It's only a matter of time before the collapse we witnessed today of an outsourcing giant, is the collapse of a giant private health firm we handed £bns of contracts to. Think about that.
I thought your case was that these private health firms were creaming off vast profits?
Ah, but to where have those profits gone? Remember Carillion’s former chief executive is still currently entitled to a £660,000 salary, apparently. I’ve not actually seen whether it’s stated that he’s been paid January’s instalment yet, although presumably Decembers has gone through. Which is more than can be said for bills of smaller suppliers and sub-contactors.
Carillion was "profitable" in the sense that RBS was "profitable"
I am pretty sure that we are still paying (Sir) Fred's enormous pension. I am pretty sure that we will still be paying Carillon's management their huge pensions.
Whoever is in power in the UK -- Labour or Tory -- serious fraudsters never seem to end up in prison.
It ought to be the case that where any company goes bust, there should be a ceiling on what any employee can receive in future payments, including pensions. Beyond that protection, her or her entitlement should be settled alongside other creditors.
Hang on, the pension fund is a separate trust, not an asset of the company. Are you suggesting that money should be confiscated from the pension fund for the benefit of creditors (usually in practice HMRC and the banks, who have a charge on the assets?)
In the case of highly-paid staff, yes.
Would you extend this Corbynistic approach to SIPPs that highly-paid staff have contributed to themselves, and if not why not?
It's only a matter of time before the collapse we witnessed today of an outsourcing giant, is the collapse of a giant private health firm we handed £bns of contracts to. Think about that.
I thought your case was that these private health firms were creaming off vast profits?
There was a wonderful Alice-in-Wonderland intervention in the Commons yesterday by Stephen Kinnock (who is supposed to be one of the relatively sane Labour MPs):
17:55 Labour’s Stephen Kinnock says Carillion is a ‘sorry tale of the privatisation of profit and the nationalisation of risk’.
"Isn’t the case for a windfall tax on these companies now unanswerable?"
It's only a matter of time before the collapse we witnessed today of an outsourcing giant, is the collapse of a giant private health firm we handed £bns of contracts to. Think about that.
I thought your case was that these private health firms were creaming off vast profits?
Ah, but to where have those profits gone? Remember Carillion’s former chief executive is still currently entitled to a £660,000 salary, apparently. I’ve not actually seen whether it’s stated that he’s been paid January’s instalment yet, although presumably Decembers has gone through. Which is more than can be said for bills of smaller suppliers and sub-contactors.
Carillion was "profitable" in the sense that RBS was "profitable"
I am pretty sure that we are still paying (Sir) Fred's enormous pension. I am pretty sure that we will still be paying Carillon's management their huge pensions.
Whoever is in power in the UK -- Labour or Tory -- serious fraudsters never seem to end up in prison.
It ought to be the case that where any company goes bust, there should be a ceiling on what any employee can receive in future payments, including pensions. Beyond that protection, her or her entitlement should be settled alongside other creditors.
Hang on, the pension fund is a separate trust, not an asset of the company. Are you suggesting that money should be confiscated from the pension fund for the benefit of creditors (usually in practice HMRC and the banks, who have a charge on the assets?)
In the case of highly-paid staff, yes.
Would you extend this Corbynistic approach to SIPPs that highly-paid staff have contributed to themselves, and if not why not?
SIPPs or something like a staff pension scheme with Aegon are simply better than the whole trustee DB type stuff as there, by definition should never be a hole in them (Unless the company has been naughty and missed paying contributions over !)
It's only a matter of time before the collapse we witnessed today of an outsourcing giant, is the collapse of a giant private health firm we handed £bns of contracts to. Think about that.
I thought your case was that these private health firms were creaming off vast profits?
Ah, but to where have those profits gone? Remember Carillion’s former chief executive is still currently entitled to a £660,000 salary, apparently. I’ve not actually seen whether it’s stated that he’s been paid January’s instalment yet, although presumably Decembers has gone through. Which is more than can be said for bills of smaller suppliers and sub-contactors.
Carillion was "profitable" in the sense that RBS was "profitable"
I am pretty sure that we are still paying (Sir) Fred's enormous pension. I am pretty sure that we will still be paying Carillon's management their huge pensions.
Whoever is in power in the UK -- Labour or Tory -- serious fraudsters never seem to end up in prison.
It ought to be the case that where any company goes bust, there should be a ceiling on what any employee can receive in future payments, including pensions. Beyond that protection, her or her entitlement should be settled alongside other creditors.
Hang on, the pension fund is a separate trust, not an asset of the company. Are you suggesting that money should be confiscated from the pension fund for the benefit of creditors (usually in practice HMRC and the banks, who have a charge on the assets?)
I believe (and there's those that know a lot more than I do about it) that it's not quite so straightforward: the pension fund is not entirely hypothecated into a trust - if it were, in cases like BHS past and or present owners would be doing time for theft, not getting told off for not replying to the regulator's letters.
It's only a matter of time before the collapse we witnessed today of an outsourcing giant, is the collapse of a giant private health firm we handed £bns of contracts to. Think about that.
I thought
Carillion paid dividends didnt they
They did, and that was, latterly, unwise. But 18p per share p.a. isn't much comfort for shareholders when the stock has gone from 350p three years ago to 200p six months ago, to nothing today.
Think it through for a moment. The company has been providing goods and services to us taxpayers. The government has been paying for them. There has been a loss. That is, the costs of providing those goods and services were higher than the revenues received for having provided them. We taxpayers have been paying less than the value of what we’ve been paying for – that’s a profit to us.
Whilst that is true the reality with Carillion is that they were taking taxpayers money to provide the services, subcontracting the delivery of those services and then not paying their subcontractors. It really isn't obvious what they were bringing to the party at all other than the fact that governments and public bodies like to deal with big parties because they are, you know, safe. I think this is something we are going to have to look at quite carefully going forward. Intermediaries like this are parasitical.
Government policy is contradictory.
On the one hand they want established providers who can provide a one-stop-shop service, and can clear their financial resilience hurdles. So relatively few big firms get appointed as framework providers.
There is then a limited amount of competition on the framework (typically between 3-8 providers). Those that play the game know how to play it, and having been winning big contracts for years, mostly know how to meet the quality hurdles, but beat all the others to be awarded contracts on "value". They then rely on bulk work (lots of contracts) to make a small profit overall.
The trouble is that, when one goes down, it takes a lot with it.
On the other hand, the Government want more British SMEs to bid for Government contracts and be awarded the work. This would give much more diversity, and possibly innovation too, but they are poorly set up to support such a procurement approach.
At the heart of it is that there are very few contract and commercial experts within the civil service, because they can earn much more elsewhere in the private sector, and the Government don't want to run the risk of the wrath of the tabloids by paying a market rate for the right staff.
Turns out Liam Fox's 40 third party trade deals are just as non-existent as David Davis' 50 Brexit impact assessments. If we want arrangements with non-EU countries after we Brexit, it will through the EU and we will need to ask the EU nicely.
Get Bercow to bar him for absenteeism? Green provoked a lot of comments on the lines of yebbut my employer would discipline me for looking at porn in office hours, and just not being there for 6 months on end is also not within the spirit or letter of the usual contract of employment.
MPs do not have and should not have a "usual contract of employment". It is not for Bercow or anyone else to second-guess the reasons why the voters of a particular constituency voted for a particular candidate.
Whilst I agree with that, maybe it is time for a semi-normal employment contract? I understand that because they have actually been voted in, it isn't a simple matter. Doing something that would get the vast majority of employees disciplined or sacked shouldn't be ignored just because you are an MP. There has to be some sort of severe punishment- getting binned off a Ministerial/Shadow position doesn't really cut it for me. Without doubt, the majority of MPs take their responsibilities seriously, even though they can still fall foul of twitter (other social media platforms are available) but the general public see certain MPs getting away with things that would see them sacked anywhere but Westminster. Unfortunately, MPs have to have new guidelines and codes of conduct to deter them from harassing junior assistants and journos, so I'm not hopeful that they could come up with a system to make them as responsible for their actions as ordinary employees.
Turns out Liam Fox's 40 third party trade deals are just as non-existent as David Davis' 50 Brexit impact assessments. If we want arrangements with non-EU countries after we Brexit, it will through the EU and we will need to ask the EU nicely.
What's the Brexit PR strategy for new FTAs that the EU signs during the transition phase?
It ought to be the case that where any company goes bust, there should be a ceiling on what any employee can receive in future payments, including pensions. Beyond that protection, her or her entitlement should be settled alongside other creditors.
No, the pension should be completely outside the company. Everyone in both the private and public sector should be on defined contribution. Yesterday.
Better, return to a SERPS.
Brought in by Barbara Castle. Destroyed by Thatcher.
The US has one. It looks to me as if a household/couple on $13,000 per month get a state pension of 29% of that, i.e. $4,000 per month
Anyway, if that's the maximum state pension, you need invest in a personal pension only if you'd suffer a massive drop in living standards and want more than £35,000 per year. I suppose today's retired CEOs and Vice-Chancellors might complain.
On the one hand they want established providers who can provide a one-stop-shop service, and can clear their financial resilience hurdles. So relatively few big firms get appointed as framework providers.
There is then a limited amount of competition on the framework (typically between 3-8 providers). Those that play the game know how to play it, and having been winning big contracts for years, mostly know how to meet the quality hurdles, but beat all the others to be awarded contracts on "value". They then rely on bulk work (lots of contracts) to make a small profit overall.
The trouble is that, when one goes down, it takes a lot with it.
