No difference between red common purpose and blue common purpose.
O/T but CNBC TV have just announced that UK Ministers are seriously considering abandoning the £ and joining the Euro. Eurocrats reckon the crisis would not be so bad if the UK was in the Eurozone.
So the sell out to Euronazi-ism looks like it is already well under way. Time to go to Oz methinks.
Mike,
I am sorry that your correspondent KM doesn't like Ealing's Park Smart guide. KM says: "And since when has it been the local council’s job to educate the great British motorist about the Highway Code?". He is right that motorists should know the Highway Code before they get behind the wheel. Unfortunately the reality is that the rules change and people don't brush up their knowledge.
Residents want us to tackle traffic congestion. It is the fourth most cited concern of residents (by 23% of residents) after crime (29%), litter (26%) and Council Tax (25%).
No doubt many of your readers would look askance at our spending money on surveying residents to find out their opinions. Any business would do this and we think that it is important to respond to residents' actual concerns rather than our perception of what they might be. This can only be based on proper market research.
In Ealing we are keen to reduce congestion and to keep drivers off zig-zag markings and bus stops among other things. We have had complaints about overzealous enforcement and this guide is an attempt to give people fair warning about what they can and can't do. We can't tackle congestion, as we know our residents want us to, without enforcement and for this to be fair people need to know the rules.
KM may be a non-driver but the cheapest way to deliver this information is to do a blanket door drop - leaving him out would cost more.
Tut, tut, Wat.
"Many" nurses earn £60k+ according to your indignant assessment - what do you mean by "many" ?
The Times article you link to puts the number at "dozens" - why don't they just cite the actual number instead ?
The NHS employees 400,000 nurses (give or take).
http://www.nhsconfed.org/issues/.../about-
1857.cfm
Altogether there are 686,000 nurses on the NMC register (some in the private sector, some not currently in practice, some abroad).
And a few dozen get £60k - bearing in mind that these are nurses at the top of their game with a lifetime's experience in their chosen specialty.
For example, my brother-in-law is a so called consultant nurse (working in palliative care) - never go to a dinner party with him or he will bore the arse of you talking about the latest developments in cancer nursing (that's the sort of person attracted to these posts in my experience).
Yet the chosen few still earn far less than John Terry does for playing 45 minutes of football - it would take x2 of their salaries to match him for the full 90 minutes.
In what way is this news ?
I'm not surprised that the UK government is concidering joining the Euro. Mainly since UK is a part of europe and the main cause at the moment being handled by the big guys, is to join all nations into one singel super nation with one currency, one people and one world government. This is happening now people! this is not the future, this is now!
If there is any interest visit my blog @
http://streetlight-zeitgeist.blo...t.blogspot.com/
(other links are provided through my blog) make yourselves heard, join the cause. // Zeige
> Many" nurses earn £60k+ according to your indignant assessment
Tut tut.
No nurse in the U.K. NHS earns 60K, they extort 60K from taxpayers.
Extortion, eh.
That'll be news to most nurses given that we were ranked 153rd on a list of wage earners - the average (nursing) salary was reported to be £24,759 pa - while average earnings across all jobs (2005 figures) was £28,210, at least according to figures from the Office for National Statistics.
More stats can be found be googling "this is money" best paid jobs revealed.
a & e charge nurse,
Mean NHS nurses earnings last year were £31,600. You may say that this includes overtime (which it does) but, of course, most professionals in most occupations don't get paid overtime at all.
Considering how many nurses drop out at a fairly young age before they get the higher salaries (babies, families, etc.) and also considering not that many work much past 50 (and people of this age - if they're still in work at their chosen occupation - tend to be higher up the salary scales), then they do pretty well. They also have those nice index linked salaries and plenty of options to return to nursing after a career break (not open to many occupations) or to work part time (again, not an option in many occupations). Educational requirements to become a nurse aren't particularly high and, unlike other students they are actually paid during training (no loans or tuition fees).
Overall, they get a pretty good deal compared to anything else they could be doing.
Neither do most professions (teachers, lawyers, accountants, etc) routinely work nights, weekends and even Xmas day.........or for free, come to think of it (once we factor in the amount of unpaid hours put in during 10 or 20 years at the coal face).
You say educational requirements are not high, HJ, but diploma is the minimum academic standard nowadays, while increasing numbers obtain a degree - theory that has to be applied in various clinical settings, of course, not learning that vanishes into the ether once you set foot outside of the university campus (if we compare nursing to geoga, or history, say.
Unfortunately there isn't any simple educational formula for training nurses to deal with dying patients, or their bereaved relatives, to name just one sphere were text book learning is of limited value.
Mind you education doesn't stop on qualification, you may or not be familiar with a nurses requirement to provide evidence (to the NMC if asked) of "life long learning", in other words the vast majority of nurses are expected to undertake different forms of post registration training as well.
I'm not complaining that nurses are underpaid (leaving aside comparisons to penalty missing centre backs) just that I was rather taken back by the apparent incredulity of our genial host because a dozen of them have managed to wangle a slightly fuller wage packet.
Worth is really a subjective assessment but lets just remind ourselves that nurses look after a growing army of elderly patients (thought to be around 400,000) a cohort that even their own relatives find too demanding to care for, perhaps because of the effects of dementia and so on.
I know the pension issue rankles as well, but personally I would be quite happy to accept a nice christmas bonus if this is preferable.
You only need 5 GCSEs grade A*-C to start nurse training. That isn't very high. It's about average.
When I was at school, I took an extra O level in two terms in the sixth form. I had dropped Biology previously because it didn't fit in with my other choices, so I did one in Human Biology. There were eight of us taking this. It was easy - I got an A (no A* in those days). Nobody else got higher than a C - and everybody else on the course then left school to start nurse training, for which they were paid. I still had five years of education ahead of me before I earned a wage.
Yes, they have to train and to do other courses, but they're paid to do these and they do them during working hours. The vast majority of my post graduate training and eduction I have had to do in my own time and pay for it with my own (post tax) money.
Only about 10% of nurses have degrees and - let's face it - all sorts of training that would have earned you some sort of diploma in the past (and nothing wrong with that) now lead to so-called degrees. A nursing degree is hardly physics or engineering, is it? Nevertheless, the mean starting salary for a graduate nurse is now, amazingly, higher than for physicists or engineers.
I'd quite like a Christmas bonus too. But I'm self employed, so it would come out of my pocket anyway. I never received one in 25 years in the electronics industry, so I don't feel I'm missing out now. Could I have a taxpayer-funded index-linked final salary pension please?
If you are saying that engineers/physicists are underpaid then I would not disagree with you.
Some tube drivers earn £40k so obviously money isn't everything.
You seem to have overlooked the fact that book learning only goes so far in preparing nurses for dealing with the emotional, or psychological aspects of the job - it's very difficult to convey how challenging these can be, especially for those who believe that academic credentials are the be all and end all.
Some people may be very clever, but they're still not clever enough to look after their own frail relatives (in ever increasing numbers).
My wife is self employed - she gets the odd meal bought for her at Xmas but no other benefits.
Overall I would say the quality of her life is better than mine despite the holy grail of a state pension.
You're absolutely right about the way public sector workers get ridiculous benefits and generally have no idea what a proper day's work is.
But nurses are probably the most valuable and hardest working of the lot.
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