Best Of

Labour

Warwick All Saints and Woodloes (Warwick) council by-election result:

GRN: 34.9% (+22.1)
REF: 21.8% (+21.8)
LAB: 19.4% (-24.7)
CON: 18.6% (-15.7)
LDEM: 5.3% (-3.5)

+/- 2023

Great result for my party

Who are the Putinists?

You

Care to explain your 'thinking' on that? Because your apparent hatred for Zelensky, and the joy you showed yesterday at Trump's betrayal of Ukraine, rather makes you appear like a Putinist shill.

And therefore a shill for imperialism and fascism,.

I think the logic is as follows:

1) Starmer is bad for dissing Jezza.
2) Starmer supports Zelensky and opposes Putin
3) therefore Zelensky is bad and Putin is good.

And the last step in BJO's decent into madness.

4) Trump sides with Putin therefore Trump is good.

Complete lunacy from a claimed socialist.

Labour

Warwick All Saints and Woodloes (Warwick) council by-election result:

GRN: 34.9% (+22.1)
REF: 21.8% (+21.8)
LAB: 19.4% (-24.7)
CON: 18.6% (-15.7)
LDEM: 5.3% (-3.5)

+/- 2023

Great result for my party

Who are the Putinists?

You

Care to explain your 'thinking' on that? Because your apparent hatred for Zelensky, and the joy you showed yesterday at Trump's betrayal of Ukraine, rather makes you appear like a Putinist shill.

And therefore a shill for imperialism and fascism,.

Wanting peace and an end to the million plus death on both sides is not consistent with supporting Putin it's about stopping the pointless killing.

If you think Putin wants to stop at just Ukraine, they you are a fool. Hos own words and rhetoric says exactly the opposite.

You are asking for more war, not less. You are an appeaser. And whilst most appeasers in the late 1930s did so for good, moral - even if mistaken - reasons; others had more malign motives.

You are in that latter category.

You are a bloodthirsty apologist for a genocide and generally in favour of killing of innocents who believes every bit of Zionist/ Western made up shit so I will take no notice of your opinions on me.

Are Ukrainians not innocents? Or are people only innocent when they're being killed by Jews.

Be consistent: I totally get it if you want to support the Palestinians. But to do so while denying the Ukrainian right to resist invasion is just sickening.

Of course they are hence why stopping the war is excellent

I am consistent I want the killing to stop in Ukraine and the middle East.

How can you think that is inconsistent?

You want to stop the killing in the Middle East by Israel ceasing to attack the Palestinians, and you wish to stop the killing in Ukraine by the Ukrainians ceasing to resist Russia.

Labour

Warwick All Saints and Woodloes (Warwick) council by-election result:

GRN: 34.9% (+22.1)
REF: 21.8% (+21.8)
LAB: 19.4% (-24.7)
CON: 18.6% (-15.7)
LDEM: 5.3% (-3.5)

+/- 2023

Great result for my party

Who are the Putinists?

You

Care to explain your 'thinking' on that? Because your apparent hatred for Zelensky, and the joy you showed yesterday at Trump's betrayal of Ukraine, rather makes you appear like a Putinist shill.

And therefore a shill for imperialism and fascism,.

Wanting peace and an end to the million plus death on both sides is not consistent with supporting Putin it's about stopping the pointless killing.

If you think Putin wants to stop at just Ukraine, they you are a fool. Hos own words and rhetoric says exactly the opposite.

You are asking for more war, not less. You are an appeaser. And whilst most appeasers in the late 1930s did so for good, moral - even if mistaken - reasons; others had more malign motives.

You are in that latter category.

You are a bloodthirsty apologist for a genocide and generally in favour of killing of innocents who believes every bit of Zionist/ Western made up shit so I will take no notice of your opinions on me.

Are Ukrainians not innocents? Or are people only innocent when they're being killed by Jews.

Be consistent: I totally get it if you want to support the Palestinians. But to do so while denying the Ukrainian right to resist invasion is just sickening.

There seems to be a national consensus, or at least a PB consensus, that bringing back economic growth to the UK and “fixing our economy” will require “difficult and unpopular decisions” and “radical action”. I am not so sure.

