The UK Politics and EU Referendum thread - merged

[DungBeetle]

Back to an older topic.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-34857015

Genuinely terrifying

Jeez.  Won't this potentially reduce life expectancy by 20 or so years?  Any sizeable wound or any operation and you're fecked?

[TightEnd]

Can someone explain to me how us bombing Syria makes us more safe?

Let's for the sake of this argument assume that bombing Syria is the correct thing to do. I'm not saying it is, but just bear with me.

The US, Russia and France are already bombing the place. I can't imagine the addition of a few UK planes will really make much of a difference one way or another, but places us directly in the firing line for revenge attacks.

Is it just wanting to be seen to be "playing our part" and wanting to be seen as a major player on the global scale and to be allowed to be involved in the reconstruction process or am I being too cynical?

you could bomb saudi arabia and say we wouldn't stop until they stopped facilitiating the funding for ISIS

I am being facetious, but i tend to agree that bombing on its own is not the solution

[AlunB]

Back to an older topic.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-34857015

Genuinely terrifying

Jeez.  Won't this potentially reduce life expectancy by 20 or so years?  Any sizeable wound or any operation and you're fecked?

That's the implication yes.

[AlunB]

Can someone explain to me how us bombing Syria makes us more safe?

Let's for the sake of this argument assume that bombing Syria is the correct thing to do. I'm not saying it is, but just bear with me.

The US, Russia and France are already bombing the place. I can't imagine the addition of a few UK planes will really make much of a difference one way or another, but places us directly in the firing line for revenge attacks.

Is it just wanting to be seen to be "playing our part" and wanting to be seen as a major player on the global scale and to be allowed to be involved in the reconstruction process or am I being too cynical?

you could bomb saudi arabia and say we wouldn't stop until they stopped facilitiating the funding for ISIS

I am being facetious, but i tend to agree that bombing on its own is not the solution

What about Qatar?

[horseplayer]

Click to see full-size image.

[TightEnd]

Can someone explain to me how us bombing Syria makes us more safe?

Let's for the sake of this argument assume that bombing Syria is the correct thing to do. I'm not saying it is, but just bear with me.

The US, Russia and France are already bombing the place. I can't imagine the addition of a few UK planes will really make much of a difference one way or another, but places us directly in the firing line for revenge attacks.

Is it just wanting to be seen to be "playing our part" and wanting to be seen as a major player on the global scale and to be allowed to be involved in the reconstruction process or am I being too cynical?

you could bomb saudi arabia and say we wouldn't stop until they stopped facilitiating the funding for ISIS

I am being facetious, but i tend to agree that bombing on its own is not the solution

What about Qatar?

and them.

[AlunB]

Click to see full-size image.

This situation is completely ludicrous. The one thing ANY health service needs is well motivated and well trained doctors. How pissing them off and reducing pay achieves anything is beyond me. It is so patently obvious that the government doesn't actually understand the complaints junior doctors have here and is pretending it's all about money. It's not.

My dad was a GP and the way the government treated pay negotiations with them was beyond inept and came from a fundamental misunderstanding of what the GPs were actually complaining about, which was the stress of out of hours work.

[AlunB]

The main reason it's impossible to see a decent GP out of hours is because the (Labour) government offered them what was basically a 10% pay cut for no longer having out of hours work and they snapped their hand off.

[DungBeetle]

The main reason it's impossible to see a decent GP out of hours is because the (Labour) government offered them what was basically a 10% pay cut for no longer having out of hours work and they snapped their hand off.

6% cut to base.  But wasn't a new bonus structure put in place which allowed them to claw this back and more?

"Thousands of family doctors are being paid automatic bonuses of up to £14,000 a year simply for staying in their jobs, new figures disclose.
Official statistics reveal that more than 13,000 GPs are being awarded annual payments for time served, under a system which was quietly introduced as part of Labour’s GP contract."

"GPs were so stunned by the terms offered to them when negotiating their new contract that they thought it was a "bit of a laugh", a doctor has said."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6314301.stm

[AlunB]

The main reason it's impossible to see a decent GP out of hours is because the (Labour) government offered them what was basically a 10% pay cut for no longer having out of hours work and they snapped their hand off.

6% cut to base.  But wasn't a new bonus structure put in place which allowed them to claw this back and more?

"Thousands of family doctors are being paid automatic bonuses of up to £14,000 a year simply for staying in their jobs, new figures disclose.
Official statistics reveal that more than 13,000 GPs are being awarded annual payments for time served, under a system which was quietly introduced as part of Labour’s GP contract."

"GPs were so stunned by the terms offered to them when negotiating their new contract that they thought it was a "bit of a laugh", a doctor has said."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6314301.stm

Yeah it was an effective pay rise I think. My dad was a GP at the time and he is still incredulous about it. They made a huge error of judgement. They could have probably offered a real terms pay cut and they would have taken it to get rid of out of hours on-call work.

