You're right. There are signs however that rising life expectancy, which has been one of the biggest strains on pension costs, is topping out. Medical science continues to improve, but the lifestyles of the currently middle aged aren't as healthy as those of our parents, who got more exercise and ate and drunk less than we do.
Interesting aspect to the tailing off of rising life expectancy - could it be that those who have arrived as immigrants have had an impact because they are coming from countries with much lower life expectancy to start with? Life expectancy of, for example, Somalis in Somalia is under 52. OK, they come to the UK and have access to much better health care etc - but I'd suggest that their life expectancy doesn't immediately jump to that of the rest of the UK population, because of all the stresses and strains their bodies have endured in earlier life.
The point being, that for those born in the UK, their life expectancy might still be going upwards - and the stresses on pensions, health etc still expanding - whilst this effect is being masked by averaging in several million migrants with a much lower life expectancy.
Thoughts?
I really don't know. Some of the long-term trends towards healthiness, such as not smoking and general health/lifestyle awareness, are still slowly feeding through the generations. Others, such as drinking, sedentary lifestyles and a higher calorie diet, trend in the opposite direction.
A low calorie diet, even to near starvation levels, has a significant beneficial effect on expectancy. Somalia's expectancy is low principally because of inadequate healthcare, and more dangerous lifestyles. The first step toward answering your question would be to get some data on life expectancy of immigrant communities in the Uk, normalised as far as is possible for other variables such as age and class.
I think that data would be quite fascinating. Of course, if it shows that migrants do indeed get a massive and immediate uplift in life expectancy by coming here, then that data will probably be sat on by Government!
I found this from Australia, which has proportionately higher immigration than we do. Their data suggests expectancy for immigrants did increase compared to their home country, and indeed their expectancy was higher than the rest of Australians. The profile of their immigration is heavily tilted towards SE Asia, and therefore different from ours.
Interesting that almost 40% of 18-24 year olds want to see immigration reduced to the tens of thousands.
Much higher than I thought it'd be.
If that’s really the main thing you took from the article, that might explain why the Conservatives still aren’t breaking through with younger demographics. Throughout this post GE period I’ve seen a number of Conservatives now - including Sean_F and yourself draw comfort from ‘this significant minority’ supports this view on Brexit/Immigration, instead of confronting the reasons why the Conservatives lost among this demographic so badly.
Reality is, the Conservatives likely already enjoy a sizeable share among those 39%. Mori’s post election poll showed that the Tories polled around 27% approx with 18-24 year olds.
The more worrying statistic for the Tories (which was perhaps the point Curtis was trying to make) is that among the under 40s more generally, 54% have a positive view of immigration, as opposed to only 34% of the over 65s viewing it this way, and that this difference in cultural outlook is likely to be a millstone round the Conservatives’ neck.
I am a touch surprised that only 54% of the under 40's have a positive view of immigration. I would have expected it to be higher.
Seems about right. It's one reason people acting like only old tories care about immigration are being silly. They just care about it more.
I don’t think anyone thinks ‘only old Tories’ care about immigration. But the priority in which you place on immigration is important. I know people in my own family who care about immigration, but not to the extent that they believe it to be the single biggest issue facing the country and will thus vote accordingly. They are not particularly drawn to campaigns primarily focused on overtly negative appeals on immigration, despite not being as socially liberal as myself, because it’s not their main concern. This, perhaps may be another difference between the generations: even among those under 40 who are more alarmed about immigration, some may not consider it their no.1 issue in the way older voters more generally speaking, are likely to.
You're right. There are signs however that rising life expectancy, which has been one of the biggest strains on pension costs, is topping out. Medical science continues to improve, but the lifestyles of the currently middle aged aren't as healthy as those of our parents, who got more exercise and ate and drunk less than we do.
Interesting aspect to the tailing off of rising life expectancy - could it be that those who have arrived as immigrants have had an impact because they are coming from countries with much lower life expectancy to start with? Life expectancy of, for example, Somalis in Somalia is under 52. OK, they come to the UK and have access to much better health care etc - but I'd suggest that their life expectancy doesn't immediately jump to that of the rest of the UK population, because of all the stresses and strains their bodies have endured in earlier life.
The point being, that for those born in the UK, their life expectancy might still be going upwards - and the stresses on pensions, health etc still expanding - whilst this effect is being masked by averaging in several million migrants with a lower life expectancy.
Thoughts?
Last week Kenneth Kaunda (93) sat down with Robert Mugabe (93) to discuss the retirement of the latter, not on health grounds. It is an astonishing achievement to be not just non-demented but robust enough for power politics in ones 90s. Which suggests that the Sub-Saharan African genome plus effective Western medicine implies greater longevity.
... on a sample of two.
That is meaningless, except by reference to the population size (in the statistical sense). What in your view is the population size (of SSA natives with access to top of the range Western medicine?) And why does the thought of African longevity worry you so much?
I expect him to do something on UC. Cut the wait by a week or perhaps two. Which will do nothing to stop the crisis that UC brings to a community and will demonstrate again that the Conservatives have no idea who receives this benefit, why, or how their lives work.
What's the reason behind the six week wait for UC ?
Not having followed the issue is there a reason why it shouldn't be paid asap rather than after any delay at all ?
George Osborne thought it would save money. He and IDS had a big falling out and the minister resigned.
So another Osborne fuckup to go with triple lock pensions, student debt and help to raise house prices.
On basic humanity, it is impossible to support Osborne's contention on this aspect of UC.
Although, perhaps TSE will try?
Why does the thought of George Osborne deciding that benefits claimants would be fine to wait six weeks remind me of Marie Antionette's 'let them eat cake'?
Cos you're a bit thick? Or just a tribal lefty? Who cares?
Re younger voters, the Tories were pretty much level among 25-34 year olds at the start, and had a big lead among 35-44 year olds. Both groups shifted hugely to Labour during the campaign, which suggests that the Conservatives' piss-poor effort, and Corbyn's very good effort were key.
But it might equally suggest that the polls led the voting - Corbyn as a no hoper was an easy stick to beat the government with (on Brexit) because there was no chance that he would actually win.
Against which (and I appreciate it's only anecdotal) I have spoken to quite a few who held their noses and voted Conservative because they genuinely thought what the country needed now was a strong government.
Given Bernie Sanders currently leads US polls for the 2020 presidential election and Sanders backed Corbyn in June do not think the US is safe from populism either, Trump v Sanders is hardly a recipe for stability whichever of them wins.
Trudeau's Canada or Australia or even Macron's France (provided he sees off Melenchon and Le Pen in 2022) are all better bets for stability, growth and centrist politics in the next decade than the UK or USA
Stability was one of Britain's USPs. Brexit killed that overnight. Shame.
In every month from February 1998 onwards the UK has had a trade deficit - is that stability good ?
In every year from 2002 onwards the UK's government debt as a percentage of GDP has increased - is that stability good ?
In every year from 2003 onwards home ownership levels in the UK have fallen - is that stability good ?
For the last decade UK productivity and wages have been stagnant - is that stability good ?
From 2000 UK manufacturing has been in depression - is that stability good ?
From 1999 until the Referendum the FTSE100 was in depression - was that stability good ?
This is a point I keep making as well. The current status quo works very well for those in the City and London more generally. It does not work for UK plc or the country as a whole. Our position is completely unsustainable. We are Wylie Coyote but we have been walking on air so long the cliff is completely out of sight.
Those who gain from it, like Londoners, are quite keen to keep things how they are and point out how much tax they pay from the benefits they receive. They completely ignore the adverse consequences for everyone else. We need to change our terms of trade. If that results in a net reduction in trade but at a sustainable level so be it.
The most important things Hammond could do today is to double the reliefs on capital investment and training to try to improve productivity. He won't.
From martin wolf FT article, killer stat I suspect:
"Those aged 22-39 experienced a 10 per cent fall in real earnings between 2007 and 2017."
It's 2.6% across the population - so presumably some age groups have seen their income rise, or hold more or less steady...
Pensioners. Triple lock. Will we see that unwound a bit today? May be a bit brave.
David, since The Ashes start tonight, I take it I don't have to remind you not to curse the England team with your praise for the next couple of months.
You're only allowed to praise the Aussies.
And Liverpool's opponents. Although, even that probably isn't enough....
I expect him to do something on UC. Cut the wait by a week or perhaps two. Which will do nothing to stop the crisis that UC brings to a community and will demonstrate again that the Conservatives have no idea who receives this benefit, why, or how their lives work.
What's the reason behind the six week wait for UC ?
Not having followed the issue is there a reason why it shouldn't be paid asap rather than after any delay at all ?
George Osborne thought it would save money. He and IDS had a big falling out and the minister resigned.
So another Osborne fuckup to go with triple lock pensions, student debt and help to raise house prices.
On basic humanity, it is impossible to support Osborne's contention on this aspect of UC.
Although, perhaps TSE will try?
Why does the thought of George Osborne deciding that benefits claimants would be fine to wait six weeks remind me of Marie Antionette's 'let them eat cake'?
Cos you're a bit thick? Or just a tribal lefty? Who cares?
You're right. There are signs however that rising life expectancy, which has been one of the biggest strains on pension costs, is topping out. Medical science continues to improve, but the lifestyles of the currently middle aged aren't as healthy as those of our parents, who got more exercise and ate and drunk less than we do.
Interesting aspect to the tailing off of rising life expectancy - could it be that those who have arrived as immigrants have had an impact because they are coming from countries with much lower life expectancy to start with? Life expectancy of, for example, Somalis in Somalia is under 52. OK, they come to the UK and have access to much better health care etc - but I'd suggest that their life expectancy doesn't immediately jump to that of the rest of the UK population, because of all the stresses and strains their bodies have endured in earlier life.
The point being, that for those born in the UK, their life expectancy might still be going upwards - and the stresses on pensions, health etc still expanding - whilst this effect is being masked by averaging in several million migrants with a lower life expectancy.
Thoughts?
Last week Kenneth Kaunda (93) sat down with Robert Mugabe (93) to discuss the retirement of the latter, not on health grounds. It is an astonishing achievement to be not just non-demented but robust enough for power politics in ones 90s. Which suggests that the Sub-Saharan African genome plus effective Western medicine implies greater longevity.
... on a sample of two.
That is meaningless, except by reference to the population size (in the statistical sense). What in your view is the population size (of SSA natives with access to top of the range Western medicine?) And why does the thought of African longevity worry you so much?
It doesn't bother me at all, I was merely pointing out that two 93 year olds sitting down to chat does not prove or even indicate anything about the longevity or otherwise of a population in general.
Interesting aspect to the tailing off of rising life expectancy - could it be that those who have arrived as immigrants have had an impact because they are coming from countries with much lower life expectancy to start with? Life expectancy of, for example, Somalis in Somalia is under 52. OK, they come to the UK and have access to much better health care etc - but I'd suggest that their life expectancy doesn't immediately jump to that of the rest of the UK population, because of all the stresses and strains their bodies have endured in earlier life.
The point being, that for those born in the UK, their life expectancy might still be going upwards - and the stresses on pensions, health etc still expanding - whilst this effect is being masked by averaging in several million migrants with a much lower life expectancy.
Thoughts?
I really don't know. Some of the long-term trends towards healthiness, such as not smoking and general health/lifestyle awareness, are still slowly feeding through the generations. Others, such as drinking, sedentary lifestyles and a higher calorie diet, trend in the opposite direction.
A low calorie diet, even to near starvation levels, has a significant beneficial effect on expectancy. Somalia's expectancy is low principally because of inadequate healthcare, and more dangerous lifestyles. The first step toward answering your question would be to get some data on life expectancy of immigrant communities in the Uk, normalised as far as is possible for other variables such as age and class.
Without any data, I doubt that the inflow of immigrants has been so big as to dramatically effect the data on life expectancy for the general population? Particularly as many of the working age ones will return home.
Life expectancy figures in Somalia and the like are mostly due to infant mortality, violence and HIV. None of these apply in a big way when in UK. Somalis do have higher rates of diabetes and obesity here though.
Bangladeshis now have similar life expectancy as Britons, as infant mortality drops. Indeed the world is ageing fast, not just here.
Mostly the stalling of increasing life expectancy here is lifestyle related, with obesity and diabetes the big culprits.
Thanks. And a great graphic. Japan just beats Italy, and then Spain and Portugal, as the first country projected to have median age in the 50s. By European standards, the Uk is relatively youthful, due of course to immgration (Germany less so, which may throw an interesting perspective on Merkel's thinking?). And reminding us that mortality rate and life expectancy are different things.