On the other hand, the Government want more British SMEs to bid for Government contracts and be awarded the work. This would give much more diversity, and possibly innovation too, but they are poorly set up to support such a procurement approach.
At the heart of it is that there are very few contract and commercial experts within the civil service, because they can earn much more elsewhere in the private sector, and the Government don't want to run the risk of the wrath of the tabloids by paying a market rate for the right staff.
The problem for SMEs, according to the Blessed Vince on the radio on Saturday morning, is that the banks won't lend to them, so only the biggest boys can finance the contract.
Whilst that is true the reality with Carillion is that they were taking taxpayers money to provide the services, subcontracting the delivery of those services and then not paying their subcontractors. It really isn't obvious what they were bringing to the party at all other than the fact that governments and public bodies like to deal with big parties because they are, you know, safe. I think this is something we are going to have to look at quite carefully going forward. Intermediaries like this are parasitical.
Government policy is contradictory.
On the one hand they want established providers who can provide a one-stop-shop service, and can clear their financial resilience hurdles. So relatively few big firms get appointed as framework providers.
There is then a limited amount of competition on the framework (typically between 3-8 providers). Those that play the game know how to play it, and having been winning big contracts for years, mostly know how to meet the quality hurdles, but beat all the others to be awarded contracts on "value". They then rely on bulk work (lots of contracts) to make a small profit overall.
The trouble is that, when one goes down, it takes a lot with it.
On the other hand, the Government want more British SMEs to bid for Government contracts and be awarded the work. This would give much more diversity, and possibly innovation too, but they are poorly set up to support such a procurement approach.
At the heart of it is that there are very few contract and commercial experts within the civil service, because they can earn much more elsewhere in the private sector, and the Government don't want to run the risk of the wrath of the tabloids by paying a market rate for the right staff.
Post of the day. Its a real challenge for Local Authorities and Governemnt agencies to put work out to tender, to award the work and then manage the contractor. They lack the staff and skills to do it as the private sector pays double or treble the wages they pay. We work for a Council based near London. They simply cannot retain engineers and rely on graduates in their first job to manage multi millionpound projects. So all this talk of full tender analysis to ensure that the winning bidder is not too cheap is in reality not possible as the Government Agency or Council often have no idea what the cost should be.
O'Mara needs to do the decent thing and take the Chiltern Hundreds. The party can remove the whip and expel him but he can stay "sitting" as an independent.
I understand that ‘average’ time between stops on the Underground is 2 minutes, plus a minute in the station. Enables one to estimate one’s journey time surprisingly accurately.
For journeys wholly within Zone 1 (ie the majority of tube journeys) that is a significant over-estimate. Your rule applies better to journeys to/from outer London.
TBH I think it’s often difficult to manage a one minute stop in inner London, which balances thing aout a bit. Must admit though that since realising that London Transport would accept my Essex bus pass 15 or so years ago I’ve rarely used the Tube, and I don’t go to London all that often, either.
Kings Cross to Victoria (5 stops) is 10 minutes. Even quicker for a 5 stop journey on the Circle line as the stops are closer together. Rule of thumb is 2 minutes per stop in central London including station time.
It's only a matter of time before the collapse we witnessed today of an outsourcing giant, is the collapse of a giant private health firm we handed £bns of contracts to. Think about that.
I thought your case was that these private health firms were creaming off vast profits?
Ah, but to where have those profits gone? Remember Carillion’s former chief executive is still currently entitled to a £660,000 salary, apparently. I’ve not actually seen whether it’s stated that he’s been paid January’s instalment yet, although presumably Decembers has gone through. Which is more than can be said for bills of smaller suppliers and sub-contactors.
Whilst it's bad for execs on big bucks whilst their companies fail, it's very small beer when it comes to the factors which make them fail.
this is a company with billions of pounds contract wise. It's clear they were not making huge profits from this and paying money to shareholders, otherwise the company would not have failed.
Brought in by Barbara Castle. Destroyed by Thatcher.
A brilliant specimen of the popular 'Thatcher myth' genre.
In reality:
The State Earnings Related Pension Scheme (SERPS), originally known as the State Earnings Related Pension Supplement, was a UK Government pension arrangement, to which employees and employers contributed between 6 April 1978 and 5 April 2002, when it was replaced by the State Second Pension.
Post of the day. Its a real challenge for Local Authorities and Government agencies to put work out to tender, to award the work and then manage the contractor. They lack the staff and skills to do it as the private sector pays double or treble the wages they pay. We work for a Council based near London. They simply cannot retain engineers and rely on graduates in their first job to manage multi millionpound projects. So all this talk of full tender analysis to ensure that the winning bidder is not too cheap is in reality not possible as the Government Agency or Council often have no idea what the cost should be.
Quite - that's the value that "intermediaries" such as Carillion should be adding - management and experience. And competition between such firms ought to manage the price side of things for government agencies.
I say "ought" and "should" as it's clear that hasn't always been the case. There was a period where such firms were running rings round the Government, on PFI deals and the like, and a period where the Government's monopsony power may actually have screwed prices (and, more relevantly, terms) down so far that it made a Carillion-style collapse quite likely.
There are lots of areas that need looking at (pensions, as discussed below; slow payments to subcontractors etc.) but I don't think these are specific to outsourcing.
It's only a matter of time before the collapse we witnessed today of an outsourcing giant, is the collapse of a giant private health firm we handed £bns of contracts to. Think about that.
I thought your case was that these private health firms were creaming off vast profits?
Ah, but to where have those profits gone? Remember Carillion’s former chief executive is still currently entitled to a £660,000 salary, apparently. I’ve not actually seen whether it’s stated that he’s been paid January’s instalment yet, although presumably Decembers has gone through. Which is more than can be said for bills of smaller suppliers and sub-contactors.
Carillion was "profitable" in the sense that RBS was "profitable"
I am pretty sure that we are still paying (Sir) Fred's enormous pension. I am pretty sure that we will still be paying Carillon's management their huge pensions.
Whoever is in power in the UK -- Labour or Tory -- serious fraudsters never seem to end up in prison.
It ought to be the case that where any company goes bust, there should be a ceiling on what any employee can receive in future payments, including pensions. Beyond that protection, her or her entitlement should be settled alongside other creditors.
Hang on, the pension fund is a separate trust, not an asset of the company. Are you suggesting that money should be confiscated from the pension fund for the benefit of creditors (usually in practice HMRC and the banks, who have a charge on the assets?)
In the case of highly-paid staff, yes.
The Pension Protection Fund, in the case of DB schemes that enter it, pays 90% up to £30K. So if the chief exec were in the DB scheme and had a notional entitlement of a £squillions pension, they are not going to get most of it anyway.
It's only a matter of time before the collapse we witnessed today of an outsourcing giant, is the collapse of a giant private health firm we handed £bns of contracts to. Think about that.
I thought your case was that these private health firms were creaming off vast profits?
There was a wonderful Alice-in-Wonderland intervention in the Commons yesterday by Stephen Kinnock (who is supposed to be one of the relatively sane Labour MPs):
17:55 Labour’s Stephen Kinnock says Carillion is a ‘sorry tale of the privatisation of profit and the nationalisation of risk’.
"Isn’t the case for a windfall tax on these companies now unanswerable?"
One of the ironies of Chuchill's call for rearmament is that had the government of the day listened, Britain would have been lumbered with thousands of obsolete aircraft. The UK was fortunate that the expansion orders came at exactly the right time for the right number of new design aircraft to be in place for the Summer of 1940. By contrast, France's planes were still in the factories, IIRC.
Once of the many paradoxes of WW2 - Italy starting re-armament first meant it was lumbered with lots of really crappy kit for WW2.
The timing and branching of British tank development is truly fascinating - a series of either under armored or under gunned early war tanks, a reliance on American Shermans & Grants ultimately led to Britain designing and producing the Centurion which is, for me, the outstanding tank design of the time.
"No one has suggested that an MP should be recalled for any and every niche view they might hold. You are using the logical fallacy of reductio ad absurdum. But the argument is whether or not an MP who is clearly failing to represent their constituents either through neglect or design should simply be allowed to get away with it with no recourse from the voters until the next election. If you believe that should be the case then you have a very poor view of democracy."
Local councils have a system whereby you are forced to stand down if you don't attend meetings and vote for six months. That would address the issue of non attendance and lack of representation re O Mara - with exemptions for those who have severe illnesses.
You say no MP would be recalled on a matter of principle - where their views differed from a vocal minority of electors. But they could be. And that is the problem! And recall elections with lower turnouts than a general election could be driven by a vocal minority.
My view of democracy is voters have a vote - and the people they elect should be given time to do what they were sent to do and see the results through. I don't agree with holding elections and referendums every five minutes because of changes in opinion polls or because you are unhappy with your local MP at one moment in time. That is the road to short termism - you get MPs who will always do what is popular at the time and never do what is right.
We need more signposts and fewer weathercocks. Recall systems would risk more of the latter - why take an unpopular stand against the prevailing mood? Not worth the risk.
No they wouldn't be. It would be extremely simple to set out the rules under which recall would be activated to exclude a simple difference of opinion.
At the moment the majority of MPs are being elected to serve their parties or themselves not the electorate. That needs to change. My answer has always been to make almost all votes free but we also need a more effective system of recall.
We do have a recall system - it's called a general election every 5 years.
Recall systems could be used to remove O Mara but could equally be used to remove MPs acting on personal principle on an issue which a sizeable section of their electorate disapprove of.
And the problem with that is?
Depends if we want sign posts or weathercocks as MPs?. If we had had recall systems in the mid 1930s might Churchill given his views have been recalled? He was right though - even though he was castigated and an outcast at the time. But voters needed 5 years to find that out.
