Mel Stride is talking the most sense (admittedly the bar’s not very high and he won’t win). If, for some bizarre reason, I had a vote, that is where my vote would go.
However, I wonder if he really wants a Big Job and this is his pitch to the others, because he can’t possibly win. Can he? Strikes me as a back room boy really. A personable, relatively media friendly one, but still back room.
I would take any of the six candidates over Sir Keir. Does anyone honestly think that he's not a liar?
If she's that concerned about the taking away of freedoms, I would suggest that taking away the freedom to live and work, or even travel without queues at immigration and roaming charges on the phone, throughout the EU is a far bigger loss than being able to light up in a beer garden. Which is something her party are entirely responsible for.
With respect, this is a stupid argument.
There are personal liberty arguments about smoking - the sort of argument that says that if it's not harming anyone else, the government has no place attempting to restrict it. An honest person making such an argument would also argue for, for example, the legalization of cannabis.
The same liberty arguments do not apply to membership of the EU. The EU does not consider that the right of free movement is a natural human right - the EU is a member's club that offers free trade and free movement within its boundaries as benefits of being a member of the club. The choice to join (or not join) the club comes with costs and benefits. In your opinion, and in mine, the benefits outweigh the costs, and being an EU member is clearly worthwhile.
Despite those who dislike him, and his party, it looks as though Sir Keir will be in charge for the next few years, unless Great Cthulhu returns and eats us all.
FWIW, I doubt if the rump tories, whoever they choose to lead them, will be much of a force to be reckoned with for quite a while.
If she's that concerned about the taking away of freedoms, I would suggest that taking away the freedom to live and work, or even travel without queues at immigration and roaming charges on the phone, throughout the EU is a far bigger loss than being able to light up in a beer garden. Which is something her party are entirely responsible for.
With respect, this is a stupid argument.
There are personal liberty arguments about smoking - the sort of argument that says that if it's not harming anyone else, the government has no place attempting to restrict it. An honest person making such an argument would also argue for, for example, the legalization of cannabis.
The same liberty arguments do not apply to membership of the EU. The EU does not consider that the right of free movement is a natural human right - the EU is a member's club that offers free trade and free movement within its boundaries as benefits of being a member of the club. The choice to join (or not join) the club comes with costs and benefits. In your opinion, and in mine, the benefits outweigh the costs, and being an EU member is clearly worthwhile.
Well, I don't think we're discussing "natural human rights" in regard to smoking. Is there a natural right to poison yourself, encumbering the health service with the costs of treating the effects of those poisons, much less do so in public where you're also going to poison others?
On the other hand, I'm sure an argument could be made that there's a natural human right to travel freely, and the imposition of lines on maps marking political boundaries is the unnatural state.
I see that Ms Badenoch has decided that the best way to convince people she deserves the top job in the Tories (and, presumably from there to the country) is to pick a fight with Dr Who. Or, at least David Tennant. We all know what happened when a politician went up against the Doctor, "don't you think she looks tired?"
I see that Ms Badenoch has decided that the best way to convince people she deserves the top job in the Tories (and, presumably from there to the country) is to pick a fight with Dr Who. Or, at least David Tennant. We all know what happened when a politician went up against the Doctor, "don't you think she looks tired?"
It just seems incredibly petulant, almost as bad as Truss whining about the lettuce stunt. If you're going to be a party leader it's going to get a lot worse than the parents of people you abuse for political gain wishing you'd vanish off the face of the earth and/or STFU.
On the other hand, I'm sure an argument could be made that there's a natural human right to travel freely, and the imposition of lines on maps marking political boundaries is the unnatural state.
It could, but such an argument would not support differential treatment depending on whether people were members of your travel club or not.
From what Cleverly and Badenoch have said so far, the tories' 14 years in office have been badly misrepresented, and it was in reality a golden age, now gone for ever...
On the other hand, I'm sure an argument could be made that there's a natural human right to travel freely, and the imposition of lines on maps marking political boundaries is the unnatural state.
It could, but such an argument would not support differential treatment depending on whether people were members of your travel club or not.
And, would non-differential treatment be a bad thing?
On the other hand, I'm sure an argument could be made that there's a natural human right to travel freely, and the imposition of lines on maps marking political boundaries is the unnatural state.