From martin wolf FT article, killer stat I suspect:
"Those aged 22-39 experienced a 10 per cent fall in real earnings between 2007 and 2017."
It's 2.6% across the population - so presumably some age groups have seen their income rise, or hold more or less steady...
Pensioners. Triple lock. Will we see that unwound a bit today? May be a bit brave.
David, since The Ashes start tonight, I take it I don't have to remind you not to curse the England team with your praise for the next couple of months.
You're only allowed to praise the Aussies.
Fair enough. In fairness, I think that their bowling attack is daunting, particularly at the Gabba. England are going to need to play out of their skins to come out of there anything other than 1-0 down.
Don't suppose your team is willing to lend Klopp to the Aussies for a month?
Re Sean_F’s point on the campaign, it depends in what is viewed as the ‘failures’ of the Conservative campaign. Sure, the most obvious one is the dementia tax, and the arguments related to it concerning property and inherited wealth. But there’s also the matter that the dementia tax saga broke the Tory’s USP (this has been noted on here before) that they were ‘strong and stable’. It led to many no longer seeing the Tories as the competent party, and once that is gone it has been traditionally hard to get it back. If many see you as incompetent, it becomes harder to argue that the opposition is unrealistic, unreasonable, and not sensible.
There is also the matter of the manifesto, of which the well reported parts (aside from the dementia tax) revealed the Conservatives’ vision, a vision which may not have been as clear to voters previously, given many voters don’t play close attention to politics. This includes the implied Hard Brexit stance, but also a sense that for all the ponficating about the JMS and appealing to them, that there wasn’t that much in the Manifesto to help them. This may be one contributory as to why the Tories didn’t do so well among the young JMS (NatCen) for example.
Given Bernie Sanders currently leads US polls for the 2020 presidential election and Sanders backed Corbyn in June do not think the US is safe from populism either, Trump v Sanders is hardly a recipe for stability whichever of them wins.
Trudeau's Canada or Australia or even Macron's France (provided he sees off Melenchon and Le Pen in 2022) are all better bets for stability, growth and centrist politics in the next decade than the UK or USA
Stability was one of Britain's USPs. Brexit killed that overnight. Shame.
In every month from February 1998 onwards the UK has had a trade deficit - is that stability good ?
In every year from 2002 onwards the UK's government debt as a percentage of GDP has increased - is that stability good ?
In every year from 2003 onwards home ownership levels in the UK have fallen - is that stability good ?
For the last decade UK productivity and wages have been stagnant - is that stability good ?
From 2000 UK manufacturing has been in depression - is that stability good ?
From 1999 until the Referendum the FTSE100 was in depression - was that stability good ?
This is a point I keep making as well. The current status quo works very well for those in the City and London more generally. It does not work for UK plc or the country as a whole. Our position is completely unsustainable. We are Wylie Coyote but we have been walking on air so long the cliff is completely out of sight.
Those who gain from it, like Londoners, are quite keen to keep things how they are and point out how much tax they pay from the benefits they receive. They completely ignore the adverse consequences for everyone else. We need to change our terms of trade. If that results in a net reduction in trade but at a sustainable level so be it.
The most important things Hammond could do today is to double the reliefs on capital investment and training to try to improve productivity. He won't.
Since the Brexit vote, and the fall in the value of sterling that resulted, manufacturing has grown by 3%, the trade deficit has narrowed, and stock markets have risen sharply.
Interesting aspect to the tailing off of rising life expectancy - could it be that those who have arrived as immigrants have had an impact because they are coming from countries with much lower life expectancy to start with? Life expectancy of, for example, Somalis in Somalia is under 52. OK, they come to the UK and have access to much better health care etc - but I'd suggest that their life expectancy doesn't immediately jump to that of the rest of the UK population, because of all the stresses and strains their bodies have endured in earlier life.
The point being, that for those born in the UK, their life expectancy might still be going upwards - and the stresses on pensions, health etc still expanding - whilst this effect is being masked by averaging in several million migrants with a much lower life expectancy.
Thoughts?
I really don't know. Some of the long-term trends towards healthiness, such as not smoking and general health/lifestyle awareness, are still slowly feeding through the generations. Others, such as drinking, sedentary lifestyles and a higher calorie diet, trend in the opposite direction.
A low calorie diet, even to near starvation levels, has a significant beneficial effect on expectancy. Somalia's expectancy is low principally because of inadequate healthcare, and more dangerous lifestyles. The first step toward answering your question would be to get some data on life expectancy of immigrant communities in the Uk, normalised as far as is possible for other variables such as age and class.
I think that data would be quite fascinating. Of course, if it shows that migrants do indeed get a massive and immediate uplift in life expectancy by coming here, then that data will probably be sat on by Government!
I found this from Australia, which has proportionately higher immigration than we do. Their data suggests expectancy for immigrants did increase compared to their home country, and indeed their expectancy was higher than the rest of Australians. The profile of their immigration is heavily tilted towards SE Asia, and therefore different from ours.
I suspect there is some self-selection going on - someone with the means, initiative, awareness and capability to uproot and find work abroad is unlikely to be representative of their domestic population, even normalised for gender and age.
Brexit is happening. A chunk of the middle class youth vote (and I'd be far more concerned with 25-40 year olds than the under 25s, who have dressed to the Left since time immemorial and didn't much like Cameron either) clearly detest Brexit, but not all, particularly in the regions.
Some reciprocal 2-year youth work visa scheme for the under 30s in the EU, and also with other countries like Canada and Australia, and further help for first time home buyers would seem to do the trick by GE2022.
The rest is getting the rhetoric and mood music right, which matters.
I expect in 20 years time you'll still be wondering why a cohort of 40-60 year olds are so firmly anti-Conservative.
Won't they mostly have emigrated, Alastair?
My son's off, and I believe Smithson Jnr is now a Californian. Could become a stampede.
Given Bernie Sanders currently leads US polls for the 2020 presidential election and Sanders backed Corbyn in June I do not think the US is safe from populism either, Trump v Sanders is hardly a recipe for stability whichever of them wins.
Trudeau's Canada or Australia or even Macron's France (provided he sees off Melenchon and Le Pen in 2022) are all better bets for stability, growth and centrist politics in the next decade than the UK or USA
Well I was teasing re Smithson, Hyufd, who was a Brexit supporter, as you know. Seriously, I would agree with your last paragraph, especially Canada which seems a great option for those that can go there. That would include me, by the way.
Yes he went off to sunnier climes soon after leaving us with Brexit.
Canada is a good option provided you are willing to endure the winters
For a start, they have enough bottle to able to secure trade deals with the EU without rolling over and paying through the nose for the privilege.
They were never in the EU so had no exit bill
A payment of a "bill" represents settlement of a legal obligation. That is not the nature of the payment the EU are attempting to bluff their way to extorting from the UK, in order to be able to continue to sell far more to the UK than the UK sells to them.
I expect him to do something on UC. Cut the wait by a week or perhaps two. Which will do nothing to stop the crisis that UC brings to a community and will demonstrate again that the Conservatives have no idea who receives this benefit, why, or how their lives work.
What's the reason behind the six week wait for UC ?
Not having followed the issue is there a reason why it shouldn't be paid asap rather than after any delay at all ?
George Osborne thought it would save money. He and IDS had a big falling out and the minister resigned.
So another Osborne fuckup to go with triple lock pensions, student debt and help to raise house prices.
On basic humanity, it is impossible to support Osborne's contention on this aspect of UC.
Although, perhaps TSE will try?
Why does the thought of George Osborne deciding that benefits claimants would be fine to wait six weeks remind me of Marie Antionette's 'let them eat cake'?
Cos you're a bit thick? Or just a tribal lefty? Who cares?
You might need to reverse ferret that when (as expected) the 6-week delay is scrapped in about three hours' time.
We PBites tend to be fairly intelligent people who can cope well with money and budgeting. It's easy to forget that's not always the case for everyone.
When my dad was in business, he employed lots of what would probably be classes as skilled labourers. He preferred to pay them by cheque monthly. About half did this; a few had the money paid directly into their accounts. The others wanted cash weekly, despite some of them having worked with my dad for decades.
I remember talking to one of them about why, as it was a pain in the backside to go to the bank each week, get the cash out, make the paypackets etc (*) (as well as the risk of carrying lots of money back to the office). He replied: "If I get paid weekly, then when I run out of money at the end of the week I'll only have a day or two without money. If I get paid monthly, I'll go a week or more without money."
The ones who had cash weekly would invariably go down the pub after work on payday and spend much of it; the ones who got paid by cheque generally did not.
It's no good paying people monthly if they're cr@p at budgeting. Yes, you can argue it's their fault for not being able to budget. But some people just cannot do it, and forcing it may cause harm.
(*) As an aside, my dad used to make me assemble the paypackets every Thursday during holidays. I put much of my skill with mental arithmetic down to this.
You're right. There are signs however that rising life expectancy, which has been one of the biggest strains on pension costs, is topping out. Medical science continues to improve, but the lifestyles of the currently middle aged aren't as healthy as those of our parents, who got more exercise and ate and drunk less than we do.
Interesting aspect to the tailing off of rising life expectancy - could it be that those who have arrived as immigrants have had an impact because they are coming from countries with much lower life expectancy to start with? Life expectancy of, for example, Somalis in Somalia is under 52. OK, they come to the UK and have access to much better health care etc - but I'd suggest that their life expectancy doesn't immediately jump to that of the rest of the UK population, because of all the stresses and strains their bodies have endured in earlier life.
The point being, that for those born in the UK, their life expectancy might still be going upwards - and the stresses on pensions, health etc still expanding - whilst this effect is being masked by averaging in several million migrants with a lower life expectancy.
Thoughts?
Last week Kenneth Kaunda (93) sat down with Robert Mugabe (93) to discuss the retirement of the latter, not on health grounds. It is an astonishing achievement to be not just non-demented but robust enough for power politics in ones 90s. Which suggests that the Sub-Saharan African genome plus effective Western medicine implies greater longevity.
... on a sample of two.
That is meaningless, except by reference to the population size (in the statistical sense). What in your view is the population size (of SSA natives with access to top of the range Western medicine?) And why does the thought of African longevity worry you so much?
It doesn't bother me at all, I was merely pointing out that two 93 year olds sitting down to chat does not prove or even indicate anything about the longevity or otherwise of a population in general.
If it were two randomly selected 93 year olds your point would have some merit. It isn't, so it doesn't.
I expect him to do something on UC. Cut the wait by a week or perhaps two. Which will do nothing to stop the crisis that UC brings to a community and will demonstrate again that the Conservatives have no idea who receives this benefit, why, or how their lives work.
What's the reason behind the six week wait for UC ?
Not having followed the issue is there a reason why it shouldn't be paid asap rather than after any delay at all ?
George Osborne thought it would save money. He and IDS had a big falling out and the minister resigned.
So another Osborne fuckup to go with triple lock pensions, student debt and help to raise house prices.
On basic humanity, it is impossible to support Osborne's contention on this aspect of UC.
Although, perhaps TSE will try?
Why does the thought of George Osborne deciding that benefits claimants would be fine to wait six weeks remind me of Marie Antionette's 'let them eat cake'?
Cos you're a bit thick? Or just a tribal lefty? Who cares?
You might need to reverse ferret that when (as expected) the 6-week delay is scrapped in about three hours' time.
Interesting aspect to the tailing off of rising life expectancy - could
Thoughts?
I really don't know. Some of the long-term trends towards healthiness, such as not smoking and general health/lifestyle awareness, are still slowly feeding through the generations. Others, such as drinking, sedentary lifestyles and a higher calorie diet, trend in the opposite direction.
A low calorie diet, even to near starvation levels, has a significant beneficial effect on expectancy. Somalia's expectancy is low principally because of inadequate healthcare, and more dangerous lifestyles. The first step toward answering your question would be to get some data on life expectancy of immigrant communities in the Uk, normalised as far as is possible for other variables such as age and class.
Without any data, I doubt that the inflow of immigrants has been so big as to dramatically effect the data on life expectancy for the general population? Particularly as many of the working age ones will return home.
Life expectancy figures in Somalia and the like are mostly due to infant mortality, violence and HIV. None of these apply in a big way when in UK. Somalis do have higher rates of diabetes and obesity here though.
Bangladeshis now have similar life expectancy as Britons, as infant mortality drops. Indeed the world is ageing fast, not just here.
Mostly the stalling of increasing life expectancy here is lifestyle related, with obesity and diabetes the big culprits.
