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Labour claims to be saving families up to £450 per month with their new Breakfast Clubs

How many children do they have, to be spending over twenty quid every day on breakfast?


The Labour Party
@UKLabour
·
1h

Labour is rolling out free breakfast clubs, helping children start the day ready to learn and saving parents up to £450 a month.

https://x.com/UKLabour/status/1982757848879669698

It isn't the cost of the breakfast. Its that many parents need to be in work earlier than school starts...

(More) breakfast clubs for schools isn't a bad use of public money, probably pays for itself with the combination of children getting decent nutrition first thing (OK Rice Krispies) in the morning leading to long term better outcomes & parents able to work slightly longer hours.
There's plenty to criticise Labour for but this is a good policy.

Labour claims to be saving families up to £450 per month with their new Breakfast Clubs

How many children do they have, to be spending over twenty quid every day on breakfast?


The Labour Party
@UKLabour
·
1h

Labour is rolling out free breakfast clubs, helping children start the day ready to learn and saving parents up to £450 a month.

https://x.com/UKLabour/status/1982757848879669698

Breakfast and childcare?

The one Things One and Two went to back in the day is now £5.50 per morning.

It's a correct place to start, as is rolling out SureStart-alike - which by the end of this term is one thing that will be noticeable in many less well off areas aka Labour/Reform battlegrounds.

The slashing of SureStart was one of the most egregious things done by Cameron & Co.

Great header. It is also what we know in biology as the "rate limiting step".

It speaks to me of how useless Starmer is. He may not know much about other things but has decades of experience of the criminal justice system and should be completely familiar with the delays, yet has failed to tackle it at all.

Or in manufacturing - Queuing Theory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queueing_theory

In project management, it’s called Critical Path Methodology, which will be familiar to anyone who’s done the PMP course.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_path_method

Interesting that different disciplines have their own terminology for what’s basically the same idea, that there’s always one point that dictates the speed of the whole process.

For warfare: "schwerpunkt"

I'm going to respectfully disagree. The schwerpunkt - lit the point of the spear - was actually dependent on the supply chain. Hence the ultimate failure in front of Moscow (unable to supply the front across the distance with a railway of a different gauge and shit roads) and the Battle of the Bulge (no petrol, poor, difficult terrain).

It’s 2025 and there’s still problems with getting petrol to Moscow 😉

Cyclefree ghost-writing for Robert?

Um, good, well-argued article, BTW.

It's an excellent article. @rcs1000 describes one of the bottlenecks very well.

Why has it arisen? I'll tell you why - and it is exactly the same reason as I said in August 2019 -

"The legal system has few friends. There is an assumption that it mostly deals with the criminal and the feckless. Few politicians care about them. It has no “Aaah” factor. Most people hope never to encounter it. Those who are caught up in it are generally appalled by the experience. It has been in recent years put in the care, if that is the word, of politicians with little knowledge about it and little willingness to learn, let alone to fight to make it better.

For 6 years from 2012 to 2018, no lawyer was deemed worthy to be Minister of Justice, the choice instead falling on Chris Grayling and Liz Truss, about whom the word “second-rate” would be an undeserved compliment. Michael Gove spent much of his time undoing the damage caused by his predecessor. Few Ministers lasted more than a year. And who was responsible for the police? Well, one Mrs May, followed by Amber Rudd and Sajid Javid. Enough said.

Lawyers, however eloquent they may be on behalf of their clients, are generally hopeless at explaining why law and justice matter to anyone other than fellow lawyers. But our legal system does matter, very much indeed. There is no more important function of the state than the maintenance of law and order.

Crucial to that are a competent police force, a legal system which works and in which equality under the law and access to justice are not simply empty phrases, prisons which are something other than a breeding ground of violence and hopelessness and a probation service which works. All these aspects matter not just one of them.

The rule of law is not simply an airy phrase: it is the reality of a state able to keep its citizens safe, a state able to apprehend criminals, a state able to dispense justice, a state able find the right balance between the rights of the innocent and the guilty, a state able to enforce its laws, a state able to punish fairly and provide the hope of rehabilitation for those who have paid their dues. ........

The rule of law in its widest sense is something of which Britain ought to be proud; it has probably had a greater claim than the NHS to be considered “the envy of the world“. But for too long it has been neglected, downgraded, ignored and managed by penny pinchers who know the price of everything and the value of nothing. Futile as this plea may be, it is long past the time for this to stop."

(https://www1.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2019/08/11/blind-to-justice/)

I'll be naughty and repost this.

Of course you're right, Ms Cyclefree. But the apparently impossible question is... how to fix it?

We are in a society that likes penny-pinching, because it assumes that frees up pennies for sweeties now. As for future us, they're in the future, so serves them right.

One of our problems derives from Mrs Thatcher's views. I recall her saying something like her preferring that the best minds from Oxford and Cambridge (I know, I know) should go into the City rather than public service. Up until then very bright students would include public service, as Civil Servants in their career options. After that, not so much.

