Blow for Nicola Sturgeon as study shows even Yes voters want to KEEP majority of UK state Polling suggests even Yes voters want to keep the British welfare system, armed forces and pensions while also following the same path on international diplomacy
Tendentious interpretation of the question. It's like claiming that the need for a health service in Scotland means that independence is impossible becauise NHS. Which is a separate organization already.
An exaggerated claim, but one not wholly without validity. Ireland is brought up frequently as a successful example of leaving the British state - but they don't have an NHS, and indeed people injured near the border usually 'go north' for that reason. I believe that indy Scotland can work as a lean, mean, independent state (I just think it would be unecessary, damaging and sad) - but there's no doubt that some some luxuries would have to go, and the NHS in its present form is one of them.
Personally I think that's a bonus, but I don't think many Scots agree with me, especially not independence-leaning ones.
There's a cross-party consensus to move towards something a lot more like the NHS than the status quo in Ireland, but for some reason it never happens.
Fairly certain one reason for the consensus is a recognition that the NHS would be an issue in any border poll, and that Ireland's health service is in many respects in worse shape than Britain's.
The NHS NI stats are by far the worst of the UK countries, so to prefer there to ROI must be pretty desperate. Emergencies may work, but elective care, probably not.
One of the independent TDs in my corner of Ireland is well-known locally for organising cataract buses to take people to the eye hospital in Belfast. Broadly speaking the health service in Ireland exists in the space between the British and US systems.
Maybe. Maybe they'll be able to rejoin while England continue floating down the toilet?
If they did rejoin I'd be first in the queue for a Scottish passport
While England would of course build the border posts and hard border from Cumbria to Northumberland the next day. Plus cut off the Treasury spending taps immediately.
Not that any UK government is going to allow indyref2 after the SC ruling anytime soon
Patrol boats on the Tweed eh?
A hard border on the Tweed, but not on the Foyle.
Funny old world.
There is a hard border in the Irish Sea and the same hard border would apply from Cumbria to Northumberland. More Scottish exports go to England percentage wise of course than even UK exports percentage wise went to the EU in 2016
I can see the war pestering out in a stalemate, with Russia unable to sustain a major campaign in the spring, but Ukraine struggling to dislodge the Russians from the remaining occupied territories.
The Russians have been willing to sustain heavy losses when on the front foot - e.g. in the fighting for Mariupol and Bakhmut - but haven't held a defensive position when put under pressure and with their logistics smashed.
I'm not convinced their defensive lines will hold this time round after another couple of months of having their positions taken apart by accurate Ukrainian fire.
On Topic has SKS told striking nurses to get up and go home we don't support you yet?
Or are the SKS Tory party currently only picking on Dr's
Just the usual fence sitting.
Basically Starmer proposes Toryism, but with a face like he has a pineapple stuck up his arse.
Is the NHS safe under SKS and Streeting?
This "radical reform" of which they speak?
Same shit different day. Milburn plans and the Iraq war were why I left Labour 20 years ago.
Looks like Starmer is going to skip straight to the unpopular bit of New Labour, bypassing the few enthusiastic years.
Where would you start if suddenly appointed Health Secretary, if you didn’t turn it down flat ? Solving the problems of the NHS is a bit much to ask, but what changes would have the biggest impact (assuming a bit of financial headroom to fund change) ?
I wrote a long header a few years ago on the subject.
Alongside an emphasis on public health by implementing the Marmot report, I would reform UK private medicine first, which is really quite archaic and patchy. I proposed a SIPP style system for people to fund their own Health and Social Care pots, rather than take out insurance.
I don't think my views have altered much since. The problem of an ageing society on pensions (work longer, pay more, get less) are similar for healthcare, whether state funded like the NHS or via compulsory insurance like other countries. (lead healthier lives, pay more, get less).
The Sunday Rawnsley: A year of cascading scandals and whipsawing policies has also been 12 months in which vital public services have come dangerously close to collapse and food banks haven’t been able to cope with the demand for their help. The serial debauchery of the king of rogues was followed by the ruinous reign of the mad queen. Financial markets started applying a “moron premium” to the price of lending to Britain.
It’s not disruption by the opposition parties that has destabilised the governance of Britain but the Conservative party itself.
No explanation can overlook Brexit, a rupture unique to this country and one that has left Britons poorer than they need have been, while scrambling the synapses of the Conservative party responsible for it.
A sequence of successively worse prime ministers has crashed and burned because they promised things they couldn’t deliver. This cycle of leadership boom and bust has been accompanied by vicious purges as the so-called Brexit revolution devoured itself. The pool of Tory talent has been drained, especially of Conservatives of more decent and sensible character, many of whom have been ejected from the party or abandoned it in despair.
So 2022 has been a year of extreme misgovernance, but it is best interpreted not as a shockingly unexpected aberration, but the culmination of forces unleashed since 2016.
Mutinous Conservative MPs are already chuntering that, if their prospects aren’t looking up by the spring, Mr Sunak will find himself putsched out of Downing Street next year. And the name you are most likely to hear bandied about as his replacement? Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.
That this is even being talked about tells us that the dementia of the Conservative party has reached a very advanced stage.
Britain is unlucky. Not only did we suffer from Covid and Putin, on top of that we suffered from this bizarre flavour of the Conservative Party who gave us hard Brexit, Truss-o-nomics and a myriad of corrupt and crazy schemes that mean today we can’t afford nurses.
THIS might be one other reason we can’t afford nurses. A total non-job. Woke nonsense. £110,000 a year
I posted yesterday that I have no issue with the job, which if you drill into it is about improving patient care. It’s the salary. The job should around £30K max. How the hell is it rated at £110,000? How many people does it report on (size of team)? What qualifications are required?
Putin can keep fighting as long as he holds significant land in Ukraine. I think he will eventually fail to meet that contingency. If he loses the Crimea he has lost and will very likely be overthrown. Ukraine's economy is utterly devastated, it survives on the charity of friends and there is a possibility that we will weary but not as long as Ukraine continues to win, recover land and destroy the Russian army.
What Ukraine, and very probably the west, cannot tolerate is a prolonged stalemate. The 2 months since the fall of Kherson have been largely static. Ukraine need victories.
Your post is a good example of the trouble with short modern attention spans. The liberation of Kherson was on November 11th - only 1 month and a week ago, not 2 months - but it's the impression of stalemate that is as important as the reality.
Ukraine will need some time to inflict losses on the newly mobilised Russian troops before they can make further advances. It will take time. But there's not currently any reason to expect that they won't make further advances once that has been done.
Maybe. Maybe they'll be able to rejoin while England continue floating down the toilet?
If they did rejoin I'd be first in the queue for a Scottish passport
While England would of course build the border posts and hard border from Cumbria to Northumberland the next day. Plus cut off the Treasury spending taps immediately.
Not that any UK government is going to allow indyref2 after the SC ruling anytime soon
Maybe cutting off the 'Treasury spending taps' would be the best thing for Scotland?
Is there any particular reason why an independent Scotland should be any poorer than those other northern European nations of circa 5 million people? Any reason why Scotland wouldn't be as wealthy as Norway, Finland, Denmark or Ireland in time?
Well, the main difference till now is that Scotland has had the good luck of being under the wise and beneficent oversight of the Union for 315 years. I’m looking forward to Bettertogether II majoring on that as a selling point.
The Scottish Government has a lot of control over many aspects of Scottish life - why not start down this road of Singapore-on-Clyde now? Public services could be leaned out, taxes could be lowered significantly to attract investment, money could be diverted to a 'Scottish sovereign wealth fund', even the accoutrements of a digital invisible customs border with RUK could be built.
There's no move in any of these directions because remaining comfortably within the UK that has apparently subjected Scotland to 300 years of rape and plunder but complaining about it all the time is preferred. And those who actually do want independence want it to be not actual independence, but within the clammy embrace of the EU, so they can effectively replace the UK.
Good luck with your relaunch of Kwasitrussism north of the border, don't let it going down like a cup of microwaved sick south of it haud ye back.
Blow for Nicola Sturgeon as study shows even Yes voters want to KEEP majority of UK state Polling suggests even Yes voters want to keep the British welfare system, armed forces and pensions while also following the same path on international diplomacy
Tendentious interpretation of the question. It's like claiming that the need for a health service in Scotland means that independence is impossible becauise NHS. Which is a separate organization already.
An exaggerated claim, but one not wholly without validity. Ireland is brought up frequently as a successful example of leaving the British state - but they don't have an NHS, and indeed people injured near the border usually 'go north' for that reason. I believe that indy Scotland can work as a lean, mean, independent state (I just think it would be unecessary, damaging and sad) - but there's no doubt that some some luxuries would have to go, and the NHS in its present form is one of them.
Personally I think that's a bonus, but I don't think many Scots agree with me, especially not independence-leaning ones.
There's a cross-party consensus to move towards something a lot more like the NHS than the status quo in Ireland, but for some reason it never happens.
Fairly certain one reason for the consensus is a recognition that the NHS would be an issue in any border poll, and that Ireland's health service is in many respects in worse shape than Britain's.
The NHS NI stats are by far the worst of the UK countries, so to prefer there to ROI must be pretty desperate. Emergencies may work, but elective care, probably not.
One of the independent TDs in my corner of Ireland is well-known locally for organising cataract buses to take people to the eye hospital in Belfast. Broadly speaking the health service in Ireland exists in the space between the British and US systems.
Seems a bit strange when the Belfast NHS Trust has a waiting list of 3 years and 7 months according to FOI enquiries:
The Sunday Rawnsley: A year of cascading scandals and whipsawing policies has also been 12 months in which vital public services have come dangerously close to collapse and food banks haven’t been able to cope with the demand for their help. The serial debauchery of the king of rogues was followed by the ruinous reign of the mad queen. Financial markets started applying a “moron premium” to the price of lending to Britain.
It’s not disruption by the opposition parties that has destabilised the governance of Britain but the Conservative party itself.
No explanation can overlook Brexit, a rupture unique to this country and one that has left Britons poorer than they need have been, while scrambling the synapses of the Conservative party responsible for it.
A sequence of successively worse prime ministers has crashed and burned because they promised things they couldn’t deliver. This cycle of leadership boom and bust has been accompanied by vicious purges as the so-called Brexit revolution devoured itself. The pool of Tory talent has been drained, especially of Conservatives of more decent and sensible character, many of whom have been ejected from the party or abandoned it in despair.
So 2022 has been a year of extreme misgovernance, but it is best interpreted not as a shockingly unexpected aberration, but the culmination of forces unleashed since 2016.
Mutinous Conservative MPs are already chuntering that, if their prospects aren’t looking up by the spring, Mr Sunak will find himself putsched out of Downing Street next year. And the name you are most likely to hear bandied about as his replacement? Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.
That this is even being talked about tells us that the dementia of the Conservative party has reached a very advanced stage.
Britain is unlucky. Not only did we suffer from Covid and Putin, on top of that we suffered from this bizarre flavour of the Conservative Party who gave us hard Brexit, Truss-o-nomics and a myriad of corrupt and crazy schemes that mean today we can’t afford nurses.
THIS might be one other reason we can’t afford nurses. A total non-job. Woke nonsense. £110,000 a year
I posted yesterday that I have no issue with the job, which if you drill into it is about improving patient care. It’s the salary. The job should around £30K max. How the hell is it rated at £110,000? How many people does it report on (size of team)? What qualifications are required?
I’ve read the advert several times and still have no clue what the job entails. What this person DOES
It’s Wokeness colliding with cronyism. Jobs for the girls. It’s a rancid waste of public money
Blow for Nicola Sturgeon as study shows even Yes voters want to KEEP majority of UK state Polling suggests even Yes voters want to keep the British welfare system, armed forces and pensions while also following the same path on international diplomacy
Tendentious interpretation of the question. It's like claiming that the need for a health service in Scotland means that independence is impossible becauise NHS. Which is a separate organization already.
An exaggerated claim, but one not wholly without validity. Ireland is brought up frequently as a successful example of leaving the British state - but they don't have an NHS, and indeed people injured near the border usually 'go north' for that reason. I believe that indy Scotland can work as a lean, mean, independent state (I just think it would be unecessary, damaging and sad) - but there's no doubt that some some luxuries would have to go, and the NHS in its present form is one of them.
Personally I think that's a bonus, but I don't think many Scots agree with me, especially not independence-leaning ones.
There's a cross-party consensus to move towards something a lot more like the NHS than the status quo in Ireland, but for some reason it never happens.
Fairly certain one reason for the consensus is a recognition that the NHS would be an issue in any border poll, and that Ireland's health service is in many respects in worse shape than Britain's.
The NHS NI stats are by far the worst of the UK countries, so to prefer there to ROI must be pretty desperate. Emergencies may work, but elective care, probably not.
One of the independent TDs in my corner of Ireland is well-known locally for organising cataract buses to take people to the eye hospital in Belfast. Broadly speaking the health service in Ireland exists in the space between the British and US systems.
