Westminster Politics 2024-2029
- Thread starter Pexbo
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Thank goodness the Labour leadership bent over backwards to accommodate her. Incredibly brave decision to do this right after an election when you have been elected as a Labour MP too.
Don’t know her background but what’s the nepotism she mentions in her resignation letter?
I'm guessing it stsuff like rachel reeves' sister getting a ministerial position whilst simutaneously being as dumb as a box of frogs, sue gray's son getting to stand in a labour safe seat after winning in a candidate list of one, and wes streetings current and former partners both enjoying the same safe seat opportunities.
That's just the tip of it all. Pretty much everyone in southside these days is either related, family friends or used to be in relationships with each other.
Thanks.
Didn’t know that… surprised media doesn’t talk about it (or not that I’ve seen). Seem important…
How is any of this a surprise to her?
Maybe the straw(s) that broke the camels back? Possibly hoped that as PM not Shadow Leader, he’d show he was different… as he said he would.
Yet another tosser, this time in red innit.
This is a broken clock moment. She’s completely right that the Labour Party are disgusting and hypocritical Red Tories who are just as corrupt as the actual Tories, but she’s also a disgusting transphobic bigot who should have been expelled from the party for her disgusting and unacceptable hatred towards trans people.
£100k over 5 years
£35k Arsenal Box (zero cost)
£20k house ‘rental’ (zero cost)
Two transactions totalling £55k that are 100% justifiable. Zero cost to the tax payer. One of which covered 6 weeks before he was PM. The other replaces a cost he previously paid out of his own pocket, and is necessary due to security.
£45k over 5 years. £9k a year in declarations. Some of it silly and barely justified. None of it conditional.
This country is done. Absolutely fecked. Anyone judging Starmer and Labour over an annual sum that’s dwarfed by the champagne bill at the Spectator summer party (104 bottles at £120 = £12,480) is pathetic.
It’s so boring. Stop engaging. There’s some daft shit. But move along. The Covid investigation is getting less press. And that’s OUR MONEY. Hundreds of millions of pounds of our money. But nah, let’s look at 3 and 4 digit declarations.
Games gone.
The increase to 9k fees did not actually provide more money to universities. It replaced a 70-80% cut in state funding which Osborne and Cameron no longer wanted to provide. Students as consumers would pay for the majority of university funding. And those fees would be something like 12k or so now just from inflation.
It is tricky to give a clear list that is applicable to all institutions. Oxford and Cambridge have billions in endowments. New universities may have as little as a million.
OUP and CUP as global publishers have never paid any tax here as Henry VIII made them that promise. So that's a massive income stream not available to the majority of institutions.
However, there are some big costs:
Staff:
- there is national pay bargaining, so a lecturers usually start on point 31 or 32 of this scale: https://www.ucu.org.uk/he_singlepayspine
- it is a good wage, but considering a PhD is a prerequisite for the job, and a PhD requires a Masters degree, it is unusual now for people to start work in their 20s
- a university could have 1,000 academics or more
- every year a member of staff moves up the salary scale one point, as well as receiving an annual uplift
- university management salaries are large, but overall it may amount to £6-£10 million annually -- a lot, but not a large proportion
- usually over half of university employees are not academics but include cleaners, gardeners, IT, security, technicians, clerical staff, administrative support and so on, as well as recruitment staff whose sole role is to travel and market the institution around the world
- this can cost tens of millions alone
Buildings:
- many universities are postwar and have many buildings made from concrete (and many have RAAC)
- these buildings are often past their lifespan, are poorly insulated, are filled with asbestos, and cost millions just to heat and maintain
- many universities need new buildings because of the point above, and those can easily cost tens of millions, which are usually paid for by long-term loans with a 20-50 year span, again costing millions a year
- student accommodation usually has a 1-2% working surplus, meaning the fortune students are charged barely covers heating, food, staff, repairs, security (very important), and many more
Research and teaching costs:
- academics produce research as part of their job, which they are paid for
- academics publish that material and do not get paid extra for this
- those journals are owned by MNCs (Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, Springer) who sell the publications back to the institutions that produce them, with licensing costs sometimes being tens of thousands of pounds per journal
- having up to date research and materials in a library can and does cost tens of millions annually (it is a racket which should be smashed)
- in the hard sciences equipment to produce research costs tens if not hundreds of thousands
- paying for lab equipment for teaching adds to that cost
- I haven't checked in the last couple of years but the last estimate I saw was that a science degree can cost 20-25k a year to teach a student, and more for medicine and dentistry
- even in the humanities and social sciences, if you want reasonable class sizes you may need 100 academic staff members to deliver all the modules and courses run in one subject
- an intake of 200 students per year, with class sizes in seminars of around 10, and full year lectures for the first year, can be reasonably delivered by 30-40 academics
- if you get academics to teach more, they cannot produce research, which is what is meant to underpin university teaching; if you do that, then I would say there is no point students going to that university
- a lot of important activities (open days, induction, clearing and admissions, day to day administration, exam boards) are done by academics and not support staff
- this 'saves' the institution employing more staff, and is in contrast to what happens in say the USA, where there is more money but also an expectation that academics will just do academics
Andrew McGettigan's work is excellent on all of this. He wrote about the 'Big University Gamble' in 2013 which basically predicted all this. Universities have been left to the whims of the market, which assumes only the best will survive. This is nonsensical (and contradictory) considering that universities are also seen by Government as a key regional employer and investment vehicle (which kind of assumes you want them to continue existing).