It could, but such an argument would not support differential treatment depending on whether people were members of your travel club or not.
And, would non-differential treatment be a bad thing?
TBH the recent high inflation we’ve experienced was not particularly the fault of the previous government, neither is it’s reduction very much due to anything they did.
Did you not see the state of the country when they’d finished with it ?
Inflation...down
Growth...up.
What worries me most is that I think you mean this.
Why would the truth worry you. Inflation is down to 2% and there was a small rise in growth in ther last quarter.
It's not that these statements are factually inaccurate, they are clearly not. It's the implication that they mean something that they don't.
Note here that you stated these two pieces of data in response to a comment about the state of the country.
Therefore your meaning is that the UK economy is in a good state. Unless you are trolling, which I don't believe you are.
My point being that these two data points mean nothing of the sort. Taking them out of context is dangerously misleading.
Forgive me a medical metaphor but it's what I do.
The heart rate is 56 beats per minute
That's a factual statement. And in this hypothetical, I will stipulate that it's true.
Is it good news or bad news?
Well, in you or me, it's probably good news. All other things being equal it would be a marker of good cardiovascular health.
But if we change the scenario to my average patient- a new born baby with NEC; this heart rate would suggest the baby is about to arrest. This is very, very bad.
Others have noted the context of the inflation figures. Governments can be responsible for rising inflation they can be responsible for mitigation measures. In this particular case, the consensus is that both are due to extraneous factors. But actually, that is beside the point. I'm going to take a theoretical short-cut here, it's not this simple but let's pretend it is for a moment.
From a day-to-day perspective, the rate of inflation is irrelevant. If wages and prices rise at the same rate, our spending power is unchanged. If wages rise faster than prices, those on a wage are better off. If prices rise faster, wage earners are worse off. So in one sense, an inflation rate of 2% or 4% or 6% is irrelevant. If wages rise at the same rate then in real terms we are neither better nor worse off.
Now it is not that simple because of the effects on borrowing and saving and the potential for inflation spirals. Higher inflation makes borrowing cheaper and saving less worthwhile. Moreover, the macroeconomic effects are more complex as inflation expectation affects business and consumer actions.
Ok, but let's come back to prices vs wages. What is the lived experience of someone who gets a 4% pay rise this year vs a 2% rise in average prices? Pretty good yes? Not necessarily.
Let us postulate the previous few years when year-on-year, prices went up more than income. Which is the lived experience of most of us.
So, what have we all done? Cut back on discretionary spending. Say, not having takeaways. That was year one. But in year 2 as things got worse, we either drew on savings or increased debt. Because the next option is to stop eating and heating.
Obviously, the effects are different depending on where one is on the income spectrum.
So a low inflation rate now only means something if it's enough to allow rebuilding savings or paying down debt. This solitary datapoint is meaningless.
Again, to repeat, the context of your comment was to imply that economically, things are pretty good. For the majority of people, it will take years of wages being higher than prices (something that's very hard to achieve sustainably) to get back to where they were 5 years ago.
The growth figure similarly is misleading out of context. Remember, we had a recession (albeit a small one) at the end of last year. All other things being equal, economies have higher rates of growth after a recession. This is because of the spare capacity in the economy. The major exception is the 2009 recession due to Osborne's foolish austerity.
Unemployment. Unemployment has historically been a really good measure of spare capacity in the economy. Thus in simple terms, low unemployment with low inflation is indeed a marker of things being in a good place economically.
However, that relationship has weakened for two specific reasons since 2009. I think it's Richard Murphy who did the work on underemployment. This is people who want to work full time but can only get part time work. Mathematically, 2 people working half time who want to work full time is the same amount of spare capacity in the economy as one person unemployed. Zero-hours contracts can be a particularly egregious example of this.
In one sense, this is a very good thing. The effect for the individual of being in part time work is significantly less than being unemployed both in terms of mental health effects and long terming earning potential. So actually it is not necessarily a bad thing. However it means that the unemployment figures in 2010 are not comparable to 1985 for example.
Following the 2009 crash there was a massive rise in underemployment that persists.