He was castigated and outcast by the political parties and their leaderships. His views had significant and widespread support amongst the public themselves. This is exactly the problem. To succeed as an MP these days the people you need to keep happy are the parties not the electorate.
Actually voters were pretty content with the appeasement policies at the time - although perhaps Churchill's Essex constituents in Epping might have felt differently. They may have changed their views by 1940 - but in 1935 appeasement and disarmament was mainstream and Churchill was the warmongering extremist.
Me thinks you have been watching the tube scene in the Darkest hour. I know the district line is slow - but more than 10 minutes to go one stop?!
Recalls could be used to remove bad MPs but also principled ones who held unpopular positions which later were proved to be right. We need more long term thinking and planning - not more short termism where politicians do the popular thing not the right thng.
Not seen Darkest Hour yet. But I have studied Churchill's work in both the later First World War and the interwar period and his view of distrusting the German's was very widely held throughout the period by the country at large.
We do have a recall system - it's called a general election every 5 years.
Recall systems could be used to remove O Mara but could equally be used to remove MPs acting on personal principle on an issue which a sizeable section of their electorate disapprove of.
And the problem with that is?
Depends if we want sign posts or weathercocks as MPs?. If we had had recall systems in the mid 1930s might Churchill given his views have been recalled? He was right though - even though he was castigated and an outcast at the time. But voters needed 5 years to find that out.
He was castigated and outcast by the political parties and their leaderships. His views had significant and widespread support amongst the public themselves. This is exactly the problem. To succeed as an MP these days the people you need to keep happy are the parties not the electorate.
Actually voters were pretty content with the appeasement policies at the time - although perhaps Churchill's Essex constituents in Epping might have felt differently. They may have changed their views by 1940 - but in 1935 appeasement and disarmament was mainstream and Churchill was the warmongering extremist.
Me thinks you have been watching the tube scene in the Darkest hour. I know the district line is slow - but more than 10 minutes to go one stop?!
Recalls could be used to remove bad MPs but also principled ones who held unpopular positions which later were proved to be right. We need more long term thinking and planning - not more short termism where politicians do the popular thing not the right thng.
Not seen Darkest Hour yet. But I have studied Churchill's work in both the later First World War and the interwar period and his view of distrusting the German's was very widely held throughout the period by the country at large.
I recall that Churchill himself said that history was going to be very kind to him because he intended to write it.
The Luftwaffe bomber force was superior, but the early variant BF 109's were slower than Hurricanes and Spitfires though much more numerous.
Assuming we discussing Spitfire I/II vs 'Emil'...
The relative speeds of the two aircraft are close enough to be irrelevant for the purposes of air combat. The crucial advantages the Spitfire had over the 109 were:
Better sustained turn and roll rates. The 109 had higher wing loading but clawed some of that deficit by leading edge slats. In instantaneous turns that bled speed the Spitfire gave better warning of an imminent stall via wash out. Though this feature was a happy accident of its primitive wing design and was not anticipated or intended. As a result relatively few Emil pilots were willing to push it to the edge of a stall as it gave little warning. Once in a stall had very benign characteristics and was easy to recover without departing into a spin.
The 109 also suffered from very poorly harmonised control forces. Once the member of the Herrenrasse got into high speed regimes he would have had to have been eating all his bratwurst to master the massive stick forces in the pitch axis. This problem was exacerbated by relatively small range of stick travel.
Conclusion: the performance of the two aircraft were almost the same on paper but only the truly talented and brave could extract the last 5-10% of combat performance out of the Emil.
I direct interested parties to "Testing for Combat" by Captain Eric Melrose "Winkle" Brown, CBE, DSC, AFC, Hon FRAeS, RN. (RAF reject like me!)
I can't see why he's bothering. Sadiq Khan is doing well.
On some issues like crime for instance rather less so, if say Alan Sugar or a former senior policeman stood up as an independent they would have a real chance
I recall that Churchill himself said that history was going to be very kind to him because he intended to write it.
LOL yes.
I was however talking about what was written by others at the time, not by Churchill himself. For all his failings over Gallipoli, by the end of the war he was extremely popular again, not least because Lloyd George specifically gave him a lot of credit for his work as armaments minister during the crisis of 1918 and also because he had a hugely positive reputation with the soldiers. Indeed it is partly his own writing that has generated the impression of him being disliked in the interwar period. He was so driven to be in power that he viewed his failure to remain in Government as a sign of complete failure. His own Black Dog influenced our historic view of him in that period as much as reality.
Weirdly on R5 this morning this was described as a "nudge" whilst the point was made that inflation was still very high compared with what we are used to (at least from the point of view of those still in short trousers).
Inflation just might have peaked although the oil price is a concern. If so real wage growth might be possible in the second half of this year.
I can't see why he's bothering. Sadiq Khan is doing well.
On some issues like crime for instance rather less so, if say Alan Sugar or a former senior policeman stood up as an independent they would have a real chance
I think the Lib Dems tried the ex senior policeman. It was not a great success.
Brought in by Barbara Castle. Destroyed by Thatcher.
A brilliant specimen of the popular 'Thatcher myth' genre.
In reality:
The State Earnings Related Pension Scheme (SERPS), originally known as the State Earnings Related Pension Supplement, was a UK Government pension arrangement, to which employees and employers contributed between 6 April 1978 and 5 April 2002, when it was replaced by the State Second Pension.
Not entirely a myth, though it might be fairer to say first undermined by Thatcher. It is not to her credit that the contracting out of SERPS which she initiated led to numerous pensions mis-selling cases.
O'Mara needs to do the decent thing and take the Chiltern Hundreds. The party can remove the whip and expel him but he can stay "sitting" as an independent.
Do the decent thing? Are you joking? This is Labour under Corbyn and Momentum. The decent thing would be a full statement apologising to the people of Sheffield Hallam for fielding such a palpably unsuitable candidate, an apology for his performance since election and an immediate by-election. I shall not be holding my breath.
The Luftwaffe bomber force was superior, but the early variant BF 109's were slower than Hurricanes and Spitfires though much more numerous.
Assuming we discussing Spitfire I/II vs 'Emil'...
The relative speeds of the two aircraft are close enough to be irrelevant for the purposes of air combat. The crucial advantages the Spitfire had over the 109 were:
Better sustained turn and roll rates. The 109 had higher wing loading but clawed some of that deficit by leading edge slats. In instantaneous turns that bled speed the Spitfire gave better warning of an imminent stall via wash out. Though this feature was a happy accident of its primitive wing design and was not anticipated or intended. As a result relatively few Emil pilots were willing to push it to the edge of a stall as it gave little warning. Once in a stall had very benign characteristics and was easy to recover without departing into a spin.
The 109 also suffered from very poorly harmonised control forces. Once the member of the Herrenrasse got into high speed regimes he would have had to have been eating all his bratwurst to master the massive stick forces in the pitch axis. This problem was exacerbated by relatively small range of stick travel.
Conclusion: the performance of the two aircraft were almost the same on paper but only the truly talented and brave could extract the last 5-10% of combat performance out of the Emil.
I direct interested parties to "Testing for Combat" by Captain Eric Melrose "Winkle" Brown, CBE, DSC, AFC, Hon FRAeS, RN. (RAF reject like me!)
Brown is/was great at managing to explain the differences in aircraft performances & characteristics to amateurs like me.
I was more thinking what was available at the time of the Munich crisis which would have been 109s A-D with the Jumo engine. I think we had around 5 squadrons of Hurricanes and Spitfires were just starting to be delivered at that point; hopefully with a phony war period that would have increased.
There's currently a good flight test piece on an Emil in one of the flight magazines I graze on in Tescos, you'd probably get the finer technical points of it more than me.
I can't see why he's bothering. Sadiq Khan is doing well.
On some issues like crime for instance rather less so, if say Alan Sugar or a former senior policeman stood up as an independent they would have a real chance
I think the Lib Dems tried the ex senior policeman. It was not a great success.
Brian Paddick was just a left liberal Guardian candidate who happened to be a policeman.
I was talking a proper, tough, zero tolerance, '3 strikes and you're out' candidate who fights minor crimes as hard as major ones ie a prosecutor or policeman in the Rudy Giuliani or Bill Bratton mode
I can't see why he's bothering. Sadiq Khan is doing well.
On some issues like crime for instance rather less so, if say Alan Sugar or a former senior policeman stood up as an independent they would have a real chance
I think the Lib Dems tried the ex senior policeman. It was not a great success.
Brian Paddock was just a left liberal Guardian candidate who just happened to be a policeman.
I was talking a proper, tough, zero tolerance, '3 strikes and you're out' candidate who fights minor crimes as hard as major ones ie a prosecutor or policeman in the Rudy Giuliani or Bob Bratton mode
And you are going to find one of them above the rank of Sergeant in the Met?
And yet you can be damn sure that the extremists in Momentum who have just gained control of the NEC and are now planning the deselection of moderate MPs wont be deselecting O'Mara. Never before in Labour's history has the hard left been in such control of the Labour Party. Never before has moderation and mainstreamism been so unrepresented. Labour has locked itself into hard ideological extremism, and has locked out pragmatism and moderation. Millions of people like me who desperately want to get rid of the Tories but dont want them replaced by baying hard left extremists simply dont have anyone to vote for -and this stituation cant carry on forever for politics like nature abhors a vaccuum.
I can't see why he's bothering. Sadiq Khan is doing well.
On some issues like crime for instance rather less so, if say Alan Sugar or a former senior policeman stood up as an independent they would have a real chance
I think the Lib Dems tried the ex senior policeman. It was not a great success.