Seems a bit strange when the Belfast NHS Trust has a waiting list of 3 years and 7 months according to FOI enquiries:
Blow for Nicola Sturgeon as study shows even Yes voters want to KEEP majority of UK state Polling suggests even Yes voters want to keep the British welfare system, armed forces and pensions while also following the same path on international diplomacy
The Sunday Rawnsley: A year of cascading scandals and whipsawing policies has also been 12 months in which vital public services have come dangerously close to collapse and food banks haven’t been able to cope with the demand for their help. The serial debauchery of the king of rogues was followed by the ruinous reign of the mad queen. Financial markets started applying a “moron premium” to the price of lending to Britain.
It’s not disruption by the opposition parties that has destabilised the governance of Britain but the Conservative party itself.
No explanation can overlook Brexit, a rupture unique to this country and one that has left Britons poorer than they need have been, while scrambling the synapses of the Conservative party responsible for it.
A sequence of successively worse prime ministers has crashed and burned because they promised things they couldn’t deliver. This cycle of leadership boom and bust has been accompanied by vicious purges as the so-called Brexit revolution devoured itself. The pool of Tory talent has been drained, especially of Conservatives of more decent and sensible character, many of whom have been ejected from the party or abandoned it in despair.
So 2022 has been a year of extreme misgovernance, but it is best interpreted not as a shockingly unexpected aberration, but the culmination of forces unleashed since 2016.
Mutinous Conservative MPs are already chuntering that, if their prospects aren’t looking up by the spring, Mr Sunak will find himself putsched out of Downing Street next year. And the name you are most likely to hear bandied about as his replacement? Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.
That this is even being talked about tells us that the dementia of the Conservative party has reached a very advanced stage.
Britain is unlucky. Not only did we suffer from Covid and Putin, on top of that we suffered from this bizarre flavour of the Conservative Party who gave us hard Brexit, Truss-o-nomics and a myriad of corrupt and crazy schemes that mean today we can’t afford nurses.
THIS might be one other reason we can’t afford nurses. A total non-job. Woke nonsense. £110,000 a year
I posted yesterday that I have no issue with the job, which if you drill into it is about improving patient care. It’s the salary. The job should around £30K max. How the hell is it rated at £110,000? How many people does it report on (size of team)? What qualifications are required?
I’ve read the advert several times and still have no clue what the job entails. What this person DOES
It’s Wokeness colliding with cronyism. Jobs for the girls. It’s a rancid waste of public money
Equivalent to a director of nursing, but for social work esque workers within the NHS.
Blow for Nicola Sturgeon as study shows even Yes voters want to KEEP majority of UK state Polling suggests even Yes voters want to keep the British welfare system, armed forces and pensions while also following the same path on international diplomacy
Tendentious interpretation of the question. It's like claiming that the need for a health service in Scotland means that independence is impossible becauise NHS. Which is a separate organization already.
"Access to a UK passport and citizenship" 47% hahahaha
I do wonder if much of this Yes support won't survive an initial brush with reality. All the campaign needs to do is say stuff like:
"Like Brexit..." "During the negotiations..." "State pension payments will cease 6 months after the referendum" "People born in Scotland who have lived in England, Wales and Northern Ireland for over 5 years...." "Major arterial routes will remain open, like the M74 and A1, but..."
A Tory government, or a Starmer one, would be hard pushed to take the line that "Sindy would be a mess and disaster, just like Brexit" even if it is true. Neither Tories nor Labour can face that truth yet.
Particularly “Sindy would be a mess and disaster, just like Brexit which we are insisting on keeping”.
I do wonder if Starmer has the necessary rhetorical deftness to manage the inevitable reverse ferret on Brexit. Actually I don’t; he doesn’t.
I don’t think rhetorical deftness will be needed beyond: “We knew the deal was bad, but now we’ve seen the real numbers it’s much worse than we thought.” No-one beyond the loons on the right will care and if the Tories lose power they won’t matter anymore.
Yes, it's pretty obvious this is the plan and the sleight of hand Starmer is planning to pull once safely in office.
The Sunday Rawnsley: A year of cascading scandals and whipsawing policies has also been 12 months in which vital public services have come dangerously close to collapse and food banks haven’t been able to cope with the demand for their help. The serial debauchery of the king of rogues was followed by the ruinous reign of the mad queen. Financial markets started applying a “moron premium” to the price of lending to Britain.
It’s not disruption by the opposition parties that has destabilised the governance of Britain but the Conservative party itself.
No explanation can overlook Brexit, a rupture unique to this country and one that has left Britons poorer than they need have been, while scrambling the synapses of the Conservative party responsible for it.
A sequence of successively worse prime ministers has crashed and burned because they promised things they couldn’t deliver. This cycle of leadership boom and bust has been accompanied by vicious purges as the so-called Brexit revolution devoured itself. The pool of Tory talent has been drained, especially of Conservatives of more decent and sensible character, many of whom have been ejected from the party or abandoned it in despair.
So 2022 has been a year of extreme misgovernance, but it is best interpreted not as a shockingly unexpected aberration, but the culmination of forces unleashed since 2016.
Mutinous Conservative MPs are already chuntering that, if their prospects aren’t looking up by the spring, Mr Sunak will find himself putsched out of Downing Street next year. And the name you are most likely to hear bandied about as his replacement? Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.
That this is even being talked about tells us that the dementia of the Conservative party has reached a very advanced stage.
Britain is unlucky. Not only did we suffer from Covid and Putin, on top of that we suffered from this bizarre flavour of the Conservative Party who gave us hard Brexit, Truss-o-nomics and a myriad of corrupt and crazy schemes that mean today we can’t afford nurses.
THIS might be one other reason we can’t afford nurses. A total non-job. Woke nonsense. £110,000 a year
I posted yesterday that I have no issue with the job, which if you drill into it is about improving patient care. It’s the salary. The job should around £30K max. How the hell is it rated at £110,000? How many people does it report on (size of team)? What qualifications are required?
I’ve read the advert several times and still have no clue what the job entails. What this person DOES
It’s Wokeness colliding with cronyism. Jobs for the girls. It’s a rancid waste of public money
I think it’s around gaining patient centred information, particularly for those who have significant experiences. For instance I had nearly 5 weeks in an isolation ward with leukaemia, and four rounds in total of chemotherapy, plus three years of regular bone marrow biopsies. I now do a session for our undergrads on my patient experience, which is useful for them. No one from the NHS ever asked if I could give feedback on my experiences.
The Sunday Rawnsley: A year of cascading scandals and whipsawing policies has also been 12 months in which vital public services have come dangerously close to collapse and food banks haven’t been able to cope with the demand for their help. The serial debauchery of the king of rogues was followed by the ruinous reign of the mad queen. Financial markets started applying a “moron premium” to the price of lending to Britain.
It’s not disruption by the opposition parties that has destabilised the governance of Britain but the Conservative party itself.
No explanation can overlook Brexit, a rupture unique to this country and one that has left Britons poorer than they need have been, while scrambling the synapses of the Conservative party responsible for it.
A sequence of successively worse prime ministers has crashed and burned because they promised things they couldn’t deliver. This cycle of leadership boom and bust has been accompanied by vicious purges as the so-called Brexit revolution devoured itself. The pool of Tory talent has been drained, especially of Conservatives of more decent and sensible character, many of whom have been ejected from the party or abandoned it in despair.
So 2022 has been a year of extreme misgovernance, but it is best interpreted not as a shockingly unexpected aberration, but the culmination of forces unleashed since 2016.
Mutinous Conservative MPs are already chuntering that, if their prospects aren’t looking up by the spring, Mr Sunak will find himself putsched out of Downing Street next year. And the name you are most likely to hear bandied about as his replacement? Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.
That this is even being talked about tells us that the dementia of the Conservative party has reached a very advanced stage.
Britain is unlucky. Not only did we suffer from Covid and Putin, on top of that we suffered from this bizarre flavour of the Conservative Party who gave us hard Brexit, Truss-o-nomics and a myriad of corrupt and crazy schemes that mean today we can’t afford nurses.
THIS might be one other reason we can’t afford nurses. A total non-job. Woke nonsense. £110,000 a year
I checked if that was real.
It is.
Having read the job advert twice now I'm still not sure what it's for or what the job entails.
The Sunday Rawnsley: A year of cascading scandals and whipsawing policies has also been 12 months in which vital public services have come dangerously close to collapse and food banks haven’t been able to cope with the demand for their help. The serial debauchery of the king of rogues was followed by the ruinous reign of the mad queen. Financial markets started applying a “moron premium” to the price of lending to Britain.
It’s not disruption by the opposition parties that has destabilised the governance of Britain but the Conservative party itself.
No explanation can overlook Brexit, a rupture unique to this country and one that has left Britons poorer than they need have been, while scrambling the synapses of the Conservative party responsible for it.
A sequence of successively worse prime ministers has crashed and burned because they promised things they couldn’t deliver. This cycle of leadership boom and bust has been accompanied by vicious purges as the so-called Brexit revolution devoured itself. The pool of Tory talent has been drained, especially of Conservatives of more decent and sensible character, many of whom have been ejected from the party or abandoned it in despair.
So 2022 has been a year of extreme misgovernance, but it is best interpreted not as a shockingly unexpected aberration, but the culmination of forces unleashed since 2016.
Mutinous Conservative MPs are already chuntering that, if their prospects aren’t looking up by the spring, Mr Sunak will find himself putsched out of Downing Street next year. And the name you are most likely to hear bandied about as his replacement? Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.
That this is even being talked about tells us that the dementia of the Conservative party has reached a very advanced stage.
Britain is unlucky. Not only did we suffer from Covid and Putin, on top of that we suffered from this bizarre flavour of the Conservative Party who gave us hard Brexit, Truss-o-nomics and a myriad of corrupt and crazy schemes that mean today we can’t afford nurses.
THIS might be one other reason we can’t afford nurses. A total non-job. Woke nonsense. £110,000 a year
I posted yesterday that I have no issue with the job, which if you drill into it is about improving patient care. It’s the salary. The job should around £30K max. How the hell is it rated at £110,000? How many people does it report on (size of team)? What qualifications are required?
I’ve read the advert several times and still have no clue what the job entails. What this person DOES
It’s Wokeness colliding with cronyism. Jobs for the girls. It’s a rancid waste of public money
I think it’s around gaining patient centred information, particularly for those who have significant experiences. For instance I had nearly 5 weeks in an isolation ward with leukaemia, and four rounds in total of chemotherapy, plus three years of regular bone marrow biopsies. I now do a session for our undergrads on my patient experience, which is useful for them. No one from the NHS ever asked if I could give feedback on my experiences.
The jargon is obtuse, but you'd have equivalent customer experience roles in the private sector. No idea why Leon thinks it has anything to do with woke.
Blow for Nicola Sturgeon as study shows even Yes voters want to KEEP majority of UK state Polling suggests even Yes voters want to keep the British welfare system, armed forces and pensions while also following the same path on international diplomacy
Tendentious interpretation of the question. It's like claiming that the need for a health service in Scotland means that independence is impossible becauise NHS. Which is a separate organization already.
"Access to a UK passport and citizenship" 47% hahahaha
I do wonder if much of this Yes support won't survive an initial brush with reality. All the campaign needs to do is say stuff like:
"Like Brexit..." "During the negotiations..." "State pension payments will cease 6 months after the referendum" "People born in Scotland who have lived in England, Wales and Northern Ireland for over 5 years...." "Major arterial routes will remain open, like the M74 and A1, but..."
A Tory government, or a Starmer one, would be hard pushed to take the line that "Sindy would be a mess and disaster, just like Brexit" even if it is true. Neither Tories nor Labour can face that truth yet.
Particularly “Sindy would be a mess and disaster, just like Brexit which we are insisting on keeping”.
I do wonder if Starmer has the necessary rhetorical deftness to manage the inevitable reverse ferret on Brexit. Actually I don’t; he doesn’t.
I don’t think rhetorical deftness will be needed beyond: “We knew the deal was bad, but now we’ve seen the real numbers it’s much worse than we thought.” No-one beyond the loons on the right will care and if the Tories lose power they won’t matter anymore.
Yes, it's pretty obvious this is the plan and the sleight of hand Starmer is planning to pull once safely in office.
He can’t go back into the EEA however without restoring free movement and handing the red wall seats back to the Conservatives again.
So at most it would likely be some combination of May’s deal and a Customs Union Starmer’s Labour government would go for
On Topic has SKS told striking nurses to get up and go home we don't support you yet?
Or are the SKS Tory party currently only picking on Dr's
SKS has called for negotiation with nurses, which is exactly what any responsible leader should do.
Your personal campaign does blind you from time to time. I do find it odd how you can criticise others as Tories when you’re a self proclaimed Tory supporter.
Never voted Tory.
He has also said we cannot afford an inflation matching pay award for nurses
The choice between 2 identical ideologies Tory neo Liberalism or Tory neoliberalism is not for me.
