Servicing debt on nearly £6m must be fun, I assume rents are fairly tragic in Colchester and they'll be getting walloped from all angles as modern-day landlords unless they're of the unscrupulous variety. The valuations will probably be Trumpian as well, so, all in all, lol.
They cut out the lol bit, which is that them 'go[ing] back to full-time working' is them managing all of the properties because the agency they were using put the fees up.Originally Posted by phonics
Going to the bank to cash sixty checks every month is a lot of work.
Nah, I feel like part of the IPA wankery involves forcing it upon others. Typically in a bar setting. As for pint pricing, it's around £2.50-£4 here.
Last edited by Shindig; 31-10-2024 at 07:15 PM.
Badenoch wins Tory leadership. The right decision I think, Jenrick is dead behind the eyes and has a grifter's poise. Badenoch is possibly a lightweight but has more about her and probably more malleable to what may well become changing times.
She's a wretched cunt.
The fact that all of the people who killed the party endorsed her tells you all you need to know, and that's without the fact that she appears to get very shirty very quickly under any sort of pressure (not unlike the Prime Minister). I was all for it in whenever it was they did their last contest, but further exposure suggests that she is actually crap. If she makes Honest Bob shadow the Home Office, and lets him devise their not turning the country into India policies, then it might work; but otherwise Nigel will be pissing himself.
I'm surprised you think that. She may well be crap (they all are) but the shirtiness can be weeded out with time and experience, and for the next 2-3 years the policies don't matter anyway. The key thing with Badenoch is she is going to be the only party leader with the combination of intellectual confidence (however thin in reality) and narrative authority to tell immigrant 'communities' where to shove it, which I think is going to be a far bigger rupture between the government and the opposition in the next ten years than is anything to do with economics, much of which is dictated to us anyway. What is 60 year old Nigel going to do, tell everyone that Kemi is a wet liberal and to vote for him and his completely empty words instead? I'm not sure that will wash.
Foreign policy might be a bit of a weakness, but she can presumably drag in some old soldiers (possibly literally) to do that.
Nigel just needs to keep his fifteen per cent or whatever that prevents the Conservative Party from governing and him in national relevance. In the meantime, the Communities will just call her a racist like they did Priti Patel and Suella Braverman, which leaves you with a thin-skinned, foot-in-mouth merchant beholden to the pathetic twat wing of the party. Maybe Labour continues to implode and she wins anyway in 2029, but then you just have that in government instead.
I hadn't appreciated that all those IHT on pensions reforms are merely out for consultation rather than being some set in stone new law. So that's them never happening, at least not retrospectively.
I was speaking to my development manager at Royal London today about this and he said one of the things which they have been told is that they need to pay HMRC the tax and it needs to be paid within 6 months which shows just how out of touch politicians are. Even for well planned out estates 6 months is quick to get the estate settled.
He said there will be push back from the providers on how some of what is being asked for can be implemented.
It isn't going to happen.
It's wildly unfair and massively moving the goal posts after the fact for some people. There will be all sorts of challenges if they try to push it through. It also has a dangerous public policy impact of deterring people from making provision for their own old age if the taxman can just come along in the future and go, nah, I'll have that. If you're going to pierce the veil of the trust structure then maybe start a bit higher in the wealth spectrum.
That said, most of this is a consequence of the 2015 reforms not being properly thought through in the same way that these haven't.
They're not all over educated though are they as a lot of them have done utterly pointless degrees.
The end of my loan is almost in sight. £300 a month.
I paid mine back this year, it was a great feeling to be free of it.The end of my loan is almost in sight. £300 a month.
Pointless for who though? Certainly not for the highly paid chancellors and provosts.
Middle class on minimum wage? That doesn't sound right.
Ultimately the economy. For university to mean what it should we simply shouldn't have anywhere near 50% of the population going, or whatever % it currently is.
Tell employers to stop requiring degrees for jobs that don't need them then and to do any sort of on the job training.