Thanks. And a great graphic. Japan just beats Italy, and then Spain and Portugal, as the first country projected to have median age in the 50s. By European standards, the Uk is relatively youthful, due of course to immgration (Germany less so, which may throw an interesting perspective on Merkel's thinking?). And reminding us that mortality rate and life expectancy are different things.
We PBites tend to be fairly intelligent people who can cope well with money and budgeting. It's easy to forget that's not always the case for everyone.
When my dad was in business, he employed lots of what would probably be classes as skilled labourers. He preferred to pay them by cheque monthly. About half did this; a few had the money paid directly into their accounts. The others wanted cash weekly, despite some of them having worked with my dad for decades.
I remember talking to one of them about why, as it was a pain in the backside to go to the bank each week, get the cash out, make the paypackets etc (*) (as well as the risk of carrying lots of money back to the office). He replied: "If I get paid weekly, then when I run out of money at the end of the week I'll only have a day or two without money. If I get paid monthly, I'll go a week or more without money."
The ones who had cash weekly would invariably go down the pub after work on payday and spend much of it; the ones who got paid by cheque generally did not.
It's no good paying people monthly if they're cr@p at budgeting. Yes, you can argue it's their fault for not being able to budget. But some people just cannot do it, and forcing it may cause harm.
(*) As an aside, my dad used to make me assemble the paypackets every Thursday during holidays. I put much of my skill with mental arithmetic down to this.
I too used to manually write out payslips each week. Jumpers for goalposts. Hence the old standby Sweeney plot -- the wages snatch. Armed robbers would target firms carrying thousands of pounds in cash for payday. I wonder if any Home Secretary ever claimed credit for the fall in armed robberies.
We PBites tend to be fairly intelligent people who can cope well with money and budgeting. It's easy to forget that's not always the case for everyone.
When my dad was in business, he employed lots of what would probably be classes as skilled labourers. He preferred to pay them by cheque monthly. About half did this; a few had the money paid directly into their accounts. The others wanted cash weekly, despite some of them having worked with my dad for decades.
I remember talking to one of them about why, as it was a pain in the backside to go to the bank each week, get the cash out, make the paypackets etc (*) (as well as the risk of carrying lots of money back to the office). He replied: "If I get paid weekly, then when I run out of money at the end of the week I'll only have a day or two without money. If I get paid monthly, I'll go a week or more without money."
The ones who had cash weekly would invariably go down the pub after work on payday and spend much of it; the ones who got paid by cheque generally did not.
It's no good paying people monthly if they're cr@p at budgeting. Yes, you can argue it's their fault for not being able to budget. But some people just cannot do it, and forcing it may cause harm.
(*) As an aside, my dad used to make me assemble the paypackets every Thursday during holidays. I put much of my skill with mental arithmetic down to this.
One of the things which we ought to do is help those who are moving from unemployment into work with things like budgeting. You don't have to be a financial genius to do it. I would have thought that phasing in monthly UC payments would be the way to go coupled with real practical help such as this.
But generally financial education is terrible in this country. It's one reason why financial spivs find it so easy to get away with it.
We disagree on Brexit - no problem. In an ideal world, staying in the Common Market, but exiting the EU would be the ideal solution.
This isn't on offer because the EU can't be seen to offering it without risking losing more countries. I repeat this isn't on offer because of the EU. I'm no Tory voter, but I'm quite sure Mrs May would snap their hand off if it was offered.
I'm not sure what these hysterical protests from the Remainers are about. We lost but we should have our way anyway? We must stay in the Common Market and if that means staying in the EU, we have to accept it?
The squawking of spoilt children. Where is the logic? Perhaps you can explain even if you don't agree.
That is worth a thread rather than a few lines, but in brief you can divide those you would call Remoaners into the following groups:
1) Those who believe that leaving the EU is catastrophic and must be halted; the public simply got it wrong.
2) Those who believe that leaving the EU is greatly inferior to staying in and that as many as possible of the benefits must be retained, and that the government is throwing away the possibility of doing so by fetishising immigration control.
3) Those who are simply appalled at the vindictive and ugly way in which the government is pursuing what they already consider to be a really bad idea, alienating Britain's neighbours and allies.
All three are logical positions, even if you don't like them.
2) with a dollop of 3) for me.
I think the inclusion of (3) is misleading as I don't believe this is in any way a defining group of Remoaners. Indeed there are a great many Leavers and Remainers who have accepted the result of the referendum who also feel exactly the same way about the way the Government is pursuing Brexit.
That is true although if I were a hard Brexiter (gasp, cough) I would endorse May's approach. That it is entirely impractical and unrealistic might not put me off from the fact that in my eyes she would be pursuing the cake and eat it strategy that I wanted.
Oh I agree. But as I said yesterday May seems to be pursuing a form of Brexit that will o my appeal to a minority of people in the country even given the referendum result. I think both she and some of the more ardent Remain commentators on here underestimate the number if Leave voters who would be satisfied with an EFTA type Brexit.
Here's a serious question: How does one know for sure whether someone falls asleep? For instance I knew someone who could sleep with his eyes wide open. I think sleep is more a Schroedinger cat state with probabilities of the result of a measurement's outcome. What form, here, should that measurement take? Plugging him into an electroencephalograph?
Here's a serious question: How does one know for sure whether someone falls asleep? For instance I knew someone who could sleep with his eyes wide open. I think sleep is more a Schroedinger cat state with probabilities of the result of a measurement's outcome. What form, here, should that measurement take? Plugging him into an electroencephalograph?
Shadsy in 2011 took Ed Miliband's accusation as proof.
Jez, if you're reading, can you accuse Ken Clarke of sleeping during the budget, some of us will appreciate it.
We PBites tend to be fairly intelligent people who can cope well with money and budgeting. It's easy to forget that's not always the case for everyone.
When my dad was in business, he employed lots of what would probably be classes as skilled labourers. He preferred to pay them by cheque monthly. About half did this; a few had the money paid directly into their accounts. The others wanted cash weekly, despite some of them having worked with my dad for decades.
I remember talking to one of them about why, as it was a pain in the backside to go to the bank each week, get the cash out, make the paypackets etc (*) (as well as the risk of carrying lots of money back to the office). He replied: "If I get paid weekly, then when I run out of money at the end of the week I'll only have a day or two without money. If I get paid monthly, I'll go a week or more without money."
The ones who had cash weekly would invariably go down the pub after work on payday and spend much of it; the ones who got paid by cheque generally did not.
It's no good paying people monthly if they're cr@p at budgeting. Yes, you can argue it's their fault for not being able to budget. But some people just cannot do it, and forcing it may cause harm.
(*) As an aside, my dad used to make me assemble the paypackets every Thursday during holidays. I put much of my skill with mental arithmetic down to this.
I too used to manually write out payslips each week. Jumpers for goalposts. Hence the old standby Sweeney plot -- the wages snatch. Armed robbers would target firms carrying thousands of pounds in cash for payday. I wonder if any Home Secretary ever claimed credit for the fall in armed robberies.
In the 1980s, my dad was warned by the manager of the bank branch that there was a new scam. Someone hangs around inside a bank branch waiting for someone to get money out. As that person leaves, the bad guy puts a marker on him - I think it was a little chalk dust on the coat. Then a colleague outside the bank sees the marker, follows the target, and assaults him well away from the bank. The bad guy in the bank then goes in another direction.
Here's a serious question: How does one know for sure whether someone falls asleep? For instance I knew someone who could sleep with his eyes wide open. I think sleep is more a Schroedinger cat state with probabilities of the result of a measurement's outcome. What form, here, should that measurement take? Plugging him into an electroencephalograph?
When I did a sleep study a few years back, an eeg was used as you say. I believe these days there are mobile phone apps which claim to monitor sleep.
That is worth a thread rather than a few lines, but in brief you can divide those you would call Remoaners into the following groups:
1) Those who believe that leaving the EU is catastrophic and must be halted; the public simply got it wrong.
2) Those who believe that leaving the EU is greatly inferior to staying in and that as many as possible of the benefits must be retained, and that the government is throwing away the possibility of doing so by fetishising immigration control.
3) Those who are simply appalled at the vindictive and ugly way in which the government is pursuing what they already consider to be a really bad idea, alienating Britain's neighbours and allies.
All three are logical positions, even if you don't like them.
2) with a dollop of 3) for me.
I think the inclusion of (3) is misleading as I don't believe this is in any way a defining group of Remoaners. Indeed there are a great many Leavers and Remainers who have accepted the result of the referendum who also feel exactly the same way about the way the Government is pursuing Brexit.
That is true although if I were a hard Brexiter (gasp, cough) I would endorse May's approach. That it is entirely impractical and unrealistic might not put me off from the fact that in my eyes she would be pursuing the cake and eat it strategy that I wanted.
Oh I agree. But as I said yesterday May seems to be pursuing a form of Brexit that will o my appeal to a minority of people in the country even given the referendum result. I think both she and some of the more ardent Remain commentators on here underestimate the number if Leave voters who would be satisfied with an EFTA type Brexit.
I don't understand why she hasn't gone for this sort of option. I really don't.
The option she's chosen is quite likely not to succeed, even if it does will probably piss off quite a lot of both Remainers and Leavers and has probably poisoned relations with the EU for some time, as well as making Britain look unstable, incompetent and weak. She's like a King John of our times.
Given Bernie Sanders currently leads US polls for the 2020 presidential election and Sanders backed Corbyn in June do not think the US is safe from populism either, Trump v Sanders is hardly a recipe for stability whichever of them wins.
Trudeau's Canada or Australia or even Macron's France (provided he sees off Melenchon and Le Pen in 2022) are all better bets for stability, growth and centrist politics in the next decade than the UK or USA
Stability was one of Britain's USPs. Brexit killed that overnight. Shame.
In every month from February 1998 onwards the UK has had a trade deficit - is that stability good ?
In every year from 2002 onwards the UK's government debt as a percentage of GDP has increased - is that stability good ?
In every year from 2003 onwards home ownership levels in the UK have fallen - is that stability good ?
For the last decade UK productivity and wages have been stagnant - is that stability good ?
From 2000 UK manufacturing has been in depression - is that stability good ?
From 1999 until the Referendum the FTSE100 was in depression - was that stability good ?
This is a point I keep making as well. The current status quo works very well for those in the City and London more generally. It does not work for UK plc or the country as a whole. Our position is completely unsustainable. We are Wylie Coyote but we have been walking on air so long the cliff is completely out of sight.
Those who gain from it, like Londoners, are quite keen to keep things how they are and point out how much tax they pay from the benefits they receive. They completely ignore the adverse consequences for everyone else. We need to change our terms of trade. If that results in a net reduction in trade but at a sustainable level so be it.
The most important things Hammond could do today is to double the reliefs on capital investment and training to try to improve productivity. He won't.
Since the Brexit vote, and the fall in the value of sterling that resulted, manufacturing has grown by 3%, the trade deficit has narrowed, and stock markets have risen sharply.
Yes, currency depreciation has helped (thank the lord we never joined the Euro) but it is not enough on its own. We need to incentivise investment and training to keep ourselves competitive without a falling pound.
We PBites tend to be fairly intelligent people who can cope well with money and budgeting. It's easy to forget that's not always the case for everyone.
When my dad was in business, he employed lots of what would probably be classes as skilled labourers. He preferred to pay them by cheque monthly. About half did this; a few had the money paid directly into their accounts. The others wanted cash weekly, despite some of them having worked with my dad for decades.
I remember talking to one of them about why, as it was a pain in the backside to go to the bank each week, get the cash out, make the paypackets etc (*) (as well as the risk of carrying lots of money back to the office). He replied: "If I get paid weekly, then when I run out of money at the end of the week I'll only have a day or two without money. If I get paid monthly, I'll go a week or more without money."
The ones who had cash weekly would invariably go down the pub after work on payday and spend much of it; the ones who got paid by cheque generally did not.
It's no good paying people monthly if they're cr@p at budgeting. Yes, you can argue it's their fault for not being able to budget. But some people just cannot do it, and forcing it may cause harm.
(*) As an aside, my dad used to make me assemble the paypackets every Thursday during holidays. I put much of my skill with mental arithmetic down to this.
One of the things which we ought to do is help those who are moving from unemployment into work with things like budgeting. You don't have to be a financial genius to do it. I would have thought that phasing in monthly UC payments would be the way to go coupled with real practical help such as this.
But generally financial education is terrible in this country. It's one reason why financial spivs find it so easy to get away with it.
Agree with that. A lot of people would be helped if they could manage their money a little better (and I'm not talking about grand concepts like investments).
ISTR seeing figures once for how many people in the UK who don't have any form of bank account. Is there a recent figure, and I wonder if the rise of cashpoints has altered it?
