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reluctantjumper has it, sadly
I'm a wedding photographer and have had basically all my summer's work postponed/cancelled. After the first lockdown eased people started getting excited about getting married next summer, that all seems to have died off now as people realise it probably won't be much different by then. I have some bookings for next year but people are already talking about postponing again.
I had 80%/70% of 'averaged' earnings during summer but normally my summer months are far from average and I earn most of my year's money during that time. Now I'm going into winter having eaten into my savings that were supposed to be to buy a house, but I'll get 20% of my average earnings now so yay! Can't see when it's likely to get any better really, everyone will be broke for the foreseeable future especially after Brexit.
Had to move from Glasgow back to my mum's in Cumbria with my partner and our three kids. Could be worse obviously but it's not ideal. Think I'm gonna have to look at delivery jobs or something too.
Its looking like we could be hitting something of a tipping point here.
I've just heard Andy Burnham on Radio 4 this morning and he's clearly livid. This on top of the Middlesborough, Liverpool, and Hartlepool Mayors saying the same thing yesterday. And they've all got a valid point
These increased COVID restrictions are being imposed with no consultation and no notice on what is now pretty much the entirety of the North now. In a lot of cases, this means they are effectively shutting down the entire hospitality industry (as well as others) in the northern towns and cities.
But because it's not technically a national lockdown, there is now no financial aid package. And with the furlough scheme winding up, businesses are now truly on their own. How many are going to still be there after the winter?
On top of this its obvious that these restrictions are effectively indefinite and again all decisions are being taken in Westminster with absolutely no local level consultation. There is no exit strategy and the test and trace system is still a total shambles.
So much for 'leveling up'?
Are Local Lockdowns Worsening The North-South Divide?
Definitely time the whole country was locked down to the same level as the north. The different restrictions make it way too confusing and undermine the intention. Plus I don't think people up North are taking much notice anyway based on a combination of the increasing infections and personal observations from the few times ive actual gone out. It doesnt feel like there any restrictions.
Asking for a colleague, TUPE does not protect you from redundancy after the fact right? He's about to be TUPE'd and joyfully thinks he's legally guaranteed 2 years employment and prancing around like an idiot, but I'm pretty sure even after the TUPE process is complete, he could be made redundant form "restructuring" or similar?
FWIW is not a "taking over a contract from another supplier" TUPE, its a company entity change.
TUPE protects you from being singled out for redundancy from the other workers for the new company but if the company puts everyone on notice or folds then you can still lose your job. It's there to stop Company A absorbing Company B's workforce and contracts only to dump Company A's workers as their terms and conditions are better than Company B's. As for an entity change it would just protect their terms and conditions, redundancy is still an option. The company I just got made redundant from were in the same situation and TUPE rules were examined during the 'consultation' period. Worked example:
G4S were a giant company that encompassed Guarding, Prisons, Personal Security and CVIT (cash and valuables in transit) services. This giant was formed between a merger between Group 4 (the part of the company that is always in the news for dodgy behaviour etc) and Securicor. Last year the CVIT side was split off to be sold. A new company was set up, G4S Cash Solutions. All of us that worked in the CVIT part were then TUPE'd over to the new company, all completed in April last year. Under TUPE there could be no changes to terms or conditions for 24 months unless agreed with the workers via a union ballot. After using the furlough scheme it became obvious that redundancies were inevitable so negotiations and examination of the TUPE situation began. As we were all in the same boat redundancy-wise there was no TUPE protection to help us. They were originally going to trim the headcount at every branch but that would have triggered a 6 month consultation period due to some quirk at one legacy site from the Securicor era so they instead decided to just close whole branches instead, mine included, with no redundancies at sites staying open. Redundancies were finalised on August 31st with PILON used to hurry up the process.
So despite TUPE meaning to protect your job for 24 months it doesn't in certain circumstances.
These increased COVID restrictions are being imposed with no consultation and no notice on what is now pretty much the entirety of the North now.
I can't find it now but on twitter a week a or two ago someone posted a map of covid restriciton areas along side a map of former UK coal mining areas. You can guess what they looked like. It's Thatcher 2.0, on steroids. They have a radical economic plan involving a post-brexit deregulated sweatshop gig economy, and the labour supporting ex mining areas are the guinea pigs. They can't use Scotland any more so it's the next best option.
So despite TUPE meaning to protect your job for 24 months it doesn’t in certain circumstances
TUPE just protects your T&C's for 2 years, not your job.
I can’t find it now but on twitter a week a or two ago someone posted a map of covid restriciton areas along side a map of former UK coal mining areas. You can guess what they looked like. It’s Thatcher 2.0, on steroids.
