Big J

Isn't that a shame though? I have found it almost impossible over the years to find cutters who were both properly competent and happy to work for someone else. The issue with running your own business is that inevitably, you end up pulled away from the saws. You're then forced to rely on subcontractors of inconsistent quality and the overall work quality deteriorates. Really good cutters should be paid really good money. I've paid £240 a day down in Devon (where rates are suppressed) and made good money off the back of those guys. Equally, I have lost money on guys I've paid £80 a day because they've been so bad. Perhaps some sort of cooperative, profit sharing company would be a way to go. A collective of top notch cutters, machine operators, foresters and timber sellers, working together to do the best job possible where everyone makes a fair and decent wage. So much of the timber industry is driven down to price and price alone. It is (I feel) one of the main reasons there is such inconsistency in the market. Boom and bust.

If I may take an analytical view for a moment, the biggest practical issue (leaving aside the frequent and pointless popularity contests the Tories seem to enjoy having at the moment) is a lack of money. In reversing Liz Truss's insane mini budget, Jeremy Hunt was able to roughly half the budgetary black hole, but that still leaves a £40 billion shortfall. So just to balance the books, £40b needs to be found in either cuts or tax rises. Add to that the fact that at the present level of funding, basic services are not being adequately provided. NHS, education, emergency services, infrastructure, transport. The list goes on. This is a poison chalice for any government to take on, let alone another Tory government who cannot escape some degree of responsibility for the previous 12 years of failure. To coronate yet another Tory PM and expecting a different outcome seems like an exercise in insanity. Repeating the same action and expecting a different outcome and all that. How best to tackle this though? In my view, the situation the UK finds itself in now is at least in part due to a large scale transfer of wealth from the public coffers to private individuals and companies. Widescale privatisation, lobbied interests and cronyism has only worsened over the past 12 years. The final straw was Truss's attempt to simply and overtly pander to these interest groups with her mini budget. At least at this point there was some pushback. I've got absolutely no idea how the next government can fix this extraordinary funding gap. In a time where more needs to be spent on public services and taxes need to be reduced to ease the cost of living crisis, the prospect of cutting funding and increasing taxes seems unconscionable.

It's not so much because he had a beer. It's because he lied and lied and lied about it and everything else. If he's the best the British public have on offer, then perhaps Kev's proposal ( 😉 ) for a military coup is the way to go.

There is something to be said for a benevolent dictatorship! The problem is that they rarely remain benevolent. I wonder how this period of tumult will be regarded in the future? The death of the Tory party? The death of common sense? The death of democracy in the UK? All of the above?

It's OK - I understood your intent. I agree, for what it's worth. It's a circus and so irrelevant to the average person. Simple, understated competency. That's what the country needs. The issue is that it's believed that such qualities don't win elections. So untrustworthy showmen like Boris get in....

I agree. Simultaneously hilarious and awful! Can you imagine how wonderful things would be if politicians' first priority was enacting beneficial policy for the country rather than self preservation? What a novel idea that'd be!

So it appears that a significant percentage of Tory MPs want Boris back. Not because he's a good leader, but because he can win them their elections and save them their jobs. What a miserable reflection of the British parliamentary democracy. Integrity, honesty and ability to do the job seem to mean nothing.

And she's gone!! Hahahahahaha!! 😆 What a complete and utter flustercuck.

That's Braveman gone now. The first of many? Seems like Truss is getting closer and closer to the end.

Quite unlike you to be so optimistic! 😄

I respect your take on the overall process and don't disagree that a democratic process of sorts was followed, but the entire campaign for Brexit was littered with half truths and complete lies, which had the effect of causing a tiny majority to vote for it. The upshot now is that the UK finds itself in a much lesser position than it did prior to Brexit with little benefit. But that is water under the bridge and no longer has the same effect on me as it once did. It has happened, the consequences are being suffered and perhaps in a few years it'll be reversed. Time will tell. On the point of Conservative Party leadership, it does rather seem that competence isn't a valued character trait for prospective leaders. Sunak accurately predicted what would happen if Truss took over, yet he isn't leader and she is...

That as the case may be, the Conservative Party has gone through such a seismic shift in recent years that continuously replacing the leader without the general public being allowed to choose seems to be undemocratic.

I have a lot of time for Rory Stewart and I agree, he's cut from a slightly different cloth to the others. The Tory party is a very broad church which in and of itself is one of the causes of Brexit (offering the vote was an act of appeasement to the ERG that backfired spectacularly on Cameron).

That as it may be, he's pressed from a similar mould to the likes of Cameron, Major, Ken Clarke, Rory Stewart. Today's Tory party bears little resemblance to that of 10-15 years ago.

Well we disagree on the character of Starmer, and that's OK, but I feel that after 3 new Tory PMs that haven't been elected, it's time the public had a vote.

Even if you don't agree with his policies, at least you'd be voting instead of watching a Tory elite play king/queen maker.

