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Which is why I find it genuinely depressing that, since devolution, we’ve had so little to show for it in the things that actually matter: health outcomes, education outcomes, housing, infrastructure delivery, addiction and mental health, local services that work, and the general sense that the state can still build and run things competently. Plenty of blame to go around across administrations, but after almost 19 years in power the SNP own the results.

There is a debate to be had about why the first Labour devolved administration was not as successful as hoped on that front, but the problem with the SNP is they are determined to prove that devolution can't be successful, which makes it hard for them to run a successful devolved administration...

The SNP are a protest party, a single issue nationalist campaigning group who have found themselves in power for the last 19 years with no idea what to do with it.

Come on then, give me your Unionist manifesto to make a success of devolution then.

The problem for Unionist parties in Scotland with devolution is that it has entirely infantilised them (and as sub branches being junior was always part of their nature). They constantly piss and moan about the EssEnnPee without providing any kind of an alternative prospectus except ‘well, we wouldn’t do that’. In addition having their head offices running non-devolved government for Scotland in perpetuity keeps them as barely developed embryos floating in the warm, amniotic fluid of the Union.

Sorry, went a bit Leon with the metaphors there.

did you read my post down-thread?

I did, a dearth of solid policy proposals but a lot of ‘just do things better’.

I recall one PBer (resident in England) saying that it was the SNP’s job to govern ‘superbly’ to make the case for an Indy Scotland. Since I can’t think of any recent national governments let alone devolved ones as a model for that level of attainment, it seems a bit unfair to single out the SNP for so much unrealistic expectation.

That's an extraordinary lack of ambition. The normal expectation for any democratic government, whether devolved or not, is that they run everything they are charged with running very well.

The stuff people want run well is the ordinary non party political stuff of government - health, education, civil administration of stuff, roads, infrastructure, and so on. 'Superb', while ambitious, is a good term for government's aspiration.

What better way of making the case for Scottish independence can there be than by showing how it's done? No stunts, no wheezes, no excuses, just do it well.

Have you checked the UK zeitgeist lately for the normal expectations of the British public? If you haven’t, normal is expecting things to be a bit shit.
At the risk of encouraging a pomposity from PB’s chief anecdotalist, what would be your recent examples of governments running things very well?

The Passport Office. As we have discussed on here before (and now based in Scotland, so it should be a source of Caledonian pride)

Used to be terrible and janky, now it is a smooth model of quite remarkable efficiency. They can take an application for a replacement passport and turn it around in a few days, and it is briskly delivered to your door. They literally call you up to discuss your needs (with nice Scottish accents) and ask if there is anything else required

Lord knows why this is a weird outpost of technocratic excellence, but whoever is running the UKPO should be running the UKG

Process streamlining.

What they did was realise that manually handling *everything* is slow, expensive and prone to mistakes. The modern approach is to automate what you can, and devote your human resources to the edge cases. So a vast proportion of what the passport office does is to replacement passports. If you are sending a replacement to someone at the same address they have previously received a passport, little checking is needed. The process can be entirely automated. It's actually more secure to use software tools to look for patterns or anomalies in such work, than it is to get a bored human to read (well put the paper in front of their face) the application.

This meant they could speed up such applications massively. So people get their passports quicker. And they can devote more staff time to tricky problems and get them sorted out quicker.

Win win win. Classic OR productivity work.

Jason Groves
@JasonGroves1

Labour Together urges ministers to impose a 'temporary' 2p hike in income tax to fund another energy bill bailout

https://x.com/JasonGroves1/status/2032413254115373333

If energy prices soar then the underlying issue will be around a quarter of households literally won't be able to pay their energy bills. Once enough people stop paying that will snowball into a payment strike and the energy firms themselves won't be able to purchase enough energy to keep supply going.

I am generally very much against the "something needs to be done" line of thinking but energy prices at 2022 levels is rightly in that category. There are lots of different approaches but all come with political risks and costs. Those who think it can be left to a "free" market here are deluded.

