I’m, nostalgic about a lot of things in the 1970s

Kipper ties, the Black and White Minstrels, the Grunwick Strike…?

Can you point to that bit of the constitution? Nope, thought not.

This is such a specious, stupid-trying-to-sound-smart comment. Of course abortion is not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution. Neither are Twitter, bump stocks or warnings on the right to silence. That doesn’t mean that none of those things are constitutionally protected.

The US Constitution and its amendments is not an exhaustive shopping list of particularised rights. (I can’t think of any that are). It is (relevantly) a series of restraints on the government. Of course it’s up to the courts to determine whether and how those restraints operate in particular circumstances and say whether things are or are not constitutionally guaranteed. That’s the whole point of Art III of the Constitution giving jurisdiction to the federal judiciary to hear constitutional cases!

If you want to understand the constitutional origin of a right to abortion in federal law, then all you need to do is read the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v Wade – or even the dissent in Dobbs. I’m sure you’ll find it very insightful!

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/597us1r58_gebh.pdf

Been through this recently. You’re not a fraud.

And from the perspective of your colleagues: if you’re distracted and knackered, you won’t be at your best anyway. Take the time to recover. Be outside in the sun and destress. Eat well. Most of us don’t have jobs that are so important that they can’t wait a bit.

Supermarkets just sell what people want to buy.

You don’t need to be Chomsky to think that supermarkets’ marketing and advertising shapes what people want to buy. No-one spontaneously asked for the breakfast bar category.

Definitely you can trust Putin not to invade anywhere else if Ukraine capitulates. Absolutely, definitely Russia won’t repeat what he did in Ukraine. And Georgia. And Moldova. And he certainly won’t interfere in Ukraine again.

I think some people on this forum have been watching The Handmaid’s Tale a bit too much

You mean that story about a reactionary government that doesn’t allow women to control their own reproductive functions?

The U.S. Supreme Court officially reversed Roe v. Wade on Friday, declaring that the constitutional right to abortion, upheld for nearly a half century, no longer exists…The decision, most of which was leaked in early May, means that abortion rights will be rolled back in nearly half of the states immediately, with more restrictions likely to follow. For all practical purposes, abortion will not be available in large swaths of the country.

https://www.npr.org/2022/06/24/1102305878/supreme-court-abortion-roe-v-wade-decision-overturn

No idea. I’d give up and park somewhere else.

That’s what set alarm bells ringing about whether this would count as income or not.

It’s not income merely because it’s paid directly to your OH instead of via the lawyer. It was still part of the estate and it’s still covered by whatever the final inheritance tax bill (if any) was. In the very unlikely event of HMRC coming along later and saying “what’s this payment about then?”, you’ll just send them the paperwork showing it was all taken care of and any tax paid as part of probate. The probate lawyer could answer this off rhe cuff.

PS condolences and good luck for the future house.

Yes – I would guess it might get very busy from January onwards when people realise the window is closing forever!

OK, well, we are agreed that student fees could be means tested.

Obviously it’s a policy decision not to do that, and the consequence is for the state to subsidise all students rather than target students with the greatest need, and as a result the state isn’t able to spend that same value elsewhere in education or to reduce taxes. Some people will think that’s worthwhile.

he’ll have the entire machinery of the state allied against him just like the last time.

All those “professionals” in government service have quit or been driven out. I don’t place much faith in the machinery of the state to moderate Presidents considering various other disasters they’ve been happy to deliver in the past.

Trump was a shambles last time, half of the Party rebelled against him, and COVID obstructed him greatly. This time around there is an aggressive, shadow government that knows how to get what it (well, the Kochs and others) want, opposition within the party has been crushed, the Supreme Court has been “aligned”, and Trump is out for revenge at all costs.

True – but student loans are already means tested in Scotland, so why can’t fees be too? https://www.mygov.scot/apply-student-loan

I’m just a bit unenthusiastic about “universal” benefits that can end up benefiting higher earning families more than lower income families. But I do accept that sometimes it costs more money to administer the means testing than you save by withholding benefits/subsidies/whatever from people that don’t need them as much.

I should have added the Baby Box to the list of Good Things the SNP has achieved in power.

Yeah agreed on god knows why anyone would ever want to stay in a hospital a minute longer than required

+1. I was in a very nice hospital recently and was very well taken care of, and was very grateful – but couldn’t wait to go home. I mean, hospitals are full of sick people (and, less facetiously, a bigger infection risk than even my hovel).

