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von der Leyen was a housewife. Sunak was a partner at one of the most successful hedge funds of all-time (in his late 20s), and founded his own multi-billion he

von der Leyen was a housewife. Sunak was a partner at one of the most successful hedge funds of all-time (in his late 20s), and founded his own multi-billion hedge fund. His Chancellor started his own business and sold it for $20m before going into politics. Leader of the Opposition was a barrister in one of the top chambers, head of CPS. Shadow Chancellor worked at the BoE. Britain has no shortage of extremely competent politicians, and a strong political system. There is no comparison possible with German politics. German politicians wouldn't be councillors in the UK, and their system is totally cooked (Russia appears to have purchased almost all of the SPD, the media is non-existent, the farce around the Merkel transition was incredible). Junior doctors do not have less purchasing power than a German janitor. One of the main issues with the NHS is doctors going part-time because the pay is so high. The BMA have actually mooted the idea of tax cuts for doctors only between the band of £100-125k in order to get more of them into work (and btw, part of the issue with pay is regional inequality, doctors in London can work two days a week and earn £300k/year...London is distinct). One of the negative aspects of the UK political system is that the BMA has massive political/media/PR influence so people will say things like doctors are underpaid, without connecting to this any other information that they have. Nurses are generally overpaid too. One of the problems in the NHS has been low productivity, and part of that has been significant growth in nurse numbers. But there is a hard cap on their productivity (and a result pay). Starting pay is £27k/year...for reference, this is as much as engineering grads make (generally speaking, almost all grads are underpaid in the UK apart from those going into tech/finance/medicine...relatively low-skill work is almost always overpaid). I actually agree with your point in part, a lot of it is naval-gazing but there is a need for more local powers (if you look at what is happening around Manchester, it is clear that this can work). Thankfully, leading politicians of both parties today are largely past it. Also, public investment isn't being cut whilst taxes are rising...taxes are significantly below the level required to fund public investment. One of the main political issues is that voters don't understand this.