You're right. There are signs however that rising life expectancy, which has been one of the biggest strains on pension costs, is topping out. Medical science continues to improve, but the lifestyles of the currently middle aged aren't as healthy as those of our parents, who got more exercise and ate and drunk less than we do.
Interesting aspect to the tailing off of rising life expectancy - could it be that those who have arrived as immigrants have had an impact because they are coming from countries with much lower life expectancy to start with? Life expectancy of, for example, Somalis in Somalia is under 52. OK, they come to the UK and have access to much better health care etc - but I'd suggest that their life expectancy doesn't immediately jump to that of the rest of the UK population, because of all the stresses and strains their bodies have endured in earlier life.
The point being, that for those born in the UK, their life expectancy might still be going upwards - and the stresses on pensions, health etc still expanding - whilst this effect is being masked by averaging in several million migrants with a lower life expectancy.
Thoughts?
Last week Kenneth Kaunda (93) sat down with Robert Mugabe (93) to discuss the retirement of the latter, not on health grounds. It is an astonishing achievement to be not just non-demented but robust enough for power politics in ones 90s. Which suggests that the Sub-Saharan African genome plus effective Western medicine implies greater longevity.
... on a sample of two.
That is meaningless, except by reference to the population size (in the statistical sense). What in your view is the population size (of SSA natives with access to top of the range Western medicine?) And why does the thought of African longevity worry you so much?
It doesn't bother me at all, I was merely pointing out that two 93 year olds sitting down to chat does not prove or even indicate anything about the longevity or otherwise of a population in general.
If it were two randomly selected 93 year olds your point would have some merit. It isn't, so it doesn't.
Your superior intellect has lost me a bit there Ishmael. Maybe we should re-discuss it when we're both 93
I don't understand why she hasn't gone for this sort of option. I really don't.
The option she's chosen is quite likely not to succeed, even if it does will probably piss off quite a lot of both Remainers and Leavers and has probably poisoned relations with the EU for some time, as well as making Britain look unstable, incompetent and weak. She's like a King John of our times.
The campaign was fought on ending free movement and leaving the single market.
EFTA would have been Brexit in name only and an affront to democracy.
A man who leaked confidential Game of Thrones information and unaired HBO shows has been charged by the Department of Justice. Behzad Mesri, an Iranian national, is said to have demanded $6 million in Bitcoin from HBO.
“Behzad Mesri, an Iranian national who had previously hacked computer systems for the Iranian military, allegedly infiltrated HBO’s systems, stole proprietary data, including scripts and plot summaries for unaired episodes of Game of Thrones, and then sought to extort HBO of $6 million in Bitcoins,” Kim said.
Here's a serious question: How does one know for sure whether someone falls asleep? For instance I knew someone who could sleep with his eyes wide open. I think sleep is more a Schroedinger cat state with probabilities of the result of a measurement's outcome. What form, here, should that measurement take? Plugging him into an electroencephalograph?
When I did a sleep study a few years back, an eeg was used as you say. I believe these days there are mobile phone apps which claim to monitor sleep.
If I am in a meeting and really concentrating on what someone is saying, I tend to close my eyes. Apparently I've always done it, and people just get used to it.
John was an extortionist, rapist traitor who starved prisoners to death and failed in war. When he came to the throne he was king of England and half of modern day France. When he died, he was king of about half of England.
One of the most interesting observations in recent months is that politicians appear to take as much notice of opinon polls as those who are not politicians, but simply interested in politics.
Although apparently Kantar have used a weird turnout model which isn’t a 2017 one, and we all know how certain turnout models produced leads which didn’t actually exist during the GE.
We PBites tend to be fairly intelligent people who can cope well with money and budgeting. It's easy to forget that's not always the case for everyone.
When my dad was in business, he employed lots of what would probably be classes as skilled labourers. He preferred to pay them by cheque monthly. About half did this; a few had the money paid directly into their accounts. The others wanted cash weekly, despite some of them having worked with my dad for decades.
I remember talking to one of them about why, as it was a pain in the backside to go to the bank each week, get the cash out, make the paypackets etc (*) (as well as the risk of carrying lots of money back to the office). He replied: "If I get paid weekly, then when I run out of money at the end of the week I'll only have a day or two without money. If I get paid monthly, I'll go a week or more without money."
The ones who had cash weekly would invariably go down the pub after work on payday and spend much of it; the ones who got paid by cheque generally did not.
It's no good paying people monthly if they're cr@p at budgeting. Yes, you can argue it's their fault for not being able to budget. But some people just cannot do it, and forcing it may cause harm.
(*) As an aside, my dad used to make me assemble the paypackets every Thursday during holidays. I put much of my skill with mental arithmetic down to this.
I too used to manually write out payslips each week. Jumpers for goalposts. Hence the old standby Sweeney plot -- the wages snatch. Armed robbers would target firms carrying thousands of pounds in cash for payday. I wonder if any Home Secretary ever claimed credit for the fall in armed robberies.
When I started work we had thousands of employees paid weekly in cash, and the money (over a £ million in a big metal box) arriving every Wednesday lunchtime was a big event, with a lockdown of the building as it was trundled slowly through to the payroll section. Nevertheless the only external security was a couple of guys on the van, and it always seemed to me that you wouldn't have needed a computer mastermind and a fleet of different coloured minis to pull off a successful heist.
ISTR seeing figures once for how many people in the UK who don't have any form of bank account. Is there a recent figure, and I wonder if the rise of cashpoints has altered it?
Following up on my own post:
The proportion of low-income households without a bank account is much lower than a decade ago, from 20-25% in the late 1990s to 5% in 2008/09. Most of the fall was in the three years from 2002/03 to 2005/06.
Given Bernie Sanders currently leads US polls for the 2020 presidential election and Sanders backed Corbyn in June do not think the US is safe from populism either, Trump v Sanders is hardly a recipe for stability whichever of them wins.
Trudeau's Canada or Australia or even Macron's France (provided he sees off Melenchon and Le Pen in 2022) are all better bets for stability, growth and centrist politics in the next decade than the UK or USA
Stability was one of Britain's USPs. Brexit killed that overnight. Shame.
In every month from February 1998 onwards the UK has had a trade deficit - is that stability good ?
In every year from 2002 onwards the UK's government debt as a percentage of GDP has increased - is that stability good ?
In every year from 2003 onwards home ownership levels in the UK have fallen - is that stability good ?
For the last decade UK productivity and wages have been stagnant - is that stability good ?
From 2000 UK manufacturing has been in depression - is that stability good ?
From 1999 until the Referendum the FTSE100 was in depression - was that stability good ?
This is a point I keep making as well. The current status quo works very well for those in the City and London more generally. It does not work for UK plc or the country as a whole. Our position is completely unsustainable. We are Wylie Coyote but we have been walking on air so long the cliff is completely out of sight.
Those who gain from it, like Londoners, are quite keen to keep things how they are and point out how much tax they pay from the benefits they receive. They completely ignore the adverse consequences for everyone else. We need to change our terms of trade. If that results in a net reduction in trade but at a sustainable level so be it.
The most important things Hammond could do today is to double the reliefs on capital investment and training to try to improve productivity. He won't.
With Corporation Tax at 20% and falling, the benefit of tax relief is less important. Anyway if you need tax relief to make an investment pay you probably should not be doing it.
John was an extortionist, rapist traitor who starved prisoners to death and failed in war. When he came to the throne he was king of England and half of modern day France. When he died, he was king of about half of England.
But without him we might not have had Magna Carta Libertatum, so King John's not so bad.
Here's a serious question: How does one know for sure whether someone falls asleep? For instance I knew someone who could sleep with his eyes wide open. I think sleep is more a Schroedinger cat state with probabilities of the result of a measurement's outcome. What form, here, should that measurement take? Plugging him into an electroencephalograph?
When I did a sleep study a few years back, an eeg was used as you say. I believe these days there are mobile phone apps which claim to monitor sleep.
If I am in a meeting and really concentrating on what someone is saying, I tend to close my eyes. Apparently I've always done it, and people just get used to it.
Do you make a sort of purring sound as well, to signify your support for the speaker? One odd thing about Donald Trump is that he seems to close his eyes when he is reading. It is as if he has been fitted with bifocal corneas in some sort of experimental Lasik procedure.
One of the most interesting observations in recent months is that politicians appear to take as much notice of opinon polls as those who are not politicians, but simply interested in politics.
Although apparently Kantar have used a weird turnout model which isn’t a 2017 one, and we all know how certain turnout models produced leads which didn’t actually exist during the GE.
Their turnout model is based heavily on their 2017 model with a nod to 2015, their final GE2017 poll gave the Tories a 5% versus an actual lead of 2.5%, so their modelling does have soundness to it.
John was an extortionist, rapist traitor who starved prisoners to death and failed in war. When he came to the throne he was king of England and half of modern day France. When he died, he was king of about half of England.
But without him we might not have had Magna Carta Libertatum, so King John's not so bad.
I don't understand why she hasn't gone for this sort of option. I really don't.
The option she's chosen is quite likely not to succeed, even if it does will probably piss off quite a lot of both Remainers and Leavers and has probably poisoned relations with the EU for some time, as well as making Britain look unstable, incompetent and weak. She's like a King John of our times.
The campaign was fought on ending free movement and leaving the single market.
EFTA would have been Brexit in name only and an affront to democracy.
This is why campaigns matter.
I take a different view.
She was not in the Leave campaign. She became PM. She should have taken decisions in the best interests of the country which included, yes, implementing the decision but doing so in a way which was in the country's best interests.
And if that meant saying that disengaging from a union in which we had been a member for more than 40 years would take time and that EFTA was an option which caused the least harm etc then I think she ought to have had the balls to go for that.
MPs are representatives not simply delegates. They owe us their judgment.
All the more so when there has been a divisive campaign and the Leave campaign had two different groupings. PMs don't always implement their own manifestos. So I don't think that not implementing a confused manifesto of single issue campaigning group which disappeared into the mists as soon as the referendum was over should have been treated as some sort of Holy Writ, to be implemented only in its most fundamentalist form.
I don't understand why she hasn't gone for this sort of option. I really don't.
The option she's chosen is quite likely not to succeed, even if it does will probably piss off quite a lot of both Remainers and Leavers and has probably poisoned relations with the EU for some time, as well as making Britain look unstable, incompetent and weak. She's like a King John of our times.
The campaign was fought on ending free movement and leaving the single market.
EFTA would have been Brexit in name only and an affront to democracy.
This is why campaigns matter.
I take a different view.
She was not in the Leave campaign. She became PM. She should have taken decisions in the best interests of the country which included, yes, implementing the decision but doing so in a way which was in the country's best interests.
And if that meant saying that disengaging from a union in which we had been a member for more than 40 years would take time and that EFTA was an option which caused the least harm etc then I think she ought to have had the balls to go for that.
MPs are representatives not simply delegates. They owe us their judgment.
All the more so when there has been a divisive campaign and the Leave campaign had two different groupings. PMs don't always implement their own manifestos. So I don't think that not implementing a confused manifesto of single issue campaigning group which disappeared into the mists as soon as the referendum was over should have been treated as some sort of Holy Writ, to be implemented only in its most fundamentalist form.
Had she tried to do that, she would have been ousted by Tory Leavers within hours.
I don't understand why she hasn't gone for this sort of option. I really don't.
The option she's chosen is quite likely not to succeed, even if it does will probably piss off quite a lot of both Remainers and Leavers and has probably poisoned relations with the EU for some time, as well as making Britain look unstable, incompetent and weak. She's like a King John of our times.
The campaign was fought on ending free movement and leaving the single market.
EFTA would have been Brexit in name only and an affront to democracy.
This is why campaigns matter.
I don't remember the campaign being fought on "leaving the single market" and, insofar that it was, it was the Remainers saying we would have to leave it and the Leavers saying that we wouldn't!
Mr. Eagles, perversely, a Leave supporter might've gone softer, as per only Nixon could go to China (or Sharon being able to attempt more conciliation due to his war record [or would've/could've, if he hadn't had that stroke]).
I don't understand why she hasn't gone for this sort of option. I really don't.
The option she's chosen is quite likely not to succeed, even if it does will probably piss off quite a lot of both Remainers and Leavers and has probably poisoned relations with the EU for some time, as well as making Britain look unstable, incompetent and weak. She's like a King John of our times.
The campaign was fought on ending free movement and leaving the single market.
EFTA would have been Brexit in name only and an affront to democracy.
This is why campaigns matter.