Why do you support immigrant hating, strike hating red Rosette wearing Tories over the same philosophy with a blue rosette, favourite colour?
You publicly back Boris. The most Tory Tory of them all. You’re a Tory supporter.
I know it’s not ideal, but I find your opinion on Labour difficult to take seriously as a result.
I backed levelling up,.and will always support redistribution and Socialism
You back immigrant hating, climate change protestor hating, can't afford a decent wage supporting, can't afford nationalisation supporting, army strike break supporting SKS.
"Not ideal" you are right on that front.
Anyway I am out of here for today. Daughters birthday party to attend.
Starmer will throw open the borders the second he enters office, and create "safe and legal routes" for anyone who might want to come here - Biden and Trudeaus policies are instructive here and they are both "moderates".
Maybe. Maybe they'll be able to rejoin while England continue floating down the toilet?
If they did rejoin I'd be first in the queue for a Scottish passport
While England would of course build the border posts and hard border from Cumbria to Northumberland the next day. Plus cut off the Treasury spending taps immediately.
Not that any UK government is going to allow indyref2 after the SC ruling anytime soon
Is that a bit like how they stop the boats arriving.
I never said I was in the popular position on the argument, only in the right to point out, whenever Labour have been in power, they have used exactly the same argument I debated Stodge into defeat with, that is, where is your budget, and credibility with the markets, if you settle with the strikers asking 19%? Settling is not easy, because it means a double whammy in having to fund settlements by re opening budgets, and wage inflation prolongs the high inflation agony for everyone - which ironically for your post, does regard Mike saying in the header, cave in to one strike force only encourages others, a bit like a don’t give in to hostage takers. So yes, I have explained regarding the header - the headers on my side! 😇
In recent hours Grant Schnapps has been put in charge of bringing legislation to parliament in January to finish these strikes once and for all - trains will by law have to run or else workers will be sacked if they don’t run them, ambulance staff will be banned from striking and sacked if they do, and unions banned from compensating lost earnings of strikers.
If people like the sound of this legislation, they can applaud Mick Lynch for his role in bringing it about - if you don’t like the sound of this legislation just look in direction of Mick Lynch and the greedy union barons.
As HY points out, we have a centrist moderate government.
"Greedy union barons" is a hilarious phrase. Can we have "bully boys" as well? Pitted against "entrepreneurs", the public, and babies in incubators maybe? There's Stephen Fitzpatrick, majority owner of Ovo, working his SOCKS off as an entrepreneur, and here come these baronial pushy selfish bullies who grant themselves the right - without even asking the king! - to go on strike! They're so lazy they don't like the idea of getting second and third jobs, such as going on the game each night, to EARN the money they need to be able to give the altruistic Fitzpatrick the treble-sized leccy payments that he so clearly deserves. Acting like a bunch of posh moneygrabbing entitled profiteers, those damned workers are, trampling all over the ordinary Heil readers obsessed with house prices and savings rates.
You have some good points, but personally I wouldn’t go that far.
However “Mick Lynch who is paralysing Britain with crippling rail strikes earns £120,000-a-year total pay package and lives in London home worth nearly £1m”
The average total remuneration of the 30 union bosses on more than £100,000 was £150,755 in 2020. VFM? Or nice work if you can get it?
The Sunday Rawnsley: A year of cascading scandals and whipsawing policies has also been 12 months in which vital public services have come dangerously close to collapse and food banks haven’t been able to cope with the demand for their help. The serial debauchery of the king of rogues was followed by the ruinous reign of the mad queen. Financial markets started applying a “moron premium” to the price of lending to Britain.
It’s not disruption by the opposition parties that has destabilised the governance of Britain but the Conservative party itself.
No explanation can overlook Brexit, a rupture unique to this country and one that has left Britons poorer than they need have been, while scrambling the synapses of the Conservative party responsible for it.
A sequence of successively worse prime ministers has crashed and burned because they promised things they couldn’t deliver. This cycle of leadership boom and bust has been accompanied by vicious purges as the so-called Brexit revolution devoured itself. The pool of Tory talent has been drained, especially of Conservatives of more decent and sensible character, many of whom have been ejected from the party or abandoned it in despair.
So 2022 has been a year of extreme misgovernance, but it is best interpreted not as a shockingly unexpected aberration, but the culmination of forces unleashed since 2016.
Mutinous Conservative MPs are already chuntering that, if their prospects aren’t looking up by the spring, Mr Sunak will find himself putsched out of Downing Street next year. And the name you are most likely to hear bandied about as his replacement? Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.
That this is even being talked about tells us that the dementia of the Conservative party has reached a very advanced stage.
Britain is unlucky. Not only did we suffer from Covid and Putin, on top of that we suffered from this bizarre flavour of the Conservative Party who gave us hard Brexit, Truss-o-nomics and a myriad of corrupt and crazy schemes that mean today we can’t afford nurses.
THIS might be one other reason we can’t afford nurses. A total non-job. Woke nonsense. £110,000 a year
I posted yesterday that I have no issue with the job, which if you drill into it is about improving patient care. It’s the salary. The job should around £30K max. How the hell is it rated at £110,000? How many people does it report on (size of team)? What qualifications are required?
The full ad is here. It is a Director level appointment, so on the board of the Trust, and seems to require both direct experience of management of change, and personal experience of life changing illness.
It is in Stafford, which does have a long history of poor lived experience by patients!
Blow for Nicola Sturgeon as study shows even Yes voters want to KEEP majority of UK state Polling suggests even Yes voters want to keep the British welfare system, armed forces and pensions while also following the same path on international diplomacy
Tendentious interpretation of the question. It's like claiming that the need for a health service in Scotland means that independence is impossible becauise NHS. Which is a separate organization already.
"Access to a UK passport and citizenship" 47% hahahaha
I do wonder if much of this Yes support won't survive an initial brush with reality. All the campaign needs to do is say stuff like:
"Like Brexit..." "During the negotiations..." "State pension payments will cease 6 months after the referendum" "People born in Scotland who have lived in England, Wales and Northern Ireland for over 5 years...." "Major arterial routes will remain open, like the M74 and A1, but..."
A Tory government, or a Starmer one, would be hard pushed to take the line that "Sindy would be a mess and disaster, just like Brexit" even if it is true. Neither Tories nor Labour can face that truth yet.
Particularly “Sindy would be a mess and disaster, just like Brexit which we are insisting on keeping”.
I do wonder if Starmer has the necessary rhetorical deftness to manage the inevitable reverse ferret on Brexit. Actually I don’t; he doesn’t.
I don’t think rhetorical deftness will be needed beyond: “We knew the deal was bad, but now we’ve seen the real numbers it’s much worse than we thought.” No-one beyond the loons on the right will care and if the Tories lose power they won’t matter anymore.
Yes, it's pretty obvious this is the plan and the sleight of hand Starmer is planning to pull once safely in office.
He can’t go back into the EEA however without restoring free movement and handing the red wall seats back to the Conservatives again.
So at most it would likely be some combination of May’s deal and a Customs Union Starmer’s Labour government would go for
He batted for Corbyn for as long as it suited him, then he tried to overturn the referendum result, then he campaigned as a left-winger to the Labour membership- to get elected - and than rapidly pivoted to Brownism (with Blairite mood music) once he was elected.
You can't trust him. You don't know what you're going to get with SKS.
The Sunday Rawnsley: A year of cascading scandals and whipsawing policies has also been 12 months in which vital public services have come dangerously close to collapse and food banks haven’t been able to cope with the demand for their help. The serial debauchery of the king of rogues was followed by the ruinous reign of the mad queen. Financial markets started applying a “moron premium” to the price of lending to Britain.
It’s not disruption by the opposition parties that has destabilised the governance of Britain but the Conservative party itself.
No explanation can overlook Brexit, a rupture unique to this country and one that has left Britons poorer than they need have been, while scrambling the synapses of the Conservative party responsible for it.
A sequence of successively worse prime ministers has crashed and burned because they promised things they couldn’t deliver. This cycle of leadership boom and bust has been accompanied by vicious purges as the so-called Brexit revolution devoured itself. The pool of Tory talent has been drained, especially of Conservatives of more decent and sensible character, many of whom have been ejected from the party or abandoned it in despair.
So 2022 has been a year of extreme misgovernance, but it is best interpreted not as a shockingly unexpected aberration, but the culmination of forces unleashed since 2016.
Mutinous Conservative MPs are already chuntering that, if their prospects aren’t looking up by the spring, Mr Sunak will find himself putsched out of Downing Street next year. And the name you are most likely to hear bandied about as his replacement? Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.
That this is even being talked about tells us that the dementia of the Conservative party has reached a very advanced stage.
Britain is unlucky. Not only did we suffer from Covid and Putin, on top of that we suffered from this bizarre flavour of the Conservative Party who gave us hard Brexit, Truss-o-nomics and a myriad of corrupt and crazy schemes that mean today we can’t afford nurses.
THIS might be one other reason we can’t afford nurses. A total non-job. Woke nonsense. £110,000 a year
I posted yesterday that I have no issue with the job, which if you drill into it is about improving patient care. It’s the salary. The job should around £30K max. How the hell is it rated at £110,000? How many people does it report on (size of team)? What qualifications are required?
The full ad is here. It is a Director level appointment, so on the board of the Trust, and seems to require both direct experience of management of change, and personal experience of life changing illness.
It is in Stafford, which does have a long history of poor lived experience by patients!
Director of Customer Care with some hard targets for improving patient outcomes (KPIs) and specific goals that the Trust wanted to achieve would be fine. Also, demanding the candidate shows a track record of achieving such change elsewhere.
As it is this job is a job for loudmouth Wokery, and will attract candidates accordingly, and so that's precisely what they will get.
I'd be very confident that in 5 years time patient experiences won't have budged a jot in Stafford off the back of this role. What they want to be able to do is point to the job as a sign they are "taking it very seriously".
The Sunday Rawnsley: A year of cascading scandals and whipsawing policies has also been 12 months in which vital public services have come dangerously close to collapse and food banks haven’t been able to cope with the demand for their help. The serial debauchery of the king of rogues was followed by the ruinous reign of the mad queen. Financial markets started applying a “moron premium” to the price of lending to Britain.
It’s not disruption by the opposition parties that has destabilised the governance of Britain but the Conservative party itself.
No explanation can overlook Brexit, a rupture unique to this country and one that has left Britons poorer than they need have been, while scrambling the synapses of the Conservative party responsible for it.
A sequence of successively worse prime ministers has crashed and burned because they promised things they couldn’t deliver. This cycle of leadership boom and bust has been accompanied by vicious purges as the so-called Brexit revolution devoured itself. The pool of Tory talent has been drained, especially of Conservatives of more decent and sensible character, many of whom have been ejected from the party or abandoned it in despair.
So 2022 has been a year of extreme misgovernance, but it is best interpreted not as a shockingly unexpected aberration, but the culmination of forces unleashed since 2016.
Mutinous Conservative MPs are already chuntering that, if their prospects aren’t looking up by the spring, Mr Sunak will find himself putsched out of Downing Street next year. And the name you are most likely to hear bandied about as his replacement? Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.
That this is even being talked about tells us that the dementia of the Conservative party has reached a very advanced stage.
Britain is unlucky. Not only did we suffer from Covid and Putin, on top of that we suffered from this bizarre flavour of the Conservative Party who gave us hard Brexit, Truss-o-nomics and a myriad of corrupt and crazy schemes that mean today we can’t afford nurses.
THIS might be one other reason we can’t afford nurses. A total non-job. Woke nonsense. £110,000 a year
I posted yesterday that I have no issue with the job, which if you drill into it is about improving patient care. It’s the salary. The job should around £30K max. How the hell is it rated at £110,000? How many people does it report on (size of team)? What qualifications are required?
I’ve read the advert several times and still have no clue what the job entails. What this person DOES
It’s Wokeness colliding with cronyism. Jobs for the girls. It’s a rancid waste of public money
I think it’s around gaining patient centred information, particularly for those who have significant experiences. For instance I had nearly 5 weeks in an isolation ward with leukaemia, and four rounds in total of chemotherapy, plus three years of regular bone marrow biopsies. I now do a session for our undergrads on my patient experience, which is useful for them. No one from the NHS ever asked if I could give feedback on my experiences.
The jargon is obtuse, but you'd have equivalent customer experience roles in the private sector. No idea why Leon thinks it has anything to do with woke.
The language employed is Woke Newspeak. Where identity politics meets bureaucratic jargon
The intention is to say nothing at all, but do it in a way that offers feelgood vibes to insiders
Wonder whether the expectation of a general election is indicative more of a desire for a general election. I think there will be many people frustrated at having to wait.
Not me. It's time we had another full(ish) term.
Of course, by repealing the FTPA (which in fairness both Labour and Conservatives wanted to do), the government cannot hide behind even the flimsy pretext of following the official schedule, as the opposition will rightly point out if they thought they would win they could, and would, call one sooner.