pjc50 4y ago
> His Chancellor started his own business and sold it for $20m before going into politics Would this be the same Chancellor who's just resigned in disgrace over ordering HMRC not to investigate him for not paying tax, then threatening any journalist who mentioned it with a libel lawsuit? > Britain has no shortage of extremely competent politicians We have a massive shortage of competent politicians at delivering benefits to the country. They're only competent at delivering benefits to themselves. If there wasn't a shortage, Truss would never have been put in charge. Anyone trying to defend the Tory record has to defend Truss without just memory-holing that whole 45 day period. Not just herself - a hapless, content-free cipher, now discarded - but everyone who voted for her should be regarded as grossly incompetent. As should people who published positive press about her. Just as SBF got so many glowing reviews before stealing/losing several billions of dollars of customer money.
- skippyboxedhero 4y ago
  > Would this be the same Chancellor who's just resigned in disgrace over ordering HMRC not to investigate him for not paying tax, then threatening any journalist who mentioned it with a libel lawsuit? No. > Anyone trying to defend the Tory record has to defend Truss without just memory-holing that whole 45 day period. And anyone criticizing the system has to explain how someone incompetent was removed so quickly. In any other country, she would have been in power for years. And the shortage theory would only follow logically if the Tories had then elected someone who was at least as bad...which didn't happen. Truss was bad, but that is all you can really say.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    > And anyone criticizing the system has to explain how someone incompetent was removed so quickly. In any other country, she would have been in power for years. She was polling so badly it was seen as the equivalent of her party coming fourth, behind not only Labour, but also the SNP and the LibDems: """That could see the Tories win just 22 seats, behind the SNP on 42, the Lib Dems on 47 and Labour on 515.""" - https://metro.co.uk/2022/10/18/liz-truss-silent-as-poll-points-to-22-seat-election-wipeout-17582308/ https://metro.co.uk/2022/10/18/liz-truss-silent-as-poll-poin... > And the shortage theory would only follow logically if the Tories had then elected someone who was at least as bad...which didn't happen. Not so; while competence and popularity aren't the same things, none of the candidates for leadership of the Tory party have been of a high standard at least since Cameron left.
    - skippyboxedhero 4y ago
      And? She was removed. In most other political systems, it is not possible to remove someone in her position because we have a parliamentary, not presidential, system. Some countries, like Italy, do not even have an elected President. Cameron said Sunak was going to lead the party. He is leagues above Cameron (who, for a British politician, was quite average). If you look in the Cabinet, you see the same thing. It is more obvious once you compare the Tories to Labour, the gulf is huge (Labour really only has Reeves and Starmer, and the latter is, seemingly by his own admission, not strong opposition...btw, I am a Labour supporter, the reason I know this is because I know people in the party, it is embarrassing and all stemmed from the problems with Brown). Truss was one of the weakest members of the Cabinet (alongside her stooges). But Johnson, for all his faults, was the right man at the right time, and left when he was supposed to. Again, another one of the strengths of our system. And we didn't get a Brown situation (you may have forgotten that Brown also polled under the Lib Dems in the run-up to 2010, Corbyn was leader for how long...and he actually polled under the Lib Dems too in 2019).
Marazan 4y ago
How much do you think junior doctors are paid?
- skippyboxedhero 4y ago
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  - Marazan 4y ago
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    - skippyboxedhero 4y ago
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      - Marazan 4y ago
        I know how to read the NHS webpages that list the salary bands of 1st and 2nd year junior doctors. Which you seem to be just ignoring. You talk about senior consultant wages and imply junior doctors are on similar wages when, in reality, theu are no where close. And I have friends who work in the NHS if you want to play the anecdote game.
        skippyboxedhero 4y ago
        Because, as I have told you repeatedly and you can verify by reading any story about the NHS written over the last month, they are working part-time and locum (which is usually 3x FT rates). So your range given is not accurate, you can Google for yourself, but this also does not reflect the actual rate paid anyway. I don't imply at any point that junior doctors have the same wage as senior consultants. I have no idea how poor your comprehension has to be to think this. Okay, then why are we arguing? How many PT per shift? How many locums per shift? This is all stuff that isn't disputed by any side in this debate. You are arguing about stuff that is obvious and self-evident.
ralfd 4y ago
Von der Leyen was a medical doctor. She was only a few years in the 90s a housewife when she and her husband (who have seven children) moved to the US. But 1998 she taught again at university before she moved into politics. Maybe not as impressive as billionaires, but still impressive. And certainly as a family more valuable than hedge funds.
- skippyboxedhero 4y ago
  The hedge fund that Sunak worked for runs one of the largest charities in the world (25th largest, 2nd or largest in the UK). They have also created tens of billions for pension funds. Whether this is the case or not, Von der Leyen is a visibly average politician. Juncker-tier. You actually wonder if there was some kind of competition to elect the biggest idiot.
  - mmarq 4y ago