Brian Paddick was just a left liberal Guardian candidate who happened to be a policeman.
I was talking a proper, tough, zero tolerance, '3 strikes and you're out' candidate who fights minor crimes as hard as major ones ie a prosecutor or policeman in the Rudy Giuliani or Bill Bratton mode
Let me know when you find a senior copper who is like that.
I can't see why he's bothering. Sadiq Khan is doing well.
On some issues like crime for instance rather less so, if say Alan Sugar or a former senior policeman stood up as an independent they would have a real chance
I think the Lib Dems tried the ex senior policeman. It was not a great success.
Brian Paddock was just a left liberal Guardian candidate who just happened to be a policeman.
I was talking a proper, tough, zero tolerance, '3 strikes and you're out' candidate who fights minor crimes as hard as major ones ie a prosecutor or policeman in the Rudy Giuliani or Bob Bratton mode
And you are going to find one of them above the rank of Sergeant in the Met?
In an organisation as big as the Met I am sure there are some somewhere and there is of course nothing to stop a Sergeant standing.
Sugar with a tough policeman as his candidate for deputy would be the most dangerous opponent for Khan
Brought in by Barbara Castle. Destroyed by Thatcher.
A brilliant specimen of the popular 'Thatcher myth' genre.
In reality:
The State Earnings Related Pension Scheme (SERPS), originally known as the State Earnings Related Pension Supplement, was a UK Government pension arrangement, to which employees and employers contributed between 6 April 1978 and 5 April 2002, when it was replaced by the State Second Pension.
Not entirely a myth, though it might be fairer to say first undermined by Thatcher. It is not to her credit that the contracting out of SERPS which she initiated led to numerous pensions mis-selling cases.
Contracting out was built in to SERPS at the start. The change under Thatcher was to extend contracting-out to money-purchase schemes. That did lead to some misselling (although most of it occurred some time after her premiership), but it was limited.
The Luftwaffe bomber force was superior, but the early variant BF 109's were slower than Hurricanes and Spitfires though much more numerous.
Assuming we discussing Spitfire I/II vs 'Emil'...
The relative speeds of the two aircraft are close enough to be irrelevant for the purposes of air combat. The crucial advantages the Spitfire had over the 109 were:
Better sustained turn and roll rates. The 109 had higher wing loading but clawed some of that deficit by leading edge slats. In instantaneous turns that bled speed the Spitfire gave better warning of an imminent stall via wash out. Though this feature was a happy accident of its primitive wing design and was not anticipated or intended. As a result relatively few Emil pilots were willing to push it to the edge of a stall as it gave little warning. Once in a stall had very benign characteristics and was easy to recover without departing into a spin.
The 109 also suffered from very poorly harmonised control forces. Once the member of the Herrenrasse got into high speed regimes he would have had to have been eating all his bratwurst to master the massive stick forces in the pitch axis. This problem was exacerbated by relatively small range of stick travel.
Conclusion: the performance of the two aircraft were almost the same on paper but only the truly talented and brave could extract the last 5-10% of combat performance out of the Emil.
I direct interested parties to "Testing for Combat" by Captain Eric Melrose "Winkle" Brown, CBE, DSC, AFC, Hon FRAeS, RN. (RAF reject like me!)
Brown is/was great at managing to explain the differences in aircraft performances & characteristics to amateurs like me.
I was more thinking what was available at the time of the Munich crisis which would have been 109s A-D with the Jumo engine. I think we had around 5 squadrons of Hurricanes and Spitfires were just starting to be delivered at that point; hopefully with a phony war period that would have increased.
There's currently a good flight test piece on an Emil in one of the flight magazines I graze on in Tescos, you'd probably get the finer technical points of it more than me.
Munich was late September 1938. If a general war had broken out then, as it easily could have and as Hitler wanted, the earliest that there could realistically have been a Battle of Britain was Summer 1939. For Germany, defeating France and the low countries, Czechoslovakia and probably Poland would still have been a minimum pre-requisite.
Weirdly on R5 this morning this was described as a "nudge" whilst the point was made that inflation was still very high compared with what we are used to (at least from the point of view of those still in short trousers).
Inflation just might have peaked although the oil price is a concern. If so real wage growth might be possible in the second half of this year.
1) This is an object lesson in how little the individual candidate matters. Jared O'Meara beat the former deputy Prime Minister - whatever else you think of Nick Clegg, he was a serious figure. He was beaten by a cipher.
2) Following on from this thought, I wonder whether Labour is making a mistake selecting candidates in key seats so early. CCHQ has much more time to get its teeth into these candidates, find out their past indiscretions and turn those into campaign materials.
1) OTOH, only Nick Clegg could have come as close as he did for the Lib Dems, or indeed have held the seat in 2015.
2) The Conservatives are looking to select for target seats this year too. In both cases it looks like an over-reaction to being caught out in 2017, though there is certainly some merit in doing so where there is a good local candidate and/or not much by way of institutional opposition to the MP (e.g. council control, or a plausible council opposition).
Yet, formally, there are supposed to be new 600-seat boundaries before the next GE (yet we all know it isn't going to happen) and the plan B being discussed is a new set of 650-seat boundaries. Selecting so early in these circumstances is somewhat peculiar.
The Luftwaffe bomber force was superior, but the early variant BF 109's were slower than Hurricanes and Spitfires though much more numerous.
Assuming we discussing Spitfire I/II vs 'Emil'...
The relative speeds of the two aircraft are close enough to be irrelevant for the purposes of air combat. The crucial advantages the Spitfire had over the 109 were:
Better sustained turn and roll rates. The 109 had higher wing loading but clawed some of that deficit by leading edge slats. In instantaneous turns that bled speed the Spitfire gave better warning of an imminent stall via wash out. Though this feature was a happy accident of its primitive wing design and was not anticipated or intended. As a result relatively few Emil pilots were willing to push it to the edge of a stall as it gave little warning. Once in a stall had very benign characteristics and was easy to recover without departing into a spin.
The 109 also suffered from very poorly harmonised control forces. Once the member of the Herrenrasse got into high speed regimes he would have had to have been eating all his bratwurst to master the massive stick forces in the pitch axis. This problem was exacerbated by relatively small range of stick travel.
Conclusion: the performance of the two aircraft were almost the same on paper but only the truly talented and brave could extract the last 5-10% of combat performance out of the Emil.
I direct interested parties to "Testing for Combat" by Captain Eric Melrose "Winkle" Brown, CBE, DSC, AFC, Hon FRAeS, RN. (RAF reject like me!)
Brown is/was great at managing to explain the differences in aircraft performances & characteristics to amateurs like me.
I was more thinking what was available at the time of the Munich crisis which would have been 109s A-D with the Jumo engine. I think we had around 5 squadrons of Hurricanes and Spitfires were just starting to be delivered at that point; hopefully with a phony war period that would have increased.
There's currently a good flight test piece on an Emil in one of the flight magazines I graze on in Tescos, you'd probably get the finer technical points of it more than me.
Munich was late September 1938. If a general war had broken out then, as it easily could have and as Hitler wanted, the earliest that there could realistically have been a Battle of Britain was Summer 1939. For Germany, defeating France and the low countries, Czechoslovakia and probably Poland would still have been a minimum pre-requisite.
Weirdly on R5 this morning this was described as a "nudge" whilst the point was made that inflation was still very high compared with what we are used to (at least from the point of view of those still in short trousers).
Inflation just might have peaked although the oil price is a concern. If so real wage growth might be possible in the second half of this year.
We used to dream of inflation at only 3%.
Ridiculous to say 3% is 'still very high'.
Well it gave me a smile. And it is still 1% above target. But the BBC may have to look for other negative slants in the coming months.
I can't see why he's bothering. Sadiq Khan is doing well.
On some issues like crime for instance rather less so, if say Alan Sugar or a former senior policeman stood up as an independent they would have a real chance
I think the Lib Dems tried the ex senior policeman. It was not a great success.
Brian Paddock was just a left liberal Guardian candidate who just happened to be a policeman.
I was talking a proper, tough, zero tolerance, '3 strikes and you're out' candidate who fights minor crimes as hard as major ones ie a prosecutor or policeman in the Rudy Giuliani or Bob Bratton mode
And you are going to find one of them above the rank of Sergeant in the Met?
In an organisation as big as the Met I am sure there are some somewhere and there is of course nothing to stop a Sergeant standing.
Sugar with a tough policeman as his candidate for deputy would be the most dangerous opponent for Khan
Weirdly on R5 this morning this was described as a "nudge" whilst the point was made that inflation was still very high compared with what we are used to (at least from the point of view of those still in short trousers).
Inflation just might have peaked although the oil price is a concern. If so real wage growth might be possible in the second half of this year.
We used to dream of inflation at only 3%.
Ridiculous to say 3% is 'still very high'.
Well it gave me a smile. And it is still 1% above target. But the BBC may have to look for other negative slants in the coming months.
Brought in by Barbara Castle. Destroyed by Thatcher.
A brilliant specimen of the popular 'Thatcher myth' genre.
In reality:
The State Earnings Related Pension Scheme (SERPS), originally known as the State Earnings Related Pension Supplement, was a UK Government pension arrangement, to which employees and employers contributed between 6 April 1978 and 5 April 2002, when it was replaced by the State Second Pension.
Well, irrespective of who we blame for killing off SERPS, it appears that the US scheme does what the UK scheme aimed to do ... and more, it also provides the self-employed with pensions.
The UK scheme aimed to provide:
25% of lifetime earnings plus the state pension of c.£7,000 per year. Someone on £100,000/yr could thus expect ~£32,000/yr.
