A key problem with the UK - and in comparison with many other countries - is that, with our services, we unduly focus on the process rather than what we want the result to be.
Take health. Instead of saying "we want a well-funded health system that deals with the population's health in a holistic way and which is primarily free for patients" and then working back from that to think what is the best way to deliver that, 90%+ of the conversation is about the NHS and - worse - all the plans, proposals etc have to be done in the context of what works within the NHS framework.
The NHS may be the best way to do this indeed but it's like saying "the only way we can get to Manchester is the 2:05 train via Stafford." Talk about any other way of delivering the end goal and you are immediately accused of wanting to turn Health into a U.S.-style situation.
A lot of that I know is political. Ideally there would be a bipartisan framework but that isn't going to happen because both sides - particularly Labour - have their grounds for keeping it partisan.
Scenario A - £2 of extra spending on the NHS to get £1 of output Scenario B - £1 of extra spending on the NHS to get £2 of output
Which is better for the nation's health and wellbeing ? Scenario B of course.
But how many politicians and NHS worshippers would prefer scenario A ?
Don’t be silly. Voters aren’t cross about the size of the NHS budget. They’re cross because they can’t get a GP appointment, they have long waits for hospital treatment, ambulances don’t turn up for hours. If you have a way of fixing these things more efficiently, I’m sure everyone would love to hear from you.
Voters by and large care about results more than policies. YouGov has health as the second most important issue facing the country, according to the public, at 45%. (The economy is first.) Moaning about “NHS worshippers” isn’t going to win the Tories votes on this issue.
Labour strategists are cock-a-hoop with how the adverts have landed. The first advert tweeted has received 20.8 million views, making it arguably the most successful Labour attack in recent memory. A party insider said: “Nice doesn’t win elections. They have got used to Labour shirking the dirty stuff. That’s changed.”...
...The party is not going to stop there. According to senior Labour sources, one of the next attack ads will suggest the PM has “effectively decriminalised rape”.
It will claim that under the Tories “only 1.6 per cent of rapists have been charged”. A source said: “We aren’t talking to Twitter. We are talking to the vast majority of the country who want to see child rapists locked up and know the Tories have destroyed the criminal justice system. [Sunak] is leading the government that is responsible and he has got the man [Jeremy Hunt] who butchered the NHS as his chancellor.”
It is understood Labour drew up the messages some time ago and have been waiting for the right time to deploy them....
...It has even been claimed that a group of former Tory election staffers have turned against their own party and approached Labour to help formulate their election strategy.
This is all ultimately for nought if the Labour Party won't advance a viable alternative. As with all the rest of the myriad problems with public services, they need to formulate a plan to fix them and find from somewhere the colossal sums of money needed to pay for the plan.
It's where the money's meant to come from that's likely to prove their undoing, in the end. They can probably get away with a certain amount of borrowing to invest for infrastructure projects, albeit that they're going to have to be extremely careful not to repeat the mistakes of PFI and end up saddling public sector organisations with even more debt servicing obligations. However, ultimately they need to service the ongoing costs of, for example, paying more for care home places so the staff can be paid enough not to sod off to Aldi, and putting tens of thousands of extra police on the streets, by raising an awful lot of tax.
Low and middle income earners have already been bled white and there's no indication that Labour are willing to milk the obvious source of extra revenue which is asset wealth - residential and commercial property, stocks and shares. So where's the money to pay for all this stuff?
And there's no indication that increasing spending on public services would lead to an equivalent improvement in them.
189k more employed by the NHS than at the 2019GE yet we're continually told that the NHS is a disaster which is about to collapse.
Voters have one fairly simple comparator to call upon. The state of public services under the last Labour government vs those now. Unfortunately for the Tories that comparator is pretty stark. No need for theory - there’s empirical evidence aplenty.
So you cannot explain how Labour (or anyone else) is going to wave this magic wand and turn 'a disaster about to collapse' back into 'the envy of the world'.
Not that it was 'the envy of the world' before 2010 even without Stafford, Maidstone and all the other hospital scandals of that era.
Now perhaps relying on false nostalgia for some none existent golden age of public services is all that is needed before an election but it rapidly wears out once in government.
“As success in reducing long waits in the early part of this century continued, the Labour government raised the stakes by announcing a new, more comprehensive target in 2005 that no more than 10% of patients should wait longer than 18 weeks from referral by a GP to treatment in hospital. This meant another change in waiting list data in 2007 to better capture what would now become a more overarching measure of the complete waiting list/time experience.
“Within two years – by 2009 – the total waiting list had nearly halved to 2.3 million, and the 18-week target continued to be met up until 2017. But from around 2012 the waiting list started to rise, nearly doubling to 4.34 million by February 2020.”
Thanks for proving my point that the NHS wasn't the 'envy of the world' before 2010.
Now could you tell us how many more tens of billions of pounds and hundreds of thousands more employees the NHS requires to get to some predicted output metric ?
Again with this narrative that any change is impossible. We had a better NHS under Labour; the NHS has deteriorated under the Conservatives. Voters might, understandably, want to go back to how things were under Labour (or some other non-Conservative alternative).
These repeated claims that there’s nothing that can be done aren’t going to win the Tories the election.
But Labour can only plausibly offer an improved NHS if it throws more money at it, to cover all the costs of:
*Staff recruitment and retention *Building repair backlogs *Repair and replacement of expensive kit *Clearing massive treatment backlogs, and *Improving preventative medicine and public health
The fact that UK health spending per head is already relatively high doesn't help. The country is also rammed full of poor people, chronically ill people and extremely fat people (the three issues being intimately related,) which means that our costs are also relatively high. As with so many of the other deficient areas of the public sphere, more money must be found to put them right. Where is Labour going to get the money? That's what risks doing for them.
Labour strategists are cock-a-hoop with how the adverts have landed. The first advert tweeted has received 20.8 million views, making it arguably the most successful Labour attack in recent memory. A party insider said: “Nice doesn’t win elections. They have got used to Labour shirking the dirty stuff. That’s changed.”...
...The party is not going to stop there. According to senior Labour sources, one of the next attack ads will suggest the PM has “effectively decriminalised rape”.
It will claim that under the Tories “only 1.6 per cent of rapists have been charged”. A source said: “We aren’t talking to Twitter. We are talking to the vast majority of the country who want to see child rapists locked up and know the Tories have destroyed the criminal justice system. [Sunak] is leading the government that is responsible and he has got the man [Jeremy Hunt] who butchered the NHS as his chancellor.”
It is understood Labour drew up the messages some time ago and have been waiting for the right time to deploy them....
...It has even been claimed that a group of former Tory election staffers have turned against their own party and approached Labour to help formulate their election strategy.
This is all ultimately for nought if the Labour Party won't advance a viable alternative. As with all the rest of the myriad problems with public services, they need to formulate a plan to fix them and find from somewhere the colossal sums of money needed to pay for the plan.
It's where the money's meant to come from that's likely to prove their undoing, in the end. They can probably get away with a certain amount of borrowing to invest for infrastructure projects, albeit that they're going to have to be extremely careful not to repeat the mistakes of PFI and end up saddling public sector organisations with even more debt servicing obligations. However, ultimately they need to service the ongoing costs of, for example, paying more for care home places so the staff can be paid enough not to sod off to Aldi, and putting tens of thousands of extra police on the streets, by raising an awful lot of tax.
Low and middle income earners have already been bled white and there's no indication that Labour are willing to milk the obvious source of extra revenue which is asset wealth - residential and commercial property, stocks and shares. So where's the money to pay for all this stuff?
We can’t afford to bring alleged rapists to trial is really not going to cut the mustard. I am pretty sure people will take additional taxes on wealth to sort the criminal justice system out.
How many Rapists were not brought to trial when Keir Starmer was DPP..
It is always interesting to try and work out the actual reasons why these situations exist. Regarding the lack of convictions on sexual offences, I would suggest that this is due to the formulation of the underlying legislation relating to sex offences. In essence, this defines a sexual offence as sexual activity without the other persons consent. But if you have a 'reasonable belief' that consent exists, it is not a crime. So to convict someone, the police and the CPS have to prove 'beyond reasonable doubt' that the perpetrator carried out the act without any reasonable belief that they had the other persons consent. This has proved to be an extremely difficult test.
I would say that the ultimate cause of the lack of prosecutions in this area is the underlying legislation itself, which was bought in by... the last labour government in 2003.
No doubt there would have been more prosecutions if the law had prescribed written consent in triplicate.
But surely it's obvious that there is a very difficult problem here. It's bad news if politicians have decided that this is an area that's fair game for cartoon rhetoric.
Labour strategists are cock-a-hoop with how the adverts have landed. The first advert tweeted has received 20.8 million views, making it arguably the most successful Labour attack in recent memory. A party insider said: “Nice doesn’t win elections. They have got used to Labour shirking the dirty stuff. That’s changed.”...
...The party is not going to stop there. According to senior Labour sources, one of the next attack ads will suggest the PM has “effectively decriminalised rape”.
It will claim that under the Tories “only 1.6 per cent of rapists have been charged”. A source said: “We aren’t talking to Twitter. We are talking to the vast majority of the country who want to see child rapists locked up and know the Tories have destroyed the criminal justice system. [Sunak] is leading the government that is responsible and he has got the man [Jeremy Hunt] who butchered the NHS as his chancellor.”
It is understood Labour drew up the messages some time ago and have been waiting for the right time to deploy them....
...It has even been claimed that a group of former Tory election staffers have turned against their own party and approached Labour to help formulate their election strategy.
Is Starmer really so utterly thick? Rishi sending his stormtroopers in under cover is absolute genius.
Does anyone remember the Peter Cook film, the Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer? Starmer appears to be as foolish as the Labour Prime Minister played by George A. Cooper
Thanks a bunch. That's given me my earworm for the next couple of days.
Labour strategists are cock-a-hoop with how the adverts have landed. The first advert tweeted has received 20.8 million views, making it arguably the most successful Labour attack in recent memory. A party insider said: “Nice doesn’t win elections. They have got used to Labour shirking the dirty stuff. That’s changed.”...
...The party is not going to stop there. According to senior Labour sources, one of the next attack ads will suggest the PM has “effectively decriminalised rape”.
It will claim that under the Tories “only 1.6 per cent of rapists have been charged”. A source said: “We aren’t talking to Twitter. We are talking to the vast majority of the country who want to see child rapists locked up and know the Tories have destroyed the criminal justice system. [Sunak] is leading the government that is responsible and he has got the man [Jeremy Hunt] who butchered the NHS as his chancellor.”
It is understood Labour drew up the messages some time ago and have been waiting for the right time to deploy them....
...It has even been claimed that a group of former Tory election staffers have turned against their own party and approached Labour to help formulate their election strategy.
This is all ultimately for nought if the Labour Party won't advance a viable alternative. As with all the rest of the myriad problems with public services, they need to formulate a plan to fix them and find from somewhere the colossal sums of money needed to pay for the plan.
It's where the money's meant to come from that's likely to prove their undoing, in the end. They can probably get away with a certain amount of borrowing to invest for infrastructure projects, albeit that they're going to have to be extremely careful not to repeat the mistakes of PFI and end up saddling public sector organisations with even more debt servicing obligations. However, ultimately they need to service the ongoing costs of, for example, paying more for care home places so the staff can be paid enough not to sod off to Aldi, and putting tens of thousands of extra police on the streets, by raising an awful lot of tax.
Low and middle income earners have already been bled white and there's no indication that Labour are willing to milk the obvious source of extra revenue which is asset wealth - residential and commercial property, stocks and shares. So where's the money to pay for all this stuff?
And there's no indication that increasing spending on public services would lead to an equivalent improvement in them.
189k more employed by the NHS than at the 2019GE yet we're continually told that the NHS is a disaster which is about to collapse.
Voters have one fairly simple comparator to call upon. The state of public services under the last Labour government vs those now. Unfortunately for the Tories that comparator is pretty stark. No need for theory - there’s empirical evidence aplenty.
So you cannot explain how Labour (or anyone else) is going to wave this magic wand and turn 'a disaster about to collapse' back into 'the envy of the world'.
Not that it was 'the envy of the world' before 2010 even without Stafford, Maidstone and all the other hospital scandals of that era.
Now perhaps relying on false nostalgia for some none existent golden age of public services is all that is needed before an election but it rapidly wears out once in government.
“As success in reducing long waits in the early part of this century continued, the Labour government raised the stakes by announcing a new, more comprehensive target in 2005 that no more than 10% of patients should wait longer than 18 weeks from referral by a GP to treatment in hospital. This meant another change in waiting list data in 2007 to better capture what would now become a more overarching measure of the complete waiting list/time experience.
“Within two years – by 2009 – the total waiting list had nearly halved to 2.3 million, and the 18-week target continued to be met up until 2017. But from around 2012 the waiting list started to rise, nearly doubling to 4.34 million by February 2020.”
Thanks for proving my point that the NHS wasn't the 'envy of the world' before 2010.
Now could you tell us how many more tens of billions of pounds and hundreds of thousands more employees the NHS requires to get to some predicted output metric ?
Again with this narrative that any change is impossible. We had a better NHS under Labour; the NHS has deteriorated under the Conservatives. Voters might, understandably, want to go back to how things were under Labour (or some other non-Conservative alternative).
These repeated claims that there’s nothing that can be done aren’t going to win the Tories the election.
Most people understand we have just asked the NHS to cope with a once in a century workload, of a disease about which little was initially known and for which a range of treatments have been required. We are also learning that it has a from of "long Covid" which is going to put strains on the NHS for years to come, with perhaps a significantly increased cardiac workload. Not to get into the mental health issues which may take a decade to fully unravel.
That all happened on the Tories' watch. Most people understand those exact same issues would have arisen had Labour been in power.
Presume you'd recommend the same analysis of the SNHS and Yousaf's oversight of it.
Amazingly other European countries have been unable to wave a magic wand at their health systems:
For decades, western Europe’s national healthcare systems have been widely touted as among the best in the world.
But an ageing population, more long-term illnesses, a continuing recruitment and retainment crisis plus post-Covid exhaustion have combined, this winter, to create a perfect healthcare storm that is likely to get worse before it gets better.
“All countries of the region face severe problems related to their health and care workforce,” the World Health Organization’s Europe region said in a report earlier this year, warning of potentially dire consequences without urgent government action.
In France, there are fewer doctors now than in 2012. More than 6 million people, including 600,000 with chronic illnesses, do not have a regular GP and 30% of the population does not have adequate access to health services.
In Germany, 35,000 care sector posts were vacant last year, 40% more than a decade ago, while a report this summer said that by 2035 more than a third of all health jobs could be unfilled. Facing unprecedented hospital overcrowding due to “a severe shortage of nurses”, even Finland will need 200,000 new workers in the health and social care sector by 2030.
In Spain, the health ministry announced in May that more than 700,000 people were waiting for surgery, and 5,000 frontline GPs and paediatricians in Madrid have been on strike for nearly a month in protest at years of underfunding and overwork.
Efforts to replace retiring workers were already “suboptimal”, the WHO Europe report said, but had to now be urgently extended to “improve retention and tackle an expected increase in younger people leaving the workforce due to burnout, ill health and general dissatisfaction”.
In a third of countries in the region, at least 40% of doctors were aged 55 or over, the report said. Even when younger practitioners stayed despite stress, long hours and often low pay, their reluctance to work in remote rural areas or deprived inner cities had created “medical deserts” that were proving almost impossible to fill.
Labour strategists are cock-a-hoop with how the adverts have landed. The first advert tweeted has received 20.8 million views, making it arguably the most successful Labour attack in recent memory. A party insider said: “Nice doesn’t win elections. They have got used to Labour shirking the dirty stuff. That’s changed.”...
...The party is not going to stop there. According to senior Labour sources, one of the next attack ads will suggest the PM has “effectively decriminalised rape”.
It will claim that under the Tories “only 1.6 per cent of rapists have been charged”. A source said: “We aren’t talking to Twitter. We are talking to the vast majority of the country who want to see child rapists locked up and know the Tories have destroyed the criminal justice system. [Sunak] is leading the government that is responsible and he has got the man [Jeremy Hunt] who butchered the NHS as his chancellor.”
It is understood Labour drew up the messages some time ago and have been waiting for the right time to deploy them....
...It has even been claimed that a group of former Tory election staffers have turned against their own party and approached Labour to help formulate their election strategy.
This is all ultimately for nought if the Labour Party won't advance a viable alternative. As with all the rest of the myriad problems with public services, they need to formulate a plan to fix them and find from somewhere the colossal sums of money needed to pay for the plan.
It's where the money's meant to come from that's likely to prove their undoing, in the end. They can probably get away with a certain amount of borrowing to invest for infrastructure projects, albeit that they're going to have to be extremely careful not to repeat the mistakes of PFI and end up saddling public sector organisations with even more debt servicing obligations. However, ultimately they need to service the ongoing costs of, for example, paying more for care home places so the staff can be paid enough not to sod off to Aldi, and putting tens of thousands of extra police on the streets, by raising an awful lot of tax.
Low and middle income earners have already been bled white and there's no indication that Labour are willing to milk the obvious source of extra revenue which is asset wealth - residential and commercial property, stocks and shares. So where's the money to pay for all this stuff?
And there's no indication that increasing spending on public services would lead to an equivalent improvement in them.
189k more employed by the NHS than at the 2019GE yet we're continually told that the NHS is a disaster which is about to collapse.
Voters have one fairly simple comparator to call upon. The state of public services under the last Labour government vs those now. Unfortunately for the Tories that comparator is pretty stark. No need for theory - there’s empirical evidence aplenty.
So you cannot explain how Labour (or anyone else) is going to wave this magic wand and turn 'a disaster about to collapse' back into 'the envy of the world'.
Not that it was 'the envy of the world' before 2010 even without Stafford, Maidstone and all the other hospital scandals of that era.
Now perhaps relying on false nostalgia for some none existent golden age of public services is all that is needed before an election but it rapidly wears out once in government.
“As success in reducing long waits in the early part of this century continued, the Labour government raised the stakes by announcing a new, more comprehensive target in 2005 that no more than 10% of patients should wait longer than 18 weeks from referral by a GP to treatment in hospital. This meant another change in waiting list data in 2007 to better capture what would now become a more overarching measure of the complete waiting list/time experience.
“Within two years – by 2009 – the total waiting list had nearly halved to 2.3 million, and the 18-week target continued to be met up until 2017. But from around 2012 the waiting list started to rise, nearly doubling to 4.34 million by February 2020.”
Thanks for proving my point that the NHS wasn't the 'envy of the world' before 2010.
Now could you tell us how many more tens of billions of pounds and hundreds of thousands more employees the NHS requires to get to some predicted output metric ?
