Positive v Negative
Several commentators said one reason remain lost the Brexit vote was because they weren’t positive enough. Too much doom and gloom. The same is being said for the current Labour government. Always harping on about the mess the Cons left and how we are going to pay for that incompetence. Back in the day there was a cigarette add for Strand with the punch line “Your never alone with a Strand”. It seems that they didn’t sell well because they came across as being for sad lonely people. Is it a good idea to stay positive in these circumstances or could there be positives from negatives?
Comments
It is disgraceful how this constant lowering of morale never seems to be countered - the media perpetuate it in headlines intended to instigate fear of this, that or the other.
The whole purpose of negatives is to find positive solutions.
Let's hope they have a Plan B.
I'm not sure they are imaginative enough though.
I'm reasonably certain the cutting winter fuel payments is about appearing to be Tough People making Tough Choices.
I'm not sure, however, what details you're expecting about the £22 billion. It's a notional sum calculated from spending that the last government committed to but did not account for and from the difference between the amount of borrowing the (somewhat but not entirely arbitrary) fiscal rules allow and what current spending and taxation levels are likely to require.
Aren’t (some of) the new pay settlements included in the £22bn? That’s where it starts to get dishonest for me.
Agreed. It shouldn't be too difficult to give us the details.
AIUI the pay settlements included are the ones previously recommended by the independent pay review bodies, but which the previous government hadn’t budgeted for.
Constables start on slightly more than entry level nurse. Nursing is a degree entry or equivalent entry position, policing is not.*
An unpromoted constable with 7 years experience, earns slightly more than a band six nurse with 30 years experience - as you can see here.
*(So nurses start with thousands in educational debt to pay off and police officers do not do so unless they choose a post degree entry route)
A resident (formerly described misleadingly as junior) doctor - who is a fully qualified doctor with five years of training they already have debt on, starts on 2,300 more than a police constable and their pay tops out at slightly less that the top of a police inspector’s pay range 8 years later. (Both police and doctors get overtime etc which alters absolute pay - these comparisons are based on basic pay.)
Also keep in mind, these are the doctors pay levels *after* striking for the first time in the history of the NHS. And ultimately, what the strike got them, was what the independent pay review body said they should have in the first place.
The reason the police are on those pay rates, with a smaller percentage pay increase, is because NHS pay rates were held down for years with minimal increases or none relative to inflation for professional staff band 7 or above equivalent.
Does in reverse in the armed forces - whether Officer or other rank you can expect to be probably better paid than your peer group until your mid 30s, at which point you tend to leave, start again from scratch in the civilian world and never quite catch up again.
I’d do it again tomorrow but the Queen’s/King’s Hard Bargain is what it always has been - you’ll prosper up front in a young man’s game then diverge to your detriment over time.
I have not complained about Police pay.
There was something of the reverse of this situation historically, where the question of how to keep professional soldiers doing what was a very unpleasant job was big.
All formatting and links from the original.
No, but you have asserted the doctors were greedy, when they were wanting something comparable.
Which post are you refering to. I don't think that Doctors want to be paid the same as Police Officers.
This and very many other similar posts by you during the doctors strikes.
No I wasn't. I was explaining the source of the mythical £22 billion black hole.
I couldn't find any reference to Police pay.
I'm out.
You are either being deliberately obtuse or very naive.
You have done nothing but complain about the junior doctors' payrise.
Sure, there is much that could be said about the new Labour government's lack-lustre debut and the alleged £22 billion black hole but read your own posts. Listen to how they sound.
I don’t. I think there is a hole but they knew. For them not to know about such an amount shows an amazing lack of research on behalf of a party that was supposed to hold the government to account. The Con government was incompetent. To hide such a big hole was conceivably beyond them.
But many a true word ...
I'm Lib Dem so it's not as if I voted either Labour or Conservative, but I did want to see the Tories out. That doesn't mean unequivocal support for Starmer and Co.
I'm prepared to accept that there is a whopping big hole but whether it's as large as Starmer claims or Hunt denies, I'm not qualified to say. I'm not an economist.
Whatever the case I don't think even Starmer and Reeves would take such a hard line unless there was a hole of some kind - even if it isn't as deep as they allege.