Following Covid in 2020, there is a significant rise in economically inactive people. This is a misleading term but it's people who are not in work but also not seeking work. Some are long term sick, some took early retirement. Some in middle age. Again this phenomenon means that the unemployment figure in 2024 does not mean the same thing in macroeconomic terms as the figure in 2016.
How do we pull all this together? Well it's complicated, which is why I am always seeking out expert economic analysts to put it in context. There is no single figure that tells you how well the economy is doing but the closest proxy is the growth rate in GDP-per head. This gives you the best aggregate answer to the question of how most people are doing?
The simple fact described by this graph is that economically the UK did well from 1995-2009. Since 2009 we have had no progress.
That does not mean that any particular government is responsible for this. That takes a separate argument to look at the causes. However, it is a fact that the UK's economic performance since 2009 is very poor.
Hence I care very little about the two datapoints you highlighted. They mean almost nothing.
Well said @alienfromzog - context is everything, although there will always be some who regard the 14 years of tory ghastliness as some sort of Golden Age.
Leadership hopeful Tugendhat reckons that voters have stopped taking the tory party seriously. He's not wrong:
Did you not see the state of the country when they’d finished with it ?
Inflation...down
Growth...up.
What worries me most is that I think you mean this.
Why would the truth worry you. Inflation is down to 2% and there was a small rise in growth in ther last quarter.
This feels a bit like saying that if a kid manages to survive 14 years of malnourishment and beating then the parents must have done a good job.
Not at all. It merely states that things were not as bad as Labour claimed. If they had been so bad, it would not have been able to agree all the public sector pay rises
Did you not see the state of the country when they’d finished with it ?
Inflation...down
Growth...up.
What worries me most is that I think you mean this.
Why would the truth worry you. Inflation is down to 2% and there was a small rise in growth in ther last quarter.
It's not that these statements are factually inaccurate, they are clearly not.
It's the implication that they mean something that they don't.
Note here that you stated these two pieces of data in response to a comment about the state of the country.
Therefore your meaning is that the UK economy is in a good state.
I never implied that it was in a good state. It just wasn't as bad a Labour claimed
Unless you are trolling, which I don't believe you are.
Thanks
The growth figure similarly is misleading out of context. Remember, we had a recession (albeit a small one) at the end of last year. All other things being equal, economies have higher rates of growth after a recession. This is because of the spare capacity in the economy. The major exception is the 2009 recession due to Osborne's foolish austerity.
Not at all. It merely states that things were not as bad as Labour claimed. If they had been so bad, it would not have been able to agree all the public sector pay rises
That does not follow logically. The cost of not fixing the public-sector pay disputes is likely to be higher than the cost of fixing them.
Moreover, the public finances and the economy, whilst linked, are not the same thing.
The growth figure similarly is misleading out of context. Remember, we had a recession (albeit a small one) at the end of last year. All other things being equal, economies have higher rates of growth after a recession. This is because of the spare capacity in the economy. The major exception is the 2009 recession due to Osborne's foolish austerity.
AFZ
I am going to interprete this as a typo.
It's not a typo, it's a factual statement followed by a strongly evidenced-based interpretation of the reason for the phenomenon. Which bit do you disagree with?
That there wasn't a recovery from the 2009 recession or that the lack of recovery wasn't Osborne's fault?
Well said @alienfromzog - context is everything, although there will always be some who regard the 14 years of tory ghastliness as some sort of Golden Age.
Leadership hopeful Tugendhat reckons that voters have stopped taking the tory party seriously. He's not wrong:
This is an important contribution. The various Tory leadership hopefuls are all over social media making clearly non-serious statements. It's nice that Tugendhat has noticed... not sure he's prepared to do anything about it though.
Well, I don't think we're discussing "natural human rights" in regard to smoking. Is there a natural right to poison yourself, encumbering the health service with the costs of treating the effects of those poisons, much less do so in public where you're also going to poison others?
That’s a dangerous argument. It could very easily also be used to ban caffeine, fast food or alcohol (and the third party impact of drunken behaviour is arguably more costly to society than that of smoking). Or, based on an article I read this week, croissants (too buttery apparently - murder on the arteries).
Can you name any principle other than “I like this poison but not that poison” by which you think smoking should be banned but alcohol, caffeine, croissants, etc. be legal?
