Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

 r_squared wrote:



I understand the concept of defecit, what I meant is I'm surprised that such a whopping sum can be calculated based on the, and I'm guessing here, 10's of thousands of lecturers in the country?
There's claims that they may lose upto £10k a year? That must be esxpecting to get a considerable sum to start with. I'm heading for a forces pension, argued at being one of the best in the country, and to lose that amount would slash my entitlement nearly in half.

Am I unaware of something here?

Apologies, I meet a lot of people that don't understand...

Professors can be on £100k pa so it's not unreasonable that some may lose this amount. Of course one thing to note is that many have already lost signficant amounts from the previous review 2/3 years ago. Most starting postdoc positions are about £32K with readers and lecturers on £40-£50k pa. However, and especially for postdocs they are temp fixed term, around 2 year contracts, so they can also get breaks in contributions as they desperately hunt for jobs. Contribution from wages is about 8% so those on the highest salaries are paying around £10 kpa into the pension pot (+ then there is the universities contribution).

 Whirlwind wrote:

 r_squared wrote:



I understand the concept of defecit, what I meant is I'm surprised that such a whopping sum can be calculated based on the, and I'm guessing here, 10's of thousands of lecturers in the country?
There's claims that they may lose upto £10k a year? That must be esxpecting to get a considerable sum to start with. I'm heading for a forces pension, argued at being one of the best in the country, and to lose that amount would slash my entitlement nearly in half.

Am I unaware of something here?

Apologies, I meet a lot of people that don't understand...

Professors can be on £100k pa so it's not unreasonable that some may lose this amount. Of course one thing to note is that many have already lost signficant amounts from the previous review 2/3 years ago. Most starting postdoc positions are about £32K with readers and lecturers on £40-£50k pa. However, and especially for postdocs they are temp fixed term, around 2 year contracts, so they can also get breaks in contributions as they desperately hunt for jobs. Contribution from wages is about 8% so those on the highest salaries are paying around £10 kpa into the pension pot (+ then there is the universities contribution).

I'll admit that I haven't read into the issue a great deal at the minute, but 14 days seems like quite a substantial term for this action to be carried out over. There must be real concerns, and solid support at the grass roots for this.

The press are probably going to have a field day otherwise.

I haven't read the newspapers for a few days, and given the dire state of UK journalism, who can blame me,

but I awake to hear accusations of Corbyn being a Morse tapper for the Reds

It's a mad world.

Yep. 14 days of strikes from 64 out of 68 Unis involved, and this is the first strike since the government changed the strike rules to make it more difficult under the Trade Union Act 2016, and it is unusual for universities to strilke at all, and when they have done in the past it has been out of term to minimise disruption to students. This is a major upset, and I know many more would strike if they could afford it.

 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:
I haven't read the newspapers for a few days, and given the dire state of UK journalism, who can blame me,

but I awake to hear accusations of Corbyn being a Morse tapper for the Reds

It's a mad world.

Not an accusation.

Not even an allegation.

A fictitious invention of a fevered, right wing mind. Consider the Czechs have said 'hahahahahahaa.....no', and Germany has checked former Stazi records, and also confirmed it's a load of old tosh....

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:

 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:
I haven't read the newspapers for a few days, and given the dire state of UK journalism, who can blame me,

but I awake to hear accusations of Corbyn being a Morse tapper for the Reds

It's a mad world.

Not an accusation.

Not even an allegation.

A fictitious invention of a fevered, right wing mind. Consider the Czechs have said 'hahahahahahaa.....no', and Germany has checked former Stazi records, and also confirmed it's a load of old tosh....

That's always been an old trick from the right-wing playbook going back to the 1920s: accuse Labour of taking its orders from Moscow.

Given the support that the Conservatives gave to the apartheid South African government in the 1980s, and given the question marks surrounding David Cameron's and John Bercow's links to a certain Conservative orginisation, and given Thatcher's support for a certain South American dictator,

who are the Tories and the right-wing press to accuse anybody of anything?

Our rightful masters, in their own minds.

 r_squared wrote:


I'll admit that I haven't read into the issue a great deal at the minute, but 14 days seems like quite a substantial term for this action to be carried out over. There must be real concerns, and solid support at the grass roots for this.

The press are probably going to have a field day otherwise.

Yes there is. You have to be going some to make someone give up about 5% of their salary for the year. It's not just the strikes though. They are also working to rule, so no 'voluntary support' actions for the university (covering staff when they are not contracted to etc..)

As a middle-aged Japanese woman my wife's knowledge of university funding in the UK is pretty scant, yet she immediately put her finger on a very important point:

"How is that the costs to students are so high, and the pay of vice-chancellors is so high, and lecturers can't have a pension pay?"

