Current Affairs How old were you when you grew up and stopped voting Labour?
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Clint Planet
Utter Cad.
So, she didn't.
We'd almost eradicated homelessness. That's not really true, is it? And I'll say again, we've had the biggest recession in almost a 100 years, one analogous to the great depression of the 1920/30s, which did an awful lot more damage of this ilk than the current one has. A bit of perspective would do no harm here.
Clint Planet
Utter Cad.
So, she didn't say it. But you could see what she meant, looking at that trend. By the way, I was paraphrasing her. I can't remember her exact words.
As for perspective, I refuse to accept a 134% increase in homelessness in a supposedly advanced country as collateral damage. It's a disgrace whether you give a toss about it or not and, I'll say again, it doesn't have to be like this. It isn't inevitable.
Clint Planet
Utter Cad.
Is he being deliberately daft to score a point? The bravado over the colour is ridiculous, but the cost is irrelevant as we'd pay that every few years for new passports regardless of the colour.
Clint Planet
Utter Cad.
The right-wing mantra of personal responsibility, making your own luck and dealing with whatever hand life deals you always sounds rather hollow and slightly ridiculous when you consider the plight of children in all this.
Huge health gap revealed between UK’s rich and poor
Report shows ‘devastating impact’ of deprivation on child health with poorest teens 70% more likely to visit A&E than their wealthier counterparts
A new report says inequality is costing the NHS millions of pounds a year. Photograph: Daniel Atkin / Alamy Stock Photo/Alamy Stock Photo
https://www.theguardian.com/inequal...guardian-in-depth-look-unequal-world-equality
Sat 23 Dec ‘17 22.00 GMT
Children from poor families are far more likely to end up in hospital A&E departments or need emergency treatment for conditions such as asthma and diabetes, according to shocking figures revealing the consequences of poverty in Britain.
In findings that senior doctors said showed the “devastating impact” of deprivation on child health, the nation’s poorest teenagers were found to be almost 70% more likely to appear in A&E than their less deprived counterparts.
A comprehensive study that examined hundreds of thousands of patient records found inequalities between children from the poorest and richest families were costing the NHS hundreds of millions a year and contributing to pressures on the health system.
Across the 10 most common conditions leading to unplanned hospital visits, the rates of admission were consistently highest among children and young people from the most deprived areas. The study, by the Nuffield Trust, found inequalities in some areas of child health had increased over the last decade in England, despite advances in care.
School-age children from the poorest areas are two and a half times more likely to be admitted to hospital in an emergency for asthma than those in the richest areas. The research shows the gap has grown substantially in a decade.
One of the study’s authors warned that with child poverty increasing, it is “hard to see the inequality gaps we highlight being eradicated any time soon”. Other experts blamed cuts to school nursing and the benefits system as contributing to the divide.
The most deprived young people are 58% more likely to go to A&E than the least deprived groups, with the most deprived teenagers experiencing A&E attendance rates almost 70% higher than those from the best-off families. The most deprived groups were 55% more likely to experience an unplanned hospital admission, though that gap narrowed over the last decade.
Experts said education, diet, environment and the pressures on families living on the breadline meant poor children often ended up in hospital when their health issues could have been headed off earlier. The report’s authors warn that the most vulnerable children are being let down by health services.
In 2005-06, school-age children in the most deprived areas had double the emergency admission rate for asthma compared with their least-deprived counterparts. However, by 2015-16, the gap had grown to about two and a half times. That gap alone is costing the NHS £8.5m per year.
There is also evidence of alarming health inequalities persisting into adulthood. While unplanned admissions for diabetes have been stable or have decreased for younger children, analysts said there had been a “striking growth” for all 20- to 24-year-olds.
The most deprived children were almost twice as likely to experience an unplanned admission in 2015-16 as the least deprived. Reducing these admissions to the level experienced by the least deprived would have led to a decrease of some 244,690 paediatric emergency admissions in 2015-16, and a potential saving of £245m per year.
Nigel Edwards, chief executive of the Nuffield Trust, said: “Asthma and diabetes are both conditions that we should be managing outside hospital. It is an indictment of how we are looking after the most vulnerable in our society that deprived children are now more likely to experience unplanned admissions for asthma than their counterparts did 10 years ago.”
Dougal Hargreaves, Nuffield visiting researcher, said: “Receiving emergency hospital treatment is often absolutely essential, and emergency care saves lives every day. But the level of variation between rich and poor, and the growing inequalities gap in unplanned admissions for asthma, is really worrying.”
Professor Russell Viner, officer for health promotion for the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, said that the report highlighted “the devastating impact poverty can have on child health, especially in relation to emergency admissions for asthma and diabetes.”.