Look at the last 20 years of UK economic history and you see 3 major shocks, each of which left us reeling and suppressed growth afterwards. 3 notches down on the growth rate.

- the global financial crisis, which hit the FS heavy UK economy harder than most
- The Covid pandemic, which scythed through consumer spending for 2 years and coincided with our leaving the EU
- The Ukraine invasion and the surge in inflation, 1973-style, which choked off recovery.

So we’ve been bashed around by 3 brutal shocks, one of which also had a long term impact on public health and human wellbeing. The GDP chart suggests that even by doing nothing, we would return to half-decent growth simply by avoiding shocks for a few years.

The next telling stat is debt to gdp, and what this means for spending power.

Public debt to GDP has risen from a historically low 35% in 2007 to just under 100% now, the highest since the 60s, though not as high as the USA (123%) or France (111%).

But, look what’s happened to private debt in that time: it peaked at 248% in 2009. The average since the mid 90s is 209%. It is now only 161%. Of which household debt is 81% to GDP.

Britain’s households and businesses have stopped spending and upped saving. Selfish bastards. Just like the Japanese. So the government has had to take up the slack.

We used to worry about the feeble balance sheets of our consumers. No longer. There are plentiful assets out there and we just need to get everyone spending. Like the old days. Then the economy will grow, the VAT revenues will come pouring in and things will look much better.

Inducing a consumer and business boom is not “painful”, unless you’re a NIMBY. Instead of telling everyone that we must cut our cloth as a country and make difficult decisions, which just makes everyone even more depressed and stops them spending, we need them to go out there and hit the shops, and companies to up their budgets. We have nothing to fear but fear itself.

Bring back boom and bust!

The latest DOGE executive order makes it something akin to the old Soviet General Secretariat, at least as far as the US executive is concerned.

The second part is meatier.

New hires have to be approved by newly-installed DOGE Team Leads in each agency. These Team Leads will report what goes on in the agency they're assigned to on a monthly basis.

But that's not even the big part yet..
https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1889479172348629194

And federal agencies are ordered to participate in their own dismemberment.
… Agencies are ordered to develop a comprehensive reorganization plan that identifies offices that can be purged because they lack statutory protections..

As a result, the head of DOGE will now wield something close to full executive power in the US bureaucracy. Domestically, it’s now the second most powerful position in government, de facto.

If, for a minute, we ignore the process and look at the results isn't there a good case for someone to be doing this? And not just in America but here too.

https://www.thetimes.com/article/f6d12453-fe46-4c84-933c-f38e049fb4e4?shareToken=e0f7dd4fa3cf9096758f36c6c30c4708

"Public sector productivity fell again last year, according to figures that dealt a blow to ministers’ hopes of a more efficient state.

Rising numbers of staff are not being matched by results and the state remains 8.4 per cent below its pre-pandemic levels of productivity, according to the Office for National Statistics.

The NHS has driven declining efficiency and remains 18.5 per cent less productive than before the Covid lockdown, the figures suggest."

Isn't it right for someone out there to be asking the question about making savings in the public sector, even if the money is shoved into other bits of it or infrastructure investment. The complete lack of oversight of state spending by politicians for the last 8 years since Theresa May turned on the taps (and Labour look like increasing further) has resulted in an almost 10% drop in productivity, that's literally £70bn in spending we could cut tomorrow from departments to push into infrastructure or just not spend and reduce the deficit. There's £40bn of productivity loss in the NHS alone.

We need more focus on outcomes and less focus on processes. It's that incessant focus on process that has resulted in an 18.5% drop in NHS productivity. The lack of accountability has slowed them to get away with it too.

Process isn't everything and a rebalancing may be needed, a shock even, but are there no limitations?