Governments mid-term are often unpopular in the polls. Rarely when a government has had a sizeable Commons majority has the opposition ever demanded "Call a general election now". Which is not to say that such a precedent means much, because nowadays most of the population don't know which way's up, because they're too busy picking at their phones or obeying orders to do this or do that, for fear of Armageddon. It won't surprise much of the electorate if there's an election in 2023 or if the law gets changed and the next one's held in 2027.
You mean, apart from Starmer now, Cameron in 2007, Kinnock in 1990 and 1991, Heath in 1968, Wilson in 1963 and Gaitskell in 1957?
They do it very often. Just not every day of the week and only when there might be a reasonable excuse for one.
I figured I'd let someone else do the research on that one. I knew oppositions would do it often.
On Topic has SKS told striking nurses to get up and go home we don't support you yet?
Or are the SKS Tory party currently only picking on Dr's
SKS has called for negotiation with nurses, which is exactly what any responsible leader should do.
Your personal campaign does blind you from time to time. I do find it odd how you can criticise others as Tories when you’re a self proclaimed Tory supporter.
Never voted Tory.
He has also said we cannot afford an inflation matching pay award for nurses
The choice between 2 identical ideologies Tory neo Liberalism or Tory neoliberalism is not for me.
Why do you support immigrant hating, strike hating red Rosette wearing Tories over the same philosophy with a blue rosette, favourite colour?
Blow for Nicola Sturgeon as study shows even Yes voters want to KEEP majority of UK state Polling suggests even Yes voters want to keep the British welfare system, armed forces and pensions while also following the same path on international diplomacy
Tendentious interpretation of the question. It's like claiming that the need for a health service in Scotland means that independence is impossible becauise NHS. Which is a separate organization already.
"Access to a UK passport and citizenship" 47% hahahaha
I do wonder if much of this Yes support won't survive an initial brush with reality. All the campaign needs to do is say stuff like:
"Like Brexit..." "During the negotiations..." "State pension payments will cease 6 months after the referendum" "People born in Scotland who have lived in England, Wales and Northern Ireland for over 5 years...." "Major arterial routes will remain open, like the M74 and A1, but..."
A Tory government, or a Starmer one, would be hard pushed to take the line that "Sindy would be a mess and disaster, just like Brexit" even if it is true. Neither Tories nor Labour can face that truth yet.
Particularly “Sindy would be a mess and disaster, just like Brexit which we are insisting on keeping”.
I do wonder if Starmer has the necessary rhetorical deftness to manage the inevitable reverse ferret on Brexit. Actually I don’t; he doesn’t.
I don’t think rhetorical deftness will be needed beyond: “We knew the deal was bad, but now we’ve seen the real numbers it’s much worse than we thought.” No-one beyond the loons on the right will care and if the Tories lose power they won’t matter anymore.
Yes, it's pretty obvious this is the plan and the sleight of hand Starmer is planning to pull once safely in office.
He can’t go back into the EEA however without restoring free movement and handing the red wall seats back to the Conservatives again.
So at most it would likely be some combination of May’s deal and a Customs Union Starmer’s Labour government would go for
He batted for Corbyn for as long as it suited him, then he tried to overturn the referendum result, then he campaigned as a left-winger to the Labour membership- to get elected - and than rapidly pivoted to Brownism (with Blairite mood music) once he was elected.
You can't trust him. You don't know what you're going to get with SKS.
I don't rate Starmer but that is called political expediency. Sunak (who I do generally rate) uses it, granted not very well, by the bus load.
It is all well and good to be BJO or a Jeremy Corbyn, content to take what they consider to be the moral high ground in perpetual opposition, be that in opposition to the blue Tories or the red Tories.
Anyway you are a political opponent of anyone but the Conservative Party, so you would write that wouldn't you?
Blow for Nicola Sturgeon as study shows even Yes voters want to KEEP majority of UK state Polling suggests even Yes voters want to keep the British welfare system, armed forces and pensions while also following the same path on international diplomacy
Tendentious interpretation of the question. It's like claiming that the need for a health service in Scotland means that independence is impossible becauise NHS. Which is a separate organization already.
"Access to a UK passport and citizenship" 47% hahahaha
I do wonder if much of this Yes support won't survive an initial brush with reality. All the campaign needs to do is say stuff like:
"Like Brexit..." "During the negotiations..." "State pension payments will cease 6 months after the referendum" "People born in Scotland who have lived in England, Wales and Northern Ireland for over 5 years...." "Major arterial routes will remain open, like the M74 and A1, but..."
A Tory government, or a Starmer one, would be hard pushed to take the line that "Sindy would be a mess and disaster, just like Brexit" even if it is true. Neither Tories nor Labour can face that truth yet.
Particularly “Sindy would be a mess and disaster, just like Brexit which we are insisting on keeping”.
I do wonder if Starmer has the necessary rhetorical deftness to manage the inevitable reverse ferret on Brexit. Actually I don’t; he doesn’t.
I don’t think rhetorical deftness will be needed beyond: “We knew the deal was bad, but now we’ve seen the real numbers it’s much worse than we thought.” No-one beyond the loons on the right will care and if the Tories lose power they won’t matter anymore.
Yes, it's pretty obvious this is the plan and the sleight of hand Starmer is planning to pull once safely in office.
He can’t go back into the EEA however without restoring free movement and handing the red wall seats back to the Conservatives again.
So at most it would likely be some combination of May’s deal and a Customs Union Starmer’s Labour government would go for
He batted for Corbyn for as long as it suited him, then he tried to overturn the referendum result, then he campaigned as a left-winger to the Labour membership- to get elected - and than rapidly pivoted to Brownism (with Blairite mood music) once he was elected.
You can't trust him. You don't know what you're going to get with SKS.
At the moment Starmer as PM looks like he will pursue Brown and Ed Miliband’s economic, domestic and foreign policy, with Blair’s social policy and Theresa May’s Brexit policy
Blow for Nicola Sturgeon as study shows even Yes voters want to KEEP majority of UK state Polling suggests even Yes voters want to keep the British welfare system, armed forces and pensions while also following the same path on international diplomacy
Tendentious interpretation of the question. It's like claiming that the need for a health service in Scotland means that independence is impossible becauise NHS. Which is a separate organization already.
"Access to a UK passport and citizenship" 47% hahahaha
I do wonder if much of this Yes support won't survive an initial brush with reality. All the campaign needs to do is say stuff like:
"Like Brexit..." "During the negotiations..." "State pension payments will cease 6 months after the referendum" "People born in Scotland who have lived in England, Wales and Northern Ireland for over 5 years...." "Major arterial routes will remain open, like the M74 and A1, but..."
A Tory government, or a Starmer one, would be hard pushed to take the line that "Sindy would be a mess and disaster, just like Brexit" even if it is true. Neither Tories nor Labour can face that truth yet.
Particularly “Sindy would be a mess and disaster, just like Brexit which we are insisting on keeping”.
I do wonder if Starmer has the necessary rhetorical deftness to manage the inevitable reverse ferret on Brexit. Actually I don’t; he doesn’t.
I don’t think rhetorical deftness will be needed beyond: “We knew the deal was bad, but now we’ve seen the real numbers it’s much worse than we thought.” No-one beyond the loons on the right will care and if the Tories lose power they won’t matter anymore.
Yes, it's pretty obvious this is the plan and the sleight of hand Starmer is planning to pull once safely in office.
He can’t go back into the EEA however without restoring free movement and handing the red wall seats back to the Conservatives again.
So at most it would likely be some combination of May’s deal and a Customs Union Starmer’s Labour government would go for
He batted for Corbyn for as long as it suited him, then he tried to overturn the referendum result, then he campaigned as a left-winger to the Labour membership- to get elected - and than rapidly pivoted to Brownism (with Blairite mood music) once he was elected.
You can't trust him. You don't know what you're going to get with SKS.
I don't rate Starmer but that is called political expediency. Sunak (who I do generally rate) uses it, granted not very well, by the bus load.
It is all well and good to be BJO or a Jeremy Corbyn, content to take what they consider to be the moral high ground in perpetual opposition, be that in opposition to the blue Tories or the red Tories.
Anyway you are a political opponent of anyone but the Conservative Party, so you would write that wouldn't you?
Maybe. Maybe they'll be able to rejoin while England continue floating down the toilet?
If they did rejoin I'd be first in the queue for a Scottish passport
While England would of course build the border posts and hard border from Cumbria to Northumberland the next day. Plus cut off the Treasury spending taps immediately.
Not that any UK government is going to allow indyref2 after the SC ruling anytime soon
Maybe cutting off the 'Treasury spending taps' would be the best thing for Scotland?
Is there any particular reason why an independent Scotland should be any poorer than those other northern European nations of circa 5 million people? Any reason why Scotland wouldn't be as wealthy as Norway, Finland, Denmark or Ireland in time?
Well, the main difference till now is that Scotland has had the good luck of being under the wise and beneficent oversight of the Union for 315 years. I’m looking forward to Bettertogether II majoring on that as a selling point.
The Scottish Government has a lot of control over many aspects of Scottish life - why not start down this road of Singapore-on-Clyde now? Public services could be leaned out, taxes could be lowered significantly to attract investment, money could be diverted to a 'Scottish sovereign wealth fund', even the accoutrements of a digital invisible customs border with RUK could be built.
There's no move in any of these directions because remaining comfortably within the UK that has apparently subjected Scotland to 300 years of rape and plunder but complaining about it all the time is preferred. And those who actually do want independence want it to be not actual independence, but within the clammy embrace of the EU, so they can effectively replace the UK.
Good luck with your relaunch of Kwasitrussism north of the border, don't let it going down like a cup of microwaved sick south of it haud ye back.
If you're not prepared even to countenance any moderation to the cause of soggy statist social democracy, then I wonder if independence and all it means is actually for you.
Dominic Raab misses the point, perhaps deliberately. What we want are fewer murders, not more gimmicks. The scandals about the Zara Aleena murder are, first, yet another lone woman was attacked, raped and murdered, and second that her killer had already been recalled to prison for breaching his parole terms, but he was out when the police popped round to pick him up. That he declined to stand in the dock to be sentenced is neither here nor there, except it will give Raab the appearance of action.
Yes, criminal justice depresses me because the focus on gimmicks and other pointless actions like unnecessary new laws is so blatant.
And to be perfectly blunt, and acknowledging I would probably feel different were I in that situation, I don't think criminal justice is about being therapeutic for vicims anyway, not as a primary purpose. I know some will get that out of it, but it isn't the point of it, it's why you don't (or shouldn't) take cases that are not likely to succeed to trial to give victims a 'day in court' or some such, and why we may prosecute people even if the victim might not even care for that option.
Spent the night in Soho. Quite busy, despite rail strikes
More interestingly, on the Tube train to Tott Ct Road I was struck by the multiracial nature of the passengers. In my fairly packed carriage of about 100 people maybe 5-10% were white British
The ethnic transformation of our great capital is astonishing. Unprecedented. And happening at speed. And no one asked for it. That makes it a massive and risky experiment. We must pray that it works
What is an ‘interpersonallly talented’ person? Does it just mean ‘chatty’?
It means self confident and articulate and shameless enough to talk themselves into a taxpayer funded job of gobbledygook paid 3 times a nurses salary and more even than some doctors and surgeons earn
I can see the war pestering out in a stalemate, with Russia unable to sustain a major campaign in the spring, but Ukraine struggling to dislodge the Russians from the remaining occupied territories.
The Russians have been willing to sustain heavy losses when on the front foot - e.g. in the fighting for Mariupol and Bakhmut - but haven't held a defensive position when put under pressure and with their logistics smashed.
I'm not convinced their defensive lines will hold this time round after another couple of months of having their positions taken apart by accurate Ukrainian fire.
The reason that fortifications in the Maginot sense died out (mostly) was not that they did work. They were very very good at resisting attack. But because they were so expensive, the number of guns mounted etc was tiny. So an attacking force could line up its heaviest artillery and pound the small number of obvious targets. Leaving the survivors in the fortresses in their own dungeons.
More limited fortifications - bunkers in a network of trenches worked better. Because thousands could be afforded and the loss of one didn’t threaten the whole system.
Now, in the age of distributed intelligence - due to the internet and drones, every soldier on the battlefield, potentially, has access to the kind of detailed intelligence that was previously only seen at the highest levels. Every bunker is located to the centimetre. And the weapons to hit them are accurate enough to target not just the bunker in general, but the individual weakspots - doors, weapons positions.
On Topic has SKS told striking nurses to get up and go home we don't support you yet?
Or are the SKS Tory party currently only picking on Dr's
SKS has called for negotiation with nurses, which is exactly what any responsible leader should do.
Your personal campaign does blind you from time to time. I do find it odd how you can criticise others as Tories when you’re a self proclaimed Tory supporter.
Never voted Tory.
He has also said we cannot afford an inflation matching pay award for nurses
The choice between 2 identical ideologies Tory neo Liberalism or Tory neoliberalism is not for me.
