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Reply | Hull roll call
at 11:40 26 Apr 2024
yup, driving up tomorrow, starting to get hyped! |
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Reply | Presser - Hirst and Burns
at 15:11 25 Apr 2024
Just in time for this year's Peterborough-Barnsley-Exeter.
"IT'S HIRST... IT'S TWOOOO" |
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Reply | We're all going to have to make some selfless sacrifices to get this country
at 14:50 25 Apr 2024
but again, you look at their charts and tax levels relative to GDP are pretty constant between the end of the Major Government until 2020 and still remain below several of the peaks in the 1970s and 1980s.
I think rendering "taxes will occupy a greater proportion of GDP than they have for 70 years if tax thresholds remain the same and incomes go up as forecast" as "highest tax burden for 70 years" would be a bit misleading for most people, particularly when what you are discussing is the efficacy of government spending. |
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Reply | We're all going to have to make some selfless sacrifices to get this country
at 12:02 25 Apr 2024
I would say though, people have been making this sort of complaint about "young people" since the dawn of time.
We tend to lose a bit of perspective when we talk about generations, but you can find plenty of newspaper articles and testimony from the 1960s with parents and older people complaining that "kids these days don't know they're born" and "don't know the meaning of hard work" etc. etc. It seems to be just the way people talk about different generations! |
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Reply | Hallelujah!
at 09:57 25 Apr 2024
The inefficiencies of the old rail operators were rather lost in the rush to destroy the post-war settlement. There was a reason why the Conservative governments of 1951-1964 didn't reverse nationalisation. |
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Reply | We're all going to have to make some selfless sacrifices to get this country
at 09:53 25 Apr 2024
I would say this as a History lecturer, but I'd always advise any 17 year old prospective student to go study something different for their undergrad and do a law conversion after. Diversifies and deepens your skills/knowledge, plenty of time to bury yourself in precedents later on in life! [Post edited 25 Apr 9:57]
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Reply | We're all going to have to make some selfless sacrifices to get this country
at 09:48 25 Apr 2024
Always wonder how this meme about "the highest levels of taxation since the war" spread so rapidly? It's obviously an incredibly counter-intuitive thing to believe, given that high taxes in the 1960s and 1970s is a bit of a national legend (90% top rate of income tax!). None of the most relevant tax categories (income tax, sales tax, corporation tax) are at historically very high levels.
It seems to come from an OBR report suggesting Britain would have the highest tax to GDP ratio since the war by 2027-28 if average incomes rise and if tax thresholds for National Insurance and Income Tax don't change (meaning poorer people will be pulled into higher tax brackets).
(See here: https://obr.uk/box/the-uks-tax-burden-in-historical-and-international-context/ )
Essentially it was a warning about poorer people being pulled into higher tax brackets rather than about people with "investment portfolios" contributing more to the exchequer.
The overall tax burden relative to GDP in Britain remains much lower than most Western European countries. [Post edited 25 Apr 10:14]
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Reply | We're all going to have to make some selfless sacrifices to get this country
at 09:15 25 Apr 2024
People have very strange ideas about what universities actually do. If you believed the press, you'd assume that every university consists of precisely two departments - one for "David Beckham studies" and the other for "Anti-British History".
The reality is the vast majority of undergraduate students are studying something that most people would recognise as economically important. There are 2.8m people in Higher Education - the most popular course is Business/Management (530k), followed by Medicine and Allied Subjects (448k). Huge numbers are studying in other areas that most would recognise as straightforwardly serious/vocational - Hard Sciences (265k), Engineering (186k), Computing (164k), Law (142k), Psychology (140k), Education (136k), Languages (88k), Architecture and planning (64k), Media and journalism (48k), Agriculture (20k), Veterinary Science (12k).
Together these subjects account for more than 80% of all students. These subjects have minimal scope for "indoctrination" or "wokery" or whatever else you are scared about. I promise you my colleagues in Computer Science aren't secretly teaching their students about Slavery or Empire.
That's before we even get to the other 20% doing social sciences, humanities and creative arts. I teach history and our students go out into the world with huge variety of useful critical thinking skills, they go into a wide variety of vitally necessary fields, they become lawyers, civil servants, accountants, teachers, work in the private sector, the public sector, one student of mine recently applied for post-graduate medicine off the back of their history degree. They come out of university highly capable, but they don't dictate the state of the labour market, which has far more to do with the society we are building as a nation than they do with British universities.