Again with this narrative that any change is impossible. We had a better NHS under Labour; the NHS has deteriorated under the Conservatives. Voters might, understandably, want to go back to how things were under Labour (or some other non-Conservative alternative).
These repeated claims that there’s nothing that can be done aren’t going to win the Tories the election.
But Labour can only plausibly offer an improved NHS if it throws more money at it, to cover all the costs of:
*Staff recruitment and retention *Building repair backlogs *Repair and replacement of expensive kit *Clearing massive treatment backlogs, and *Improving preventative medicine and public health
The fact that UK health spending per head is already relatively high doesn't help. The country is also rammed full of poor people, chronically ill people and extremely fat people (the three issues being intimately related,) which means that our costs are also relatively high. As with so many of the other deficient areas of the public sphere, more money must be found to put them right. Where is Labour going to get the money? That's what risks doing for them.
Doing those things cost money upfront but save money long term. One of the reasons the NHS is both expensive and inefficient is the cult of cuts.
Labour strategists are cock-a-hoop with how the adverts have landed. The first advert tweeted has received 20.8 million views, making it arguably the most successful Labour attack in recent memory. A party insider said: “Nice doesn’t win elections. They have got used to Labour shirking the dirty stuff. That’s changed.”...
...The party is not going to stop there. According to senior Labour sources, one of the next attack ads will suggest the PM has “effectively decriminalised rape”.
It will claim that under the Tories “only 1.6 per cent of rapists have been charged”. A source said: “We aren’t talking to Twitter. We are talking to the vast majority of the country who want to see child rapists locked up and know the Tories have destroyed the criminal justice system. [Sunak] is leading the government that is responsible and he has got the man [Jeremy Hunt] who butchered the NHS as his chancellor.”
It is understood Labour drew up the messages some time ago and have been waiting for the right time to deploy them....
...It has even been claimed that a group of former Tory election staffers have turned against their own party and approached Labour to help formulate their election strategy.
This is all ultimately for nought if the Labour Party won't advance a viable alternative. As with all the rest of the myriad problems with public services, they need to formulate a plan to fix them and find from somewhere the colossal sums of money needed to pay for the plan.
It's where the money's meant to come from that's likely to prove their undoing, in the end. They can probably get away with a certain amount of borrowing to invest for infrastructure projects, albeit that they're going to have to be extremely careful not to repeat the mistakes of PFI and end up saddling public sector organisations with even more debt servicing obligations. However, ultimately they need to service the ongoing costs of, for example, paying more for care home places so the staff can be paid enough not to sod off to Aldi, and putting tens of thousands of extra police on the streets, by raising an awful lot of tax.
Low and middle income earners have already been bled white and there's no indication that Labour are willing to milk the obvious source of extra revenue which is asset wealth - residential and commercial property, stocks and shares. So where's the money to pay for all this stuff?
And there's no indication that increasing spending on public services would lead to an equivalent improvement in them.
189k more employed by the NHS than at the 2019GE yet we're continually told that the NHS is a disaster which is about to collapse.
Voters have one fairly simple comparator to call upon. The state of public services under the last Labour government vs those now. Unfortunately for the Tories that comparator is pretty stark. No need for theory - there’s empirical evidence aplenty.
So you cannot explain how Labour (or anyone else) is going to wave this magic wand and turn 'a disaster about to collapse' back into 'the envy of the world'.
Not that it was 'the envy of the world' before 2010 even without Stafford, Maidstone and all the other hospital scandals of that era.
Now perhaps relying on false nostalgia for some none existent golden age of public services is all that is needed before an election but it rapidly wears out once in government.
“As success in reducing long waits in the early part of this century continued, the Labour government raised the stakes by announcing a new, more comprehensive target in 2005 that no more than 10% of patients should wait longer than 18 weeks from referral by a GP to treatment in hospital. This meant another change in waiting list data in 2007 to better capture what would now become a more overarching measure of the complete waiting list/time experience.
“Within two years – by 2009 – the total waiting list had nearly halved to 2.3 million, and the 18-week target continued to be met up until 2017. But from around 2012 the waiting list started to rise, nearly doubling to 4.34 million by February 2020.”
Thanks for proving my point that the NHS wasn't the 'envy of the world' before 2010.
Now could you tell us how many more tens of billions of pounds and hundreds of thousands more employees the NHS requires to get to some predicted output metric ?
Again with this narrative that any change is impossible. We had a better NHS under Labour; the NHS has deteriorated under the Conservatives. Voters might, understandably, want to go back to how things were under Labour (or some other non-Conservative alternative).
These repeated claims that there’s nothing that can be done aren’t going to win the Tories the election.
Most people understand we have just asked the NHS to cope with a once in a century workload, of a disease about which little was initially known and for which a range of treatments have been required. We are also learning that it has a from of "long Covid" which is going to put strains on the NHS for years to come, with perhaps a significantly increased cardiac workload. Not to get into the mental health issues which may take a decade to fully unravel.
That all happened on the Tories' watch. Most people understand those exact same issues would have arisen had Labour been in power.
The NHS was deteriorating before COVID-19, and voters might remember that. But, yes, of course, the pandemic has had a huge impact. And, of course, the Govt can be judged on how it handled the pandemic… let’s wait until the Privileges Committee reports on Boris and see whether reminders of Partygate help or hinder the Tories’ polling.
Generally speaking, voters blame governments for things that aren’t their fault, and give them credit for things that aren’t their responsibility. If you want the Conservatives to do well at the next election, yes, you can hope that voters will blame the pandemic more than they blame the Tories for the parlous state of the NHS, but I suggest psephological history is against you.
Current polling suggests voters have plenty of blame to lay on the Tories. As time moves on, do you think voters will become more likely to blame the incumbent Govt or more like to blame the pandemic? I suggest that, if anything, the blame allocation will shift towards blaming the incumbents.
On a Thursday in mid-August, the doors of a hospital's emergency department two hours west of Toronto were shut.
A note posted on the front said the ER was closed for the day. It would reopen the following morning at 08:00, but close again for the evening. Patients who needed urgent care were asked to go to nearby hospitals - a 15- to 35-minute drive away.
It was the ninth time since April that the Huron Public Healthcare Alliance - a network of four hospitals serving around 150,000 people in western Ontario - had to temporarily close or cut back hours at one of its emergency departments.
And it won't be the last, said the organisation's CEO Andrew Williams.
The reason? There aren't enough nurses to staff the ER.
"You are seeing - almost weekly - hospitals having to reduce their services," Mr Williams told the BBC.
It's a dilemma playing out at emergency departments across Canada, particularly at smaller hospitals where reduced services have become commonplace.
In the maritime province of Nova Scotia, one hospital's ER has been closed since June 2021 due to staffing shortages.
A key problem with the UK - and in comparison with many other countries - is that, with our services, we unduly focus on the process rather than what we want the result to be.
Take health. Instead of saying "we want a well-funded health system that deals with the population's health in a holistic way and which is primarily free for patients" and then working back from that to think what is the best way to deliver that, 90%+ of the conversation is about the NHS and - worse - all the plans, proposals etc have to be done in the context of what works within the NHS framework.
The NHS may be the best way to do this indeed but it's like saying "the only way we can get to Manchester is the 2:05 train via Stafford." Talk about any other way of delivering the end goal and you are immediately accused of wanting to turn Health into a U.S.-style situation.
A lot of that I know is political. Ideally there would be a bipartisan framework but that isn't going to happen because both sides - particularly Labour - have their grounds for keeping it partisan.
Not sure about your analogy. The 2.05 to Manchester via Stafford is usually cancelled.
Malcolm is doing us a favour in reminding us that party leaders covering up problems only lead to them being uncovered later. I rather wonder whether the SNP will get a real hammering in in any elections in the near future, to the probable advantage of the Labour Party. However, he also says, I think, that the LibDems are very prounionist. I seem to remember that the old Liberal party was very pro-devolution and wonder why policies have changed. There is no reason in principle, why both Wales and Scotland, and indeed those parts of England, which wish it should not have as much self-government as they can manage.
Are we not seeing right now, the limit of how much self-government can be managed in Scotland?
No. I think it demonstrates that there is some stuff that works better at a UK or EU level. A confident, independent Scotland would (hopefully) recognise this and work with others to implement policies like:
- the census - bottle scheme - defence - large infrastructure projects (HS2 to Glasgow)
Nothing will happen at a UK level if Scotland terminates the UK. Independence = divorce. That is the entire point.
An arrangement encompassing joint infrastructure projects, common defence, an invisible border with seamless trade, and an internal market with common standards (and, presumably, a common currency to remove transaction costs,) sounds suspiciously like a federation. Or a union.
You're not wrong! That's why I voted No, then Remain.
I think there is room for a bit more devolution to Scotland, and reworking of the Fiscal Framework and so on. But we should also sort out the relationship between the SG and Local Authorities.
I agree with Helen Lewis that Starmer is “ruthless” in the sense that he is determined, focused on winning, and not sentimentally bound to factions or individuals. But to me the word implies a clarity of purpose which he does not have. Yes, he is determined to climb the mountain, but at any given moment he seems unsure of the path to the top. He kind of scrabbles around from side to side until he finds a way to get a few feet further along, and sometimes heads in the wrong direction before changing course.
His treatment of the gender issue is typical. A ruthless leader would have worked out what he thought about it by now, steamrollered internal opposition, and scraped this particular barnacle off the boat. Instead, he has shifted towards a tenable position by salami-sliced increments while allowing senior colleagues to ignore or contradict him. It is painful to watch, and typified by his latest, excruciating statement that 99.9% of women don’t have a penis. In politics, you really have to round up.
Labour strategists are cock-a-hoop with how the adverts have landed. The first advert tweeted has received 20.8 million views, making it arguably the most successful Labour attack in recent memory. A party insider said: “Nice doesn’t win elections. They have got used to Labour shirking the dirty stuff. That’s changed.”...
...The party is not going to stop there. According to senior Labour sources, one of the next attack ads will suggest the PM has “effectively decriminalised rape”.
It will claim that under the Tories “only 1.6 per cent of rapists have been charged”. A source said: “We aren’t talking to Twitter. We are talking to the vast majority of the country who want to see child rapists locked up and know the Tories have destroyed the criminal justice system. [Sunak] is leading the government that is responsible and he has got the man [Jeremy Hunt] who butchered the NHS as his chancellor.”
It is understood Labour drew up the messages some time ago and have been waiting for the right time to deploy them....
...It has even been claimed that a group of former Tory election staffers have turned against their own party and approached Labour to help formulate their election strategy.
This is all ultimately for nought if the Labour Party won't advance a viable alternative. As with all the rest of the myriad problems with public services, they need to formulate a plan to fix them and find from somewhere the colossal sums of money needed to pay for the plan.
It's where the money's meant to come from that's likely to prove their undoing, in the end. They can probably get away with a certain amount of borrowing to invest for infrastructure projects, albeit that they're going to have to be extremely careful not to repeat the mistakes of PFI and end up saddling public sector organisations with even more debt servicing obligations. However, ultimately they need to service the ongoing costs of, for example, paying more for care home places so the staff can be paid enough not to sod off to Aldi, and putting tens of thousands of extra police on the streets, by raising an awful lot of tax.
Low and middle income earners have already been bled white and there's no indication that Labour are willing to milk the obvious source of extra revenue which is asset wealth - residential and commercial property, stocks and shares. So where's the money to pay for all this stuff?
And there's no indication that increasing spending on public services would lead to an equivalent improvement in them.
189k more employed by the NHS than at the 2019GE yet we're continually told that the NHS is a disaster which is about to collapse.
Voters have one fairly simple comparator to call upon. The state of public services under the last Labour government vs those now. Unfortunately for the Tories that comparator is pretty stark. No need for theory - there’s empirical evidence aplenty.
So you cannot explain how Labour (or anyone else) is going to wave this magic wand and turn 'a disaster about to collapse' back into 'the envy of the world'.
Not that it was 'the envy of the world' before 2010 even without Stafford, Maidstone and all the other hospital scandals of that era.
Now perhaps relying on false nostalgia for some none existent golden age of public services is all that is needed before an election but it rapidly wears out once in government.
“As success in reducing long waits in the early part of this century continued, the Labour government raised the stakes by announcing a new, more comprehensive target in 2005 that no more than 10% of patients should wait longer than 18 weeks from referral by a GP to treatment in hospital. This meant another change in waiting list data in 2007 to better capture what would now become a more overarching measure of the complete waiting list/time experience.
“Within two years – by 2009 – the total waiting list had nearly halved to 2.3 million, and the 18-week target continued to be met up until 2017. But from around 2012 the waiting list started to rise, nearly doubling to 4.34 million by February 2020.”
Thanks for proving my point that the NHS wasn't the 'envy of the world' before 2010.
Now could you tell us how many more tens of billions of pounds and hundreds of thousands more employees the NHS requires to get to some predicted output metric ?
Again with this narrative that any change is impossible. We had a better NHS under Labour; the NHS has deteriorated under the Conservatives. Voters might, understandably, want to go back to how things were under Labour (or some other non-Conservative alternative).
These repeated claims that there’s nothing that can be done aren’t going to win the Tories the election.
But Labour can only plausibly offer an improved NHS if it throws more money at it, to cover all the costs of:
*Staff recruitment and retention *Building repair backlogs *Repair and replacement of expensive kit *Clearing massive treatment backlogs, and *Improving preventative medicine and public health
The fact that UK health spending per head is already relatively high doesn't help. The country is also rammed full of poor people, chronically ill people and extremely fat people (the three issues being intimately related,) which means that our costs are also relatively high. As with so many of the other deficient areas of the public sphere, more money must be found to put them right. Where is Labour going to get the money? That's what risks doing for them.
Doing those things cost money upfront but save money long term. One of the reasons the NHS is both expensive and inefficient is the cult of cuts.
Yes, I know all that - the whole point of bringing up the expense was expressly not to say that "this is impossible, we can't find all that money," but to suggest that Labour will get no credit from a sceptical populace for promising to spend the money if it won't present a plausible mechanism for raising it.
One gets the distinct impression that Labour wants to make lots of promises to pay for shiny new things but doesn't want to say where the vast bulk of the cash will come from. Making posh parents cough up VAT on private school fees or something is not going to cover the costs of resolving the social care calamity, never mind anything else.
Malcolm is doing us a favour in reminding us that party leaders covering up problems only lead to them being uncovered later. I rather wonder whether the SNP will get a real hammering in in any elections in the near future, to the probable advantage of the Labour Party. However, he also says, I think, that the LibDems are very prounionist. I seem to remember that the old Liberal party was very pro-devolution and wonder why policies have changed. There is no reason in principle, why both Wales and Scotland, and indeed those parts of England, which wish it should not have as much self-government as they can manage.
Are we not seeing right now, the limit of how much self-government can be managed in Scotland?
No. I think it demonstrates that there is some stuff that works better at a UK or EU level. A confident, independent Scotland would (hopefully) recognise this and work with others to implement policies like:
- the census - bottle scheme - defence - large infrastructure projects (HS2 to Glasgow)
Nothing will happen at a UK level if Scotland terminates the UK. Independence = divorce. That is the entire point.
An arrangement encompassing joint infrastructure projects, common defence, an invisible border with seamless trade, and an internal market with common standards (and, presumably, a common currency to remove transaction costs,) sounds suspiciously like a federation. Or a union.
You're not wrong! That's why I voted No, then Remain.
I think there is room for a bit more devolution to Scotland, and reworking of the Fiscal Framework and so on. But we should also sort out the relationship between the SG and Local Authorities.
We should also sort out the SG itself.
But no one's going to talk about that .
Who is this 'We' of whom you both seem quite keen on talking about?
Amazingly other European countries have been unable to wave a magic wand at their health systems:
For decades, western Europe’s national healthcare systems have been widely touted as among the best in the world.
But an ageing population, more long-term illnesses, a continuing recruitment and retainment crisis plus post-Covid exhaustion have combined, this winter, to create a perfect healthcare storm that is likely to get worse before it gets better.
“All countries of the region face severe problems related to their health and care workforce,” the World Health Organization’s Europe region said in a report earlier this year, warning of potentially dire consequences without urgent government action.
In France, there are fewer doctors now than in 2012. More than 6 million people, including 600,000 with chronic illnesses, do not have a regular GP and 30% of the population does not have adequate access to health services.
In Germany, 35,000 care sector posts were vacant last year, 40% more than a decade ago, while a report this summer said that by 2035 more than a third of all health jobs could be unfilled. Facing unprecedented hospital overcrowding due to “a severe shortage of nurses”, even Finland will need 200,000 new workers in the health and social care sector by 2030.
In Spain, the health ministry announced in May that more than 700,000 people were waiting for surgery, and 5,000 frontline GPs and paediatricians in Madrid have been on strike for nearly a month in protest at years of underfunding and overwork.
Efforts to replace retiring workers were already “suboptimal”, the WHO Europe report said, but had to now be urgently extended to “improve retention and tackle an expected increase in younger people leaving the workforce due to burnout, ill health and general dissatisfaction”.
In a third of countries in the region, at least 40% of doctors were aged 55 or over, the report said. Even when younger practitioners stayed despite stress, long hours and often low pay, their reluctance to work in remote rural areas or deprived inner cities had created “medical deserts” that were proving almost impossible to fill.
We are increasingly seeing the same in our GP network locally. 3 practices have closed over the last few months, all because they couldn't find the staff, doctors especially, willing to work as GPs in run down areas (and in one not so run down area). Practices are being consolidated into super surgeries which were not designed for such numbers and have inadequate parking and space. More and more of the GP service is being provided by directly employed doctors who rotate rapidly ending any concept of a doctor patient relationship. The service is deteriorating fast with no obvious sign of a base.
Those attack posters seem fine to me. Neither Labour or the Tories can claim any moral high ground after the last decade of shenanigans, so watching them rip the shite out of each other is good sport. I actually didn't even know it was Easter today, until I ordered some plumbing fittings from screwfix, and it said I couldn't pick them up until tomorrow. I sort of knew Easter was this month, as overpriced egg shaped chocolate was for sale in the supermarkets and local Facebook groups were full of mums asking if there were any Easter egg hunts they could take their kids to (what?) but that was the limit of my interest. In all the limited bits I've seen on posts about Easter, none have mentioned the actual religious significance of the day. I'm not religious in the slightest, but even I found that bizarre.
It was on breakfast news this morning, and the church bells have been peeling here in my village today too. Also, I took my children to a Good Friday service with real donkeys and a (very British) Jesus where the vicar led an outside storytelling of The Passion and my 4-year refused to shout for the release of Barrubus. I also listened to some sublime music and hymns from Kings last night.
So, we've certainly had a little bit of the Easter message in our family. And it was delightful.