Subsiding energy prices is a really inefficient way to do it though, for two reasons:

1) Energy consumption correlates closely with income. The richest households burn much more gas and petrol/diesel than poorer ones. The exception is electricity, as a percentage of household income, though that will change with EVs rolling out. It's a fiscal transfer from poor, working households in small flats to rich, non-working households in large detached houses.

2) The incentives are all wrong. By protecting consumers from these hikes we are sending a signal that they don't need to switch away from fossil fuels, or make their homes more efficient. Over the long term it actually increases our exposure to these crises.

So, I'd suggest a temporary uplift to the standard allowance of UC and to Pension Credit, if anything.

‘Temporary’.

The WFA was temporary. The ‘windfall tax’ was temporary

It will be temporary in name only.

The last temporary uplift to UC during COVID was, actually, temporary. That's part of the reason I suggested it.

An exception. This is not COVID. The whole economy has not ground to a halt.

I’ve give you my view. I stand by it. This is a govt that loves giving cash to the economically inactive or underutilised. They will not want to remove it.

FWIW I don't actually think it's a good idea, just a better one than noneoftheabove's suggestion that we subsidise energy prices for everyone.

Linking benefits to a rolling, rapidly updated, average for inflation would solve the problem, for now and the future.

Apologies if this has been mentioned, but administration officials admitted the US hadn't planned for the closing of the Straits in a closed briefing according to multiple sources.
Quite breathtaking.

I think they must have used Grok to wargame the Iranian response.

Or Trump had people with really low IQ working for him.

There was a board game I used to enjoy as a teenager, (sadly, I can't remember its name), which was set in a thinly-veiled version of the Middle East. And, blocking the equivalent of the Straits of Hormuz was one of the standard operations in that game.

I knew that Hegseth was a drunken idiot. I had not appreciated just how much of a drunken idiot.

Which is why I find it genuinely depressing that, since devolution, we’ve had so little to show for it in the things that actually matter: health outcomes, education outcomes, housing, infrastructure delivery, addiction and mental health, local services that work, and the general sense that the state can still build and run things competently. Plenty of blame to go around across administrations, but after almost 19 years in power the SNP own the results.

There is a debate to be had about why the first Labour devolved administration was not as successful as hoped on that front, but the problem with the SNP is they are determined to prove that devolution can't be successful, which makes it hard for them to run a successful devolved administration...

The SNP are a protest party, a single issue nationalist campaigning group who have found themselves in power for the last 19 years with no idea what to do with it.

Come on then, give me your Unionist manifesto to make a success of devolution then.

The problem for Unionist parties in Scotland with devolution is that it has entirely infantilised them (and as sub branches being junior was always part of their nature). They constantly piss and moan about the EssEnnPee without providing any kind of an alternative prospectus except ‘well, we wouldn’t do that’. In addition having their head offices running non-devolved government for Scotland in perpetuity keeps them as barely developed embryos floating in the warm, amniotic fluid of the Union.

Sorry, went a bit Leon with the metaphors there.

did you read my post down-thread?

I did, a dearth of solid policy proposals but a lot of ‘just do things better’.

I recall one PBer (resident in England) saying that it was the SNP’s job to govern ‘superbly’ to make the case for an Indy Scotland. Since I can’t think of any recent national governments let alone devolved ones as a model for that level of attainment, it seems a bit unfair to single out the SNP for so much unrealistic expectation.

That's an extraordinary lack of ambition. The normal expectation for any democratic government, whether devolved or not, is that they run everything they are charged with running very well.

The stuff people want run well is the ordinary non party political stuff of government - health, education, civil administration of stuff, roads, infrastructure, and so on. 'Superb', while ambitious, is a good term for government's aspiration.

What better way of making the case for Scottish independence can there be than by showing how it's done? No stunts, no wheezes, no excuses, just do it well.