I’m sympathetic to the hospitals seeming to keep people hanging around unnecessarily, though. You’re just one patient in a big (overstressed?) machine, there’s a routine to everything, everyone’s running about between 5 different jobs, and sometimes you just have to go with the flow even if it doesn’t suit you.

(Thank you all healthcare workers – even managers and administrators without whom no-one else would be able to do anything. I don’t want a nurse practitioner ordering bin bags or arranging PAT testing or producing trial balances…)

Nice, I will try again in that case! maybe theres not so much of a backlog now?

My OH got through to the HMRC helpline quite quickly last week and they were very helpful. The Govt Gateway account wasn’t able to display incomplete years for some months (OH has unusual arrangements), but the person on the end of the phone dug up the historical stuff pretty quickly.

OH has to call Future Pensions and get the final figure before we can pay.

I know people complain about HMRC and there probably have been disasters, but whenever I’ve had to call them, they’ve been really accurate and helpful

Yes, for example the government could stop all student visas immediately.  The additional profits from that would also stop immediately so not the brightest thing to do

This is exactly how non-EU student migration has been managed for the last 20 years: does it make more money for tertiary education (good) or less money (bad)? Obviously the lobbyists are always going to ask for more and more. But what are the downstream effects and how does this fit in to the rest of the picture? There is no comprehensive consideration of that.

https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/what-we-do/work-parliament/political-affairs-overview

Visas for study and for frontline care workers looks like planning to me.

Two things:

– I think the fact that they reversed big chunks of those changes (and reached an 11 year target in 1 year!) speaks to the degree of “planning” involved in the omnishambles. The money-grabbing tertiary education sector and private care home operators were calling the shots more than any government strategy. The Tories didn’t intend to increase immigration after Brexit.

– those decisions, and all the other factors that affect net migration, were not informed by any “requirement for immigration” for the UK. The UK government doesn’t have a target population size or immigration strategy. It just has three dozen different levers that it pushes and pulls at random and without coordination, and waits to see what happens.

The smallest volume of net migration in the last 23 years was in lockdown in 2020 – and even then it was 93,000 inbound! This is why the UK doesn’t have a shrinking or ageing population.

See https://www.statista.com/statistics/283287/net-migration-figures-of-the-united-kingdom-y-on-y/ (it’s easier to read if you untick the immigration and emigration boxes so it just leaves the net migration bars).

https://www.worlddata.info/europe/united-kingdom/populationgrowth.php#google_vignette

I wonder if there’s an upside to Trump choosing Vance. Scaramucci has said that Trump bristled at suggestions that he needed a black or Hispanic VP to bring in “minority” votes to get Trump elected, and would be resentful of a suggestion that he didn’t win everything himself.

Perhaps not coincidentally, Trump has chosen Vance, a “hillbilly” White guy from Ohio. Will that mean Trump will connect less effectively with black and Latino voters who have been drifting towards him, particularly in the South, and strengthen Biden’s position just enough to win?

It’s the only shred of hope from this last uninspiring week.

On the one hand, there are exchanges that you can imagine should be privileged and private.

Records of those kinds of discussions are already non-disclosable under freedom of information laws…I think. But they should still be created and retained. Westminster, Cardiff and Holyrood have all seem politicians switch to WhatsApp and then delete messages so there are no records.

https://www.parliament.uk/site-information/freedom-of-information/how-to-make-a-request/staff-guidance-on-handling-requests-for-information/freedom-of-information-act-practice-note-for-committee-clerks/

@alpin: you can buy all those missing years contributions by April 2025. You’ll then have about 23 years of contributions. Pay another 12ish years any time before you retire, and you’ll have a full UK state pension.

But if you call HMRC and Future Pensions helplines, they will walk you through it.

Am I getting that right, anyone?

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/deadline-for-voluntary-national-insurance-contributions-extended-to-april-2025

fine taking that time to start a 5 year election campaign.

Yeah, sod planning things out over many years – I reckon we should go back to the Tory approach of developing policy in the back of the ministerial car on your way to the presser to announce it.

Vance has a pretty good chance of ascending to the Presidency from the VP position – either by Trump karking it from natural causes or Vanve engineering his removal via the 25th Amendment.

Trump’s speech on Thursday will be interesting. He’s said he has thrown away the old one

His speeches are prepared?!?!

There is no reason to assume immigration will continue at 300-700k per annum if there is no requirement for continued immigration.

The level of net migration isn’t matched to any “requirement”. It seems totally beyond government control or planning.