A couple of months ago, as local lockdowns kicked in, the resident racists were trying to pin increased infections on race. It was all bullshit, of course. And a distraction from the reality
What all these areas had in common was poverty. The people in these areas were all in zero hours, gig economy, minimum wage jobs where they simply couldn't stop working. Probably working in jobs where you were most potentially exposed or for employers who couldn't care less about their employees safety.
The areas being adversely affected are predominantly poorer areas. There's been no leafy Surrey commuter belt suburbs or Cotswold villages been locked down, to my knowledge. When Trafford had restrictions put on it they were up in arms. But trafford certainly isn't all footballers in Hale Barns
But you're absolutely right that as these Welsh or Northern areas have been locked down, they're being offered the same amount of care, concern, and financial support as Thatcher offered these very same places 30 years ago.
Absolutely * all.
At least we can give up what always was a ridiculous pretence, sold to the harder of thinking ... levelling up.
There's about to be a huge spike in unemployment as businesses go down like dominoes and the hardest-hit areas will be exactly the same areas as in the '80s
And Boris, Dom and chums couldn't give a flying *! We're being treated like completely expendable colonial outposts.
Next year is going to be another grim chapter in the North West, North East and the Welsh Valleys
I can’t find it now but on twitter a week a or two ago someone posted a map of covid restriciton areas along side a map of former UK coal mining areas.
While there may be some truth in it, you can do a similar thing with population density.
The obvious one in the game of spot the difference between lockdown map and population map for the uk at the moment is London, which I believe is on the watch list?
They have a radical economic plan
I've highlighted the mistakes in your assertion DazH.
What was it we were saying about lockdowns being politically motivated?
https://twitter.com/BWDDPH/status/1312669570319167493?s=20
Five Live are just about to discuss why affluent southern areas are not having restrictions imposed while having far higher infection rates than poorer northern areas who have been under lockdown restrictions for weeks.
It sounds like what measures you have imposed depends not on the infection rate, but on who your MP is. Johnsons own constituency has a lot higher infection rates than some northern areas that are under lockdown, but has had no extra restrictions imposed. Probably as his dad demands his god-given right to stroll around without a mask on and cough on people.
It sounds like what measures you have imposed depends not on the infection rate, but on who your MP is. Johnsons own constituency has a lot higher infection rates than some northern areas that are under lockdown, but has had no extra restrictions imposed.
If only we'd voted in a PM that gave a shit about the poor.
I did read, but can’t confirm it’s veracity, that for every person whose contacts they pursue Serco is paid £900.
By my maths, the government have just saved £14.4m.
Nah, Serco will still charge for them, and they will get it.
How much is it to license a copy of Excel nowadays?
A SPREADSHEET??? A ****ing spreadsheet!!!
World class track and trace system and they are storing the information in a spreadsheet? Bunch of inept, crooked, incompetent, fraudulent cockwombles!!!
So Sunak is planning to 'balance the books'. Aside from the fact that its complete fiction, if true it'll be the final nail in the UK economic coffin. Mrs Daz works for the local authority, and received an email last week asking for volunteers for early retirement and redundancy. Austerity 2.0 at a time of national crisis. It's going to be worse than I ever thought it could be.
https://twitter.com/BBCPolitics/status/1313098277584338944?s=20
It’s going to be worse than I ever thought it could be.
I genuinely think that the UK will be put through it before Christmas, with today's cinema jobs but the tip of a huge iceberg.
Add in the folly of Brexshit and the new cuts and/or taxes Sunak is promising, and we are all going to feel it by Easter.
It’s going to be worse than I ever thought it could be.
It was inevitable.
These lot are the least imaginative people on the planet and are absolutely blinkered by right wing neoliberal dogma. Did you honestly think that they would offer up any other solution than more austerity? It's the only thing they know.
Next year, after the horror of a no deal Brexit, will be a total nightmare in this country, as one things for sure... these lot won't have any answers to the economic crisis other than to slash public spending even more.
The rest will be like Thatcherism's even crueler big brother. 'The Market' will be left to decide as unemployment goes through the roof
The only reason Rishi looks like he knows what he's doing is that when it comes to understanding how the real economy actually functions, my cat is more clued up than the rest of the cabinet
that kinda depends. Balance books probably does not refer to getting our debt back to where it was a year ago, it probably means, at some point in the future (probably 5 years out so it can nicely be over-ridden by then), have spending be forecast to approx equal spending. if this is a V shaped recession that's easy to achieve (especially with interest rates where they are).
Sunak has, to date, been mr popularity; splashing the cash but that's now stopped, eloquent, apparently personable.
Eat out to help out was well-intentioned but naive; it was never going to provide a sustainable benefit unless many other things went well - they haven't.
gove and cummings will do everything necessary to ensure he isn't seen as the main man.
Failure to continue providing meaningful support, escalating job losses and 'balancing the books' will rapidly tarnish his reputation.
if this is a V shaped recession that’s easy to achieve (especially with interest rates where they are).
