Best Of

William Dalrymple
@DalrympleWill
·
3h
BBC News is now running a full-blown recruitment campaign for Reform. This report, by the BBC political editor, doesn't even make a stab at neutrality in its breathless enthusiasm for Farage

Reform conference shows party's growing ambition

https://x.com/DalrympleWill/status/1964408520989708621

He's probably just annoyed that the BBC isn't being positively anti-Reform for the first time ever.

The BBC have spent the last few months fawning over Reform which came to a head today with Masons article .

How absurd you are! A newish party comfortably leads in all the polls and you object because the BBC reports on the phenomenon. If the government showed a modicum of competence on any of the key issues Reform would be no threat. When you add bucket loads of corruption and hypocrisy... The plain truth is that the Labour seat majority flatters to deceive when you look at votes cast. It hasn't required much to leave them holes below the waterline. They are now objects of contempt and ridicule and to expect the important news outlets to pretend otherwise is utterly absurd.

I am concerned just how poorly Labour supporters are reacting to the coverage of Farage and Reform

The way to tackle Reform is to govern properly and frankly stop trying to mimic them

And as for media bias they are only reacting to what is clearly a very new political climate and Raynergate has just ramped up the problems for Starmer and labour

I do not support Farage or Reform in any way whatsoever but the reality is Farage is taking all the headlines and all Labour are doing is adding to his publicity

My advise to those who are really upset and even trying to close down media coverage of Farage is reflect on why Starmer and labour have created space for this change in politics

It makes you despair

Llandudno RNLI inshore lifeboat was called to an injury to a lady in her 70s have fallen in a local speedboat on a trip and, whilst the speedboat came alongside the jetty, she couldn't move and the 4 person crew administered Entonox [ they are trained to do this] and with the help of the coastguards carried her to a local hotel to await ambulance

It arrived 9 [Nine] hours later to take her to hospital !!!!!!

That is shocking. I, and I suspect most, have already concluded that if I or my wife ever need a hip or knee replacement or rapid attention to a variety of ailments then there is little option other than to go private with the NHS being a literal and unacceptable pain. But A&E is one of the things they are supposed to be good at. £188bn in a year. WTF are they spending it on other than themselves?

An ageing population. A lot of the ambulance delays relate to inadequate social care.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9423059/ is a good summary.

The causes of these increased waits are complex and are a symptom of pressures within the NHS and social care system. Waits for social care mean it is difficult to discharge patients from hospital, which means there is a lack of hospital beds, which means that accident and emergency (A&E) staff can’t get patients out of their department, and, ultimately, paramedics queuing outside hospitals can’t hand their patients over to A&E staff.

I'm sorry. £188bn is more than £500m a day. And they can't even produce an ambulance? Their performance is literally killing people every day. It is time we stopped pretending that that is ok.

I suspect it would be cheaper to pay an adult social care worker to do a home safety assessment and if necessary get some chap with an electric screwdriver to fit a hand rail or ramp to assist mobility issues.

But that would go against the grain of hating on Councils. Pretending that all they do is diversity.

Our press is poison.

Hunt was right to bring social care and health into the same department but the benefits have been less than we might have hoped.

I have mentioned this before but the hospital my daughter works at, Ninewells in Dundee, has a department who start working on the discharge of every patient when they are admitted so by the time they finish their treatment their social care package that allows them to go home is already in place preventing bed blocking. It does involve the NHS taking on responsibilities and costs that are not really theirs but the savings are so obvious that there is a stream of visitors from other Trusts looking to see how they do it.

That is very interesting. Hopefully other trusts will take this up if they don't already.

Sadly, I have far too much experience of the interface between NHS and social care through my own family's experiences.

An issue that is not discussed enough imho is the ridiculous level of box ticking and risk aversion that hospitals display about discharge. I presume it is our litigation culture but it is nuts and government needs to sort it out.

I have found, and it has been confirmed by others I know in similar situations, that getting someone out of hospital when there is some level of care need - EVEN IF THE NEED IS CLEARLY MET - is like getting blood out of the proverbial stone. In one situation I was involved in very directly involving a family member - six different professional disciplines had to all sign off on discharge. The ward doctor was almost a pawn in the game frankly. Everyone of these disciplines seemed to be looking for reasons to delay discharge just in case...

