JeezâŠwas never a fan but
The comments from his fan boys/girls on the Twatter link probably explains why weâre not getting a handle on managing Covid 
OK, pay rises have been rare in the last year but this feels like a slap in the face for the NHS
Ffs
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It does but itâs 1% more than most people are getting and at least they are getting 100% of their salary. A huge number of people who still have a job are still on pay cuts or on the 80% furlough money
Thatâs why there wonât be a public backlash - in the real sense - not in Twitter land
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Please. Itâs an effective pay cut after a year of hell which they have had to work in.
Itâs fucking poor form.
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Another ÂŁ15 billion for Dido Hardingâs excellence though so thatâs ok. ÂŁ37 billion.
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So what should they get 2% 5% 10%? Iâm not sure any amount of money will compensate.
Iâm not saying is fair reward - its not. But when compared to the financial circumstances of everyone else, and against a backdrop of public finances that are in the shitter, it is at least something. I believe it is also on top of previously agreed pay deals.
Well, if you believe they deserve a pay rise, inflation plus 2%.
Not that hard a gesture to make in the midst of all the money gone on cronyism, is it?
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Interesting view on the Covid situation in Europe
Emmanuel Macron and Boris Johnson have swapped places. The French technocrat has become the Covid gambler, hoping to muddle through the third wave with half measures and to wish away the invading variants.
In late January he took one of his Jupiterian decisions - alone - and defied the overwhelming majority of his scientists, something Mr Johnson never actually did despite the media myth in Europe that he was some sort of Bolsonaro.
Mr Macron overruled the Conseil Scientifique and Franceâs epidemiologists, and even his own prime minister. This was a big deal. It was seen as an act of bold leadership by an intelligent man weighing up all the medical, social, and economic variables in their just proportions. He was rewarded with a bounce in the polls.
Every week without a lockdown buys time, he said confidently, a week gained for economic recovery. This is an extraordinary line of argument given everything we have learned over the pandemic. He himself criticised Mr Johnson (unfairly) for delaying in much the same way a year ago before the respass of our Magna Carta rights became routine and when it was perhaps more understandable, threatening to close the French frontier at one point unless the UK followed his lead.
But for Mr Macronâs gamble to pay off, it requires stable infection and very fast vaccination. Both are slipping away from him. Franceâs case count is merely impressionistic but the trend is clear: numbers in ICU beds have risen to 3,544 and are near alarm thresholds in several areas. The share of positive Covid tests is 7.3pc, the highest since last November in the second wave.
What Mr Macron has in fact done with each week of delay is to let new variants take hold. The English B.1.1.1.7 is already 53pc of cases, reaching 90pc in Dunkirk. The South African and Brazil variants top 10pc in eleven French departments, and 54pc in Moselle. The UKâs latest flap over an escaped case of the Brazil case seems surreal when set against events on our Continental doorstep.
Yet still he hesitates. The evening curfew has been tightened from 8pm to 6pm as a token gesture, but this chiefly means that employed working people must crush together in supermarkets at the end of the day. Dunkirk and Nice have gone into weekend lockdowns. Paris and 20 departments are likely to follow. France is edging crab-like and slowly towards another lockdown that dares not speak its name.
It is hard to see how Mr Macron is going to get away with this. And if he fails, his Enarque I-know-best presidency will be damaged beyond repair, with consequences for European politics. As of early March, the eurosceptic Marine Le Pen is Franceâs dauphine , running almost neck and neck in the polls for a run-off duel.
To succeed, he needs lightning-fast jabs with a stretched single dose strategy - the British strategy deemed dangerously irresponsible by his anglophobe Europe minister, Clément Beaune, but rapidly gaining support among alarmed health experts in Germany, Italy, and France itself.
Instead Mr Macron drifted into the immunisation campaign with a breathtaking lack of urgency, keener to assuage sottish anti-vaxxers than to serve rational citizens. The problem is not just that he rubbished the AstraZeneca jab as next to useless for over 65s when the peer-reviewed science said no such thing, but also that the French authorities refused to sanction its use for the elderly.
This derailed the whole vaccination process. France did not have the cold storage chains to deliver the Pfizer-BioNTech jab en masse to care homes or the elderly. Everything got snarled up.
Three months into the global vaccination drive, barely more than 4 million people in France have protection from a first jab. Just 24pc of the 1.1m AstraZeneca doses delivered so far have been administered. The target was 80pc to 85pc.
France has now tweaked the age limit to 75 for certain cases but has not removed the stigma. Mr Macron is belatedly talking up the vaccine but still damns it with faint praise. It is as if he cannot bring himself to accept the real-life data from Scotland and England, as if loath to tell the French people that it cuts hospital admissions by 94pc and slightly outperforms the Pfizer-BioNTech jab.
The ĂlysĂ©e Palace insisted on Wednesday that Mr Macron will soon be opening up rather than closing down. âMore normal living conditions are in sight. It is getting closer and closer. We hope maybe from mid-April, and we are preparing for it," said his spokesman.
Bet on that if you dare. It is just as likely that a stubbornly high death toll will prolong the agony into late spring, with reopening coming too late to save the 2021 tourist season. Economic recovery may not arrive until the second half of 2021. That would push French public debt through 120pc of GDP and push thousands more firms over the edge, with non-linear risks to the banking system and social cohesion.
Italy is a few days behind France in this enveloping third wave. Infections have been climbing since early February. The Istituto Superiore di SanitĂ says the English variant has reached 54pc of new cases, with Brazilian hotspots in Lazio and Tuscany. âIf we donât act quickly weâll have 30,000 to 40,000 cases a day within a week, just as occured in England,â said Prof Andrea Crisanti from Imperial College.