Why do you support immigrant hating, strike hating red Rosette wearing Tories over the same philosophy with a blue rosette, favourite colour?
You publicly back Boris. The most Tory Tory of them all. You’re a Tory supporter.
I know it’s not ideal, but I find your opinion on Labour difficult to take seriously as a result.
I backed levelling up,.and will always support redistribution and Socialism
You back immigrant hating, climate change protestor hating, can't afford a decent wage supporting, can't afford nationalisation supporting, army strike break supporting SKS.
"Not ideal" you are right on that front.
Anyway I am out of here for today. Daughters birthday party to attend.
Starmer will throw open the borders the second he enters office, and create "safe and legal routes" for anyone who might want to come here - Biden and Trudeaus policies are instructive here and they are both "moderates".
He's a North London liberal left-winger.
Well the current state of affairs is an utter disaster. Short of strafing the Zodiacs with gunfire Suella has no idea what to do next to reduce the numbers arriving on our shores. Some sort of safe passage and grown up agreements with other third party European countries would make sense. I don't know what exactly, but then I am not Home Secretary so I don't need to know what exactly.
Saying something bottom of the barrel bad would be worse under a new regime makes no sense.
Spent the night in Soho. Quite busy, despite rail strikes
More interestingly, on the Tube train to Tott Ct Road I was struck by the multiracial nature of the passengers. In my fairly packed carriage of about 100 people maybe 5-10% were white British
The ethnic transformation of our great capital is astonishing. Unprecedented. And happening at speed. And no one asked for it. That makes it a massive and risky experiment. We must pray that it works
Blow for Nicola Sturgeon as study shows even Yes voters want to KEEP majority of UK state Polling suggests even Yes voters want to keep the British welfare system, armed forces and pensions while also following the same path on international diplomacy
Tendentious interpretation of the question. It's like claiming that the need for a health service in Scotland means that independence is impossible becauise NHS. Which is a separate organization already.
An exaggerated claim, but one not wholly without validity. Ireland is brought up frequently as a successful example of leaving the British state - but they don't have an NHS, and indeed people injured near the border usually 'go north' for that reason. I believe that indy Scotland can work as a lean, mean, independent state (I just think it would be unecessary, damaging and sad) - but there's no doubt that some some luxuries would have to go, and the NHS in its present form is one of them.
Personally I think that's a bonus, but I don't think many Scots agree with me, especially not independence-leaning ones.
There's a cross-party consensus to move towards something a lot more like the NHS than the status quo in Ireland, but for some reason it never happens.
Fairly certain one reason for the consensus is a recognition that the NHS would be an issue in any border poll, and that Ireland's health service is in many respects in worse shape than Britain's.
The NHS NI stats are by far the worst of the UK countries, so to prefer there to ROI must be pretty desperate. Emergencies may work, but elective care, probably not.
One of the independent TDs in my corner of Ireland is well-known locally for organising cataract buses to take people to the eye hospital in Belfast. Broadly speaking the health service in Ireland exists in the space between the British and US systems.
Has there been discussion of Clarkson's bilious ranting about Meghan? Surprised if not since he's the patron saint of PB Gammons and his views seem a pretty fair reflection of their's.
Dominic Raab misses the point, perhaps deliberately. What we want are fewer murders, not more gimmicks. The scandals about the Zara Aleena murder are, first, yet another lone woman was attacked, raped and murdered, and second that her killer had already been recalled to prison for breaching his parole terms, but he was out when the police popped round to pick him up. That he declined to stand in the dock to be sentenced is neither here nor there, except it will give Raab the appearance of action.
Yes, criminal justice depresses me because the focus on gimmicks and other pointless actions like unnecessary new laws is so blatant.
And to be perfectly blunt, and acknowledging I would probably feel different were I in that situation, I don't think criminal justice is about being therapeutic for vicims anyway, not as a primary purpose. I know some will get that out of it, but it isn't the point of it, it's why you don't (or shouldn't) take cases that are not likely to succeed to trial to give victims a 'day in court' or some such, and why we may prosecute people even if the victim might not even care for that option.
Criminal justice is perhaps this government's worst failure.
It wouldn't take very much expenses (hundreds of millions of pounds, not billions) to fix the system, so that justice was delivered in a timely and effective fashion.
Legal aid rates are appalling, reducing the number of lawyers willing to practice in that field. Courts have been shut, and those that remain are subject to terrible delays.
Spent the night in Soho. Quite busy, despite rail strikes
More interestingly, on the Tube train to Tott Ct Road I was struck by the multiracial nature of the passengers. In my fairly packed carriage of about 100 people maybe 5-10% were white British
The ethnic transformation of our great capital is astonishing. Unprecedented. And happening at speed. And no one asked for it. That makes it a massive and risky experiment. We must pray that it works
Blow for Nicola Sturgeon as study shows even Yes voters want to KEEP majority of UK state Polling suggests even Yes voters want to keep the British welfare system, armed forces and pensions while also following the same path on international diplomacy
Tendentious interpretation of the question. It's like claiming that the need for a health service in Scotland means that independence is impossible becauise NHS. Which is a separate organization already.
"Access to a UK passport and citizenship" 47% hahahaha
I do wonder if much of this Yes support won't survive an initial brush with reality. All the campaign needs to do is say stuff like:
"Like Brexit..." "During the negotiations..." "State pension payments will cease 6 months after the referendum" "People born in Scotland who have lived in England, Wales and Northern Ireland for over 5 years...." "Major arterial routes will remain open, like the M74 and A1, but..."
A Tory government, or a Starmer one, would be hard pushed to take the line that "Sindy would be a mess and disaster, just like Brexit" even if it is true. Neither Tories nor Labour can face that truth yet.
Particularly “Sindy would be a mess and disaster, just like Brexit which we are insisting on keeping”.
I do wonder if Starmer has the necessary rhetorical deftness to manage the inevitable reverse ferret on Brexit. Actually I don’t; he doesn’t.
I don’t think rhetorical deftness will be needed beyond: “We knew the deal was bad, but now we’ve seen the real numbers it’s much worse than we thought.” No-one beyond the loons on the right will care and if the Tories lose power they won’t matter anymore.
Yes, it's pretty obvious this is the plan and the sleight of hand Starmer is planning to pull once safely in office.
He can’t go back into the EEA however without restoring free movement and handing the red wall seats back to the Conservatives again.
So at most it would likely be some combination of May’s deal and a Customs Union Starmer’s Labour government would go for
He batted for Corbyn for as long as it suited him, then he tried to overturn the referendum result, then he campaigned as a left-winger to the Labour membership- to get elected - and than rapidly pivoted to Brownism (with Blairite mood music) once he was elected.
You can't trust him. You don't know what you're going to get with SKS.
I don't rate Starmer but that is called political expediency. Sunak (who I do generally rate) uses it, granted not very well, by the bus load.
It is all well and good to be BJO or a Jeremy Corbyn, content to take what they consider to be the moral high ground in perpetual opposition, be that in opposition to the blue Tories or the red Tories.
Anyway you are a political opponent of anyone but the Conservative Party, so you would write that wouldn't you?
Ah, ad hominem.
Always a convincing argument.
I believe I played the ball before I played the man there.
Dominic Raab misses the point, perhaps deliberately. What we want are fewer murders, not more gimmicks. The scandals about the Zara Aleena murder are, first, yet another lone woman was attacked, raped and murdered, and second that her killer had already been recalled to prison for breaching his parole terms, but he was out when the police popped round to pick him up. That he declined to stand in the dock to be sentenced is neither here nor there, except it will give Raab the appearance of action.
Yes, criminal justice depresses me because the focus on gimmicks and other pointless actions like unnecessary new laws is so blatant.
And to be perfectly blunt, and acknowledging I would probably feel different were I in that situation, I don't think criminal justice is about being therapeutic for vicims anyway, not as a primary purpose. I know some will get that out of it, but it isn't the point of it, it's why you don't (or shouldn't) take cases that are not likely to succeed to trial to give victims a 'day in court' or some such, and why we may prosecute people even if the victim might not even care for that option.
Criminal justice is perhaps this government's worst failure.
It wouldn't take very much expenses (hundreds of millions of pounds, not billions) to fix the system, so that justice was delivered in a timely and effective fashion.
Legal aid rates are appalling, reducing the number of lawyers willing to practice in that field. Courts have been shut, and those that remain are subject to terrible delays.
It'd be peanuts, but they seem to think anything to do with legal aid makes them look soft on crime, when from what I've seen it would speed up justice considerably.
The ethnic transformation of our great capital is astonishing. Unprecedented. And happening at speed. And no one asked for it. That makes it a massive and risky experiment. We must pray that it works
An experiment that began thousands of years ago...
I can see the war pestering out in a stalemate, with Russia unable to sustain a major campaign in the spring, but Ukraine struggling to dislodge the Russians from the remaining occupied territories.
The Russians have been willing to sustain heavy losses when on the front foot - e.g. in the fighting for Mariupol and Bakhmut - but haven't held a defensive position when put under pressure and with their logistics smashed.
I'm not convinced their defensive lines will hold this time round after another couple of months of having their positions taken apart by accurate Ukrainian fire.
The reason that fortifications in the Maginot sense died out (mostly) was not that they did work. They were very very good at resisting attack. But because they were so expensive, the number of guns mounted etc was tiny. So an attacking force could line up its heaviest artillery and pound the small number of obvious targets. Leaving the survivors in the fortresses in their own dungeons.
More limited fortifications - bunkers in a network of trenches worked better. Because thousands could be afforded and the loss of one didn’t threaten the whole system.
Now, in the age of distributed intelligence - due to the internet and drones, every soldier on the battlefield, potentially, has access to the kind of detailed intelligence that was previously only seen at the highest levels. Every bunker is located to the centimetre. And the weapons to hit them are accurate enough to target not just the bunker in general, but the individual weakspots - doors, weapons positions.
Yes. One of the main advantages the Ukrainians have had over the Russians has been in intelligence and target acquisition, and so the Russians will combat this advantage by constructing fixed positions and waiting for the Ukrainians to hit them.
Not convinced they're doing a good job of learning from their lived experience. We must count our blessings that they don't have a spare £110k to appoint an expert in the field!
Dominic Raab misses the point, perhaps deliberately. What we want are fewer murders, not more gimmicks. The scandals about the Zara Aleena murder are, first, yet another lone woman was attacked, raped and murdered, and second that her killer had already been recalled to prison for breaching his parole terms, but he was out when the police popped round to pick him up. That he declined to stand in the dock to be sentenced is neither here nor there, except it will give Raab the appearance of action.
Yes, criminal justice depresses me because the focus on gimmicks and other pointless actions like unnecessary new laws is so blatant.
And to be perfectly blunt, and acknowledging I would probably feel different were I in that situation, I don't think criminal justice is about being therapeutic for vicims anyway, not as a primary purpose. I know some will get that out of it, but it isn't the point of it, it's why you don't (or shouldn't) take cases that are not likely to succeed to trial to give victims a 'day in court' or some such, and why we may prosecute people even if the victim might not even care for that option.
Criminal justice is perhaps this government's worst failure.
It wouldn't take very much expenses (hundreds of millions of pounds, not billions) to fix the system, so that justice was delivered in a timely and effective fashion.
Legal aid rates are appalling, reducing the number of lawyers willing to practice in that field. Courts have been shut, and those that remain are subject to terrible delays.
There's so many failures it's tricky to choose just one isn't it?
Spent the night in Soho. Quite busy, despite rail strikes
More interestingly, on the Tube train to Tott Ct Road I was struck by the multiracial nature of the passengers. In my fairly packed carriage of about 100 people maybe 5-10% were white British
The ethnic transformation of our great capital is astonishing. Unprecedented. And happening at speed. And no one asked for it. That makes it a massive and risky experiment. We must pray that it works
Only 37% of London’s population is now white British born according to the latest census.
Dominic Raab misses the point, perhaps deliberately. What we want are fewer murders, not more gimmicks. The scandals about the Zara Aleena murder are, first, yet another lone woman was attacked, raped and murdered, and second that her killer had already been recalled to prison for breaching his parole terms, but he was out when the police popped round to pick him up. That he declined to stand in the dock to be sentenced is neither here nor there, except it will give Raab the appearance of action.
Yes, criminal justice depresses me because the focus on gimmicks and other pointless actions like unnecessary new laws is so blatant.
And to be perfectly blunt, and acknowledging I would probably feel different were I in that situation, I don't think criminal justice is about being therapeutic for vicims anyway, not as a primary purpose. I know some will get that out of it, but it isn't the point of it, it's why you don't (or shouldn't) take cases that are not likely to succeed to trial to give victims a 'day in court' or some such, and why we may prosecute people even if the victim might not even care for that option.
Criminal justice is perhaps this government's worst failure.
It wouldn't take very much expenses (hundreds of millions of pounds, not billions) to fix the system, so that justice was delivered in a timely and effective fashion.
