Best Of

Get rid, he's useless.

General Election now, and here's the winner. He has some super new plans for the NHS that I think all his voters are going to love.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DO9Sd1MDR1H/?igsh=azFwZWdhcHp1Z2xz

Unfortunately I think UK insurance companies have more in common with those in the USA than with those in Europe. An insurance-based system does seem to work in Europe and my perception is that it's because the companies aren't out to screw the customer for every last penny.

I was being mischievous. I very much doubt the average Reform voters has any clue that their healthcare could cost them £420 a month.

This guy is getting away with blue murder and very few are calling him out. I am particularly disappointed with the Conservatives, they seem to look upon this outrageous clown as a friend and ally on the basis of my enemy's enemy is my friend.

How much do you think the NHS costs the average Reform voter at the moment? And is that good value for money?

We spend a very similar percentage of GDP as European peers such as Germany and France.

But the median age in those countries is higher than the UK. And health outcomes can be debated, but we're certainly not an obvious leader of the pack.

I think both sides could do with accepting that the NHS isn't as amazing or awful as some imagine.

The US system, by contrast, is objectively awful. Extremely high cost and worse outcomes at an aggregate level.

I imagine there's lots we could learn from where some European nations deliver better value for money than us.

A friend is something of a polyglot. She gets annoyed with people online who are always looking for One Simple Trick to learn a language quickly. There's no such thing, she says. You just have to put the work in.

I feel the same about healthcare policy. People want One Simple Trick to deliver better healthcare at less cost. It doesn't exist. Yes, there are plenty of small things you can do. The healthcare policy research literature is full of international comparisons and proposals, and the NHS is constantly looking at these, piloting schemes and making changes. But switching to, say, the German healthcare system isn't going to spectacularly change the underlying challenges: healthcare costs money and the population is ageing. The research suggests that, more or less, the different delivery systems across Europe don't make that much difference, but the amount you spend does.

Now that Xitter is revealing the locations of various accounts, a swathe of cultural rightish accounts have been revealed to be be (in come cases quite sophisticated) Russian disinfo mills.

Has anyone spotted equivalent leftish accounts who also turn out to be located in Eastern Europe / the Russian Federation? Russia is notorious for playing both sides of cultural conflicts in the countries they target.

This is where we need Leon's TwiX expertise.

The Soviets were very fond of using “active measures” during the Cold War to destabilise their enemies. The Soviets often took an agnostic, opportunistic approach to internal politics in target countries. Their goal was not to promote a coherent ideology everywhere, but to amplify whatever tensions already existed, regardless of political alignment, as long as it undermined their adversaries.

The “active measures” they employed were dialectical. Ideologically agnostic. They wanted to exploit existing fractures. Not create new ones.

There’s no reason to believe this strategy is any different now.

The context is redundant as the bar chart is accurately drawn. The zig zag shown shows there is a gap between 0 and first y-axis term of 200,000.

Dodgy bar charts omit that zig zag normally. There's nothing dodgy here.

The bigger issue is the more fundamental one that the data is accurate and that the Government has done nothing to improve the situation in future years either.

I disagree. The “zig zag” is a sale, or axis, break, which is very common in specialised contexts. But data visualisation needs to serve fundamentally different audiences with different needs, knowledge bases, and attention spans in public vs specialist contexts. Specialist audiences share disciplinary knowledge of standard visual conventions in their field. They can interpret complex encodings like log scales, or axis breaks, without explanation. Public audiences lack this shared foundation, so visualisation should use intuitive visual metaphors and limit jargon. This one utilises such visual jargon, making it as bad as a Lib Dem bar chart.

The context is redundant as the bar chart is accurately drawn. The zig zag shown shows there is a gap between 0 and first y-axis term of 200,000.

Dodgy bar charts omit that zig zag normally. There's nothing dodgy here.

The bigger issue is the more fundamental one that the data is accurate and that the Government has done nothing to improve the situation in future years either.

I agree Labour has done nothing to improve supply.

However, even if they had done everything that you and I would suggest needs to be done, then I doubt the chart would look very different. Simply: the vast majority of the homes that have become available since June 2024 began construction under the previous government. The question -really- is have housing starts (i.e. construction beginning) improved, because measuring the finished product after such a short period of time is a bit of a cheat.

There does seem to be a distinct lack of media interest in the Nathan Gill conviction, and how such treachery could be circling around his sphere of influence.

Compare and contrast with, for example Rayner whose tax affairs were considered in detail both before and after her defenestration. If treason is too minor a scandal to focus upon when financial impropriety is of greater interest, one could also compare and contrast with a similar home ownership anomaly around a house purchase in Frinton-on- Sea, which barely made a sub- headline.

Well for a start Rayner is a household name in politics, whereas Nathan Gill isn't and never was. She was a current government minister and still one of the favourites to be next Prime Minister, whereas Gill stopped being the leader of the Welsh version of a party with no MPs five years ago.

Secondly, there was a lot of focus on Rayner, but never the constant inference that her misdemeanours meant Starmer, Reeves and co were also at it.

Thirdly, there has been quite a lot of focus on Farage's home in Frinton (I don't think you have to pretend to be a journalist worried about libel on that one), and no doubt more to come.

There has been virtually no interest in Farage's girlfriend's house in Frinton. Certainly none on how she was in a position to afford it.

As to Gill being a nobody. I suspect you have a point. There should however be media questions, and detailed ones at that, asking Farage about the content of his statements in the European Parliament and elsewhere and how he reached the conclusions he did, bearing in mind the rest of us thought Putin to be an expansionist with serious human rights questions to answer both at home and abroad at the time Farage was singing his praises.

I have not accused Mr Farage of any wrongdoing but I would like him to explain the incredible, presumably coincidental, similarities between his speeches and Gill's speeches.

I am of the opinion that our next Prime Minister having unexplained connections with an enemy of our state is far more vexing than Starmer tripping over at the G20.

There has been quite a lot of speculation over Farage's house in Frinton, and if there was something in it, or turns out to be in the future, no doubt it will be big news

As for anti EU politicians making speeches blaming the EU for Russian aggression towards Ukraine, you must have noticed that UKIP MEPs, and Eurosceptics in general, blame(d) the EU for almost everything. They didn't have to be paid to say so. That's why it didn't really feel like big news for Gill to be making the speeches and comments he did back then

We know Russia has been funding populist right wing parties across Europe. Marine Le Pen was bankrolled by Russian bank loans. The connections between Russia and AfD are dense and manifold.

We also saw with our own eyes Farage present on Russia Today, spend a lot of time with various Russian officials, and involve himself with characters like Julian Assange.

It would be incredibly surprising, tbh, if UKIP and Brexit Parties (dunno about Reform) were NOT funded in part by Russian interests, even if nobody has found a “smoking gun.”

An astonishing amount of global ne’erdowells, including Epstein and Trump, seem to have Russian connections.

It’s kind of weird. I don’t know anybody with “Russian connections”, but perhaps I just don’t mix in the right circles.