This allows me to get back on my hobby horse of calling the big change of UK society and the divisions over the past 40 years. Before Fatch indeed bright young things would go into all kinds of occupations - doctors, civil servants, yes finance, but that was only one of several options. All paid roughly the same, perhaps the City a smidge more.

Then Big Bang happened, the US banks took over the UK merchant banks and began to pay megabucks for the people to work there (or at "their" bank, rather than another one). City salaries skyrocketed and hence any sensible grad, Oxbridge or not, would likely try to get a job in finance, rather than become a doctor or a civil servant, etc.

This seems like a ridiculous sentence for a juror who seemed to just want to understand more about the case . Prisons are full and yet they’re putting people in jail for this .

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c77zvl0777mo

At least 5 days of trial court wasted. Probably at least £100k. Preparation work for a murder probably several multiples of that depending on the complexity of the case. Justice delayed for the best part of a year and more court time needed which delays other cases. For murder, possibly the additional cost of having the accused on remand for even longer.

This is made crystal clear to every jury. What they read on the internet is not necessarily right and it is not evidence in the case. It cannot be allowed to influence their decisions. It sounds relatively innocent but the consequences are significant.

Come on, the sentence is so stiff because the juror has basically trod on the court's toes. Burglary, fraud, people razzing away from the coppers at 70 down a residential road, shoplifters & nonces aren't nearly dealt with as relatively harshly. But because the juror was directly potentially mucking up the judges' own work the sentence is completely out of whack because he's angered the judge.
Now the judge might be very angry with all this but he shouldn't be sentencing based on that anger, which is what I think he's done here.

Morning all

I realise this will get me the ban hammer, but it's all George Osborne's fault.

The oft-quoted "austerity", backed, unfortunately, by the LDs in Coalition, continues to resonate through our society. From 2010, while some parts of the public sector (health, education) were left unscathed, other areas suffered savage cuts. Local Government suffered badly with over one million posts lost and savage cuts to services leaving councils vulnerable to the rise of social care demand.

We now see the impacts of the dreadful decisions implemented by Theresa May at the Home Office aided and abetted by idiots like Boris Johnson when Mayor of London. It wasn't just the cuts to Police numbers but the selling off of operational Police offices which effectively distanced law enforcement from the general public but also the closure of court buildings such as Magistrates Courts.

Labour, a decade and a half later, are paying the political consequences for the failings of their predecessors but that's how politics works and they've been left holding the hand grenade. The problem, as we know, is spending money on courts and lawyers isn't popular while making extravagant promised about recruiting more Police (Kemi Badenoch and before her Susan Hall when campaigning to be Mayor of London) are what the public (whose perceptions of criminality are often at huge variance to the facts) want to hear.

Who are the Telegraph employing these days?

Javier Milei’s far-right party wins Argentina’s midterm elections
The libertarian party won a landslide victory with voters backing Milei’s free-market reforms and deep austerity measures

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/10/27/javier-mileis-wins-argentinas-midterm-election/

So is he far-right or libertarian? They are quite different things.

Landslide is rather overdoing it!

LLA have exceeded their target of stopping veto overrides, but do fall short of 50% so will need to rely on the Conservative PRO party in order to pass legislation.

At 41% of the vote for LLA it was at the top end of polling predictions, though not as good as the 55% that Milei got in the second round Presidential election in 2023.

So Milei is in a stronger position for his reforms to go though, but still needs to build allies and relationships outside his party.

Atrention now goes to the Peso/USD rate band.

I think "far-right" is somewhat overdoing it as well.

Indeed in some ways the Peronists are more right wing. Argentinian politics dont map very well to the UK.

Milei has no truck with protection of pensions or for tariffs for example. He is happy to trade with China, where 2/3 of exported beef goes, and now soybeans too.

I don't think the political spectrum is particularly helpful in classifying an eccentric like Milei. He's as much an authoritarian as he is a libertarian, for example.

Also "landslide" is a slightly inaccurate description of getting 41% of the vote (though not as ridiculous as Starmer's "landslide").

And do we have any real indication of how great an effect Trump's $40bn bribe/blackmail might have had on the vote ?

Probably the best result for Argentina's economy - Milei becoming a lame duck, and Trump pulling financial aid would have meant chaos - but harder to say what it means for the future of democracy there.

I don't really see that materially Trump's baillout is a bribe. Any Government giving a baillout would want measures in place to ensure it came with a programme of reforms and cutbacks. Those are Millei's reforms and cutbacks. It was just expressed in a Trumpy way.

Trump stating that aid was contingent on the electorate backing Milei was precisely that.

Why would any Government commit to bailing out a Peronist Government that was going to splash the cash? A no-strings bailout like that would be completely irresponsible. The bailout depended, quite understandably, on the Millei programme being carried out.