My mother in law has severe dementia but is being cared for at home.

Sometimes it is very hard to work out what might be wrong.

She had a swollen wrist and was grabbing it with her other hand and screeching a lot, so we got her to the hospital for an x-ray (elective, not A&E).

There was nothing much wrong with the wrist but they decided she had a slight infection and needed antibiotics.

It was very late by this time and she was barely awake so was not able to swallow any.

They therefore insisted on admitting her for an IV because they couldn't just send her home without giving her the first dose. Why the first dose mattered so much when the other 27 would have been at home anyway, I have no idea.

It took 11 days to get her out again. 11 days where they didn't really look after her properly but couldn't let her out to a home where she had been safe for the past year. Of course, she deteriorated somewhat through being bed ridden because they couldn't risk getting her out of it.


It is definitely risk aversion, but a perverse kind of risk aversion where the harms of being in hospital are ignored.

The Guardian report on the Reform conference is fascinating

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/sep/05/such-a-vibrant-feeling-reform-uk-devotees-gather-party-conference

It seems to be the one political place you go if you want to be optimistic and positive about Britain - and your own political future

That’s an incredible asset and Reform own it. All the other parties are a downbeat melange of apology, protest, whining or guilt. Reform remind me of the SNP in the noughties, but in a much wider British context

It may be the wave they surf into government. Or it may overturn them, surfboard flipping

It seems the BBC’s Chris Mason is copping a load of flak for honestly reporting what he saw rather than what centrists want to read

Yes. I read it. He discovered exactly what the Guardian reporter discovered - a genuine sense of optimism allied with serious money, scale and intent. Yet also a sense it could go wrong

For that he is labelled a “Nazi journalist”??

There are many reasons to despise the PB centrist dad. But perhaps the most salient is their lame, feeble, cringeworthy stupidity

All that report on Reform is fine in itself line by line, but we've seen bits of the deeply MAGA stuff today, anti vaxx, Connolly, so to say that Farage called for "discipline" without even mentioning all that is, in itself, an act of sane washing.

The Connolly stuff is the aspect of Reform that could turn to the far-right, or the more extreme end of Maga. They are currently poised between this and Farage's personal business vanity project, with the Telegraph and GB News helpfully and partly playing the role that Berluscomi's own TV channels used to in this.

I find it all quite vexing.
I'm the sort of voter who on the face of it ought to be Reform-curious. I'm the sort of culturally-right voter who never felt fully at home with the Conservatives. I'm exasperated with the way we are governed. Hurray that this voice is being heard, for what feels like the first time in my lifetime.
But I don't want Putinism with that. I think the closure of tge North Sea oilfield is madness, but that doesn't mean I hate renewables and love fossil fuels. I definitely don't want antivaxery. I'd like to stand firm against the culture warriors who've dragged us into madness in the last fifteen years, but that doesn't mean I want to be opening new fronts like abortion. I hate compulsory enthusiasm for Pride, but that doesn't mean I want to put the gays back in the closet. Reform appear to have taken a promising niche and extrapolated it far far too far. I don't want to be contrarian on everything.

Oliver Stirling
@OWS1892
·
2h
Freaks. An absolute menagerie of full-blown freaks.

https://x.com/OWS1892/status/1964353905120117045

At least she looked embarrassed at singing “God save the Queen”. We’ve all been there…

This reads as if people often sing the national anthem. I'm not sure I ever have. Not that I've avoided it or anything, the scenario just hasn't arisen. Is this unusual? Do PBers have a lot of singing the national anthem in their lives?

You have lived a largely “safe” life. You have had a good career and lived in a country which, bar the odd uncomfortable time has not realistically been under threat in your lifetime.

You take for granted a factor of soft nationalism that many people in most countries don’t take for granted. To a huge amount of people on the planet, whether they live in democracies or dictatorships, the state protects them. There will always be minorities who the state oppresses but your average man on the street believes that the state, their state is protecting them.