    And that’s my point, she had to be removed from the ministry of defence because of her incompetence. Still she didn’t even get close to the damage caused by the Eat Out to Help Out thing.
mmarq 4y ago
I have no sympathy for Ursula von der Leyen, I would not have referred to her as a failed politician otherwise. But she does indeed look like a monumental stateswoman compared to Cameron, Osborne, Johnson, Sunak, Gove, Farage, May, Corbyn, Truss, Sunak, etc… Germany works much better than the UK. Just look at salary growth or at the number of strikes that the past 12 years of idiocy unleashed on the UK. Sunak as a chancellor is responsible for idiocies like Eat Out to Help Out, the stamp duty holiday and losing billions of pound of taxpayers’ money to fraudsters during the pandemic. As a prime minister he can’t manage the strikes and half his cabinet is under investigation (by HMRC or for violations of the ministerial code or bullying). He’s clearly not fit for the role and doesn’t know what he’s doing. And at this point I’m not even expecting a strategic vision, I’d just like somebody that doesn’t increase my tax bill by 10 % every year and loses half of the money like a toddler sent to buy milk and bread. An NHS consultant makes 70K, that in London is not enough to send a child to nursery and pay the rent (that is: they are poor). A junior doctor makes a fraction of that. For those unaware, depending on the specialty, a junior doctor may be even 35-40 year old. A private doctor may make a lot of money, but I wrote specifically that the NHS can’t hire, not that I can’t find a doctor in Harley Street. Finally, taxes have gone up (I would have payed £800 less a month in 2009). Sunak alone increased my tax bill by £2-300 a month, while inflation reduced my real income by more than 10%. I don’t have time to find the data, but last time I checked public capital investment as a share of GDP was lower than in 2007.
- skippyboxedhero 4y ago
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- makomk 4y ago
  "Looks like" is very much the right way of describing it - it's largely a matter of appearances. Especially since Brexit, a lot of the British media pushes only the downsides of any option the government chooses and only the upsides of the alternatives, whilst at the same time spinning everything other countries do as a success. For example, Germany's rail infrastructure has been having real problems actually running trains as a result of massive underinvestment (about a third of what the UK spends if I remember ightly) but our media makes it sounds like they're the ones with a better rail system due to actually investing. Or take Covid - our press pushed this tale about South Korea having such effective contact tracing they could lift restrictions and reopen society, whereas our incompetent government failed to do so, but in reality they were actually less successful at doing so and even had their own equivalent of Eat Out to Help Out planned that they completely failed to launch in 2020 because they couldn't keep restrictions lifted for long enough. It's just that the British press only reported on them attempting to lift restrictions as proof they succeeded and ignored the part where it kept on failingg and they were almost immediately reimposed, whilst their UK coverage only focused on failures and not on the country being largely out of lockdown for most of summer 2020. Also, the only zero-fraud option for something like furlough or business support is to deny everyone - every real-world set of anti-fraud checks inevitably blocks some genuine people and permits some fraudsters, I'm sure HN must be familiar with this concept by now, and of course the media attacked the government as incompetent for both. (For example, complaining that businesses couldn't just add people to payroll and immediately claim furlough for them - which would enable massive, trivial fraud - and also that they had no way of detecting if employers were making people come into work whilst claming they were furloughed.) Most of the publications pushing that story even spin normal benefit fraud as something that's not a big deal and right-wing Tory attempts to crack down on it as damaging and counterproductive using essentially this argument. On the other hand, Germany's financial regulator actually opened a criminal investigation into the journalists who investigated the Wirecard fraud, and Germany's own press and politicians failed so hard at investigating that it fell to journalists from outside the country working for the Financial Times to finally prove it. Those are, qualititively, very different kinds of fraud problems and not in a way that makes Germany look good.
foldr 4y ago
> von der Leyen was a housewife This is a very misleading statement. Here’s a Wikipedia summary of her career, which you could easily have checked: > In 1980, she switched to studying medicine and enrolled at the Hannover Medical School, where she graduated in 1987 and acquired her medical license.[33] From 1988 to 1992, she worked as an assistant physician at the Women's Clinic of the Hannover Medical School. Upon completing her doctoral studies, she graduated as a Doctor of Medicine in 1991. Following the birth of twins, she was a housewife in Stanford, California, from 1992 to 1996, while her husband was a faculty member of Stanford University.[34] > From 1998 to 2002, she taught at the Department of Epidemiology, Social Medicine and Health System Research at the Hannover Medical School.[citation needed] In 2001 she earned a Master of Public Health degree at the institution.[35][36][37]
doe88 4y ago
> von der Leyen was a housewife. Sunak was a partner at one of the most successful hedge funds of all-time (in his late 20s), and founded his own multi-billion hedge fund. A bit partial I think, for those interested, maybe a more complete profile from BBC (2021): https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000vp0r https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000vp0r

