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The NHS the biggest vulnerability of Sunak’s Tories – Ipsos polling – politicalbetting.com
The NHS the biggest vulnerability of Sunak’s Tories – Ipsos polling – politicalbetting.com
A few days ago the Labour leader Keir Starmer set out what he described as Labour’s 5 missions as the first part of his build-up to the general election.
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For parents of 1 year olds it's going to be will Labour match or improve on the Gov'ts 15 hour offer.
I note Humza is pledging to improve the childcare offer in his SNP leader pledge.
I don‘t need an excuse to be in the pub for six hours tomorrow!
Indeed, Hunt's announcements this week are an attempted pre-emptive strike to park its tanks on Labour's childcare lawn.
I think actually the NHS will be subsumed into the general year of chaos and hence this will benefit the Cons.
Government signs £2.9m Moon base nuclear power deal with Rolls-Royce
The offer is 30 hours in 2025
https://twitter.com/nahtnews/status/1636653887380750337?s=61&t=s0ae0IFncdLS1Dc7J0P_TQ
Mission 2 - Spend money
Mission 3 - Spend money
Mission 4 - Spend money
Mission 5 - Spend money
Now when do we get told where that money is going to come from ?
Given that the chosen lander for the Artemis project can put (potentially) a 100 tons on the Lunar surface, time to think big.
Edit : the other builders of smallish nuclear reactors are the French, Chinese, Russias and Americans. Think the mini nuke project, submarine ms and the interconnections politically
Which would require higher output without spending any more money.
I doubt that's a message the public services want to hear from Starmer.
So the figures on the economy are the ones to watch. The Truss Calamity and the inflation crisis has helped to give Labour a solid lead, but it's indicative of how influential the long-term beliefs are that the lead is only 13 points.
If the Tories can get that lead down to low single figures, or better, then they would have a chance of denying Labour a majority.
The effective offer looks a bit different depending on their precise DoB.
August 2022 baby current situation = 30 hours from Sep 2025.
New situation for August baby = 15 hours from Sep 2024. Which means they effectively get 1 year of 15 hours more than they would have done.
September baby current situation = 30 hours from Jan 2026.
New situation for September baby = 15 hours from Sep 2024 & 30 hours from Sep 2025 to Dec 2026 which they wouldn't have got.
So it's 1 year more of 15 hours plus an extra term of 30 hours.
COL imo is the bigger vulnerability, but helpfully, Labour have no plans to address that either, indeed 'Mission 2' will probably make it worse.
I guess that means they must be pretty confident China won't supply weapons and ammunition to Russia.
The problem is that the NHS has been awful *in parts* for decades. In other parts, it's brilliant, or (dare I say it) world-beating. Which parts are awful varies according to condition, according to postcode, and according to age.
So someone might have a brilliant experience with their cancer treatment at place A, but someone under a different trust a few miles away might have an awful experience. But because of the religion that's grown up around the NHS, only the former experience counts.
I haven't heard that, and it sounds interesting. Have you got details?
(Xi's visit to Moscow, and his call with Zelenskyy, promise to be very interesting.O
Which sort-of shows the problem: the variability is staggering. In the case of my meningitis, the ambulance drove past a queue of ambulances, presumably not because I was important, but because the condition was seen as serious.
So my experience of A&E over the last ten years has been brilliant. Perhaps that was just luck. But my experience of other parts of the NHS, especially GP services, is remarkably less positive.
(And if you look at my posts, I'm both praising and slagging off the NHS...)
First of all, my promised tips for today.
Cheltenham Gold Cup 3.30 superstar Galopin Des Champs with an extra finishing gear over rivals at the moment in my opinion. It will amble around in background not looking special, but will show a Constitution Hillesque finish to get up to win.
However, if you prefer longer odds e/w bet on Hewick I suggest as outsider most likely to cause a surprise by coming second, lightly raced this season but shown class previously in what is still early in a career.
Lossiemouth 1.30
Highway One O Two 2.10
Vaucelet 4.10
I may have been a tad over excited at start of the week, but it hasn’t stopped me enjoying it. I didn’t bet in every race, but watched and enjoyed all of them - I watched every minute of ITV excellent coverage, and watched via my bookie website the races ITV couldn’t show.
I also enjoyed countless hours researching into picking festival winners. I still think Marie’s Rock was entered into the wrong race. I’m still gutted Love Envoi was pipped in the final yards.
I’m very confident Galloping Galopin will deliver my third Festival winner, and quietly confident Lossiemouth and Vaucelet can get me up to five winners.
I’m most happy that when very drunk Thursday, I didn’t post photos of my home made pizza with the Leonesque tagline “must honestly let you know, the best EVER”
I didn’t post those pizza photos did I?
Good luck everyone betting and enjoy Gold Cup day.
Which shows how hard it is going to be to find more money.
And if you think I'm being cynical then I am but I'm also correct.
Now if you want practical money raising suggestions then:
1) Increase VAT on imported consumer tat
2) Increase taxes on air travel (good environmental case as well)
3) Higher taxes on property - start with extra council tax bands
4) Get rid of the pension triple lock
And in return reduce employment taxes on the low paid.
I doubt those ideas would be vote winners though.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-red-line-biden-and-xis-secret-ukraine-talks-revealed/
What you suggest seems sensible to me. Whether Lab would be clear sighted enough to try to implement those suggestions is another question.
Everything else, even Brexit and the culture wars, is noise.
The ordering paperclips parts are world beating.
Evidence is that Scottish Tories doing well in their important areas. Likewise SLAB.
If we split government into day to day services, wealth redistribution and investment then sure the first two require balancing of the books in the medium and especially long term, but the amount we can invest depends more on economic opportunities and how well we spend it, rather than how we raise it.