Can you name any principle other than “I like this poison but not that poison” by which you think smoking should be banned but alcohol, caffeine, croissants, etc. be legal?
Or skiing - the cost of all those broken legs has got to add up, hasn't it? Or climbing, or mountain biking, or other "extreme" sports. Do we weight sports by their health benefits and injury risk, and allow only the ones that offer a net reduction to NHS costs?
Not at all. It merely states that things were not as bad as Labour claimed. If they had been so bad, it would not have been able to agree all the public sector pay rises
That does not follow logically. The cost of not fixing the public-sector pay disputes is likely to be higher than the cost of fixing them.
And in fact we have at least one worked example of just this, In the case of the pay rises for railway workers:
Furthermore it’s highly likely that the overspend at the home office (largely in the abortive Rwanda scheme and soaring costs for keeping asylum seekers in temporary accommodation for long periods of time) was caused by the unwillingness to spend the smaller amount of money it would have taken to process them by a government intent on turning a large backlog into a political issue.
And in fact we have at least one worked example of just this, In the case of the pay rises for railway workers:
Yes and no. That's a short-term costs analysis. When looked at long-term, the position is less clear. It depends on whether you think that being "tough" on unions or being "generous" with unions is more likely to create future strike action or large pay demands.
And in fact we have at least one worked example of just this, In the case of the pay rises for railway workers:
Yes and no. That's a short-term costs analysis. When looked at long-term, the position is less clear. It depends on whether you think that being "tough" on unions or being "generous" with unions is more likely to create future strike action or large pay demands.
Sort of. There's also a big productively price to pay when staff retention goes down. That's a major factor in the NHS at the moment. I cannot speak as accurately about the railways but train drivers take time to train. If they leave and you have to train more, that is a cost.
Retention of expensively-trained NHS staff is very poor at the moment. When vacancies are unfilled, agency costs soar. We are definitely at a tipping point where the cost of junior doctors' pay rises in the medium to long term will be lower than not doing so because the continued erosion of morale and consequential further loss of trained staff will cost more. The short term costs of the strikes are also notable, of course.
Sort of. There's also a big productively price to pay when staff retention goes down. That's a major factor in the NHS at the moment. I cannot speak as accurately about the railways but train drivers take time to train. If they leave and you have to train more, that is a cost.
Yes, that's a factor as well.
Apparently it takes a year or so to qualify as a train driver - perhaps as long as two years in some cases. I don't know what drives the variability. Train Driver job postings are notoriously oversubscribed, although I don't know what fraction of the typical applicants would be viable candidates.
That does not follow logically. The cost of not fixing the public-sector pay disputes is likely to be higher than the cost of fixing them.
OK. So the Government is supposed to just cave in to any big pay demands and expect the same next year
Are you seriously blaming Osborne for a recession in 2009 ?
That does not follow logically. The cost of not fixing the public-sector pay disputes is likely to be higher than the cost of fixing them.
OK. So the Government is supposed to just cave in to any big pay demands and expect the same next year
Are you seriously blaming Osborne for a recession in 2009 ?
1. "Cave in" is a pejorative term and misleading. Train drivers have a below inflation rise when you look at it over the 3 year period. Junior Doctors have not been given what they asked for, just a sensible compromise.
2. No, don't be silly. Although that's only marginally more ridiculous than blaming Labour. The issue is not the recession. That was an inevitable consequence of the global financial crisis. The thing I blame Osborne for is the lack of recovery.
Fact 1: A recovery has a specific definition: "An above trend level growth that makes up for the ground lost by the recession"
Fact 2: After every recession since World War 2, there was a recovery except one. (Similarly most recessions in most countries - recoveries normally follow recessions for very good reasons).
Fact 3: There was no recovery from the 2009 recession.
That part is indisputable. The question is whether Osborne's policies are the reason. But before we go there, we should note that the lack of recovery is surprising and a big part of where we are as a country. For whatever reason, the period 2009-2012 made the UK significantly worse off.
You can expect the right wing media to criticize Starmer and the govt from now on. 14 years of carnage will be erased.
All too true, alas.
Those were not 14 years of carnage - they were 14 Golden Years. How could those who failed to vote tory, back in July, have been so stupid and short-sighted?
If only Boris and Liz could be brought back, all would again be well.