Back to the whole lack of understanding because of the privilege of living in a very free and tolerant country. You have no cultural or direct knowledge of what it’s like to lose it so the things that attach you to that state, the UK, it’s flag and anthem are disposable.

I live in a place that has largely the same protections but it also has people alive who lived under the Nazis, they lived in fear and it was physically and mentally awful. The national anthem and display of flags is very important culturally because there is a cultural memory of losing that.

So you can cock a snook at it but maybe think about the fact that seemingly minor trivial and silly things like “a song” or a “bit of cloth” represent something more - they represent a country where someone from the arse end of nowhere can move through the system and get a well paid city career that allows them a comfortable late age existence where they can freely criticise the govern,ent or future government without fear of someone knocking on the door one night.

It’s not a bad thing to have love for your country and often that’s as simple as singing a patriotic song, like pretty much every nation in the world does, often very happily. Don’t mock, it’s allowed you to exist the way you do.

Rachel Reeves is considering proposals for a tax raid on GPs and other professionals that would raise almost £2bn a year.

The Treasury has been presented with plans to levy National Insurance (NI) on partnerships as she scrambles for ways to fill a £50bn black hole in the public purse.

Such a move would impact 190,000 workers, with family doctors, lawyers and solicitors, accountants and financial advisers hit the hardest.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/09/06/rachel-reeves-2-billion-national-insurance-gps-tax-budget/

I feel like we are being "anchored" with these leaks.

Treasury flying kites again.

They want it to be illegal to do any work for a company with fewer than x employees, where x gives full employment rights from Day 1. Just like France.

Actually, I think it's incompetence rather than malice.

Ms Reeves is stuck in a crazy short term world, where she's rushing to fill in holes in the budget. But everything she does slows the economy down, and therefore makes the holes worse. Meaning she needs to find something more to fill the hole.

She needs to take a step back, and ask what will stimulate growth? Because nothing fills holes more than falling unemployment and rising employment. I suspect you could do more to fill budget holes through planning reform getting home building moving than you could through any of these schemes.

Sadly: I don't think she's up to it. She can't see beyond today's crisis. It's basically the 1974 to 1979 Labour government again, only much more sellf inflicted.

Oh.

It's Farage, Badenoch and Burnham for Laura K tomorrow.

Farage was interviewed before today. It’s still questionable though whether LK would have asked him why they invited Connolly to the conference.

Not mentioned either in this gushing piece, which is probably a better effort than Reform's PR dept could have managed themselves.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c62zdpke8kko

The BBC ARE Reform’s PR department. I hope the government are looking at their charter in regards to impartiality.

I’ve seen this bizarre idea elsewhere

In what possible way is the BBC “acting as PR” for Reform?

Maybe voters are just thinking for themselves and saying “yes I want a government that gets a grip on immigration and asylum, instead of promising this and then doing nothing. Or actually doing the opposite”

Hence the popularity of Reform. It is not some conspiracy at the BBC

Have you read this pile of sycophantic shite? I mean, he even blames Rayner for being late....

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c62zdpke8kko

Yes.

I expect the BBC to report on Reform in the same manner they report on say the Greens or LibDems. Respectful but balanced reporting. Interview them. Quote what they say. Do an analysis of their manifesto and produce an ordered list of key ideas.

I don't expect 'I am going to wet myself this is soooo exciting'

It's going exactly the way MAGA did.

Politics as entertainment, completely different set of standards applied to the new party, Republicans (Conservatives) not sure whether to tag along or not while exhibiting a deep satisfaction at the distress of the Left, even as their own principles are those that are primarily subsumed.

The demographic bit has already happened. The distribution of the vote in 2024 was similar to that in the US, with high earners overwhelmingly voting for left-wing parties, while pensioners and those on low incomes (or on benefits) voting for the right.

That's all very well and may be true. But we were talking about the BBC reporting, specifically Chris Mason's oleaginous, fawning love-in with the Reform conference, in which he even omitted to mention some fairly controversial speakers.

The BBC is supposed to be objective and impartial, reporting the facts. It no longer is. Chris Mason is top bod, and is forever putting his own, subjective spin on things. The article referred to is just the worst of many such examples.