 Kilkrazy wrote:
As a middle-aged Japanese woman my wife's knowledge of university funding in the UK is pretty scant, yet she immediately put her finger on a very important point:

"How is that the costs to students are so high, and the pay of vice-chancellors is so high, and lecturers can't have a pension pay?"

Because people like you are posting on Dakka. Get off here and get on with earning us the yearly transfer! Without it the VC might not be able to get that extra bottle of chateauneuf du pape 1978 for her next formal dinner!

Radio 4 did a piece on it this morning. They had a lecturer's union representative and the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Buckinghamshire.

LUP: There are various established methods for calculating pension liabilities, some of which give a surplus in the University fund, in the best case of £8 billion. Why did the universities invent a new method of their own, and why does it give such a bad result?

VCUB: Won't you think of the children?

LUP: If there is a deficit in the fund, could the "pension holiday" that universities awarded to themselves between 1997 and 2011 have had any affect on this?
(A pension holiday is a year when the employer pays a reduced contribution to the pension fund because they think they can get away with it.)

VCUB: There have been 35 meetings on the pension issue in the last year without reaching an agreement. [It's the lecturers' fault for not rolling over and dying.]

I was just reading back about the change to the pension that happened in 2014/15. Apparently then there was a deficit in the fund of £13 billion, going on the USS "The world is ending" claims then. So in 3 years it has gone from £13billion to £6billion. If it is going down at that rate, what's the need to change?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 r_squared wrote:

 Whirlwind wrote:

 r_squared wrote:
Well, we did discuss university fees earlier.

How can the pension defecit be £6bn? How many lecturers are there in the UK that have caused such a sizeable sum?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-43140726

This is a misunderstanding of what it meant by defecit. It is *not* being debt. Defecit means they calculate the current liabilties of the scheme rolling forward. It is based on such things as the average life expectancy after retirement, the returns on investments .For example IIRC one of the issues the union has is that the current assessment is based on the last two years of government bond returns and these are at historically low levels which the unions argue is unrealistic for calculating a 30 year return.

A defecit is at a simplisitc level where you calcuate the contributions of the person paying into the scheme plus the return from investment minus what you think that person will cost you in retirement. As a noddy example. If you pay £100 into a scheme for 10 years and the pension scheme invests that and gets a return of 10% (£100) then the person's contribution is effectively £1100. If you expect the average person to live for 9 years and pay out £130 per year in pension then the cost to the scheme is £1170. You hence have a defecit of £70 (which has to be found from somewhere). However if say the 10% was the lowest estimate from the last 2 years and actually the average over a 30 year period someone pays in is 20% then in this case the pension pot is £1200 and the scheme makes money on your pension.

Hence it's not a debt, it's a *potential* liability and the argument is that the pension scheme have taken extremely risk averse assumptions which in likelihood will mean that if the changes go forward they will making signficantly out of the scheme

I understand the concept of defecit, what I meant is I'm surprised that such a whopping sum can be calculated based on the, and I'm guessing here, 10's of thousands of lecturers in the country?
There's claims that they may lose upto £10k a year? That must be esxpecting to get a considerable sum to start with. I'm heading for a forces pension, argued at being one of the best in the country, and to lose that amount would slash my entitlement nearly in half.

Am I unaware of something here?

It is expected to slash entitlement by half. I would guess it is probably not as good as the army pension, but average pay is probably higher, but I could be wrong. It will also contain a little exaggeration.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Radio 4 did a piece on it this morning. They had a lecturer's union representative and the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Buckinghamshire.

LUP: There are various established methods for calculating pension liabilities, some of which give a surplus in the University fund, in the best case of £8 billion. Why did the universities invent a new method of their own, and why does it give such a bad result?

VCUB: Won't you think of the children?

LUP: If there is a deficit in the fund, could the "pension holiday" that universities awarded to themselves between 1997 and 2011 have had any affect on this?
(A pension holiday is a year when the employer pays a reduced contribution to the pension fund because they think they can get away with it.)

VCUB: There have been 35 meetings on the pension issue in the last year without reaching an agreement. [It's the lecturers' fault for not rolling over and dying.]

Apparently and from what I have been told the VC at Buckinghamshire is the poster child of the Tories for a VC operating a University. Basically a treadmill business running staff as hard as possible to maximise income.

It doesn't then surprise me that this person is also taking the Tory mantra to heart of answering a question with a completely random response (that has nothing to do with the original question).

Not completely random responses, but responses that offer a specious attack on the other side's position.

I.e. "Won't you think of the children," is saying that the students have worked hard all their lives to get where they are, and it's not right for the staff to jeopardise that, while simulatenously ignoring the fact that the staff have worked hard all their lives to get where they are, and it's not right for their employer to jeopardise that.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Not completely random responses, but responses that offer a specious attack on the other side's position.

I.e. "Won't you think of the children," is saying that the students have worked hard all their lives to get where they are, and it's not right for the staff to jeopardise that, while simulatenously ignoring the fact that the staff have worked hard all their lives to get where they are, and it's not right for their employer to jeopardise that.

