depends if your holding is in a company that earns most of its income from overseas operations.

If so then holding on to the shares might be a good thing – if the £ weakens further then profits *may* rise depending on where the operations are and where any raw materials are procured.

If the shares are in a UK listed company that imports a significant volume of raw materials I’d think twice.

The future probability of tariffs is worthy of some consideration – but in many cases the likely tariffs for UK producers coupled with devaluation of sterling will steal mean goods offered for sale overseas will be cheaper in the future than they were 12 months ago in relative terms… so exports **may** be ok.

Also agree on above point re: eggs in basket.

Oh great, so anyone who wants to check on a single specific detail of one person needs access to a system storing full details of all citizens. Can’t see how that could possibly go wrong.

Most of the citizen identity management deployments in other countries are not set up this way.

Although the citizen name is used as an identify the access rights to information (and often the information itself) is stored entirely separately. This enables identity and eligibility to confirmed in each domain e.g. health, state benefits, education etc. without the users in those domains being able to see anything else.

Estonia is quite a good model for this – it’s ID card system (which doesn’t actually rely on a plastic ID card) is the backbone for a fairly efficient public sector.

http://www.economist.com/news/international/21605923-national-identity-scheme-goes-global-estonia-takes-plunge

They tried to accommodate our wish to not obey the rules as far as was practical.

Junkyard, you’re ignoring the rather awkward fact that they didn’t.

We know this not from David Cameron but from other European Leaders who criticised the conduct of Juncker and his team before, during and after the negotiations with the UK.

Juncker’s personal agenda is to retain / extend power held by the commission. He has not accepted any need to consider an evolution of current rules in order to address the quite apparent unforeseen effect even though this has been called for by member states.

In short the ego of one unelected man has been allowed to dominate the will of Elected Representatives of the EU member states and has led us to where we now find ourselves.

Should Juncker be replaced by a pragmatist, or member states regain control of the Commission it’s quite likely that the many calls for change across Europe will be heard and acted on.

Merckel will have to deal with Juncker

Juncker under fire from Leaders

Leaders call for Juncker to step down

However, I don’t think that trying to unravel 60 years of mostly mutually beneficial agreements virtually overnight was ever going to be a good thing because I am not a child.

But this could have been avoided had the negotiations between the UK and the Commission been handled in good faith earlier in the year. Many of Europe’s elected leaders have criticised the conduct of Juncker and the bureacrats involved in their negotiations.

The direction of travel in the UK was crystal clear at that time so is just incredible that the Commission was only willing to offer meaningless compromises on the basis of a “take it and forever forfeit your right to discuss this again”. How many of us would accept a bad deal offered on those terms?

If the member states have any sense they need to work towards a reversal of the 5 President model, Juncker to stand down and then a good detailed review of what’s not working in europe and why. This would inform sensible shifts in policy and may will result in enough significant change to warrant a second referendum in the UK i.e. the outcome doesn’t need to be a disaster but so far there’s been very little acceptance of the need for change in Brussels even though many member states and their people are demanding this.

Juncker has said a lot of things over recent months. One of the things he has said most frequently is that there will be no negotiation before article 50 has been served and that all EU officials are banned from any informal Brexit talks with Britain.

Most observers haven’t clocked that this presidential decree is outside of his actual powers – so the very criticism levelled at Brussels i.e. unelected officials dictating to member states what will happen is perfectly illustrated in what’s happening now. It’s also clear that although all member states will be negatively impacted by Brexit, the commission is much more interested in scoring political points and shoring up its power base than working through issues in a constructive orderly way. Again this highlights why significant reform of the workings of the Commission is long overdue.

Dulwich I think – rough lot judging by the sledging their cricket teams get involved in

Correct, £37K a year for each of the kids – around £140K in gross salary.

Still, good to see that Labour are still focussed on comprehensive education for everyone else and continuing to attach the privilege of the “Elites”.

Well at least Shami Corbers and Dianne have something in common apart from politics – they all have / had kids who went to private schools.

There’s a lot of public protest about energy cost and fracking.

But:

– most people can’t be bothered to spend 2 mins switching energy suppliers (AIRI 70% of homes have never switched)
– a lot of people can’t be bothered to take any steps at all to save energy by turning things off
– so we need to keep producing elec and gas even though a lot of this is wasted
– and…most car journeys are for distances less than 3 miles. Presumably this will be even worse with plug-in “clean” electric vehicles.

Perhaps the counter to the “fracking outrage” is along of the lines of “change your behaviour and reduce energy use first before you complain about where the energy comes from”.