Legal aid rates are appalling, reducing the number of lawyers willing to practice in that field. Courts have been shut, and those that remain are subject to terrible delays.
I suspect that is something that Starmer would sort out quickly. Speeding up cases is the sort of unglamorous change that would make a real difference to policing and criminal justice.
The Sunday Rawnsley: A year of cascading scandals and whipsawing policies has also been 12 months in which vital public services have come dangerously close to collapse and food banks haven’t been able to cope with the demand for their help. The serial debauchery of the king of rogues was followed by the ruinous reign of the mad queen. Financial markets started applying a “moron premium” to the price of lending to Britain.
It’s not disruption by the opposition parties that has destabilised the governance of Britain but the Conservative party itself.
No explanation can overlook Brexit, a rupture unique to this country and one that has left Britons poorer than they need have been, while scrambling the synapses of the Conservative party responsible for it.
A sequence of successively worse prime ministers has crashed and burned because they promised things they couldn’t deliver. This cycle of leadership boom and bust has been accompanied by vicious purges as the so-called Brexit revolution devoured itself. The pool of Tory talent has been drained, especially of Conservatives of more decent and sensible character, many of whom have been ejected from the party or abandoned it in despair.
So 2022 has been a year of extreme misgovernance, but it is best interpreted not as a shockingly unexpected aberration, but the culmination of forces unleashed since 2016.
Mutinous Conservative MPs are already chuntering that, if their prospects aren’t looking up by the spring, Mr Sunak will find himself putsched out of Downing Street next year. And the name you are most likely to hear bandied about as his replacement? Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.
That this is even being talked about tells us that the dementia of the Conservative party has reached a very advanced stage.
Britain is unlucky. Not only did we suffer from Covid and Putin, on top of that we suffered from this bizarre flavour of the Conservative Party who gave us hard Brexit, Truss-o-nomics and a myriad of corrupt and crazy schemes that mean today we can’t afford nurses.
THIS might be one other reason we can’t afford nurses. A total non-job. Woke nonsense. £110,000 a year
I checked if that was real.
It is.
Having read the job advert twice now I'm still not sure what it's for or what the job entails.
Seems fairly clear to me - person in charge of a function/unit that looks at healthcare from the consumer rather than producer point of view and brings that to the (higher management) table.
It is dressed up in a pile of tedious “business bullshit meets a sociology textbook found on a train” stuff. Sadly, this kind of “professionalisation” of language is common. Especially in organisations where deep matter technical experts have to work with generalists. The generalists find all the long words frightening. Not wanting to be the inferior group, they try and generate their own impenetrable jargon.
Dominic Raab misses the point, perhaps deliberately. What we want are fewer murders, not more gimmicks. The scandals about the Zara Aleena murder are, first, yet another lone woman was attacked, raped and murdered, and second that her killer had already been recalled to prison for breaching his parole terms, but he was out when the police popped round to pick him up. That he declined to stand in the dock to be sentenced is neither here nor there, except it will give Raab the appearance of action.
Yes, criminal justice depresses me because the focus on gimmicks and other pointless actions like unnecessary new laws is so blatant.
And to be perfectly blunt, and acknowledging I would probably feel different were I in that situation, I don't think criminal justice is about being therapeutic for vicims anyway, not as a primary purpose. I know some will get that out of it, but it isn't the point of it, it's why you don't (or shouldn't) take cases that are not likely to succeed to trial to give victims a 'day in court' or some such, and why we may prosecute people even if the victim might not even care for that option.
Criminal justice is perhaps this government's worst failure.
It wouldn't take very much expenses (hundreds of millions of pounds, not billions) to fix the system, so that justice was delivered in a timely and effective fashion.
Legal aid rates are appalling, reducing the number of lawyers willing to practice in that field. Courts have been shut, and those that remain are subject to terrible delays.
I suspect that is something that Starmer would sort out quickly. Speeding up cases is the sort of unglamorous change that would make a real difference to policing and criminal justice.
I wouldn't normally be optimistic about it, on the basis gimmicks and headline chasing around justice and legal aid feels like something Labour would not be strangers too, but perhaps in his case as he actually understands that area he would be sensible about it.
Has there been discussion of Clarkson's bilious ranting about Meghan? Surprised if not since he's the patron saint of PB Gammons and his views seem a pretty fair reflection of their's.
Are people still falling for the stage Clarkson thing?
Dominic Raab misses the point, perhaps deliberately. What we want are fewer murders, not more gimmicks. The scandals about the Zara Aleena murder are, first, yet another lone woman was attacked, raped and murdered, and second that her killer had already been recalled to prison for breaching his parole terms, but he was out when the police popped round to pick him up. That he declined to stand in the dock to be sentenced is neither here nor there, except it will give Raab the appearance of action.
Yes, criminal justice depresses me because the focus on gimmicks and other pointless actions like unnecessary new laws is so blatant.
And to be perfectly blunt, and acknowledging I would probably feel different were I in that situation, I don't think criminal justice is about being therapeutic for vicims anyway, not as a primary purpose. I know some will get that out of it, but it isn't the point of it, it's why you don't (or shouldn't) take cases that are not likely to succeed to trial to give victims a 'day in court' or some such, and why we may prosecute people even if the victim might not even care for that option.
Criminal justice is perhaps this government's worst failure.
It wouldn't take very much expenses (hundreds of millions of pounds, not billions) to fix the system, so that justice was delivered in a timely and effective fashion.
Legal aid rates are appalling, reducing the number of lawyers willing to practice in that field. Courts have been shut, and those that remain are subject to terrible delays
The government has though given criminal barristers a 15% pay rise, well above inflation
Spent the night in Soho. Quite busy, despite rail strikes
More interestingly, on the Tube train to Tott Ct Road I was struck by the multiracial nature of the passengers. In my fairly packed carriage of about 100 people maybe 5-10% were white British
I have bad news for you. A substantial proportion of the white population of London is not actually British.
Dominic Raab misses the point, perhaps deliberately. What we want are fewer murders, not more gimmicks. The scandals about the Zara Aleena murder are, first, yet another lone woman was attacked, raped and murdered, and second that her killer had already been recalled to prison for breaching his parole terms, but he was out when the police popped round to pick him up. That he declined to stand in the dock to be sentenced is neither here nor there, except it will give Raab the appearance of action.
Yes, criminal justice depresses me because the focus on gimmicks and other pointless actions like unnecessary new laws is so blatant.
And to be perfectly blunt, and acknowledging I would probably feel different were I in that situation, I don't think criminal justice is about being therapeutic for vicims anyway, not as a primary purpose. I know some will get that out of it, but it isn't the point of it, it's why you don't (or shouldn't) take cases that are not likely to succeed to trial to give victims a 'day in court' or some such, and why we may prosecute people even if the victim might not even care for that option.
Criminal justice is perhaps this government's worst failure.
It wouldn't take very much expenses (hundreds of millions of pounds, not billions) to fix the system, so that justice was delivered in a timely and effective fashion.
Legal aid rates are appalling, reducing the number of lawyers willing to practice in that field. Courts have been shut, and those that remain are subject to terrible delays.
There's so many failures it's tricky to choose just one isn't it?
I'd say the things that the government mostly got right, were the economy (at least up till 2020), Covid, and Ukraine.
The failures are criminal justice, inter-generational unfairness, rampant corruption, and forming the circular firing squad.
The Sunday Rawnsley: A year of cascading scandals and whipsawing policies has also been 12 months in which vital public services have come dangerously close to collapse and food banks haven’t been able to cope with the demand for their help. The serial debauchery of the king of rogues was followed by the ruinous reign of the mad queen. Financial markets started applying a “moron premium” to the price of lending to Britain.
It’s not disruption by the opposition parties that has destabilised the governance of Britain but the Conservative party itself.
No explanation can overlook Brexit, a rupture unique to this country and one that has left Britons poorer than they need have been, while scrambling the synapses of the Conservative party responsible for it.
A sequence of successively worse prime ministers has crashed and burned because they promised things they couldn’t deliver. This cycle of leadership boom and bust has been accompanied by vicious purges as the so-called Brexit revolution devoured itself. The pool of Tory talent has been drained, especially of Conservatives of more decent and sensible character, many of whom have been ejected from the party or abandoned it in despair.
So 2022 has been a year of extreme misgovernance, but it is best interpreted not as a shockingly unexpected aberration, but the culmination of forces unleashed since 2016.
Mutinous Conservative MPs are already chuntering that, if their prospects aren’t looking up by the spring, Mr Sunak will find himself putsched out of Downing Street next year. And the name you are most likely to hear bandied about as his replacement? Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.
That this is even being talked about tells us that the dementia of the Conservative party has reached a very advanced stage.
Britain is unlucky. Not only did we suffer from Covid and Putin, on top of that we suffered from this bizarre flavour of the Conservative Party who gave us hard Brexit, Truss-o-nomics and a myriad of corrupt and crazy schemes that mean today we can’t afford nurses.
THIS might be one other reason we can’t afford nurses. A total non-job. Woke nonsense. £110,000 a year
I checked if that was real.
It is.
Having read the job advert twice now I'm still not sure what it's for or what the job entails.
Seems fairly clear to me - person in charge of a function/unit that looks at healthcare from the consumer rather than producer point of view and brings that to the (higher management) table.
It is dressed up in a pile of tedious “business bullshit meets a sociology textbook found on a train” stuff. Sadly, this kind of “professionalisation” of language is common. Especially in organisations where deep matter technical experts have to work with generalists. The generalists find all the long words frightening. Not wanting to be the inferior group, they try and generate their own impenetrable jargon.
I think you've hit the nail on the head with that one. I never find jargon so inpenetrable than when it is from a group or team claiming it is opposed to jargon.
The ethnic transformation of our great capital is astonishing. Unprecedented. And happening at speed. And no one asked for it. That makes it a massive and risky experiment. We must pray that it works
An experiment that began thousands of years ago...
Not really. Not at this speed
By the way I’m not objecting to this evolution. A great world city will import people from all over. It has to. Or it dies. And London was founded by Italians. Objecting to its multicultural nature is absurd
What I AM noting is the dramatic scale and speed of the change, and the fact it is historically unprecedented. Has any other ancient top tier city undergone such fast and radical ethnic change? I don’t think so. Moreover, no one voted for this. All of which adds up to: a risk
Dominic Raab misses the point, perhaps deliberately. What we want are fewer murders, not more gimmicks. The scandals about the Zara Aleena murder are, first, yet another lone woman was attacked, raped and murdered, and second that her killer had already been recalled to prison for breaching his parole terms, but he was out when the police popped round to pick him up. That he declined to stand in the dock to be sentenced is neither here nor there, except it will give Raab the appearance of action.
Yes, criminal justice depresses me because the focus on gimmicks and other pointless actions like unnecessary new laws is so blatant.
And to be perfectly blunt, and acknowledging I would probably feel different were I in that situation, I don't think criminal justice is about being therapeutic for vicims anyway, not as a primary purpose. I know some will get that out of it, but it isn't the point of it, it's why you don't (or shouldn't) take cases that are not likely to succeed to trial to give victims a 'day in court' or some such, and why we may prosecute people even if the victim might not even care for that option.
Criminal justice is perhaps this government's worst failure.
It wouldn't take very much expenses (hundreds of millions of pounds, not billions) to fix the system, so that justice was delivered in a timely and effective fashion.
Legal aid rates are appalling, reducing the number of lawyers willing to practice in that field. Courts have been shut, and those that remain are subject to terrible delays.
There's so many failures it's tricky to choose just one isn't it?
I'd say the things that the government mostly got right, were the economy (at least up till 2020), Covid, and Ukraine.
The failures are criminal justice, inter-generational unfairness, rampant corruption, and forming the circular firing squad.
The ethnic transformation of our great capital is astonishing. Unprecedented. And happening at speed. And no one asked for it. That makes it a massive and risky experiment. We must pray that it works
An experiment that began thousands of years ago...
I think the point was the pace of change. Whether people think it is a good or bad thing it is the case that demographics in this country, and in places like London particularly, have changed much more rapidly than previously, as it applies to race.
Spent the night in Soho. Quite busy, despite rail strikes
More interestingly, on the Tube train to Tott Ct Road I was struck by the multiracial nature of the passengers. In my fairly packed carriage of about 100 people maybe 5-10% were white British
The ethnic transformation of our great capital is astonishing. Unprecedented. And happening at speed. And no one asked for it. That makes it a massive and risky experiment. We must pray that it works
I think that most people stop noticing after a while, and just deal with people as individuals. What you describe struck me when I first lived in Holloway. After a couple of months I just gave up on the pointless "he looks as though he might be of partly Somali descent" speculation - most people had lived there much longer than I had, and it was me who was getting used to the area.
Dominic Raab misses the point, perhaps deliberately. What we want are fewer murders, not more gimmicks. The scandals about the Zara Aleena murder are, first, yet another lone woman was attacked, raped and murdered, and second that her killer had already been recalled to prison for breaching his parole terms, but he was out when the police popped round to pick him up. That he declined to stand in the dock to be sentenced is neither here nor there, except it will give Raab the appearance of action.