Labour strategists are cock-a-hoop with how the adverts have landed. The first advert tweeted has received 20.8 million views, making it arguably the most successful Labour attack in recent memory. A party insider said: “Nice doesn’t win elections. They have got used to Labour shirking the dirty stuff. That’s changed.”...
...The party is not going to stop there. According to senior Labour sources, one of the next attack ads will suggest the PM has “effectively decriminalised rape”.
It will claim that under the Tories “only 1.6 per cent of rapists have been charged”. A source said: “We aren’t talking to Twitter. We are talking to the vast majority of the country who want to see child rapists locked up and know the Tories have destroyed the criminal justice system. [Sunak] is leading the government that is responsible and he has got the man [Jeremy Hunt] who butchered the NHS as his chancellor.”
It is understood Labour drew up the messages some time ago and have been waiting for the right time to deploy them....
...It has even been claimed that a group of former Tory election staffers have turned against their own party and approached Labour to help formulate their election strategy.
This is all ultimately for nought if the Labour Party won't advance a viable alternative. As with all the rest of the myriad problems with public services, they need to formulate a plan to fix them and find from somewhere the colossal sums of money needed to pay for the plan.
It's where the money's meant to come from that's likely to prove their undoing, in the end. They can probably get away with a certain amount of borrowing to invest for infrastructure projects, albeit that they're going to have to be extremely careful not to repeat the mistakes of PFI and end up saddling public sector organisations with even more debt servicing obligations. However, ultimately they need to service the ongoing costs of, for example, paying more for care home places so the staff can be paid enough not to sod off to Aldi, and putting tens of thousands of extra police on the streets, by raising an awful lot of tax.
Low and middle income earners have already been bled white and there's no indication that Labour are willing to milk the obvious source of extra revenue which is asset wealth - residential and commercial property, stocks and shares. So where's the money to pay for all this stuff?
And there's no indication that increasing spending on public services would lead to an equivalent improvement in them.
189k more employed by the NHS than at the 2019GE yet we're continually told that the NHS is a disaster which is about to collapse.
Voters have one fairly simple comparator to call upon. The state of public services under the last Labour government vs those now. Unfortunately for the Tories that comparator is pretty stark. No need for theory - there’s empirical evidence aplenty.
So you cannot explain how Labour (or anyone else) is going to wave this magic wand and turn 'a disaster about to collapse' back into 'the envy of the world'.
Not that it was 'the envy of the world' before 2010 even without Stafford, Maidstone and all the other hospital scandals of that era.
Now perhaps relying on false nostalgia for some none existent golden age of public services is all that is needed before an election but it rapidly wears out once in government.
“As success in reducing long waits in the early part of this century continued, the Labour government raised the stakes by announcing a new, more comprehensive target in 2005 that no more than 10% of patients should wait longer than 18 weeks from referral by a GP to treatment in hospital. This meant another change in waiting list data in 2007 to better capture what would now become a more overarching measure of the complete waiting list/time experience.
“Within two years – by 2009 – the total waiting list had nearly halved to 2.3 million, and the 18-week target continued to be met up until 2017. But from around 2012 the waiting list started to rise, nearly doubling to 4.34 million by February 2020.”
Thanks for proving my point that the NHS wasn't the 'envy of the world' before 2010.
Now could you tell us how many more tens of billions of pounds and hundreds of thousands more employees the NHS requires to get to some predicted output metric ?
Again with this narrative that any change is impossible. We had a better NHS under Labour; the NHS has deteriorated under the Conservatives. Voters might, understandably, want to go back to how things were under Labour (or some other non-Conservative alternative).
These repeated claims that there’s nothing that can be done aren’t going to win the Tories the election.
So its wave a magic wand, cut spending on the NHS by tens of billions, reduce the NHS workforce by over 300k and we're back to the NHS of 2009.
Voters can want what they want but getting it costs money.
So where do the extra tens of billions of pounds and extra hundreds of thousands of workers come from ?
Increased spending comes from economic growth, taxes and borrowing. That’s always the answer.
Different political parties have different ideas about how you achieve economic growth, what taxes should be and what borrowing is appropriate, and of course on how you then spend the money. Within a democracy, we have a debate over those different answers, which are correct, which aren’t. We will go on having those debates as long as PB.com exists.
What I’m railing against is the idea put forward by some right-wing posters that there is no possible alternative, that nothing can be done, that increased spending is an impossibility. They can’t defend the Tories’ record in government, so instead they argue that doing anything else is impossible. This is bullshit.
Alternatives exist. You might think they’re bad ideas, but it is clearly possible for an alternative government to borrow more, to tax more, to impact economic growth positively. To spend better. We’ve had governments in the past that did things differently. We can see countries around us doing things differently. One can clearly advance an argument that some of those past governments, some of those other countries, seem to have done things better.
From a campaigning point of view, saying “we can’t do anything” or “there’s no magic money tree” aren’t, I suggest, going to win the Tories the next general election.
I agree with Helen Lewis that Starmer is “ruthless” in the sense that he is determined, focused on winning, and not sentimentally bound to factions or individuals. But to me the word implies a clarity of purpose which he does not have. Yes, he is determined to climb the mountain, but at any given moment he seems unsure of the path to the top. He kind of scrabbles around from side to side until he finds a way to get a few feet further along, and sometimes heads in the wrong direction before changing course.
His treatment of the gender issue is typical. A ruthless leader would have worked out what he thought about it by now, steamrollered internal opposition, and scraped this particular barnacle off the boat. Instead, he has shifted towards a tenable position by salami-sliced increments while allowing senior colleagues to ignore or contradict him. It is painful to watch, and typified by his latest, excruciating statement that 99.9% of women don’t have a penis. In politics, you really have to round up.
Yes, it is one of the clearer understandings of the man I have read. He comes across as a pretty decent bloke. Whether that will make him a good PM I am less sure. Things come at you very fast in Number 10. You need good instincts and the ability to act instinctively. Not sure he can.
I disagree. What you’re describing is an ideal which doesn’t often exist - and certainly hasn’t in recent years. We’ve had too many PMs who’ve been all instinct, and it’s been disastrous. I’d prefer someone who actually thinks about what they’re doing - and any assessment of Starmer next year is also going to require paying close attention to his top team.
His top team are atrocious, Reeves arguably apart. The idea of the quality of cabinet ministers deteriorating when the current rabble are dismissed is truly dismal.
Malcolm is doing us a favour in reminding us that party leaders covering up problems only lead to them being uncovered later. I rather wonder whether the SNP will get a real hammering in in any elections in the near future, to the probable advantage of the Labour Party. However, he also says, I think, that the LibDems are very prounionist. I seem to remember that the old Liberal party was very pro-devolution and wonder why policies have changed. There is no reason in principle, why both Wales and Scotland, and indeed those parts of England, which wish it should not have as much self-government as they can manage.
The Lib Dem overarching policy is subsidiarity - the principle that a central authority should perform only those tasks which cannot be performed at a more local level.
So it is devolution to nation states and local authorities but "better together" where the issue cannot be effectively dealt with locally.
I call it glocalization - local decision-making within a light global policy framework.
It is how the EU should operate and why Lib Dems support it. Unfortunately power always accretes power to itself. That happens with Brussels and Westminster and so it needs continual push back.
For the LIb Dems in Scotland, the policy is federalism, not top down unionism which distinguishes it from Tory and Labour policy.
I agree with Helen Lewis that Starmer is “ruthless” in the sense that he is determined, focused on winning, and not sentimentally bound to factions or individuals. But to me the word implies a clarity of purpose which he does not have. Yes, he is determined to climb the mountain, but at any given moment he seems unsure of the path to the top. He kind of scrabbles around from side to side until he finds a way to get a few feet further along, and sometimes heads in the wrong direction before changing course.
His treatment of the gender issue is typical. A ruthless leader would have worked out what he thought about it by now, steamrollered internal opposition, and scraped this particular barnacle off the boat. Instead, he has shifted towards a tenable position by salami-sliced increments while allowing senior colleagues to ignore or contradict him. It is painful to watch, and typified by his latest, excruciating statement that 99.9% of women don’t have a penis. In politics, you really have to round up.
I don’t know that a short article can completely sum anyone up, but it certainly rings true.
I note Carlotta didn’t quote this bit, which suggests qualities likely to be rather more useful in government than campaigning. … He rarely has a strong, intuitive feel for a policy issue, or for political positioning, or for the right decision in a fast-moving situation. But they also say that this weakness is mitigated by a strength which is in some ways its flipside: he listens. He wants to hear the arguments and he tries to address his own areas of ignorance. He does not assume he is the smartest person in the room and he is not stubborn. So he learns on the job, slowly...
It sounds, if anything, quite conservative (of the better kind).
But, it shows he's not really a leader and that you can't be sure what you're going to get. And being a PM isn't like LOTO - you have to take decisions quickly and deal with black swans.
I agree it's a pro-Starmer article, but I didn't takeaway the warm fuzzy feeling the author intended.
Owen Jones having a rare lucid moment. The BBC clip of Braverman is extremely enlightening. From thinking Keir Starmer demeaned himself I am now wondering whether it was a deliberate pointer to a Powellite Home Secretary who would have been thrown out of most Tory Cabinets of the past and a Prime Minister who clearly backs her.
'The good thing about Rishi is that everyone can see he's not some rabble-rousing populist,' one Cabinet Minister told me. 'He can engage on issues like this in a measured way. When he speaks, people are going to listen.'
Another factor is a recognition among Tory strategists of the unmitigated mess Sir Keir Starmer is getting himself into as he blunders blindly through the cultural minefield sown by his progressive allies. Addressing the trans issue last weekend, Labour's leader bizarrely proclaimed: 'For 99.9 per cent of women, it is completely biological… and of course they haven't got a penis.'
Twenty-four hours later, he went on the radio to lecture all those women concerned about men invading their changing rooms and other protected spaces.
Labour strategists are cock-a-hoop with how the adverts have landed. The first advert tweeted has received 20.8 million views, making it arguably the most successful Labour attack in recent memory. A party insider said: “Nice doesn’t win elections. They have got used to Labour shirking the dirty stuff. That’s changed.”...
...The party is not going to stop there. According to senior Labour sources, one of the next attack ads will suggest the PM has “effectively decriminalised rape”.
It will claim that under the Tories “only 1.6 per cent of rapists have been charged”. A source said: “We aren’t talking to Twitter. We are talking to the vast majority of the country who want to see child rapists locked up and know the Tories have destroyed the criminal justice system. [Sunak] is leading the government that is responsible and he has got the man [Jeremy Hunt] who butchered the NHS as his chancellor.”
It is understood Labour drew up the messages some time ago and have been waiting for the right time to deploy them....
...It has even been claimed that a group of former Tory election staffers have turned against their own party and approached Labour to help formulate their election strategy.
This is all ultimately for nought if the Labour Party won't advance a viable alternative. As with all the rest of the myriad problems with public services, they need to formulate a plan to fix them and find from somewhere the colossal sums of money needed to pay for the plan.
It's where the money's meant to come from that's likely to prove their undoing, in the end. They can probably get away with a certain amount of borrowing to invest for infrastructure projects, albeit that they're going to have to be extremely careful not to repeat the mistakes of PFI and end up saddling public sector organisations with even more debt servicing obligations. However, ultimately they need to service the ongoing costs of, for example, paying more for care home places so the staff can be paid enough not to sod off to Aldi, and putting tens of thousands of extra police on the streets, by raising an awful lot of tax.
Low and middle income earners have already been bled white and there's no indication that Labour are willing to milk the obvious source of extra revenue which is asset wealth - residential and commercial property, stocks and shares. So where's the money to pay for all this stuff?
And there's no indication that increasing spending on public services would lead to an equivalent improvement in them.
189k more employed by the NHS than at the 2019GE yet we're continually told that the NHS is a disaster which is about to collapse.
Voters have one fairly simple comparator to call upon. The state of public services under the last Labour government vs those now. Unfortunately for the Tories that comparator is pretty stark. No need for theory - there’s empirical evidence aplenty.
So you cannot explain how Labour (or anyone else) is going to wave this magic wand and turn 'a disaster about to collapse' back into 'the envy of the world'.
Not that it was 'the envy of the world' before 2010 even without Stafford, Maidstone and all the other hospital scandals of that era.
Now perhaps relying on false nostalgia for some none existent golden age of public services is all that is needed before an election but it rapidly wears out once in government.
“As success in reducing long waits in the early part of this century continued, the Labour government raised the stakes by announcing a new, more comprehensive target in 2005 that no more than 10% of patients should wait longer than 18 weeks from referral by a GP to treatment in hospital. This meant another change in waiting list data in 2007 to better capture what would now become a more overarching measure of the complete waiting list/time experience.
“Within two years – by 2009 – the total waiting list had nearly halved to 2.3 million, and the 18-week target continued to be met up until 2017. But from around 2012 the waiting list started to rise, nearly doubling to 4.34 million by February 2020.”
Thanks for proving my point that the NHS wasn't the 'envy of the world' before 2010.
Now could you tell us how many more tens of billions of pounds and hundreds of thousands more employees the NHS requires to get to some predicted output metric ?
Again with this narrative that any change is impossible. We had a better NHS under Labour; the NHS has deteriorated under the Conservatives. Voters might, understandably, want to go back to how things were under Labour (or some other non-Conservative alternative).
These repeated claims that there’s nothing that can be done aren’t going to win the Tories the election.
But Labour can only plausibly offer an improved NHS if it throws more money at it, to cover all the costs of:
*Staff recruitment and retention *Building repair backlogs *Repair and replacement of expensive kit *Clearing massive treatment backlogs, and *Improving preventative medicine and public health
The fact that UK health spending per head is already relatively high doesn't help. The country is also rammed full of poor people, chronically ill people and extremely fat people (the three issues being intimately related,) which means that our costs are also relatively high. As with so many of the other deficient areas of the public sphere, more money must be found to put them right. Where is Labour going to get the money? That's what risks doing for them.
Doing those things cost money upfront but save money long term. One of the reasons the NHS is both expensive and inefficient is the cult of cuts.
Yes, I know all that - the whole point of bringing up the expense was expressly not to say that "this is impossible, we can't find all that money," but to suggest that Labour will get no credit from a sceptical populace for promising to spend the money if it won't present a plausible mechanism for raising it.
One gets the distinct impression that Labour wants to make lots of promises to pay for shiny new things but doesn't want to say where the vast bulk of the cash will come from. Making posh parents cough up VAT on private school fees or something is not going to cover the costs of resolving the social care calamity, never mind anything else.
The sceptical populace of which you speak currently massively favour Labour in the polls. Might I ask when is there scepticism meant to kick in?
It truly is glorious today. I am sittings in the garden listening to birdsong and the sun beating down on my head, whilst I sip an early Doombar and not really care about anything.
Labour strategists are cock-a-hoop with how the adverts have landed. The first advert tweeted has received 20.8 million views, making it arguably the most successful Labour attack in recent memory. A party insider said: “Nice doesn’t win elections. They have got used to Labour shirking the dirty stuff. That’s changed.”...
...The party is not going to stop there. According to senior Labour sources, one of the next attack ads will suggest the PM has “effectively decriminalised rape”.
It will claim that under the Tories “only 1.6 per cent of rapists have been charged”. A source said: “We aren’t talking to Twitter. We are talking to the vast majority of the country who want to see child rapists locked up and know the Tories have destroyed the criminal justice system. [Sunak] is leading the government that is responsible and he has got the man [Jeremy Hunt] who butchered the NHS as his chancellor.”
It is understood Labour drew up the messages some time ago and have been waiting for the right time to deploy them....
...It has even been claimed that a group of former Tory election staffers have turned against their own party and approached Labour to help formulate their election strategy.
This is all ultimately for nought if the Labour Party won't advance a viable alternative. As with all the rest of the myriad problems with public services, they need to formulate a plan to fix them and find from somewhere the colossal sums of money needed to pay for the plan.
It's where the money's meant to come from that's likely to prove their undoing, in the end. They can probably get away with a certain amount of borrowing to invest for infrastructure projects, albeit that they're going to have to be extremely careful not to repeat the mistakes of PFI and end up saddling public sector organisations with even more debt servicing obligations. However, ultimately they need to service the ongoing costs of, for example, paying more for care home places so the staff can be paid enough not to sod off to Aldi, and putting tens of thousands of extra police on the streets, by raising an awful lot of tax.
Low and middle income earners have already been bled white and there's no indication that Labour are willing to milk the obvious source of extra revenue which is asset wealth - residential and commercial property, stocks and shares. So where's the money to pay for all this stuff?
And there's no indication that increasing spending on public services would lead to an equivalent improvement in them.
189k more employed by the NHS than at the 2019GE yet we're continually told that the NHS is a disaster which is about to collapse.
Voters have one fairly simple comparator to call upon. The state of public services under the last Labour government vs those now. Unfortunately for the Tories that comparator is pretty stark. No need for theory - there’s empirical evidence aplenty.
So you cannot explain how Labour (or anyone else) is going to wave this magic wand and turn 'a disaster about to collapse' back into 'the envy of the world'.
Not that it was 'the envy of the world' before 2010 even without Stafford, Maidstone and all the other hospital scandals of that era.
Now perhaps relying on false nostalgia for some none existent golden age of public services is all that is needed before an election but it rapidly wears out once in government.
“As success in reducing long waits in the early part of this century continued, the Labour government raised the stakes by announcing a new, more comprehensive target in 2005 that no more than 10% of patients should wait longer than 18 weeks from referral by a GP to treatment in hospital. This meant another change in waiting list data in 2007 to better capture what would now become a more overarching measure of the complete waiting list/time experience.
“Within two years – by 2009 – the total waiting list had nearly halved to 2.3 million, and the 18-week target continued to be met up until 2017. But from around 2012 the waiting list started to rise, nearly doubling to 4.34 million by February 2020.”
Thanks for proving my point that the NHS wasn't the 'envy of the world' before 2010.
Now could you tell us how many more tens of billions of pounds and hundreds of thousands more employees the NHS requires to get to some predicted output metric ?
Again with this narrative that any change is impossible. We had a better NHS under Labour; the NHS has deteriorated under the Conservatives. Voters might, understandably, want to go back to how things were under Labour (or some other non-Conservative alternative).
These repeated claims that there’s nothing that can be done aren’t going to win the Tories the election.
But Labour can only plausibly offer an improved NHS if it throws more money at it, to cover all the costs of:
*Staff recruitment and retention *Building repair backlogs *Repair and replacement of expensive kit *Clearing massive treatment backlogs, and *Improving preventative medicine and public health
The fact that UK health spending per head is already relatively high doesn't help. The country is also rammed full of poor people, chronically ill people and extremely fat people (the three issues being intimately related,) which means that our costs are also relatively high. As with so many of the other deficient areas of the public sphere, more money must be found to put them right. Where is Labour going to get the money? That's what risks doing for them.