As one of the above posts references, we are dependent on imported energy and shale gas for chemical / energy intensive industries but this wouldn’t be such a big need if we weren’t wasting so much energy / raw materials on an individual basis. Our behaviour as individuals needs to change.

May and all those who voted Leave and many of the elected leaders and people of countries in europe want the UK to have immigration rules like every other country in the world outside the EU but the unelected commissioners in Brussels will not compromise on any element of this as a point of principle

FTFY

With respect though Kimbers, maybe you just heard what you wanted to hear?

You could easily view each of those things a different way:

– They will stop recruiting doctors whose training was paid for by other countries ..many of which are poorer than the UK and themselves have less doctors per head of population
– They will welcome with open arms people who want to come here solely for the purpose of accessing education but will not welcome those who are really coming here for other reasons
– They will make sure the proven abuses by some employers are dealt with – and also force employers to invest more in training.

e.g.

A bus driver was ‘refused a job interview because he’s not Romanian’

On the latter point British Employers rank 22nd in Europe on the amount they invest in training and educating their employees. There is a significant risk to our economy (not least with Brexit) that some of the key labour skills we’ve attracted from abroad may decide to go somewhere else – leaving us without the skills and capabilities our economy needs.

The Casper mattress is supposed to be pretty good:

https://casper.com/uk/en/mattresses/reviews

Singapore, really that’s your model?

Sure, we’ve got nothing to learn from a country that has gone from being outside of the top 30 countries for foreign inward investment to top 10 in the space of 2 decades. Or a country where real household income after tax and transfers rose 37% in the 10 years to 2013 compared to 2.8% in the same period in the UK.

I thought about tooth whitening but tried something else first:

Oral B 3D Lux white toothpaste – £4

http://www.superdrug.com/Oral-B/Oral-B-3D-White-Luxe-Healthy-Shine-Toothpaste-75ml/p/719471?gclid=CPmWoImzw88CFRfjGwodzX4KHw&gclsrc=aw.ds

A new Colgate sonic toothbrush which is claimed to whiten teeth in a week:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Colgate-ProClinical-Rechargeable-Electric-Toothbrush/dp/B009S674ME/ref=sr_1_6_s_it?s=drugstore&ie=UTF8&qid=1475661477&sr=1-6&keywords=colgate+pro-clinical

The price on the above toothbrush varies between £49 and £79.

I wasn’t expecting to see any major change but have actually been quite surprised. The difference in the colour of the teeth is noticeable mainly as the staining from coffee and tea has completely gone.

I didn’t actually mention to anyone that I was doing it but my mum noticed and commented on it last time I saw her.

The reporting of foreign employees isn’t potentially quite as daft as it sounds.

There are several things going on the economy now that are undesirable:

– large employers often find it easier to hire skills abroad than invest in the training and development of existing employees.
– existing employees / low skilled workers increasingly don’t have access to “ramps” to improve their skills and progress – trapping many people in low paying jobs no matter how hard they work and irrespective of any ambition they have (particularly for parents who may find it more difficult to move areas in order to progress)
– Universities are too removed from the business of developing skills the economy needs.

If we look abroad at economies like Singapore, other governments often focus on a number of strategically important industries that have the potential to create the volumes of well paid jobs the economy needs in order to fund things like good healthcare, education etc.

Those governments also align education / training to these to ensure employers can either access the skills they need or get the support to develop programmes to develop the skills in house – the German apprentice system is a good example of this. They also manage the number of migrant workers so that as the economy grows home local people have the opportunity AND skills to do the job offered by employers.

If you walk into many large companies in Britain you’ll find many thousands of overseas workers doing jobs that could be done by locals if only the employers had the incentive and support to invest in more training.

Measuring the size of the gap between employers’ “needs” and provision of local skilled labour doesn’t seem to be a retrograde step if this informs better long term skills / training planning. It also means there will be more opportunity for people at the bottom and potentially an end to the current system whereby people on low wages are stuck there for life as the employer can always bring in someone from abroad at the same / lower wages.

Businesses don’t just invest here for easy access to the EU though. They also invest here because (to name but a few):

– we have relatively low (and predictable) rates of corporation tax
– significant depth of expertise in law
– creative (sometimes too much so) and accessible finance / capital markets
– We have one of the world’s largest stock markets and insurance markets

Anyone who has tried to set up a company in the eurozone will know how hard / bureaucratic the process can be compared to the UK.

