Completely agree with Naz Shaa’s article.

I saw the uncle of the victim on the news yesterday – despite the news showing video of the couple after their civil wedding at Leeds Town Hall he was saying something like “This so called husband… we don’t recognise him as the husband… it was not a marriage we recognise”.

What’s probably behind this case is a family that refuses to accept that the law of the country they live in because “their law” is supreme. This is at the root of a lot of the problems in Europe at present and the friction that arises as a result.

FunkyDunc – if your wife is a surgeon and was offered £100K in the private sector she would very likely be taking a substantial pay cut when comparing her current overall remuneration (Pay, Holidays, Maternity Leave, Employers Pension contribution / value of the defined pension benefit) with that of a different role in the private sector that offers “headline” higher base pay.

As I recall it employees in most private sector roles would need around 40-45% of their salary paid into a pension to get parity with NHS staff and their defined pension benefit.

Although NHS staff sacrifice 10-15% of their salary the employers element is worth more than 25% of salary – compared to an average of 6% in the private sector. To make up the gap a typical private sector worker would need to sacrifice more than 35% of salary to get the same pension.

Also factor in total job security compared to potentially very limited job security – the GMC / RCS find it extremely difficult to remove practising rights from doctors / surgeons with the result even the bad ones continue to be employed by the NHS.

Also agree with Jamba above – we need Doctors / Surgeons to work reasonable hours to ensure they are not over tired and not making mistakes – as is the case with other safety critical professions.

That chart up there shows tax paid by workers on an average salary.

We already know that workers on average salaries in the UK make no net contribution to the running of the state – this is offset by relatively small number of individuals (300,000 people or so) who pay the bulk of the cost for running public services.

So the debate should actually be – are people on average incomes willing to pay significantly more tax to improve the funding of the NHS?

My hunch would be everyone agrees with the principle of raising NHS funding based on an assumption “others” will pay more – but the level of support for more spending disappears faster than a newly appointed member of the shadow cabinet when it becomes clear they personally need to pay more tax.

A typical lawyer charges £300-500 an hour fwiw. Barristers double that

Yes but a lawyer’s / Barrister’s hourly rate also recovers significant overheads such as office space, admin support costs etc. The hourly rate for a Locum Doctor doesn’t need to cover any of these and yet the hourly rate is still in that range.

As I understand it, the Doctor’s Union is of the view that anything over than 60 hours a week is very unsafe, so as well as the reported scale of the overtime payments (enough to employ 4-8 additional doctors) the Doctor concerned is very likely to be presenting a clinical risk to his / her patients.

Garlic, but what do these statements actually mean and are they pie in the sky?

“Corbyn wants major reforms to services; he believes that businesses that are meant to serve the public but have have stopped serving the public, such as rail and energy companies, should be publicly owned and not for profit. That’s not a mandate for total nationalisation, just applying state ownership to services that have stopped functioning as promised by the reforms of the 1980s.”

States can’t run businesses under EU rules because of the risk or monopolies. Retail Energy costs in the Uk are lower than many other EU states, with margins of between 2-3%. What margin would be acceptable and still cover the cost of working capital?

“Anti-Austerity- i.e. increase money to public services such as benefits and the NHS, salaries for public servants such as doctors and nurses should meet inflation.”

NHS Doctors are the highest paid in Europe. The Liability associated with the unfunded NHS Pension scheme has risen to £240B – more than double the entire annual NHS budget and roughly comparable to the entire annual tax receipts from income tax. What would be a fair pay award in a period of sustained low / no inflation?

Garlic – what are Jeremy’s polices?

I ask because I’ve spent the last 1/2 hour looking at endless “priorities” and “what Jeremy thinks” but have yet to stumble across anything that could be mistaken for a well researched, fully costed proposal.

Where should I be looking? If Jeremy were to become PM what would he actually do?

5 years forecast

Unemployed – lower in absolute numbers
Benefits – less people on benefit, no net change in value of benefits in real terms
Free movement of people in EU – right to work / working visas, restricted right to settle and benefits (somewhere between Swiss model and Australia)
Incomes – modest rise in real terms
The rich – continuation of the last 6 years with the rich continuing to pay a disproportionate share of the running of the country
The poor – cost of living down, but with modest rise of incomes contributing to improved sense of financial security

Also:
Housing – a “grand plan” to sort out housing provision
Economy -establishment of new ultra low tax enterprise zones to encourage business to expand outside of the south east
Eurozone – has collapsed
Brussels magically finds it’s able negotiate on the things that it wouldn’t negotiate on with David Cameron

having watched the Labour MP on the brink of tears in an interview on C4 news as she described death threats, stalking, intimidation and thousands of abusive emails that her / her colleagues have received from “Momentum” supporters it makes me think today’s “nasty party” is the one in opposition.