I don't remember the campaign being fought on "leaving the single market" and, insofar that it was, it was the Remainers saying we would have to leave it and the Leavers saying that we wouldn't!
Gove and Johnson said repeatedly we'd leave the single market, as it was the only way to take back control of our laws and borders.
Mr. Eagles, perversely, a Leave supporter might've gone softer, as per only Nixon could go to China (or Sharon being able to attempt more conciliation due to his war record [or would've/could've, if he hadn't had that stroke]).
Nope, remember Farage would grab his rifle if Mrs May or anyone tried to frustrate Leaving like that.
One of the most interesting observations in recent months is that politicians appear to take as much notice of opinon polls as those who are not politicians, but simply interested in politics.
Although apparently Kantar have used a weird turnout model which isn’t a 2017 one, and we all know how certain turnout models produced leads which didn’t actually exist during the GE.
Their turnout model is based heavily on their 2017 model with a nod to 2015, their final GE2017 poll gave the Tories a 5% versus an actual lead of 2.5%, so their modelling does have soundness to it.
The reason for the unusual result appears to be methodological, rather than from some sudden Tory recovery, and down to the way Kantar treat turnout. As regular readers will know, many polls came horribly unstuck at the 2017 election because instead of basing turnout on how likely respondents said they were to vote, they predicted respondents likelihood to vote based on factors like their age and class. These methods assumed young people would be much less likely to vote, and produced large Conservative leads that ended up being wrong. Generally speaking, these socio-economic models have been dropped. At the election Kantar took a sort of halfway position – they based their turnout model on both respondents’ self-assessed likelihood to vote, whether they voted last time and their age, assuming that older people were more likely to vote than younger people. This actually performed far better than most other companies did; Kantar’s final poll showed a five point Conservative lead, compared to the 2.5 they actually got. As such, Kantar appear to have kept using their old turnout model that partly predicts likelihood to vote based on age. The impact of this is clear – before turnout weighting Labour would have had a one point lead, very similar to other companies’ polls. After turnout weighting the Conservatives are four points ahead.
From what Wells’ saying it appears they’ve used a kind of halfway type of model in regard to turnout, which although had them doing better than ICM and ComRes, didn’t have them doing as well as Survation. While we have no idea whether 2017 turnout will actually prove a reliable model in the next GE, I don’t think we can be sure this halfway model will either, it seems a bit of an educated guess.
Edit: and apparently they’ve weighed 18-24 year olds on a 19% turnout....
John was an extortionist, rapist traitor who starved prisoners to death and failed in war. When he came to the throne he was king of England and half of modern day France. When he died, he was king of about half of England.
But without him we might not have had Magna Carta Libertatum, so King John's not so bad.
I am surprised to see Angela Rayner drawing attention to haing become a grandmother at the age of 37. Bad enough surely to have had a child out of wedlock herself at 16 - yet she appears happy to highlight the fact that her 21 year old son has done the same thing. Perhaps such immorality runs in families - but she does not strike me as a role model that we should have in a position of authority at all.
Your entire strategy for this group seems to be based around "I'm right, they're wrong and in a couple of years they will see I'm right, or they'll forget if I can dangle a few gewgaws under their nose". To date there hasn't been the slightest indication that this group are being persuaded by Brexit, especially given the incompetent and narrow-minded way in which the negotiations have been conducted by the UK government.
The Conservatives are toxifying themselves for a generation at present.
You got GE2017 wrong, as did I. We can't see 17 months into the future, yet alone 17 years.
The World and the landscape of British politics will look very different in 20 years time, to which all major political parties will have adapted, so I'm relaxed about this.
As .
The circle could have been squared quite easily. But Leavers were too busy exulting in their victory and telling potentially persuadable Remain voters to "suck it up, losers" to try.
Humour me. How?
Theresa May actually got it half-right.
What it needed was the government to set out immediately the parameters that it considered the referendum set and to explain that Brexit was to be negotiated within those parameters, reassuring Leave voters that the vote would be respected. A tick for the PM there, despite the endless wailing that Leave supporters irrationally inflicted on the nation about impending betrayal.
But it also needed the government to set out meaningfully what the longterm relationship between Britain and the rest of the EU would look like. In this part, the government could show how the fears of Remain voters would be addressed. I expect that the loopier Leave voters would have howled betrayal again here at the points where the government made contact with reality on subjects like immigration, trade and co-operation between the EU and Britain.
There has been no attempt to offer a longterm vision of what post-Brexit Britain would look like. As a result, it's been filled by the meanest, nastiest, maddest Leave ideas.
Remain voters and the EU have responded accordingly.
Why didn't the second half happen? Partly it was failure by the government. And partly it was because far too big a part of the Leave coalition was vindictive, small-minded and nasty to allow the government the freedom of manoeuvre to make such an approach safe for the government to pursue.
Got sucked into work this morning, but thank you for this. Appreciated.
I am surprised to see Angela Rayner drawing attention to haing become a grandmother at the age of 37. Bad enough surely to have had a child out of wedlock herself at 16 - yet she appears happy to highlight the fact that her 21 year old son has done the same thing. Perhaps such immorality runs in families - but she does not strike me as a role model that we should have in a position of authority at all.
What it needed was the government to set out immediately the parameters that it considered the referendum set and to explain that Brexit was to be negotiated within those parameters, reassuring Leave voters that the vote would be respected. A tick for the PM there, despite the endless wailing that Leave supporters irrationally inflicted on the nation about impending betrayal.
But
There has been no attempt to offer a longterm vision of what post-Brexit Britain would look like. As a result, it's been filled by the meanest, nastiest, maddest Leave ideas.
I think that setting out the longterm relationship between Britain and the EU needed to be done before or, at least, at the same time as setting out the parameters within which Brexit was to be negotiated. May's error, to my mind, was to set out very early her view of those parameters without involving anyone else or, critically, thinking through the consequences, both for how Brexit needed to be implemented and for the long-term relationship.
And, even worse, she then put in charge people who were completely unable to do any of that sort of thinking for her.
She did that because she was unwilling or too afraid to face down the mean nasty cohort within Leave and the Tories. It is odd that someone whose only real claim to fame was her speech to Tory activists about being seen as the "nasty" party was so willing to pander to a group which is now turning the Tories into the "nasty" party all over again.
Perhaps not so odd given Parliamentary arithmetic. But at a time when she was unchallengeable and apparently riding high in the polls she really could have reached out in a way that would have made her look like the Prime Minister of the nation rather than simply a Tory PM trying to keep a fractious party together.
Courage. There are times when it is really needed. We have lacked politicians with courage in the last year and a half and it explains much of the mess we're in.
May is not courageous. She's not brave. She's foolhardy. She's like a driver who drives at 35 mph most of the time and then suddenly decides to overtake on a blind bend going up a hill.
Two words: Nick Timothy.
But, of course, May didn't have to (and shouldn't of) just listened to him.
I am surprised to see Angela Rayner drawing attention to haing become a grandmother at the age of 37. Bad enough surely to have had a child out of wedlock herself at 16 - yet she appears happy to highlight the fact that her 21 year old son has done the same thing. Perhaps such immorality runs in families - but she does not strike me as a role model that we should have in a position of authority at all.
Did you have sex before marriage?
Most certainly not! Moreover, I doubt that HM the Queen did or Mrs Thatcher.
I am surprised to see Angela Rayner drawing attention to haing become a grandmother at the age of 37. Bad enough surely to have had a child out of wedlock herself at 16 - yet she appears happy to highlight the fact that her 21 year old son has done the same thing. Perhaps such immorality runs in families - but she does not strike me as a role model that we should have in a position of authority at all.
Interesting aspect to the tailing off of rising life expectancy - could
Thoughts?
I really don't know. Some of the long-term trends towards healthiness, such as not smoking and general health/lifestyle awareness, are still slowly feeding through the generations. Others, such as drinking, sedentary lifestyles and a higher calorie diet, trend in the opposite direction.
A low calorie diet, even to near starvation levels, has a significant beneficial effect on expectancy. Somalia's expectancy is low principally because of inadequate healthcare, and more dangerous lifestyles. The first step toward answering your question would be to get some data on life expectancy of immigrant communities in the Uk, normalised as far as is possible for other variables such as age and class.
Without any data, I doubt that the inflow of immigrants has been so big as to dramatically effect the data on life expectancy for the general population? Particularly as many of the working age ones will return home.
Life expectancy figures in Somalia and the like are mostly due to infant mortality, violence and HIV. None of these apply in a big way when in UK. Somalis do have higher rates of diabetes and obesity here though.
Bangladeshis now have similar life expectancy as Britons, as infant mortality drops. Indeed the world is ageing fast, not just here.
Mostly the stalling of increasing life expectancy here is lifestyle related, with obesity and diabetes the big culprits.
Thanks. And a great graphic. Japan just beats Italy, and then Spain and Portugal, as the first country projected to have median age in the 50s. By European standards, the Uk is relatively youthful, due of course to immgration (Germany less so, which may throw an interesting perspective on Merkel's thinking?). And reminding us that mortality rate and life expectancy are different things.
Re Sean_F’s point on the campaign, it depends in what is viewed as the ‘failures’ of the Conservative campaign. Sure, the most obvious one is the dementia tax, and the arguments related to it concerning property and inherited wealth. But there’s also the matter that the dementia tax saga broke the Tory’s USP (this has been noted on here before) that they were ‘strong and stable’. It led to many no longer seeing the Tories as the competent party, and once that is gone it has been traditionally hard to get it back. If many see you as incompetent, it becomes harder to argue that the opposition is unrealistic, unreasonable, and not sensible.
There is also the matter of the manifesto, of which the well reported parts (aside from the dementia tax) revealed the Conservatives’ vision, a vision which may not have been as clear to voters previously, given many voters don’t play close attention to politics. This includes the implied Hard Brexit stance, but also a sense that for all the ponficating about the JMS and appealing to them, that there wasn’t that much in the Manifesto to help them. This may be one contributory as to why the Tories didn’t do so well among the young JMS (NatCen) for example.
The Conservative manifesto probably spiked 1-2% off their national vote on the day.
It remains to be seen what happens next time, and whether Corbyn can peel off Con-Lab switchers directly, outside the most Remainest of Remainer fiefdoms.
I am surprised to see Angela Rayner drawing attention to haing become a grandmother at the age of 37. Bad enough surely to have had a child out of wedlock herself at 16 - yet she appears happy to highlight the fact that her 21 year old son has done the same thing. Perhaps such immorality runs in families - but she does not strike me as a role model that we should have in a position of authority at all.
Whoosh!
Or are you a bastard, possibly in both senses of the word?
Interesting aspect to the tailing off of rising life expectancy - could
Thoughts?
I really don't know. Some of the long-term trends towards healthiness, such as not smoking and general health/lifestyle awareness, are still slowly feeding through the generations. Others, such as drinking, sedentary lifestyles and a higher calorie diet, trend in the opposite direction.
A low calorie diet, even to near starvation levels, has a significant beneficial effect on expectancy. Somalia's expectancy is low principally because of inadequate healthcare, and more dangerous lifestyles. The first step toward answering your question would be to get some data on life expectancy of immigrant communities in the Uk, normalised as far as is possible for other variables such as age and class.
Without any data, I doubt that the inflow of immigrants has been so big as to dramatically effect the data on life expectancy for the general population? Particularly as many of the working age ones will return home.
Life expectancy figures in Somalia and the like are mostly due to infant mortality, violence and HIV. None of these apply in a big way when in UK. Somalis do have higher rates of diabetes and obesity here though.
Bangladeshis now have similar life expectancy as Britons, as infant mortality drops. Indeed the world is ageing fast, not just here.
Mostly the stalling of increasing life expectancy here is lifestyle related, with obesity and diabetes the big culprits.
Thanks. And a great graphic. Japan just beats Italy, and then Spain and Portugal, as the first country projected to have median age in the 50s. By European standards, the Uk is relatively youthful, due of course to immgration (Germany less so, which may throw an interesting perspective on Merkel's thinking?). And reminding us that mortality rate and life expectancy are different things.
Weirdly, the evolving population pyramid of China is a pagoda and thatof India is the Taj Mahal.
I think the rather spikey Chinese one is because of wars and famines at various periods. Russia had a similar one, but now back to a more conventional shape.
I am surprised to see Angela Rayner drawing attention to haing become a grandmother at the age of 37. Bad enough surely to have had a child out of wedlock herself at 16 - yet she appears happy to highlight the fact that her 21 year old son has done the same thing. Perhaps such immorality runs in families - but she does not strike me as a role model that we should have in a position of authority at all.
How much in benefits are the Rayner clan costing the taxpayer ?
