Comments by "Tony L" (@tlangdon12) on "Richard J Murphy" channel.

  1. I agree that local councils could easily check whether someone is in receipt of Universal Credit, Employment and Support Allowance and Pension Credit - they have access to the data from the DWP to check Council Tax and Housing Benefit Claims. They could then automatically reduce their council tax. It would save a lot of money processing manual claims for Council Tax Support.
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  2. There is an advantage to cutting the aid budget. It aligns Starmer with Trump and allows Starmer to suggest that he is on-side with the President. (After all, copying is the sincerest form of flattery!) And it allows Starmer to say "We've got $7 billion more to spend on defence, and we will buy hardware from the USA if you don't impose tarrifs on what we export to the USA". We were going to buy some stuff from the USA anyway, but Starmer should tell Trump he can wave this goodbye if he imposes tariffs. This is the sort of strong lanuage that Trump understands - if Starmer says anything that suggests he is a liberal, Trump will laugh him out of Washington.
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  3. What do you think his answer will be?
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  4. Cutting their education budget is only going to increase the time it takes!
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  5. The UK has been drifiting towards the American societal standard of individualism. We are seeing the same cracks in our society as they see in theirs. We need to become a more equal society, with people being less focused on their individual success and more on the success of everyone.
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  6. I didn't know the full story, so I have learned something about Canute today. I knew that Trump had no sense that his own power had limits.
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  7. There's no need for the pension funds to be offered by NS&I exclusively. It would be easy for government to legislate to require all private pension funds to publish accounts, in a simplified form, but which would explain where the money was invested and demonstrate that it was sustainable, which would embody the requirement to avoid climate change.
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  8. The siutation witht he Drax powerstation is also scandalous. Drax receives £300million per year of state subsidy for their supposedly 'green' technology, while also paying shareholder £330million per year in dividends. Our tax is going straight into the pockets of the shareholders!
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  9.  @andypandy1986  The purpose of QE wasn't to address wealth inequality. That it would make wealth inequality worse was to be expected. The question is What are we going to do about it now? Ban QE (as Reform want) or tax the wealthy and redistribute the money (which Reform definitely don't want)?
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  10.  @fylbike  Imagine an advice worker who knows all the benefit rules. That's going to cost the government a lot of money!
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  11. War in Ukraine has raised prices, and the national grids needs money to adapt to the changes required by climate change, and to increase resillience in uncertain times, but fundamentally Ofgem is mismanaging the energy market. There should have been greater reductions in price due to the switch to more sustainable forms of energy, as the 'fuel' is essentially free, but the windfall has gone to the shareholders (much like in the water sector).
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  12. As someone who has been aware of the option to self-build for a long time, I would agree. However, the issue is more to do with the cost of labout - the brickies need to pay their rent, so with high housing (and food and energy) costs, labour costs are through the roof.
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  13. A software company that I in the early 1990s worked for gave every employee (about 100) their own office with a door that could be shut! The only person who didn’t have an office was the receptionist! This was because the work needed concentration and was harmed by distractions. There were meeting rooms for times when teams needed to get together, but people spent 70% of their time in their office, head down, writing and testing code. It was a great environment, but office rents were cheaper then compared to highly profitable work. But you can see that for some sort of work, working at home is better for the employer, the staff and the environment. The only downside is that your manager can’t see that you are working. We have to train managers better.
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  14. Once you have decided this is so, you are part of the problem. I don't hold that view. I think there are things we can do together to solve the problems we have.
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  15. I imagine that the CIO was begging the board for money to fix the systems, much as the COO was begging for money to overhaul and replace the physical infrastructure, but shareholders were put first. I see this as a problem of regulation. Ofwat has failed, and if the cause of their failure is that they were not given adequate powers, then it is the Conservative government that privatised and deregulated the water industry that is the root cause. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown's Labour governments may be equally culpable if they did not fix the problem.
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  16. I often think that our electorate is cleverer than our politicians give us credit for. Most of us know someone who is caring for a young family or caring for a sick or disabled person, and we know the people who are being cared for. We know about them because they are part of our lives. We know intimately the challenges they face and how certain people will never be welcome in a conventional workplace because they need too much support. When politicians try to drive wedges between us, it succeeds when we allow them to focus on our differences. They fail when we focus on what makes us the same; and that is generally that we are humans, with all the strengths and weaknesses that that implies.
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  17. One has to wonder if the employment legislation is forcing employers to become super-selective because they feel they are penalised if they make a mistake in hiring someone. I don't think the employment legislation in the UK is wrong, but it might be driving some undesirable behaviours from employers. Hope you are successful in your job hunting.
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  18. But not to go to countries with lower taxes.
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  19.  @stevehiggins1263  My daughter has done the same in Denmark.
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  20. He also has support from others, some of whom are much cleverer than he is.
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  21. Not printing money to avoid the collapse of your banking system is more stupid.
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  22.  @Hickalum Richard was talking about electricity pricing.
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  23. Fundamentally, we have to address this with our training of business leaders/executives, and with regulation (especially in relation to Directors insurance). The Executives need to understand their responsibilities and that they will be held to account by the shareholders if the board does not. Long-term incentive programs are good for executives where the effect of their decisions might not be truly understood for five to ten years. Short-term bonuses encourage short-term thinking. Perhaps Shareholders should become more active in taking legal action against executives, and perhaps the Insurance policies that protect Directors should not do so in cases where there is clear evidence of self-interested decision-making.