PS: those cancer wait times above don’t tell the whole story – there’s been significant increases in cancer funding and a step change in the number of people being referred for diagnostics. This has had the dual result of more people requiring treatment and the need to treat those first who have the most aggressive cancers i.e. more people referred, more people diagnosed, some people with less aggressive cancers waiting longer but those with the most aggressive cancers continuing to be treated first.

Not a bad set of real world experience in the cabinet so far:

Theresa May – Bank of England
David Davies – SAS
Phillip Hammond – Medical Devices
Michael Fallon – Set up a chain of nurseries
Liam Fox – NHS Doctor

It’s nice to see a cabinet that’s not rammed with lawyers / former BBC Journalists / people who’ve only ever done politics. Not quite sure where to place Boris though – Mayor, Buffoon or just biding his time until 2020.

Thanks DannybGoode, I’m hoping my situation is a bit less complex because I’ve only been on one contract albeit with interim letters assigning me to new projects and pushing back the termination date each time. I’ll find out soon enough though 😀

drslow, hadn’t considered that possibility! To be honest they should be paying me the redundancy payment anyway for putting up with the cr5p of the last few years. They certainly can’t fault my commitment or delivery but it’s supposed to be a reciprocal arrangement.

Thanks all. With a heavy heart I guess I will have to get some legal advice – it has been a pretty rotten run to be honest..

People need to stop thinking about this as the rise of the far right and more the rejection of the EU by a broad swath of the population across the political spectrum

+1. The brexit vote is a measure of the willingness of un-elected Commission officials to listen to the concerns of citizens in Europe and secondly to adjust they way they manage the EU to reflect this.

There’s a great article by Henry Kissinger in the Wall Street Journal:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/out-of-the-brexit-turmoil-opportunity-1467151419

The EU “will not wish to reward Britain’s Leave majority by granting Britain better terms than it enjoyed as a full member. Hence a punitive element is likely to be inherent in the EU bargaining position.

Many of us who have grown up with and admired the vision of European unity hope that the EU will transcend itself, by seeking its vocation not in penalizing the recalcitrant but by negotiating in a manner that restores the prospects of unity. The EU should not treat Britain as an escapee from prison but as a potential compatriot.

Punishing the U.K. will not solve the question of how to operate a common currency in the absence of a common fiscal policy among countries with disparate economic capacities, or of how to define a union whose ability to achieve common political strategies lags fundamentally behind its economic and administrative capacities.

By the same token, Britain needs to put forward the concept of autonomy for which its people voted in a manner that embraces ultimate cooperation. Britain and Europe together must consider how they might return, at least partially, to their historical role as shapers of international order.”

For me:

1. Free trade
2. Controlled migration:

– no free movement for citizens with serious criminal records so that no parent has to go through the pain of finding out the man that killed their child had previously murdered someone in another country

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-36652565

– some controls on the rate of migration linked to housing availability so that we don’t add to the problem of 100K children waking up each day in temporary accommodation

3. a revision to the way policy is developed so that we’re not just introducing policies that effectively lead to the wholesale transfer of jobs out of Europe because the standards we set are higher than anywhere els

4. A significant reduction in the size of the bureaucracy that runs Europe and the cost. If the figures of 6,000+ civil servants in Brussels earning more than £150K a year tax free are true it’s scandalous

5. A revision to the Lisbon treaty to remove qualified majority voting

6. A stronger social element to policy setting in Europe so that we’re not consigning millions of people to the lowest possible pay for decades (or longer)

7. A more dynamic Europe that fosters Enterprise, particularly in services. The claim of “free trade” on services is absolutely ridiculous given the numerous artificial and constantly shifting barriers that France / Germany / Spain erect to stop firms in other countries selling across borders.

8. The removal of passport free travel across Europe. Given the current geopolitical climate it’s absolutely crackers and just increases the threat level against member states (per the movement of the Paris terrorists from Brussels and back again)

9. A statutory duty for the EU to demonstrate how it is engaging with citizens in member states to inform new policy

by the time you’ve paid for a family’s worth of single tube tickets on the Saturday and Sunday you’d be no worse off paying for parking in Paddington – just drive up the M4, skip round the M25 for one junction and then it’s M40 / A40 all the way to Paddington.

if your name is “Lord” Brian Paddick the answer is yes – even if the purpose of the £9K return flight from New York (paid for by us) is to come back to the House of Lords to say just short of 500 words in a speech and then leave immediately.

