Mailwatch(ed) Forum

Both for what's happening now and what this shower did in the past.

Starter for 10. Which party, now banging on about proper blue collar jobs for left behind areas, presided over the following?

Pre-existing thread here:

viewtopic.php?f=13&t=40

Less demand for apprentices in poorer areas isn’t a surprise. Plenty of eager young people prepared to move to better themselves. And that only exacerbates the problem. Don’t know how more routine home working will fundamentally alter the economic geography but like the sound of the potential for provincial towns more than prestige infrastructure projects. Working for a London firm from a semi in Mansfield is like a lottery win.

Youngian wrote: ↑Sun May 23, 2021 8:48 am Less demand for apprentices in poorer areas isn’t a surprise. Plenty of eager young people prepared to move to better themselves. And that only exacerbates the problem. Don’t know how more routine home working will fundamentally alter the economic geography but like the sound of the potential for provincial towns more than prestige infrastructure projects. Working for a London firm from a semi in Mansfield is like a lottery win.

It also sounds about as likely as a lottery win.

I've worked for several firms that espouse the distributed model with a big site in central Scotland and a small HQ / sales footprint in London.
No prizes for guessing which site supplies the bulk of the promotions, the "sexy" new jobs and has a monopoly on elevation to the beard.

Your worker in a semi n Mansfield will certainly be coining it for a while, but under business as usual will be back of the queue for training and promotion, and when it's time for redundancies they'l stick you in the stalls.

And at this point, who says it has to be a *British* person doing that work remotely? Why not someone in Kolkata?

Youngian wrote: ↑Sun May 23, 2021 8:48 am Less demand for apprentices in poorer areas isn’t a surprise. Plenty of eager young people prepared to move to better themselves. And that only exacerbates the problem. Don’t know how more routine home working will fundamentally alter the economic geography but like the sound of the potential for provincial towns more than prestige infrastructure projects. Working for a London firm from a semi in Mansfield is like a lottery win.

Have the blue collar revival apprentices already fucked off?

I change my mind all the time on the infrastructure stuff. On the one hand, if you've not had much spent before, it's easy for spaffing to look like a gamechanger, especially when you throw Facebook money at it. Unless...

https://www.gazettelive.co.uk/news/tees ... s-19810948

Labour's candidate for Tees Valley Mayor, Jessie Joe Jacobs has called for greater transparency and said the public needed to know their money was being spent wisely.

Get with the project, square!

Does even this spaffing undo all the council cuts coming down the track?

Youngian wrote: ↑Sun May 23, 2021 8:48 am Less demand for apprentices in poorer areas isn’t a surprise. Plenty of eager young people prepared to move to better themselves. And that only exacerbates the problem. Don’t know how more routine home working will fundamentally alter the economic geography but like the sound of the potential for provincial towns more than prestige infrastructure projects. Working for a London firm from a semi in Mansfield is like a lottery win.

When I heard about the "Apprenticeship Grab" the problem wasn't so much poor areas missing out.

I saw a lot of bad feeling about careers like media, publishing and law creating white collar apprenticeships as figleaves for posts that used to be unpaid internships.
Rupert and Annunziata getting £3.50 an hour for their hobby job in Chelsea, while Dazza form Workington loses out on his building trade training.

That sounds very plausible. Though by virtue of where the jobs were, that's a process unlikely to work to the advantage of poorer areas.

Boiler wrote: ↑Sun May 23, 2021 10:23 am And at this point, who says it has to be a *British* person doing that work remotely? Why not someone in Kolkata?

Frightening thought. That’s already happened in some crafts like graphic design but its not all one way or ubiquitous.
I’m assuming an organisation would need some part time office based interaction with their team. Which anecdotally seems to be happening.

Couple of people questioning the data (and some of it does look odd- see Oxford and Swindon). But if it's good enough for Giles Wilkes, it's good enough for me.

Lots of the "towns" that are doing well seem to be near London. But there's not too much evidence from this that "left behind Northern towns" are doing much worse than "out of touch metropolitan elite cities".

I wonder if there could be some difference between the poor who live in towns and the poor who live in cities? What could it be, eh?

The Right in 2010: Thicko Gordon Brown has actually harmed poorer areas because public sector non-jobs crowd out private investment.

The Right in 2021: Genius Rishi Sunak will bring on a new Golden Age in Darlington by transferring some public sector jobs there.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/202 ... eak-claims

HS2 eastern leg to Leeds may be scrapped, new leak claims

The Guarding typically get the cost wrong, but anyway.

I'd be surprised at this. Birmingham to Leeds and Newcastle is very slow at the moment.

Alexander Stafford, MP for the Rother Valley, is among several opponents to HS2 among the Conservatives’ 2019 red wall intake.

He said: “What we need is the money invested in transport infrastructure that might actually bring a tangible benefit to seats like mine. We need a better bus service and better links to Manchester across the pennines rather than a hugely expensive white elephant that is sucking resources out of areas like mine and will only benefit a tiny number of people living in central Leeds.”

People who use inter city trains all live in the centre of cities, yeah. Why won't better trains to Manchester suck resources out of your area?

Got a couple of pages into Rail Magazine today and was treated to my first sighting of "levelling up"- not the magazine's fault, I hasten to add, it was reporting on government ministers and Ben Houchen. A firm in Hartlepool has won a large contract to supply concrete for HS2. Good news, no doubt about it. But did nobody in the North of England ever win a contract before?

Tubby Isaacs wrote: ↑Mon Nov 01, 2021 7:48 pm Got a couple of pages into Rail Magazine today and was treated to my first sighting of "levelling up"- not the magazine's fault, I hasten to add, it was reporting on government ministers and Ben Houchen. A firm in Hartlepool has won a large contract to supply concrete for HS2. Good news, no doubt about it. But did nobody in the North of England ever win a contract before?

And therein lies the thing about HS2. All this expense isn't going to somehow be taken out of everyone's pocket and vanish, it's going on contracts that will keep them in work, that they'll be paid for, that will provide investment where they live.

Would this be the HS2 that isn't going to Leeds, and most probably won't get further north than Crewe? The civil engineering journals are full of it. Even the Fail has had a go at Johnson about it.

I think it's unlikely to stop at Crewe. You don't get the Lon-Sco times down enough to compete with air if you do that. And some of the HS2 infrastructure would be shared with the new Liverpool to Manchester (and beyond) link.

More smoke and mirrors.

Almost £2bn slashed from ‘levelling up’ funding in poor areas, despite Boris Johnson’s pledge

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/p ... 46372.html

Actually, shall we put the rail plan stuff on here?

Good thread here.

The word "may" doing some powerlifting there.