In the UK the government does too little investment which puts too much pressure on day to day services. The only way we can get out of this spiral is actually spending more, but spending it more wisely.
Until then, its all a bit meh!
The world-beating ordering of paperclips is also important as the same people are dealing with pharma companies etc and making good deals which is why the NHS does fairly well on a cost perspective (along with being monolithic - if you don't do a deal with the NHS then you're not going to really have a market in the UK - you have more options in countries with competing providers). I'm yet to be shown a significantly better service that doesn't cost a lot more.
(For the avoidance of doubt, I'd be quite happy with the setups in many other European countries, by many measures they're better, even much better, but they do also cost more. Maybe by 10-20%, which makes a hell of a difference due to not always operating at the extreme limits of capacity and surviving only on the goodwill of staff).
If we all did it I wonder when there would be a paperclip shortage or whether there are enough spare in the world to keep circulating.
The grim discovery was made in Scalby, Scarborough, at 6am on Friday.
Detectives and specialist teams from the North Yorkshire force are currently at the scene and a cordon is in place.
Enquiries are ongoing, but officers do not believe there are any suspicious circumstances."
Sky News and Scarborough police leaving us wondering what a suspicious circumstance looks like.
I suppose is it possible that @Foxy & Co went to medical school so they could copy the data from one system to an Excel sheet, copy it into a USB stick, load it into a different computer and copy and pasta into another system. Just so they can deliver some treatment to a patient. But somehow, I doubt that was what they dreamed of.
Pre-Blair it was a 7/10 mass public health service and now it is a 7/10 mass public health service. The difference is the shed-loads of cash we have been shovelling into it from Blair onwards.
I was making exactly the same point with regard to teachers last night.
Conservative: 1832 (41%, +10.9)
SNP: 1202 (26.9%, +1.1)
Labour: 600 (13.4%, +1.6)
Lib Dem: 399 (8.9%, -0.4)
Green: 389 (8.7%, -7.3)
Family: 50 (1.1%, +0.4)
(Non-returns 6.2% in 2022)
Con elected stage 6.
hat tip Ballot Box Scotland
Interesting as my father-in-law's experience with post-op physio has been excellent (North Yorks, broken arm and knee op both in the last two years). Excellent regular follow-up for as long as needed. My mum's, after a broken ankle (mid Essex) was very poor - a couple of sessions and then good luck to you. She did eventually get some more via the GP, but it took some time and persistence. Postcode lottery again.
(BTW - do you mean you're now trying for secondary care physio - hospital - or primary care - via GP? Somewhat counterintuively, in terms of order, if you've had an op then that's under secondary care, or possibly tertiary and then your community followup is primary care)
Anecdotally, it's got noticeably worse accessing GP care and/or A&E services over the last ten to fifteen years.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/formula1/64979439
...Aston Martin's Lance Stroll and Red Bull's Sergio Perez said they trusted F1 and the race organisers to look after them and that they believed positive change was happening in Saudi Arabia, which has been accused by human rights groups of widespread abuses.
Hamilton was the last to answer in the official news conference on matters of safety and human rights, and initially said that he believed "the opposite to everything they [Stroll and Perez] said"...
Like coat hangers where the gains massively outweigh the losses. From time to time I have to cull them with a rifle under licence from DEFRA. This is widely believed to be because they breed and multiply in the dark places they mostly inhabit.
But, if an organisation employs 1.3 million people, then some of those people will be bad at their job, or bullies, or lazy, or incompetent.
That is just a Law of Large Numbers.
Very different to a private sector strike where people, particularly if pissed off with the workers/company will simply go elsewhere.
The problems are systemic, not just a 'few rotten apples'.
Dominic Raab defends Met police as damning Casey report looms
Justice secretary praises ‘vast majority’ of officers but concedes London force clearly has a problem
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/mar/17/dominic-raab-defends-met-police-as-damning-casey-report-looms
Though of course, Raab believes he "sets high standards", and sees no problem with his own behaviour.
FFS, the head of the IOPC just resigned, as he's under police investigation.
And another board member is moving on in opaque circumstances*, in the middle of conducting a police shooting homicide investigation.
* "For family reasons" - but has accepted a new job with OFQUAL.
Clearly the obvious solution is to privatise the public sector
1. Inflation likely to fall, if only because of comps
2. Tax receipts likely to be high because of wage increases, particularly the private sector + fiscal drag
3. Public finances therefore likely to better, a lot to do with 2 (+ higher VAT because of higher prices).
4. Fed is likely to cut rates next year as we approach the 2024 election, which will have a positive effect on world economies (and help with 1).
The economic cycle is actually looking good for the Government only the next 18 months.
Where's my medal?
Edit: I assume they mean heavier than any light tank, but what is the definition of a ‘light’ tank, particularly if it’s not light.
The classic of this genre was how as Rover etc staggered to their doom, brand new factories managed by people recruited from the old car making industry and staffed by people from the same made cars. Better cars, cheaper and without the toxic industrial relations.
Same people, different organisations.
Eventually, the answer is "go and do something else instead", or "go abroad". Despite the hassle barriers in those, far too many people are doing that for comfort.
Yeah, there's also the issue that for every private sector employee pissed with the public sector workers in x industry getting an apparently juicy pay rise from their taxes, there's a public sector in another industry who either got a similar pay rise or is might pissed with the government because they didn't.
I'm technically private sector (apparently, checked the ONS pay stats, which count universities as private, whic they technically are, I guess) but in a private sector that looks, sounds and smells like public sector, even with national pay scales.
*which clearly, for reasons I can't work out, is not the opposite of 'privatise' although it sounds like it should be