Best Of

Yes Cooper is probably the most heavyweight frontbencher if Reeves goes. May mean Ed Balls is backseat driving on economic policy if she becomes Chancellor though

Although one might surmise that after serving as Chief Secretary to the Treasury under Brown the fact shes been put pretty much everywhere - Shadiw Foreign, Home, DWP etc etc except back in the Treasury it suggests she didnt set the world alight with her economics

Our whole system is based on ministers not being specialists. Mrs Thatcher was not actually driving the tank in that famous picture. Chancellors do not need to have more than the most basic grasp of economics. They do need to have a policy.

But they do need to be able to count. There is little evidence Reeves can count. There is absolute evidence that Keir Starmer is functionally disnumerate and I wouldn't be surprised is Reeves is much the same.

SKS has an A in maths at A-level, and Reeves has an A in both maths and further maths, so it is absurd to claim that they are unable to count or "disnumerate" (a word which you appear to have invented; I assume you mean innumerate). They may not be the world's greatest economists, but they are certainly not stupid or innumerate.

FPT

New neighbourhood health services, open 12 hours a day, six day days a week, will be launched across the country offering tests, post-operation care, nursing and mental health treatment

To "bring back the family doctor" system, thousands more GPs will be trained

There will also be a push for GPs to lean on artificial intelligence to take notes while other technology will be used to speed up answering calls to surgeries

Newly qualified dentists will need to practise in the NHS for a minimum period - the government has indicated they intend this to be three years

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cx247rn0252t

Lord Darzi proposed this 20 years ago. I can't remember, why didn't it happen?

Or indeed when May promised it in 2019. It's a good plan that is very difficult to implement.

I suppose we will see the detail later today, but all those new neighbourhood health centres and staff are going to need funding, and it's not obvious where either that capital or revenue are coming from. Or the trained staff for that matter. The NHS workforce plan seems to have all gone quiet since it's announcement.

I am not convinced by AI either. It confabulates too much to be reliable for medical notes.

Despite being a Hospital practitioner myself, I think the emphasis on General Practice is correct.

There are many problems though with General Practice, but perhaps the main and most intractable one is the loss of clinical skills and confidence to investigate and manage disease themselves. The loss of the senior experience and rise of defensive medicine makes that very hard to restore.

FPT

New neighbourhood health services, open 12 hours a day, six day days a week, will be launched across the country offering tests, post-operation care, nursing and mental health treatment

To "bring back the family doctor" system, thousands more GPs will be trained

There will also be a push for GPs to lean on artificial intelligence to take notes while other technology will be used to speed up answering calls to surgeries

Newly qualified dentists will need to practise in the NHS for a minimum period - the government has indicated they intend this to be three years

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cx247rn0252t

Lord Darzi proposed this 20 years ago. I can't remember, why didn't it happen?

Or indeed when May promised it in 2019. It's a good plan that is very difficult to implement.

I suppose we will see the detail later today, but all those new neighbourhood health centres and staff are going to need funding, and it's not obvious where either that capital or revenue are coming from. Or the trained staff for that matter. The NHS workforce plan seems to have all gone quiet since it's announcement.

I am not convinced by AI either. It confabulates too much to be reliable for medical notes.

Despite being a Hospital practitioner myself, I think the emphasis on General Practice is correct.

There are many problems though with General Practice, but perhaps the main and most intractable one is the loss of clinical skills and confidence to investigate and manage disease themselves. The loss of the senior experience and rise of defensive medicine makes that very hard to restore.

It is something I saw all too often at the Civil bar before I turned to a life of crime. Highly competent solicitors would ask me to advise their clients of the bleeding obvious. They did this for a variety of reasons. Firstly, it passed on the risk of the bleeding obvious being wrong to me. Secondly, some solicitors were reluctant to give clients bad news because of their wider onging relationship with them. Thirdly, some clients took it better from the likes of me for whatever reason.

The result of all of these is that consultants such as myself were involved in matters well within the competence of the solicitor and I suspect this is an exact analogy with general practice. It is inefficient and puts much more pressure on the whole system but once established it is difficult to stop.

Yes, that is very much what I mean.

Even in hospital Practice the same happens, when more recently appointed Consultants are reluctant to make decisions that are well within their competence and skills without a second (delaying) opinion or loads of unnecessary further tests.

I suppose it was ever so, and a sign that we are both getting old!

(I was second the Surgical prize in my medical school finals for answering the question "what further tests would you do on this patient?" with the reply "I would do no further tests, the patient needs to go straight to theatre for a laprotomy". The smile on the examining panel of senior surgeons at my youthful confidence still warms my heart.)

By the way, here is some more on the IMF for those that think that it will bail us out.

For an IMF programme to have any effect at all, it would have to be a decent size, say 10% of our GDP, or about £250 billion. We might have to borrow more - Ireland borrowed about 15% of its GDP in 2010 from the Fund and 20% from others. But let's stick with 10%. The biggest ever loan in the IMF's history, in 2018, was to Argentina and that was $57 billion, or about a fifth of what we'd need. Even that caused them some consternation at the time.

The IMF's current total loanable funds are around $900 billion, of which about $200 billion is already loaned out. So we'd need to borrow about half their remaining funds for a minimal sized loan. There is no way the IMF (basically the Americans, EU and Chinese) would be comfortable with lending such a huge amount to one borrower whose woes are entirely the fault of its lazy and entitled political class and electorate, and which is not facing an imminent bond market crash (as we print our own currency, we can't) as doing so would mean that its ability to help genuinely needy borrowers would be greatly diminished.