I was chatting to a mate of mine about this the other week his daugher is 18 and doesn't know if she should go to University. My thoughts are if you want to be something and it needs a degree to do it and you will be well paid once qualified then do it. If you just don't know what to do and are going for the sake of it then don't do it. I have seen so many people down the years who pissed around with History and Geography degrees who have never done anything with the qualification and just piss around in lowly paid jobs never actually paying back their student loan.
Between the student loan stuff and the various child benefit cliff edges there are some really perverse incentives in the British tax system (VAT registration seems another one), and yet everybody in a position to resolve them seems perfectly happy with them, presumably because they are not as obvious as headline rates.
If you're doing history and geography (or politics, as I did) you're not meant to 'do anything with' the qualification, it's an academic degree not a vocational one. A lot of people find this really hard to get their heads around, and I'm not saying that to diss them, it's just an observation.
Not sure about the UK, but over here getting a degree, even in the shit disciplines and despite the lol costs, is worth it when it comes to earnings. I did see a lot of job ads when I was looking without degree requirements, which was nice to see, but then the experience they were asking for is basically impossible to get without a degree in the first place. I would never recommend anyone to skip university unless they are too stupid to finish. Delaying it for a few years would be a good idea for many though.
More testing less degree requirements and several month probationary people would be the way forward, but then people would complain about that too.
Who gives a shit about students? *Spits on floor*
God I wish I'd delayed going to university. At our high performing grammar school, it was basically assumed almost everyone would go, so my thinking as a spasticated 17 year old wasn't "should I go?" or "what is the purpose for me going?" and then working it out from there, it was more well I'm DEFINITELY going, and just sorta picking the subject I enjoyed doing most at A-level.
I went a social anxious mess, so didn't even do the fun making friends stuff, I spent 3 years getting up in the afternoon, playing football manager, then getting pissed with my weirdo mate I'd known from back home and his older brother and his mates who were also at the same university.
A year or two doing menial jobs, a bit of travelling, maybe I'm kidding myself, but i feel like I'd have been far more capable of picking something useful and getting something more worthwhile out of the whole experience.
I mean, I did complete the degree and get a 2.1 but obviously I've done nothing with it. I'm getting on, about to turn 33 (Christ), but maybe it isn't too late to do a vaguely vocational masters of some description. Probably not though.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clyjm6nrr0zo
I wonder what you find if you try to dig behind the facade of BROCKWELL GROUP BEXHILL LLP?
I'm glad I went, even if my degree was a waste of time. I grew up a lot and developed some work ethic.
I went too young, it was a disaster, went again at 21 and that did the trick. In classic 21st century man terms I therefore believe everyone should have the exact same experience as me and am calling now for a law to ban university until the age of 21, give people 3 years to go and get a job, then they can choose whether to carry on or whether to go back into full time education. Obviously the universities should be taking account of the contents of those 3-5 years when they consider applications. No timewasters.
Lol, I wish it was the same for me, if anything it did the opposite - I learned pretty early on that my course was dead easy, my peers were thicker than my classmates were at school, so it just enabled my lazy tendancies.
I didn't start a single essay more than 48 hours before it was due, and I think I averaged about 20% attendance over the 3 years, including not going to a single lecture or seminar in my second semester of year 1, so didn't see any of my classmates from December 2010 until September 2011, except exams. Sounds like I'm showing off, but it was absolutely horrendous. I think I had a bit of a mental breakdown really. Part of me thinks getting found out, failing first year and getting kicked out would have done me good in the long run.
Yeah I scraped through, don't think I did much growing up. There were people on my course who I remember thinking "wow you really have your shit together" during first year, and they were generally the ones that lived at home and/or had already had jobs with responsibility, and were the ones that ended up doing well. Most of the people who were wasters at the start (me) were also wasters at the end.
In hindsight I cringe, but considering who I was before uni it was never really going to go any differently. Nearly all 16-20 year olds are so very childish that I think it's a bit of a dead loss projecting your 32 your old self backwards.
So funnily enough, the growing up and work ethic were completely independant of my course, of which I did the bare minimum. It was the job working in a pub kitchen that I needed to survive that actually provided me with the most benefit.