Well, it's not a completely random response, otherwise it would just be a jumble of random words . However it was more in context that the type of answer you get is random in that it is relatively unpredictable as they can attack anything, from anywhere or anytime that both deflects from the question; is difficult to counter (because the response could be anything) and destroys any ability to have a rationale argument. If both sides did the same thing then you get a string of pointless points that have nothing to do with the topic initially submitted for discussion.

In more university pension news, the boss of the pension scheme got an £82,000 pay rise last year.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-43157711

Yes, that is PAY RISE, not pay.

"Bill Galvin's pay package had risen from £484,000 to £566,000, said a spokeswoman for the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS)."

Another board member is Dame Prof Glynis Breakwell, the UK's highest paid vice-chancellor with a salary of £468,000,

If anyone found it hard to understand how the pension fund came to be in difficulty, these pieces of information may bring more clarity.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
In more university pension news, the boss of the pension scheme got an £82,000 pay rise last year.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-43157711

Yes, that is PAY RISE, not pay.

"Bill Galvin's pay package had risen from £484,000 to £566,000, said a spokeswoman for the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS)."

Another board member is Dame Prof Glynis Breakwell, the UK's highest paid vice-chancellor with a salary of £468,000,

If anyone found it hard to understand how the pension fund came to be in difficulty, these pieces of information may bring more clarity.

I guess the era of poverty stricken academics is over then.

How on earth do they justify such eye-watering renumeration? Let me guess, they compare themselves to equivalence in business.

Still less than a professional footballer, but more than the Prime minister.

That’s not regular academics, that’s not lecturing staff and postgrads, the people actually running the university courses. The chancellors are a minority on unjustifiably silly money, don’t assume they account for ‘academia’.

Dame Prof Breakwell came under such heavy fire she was unable to justify it and bailed, though she gets a year's pay in lieu of notice, and a £31,000 car loan written off. It's all right for some.

The VC of Oxford University was on the radio a few weeks ago, and was in pretty heavy going on the pay issue, and she is on half that money and running one of the top five universities in the world.

(For disclosure, I work there, in the bit that makes money to keep the rest of it going.)

With a bit of luck, Fat Cat Pay and the Chumocracy may now be hitting the same kind of bumpers as sex harassment in the media, equal pay for women and so on.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

.. As you may have heard UKIP lost control of Thanet council -- the only council in the country they controlled.


..... so a new leader has had to be appointed..



...well.. they do say you get a bit more rightwing as you get older eh ?

 Kilkrazy wrote:

(For disclosure, I work there, in the bit that makes money to keep the rest of it going.)

Ish.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/janebradley/britains-hidden-homeless-slaves?utm_term=.qk65EELpV6#.hgMAXX6Nrm

some highlights



.. makes you proud to be British eh ?

Sure you may actually have been a slave but that doesn't count as employment.

There would be a joke in that if it wasn’t so tragic.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/albertonardelli/boris-johnson-let-a-pro-brexit-think-tank-to-launch-at-the?utm_term=.spWzjjkPmL#.qap4oo6DMk



"friendlies"

Corbyn's Lawyers response to the accusations of treason etc (http://www.dorseteye.com/north/articles/you-need-to-read-the-letter-from-corb-s-lawyers-to-ben-bradley-tory-mp)

Dear Mr Bradley

OUR CLIENT: RT HON JEREMY CORBYN MP
DEFAMATORY TWEET

We act for the Rt Hon Jeremy Corbyn MP.

This is a Letter of Claim for the purposes of the Pre-action Protocol for Defamation. The prospective Claimant is our client, the Rt Hon Jeremy Corbyn MP. The prospective Defendant is you, Mr Ben Bradley MP.

Yesterday, 19 February 2018, you published the following tweet on your Twitter account, Ben Bradley MP (@bbradleymp):

“Corbyn sold British secrets to communist spies...get some perspective mate!! Your priorities are a bit awry! # AreYouSerious”

Your statement that our client sold British secrets to communist spies is untrue. The inference that our client, whom you know to be the Leader of Her Majesty’s Official Opposition and the Leader of the Labour Party, had engaged in criminal acts of treachery and spying could not be more seriously harmful of a British citizen, let alone such a prominent politician. As the vice-chairman of the Conservative Party you are fully aware of the serious harm that was caused or was likely to be caused to our client’s reputation by your defamatory statement.

The natural and ordinary meaning of your words is that our client engaged in criminal activity at the most serious level. For example, espionage and serious breaches of the Official Secrets Act 1911; that he acted in a manner which was/is prejudicial to the safety or interests of the United Kingdom; that he colluded with representatives of the secret services of foreign states to the detriment of the national interests of the United Kingdom, putting its citizens and its allies at serious risk of harm by passing confidential secret information to foreign agents/intelligence officers. Furthermore the natural and ordinary meaning of your words is that our client made financial gain for such criminal acts and espionage.

