New starters are on career average. If you have been in the system a while then some of your pension will be under the old scheme. In a few years they will all be career average.
For too long successive governments have shied away from putting up taxes and in particular putting up taxes for the wealthy, who they fear will leave the country if they do. There is however little evidence to support this. So money is borrowed. So youâre in debt.
If you ask people in the street if they want: better roads, nhs, housing etc they do. But they donât think they should be paying for it.
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Or genuine arguments 
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I think that there is a lack of honest, mature debate about this - but, then I donât think most people are capable of that.
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Canât he charge it at or near work?
I did raise a few.
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It appears that ideology and vested interests are two driving forces behind the push for all-electric transport. The technology and infrastructure is not anywhere near sufficiently mature for such existential changes to the lives of ordinary people. Itâs interesting that the rich & famous, such as some among the Hollywood acting class and the former US giant PC software owner pontificate about climate change and fossil fuels, but they maintain and enjoy fleets of vehicles, aircraft and monstrous yachts.
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Well yes because âone rule for meâ is alive and well. As for electric transport - we have a thread for that.
Unfortunately no. He travels 30,000 miles a year all over the south of England installing communications equipment, so his workplace is constantly changing. Just to add to the complexity of the situation, there are 4 different public charging points in the small town where he lives, but not one of them will connect to the car !
Same thing happened to me, I had a diesel car that used +/- 5.5l for 100kms, then we had to go green, head office says we go all electric, ah I say but I need to drive 7-8 hours in a day sometimes & after driving an hour and a half I donât want to be sitting in a service station charging the car, time is money after all. Ok head office came back, youâll have a hybrid then, ah I said but theyâre only electric up until 70km/h I do mostly motorways. So I ended up with a petrol car that didnât do as many km per liter and cost the company more. I ended all that with an agreed wage rise and the company pays me by km to use my own car. Win win situation. Not sure if this can be done in the UK? As here in France the pay back isnât part of the salary so not declared, so Iâm quids inđ
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Youâre just repeating tired old arguments that were comprehensively debunked decades ago. Itâs not necessarily the level of CO2 in the atmosphere that is the real issue (although itâs still not great on itâs own), itâs the rate of change that is the real issue. The huge surge in CO2 levels creates an environment where plants and animals canât adapt fast enough to survive or migrate to other areas. Man is also directly contributing to habitat loss and lack of migration opportunities, compounding the problem. The current rate of extinction amongst plants and animals is around 100 times the natural rate, and is accelerating (Past and future decline and extinction of species | Royal Society). Most of this is due to human activity and is being exacerbated by climate change. It is the new mass extinction and itâs happening now and we may not be totally immune to it.
Iâll leave you with an excellent XKCD which shows the problem very well. As itâs so long, youâll have to click on the link to view it properly.
Tne rest of you post is just defeatist nonsense.
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Itâs a head scratcher isnât it 
. Record government tax receipts are not really the issue. Government spending should be increasing year on year to keep pace with inflation. During the âausterity yearsâ up until 2023/4, UK public debt increased by around 230%. In the same period government repayment of interest on debt has also more than doubled, although the reasons are complex. This, along with increased spending during that period on health, social security and other areas has made government spending balloon. Austerity also created a society where average wages stagnated and many people near the bottom of the pile, many in fixed hours contract work, were much worse off. This caused a big dip in productivity which meant that people were paying an increasing amount of their earnings in tax just so the government could stay afloat. Without austerity, the country had at least a chance to increase productivity and generate more wealth to support increased government spending. But instead austerity put a huge brake on the economy and created the issues we see today. I could write an essay on this topic but lifeâs too short.
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Are you economist, hairbear?
No, not at all. I just like to inform myself about what is happening and why.
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Me too.
You attempt to dismiss without explanation the few points that I raise. Climate alarmism orthodoxy maintains that the rise in atmospheric CO2 concentrations since the beginning of the industrial revolution is causing catastrophic changes to life from claimed climate pattern change. Notice that this claim has changed over the last 70-75 years from freezing of the earth, to over-heating of the earth, and now to âclimate changeâ; however, despite such wild uncertainty, CO2 is supposedly certain to be the determining factor of an undecided type of change. You fail to reconcile my earlier point that the earthâs temperature rose and fell, each for a few centuries at a time, around what has been a mean level of 288,5K, while atmospheric CO2 remained constant for at least 2.000 years preceding the industrial revolution. And, this is only considering 2.000 years of earthâs climate.