Doing those things cost money upfront but save money long term. One of the reasons the NHS is both expensive and inefficient is the cult of cuts.
Yes, I know all that - the whole point of bringing up the expense was expressly not to say that "this is impossible, we can't find all that money," but to suggest that Labour will get no credit from a sceptical populace for promising to spend the money if it won't present a plausible mechanism for raising it.
One gets the distinct impression that Labour wants to make lots of promises to pay for shiny new things but doesn't want to say where the vast bulk of the cash will come from. Making posh parents cough up VAT on private school fees or something is not going to cover the costs of resolving the social care calamity, never mind anything else.
Well it is fairly obvious the money will mostly come from borrowing and some higher taxes. Labour, as with every other political party in western democracies with a realistic chance of winning, won't spell the full extent of this out explicitly.
Labour strategists are cock-a-hoop with how the adverts have landed. The first advert tweeted has received 20.8 million views, making it arguably the most successful Labour attack in recent memory. A party insider said: “Nice doesn’t win elections. They have got used to Labour shirking the dirty stuff. That’s changed.”...
...The party is not going to stop there. According to senior Labour sources, one of the next attack ads will suggest the PM has “effectively decriminalised rape”.
It will claim that under the Tories “only 1.6 per cent of rapists have been charged”. A source said: “We aren’t talking to Twitter. We are talking to the vast majority of the country who want to see child rapists locked up and know the Tories have destroyed the criminal justice system. [Sunak] is leading the government that is responsible and he has got the man [Jeremy Hunt] who butchered the NHS as his chancellor.”
It is understood Labour drew up the messages some time ago and have been waiting for the right time to deploy them....
...It has even been claimed that a group of former Tory election staffers have turned against their own party and approached Labour to help formulate their election strategy.
This is all ultimately for nought if the Labour Party won't advance a viable alternative. As with all the rest of the myriad problems with public services, they need to formulate a plan to fix them and find from somewhere the colossal sums of money needed to pay for the plan.
It's where the money's meant to come from that's likely to prove their undoing, in the end. They can probably get away with a certain amount of borrowing to invest for infrastructure projects, albeit that they're going to have to be extremely careful not to repeat the mistakes of PFI and end up saddling public sector organisations with even more debt servicing obligations. However, ultimately they need to service the ongoing costs of, for example, paying more for care home places so the staff can be paid enough not to sod off to Aldi, and putting tens of thousands of extra police on the streets, by raising an awful lot of tax.
Low and middle income earners have already been bled white and there's no indication that Labour are willing to milk the obvious source of extra revenue which is asset wealth - residential and commercial property, stocks and shares. So where's the money to pay for all this stuff?
And there's no indication that increasing spending on public services would lead to an equivalent improvement in them.
189k more employed by the NHS than at the 2019GE yet we're continually told that the NHS is a disaster which is about to collapse.
Voters have one fairly simple comparator to call upon. The state of public services under the last Labour government vs those now. Unfortunately for the Tories that comparator is pretty stark. No need for theory - there’s empirical evidence aplenty.
So you cannot explain how Labour (or anyone else) is going to wave this magic wand and turn 'a disaster about to collapse' back into 'the envy of the world'.
Not that it was 'the envy of the world' before 2010 even without Stafford, Maidstone and all the other hospital scandals of that era.
Now perhaps relying on false nostalgia for some none existent golden age of public services is all that is needed before an election but it rapidly wears out once in government.
“As success in reducing long waits in the early part of this century continued, the Labour government raised the stakes by announcing a new, more comprehensive target in 2005 that no more than 10% of patients should wait longer than 18 weeks from referral by a GP to treatment in hospital. This meant another change in waiting list data in 2007 to better capture what would now become a more overarching measure of the complete waiting list/time experience.
“Within two years – by 2009 – the total waiting list had nearly halved to 2.3 million, and the 18-week target continued to be met up until 2017. But from around 2012 the waiting list started to rise, nearly doubling to 4.34 million by February 2020.”
Thanks for proving my point that the NHS wasn't the 'envy of the world' before 2010.
Now could you tell us how many more tens of billions of pounds and hundreds of thousands more employees the NHS requires to get to some predicted output metric ?
Again with this narrative that any change is impossible. We had a better NHS under Labour; the NHS has deteriorated under the Conservatives. Voters might, understandably, want to go back to how things were under Labour (or some other non-Conservative alternative).
These repeated claims that there’s nothing that can be done aren’t going to win the Tories the election.
But Labour can only plausibly offer an improved NHS if it throws more money at it, to cover all the costs of:
*Staff recruitment and retention *Building repair backlogs *Repair and replacement of expensive kit *Clearing massive treatment backlogs, and *Improving preventative medicine and public health
The fact that UK health spending per head is already relatively high doesn't help. The country is also rammed full of poor people, chronically ill people and extremely fat people (the three issues being intimately related,) which means that our costs are also relatively high. As with so many of the other deficient areas of the public sphere, more money must be found to put them right. Where is Labour going to get the money? That's what risks doing for them.
Doing those things cost money upfront but save money long term. One of the reasons the NHS is both expensive and inefficient is the cult of cuts.
Yes, I know all that - the whole point of bringing up the expense was expressly not to say that "this is impossible, we can't find all that money," but to suggest that Labour will get no credit from a sceptical populace for promising to spend the money if it won't present a plausible mechanism for raising it.
One gets the distinct impression that Labour wants to make lots of promises to pay for shiny new things but doesn't want to say where the vast bulk of the cash will come from. Making posh parents cough up VAT on private school fees or something is not going to cover the costs of resolving the social care calamity, never mind anything else.
The sceptical populace of which you speak currently massively favour Labour in the polls. Might I ask when is there scepticism meant to kick in?
When we get to an election and everyone has to say how stuff is going to get done.
Labour's lead is the product of things being a bit rubbish and a lot of people feeling miserable. It hasn't had to explain why it would do a better job yet.
Also worth bearing in mind that Labour intend to keep going with their negative attacks on Sunak. He is a very easy target and they should not let him off.
Mike might claim to disapprove of such things, which is mildly amusing to those of us who have seen the LibDems at work, but it's naivety that has cost Labour in the past and the tories are a disgusting mob who will stop at nothing.
p.s. not saying I approve of such things. But it's politics and it's going to be dirty.
The trouble is, even if we accept Labour must climb into the gutter, Sunak is the wrong target because no-one believes he wants armed gangs of child molesters to roam the land. It is the same mistake the Tories made when portraying Tony Blair with demonic eyes. Labour ought to be targeting Tory sleaze and corruption, especially around PPE during the Covid pandemic with its echoes of Partygate. Voters made sacrifices while Tories were throwing billions to their dodgy mates. Voters will be swayed by that because they are already halfway there.
Saying Labour will reduce crime is also good in itself, especially if there is some mechanism promised, such as rebuilding however many courts the Tories have closed, but the personal attacks on Rishi are likely to be unproductive or even counterproductive.
And the fact Labour is just talking about sentencing suggests there is no serious policy there either.
Indeed. You wonder what genius Labour strategy meeting debated all the issues that are worrying people right now, and came up with Sunak being supposedly soft on child abuse as the right one to target?
Where’s the positivity and the vision? 1995-era Blair had vision and positivity in spades.
Not that I’m persuaded by it, but Labour are positive that they’re not the Tories and they have a vision of the UK not being governed by gurning sociopaths. That’s enough to convince voters atm but who knows where the notoriously amnesiac great British public will be in a year’s time?
Labour appear to be offering their own core vote next to nothing, and the Conservative core vote a bad copy of the party that has been pinning them to the ground and stuffing their all-too-willing mouths full of gold for the last thirteen years. Their entire election strategy seems to have consisted of "look at the fat blond wanker, our wooden mannequin will offer some blessed relief." Now the Tories have found a marketable replacement for the fat blond wanker, Labour is flailing about for a response.
There's no big idea from Labour, no vision, no sense of direction, no meaningful program for change. This entirely explains the dissatisfaction of Labour voters with Starmer's leadership: the hardcore partisans may be willing to sing his praises regardless, but the softer flank of Labour's support thinks "You're offering me nothing of value."
Labour are running as the Not Tory party, and that's it. Where does that leave you once the Tories have mollified their ageing core vote and the remainder of the electorate is not actively repelled by the Prime Minister, and thinks that you offer no alternative to his platform? It leaves you stranded in the middle of nowhere.
Labour needs to convert a double negative into a positive IMO. The core themes of the long Conservative years in power are declining incomes for ordinary people and disintegrating public services. Labour saying they are not the Tories might imply they won't be so bad
People need to believe the positive - they will become wealthier and public services improve.
At the moment large numbers of middle-income people, currently making £30k or £40k - or with aspirations to make that much in the future - think that they’ll be the target for higher taxes. They won’t end up wealthier at all.
They are already paying higher taxes from last week.
So far two of my pensions are a tad lower than last year.
It might be interesting to form a panel of PB Bellweather voters in the run up to the GE. Specifically, former Tory loyalists who intend to vote otherwise or abstain next time. To be on the panel, one would state the current voting intention in % probability and, say, the top three reasons why and also give, say, three things that would make you revert to type. Then, between now and the GE, just notify PB if you do change your mind. A panel of 10 would be a wholly unreliable, but nonetheless interesting, tracker of how effective the various campaigns are.
I’m happy to go first:
Constituency: Skipton and Ripon, Conservative May 24,000 (6%)
Previous record at GEs: 100% Conservative
Current intention: 70% Labour or LD depending on any tactical agreements
Reasons:
- Brexit - State of public services - Treatment of younger generation
What could change my mind:
- Labour manifesto commitment to onshore wind farms in AONB or National Parks - Commitment to impose NI on pensions - Strong polling by Ref Party in S&R
NI on pensions is just simple inter generational fairness though. It should be in every manifesto. Or better still just abolish NI and replace with a higher income tax rate.
Having said that over here we have the grotesque chaos, the grotesque chaos, of youngsters in their 20s scuttling around on demos to prevent their featherbedded grandparents from having to wait until the grand old age of, er 64 to get a pension.
Nobody's going to get rid of NI, precisely because it functions as a parallel income tax system from which the elderly, of whose opprobrium almost everyone in political life seems to be desperately afraid, are exempt.
I still maintain that the only good thing Liz Truss managed during her five minute reign was to get rid of Sunak's Health and Social Care Levy, which threatened to turn into an automated ratchet for successive administrations to screw more and more money out of the young and the poor, so that the better-off elderly could afford to keep going on Mediterranean cruises every year for the remainder of their lives and pass on huge estates to their kids free of tax when they eventually expired. I'm astonished that Hunt hasn't brought it back.
NI also has the 'benefit' that the 13.8% employers NI is kept off payslips despite the employee being effectively the one paying it.
For any wondering how Jolyon sets his moral compass:
No one knows better than huge consumer facing brands what the future looks like. And what Nike is saying, by choosing a trans woman ambassador, is that the future is trans inclusive.
Hang on in there: the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice
There’s a world of difference between being “trans inclusive” and having a trans woman represent biological women.
Women get 1% of the USA sports sponsorship cash! Let that figure really sink in… In a world where they represent 51% of the population! And we’re supposed to be happy males now get to advertise our sports bras - just say NO #boycottnike
Those attack posters seem fine to me. Neither Labour or the Tories can claim any moral high ground after the last decade of shenanigans, so watching them rip the shite out of each other is good sport. I actually didn't even know it was Easter today, until I ordered some plumbing fittings from screwfix, and it said I couldn't pick them up until tomorrow. I sort of knew Easter was this month, as overpriced egg shaped chocolate was for sale in the supermarkets and local Facebook groups were full of mums asking if there were any Easter egg hunts they could take their kids to (what?) but that was the limit of my interest. In all the limited bits I've seen on posts about Easter, none have mentioned the actual religious significance of the day. I'm not religious in the slightest, but even I found that bizarre.
It was on breakfast news this morning, and the church bells have been peeling here in my village today too. Also, I took my children to a Good Friday service with real donkeys and a (very British) Jesus where the vicar led an outside storytelling of The Passion and my 4-year refused to shout for the release of Barrubus. I also listened to some sublime music and hymns from Kings last night.
So, we've certainly had a little bit of the Easter message in our family. And it was delightful.
What on earth is a "very British" Jesus? And - perhaps my Biblical knowledge is lacking - did donkeys have any significant role to play in the Crucifixion?
Those attack posters seem fine to me. Neither Labour or the Tories can claim any moral high ground after the last decade of shenanigans, so watching them rip the shite out of each other is good sport. I actually didn't even know it was Easter today, until I ordered some plumbing fittings from screwfix, and it said I couldn't pick them up until tomorrow. I sort of knew Easter was this month, as overpriced egg shaped chocolate was for sale in the supermarkets and local Facebook groups were full of mums asking if there were any Easter egg hunts they could take their kids to (what?) but that was the limit of my interest. In all the limited bits I've seen on posts about Easter, none have mentioned the actual religious significance of the day. I'm not religious in the slightest, but even I found that bizarre.
It was on breakfast news this morning, and the church bells have been peeling here in my village today too. Also, I took my children to a Good Friday service with real donkeys and a (very British) Jesus where the vicar led an outside storytelling of The Passion and my 4-year refused to shout for the release of Barrubus. I also listened to some sublime music and hymns from Kings last night.
So, we've certainly had a little bit of the Easter message in our family. And it was delightful.
I don't doubt that it was lovely for your family, but as someone who doesn't watch broadcast TV, it really hasn't registered for me at all. I live near a small country church and that didn't sound any different than it does on a bog standard Sunday (it does sound magnificent, even to my pagan ears). I just wonder at how the actual Christian message gets lost in all the rampant consumerism and Americanisation of our holidays and festivals. They all seem to roll into each other, with the supermarkets stacking the shelves with the next cash cow holiday products as soon as the last one is over. I find it a little saddening.
Labour strategists are cock-a-hoop with how the adverts have landed. The first advert tweeted has received 20.8 million views, making it arguably the most successful Labour attack in recent memory. A party insider said: “Nice doesn’t win elections. They have got used to Labour shirking the dirty stuff. That’s changed.”...
...The party is not going to stop there. According to senior Labour sources, one of the next attack ads will suggest the PM has “effectively decriminalised rape”.
It will claim that under the Tories “only 1.6 per cent of rapists have been charged”. A source said: “We aren’t talking to Twitter. We are talking to the vast majority of the country who want to see child rapists locked up and know the Tories have destroyed the criminal justice system. [Sunak] is leading the government that is responsible and he has got the man [Jeremy Hunt] who butchered the NHS as his chancellor.”
It is understood Labour drew up the messages some time ago and have been waiting for the right time to deploy them....
...It has even been claimed that a group of former Tory election staffers have turned against their own party and approached Labour to help formulate their election strategy.
This is all ultimately for nought if the Labour Party won't advance a viable alternative. As with all the rest of the myriad problems with public services, they need to formulate a plan to fix them and find from somewhere the colossal sums of money needed to pay for the plan.
It's where the money's meant to come from that's likely to prove their undoing, in the end. They can probably get away with a certain amount of borrowing to invest for infrastructure projects, albeit that they're going to have to be extremely careful not to repeat the mistakes of PFI and end up saddling public sector organisations with even more debt servicing obligations. However, ultimately they need to service the ongoing costs of, for example, paying more for care home places so the staff can be paid enough not to sod off to Aldi, and putting tens of thousands of extra police on the streets, by raising an awful lot of tax.
Low and middle income earners have already been bled white and there's no indication that Labour are willing to milk the obvious source of extra revenue which is asset wealth - residential and commercial property, stocks and shares. So where's the money to pay for all this stuff?
And there's no indication that increasing spending on public services would lead to an equivalent improvement in them.
189k more employed by the NHS than at the 2019GE yet we're continually told that the NHS is a disaster which is about to collapse.
Voters have one fairly simple comparator to call upon. The state of public services under the last Labour government vs those now. Unfortunately for the Tories that comparator is pretty stark. No need for theory - there’s empirical evidence aplenty.
So you cannot explain how Labour (or anyone else) is going to wave this magic wand and turn 'a disaster about to collapse' back into 'the envy of the world'.
Not that it was 'the envy of the world' before 2010 even without Stafford, Maidstone and all the other hospital scandals of that era.
Now perhaps relying on false nostalgia for some none existent golden age of public services is all that is needed before an election but it rapidly wears out once in government.
“As success in reducing long waits in the early part of this century continued, the Labour government raised the stakes by announcing a new, more comprehensive target in 2005 that no more than 10% of patients should wait longer than 18 weeks from referral by a GP to treatment in hospital. This meant another change in waiting list data in 2007 to better capture what would now become a more overarching measure of the complete waiting list/time experience.
“Within two years – by 2009 – the total waiting list had nearly halved to 2.3 million, and the 18-week target continued to be met up until 2017. But from around 2012 the waiting list started to rise, nearly doubling to 4.34 million by February 2020.”
Thanks for proving my point that the NHS wasn't the 'envy of the world' before 2010.
Now could you tell us how many more tens of billions of pounds and hundreds of thousands more employees the NHS requires to get to some predicted output metric ?
Again with this narrative that any change is impossible. We had a better NHS under Labour; the NHS has deteriorated under the Conservatives. Voters might, understandably, want to go back to how things were under Labour (or some other non-Conservative alternative).
These repeated claims that there’s nothing that can be done aren’t going to win the Tories the election.
But Labour can only plausibly offer an improved NHS if it throws more money at it, to cover all the costs of:
*Staff recruitment and retention *Building repair backlogs *Repair and replacement of expensive kit *Clearing massive treatment backlogs, and *Improving preventative medicine and public health
The fact that UK health spending per head is already relatively high doesn't help. The country is also rammed full of poor people, chronically ill people and extremely fat people (the three issues being intimately related,) which means that our costs are also relatively high. As with so many of the other deficient areas of the public sphere, more money must be found to put them right. Where is Labour going to get the money? That's what risks doing for them.
Doing those things cost money upfront but save money long term. One of the reasons the NHS is both expensive and inefficient is the cult of cuts.
Yes, I know all that - the whole point of bringing up the expense was expressly not to say that "this is impossible, we can't find all that money," but to suggest that Labour will get no credit from a sceptical populace for promising to spend the money if it won't present a plausible mechanism for raising it.
One gets the distinct impression that Labour wants to make lots of promises to pay for shiny new things but doesn't want to say where the vast bulk of the cash will come from. Making posh parents cough up VAT on private school fees or something is not going to cover the costs of resolving the social care calamity, never mind anything else.