From the UK Wikpedia page:
'Under the Social Security Act 1986 the target SERPS pension was reduced from twenty five to twenty per cent of average earnings between the two limits. Pensions earned before 6 April 1988 were not reduced and the change was to be phased in for people retiring between 1999 and 2009.' and moving forward 20 yrs 'The Additional State Pension was replaced for new pensioners by the new State Pension on 6 April 2016.'
The 'New State Pension' is ~£7,000 per year.
In other words, there is now no earnings-related pension, although it took time to kill it off. It was though the govt of 1979-90 that took a dislike to the thought of a state pension of £10,000s per year for higher earners and decided to bribe them to resort to the vagaries of financial advisers and investment black swans.
Weirdly on R5 this morning this was described as a "nudge" whilst the point was made that inflation was still very high compared with what we are used to (at least from the point of view of those still in short trousers).
Inflation just might have peaked although the oil price is a concern. If so real wage growth might be possible in the second half of this year.
We used to dream of inflation at only 3%.
Ridiculous to say 3% is 'still very high'.
Well it gave me a smile. And it is still 1% above target. But the BBC may have to look for other negative slants in the coming months.
The relative speeds of the two aircraft are close enough to be irrelevant for the purposes of air combat. The crucial advantages the Spitfire had over the 109 were:
The 109 also suffered from very poorly harmonised control forces. Once the member of the Herrenrasse got into high speed regimes he would have had to have been eating all his bratwurst to master the massive stick forces in the pitch axis. This problem was exacerbated by relatively small range of stick travel.
Conclusion: the performance of the two aircraft were almost the same on paper but only the truly talented and brave could extract the last 5-10% of combat performance out of the Emil.
I direct interested parties to "Testing for Combat" by Captain Eric Melrose "Winkle" Brown, CBE, DSC, AFC, Hon FRAeS, RN. (RAF reject like me!)
Brown is/was great at managing to explain the differences in aircraft performances & characteristics to amateurs like me.
I was more thinking what was available at the time of the Munich crisis which would have been 109s A-D with the Jumo engine. I think we had around 5 squadrons of Hurricanes and Spitfires were just starting to be delivered at that point; hopefully with a phony war period that would have increased.
There's currently a good flight test piece on an Emil in one of the flight magazines I graze on in Tescos, you'd probably get the finer technical points of it more than me.
Munich was late September 1938. If a general war had broken out then, as it easily could have and as Hitler wanted, the earliest that there could realistically have been a Battle of Britain was Summer 1939. For Germany, defeating France and the low countries, Czechoslovakia and probably Poland would still have been a minimum pre-requisite.
Also USSR more likely to have become involved.
I did think about making that comment but it's highly contentious. What is obvious is that Hitler didn't have a deal with Stalin at the time. On the other hand, despite Stalin making an offer to France to oppose Hitler, the reality is that the Red Army was in a shocking state after the purge: it didn't do very well in the Winter War against Finland (though it did rather better against Japan in the Far East).
What Stalin would actually have done is anyone's guess but my own is that he'd have sat it out initially with an eye to tidying up his back yard when the opportunity presented itself.
On the one hand they want established providers who can provide a one-stop-shop service, and can clear their financial resilience hurdles. So relatively few big firms get appointed as framework providers.
There is then a limited amount of competition on the framework (typically between 3-8 providers). Those that play the game know how to play it, and having been winning big contracts for years, mostly know how to meet the quality hurdles, but beat all the others to be awarded contracts on "value". They then rely on bulk work (lots of contracts) to make a small profit overall.
The trouble is that, when one goes down, it takes a lot with it.
On the other hand, the Government want more British SMEs to bid for Government contracts and be awarded the work. This would give much more diversity, and possibly innovation too, but they are poorly set up to support such a procurement approach.
At the heart of it is that there are very few contract and commercial experts within the civil service, because they can earn much more elsewhere in the private sector, and the Government don't want to run the risk of the wrath of the tabloids by paying a market rate for the right staff.
The problem for SMEs, according to the Blessed Vince on the radio on Saturday morning, is that the banks won't lend to them, so only the biggest boys can finance the contract.
It's only a matter of time before the collapse we witnessed today of an outsourcing giant, is the collapse of a giant private health firm we handed £bns of contracts to. Think about that.
I thought your case was that these private health firms were creaming off vast profits?
Ah, but to where have those profits gone? Remember Carillion’s former chief executive is still currently entitled to a £660,000 salary, apparently. I’ve not actually seen whether it’s stated that he’s been paid January’s instalment yet, although presumably Decembers has gone through. Which is more than can be said for bills of smaller suppliers and sub-contactors.
Carillion was "profitable" in the sense that RBS was "profitable"
I am pretty sure that we are still paying (Sir) Fred's enormous pension. I am pretty sure that we will still be paying Carillon's management their huge pensions.
Whoever is in power in the UK -- Labour or Tory -- serious fraudsters never seem to end up in prison.
It ought to be the case that where any company goes bust, there should be a ceiling on what any employee can receive in future payments, including pensions. Beyond that protection, her or her entitlement should be settled alongside other creditors.
Hang on, the pension fund is a separate trust, not an asset of the company. Are you suggesting that money should be confiscated from the pension fund for the benefit of creditors (usually in practice HMRC and the banks, who have a charge on the assets?)
In the case of highly-paid staff, yes.
The Pension Protection Fund, in the case of DB schemes that enter it, pays 90% up to £30K. So if the chief exec were in the DB scheme and had a notional entitlement of a £squillions pension, they are not going to get most of it anyway.
Thanks for that. So my own suggestion only expands that principle a little further.
It is fundamentally wrong that senior executives, who are probably the ones primarily to blame for a company going to the wall, can still walk away with pensions worth hundreds of thousands a year while low-paid employees have very little and small businesses creditors - for example - end up with a fraction of what they're owed. I don't think it's unreasonable that the individual pension funds of senior staff, beyond some protected level, are included in the company's assets (or, in the first instance perhaps, the pension fund's assets, if it's in deficit).
Weirdly on R5 this morning this was described as a "nudge" whilst the point was made that inflation was still very high compared with what we are used to (at least from the point of view of those still in short trousers).
Inflation just might have peaked although the oil price is a concern. If so real wage growth might be possible in the second half of this year.
We used to dream of inflation at only 3%.
Ridiculous to say 3% is 'still very high'.
Well it gave me a smile. And it is still 1% above target. But the BBC may have to look for other negative slants in the coming months.
50% above target!
In real terms: - high inflation favours borrowers and those on progressive salaries; - low inflation favours savers and those on fixed incomes.
I can't see why he's bothering. Sadiq Khan is doing well.
On some issues like crime for instance rather less so, if say Alan Sugar or a former senior policeman stood up as an independent they would have a real chance
I think the Lib Dems tried the ex senior policeman. It was not a great success.
Brian Paddock was just a left liberal Guardian candidate who just happened to be a policeman.
I was talking a proper, tough, zero tolerance, '3 strikes and you're out' candidate who fights minor crimes as hard as major ones ie a prosecutor or policeman in the Rudy Giuliani or Bob Bratton mode
And you are going to find one of them above the rank of Sergeant in the Met?
In an organisation as big as the Met I am sure there are some somewhere and there is of course nothing to stop a Sergeant standing.
Sugar with a tough policeman as his candidate for deputy would be the most dangerous opponent for Khan
Alan Sugar?
Not impossible he would run as an independent, he is no fan of Khan
Good for those with salaries and pensions linked to RPI or those with inflation linked gilts (which are also linked to RPI). Regulated rail fares are also linked to RPI so good for rail company shareholders such as pension funds and their subscribers.
And yet you can be damn sure that the extremists in Momentum who have just gained control of the NEC and are now planning the deselection of moderate MPs wont be deselecting O'Mara. Never before in Labour's history has the hard left been in such control of the Labour Party. Never before has moderation and mainstreamism been so unrepresented. Labour has locked itself into hard ideological extremism, and has locked out pragmatism and moderation. Millions of people like me who desperately want to get rid of the Tories but dont want them replaced by baying hard left extremists simply dont have anyone to vote for -and this stituation cant carry on forever for politics like nature abhors a vaccuum.
And just look at the vacuum that Cameron left, that sucked May in to the Premiership, who then chose the best the Conservatives had, in to the Cabinet..... And the vacuum in the Labour Parliamentary Party, sucked in Corbyn. Remember, Mr F, Corbyn did not expect to be elected, and I suspect was very surprised to be on the first ballot. That the membership of the party thought he was the best by far of the candidates on offer, twice, and has shown to be one of the best electioneering leaders of any party in recent times, means that you have some very serious questions to ask yourself. The main one being, is why the membership feels that they are reclaiming the heart and soul of the party from the centre rightists of New Labour and Portland Communications?
Brought in by Barbara Castle. Destroyed by Thatcher.
A brilliant specimen of the popular 'Thatcher myth' genre.
In reality:
The State Earnings Related Pension Scheme (SERPS), originally known as the State Earnings Related Pension Supplement, was a UK Government pension arrangement, to which employees and employers contributed between 6 April 1978 and 5 April 2002, when it was replaced by the State Second Pension.
Well, irrespective of who we blame for killing off SERPS, it appears that the US scheme does what the UK scheme aimed to do ... and more, it also provides the self-employed with pensions.
The UK scheme aimed to provide:
25% of lifetime earnings plus the state pension of c.£7,000 per year. Someone on £100,000/yr could thus expect ~£32,000/yr.
