UK Politics: Striking at the heart of the nation

[BigFatCoward]

1 minute ago, dog-days said:

So Sunak expects the teachers' pay rises to come out of existing budgets. How on earth will that work?

"Good news, kids. Mrs Trelawney has decided not to resign and go work as a private tutor for another year. Also, today we will be learning how to make some delicious, healthy stew from grass cuttings, and Mr Slater from the IT team will be demonstrating how to light a cooking fire the ecological way by using our stock of broken iPads to reflect the sun's light onto last summer's Year 3 art projects." 

They are just fucking insane.  So many voters have kids in schools, everyone needs the police and the NHS, politically how do they expect to recover from this decade and a half of leadership ever (thankfully for them a great many voters are also fucking insane)?  

[mormont]

A chunk of the teachers' pay settlement, I understand, will come from increasing visa fees for overseas HE students, by up to £500 a year in many cases. Not a penny of that money will go to the universities they're paying to attend, of course. And universities aren't included in this pay settlement.

Re: erosion of wages, I don't think I've had a pay settlement above inflation since, oh, 2008 or so? I've had promotions in that time so I'm earning more than I was then, but the point is, the government can't continue to distribute the benefits of growth to the rich and the pain of austerity and inflation to everyone else.

I understand that the UK is, due to some bad decisions by the Treasury, more exposed to inflation in terms of the national debt than other countries. We also have huge funding gaps in many public services - health, education - and need to do a lot of infrastructure spending. We need major change, and someone with the courage to make it happen. And when I say that, I do not mean more privatisation and private sector provision of public services. That's a failed old idea that certain folks like to pretend is still radical and new. We've been doing it for decades and it's a big part of why we're in this mess.

[BigFatCoward]

1 hour ago, mormont said:

 

Re: erosion of wages, I don't think I've had a pay settlement above inflation since, oh, 2008 or so? I've had promotions in that time so I'm earning more than I was then, but the point is, the government can't continue to distribute the benefits of growth to the rich and the pain of austerity and inflation to everyone else.

 

Can't remember if I mentioned this before but a top of their pay scale PC in 2008, with inflation applied to their salary, would be on the same as a top of their pay rate Inspector now.  They have basically wiped out my 2 promotions. 

[Raja]

7 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

. Rank xenophobic policy IMO. I can sort of see a rationale for non-resident foreign visitors having to pay for using the NHS.

Yup. I've looked through my emails and I paid £1,875 for the surcharge when I first moved here 3 years ago. This isn't including visa fees btw, this is just the surcharge.

Because of Brexit and a lack of medical workforce planning over the last 15 years, the year after I moved here they cancelled the surcharge for NHS workers ( at least the doctors & the nurses), but like you say, most immigrants pay that surcharge on top of the NI & other forms of tax that everyone else pays.

It's also not great because young immigrants on working visas barely use the health service relative to people that are older. As for tourists, emergency care is free but if you're admitted to the hospital, one does pay for that.

[Spockydog]

3 hours ago, mormont said:

the government can't continue to distribute the benefits of growth to the rich and the pain of austerity and inflation to everyone else.

Yes, they can. And they will. Who is going to stop them? Starmer? Don't make me laugh.

 

[Spockydog]

It's 2023, and in one of the richest countries in the world, people are having to pull out their own teeth with pliers.

MPs demand dentistry overhaul as patients resort to DIY treatment

Quote

 

NHS dental services are not fit for purpose and need urgent reform, according to MPs who have warned that people are resorting to DIY treatment using pliers.

A report published on Friday by the health and social care select committee said it was “totally unacceptable in the 21st century” that large numbers of patients had to experience pain and distress because they could not see an NHS dentist.

Fundamental changes were vital if people were to receive the dental care they were entitled to, the report concluded.

Figures obtained by the British Dental Association (BDA) in May showed that 23,577 dentists carried out NHS work in the 2022-23 financial year, down by more than 1,100 on the pre-pandemic level and the lowest number since 2012-13. Up to 90% of practices are not accepting new NHS patients.