On call work was enormously stressful for my dad, and all the doctors he worked with. It was by a long long way the worst part of the job. The government simply looked at is as a budget line and thought doctors were making a massive fuss over nothing and it would be easy to get people to do that work. They literally couldn't have been more wrong.

I suspect something similar is happening here.

[The Camel]

That article in The Atlantic crystallised the sort of opponent we are facing in IS.

It is nothing like anything we've ever faced before.

It is like a cult, more like followers of David Koresh or Jim Jones than anything else. Only instead of 800 followers, IS has 8 million.

Bombing them will actually probably help their cause. As ever more disaffected Muslims join up for the hopes of their 72 virgins in Paradise on martyrdom.

The only way to beat them is to take away their land, as the whole ideology is based on an ever expanding caliphate.

There is a passage in the Koran where it talks of a mighty battle against the "forces of Rome" (now the Americans) which will be defeated at Raqqa.

As far as I can see fighting this battle is the only way to beat them.

[RED-DOG]

What is the point of a whipped vote, isn't it a contradiction in terms?

[AlunB]

That article in The Atlantic crystallised the sort of opponent we are facing in IS.

It is nothing like anything we've ever faced before.

It is like a cult, more like followers of David Koresh or Jim Jones than anything else. Only instead of 800 followers, IS has 8 million.

Bombing them will actually probably help their cause. As ever more disaffected Muslims join up for the hopes of their 72 virgins in Paradise on martyrdom.

The only way to beat them is to take away their land, as the whole ideology is based on an ever expanding caliphate.

There is a passage in the Koran where it talks of a mighty battle against the "forces of Rome" (now the Americans) which will be defeated at Raqqa.

As far as I can see fighting this battle is the only way to beat them.

There is sort of an inherent logical flaw in that though. Unlike other cults this is based on ideology and theology rather than a central figure. How do you destroy an ideology?

[DungBeetle]

The main reason it's impossible to see a decent GP out of hours is because the (Labour) government offered them what was basically a 10% pay cut for no longer having out of hours work and they snapped their hand off.

6% cut to base.  But wasn't a new bonus structure put in place which allowed them to claw this back and more?

"Thousands of family doctors are being paid automatic bonuses of up to £14,000 a year simply for staying in their jobs, new figures disclose.
Official statistics reveal that more than 13,000 GPs are being awarded annual payments for time served, under a system which was quietly introduced as part of Labour’s GP contract."

"GPs were so stunned by the terms offered to them when negotiating their new contract that they thought it was a "bit of a laugh", a doctor has said."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6314301.stm

Yeah it was an effective pay rise I think. My dad was a GP at the time and he is still incredulous about it. They made a huge error of judgement. They could have probably offered a real terms pay cut and they would have taken it to get rid of out of hours on-call work.

On call work was enormously stressful for my dad, and all the doctors he worked with. It was by a long long way the worst part of the job. The government simply looked at is as a budget line and thought doctors were making a massive fuss over nothing and it would be easy to get people to do that work. They literally couldn't have been more wrong.

I suspect something similar is happening here.

Yeah - seems fair to have a contract that has a heavy bonus of out of hours and on call work and then GPs can decide what to do.  Seems they just messed up the contract completely.

The graphs for A&E attendance has gone through the roof since the 2004 contract.

You are right it seems exactly the same thing may be at work here.

[TightEnd]

What is the point of a whipped vote, isn't it a contradiction in terms?

Party politics and party discipline are incredibly powerful forces in our parliamentary democracy, and also in others too.

While an MP is elected to represent their constituents, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that, the vast majority of the time, how an MP votes on various issues will be determined by their party’s whip and not by what their constituents want.

The reality is that an MP who regularly votes against their party’s official position on a given issue will soon find themselves ostracised by the party. Until the seismic shift of Corbyn winning (largely because the voting system neutered what the party apparatus wanted and put the voting in the hands of £3 members) that happened to the hard left in the labour party, even those who were MPs. on the other side, the eurosceptic right (bill cash etc) had no chance of advancement, many left for UKIP etc because they were not conforming to the party view

Indeed, in many ways, it is an act of political courage for an individual MP to defy their party and vote the way their constituents want, or according to their own conscience. Or career suicide.

What this means is that if a party has an official position on a given issue, its MPs are expected to vote that way if the issue comes up for a vote in the legislature, even if majority opinion in an MP’s constituency differs. While this might seem wrong on the surface, one could counter-argue that voters in that constituency knew what the various parties’ positions were on each major issue, and so it would be expected that whoever they elect will vote according to that party’s position.