I think it should be noted that Labour have only ruled out borrowing to pay for day to day spending commitments. That doesn't rule it out borrowing to invest, and Labour currently interestingly has a lot of infrastructure commitments right now (e.g., building HS2 to Leeds). So, I suspect Labour's long term plan is that it will be able to change things round by getting the economy to grow... and to do that's in going to need to some borrowing to invest in things which will generate revenue.
It might be interesting to form a panel of PB Bellweather voters in the run up to the GE. Specifically, former Tory loyalists who intend to vote otherwise or abstain next time. To be on the panel, one would state the current voting intention in % probability and, say, the top three reasons why and also give, say, three things that would make you revert to type. Then, between now and the GE, just notify PB if you do change your mind. A panel of 10 would be a wholly unreliable, but nonetheless interesting, tracker of how effective the various campaigns are.
I’m happy to go first:
Constituency: Skipton and Ripon, Conservative May 24,000 (6%)
Previous record at GEs: 100% Conservative
Current intention: 70% Labour or LD depending on any tactical agreements
Reasons:
- Brexit - State of public services - Treatment of younger generation
What could change my mind:
- Labour manifesto commitment to onshore wind farms in AONB or National Parks - Commitment to impose NI on pensions - Strong polling by Ref Party in S&R
NI on pensions is just simple inter generational fairness though. It should be in every manifesto. Or better still just abolish NI and replace with a higher income tax rate.
Having said that over here we have the grotesque chaos, the grotesque chaos, of youngsters in their 20s scuttling around on demos to prevent their featherbedded grandparents from having to wait until the grand old age of, er 64 to get a pension.
Nobody's going to get rid of NI, precisely because it functions as a parallel income tax system from which the elderly, of whose opprobrium almost everyone in political life seems to be desperately afraid, are exempt.
I still maintain that the only good thing Liz Truss managed during her five minute reign was to get rid of Sunak's Health and Social Care Levy, which threatened to turn into an automated ratchet for successive administrations to screw more and more money out of the young and the poor, so that the better-off elderly could afford to keep going on Mediterranean cruises every year for the remainder of their lives and pass on huge estates to their kids free of tax when they eventually expired. I'm astonished that Hunt hasn't brought it back.
NI also has the 'benefit' that the 13.8% employers NI is kept off payslips despite the employee being effectively the one paying it.
It is shown on my payslip.
Employers NI ?
As well as Employees NI ?
I've never seen that before.
But having both NIs plus income tax listed as deductions shows how much the government takes from your employment compared to your net earnings.
Those attack posters seem fine to me. Neither Labour or the Tories can claim any moral high ground after the last decade of shenanigans, so watching them rip the shite out of each other is good sport. I actually didn't even know it was Easter today, until I ordered some plumbing fittings from screwfix, and it said I couldn't pick them up until tomorrow. I sort of knew Easter was this month, as overpriced egg shaped chocolate was for sale in the supermarkets and local Facebook groups were full of mums asking if there were any Easter egg hunts they could take their kids to (what?) but that was the limit of my interest. In all the limited bits I've seen on posts about Easter, none have mentioned the actual religious significance of the day. I'm not religious in the slightest, but even I found that bizarre.
It was on breakfast news this morning, and the church bells have been peeling here in my village today too. Also, I took my children to a Good Friday service with real donkeys and a (very British) Jesus where the vicar led an outside storytelling of The Passion and my 4-year refused to shout for the release of Barrubus. I also listened to some sublime music and hymns from Kings last night.
So, we've certainly had a little bit of the Easter message in our family. And it was delightful.
What on earth is a "very British" Jesus? And - perhaps my Biblical knowledge is lacking - did donkeys have any significant role to play in the Crucifixion?
This is the only one I can think of:
I can only suggest that a very British Jesus is the one in that traditional socialist - and clearly anti-business* - hymn by William Blake: edit: the point possibly bein g that there never was such a Messiah in England (though IANAE):
And did those feet in ancient time Walk upon Englands mountains green: And was the holy Lamb of God, On Englands pleasant pastures seen!
And did the Countenance Divine, Shine forth upon our clouded hills? And was Jerusalem builded here, Among these dark Satanic Mills?
Bring me my Bow of burning gold: Bring me my arrows of desire: Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold! Bring me my Chariot of fire!
I will not cease from Mental Fight, Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand: Till we have built Jerusalem, In Englands green & pleasant Land.
*admittedly the current Tory party also qualifies as anti-business, pace Mr Hunt's latest efforts.
I agree with Helen Lewis that Starmer is “ruthless” in the sense that he is determined, focused on winning, and not sentimentally bound to factions or individuals. But to me the word implies a clarity of purpose which he does not have. Yes, he is determined to climb the mountain, but at any given moment he seems unsure of the path to the top. He kind of scrabbles around from side to side until he finds a way to get a few feet further along, and sometimes heads in the wrong direction before changing course.
His treatment of the gender issue is typical. A ruthless leader would have worked out what he thought about it by now, steamrollered internal opposition, and scraped this particular barnacle off the boat. Instead, he has shifted towards a tenable position by salami-sliced increments while allowing senior colleagues to ignore or contradict him. It is painful to watch, and typified by his latest, excruciating statement that 99.9% of women don’t have a penis. In politics, you really have to round up.
Yes, it is one of the clearer understandings of the man I have read. He comes across as a pretty decent bloke. Whether that will make him a good PM I am less sure. Things come at you very fast in Number 10. You need good instincts and the ability to act instinctively. Not sure he can.
I disagree. What you’re describing is an ideal which doesn’t often exist - and certainly hasn’t in recent years. We’ve had too many PMs who’ve been all instinct, and it’s been disastrous. I’d prefer someone who actually thinks about what they’re doing - and any assessment of Starmer next year is also going to require paying close attention to his top team.
His top team are atrocious, Reeves arguably apart. The idea of the quality of cabinet ministers deteriorating when the current rabble are dismissed is truly dismal.
So Braverman is better than Cooper. Barclay better than Streeting. Cleverley better than Lammy. And so on. Are you sure?
Those attack posters seem fine to me. Neither Labour or the Tories can claim any moral high ground after the last decade of shenanigans, so watching them rip the shite out of each other is good sport. I actually didn't even know it was Easter today, until I ordered some plumbing fittings from screwfix, and it said I couldn't pick them up until tomorrow. I sort of knew Easter was this month, as overpriced egg shaped chocolate was for sale in the supermarkets and local Facebook groups were full of mums asking if there were any Easter egg hunts they could take their kids to (what?) but that was the limit of my interest. In all the limited bits I've seen on posts about Easter, none have mentioned the actual religious significance of the day. I'm not religious in the slightest, but even I found that bizarre.
It was on breakfast news this morning, and the church bells have been peeling here in my village today too. Also, I took my children to a Good Friday service with real donkeys and a (very British) Jesus where the vicar led an outside storytelling of The Passion and my 4-year refused to shout for the release of Barrubus. I also listened to some sublime music and hymns from Kings last night.
So, we've certainly had a little bit of the Easter message in our family. And it was delightful.
What on earth is a "very British" Jesus? And - perhaps my Biblical knowledge is lacking - did donkeys have any significant role to play in the Crucifixion?
This is the only one I can think of:
I can only suggest that a very British Jesus is the one in that traditional socialist - and clearly anti-business* - hymn by William Blake: edit: the point possibly bein g that there never was such a Messiah in England (though IANAE):
And did those feet in ancient time Walk upon Englands mountains green: And was the holy Lamb of God, On Englands pleasant pastures seen!
And did the Countenance Divine, Shine forth upon our clouded hills? And was Jerusalem builded here, Among these dark Satanic Mills?
Bring me my Bow of burning gold: Bring me my arrows of desire: Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold! Bring me my Chariot of fire!
I will not cease from Mental Fight, Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand: Till we have built Jerusalem, In Englands green & pleasant Land.
*admittedly the current Tory party also qualifies as anti-business, pace Mr Hunt's latest efforts.
Obviously Jesus went on holiday to the West Country as a child, but I scarcely think that qualifies him to wear a Union Jack waistcoat!
Those attack posters seem fine to me. Neither Labour or the Tories can claim any moral high ground after the last decade of shenanigans, so watching them rip the shite out of each other is good sport. I actually didn't even know it was Easter today, until I ordered some plumbing fittings from screwfix, and it said I couldn't pick them up until tomorrow. I sort of knew Easter was this month, as overpriced egg shaped chocolate was for sale in the supermarkets and local Facebook groups were full of mums asking if there were any Easter egg hunts they could take their kids to (what?) but that was the limit of my interest. In all the limited bits I've seen on posts about Easter, none have mentioned the actual religious significance of the day. I'm not religious in the slightest, but even I found that bizarre.
It was on breakfast news this morning, and the church bells have been peeling here in my village today too. Also, I took my children to a Good Friday service with real donkeys and a (very British) Jesus where the vicar led an outside storytelling of The Passion and my 4-year refused to shout for the release of Barrubus. I also listened to some sublime music and hymns from Kings last night.
So, we've certainly had a little bit of the Easter message in our family. And it was delightful.
What on earth is a "very British" Jesus?
One that isn't anti-imperialist or a child refugee.
Those attack posters seem fine to me. Neither Labour or the Tories can claim any moral high ground after the last decade of shenanigans, so watching them rip the shite out of each other is good sport. I actually didn't even know it was Easter today, until I ordered some plumbing fittings from screwfix, and it said I couldn't pick them up until tomorrow. I sort of knew Easter was this month, as overpriced egg shaped chocolate was for sale in the supermarkets and local Facebook groups were full of mums asking if there were any Easter egg hunts they could take their kids to (what?) but that was the limit of my interest. In all the limited bits I've seen on posts about Easter, none have mentioned the actual religious significance of the day. I'm not religious in the slightest, but even I found that bizarre.
It was on breakfast news this morning, and the church bells have been peeling here in my village today too. Also, I took my children to a Good Friday service with real donkeys and a (very British) Jesus where the vicar led an outside storytelling of The Passion and my 4-year refused to shout for the release of Barrubus. I also listened to some sublime music and hymns from Kings last night.
So, we've certainly had a little bit of the Easter message in our family. And it was delightful.
I don't doubt that it was lovely for your family, but as someone who doesn't watch broadcast TV, it really hasn't registered for me at all. I live near a small country church and that didn't sound any different than it does on a bog standard Sunday (it does sound magnificent, even to my pagan ears). I just wonder at how the actual Christian message gets lost in all the rampant consumerism and Americanisation of our holidays and festivals. They all seem to roll into each other, with the supermarkets stacking the shelves with the next cash cow holiday products as soon as the last one is over. I find it a little saddening.
We've got an extra marketing opportunity this year! Complete with coronation anointing salad oil dispenser, pop-up baubles, and Henry VIII's Lost Crown Gold Plated Keyring
Those attack posters seem fine to me. Neither Labour or the Tories can claim any moral high ground after the last decade of shenanigans, so watching them rip the shite out of each other is good sport. I actually didn't even know it was Easter today, until I ordered some plumbing fittings from screwfix, and it said I couldn't pick them up until tomorrow. I sort of knew Easter was this month, as overpriced egg shaped chocolate was for sale in the supermarkets and local Facebook groups were full of mums asking if there were any Easter egg hunts they could take their kids to (what?) but that was the limit of my interest. In all the limited bits I've seen on posts about Easter, none have mentioned the actual religious significance of the day. I'm not religious in the slightest, but even I found that bizarre.
It was on breakfast news this morning, and the church bells have been peeling here in my village today too. Also, I took my children to a Good Friday service with real donkeys and a (very British) Jesus where the vicar led an outside storytelling of The Passion and my 4-year refused to shout for the release of Barrubus. I also listened to some sublime music and hymns from Kings last night.
So, we've certainly had a little bit of the Easter message in our family. And it was delightful.
I don't doubt that it was lovely for your family, but as someone who doesn't watch broadcast TV, it really hasn't registered for me at all. I live near a small country church and that didn't sound any different than it does on a bog standard Sunday (it does sound magnificent, even to my pagan ears). I just wonder at how the actual Christian message gets lost in all the rampant consumerism and Americanisation of our holidays and festivals. They all seem to roll into each other, with the supermarkets stacking the shelves with the next cash cow holiday products as soon as the last one is over. I find it a little saddening.
The next supermarket cash cow will of course be the coronation! "Souvenir "mugs, plates etc. And special offers on booze etc "so that you can enjoy the whole event! ".
Labour strategists are cock-a-hoop with how the adverts have landed. The first advert tweeted has received 20.8 million views, making it arguably the most successful Labour attack in recent memory. A party insider said: “Nice doesn’t win elections. They have got used to Labour shirking the dirty stuff. That’s changed.”...
...The party is not going to stop there. According to senior Labour sources, one of the next attack ads will suggest the PM has “effectively decriminalised rape”.
It will claim that under the Tories “only 1.6 per cent of rapists have been charged”. A source said: “We aren’t talking to Twitter. We are talking to the vast majority of the country who want to see child rapists locked up and know the Tories have destroyed the criminal justice system. [Sunak] is leading the government that is responsible and he has got the man [Jeremy Hunt] who butchered the NHS as his chancellor.”
It is understood Labour drew up the messages some time ago and have been waiting for the right time to deploy them....
...It has even been claimed that a group of former Tory election staffers have turned against their own party and approached Labour to help formulate their election strategy.
This is all ultimately for nought if the Labour Party won't advance a viable alternative. As with all the rest of the myriad problems with public services, they need to formulate a plan to fix them and find from somewhere the colossal sums of money needed to pay for the plan.
It's where the money's meant to come from that's likely to prove their undoing, in the end. They can probably get away with a certain amount of borrowing to invest for infrastructure projects, albeit that they're going to have to be extremely careful not to repeat the mistakes of PFI and end up saddling public sector organisations with even more debt servicing obligations. However, ultimately they need to service the ongoing costs of, for example, paying more for care home places so the staff can be paid enough not to sod off to Aldi, and putting tens of thousands of extra police on the streets, by raising an awful lot of tax.
Low and middle income earners have already been bled white and there's no indication that Labour are willing to milk the obvious source of extra revenue which is asset wealth - residential and commercial property, stocks and shares. So where's the money to pay for all this stuff?
And there's no indication that increasing spending on public services would lead to an equivalent improvement in them.
189k more employed by the NHS than at the 2019GE yet we're continually told that the NHS is a disaster which is about to collapse.
Voters have one fairly simple comparator to call upon. The state of public services under the last Labour government vs those now. Unfortunately for the Tories that comparator is pretty stark. No need for theory - there’s empirical evidence aplenty.
So you cannot explain how Labour (or anyone else) is going to wave this magic wand and turn 'a disaster about to collapse' back into 'the envy of the world'.
Not that it was 'the envy of the world' before 2010 even without Stafford, Maidstone and all the other hospital scandals of that era.
Now perhaps relying on false nostalgia for some none existent golden age of public services is all that is needed before an election but it rapidly wears out once in government.
“As success in reducing long waits in the early part of this century continued, the Labour government raised the stakes by announcing a new, more comprehensive target in 2005 that no more than 10% of patients should wait longer than 18 weeks from referral by a GP to treatment in hospital. This meant another change in waiting list data in 2007 to better capture what would now become a more overarching measure of the complete waiting list/time experience.
“Within two years – by 2009 – the total waiting list had nearly halved to 2.3 million, and the 18-week target continued to be met up until 2017. But from around 2012 the waiting list started to rise, nearly doubling to 4.34 million by February 2020.”
Thanks for proving my point that the NHS wasn't the 'envy of the world' before 2010.
Now could you tell us how many more tens of billions of pounds and hundreds of thousands more employees the NHS requires to get to some predicted output metric ?
Again with this narrative that any change is impossible. We had a better NHS under Labour; the NHS has deteriorated under the Conservatives. Voters might, understandably, want to go back to how things were under Labour (or some other non-Conservative alternative).
These repeated claims that there’s nothing that can be done aren’t going to win the Tories the election.
But Labour can only plausibly offer an improved NHS if it throws more money at it, to cover all the costs of:
*Staff recruitment and retention *Building repair backlogs *Repair and replacement of expensive kit *Clearing massive treatment backlogs, and *Improving preventative medicine and public health
The fact that UK health spending per head is already relatively high doesn't help. The country is also rammed full of poor people, chronically ill people and extremely fat people (the three issues being intimately related,) which means that our costs are also relatively high. As with so many of the other deficient areas of the public sphere, more money must be found to put them right. Where is Labour going to get the money? That's what risks doing for them.
Doing those things cost money upfront but save money long term. One of the reasons the NHS is both expensive and inefficient is the cult of cuts.
Yes, I know all that - the whole point of bringing up the expense was expressly not to say that "this is impossible, we can't find all that money," but to suggest that Labour will get no credit from a sceptical populace for promising to spend the money if it won't present a plausible mechanism for raising it.
One gets the distinct impression that Labour wants to make lots of promises to pay for shiny new things but doesn't want to say where the vast bulk of the cash will come from. Making posh parents cough up VAT on private school fees or something is not going to cover the costs of resolving the social care calamity, never mind anything else.
Well it is fairly obvious the money will mostly come from borrowing and some higher taxes. Labour, as with every other political party in western democracies with a realistic chance of winning, won't spell the full extent of this out explicitly.
They can only get away with fuzziness for so long as they don't have to publish a manifesto with associated costings. In all the furore about Brexit and antisemitism claims, people forget that Jeremy Corbyn's economic platform in 2019 was also a major part of his undoing. Way, way too much depended effectively on printing telephone number sums of new money, which voters concluded was laughable.
Labour can get away with quite a lot of extra borrowing for investment, but it's also going to need a lot more in tax to fund day-to-day spending on all its extra nurses, police officers and whatever other initiatives it identifies as necessary to help begin to put our tatty old country back together again. It's going to have to explain where all that tax is meant to come from, and the rationale behind who gets clobbered and who gets excused from paying.
My concern is that Labour will be too scared to go after the asset wealth of the old so it will go return, once again, to the well of earned incomes, just like the Conservatives. In which case, what is the point? Middle income earners aren't going to vote for a shiny new hospital getting built down the road in five years' time if it means they can't pay their mortgages in five months' time.
Those attack posters seem fine to me. Neither Labour or the Tories can claim any moral high ground after the last decade of shenanigans, so watching them rip the shite out of each other is good sport. I actually didn't even know it was Easter today, until I ordered some plumbing fittings from screwfix, and it said I couldn't pick them up until tomorrow. I sort of knew Easter was this month, as overpriced egg shaped chocolate was for sale in the supermarkets and local Facebook groups were full of mums asking if there were any Easter egg hunts they could take their kids to (what?) but that was the limit of my interest. In all the limited bits I've seen on posts about Easter, none have mentioned the actual religious significance of the day. I'm not religious in the slightest, but even I found that bizarre.