I'm not sure I'm so cynical as to suggest that they are adopting austerity measures purely to give the junior doctors and train drivers a pay-rise so as to ensure they'll vote for them in future - although there will be an element of that of course.
We are talking politics here.
What has the junior doctors' pay rise got to do with police salaries, @Telford? You tell me. You arevthe one who repeatedly makes that connection and who continually uses police pay and conditions as some kind of yardstick against which to measure everything else. Have you not read your own posts?
Of course, we all rely on our own work experiences and refer to whatever goes on in our respective fields - @Hugal in the hospitality industry for instance. Other posters in the health service.
But we don't use that as a benchmark or barometer for every other profession or line of work.
I find your insights into the police service very enlightening and interesting. I've learned a lot from them in terms of how things operate there.
Yes, it can be interesting to compare pay scales across various sectors but I agree with you that we can't stretch comparisons too far. The police and fire services are very different. The health services different again.
Yet you keep referring to how little paternity leave you got as a Bobby or or how this that or the other compares to how things were when you were on the beat.
Then, when someone queries those comparisons you complain.
Either I'm misunderstanding your posts and points or you aren't explaining them clearly enough.
I think you are. I don't refer to Police pay and I never had any paternity leave. I may have refered to conditions but they are actually now less generous
If you do want to make such comparisons, you need to compare everything. Pay, hours, conditions, benefits, lifetime trajectory of pay (there are some careers in which one makes a relatively small amount of money as a junior / trainee, and a significantly larger sum as one attains more seniority, and there are others where a typical person sees their income increase only modestly over time.)
And then you find yourself trying to answer questions about the relative worth of a nurse and a police officer and a train driver, and those questions aren't really answerable.
You can reasonably take the line that "fair pay" for a particular occupation is the amount of pay that ensures that you have a ready supply of suitable new entrants wishing to work in that occupation, and you're not losing significant numbers of experienced workers to other occupations.
Not everyone would like the outcome of that computation.
Perhaps I haven't read them closely enough but I had got the impression that you were expressing sour grapes at people and professions where the terms and conditions are better than the ones you had back in the day.
If you weren't then fair enough.
@Leorning Cniht, yes indeed and I wasn't proposing that we make those kind of comparisons. I'd assumed, wrongly as it turns out according to Telford. that this is what he was doing.
Who did people who voted Green or Reform expect to replace the Conservatives?
Reform?
The Greens?
Same with the Lib Dems, although we got more than a few.
I do. I think it’s a deliberate tactic by which they’ll make things worse for the rest of us in the first year or two (while they can still blame the Tories), and then start making things better again just in time to claim all the credit for the improvement and ride it to victory in the next election. They don’t want things to get better too soon, lest they run into “what have you done for me lately” syndrome in 2029.
I can see some grounds for this assertion but it's a highly risky strategy.
Besides, even if the deficit is not as large as they claim it's not as if the Conservatives have handed anything over in any great shape.
But we are where we are and if this is the strategy it'll bite them on the backside.
The Tory Party conference was a lot more upbeat than the one after the 1997 election.
I don't have the figures to hand, but it seems that the national borrowing is actually quite low at the moment, hence the "black hole" only exists because the government isn't borrowing money to fill it. Which in turn suggests that they think that there will not be increases in overall tax collections, which in turn suggests they think the likelihood is low growth or recession.
The Keysian solution to the morass would be to invest in more infrastructure which in turn would stimulate the economy rather than cutting it.
I'm not an economist, so it might well be that I'm hopelessly naive about this.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-50504151
They are perceived as wanting to wge a war on pensioners. Some of their tax plans are unravelling, such as making nondoms pay tax on assets held abroad that have nothing to do with the UK. This move is estimated to cost the treasury £1billion a year, because the mega rich always know how to move their money out of the reach of greedy governments. Which leaves the ordinary people, such as pensioners, who have nowhere to escape to, to pay the bills.
Squeezing the rich until they squeak, as Labour Chancellor Dennis Healy said in the 1970's usually appeals to voters, but there comes a point where they will remove their money to a safer place where they pay less. It's something Labour never seems to learn.
There is a none zero chance we are sliding into a wide scale war, if not WW3 - this may effect how sanguine the government is about general spending and borrowing.