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greyskiesthinking.bsky.social
Research, analysis & grey-skies thinking on labour markets, social security, public finance & equality. Usual disclaimer. Cheap foreign labour 🇮🇪. Profile pic is Takashi Shimura with Toshiro Mifune in Stray Dog (Akira Kurosawa, 1949).
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*mixed race people enter the chat* My ancestors hail from England for generations and the Caribbean for generations. Do I get to count as English according to Matthew Goodwin? Or is my skin the wrong colour?

submitted 3 hours ago • 23 comments

Civil servants will privately tell you that a major reason every process is slow, full of redundant checks and forms is that, "government accidentally granted benefit to someone who shouldn't get one" is a front page tabloid story, and "government was annoying, slow and painful for citizen" is not.

submitted 4 hours ago • 9 comments

I don't hear enough media reports being clear that the long-run system of disability & incapacity benefits will be the same after last week's concessions as was proposed in the Green Paper. All that has changed is whether existing recipients will lose out (they now won't).

submitted 4 hours ago • 0 comments

New post, ***The PIP cuts and public opinion*** -> Exempting current claimants will avoid the worst controversies - but there's a chance of more resistance as the cuts are implemented inequalities.substack.com/p/the-pip-cu...

submitted 5 hours ago • 0 comments

A long thread on why the concessions in and around the UCPIP Bill (ie the disability benefits cuts) are illusory, disingenuous and potentially makes things worse 🧵 There are 5 big myths to bust -fifth is the most difficult to untangle, but the most significant in my view, so please do bear with 🙂

submitted 5 hours ago • 1 comment

Thing is, if the telegraph were still a proper newspaper they might put reporters undercover to try and prove these claims or the like, right? But their connection to news has degraded to such a degree that they just repeat what they’ve read on reddit

submitted 6 hours ago • 14 comments

As Parliament prepares to vote tomorrow on cuts to PIP and UC-Health, the Govt consultation on longer-term changes to the benefits system also closes. A thread on the good, the bad and the messy included in the consultation... www.resolutionfoundation.org/publications...

submitted 6 hours ago • 1 comment

Vicky's resignation was thoroughly principled, government should get out of defensive mode and listen.

submitted 19 hours ago • 0 comments

'Curiously insignificant' - Alfred Cortot's verdict on Satie apparently, which sounds like a lovely tribute to me but probably wasn't meant that way.

submitted 21 hours ago • 0 comments

Niche.

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

I learn from Wikipedia that Seán Ó Sé is still alive, aililiú.

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

When I first heard Leo Rowsome's piping I thought it lacked the wildness and passion I associated with my great hero Willie Clancy. I now realise at least some of that was to do with the fact that Rowsome's pipes were always in tune. (He was a great pipe-maker as well as a great musician & teacher.)

submitted 1 day ago • 1 comment

Jason Cowley there managing to have immigration counting twice as two of his three intractable problems.

submitted 1 day ago • 5 comments

Here's this week's column - it's not as sexy as spads bitching about backbenchers, but one lesson of the welfare rebellion has to be that having two OBR forecasts + a wafer thin margin of error + one budget a year is a terrible way to make fiscal policy. www.theguardian.com/business/202...

submitted 1 day ago • 9 comments

True, government handed backbenchers a blatantly dishonest line about work incentives to defend a policy taking thousands of £s from hundreds of thousands of disabled people. But let's focus on the real problem here.

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

RAR was by far Clapton's most significant contribution to UK musical culture.

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

Always worth remembering this.

submitted 1 day ago • 5 comments

Mel Brooks produced The Elephant Man: this was his response to Paramount’s demand for changes "We are involved in a business venture. We screened the film for you, to bring you up to date as to the status of that venture. Do not misconstrue this as our soliciting the input of raging primitives."

submitted 2 days ago • 27 comments

The rise of people like Lander and Walz, whose ideologies don't exactly match mine but have the exact right combination of "love thy neighbor" and "fuck you, asshole" attitudes, is massive positive for people who care about left of center politics

submitted 2 days ago • 122 comments

The difference between this and Nazi propaganda against Jews is that this is AI-generated.

submitted 3 days ago • 249 comments

It seems to me that Peter Theil is not smart in the way that a lot of men who are smart but vain become not smart - they decide that an unorthodox view makes them sound even smarter and then surround themselves with others dedicated to that view and try to be the biggest fish in that small pond.

submitted 2 days ago • 20 comments

When it comes to welfare changes & "making work pay" I worry there is still one big wrinkle that none of the coverage has grasped www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/busine...

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

"even after" ?

submitted 3 days ago • 3 comments

The Conservative Party has given up controlling its borders with the racist far right. It’s not just fringe backbenchers - that’s always been an issue - but leading figures dabbling with stuff that’s indistinguishable from the more ‘intellectual’ and sanitised output of the BNP or NF.

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

I will go to my grave believing that he literally thinks asylum means the person is mentally ill. I really wish the press would ask him what asylum means. They never will.

submitted 3 days ago • 71 comments

This is all getting a bit Catch-22. Did he lend them the bombs as well?

submitted 3 days ago • 2 comments