In scientific terms, no causal relationship between atmospheric concentration of CO2 and global mean surface temperatures has ever been demonstrated. You deviate from the issue by introducing an erroneous claim that the main determining factor for claimed change to climate is the the rate of change of concentration. The latter was certainly much higher during very turbulent periods of volcanic activity many 100s to 1000s of millions of years ago, and no one can refute that life on earth has succeeded in flouring. While life has burgeoned over this time period, as CO2 concentrations were often consistently multiples of todayâs 415ppm level, how can the alarmists claim, let alone prove, that a unit of CO2 from fossil fuel release has a supposed much greater impact on the climate than an equal unit of non-human generated CO2. Then we have to ascertain what level of CO2 can be considered to be normally existent without the burning of fossil fuels, when it has been shown to be a very highly variable quantity, many eons before the Gregorian calendar was even an idea.
Consider that CO2 is one of several green house gases, one playing only a minor role in maintaining a life-supporting environment. The most significant one is atmospheric water vapour. Therefore, for those who believe that CO2 levels are rising out of control, it is reasonable to assert that the imposition of serious curtailment on this plant food is a reckless act that is causing existential changes to the lives of already struggling ordinary people, in terms of e.g. food security, healthcare, heating, lighting and transport needs.
If you look at CO2 concentrations vs GMST over a meaningful time series, say 600 million years, it is patently clear that CO2 lags, NOT leads, GMST, and by around 800 to 1000 years. The 270 year considered time frame is not sufficient to observe this. This introduces a very substantial aspect that even all the most sophisticated climate modelling technology has utterly failed to model; in the interests of brevity, I wonât detail it here.
With regard to animal habitat and migration patterns, there is no doubt that human activity, including farming, construction and habitation, one could argue human population, has had a defining impact. However, your point infers a causal relationship between anthropogenic generated CO2 and changes to animal habit & migration; this is utterly erroneous.
You introduce the concept of ânatural rate of extinctionâ. What does this mean? How has or could this be determined, particularly when it has been very much a variable quantity since the dawn of life on earth? Has any institution actually arrived at a figure or definition of the natural rate of extinction?
I want to return to the time scales of consideration. We are being distracted by observations over a 270 year period, when climate has been changing for various reasons for 4.500 millions years. Without even considering ANY data over recent centuries, the considered time series is so insignificant that it totally invalidates any claim of changes to the climate pattern. To some extent, we have had the benefits of temperature measurement and climate records for the shorter time series (another complex subject), affording us good, but not defining, data granularity. The prior unavailability of instantaneous data has required the substitution of proxy data. Proxy data only provides, at best, century or millenial average data, thereby concealing actual events. This invalidates the comparison of weather/climate events over the last 270 years (usually whipped up by our media) with pre-industrial times.
Climate is an impossibly complex and uncertain topic, one that science does not yet understand. It is disingenuous and insulting for some scientific, governmental, ruling elites etc to claim that CO2 levels are the control mechanism of climate. Climate will almost certainly continue to vary in a cyclical pattern, not in any one fatalistic direction. There are real and true ecological challenges, but there is no evidence that CO2 atmospheric concentration is an existential threat to humanity or other life forms.
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Forget 270 years, how do you explain the significant climate changes in the last 20 years?
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You are asserting that a very much shorter time series is more representative than an already insignificant one. Even if there has been a detected change over this time, it is misguided to consider what happens in 20 years to be representative of a time series of 4.500 million years, or even 2.000 years,. The reason is that what occurs in twenty years is simply data noise over a meaningful time period. This noise was not detectable prior to the successful measurement of instantaneous data and record keeping, and we are unable to assert, therefore, that similar changes to what you allege did not occur in earlier times. Humans usually judge circumstances over their life time, or over the period of societal collective memory; we look for patterns over our living experience. These are isolated observations, not representative of a statistically meaningful time period.
How do you know that in e.g the year 948 or 1361 that there werenât prolonged periods of heat, drought, wind etc? There area historical records of these past times, but events were not systematically recorded or their records maintained.
I know from historical data, prior to meteorological records, that in the area where I grew up there were a number of years between at least 1780 and the 1830s when it rained so much from March until October in these years that crops were lost, as farmers couldnât carry out their harvest, and local famines was experienced. If that happened today in the UK or France the media, sections of the scientific community, politicians etc would be attributing this to âClimate Changeâ.
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Rising sea levels are good indicator of climate change and we know that before 1900 they had been relatively stable for around 3000 years, the average rate of the annual increase is now double what it was 125 years ago and the only thing that has changed in that time is worldwide mass industrialisation so clearly the increases in the sea levels are down to us humans.
Of course you can argue that this could have occurred millions of years ago and weâre now in a new climate cycle but have a look at whatâs happened with the ozone layer over Antarctica, the ban on ozone-depleting substances has resulted in the hole of the ozone layer being smaller and shorter-lived than six years ago, climate change can be reversed if we really want it to.
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And likewise loss of glaciers, which has become astonishingly rapid and extensive.
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