As I suggested, there are rumours that Jim Hacker/Mel Stride is through because everyone’s busy knifing their enemies and everyone likes him…
Presumably he has never had ambitions in that particular direction. He has only ever wanted to serve his party and his country but if he colleagues felt he could best serve in high office then he would reluctantly let his name go forward....?
As I suggested, there are rumours that Jim Hacker/Mel Stride is through because everyone’s busy knifing their enemies and everyone likes him…
Presumably he has never had ambitions in that particular direction. He has only ever wanted to serve his party and his country but if he colleagues felt he could best serve in high office then he would reluctantly let his name go forward....?
Meanwhile the leader is still Mr Sunak, who I thought made a pretty good job of PMQs and a very good job of responding to the PM's statement on the Grenfell Report.
Meanwhile the leader is still Mr Sunak, who I thought made a pretty good job of PMQs and a very good job of responding to the PM's statement on the Grenfell Report.
Asking the questions is far easier than answering them. Will Sir Keir be refering to the 'Black hole' in all his answers ?
Comments
I rather like today's Guardian cartoon, depicting the seven tory leader wannabes:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/picture/2024/sep/01/nicola-jennings-conservative-leadership-race-nigel-farage-cartoon
I would take any of the six candidates over Sir Keir. Does anyone honestly think that he's not a liar?
With respect, this is a stupid argument.
There are personal liberty arguments about smoking - the sort of argument that says that if it's not harming anyone else, the government has no place attempting to restrict it. An honest person making such an argument would also argue for, for example, the legalization of cannabis.
The same liberty arguments do not apply to membership of the EU. The EU does not consider that the right of free movement is a natural human right - the EU is a member's club that offers free trade and free movement within its boundaries as benefits of being a member of the club. The choice to join (or not join) the club comes with costs and benefits. In your opinion, and in mine, the benefits outweigh the costs, and being an EU member is clearly worthwhile.
FWIW, I doubt if the rump tories, whoever they choose to lead them, will be much of a force to be reckoned with for quite a while.
Reform Ltd is the danger...
On the other hand, I'm sure an argument could be made that there's a natural human right to travel freely, and the imposition of lines on maps marking political boundaries is the unnatural state.
It worked for him.
Yes, it's Farage, with the usual fag drooping from his reptilian mouth. Dunno about the line-up - they all seem much of a muchness to me i.e. awful...
It just seems incredibly petulant, almost as bad as Truss whining about the lettuce stunt. If you're going to be a party leader it's going to get a lot worse than the parents of people you abuse for political gain wishing you'd vanish off the face of the earth and/or STFU.
Growth...up.
It could, but such an argument would not support differential treatment depending on whether people were members of your travel club or not.
What worries me most is that I think you mean this.
Perhaps not, but that's not what the EU offers.
This feels a bit like saying that if a kid manages to survive 14 years of malnourishment and beating then the parents must have done a good job.
It's not that these statements are factually inaccurate, they are clearly not. It's the implication that they mean something that they don't.
Note here that you stated these two pieces of data in response to a comment about the state of the country.
Therefore your meaning is that the UK economy is in a good state. Unless you are trolling, which I don't believe you are.
My point being that these two data points mean nothing of the sort. Taking them out of context is dangerously misleading.
Forgive me a medical metaphor but it's what I do.
The heart rate is 56 beats per minute
That's a factual statement. And in this hypothetical, I will stipulate that it's true.
Is it good news or bad news?
Well, in you or me, it's probably good news. All other things being equal it would be a marker of good cardiovascular health.
But if we change the scenario to my average patient- a new born baby with NEC; this heart rate would suggest the baby is about to arrest. This is very, very bad.
Others have noted the context of the inflation figures. Governments can be responsible for rising inflation they can be responsible for mitigation measures. In this particular case, the consensus is that both are due to extraneous factors. But actually, that is beside the point. I'm going to take a theoretical short-cut here, it's not this simple but let's pretend it is for a moment.
From a day-to-day perspective, the rate of inflation is irrelevant. If wages and prices rise at the same rate, our spending power is unchanged. If wages rise faster than prices, those on a wage are better off. If prices rise faster, wage earners are worse off. So in one sense, an inflation rate of 2% or 4% or 6% is irrelevant. If wages rise at the same rate then in real terms we are neither better nor worse off.