However poverty has an impact on a range of other issues such as education, housing and continuity of healthcare,” he said. “We agree with the authors of this report when they say the most vulnerable children are being let down by health services and we back their calls for policymakers to focus on narrowing the inequalities gap. They can do this by reversing cuts to universal credit which actually leave the majority of families claiming this benefit worse off, and by the restoration of national targets to reduce child poverty, backed by a national child poverty strategy.”
Wendy Preston, head of nursing at the Royal College of Nursing, said asthma should be managed outside hospital. “Yet the worsening shortage of school nurses and health visitors means early warning signs and prevention opportunities are missed, and vulnerable children do not receive the support they need.
The Department of Health said: “Progress has been made in reducing the rate of emergency admissions for the most deprived children – but more needs to be done. To help, we have introduced the world’s first diabetes prevention programme, a new tobacco control plan, targeting the most vulnerable groups, and we are giving local areas £16bn to spend on public health.”
Huge health gap revealed between UK’s rich and poor
Report shows ‘devastating impact’ of deprivation on child health with poorest teens 70% more likely to visit A&E than their wealthier counterparts
A new report says inequality is costing the NHS millions of pounds a year. Photograph: Daniel Atkin / Alamy Stock Photo/Alamy Stock Photo
https://www.theguardian.com/inequal...guardian-in-depth-look-unequal-world-equality
Sat 23 Dec ‘17 22.00 GMT
Children from poor families are far more likely to end up in hospital A&E departments or need emergency treatment for conditions such as asthma and diabetes, according to shocking figures revealing the consequences of poverty in Britain.
In findings that senior doctors said showed the “devastating impact” of deprivation on child health, the nation’s poorest teenagers were found to be almost 70% more likely to appear in A&E than their less deprived counterparts.
A comprehensive study that examined hundreds of thousands of patient records found inequalities between children from the poorest and richest families were costing the NHS hundreds of millions a year and contributing to pressures on the health system.
Across the 10 most common conditions leading to unplanned hospital visits, the rates of admission were consistently highest among children and young people from the most deprived areas. The study, by the Nuffield Trust, found inequalities in some areas of child health had increased over the last decade in England, despite advances in care.
School-age children from the poorest areas are two and a half times more likely to be admitted to hospital in an emergency for asthma than those in the richest areas. The research shows the gap has grown substantially in a decade.
One of the study’s authors warned that with child poverty increasing, it is “hard to see the inequality gaps we highlight being eradicated any time soon”. Other experts blamed cuts to school nursing and the benefits system as contributing to the divide.
The most deprived young people are 58% more likely to go to A&E than the least deprived groups, with the most deprived teenagers experiencing A&E attendance rates almost 70% higher than those from the best-off families. The most deprived groups were 55% more likely to experience an unplanned hospital admission, though that gap narrowed over the last decade.
Experts said education, diet, environment and the pressures on families living on the breadline meant poor children often ended up in hospital when their health issues could have been headed off earlier. The report’s authors warn that the most vulnerable children are being let down by health services.
In 2005-06, school-age children in the most deprived areas had double the emergency admission rate for asthma compared with their least-deprived counterparts. However, by 2015-16, the gap had grown to about two and a half times. That gap alone is costing the NHS £8.5m per year.
There is also evidence of alarming health inequalities persisting into adulthood. While unplanned admissions for diabetes have been stable or have decreased for younger children, analysts said there had been a “striking growth” for all 20- to 24-year-olds.
The most deprived children were almost twice as likely to experience an unplanned admission in 2015-16 as the least deprived. Reducing these admissions to the level experienced by the least deprived would have led to a decrease of some 244,690 paediatric emergency admissions in 2015-16, and a potential saving of £245m per year.
Nigel Edwards, chief executive of the Nuffield Trust, said: “Asthma and diabetes are both conditions that we should be managing outside hospital. It is an indictment of how we are looking after the most vulnerable in our society that deprived children are now more likely to experience unplanned admissions for asthma than their counterparts did 10 years ago.”
Dougal Hargreaves, Nuffield visiting researcher, said: “Receiving emergency hospital treatment is often absolutely essential, and emergency care saves lives every day. But the level of variation between rich and poor, and the growing inequalities gap in unplanned admissions for asthma, is really worrying.”
Professor Russell Viner, officer for health promotion for the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, said that the report highlighted “the devastating impact poverty can have on child health, especially in relation to emergency admissions for asthma and diabetes.”.