Is that representative?
Whats the net migration figure?

According to the Head of Housing for the Council, yes it is representative. 184,000 / yr is the net migration figure for EU nationals and 333,000 in total.

and the commercial pressures on pharmacists in pharmacy chains to sell rubbish has gone up.

But this is almost entirely down to the NHS not being willing to use highly qualified pharmacists as part of the overall health system – so they are doing other things to cover the fairly limited returns from prescribing – Pharmacists are highly qualified and regulated but pretty badly paid.

I have two recent examples of this:

1. I’ve been asthmatic for 30+ years and have always been shown the same way of using my inhalers by countless doctors over the years. Very recently a pharmacist checked how I was using my inhaler and told me I’d been getting it wrong. After checking her advice with the manufacturer’s helpline it turned out she was right and all of the doctors had been wrong. Asthma is one of the most common Long Term conditions so it’s quite possible that many thousands of asthma patients are also not using their medicine correctly, potentially leading to avoidable hospital admissions / more cost for the NHS.

2. I have a hiatus hernia and have been hospitalised several times due to violent / sustained acid reflux (we’re talking continual wretching for 8+ hours and acute pain).

After each of these episodes I went back to my GPs to question whether another PPI would be more effective to be told no – this advice was consistent over 10+ doctors over a 4 year period. After consulting a pharmacist in desperation due to the regular pain and vomiting I was advised that PPIs all work on different receptor antagonists. After talking to me and consulting his formulary, I was advised to go back to the GP and ask for a specific / different PPI.

The GPs initially refused citing CCG prescribing guidelines but after I pushed very hard I finally managed to persuade one of them that I should be allowed to try it on a trial basis. My acid reflux is now well managed (touch wood), I don’t get the regular pain and I haven’t been hospitalised since.

In both of these cases the NHS has been wasting money on Long term medication and hospital admissions without anyone checking the drug was right / making sure it was used correctly. The Pharmacists in both cases have helped to improve my health and reduce NHS spend, yet in neither case was their expertise recognised or valued by local GPs who didn’t really seem to have any real knowledge themselves.

the level of EU net migration is absolutely crazy – 727 people every working day. We’ve got 100,000+ children living in temporary accommodation, can’t build housing quickly enough and yet need to build a city the size of Newcastle every year just to stand still.

Most people probably won’t have seen this week’s “how to get a council house” which featured a chap from Romania who came here, couldn’t get work and signed on, and then with his Job Seekers Allowance claim registered proceeded to bring his whole family over a few weeks knowledge who were then housed the next day in a 4 bedroom house by Hounslow Council who had no choice but to do otherwise. The head of housing for Hounslow said at the end of the programme words to the effect of this pattern is already a significant problem and growing rapidly – yet we have no way of controlling it irrespective of the cost to the public.

Having a system where anyone can come here with their families and receive housing automatically is nuts and just means that the many people who are already here and don’t have children just slip further and further down the waiting list – at a significant cost to people with mental health problems or social care needs.

wonder if “Dave” tuned into this thread for advice before buying a second hand run around for his wife?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-36359921

“but the money was barely enough to pay bills and rent. You can’t live on today’s minimum wage…..”

“I learned that my family is more important than having designer clothes on your back or expensive trainers, or loads of money”

It doesn’t sound like there’s any real remorse here despite the sob story at the end of the article.

redstripe – it’s probably part of the cornerstone rollout – o2 and vodafone have a mast sharing agreement and are (very) slowly working across the country removing duplicate masts and the sharing the ones that are left. In some areas this means that existing coverage changes / disappears for good.

The Cel-Fi ones work fine with the MVNOs on the same Mobile Network Operator i.e. the EE one supports Virgin, the o2 one supports GiffGaff and Tesco mobile etc.

the occasional bargains are well worth watching out for. I got a beautiful HTC Lezyne portable tool kit for about £70 a few years back. The cheapest alternative I could find anywhere else was well over £200.

Wifi calling isn’t supported on o2 as far as I know – only via the o2 Tu Go app.

