
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