A man who leaked confidential Game of Thrones information and unaired HBO shows has been charged by the Department of Justice. Behzad Mesri, an Iranian national, is said to have demanded $6 million in Bitcoin from HBO.
“Behzad Mesri, an Iranian national who had previously hacked computer systems for the Iranian military, allegedly infiltrated HBO’s systems, stole proprietary data, including scripts and plot summaries for unaired episodes of Game of Thrones, and then sought to extort HBO of $6 million in Bitcoins,” Kim said.
Interesting to see what Trump has to say about this...
(If Ronald Reagan coud adopt "Star Wars", maybe the Donald will demand the US Military develops fire-breathing flying reptiles, with which to get Iran back in line..... )
I don't understand why she hasn't gone for this sort of option. I really don't.
The option she's chosen is quite likely not to succeed, even if it does will probably piss off quite a lot of both Remainers and Leavers and has probably poisoned relations with the EU for some time, as well as making Britain look unstable, incompetent and weak. She's like a King John of our times.
The campaign was fought on ending free movement and leaving the single market.
EFTA would have been Brexit in name only and an affront to democracy.
This is why campaigns matter.
I take a different view.
She was not in the Leave campaign. She became PM. She should have taken decisions in the best interests of the country which included, yes, implementing the decision but doing so in a way which was in the country's best interests.
And if that meant saying that disengaging from a union in which we had been a member for more than 40 years would take time and that EFTA was an option which caused the least harm etc then I think she ought to have had the balls to go for that.
MPs are representatives not simply delegates. They owe us their judgment.
All the more so when there has been a divisive campaign and the Leave campaign had two different groupings. PMs don't always implement their own manifestos. So I don't think that not implementing a confused manifesto of single issue campaigning group which disappeared into the mists as soon as the referendum was over should have been treated as some sort of Holy Writ, to be implemented only in its most fundamentalist form.
You are of course correct which is why @AlastairMeeks approach to this is fundamentally wrong. There is an obligation on the government to implement the decision of the people, not the wish list of any particular band of loons who campaigned for it. They should do so in the most constructive way possible. The fact that May was able to carry the decision to double the money on the table in exchange for trade talks is a good sign.
We disagree on Brexit - no problem. In an ideal world, staying in the Common Market, but exiting the EU would be the ideal solution.
This isn't on offer because the EU can't be seen to offering it without risking losing more countries. I repeat this isn't on offer because of the EU. I'm no Tory voter, but I'm quite sure Mrs May would snap their hand off if it was offered.
I'm not sure what these hysterical protests from the Remainers are about. We lost but we should have our way anyway? We must stay in the Common Market and if that means staying in the EU, we have to accept it?
The squawking of spoilt children. Where is the logic? Perhaps you can explain even if you don't agree.
That is worth a thread rather than a few lines, but in brief you can divide those you would call Remoaners into the following groups:
1) Those who believe that leaving the EU is catastrophic and must be halted; the public simply got it wrong.
2) Those who believe that leaving the EU is greatly inferior to staying in and that as many as possible of the benefits must be retained, and that the government is throwing away the possibility of doing so by fetishising immigration control.
3) Those who are simply appalled at the vindictive and ugly way in which the government is pursuing what they already consider to be a really bad idea, alienating Britain's neighbours and allies.
All three are logical positions, even if you don't like them.
2) with a dollop of 3) for me.
I think the inclusion of (3) is misleading as I don't believe this is in any way a defining group of Remoaners. Indeed there are a great many Leavers and Remainers who have accepted the result of the referendum who also feel exactly the same way about the way the Government is pursuing Brexit.
That is true although if I were a hard Brexiter (gasp, cough) I would endorse May's approach. That it is entirely impractical and unrealistic might not put me off from the fact that in my eyes she would be pursuing the cake and eat it strategy that I wanted.
Oh I agree. But as I said yesterday May seems to be pursuing a form of Brexit that will o my appeal to a minority of people in the country even given the referendum result. I think both she and some of the more ardent Remain commentators on here underestimate the number if Leave voters who would be satisfied with an EFTA type Brexit.
Maybe but 78.5% of the people who would throw a hissy fit at an EFTA-type Brexit are either in her cabinet or sitting on her back benches.
I am surprised to see Angela Rayner drawing attention to haing become a grandmother at the age of 37. Bad enough surely to have had a child out of wedlock herself at 16 - yet she appears happy to highlight the fact that her 21 year old son has done the same thing. Perhaps such immorality runs in families - but she does not strike me as a role model that we should have in a position of authority at all.
Did you have sex before marriage?
Most certainly not! Moreover, I doubt that HM the Queen did or Mrs Thatcher.
We PBites tend to be fairly intelligent people who can cope well with money and budgeting. It's easy to forget that's not always the case for everyone.
When my dad was in business, he employed lots of what would probably be classes as skilled labourers. He preferred to pay them by cheque monthly. About half did this; a few had the money paid directly into their accounts. The others wanted cash weekly, despite some of them having worked with my dad for decades.
I remember talking to one of them about why, as it was a pain in the backside to go to the bank each week, get the cash out, make the paypackets etc (*) (as well as the risk of carrying lots of money back to the office). He replied: "If I get paid weekly, then when I run out of money at the end of the week I'll only have a day or two without money. If I get paid monthly, I'll go a week or more without money."
The ones who had cash weekly would invariably go down the pub after work on payday and spend much of it; the ones who got paid by cheque generally did not.
It's no good paying people monthly if they're cr@p at budgeting. Yes, you can argue it's their fault for not being able to budget. But some people just cannot do it, and forcing it may cause harm.
(*) As an aside, my dad used to make me assemble the paypackets every Thursday during holidays. I put much of my skill with mental arithmetic down to this.
It became a cliché but the core working-class culture was that each week the wife was given a chunk of the wages for housekeeping, and the husband went to the pub/working man's club.
Problems could arise when the latter took place prior to the former.
I don't understand why she hasn't gone for this sort of option. I really don't.
The option she's chosen is quite likely not to succeed, even if it does will probably piss off quite a lot of both Remainers and Leavers and has probably poisoned relations with the EU for some time, as well as making Britain look unstable, incompetent and weak. She's like a King John of our times.
The campaign was fought on ending free movement and leaving the single market.
EFTA would have been Brexit in name only and an affront to democracy.
This is why campaigns matter.
I take a different view.
She was not in the Leave campaign. She became PM. She should have taken decisions in the best interests of the country which included, yes, implementing the decision but doing so in a way which was in the country's best interests.
And if that meant saying that disengaging from a union in which we had been a member for more than 40 years would take time and that EFTA was an option which caused the least harm etc then I think she ought to have had the balls to go for that.
MPs are representatives not simply delegates. They owe us their judgment.
All the more so when there has been a divisive campaign and the Leave campaign had two different groupings. PMs don't always implement their own manifestos. So I don't think that not implementing a confused manifesto of single issue campaigning group which disappeared into the mists as soon as the referendum was over should have been treated as some sort of Holy Writ, to be implemented only in its most fundamentalist form.
You are of course correct which is why @AlastairMeeks approach to this is fundamentally wrong. There is an obligation on the government to implement the decision of the people, not the wish list of any particular band of loons who campaigned for it. They should do so in the most constructive way possible. The fact that May was able to carry the decision to double the money on the table in exchange for trade talks is a good sign.
And they say that Remain supporters are undemocratic.
The Leave campaign was won on a specific prospectus. The cynicism of some Leavers in wishing to junk what they fell in behind is breathtaking.
I am surprised to see Angela Rayner drawing attention to haing become a grandmother at the age of 37. Bad enough surely to have had a child out of wedlock herself at 16 - yet she appears happy to highlight the fact that her 21 year old son has done the same thing. Perhaps such immorality runs in families - but she does not strike me as a role model that we should have in a position of authority at all.
Whoosh!
Or are you a bastard, possibly in both senses of the word?
No - I just adhere to Christian standards of behaviour with regard to personal morality. It sometimes leads to my being accused of being more rightwing than most Tories.
I am surprised to see Angela Rayner drawing attention to haing become a grandmother at the age of 37. Bad enough surely to have had a child out of wedlock herself at 16 - yet she appears happy to highlight the fact that her 21 year old son has done the same thing. Perhaps such immorality runs in families - but she does not strike me as a role model that we should have in a position of authority at all.
Did you have sex before marriage?
It's fine, as long as it doesn't delay the ceremony.
(Although, not so much if it is with a bridesmaid.....)
We PBites tend to be fairly intelligent people who can cope well with money and budgeting. It's easy to forget that's not always the case for everyone.
When my dad was in business, he employed lots of what would probably be classes as skilled labourers. He preferred to pay them by cheque monthly. About half did this; a few had the money paid directly into their accounts. The others wanted cash weekly, despite some of them having worked with my dad for decades.
I remember talking to one of them about why, as it was a pain in the backside to go to the bank each week, get the cash out, make the paypackets etc (*) (as well as the risk of carrying lots of money back to the office). He replied: "If I get paid weekly, then when I run out of money at the end of the week I'll only have a day or two without money. If I get paid monthly, I'll go a week or more without money."
The ones who had cash weekly would invariably go down the pub after work on payday and spend much of it; the ones who got paid by cheque generally did not.
It's no good paying people monthly if they're cr@p at budgeting. Yes, you can argue it's their fault for not being able to budget. But some people just cannot do it, and forcing it may cause harm.
(*) As an aside, my dad used to make me assemble the paypackets every Thursday during holidays. I put much of my skill with mental arithmetic down to this.
It became a cliché but the core working-class culture was that each week the wife was given a chunk of the wages for housekeeping, and the husband went to the pub/working man's club.
Problems could arise when the latter took place prior to the former.
In Dundee the women would be waiting outside the gates to make sure that did not happen.
I don't understand why she hasn't gone for this sort of option. I really don't.
The option she's chosen is quite likely not to succeed, even if it does will probably piss off quite a lot of both Remainers and Leavers and has probably poisoned relations with the EU for some time, as well as making Britain look unstable, incompetent and weak. She's like a King John of our times.
The campaign was fought on ending free movement and leaving the single market.
EFTA would have been Brexit in name only and an affront to democracy.
This is why campaigns matter.
I take a different view.
She was not in the Leave campaign. She became PM. She should have taken decisions in the best interests of the country which included, yes, implementing the decision but doing so in a way which was in the country's best interests.
And if that meant saying that disengaging from a union in which we had been a member for more than 40 years would take time and that EFTA was an option which caused the least harm etc then I think she ought to have had the balls to go for that.
MPs are representatives not simply delegates. They owe us their judgment.
All the more so when there has been a divisive campaign and the Leave campaign had two different groupings. PMs don't always implement their own manifestos. So I don't think that not implementing a confused manifesto of single issue campaigning group which disappeared into the mists as soon as the referendum was over should have been treated as some sort of Holy Writ, to be implemented only in its most fundamentalist form.
You are of course correct which is why @AlastairMeeks approach to this is fundamentally wrong. There is an obligation on the government to implement the decision of the people, not the wish list of any particular band of loons who campaigned for it. They should do so in the most constructive way possible. The fact that May was able to carry the decision to double the money on the table in exchange for trade talks is a good sign.
And they say that Remain supporters are undemocratic.
The Leave campaign was won on a specific prospectus. The cynicism of some Leavers in wishing to junk what they fell in behind is breathtaking.
Says you. The rest of us just know how and why we voted. There were many, many different reasons.
I don't understand why she hasn't gone for this sort of option. I really don't.
The option she's chosen is quite likely not to succeed, even if it does will probably piss off quite a lot of both Remainers and Leavers and has probably poisoned relations with the EU for some time, as well as making Britain look unstable, incompetent and weak. She's like a King John of our times.
The campaign was fought on ending free movement and leaving the single market.
EFTA would have been Brexit in name only and an affront to democracy.
This is why campaigns matter.
I don't remember the campaign being fought on "leaving the single market" and, insofar that it was, it was the Remainers saying we would have to leave it and the Leavers saying that we wouldn't!
Gove and Johnson said repeatedly we'd leave the single market, as it was the only way to take back control of our laws and borders.
Wasn't as clear as that. Gove qualified his comments with stuff about how we would continue to trade on the same terms (and indeed his Marr interview in early May was reported as the "first time" a prominent leaver had talked about leaving the market). The official Leave campaign talked about remaining within the free trade zone, Leave.EU said next to nothing about it but often talked about the "Norway option", Dan Hannan said we would stay a member of the single market and Boris often used the phrase "retain full access to the single market" (which is of course literally almost meaningless but clearly intended to imply that little would change as far as trade terms were concerned).