There’s plenty of scope for the government to mitigate the potential added cost of tariffs – we also shouldn’t overlook that the Sunderland plant has a few unique qualities:

– Was (possibly still is) the most productive car plant in the world
– Configured to build several different models of car on the same line at the same time (lower Opex and avoidance of Capex)
– Flexible labour force (compared to Renault factories) and mature supply chain

In terms of the help the Government can provide there’s quite a lot that would be attractive to Carlos Ghosn:

– extension of patent box principles so that platforms researched and developed and then made in the UK qualify for significant extra tax relief (this is something the EU is trying to stop the UK doing at the moment because it’s helped us to increase foreign investment in strategic industries)
– Rebate on Business Rates (not possible under current EU roles but absolutely possible under our own rules)
– Acceleration of the existing initiatives that have already significantly improved the depth of the automotive supply chain in the UK. So more parts designed, developed and made here and at lower cost than imported components).

Consumer behaviour may also change if we get into “tariffs”. I actually bought a Qashqai a few years back specifically because it was a good car and also made here – for me it was a choice of 2 cars one of which directly created jobs here… a no brainer. Faced with the choice of other models produced from within the EU and “punishment” tariffs from the EU there’s the possibility British consumers may buy more home produced cars thus helping to mitigate any drop in export sales.

0.7%, but Dirty(Richard) Desmond goes all out to parade the worst excesses of that 0.7% on TV

Which would be correct if Richard Desmond actually owned Channel5. It’s actually owned by Viacom and has been since early 2014 – the current CEO is American and a lawyer by background – it’s unlikely this represents any improvement on toady Richard Desmond though.

Corbers can’t even spell “conventional”. There would be no science or engineering left under a government led by him.

That’s tomorrow.

Monday = Walk
Tuesday = Run
Wednesday = Cycle
Thursday = Drive
Friday = Fly

Are you staging a one man production of “planes trains and automobiles”?

I’ve seen 2 friends go completely off the rails through prodigious soft drug misuse and it’s a sad thing to see. It’s quite likely neither of them will be the same again.

Although there’s the example of Portugal where drugs have been decriminalised and usage has fallen, the more recent example is Colorado, where cannabis was decriminalised a few years back and usage has been rising year on year since – particularly amongst kids.

He’s still got a young family so hopefully he’s planning on spending more time with them – I can’t imagine that being PM is an easy role for anyone with the 24×7 nature of politics and news these days.

“Cameron failed big time regards the health and well-being of the nation, poverty reduction and equality, to name but a few.”

Well on Health we’re more responsible as individuals than he is as PM – and we’re the most obese nation in Europe now.

On well being, income inequality has actually been falling with the richest 10% now having a smaller share of gross income than they did when David Cameron became PM – see figure 3:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personalandhouseholdfinances/incomeandwealth/bulletins/theeffectsoftaxesandbenefitsonincomeinequality/1977tofinancialyearending2015

And compared to Europe we’re not very different:

“The data indicate that, before any taxes and benefits, the UK had one of the highest levels of income inequality in the EU. However, the UK’s tax and benefits system appears to be more redistributive than that of many other countries with relatively high inequality of original income, bringing the UK close to the overall EU average for disposable income inequality.”

I’m not sure the measure on poverty reduction or “equality” are absolute as there’s a lag in any changes made in government that’s often hard to detect for 5-10 years. That said the “full fact” web site shows that relativepoverty is still lower now than it was 10 years into the last Labour government.

For individuals:

And for children:

Get it fixed then take your neighbours to the small claims court – if they own their house.

Tell them you’ll do this in writing first and give them 30 days to put right the damage to your satisfaction or use a surveyor to decide this for you and add it to the cost.

Isn’t it about time that STW had some standardised abbreviations?

Mumsnet is full of DS DD DH and such like – so should STW follow the convention… We’ve already got N+1 but how about:

PB Paging Brant
GN Grumpy Northerner
ATGNI All the gear no idea

What else is there?

etc.

It’s not bias – for BMW drivers it’s an evidence based conclusion:

http://www.express.co.uk/life-style/cars/697232/BMW-drivers-most-likely-break-speed-limit

My experience of cycling to work is that it’s consistently Audi SUV, BMW and Range Rover drivers that are complete c0ckwombles. They mostly seem to be the personification of:

It’s certainly going to be interesting to see how he accounts for the £4m of property he’s reportedly managed to accrue on his back bench MP’s salary plus the £60K his wife reportedly earns a year.

Last year the pair of them bought two properties totalling c£850K – in cash.

How many people have £850K in cash to hand when it would take many lifetimes of full time employment on £130K joint incomes to save that?

play it forward. unless you really need it, invest it now to pay for Uni education for the kids or as a contribution to a deposit on their first flat.

We’re at $3235 with France at $4124 and Germany at $5002. So between 27% and 55% dearer..

But that’s quite misleading.

The cost of pensions in the French and German healthsystems is fully funded. The NHS pension liability is completely unfunded and has already passed £500B.