From the UK Wikpedia page:
'Under the Social Security Act 1986 the target SERPS pension was reduced from twenty five to twenty per cent of average earnings between the two limits. Pensions earned before 6 April 1988 were not reduced and the change was to be phased in for people retiring between 1999 and 2009.' and moving forward 20 yrs 'The Additional State Pension was replaced for new pensioners by the new State Pension on 6 April 2016.'
The 'New State Pension' is ~£7,000 per year.
In other words, there is now no earnings-related pension, although it took time to kill it off. It was though the govt of 1979-90 that took a dislike to the thought of a state pension of £10,000s per year for higher earners and decided to bribe them to resort to the vagaries of financial advisers and investment black swans.
Desirable though this may have been, what would the cost be though now? I'd guess the State would've assumed far less life expectancy in its 1970's calculations than has turned out to be the case. In effect we'd have nationalised the DB pension deficit issue.
Bottom line is I can't see any way out of the demographics of the pensions hole in general without most of us working quite a bit longer and retiring for quite a bit less. Tough sell and all that, but we can't start work on average at about 19/20 and retire for 25 odd years at 65 on "good" pensions. The maths just does not add up for the vast majority if you are working only about 60% longer than you retire for.
Now higher interest rates and lower longevity improvements might help in the shortish term a little, but in the end it's work more, save more, retire less, or be poorer.
And yet you can be damn sure that the extremists in Momentum who have just gained control of the NEC and are now planning the deselection of moderate MPs wont be deselecting O'Mara. Never before in Labour's history has the hard left been in such control of the Labour Party. Never before has moderation and mainstreamism been so unrepresented. Labour has locked itself into hard ideological extremism, and has locked out pragmatism and moderation. Millions of people like me who desperately want to get rid of the Tories but dont want them replaced by baying hard left extremists simply dont have anyone to vote for -and this stituation cant carry on forever for politics like nature abhors a vaccuum.
And just look at the vacuum that Cameron left, that sucked May in to the Premiership, who then chose the best the Conservatives had, in to the Cabinet..... And the vacuum in the Labour Parliamentary Party, sucked in Corbyn. Remember, Mr F, Corbyn did not expect to be elected, and I suspect was very surprised to be on the first ballot. That the membership of the party thought he was the best by far of the candidates on offer, twice, and has shown to be one of the best electioneering leaders of any party in recent times, means that you have some very serious questions to ask yourself. The main one being, is why the membership feels that they are reclaiming the heart and soul of the party from the centre rightists of New Labour and Portland Communications?
Employing Corbyn as an antidote to Blairism is like prescribing swallowing bleach as an antidote to tummy ache.
Turns out Liam Fox's 40 third party trade deals are just as non-existent as David Davis' 50 Brexit impact assessments. If we want arrangements with non-EU countries after we Brexit, it will through the EU and we will need to ask the EU nicely.
An implication is that third parties can import into the UK after Brexit on current EU terms but the UK won't necessarily be able to export to third parties on current terms. It's up to those third parties and they may not have a huge incentive to be generous to the UK.
That would be a 1.7% swing to Lab from Con when compared with last June , and - if it happened uniformly - would lead to 25 Labour gains at Tory expense. Labour could also make circa 20 gains from SNP to give them a total not far off 310 seats. Tories would struggle to hit 290 if they lose a few to LibDems.
That would be a 1.7% swing to Lab from Con when compared with last June , and - if it happened uniformly - would lead to 25 Labour gains at Tory expense. Labour could also make circa 20 gains from SNP to give them a total not far off 310 seats. Tories would struggle to hit 290 if they lose a few to LibDems.
So still the SNP and/or LDs would hold the balance of power
I take the point, but you are sort of chipping away at the notion of limited liability in a sense, and effectively making the directors have some of the shareholders' risk without necessarily getting the upsides. I could see the dangers of a raft of directors simply walking away en masse than take the risk.
It's not an easy one, as for every bang to rights wrong 'un out there, that will grab headlines there's lots of unheralded difficult shades of grey or sheer bad luck ones that are far trickier.
That would be a 1.7% swing to Lab from Con when compared with last June , and - if it happened uniformly - would lead to 25 Labour gains at Tory expense. Labour could also make circa 20 gains from SNP to give them a total not far off 310 seats. Tories would struggle to hit 290 if they lose a few to LibDems.
It would only be a 1.7 swing to Labour if the polling was transformed into reality on general election day. Remember Neil Kinnock and Ed Miliband were all further ahead in polls, and remember too that no opposition has ever come to power (ever!) without first having been 15 points ahead in mid term polls.
On topic. Jared O’Mara, a fantastic example of the need for proper recall powers of MPs.
Not only a complete arse, but a lazy f...er who takes his £75k salary but can’t be arsed to turn up, and seemingly nothing that can be done about it.
Given the nature of the seat, I wonder if Con, Lab and LD might all be in favour of extending recall powers if a Private Members’ Bill was to ask for it?
And yet you can be damn sure that the extremists in Momentum who have just gained control of the NEC and are now planning the deselection of moderate MPs wont be deselecting O'Mara. Never before in Labour's history has the hard left been in such control of the Labour Party. Never before has moderation and mainstreamism been so unrepresented. Labour has locked itself into hard ideological extremism, and has locked out pragmatism and moderation. Millions of people like me who desperately want to get rid of the Tories but dont want them replaced by baying hard left extremists simply dont have anyone to vote for -and this stituation cant carry on forever for politics like nature abhors a vaccuum.
1. Momentum aren't "extremists". The "hard left" policies they advocate have been the policies of Merkel's Conservative government in Germany for years. 2. A vote to have mandatory reselection of MPs won't get past conference if proposed. 3. The MPs that certain gobshites have it in for won't get deselected - the majority of members don't turn up to CLP meetings. The members who do turn up to CLP meetings only deselect their sitting Labour MP where communications have completely broken down.
A world of difference between what the loud and shouty minority in Momentum claim the mass membership want, and with what happens at a local level
So Corbyn even now cant lead Labour to most seats in the House of Commons
No and he would need SNP backing to form a minority government
I would be surprised if Labour failed to emerge as the largest party on those poll figures. In addition, they would be odds-on to win back Copeland as the by-election effect unwinds. There have also been issues there regarding the willingness of the new Tory MP to hold surgeries.
I can't see why he's bothering. Sadiq Khan is doing well.
On some issues like crime for instance rather less so, if say Alan Sugar or a former senior policeman stood up as an independent they would have a real chance
I think the Lib Dems tried the ex senior policeman. It was not a great success.
Brian Paddock was just a left liberal Guardian candidate who just happened to be a policeman.
I was talking a proper, tough, zero tolerance, '3 strikes and you're out' candidate who fights minor crimes as hard as major ones ie a prosecutor or policeman in the Rudy Giuliani or Bob Bratton mode
And you are going to find one of them above the rank of Sergeant in the Met?
In an organisation as big as the Met I am sure there are some somewhere and there is of course nothing to stop a Sergeant standing.
Sugar with a tough policeman as his candidate for deputy would be the most dangerous opponent for Khan
Alan Sugar?
Not impossible he would run as an independent, he is no fan of Khan
Sugar is getting on a bit now, but you're right, no way would he tie his flag to Labour's mast now. He has spoken very disparagingly of Corbyn and resigned from the party.
I think a strong centre / centre-right independent is probably the only candidate that could realistically beat a Labour mayor of London nowadays, given the further shift to Labour that has occurred in London since the Brexit vote. I don't think it's OTT to speculate that London could be the Tories' new Scotland in 10 years' time.
London's decision to reject the Tories at all costs will mean that it is treated much more harshly in terms of spending by Tory governments, in contrast to the very favourable treatment Boris obtained from the Coalition to maintain funding for Crossrail etc. We are already seeing it with the strong increase in knife crime and cuts to the Met.
That would be a 1.7% swing to Lab from Con when compared with last June , and - if it happened uniformly - would lead to 25 Labour gains at Tory expense. Labour could also make circa 20 gains from SNP to give them a total not far off 310 seats. Tories would struggle to hit 290 if they lose a few to LibDems.
It would only be a 1.7 swing to Labour if the polling was transformed into reality on general election day. Remember Neil Kinnock and Ed Miliband were all further ahead in polls, and remember too that no opposition has ever come to power (ever!) without first having been 15 points ahead in mid term polls.
I think Labour's biggest lead so far in this Parliament has been 8% from Survation. Did Kinnock and Milliband have bigger leads a mere 7 months or so after a General Election? I do not recall that being the case.
So Corbyn even now cant lead Labour to most seats in the House of Commons
No and he would need SNP backing to form a minority government
I would be surprised if Labour failed to emerge as the largest party on those poll figures. In addition, they would be odds-on to win back Copeland as the by-election effect unwinds. There have also been issues there regarding the willingness of the new Tory MP to hold surgeries.
So what? Largest party is only a moral victory it would still be the SNP and/or LDs who would determine who becomes PM
So Corbyn even now cant lead Labour to most seats in the House of Commons
No and he would need SNP backing to form a minority government
I would be surprised if Labour failed to emerge as the largest party on those poll figures. In addition, they would be odds-on to win back Copeland as the by-election effect unwinds. There have also been issues there regarding the willingness of the new Tory MP to hold surgeries.
So what? Largest party is only a moral victory it would still be the SNP and/or LDs who would determine who becomes PM
And yet you can be damn sure that the extremists in Momentum who have just gained control of the NEC and are now planning the deselection of moderate MPs wont be deselecting O'Mara. Never before in Labour's history has the hard left been in such control of the Labour Party. Never before has moderation and mainstreamism been so unrepresented. Labour has locked itself into hard ideological extremism, and has locked out pragmatism and moderation. Millions of people like me who desperately want to get rid of the Tories but dont want them replaced by baying hard left extremists simply dont have anyone to vote for -and this stituation cant carry on forever for politics like nature abhors a vaccuum.
