Best Of

I'll wait to read the detail from covid but have to say I'm going to take a hell of a lot of convincing that locking down a week or two earlier would have reduced the overall deaths by 10ks they are claiming. Surely the deaths are simply postponed at that stage as there was no vaccine?

How we forget all those discussions on here about R !

I don't need an inquiry to tell me Johnson is "toxic and chaotic", but a good three word summary of the man nevertheless.

On the actual conclusions, I now cut Johnson more slack than I did at the time. Clearly a lot of decision making could have been better, but no-one got this completely right. In the end the UK was middle ranking amongst peers. Some countries did better but some did worse.

Well the important things are

1) having tried to source lots of disposable PPE in the middle of a world wide shortage, non-disposable has been rejected. We Don’t Do That Here
2) for disposable PPE a stockpile large enough to be useful would be huge and mean destroying vast amounts every year, unused. So we don’t do that either
3) Yes, kids. We are back to depending on PPE from Chinese factories, with about two weeks in the pipeline
4) if the next disease is really airborne, this stuff won’t protect anyone.
5) as much of the knowledge from test and trace etc has been got rid of, as possible
6) vaccine production on the Uk won’t happen
7) the dashboard team was disbanded for fear that easily accessible information would upset departmental control of policy.
{insert more here}

So all good for the future.

I'll wait to read the detail from covid but have to say I'm going to take a hell of a lot of convincing that locking down a week or two earlier would have reduced the overall deaths by 10ks they are claiming. Surely the deaths are simply postponed at that stage as there was no vaccine?

There's going to be a lot of noise and very little light from the reporting on this, which was utterly predictable.

At the time nobody thought the vaccine would be available so soon, so the only choice was in how fast people caught it.

The 20k or so saved by an earlier lockdown would have been caught by a later wave (which would have been bigger as a consequence).


Of course the last thing anyone is going to point at in all the noise is the massive debt pile - which will cause its own excess deaths for many years to come.

It was a no-win situation. Does anyone think the current government would have done any better?

I’m in the (minority, or silent majority?) view that thinks the government probably got it about right overall, in the grander scheme of things. If we ignore the lockdown parties.

The problems in our approach were largely in a few details:

- probably being a little slow early on in April 2020, but to me that’s perfectly understandable
- Allowing some jobsworths in the constabulary to get the idea that fun spreads COVID and do frankly silly things during lockdowns, like apprehending people sitting alone on beaches or going for walks on the moors
- Getting overly complicated with tiering in autumn 2020, but again I can understand why they tried it
- Flunking and then panic-buying PPE

Closing schools was, in hindsight, probably the most damaging mistake. One that most developed countries made. But the fear at the time was so great, it’s not remotely surprising the decision was made. I’d hope if we have another pandemic that largely affects adults that we’ll not do the same thing again.

I think the phasing of the lifting of restrictions towards the end was pretty well judged. The vaccine rollout was good. Furlough was expensive, but what’s really done in our finances is the (unexpected back in 2020) one-two of Covid spending followed by Ukraine war energy price subsidies.

“…will Sir Keir Starmer ensure the candidate for the by-election is from an all women shortlist.”

Seems like there would be an obvious route for Burnham in that case.

The header from @Cyclefree would be volcanic - I’m thinking Thera, maybe Deccan Traps?

Ha ha! There would not in fact be any sort of route for Burnham, no matter how much mascara he wears, because the Labour Party changed its own rules quietly and without fuss shortly after the Supreme Court judgment in April to state that only women - real ones - (not men claiming to be women) could be in all-women shortlists or other Labour Party positions reserved for women.

Other organisations bewailing how difficult it is to understand the judgment might learn from this.

That is the good news. Party in government understands the importance of complying with the law, even if some of its own Ministers say the opposite to the courts (yes, I'm looking at you Bridget Phillipson).

The bad news is that it opens the way for twits like Lucy Powell.

Has the Labour Party updated its own policy documents to say that men in dresses are not women?

They seem to be taking their own pretty time over updating the official government guidance on the subject.

Er ..... yes they are. Because they are cowards. Or they don't want to admit that the women who challenged them were right.

I have written a header on this. https://www1.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2025/11/01/a-halloween-nightmare/ and the one earlier this week.

Or you can see these two articles by Legal Feminist - one by me: https://www.legalfeminist.org.uk/2025/10/31/cracking-the-code/ and https://www.legalfeminist.org.uk/2025/11/14/three-questions/

At any event, the guidance is not law and cannot change it, the judgment is clear, the law is effective now and has been in fact since 2010 and on toilets for years before that (since 1992) and quite a few bodies have started complying with it including, amusingly, NHS Fife, which is also spending hundreds of thousands of taxpayers money arguing the opposite.

Don't forget the trans men who now have to go into women's toilets, some of whom look exactly like cis men. I'm sure that will cause no problems whatsoever.

Men don’t care who goes in their toilets.

Cat Man was talking about trans men, people who were born female but now look male, going into women’s toilets.

And… Speak for yourself. I would be unnerved if a woman or someone presenting as a woman came into the men’s.

About that.

Trans people could be banned from single-sex spaces based on how they look
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/trans-women-only-space-guidance-tmrm9f3m5

..The Times has been passed a copy of the final guidance, which aims to preserve the dignity and safety of women, by Whitehall figures who are concerned that Labour is deliberately delaying publication to avoid a potential political backlash...