pjc50 4y ago

> His Chancellor started his own business and sold it for $20m before going into politics Would this be the same Chancellor who's just resigned in disgrace over ordering HMRC not to investigate him for not paying tax, then threatening any journalist who mentioned it with a libel lawsuit? > Britain has no shortage of extremely competent politicians We have a massive shortage of competent politicians at delivering benefits to the country. They're only competent at delivering benefits to themselves. If there wasn't a shortage, Truss would never have been put in charge. Anyone trying to defend the Tory record has to defend Truss without just memory-holing that whole 45 day period. Not just herself - a hapless, content-free cipher, now discarded - but everyone who voted for her should be regarded as grossly incompetent. As should people who published positive press about her. Just as SBF got so many glowing reviews before stealing/losing several billions of dollars of customer money.

skippyboxedhero 4y ago
> Would this be the same Chancellor who's just resigned in disgrace over ordering HMRC not to investigate him for not paying tax, then threatening any journalist who mentioned it with a libel lawsuit? No. > Anyone trying to defend the Tory record has to defend Truss without just memory-holing that whole 45 day period. And anyone criticizing the system has to explain how someone incompetent was removed so quickly. In any other country, she would have been in power for years. And the shortage theory would only follow logically if the Tories had then elected someone who was at least as bad...which didn't happen. Truss was bad, but that is all you can really say.
- ben_w 4y ago
  > And anyone criticizing the system has to explain how someone incompetent was removed so quickly. In any other country, she would have been in power for years. She was polling so badly it was seen as the equivalent of her party coming fourth, behind not only Labour, but also the SNP and the LibDems: """That could see the Tories win just 22 seats, behind the SNP on 42, the Lib Dems on 47 and Labour on 515.""" - https://metro.co.uk/2022/10/18/liz-truss-silent-as-poll-points-to-22-seat-election-wipeout-17582308/ https://metro.co.uk/2022/10/18/liz-truss-silent-as-poll-poin... > And the shortage theory would only follow logically if the Tories had then elected someone who was at least as bad...which didn't happen. Not so; while competence and popularity aren't the same things, none of the candidates for leadership of the Tory party have been of a high standard at least since Cameron left.
  - skippyboxedhero 4y ago
    And? She was removed. In most other political systems, it is not possible to remove someone in her position because we have a parliamentary, not presidential, system. Some countries, like Italy, do not even have an elected President. Cameron said Sunak was going to lead the party. He is leagues above Cameron (who, for a British politician, was quite average). If you look in the Cabinet, you see the same thing. It is more obvious once you compare the Tories to Labour, the gulf is huge (Labour really only has Reeves and Starmer, and the latter is, seemingly by his own admission, not strong opposition...btw, I am a Labour supporter, the reason I know this is because I know people in the party, it is embarrassing and all stemmed from the problems with Brown). Truss was one of the weakest members of the Cabinet (alongside her stooges). But Johnson, for all his faults, was the right man at the right time, and left when he was supposed to. Again, another one of the strengths of our system. And we didn't get a Brown situation (you may have forgotten that Brown also polled under the Lib Dems in the run-up to 2010, Corbyn was leader for how long...and he actually polled under the Lib Dems too in 2019).

Marazan 4y ago

How much do you think junior doctors are paid?

skippyboxedhero 4y ago
[flagged]
- Marazan 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - skippyboxedhero 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - Marazan 4y ago
      I know how to read the NHS webpages that list the salary bands of 1st and 2nd year junior doctors. Which you seem to be just ignoring. You talk about senior consultant wages and imply junior doctors are on similar wages when, in reality, theu are no where close. And I have friends who work in the NHS if you want to play the anecdote game.
      - skippyboxedhero 4y ago
        Because, as I have told you repeatedly and you can verify by reading any story about the NHS written over the last month, they are working part-time and locum (which is usually 3x FT rates). So your range given is not accurate, you can Google for yourself, but this also does not reflect the actual rate paid anyway. I don't imply at any point that junior doctors have the same wage as senior consultants. I have no idea how poor your comprehension has to be to think this. Okay, then why are we arguing? How many PT per shift? How many locums per shift? This is all stuff that isn't disputed by any side in this debate. You are arguing about stuff that is obvious and self-evident.

ralfd 4y ago

Von der Leyen was a medical doctor. She was only a few years in the 90s a housewife when she and her husband (who have seven children) moved to the US. But 1998 she taught again at university before she moved into politics. Maybe not as impressive as billionaires, but still impressive. And certainly as a family more valuable than hedge funds.

skippyboxedhero 4y ago
The hedge fund that Sunak worked for runs one of the largest charities in the world (25th largest, 2nd or largest in the UK). They have also created tens of billions for pension funds. Whether this is the case or not, Von der Leyen is a visibly average politician. Juncker-tier. You actually wonder if there was some kind of competition to elect the biggest idiot.
- mmarq 4y ago
  And that’s my point, she had to be removed from the ministry of defence because of her incompetence. Still she didn’t even get close to the damage caused by the Eat Out to Help Out thing.

