Bullet
Andy Thompson
Very vague.
Do you mean the dresses a designer wanted her to wear, to promote the designer, or something else?
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Politics, politics, politics (so long and thanks for all the fish)
- Thread starter SpurMeUp
- Start date
Do you mean the dresses a designer wanted her to wear, to promote the designer, or something else?
SpiderSpurs
John Piercy
Thanks for posting that. Like her or loathe her, that's a great watch.
Danishfurniturelover
the prettiest spice girl
Clothes and holidays and apparently though not seen it confirmed by a reliable source she is now using tax payers money to get an official photographer.
Dont think she is the working class hero she makes herself out to be, wish she was.
Mikey10
Frederic Kanoute
“It’s made my day to say hello to you. For a couple of years now I’ve hoped that I’d someday get the chance to meet the worst Prime Minister that Britain’s ever had.”
spurspinter1
Steve Carr
I don't see how you've reached your therefore point at all and we are going round in circles.
UBI doesn't stop people who want more than the bare necessities achieving that, I'm not calling for the government to give everyone a Ferrari and a pony, if you want that you can work for it but everyone has enough to get by - It's not complicated
Edit - When I say it's not complicated , I appreciate the implementation of it will have many considerations that are beyond my understanding but I was referring to the idea in general.
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thfcsteff
George Hunt
...you can produce any 'common sense statement' you like with regards to 'hardly realistic' salaries for registered nurses, but the truth is, under Tory governance, the NHS has continued to become a magnet for private sector abuse. Large contracts given for increasingly poor services within the system. Shareholders in these companies are obviously more highly valued than the medical professionals within the NHS...
You chose to jump on a post comment where someone mentioned paying registered nurses the same annual salary as professional footballers. Rather than stick with your 'glassdoor' figures, let's take my 'glassdoor' figure as a basis. Because I believe that if we take into account the flagrant 'theft' which occurred during covid especially, you know, 45 billion quids worth of outsoucing with an auditing policy which essentially amounted to ordering a happy meal, that (in fact) paying registered nurses an average salary of 73k a year (and that's at the bottom end, again according to my 'glassdoor' figure) is highly, highly realistic...unless, of course, you're at the end of the wedge which is, errrr, making the wedge. In which case, experience tells us that you don't want to give up any percentage of your profit margin to aid the service and the people who work within it.
Regarding UBI, I believe there has to be more research done in order to make it an effective aide for those who are vulnerable as opposed as to a 'station agent' which essentially traps people in a loop.
You mentioned nobody having an 'actual' alternative to the current system. How about we start with fairer taxation of corporations, either a better and whiolly transparent auditing system when it comes to awarding private contracts for public services, or nationalizing essential utilies and services such as power, water and public transport, how about proper investment in public housing, how about proper investment in public education, how about an affordable university system with government funding, and yes, how about paying registerd nurses 73k a year? Not to mention greater investment in proactive health care versus reactive?
Doubtless the question arises as to where this money would come from. I'd counter that if we had people in charge who actually gave a brick about societies, then the extra few percent of national money such things would require could be funded with breathing space. Instead, we have been largely governed for too long by people whose main interests best serve the needs of the few and not the many. Which is a problem.
I suppose it comes down to what you believe in...
p.s. offered in the spirit of discussion.
https://www.nhsforsale.info/50-examples-of-nhs-outsourcing-failures/
https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/...baller-salary-SRCH_IL.0,21_IM1035_KO22,32.htm
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thfcsteff
George Hunt
I agree, they are tough equations and require careful thought so as not to become further tools of misery with which to keep people trapped. I scribbled some thoughts in reaction to another poster which have a little more of my personal thoughts on such things. But I agree, not easy in any way...
thfcsteff
George Hunt
Sadly, if a nuclear weapon is fired, then...well...read this if you have the stomach for it (I have to say I am not usually floored by a book on such matters, but this one was jaw-dropping)...
https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2024-06/book-reviews/nuclear-war-scenario
thfcsteff
George Hunt
Even though the corporate tax rate has gone up to 25%, it is still (I believe - and feel to correct me because I could well be wrong) the lowest corporate tax rate of all the G7 countries? Put it this way, I'll bet there's a few extra bob down the back of that sofa!
Muttley
Louis Saha
Probably best to forget a football comparison. Our NHS operates with 800k nurses in a system that has 9 bands. It's not a pyramid though with 43% of those nurses operating in Band 5. That is a £29-36k band. The 800k only equals 88% of job reqs though as 12% are always open but not filled. Compared to football where we have 4 divisions of 20 teams of 25 players = 200 professional footballers. One nice stat is that the fourth-highest League Two earner in 2022-23 earned less in a year than seven Premier League players do in a week. So you can see how differently distributed the football population are from nurses.
I always think the better comparisons are to the white collar workers who do tend to get disproportionately higher salaries than the blue collar workers. If I were the government, I would really challenge that concept and think about how to change it. As another example, there are 360k accountants registered with the 8 professional bodies. Now if we could smooth their salary and wealth distribution with the nurses and teachers, I think life would be different. Both sets of workers study hard beyond their natural educational years. Both sets of workers have to work under hard and under incredible pressure. Both are performance based. However, one gets more equity in life because that is the way it has always been.
Don't even get me started about the stupid salaries that we accept in the high-tech industry. Just a license to print money for work that just gets easier and easier over time. LOL - programmers barely even write code nowadays. They just drag and drop with their mouses.