I think it's sad that people run down the work done in British universities because they are one of the few things about this country that are genuinely world class and admired around the world. [Post edited 25 Apr 9:17]
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Reply | Hallelujah!
at 08:46 25 Apr 2024
Definitely a step in the right direction.
Amongst all the privatisations since the 1980s it's hard to make the case that any of them worked particularly brilliantly. British Telecom is probably the success story, but even then I think it's hard to unpick how much of that can be attributed to the way telecommunications technology leapt forward rather than privatisation per se.
No guarantees that re-nationalisation flips a switch and everything suddenly improves - success depends on good long-term governance (and public investment!) which has been short supply in Britain for a very long time. But at least decisions in a nationalised utilities are going to be aimed at the public good rather than private profit and at least the public can exert democratic pressure on the people running it. |
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Reply | If you were offered the play off final right now, would you take it?
at 18:57 24 Apr 2024
Haha, yeah, I suppose I could be more precise there!
The bookies' implied probabilities at Kick Off for our game at Carrow Road gave us a 39.22% chance of winning and a 27.78% chances of drawing. Imagine they'd be more generous towards us a neutral venue mind. [Post edited 24 Apr 19:47]
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Reply | If you were offered the play off final right now, would you take it?
at 17:10 24 Apr 2024
Going to run the probabilities on this one...
I think the latest stats have us at 46% chance for autos as of this moment. Add in that if we fail, we'd still have a roughly 1 in 4 chance of winning the play-offs, so that's 0.55 x 0.25 = 13.75%. Total probability of 59.75%
I'd make us 50/50 to win a one-off play-off final having got there, so statistically I'm taking my chances with the actual season playing out (which is just as well because we don't have a choice in the matter!). |
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Reply | A blessing in disguise?
at 15:07 23 Apr 2024
If your Summer business meant you weren't a good team until 50-60% of the season was already over, with the result that you ultimately finished mid-table, then your Summer business made you a worse team in my book.
If that happened to us, it'd be hard to read that as progress. |
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Reply | A blessing in disguise?
at 13:33 23 Apr 2024
Of course, the other thing about Coventry is that they're a walking warning that teams usually get worse when they fail to get promoted, rather than better. |
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Reply | Do we want a Southampton win tomorrow now then?
at 12:55 23 Apr 2024
Can't really see any significant downside to Southampton winning, really.
As it stands, we need 4 points to guarantee finishing ahead of them, even if they take max points, less than that surely wouldn't be enough anyway? |
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Reply | A blessing in disguise?
at 12:37 23 Apr 2024
Did I miss a memo where Leeds winning yesterday ended our season? |
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Reply | Careful what you wish for 2.0
at 12:36 23 Apr 2024
Well, the main difference would be that our manager is Kieran McKenna and there's was Paul Heckingbottom. |
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Reply | Threatened with arrest for being openly Jewish on the streets of London
at 07:58 23 Apr 2024
This elides two very different things though.
Whether it's safe to be a visibly Jewish person at a Pro-Palestine demo and whether it's safe to be Gideon Falter specifically, as a public advocate of Gideon Falter's particular politics, are not the same question.
Keeping groups with antagonistic politics separate is an ordinary part of public order policing. I've been on anti-fascist counter-protests to EDL marches in the past where the police kettled both sides (actually some of the most aggressive and unpleasant policing I've ever experienced, certainly no "patiently explaining why it might be a good idea to go around, sir"). |
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Reply | Threatened with arrest for being openly Jewish on the streets of London
at 17:04 22 Apr 2024
Given that plenty of people have attended these demonstrations wearing kippahs (or even with signs declaring their Jewishness, giving platform speeches that reference their heritage etc.), it would be pretty bizarre for the police to start arresting demonstrators on the unproven (and self-evidently ridiculous) presumption that the sight of a kippah will provoke them to violence.
It is a long-standing police practice to keep demonstrators and counter-demonstrators separate (for e.g. fascist marches and the policing of anti-fascist counter-protesters) to avoid the two sides beating each other up. That's slightly different from people choosing to protest a formal state function (well, it should be, but actually in practice it isn't, the police routinely pre-arrest people to protect state functions). |
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