mmarq 4y ago

I have no sympathy for Ursula von der Leyen, I would not have referred to her as a failed politician otherwise. But she does indeed look like a monumental stateswoman compared to Cameron, Osborne, Johnson, Sunak, Gove, Farage, May, Corbyn, Truss, Sunak, etc… Germany works much better than the UK. Just look at salary growth or at the number of strikes that the past 12 years of idiocy unleashed on the UK. Sunak as a chancellor is responsible for idiocies like Eat Out to Help Out, the stamp duty holiday and losing billions of pound of taxpayers’ money to fraudsters during the pandemic. As a prime minister he can’t manage the strikes and half his cabinet is under investigation (by HMRC or for violations of the ministerial code or bullying). He’s clearly not fit for the role and doesn’t know what he’s doing. And at this point I’m not even expecting a strategic vision, I’d just like somebody that doesn’t increase my tax bill by 10 % every year and loses half of the money like a toddler sent to buy milk and bread. An NHS consultant makes 70K, that in London is not enough to send a child to nursery and pay the rent (that is: they are poor). A junior doctor makes a fraction of that. For those unaware, depending on the specialty, a junior doctor may be even 35-40 year old. A private doctor may make a lot of money, but I wrote specifically that the NHS can’t hire, not that I can’t find a doctor in Harley Street. Finally, taxes have gone up (I would have payed £800 less a month in 2009). Sunak alone increased my tax bill by £2-300 a month, while inflation reduced my real income by more than 10%. I don’t have time to find the data, but last time I checked public capital investment as a share of GDP was lower than in 2007.

skippyboxedhero 4y ago
[dead]
makomk 4y ago
"Looks like" is very much the right way of describing it - it's largely a matter of appearances. Especially since Brexit, a lot of the British media pushes only the downsides of any option the government chooses and only the upsides of the alternatives, whilst at the same time spinning everything other countries do as a success. For example, Germany's rail infrastructure has been having real problems actually running trains as a result of massive underinvestment (about a third of what the UK spends if I remember ightly) but our media makes it sounds like they're the ones with a better rail system due to actually investing. Or take Covid - our press pushed this tale about South Korea having such effective contact tracing they could lift restrictions and reopen society, whereas our incompetent government failed to do so, but in reality they were actually less successful at doing so and even had their own equivalent of Eat Out to Help Out planned that they completely failed to launch in 2020 because they couldn't keep restrictions lifted for long enough. It's just that the British press only reported on them attempting to lift restrictions as proof they succeeded and ignored the part where it kept on failingg and they were almost immediately reimposed, whilst their UK coverage only focused on failures and not on the country being largely out of lockdown for most of summer 2020. Also, the only zero-fraud option for something like furlough or business support is to deny everyone - every real-world set of anti-fraud checks inevitably blocks some genuine people and permits some fraudsters, I'm sure HN must be familiar with this concept by now, and of course the media attacked the government as incompetent for both. (For example, complaining that businesses couldn't just add people to payroll and immediately claim furlough for them - which would enable massive, trivial fraud - and also that they had no way of detecting if employers were making people come into work whilst claming they were furloughed.) Most of the publications pushing that story even spin normal benefit fraud as something that's not a big deal and right-wing Tory attempts to crack down on it as damaging and counterproductive using essentially this argument. On the other hand, Germany's financial regulator actually opened a criminal investigation into the journalists who investigated the Wirecard fraud, and Germany's own press and politicians failed so hard at investigating that it fell to journalists from outside the country working for the Financial Times to finally prove it. Those are, qualititively, very different kinds of fraud problems and not in a way that makes Germany look good.

foldr 4y ago

> von der Leyen was a housewife This is a very misleading statement. Here’s a Wikipedia summary of her career, which you could easily have checked: > In 1980, she switched to studying medicine and enrolled at the Hannover Medical School, where she graduated in 1987 and acquired her medical license.[33] From 1988 to 1992, she worked as an assistant physician at the Women's Clinic of the Hannover Medical School. Upon completing her doctoral studies, she graduated as a Doctor of Medicine in 1991. Following the birth of twins, she was a housewife in Stanford, California, from 1992 to 1996, while her husband was a faculty member of Stanford University.[34] > From 1998 to 2002, she taught at the Department of Epidemiology, Social Medicine and Health System Research at the Hannover Medical School.[citation needed] In 2001 she earned a Master of Public Health degree at the institution.[35][36][37]

doe88 4y ago

> von der Leyen was a housewife. Sunak was a partner at one of the most successful hedge funds of all-time (in his late 20s), and founded his own multi-billion hedge fund. A bit partial I think, for those interested, maybe a more complete profile from BBC (2021): https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000vp0r https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000vp0r