The inquiry found substantial regional variation affecting people living in rural areas and places with the highest levels of deprivation. People from ethnic minorities and lower socioeconomic backgrounds were twice as likely to avoid dental treatment because of costs compared with white people from the same backgrounds.

Despite proposals in the NHS workforce plan to increase the number of dental students by 40% by 2031-32, the cross-party committee concluded that the “government and NHS England have not fully grasped the scale of the challenge for the workforce, and the need to urgently provide compelling incentives to attract new and existing dentists to undertake NHS work”.

MPs also expressed frustration that the government’s recovery plan for NHS dental services, announced in April, has yet to be published.

The Conservative chair of the committee, Steve Brine, said: “Rarely has an inquiry been more necessary than this one. To hear of someone in such pain and distress that they resorted to using pliers to extract their teeth demonstrates the crisis in NHS dental services.

“We register in the strongest terms possible our concern for the future of NHS dental services and the patients who desperately need access to them.”

 

 

[BigFatCoward]

https://news.sky.com/story/gillian-keegan-headteachers-should-pick-up-absent-pupils-from-home-12920515

They are off their tits, and utterly clueless. The average size of a secondary school in the UK is 986. Average attendamce is 86%. So ball park of 140 collections a day? Do they even think before they open their mouths?

Even assuming they only thought 1/4 were truant rather than genuine absence, it would be logistically inpossile. And is that what we pay headteachers for? Not remotely.

And the vast majority of truants a) wouldn't be home and b) parents would tell you to fuck off. 

Can we have some reall people in government please? 

Edited July 14, 2023 by BigFatCoward

[Derfel Cadarn]

 

[BigFatCoward]

In a massive turn up for the books the big boss has put his money where his mouth is   

He has been very vocal that we needed 10% (the only commissioner to ever actually go and speak to the pay review board in person and make his/our case), when we got 7% he pushed up our London weighting by a grand, which is the maximum he could.

He obviously could uave done it sooner, but at least he did it eventually. 

[James Arryn]

6 hours ago, BigFatCoward said:

In a massive turn up for the books the big boss has put his money where his mouth is   

He has been very vocal that we needed 10% (the only commissioner to ever actually go and speak to the pay review board in person and make his/our case), when we got 7% he pushed up our London weighting by a grand, which is the maximum he could.

He obviously could uave done it sooner, but at least he did it eventually. 

Serious question for you, not trying to catch you up, I’ve often argued that policing is important enough to raise the training/requirements but also the pay. My assumption is that the latter in particular should reduce things like moonlighting burnout, corruption and the like. From your POV, forgetting for a moment where the money will come from, do you think that’s correct? And I mean significant reduction, not marginal. Is that pie in the sky?

[Derfel Cadarn]

Privatised water conpanies and their lack of investment in infrastructure because they gave all the money to shareholders. How it’s going:

water is stil publicly owned in Scotland, thankfully

[Which Tyler]

Verified

https://www.anglianwater.co.uk/hidden-pages/boil-notice/

 

Oh, and note the URL there, it may be today's date, but it's also "hidden-pages/boil-notice"

Which means it doesn't unfurl in the likes of Facebook posts and some forae

Edited July 15, 2023 by Which Tyler

[Heartofice]

1 hour ago, Derfel Cadarn said:

Privatised water conpanies and their lack of investment in infrastructure because they gave all the money to shareholders. How it’s going:

water is stil publicly owned in Scotland, thankfully

Worth checking out this thread. Yes Scottish water is publically owned but it’s also quite shit and is worse than English water in a number of measures, including having the worst beaches in the UK, the lowest amount of monitoring , the 2nd worst quality tap water and number of leaks. 
 

 

Edited July 15, 2023 by Heartofice

[DaveSumm]

That thread is excellent, and the previous one he links to at the end of that thread:

I’d be interested to know the specifics of the Anglian boil notices (I work for Thames Water, monitoring drinking water quality), but my guess is cryptosporidium. It’s the one pain in the arse bacteria that chlorine doesn’t catch, which means you have to set up physical filters. And it doesn’t show up on chemical tests, which means you have to periodically (daily on some sites) send the filters back to the lab for someone to examine under a microscope and just plain old look for them. 