1. Momentum aren't "extremists". The "hard left" policies they advocate have been the policies of Merkel's Conservative government in Germany for years. 2. A vote to have mandatory reselection of MPs won't get past conference if proposed. 3. The MPs that certain gobshites have it in for won't get deselected - the majority of members don't turn up to CLP meetings. The members who do turn up to CLP meetings only deselect their sitting Labour MP where communications have completely broken down.
A world of difference between what the loud and shouty minority in Momentum claim the mass membership want, and with what happens at a local level
Nonsense. Merkel is not a hard left socialist, and if you look at the history and statements of Momentum leaders it clearly is a Marxist and Trotskyite infilitration group. I would also remind you that these Momentum NEC candidates were voted for by a mere 12% of members.
Eventually, the chickens will come home to roost on Momentum.
And yet you can be damn sure that the extremists in Momentum who have just gained control of the NEC and are now planning the deselection of moderate MPs wont be deselecting O'Mara. Never before in Labour's history has the hard left been in such control of the Labour Party. Never before has moderation and mainstreamism been so unrepresented. Labour has locked itself into hard ideological extremism, and has locked out pragmatism and moderation. Millions of people like me who desperately want to get rid of the Tories but dont want them replaced by baying hard left extremists simply dont have anyone to vote for -and this stituation cant carry on forever for politics like nature abhors a vaccuum.
A world of difference between what the loud and shouty minority in Momentum claim the mass membership want, and with what happens at a local level
So what practical difference will the NEC results have on Labour's policy/direction?
So Corbyn even now cant lead Labour to most seats in the House of Commons
No and he would need SNP backing to form a minority government
I would be surprised if Labour failed to emerge as the largest party on those poll figures. In addition, they would be odds-on to win back Copeland as the by-election effect unwinds. There have also been issues there regarding the willingness of the new Tory MP to hold surgeries.
So what? Largest party is only a moral victory it would still be the SNP and/or LDs who would determine who becomes PM
If Labour are the largest party, then they will undoubtedly form the Government. The window for it being a 'moral victory' and not yielding the PM after the GE is entirely a potential for the Tories and not Labour. Labour do not need to be the largest party in order for Corbyn to become PM.
I can't see why he's bothering. Sadiq Khan is doing well.
On some issues like crime for instance rather less so, if say Alan Sugar or a former senior policeman stood up as an independent they would have a real chance
I think the Lib Dems tried the ex senior policeman. It was not a great success.
Brian Paddock was just a left liberal Guardian candidate who just happened to be a policeman.
I was talking a proper, tough, zero tolerance, '3 strikes and you're out' candidate who fights minor crimes as hard as major ones ie a prosecutor or policeman in the Rudy Giuliani or Bob Bratton mode
And you are going to find one of them above the rank of Sergeant in the Met?
In an organisation as big as the Met I am sure there are some somewhere and there is of course nothing to stop a Sergeant standing.
Sugar with a tough policeman as his candidate for deputy would be the most dangerous opponent for Khan
Alan Sugar?
Not impossible he would run as an independent, he is no fan of Khan
Sugar is getting on a bit now, but you're right, no way would he tie his flag to Labour's mast now. He has spoken very disparagingly of Corbyn and resigned from the party.
I think a strong centre / centre-right independent is probably the only candidate that could realistically beat a Labour mayor of London nowadays, given the further shift to Labour that has occurred in London since the Brexit vote. I don't think it's OTT to speculate that London could be the Tories' new Scotland in 10 years' time.
London's decision to reject the Tories at all costs will mean that it is treated much more harshly in terms of spending by Tory governments, in contrast to the very favourable treatment Boris obtained from the Coalition to maintain funding for Crossrail etc. We are already seeing it with the strong increase in knife crime and cuts to the Met.
Sugar is younger than Trump.
Of course New York city is just as strongly Democrat as London is strongly Labour and while it tends to elect Democrats as Mayor Giuliani won as a Republican in 1993 on a tough on crime ticket and Bloomberg in 2001 as a problem solving businessman before becoming an independent
And yet you can be damn sure that the extremists in Momentum who have just gained control of the NEC and are now planning the deselection of moderate MPs wont be deselecting O'Mara. Never before in Labour's history has the hard left been in such control of the Labour Party. Never before has moderation and mainstreamism been so unrepresented. Labour has locked itself into hard ideological extremism, and has locked out pragmatism and moderation. Millions of people like me who desperately want to get rid of the Tories but dont want them replaced by baying hard left extremists simply dont have anyone to vote for -and this stituation cant carry on forever for politics like nature abhors a vaccuum.
1. Momentum aren't "extremists". The "hard left" policies they advocate have been the policies of Merkel's Conservative government in Germany for years. 2. A vote to have mandatory reselection of MPs won't get past conference if proposed. 3. The MPs that certain gobshites have it in for won't get deselected - the majority of members don't turn up to CLP meetings. The members who do turn up to CLP meetings only deselect their sitting Labour MP where communications have completely broken down.
A world of difference between what the loud and shouty minority in Momentum claim the mass membership want, and with what happens at a local level
Mass deselections of Labour moderatrs are a PB Tory perennial fantasy.
So Corbyn even now cant lead Labour to most seats in the House of Commons
No and he would need SNP backing to form a minority government
I would be surprised if Labour failed to emerge as the largest party on those poll figures. In addition, they would be odds-on to win back Copeland as the by-election effect unwinds. There have also been issues there regarding the willingness of the new Tory MP to hold surgeries.
So what? Largest party is only a moral victory it would still be the SNP and/or LDs who would determine who becomes PM
So Corbyn even now cant lead Labour to most seats in the House of Commons
No and he would need SNP backing to form a minority government
I would be surprised if Labour failed to emerge as the largest party on those poll figures. In addition, they would be odds-on to win back Copeland as the by-election effect unwinds. There have also been issues there regarding the willingness of the new Tory MP to hold surgeries.
So what? Largest party is only a moral victory it would still be the SNP and/or LDs who would determine who becomes PM
If Labour are the largest party, then they will undoubtedly form the Government. The window for it being a 'moral victory' and not yielding the PM after the GE is entirely a potential for the Tories and not Labour. Labour do not need to be the largest party in order for Corbyn to become PM.
True though as you say the Tories could be largest party but still not form the government as happened in New Zealand recently where Labour came second but their leader still became PM with Green and NZ First support.
If Corbyn did become PM having not won most seats it would be the first time that has happened since WW2
Comments
On the one hand they want established providers who can provide a one-stop-shop service, and can clear their financial resilience hurdles. So relatively few big firms get appointed as framework providers.
There is then a limited amount of competition on the framework (typically between 3-8 providers). Those that play the game know how to play it, and having been winning big contracts for years, mostly know how to meet the quality hurdles, but beat all the others to be awarded contracts on "value". They then rely on bulk work (lots of contracts) to make a small profit overall.
The trouble is that, when one goes down, it takes a lot with it.
On the other hand, the Government want more British SMEs to bid for Government contracts and be awarded the work. This would give much more diversity, and possibly innovation too, but they are poorly set up to support such a procurement approach.
At the heart of it is that there are very few contract and commercial experts within the civil service, because they can earn much more elsewhere in the private sector, and the Government don't want to run the risk of the wrath of the tabloids by paying a market rate for the right staff.
https://twitter.com/AlbertoNardelli/status/953216875667902467
Without doubt, the majority of MPs take their responsibilities seriously, even though they can still fall foul of twitter (other social media platforms are available) but the general public see certain MPs getting away with things that would see them sacked anywhere but Westminster.
Unfortunately, MPs have to have new guidelines and codes of conduct to deter them from harassing junior assistants and journos, so I'm not hopeful that they could come up with a system to make them as responsible for their actions as ordinary employees.
Brought in by Barbara Castle. Destroyed by Thatcher.
The US has one. It looks to me as if a household/couple on $13,000 per month get a state pension of 29% of that, i.e. $4,000 per month
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_(United_States)
Blimey ...
Anyway, if that's the maximum state pension, you need invest in a personal pension only if you'd suffer a massive drop in living standards and want more than £35,000 per year. I suppose today's retired CEOs and Vice-Chancellors might complain.
https://capx.co/carillions-losses-were-the-taxpayers-gains/
Whilst that is true the reality with Carillion is that they were taking taxpayers money to provide the services, subcontracting the delivery of those services and then not paying their subcontractors. It really isn't obvious what they were bringing to the party at all other than the fact that governments and public bodies like to deal with big parties because they are, you know, safe. I think this is something we are going to have to look at quite carefully going forward. Intermediaries like this are parasitical.
Government policy is contradictory.
On the one hand they want established providers who can provide a one-stop-shop service, and can clear their financial resilience hurdles. So relatively few big firms get appointed as framework providers.
There is then a limited amount of competition on the framework (typically between 3-8 providers). Those that play the game know how to play it, and having been winning big contracts for years, mostly know how to meet the quality hurdles, but beat all the others to be awarded contracts on "value". They then rely on bulk work (lots of contracts) to make a small profit overall.
The trouble is that, when one goes down, it takes a lot with it.
On the other hand, the Government want more British SMEs to bid for Government contracts and be awarded the work. This would give much more diversity, and possibly innovation too, but they are poorly set up to support such a procurement approach.
