Fears of talent leaving City ‘over-blown’
From Financial News:
Not a single trading team from Tullett Prebon, the London-based broker which told employees they cold move abroad for tax reasons in one of the clearest signals of an exodus from London has moved, almost a year after the offer was made.
It is the second development in a week that suggests fears over core talent leaving the City were overblown.
So *nobody at all* at Tullett thought that they would be better off paying less tax to work somewhere that wasn’t in London.
I suppose some people might argue that although not emigrating, Tullett’s brokers are working-to-rule and deliberately ensuring they aren’t eligible for big bonuses, because they’d rather have 100% of nothing than 50% of a lot.
This doesn’t seem entirely convincing, given the personality traits of the trader-y types that I’ve encountered…
How Labour can win in the South of England (pt 1)
A new pamphlet was released this week about why Labour lost the support of people in Southern England, and what it needs to do to win them back. It is written by a former MP, Giles Radice, and the former head of policy planning under Gordon Brown, Patrick Diamond.
This pamphlet is the follow up to research that was done after the 1992 election, which argued that Labour needed to modernise and stand up for individual freedom, against public and private vested interests, to show that the party could be on the side of those who wanted to get on, making responsible tax and spending commitments and promising to manage capitalism more efficiently than the Conservatives.
The 2010 remix has pages and pages about how immigration and welfare reform lost Labour support, the inevitable opinion polls designed to prove that the public agree with the authors, and concludes with eight “key messages”.
continue reading… »
How the BBC reported a Migration Watch study
On Wednesday night BBC online ran a news story on the hard-right lobby group Migration Watch’s latest report.
It says that half a million extra school places would be needed in the UK over the next five years as a result of immigration.
The news story simply regurgitated the MigrationWatch press release and didn’t bother offering additional information or a counter-balance. By yesterday morning the story had been updated with a comment by Tim Finch of think-tank ippr.
What struck me afterwards is how rubbish the BBC news story was in giving any context to the report.
First, author Phillipe Legrain did a quick rebuttal explaining its assumptions:
1) By using cumulative figures. If you add up spending on anything over a long period of time, it looks much bigger than it really is. Using a single year’s statistics, 2009, and MW’s deeply flawed methodology, the cost of schooling the children of migrants who have arrived since 1998 is £4.6 billion, out of an education budget of £88 billion.
2) By counting children who have one parent who was born abroad as half due to migration. Since Nick Clegg has a Spanish wife, they include half the cost of educating their kids as being due to migration. Excluding that dodogy use of statistics, the cost in 2009 falls to £3.6bn.
3) By ignoring the taxes that migrants pay. Research by the Home Office, IPPR, Christian Dustmann at UCL and others show that migrants pay more in taxes than they take out in benefits and public services. Allowing for that, it is not UK-born taxpayers who are paying to educate migrants’ children, it is migrants who are subsidising the education of the children of people born in the UK.
Read that second point again. Even if one of the parents of a child born in the UK had been born abroad, Migration Watch count the child as half an ‘immigrant’.
Further analysis by the website Full Fact exposed more issues.
They point out that MigrationWatch claim their figures are based on the “principal projection” by the Office of National Statistics (ONS), which says from 2008 to 2033, 2.3 million births are projected to occur, directly or indirectly, because of net migration.
But:
But after much searching and head-scratching, Full Fact was unable to discover any ONS projections which broke down predicted birth rates by the parents’ place of birth.
A call to the ONS confirmed that no such statistics exist: “”We certainly don’t publish population projection data by country of migrant or any kind of ethnic background,” said a spokesperson, “the sums themselves won’t have been done by us.”
Most of this is ignored by the BBC report. They didn’t even ask the ONS whether these projections were produced by them or not.
It seems their job has become simply to convert press releases into stories and and let others offer soundbites.
In 2008 the BBC’s Kevin Marsh wrote a blog post titled, Journalism, not ‘churnalism’ — it seems to have been chucked in the scrapheap.
They may as well have just done a graphic and a report like the Sun newspaper did (at least it doesn’t pretend to be impartial)
Survey: NHS front-line services being hit badly
Senior NHS service managers have revealed that the drive to make savings is already having an impact on physiotherapy services for patients and on staffing levels despite the Government’s promise to protect future patient care.
A new survey of 120 NHS managers carried out by the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy reveals today that nine out of ten physiotherapy service managers are being asked to make savings of up to 20 per cent during the current financial year.
70% of managers did not expect to have sufficient resources to meet the anticipated rise in patient demand for physiotherapy.
57% of those surveyed said that the cuts were certain or very likely to lead to cuts in staffing.
Speaking today at the CSP’s Congress in Liverpool, Chief Executive, Phil Gray will say:
Cutting physiotherapy services to patients right now will have a major long term impact. It make no sense, especially in the current economic climate, when it is more important than ever to maintain services which support people back to work.
Physiotherapists are needed now and into the future to help prevent health problems become chronic leading to long term sickness, which increases the numbers of people who end up on benefits.
The survey also showed that:
· Two thirds of managers reported significant delays to filling all or most vacant posts. The figure rose to 80 per cent in Scotland and 88 per cent in Wales
· Over 40% of managers surveyed said that inadequate staffing levels were getting in the way of redesigning and modernising services
· Cuts in purchasing of clinical equipment were felt certain or very likely by half of service managers
“Physiotherapy staffing levels and training places need to be maintained to avoid a future crisis in physiotherapy services, but the opposite seems to already be happening with severe implications for patient care” warned Phil Gray.