But it’s one of those things that you couldn’t possibly rig every treatment works to 100% eliminate, you have to work with the probabilities of finding it. If there’d been a sudden increase then I don’t know that Anglian could’ve done much, assuming they got the boil notices out when they should’ve. Just unlucky really.

But yea, that thread makes clear that there’s really no adverse relationship between privatisation and quality, quite the opposite. 

Edited July 15, 2023 by DaveSumm
Substituted confusing tweet link

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

8 hours ago, DaveSumm said:

But yea, that thread makes clear that there’s really no adverse relationship between privatisation and quality, quite the opposite. 

Oh really? I could link you a number of studies that conclude the exact opposite is true. Privatization tends to lead to worse results for the vast majority of people. It makes more economic sense in the short run, but in the long term they leave the people and resources worse off. Can't speak to the UK, however in the US so many of the water issues are created because private companies do exactly what their main goal is, make money. Clean drinking water is not their main priority which is why it's best left in the government's hands even if they're not the best at it either. At least with them goal number one should be the obvious which is clean water. Corporations don't care especially if no one is really holding them accountable. 

Edited July 16, 2023 by Tywin et al.

[DaveSumm]

Well, I was talking about water in the UK specifically … and my evidence being, the thread I / HoI linked.

[A wilding]

56 minutes ago, DaveSumm said:

But yea, that thread makes clear that there’s really no adverse relationship between privatisation and quality, quite the opposite. 

I can't read Twitter stuff any longer, but ...

As I understand it, approximately 10% of every Thames Water water bill everyone in its area has to pay goes straight offshore to pay the debts Thames Water owes to assorted offshore companies. These debts were run up not to maintain or improve Thames Water's infrastructure or processes, but to pay out huge dividends. (There is even a suggestion that previous recipients of those dividends have an interest in the offshore creditors, i.e. they gave Thames Water money that Thames Water then gave back to them, and those debt payments are pure profit.)

With such a millstone round Thames Water's neck is it really likely that there is "really no adverse relationship between privatisation and quality"? All the evidence of what has happened to the UK water companies in the 30 years since privatisation seems to show the opposite to me. Certainly all the anecdotal evidence I have from both customers and employees of Thames Water seems to point that way.

[DaveSumm]

Maybe I worded it poorly, I don’t mean privatisation has no negative side effects. I mean that, it clearly isn’t true that everything would be better if we hadn’t privatised the water industry. The exact opposite trend across UK areas holds, the more nationalised, the worse the water.

There’s absolutely a shit ton of money that goes to shareholders that could be put to better use, but the ideal solution there is that Ofwat takes a firmer hand on what money is allowed to go where and on what. I’m not here defending everything Thames does, the financial management has been absolute jank for far too long (although the previous owners are more to blame there tbh), but it doesn’t then follow that privatisation must have been bad; the initial argument in its favour was to improve water quality, and it’s done that.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

46 minutes ago, DaveSumm said:

Maybe I worded it poorly, I don’t mean privatisation has no negative side effects. I mean that, it clearly isn’t true that everything would be better if we hadn’t privatised the water industry. The exact opposite trend across UK areas holds, the more nationalised, the worse the water.

There’s absolutely a shit ton of money that goes to shareholders that could be put to better use, but the ideal solution there is that Ofwat takes a firmer hand on what money is allowed to go where and on what. I’m not here defending everything Thames does, the financial management has been absolute jank for far too long (although the previous owners are more to blame there tbh), but it doesn’t then follow that privatisation must have been bad; the initial argument in its favour was to improve water quality, and it’s done that.

Just out of curiosity, would you support privatizing airspace? 

[The Anti-Targ]

Privatising water is like privatising the roads. It's insane to sell of the roads to private companies. You can privatise the delivery of road building and maintenance, but even then you should not privatise the decisions on where to build roads and the repair and maintenance programme. Similar with water, you can privatise the operational delivery of clean water, but the resource itself and the infrastructure should always remain public.