However poverty has an impact on a range of other issues such as education, housing and continuity of healthcare,” he said. “We agree with the authors of this report when they say the most vulnerable children are being let down by health services and we back their calls for policymakers to focus on narrowing the inequalities gap. They can do this by reversing cuts to universal credit which actually leave the majority of families claiming this benefit worse off, and by the restoration of national targets to reduce child poverty, backed by a national child poverty strategy.”
Wendy Preston, head of nursing at the Royal College of Nursing, said asthma should be managed outside hospital. “Yet the worsening shortage of school nurses and health visitors means early warning signs and prevention opportunities are missed, and vulnerable children do not receive the support they need.
The Department of Health said: “Progress has been made in reducing the rate of emergency admissions for the most deprived children – but more needs to be done. To help, we have introduced the world’s first diabetes prevention programme, a new tobacco control plan, targeting the most vulnerable groups, and we are giving local areas £16bn to spend on public health.”
Clint Planet
Utter Cad.
A case in point:
$180bn investment in plastic factories feeds global packaging binge
Colossal funding in manufacturing plants by fossil fuel companies will increase plastic production by 40%, risking permanent pollution of the earth
One million plastic bottles are bought around the world every minute, with most ending up in landfill or in the sea. Photograph: Zakir Chowdhury/Barcroft Images
Matthew Taylor
Tue 26 Dec ‘17 07.00 GMTLast modified on Tue 26 Dec ‘17 09.24 GMT
The global plastic binge which is already causing widespread damage to oceans, habitats and food chains, is set to increase dramatically over the next 10 years after multibillion dollar investments in a new generation of plastics plants in the US.
Fossil fuel companies are among those who have ploughed more than $180bn since 2010 into new “cracking” facilities that will produce the raw material for everyday plastics from packaging to bottles, trays and cartons.
The new facilities – being built by corporations like Exxon Mobile Chemical and Shell Chemical – will help fuel a 40% rise in plastic production in the next decade, according to experts, exacerbating the plastic pollution crisis that scientist warn already risks “near permanent pollution of the earth.”
“We could be locking in decades of expanded plastics production at precisely the time the world is realising we should use far less of it,” said Carroll Muffett, president of the US Center for International Environmental Law, which has analysed the plastic industry.
“Around 99% of the feedstock for plastics is fossil fuels, so we are looking at the same companies, like Exxon and Shell, that have helped create the climate crisis. There is a deep and pervasive relationship between oil and gas companies and plastics.”
Greenpeace UK’s senior oceans campaigner Louise Edge said any increase in the amount of plastic ending up in the oceans would have a disastrous impact.
“We are already producing more disposable plastic than we can deal with, more in the last decade than in the entire twentieth century, and millions of tonnes of it are ending up in our oceans.”
The huge investment in plastic production has been driven by the shale gas boom in the US. This has resulted in one of the raw materials used to produce plastic resin – natural gas liquids – dropping dramatically in price.
The American Chemistry Council says that since 2010 this has led to $186bn dollars being invested in 318 new projects. Almost half of them are already under construction or have been completed. The rest are at the planning stage.
“I can summarise [the boom in plastics facilities] in two words,” Kevin Swift, chief economist at the ACC, told the Guardian. “Shale gas.”
He added: “There has been a revolution in the US with the shale gas technologies, with the fracking, the horizontal drilling. The cost of our raw material base has gone down by roughly two thirds.”
The findings come amid growing concern about the scale of plastics pollution around the world. Earlier this year scientists warned that it risked near permanent contamination of the planet and at a UN environment conference in Kenya this month the scale of plastic in the sea was described as an “ocean armageddon”.
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Plastic waste washed up on the coast of the Philippines.
Photograph: Jes Aznar/Getty Images
In June a Guardian investigation revealed that a million plastic bottles are bought around the world every minute with most ending up in landfill or the sea. Earlier this month, UK environment secretary Michael Gove said reducing plastic pollution was a key focus, adding that he had been “haunted” by images of the damage being done from David Attenborough’s Blue Planet II TV series.
However, campaigners warn that despite the rising tide of concern, powerful corporations are pressing ahead with a new generation of plastic production facilities that will swamp efforts to move the global economy away from single use, throw away plastic products.
Steven Feit, from the Centre for Environmental International Law which has researched the impact of the US shale boom on plastics, said: “The link between the shale gas boom in the United States and the ongoing – and accelerating – global plastics crisis cannot be ignored.
“In the US, fossil fuel and petrochemical companies are investing hundreds of billions of dollars to expand plastic production capacity... All this buildout, if allowed to proceed, will flood the global market with even more disposable, unmanageable plastic for decades to come.”