It was on breakfast news this morning, and the church bells have been peeling here in my village today too. Also, I took my children to a Good Friday service with real donkeys and a (very British) Jesus where the vicar led an outside storytelling of The Passion and my 4-year refused to shout for the release of Barrubus. I also listened to some sublime music and hymns from Kings last night.
So, we've certainly had a little bit of the Easter message in our family. And it was delightful.
What on earth is a "very British" Jesus?
One that isn't anti-imperialist or a child refugee.
Those attack posters seem fine to me. Neither Labour or the Tories can claim any moral high ground after the last decade of shenanigans, so watching them rip the shite out of each other is good sport. I actually didn't even know it was Easter today, until I ordered some plumbing fittings from screwfix, and it said I couldn't pick them up until tomorrow. I sort of knew Easter was this month, as overpriced egg shaped chocolate was for sale in the supermarkets and local Facebook groups were full of mums asking if there were any Easter egg hunts they could take their kids to (what?) but that was the limit of my interest. In all the limited bits I've seen on posts about Easter, none have mentioned the actual religious significance of the day. I'm not religious in the slightest, but even I found that bizarre.
It was on breakfast news this morning, and the church bells have been peeling here in my village today too. Also, I took my children to a Good Friday service with real donkeys and a (very British) Jesus where the vicar led an outside storytelling of The Passion and my 4-year refused to shout for the release of Barrubus. I also listened to some sublime music and hymns from Kings last night.
So, we've certainly had a little bit of the Easter message in our family. And it was delightful.
I don't doubt that it was lovely for your family, but as someone who doesn't watch broadcast TV, it really hasn't registered for me at all. I live near a small country church and that didn't sound any different than it does on a bog standard Sunday (it does sound magnificent, even to my pagan ears). I just wonder at how the actual Christian message gets lost in all the rampant consumerism and Americanisation of our holidays and festivals. They all seem to roll into each other, with the supermarkets stacking the shelves with the next cash cow holiday products as soon as the last one is over. I find it a little saddening.
We've got an extra marketing opportunity this year! Complete with coronation anointing salad oil dispenser, pop-up baubles, and Henry VIII's Lost Crown Gold Plated Keyring
Those attack posters seem fine to me. Neither Labour or the Tories can claim any moral high ground after the last decade of shenanigans, so watching them rip the shite out of each other is good sport. I actually didn't even know it was Easter today, until I ordered some plumbing fittings from screwfix, and it said I couldn't pick them up until tomorrow. I sort of knew Easter was this month, as overpriced egg shaped chocolate was for sale in the supermarkets and local Facebook groups were full of mums asking if there were any Easter egg hunts they could take their kids to (what?) but that was the limit of my interest. In all the limited bits I've seen on posts about Easter, none have mentioned the actual religious significance of the day. I'm not religious in the slightest, but even I found that bizarre.
It was on breakfast news this morning, and the church bells have been peeling here in my village today too. Also, I took my children to a Good Friday service with real donkeys and a (very British) Jesus where the vicar led an outside storytelling of The Passion and my 4-year refused to shout for the release of Barrubus. I also listened to some sublime music and hymns from Kings last night.
So, we've certainly had a little bit of the Easter message in our family. And it was delightful.
I don't doubt that it was lovely for your family, but as someone who doesn't watch broadcast TV, it really hasn't registered for me at all. I live near a small country church and that didn't sound any different than it does on a bog standard Sunday (it does sound magnificent, even to my pagan ears). I just wonder at how the actual Christian message gets lost in all the rampant consumerism and Americanisation of our holidays and festivals. They all seem to roll into each other, with the supermarkets stacking the shelves with the next cash cow holiday products as soon as the last one is over. I find it a little saddening.
We've got an extra marketing opportunity this year! Complete with coronation anointing salad oil dispenser, pop-up baubles, and Henry VIII's Lost Crown Gold Plated Keyring
Labour strategists are cock-a-hoop with how the adverts have landed. The first advert tweeted has received 20.8 million views, making it arguably the most successful Labour attack in recent memory. A party insider said: “Nice doesn’t win elections. They have got used to Labour shirking the dirty stuff. That’s changed.”...
...The party is not going to stop there. According to senior Labour sources, one of the next attack ads will suggest the PM has “effectively decriminalised rape”.
It will claim that under the Tories “only 1.6 per cent of rapists have been charged”. A source said: “We aren’t talking to Twitter. We are talking to the vast majority of the country who want to see child rapists locked up and know the Tories have destroyed the criminal justice system. [Sunak] is leading the government that is responsible and he has got the man [Jeremy Hunt] who butchered the NHS as his chancellor.”
It is understood Labour drew up the messages some time ago and have been waiting for the right time to deploy them....
...It has even been claimed that a group of former Tory election staffers have turned against their own party and approached Labour to help formulate their election strategy.
This is all ultimately for nought if the Labour Party won't advance a viable alternative. As with all the rest of the myriad problems with public services, they need to formulate a plan to fix them and find from somewhere the colossal sums of money needed to pay for the plan.
It's where the money's meant to come from that's likely to prove their undoing, in the end. They can probably get away with a certain amount of borrowing to invest for infrastructure projects, albeit that they're going to have to be extremely careful not to repeat the mistakes of PFI and end up saddling public sector organisations with even more debt servicing obligations. However, ultimately they need to service the ongoing costs of, for example, paying more for care home places so the staff can be paid enough not to sod off to Aldi, and putting tens of thousands of extra police on the streets, by raising an awful lot of tax.
Low and middle income earners have already been bled white and there's no indication that Labour are willing to milk the obvious source of extra revenue which is asset wealth - residential and commercial property, stocks and shares. So where's the money to pay for all this stuff?
And there's no indication that increasing spending on public services would lead to an equivalent improvement in them.
189k more employed by the NHS than at the 2019GE yet we're continually told that the NHS is a disaster which is about to collapse.
Voters have one fairly simple comparator to call upon. The state of public services under the last Labour government vs those now. Unfortunately for the Tories that comparator is pretty stark. No need for theory - there’s empirical evidence aplenty.
So you cannot explain how Labour (or anyone else) is going to wave this magic wand and turn 'a disaster about to collapse' back into 'the envy of the world'.
Not that it was 'the envy of the world' before 2010 even without Stafford, Maidstone and all the other hospital scandals of that era.
Now perhaps relying on false nostalgia for some none existent golden age of public services is all that is needed before an election but it rapidly wears out once in government.
“As success in reducing long waits in the early part of this century continued, the Labour government raised the stakes by announcing a new, more comprehensive target in 2005 that no more than 10% of patients should wait longer than 18 weeks from referral by a GP to treatment in hospital. This meant another change in waiting list data in 2007 to better capture what would now become a more overarching measure of the complete waiting list/time experience.
“Within two years – by 2009 – the total waiting list had nearly halved to 2.3 million, and the 18-week target continued to be met up until 2017. But from around 2012 the waiting list started to rise, nearly doubling to 4.34 million by February 2020.”
Thanks for proving my point that the NHS wasn't the 'envy of the world' before 2010.
Now could you tell us how many more tens of billions of pounds and hundreds of thousands more employees the NHS requires to get to some predicted output metric ?
Again with this narrative that any change is impossible. We had a better NHS under Labour; the NHS has deteriorated under the Conservatives. Voters might, understandably, want to go back to how things were under Labour (or some other non-Conservative alternative).
These repeated claims that there’s nothing that can be done aren’t going to win the Tories the election.
But Labour can only plausibly offer an improved NHS if it throws more money at it, to cover all the costs of:
*Staff recruitment and retention *Building repair backlogs *Repair and replacement of expensive kit *Clearing massive treatment backlogs, and *Improving preventative medicine and public health
The fact that UK health spending per head is already relatively high doesn't help. The country is also rammed full of poor people, chronically ill people and extremely fat people (the three issues being intimately related,) which means that our costs are also relatively high. As with so many of the other deficient areas of the public sphere, more money must be found to put them right. Where is Labour going to get the money? That's what risks doing for them.
Doing those things cost money upfront but save money long term. One of the reasons the NHS is both expensive and inefficient is the cult of cuts.
Yes, I know all that - the whole point of bringing up the expense was expressly not to say that "this is impossible, we can't find all that money," but to suggest that Labour will get no credit from a sceptical populace for promising to spend the money if it won't present a plausible mechanism for raising it.
One gets the distinct impression that Labour wants to make lots of promises to pay for shiny new things but doesn't want to say where the vast bulk of the cash will come from. Making posh parents cough up VAT on private school fees or something is not going to cover the costs of resolving the social care calamity, never mind anything else.
The sceptical populace of which you speak currently massively favour Labour in the polls. Might I ask when is there scepticism meant to kick in?
When we get to an election and everyone has to say how stuff is going to get done.
Labour's lead is the product of things being a bit rubbish and a lot of people feeling miserable. It hasn't had to explain why it would do a better job yet.
OK, that’s a hypothesis that will be tested. But, sure, maybe in an election campaign, people will be more focused on these issues.
So, what’s the Tories’ pitch? Do they say, “There’s no money, so the NHS will not get any better than this.” I can’t see that winning an election.
Do they say, “We’ll make the NHS better without spending anything more.” That seems likely to be met with a sceptical reaction.
Do they say, “We’ll spend more on the NHS,” at which point they face the same questions you are posing to Labour.
An election is a choice. Solving the problems of the NHS, of public services generally, will not be easy. Yes, of course, Labour will face questions over how they will do these things, where will the money come from. But so will the Conservatives, and the Conservatives’ problem is that we’ve seen what they’ve done over the last 13 years.
Those attack posters seem fine to me. Neither Labour or the Tories can claim any moral high ground after the last decade of shenanigans, so watching them rip the shite out of each other is good sport. I actually didn't even know it was Easter today, until I ordered some plumbing fittings from screwfix, and it said I couldn't pick them up until tomorrow. I sort of knew Easter was this month, as overpriced egg shaped chocolate was for sale in the supermarkets and local Facebook groups were full of mums asking if there were any Easter egg hunts they could take their kids to (what?) but that was the limit of my interest. In all the limited bits I've seen on posts about Easter, none have mentioned the actual religious significance of the day. I'm not religious in the slightest, but even I found that bizarre.
It was on breakfast news this morning, and the church bells have been peeling here in my village today too. Also, I took my children to a Good Friday service with real donkeys and a (very British) Jesus where the vicar led an outside storytelling of The Passion and my 4-year refused to shout for the release of Barrubus. I also listened to some sublime music and hymns from Kings last night.
So, we've certainly had a little bit of the Easter message in our family. And it was delightful.
I don't doubt that it was lovely for your family, but as someone who doesn't watch broadcast TV, it really hasn't registered for me at all. I live near a small country church and that didn't sound any different than it does on a bog standard Sunday (it does sound magnificent, even to my pagan ears). I just wonder at how the actual Christian message gets lost in all the rampant consumerism and Americanisation of our holidays and festivals. They all seem to roll into each other, with the supermarkets stacking the shelves with the next cash cow holiday products as soon as the last one is over. I find it a little saddening.
We've got an extra marketing opportunity this year! Complete with coronation anointing salad oil dispenser, pop-up baubles, and Henry VIII's Lost Crown Gold Plated Keyring
Those attack posters seem fine to me. Neither Labour or the Tories can claim any moral high ground after the last decade of shenanigans, so watching them rip the shite out of each other is good sport. I actually didn't even know it was Easter today, until I ordered some plumbing fittings from screwfix, and it said I couldn't pick them up until tomorrow. I sort of knew Easter was this month, as overpriced egg shaped chocolate was for sale in the supermarkets and local Facebook groups were full of mums asking if there were any Easter egg hunts they could take their kids to (what?) but that was the limit of my interest. In all the limited bits I've seen on posts about Easter, none have mentioned the actual religious significance of the day. I'm not religious in the slightest, but even I found that bizarre.
It was on breakfast news this morning, and the church bells have been peeling here in my village today too. Also, I took my children to a Good Friday service with real donkeys and a (very British) Jesus where the vicar led an outside storytelling of The Passion and my 4-year refused to shout for the release of Barrubus. I also listened to some sublime music and hymns from Kings last night.
So, we've certainly had a little bit of the Easter message in our family. And it was delightful.
What on earth is a "very British" Jesus?
One that isn't anti-imperialist or a child refugee.
You should throw your hat into the ring. The C of E needs a bit of livening up.
The weird thing about Labour going dirty is they could have done it slightly armed length and and feigned disappointment-but-it-has-a-point kind of thing.
Instead they've conceded that Braverman for example says awful stuff so they will too, their spokesman referred to her, so they are not even going to get to pretend to be outraged next time she does something like that.
Braverman hasn't made any personal attacks on other politicians as far as I'm aware.
For any wondering how Jolyon sets his moral compass:
No one knows better than huge consumer facing brands what the future looks like. And what Nike is saying, by choosing a trans woman ambassador, is that the future is trans inclusive.
Hang on in there: the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice
There’s a world of difference between being “trans inclusive” and having a trans woman represent biological women.
Women get 1% of the USA sports sponsorship cash! Let that figure really sink in… In a world where they represent 51% of the population! And we’re supposed to be happy males now get to advertise our sports bras - just say NO #boycottnike
Those attack posters seem fine to me. Neither Labour or the Tories can claim any moral high ground after the last decade of shenanigans, so watching them rip the shite out of each other is good sport. I actually didn't even know it was Easter today, until I ordered some plumbing fittings from screwfix, and it said I couldn't pick them up until tomorrow. I sort of knew Easter was this month, as overpriced egg shaped chocolate was for sale in the supermarkets and local Facebook groups were full of mums asking if there were any Easter egg hunts they could take their kids to (what?) but that was the limit of my interest. In all the limited bits I've seen on posts about Easter, none have mentioned the actual religious significance of the day. I'm not religious in the slightest, but even I found that bizarre.
It was on breakfast news this morning, and the church bells have been peeling here in my village today too. Also, I took my children to a Good Friday service with real donkeys and a (very British) Jesus where the vicar led an outside storytelling of The Passion and my 4-year refused to shout for the release of Barrubus. I also listened to some sublime music and hymns from Kings last night.
So, we've certainly had a little bit of the Easter message in our family. And it was delightful.
I don't doubt that it was lovely for your family, but as someone who doesn't watch broadcast TV, it really hasn't registered for me at all. I live near a small country church and that didn't sound any different than it does on a bog standard Sunday (it does sound magnificent, even to my pagan ears). I just wonder at how the actual Christian message gets lost in all the rampant consumerism and Americanisation of our holidays and festivals. They all seem to roll into each other, with the supermarkets stacking the shelves with the next cash cow holiday products as soon as the last one is over. I find it a little saddening.
We've got an extra marketing opportunity this year! Complete with coronation anointing salad oil dispenser, pop-up baubles, and Henry VIII's Lost Crown Gold Plated Keyring
Hmm! I've been a member of EH and Historic Scotland and their precursors ever since I was a teenager, pretty much, and there was a timke when they sold only scholarly guide books and the like. Now it's almost impossible to find the more interesting books. Even the EH website doesn't bother with its own grown-up books, a few stray exceptioons aside.
It truly is glorious today. I am sittings in the garden listening to birdsong and the sun beating down on my head, whilst I sip an early Doombar and not really care about anything.
Why can't Britain always be like this?
It's like paradise.
It wouldn't be so wonderful an occasion if it was like it all the time.
The next supermarket cash cow will of course be the coronation! "Souvenir "mugs, plates etc. And special offers on booze etc "so that you can enjoy the whole event! ".
The "Ducks of Grief" are going to take some beating.
"A Very British Jesus" sounds like the next big Channel 4 programme.
10 contenders compete to be recognised as the rightful son of God by competing against each other in a series of weekly tasks, voted off by the Reverend Richard Coles and Prue Leith.
Labour strategists are cock-a-hoop with how the adverts have landed. The first advert tweeted has received 20.8 million views, making it arguably the most successful Labour attack in recent memory. A party insider said: “Nice doesn’t win elections. They have got used to Labour shirking the dirty stuff. That’s changed.”...
...The party is not going to stop there. According to senior Labour sources, one of the next attack ads will suggest the PM has “effectively decriminalised rape”.
It will claim that under the Tories “only 1.6 per cent of rapists have been charged”. A source said: “We aren’t talking to Twitter. We are talking to the vast majority of the country who want to see child rapists locked up and know the Tories have destroyed the criminal justice system. [Sunak] is leading the government that is responsible and he has got the man [Jeremy Hunt] who butchered the NHS as his chancellor.”
It is understood Labour drew up the messages some time ago and have been waiting for the right time to deploy them....
...It has even been claimed that a group of former Tory election staffers have turned against their own party and approached Labour to help formulate their election strategy.
This is all ultimately for nought if the Labour Party won't advance a viable alternative. As with all the rest of the myriad problems with public services, they need to formulate a plan to fix them and find from somewhere the colossal sums of money needed to pay for the plan.
It's where the money's meant to come from that's likely to prove their undoing, in the end. They can probably get away with a certain amount of borrowing to invest for infrastructure projects, albeit that they're going to have to be extremely careful not to repeat the mistakes of PFI and end up saddling public sector organisations with even more debt servicing obligations. However, ultimately they need to service the ongoing costs of, for example, paying more for care home places so the staff can be paid enough not to sod off to Aldi, and putting tens of thousands of extra police on the streets, by raising an awful lot of tax.
Low and middle income earners have already been bled white and there's no indication that Labour are willing to milk the obvious source of extra revenue which is asset wealth - residential and commercial property, stocks and shares. So where's the money to pay for all this stuff?
And there's no indication that increasing spending on public services would lead to an equivalent improvement in them.
189k more employed by the NHS than at the 2019GE yet we're continually told that the NHS is a disaster which is about to collapse.
Voters have one fairly simple comparator to call upon. The state of public services under the last Labour government vs those now. Unfortunately for the Tories that comparator is pretty stark. No need for theory - there’s empirical evidence aplenty.
So you cannot explain how Labour (or anyone else) is going to wave this magic wand and turn 'a disaster about to collapse' back into 'the envy of the world'.
Not that it was 'the envy of the world' before 2010 even without Stafford, Maidstone and all the other hospital scandals of that era.
Now perhaps relying on false nostalgia for some none existent golden age of public services is all that is needed before an election but it rapidly wears out once in government.
“As success in reducing long waits in the early part of this century continued, the Labour government raised the stakes by announcing a new, more comprehensive target in 2005 that no more than 10% of patients should wait longer than 18 weeks from referral by a GP to treatment in hospital. This meant another change in waiting list data in 2007 to better capture what would now become a more overarching measure of the complete waiting list/time experience.