I am surprised to see Angela Rayner drawing attention to haing become a grandmother at the age of 37. Bad enough surely to have had a child out of wedlock herself at 16 - yet she appears happy to highlight the fact that her 21 year old son has done the same thing. Perhaps such immorality runs in families - but she does not strike me as a role model that we should have in a position of authority at all.
Did you have sex before marriage?
It's fine, as long as it doesn't delay the ceremony.
(Although, not so much if it is with a bridesmaid.....)
Gets even more complicated if the bridesmaid is related to the bride and not just her bestie.
I don't understand why she hasn't gone for this sort of option. I really don't.
The option she's chosen is quite likely not to succeed, even if it does will probably piss off quite a lot of both Remainers and Leavers and has probably poisoned relations with the EU for some time, as well as making Britain look unstable, incompetent and weak. She's like a King John of our times.
The campaign was fought on ending free movement and leaving the single market.
EFTA would have been Brexit in name only and an affront to democracy.
This is why campaigns matter.
I take a different view.
She was not in the Leave campaign. She became PM. She should have taken decisions in the best interests of the country which included, yes, implementing the decision but doing so in a way which was in the country's best interests.
And if that meant saying that disengaging from a union in which we had been a member for more than 40 years would take time and that EFTA was an option which caused the least harm etc then I think she ought to have had the balls to go for that.
MPs are representatives not simply delegates. They owe us their judgment.
All the more so when there has been a divisive campaign and the Leave campaign had two different groupings. PMs don't always implement their own manifestos. So I don't think that not implementing a confused manifesto of single issue campaigning group which disappeared into the mists as soon as the referendum was over should have been treated as some sort of Holy Writ, to be implemented only in its most fundamentalist form.
You are of course correct which is why @AlastairMeeks approach to this is fundamentally wrong. There is an obligation on the government to implement the decision of the people, not the wish list of any particular band of loons who campaigned for it. They should do so in the most constructive way possible. The fact that May was able to carry the decision to double the money on the table in exchange for trade talks is a good sign.
And they say that Remain supporters are undemocratic.
The Leave campaign was won on a specific prospectus. The cynicism of some Leavers in wishing to junk what they fell in behind is breathtaking.
Unfortunately that is a problem inherent with referendums - the advocates for each side do not necessarily end up in power to enact the result.
Cameron gambled that he would win - and miscalculated.
@DavidL "The fact that May was able to carry the decision to double the money on the table in exchange for trade talks is a good sign." To me it is worrying, even though it seems to be contingent on a quid pro quo. It's the devil-may-care attitude of bandying about billions that makes me uneasy.
I don't understand why she hasn't gone for this sort of option. I really don't.
The option she's chosen is quite likely not to succeed, even if it does will probably piss off quite a lot of both Remainers and Leavers and has probably poisoned relations with the EU for some time, as well as making Britain look unstable, incompetent and weak. She's like a King John of our times.
The campaign was fought on ending free movement and leaving the single market.
EFTA would have been Brexit in name only and an affront to democracy.
This is why campaigns matter.
I take a different view.
She was not in the Leave campaign. She became PM. She should have taken decisions in the best interests of the country which included, yes, implementing the decision but doing so in a way which was in the country's best interests.
And if that meant saying that disengaging from a union in which we had been a member for more than 40 years would take time and that EFTA was an option which caused the least harm etc then I think she ought to have had the balls to go for that.
MPs are representatives not simply delegates. They owe us their judgment.
All the more so when there has been a divisive campaign and the Leave campaign had two different groupings. PMs don't always implement their own manifestos. So I don't think that not implementing a confused manifesto of single issue campaigning group which disappeared into the mists as soon as the referendum was over should have been treated as some sort of Holy Writ, to be implemented only in its most fundamentalist form.
You are of course correct which is why @AlastairMeeks approach to this is fundamentally wrong. There is an obligation on the government to implement the decision of the people, not the wish list of any particular band of loons who campaigned for it. They should do so in the most constructive way possible. The fact that May was able to carry the decision to double the money on the table in exchange for trade talks is a good sign.
And they say that Remain supporters are undemocratic.
The Leave campaign was won on a specific prospectus. The cynicism of some Leavers in wishing to junk what they fell in behind is breathtaking.
Says you. The rest of us just know how and why we voted. There were many, many different reasons.
You cannot ignore the fact that the official Vote Leave campaign fought on the basis that immigration control would be repatriated and Britain would leave the single market. If you were silly enough to vote Leave and didn't want those things, more fool you.
@DavidL "The fact that May was able to carry the decision to double the money on the table in exchange for trade talks is a good sign." To me it is worrying, even though it seems to be contingent on a quid pro quo. It's the devil-may-care attitude of bandying about billions that makes me uneasy.
It depends entirely on the trade offer, as you say. I suspect we are heading for a deal that will be fairly close to free trade on goods, but not services.
I am surprised to see Angela Rayner drawing attention to haing become a grandmother at the age of 37. Bad enough surely to have had a child out of wedlock herself at 16 - yet she appears happy to highlight the fact that her 21 year old son has done the same thing. Perhaps such immorality runs in families - but she does not strike me as a role model that we should have in a position of authority at all.
Whoosh!
Or are you a bastard, possibly in both senses of the word?
No - I just adhere to Christian standards of behaviour with regard to personal morality. It sometimes leads to my being accused of being more rightwing than most Tories.
You have to work really, really hard to find any evidence that JC was particularly fussed about a bit of extramarital porkswordsmanship with either one's own or the opposite sex; just as well, considering the circumstances of his own birth. Especially, you have to realise that that self-righteous bully Saul of Tarsus never met him and had no particular claim to speak for him. What JC really had no time for, is the Pharisaism of which you are such a good example.
You are of course correct which is why @AlastairMeeks approach to this is fundamentally wrong. There is an obligation on the government to implement the decision of the people, not the wish list of any particular band of loons who campaigned for it. They should do so in the most constructive way possible. The fact that May was able to carry the decision to double the money on the table in exchange for trade talks is a good sign.
And they say that Remain supporters are undemocratic.
The Leave campaign was won on a specific prospectus. The cynicism of some Leavers in wishing to junk what they fell in behind is breathtaking.
Says you. The rest of us just know how and why we voted. There were many, many different reasons.
You cannot ignore the fact that the official Vote Leave campaign fought on the basis that immigration control would be repatriated and Britain would leave the single market. If you were silly enough to vote Leave and didn't want those things, more fool you.
As it happens I did want both of those things but trying to say that everyone who voted leave did is absurd. This was not a party with a manifesto for government. It has no duty of implementation. The elected government does and has a duty to do this in our best interests respecting the one thing we know for certain: a majority in our largest vote ever wanted to leave the EU. So get on with it.
I don't understand why she hasn't gone for this sort of option. I really don't.
The option she's chosen is quite likely not to succeed, .
The campaign was fought on ending free movement and leaving the single market.
EFTA would have been Brexit in name only and an affront to democracy.
This is why campaigns matter.
I take a different view.
She was not in the Leave campaign. She became PM. She should have taken decisions in the best interests of the country which included, yes, implementing the decision but doing so in a way which was in the country's best interests.
And if that meant saying that disengaging from a union in which we had been a member for more than 40 years would take time and that EFTA was an option which caused the least harm etc then I think she ought to have had the balls to go for that.
MPs are representatives not simply delegates. They owe us their judgment.
All the more so when there has been a divisive campaign and the Leave campaign had two different groupings. PMs don't always implement their own manifestos. So I don't think that not implementing a confused manifesto of single issue campaigning group which disappeared into the mists as soon as the referendum was over should have been treated as some sort of Holy Writ, to be implemented only in its most fundamentalist form.
You are of course correct which is why @AlastairMeeks approach to this is fundamentally wrong. There is an obligation on the government to implement the decision of the people, not the wish list of any particular band of loons who campaigned for it. They should do so in the most constructive way possible. The fact that May was able to carry the decision to double the money on the table in exchange for trade talks is a good sign.
And they say that Remain supporters are undemocratic.
The Leave campaign was won on a specific prospectus. The cynicism of some Leavers in wishing to junk what they fell in behind is breathtaking.
Says you. The rest of us just know how and why we voted. There were many, many different reasons.
You cannot ignore the fact that the official Vote Leave campaign fought on the basis that immigration control would be repatriated and Britain would leave the single market. If you were silly enough to vote Leave and didn't want those things, more fool you.
the official Leave campaign said:"There is a free trade zone stretching all the way from Iceland to the Russian border. We will still be part of it after we Vote Leave".
You are of course correct which is why @AlastairMeeks approach to this is fundamentally wrong. There is an obligation on the government to implement the decision of the people, not the wish list of any particular band of loons who campaigned for it. They should do so in the most constructive way possible. The fact that May was able to carry the decision to double the money on the table in exchange for trade talks is a good sign.
And they say that Remain supporters are undemocratic.
The Leave campaign was won on a specific prospectus. The cynicism of some Leavers in wishing to junk what they fell in behind is breathtaking.
Says you. The rest of us just know how and why we voted. There were many, many different reasons.
You cannot ignore the fact that the official Vote Leave campaign fought on the basis that immigration control would be repatriated and Britain would leave the single market. If you were silly enough to vote Leave and didn't want those things, more fool you.
As it happens I did want both of those things but trying to say that everyone who voted leave did is absurd. This was not a party with a manifesto for government. It has no duty of implementation. The elected government does and has a duty to do this in our best interests respecting the one thing we know for certain: a majority in our largest vote ever wanted to leave the EU. So get on with it.
The referendum was fought on a prospectus. You can't just rip it up because you repent of xenophobic lies on posters.
You are of course correct which is why @AlastairMeeks approach to this is fundamentally wrong. There is an obligation on the government to implement the decision of the people, not the wish list of any particular band of loons who campaigned for it. They should do so in the most constructive way possible. The fact that May was able to carry the decision to double the money on the table in exchange for trade talks is a good sign.
And they say that Remain supporters are undemocratic.
The Leave campaign was won on a specific prospectus. The cynicism of some Leavers in wishing to junk what they fell in behind is breathtaking.
Says you. The rest of us just know how and why we voted. There were many, many different reasons.
You cannot ignore the fact that the official Vote Leave campaign fought on the basis that immigration control would be repatriated and Britain would leave the single market. If you were silly enough to vote Leave and didn't want those things, more fool you.
As it happens I did want both of those things but trying to say that everyone who voted leave did is absurd. This was not a party with a manifesto for government. It has no duty of implementation. The elected government does and has a duty to do this in our best interests respecting the one thing we know for certain: a majority in our largest vote ever wanted to leave the EU. So get on with it.
The referendum was fought on a prospectus. You can't just rip it up because you repent of xenophobic lies on posters.
We PBites tend to be fairly intelligent people who can cope well with money and budgeting. It's easy to forget that's not always the case for everyone.
When my dad was in business, he employed lots of what would probably be classes as skilled labourers. He preferred to pay them by cheque monthly. About half did this; a few had the money paid directly into their accounts. The others wanted cash weekly, despite some of them having worked with my dad for decades.
I remember talking to one of them about why, as it was a pain in the backside to go to the bank each week, get the cash out, make the paypackets etc (*) (as well as the risk of carrying lots of money back to the office). He replied: "If I get paid weekly, then when I run out of money at the end of the week I'll only have a day or two without money. If I get paid monthly, I'll go a week or more without money."
The ones who had cash weekly would invariably go down the pub after work on payday and spend much of it; the ones who got paid by cheque generally did not.
It's no good paying people monthly if they're cr@p at budgeting. Yes, you can argue it's their fault for not being able to budget. But some people just cannot do it, and forcing it may cause harm.
(*) As an aside, my dad used to make me assemble the paypackets every Thursday during holidays. I put much of my skill with mental arithmetic down to this.
It became a cliché but the core working-class culture was that each week the wife was given a chunk of the wages for housekeeping, and the husband went to the pub/working man's club.
Problems could arise when the latter took place prior to the former.
In Dundee the women would be waiting outside the gates to make sure that did not happen.
Not just Dundee. When I were a lad, a student, I used to draw out a fixed sum each week on a Saturday morning, pay the landlady (lived in ‘digs’) and the balance was to cover my expenses for the rest of the week. That was OK until I got engaged when I used to give my fiancee anything I had spare on a Friday night, and we saved it up, together with the equivalent of what I spent on her, and we saved up. Came to enough to go on holiday with at the end of the year, before we started work.