Yes, criminal justice depresses me because the focus on gimmicks and other pointless actions like unnecessary new laws is so blatant.
And to be perfectly blunt, and acknowledging I would probably feel different were I in that situation, I don't think criminal justice is about being therapeutic for vicims anyway, not as a primary purpose. I know some will get that out of it, but it isn't the point of it, it's why you don't (or shouldn't) take cases that are not likely to succeed to trial to give victims a 'day in court' or some such, and why we may prosecute people even if the victim might not even care for that option.
Criminal justice is perhaps this government's worst failure.
It wouldn't take very much expenses (hundreds of millions of pounds, not billions) to fix the system, so that justice was delivered in a timely and effective fashion.
Legal aid rates are appalling, reducing the number of lawyers willing to practice in that field. Courts have been shut, and those that remain are subject to terrible delays.
There's so many failures it's tricky to choose just one isn't it?
I'd say the things that the government mostly got right, were the economy (at least up till 2020), Covid, and Ukraine.
The failures are criminal justice, inter-generational unfairness, rampant corruption, and forming the circular firing squad.
The Sunday Rawnsley: A year of cascading scandals and whipsawing policies has also been 12 months in which vital public services have come dangerously close to collapse and food banks haven’t been able to cope with the demand for their help. The serial debauchery of the king of rogues was followed by the ruinous reign of the mad queen. Financial markets started applying a “moron premium” to the price of lending to Britain.
It’s not disruption by the opposition parties that has destabilised the governance of Britain but the Conservative party itself.
No explanation can overlook Brexit, a rupture unique to this country and one that has left Britons poorer than they need have been, while scrambling the synapses of the Conservative party responsible for it.
A sequence of successively worse prime ministers has crashed and burned because they promised things they couldn’t deliver. This cycle of leadership boom and bust has been accompanied by vicious purges as the so-called Brexit revolution devoured itself. The pool of Tory talent has been drained, especially of Conservatives of more decent and sensible character, many of whom have been ejected from the party or abandoned it in despair.
So 2022 has been a year of extreme misgovernance, but it is best interpreted not as a shockingly unexpected aberration, but the culmination of forces unleashed since 2016.
Mutinous Conservative MPs are already chuntering that, if their prospects aren’t looking up by the spring, Mr Sunak will find himself putsched out of Downing Street next year. And the name you are most likely to hear bandied about as his replacement? Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.
That this is even being talked about tells us that the dementia of the Conservative party has reached a very advanced stage.
Britain is unlucky. Not only did we suffer from Covid and Putin, on top of that we suffered from this bizarre flavour of the Conservative Party who gave us hard Brexit, Truss-o-nomics and a myriad of corrupt and crazy schemes that mean today we can’t afford nurses.
THIS might be one other reason we can’t afford nurses. A total non-job. Woke nonsense. £110,000 a year
I posted yesterday that I have no issue with the job, which if you drill into it is about improving patient care. It’s the salary. The job should around £30K max. How the hell is it rated at £110,000? How many people does it report on (size of team)? What qualifications are required?
The full ad is here. It is a Director level appointment, so on the board of the Trust, and seems to require both direct experience of management of change, and personal experience of life changing illness.
It is in Stafford, which does have a long history of poor lived experience by patients!
Director of Customer Care with some hard targets for improving patient outcomes (KPIs) and specific goals that the Trust wanted to achieve would be fine. Also, demanding the candidate shows a track record of achieving such change elsewhere.
As it is this job is a job for loudmouth Wokery, and will attract candidates accordingly, and so that's precisely what they will get.
I'd be very confident that in 5 years time patient experiences won't have budged a jot in Stafford off the back of this role. What they want to be able to do is point to the job as a sign they are "taking it very seriously".
I think a lot of the problems with the NHS can be traced to New Labour's abolition of the Community Health Councils in 2003, effectively silencing the patients' voice.
The ethnic transformation of our great capital is astonishing. Unprecedented. And happening at speed. And no one asked for it. That makes it a massive and risky experiment. We must pray that it works
An experiment that began thousands of years ago...
Not really. Not at this speed
By the way I’m not objecting to this evolution. A great world city will import people from all over. It has to. Or it dies. And London was founded by Italians. Objecting to its multicultural nature is absurd
What I AM noting is the dramatic scale and speed of the change, and the fact it is historically unprecedented. Has any other ancient top tier city undergone such fast and radical ethnic change? I don’t think so. Moreover, no one voted for this. All of which adds up to: a risk
They did, they voted for Blair 3 times which was where the biggest change in immigration happened
Dominic Raab misses the point, perhaps deliberately. What we want are fewer murders, not more gimmicks. The scandals about the Zara Aleena murder are, first, yet another lone woman was attacked, raped and murdered, and second that her killer had already been recalled to prison for breaching his parole terms, but he was out when the police popped round to pick him up. That he declined to stand in the dock to be sentenced is neither here nor there, except it will give Raab the appearance of action.
Yes, criminal justice depresses me because the focus on gimmicks and other pointless actions like unnecessary new laws is so blatant.
And to be perfectly blunt, and acknowledging I would probably feel different were I in that situation, I don't think criminal justice is about being therapeutic for vicims anyway, not as a primary purpose. I know some will get that out of it, but it isn't the point of it, it's why you don't (or shouldn't) take cases that are not likely to succeed to trial to give victims a 'day in court' or some such, and why we may prosecute people even if the victim might not even care for that option.
Criminal justice is perhaps this government's worst failure.
It wouldn't take very much expenses (hundreds of millions of pounds, not billions) to fix the system, so that justice was delivered in a timely and effective fashion.
Legal aid rates are appalling, reducing the number of lawyers willing to practice in that field. Courts have been shut, and those that remain are subject to terrible delays.
There's so many failures it's tricky to choose just one isn't it?
I'd say the things that the government mostly got right, were the economy (at least up till 2020), Covid, and Ukraine.
The failures are criminal justice, inter-generational unfairness, rampant corruption, and forming the circular firing squad.
Education...
You certainly make it sound quite awful.
THat's because it is. It's a complete shambles.
Although TBF sounds like @dixiedean has it worse than I did.
The overall vote share for centre-right parties now seems to be in the mid-thirties now, making it likely that the Conservatives should hit 200+ seats next time. That's better than they deserve.
Spent the night in Soho. Quite busy, despite rail strikes
More interestingly, on the Tube train to Tott Ct Road I was struck by the multiracial nature of the passengers. In my fairly packed carriage of about 100 people maybe 5-10% were white British
I have bad news for you. A substantial proportion of the white population of London is not actually British.
One of the most noticeable features of London daytime life these days is how indeterminate are the social class distinctions that are so obvious elsewhere in the country. I think that’s the international nature of the population. Other countries just don’t have such obvious class differences.
Not so in the early morning though. That’s when the class structure of the outer London boroughs - the early stockbroker belt commuters, and the building trade and cleaners - migrates into town.
The Sunday Rawnsley: A year of cascading scandals and whipsawing policies has also been 12 months in which vital public services have come dangerously close to collapse and food banks haven’t been able to cope with the demand for their help. The serial debauchery of the king of rogues was followed by the ruinous reign of the mad queen. Financial markets started applying a “moron premium” to the price of lending to Britain.
It’s not disruption by the opposition parties that has destabilised the governance of Britain but the Conservative party itself.
No explanation can overlook Brexit, a rupture unique to this country and one that has left Britons poorer than they need have been, while scrambling the synapses of the Conservative party responsible for it.
A sequence of successively worse prime ministers has crashed and burned because they promised things they couldn’t deliver. This cycle of leadership boom and bust has been accompanied by vicious purges as the so-called Brexit revolution devoured itself. The pool of Tory talent has been drained, especially of Conservatives of more decent and sensible character, many of whom have been ejected from the party or abandoned it in despair.
So 2022 has been a year of extreme misgovernance, but it is best interpreted not as a shockingly unexpected aberration, but the culmination of forces unleashed since 2016.
Mutinous Conservative MPs are already chuntering that, if their prospects aren’t looking up by the spring, Mr Sunak will find himself putsched out of Downing Street next year. And the name you are most likely to hear bandied about as his replacement? Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.
That this is even being talked about tells us that the dementia of the Conservative party has reached a very advanced stage.
Britain is unlucky. Not only did we suffer from Covid and Putin, on top of that we suffered from this bizarre flavour of the Conservative Party who gave us hard Brexit, Truss-o-nomics and a myriad of corrupt and crazy schemes that mean today we can’t afford nurses.
THIS might be one other reason we can’t afford nurses. A total non-job. Woke nonsense. £110,000 a year
I checked if that was real.
It is.
Having read the job advert twice now I'm still not sure what it's for or what the job entails.
Seems fairly clear to me - person in charge of a function/unit that looks at healthcare from the consumer rather than producer point of view and brings that to the (higher management) table.
It is dressed up in a pile of tedious “business bullshit meets a sociology textbook found on a train” stuff. Sadly, this kind of “professionalisation” of language is common. Especially in organisations where deep matter technical experts have to work with generalists. The generalists find all the long words frightening. Not wanting to be the inferior group, they try and generate their own impenetrable jargon.
I think you've hit the nail on the head with that one. I never find jargon so inpenetrable than when it is from a group or team claiming it is opposed to jargon.
The new normal way to deal with it is to pivot offline and not give them any bandwith. It will be a real game changer.
Spent the night in Soho. Quite busy, despite rail strikes
More interestingly, on the Tube train to Tott Ct Road I was struck by the multiracial nature of the passengers. In my fairly packed carriage of about 100 people maybe 5-10% were white British
I have bad news for you. A substantial proportion of the white population of London is not actually British.
One of the most noticeable features of London daytime life these days is how indeterminate are the social class distinctions that are so obvious elsewhere in the country. I think that’s the international nature of the population. Other countries just don’t have such obvious class differences.
Not so in the early morning though. That’s when the class structure of the outer London boroughs - the early stockbroker belt commuters, and the building trade and cleaners - migrates into town.
The reverse, I'd say. The blatant, in your face gap, between rich and poor inhabitants of London is one of the things that skews London politics leftwards.
Spent the night in Soho. Quite busy, despite rail strikes
More interestingly, on the Tube train to Tott Ct Road I was struck by the multiracial nature of the passengers. In my fairly packed carriage of about 100 people maybe 5-10% were white British
The ethnic transformation of our great capital is astonishing. Unprecedented. And happening at speed. And no one asked for it. That makes it a massive and risky experiment. We must pray that it works
Partially reflective of low car ownership among ethnic minorities. If you monitored the ethnic composition of morning commuters on the motorways in and around London, I am sure you would get a different picture.
Dominic Raab misses the point, perhaps deliberately. What we want are fewer murders, not more gimmicks. The scandals about the Zara Aleena murder are, first, yet another lone woman was attacked, raped and murdered, and second that her killer had already been recalled to prison for breaching his parole terms, but he was out when the police popped round to pick him up. That he declined to stand in the dock to be sentenced is neither here nor there, except it will give Raab the appearance of action.
Yes, criminal justice depresses me because the focus on gimmicks and other pointless actions like unnecessary new laws is so blatant.
And to be perfectly blunt, and acknowledging I would probably feel different were I in that situation, I don't think criminal justice is about being therapeutic for vicims anyway, not as a primary purpose. I know some will get that out of it, but it isn't the point of it, it's why you don't (or shouldn't) take cases that are not likely to succeed to trial to give victims a 'day in court' or some such, and why we may prosecute people even if the victim might not even care for that option.
Criminal justice is perhaps this government's worst failure.
It wouldn't take very much expenses (hundreds of millions of pounds, not billions) to fix the system, so that justice was delivered in a timely and effective fashion.
Legal aid rates are appalling, reducing the number of lawyers willing to practice in that field. Courts have been shut, and those that remain are subject to terrible delays.
There's so many failures it's tricky to choose just one isn't it?
I'd say the things that the government mostly got right, were the economy (at least up till 2020), Covid, and Ukraine.
The failures are criminal justice, inter-generational unfairness, rampant corruption, and forming the circular firing squad.
Education...
You certainly make it sound quite awful.
THat's because it is. It's a complete shambles.
Although TBF sounds like @dixiedean has it worse than I did.
To tie two themes together. It's the rate of change. Having been away from the classroom for a bit it is strikingly obvious.
The Sunday Rawnsley: A year of cascading scandals and whipsawing policies has also been 12 months in which vital public services have come dangerously close to collapse and food banks haven’t been able to cope with the demand for their help. The serial debauchery of the king of rogues was followed by the ruinous reign of the mad queen. Financial markets started applying a “moron premium” to the price of lending to Britain.
It’s not disruption by the opposition parties that has destabilised the governance of Britain but the Conservative party itself.
