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Funky_Gibbon

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About Funky_Gibbon

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  • Birthday 23/11/1977

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    In a perpetual state of anarchy
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    Semi-professional whistler

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  1. They didn't 'insist' on 19%, they asked for 5% above the rate of inflation for 2022/23. Because that would already include the 5% imposed for 2022-23 by the Government that means they were opening their negotiation asking for around 12%. That sounds a lot but in reality it's just asking to be paid 5% more than they were paid in 2021-22, a sum that wouldn't even come close to restoring the nurses' wages back to what it was in real terms before 13 years of pay cuts. More importantly nobody actually expected to get it. You don't go into a negotiation telling everyone the actual figures that you'd be willing to accept. And it didn't take the focus away from any change. The single most important change to the system required is the training and hiring of more nurses to fill the massive hole in staffing numbers that the Government themselves say is required to run a safe service. Fill those empty jobs and most other issues disappear. To do that you need to make the job more attractive to new starters/need to give existing staff a reason not to quit and the most basic way to do that is to pay a salary that doesn't go down each year. That's simple dignity and respect towards your employees and it's something that a lot of public sector staff haven't received at all in the last 13 years. As for the media, most of them were never ever going to report on anything but the Government's line. Nothing the unions could have said or done was going to change the reality of how our partisan media reporting works in the UK.
  2. I'll show the same backbone as a cat when I only have to walk the distance to next door's garden to get to work rather than several miles and I get to sleep for 20 hours a day.
  3. Yes I saw that when she posted it on Twitter a few days ago and was saying stuff like how when travelling from London it didn't 'feel' like the North until you reached Leeds. 🙄 The North, the Midlands and the South as we think of them today have ancient origins as they tend to mirror the old borders of the Anglo Saxon kingdoms of Northumbria, Mercia and Wessex (Cornwall was its own kingdom which is why the Cornish still feel they have their own identity separate from the rest of the South) Sheffield was a Kingdom of Northumbria border town/village with the Kingdom of Mercia for centuries. Dore is literally named that because it was the doorway between the two kingdoms. People can move the borders of our modern day counties around, create new ones etc but the origins of 'Northern' identity is much older and harder to erase with arbitrary lines on maps.
  4. Honestly this whole discussion is like a case study in how some people can be made to believe and repeat any old rubbish no matter how palpably nuts it is.
  5. Apparently there have been wallabies living wild in the North for the last century but they're very rare and generally nocturnal.
  6. This one for starters https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2015/30/contents/enacted Slavery, servitude and forced or compulsory labour (1)A person commits an offence if— (a)the person holds another person in slavery or servitude and the circumstances are such that the person knows or ought to know that the other person is held in slavery or servitude, or (b)the person requires another person to perform forced or compulsory labour and the circumstances are such that the person knows or ought to know that the other person is being required to perform forced or compulsory labour.
  7. The right to withdraw labour is a human right because a person who has no right to do so is a slave.
  8. They won't. It's empty bluster from politicians who've got themselves into a mess they can't get out of without admitting their errors. It's not like anyone would pay a blind bit of notice to a ban if they tried it. They can't arrest millions of people if those people decide they've had enough of how their employer (the Government) treats them and refuse to work. Nor can they can't sack them and replace them either because unlike the 70s/80s the employment market is as near to full employment as is technically possible so there's isn't a pool of labour available to replace those who get sacked, most of the jobs are highly skilled and can't be filled except by people with the same skill (which we already don't have enough of because of how the Government treat them) and the country would fall into chaos if they tried anyway. An economist described the Government's rhetoric today as "delusional".
  9. I've seen some tenuous threads started on here... 🙄
  10. How easily manipulated some people are into thinking of human beings as if they weren't. Of thinking about them as personal threats to themselves. All it takes is a few days of newspaper headlines and all the same ugliness reappears... Nobody learns from history.
  11. Because that water comes from reservoirs that are all recording extremely low levels of water and need a lot more than a few hours of heavy rain over the next few months to reach a normal level where we won't be facing be facing water shortages next summer.
  12. The reason the council (and every public service in the UK) are having to think about doing stuff like this is because the Government have provided almost no additional funding to cover some quite large new expenses. One of those is the 5% pay increase (which still amounts to a large pay cut thanks to inflation) the Government announced they were giving to public sector workers in the summer. The Government only provided about 40% of the money required to cover this new mandatory spending and said that public services would have to find the rest of the money out of their existing budgets. In addition to that, the Government have also announced that they're not going to uplift their previously announced annual budgets, where they estimated inflation would be something like 4%, to take account of the actual rate of inflation of around 10% so all public services are now having to find ways delivering services on a substantially reduced budget. There's also the increased cost of gas and electricity and there's no cap on the cost for business or public services so the bills for those will have risen by a lot. The Government have announced some kind of relief scheme here but everyone is still paying more than they were even after that. Oh and the cost of paying for the rebate that was part of the Government's help on household energy costs and which local authories were made to fund. After 12 years of shrinking budgets and increased statutory spending requirements and all of these unfunded extra spending costs, it's not at all surprising that we're seeing things like this being contemplated because despite what people on here may think there's nothing a great deal that can be cut that doesn't hurt us all anymore. Oh and that's before we even get to the massive (at least as large as after 2010) reduction in public spending the Government are now planning in order to pay for every tax cut in their 'Mini' Budget, the vast majority of which they're still going ahead with, plus the £20bn per year they added to our debt repayments by spooking the markets and forcing interest rates to rise. Get used to the idea of not receiving the services you think you're entitled to because none of us are going to for a very long time.
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