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/business/industries/banking/article4562906.ece

If you add on apportioned existing NHS pension liabilities of around £32B a year to the annual budget the NHS the real cost is around £160B a year and quite possibly equal to, or more than the total healthcare spend per capita in France, Germany or the Netherlands.

Perhaps the best way of dealing with it would for a new House of Commons Ctte to be formed whereby all the people Vaz grilled on camera should now have the opportunity to individually grill him one by one for the same length of time?

No advice to add but thoughts / positive vibes going out to the original poster – it’s a rotten position to be in.

I’m co-incidentally dealing with something similar right now albeit a property that couldn’t be sold due to crystallising negative equity – the latest tenants have finally moved out and left £000s in damage behind.

Anyone choosing to do Buy to Let (we didn’t – just couldn’t sell the house when redundancy happened) needs to have their eyes open to the massive costs that can be incurred by a single “bad” tenant.

Sir John Oldham hits the spot in the Torygraph (yes, ok) today

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/09/05/junior-doctors-will-harm-our-patients-and-our-nhs-if-they-back-t/

Vaz should sling his hook as an MP, but not just for this. As others have said, what he chooses to do in his private life is his own business but where the line gets blurred is the peripheral part of the latest allegations – indirect payments.

He’s excelled in sailing close to the wind for decades whilst manoeuvring himself into a position where he can judge the conduct of others in his Chairing roles.

Just in case anyone’s forgotten his previous form includes:

– Stoking the flames of the “The Satantic Verses” controversy and giving tacit support to the first “extremist” protests in Britain. Those protests included the burning of our national flag, and repeated public calls for the murder of Salman Rushdie.
– £500K stashed in personal bank accounts and income that was undeclared on his Parliamentary returns. Scotland Yard investigated and was unable to confirm the source of those funds.
– Taking money through his wife’s company from the Hinduja brothers – although he was later cleared of trying to exert any influence on their passport applications.
– Suggesting that an IRA bomb in Leicester was planted by the British Army
– Reportedly employing an illegal migrant as a nanny and also not paying the associated tax / NI
– Making false claims against a policewoman (he was suspended for a month for that)
– “interesting” Commercial deals via family businesses
– Receiving undeclared payments from a solicitor and then lying about it
– Claiming for MPs expenses without even having receipts.

The consistent pattern in some of the above issues has been indirect payments and payments for which the source cannot be traced.

So it’s therefore very relevant that the latest allegations centre on indirect payments reportedly made to male escorts via a Charity that Vaz controls. The payments were reportedly listed as “painting” although the reporting makes it clear this does not reflect the service received. There’s no inference the people making the payments on behalf of the charity had any knowledge of what was reportedly going on.

Any of the events above are unacceptable for an MP let alone repeated issues. For that reason he should stand down immediately. We must have MPs who not only set the law but uphold it in actions AND spirit.

If the reports are correct, I feel very sorry for his wife and family for the hurt this will cause. Having seen something similar when a friend found out her husband was doing something similar the effect of this sort of thing can be profound and life changing.

But it’s not just the PM who thinks the BMA Junior Doctors’ sub ctte should be putting patients first and not going on strike – the following also concur:

– The Academy of Medical Royal Colleges
– The 14 x Consultant and GP Representatives who voted against strike action (out of the 30 people that had voting rights)
– The BMA Junior Doctors’ lead negotiator who agreed the curent / revised deal with the DH and says the final deal is fair and stood down when they refused to accept it.

What’s happening is that most of the Junior Doctors have accepted the revised contract terms but their representatives in the BMA are still hell bent on strike action and driving their own political / personal agendas.

This outcome has been entirely predictable for the last 18 months based on what the BMA’s negotiators have said. There is also the issue of the BMA’s accidental (or otherwise) willingness to mislead the Junior Doctors by releasing a completely flawed pay calculator that by their own admission was built off completely incorrect assumptions and guesses even though this wasn’t made clear to the people using it.

The BMAs dodgy pay calculator is without question the thing that tipped the negotiations into a dispute and the BMA were very very slow to recognise this to the point that many JDs still don’t even know the original numbers were guesses rather than a true reflection of the offer being made at that time.

I’m not going to be hunting pokemon or facebooking – it’s to hold my phone in sat nav mode!

Even though most drivers say this it’s quite noticeable cycling to work that many drivers are also “fiddling” with their phones even when their phones are ostensibly just in “sat nav” mode – largely because the phone continues to receive calls / display messages / app notifications.

Unless your phone is in airplane mode whilst being used as a sat nav (in which case GPS doesn’t work on most phones) all the other phone functionality continues to work / present a potential distraction.