You’re absolutely right that last year was a big immigration year and it might not continue like that. But that means we need a year of practically zero net migration to balance out the mega year of 2023 and bring us back to the modelled average of 315,000. There hasn’t been zero net migration or net emigration in 33 years. It’s not going to happen consistently until 2046.

…and in any case, going back to the comment that provoked thia, net migration would have to fall ~90% before UK population would stabilise or be at its peak. It’s just not true that net migration is basically just offsetting a declining population.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/283287/net-migration-figures-of-the-united-kingdom-y-on-y/

The number of babies born is dropping each year in most areas of the UK so we may be near peak population.

Not even close to peak population.

If net migration were 315,000 inward per annum in the long term, then “the UK’s population would grow from 67 million in 2021 to 77 million in 2046, and that net migration would account for 92% of this growth”. We’d have to build another 8 Birminghams of housing to keep up with where we are now.

Last year, net migration was 685,000 inward…

https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/the-impact-of-migration-on-uk-population-growth/

https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/press/net-migration-remained-unusually-high-in-2023-while-visa-data-indicate-further-declines-may-come-in-2024/

Nope, i was talking from personal experience…more money will not ‘lift’ the children out of poverty, so the numbers stated are not really more than a shock value, with little correlation to removing children from ‘poverty’.

I’m sorry you went through that as a kid.

One of the advantages of having 4 different jurisdictions in this country is that it creates laboratories for experiments on how different policies will affect highly similar people. We have just had such an experiment in giving more money to parents of poor children in Scotland with the Scottish Child Payment.

There was broadly positive evidence supporting some of the short-term outcomes: reduced money-related stress, increased child-related spend, children able to participate in social and educational opportunities and reduced pressure on household finances, with less clear evidence for an improved position of main carers within households.

https://www.nesta.org.uk/blog/why-arent-more-people-talking-about-the-scottish-child-payment/

There is substantial evidence that generous child benefits are an effective way to reduce child poverty and improve children’s well-being and opportunities. For example, research on a previous UK expansion in financial support for families, the introduction of the child tax credit in the early 2000s, found that the money was spent on the children – on fresh fruit and vegetables and on children’s clothes, toys and activities. Meanwhile spending on alcohol and tobacco actually fell…

What Scotland’s policies can teach Westminster about fighting poverty

I suppose Kinnock is good evidence that you need more than an ability to speak to working people to win a general election.

Does the Jogger come with Uber stickers for the front doors or do you have to buy them separately?

For tedious people like me that want a reliable and fuel efficient car, that’s a huge compliment you just paid it…

a renaissance of the Democrats under a leader who finally figures out how to speak to working people…Until the democrats continue to choose leaders like Clinton and Biden nothing will ever change.

“The guy that’s been elected 6 times on the trot to the Senate and delivered 3 winning Presidential campaigns (twice for Obama and once for himself) doesn’t know how to speak to working people”. Love it!

https://www.theonion.com/shirtless-biden-washes-trans-am-in-white-house-driveway-1819570732

Article IV:

It is understood that:

1. Jurisdiction of the Council will cover West Bank and Gaza Strip territory, except for issues that will be negotiated in the permanent status negotiations: Jerusalem, settlements, military locations and Israelis.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/1682727.stm

The ICC panel didn’t specifically consider the question of the PNA’s lack of jurisdiction over Israeli citizens. If it doesn’t have jurisdiction over them in the first place, how can it transfer jurisdiction to the ICC?

I think it’s an arguable legal point. I don’t entirely see why it’s the UK that has to put the time and effort into arguing it, though…

couple of links. If I’m wrong, then please feel free to let me know, be good to be educated on this stuff…

https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/4372320/jewish/Why-Do-Observant-Jews-Have-So-Many-Kids.htm

Agreed that “observant” or highly religious Jews are a tiny slice of the population, and also different from mainstream Jewish people. Within Israel (where Israeli Jews have a high-by-OECD-standards fertility rate of about 3, highly religious Jewish women have a fertility rate of about 6.6).

But the good rabbi you linked to is gliding over a couple more worldly causes and consequences of high fertility in highly religious households in his neck of the woods. Fertility tends to drop as women become better educated, active in the formal labour force, and get better access to birth control and abortion.

And so we then wanted to figure out what were the actual determinants of fertility. And it turns out that two variables explain 85 percent, or just under, of all the variation in fertility in the last seventy years across all countries, which is in our business an extraordinary thing that two variables can explain that much. And that’s women’s educational attainment and access to reproductive health services. Those two really explain the vast majority of all fertility patterns. There’s no mystery here. I mean, there’s a—there’s a much smaller component that is cultural, but fundamentally the trajectory of fertility is driven by what happens in the circumstances for women.