To be fair Steff, this book is by an author who has done research but by own admission knows next to nothing on the subject and has come up with a very dramatic version for obvious reasons (I'm not one to bury my head in the sand about the potential of a nuclear catastrophe either).
Interesting points here:
K.D.D.D.D.Soc
Cecil Poynton
Treat him with the contempt he deserves or follow him round out bidding him for items.
thfcsteff
George Hunt
How do you quantify the value of a profession? By the 'actual hours spent working'? How do you evaluate what 'work' is? If someone is working their shift, whether they are outting a few band aids on people or involved in a relentless stream of trauma work, they're still working their shift.
That's certainly a fine point. I would say that the angle she has chosen nonetheless contains enough hard factual data/fact that it should cause alarm. Out of interest have you read it?
markysimmo
Johnny nice-tits
Our leaders speech
1) fudge the pensioners
2) 14 years blah blah
3) You’re all far right thugs, unless you’re Muslim
4) 22BN hole that we can’t prove
5) Release the Sausages.
What an inspiration.
1) fudge the pensioners
2) 14 years blah blah
3) You’re all far right thugs, unless you’re Muslim
4) 22BN hole that we can’t prove
5) Release the Sausages.
What an inspiration.
I haven't, have only heard of it - but because of your reference to it on more than one occasion I will be purchasing at some point!
Oh yes she has done her research, and not saying it could never happen - just that it seems the likelihood of that scenario playing out is low, but it's certainly an eye opening prospect....
I imagine the way the new government have started if the tories stop eating themselves, make a sensible leadership choice and do some sort of deal with Farage that huge labour majority could well evaporate at the next election. I'm actually quite surprised. Most business leaders were looking forward to a change of government but that good will has largely evaporated. The overly negative tone and outlook has impacted the growing economy confidence.
I get that it was tempting to maximise blame on the outgoing government for hard economic yards that remain post-covid and in the current geo-political environment, but claiming there was this hugely unexpected black hole in uk government spending when pretty much every economist has been pointing to it in at least broad terms for the best part of a year makes them look like amateurs because they've overegged it to the point where the markets actually believe Reeves and Co are genuinely shocked at what they've got to deal with rather than politicking. Similarly, most of us expected Labour to abandon their "fiscal rules" once in power similarly to how Starmer threw out his socialist manifesto he sold to Labour members as soon as he got the top job.
Currently there's no sign of that and even Starmer today in his "sausage" speech was talking about fully costed budgets being a hard rule when no country on this planet runs a fully costed budget.
We shall have to see.....they're still learning clearly.
thfcsteff
George Hunt
There are protocols stated in the book which trigger certain actions, the problem is, the technology which deciphers a potential threat is (in some cases) not up to speed. We are sometimes reliant on the thinnest of kite strings to keep us suspended above destruction...check this out (it is mentioned in the book too)...
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo...petrov-the-man-who-saved-the-world-dies-at-77
I don't personally like the public/private debate in relation to anything.
In healthcare the comparison is always (and perhaps understandably) made with America. During Covid pandemic, the performance of our health & social care system was compared unfavourably with particularly the German, Japanese and South Korean systems. But of course none of those three countries operate a free-at-the point of service universal system. They do all supplement their essentially private health & social care systems with state-backed safety net for those that need it and all three offer consistently better health & social care outcomes than we receive in the UK.
I don't have an aversion to public ownership, of for example, utilities or rail, but as a child of the 80s with Scottish mother and London the constant trips to see family using British rail and memories of constant power cuts growing up tell me that public ownership isn't a panacea to fix all problems.
The important thing for me isn't ownership or sector, it's how do we deliver good outcomes.
On public sector pay, we need to talk about the elephant in the room: pensions. Public sector pensions are defined benefit schemes underwritten by the government. So if you pay nurses £73K a year you are committing to underwriting what will likely be hugely significant scheme shortfalls for what will end up being millions of people (when we say there are 800K nurses in the UK obviously this is a revolving conveyor belt of people moving in and out of these posts and picking up pension entitlements as they go).
So the cost of paying a nurse £73K a year to the NHS is an order of magnitude higher than the cost of a private sector employer paying someone the same wage.
I don't believe the alternatives you've put forward are a different system they are all possible in the current "system" and as per reference to BR, public owned utilities etc, have all been in place in previous decades.
I wasn't devaluing the nursing profession, I was just pointing out that holding the profession on a pedal stool isn't helpful, nor is devaluing the work of fund managers into the bargain - at the end of the day, the NHS and ultimately the Treasury are going to have to put an arbitrary value on the nursing profession in terms of pay award.
The problem with this kind of aggressive taxation approach is that when you're that aggressive you'll get avoidance and it's not that difficult to avoid tax if you're wealthy and can afford good lawyers and accountants. For example to avoid wealth taxes you simply don't own assets yourself but have assets owned by companies or trusts with an underlying contractual agreement that you have use of the asset and overriding voting rights over the trust or company in question.
Now you can clamp down on these schemes but that means these structures aren't available for non tax avoidance economc activity and ultimately we get back to the fact that if you want to aggressively tax and aggressively enforce taxation you need to limit freedoms and impose stare surveillance of private assets - which is why so many aggressively socialist governments become authoritarian.
If you want a free society and free markets you have to accept that some people will do better than others and some people will do particularly exceptionally well for themselves.