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  24. There are now unknowable unknowns! Who can know the mind of a madman?
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  25.  @kieran4434  If you refuse to do anything about it, then yes.
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  26. Life would become much more expensive for all if we did, so you are correct.
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  27. @ However, a progressive tax system would ensure that billionaires could still continue to accumulate but at a slower rate, giving the rest us a chance.
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  28. I think you mis-understand; America simply needs more oil!
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  29. There will always be debate about whether a government should do something or not, but there are some fundamentals that all prosperous societies rely on. The rule of law, courts and legal protection for property owners, defence, social services to care for the ill and disabled, immigration control, regulation of critical services such as banking, building, industry and transport are all vital. Stopping all of this, at once, is crazy. Swamp or no swamp, you don't take needless risks.
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  30. When I started working in Group Accounting, I quickly realised that the profit made by the group made was very much down to how much the board wanted the group to have made! After more time working with accountants, I also learned that a number was only ever 'correct' if two accountants agreed it was correct!
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  31. It's not a good policy for the reasons Richard suggests, but also modern business thinking isn't that businesses exist to make a profit, it is that businesses exist to make customers for their products. This seems equally at odds with the social benefits of enterprise, but it perhaps does explain to employees their role in a more relatable way.
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  32.  @gordonstrong5232  Thank you. In that case, I have TDS big time and will continue to call out Trump's mistakes regardless of whether his supporters think he is their saviour. He isn't.
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  33. Good points, especially about the balance between paying people who have to cope with a disability and funding the services that would minimise or eliminate the disability.
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  34. Proper investment in staffing and training would save more that it costs. The only losers are the agencies!
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  35.  @leejohnson3209  I agree! The student loan system is going to produce very unequal outcomes, and that isn't good for the UK.
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  36. I think you have covered one reason for the lack of productivity in the UK economy in a previous video - the effect of long chains of subcontractors, but I agree that we are also underutilising our human resources. Part of the issue is that managers are not well trained in the UK. Better trained managers would understand the need to allow staff the room to do the best job they can do - including the managers own job! - if they are capable of doing it. Managers need to to understand that if they have trained someone to do, or even just discovered that someone else can do, their job, this is not a threat to them, but very liberating and rewarding. If the manager's manager is also well trained, they will recognise that developing new managers is a skill in itself and will value and reward this skill.
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  37. Use the money for public good would seem a very sensible decision.
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  38. The Wolf is here and it wears a fake tan!
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  39. As someone who has worked in the City in a hybrid set-up, I can confirm that working in an office with your colleagues is very much more productive when engaged in project work.
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  40. or Barbours.
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  41. It's a worryign time to be a federal employee - not only might you lose your job, but you might also have nightmares because you know what your job does for ordinary Americans.
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  42.  @tarquin161234  I don't think anyone is arguing that Musk didn't have the right to fire anyone who worked for X, but taking the same approach with the US Government is just reckless.
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  43. I'm not sure it is. As an employee I accepted that the business had to make a profit, and that it had to distrubte most of that profit to the shareholders and pay the tax due. I hoped that some profit would be paid to me as a bonus, but I also wanted the business to be able to invest; to replace worn out equipment, to train staff in better ways of doing things, and to stop doing things that harmed the environment. I hated it when I saw executives making decisions that seemed to destroy the value inherent in the organisation (i.e. it's ability to make a profits n the long term) in order to increase profits in the short term. I am now a shareholder in a great many companies as a result of being retired with a personal pension, and while I want dividends now, I also want them for at least the next 30 years or so.
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  44. This is why, young and old, need to work together to stop the likes of Trump and Badenoch.
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  45. One of my uncle's had a learning difficulty, but held down a job as a CNC Programmer for many, many years, much to the surprise of his family. This is because his 'disability' was incredibly useful when programming CNC machines because he could deal with the level of detail that the machines needed, while 'normal' people struggled to do so. With Artificial Intelligence disrupting all forms off work, we need senior managers in businesses to ensure that opportunity remains available to all who want it.
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  46. Richard's point is that we give those words meaning. Trump cannot remove their meaning if we do not let him.
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  47. Expensive to buy and to heat! You might not mind paying so much for a new house if it meant that your energy bills were going to drop massively compared to your old rented property.
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  48.  @VinceLammas  I agree with you. And so that society can understand, manage and prevent the great harms that indistries can inflict, we need experts in those industries to be working within the regulators. Much as the tax authorities are always chasing to close the loopholes that allow tax evasion, regulators need to be able to keep up with the new ways that industries invent to do more harms.
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  49. I think your idea that we need to connect the act of saving and the consequences of doing so is correct. It's our money and if it is being used while we don't need it, we should be engaged with how it is being used. I like the idea of a regional ISA - such that if I have an affinity with my home town where I no longer live but want to support its regeneration, I can invest in the ISA tthat will benefit that community. Most people will, of course, invest in the community in which they currently live, but there is the option to support another community if you wish.
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  50. The premature failure of a Boeing-built satellite (iS-33e) also reminds us that companies need to have reserves of goodwill. If many of your products are getting slated for quality problems, you can’t afford another bad story. When will they learn that you can save too much money.
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