Best Of

Wes Streeting has been accused of taking a “chaotic and incoherent approach” to reforming the NHS which makes it unlikely the government will hit its own targets, according to a damning report by the Institute for Government (IfG).

The report praises elements of how the health secretary has managed the health service in his first year in office, including improving performance and staff retention in hospitals. Thepay settlement he reached with resident doctors last year avoided a winter plagued by NHS strikes

But it also criticises significant aspects of his performance, including the way he handled the abolition of NHS England and his lack of action to stem the exodus of senior GPs.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/nov/15/wes-streeting-accused-of-chaotic-and-incoherent-approach-to-nhs-reform

There’s quite a few Twitter stories about people who have just graduated in medicine or nursing, who are finding it very difficult to get training placements in the NHS.

There’s likely more to a lot of the stories, such as an unwillingness to move hundreds of miles, but on the face of it there seems to be a planning problem within the NHS.

We’ve been taking about this for *years* on PB.

To recap. To make a medic, you send them to university. Then you send them for x years of training in actual hospitals. This is proven methodology and works - same round the world.

The government caps the university places, then provides less than that in training places. In addition the system of allocating places to people in the NHS involves such fun as randomly sending them round the country.

So we educate far fewer medics than the NHS requires, train less and then treat them in a manner that a 19th cent mill owner would regard as a bit fruity.

So we make up the huge gap by importing medics.

Further, these numbers are increasing far slower than the NHS is growing. So our dependence on foreign labour is growing.

To add to the fun - remember the A level/uni fun during COVID. Some university classes were expanded by 25% because of that. Guess who is coming off the end of the production line, now? And no, they didn’t increase training places in the NHS.

So we have a shortage of training places in hospitals.

I do wonder if Streeting is letting this happen to put pressure on the treasury to release funds to increase the very expensive hospital training places. Or is that giving him too much credit?

Although my depression continues to fog my brain, I am cheered by the grotesque chaos of a Labour government, a LABOUR government hiring special advisors to scuttle round the Commons handing out redundancy notices to its own workers.

The Budget is sunk and there's still a week and a half before they unveil it. McSweeney will go, Reeves surely must go, I struggle to see how Starmer doesn't go.

The LabCon in full effect. Labour are the Tories, Labour are the Tories, naah naah naah naah etc

Marvellous

Of all the flaws you might have thought Starmer possessed incompetence wasn't one of them. I'm embarrassed for him watching him flounder. There were a few pointers in opposition particularly with his appointments but not many and facing the perfidious Boris Johnson disguised most of them

From a New Statesman article.

"Fears that Britain is due for a bout of mass violence on such a scale – or greater – have metastasised through the body politic in recent months. Speaking to the New Statesman earlier this year, Lisa Nandy said she believed that northern England was so tense it could “go up in flames” at any time. Dominic Cummings has claimed the intelligence services are discussing the potential for “racial/ethnic/mob/gang violence”. David Betz, a professor at the King’s College Department of War Studies, has gone further still and won much attention for predicting that Britain is sliding towards civil war.

According to Betz’s argument, governments such as our own can no longer peacefully manage multicultural societies fractured by ethnic grievance. We can therefore expect cities such as London to become “feral” with no-go zones spreading as the state’s authority dims. If civic conflict does break out, one side will push the metropolis into crisis by cutting off power and supplies, he argues. Such a scenario would leave the Met officers trained in Gravesend fighting to avert anarchy."

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-politics/2025/11/the-british-police-are-preparing-for-civil-war

What a load of cobblers. Only someone who exclusively does their research on Twitter would come up with such tosh.

Although my depression continues to fog my brain, I am cheered by the grotesque chaos of a Labour government, a LABOUR government hiring special advisors to scuttle round the Commons handing out redundancy notices to its own workers.

The Budget is sunk and there's still a week and a half before they unveil it. McSweeney will go, Reeves surely must go, I struggle to see how Starmer doesn't go.

The LabCon in full effect. Labour are the Tories, Labour are the Tories, naah naah naah naah etc

Marvellous

First, I'm sorry to hear you are struggling. If coming on here and arguing with some tired old hacks helps, more power to your keyboard, my friend.

I lament the failure of this incarnation of Labour to be radical much as I did that of Blair in 1997. Perhaps there was going to be a radical second term pace Thatcher after 1983 but the events of September 11th 2001 changed everything as we know.

The lesson, and I think it's one of Stodge's Political Laws (seventeen or eighteen), is it's never too early to be radical. Both Asquith and Attlee were radical from the minute they got into Government but it seems political timidity in the face of a hostile media (whether written, broadcat or social) is the order of the day for non-Conservative Governments - presumably there is a sense of the fragility of the voting coalition which got them elected.

From my earliest political stirrings in the 1970s doing my homework by candlelight, I had the sense Labour and the Conservatives were two cheeks of the same arse. Not sure it's as true now as it was then back in the days of the duopoly and let's not forget they still got 58% of the vote and won 532 seats out of 650 between them last time so rumours of its demise may yet be exaggerated.

This year has been horrible in general. A seriously bad patch in the spring. I've then recovered somewhat but this autumn has been brutally hard as well. Sadly I think it is work related, specifically money, specifically Big Client not paying my invoices remotely on time or to any pattern. They've promised to behave better going forward but I'm once again sat here with months of work unpaid. Its coming to a head - they will sort it or they will be dispensed with.

Anyway, what else am I doing about it? Growing a tache for Movember and raising money for mental health. £660 in the pot so far and we're only half way through the month.