Maybe there shouldn't be because what we're doing isn't working. Sending someone like Musk in to slash at the unproductive parts of the state so we can stop borrowing so much money for basically no loss in output might actually be the way out of the current conundrum for the government. Yes the unions would be upset and we'd end up with 1m or so people looking for work (resulting in lower inflation) but we're going to borrow £127bn this year and £70bn of that is due to productivity losses vs pre-covid era productivity. Imagine if the NHS was as productive today as it was in 2019 and had the same funding, literally 20% more operations, 20% more appointments, 20% more resource overall, instead we've been shoving ever more cash into a system that has peaked in output terms and can no longer expand it's output regardless of how much we put in.

This is like the benevolent dictator argument though. It may work brilliantly for a time, then it doesnt, so there's processes to avoid it.

Sure, but again, maybe we need to slash and burn at the current "process state" because it's causing a huge burden on the taxpayer for no real gain. We're spending more on the state than ever but receive less service from it than we did in 2017. That money has just gone into the ether, wouldn't it be better if we just didn't spend it and reduced state borrowing?

The extra money has gone on debt service and ageing related costs. It's not a mystery.

Again, it's not me saying this, the ONS have said there's an 18.5% drop in productivity in the NHS and 8.4% overall in the public sector. That accounts for basically all of the additional departmental spending since then, not even getting to the extra debt interest and age related spending. Dress it up how you like, since 2019 all of the additional money that government departments have got has amounted to precisely zero additional output. Maybe the way Elon Musk is doing it in the US is suboptimal, yet no one who says so admits that £70bn in additional departmental spending giving us zero incremental output is also suboptimal.

Cut that spending and reduce the deficit, stop borrowing so much, reduce gilt supply, push down yields and get inflation down (and therefore debt interest) down. The additional £70bn isn't getting us anything anyway.

Max, it is deeply frustrating, bordering on infuriating, that all this public money has been thrown at departments for no return but the idea that the spending can simply be cut and we have the same service for what it cost before is, with due respect, nuts. A lot of this money has gone in additional wages and to buy peace both in the NHS and the train sector. Are we to return their wages to 2019 levels despite the inflation since?

We certainly need to address the way that public service both deteriorates and increases in cost as time goes by. It is a major factor in our economic underperformance. But it is not a simple problem.

Payrises need to be coupled with output increases. We need to end the cycle of something for nothing in the state. End WFH, stop automatic pay rises, bring in union busting laws, strike busting laws and make it much, much easier to fire people at will from the public sector, with no recourse for compensation except in cases of discrimination or foul play. A 10% pay rise must be coupled with a 5-10% cut in headcount.

You are comparing nominal and actual. So, a 10% wage increase is entirely justified if we have 10% inflation simply to retain the real value of the wage. It does not mean that there needs to be a cut in headcount as well. Of course management should always be looking to reduce headcount where possible regardless of what people are being paid.

I am highly sympathetic to some of your points. I fear WFH, combined with an anxiety about everyone's mental health and work life balance simply means that it is a lot easier not to work as hard as you do in an office where your output is readily assessable and comparable.

But you are sounding like Elon Musk. A more measured and focused way to address these problems is needed.

Somewhat contradictory - my productivity went way up when I started WFH. Then $work brought in 'professional' management from the private sector. At which point my productivity plummeted due to endless meetings and 'process' being added to every facet of the work day so that it could all be 'measured' in some way.

I think there are just bad WFH experiences and also good ones, bad and good management, etc. I'm not sure everyone being in an office makes that much difference. Slackers gonna slack.

Just to tie it round to the AI/LLM chat, I was amused to see a demo of the Claude 'computer use' agent which got bored with the task it had been given and ended up just browsing photo's of Yosemite Park on google images.

Like the office worker it dreams of replacing.

I was working from home for various clients for the best part of 8 years before the pandemic. They all wanted me in their offices and when I said they should look elsewhere they all backed down and accepted I should work from home for them with occasional visits. The trick is to be absolutely scrupulous with your hours and show them that they get a better service. Given the work was often 24/7 on call it was the only practical way to work things. I always used to warn clients (and was proved right) that I would be less productive on those weeks when I was in the office because of the unavoidable distractions from the job at hand - not least the pointless meetings they would continually organise.

If you are disciplined and genuinely wanting to get the work done then working from home can very much be the better option.