“Within two years – by 2009 – the total waiting list had nearly halved to 2.3 million, and the 18-week target continued to be met up until 2017. But from around 2012 the waiting list started to rise, nearly doubling to 4.34 million by February 2020.”
Thanks for proving my point that the NHS wasn't the 'envy of the world' before 2010.
Now could you tell us how many more tens of billions of pounds and hundreds of thousands more employees the NHS requires to get to some predicted output metric ?
Again with this narrative that any change is impossible. We had a better NHS under Labour; the NHS has deteriorated under the Conservatives. Voters might, understandably, want to go back to how things were under Labour (or some other non-Conservative alternative).
These repeated claims that there’s nothing that can be done aren’t going to win the Tories the election.
But Labour can only plausibly offer an improved NHS if it throws more money at it, to cover all the costs of:
*Staff recruitment and retention *Building repair backlogs *Repair and replacement of expensive kit *Clearing massive treatment backlogs, and *Improving preventative medicine and public health
The fact that UK health spending per head is already relatively high doesn't help. The country is also rammed full of poor people, chronically ill people and extremely fat people (the three issues being intimately related,) which means that our costs are also relatively high. As with so many of the other deficient areas of the public sphere, more money must be found to put them right. Where is Labour going to get the money? That's what risks doing for them.
Doing those things cost money upfront but save money long term. One of the reasons the NHS is both expensive and inefficient is the cult of cuts.
Yes, I know all that - the whole point of bringing up the expense was expressly not to say that "this is impossible, we can't find all that money," but to suggest that Labour will get no credit from a sceptical populace for promising to spend the money if it won't present a plausible mechanism for raising it.
One gets the distinct impression that Labour wants to make lots of promises to pay for shiny new things but doesn't want to say where the vast bulk of the cash will come from. Making posh parents cough up VAT on private school fees or something is not going to cover the costs of resolving the social care calamity, never mind anything else.
Well it is fairly obvious the money will mostly come from borrowing and some higher taxes. Labour, as with every other political party in western democracies with a realistic chance of winning, won't spell the full extent of this out explicitly.
They can only get away with fuzziness for so long as they don't have to publish a manifesto with associated costings. In all the furore about Brexit and antisemitism claims, people forget that Jeremy Corbyn's economic platform in 2019 was also a major part of his undoing. Way, way too much depended effectively on printing telephone number sums of new money, which voters concluded was laughable.
Labour can get away with quite a lot of extra borrowing for investment, but it's also going to need a lot more in tax to fund day-to-day spending on all its extra nurses, police officers and whatever other initiatives it identifies as necessary to help begin to put our tatty old country back together again. It's going to have to explain where all that tax is meant to come from, and the rationale behind who gets clobbered and who gets excused from paying.
My concern is that Labour will be too scared to go after the asset wealth of the old so it will go return, once again, to the well of earned incomes, just like the Conservatives. In which case, what is the point? Middle income earners aren't going to vote for a shiny new hospital getting built down the road in five years' time if it means they can't pay their mortgages in five months' time.
Middle income earners already face not being able to pay their mortgages because of actions taken by the Conservatives in power. If the Tories want the election to be about hard choices on spending but economic competence from them versus wishful thinking from Labour, they’ll need to repair their own reputation for economic competence and wishful thinking.
Those attack posters seem fine to me. Neither Labour or the Tories can claim any moral high ground after the last decade of shenanigans, so watching them rip the shite out of each other is good sport. I actually didn't even know it was Easter today, until I ordered some plumbing fittings from screwfix, and it said I couldn't pick them up until tomorrow. I sort of knew Easter was this month, as overpriced egg shaped chocolate was for sale in the supermarkets and local Facebook groups were full of mums asking if there were any Easter egg hunts they could take their kids to (what?) but that was the limit of my interest. In all the limited bits I've seen on posts about Easter, none have mentioned the actual religious significance of the day. I'm not religious in the slightest, but even I found that bizarre.
It was on breakfast news this morning, and the church bells have been peeling here in my village today too. Also, I took my children to a Good Friday service with real donkeys and a (very British) Jesus where the vicar led an outside storytelling of The Passion and my 4-year refused to shout for the release of Barrubus. I also listened to some sublime music and hymns from Kings last night.
So, we've certainly had a little bit of the Easter message in our family. And it was delightful.
What on earth is a "very British" Jesus?
One that isn't anti-imperialist or a child refugee.
You should throw your hat into the ring. The C of E needs a bit of livening up.
Fuck the CoE; it's full of people like HYUFD and Casino. My backup plan for if/when Mrs DA kicks me out is to convert to Islam, go to the Atlas Mountains and become a Sufi mystic.
Those attack posters seem fine to me. Neither Labour or the Tories can claim any moral high ground after the last decade of shenanigans, so watching them rip the shite out of each other is good sport. I actually didn't even know it was Easter today, until I ordered some plumbing fittings from screwfix, and it said I couldn't pick them up until tomorrow. I sort of knew Easter was this month, as overpriced egg shaped chocolate was for sale in the supermarkets and local Facebook groups were full of mums asking if there were any Easter egg hunts they could take their kids to (what?) but that was the limit of my interest. In all the limited bits I've seen on posts about Easter, none have mentioned the actual religious significance of the day. I'm not religious in the slightest, but even I found that bizarre.
It was on breakfast news this morning, and the church bells have been peeling here in my village today too. Also, I took my children to a Good Friday service with real donkeys and a (very British) Jesus where the vicar led an outside storytelling of The Passion and my 4-year refused to shout for the release of Barrubus. I also listened to some sublime music and hymns from Kings last night.
So, we've certainly had a little bit of the Easter message in our family. And it was delightful.
What on earth is a "very British" Jesus? And - perhaps my Biblical knowledge is lacking - did donkeys have any significant role to play in the Crucifixion?
This is the only one I can think of:
He politely asked the moneylenders and market traders to "please leave" the temple in an understated voice, and then quietly turned over all the chairs and tables.
Those attack posters seem fine to me. Neither Labour or the Tories can claim any moral high ground after the last decade of shenanigans, so watching them rip the shite out of each other is good sport. I actually didn't even know it was Easter today, until I ordered some plumbing fittings from screwfix, and it said I couldn't pick them up until tomorrow. I sort of knew Easter was this month, as overpriced egg shaped chocolate was for sale in the supermarkets and local Facebook groups were full of mums asking if there were any Easter egg hunts they could take their kids to (what?) but that was the limit of my interest. In all the limited bits I've seen on posts about Easter, none have mentioned the actual religious significance of the day. I'm not religious in the slightest, but even I found that bizarre.
It was on breakfast news this morning, and the church bells have been peeling here in my village today too. Also, I took my children to a Good Friday service with real donkeys and a (very British) Jesus where the vicar led an outside storytelling of The Passion and my 4-year refused to shout for the release of Barrubus. I also listened to some sublime music and hymns from Kings last night.
So, we've certainly had a little bit of the Easter message in our family. And it was delightful.
I don't doubt that it was lovely for your family, but as someone who doesn't watch broadcast TV, it really hasn't registered for me at all. I live near a small country church and that didn't sound any different than it does on a bog standard Sunday (it does sound magnificent, even to my pagan ears). I just wonder at how the actual Christian message gets lost in all the rampant consumerism and Americanisation of our holidays and festivals. They all seem to roll into each other, with the supermarkets stacking the shelves with the next cash cow holiday products as soon as the last one is over. I find it a little saddening.
We've got an extra marketing opportunity this year! Complete with coronation anointing salad oil dispenser, pop-up baubles, and Henry VIII's Lost Crown Gold Plated Keyring
Hmm! I've been a member of EH and Historic Scotland and their precursors ever since I was a teenager, pretty much, and there was a timke when they sold only scholarly guide books and the like. Now it's almost impossible to find the more interesting books. Even the EH website doesn't bother with its own grown-up books, a few stray exceptioons aside.
I was slightly concerned that the photos included a "serving suggestion", with milk being poured from an improbable height.
It seems that after an election when most voters decided “they’re both as bad as each other”, and put their vote against the bad one with the blue rosette, Labour have decided to run on “they’re both as bad as each other” again. Not a winning tactic. Need to get back on to the parlous state of public services, and if they want to do attack ads on Sunak they should focus on the super rich out of touch thing - much easier to get that to stick.
How much of the current Sunak fightback is just one of those tides in the affairs of men is hard to know. Certainly the lower Starmer ratings in these polls don’t really come off the back of any particularly bad news for him. The ads were too recent. I think they’re just the equal and opposite of rising Sunak ratings rather than any kind of apocalyptic Gotterstarmerrung news cycle.
In brighter topical news it’s a lovely bright but chilly Easter morning on the galerie mâconnaise of our French place, the Easter bunny has been and most mini-eggs found, the wood pigeon is cooing over the sound of spring birdsong and I have Blessed be the God and Father off Easter Day from Hereford Cathedral playing on the Bluetooth speaker with my coffee.
Just off to sing that myself at St James Piccadilly!
Those attack posters seem fine to me. Neither Labour or the Tories can claim any moral high ground after the last decade of shenanigans, so watching them rip the shite out of each other is good sport. I actually didn't even know it was Easter today, until I ordered some plumbing fittings from screwfix, and it said I couldn't pick them up until tomorrow. I sort of knew Easter was this month, as overpriced egg shaped chocolate was for sale in the supermarkets and local Facebook groups were full of mums asking if there were any Easter egg hunts they could take their kids to (what?) but that was the limit of my interest. In all the limited bits I've seen on posts about Easter, none have mentioned the actual religious significance of the day. I'm not religious in the slightest, but even I found that bizarre.
It was on breakfast news this morning, and the church bells have been peeling here in my village today too. Also, I took my children to a Good Friday service with real donkeys and a (very British) Jesus where the vicar led an outside storytelling of The Passion and my 4-year refused to shout for the release of Barrubus. I also listened to some sublime music and hymns from Kings last night.
So, we've certainly had a little bit of the Easter message in our family. And it was delightful.
What on earth is a "very British" Jesus?
One that isn't anti-imperialist or a child refugee.
You'd have egged on the Crucifixion and then demanded you be put up there yourself, for the lolz.
Those attack posters seem fine to me. Neither Labour or the Tories can claim any moral high ground after the last decade of shenanigans, so watching them rip the shite out of each other is good sport. I actually didn't even know it was Easter today, until I ordered some plumbing fittings from screwfix, and it said I couldn't pick them up until tomorrow. I sort of knew Easter was this month, as overpriced egg shaped chocolate was for sale in the supermarkets and local Facebook groups were full of mums asking if there were any Easter egg hunts they could take their kids to (what?) but that was the limit of my interest. In all the limited bits I've seen on posts about Easter, none have mentioned the actual religious significance of the day. I'm not religious in the slightest, but even I found that bizarre.
It was on breakfast news this morning, and the church bells have been peeling here in my village today too. Also, I took my children to a Good Friday service with real donkeys and a (very British) Jesus where the vicar led an outside storytelling of The Passion and my 4-year refused to shout for the release of Barrubus. I also listened to some sublime music and hymns from Kings last night.
So, we've certainly had a little bit of the Easter message in our family. And it was delightful.
What on earth is a "very British" Jesus? And - perhaps my Biblical knowledge is lacking - did donkeys have any significant role to play in the Crucifixion?
This is the only one I can think of:
Donkey retires after the Triumphal entry into Jerusalem, a few days before.
BTW churches full round here this morning; mostly of normal people, few of them with two heads, from Mars or religious lunatics.
Those attack posters seem fine to me. Neither Labour or the Tories can claim any moral high ground after the last decade of shenanigans, so watching them rip the shite out of each other is good sport. I actually didn't even know it was Easter today, until I ordered some plumbing fittings from screwfix, and it said I couldn't pick them up until tomorrow. I sort of knew Easter was this month, as overpriced egg shaped chocolate was for sale in the supermarkets and local Facebook groups were full of mums asking if there were any Easter egg hunts they could take their kids to (what?) but that was the limit of my interest. In all the limited bits I've seen on posts about Easter, none have mentioned the actual religious significance of the day. I'm not religious in the slightest, but even I found that bizarre.
It was on breakfast news this morning, and the church bells have been peeling here in my village today too. Also, I took my children to a Good Friday service with real donkeys and a (very British) Jesus where the vicar led an outside storytelling of The Passion and my 4-year refused to shout for the release of Barrubus. I also listened to some sublime music and hymns from Kings last night.
So, we've certainly had a little bit of the Easter message in our family. And it was delightful.
What on earth is a "very British" Jesus? And - perhaps my Biblical knowledge is lacking - did donkeys have any significant role to play in the Crucifixion?
This is the only one I can think of:
Donkey retires after the Triumphal entry into Jerusalem, a few days before.
BTW churches full round here this morning; mostly of normal people, few of them with two heads, from Mars or religious lunatics.
What's the text in the inscription, by the way? It seems to read in Greek
ALEZALIENOS SEBETE THEOU
but I can't make sense of it apart from the last word ('of God', probably).
Labour strategists are cock-a-hoop with how the adverts have landed. The first advert tweeted has received 20.8 million views, making it arguably the most successful Labour attack in recent memory. A party insider said: “Nice doesn’t win elections. They have got used to Labour shirking the dirty stuff. That’s changed.”...
...The party is not going to stop there. According to senior Labour sources, one of the next attack ads will suggest the PM has “effectively decriminalised rape”.
It will claim that under the Tories “only 1.6 per cent of rapists have been charged”. A source said: “We aren’t talking to Twitter. We are talking to the vast majority of the country who want to see child rapists locked up and know the Tories have destroyed the criminal justice system. [Sunak] is leading the government that is responsible and he has got the man [Jeremy Hunt] who butchered the NHS as his chancellor.”
It is understood Labour drew up the messages some time ago and have been waiting for the right time to deploy them....
...It has even been claimed that a group of former Tory election staffers have turned against their own party and approached Labour to help formulate their election strategy.
This is all ultimately for nought if the Labour Party won't advance a viable alternative. As with all the rest of the myriad problems with public services, they need to formulate a plan to fix them and find from somewhere the colossal sums of money needed to pay for the plan.
It's where the money's meant to come from that's likely to prove their undoing, in the end. They can probably get away with a certain amount of borrowing to invest for infrastructure projects, albeit that they're going to have to be extremely careful not to repeat the mistakes of PFI and end up saddling public sector organisations with even more debt servicing obligations. However, ultimately they need to service the ongoing costs of, for example, paying more for care home places so the staff can be paid enough not to sod off to Aldi, and putting tens of thousands of extra police on the streets, by raising an awful lot of tax.
Low and middle income earners have already been bled white and there's no indication that Labour are willing to milk the obvious source of extra revenue which is asset wealth - residential and commercial property, stocks and shares. So where's the money to pay for all this stuff?
And there's no indication that increasing spending on public services would lead to an equivalent improvement in them.
189k more employed by the NHS than at the 2019GE yet we're continually told that the NHS is a disaster which is about to collapse.
Voters have one fairly simple comparator to call upon. The state of public services under the last Labour government vs those now. Unfortunately for the Tories that comparator is pretty stark. No need for theory - there’s empirical evidence aplenty.
So you cannot explain how Labour (or anyone else) is going to wave this magic wand and turn 'a disaster about to collapse' back into 'the envy of the world'.
Not that it was 'the envy of the world' before 2010 even without Stafford, Maidstone and all the other hospital scandals of that era.
Now perhaps relying on false nostalgia for some none existent golden age of public services is all that is needed before an election but it rapidly wears out once in government.
“As success in reducing long waits in the early part of this century continued, the Labour government raised the stakes by announcing a new, more comprehensive target in 2005 that no more than 10% of patients should wait longer than 18 weeks from referral by a GP to treatment in hospital. This meant another change in waiting list data in 2007 to better capture what would now become a more overarching measure of the complete waiting list/time experience.
“Within two years – by 2009 – the total waiting list had nearly halved to 2.3 million, and the 18-week target continued to be met up until 2017. But from around 2012 the waiting list started to rise, nearly doubling to 4.34 million by February 2020.”
Thanks for proving my point that the NHS wasn't the 'envy of the world' before 2010.
Now could you tell us how many more tens of billions of pounds and hundreds of thousands more employees the NHS requires to get to some predicted output metric ?
Again with this narrative that any change is impossible. We had a better NHS under Labour; the NHS has deteriorated under the Conservatives. Voters might, understandably, want to go back to how things were under Labour (or some other non-Conservative alternative).
These repeated claims that there’s nothing that can be done aren’t going to win the Tories the election.
But Labour can only plausibly offer an improved NHS if it throws more money at it, to cover all the costs of:
*Staff recruitment and retention *Building repair backlogs *Repair and replacement of expensive kit *Clearing massive treatment backlogs, and *Improving preventative medicine and public health
The fact that UK health spending per head is already relatively high doesn't help. The country is also rammed full of poor people, chronically ill people and extremely fat people (the three issues being intimately related,) which means that our costs are also relatively high. As with so many of the other deficient areas of the public sphere, more money must be found to put them right. Where is Labour going to get the money? That's what risks doing for them.
UK health spending isn't relatively high compared with most developed countries - it's actually relatively low. This is an interesting chart, as it also shows the balance of Government spending and private insurance in each country:
I was surprised how small a share of US health spending (which is of course humongous) is private - presumably the effect of Medicare for the elderly. As their life expectancy is much the same, they aren't getting much bang for their bucks.
I agree with Helen Lewis that Starmer is “ruthless” in the sense that he is determined, focused on winning, and not sentimentally bound to factions or individuals. But to me the word implies a clarity of purpose which he does not have. Yes, he is determined to climb the mountain, but at any given moment he seems unsure of the path to the top. He kind of scrabbles around from side to side until he finds a way to get a few feet further along, and sometimes heads in the wrong direction before changing course.
His treatment of the gender issue is typical. A ruthless leader would have worked out what he thought about it by now, steamrollered internal opposition, and scraped this particular barnacle off the boat. Instead, he has shifted towards a tenable position by salami-sliced increments while allowing senior colleagues to ignore or contradict him. It is painful to watch, and typified by his latest, excruciating statement that 99.9% of women don’t have a penis. In politics, you really have to round up.
Did you realise that one in every 67 Muslims is transgender? That adults with no educational qualifications are almost twice as likely to identify as transgender as university graduates? That the London boroughs of Brent and Newham are home to higher proportions of transgender people than Brighton and Oxford? These are some of the astonishing results from the 2021 census of England and Wales, which was the first in the world to ask about gender identity……
How did the ONS manage to produce such implausible data on gender identity? In ‘a case study of policy capture’, the statisticians were guided by lobby groups like Stonewall. It is surely no coincidence that the gender question replicated, with minor variation, Stonewall’s definition of ‘cisgender’: ‘Someone whose gender identity is the same as the sex they were assigned at birth’.