It also is problematic as universities are now allowed to take as many students as possible. This has led the richest to increase numbers in 'cheap' degrees to teach (humanities and social sciences), putting increased pressure on the poorer (and newer) universities. But again, this has no bearing on what skills the government needs universities to help students have to meet economic needs. Successive governments have set up a system where too many students get degrees which are seen as worthless (which the government criticises without mentioning their policies caused it), and where some universities and local economies will go to the wall, costing countless more jobs (but they don't want to change the underlying funding model to provide stability).
Further Reading
Andrew McGettigan: https://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/andrew-mcgettigan?filter=articles
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03079-w
https://taso.org.uk/news-item/why-t...isis-for-social-mobility-and-economic-growth/
I know I have missed a load.
Basically universities contribute £265bn to the economy (from their own data to be fair).
Government seems to want them to act like businesses in a free market. But if a restaurant goes busy, another can relatively quickly and cheaply take its place. That cannot and will not happen with a university.
If they have a strategic reason for existing both in terms of training workers and propping up local economics that may not be too prosperous without them, it makes zero sense for the state to think they should have no say in their running and in securing their futures.
Basically universities contribute £265bn to the economy (from their own data to be fair).
Government seems to want them to act like businesses in a free market. But if a restaurant goes busy, another can relatively quickly and cheaply take its place. That cannot and will not happen with a university.
If they have a strategic reason for existing both in terms of training workers and propping up local economics that may not be too prosperous without them, it makes zero sense for the state to think they should have no say in their running and in securing their futures.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cg56zlge8g5o
Disgusting bint. In any sane world she'd be flopping on the Apprentice early rounds, arguing with all the other contestants and laughed out of the room, but instead she's an ex-minister who might become the new conservative leader.
Disgusting bint. In any sane world she'd be flopping on the Apprentice early rounds, arguing with all the other contestants and laughed out of the room, but instead she's an ex-minister who might become the new conservative leader.
Presumably, she thinks Nigerians are one of the cultures that British people are so keen to have in their country.
What's wrong with this? She's generally a knob but the sentiment here is shared by a lot of people.
Would you be happy with Salafists, Russian ultranationalists, hardcore Zionists, or shit like Afghan Bacha Bazi being put into this country?
Heck, even dealing with immigrants from allied places like the Kurds have caused a headache for local government due to their insistence on importing tribal honour politics.
The baggage they bring simply isn't worth it.
You are reading this very charitably, and the points you are making are not the ones she is making.
She needs the votes of Tory party members who will run with the dog whistle and assume she meant Brown and Black people.
I also suspect Badenoch wouldn't mind Russian ultranationalists and hardcore Zionists coming to the UK. Or anyone who thinks the British Empire was swell and civilised the masses around the world. Nigel Biggar acolytes basically.
They are 'Labour' in name only.
Labour used water industry analysis to argue against nationalisation
‘Economically illiterate’ Defra letter sent to anti-sewage groups cites 2018 report commissioned by water companies
https://www.theguardian.com/busines...dustry-analysis-argue-against-nationalisation
Labour used water industry analysis to argue against nationalisation
‘Economically illiterate’ Defra letter sent to anti-sewage groups cites 2018 report commissioned by water companies
https://www.theguardian.com/busines...dustry-analysis-argue-against-nationalisation
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Can someone get me Lord Alli's email please?