He told the Piazzapulita TV show that the system of regional âyellow zonesâ had failed and that Italyâs political leaders do not understand what is happening. âThey are talking about reopening. They are absolutely unrealistic about the transmission dynamic right now,â he said.
Premier Mario Draghi refuses to pull the trigger. Restaurants and bars are still open in yellow zones up to 6pm. Cinemas and concert halls will open in two weeks. This is courting fate.
Italyâs economy is already on track for another quarter of contraction. If the second quarter blows up as well, the damage from permanent scarring rises ineluctably. So does the likelihood of future sovereign insolvency. Mr Draghi might find that his own reputation for technocrat competence is on the line.
Nor is Germany out of the woods. It too refused to approve the AstraZeneca vaccine for the elderly on precautionary grounds, even though the Oxford group was in reality more careful with its original testing than Pfizer-BioNTech, though less slick with PR.
This German decision has had the same paralysing effect on the rollout as in France, with the added disaster of a two-factor authentication app that flummoxed the eldery hoping to get a jab.
It is not so much a rejection of the AstraZeneca vaccine by the German people that is the problem, though an early smear campaign has caused some of that. It is a largely failure of the German bureaucratic state and the LĂ€nder to roll out delivery to those who want it. We did not expect to see that.
The result of so many missteps is that just 4.9pc of the German population has received the first jab, even as the English variant hits 40pc of cases.
The mounting scientific reasons for drastic action are, however, matched equally by mounting political reasons for throwing caution to the winds and opening sooner.
âMadame Chancellor, Germanyâs Patience is at an end,â was the headline across Die Welt âs front page on Wednesday, by which it meant that there was no longer a justification for the suppression of normal liberties. Rarely in modern times has Germany seemed so torn and confused.
The economic toll keeps rising. Citigroup says the cumulative drop in German retail sales over December and January was 13.2pc, almost double the 7.5pc fall in the first wave. âAnother national lockdown in April or May is not yet in our forecasts, but is increasingly likely and would delay the recovery by another quarter,â it said.
The peoples of Europe have mostly forgiven Brussels for botching vaccine procurement, and some have forgiven their own governments for botching the rollout. But that is because they have not yet discovered the price. They have been assured that the pandemic is under control and that reopening is imminent.
If they are forced back into another lockdown over the spring because vaccination paralysis has collided with galloping infections, the reckoning will be a sight to behold. We are only just beginning to glimpse the tectonic consequences of Covid failure for the political order of Europe.
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1% is pitiful, whichever way you look at it.
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Iâve not seen pay cuts but comparing to people who are on furlough at 80% is a bit disingenuous, at least they have jobs to go back to.
1% is wrong, especially after years of not getting pay rises. Donât forget that these are people who have been working the hardest and, possibly, the most dangerous part during the pandemic.
Theyâve asked for 12.5%, which is probably about right.
I havenât had a pay rise for a couple of years, even the rises I had before then were below inflation, but I wouldnât begrudge front line nursing staff a decent pay rise. The beaurocrats at the top of the NHS should take a pay cut to fund it, Iâm sure they wouldnât miss itâŠ
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And letâs chuck in this. Johnson telling porkies about contract details being available for scrutiny, but still arenât.
Itâs quite depressing that weâve facilitated a government like this.
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I wouldnât bet on it - for a lot of businesses the redundancy can is being kicked down the road in the hope that everything is ok later - it wonât be for everyone and those on furlough will be the first on the list to lose their jobs. Without the furlough cash, these companies will have already pulled the trigger.
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Agree with @CB-Saint. Furlough really is a double-edged sword. A lot of firms have wanted rid of people that they canât easily sack, so furlough has been a golden opportunity for them.
Even if thereâs no skulduggery involved, what furlough essentially says to an employee is âwe donât need you right nowâ. The big danger for those on furlough is that those businesses will adapt to not need them ever.
If you look at it over time, itâs a real terms pay cut every year for the past decade, and thatâs not just nurses. That is most in the public sector.
The nurses got particularly spanked because there is no longer a bursary available to allow them to get to a place where they can earn this pittance.
In reality, there arenât enough nurses as a result, so we end up employing temp and agency nurses to fill the shortfall. Thereâs a ready supply of them because many NHS nurses can no longer financially cope.
Iâve been saying this for twenty fucking years. Everything would be so much cheaper if we just paid people wages they could live and thrive on.
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They already have - in a lot of cases the volume of work didnât decrease just the available man hours. Businesses have had a hard look at the work being done and its real benefit - if it didnt give real bottom line benefit - it was shit canned.
Businesses are great at creating work, a lot of which is absolutely pointless
Aye, and I do think one of the biggest realisations has been how disruptive business premises can be. I noticed this long before the lock down. When we left our old firm in 2018, my work partner and I occupied an office of around six people. Both of us either worked late or arrived early to get shit done, because half the day was unplayable.
First few weeks of working from home were a revelation. Absolutely fucking shitloads done, completely on top of our remit and yet with plenty of time to spare to actually consider next moves.
You might work on premises where a manager says âoi, this isnât a social clubâ but itâs bollocks. All offices are social clubs. Yes, you can get something sorted in two minutes with a quick face to face. Yes, there are some things that really ought to be done in person.
In general, I think office life is a profligate waste of people hours.
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Not disagreeing but there is a difference between those employed in the âofficeâ and those employed in the service industries. Mrs BTripz works for a yacht club, theyâve had to close during the lockdowns, she is furloughed, when they open again sheâll be back as will all of her colleagues (eventually).
As you say office based staff are probably the ones that are in the biggest danger of losing their jobsâŠ
Couldnât agree more, Iâm quite happy to work from home for the rest of my working lifeâŠ
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On swallow a summer does not make