CornwallFox

I can only talk about myself I suppose. I'm relatively senior these days. Run a professional led service covering a region. Yet I earn less that almost all of my friends in their mid forties. And it's been that way throughout our careers. If you read our relative jobs on paper you'd expect me to be earning more, but I'm not, and never will do. With the jobs I've done in my career the private sector equivalent has always been paid far more. I could leave and join the private sector of course, but I'm an idealist and like being a public servant and not working to make money. I suspect at the low end you might have a point. But as you move through your career, and perhaps sector could have a difference here TBF, the private sector starts to get further and further ahead. Think about how much noise you hear about a public sector CEO earning £150k while running a multi billion pound organisation, Vs how much you could earn in the private sector doing that. Public sector pensions are obviously still better than private but they've been made a lot worse. There have been at least three rounds of making the pension worse over the last 15 years.

So all a bit mixed? Big hit down, then tracked inflation, then some wins, meanwhile your career progressed? Tbh I could get into private v public, but it's not really what I believe. What I believe is that the public and private sectors rely on each other. The public sector uses the private sector for huge amounts of things: direct services, construction, maintenance, goods.... Basically everything. Meanwhile the private sector sees literally hundreds of billions of pounds a year funnelled to it via public sector services. Both would be crushed without the other. One thing I dislike about right wing politics is that it talks about the private sector as an incredible wealth creator, and the public sector as a drain. That just isn't true. The private sector only creates new money when businesses take on loans, in which case banks create money when lending. Otherwise, the private sector either just moves old money around from one place to another, or takes public spending - which again can be new created money. On its own it doesn't create money. Creating wealth just means it's concentrating the nation's assets into the pockets of a few, as that's what wealth is, the concentration of assets/money. Public sector and private sector are two sides of the same coin. What ordinary people should be fighting for is better public sector pay and better private sector pensions.

Indeed. The current economic model only benefits the rich. @kenny lost a huge chunk of his wages in 2008 through no fault of his own. I had a decade of lost earnings, which actually is a career as those earnings will never come back, so it's a career 30% down. Both of us did nothing wrong. Both of us I'm sure have worked hard. Yet true wealth has flourished while we've both took hits. Capitalism is called capitalism because it pushes the wealth of a nation towards capital (wealth). Sod the rest of us. Sell of the nation's assets and steal it's money. Even if you hate socialism you must want something different to what the last 40 years have brought us.

What were your pay rises over the next ten years?

Fair enough. Do you have any examples from any club of confirmed explicit instructions to do this?

For ten straight years in the public sector I had either 0% or 1% pay rises. Ten years. Relative wages fell by about a third. The public sector absolutely did not cause the financial crisis, nor the deficit, yet public servants paid for it. That isn't good for the economy either. If public servants are poorer, they're spending less on shops, on their houses, going out etc. It's bad for the economy. It's utterly ridiculous that people are still complaining when they actually get some sort of rise after that lost decade. The Tories are economically illiterate, hence them cutting relative spending (it went up, but more slowly than demand or it would have) while also raising tax rates, with wage growth at the slowest for nearly 300 years and years of stagnation.

The manager is very unlikely to be asking him to play a short 6 yard pass to an opposing player. A manager may ask for short passing but they won't be asking for that with zero thought to attacking positioning. Otherwise he'd never kick it long, which he does do.

I don't think the Tories were that right wing particularly, except on the economy. Cutting spending led us to the dark economic place we're in now. The fact labour won't relax it's fiscal rules to enable greater borrowing to induce growth is problematic, but really we should have been borrowing significantly back when government borrowing was virtually free, to really drive growth. The Tories had an incredible opportunity to really do something amazing but their economic dogma prevented that, leading to what were record high tax rates, combined with record debt, combined with collapsing public services. Truly abysmal leadership.

I hate "record spending". Spending always goes up because of inflation. It's always record. But if it goes up slower than demand+inflation then it can be record and also not enough that's what happened for 14 consecutive years under the Tories.

The economy was crap when they came in and the amount of non budgeted spend was almost criminal. But you're probably right that they could have outlined that with some positivity attached about the change they were going to instigate. Instead they've not really done anything spectacularly different economically and so they haven't improved it at all.

I'm not arguing the metrics are poor, or that the government has failed to improve those things. I'm making a separate point that 3/4s are the media are traditionally right wing and their output does create a narrative that things are really bad that may not really be born out. Growth is poor (non existent) and the unemployment figures are going up. These are not good things. But they're also not entirely dire as much if the media might paint them. They just aren't very good.

They didn't not extend. He didn't extend. They didn't allow him to leave for free, he used his contract to leave for free.

I know what your point is Tommy, relax, labour aren't delivering on jobs or growth, it's true. I still think they're doing lots of other good things but they are pretty important metrics. Would help if right wing media didn't talk down the economy constantly, frightening business and individuals into making decisions on entirely false budget reporting. But that's not to excuse the government for failing so far on those two measures.

In the latest 3 month period, yes. And is still lower. It's going the wrong way, that's for sure. Presumably if it goes up by less than the eurozone next time you won't be claiming it's a relative good result though

Just picking up climate change, no we're not globally cooling. All the real world observations and evidence are tracking the worst possible climate change modelling and have been for some time. My biggest gripe with the BBC is they keep giving human existential climate change deniers equal prominence to climate scientists, in an effort to not be biased, when actually the science is so clear and overwhelming that giving both sides prominence is creating a false impression that they both have equal evidence. They don't. Unfortunately, it really is an existential crisis.

Honestly, you could just Google and find this stuff. Eurozone 6.4% EU 6% (I might have those two the wrong way around) US 4.4% UK was 5.1% if it's gone up slightly you probably know the new figure All of them up in latest figures

The eurozone has unemployment up since lows in 2024. Same with the EU. US has highest unemployment since 2021.

He didn't 'let' him run out down. He didn't extend.

That was exactly what we had when Top showed ambition by not selling Tielemans. The Forest house of cards could go exactly the same way with a few mistakes.

The BBC didn't make the programme. They broadcast it. It's common practice to use clips from across speeches to indicate the general theme. In this case the clipping was a bit close to the knuckle in suggesting a direct call to action which didn't happen. The idea this is evidence of BBC bias is laughable tbh.

TNT. Discovery. There is no world in which having about 15 broadcasters slicing up the English game is good for fans. I want one subscription, not loads.

Assume you meant why aren't they? There's something weird about the UK where things that are normal elsewhere don't seem to take off. Probably a very Americanised political environment doesn't help but also something about the British is just different - look at the state of us in benidorm for example. We seem to revel in being idiotic.

Tories promising to scrap the petrol and diesel sales ban that, erm, the Tories brought in. They're the biggest joke in politics with that dipstick Badenoch in charge.

As a public sector worker who generally argues for greater trade union engagement and better public services pay (because it's absolutely miles behind the private sector, so lucky we do have decent pensions before anybody brings them up), I think the doctors are utterly in the wrong at this point. Some of what they've been given previously is borderline ridiculous. Things like doing up to 2hrs overtime each day but nobody being allowed to check if it was necessary or question their judgement. Then fines for Trusts that don't pay it quickly enough. Completely out of line with any other worker. And resident doctors now have never earned 2008 money, most came into the profession much later. There are so many ways in which doctors can earn extra on top of their basic pay too. They don't deserve further public support at this point.

Yeah even in the Australian shooting, they legally had the guns from what I read. So even stricter laws may have prevented access to the guns. The PM I believe is already talking about stricter laws. The Americans are lost. No point even discussing them.