..(the guidance) also states that transgender people could be barred from single-sex services even when their biological sex matches, such if a trans man, who is biologically female but is “perceived” as a man, attempted to use a women’s changing room. It says that they can be barred because they are likely to be seen by others as the opposite sex..

That's literally what the Supreme Court said, yes.

Fortunately sex-neutral alternatives exist for the few individuals who can't use either main facility.

...unfortunately, the final guidance (recently leaked) states that sex-neutral alternatives need not be provided if the cost is prohibitive. So a woman who has had a sex-change and now looks like a man

I) cannot legally use the male toilet, because their birth sex is female
Ii) cannot legally use the female toilet, because their appearance is male
Iii) cannot legally use the sex-neutral or disabled toilet, because there isn't one

Without overtaxing my swiss-cheese memory overmuch, I can think of a Caffe Nero and another coffee shop in my town that is covered by this.

Same for disabled people though. That Cafe Nero should get its act together.

My gender-neutral hope is that, as a result of all this, national and local government will realise that toilet provision for disabled people is far from adequate.

Unpopular suggestions

- Remove winter fuel allowance & other add on benefits.
- Child benefit for first child only
- End the triple lock
- Cut back the number of diversity officers - there are at least 500 in central government according to a recent FoI request and the number has increased since Labour came into power
- Prescription charges: reduce the number of exemptions and increase payments
- Foreign aid: what actually is it being spent on and which countries
- More charges for council services above the bare minimum
- Stop or drastically reduce funding of lobby groups
- No money in current budget for AD - where is the money for that to come from? If people want it they should pay for it themselves.
- Social care - people with savings need to use those first. The rainy day has arrived so that is what the savings are for.

On the tax side -
- raise income tax and extend NI ultimately combining the two
- add council tax bands at the top end rather than faff around with extra taxes
- Extend VAT - we have more exemptions than many other countries
- Get rid of cliff edges
- Reduce pension tax relief to the basic rate
- Freeze thresholds

Once there is a path to a reduced deficit and growth then can think of reducing tax. But I would make the priority proper investment in infrastructure and high quality competent permanent staff rather than endless locums and consultants.

Some sensible measures but given our fertility rate is now just 1.45 we need to increase child benefit for the first two children if anything. I would means test not end triple lock and savings already have to be used to pay for social care except the home for at home care which after the dementia tax disaster won't change.

On tax it is likely Reeves will increase higher council tax bands and freeze thresholds and reduce pension relief anyway. I would ringfence national insurance for JSA, the state pension and some social care not merge it with income tax

A small defence of ditching the two-child limit - of all government spending, that on children tends to have the most positive long term impacts on everything from health to crime to the economy.

I don't think there's much evidence that people crack out the spreadsheet when deciding the number of children they will have - particularly those on low incomes where frankly having any children is financially irrational.

What there is plenty of evidence for is that growing up in poverty has long term and sometimes devastating impacts on life outcomes. We don't like to admit it, but the course of most people's lives are predictable to a high degree of accuracy based on their living conditions in early childhood.

I understand the equity argument for limiting benefits for children, particularly when you focus on the parents. But if you don't want to saddle the next generation with these kind of problems then the limit has to go.

There's a deeper problem here where we have benefits spending already much higher than Denmark's, yet a child poverty rate three times as high. We're in a pickle given the structure of our economy and labour market.

Good thread header. This is the real issue facing this government and it is one that the last government largely dodged. I would add that the increasing cost of our debt burden is another very serious challenge going forward. According to the OBR, " in 2025-26 we expect debt interest spending to total £111.2 billion. That would represent 8.3 per cent of total public spending and is equivalent to over 3.7 per cent of national income."

A lot of our current debt was borrowed at ridiculously low interest rates after the GFC. So a 10 year gilt from 2015, for example, might have had a coupon of 0.2%. When that became repayable this year we obviously did not have the money to repay it so the debt will have been rolled over but at a cost of around 4.5%. A lot of people on here criticised Osborne for not borrowing more to invest and claimed this was shortsighted. This shows how wrong they were. That 8.3% is heading in only 1 direction.

So, we urgently need to cut spending. Much easier said than done of course, especially given the pressures mentioned by Gareth and by me. We need to reduce regulatory costs, we need to reduce the head count in the public sector substantially, we need to stop wasting money on never ending inquiries which tell us the same things again and again (and which, as @Cyclefree points out, we normally ignore). Its a huge challenge for any government and politically it is a particular challenge for Labour. But it needs to be done.

I am all for a balanced budget, but be realistic on public headcount. After 15 years of austerity how much fat is there to cut in our criminal justice system for example? The way to cut costs there is to restrict what is permitted, for example greatly restricting the right to appeal.

Similarly in my line of work (my Trust is reducing headcount this year by 7% already). What treatments on the NHS do we stop?

On your latter point, IVF.

Given our low birthrate certainly not

IVF makes a negligible contribution to overall birthrate.

If people want to use IVF, fair enough, but not funded by the taxpayer.

It costs very little, it’s a nice thing that transforms lives, and adds to the happiness of the nation.

A lot of the cuts being proposed on here today are a. unlikely to save much, b. generally targeted at things or types of people the poster doesn’t like while protecting those things the poster does like.

Reducing the salaries of every government employee bar the geeky, numerate, IT savvy who we should actually pay much more is surprisingly popular on pb for some very obscure reason.