Athough the majority of the new investment is in the US, the impact will ripple outwards in the form of vast new supplies of raw materials for plastics being transported to Europe and China.
Petrochemical giant Ineos has been shipping natural gas liquids from the US to cracking plants in Europe and the UK on huge “dragon ships” for the past year.
Last month the company announced it will ship the first NGLs from the US to China in 2019 where it will be turned into plastic resin at a new cracking facility in Taixing China.
Roland Geyer, from the University of California at Santa Barbara, was the lead author of a study earlier this year revealing that humans have produced 8.3bn tonnes of plastic since the 1950s, with the majority ending up in landfill or polluting the world’s oceans and continents. The report warned that plastic, which does not degrade for hundreds of years, risked “near-permanent contamination” of the earth.
He said he was deeply troubled by the expansion in plastic production.
“I am now all but convinced that the plastic waste/pollution problem will remain unmanageable without serious source reduction efforts,” he told the Guardian. “Building out production capacity is obviously the opposite of source reduction.”
But experts believe the new facilities will lock in an increase in plastic production for years to come.
Matthew Thoelke, executive director at IHS Markit analysts in Germany and an expert in the global chemical industry, said the expansion in the US would be a critical part of a 40% increase in global plastics production over the next decade.
“This will help meet growing demand for plastic in the existing big markets of the US, Europe and China as well as a predicted steep increase in demand in India and south east Asia,” he said.
But the American Chemistry Council said the plastics boom had brought huge economic benefits to the US creating hundreds of thousands of jobs and allowing the manufacture of a wide range of important products from medical supplies to auto parts, piping to technology.
Steve Russell, vice president of plastics for the American Chemistry Council also defended the environmental impact of plastic, citing a study from 2016 that found using plastic reduces environmental damage.
“Advanced plastics enable us to do more with less in in almost every facet of life and commerce. From reducing packaging, to driving lighter cars, to living in more fuel-efficient homes, plastics help us reduce energy use, carbon emissions and waste.”
magicjuan
Player Valuation: £60m
Is this a selective or collective 'we'?
The public money used to bail out the banking gamblers anonymous, what percentage has been repaid and of that how much has gone into civic issues?
Recession? No. It was a blatant transfer of wealth and the means to control and generate wealth to the cost of public amenities, and the vulnerable in society.
tsubaki
Player Valuation: £90m
That is a good point, but it does sort of ignore why the latest recession was less directly damaging to individuals since the 1920s / 30s - in 2008 we had improved social housing, improved job security, better health provision and there were more people who have been educated to a higher level than there were in the 20s/30s. People were less likely in 2008 to have to trudge to the factory gates in the hope that they would be picked for work that day, or to be put in the position of doing backbreaking and dangerous work for a pittance, to have to work from the age of fourteen or be turfed out of their home because of strike action. They had more assets and more ability to recover than the Great Depression generation did, and hadn't been subjected to horror on anything like the scale that the 1927 population had seen.
Of course, the effect of the past ten-fifteen years of Government policy has been to put all of that safety net, all of those protections we enjoy at considerable risk. There are more people in financially precarious situations now than there were in 2008, many more people in the gig economy or agency work, the rate of workplace deaths has leveled off (after falling continually up to about 2008) and affordable housing is a lot less common now than it was in 2008, especially in London.
When the next crash comes, it will hit us harder than the 2008 one did.
I didn't say anything about the cause of the recession as that wasn't what was being discussed, merely the fact that we had one and it was the biggest one in nearly a century. Even looking at the world through the tin-foil rimmed glasses you do, that's not really up for debate I wouldn't have thought.
Whilst this is true, it has to be said that it was May's decision to make a song and dance over it with a ridiculous tweet that drew the ire of the public.
It wasn't ignored, but I merely tried to place a bit of context into Clint's thoughts. I would be amazed to be honest if we went back in time to the 20s as that ignores the way things are today. I mean even now, the government is still spending some £18bn more than it raises, and we're in an age where NHS spending is criticized, despite spending more per capita now than we did even a few years ago, let alone the early years of the Blair government where it was a fraction of current levels. So it's hard to imagine things even returning to 90s levels, let alone those of the 30s.
No arguments from me on that one. The whole passport colour = our identity thing was utterly ridiculous.
magicjuan
Player Valuation: £60m
Firstly, it seems apparent you saw my name and had an instant conclusion. The tinfoil reference, disingenuous and wholly uncalled for and unnecessary.
The point isn't argued as to the existence of a recession but as a recession for who exactly.
My point is the response to the cause that you used 'we', which is undoubtedly general, which, again, undoubtedly isn't the case. This 'recession' as you call it is very selective in who it affects.
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