The communities near him in which a large number of very religious Jews are concentrated are characterised by publicly-funded schools that don’t educate their kids well, poor attainment of English (which is at least useful in the labour market there), and poor access to higher education for women. Although Judaism is more open than one might expect to birth control, the tightening access to abortion across the US doesn’t help.

The same picture of poverty among the very religious in Israel applies – although interestingly women’s labour force participation is pretty much the same as the rest of the population there.

But obviously this has pretty much sod all relevance to the UK population growth.

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2022/09/21/hasidic-jewish-schools-slammed-by-new-york-times-investigation_5997740_4.html

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/danielle-kubes-the-truth-behind-israels-curiously-high-fertility-rate

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2018-12-07/ty-article/.premium/haredi-poverty-the-same-threat-in-both-new-york-and-israel/0000017f-f553-d5bd-a17f-f77b8d6f0000

The average voter only cares about whether they are better or worse off than in the past.

69% of US voters don’t even rate jobs/economy/prices as the subject they care about most, let alone the only one they care about.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1362236/most-important-voter-issues-us/

The average voter only cares about whether they are better or worse off than in the past.

That’s not true – if it were, there would be much more support for the candidate that has delivered 13 million new jobs, reduced black unemployment to a record low, lower inflation, higher growth. But Biden is struggling over a 1% lead on a good day.

I can’t believe you’ve picked a fight with the entire STW Octavia crew

I thought i would check out the swace as you mentioned it. Jesus i almost fell asleep seeing a photo ?

My idea of fun is a Toyota Auris estate, but even I thought the Suzuki Swace was too boring. Also, a terrible name.

Also, Vance is going to spend the next 4 months explainig that he didn’t mean it when he called Trump “America’s Hitler”.

I don’t think the average Trump voter cares too much about the odd spot of hypocrisy. And a few of them probably think there’s one or two things the US could learn from that historical figure.

as well as the man-frog tiring of Clacton after only a week and rushing over to ‘help’,

Notably it’s Farage making sure to tell everyone how terribly beloved and important he is in the US. (He is not).

The UK fertility rate hasn’t been above 2.81 in the last 75 years.

https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/GBR/united-kingdom/fertility-rate

Its just hyperbole

I’ve said a million times that people shouldn’t get upset by hyperbole.

As for the OP… people are living far longer. That’s the main reason for population growth in the UK.

That’s not true. “More than half (60%) of the increase in the UK population between 2004 and 2022 was due to the direct contribution of net migration.” https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/the-impact-of-migration-on-uk-population-growth/

A lot of western countries, including the UK, have falling birth rates and due to this, there will be a real need for immigration to cover the gaps in the next generation

Possibly yes, possibly no – there’s a long slow decline in population that would be offset by greater use of technology, productivity growth or simply not replacing low economic value-adding jobs. But in any case the current rate of net migration is far, far higher than would merely be needed to maintain the current size and structure of the UK population.

“Official figures projected that the UK’s population would grow from 67 million in 2021 to 77 million in 2046, and that net migration would account for 92% of this growth. In an alternative variant where net migration was zero, the population would be lower in 2031 than it was in 2021.”

https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/the-impact-of-migration-on-uk-population-growth/

I’m just interested in the psychology of thought processes under duress.

“What’s that geezer up to over th – ****, he’s got a shooter, better duck back down!”

Oh and then there is the smiles per mile. Most EVs are as dull as heck to drive.

Top selling cars in the UK: Ford Puma 26,374, Kia Sportage 24,139, Nissan Qashqai 22,881, Nissan Juke 19,429, Audi A3 19,209, Volkswagen Golf 17,587, MG HS 16,730, Hyundai Tucson 16,182, Volkswagen T-Roc 15,667.

Evidently most car buyers don’t really care about Clarkson-style “performance”.

If the copper had done his job should he have got on the roof and if necessary get shot anyway; that would have alerted the security services and maybe cost his life and saved the (ex) President’s and potentially various others.

From a prevention of crime perspective, better to stay alive and still be in a position to do something about the probem than get shot and hope that someone follows up in some point in the future. Also, from a personal perspective, most people prefer not to be shot.

They’re generally reputable. It’s a real company with real shops and real mechanics. They took over the (original?) Evans shop in Waterloo. Was in there the other week.