My 5 years at uni looked like this:
- First Year: Attempted a Physics degree, but basically did fuck all, pretty much gave up on lectures after a couple of months. Still attended the labs and did the bear minimum. Decided to switch courses before I had chance to fail my exams.
- Started a new course in Computer Engineering. Told myself I was going to do things right this year, but found the course ridiculously easy and stopped attending any lectures or classes after a few weeks. Finally went back in about February and realised they'd moved past the easy stuff and I now had no clue about anything, so stopped attending again. Revised/learned like a lunatic for exams and passed 90 credits, 10 short of passing.
- Told some sob story and they allowed me to re-take the 30 credits part time. So while most of my friends were in their final year, I was doing about 5 hours per week. But my reduced timetable meant I had hardly any student loan, so I had to work for a living (properly) for the first time in my life. Got a job working as a "chef" in a pub, worked my arse off all year and genuinely enjoyed it, and made a lot of friends. Passed the 30 credits and finally moved onto second year.
- Worked quite hard most of the year while still working 25-30 hours per week because my parents couldn't afford to subsidise my student loan anymore. Fair enough, given I was on my fourth year at Uni after starting a 3 year course. Managed to get around 65% overall, which wasn't bad as the course was actually quite tricky, especially the electrical engineering parts.
- Basically got bored, motivation to do well at Uni took a hit after my girlfriend (now wife) moved in with me. Managed to get a 2:2 in the end.
Uni allowed me to come out of my shell a lot, make proper friends, meet girls and understand what it really meant to work for a living. I think there's a realistic chance I'd be a 38 year old virgin if I hadn't gone.
Also - we had no internet access in my first year in halls. Hated it at the time, but it did wonders for me. I would've been camped in my room playing CounterStrike all day/night.
Given he's obviously an intelligent bloke, and he very much knew the question would be coming, I would have thought old Jeremy Clarkson ought to have had a better answer to his own words being put to him on the subject of farms and inheritance tax than saying "typical BBC nonsense" or whatever it was. Yeah, classic BBC, asking people to comment on their own words which have been published nationally and pertain to the matter at hand. Wokerati bullshit!
I'm very much enjoying all the ire this seems to have drawn. Not sure how the politics of it all play out in terms of whether it is worth doing for Labour, but it is quite funny.
The general government line now being, well, you can get around it anyway if you structure things correctly seems like more of an argument against the entire concept of inheritance tax.
What the country really needs is proper reform of laws on the taxation of land.
Good thread here. He'll probably be losing the whip soon.
I feel like the only reason this Rachel Reeves job history stuff isn't gaining a massive amount of traction is because it would open the floodgates.
No one likes a slippery slope.
Problem Starmer seems to have, other than very evidently being a careerist with no real political convictions, is that his comms people are absolute numpties and seem to think that putting this sort of stuff out is in any way a good idea. It reads like something a hostage would be forced to say.
Even something as simple as a Diwali get-together got shambolically handled. A quick google would send them in the right direction instead of a beer and beef buffet.
Starmer's already fighting the last war, the ground has shifted from under him incredibly quickly. Starting to think a huge Reform surge could happen, frankly even if Nigel just locks himself in a fridge for the next year.
I'm all for this, but I'm pretty sure the Tories proposed basically the same thing a couple of years back and Labour were OUTRAGED at the idea.
I'm also not sure why it's restricted to just young people. I hear "I can't work, I have kids" atleast twice a week and I'm yet to have a good response to "can't you work while they're at school?"
Last edited by Spikey M; 24-11-2024 at 09:41 PM.
The Tory one was mandatory national service unless you paid a fee to get out of it. This is you have to do these things if you haven’t found work to receive the benefits.
I’ve long said the benefits system is fucked in this country. The system I grew up under made so much more sense. Unemployment was after 2 years of contributions you would receive 75% of your salary for 18 months. If you’re still unable to find work after said period you can take a job under the government doing say gardening, paving, road cleaning, binman. Day to day looking after the city stuff for a living wage and enroll in free courses/apprenticeships or you could receive nothing. It’s your choice.