The IMF could of course ask its creditors to increase its assets. Would the taxpayers of the United States, China and the EU, which is who we're essentially talking about, be willing to ask their taxpayers to subsidise ours? Would a snowball last ten seconds in hell? Especially as they all have their own economic problems, some of them even worse than ours: the Japanese and Italians are much more indebted, France and the US are chronically fiscally incontinent, the Chinese debt bubble is frightening and they are much poorer, and the Germans don't like the idea of bailing anyone out ever. All except maybe the Krauts are quaking at the idea of higher interest rates.

So the IMF is a red herring, either as a getout for our lazy political class to pretend to be forced to implement the reforms they know are needed, or as a measure on its own merits to improve our economic performance.

I have never been a fan of Rachel Reeves since the coalition days and this incident in particular.

Two Labour politicians have apologised to Vince Cable for attacking the business secretary for not voting for the introduction of the national minimum wage while he was away caring for his terminally ill wife in hospital.

Rachel Reeves and Chris Bryant, frontbench spokespeople for Labour on work and pensions, accused the business secretary last night in the House of Commons of missing the vote on the National Minimum Wage bill in 1998.

Tory MP Jackie Doyle-Price expressed outrage at the Labour MPs' "cheap and nasty" attack on Cable.

Reeves told MPs: "He was nowhere to be seen in the debates. He was nowhere to be seen on the voting record. On Second Reading and Third Reading, he failed to vote."

Cable initially dismissed her accusation that he and many other Lib Dems failed to vote for the National Minimum Wage, telling MPs: "She speaks with all the self-confidence of somebody who was not here at the time.”

Bryant joined in with Reeves with the heckle: "You were [there], you didn't vote!"

Cable finally explained with reluctance reluctantly that he had largely been away because he was caring for his late wife Olympia, who was terminally ill with breast cancer.

"I did not particularly wish to raise this, but I am being asked personally to explain why I did not vote. It had a lot to do with the fact that my late wife was terminally ill at the time and I was in the Royal Marsden hospital. That is why my voting record at the time was poor on that and other issues."

"As it happens, my party supported the national minimum wage; nobody opposed it. I became the party’s spokesman shortly after the vote and I made it absolutely clear throughout that Parliament that we supported the principle of the national minimum wage."

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/01/16/vince-cable-wife_n_4608721.html

I've seen the way she speaks in parliament. This is not out of character. She's still basically a student politician my-lot-good-your-lot-bad.

Too many Labour people are like this.

And other parties too, to be fair. But yes. It's a product of believing themselves to be the goodies.

One of the ways that the political right has decayed in recent decades.

The old (patrician, somewhat snobbish) right line was "we think the left is well-meaning but mistaken, whereas they haven't got beyond 'the right are evil'". And yes, it is snobbish and more than a bit grating. But it was a reasonable emoillient for society. Whereas now, the worst people on the right are just as willing to shout EVIL across the barricades as the worst sort of lefty. And increasingly, the worst sort of right are the ones running the right.

Just catching up. For me there are two truths:

1) The misogyny in British politics is appalling. They have attacked Reeves from day 1 as a woman - how dare she be appointed Chancellor! I have little doubt that politics at that level can be an emotional roller-coaster and some people are emotional beings.

I cried in a senior leadership meeting because the situation was that fraught. I can imagine me crying in a situation like that, or when Theresa May quit. As a bloke I get sympathy, but women get none. "too emotional" - how many times does that get added as a label to a colleague just because they are a woman?

That being said

2) Reeves is absolutely done. If she has something upsetting going on in her personal life then my sympathies - don't get her sat in the spotlight blubbing. A failing of the management team letting her sit there. If that's just cover then its my sexist patronising guff.

Problem is that she is Chancellor of the Exchequer and needs to be robust enough to face down critics and the markets and opposition idiots. Crying doesn't work. And she can't recover - even if she goes on in the role she will always be the chancellor reduced to tears as her boss fails to defend her position.

I’m surprised you get sympathy ‘as a bloke’, in my experience it would be the woman who’d get get sympathy for crying. I’d expect a male CofE to get far more stick for crying at PMQs than Reeves got today; most people seem to be quite compassionate towards her.

Just catching up. For me there are two truths:

1) The misogyny in British politics is appalling. They have attacked Reeves from day 1 as a woman - how dare she be appointed Chancellor! I have little doubt that politics at that level can be an emotional roller-coaster and some people are emotional beings.

I cried in a senior leadership meeting because the situation was that fraught. I can imagine me crying in a situation like that, or when Theresa May quit. As a bloke I get sympathy, but women get none. "too emotional" - how many times does that get added as a label to a colleague just because they are a woman?

That being said

2) Reeves is absolutely done. If she has something upsetting going on in her personal life then my sympathies - don't get her sat in the spotlight blubbing. A failing of the management team letting her sit there. If that's just cover then its my sexist patronising guff.

Problem is that she is Chancellor of the Exchequer and needs to be robust enough to face down critics and the markets and opposition idiots. Crying doesn't work. And she can't recover - even if she goes on in the role she will always be the chancellor reduced to tears as her boss fails to defend her position.

Sorry mysogyny is a feeble excuse, I would have said Reeves is crap if it was a man, a woman, black, white or even martian.

Fed up with this bollocks "you only criticise because its "woman/man/black/white/trans". Most criticise politicians because of what they say and do not because of gender, creed or colour. Now if someone has made prior mysognist chitterings by all mean point them out and speculate maybe