Will drop him a nice email asking for £100k, if he delivers, I'll make a £5k donation to RedCafe.
Will drop him a nice email asking for £100k, if he delivers, I'll make a £5k donation to RedCafe.
The latest one about use of his townhouse should really ring alarm bells, and its not because of money.
Labour have offices at Southside, which is Southbank, about half a mile from soho across the river.
Thjey spend a few hundred grand a year on those offices, so why is starmer holding meetings in someone's house up the road? That is the part that matters, because this one hints at something much more harmful to the project. Who is actually calling the shots.
Labour have offices at Southside, which is Southbank, about half a mile from soho across the river.
Thjey spend a few hundred grand a year on those offices, so why is starmer holding meetings in someone's house up the road? That is the part that matters, because this one hints at something much more harmful to the project. Who is actually calling the shots.
I can’t work out how much smaller European countries than the UK can provide higher levels of education, including free university. The only conclusion I can come to, after spending a fairly considerable amount of time in one of them, is the disparity between richest and poorest. It seems like in every industry in the UK, big companies cream profit off the top for billionaires to get richer at the expense of everyone else. I don’t know what else can explain it.
It's basically the housing theory of everything. Property is too expensive, and building is too expensive. Universities need buildings, academic staff need places to live near urban centres, so wages are necessarily high too. Build more urban social housing, invest in training more tradesmen and producing more (green if possible) raw materials, or failing that reduce trading problems with the EU, and the cost of everything could come down.
If you want the tl;dr, Thatcher fecked us and every PM since has careered headlong down the same dead end.
If I understand the Mirror story correctly, she advised the TNK oligarchs in 2012 and 2013, long before sanctions in 2022 and before the Crimea invasion in 2014. Seems like a non-story when compared to some of the mud they could throw at Jenrick himself about his time in government.
Does she not realise that this rhetoric that she’s peddling will ultimately lead to her being deported if the people whom she’s trying to court get their way?
Her loyalty is to her country, not the party. If her party is filled with corrupt politicians who want to freeze pensioners to death do you blame her quiting?
I agree with the sentiment, by Rosie Duffield is not an honest actor here.
She has been rightly called out for her statements and views on the trans community, and complained about being bullied and victimised. The Labour Party changed its views and rhetoric to ensure Duffield and others felt able to remain in the party.
She has also been criticised consistently by Labour Party members in her constituency, to the extent that her reselection as an MP has been in question.
Her loyalty is to herself. The words are correct. The intention behind them I question.
Starmer's Labour definitely feels like controlled opposition. This is what happens when you sell the party to Murdoch and other billionaire wankers though.
Another shithouse Tory government incoming by 2029 then, an endless cycle of shit.
Another shithouse Tory government incoming by 2029 then, an endless cycle of shit.
Imagine being so feckin capitalist and in hoc to industry lobby groups and yet still being called socialists by the other side. Serves them right.
I wouldn't be surprised if the Labour Party split into a proper Labour Party and a red tory Party in the next few of years, if starmer keeps them on this road. Just as the tories will, into a centre right and a Reform lite.
Edit...the libdems will be wondering what all the fuss is about
I wouldn't be surprised if the Labour Party split into a proper Labour Party and a red tory Party in the next few of years, if starmer keeps them on this road. Just as the tories will, into a centre right and a Reform lite.
Edit...the libdems will be wondering what all the fuss is about
I must say I do not know her or her work. You are probably right about her and her intentions, but my point still stand in general, I do not think prioritising the party ahead of the people's interest is a good thing.
Se's also a certifiable moron and I am pretty certain she didn't write that resignation letter. This is someone who got caught sneaking off to shag some married bloke during lockdown and worships rowling.
The fact its likely someone from the times (who have the exclusive) or even better the daily mail (who normally print her nonsense) wrote it after starmer dunked his own head in shite just to appease them both makes it all very funny though.
Exactly my view of this. Another sign of weak, unprincipled leadership.
Only a week or so ago, she was abstaining on the winter fuel payment vote that she claimed she was strongly against so that she didn't lose her seat as a Labour MP. I don't think loyalty to any concept or ideal is what she's about.
Brilliantly explained, add to this the 9k tuition fees are now worth about 6k real terms.