The more obvious thing would be to remove the incentives for people not to work, but that would mean tackling the recent explosion in self-diagnosed shite, gigantic labour surplus, etc. Much easier to force 'young people' to work for their benefits, which companies will be all too happy to abuse, like when they were offering 'training' in stacking shelves.
Nah, not the National Service one. That was just a last minute attempt to win back the pensioners, who seem to want young people to be as miserable as possible.
I can't remember the details of the Tory one, but Labour essentially just said "THEY'RE ALL QUADRASPAZZED ON A MENTAL HEALTH-GLUG YOU MONSTERS!" and then, like everything the Tories tried, nothing at all happened. Usually for the best, but not in this case.
Last edited by Spikey M; 24-11-2024 at 10:24 PM.
Recently I've started seeing all the policymaking in this area, and other areas, by both parties, as a conscious attempt to suppress wages at pretty much any cost. I'm sure it's a lot more complicated than that, but the world makes a lot more sense viewed through that lens.
Honestly, that's a non-starter. This is a cultural thing, to the extent that we might need to add Benefits-class to the nations class system.
Children of workers grow up to work. Even when it's hard, they juggle it. They find childcare. They struggle through a bad shoulder, etc.
The children of benefit claimants grow up to be benefit claimants. Work is something other people do. It's an abstract idea, it's not something their people do. I've seen that moment if realisation in too many people's eyes.
"I'm just really struggling financially here..."
are you trying to find work?
".........."
It hasn't even occurred to them as an option. They'll beg, pawn things, go to food banks, cool. But not look for work until the idea is introduced to them.
Now, on the other hand most benefit claimants already DO work and they just get benefits to top their criminally low wages. That needs looking at too. Nobody working fulltime should be earning so little that they qualify for Universal Credit.
My short time unemployed in the uk was eye opening in the sense that it was clear neither end of the system worked. The only way to access the job centre was to claim benefits and then the job centres aim was not to find you work but to stop you claiming benefits asap.
I went in there with 15 years of experience in a field where I’d worked for Kensington palace, the UN, the WHO, two international corporations and the only two jobs I was offered the entire time was Insurance Salesman and a Prison Officer. After a few months I was told to take one of those or be sanctioned.
I don’t know when it happened as it wasn’t like that when I was looking for work in university in 2008 but I presume they merged benefits and the dwp at some point and it broke the whole system.
By all means progressively squeeze the benefits as a lifestyle people, but most people are either looking for work or have been allowed to not look for work, and could be incentivised back into it if full-time employment offered better prospects than working ninety minutes away for fuck all or sharing a bedroom with five Indians. When it doesn't, and you can claim an extra wodge for having Mental Health, why bother?
Great, so let's raise the wage you have to pay people so that it incentivises it so they're not competing with people who are trying to share a bedroom with 5 indians or send money back to Poland/Phillipines/Nigeria. Ah wait if we do that you'll complain about inflation.
The foreigners wouldn't be here, and any inflationary pressures would be more than levelled out by also not having to compete with them for housing. Easy. I could solve that and Ukraine by half-nine as well and take the rest of the Parliament off.
From memory, it was mainly filling in your job search every fortnight and showing it to some twat behind a desk. If they don't like the look of it (you could just make shit up, to be honest), then they started looking at sanctions or whatever. I never got anywhere near that. Six months without work wound you up on a New Deal placement which ultimately meant "You're not a jobseeker now. You're in training." Just moving you from one bucket to another, basically. Not that I saw that 13 weeks stint as bad. You wind up either sitting in a room all day looking for jobs or the recruitment agency in charge grabs you an unpaid job placement.
From my recollection, the two placements I got were as follows:
A computer store - Ran by a complete shitehawk that really loved the free labour. Me and two other lads were upstairs all day trying to cobble together PC's from whatever used stock was there.
Charity shop - Spent most of the time sorting through donation bags looking for good stuff to put on the racks. Not much else to it but some of the people I worked with were definitely incapable of anything else.
For what it's worth, the young faces (me included) seemed more keen to get into work. The older ones were either clearly not fussed or were pigeonholed into one industry that was never going to have them back.
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