Now it is not that simple because of the effects on borrowing and saving and the potential for inflation spirals. Higher inflation makes borrowing cheaper and saving less worthwhile. Moreover, the macroeconomic effects are more complex as inflation expectation affects business and consumer actions.
Ok, but let's come back to prices vs wages. What is the lived experience of someone who gets a 4% pay rise this year vs a 2% rise in average prices? Pretty good yes? Not necessarily.
Let us postulate the previous few years when year-on-year, prices went up more than income. Which is the lived experience of most of us.
So, what have we all done? Cut back on discretionary spending. Say, not having takeaways. That was year one. But in year 2 as things got worse, we either drew on savings or increased debt. Because the next option is to stop eating and heating.
Obviously, the effects are different depending on where one is on the income spectrum.
So a low inflation rate now only means something if it's enough to allow rebuilding savings or paying down debt. This solitary datapoint is meaningless.
Again, to repeat, the context of your comment was to imply that economically, things are pretty good. For the majority of people, it will take years of wages being higher than prices (something that's very hard to achieve sustainably) to get back to where they were 5 years ago.
The growth figure similarly is misleading out of context. Remember, we had a recession (albeit a small one) at the end of last year. All other things being equal, economies have higher rates of growth after a recession. This is because of the spare capacity in the economy. The major exception is the 2009 recession due to Osborne's foolish austerity.
Unemployment. Unemployment has historically been a really good measure of spare capacity in the economy. Thus in simple terms, low unemployment with low inflation is indeed a marker of things being in a good place economically.
However, that relationship has weakened for two specific reasons since 2009. I think it's Richard Murphy who did the work on underemployment. This is people who want to work full time but can only get part time work. Mathematically, 2 people working half time who want to work full time is the same amount of spare capacity in the economy as one person unemployed. Zero-hours contracts can be a particularly egregious example of this.
In one sense, this is a very good thing. The effect for the individual of being in part time work is significantly less than being unemployed both in terms of mental health effects and long terming earning potential. So actually it is not necessarily a bad thing. However it means that the unemployment figures in 2010 are not comparable to 1985 for example.
Following the 2009 crash there was a massive rise in underemployment that persists.
Following Covid in 2020, there is a significant rise in economically inactive people. This is a misleading term but it's people who are not in work but also not seeking work. Some are long term sick, some took early retirement. Some in middle age. Again this phenomenon means that the unemployment figure in 2024 does not mean the same thing in macroeconomic terms as the figure in 2016.
How do we pull all this together? Well it's complicated, which is why I am always seeking out expert economic analysts to put it in context. There is no single figure that tells you how well the economy is doing but the closest proxy is the growth rate in GDP-per head. This gives you the best aggregate answer to the question of how most people are doing?
Check out the first graph here:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/grossdomesticproductgdp/timeseries/mwb6/ukea
The simple fact described by this graph is that economically the UK did well from 1995-2009. Since 2009 we have had no progress.
That does not mean that any particular government is responsible for this. That takes a separate argument to look at the causes. However, it is a fact that the UK's economic performance since 2009 is very poor.
Hence I care very little about the two datapoints you highlighted. They mean almost nothing.
AFZ
https://x.com/alienfromzog/status/1830957285755027939?t=I-asUZaM51H-XEVzp3l9Pw&s=19
Leadership hopeful Tugendhat reckons that voters have stopped taking the tory party seriously. He's not wrong:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/sep/03/tom-tugendhat-warns-voters-no-longer-take-conservative-party-seriously
Not at all. It merely states that things were not as bad as Labour claimed. If they had been so bad, it would not have been able to agree all the public sector pay rises I never implied that it was in a good state. It just wasn't as bad a Labour claimed Thanks I am going to interprete this as a typo.
That does not follow logically. The cost of not fixing the public-sector pay disputes is likely to be higher than the cost of fixing them.
Moreover, the public finances and the economy, whilst linked, are not the same thing.
It's not a typo, it's a factual statement followed by a strongly evidenced-based interpretation of the reason for the phenomenon. Which bit do you disagree with?
That there wasn't a recovery from the 2009 recession or that the lack of recovery wasn't Osborne's fault?