You are of course correct which is why @AlastairMeeks approach to this is fundamentally wrong. There is an obligation on the government to implement the decision of the people, not the wish list of any particular band of loons who campaigned for it. They should do so in the most constructive way possible. The fact that May was able to carry the decision to double the money on the table in exchange for trade talks is a good sign.
And they say that Remain supporters are undemocratic.
The Leave campaign was won on a specific prospectus. The cynicism of some Leavers in wishing to junk what they fell in behind is breathtaking.
Says you. The rest of us just know how and why we voted. There were many, many different reasons.
You cannot ignore the fact that the official Vote Leave campaign fought on the basis that immigration control would be repatriated and Britain would leave the single market. If you were silly enough to vote Leave and didn't want those things, more fool you.
As it happens I did want both of those things but trying to say that everyone who voted leave did is absurd. This was not a party with a manifesto for government. It has no duty of implementation. The elected government does and has a duty to do this in our best interests respecting the one thing we know for certain: a majority in our largest vote ever wanted to leave the EU. So get on with it.
The referendum was fought on a prospectus. You can't just rip it up because you repent of xenophobic lies on posters.
It was fought on several prospectuses, which at times were contradictory. For a start, do you take Vote Leave or leave.eu as the prospectus, before you even get into what individuals were saying.
You are of course correct which is why @AlastairMeeks approach to this is fundamentally wrong. There is an obligation on the government to implement the decision of the people, not the wish list of any particular band of loons who campaigned for it. They should do so in the most constructive way possible. The fact that May was able to carry the decision to double the money on the table in exchange for trade talks is a good sign.
And they say that Remain supporters are undemocratic.
The Leave campaign was won on a specific prospectus. The cynicism of some Leavers in wishing to junk what they fell in behind is breathtaking.
Says you. The rest of us just know how and why we voted. There were many, many different reasons.
You cannot ignore the fact that the official Vote Leave campaign fought on the basis that immigration control would be repatriated and Britain would leave the single market. If you were silly enough to vote Leave and didn't want those things, more fool you.
As it happens I did want both of those things but trying to say that everyone who voted leave did is absurd. This was not a party with a manifesto for government. It has no duty of implementation. The elected government does and has a duty to do this in our best interests respecting the one thing we know for certain: a majority in our largest vote ever wanted to leave the EU. So get on with it.
The referendum was fought on a prospectus. You can't just rip it up because you repent of xenophobic lies on posters.
What xenophobic lies?
Turkey is not joining the EU and the wicked suggestion that it was, to frighten middle England that it was going to be inundated with 76 million Muslims, was xenophobic in intent.
You know that, I know that. How you sleep at night trying to defend it is beyond me but I guess it's your conscience.
You are of course correct which is why @AlastairMeeks approach to this is fundamentally wrong. There is an obligation on the government to implement the decision of the people, not the wish list of any particular band of loons who campaigned for it. They should do so in the most constructive way possible. The fact that May was able to carry the decision to double the money on the table in exchange for trade talks is a good sign.
And they say that Remain supporters are undemocratic.
The Leave campaign was won on a specific prospectus. The cynicism of some Leavers in wishing to junk what they fell in behind is breathtaking.
Says you. The rest of us just know how and why we voted. There were many, many different reasons.
You cannot ignore the fact that the official Vote Leave campaign fought on the basis that immigration control would be repatriated and Britain would leave the single market. If you were silly enough to vote Leave and didn't want those things, more fool you.
As it happens I did want both of those things but trying to say that everyone who voted leave did is absurd. This was not a party with a manifesto for government. It has no duty of implementation. The elected government does and has a duty to do this in our best interests respecting the one thing we know for certain: a majority in our largest vote ever wanted to leave the EU. So get on with it.
The referendum was fought on a prospectus. You can't just rip it up because you repent of xenophobic lies on posters.
It was fought on several prospectuses, which at times were contradictory. For a start, do you take Vote Leave or leave.eu as the prospectus, before you even get into what individuals were saying.
That's easy. Vote Leave was the official campaign.
I am surprised to see Angela Rayner drawing attention to haing become a grandmother at the age of 37. Bad enough surely to have had a child out of wedlock herself at 16 - yet she appears happy to highlight the fact that her 21 year old son has done the same thing. Perhaps such immorality runs in families - but she does not strike me as a role model that we should have in a position of authority at all.
Whoosh!
Or are you a bastard, possibly in both senses of the word?
No - I just adhere to Christian standards of behaviour with regard to personal morality. It sometimes leads to my being accused of being more rightwing than most Tories.
Who are you to tell others what 'Christian standards of behaviour' are?
Your comments don't sound very 'Christian' so I'll pray that you don't burn in eternal hell for them...
Comments
http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/niger-life-expectancy
You pays your money and takes your choice!
Those who gain from it, like Londoners, are quite keen to keep things how they are and point out how much tax they pay from the benefits they receive. They completely ignore the adverse consequences for everyone else. We need to change our terms of trade. If that results in a net reduction in trade but at a sustainable level so be it.
The most important things Hammond could do today is to double the reliefs on capital investment and training to try to improve productivity. He won't.
Don't suppose your team is willing to lend Klopp to the Aussies for a month?
There is also the matter of the manifesto, of which the well reported parts (aside from the dementia tax) revealed the Conservatives’ vision, a vision which may not have been as clear to voters previously, given many voters don’t play close attention to politics. This includes the implied Hard Brexit stance, but also a sense that for all the ponficating about the JMS and appealing to them, that there wasn’t that much in the Manifesto to help them. This may be one contributory as to why the Tories didn’t do so well among the young JMS (NatCen) for example.
We PBites tend to be fairly intelligent people who can cope well with money and budgeting. It's easy to forget that's not always the case for everyone.
When my dad was in business, he employed lots of what would probably be classes as skilled labourers. He preferred to pay them by cheque monthly. About half did this; a few had the money paid directly into their accounts. The others wanted cash weekly, despite some of them having worked with my dad for decades.
I remember talking to one of them about why, as it was a pain in the backside to go to the bank each week, get the cash out, make the paypackets etc (*) (as well as the risk of carrying lots of money back to the office). He replied: "If I get paid weekly, then when I run out of money at the end of the week I'll only have a day or two without money. If I get paid monthly, I'll go a week or more without money."
The ones who had cash weekly would invariably go down the pub after work on payday and spend much of it; the ones who got paid by cheque generally did not.
It's no good paying people monthly if they're cr@p at budgeting. Yes, you can argue it's their fault for not being able to budget. But some people just cannot do it, and forcing it may cause harm.
(*) As an aside, my dad used to make me assemble the paypackets every Thursday during holidays. I put much of my skill with mental arithmetic down to this.
https://twitter.com/foxinsoxuk/status/926925240336310272
But generally financial education is terrible in this country. It's one reason why financial spivs find it so easy to get away with it.
How does one know for sure whether someone falls asleep? For instance I knew someone who could sleep with his eyes wide open. I think sleep is more a Schroedinger cat state with probabilities of the result of a measurement's outcome. What form, here, should that measurement take? Plugging him into an electroencephalograph?
Jez, if you're reading, can you accuse Ken Clarke of sleeping during the budget, some of us will appreciate it.
I bet CCTV soon put an end to that.
The option she's chosen is quite likely not to succeed, even if it does will probably piss off quite a lot of both Remainers and Leavers and has probably poisoned relations with the EU for some time, as well as making Britain look unstable, incompetent and weak. She's like a King John of our times.
ISTR seeing figures once for how many people in the UK who don't have any form of bank account. Is there a recent figure, and I wonder if the rise of cashpoints has altered it?
EFTA would have been Brexit in name only and an affront to democracy.
This is why campaigns matter.
“Behzad Mesri, an Iranian national who had previously hacked computer systems for the Iranian military, allegedly infiltrated HBO’s systems, stole proprietary data, including scripts and plot summaries for unaired episodes of Game of Thrones, and then sought to extort HBO of $6 million in Bitcoins,” Kim said.
https://torrentfreak.com/game-of-thrones-leaks-carried-out-by-former-iranian-military-hacker-171122/
John was an extortionist, rapist traitor who starved prisoners to death and failed in war. When he came to the throne he was king of England and half of modern day France. When he died, he was king of about half of England.
One of the most interesting observations in recent months is that politicians appear to take as much notice of opinon polls as those who are not politicians, but simply interested in politics.
Although apparently Kantar have used a weird turnout model which isn’t a 2017 one, and we all know how certain turnout models produced leads which didn’t actually exist during the GE.
The proportion of low-income households without a bank account is much lower than a decade ago, from 20-25% in the late 1990s to 5% in 2008/09. Most of the fall was in the three years from 2002/03 to 2005/06.
http://www.poverty.org.uk/73/index.shtml
She was not in the Leave campaign. She became PM. She should have taken decisions in the best interests of the country which included, yes, implementing the decision but doing so in a way which was in the country's best interests.
And if that meant saying that disengaging from a union in which we had been a member for more than 40 years would take time and that EFTA was an option which caused the least harm etc then I think she ought to have had the balls to go for that.
MPs are representatives not simply delegates. They owe us their judgment.
All the more so when there has been a divisive campaign and the Leave campaign had two different groupings. PMs don't always implement their own manifestos. So I don't think that not implementing a confused manifesto of single issue campaigning group which disappeared into the mists as soon as the referendum was over should have been treated as some sort of Holy Writ, to be implemented only in its most fundamentalist form.
I suspect Farage wouldn't be the only one.
The reason for the unusual result appears to be methodological, rather than from some sudden Tory recovery, and down to the way Kantar treat turnout. As regular readers will know, many polls came horribly unstuck at the 2017 election because instead of basing turnout on how likely respondents said they were to vote, they predicted respondents likelihood to vote based on factors like their age and class. These methods assumed young people would be much less likely to vote, and produced large Conservative leads that ended up being wrong. Generally speaking, these socio-economic models have been dropped.
At the election Kantar took a sort of halfway position – they based their turnout model on both respondents’ self-assessed likelihood to vote, whether they voted last time and their age, assuming that older people were more likely to vote than younger people. This actually performed far better than most other companies did; Kantar’s final poll showed a five point Conservative lead, compared to the 2.5 they actually got. As such, Kantar appear to have kept using their old turnout model that partly predicts likelihood to vote based on age. The impact of this is clear – before turnout weighting Labour would have had a one point lead, very similar to other companies’ polls. After turnout weighting the Conservatives are four points ahead.
From what Wells’ saying it appears they’ve used a kind of halfway type of model in regard to turnout, which although had them doing better than ICM and ComRes, didn’t have them doing as well as Survation. While we have no idea whether 2017 turnout will actually prove a reliable model in the next GE, I don’t think we can be sure this halfway model will either, it seems a bit of an educated guess.
Edit: and apparently they’ve weighed 18-24 year olds on a 19% turnout....
The Daily Mail and the Sun are reporting that the US may have detected the Argentinian submarine.
Yes, not the best sources, but let's hope they have, and that they can get everyone out safely.
I agree with rather a lot of that.
But, of course, May didn't have to (and shouldn't of) just listened to him.
It remains to be seen what happens next time, and whether Corbyn can peel off Con-Lab switchers directly, outside the most Remainest of Remainer fiefdoms.
Or are you a bastard, possibly in both senses of the word?
(If Ronald Reagan coud adopt "Star Wars", maybe the Donald will demand the US Military develops fire-breathing flying reptiles, with which to get Iran back in line..... )
Problems could arise when the latter took place prior to the former.
The Leave campaign was won on a specific prospectus. The cynicism of some Leavers in wishing to junk what they fell in behind is breathtaking.
(Although, not so much if it is with a bridesmaid.....)
What was 2017 and 2015 turnout for that cohort ?
Cameron gambled that he would win - and miscalculated.
To me it is worrying, even though it seems to be contingent on a quid pro quo. It's the devil-may-care attitude of bandying about billions that makes me uneasy.
https://twitter.com/quinnipiacpoll/status/933087128854163456
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-42080090
https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2017/11/the-tin-eared-chancellor-philip-hammonds-ten-worst-gaffes/
When I were a lad, a student, I used to draw out a fixed sum each week on a Saturday morning, pay the landlady (lived in ‘digs’) and the balance was to cover my expenses for the rest of the week. That was OK until I got engaged when I used to give my fiancee anything I had spare on a Friday night, and we saved it up, together with the equivalent of what I spent on her, and we saved up. Came to enough to go on holiday with at the end of the year, before we started work.
You know that, I know that. How you sleep at night trying to defend it is beyond me but I guess it's your conscience.
Your comments don't sound very 'Christian' so I'll pray that you don't burn in eternal hell for them...