From a press release
Fact: Labour did not ‘write people off’ to a lifetime on benefits
On Monday, The Sun ran a story about “Benefit Ghettoes”, about areas where a lot of people live on Jobseeker’s Allowance, Incapacity Benefit and “other benefits, including one parent, disabled and carer handouts.” Running alongside was an opinion piece from employment minister Chris Grayling, who concentrated on two million people “on the sick”:
Some of those people will be genuinely too sick to work. But equally many will have been put there by a government who thought it was easier just to write people off to a lifetime on benefits then, when the economy picked up, fill the jobs with workers from abroad who were only too keen to pick up the slack.
Yesterday’s figures for out of work benefits give us a chance to check how accurate that picture is. They only go back to 1999, but they do give us a handy picture of what has been happening during the recession and before.
continue reading… »
A challenge to Mumsnet
In recent years, the website Mumsnet has expanded its interests from travel systems to politics, and in doing so, have incurred fawning from both MPs and the media. During the election, Mumsetters were depicted as demi-Gods whose powers lay in deciding elections and winding.
Fair enough, you might say: political activism should be encouraged, right? Yes, it should. But my problem with Mumsnet is its lack of insight, which is sometimes so glaring that it borders on outright hypocrisy.
Take for example the site’s campaign page, which is currently promoting Mumsnetters’ attempts to ‘Let Girls Be Girls‘.
continue reading… »
PC who hit Tomlinson won’t be prosecuted
The Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer QC, has today said the DPP will not reopen the prosecution of PC Simon Harwood after all.
PC Harwood was filmed striking newspaper seller Ian Tomlinson with his baton and pushing him to the ground during the G20 protests last year. Tomlinson eventually died as a result of the incident.
In a letter sent to Green Party Assembly Member Jenny Jones, Starmer confirmed that the DPP has decided not to reopen the prosecution of the Met Police officer, PC Simon Harwood, in light of the GMC decision to suspend Dr. Freddy Patel.
Starmer told Jones that he will wait to see if the coming inquest will throw up any more facts.
Jenny Jones AM has released this statement:
It is frustrating for the family, but the Crown Prosecution Service are limited by the actions of an incompetent pathologist. The effect of Dr Patel’s changing his evidence six months into the process was to undermine the CPS’ case for manslaughter, whilst leaving them unable to pursue the lesser charge of assault against a police officer who clearly struck an innocent bystander with his baton and pushed him to the ground.
It is astounding that Dr Patel failed to keep samples of blood to support either his initial findings, or his changed findings.
The family’s only hope for justice is that new evidence will emerge from an early inquest, but even that appears subject to further delays.
Disgraceful.
Dr. Freddy Patel had concluded that Ian Tomlinson died of natural causes, but two independent experts afterwards said he died from internal bleeding after falling to the ground.
Update: The full letter from the DPP to Jenny Jones is here.
Update 2: @TenPercent points out that the IPCC eventually recommended that a charge of manslaughter could be brought over Tomlinson death, after reviewing the evidence. Clearly, the DPP have ignored that too.
Ed Miliband’s three left-wing problems
Many on the left were jubilant that Ed Miliband won the Labour leadership. Neil Kinnock declared “we’ve got our party back”, Trade Union leaders are smiling ear-to-ear and Compass chair Neal Lawson said he was now within the ‘mainstream’ after being ignored for years.
But all this celebration sets up the left for a big fall later. Worse, it may even prove counter-productive for our own causes.
To start by stating the obvious, Ed Miliband is firmly on the centre-left of the political spectrum not the socialist left. There is almost zero chance of ‘Old Labour’ making a comeback.
continue reading… »
Daily Mail declares war against Germany!
It’s war! The Daily Mail is outraged!
I think this story is hilarious.
Volunteers from the Royal British Legion asked the manager whether they could set up a stall in the supermarket to to raise money for the charity in the run up to Remembrance Sunday.
The reply seemed little more than a declaration of war. The veterans were told they would not be allowed in the store itself. They would have to stand outside in the cold – and for two days only.
Apparently the request “reignited hostilities”. I’m surprised the Daily Mail thinks they ever ended!
And apparently it is not the first time Aldi has been accused of failing to support the Poppy Appeal either.
As recently as 1993 a manager ejected two teenage Army cadets (OMG!) selling poppies at the entrance of another store, saying they were a fire hazard! See, Aldi are run by the Politically Correct Police!
It turns out (at the end of the article) that they had initially requested he stand under a ‘protective overhead canopy’, but later let him into the store anyway.
But who cares about the little details when you want to go to war?
Employment figures betray a weakening labour market
The BBC reported yesterday:
Across the UK the number of people employed increased by 178,000 in the three months to August, the ONS said.
Sounds good. A more detailed look at the data, however, suggests a bleaker picture.
continue reading… »
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» The real agenda behind Telegraph’s abortion investigation
» How Scotland Yard monitors prying bloggers and journalists
» When disabled people want to work – employers can hold the back
» Revealed: the reality behind Workfare and why it doesn’t work
» Job snob? No, I’ve got the T-shirt
» Why country-by-country reporting matters to our wellbeing
» If Unions want to become stronger, they need to modernise
» Why work “reforms” in Spain are a warning for workers across Europe
» Five things you need to know about the NHS bill
» Bigger. Fatter. Gypsier. More Racist.
» Laziness levels in Britain getting lazier, wails government
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