AFZ
This is an important contribution. The various Tory leadership hopefuls are all over social media making clearly non-serious statements. It's nice that Tugendhat has noticed... not sure he's prepared to do anything about it though.
AFZ
That’s a dangerous argument. It could very easily also be used to ban caffeine, fast food or alcohol (and the third party impact of drunken behaviour is arguably more costly to society than that of smoking). Or, based on an article I read this week, croissants (too buttery apparently - murder on the arteries).
Can you name any principle other than “I like this poison but not that poison” by which you think smoking should be banned but alcohol, caffeine, croissants, etc. be legal?
Or skiing - the cost of all those broken legs has got to add up, hasn't it? Or climbing, or mountain biking, or other "extreme" sports. Do we weight sports by their health benefits and injury risk, and allow only the ones that offer a net reduction to NHS costs?
And in fact we have at least one worked example of just this, In the case of the pay rises for railway workers:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jan/18/rail-strikes-cost-uk-1bn-and-settling-would-have-been-cheaper-minister-admits
Furthermore it’s highly likely that the overspend at the home office (largely in the abortive Rwanda scheme and soaring costs for keeping asylum seekers in temporary accommodation for long periods of time) was caused by the unwillingness to spend the smaller amount of money it would have taken to process them by a government intent on turning a large backlog into a political issue.
https://ifs.org.uk/articles/home-office-budgeting-and-asylum-overspends
Yes and no. That's a short-term costs analysis. When looked at long-term, the position is less clear. It depends on whether you think that being "tough" on unions or being "generous" with unions is more likely to create future strike action or large pay demands.
Sort of. There's also a big productively price to pay when staff retention goes down. That's a major factor in the NHS at the moment. I cannot speak as accurately about the railways but train drivers take time to train. If they leave and you have to train more, that is a cost.
Retention of expensively-trained NHS staff is very poor at the moment. When vacancies are unfilled, agency costs soar. We are definitely at a tipping point where the cost of junior doctors' pay rises in the medium to long term will be lower than not doing so because the continued erosion of morale and consequential further loss of trained staff will cost more. The short term costs of the strikes are also notable, of course.
AFZ
Yes, that's a factor as well.
Apparently it takes a year or so to qualify as a train driver - perhaps as long as two years in some cases. I don't know what drives the variability. Train Driver job postings are notoriously oversubscribed, although I don't know what fraction of the typical applicants would be viable candidates.
Are you seriously blaming Osborne for a recession in 2009 ?
1. "Cave in" is a pejorative term and misleading. Train drivers have a below inflation rise when you look at it over the 3 year period. Junior Doctors have not been given what they asked for, just a sensible compromise.
2. No, don't be silly. Although that's only marginally more ridiculous than blaming Labour. The issue is not the recession. That was an inevitable consequence of the global financial crisis. The thing I blame Osborne for is the lack of recovery.
Fact 1: A recovery has a specific definition: "An above trend level growth that makes up for the ground lost by the recession"
Fact 2: After every recession since World War 2, there was a recovery except one. (Similarly most recessions in most countries - recoveries normally follow recessions for very good reasons).
Fact 3: There was no recovery from the 2009 recession.
That part is indisputable. The question is whether Osborne's policies are the reason. But before we go there, we should note that the lack of recovery is surprising and a big part of where we are as a country. For whatever reason, the period 2009-2012 made the UK significantly worse off.
AFZ
All too true, alas.
Those were not 14 years of carnage - they were 14 Golden Years. How could those who failed to vote tory, back in July, have been so stupid and short-sighted?
If only Boris and Liz could be brought back, all would again be well.
In La-La-Land, that is...
Jenrick: 28
Badenoch: 22
Cleverly: 21
Tugendhat: 17
Stride: 16
Patel: 14
Priti Patel is therefore eliminated.
Only if we eliminate all of them....
True enough.
To the others. Evenly spread perhaps.
Presumably he has never had ambitions in that particular direction. He has only ever wanted to serve his party and his country but if he colleagues felt he could best serve in high office then he would reluctantly let his name go forward....?
Not your typical tory leadership candidate, then.
Asking the questions is far easier than answering them. Will Sir Keir be refering to the 'Black hole' in all his answers ?