No explanation can overlook Brexit, a rupture unique to this country and one that has left Britons poorer than they need have been, while scrambling the synapses of the Conservative party responsible for it.
A sequence of successively worse prime ministers has crashed and burned because they promised things they couldn’t deliver. This cycle of leadership boom and bust has been accompanied by vicious purges as the so-called Brexit revolution devoured itself. The pool of Tory talent has been drained, especially of Conservatives of more decent and sensible character, many of whom have been ejected from the party or abandoned it in despair.
So 2022 has been a year of extreme misgovernance, but it is best interpreted not as a shockingly unexpected aberration, but the culmination of forces unleashed since 2016.
Mutinous Conservative MPs are already chuntering that, if their prospects aren’t looking up by the spring, Mr Sunak will find himself putsched out of Downing Street next year. And the name you are most likely to hear bandied about as his replacement? Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.
That this is even being talked about tells us that the dementia of the Conservative party has reached a very advanced stage.
Britain is unlucky. Not only did we suffer from Covid and Putin, on top of that we suffered from this bizarre flavour of the Conservative Party who gave us hard Brexit, Truss-o-nomics and a myriad of corrupt and crazy schemes that mean today we can’t afford nurses.
THIS might be one other reason we can’t afford nurses. A total non-job. Woke nonsense. £110,000 a year
I checked if that was real.
It is.
Having read the job advert twice now I'm still not sure what it's for or what the job entails.
Seems fairly clear to me - person in charge of a function/unit that looks at healthcare from the consumer rather than producer point of view and brings that to the (higher management) table.
It is dressed up in a pile of tedious “business bullshit meets a sociology textbook found on a train” stuff. Sadly, this kind of “professionalisation” of language is common. Especially in organisations where deep matter technical experts have to work with generalists. The generalists find all the long words frightening. Not wanting to be the inferior group, they try and generate their own impenetrable jargon.
I think you've hit the nail on the head with that one. I never find jargon so inpenetrable than when it is from a group or team claiming it is opposed to jargon.
I also find that that jargon is in an inverse relationship with the knowledge and intelligence of speaker or writer.
A good friend is a full Professor of physics at a high end university. They say that he has pretty much run out of things to achieve - only a couple of awards have escaped his grasp, to date. He is clearly brilliant and a leading mind.
When he talks of physics his default is not to use jargon - he explains things clearly even to me. He has a reputation as an excellent teacher, as you might expect
The ethnic transformation of our great capital is astonishing. Unprecedented. And happening at speed. And no one asked for it. That makes it a massive and risky experiment. We must pray that it works
An experiment that began thousands of years ago...
Not really. Not at this speed
By the way I’m not objecting to this evolution. A great world city will import people from all over. It has to. Or it dies. And London was founded by Italians. Objecting to its multicultural nature is absurd
What I AM noting is the dramatic scale and speed of the change, and the fact it is historically unprecedented. Has any other ancient top tier city undergone such fast and radical ethnic change? I don’t think so. Moreover, no one voted for this. All of which adds up to: a risk
They did, they voted for Blair 3 times which was where the biggest change in immigration happened
It seems the people who worry most about this kind of change are people who don’t actually live in central London. For them it looks and feels different and exotic. For Londoners it’s just normal life.
How people respond to the exoticism and difference of London - which has always been there regardless of migration, in the bigness of things, the noise, the bustle - does seem to vary. Some find it exciting and want more of it. Others feel panicked and disoriented and want to get out.
I think the latter group tend to focus on the obvious things that look different: sometimes that’s the traffic and pollution, sometimes it’s the multi-ethnic look of the place.
Spent the night in Soho. Quite busy, despite rail strikes
More interestingly, on the Tube train to Tott Ct Road I was struck by the multiracial nature of the passengers. In my fairly packed carriage of about 100 people maybe 5-10% were white British
The ethnic transformation of our great capital is astonishing. Unprecedented. And happening at speed. And no one asked for it. That makes it a massive and risky experiment. We must pray that it works
Who I feel for are the hardbitten cheerful cockneys who used to define this city. The men working the docks, famously dipping their cranes for Winnie, the women taking pride in their neat little terraces, the pie and mash and jellied eels ready for when their dock-working men came home (via the pub). These folk - the real Londoners - are now as rare as hens teeth in a place they once called home. Reduced to living in Essex and allowed into the centre only to drive a cab or to see a show at Christmas. Progress? Hmm. Eye of the beholder.
Spent the night in Soho. Quite busy, despite rail strikes
More interestingly, on the Tube train to Tott Ct Road I was struck by the multiracial nature of the passengers. In my fairly packed carriage of about 100 people maybe 5-10% were white British
The ethnic transformation of our great capital is astonishing. Unprecedented. And happening at speed. And no one asked for it. That makes it a massive and risky experiment. We must pray that it works
Who I feel for are the hardbitten cheerful cockneys who used to define this city. The men working the docks, famously dipping their cranes for Winnie, the women taking pride in their neat little terraces, the pie and mash and jellied eels ready for when their dock-working men came home (via the pub). These folk - the real Londoners - are now as rare as hens teeth in a place they once called home. Reduced to living in Essex and allowed into the centre only to drive a cab or to see a show at Christmas. Progress? Hmm. Eye of the beholder.
Has made Essex and East Kent seats much safer for the Tories though while suburban London is now the reverse and safe Labour on the whole.
Comments
I'm not convinced their defensive lines will hold this time round after another couple of months of having their positions taken apart by accurate Ukrainian fire.
Alongside an emphasis on public health by implementing the Marmot report, I would reform UK private medicine first, which is really quite archaic and patchy. I proposed a SIPP style system for people to fund their own Health and Social Care pots, rather than take out insurance.
https://www2.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2018/07/01/three-score-and-ten-has-the-nhs-reached-the-end-of-its-natural-life/
I don't think my views have altered much since. The problem of an ageing society on pensions (work longer, pay more, get less) are similar for healthcare, whether state funded like the NHS or via compulsory insurance like other countries. (lead healthier lives, pay more, get less).
There will come a point when their misery exceeds his hold on power
Ukraine will need some time to inflict losses on the newly mobilised Russian troops before they can make further advances. It will take time. But there's not currently any reason to expect that they won't make further advances once that has been done.
https://www.aop.org.uk/ot/professional-support/health-services/2022/06/21/in-the-dark#:~:text=“When you ask how long,three years and seven months.
Also in that article the NHS NI is funding private cataract surgery in ROI to tackle its backlogs.
It’s Wokeness colliding with cronyism. Jobs for the girls. It’s a rancid waste of public money
Polling consistently showed that a sizeable minority - often 20%+ - of SF voters would vote against unification with the South.
That is, a quarter of the voters for the party advocating killing people to unite Ireland were against… unifying Ireland.
* I am surprised, given their love for his products that Eugene Stoner doesn’t have statue in NI…
No one from the NHS ever asked if I could give feedback on my experiences.
It is.
Having read the job advert twice now I'm still not sure what it's for or what the job entails.
So at most it would likely be some combination of May’s deal and a Customs Union Starmer’s Labour government would go for
He's a North London liberal left-winger.
He’s earned his money.
It is in Stafford, which does have a long history of poor lived experience by patients!
Starmer is disingenuous, and a liar.
He batted for Corbyn for as long as it suited him, then he tried to overturn the referendum result, then he campaigned as a left-winger to the Labour membership- to get elected - and than rapidly pivoted to Brownism (with Blairite mood music) once he was elected.
You can't trust him. You don't know what you're going to get with SKS.
As it is this job is a job for loudmouth Wokery, and will attract candidates accordingly, and so that's precisely what they will get.
I'd be very confident that in 5 years time patient experiences won't have budged a jot in Stafford off the back of this role. What they want to be able to do is point to the job as a sign they are "taking it very seriously".
The intention is to say nothing at all, but do it in a way that offers feelgood vibes to insiders
It is all well and good to be BJO or a Jeremy Corbyn, content to take what they consider to be the moral high ground in perpetual opposition, be that in opposition to the blue Tories or the red Tories.
Anyway you are a political opponent of anyone but the Conservative Party, so you would write that wouldn't you?
Always a convincing argument.
And to be perfectly blunt, and acknowledging I would probably feel different were I in that situation, I don't think criminal justice is about being therapeutic for vicims anyway, not as a primary purpose. I know some will get that out of it, but it isn't the point of it, it's why you don't (or shouldn't) take cases that are not likely to succeed to trial to give victims a 'day in court' or some such, and why we may prosecute people even if the victim might not even care for that option.
Spent the night in Soho. Quite busy, despite rail strikes
More interestingly, on the Tube train to Tott Ct Road I was struck by the multiracial nature of the passengers. In my fairly packed carriage of about 100 people maybe 5-10% were white British
The ethnic transformation of our great capital is astonishing. Unprecedented. And happening at speed. And no one asked for it. That makes it a massive and risky experiment. We must pray that it works
More limited fortifications - bunkers in a network of trenches worked better. Because thousands could be afforded and the loss of one didn’t threaten the whole system.
Now, in the age of distributed intelligence - due to the internet and drones, every soldier on the battlefield, potentially, has access to the kind of detailed intelligence that was previously only seen at the highest levels. Every bunker is located to the centimetre. And the weapons to hit them are accurate enough to target not just the bunker in general, but the individual weakspots - doors, weapons positions.
Saying something bottom of the barrel bad would be worse under a new regime makes no sense.
It’s where you go if the LoO is effective and you’re losing.
It wouldn't take very much expenses (hundreds of millions of pounds, not billions) to fix the system, so that justice was delivered in a timely and effective fashion.
Legal aid rates are appalling, reducing the number of lawyers willing to practice in that field. Courts have been shut, and those that remain are subject to terrible delays.
Not convinced they're doing a good job of learning from their lived experience. We must count our blessings that they don't have a spare £110k to appoint an expert in the field!
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/11/29/uk-census-results-2021-white-ethnicity-london-birmingham/
Mind you New York City and to a lesser extent Paris are also increasingly multi racial and multi national too
It is dressed up in a pile of tedious “business bullshit meets a sociology textbook found on a train” stuff. Sadly, this kind of “professionalisation” of language is common. Especially in organisations where deep matter technical experts have to work with generalists. The generalists find all the long words frightening. Not wanting to be the inferior group, they try and generate their own impenetrable jargon.
LAB: 44%
CON: 29%
LIB: 9%
REFORM: 8%
GREEN: 5%
SNP: 3%
PLAID: 1%
OTHER: 2%
via @OpiniumResearch, 14-16 Dec
https://pollingreport.uk/polls https://twitter.com/PollingReportUK/status/1604439952464482304/photo/1
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11298477/amp/Barristers-announce-end-strike-action-accept-15-pay-rise-deal-today.html
The failures are criminal justice, inter-generational unfairness, rampant corruption, and forming the circular firing squad.
By the way I’m not objecting to this evolution. A great world city will import people from all over. It has to. Or it dies. And London was founded by Italians. Objecting to its multicultural nature is absurd
What I AM noting is the dramatic scale and speed of the change, and the fact it is historically unprecedented. Has any other ancient top tier city undergone such fast and radical ethnic change? I don’t think so. Moreover, no one voted for this. All of which adds up to: a risk
I sent a report they wrote back, multiple times, until it was written in English, rather than made up nonsense.
Their manager sent a rocket to my manager asking why I’d forced his juniors to write in an “unprofessional” manner.
https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/fcgi-bin/usercode.py?scotcontrol=Y&CON=29&LAB=44&LIB=9&Reform=8&Green=5&UKIP=&TVCON=&TVLAB=&TVLIB=&TVReform=&TVGreen=&TVUKIP=&SCOTCON=14.3&SCOTLAB=30.7&SCOTLIB=6.7&SCOTReform=0.6&SCOTGreen=1.7&SCOTUKIP=&SCOTNAT=43.7&display=AllChanged&regorseat=(none)&boundary=2019nbbase
Although TBF sounds like @dixiedean has it worse than I did.
Not so in the early morning though. That’s when the class structure of the outer London boroughs - the early stockbroker belt commuters, and the building trade and cleaners - migrates into town.
If you monitored the ethnic composition of morning commuters on the motorways in and around London, I am sure you would get a different picture.
Having been away from the classroom for a bit it is strikingly obvious.
A good friend is a full Professor of physics at a high end university. They say that he has pretty much run out of things to achieve - only a couple of awards have escaped his grasp, to date. He is clearly brilliant and a leading mind.
When he talks of physics his default is not to use jargon - he explains things clearly even to me. He has a reputation as an excellent teacher, as you might expect
The truly smart don’t need to bluff.
How people respond to the exoticism and difference of London - which has always been there regardless of migration, in the bigness of things, the noise, the bustle - does seem to vary. Some find it exciting and want more of it. Others feel panicked and disoriented and want to get out.
I think the latter group tend to focus on the obvious things that look different: sometimes that’s the traffic and pollution, sometimes it’s the multi-ethnic look of the place.
As an Essex Tory I won’t complain about that