I think the one thing we can say with absolute certainty is that this isn't going to be a V shaped recession
These lot are the least imaginative people on the planet and are absolutely blinkered by right wing neoliberal dogma.
Just like with the financial crisis they betrayed the lie that the money tree doesn't exist with the furlough scheme and other industrial support when the pandemic kicked off, now they're reverting to type talking about balancing the books. Seems to me that Sunak has had his wings clipped for being a bit too pragmatic and is now having to get back on message about repaying debts so they can continue with their 'national credit card' fiction. Either that or Sunak is an idiot who doesn't understand where money comes from. I'm betting its not the latter.
have spending be forecast to approx equal spending
Assuming you mean spending equal to tax income that would be an incredibly stupid idea in a recovering economy. As long as inflation is under control and we don't have full employment then we need to maintain a govt deficit to stimulate recovery. Reducing the deficit will prolong the recession and risk a depression. By saying he wants to balace the books Sunak is saying he wants a recession/depression. He only gets away with that nonsense because the public don't understand where money comes from.
if this is a V shaped recession
Are we all pretending that 2021 is going to be sunlit uplands?
We've only achieved a Government surplus twice in the last 50 years - any notion that this can be achieved in the near future only means austerity and bugger-all fiscal stimulus / infrastructure investment.
Assuming you mean spending equal to tax income that would be an incredibly stupid idea in a recovering economy. As long as inflation is under control and we don’t have full employment then we need to maintain a govt deficit to stimulate recovery. Reducing the deficit will prolong the recession and risk a depression. By saying he wants to balace the books Sunak is saying he wants a recession/depression. He only gets away with that nonsense because the public don’t understand where money comes from.
You might want to read this https://www.ft.com/content/fde4b931-6cd9-4cb2-8cec-89b3ac876b88
Literally the only way "balancing the books" can work just now is if they (sensibly) allow it to include lending and printing money as balancing spending.
"Balancing the books" isn't really a very meaningful term at all, it doesn't have a technical definition outside of the most simple applications- balancing a chequebook frinstance just means checking the cheques you've written have been cashed, so you know you're not going to get an unexpected debit. Easy. Balancing the books on a big company? Very dissimilar. Doing it for a country? Pretty much meaningless. Literally none of the approaches or the logic work the same way, you have to basically unlearn everything you know about household finance before you can start thinking about bigger finance.
But of course conservative politicians like to pretend that running a country is similar to running a household- you have to "live within your means" (a lie) and reducing spending and reducing borrowing is always prudent (also a lie). They know it's not merely untrue, but a really bad way of running a country. But they also know it rings true to everyone who lives paycheck to paycheck, which is a double whammy since successive tory governments have left more and more people doing exactly that.
But of course, "living within your means" means not borrowing to invest. It means not spending a grand on your credit card to fix your house, so it falls down and you end up losing all of the value and also having to rent a new house for £500 a month, forever. But that's "prudent" because you have £500 a month spare and therefore should spend it all on rent whereas borrowing £1000 and paying it back in 2 or 3 months and then having £500 a month spare again would be "not living within your means", and your credit card is the "magic money tree". And god forbid you should actually earn more.
And for countries, it means not borrowing at the incredibly good terms that countries can borrow at, and it means not taking advantage of low inflation by printing money, which are the only things that have any chance of getting us through the next couple of years without financial devastation. You either half to be a cretin not to do it, or you have to be clever enough to understand that you should do it, and awful enough to choose not to because you prefer the alternative, and you don't want to admit that it works.
Any government that can't borrow or print money and get a better return on it by investing, shouldn't be running a corner shop but basically the poorer you are, the harder that is to understand. And they make people poorer so that's a win win.
One of those situations where you kind of have to grimly admire how good the tories are at this sort of thing, while bearing in mind that it's all absolutely terrible and will totally kill people and ruin lives. It's not the incompetents like Johnson and Hammond you have to worry about, it's the Sunaks and the Osbornes who know how it works well enough to do something else.
Whilst mooching about the FT
There is an article detailing plans to “borrow £100 billion” over five years for a “clean energy & infrastructure plan”
https://www.ft.com/content/68300806-d197-4e94-8dc8-e9af2d1e67df
Does involve Boris so high possibility of blustering bull****
You might want to read this https://www.ft.com/content/fde4b931-6cd9-4cb2-8cec-89b3ac876b88
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If you're gonna post a paywalled link at least summarise or quote some of the content relevant to the topic.
It’s about Sunaks speech. I thought you had a free account where you get a few free articles?
You either half to be a cretin not to do it, or you have to be clever enough to understand that you should do it, and awful enough to choose not to because you prefer the alternative, and you don’t want to admit that it works.