Scrumfled – sorry you’re right and wrong. Unlicensed boosters are indeed illegal but the Cel-Fi is the only “boost” solution approved for use by operators and Ofcom and also used by o2, vodafone and EE with some clients. Cel-Fi is an active booster that adjusts signal power according to strength of the surrounding network – the other boosters don’t do that and are banned as a result.

https://www.cel-fi.co.uk/

There are a couple of different types of booster so depending on your preferences one of these might work:

Femtocell – a little box that plugs into a broadband router and creates a 3G network in your house. These are available from all networks.

Voice / text over Wifi. o2 has one of these – it uses wifi and enables calls to be made and received over wifi when the app is open. Three also have one called “Three in Touch” which does the same thing but can also connect to 3’s 800 MHz network to make / receive calls, text and access data on compatible phones. The 800 MHz network only works on some smartphones that have support 800MHz on 4G. A list of handsets is available on the 3 website – the 800MHz signal carries a lot further than 3G at 2100 MHz and is currently being marketed as “supervoice”.

EE probably have the best real world solution. They offer wifi calling without an app – if your phone loses the network and can access a wifi network you can make / receive calls and texts without having to do anything. This works really well in practice to the point you can turn the phone bit off, then turn Wifi on and it will work as normal but retain battery life for longer. Again like 3, this works on compatible handsets. EE have already rolled out most of their 800MHz network but haven’t opened it up to public use yet – they are targeting 99.5% landmass coverage by 2020.

One other solution that works really well is a Cell-Fi. Basically consists of two boxes – put the first one up in your loft and the second one in the part of your house that gets the worst signal and it creates a 3G network without the need for broadband. o2’s 3G coverage is still useless though so there will be large parts of the country where this doesn’t work because o2 still only offer 2G.

surely the:

Those making the charges now, did not see fit to bring them up at the time, under previous Labour leaders, but are using them now, just before mayoral and local elections, when they believe they can inflict most damage on the Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn.

..misses the point that the twatter / facebook post from the MP was made before she was an MP, so it’s unlikely anyone would have had cause to raise it then?

He seems to have accepted the future entitlement to a pension only to “donate” it to charity some years later.

If his moral compass is as strong as he says it is, why didn’t he just waive it in the first place like Gordon Brown and David Cameron. Wouldn’t the £42K a year be better retained in the public sector than stashed in his own charity?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9254965/Alex-Salmond-refuses-to-give-up-gold-plated-pension-like-Cameron-and-Brown.html

Northwind – if you think that’s not the case you should probably be asking the likes of Andy Burnham and Alan Johnson why they oversaw literally hundreds of procurements that use the associated frameworks and rules… For all of the talk of a “change” under Andrew Lansley there are very few (if any) examples of what the change supposedly is – all of the practices that are used by critics to illustrate it are ones you can find under the last government.

What’s effectively going on is that Labour are busy hoodwinking the public by remaining silent on what they really did during their previous time in office, their sudden damascene conversion to principles that run at odds with their most recent policies, and finally, alluding to new policies without giving us any detail on how they will work, who will pay for them OR explaining why they have done a 180 degree turn.

This will probably work quite well though as it’s impossible to have any kind of rational discussion of healthcare in the UK and despite the public wanting the best healthcare, they will only vote for it if they are certain someone else will pay the incremental cost.

Binners, you’ve still missed the point that Lansley didn’t “lay the NHS open to competition law” – he simply enacted the requirements for open public tendering that are enshrined under EU competition laws.

Unless you are suggesting that Lansley should have made the case for leaving Europe, he had no choice but to enact competition and procurement rules – this is consistent with the previous government who signed up to them in the first place.

“The mainstay of Lansleys reforms was to open up the NHS to EU competition law, so that rapacious private healthcare firms could cherry pick the profitable services from the NHS, while leaving the unprofitable bits, the important difficult stuff, the stuff that costs money, time and skill, to the state to pick up the tab. Or mount legal action if they were prevented from doing this! FFS!”

This seems to conveniently overlook what the last government because most people really can’t have failed to miss the following that all started under the last government:

1. The use of Private Sector treatment sectors
2. The change to Primary Care contracts to enable new entrants to enter the “market”
3. The privatisation of Primary Care at night
4. The agreement to follow EU procurement rules for tender and tender all contracts publically
3. The massive use of PFI that has saddled the NHS with c£150Bn of debt
4. The plans for acute trust reconfigurations were drawn up by Andy Burnham – as was the £20B Efficiency “cut” he now bangs on about

The “massive” privatisation in the current government still only reflects around 5% of NHS Opex – this is barely changed from the last government and includes the likes of Macmillan Cancer Care who are by default treated as “private” because the provision isn’t done by the NHS.

