Fascinating insight into life on Planet Zogg... My father bought the house that he lives in as a plot of land in 1966 for £4k. That equates to £35k in today’s money but the house is worth four times that because in the intervening 58 years no government has got close to its stated housebuilding target – just like Sir Keith Stalin won’t – and supply and demand dictates prices. I cannot ever recall there being ‘Unlimited work’. In any unionised industry the union made sure that you did not do too much work or at any pace. If work was unlimited then how come there are unemployment figures? There is no such thing as “free”. Somebody paid for it. Since Tony “education, education, education” Blair started tuition fees and introduced the American style dumbed down education, the yoof now have to pick up the bill themselves – or work for a pittance for thirty years until the debt is written off.
Total lunatic believes the Establishment man actually running the country tells the truth while stating a known fact that Boris told porkies on a regular basis. Anybody with half a brain (that is half more than you) could go onto a popular search engine and type in something like “Boris farm subsidy” would find lots of stories about how BoJo was going to match EU subsidies. Cretins that have never been more than five miles outside their town or city think that all farmers are wealthy landowners – ripe for taxation by the Communists – but many of the small English farms barely break even after receiving about £25k in subsidies from DEFRA. So just how are their legatees going to pay the tax bill? Sell the farm to some big corporate that will have to bring in cheap labour from the third world to work it. The economic disaster that is Brexit seems to be doing a lot better than the United States of France, sinking into recession dragged down by its dominant member, Germany.
I could trawl through the post history on here to find where certain posters celebrated the death of the old guy who shouted at a police dog but can see little point in wasting my time doing that. They know who they are.
Three great articles in the Telegraph on Saturday, starting with: Rachel Reeves wants pension funds to bail her out It was written by former Pensions minister Guy Opperman, who wondered how a Chancellor that had hammered businesses and entrepreneurs in the Budget was going to boost growth by forcing pension funds to ‘invest’ in infrastructure. Since the pension funds that Reeves is targeting are public sector pensions, her ‘reforms’ are likely to make no difference. Forcing local authority pension scheme to merge might result in savings in administration costs and increased spending power. However, the people in those pension schemes would find that their opinions carried much less weight and they have less say in how their funds are invested. As one would expect, liar Reeves theory that getting pension funds to invest in big infrastructure projects would attract private sector investment is fatally flawed. If public money is thrown at water infrastructure then only a total idiot in the private sector would join in knowing that there is virtually no return on investment to be made. That would leave the public sector pension schemes invested in something that is going to make no return but they still have commitments to provide pensions to more and more members reaching retirement age. Similarly, the private sector is in no hurry to invest in big transport and housing infrastructure projects with hardly any return on capital. Anyone want the ‘black hole’ of HS2?
Second article: 100,000 civil servant job cuts: How Britain could rip out Whitehall waste Much of the premise of this article is based on the appointment of Elon Musk to “drain the swamp” for The Donald. Whether Musk can deliver on the rhetoric remains to be seen but he might be able to make some inroads. Over here, the Civil Service head count has increased by 100,000 since 2019; when Boris was elected on a commitment to reduce the head count by that amount. When the pandemic came along, thousands more were taken on and now they do not even show up to the office to shirk. The article includes quote from (Lord) Francis Maude, who slashed the Civil Service by 21 per cent as Minister for the Cabinet Office in the 2010-2015 coalition government, saving £52bn. Ironically, the last person charged with slashing this waste was the Minister for Government Efficiency appointed in 2019 by Boris: one Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg. We know that there is no chance of Sir Keith Stalin taking on the public sector unions so wasting of finite taxpayers’ money is set to continue until 2029. Rachel Reeves has launched a quango called the “Office of Value for Money”. The man in charge is one David Goldstone, who knows absolutely nothing about value for money having been on the group responsible for HS2. What they really need is a big beast from private industry who knows how to cut costs and improve performance. For what it is worth, public sector productivity is down 6.3 per cent in the last five years: more people on the public payroll doing less work. And they get rewarded with higher pay rises than the private sector that funds them. The third article, the long Saturday read (stretched to 11 pages when copied and pasted into Word) can be found on the thread devoted to the subject here.
My father in law boasts of it. He was a welder and was continually between yards because the offered a bit more than the current lot. He's a ****ing mogo too so if he could do it...
When I started my apprenticeship in 1982, it was like that (although it was starting to change as Maggie made her mark). I remember a fitter starting in the morning and jacking at lunchtime because his mate could get him a start down the road on 25p on hour more!
All us older folk know about living on the edge. We used to answer the phone without knowing who it was.
