UK Politics Thread

AFAIK, his policies also marked him out as a shithead, too.

Trigger warning: Owen Jones


He wants a hung parliament, because Corbyn got thrown out: www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/17/hung-parliament-tories-keir-starmer-majority

Chancellor is suggesting working from the office should be norm. I guess his landlord mates are worried about their property portfolios.

The electoral reform stuff coming from NatCon has been funny - ‘voter ID rules lost us votes’, ‘proportional representation means we’d never get back in’, ‘letting young people vote would totally screw us’.

Although really this is essentially the sort if stuff that gets talked about at fringe meetings around the real party conference, it is interesting to see it getting so much coverage. This is supposed to be what you say only say in private.

His department only has space for 50% of staff to go into the office at one time

I wonder why they only refer to her as a former Brexit Party MEP when she was an government minister and in the shadow cabinet under three or four different Tory leaders. Its not like she’s just some nut who would never amounted to anything bigger than the parish council if it hadn’t been for Farage.

In my current job hunt I am still surprised when I see a 'new' firm being on-site only. Even the majority of the banks opt for a hybrid for the functions I'm interested in, though earlier this week I read about the monitoring JPMorgan insists on. Yeesh.

I’ll bet carbon footprint reasons will be one way they’ll try to force people back in.
There’s been a big push at work about working out the company’s carbon footprint in detail, with info required about how many people are in your house at the same time that you are working from home.

I await the dodgy maths that will prove that coming into work is greener.

Absolutely no way me going into an office is greener. I have solar panels and don't put the heating on. Plus it means I exercise and move about more, so I'm less likely to burden the NHS. I am almost a stone and a half lighter than when I was in schools.

I can also confirm that the last few times I've been with other staff members, it was nowhere near what one would call productive.

If you can't be "creative" in a world where you have AI, smart sharing, instant comms then you're un-fucking-prepared for the 21st century. It's almost as if the government are willfully ignorant of how companies and humans operate.






Ooooooor it's the Tory mates with portfolios thing.

It's a feature not a bug.

As I am sure we have discussed before, it shouldn't be binary. There are some things that I prefer about being in the office. My mental health for one - working at home all day drives me slightly mad, and as much as I am a misanthrope (laziness really), I do quite like the social contact. It's good seeing people you work with in person. It just doesn't need to be under diktat and for spurious reasons at best.

Talk on this topic always seems to deal in binaries and with seemingly little understanding of how most office workers work. Likely because those conducting the conversation (politicians and those in the media) have incredibly atypical working lives. Same goes for the tech bro bosses that like to pitch into the conversation, who generally have a very odd work/life balance.

I work fairly independently and mostly collaborate with people external from the place I work, so I can do pretty much all my work from home. If do meet people in person, I don't necessarily need to do it from our office. Pretty much the only reason I go into an office is for my own sanity (and I don't even necessarily need to use it for that, as I could use a coffee shop, library or one of those rental hotdesk places). I like to try to go in once week.

Likely not entirely typical, but I imagine most office based workers are somewhere on a similar scale. Only personal preference would actually require them to be in an office more than once or twice a week.

I have, but I'd class them all as very very minor annoyances, and things like the laptop can be easily gotten around. Plug it in to a monitor at work. Plug it in to a monitor at home. 

In my case, I think there probably is a carbon footprint argument, at least for people who commute by train. The office AC is still running each day, it's just there aren't many people, and they're all at home running their ACs as well. 

Plus a fitness aspect as I've put on over a stone since working from home, and despite being introverted I do miss the social contact. 
I always plan to go in once a week, but the commute is such a hassle that I rarely actually do it. 

The few times I do go in, there's often no-one else in so it's effectively no different from working from home anyway. 

Then again, on our team of 6, 1 is a digital nomad and I'm never even sure which country he's in, one is at the other end of the country and has never come in, and one is in India. So there are only 3 of us that could come in anyway. I think that's pretty representative of the IT dept, though other depts have a lot more local staff. 

We were hybrid working before Covid because the offices were at capacity. We were already two or three days from home because traffic/parking/getting a desk was getting crazy.