At the heart of it is that there are very few contract and commercial experts within the civil service, because they can earn much more elsewhere in the private sector, and the Government don't want to run the risk of the wrath of the tabloids by paying a market rate for the right staff.
Post of the day. Its a real challenge for Local Authorities and Governemnt agencies to put work out to tender, to award the work and then manage the contractor. They lack the staff and skills to do it as the private sector pays double or treble the wages they pay. We work for a Council based near London. They simply cannot retain engineers and rely on graduates in their first job to manage multi millionpound projects. So all this talk of full tender analysis to ensure that the winning bidder is not too cheap is in reality not possible as the Government Agency or Council often have no idea what the cost should be.
this is a company with billions of pounds contract wise. It's clear they were not making huge profits from this and paying money to shareholders, otherwise the company would not have failed.
In reality:
The State Earnings Related Pension Scheme (SERPS), originally known as the State Earnings Related Pension Supplement, was a UK Government pension arrangement, to which employees and employers contributed between 6 April 1978 and 5 April 2002, when it was replaced by the State Second Pension.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Earnings-Related_Pension_Scheme
I say "ought" and "should" as it's clear that hasn't always been the case. There was a period where such firms were running rings round the Government, on PFI deals and the like, and a period where the Government's monopsony power may actually have screwed prices (and, more relevantly, terms) down so far that it made a Carillion-style collapse quite likely.
There are lots of areas that need looking at (pensions, as discussed below; slow payments to subcontractors etc.) but I don't think these are specific to outsourcing.
The timing and branching of British tank development is truly fascinating - a series of either under armored or under gunned early war tanks, a reliance on American Shermans & Grants ultimately led to Britain designing and producing the Centurion which is, for me, the outstanding tank design of the time.
At the moment the majority of MPs are being elected to serve their parties or themselves not the electorate. That needs to change. My answer has always been to make almost all votes free but we also need a more effective system of recall.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/formula1/42700482
The relative speeds of the two aircraft are close enough to be irrelevant for the purposes of air combat. The crucial advantages the Spitfire had over the 109 were:
Better sustained turn and roll rates. The 109 had higher wing loading but clawed some of that deficit by leading edge slats. In instantaneous turns that bled speed the Spitfire gave better warning of an imminent stall via wash out. Though this feature was a happy accident of its primitive wing design and was not anticipated or intended. As a result relatively few Emil pilots were willing to push it to the edge of a stall as it gave little warning. Once in a stall had very benign characteristics and was easy to recover without departing into a spin.
The 109 also suffered from very poorly harmonised control forces. Once the member of the Herrenrasse got into high speed regimes he would have had to have been eating all his bratwurst to master the massive stick forces in the pitch axis. This problem was exacerbated by relatively small range of stick travel.
Conclusion: the performance of the two aircraft were almost the same on paper but only the truly talented and brave could extract the last 5-10% of combat performance out of the Emil.
I direct interested parties to "Testing for Combat" by Captain Eric Melrose "Winkle" Brown, CBE, DSC, AFC, Hon FRAeS, RN. (RAF reject like me!)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-42702752
I was however talking about what was written by others at the time, not by Churchill himself. For all his failings over Gallipoli, by the end of the war he was extremely popular again, not least because Lloyd George specifically gave him a lot of credit for his work as armaments minister during the crisis of 1918 and also because he had a hugely positive reputation with the soldiers. Indeed it is partly his own writing that has generated the impression of him being disliked in the interwar period. He was so driven to be in power that he viewed his failure to remain in Government as a sign of complete failure. His own Black Dog influenced our historic view of him in that period as much as reality.
Inflation just might have peaked although the oil price is a concern. If so real wage growth might be possible in the second half of this year.
It is not to her credit that the contracting out of SERPS which she initiated led to numerous pensions mis-selling cases.
https://www.politico.eu/blogs/the-coming-wars/2018/01/the-most-valuable-military-real-estate-in-the-world/
I was more thinking what was available at the time of the Munich crisis which would have been 109s A-D with the Jumo engine. I think we had around 5 squadrons of Hurricanes and Spitfires were just starting to be delivered at that point; hopefully with a phony war period that would have increased.
There's currently a good flight test piece on an Emil in one of the flight magazines I graze on in Tescos, you'd probably get the finer technical points of it more than me.
I was talking a proper, tough, zero tolerance, '3 strikes and you're out' candidate who fights minor crimes as hard as major ones ie a prosecutor or policeman in the Rudy Giuliani or Bill Bratton mode
Never before in Labour's history has the hard left been in such control of the Labour Party. Never before has moderation and mainstreamism been so unrepresented. Labour has locked itself into hard ideological extremism, and has locked out pragmatism and moderation.
Millions of people like me who desperately want to get rid of the Tories but dont want them replaced by baying hard left extremists simply dont have anyone to vote for -and this stituation cant carry on forever for politics like nature abhors a vaccuum.
Still, we'll have to wait for Faisal Islam to learn what the antonym of a 'spike' in inflation is.
Sugar with a tough policeman as his candidate for deputy would be the most dangerous opponent for Khan
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/2808917/Watchdog-rules-out-widespread-Serps-mis-selling.html
There is no perfect pension system, it may equally have been misselling to keep people in SERPS.
As Lady Whiteadder might say, an extravagance.
https://www.coindesk.com/down-14-percent-bitcoin-charts-bearish-amid-asia-concerns/
We used to dream of inflation at only 3%.
Ridiculous to say 3% is 'still very high'.
The UK scheme aimed to provide:
25% of lifetime earnings
plus the state pension of c.£7,000 per year.
Someone on £100,000/yr could thus expect ~£32,000/yr.
From the UK Wikpedia page:
'Under the Social Security Act 1986 the target SERPS pension was reduced from twenty five to twenty per cent of average earnings between the two limits. Pensions earned before 6 April 1988 were not reduced and the change was to be phased in for people retiring between 1999 and 2009.'
and moving forward 20 yrs
'The Additional State Pension was replaced for new pensioners by the new State Pension on 6 April 2016.'
The 'New State Pension' is ~£7,000 per year.
In other words, there is now no earnings-related pension, although it took time to kill it off. It was though the govt of 1979-90 that took a dislike to the thought of a state pension of £10,000s per year for higher earners and decided to bribe them to resort to the vagaries of financial advisers and investment black swans.
What Stalin would actually have done is anyone's guess but my own is that he'd have sat it out initially with an eye to tidying up his back yard when the opportunity presented itself.
It is fundamentally wrong that senior executives, who are probably the ones primarily to blame for a company going to the wall, can still walk away with pensions worth hundreds of thousands a year while low-paid employees have very little and small businesses creditors - for example - end up with a fraction of what they're owed. I don't think it's unreasonable that the individual pension funds of senior staff, beyond some protected level, are included in the company's assets (or, in the first instance perhaps, the pension fund's assets, if it's in deficit).
In real terms:
- high inflation favours borrowers and those on progressive salaries;
- low inflation favours savers and those on fixed incomes.
LAB: 41% (+1)
CON: 40% (-2)
LDEM: 7% (-1)
UKIP: 4% (-1)
GRN: 3% (+1)
ICM pinsticker
Bottom line is I can't see any way out of the demographics of the pensions hole in general without most of us working quite a bit longer and retiring for quite a bit less. Tough sell and all that, but we can't start work on average at about 19/20 and retire for 25 odd years at 65 on "good" pensions. The maths just does not add up for the vast majority if you are working only about 60% longer than you retire for.
Now higher interest rates and lower longevity improvements might help in the shortish term a little, but in the end it's work more, save more, retire less, or be poorer.
https://twitter.com/SamuelMarcLowe/status/953246056917151744
I take the point, but you are sort of chipping away at the notion of limited liability in a sense, and effectively making the directors have some of the shareholders' risk without necessarily getting the upsides. I could see the dangers of a raft of directors simply walking away en masse than take the risk.
It's not an easy one, as for every bang to rights wrong 'un out there, that will grab headlines there's lots of unheralded difficult shades of grey or sheer bad luck ones that are far trickier.
Not only a complete arse, but a lazy f...er who takes his £75k salary but can’t be arsed to turn up, and seemingly nothing that can be done about it.
Given the nature of the seat, I wonder if Con, Lab and LD might all be in favour of extending recall powers if a Private Members’ Bill was to ask for it?
2. A vote to have mandatory reselection of MPs won't get past conference if proposed.
3. The MPs that certain gobshites have it in for won't get deselected - the majority of members don't turn up to CLP meetings. The members who do turn up to CLP meetings only deselect their sitting Labour MP where communications have completely broken down.
A world of difference between what the loud and shouty minority in Momentum claim the mass membership want, and with what happens at a local level
I think a strong centre / centre-right independent is probably the only candidate that could realistically beat a Labour mayor of London nowadays, given the further shift to Labour that has occurred in London since the Brexit vote. I don't think it's OTT to speculate that London could be the Tories' new Scotland in 10 years' time.
London's decision to reject the Tories at all costs will mean that it is treated much more harshly in terms of spending by Tory governments, in contrast to the very favourable treatment Boris obtained from the Coalition to maintain funding for Crossrail etc. We are already seeing it with the strong increase in knife crime and cuts to the Met.
Eventually, the chickens will come home to roost on Momentum.
Of course New York city is just as strongly Democrat as London is strongly Labour and while it tends to elect Democrats as Mayor Giuliani won as a Republican in 1993 on a tough on crime ticket and Bloomberg in 2001 as a problem solving businessman before becoming an independent
It doesn't seem to happen though!
If Corbyn did become PM having not won most seats it would be the first time that has happened since WW2