Oh f*ck, I don't know. Why do we have to choose between shit and shitter? Well I suppose the point is that we didn't get to choose....

I agree. She's been living in her own head, her own ideology. No regard given for the circumstances she finds herself in. Tone deaf, living in a bubble, utter moron - take your pick. Who'll take over and when? I've no idea. It took them long enough to get rid of Boris. As awful as he was, Truss is a whole other league of disaster.

All roads seem to lead to the same destination of the UK being stuffed. I've no idea what the solution is. It's frightening really.

This is my point really. It's not that I'm driving to say that the UK or it's inhabitants are inherently bad, rather that the public and private sector have been so badly managed in the past decades that the situation the UK presently finds itself in is possibility unfixable. A poison chalice for whomever takes over after Truss is given the boot. We're out of covid now, and yet the Exchequer still borrowed £11.8 billion in August. Almost £145 billion in the year up to the end of March (£2130 per man, woman and child in the UK). The UK national debt is now £2,365 billion (almost £35k for every man woman and child). With no hope in the short to medium term of even balancing the budget, how can this ever be tackled? £8.2 billion a month just in interest payments. With this foundation of insolvency, what can any prospective PM offer other than savage cuts, tax rises and austerity, if the public finances are ever to function?

I can agree with you (to an extent) about freeloaders, but immigration into the UK has increased since Brexit. The only difference is that it's more 'brown' people (non-EU) and British nationals can't easily leave.

It's nice to know that I'm loved! 😆 There isn't anything anyone can do about the weather of course. It is what it is. But the general state of the public finances, public services and housing market is something that's been festering for decades now and is leaving a huge number of people in an untenable situation. The government is bankrupt in all but name. Basic services are not being provided. Taxes are at an historically high level, but then so is public borrowing. And all against the backdrop of historically high house prices and soaring interest rates. I have got no idea how to fix it. Truly. But after 12 years of Conservative rule, it seems like they've been presiding over a larger and larger fire whilst all the time trying to put it out with petrol. Of course other places have problems too. No where is perfect, and I include Sweden in that obviously. But it seems like the UK has more than it's far share of issues now. Not least an apparently learning-disabled PM.

I left the UK 2.5 months ago and I'm still working through my roadside timber. It's selling, but slowly. The issue is that the timber industry in the UK is too small and too varied. Too many species on too broad a variety of sites with an insufficient number of niche businesses to utilise the broad spectrum of products. But on the flipside, the niche industries can't survive due to the low forest cover not providing sufficient supply. Then add to that the obsession with health and safety tick-boxing instead of proper training, general lack of productivity and a climate which is great for growing fairly poor quality timber quickly, but is also awful for harvesting (mud, mud and more mud) and you've got an industry that's only ever going to swing from boom to bust. Here in Sweden, forestry is relatively boring. It's pine, spruce and birch, with a smattering of other forestry species. One site isn't so different to another, but there is a niche for every product. With 70% forest cover, and slow grown, mechanically harvestable timber, it's easy to manage for the long term, knowing that you'll have the products you need at an economic rate for the foreseeable future. There is a lot of market manipulation in the UK by the big players too, pushing the price up and down artificially. It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever that roadside spruce this summer was worth almost £50/t less than last summer. No one can adequately plan for that. It puts people under. I will enjoy my boring Scandinavian forestry work. I only brought a small battery chainsaw with me from the UK and I'm quite happy that that is all I need

I've had a quite a lot of experience running cutters and started out as a hardwood cutter myself. It's a minefield, truly. I much prefer working with harvesters as with one exception the only reliable, decent, flexible cutters I knew were in Northumberland and Morayshire, which isn't exactly useful for Devon. Make no mistake, 90% of chainsaw operatives are not going to make the grade. They are either talented and lazy, or talentless and enthusiastic, or worst of all, talentless and lazy. The very good ones normally end up progressing of the saws to run their own teams and very good quality, experienced cutters are left over once the shite is filtered out. The contrast between the best and worst is as stark as to say that you can lose a lot of money on a bad cutter at £80/day and make a lot off a good cutter paying them £250 a day. Production rates can vary 5 fold within the same block, depending on who's cutting. My recommendation is try to find a way of price controlling. Production rate work is difficult to get with hand cutters now, as they are so scarce. So try to use harvesters instead. Another issue I feel is that there are too many tree surgeons and not enough forestry cutters. Tree surgeons generally don't transition well into forestry as it's a completely different job, requiring much higher production, effort and far more accurate felling. You're felling the timber to sell the product, a fact sometimes lost on those recently having made that transition. For me, I generally always paid £200 a day to my cutters. Most of the guys I used were great and were well worth it. Some took the piss and I never used them again. Either way, I am very glad that I never have to work on hand felled sites again. I'll only be working behind small harvesters, which is a much, much more pleasant gig.