Our client’s reputation has been or is likely to be seriously harmed by your publication of the offending tweet and by re-tweets. Furthermore, your tweet has been quoted in full in the Guardian newspaper, the Mirror newspaper, the Huffington Post, Sky News, the Mail Online and has been paraphrased in other national print newspapers, and online, which is unsurprising given your own high profile within the Conservative Party and your status as an MP.

Our client instructed us yesterday evening and we advised his office to put out an immediate statement notifying you and others of the fact that he had taken legal advice and that the tweet should be deleted from your Twitter account. We note that you have removed the tweet but nevertheless serious harm has been caused by your libellous statement.

Next Steps

Our client requires you to immediately agree to take the following steps:

1. Provide a written undertaking, in terms to be agreed with us, that you will not repeat the defamatory statement identified above in your offending tweet or utter or publish any allegations/statements to similar effect about our client on Twitter or on any other social media platform or in any other form both written and oral.

2. Immediately agree to publish on your Twitter account an apology, in terms to be agreed with us, and with the additional statement that you will ask your followers to retweet your apology.

3. Agree to pay a sum of money direct to a charity of our client’s choice, in lieu of damages payable to our client for the injury you have caused to his reputation and also for the embarrassment and distress caused to him by your defamatory statement. We invite your proposals by return with regard to the amount that you will pay which we would expect to be substantial, as our client’s attitude towards the level of payment will take into account the speed with which you make sensible proposals or not. Our client does not seek any personal financial benefit from this litigation and if you force him to issue proceedings and recover substantial damages through the courts he will donate the damages to a charity of his choice.

4. Pay our client’s legal costs incurred in relation to this matter. If you delay the resolution of this case our client will commence legal proceedings against you in the High Court and our client will seek from you not only his basic legal costs but also a success fee (as our client has agreed a Conditional Fee Agreement which provides for a success fee) and payment of an after the event insurance premium. If proceedings are commenced legal costs payable by you will increase significantly, especially if the matter proceeds to a full trial. Your swift agreement to the matters set out in the numbered paragraphs above will assist you in limiting your exposure to our client’s legal costs. Any failure by you to respond swiftly will undoubtedly mean that our client’s legal costs will increase significantly.

We look forward to your immediate and positive response. If there is any delay our client reserves the right to commence legal proceedings against you for damages and ancillary relief for defamation without further notice. In that event, our client will rely on the terms of this letter and the lack of an adequate response, by drawing your conduct to the attention of the Court.

Please indicate if you intend to nominate solicitors to accept service of proceedings on your behalf, should you seek to defend this claim."

And then watch this:

I assume the idea behind this spy nonsense is to act as a distraction from the cabinets Checkers trip? How long until Johnson or Gove sticks there arse out of a No10 window so no one talks about the latest Brexit forecasts?

 Kilkrazy wrote:

Automatically Appended Next Post:

I hear they had the special guest Dr Marvin Monroe to help them through their family difficulties, apparently this was the view at the 'retreat'.





Automatically Appended Next Post:

 reds8n wrote:

.. makes you proud to be British eh ?

Sure you may actually have been a slave but that doesn't count as employment.

At this point I would quite happily hand in my passport and abandon the country. It is so sad that the country is being run by a few bigoted, racist donkey-caves that can't see that beneath the skin there are real people that they are affecting.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 reds8n wrote:
.. As you may have heard UKIP lost control of Thanet council -- the only council in the country they controlled.


..... so a new leader has had to be appointed..

Spoiler:

...well.. they do say you get a bit more rightwing as you get older eh ?

I think there would be riots. Having an alien run the Council in the area...surely not!

 OrlandotheTechnicoloured wrote:
Corbyn's Lawyers response to the accusations of treason etc (http://www.dorseteye.com/north/articles/you-need-to-read-the-letter-from-corb-s-lawyers-to-ben-bradley-tory-mp)

Ben Bradley is the odious little cretin who had a blog 6 years ago when he was in his early 20's containing such charming ditties as;

"Sorry but how many children you have is a choice; if you can't afford them, stop having them! Vasectomies are free," his post read.

"Families who have never worked a day in their lives having four or five kids and the rest of us having one or two means it's not long before we're drowning in a vast sea of unemployed wasters that we pay to keep!"

With luck, the damages will financially cripple the little gobshite, and he may have to experience what life is like living hand to mouth at the behest of others.

That might give him some "perspective mate".

That’s brilliant. Hopefully politicians learn a lesson from this.

 Steve steveson wrote:
That’s brilliant. Hopefully politicians learn a lesson from this.

I'm sure the Tory party will regard it as a cost of doing business.
It'll hurt them more that it's all going to charity.