Lots of people seem very happy to band about rabble rousing claims like “rapacious private healthcare firms can cherry pick the profitable services from the NHS” but where is the evidence for the level of activity actually being markedly higher now than 2009?

In my experience, which is pretty broad – there are people who knock the NHS and spread all the lies and bullshit about it, and then there’s people who’ve actually had to use it who usual gush about how well they were treated.

Three points:

1. The NHS is now paying out more than £1Bn a year to settle negligence claims. Many of these claims reflect failures to undertake simple checks, follow the right process or listen to the patient. Even by its own conservative estimates, 6,000+ patients are dying in secondary care due to the poor clinical practice they experience.

2. The CQC has said that patient care is unsafe in more 80% of the hospitals they have inspected so far in England this year.

3. Despite the huge amounts of money spent on cancer care over the last decade, NHS outcomes remain poor when compared to other health systems that have spent less – it’s not about spending more money it’s about getting the system to enable appropriate referrals and treatment without the patient having to manage the process themselves.

Putting these together, there’s a continuum of hit and miss care, poor communication and lack of compassion for patients. There’s also an ostrich-like syndrome amongst some NHS staff that the NHS is perfect, and anyone who has a poor experience or loses a relative in circumstances that could have been reasonably avoided is just out to vilify the whole service and / or just wants to privatise it.

If you’ve been in the position of seeing relatives getting consistently poor care and seeing staff spending no time at all with patients because they are so busy chatting / texting etc. you’d probably be equally frustrated – it’s worth saying that many NHS staff also feel this way but feel unable to speak up and challenge the behaviour of their colleagues.

The synapse got 5 stars in the issue of cycling plus that just came out – the model is different but the frame is the same

HonestJohn seems to rate them…

speaking of schools…

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/11154466/David-and-Samantha-Cameron-look-to-send-daughter-to-inner-city-comp.html

“Yes Labour has not got any policies.”…

Let’s look at those “policies” shall we:

Hasn’t committed to fundamentally changing the way our dysfunctional energy market works. Has pledged to disrupt a market that currently means we pay significantly less for energy than many other countries in Europe, and a market in which one of largest “profiteering / cartel” retail energy companies has made a substantial loss 3 years in a row.

Hasn’t committed to a jobs guarantee program hasn’t explained how this would work, how much it would cost or who would pay for it for those young people who have been out of work for a year or more.

Hasn’t committed to a significant increase in the minimum wage. Has committed to ignoring the recommendations of the low pay commission it established in the last parliament and won’t even commit to the living wage. Has also committed to a significant increase in the minimum wage that would take low paid Londoners over 5 years to less than the living wage is now.

Hasn’t committed to create a new nationwide apprenticeship and vocational training programme. Has committed to raising the costs of apprentice programmes so significantly employers will simply opt out.

Hasn’t committed to the reintroduce the 10p rate of tax. Has committed to reintroducing a rate of tax that punished low pay workers in the last parliament. Has not committed to reducing the overall tax burden on these workers.

Hasn’t committed to build 200,000 houses a year in the next parliament.Has committed to building 850,000 more homes than it managed in the last parliament when they actually halved the number of houses built by the public sector.

So yes, some interesting commitments, but some of them reflect the people making them have never spent a second outside of the westminster bubble, and others are best judged against what the same party actually did last time round. People are easily fooled.

the nest is fine unless you’ve got a hot water tank in which case you’ll need a separate controller for that. The British Gas hive does both and can be had free with some home energy deals or about £150 on its own.

Three do a “feel at home” thing in quite a few countries now with more due to be added by the end of the year. You can basically use your standard minutes / texts and data for no charge when abroad in those countries – and further afield even streaming Spotify in the USA and Australia is free.

http://www.three.co.uk/discover/phones/feel_at_home

the Lib Dems seem a pretty duplicitous bunch by all accounts.

Their general modus-operandi appears to be:

– blame all difficult decisions on the evil tories
– take all the credit for anything that’s good
– regularly refer to their coalition “partners” as liars (the interview with Vince Cable on radio4 yesterday on this point was quite interesting)
– set out a set of vague policies underpinned by “red lines” that they can’t confirm, but which will almost certainly flex to the left or the right if it means they can keep a seat at the cabinet table after the next election.