Have you checked the UK zeitgeist lately for the normal expectations of the British public? If you haven’t, normal is expecting things to be a bit shit.
At the risk of encouraging a pomposity from PB’s chief anecdotalist, what would be your recent examples of governments running things very well?

The Passport Office. As we have discussed on here before (and now based in Scotland, so it should be a source of Caledonian pride)

Used to be terrible and janky, now it is a smooth model of quite remarkable efficiency. They can take an application for a replacement passport and turn it around in a few days, and it is briskly delivered to your door. They literally call you up to discuss your needs (with nice Scottish accents) and ask if there is anything else required

Lord knows why this is a weird outpost of technocratic excellence, but whoever is running the UKPO should be running the UKG

Apologies if this has been mentioned, but administration officials admitted the US hadn't planned for the closing of the Straits in a closed briefing according to multiple sources.
Quite breathtaking.

With every hour that passes, the scale of the Trump screw up grows. Support for the war in the US is falling off a cliff, as it becomes clear how utterly inept Trump and his crew of fuckwits, fools and creeps truly are. Trump is maybe only a matter of weeks away from an irrecoverable political collapse.

That will be fun.

Contrary opinion, based on discussions with several pals who have recently been in the States.

As long as there are no ground troops deployed, the public won't really notice the war. The idea of a 'political collapse' is entirely propagated by the chronically online.

They will notice the price of gas (petrol) going up - and that will cost the GOP some midterm votes and seats

We'll find out if the "inflation theory of everything" holds.

Unless this price shock is very short, it will do what price shocks to fuel have always done. Kick off recessions.

Jason Groves
@JasonGroves1

Labour Together urges ministers to impose a 'temporary' 2p hike in income tax to fund another energy bill bailout

https://x.com/JasonGroves1/status/2032413254115373333

If energy prices soar then the underlying issue will be around a quarter of households literally won't be able to pay their energy bills. Once enough people stop paying that will snowball into a payment strike and the energy firms themselves won't be able to purchase enough energy to keep supply going.

I am generally very much against the "something needs to be done" line of thinking but energy prices at 2022 levels is rightly in that category. There are lots of different approaches but all come with political risks and costs. Those who think it can be left to a "free" market here are deluded.

Subsiding energy prices is a really inefficient way to do it though, for two reasons:

1) Energy consumption correlates closely with income. The richest households burn much more gas and petrol/diesel than poorer ones. The exception is electricity, as a percentage of household income, though that will change with EVs rolling out. It's a fiscal transfer from poor, working households in small flats to rich, non-working households in large detached houses.

2) The incentives are all wrong. By protecting consumers from these hikes we are sending a signal that they don't need to switch away from fossil fuels, or make their homes more efficient. Over the long term it actually increases our exposure to these crises.

So, I'd suggest a temporary uplift to the standard allowance of UC and to Pension Credit, if anything.

‘Temporary’.

The WFA was temporary. The ‘windfall tax’ was temporary

It will be temporary in name only.

Was WFA temporary? It ought to be redundant now that the core pension is quite a lot higher in real terms, but I don't remember that being put in place in that way.

(The Triple Lock really ought to have been temporary, and the failure to define the "Mission Accomplished" trigger was yet another of the failures of the 2010 coalition that nobody seemed to notice at the time.)

Apologies if this has been mentioned, but administration officials admitted the US hadn't planned for the closing of the Straits in a closed briefing according to multiple sources.
Quite breathtaking.

With every hour that passes, the scale of the Trump screw up grows. Support for the war in the US is falling off a cliff, as it becomes clear how utterly inept Trump and his crew of fuckwits, fools and creeps truly are. Trump is maybe only a matter of weeks away from an irrecoverable political collapse.

That will be fun.

Contrary opinion, based on discussions with several pals who have recently been in the States.

As long as there are no ground troops deployed, the public won't really notice the war. The idea of a 'political collapse' is entirely propagated by the chronically online.

They will notice the price of gas (petrol) going up - and that will cost the GOP some midterm votes and seats