As cyclists we’d all be a lot safer on the road if everyone else put their phones away whilst driving. We should take the lead on this.

http://www.brake.org.uk/rsw/15-facts-a-resources/facts/1131-distractionfacts

“drivers who perform a secondary task at the wheel are two to three times more likely to crash”

“Driver reaction times are 30% slower while using a hands-free phone than driving with a blood alcohol level of 80mg alcohol per 100ml blood (the current limit in England and Wales), and nearly 50% slower than driving under normal conditions.”

I’ve been knocked off my bike 3 times (some would argue that’s not enough!) but in all 3 instances the driver was either yapping on the phone or trying to tweet / facebook / play pokemon / whatever else drivers now think is safe to do whilst they drive “but it’s boring driving in traffic” (the excuse by the last person to knock me off).

I’ve never heard of anyone doing that. I’m sure it happens sometime/somewhere but “a lot”??

Well enough for the BMA to refuse to budge on a DH request in the negotiations that Junior Doctors should notify the employing Trust if they are going to do Locum work elsewhere.

This would mean their employer has a complete view of the hours they are working, potentially avoiding unsafe working hours. So why exactly are the BMA not willing to commit to this given all the endless statements to the effect of the main concern being long hours / unsafe doctors / risks to patients?

No, what the DH has tried to do is to move from all of the weekend work being effectively worked on “overtime” rates for working a Saturday morning or afternoon, to making Saturday daytime hours “normal rate” and thus releasing additional funding for evenings. As an aside a lot of locum work is currently done by doctors leaving the door of their own Trust and going a few miles to the next one and immediately starting a Locum shift there (which completely blows a hole in the “safety” argument).

This alignment of weekend pay rates simply puts doctors in the same position with pay as many other comparable roles in the NHS or other essential roles like Police / Fire etc – who generally don’t get paid 50% more for doing a shift rostered in the day on a Saturday.

If overall pay were to go up £500-£700m that’s more pay all round – around 15% based on the current pay bill.

The BMA is / was still demanding that anyone working a Saturday morning should be paid 50% more for doing so.

Source for image: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-34775980

How many times has it been pointed out on this thread that: AT NO POINT DURING THE DISPUTE HAVE JUNIOR DOCTORS ASKED FOR MORE MONEY ?!?

Well that would come as news to the Chair of the BMA Junior Doctors Committee at the time of the negotiations last year – Johann Malawana. He discussed conceding the weekend pay issue if the government increased the total medical pay bill for Junior Doctors by £500m-£700m.

http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/05/confirmed-the-junior-doctors-strike-was-about-money-not-patient-safety/

Sunday Times 21st August;

At an NSSN meeting in London last month, Yannis Gourtsoyannis, a member of the British Medical Association (BMA) junior doctors’ committee, spoke under a banner saying: “Link up all the strikes. Organise to take on the Tories. Get all the Tories out.”

Dr Gourtsoyannis said: “Building links between our unions is vital. Now is the time to ramp things up. We need to defend Corbyn and show the government the door.”

So not at all political then.

The BMA Junior Docs negotiating team includes Aaron Borbora and Yannis Goursoyannis. Both spoke at the National Shop Stewards event 2 weeks ago where they reportedly pledged to work with the RMT and other unions advocating a new winter of discontent in public services and an effort to bring down the government. Presumably at that point Corbyn will become PM and we won’t have to worry about health service funding because the country will be completely broke.

Most of the Junior Docs simply don’t know who is fighting their corner or the blatant political agenda at play – despite the BMA constitution being a-political… They are trusting the BMA to act responsibly.

Whilst the Junior Docs have voiced their concerns the real agenda at play isn’t what many of them believe it to be – it’s shamelessly political. We know from the leak of messages reported in the Health Service Journal that there was always an intent to use ‘safety’ as a front to provoke the government into imposing the contract and thus creating the grounds for a ‘justified’ strike.

http://www.itv.com/news/2016-05-26/whatsapp-leak-reveals-truth-of-doctors-pay-strategy-in-dispute/

well it makes for a nice distraction from the many stories the BBC runs in its “news” that focus on people who currently work for the BBC / people who used to work for the BBC / news about BBC brain rot endless series“light entertainment” / remakes of “classic” BBC programmes that were pretty unremarkable even at the time they were first broadcast.

This is a good example – why exactly is someone attending a funeral newsworthy?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/37231057/sue-perkins-will-be-missing-from-tonights-great-british-bake-off-episode

In short – the BBC wastes too much money re-making “classic BBC series” and on promoting itself. Oh, and there’s the £450K a year they now pay to former Labour “media expert” James Purnell.