The tories can leverage the ignorance of the public in being the party of 'prudence' and responsible financial management. They know it's bollox but it wins them votes so they carry on with the lie that the countries finances are the same as a households. Also by maintaining the public's ignorance they retain use of the money tree for themselves and their friends, using it to maintain their position as the natural party of power. It's a win-win for them, and the interests of the country at large don't even come into it.
It's an extremely clever psychological trick which persuades the public that using the state's power in their interests is irrresponsible, whilst using it to maintain the wealth and power of the elite is the model of prudence. If the general public ever really realised the extent to which they're being conned they'd be on the streets.
Sunak's retraining proposals are based on an employee-deficit model which will do nothing to rectify an investment-deficit reality but at least it encourages victims to think they are the author of their own woes.
The other problem with his scheme is that he seems to be suggesting that people who were in highly skilled professions (ie: lighting or sound engineers) should 'retrain' to be van drivers or work in coffee shops.
Once they've spent the requisite period of unemployment for them to qualify for any assistance, obviously. I'm not sure how much 'retraining' is required. Doubtless it'll be supplied by Serco at immense cost to the taxpayer?
Can an economy actually still function based on selling coffee, delivering pizza and people ordering Amazon deliveries? I suppose that come January we'll find out
I think there may be a slight flaw in his masterplan
Can an economy actually still function based on selling coffee, delivering pizza and people ordering Amazon deliveries? I suppose that come January we’ll find out
Just need the telephone sanitisers and we've got ourselves a B-Ark.
Having previously one of the cross-sector industry skills programmes, which was shelved 5 years ago when the money was re-allocated to another Government initiative: It requires a significant employer contribution which means that the only uptake will be from larger employers - most small businesses that represent 80% of the UK's employees simply won't participate.
As for $160m of 'investment' that would 5 miles of motorway or employ about 2000 people for a year - whoop de ****ing do!
The £160 million is intended to develop ports to handle mega sized turbines but putting that to one side...to most people it sounds like a lot of money but, in the context of the sector, it isn't.
It would cover the cost of 10 deep water turbines - manufacture, ship, install, connect.
Jurgen Maier, the ex Siemens UK MD, estimated that we need 3,000 new turbines to hit johnson's new capacity target.
As sharma is sec of state for BEIS can we look forward to him being wheeled out to pontificate on this?
Could he explain how the estimated job creation will be facilitated by training inc
re-training, upskilling and apprenticeships?
As for apprenticeships more generally, Interserve Group has sold its Learning and Development business (think apprenticeships and adult education) for an undisclosed amount to a private equity fund called Enact.
That sounds problematic to me.
From whats been said by Johnson and Sunak over the last few days, a few really worrying things are apparent about economic decisions that have clearly recently been taken.
There will be no economic stimulus from government. None. We can forget any hope of any kind of Keynesian infrastructure investment (in true Johnsonian fashion, this isn't new money, he just re-announced it yesterday). It's austerity, the even more hardline sequel, from here on in.
It's clear from what Johnson stated yesterday about 'any investment having to be lead by the private sector', that they plan to go 'Full Thatcher'. Everything will be left to 'The Market' and they will sit back and observe the economic 'creative destruction' like the Ayn Rand worshipers they all are. Economic policy seems to be Cummings crossing jis fingers and hoping the next Apple or Google emerges from Cambridge
For us lab rats about to be the subject of the Covid/Brexit economic experiment in neoliberalism, any of us who lived through the 80's in the North of England will be experiencing a sense of deja vu. This will probably be worse. Much worse.
Next year is going to be very very grim indeed. I was sceptical about claims from economists about 5-6 million unemployed, but given the recent announcement of these policies and the general noise coming out of government, it looks like thats very much on the agenda
Just got a wee email from Universal Credit to log on and update my "looking for work" details so I can get help finding a job.
Cattle prods out for all us shirkers!
Bloody layabout! 😉
Have had two "thanks but no thanks and don't insult us by asking for feedback" responses to applications today.
Oh well, guess I'll go for a bike ride and get pished. Or vice versa. Possibly simultaneously...
And now the mother of all u-turns. A very welcome one, but how many have already lost their jobs because of the uncertainty and dithering? Turns out Sunak is cut from the same cloth as Boris after all.
I'm changing my mind about Andy Burnham... always thought he was an empty weathervane of a politician, but he's proving himself to be a hard working, dedicated and smart but diplomatic mayor.
always thought he was an empty weathervane of a politician
I think his crushing defeat by Corbyn was a salutory lesson which he has obviously learned from. I was a supporter back in 2015 and it was soul-destroying watching him compromise his principals in the pursuit of what he thought would win him votes. I still believe if he'd stuck to his instincts and beliefs he'd be PM now. Maybe he'll get another chance in future.