Best Of

Thomas Skinner has joined Reform UK
https://x.com/PolitlcsUK/status/2013621234001440825?s=20

Who or what is Thomas Skinner?

I Googled Thomas Skinner So That You Don't Have To.

Hundreds of thousands of people follow him on Instagram to watch him eat traditional British meals like Spaghetti Bolognese, apparently.

Anyway, the important thing is that he's one of those people with that knack of being able to address an audience and connect with and enthuse them.

He's a bit of a populist rightie, in that uncomplicated way of thinking that the country is being let down by people who teach kids to be ashamed of the flag sort of thing.

I think it's very likely that we will be hearing a lot more about and from Thomas Skinner.

Thomas Skinner has joined Reform UK
https://x.com/PolitlcsUK/status/2013621234001440825?s=20

Who or what is Thomas Skinner?

I Googled Thomas Skinner So That You Don't Have To.

Hundreds of thousands of people follow him on Instagram to watch him eat traditional British meals like Spaghetti Bolognese, apparently.

Anyway, the important thing is that he's one of those people with that knack of being able to address an audience and connect with and enthuse them.

He's a bit of a populist rightie, in that uncomplicated way of thinking that the country is being let down by people who teach kids to be ashamed of the flag sort of thing.

I think it's very likely that we will be hearing a lot more about and from Thomas Skinner.

You could have just said "he's a ****", which he undoubtedly is.

On another topic entirely, I found this news item on a Doctors.net news page:


The NHS may have inadvertently benefited from December's resident doctors' strike, with health leaders suggesting that senior consultants covering for their younger colleagues helped ease winter pressures through more confident clinical decision-making.

Experienced doctors were often quicker to discharge patients, helping hospitals avoid bed pressures, it is suggested.
The five-day industrial action before Christmas appears to have contributed to stronger NHS performance this winter compared to recent years.

Speaking on an NHS Confederation podcast, Nick Hulme, who recently retired as chief executive of East Suffolk and North Essex NHS Foundation Trust, said that while the strikes were challenging, they had acted as “a bit of a fire break” as a result of senior decision makers “discharging patients a bit earlier, not ordering so many diagnostic tests, not admitting as many patients through the front door”.

Mr Hulme noted that "walking into Colchester hospital on Christmas morning with 100 empty beds is something I hadn't done for probably five years".

Several health officials, speaking to the Financial Times, confirmed that accident and emergency departments ran more smoothly during the walk out because senior consultants made quicker discharge decisions and ordered fewer diagnostic tests.

One unnamed hospital boss observed that A&E "works so much better when there is a strike" due to consultants’ more confident decision-making.

Bed occupancy rates fell to 81.2% on Christmas Day – comfortably below the 85% threshold deemed safe by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine. Only a handful of hospitals declared "critical incidents" this winter, compared to potentially two to four times that number in severe winters, according to Rory Deighton, director of the Acute Network at the NHS Confederation.

However, health leaders cautioned against oversimplifying the situation. Deighton pointed to far more detailed pre-winter planning and reforms promoting closer collaboration between hospitals and community services as important factors. Siva Anandaciva, director of policy at the King's Fund, suggested the NHS had "got lucky" by avoiding severe demand-side pressures, though flu arrived earlier than usual before levelling off from mid-December.

The British Medical Association responded strongly to suggestions that strikes had improved NHS performance. Dr Helen Neary and Dr Shanu Datta, consultants committee co-chairs, said it was "interesting" that politicians and NHS leaders previously warned of health service collapse during strikes, yet managers now suggested "the opposite in fact happened".

The NHS managers should offer the resident doctors a pay cut and pass the savings on to consultants, on the basis that it improves patient care.

To be fair on our Resident Doctors, some of the improved bed occupancy may have been down to cancelled elective activity.

Most of it is about experience and willingness to make decisions.

Which exactly what OR research across many domains has found - an equal amount of money spent on fewer staff, with higher skills, yields better results.

Chagos was an open goal for Trump, and he's right. His narrative on Greenland is that 'Europe' (in Greenland's case Denmark) will fail to defend territories in its control, ceding more and more power until an independent Greenland is gobbled up by Chinese money.

That's exactly what has happened in Chagos. We can bung Mauritius all the money we want, but we cannot stop them gradually undermining the security of Diego Garcia (from an American perspective) by aligning progressively with China's ambitions in the region. We have been weak, and US security has suffered. It doesn't matter that we've stuffed the Mauritian's mouths with gold to do what we want - without it being British sovereign territory we have no ability to enforce it.

It also completely undermines Starmer's argument that the Greenlanders have a right to self determination. What self-determination has he given to the Chagossians? The man is a moral vacuum, totally unable to spot his own glaring hypocrisy.

Trump's argument isn't perfect. The biggest counterargument is that the US could have as many more soldiers in Greenland as it likes under the current arrangement.

However, the fact that Starmer's antipatriotic Chagos policy has given Trump a case study in European weakness to highlight is nobody's fault but Starmer's.

Hang on a minute Truss fans. Truss drew up the Chagos arrangement. Chagos would have been handed to Mauritius by her had she not been outlasted by a lettuce 🥬.

Nope - she started negotiating. Starmer agreed to a deal.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/diego-garcia-chagos-islands-mauritius-b2623202.html

#trussandcleverleychagos

From your source

“After the initial formal negotiations began, James Cleverly, Grant Shapps and Oliver Dowden were working on it together. They agreed that there wasn’t going to be ground found that would be acceptable. After 15 months of James Cleverly in the Foreign Office, it wasn't signed off, but [Keir] Starmer and David Lammy signed it off in the first three months.”

You must be infuriated having to respond to ill-educated, ignorant scumbag filth like me several times a day.

Read the headline!

Headlines are the original clickbait. Always read the story.

This is why I refuse to use clickbait headlines on PB.

I quite like you clickbait headlines. Particularly the smutty ones.

This headline got somebody into trouble.

They had to meet Sunak a few days later and this is all they could think about.

Rishi Sunak's chopper is going to get him into a lot of trouble

https://www1.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2023/08/13/rishi-sunaks-chopper-is-going-to-get-him-into-a-lot-of-trouble/

Are you saying that they could only think about his chopper while talking to him?