The question, according to the ONS, was ‘evaluated via community testing at LGBT History Month events’. But did the ONS consider how immigrants whose first language is not English – and who may be blissfully ignorant of esoteric concepts like ‘cisgender’ – might understand the question, or rather could misunderstand it?
Those attack posters seem fine to me. Neither Labour or the Tories can claim any moral high ground after the last decade of shenanigans, so watching them rip the shite out of each other is good sport. I actually didn't even know it was Easter today, until I ordered some plumbing fittings from screwfix, and it said I couldn't pick them up until tomorrow. I sort of knew Easter was this month, as overpriced egg shaped chocolate was for sale in the supermarkets and local Facebook groups were full of mums asking if there were any Easter egg hunts they could take their kids to (what?) but that was the limit of my interest. In all the limited bits I've seen on posts about Easter, none have mentioned the actual religious significance of the day. I'm not religious in the slightest, but even I found that bizarre.
It was on breakfast news this morning, and the church bells have been peeling here in my village today too. Also, I took my children to a Good Friday service with real donkeys and a (very British) Jesus where the vicar led an outside storytelling of The Passion and my 4-year refused to shout for the release of Barrubus. I also listened to some sublime music and hymns from Kings last night.
So, we've certainly had a little bit of the Easter message in our family. And it was delightful.
What on earth is a "very British" Jesus?
One that isn't anti-imperialist or a child refugee.
You should throw your hat into the ring. The C of E needs a bit of livening up.
Fuck the CoE; it's full of people like HYUFD and Casino. My backup plan for if/when Mrs DA kicks me out is to convert to Islam, go to the Atlas Mountains and become a Sufi mystic.
Except you're full of shit, aren't you?
You a serene middle-aged man who sits in his armchair teaching teenagers A-level French and gives lectures in the Red Wall on the Harrier and yet pretends to be somesort of moonlighting Lenin/ Christopher Walken sleepy hollow love-of-carnage character when actually burning rubber on your local a-road is about as exciting as your life gets.
It's all an act. I don't believe you'd say boo to a goose.
Owen Jones having a rare lucid moment. The BBC clip of Braverman is extremely enlightening. From thinking Keir Starmer demeaned himself I am now wondering whether it was a deliberate pointer to a Powellite Home Secretary who would have been thrown out of most Tory Cabinets of the past and a Prime Minister who clearly backs her.
Of course it doesn't mean that such crimes were exclusive to Pakistani men. And after Rochdale, Rotherham and Telford, I don't know whether it's still an ongoing problem now.
A commitment to inclusion needs to include all vulnerable or marginalised groups. Inclusive language that can only be understood by university educated middle class people who’s first language is English is not inclusive language.…..
This has consequences. Nation wide campaigns encouraging cervix-havers to book a pap smear test will not reach people who don’t understand what a cervix is. Inclusive language needs to be genuinely inclusive.
I agree with Helen Lewis that Starmer is “ruthless” in the sense that he is determined, focused on winning, and not sentimentally bound to factions or individuals. But to me the word implies a clarity of purpose which he does not have. Yes, he is determined to climb the mountain, but at any given moment he seems unsure of the path to the top. He kind of scrabbles around from side to side until he finds a way to get a few feet further along, and sometimes heads in the wrong direction before changing course.
His treatment of the gender issue is typical. A ruthless leader would have worked out what he thought about it by now, steamrollered internal opposition, and scraped this particular barnacle off the boat. Instead, he has shifted towards a tenable position by salami-sliced increments while allowing senior colleagues to ignore or contradict him. It is painful to watch, and typified by his latest, excruciating statement that 99.9% of women don’t have a penis. In politics, you really have to round up.
I don’t know that a short article can completely sum anyone up, but it certainly rings true.
I note Carlotta didn’t quote this bit, which suggests qualities likely to be rather more useful in government than campaigning. … He rarely has a strong, intuitive feel for a policy issue, or for political positioning, or for the right decision in a fast-moving situation. But they also say that this weakness is mitigated by a strength which is in some ways its flipside: he listens. He wants to hear the arguments and he tries to address his own areas of ignorance. He does not assume he is the smartest person in the room and he is not stubborn. So he learns on the job, slowly...
It sounds, if anything, quite conservative (of the better kind).
Yep, the very last thing we want are politicians with 'strong instinctive feels' for things.
Those attack posters seem fine to me. Neither Labour or the Tories can claim any moral high ground after the last decade of shenanigans, so watching them rip the shite out of each other is good sport. I actually didn't even know it was Easter today, until I ordered some plumbing fittings from screwfix, and it said I couldn't pick them up until tomorrow. I sort of knew Easter was this month, as overpriced egg shaped chocolate was for sale in the supermarkets and local Facebook groups were full of mums asking if there were any Easter egg hunts they could take their kids to (what?) but that was the limit of my interest. In all the limited bits I've seen on posts about Easter, none have mentioned the actual religious significance of the day. I'm not religious in the slightest, but even I found that bizarre.
It was on breakfast news this morning, and the church bells have been peeling here in my village today too. Also, I took my children to a Good Friday service with real donkeys and a (very British) Jesus where the vicar led an outside storytelling of The Passion and my 4-year refused to shout for the release of Barrubus. I also listened to some sublime music and hymns from Kings last night.
So, we've certainly had a little bit of the Easter message in our family. And it was delightful.
What on earth is a "very British" Jesus?
One that isn't anti-imperialist or a child refugee.
“Render unto Caesar…”
Jesus was indeed a radical, but not a revolutionary.
Those attack posters seem fine to me. Neither Labour or the Tories can claim any moral high ground after the last decade of shenanigans, so watching them rip the shite out of each other is good sport. I actually didn't even know it was Easter today, until I ordered some plumbing fittings from screwfix, and it said I couldn't pick them up until tomorrow. I sort of knew Easter was this month, as overpriced egg shaped chocolate was for sale in the supermarkets and local Facebook groups were full of mums asking if there were any Easter egg hunts they could take their kids to (what?) but that was the limit of my interest. In all the limited bits I've seen on posts about Easter, none have mentioned the actual religious significance of the day. I'm not religious in the slightest, but even I found that bizarre.
It was on breakfast news this morning, and the church bells have been peeling here in my village today too. Also, I took my children to a Good Friday service with real donkeys and a (very British) Jesus where the vicar led an outside storytelling of The Passion and my 4-year refused to shout for the release of Barrubus. I also listened to some sublime music and hymns from Kings last night.
So, we've certainly had a little bit of the Easter message in our family. And it was delightful.
What on earth is a "very British" Jesus?
One that isn't anti-imperialist or a child refugee.
You should throw your hat into the ring. The C of E needs a bit of livening up.
Fuck the CoE; it's full of people like HYUFD and Casino. My backup plan for if/when Mrs DA kicks me out is to convert to Islam, go to the Atlas Mountains and become a Sufi mystic.
Is it?! My (utterly outside) impression of the CofE is that it is a broad church, ranging all the way from the far left to the ultra-far-left, and that Dura Ace would be right at home.
Labour strategists are cock-a-hoop with how the adverts have landed. The first advert tweeted has received 20.8 million views, making it arguably the most successful Labour attack in recent memory. A party insider said: “Nice doesn’t win elections. They have got used to Labour shirking the dirty stuff. That’s changed.”...
...The party is not going to stop there. According to senior Labour sources, one of the next attack ads will suggest the PM has “effectively decriminalised rape”.
It will claim that under the Tories “only 1.6 per cent of rapists have been charged”. A source said: “We aren’t talking to Twitter. We are talking to the vast majority of the country who want to see child rapists locked up and know the Tories have destroyed the criminal justice system. [Sunak] is leading the government that is responsible and he has got the man [Jeremy Hunt] who butchered the NHS as his chancellor.”
It is understood Labour drew up the messages some time ago and have been waiting for the right time to deploy them....
...It has even been claimed that a group of former Tory election staffers have turned against their own party and approached Labour to help formulate their election strategy.
This is all ultimately for nought if the Labour Party won't advance a viable alternative. As with all the rest of the myriad problems with public services, they need to formulate a plan to fix them and find from somewhere the colossal sums of money needed to pay for the plan.
It's where the money's meant to come from that's likely to prove their undoing, in the end. They can probably get away with a certain amount of borrowing to invest for infrastructure projects, albeit that they're going to have to be extremely careful not to repeat the mistakes of PFI and end up saddling public sector organisations with even more debt servicing obligations. However, ultimately they need to service the ongoing costs of, for example, paying more for care home places so the staff can be paid enough not to sod off to Aldi, and putting tens of thousands of extra police on the streets, by raising an awful lot of tax.
Low and middle income earners have already been bled white and there's no indication that Labour are willing to milk the obvious source of extra revenue which is asset wealth - residential and commercial property, stocks and shares. So where's the money to pay for all this stuff?
And there's no indication that increasing spending on public services would lead to an equivalent improvement in them.
189k more employed by the NHS than at the 2019GE yet we're continually told that the NHS is a disaster which is about to collapse.
Voters have one fairly simple comparator to call upon. The state of public services under the last Labour government vs those now. Unfortunately for the Tories that comparator is pretty stark. No need for theory - there’s empirical evidence aplenty.
So you cannot explain how Labour (or anyone else) is going to wave this magic wand and turn 'a disaster about to collapse' back into 'the envy of the world'.
Not that it was 'the envy of the world' before 2010 even without Stafford, Maidstone and all the other hospital scandals of that era.
Now perhaps relying on false nostalgia for some none existent golden age of public services is all that is needed before an election but it rapidly wears out once in government.
“As success in reducing long waits in the early part of this century continued, the Labour government raised the stakes by announcing a new, more comprehensive target in 2005 that no more than 10% of patients should wait longer than 18 weeks from referral by a GP to treatment in hospital. This meant another change in waiting list data in 2007 to better capture what would now become a more overarching measure of the complete waiting list/time experience.
“Within two years – by 2009 – the total waiting list had nearly halved to 2.3 million, and the 18-week target continued to be met up until 2017. But from around 2012 the waiting list started to rise, nearly doubling to 4.34 million by February 2020.”
Thanks for proving my point that the NHS wasn't the 'envy of the world' before 2010.
Now could you tell us how many more tens of billions of pounds and hundreds of thousands more employees the NHS requires to get to some predicted output metric ?
Again with this narrative that any change is impossible. We had a better NHS under Labour; the NHS has deteriorated under the Conservatives. Voters might, understandably, want to go back to how things were under Labour (or some other non-Conservative alternative).
These repeated claims that there’s nothing that can be done aren’t going to win the Tories the election.
But Labour can only plausibly offer an improved NHS if it throws more money at it, to cover all the costs of:
*Staff recruitment and retention *Building repair backlogs *Repair and replacement of expensive kit *Clearing massive treatment backlogs, and *Improving preventative medicine and public health
The fact that UK health spending per head is already relatively high doesn't help. The country is also rammed full of poor people, chronically ill people and extremely fat people (the three issues being intimately related,) which means that our costs are also relatively high. As with so many of the other deficient areas of the public sphere, more money must be found to put them right. Where is Labour going to get the money? That's what risks doing for them.
Doing those things cost money upfront but save money long term. One of the reasons the NHS is both expensive and inefficient is the cult of cuts.
Yes, I know all that - the whole point of bringing up the expense was expressly not to say that "this is impossible, we can't find all that money," but to suggest that Labour will get no credit from a sceptical populace for promising to spend the money if it won't present a plausible mechanism for raising it.
One gets the distinct impression that Labour wants to make lots of promises to pay for shiny new things but doesn't want to say where the vast bulk of the cash will come from. Making posh parents cough up VAT on private school fees or something is not going to cover the costs of resolving the social care calamity, never mind anything else.
Well it is fairly obvious the money will mostly come from borrowing and some higher taxes. Labour, as with every other political party in western democracies with a realistic chance of winning, won't spell the full extent of this out explicitly.
They can only get away with fuzziness for so long as they don't have to publish a manifesto with associated costings. In all the furore about Brexit and antisemitism claims, people forget that Jeremy Corbyn's economic platform in 2019 was also a major part of his undoing. Way, way too much depended effectively on printing telephone number sums of new money, which voters concluded was laughable.
Labour can get away with quite a lot of extra borrowing for investment, but it's also going to need a lot more in tax to fund day-to-day spending on all its extra nurses, police officers and whatever other initiatives it identifies as necessary to help begin to put our tatty old country back together again. It's going to have to explain where all that tax is meant to come from, and the rationale behind who gets clobbered and who gets excused from paying.
My concern is that Labour will be too scared to go after the asset wealth of the old so it will go return, once again, to the well of earned incomes, just like the Conservatives. In which case, what is the point? Middle income earners aren't going to vote for a shiny new hospital getting built down the road in five years' time if it means they can't pay their mortgages in five months' time.
Labour will wait until next year’s budget before giving any hostages to fortune. This year (unless Sunak has an unlikely rush of blood to the head) is phoney war.
I don't know what Starmer is like or if he'll be any good, but he's not a Tory and all he has to do once he gets in is not fuck up anything anymore than it's been fucked up already. If he can manage that, we'll all win.
Multiple sources have confirmed to me an accelerated timetable for @theSNP leadership election was 100percent driven by @PeterMurrell. If his arrest and a police search of he and @NicolaSturgeon’s house came before voting opened would the continuity candidate have cut it?
Those attack posters seem fine to me. Neither Labour or the Tories can claim any moral high ground after the last decade of shenanigans, so watching them rip the shite out of each other is good sport. I actually didn't even know it was Easter today, until I ordered some plumbing fittings from screwfix, and it said I couldn't pick them up until tomorrow. I sort of knew Easter was this month, as overpriced egg shaped chocolate was for sale in the supermarkets and local Facebook groups were full of mums asking if there were any Easter egg hunts they could take their kids to (what?) but that was the limit of my interest. In all the limited bits I've seen on posts about Easter, none have mentioned the actual religious significance of the day. I'm not religious in the slightest, but even I found that bizarre.
It was on breakfast news this morning, and the church bells have been peeling here in my village today too. Also, I took my children to a Good Friday service with real donkeys and a (very British) Jesus where the vicar led an outside storytelling of The Passion and my 4-year refused to shout for the release of Barrubus. I also listened to some sublime music and hymns from Kings last night.
So, we've certainly had a little bit of the Easter message in our family. And it was delightful.
What on earth is a "very British" Jesus?
One that isn't anti-imperialist or a child refugee.
I was tempted by Piss Christ but Gilbert & George nailed(!) it. Possibly a Spifire Mk II piloted by the Archangel Gabriel looping it overhead.
I agree with Helen Lewis that Starmer is “ruthless” in the sense that he is determined, focused on winning, and not sentimentally bound to factions or individuals. But to me the word implies a clarity of purpose which he does not have. Yes, he is determined to climb the mountain, but at any given moment he seems unsure of the path to the top. He kind of scrabbles around from side to side until he finds a way to get a few feet further along, and sometimes heads in the wrong direction before changing course.
His treatment of the gender issue is typical. A ruthless leader would have worked out what he thought about it by now, steamrollered internal opposition, and scraped this particular barnacle off the boat. Instead, he has shifted towards a tenable position by salami-sliced increments while allowing senior colleagues to ignore or contradict him. It is painful to watch, and typified by his latest, excruciating statement that 99.9% of women don’t have a penis. In politics, you really have to round up.
Owen Jones having a rare lucid moment. The BBC clip of Braverman is extremely enlightening. From thinking Keir Starmer demeaned himself I am now wondering whether it was a deliberate pointer to a Powellite Home Secretary who would have been thrown out of most Tory Cabinets of the past and a Prime Minister who clearly backs her.
Of course it doesn't mean that such crimes were exclusive to Pakistani men. And after Rochdale, Rotherham and Telford, I don't know whether it's still an ongoing problem now.
Indeed, it seems a bit of a confected outrage. Imprecise language may still lead to offensive implications, but there seems to be a pushback on facts which were accepted years ago after reports
I don't know what Starmer is like or if he'll be any good, but he's not a Tory and all he has to do once he gets in is not fuck up anything anymore than it's been fucked up already. If he can manage that, we'll all win.
He'll fuck up my kids education and my families welfare.
I don't know what Starmer is like or if he'll be any good, but he's not a Tory and all he has to do once he gets in is not fuck up anything anymore than it's been fucked up already. If he can manage that, we'll all win.
He'll fuck up my kids education and my families welfare.
I will wade through blood to stop him.
With respect, that's as full of shit as anything you accuse Dura Ace of. You'll do fuck all blood wading, and once he gets in, you'll just snark on the sidelines here like we all do.
I don't know what Starmer is like or if he'll be any good, but he's not a Tory and all he has to do once he gets in is not fuck up anything anymore than it's been fucked up already. If he can manage that, we'll all win.
He'll fuck up my kids education and my families welfare.
I will wade through blood to stop him.
The mellow 'early Doombar in the garden on this glorious Easter Sunday' vibe seems to have dissipated.
Multiple sources have confirmed to me an accelerated timetable for @theSNP leadership election was 100percent driven by @PeterMurrell. If his arrest and a police search of he and @NicolaSturgeon’s house came before voting opened would the continuity candidate have cut it?
I don't know what Starmer is like or if he'll be any good, but he's not a Tory and all he has to do once he gets in is not fuck up anything anymore than it's been fucked up already. If he can manage that, we'll all win.
He'll fuck up my kids education and my families welfare.
I will wade through blood to stop him.
The mellow 'early Doonbar on this glorious Easter Sunday' vibe seems to have dissipated.
Perhaps the sun has gone in, and he spilt his brew hustling to get back in the warm.
I don't know what Starmer is like or if he'll be any good, but he's not a Tory and all he has to do once he gets in is not fuck up anything anymore than it's been fucked up already. If he can manage that, we'll all win.
He'll fuck up my kids education and my families welfare.
I will wade through blood to stop him.
Is this the second confirmed case of Starmer Derangement Syndrome on pb?
I don't know what Starmer is like or if he'll be any good, but he's not a Tory and all he has to do once he gets in is not fuck up anything anymore than it's been fucked up already. If he can manage that, we'll all win.
He'll fuck up my kids education and my families welfare.
I will wade through blood to stop him.
No you won't - you will write a few letters and post somethings on line but you won't and will finally realize you can't do anything about it.
Now once upon a time you could have left to somewhere like Vienna but that isn't an option nowadays.
I don't know what Starmer is like or if he'll be any good, but he's not a Tory and all he has to do once he gets in is not fuck up anything anymore than it's been fucked up already. If he can manage that, we'll all win.
He'll fuck up my kids education and my families welfare.
I will wade through blood to stop him.
With respect, that's as full of shit as anything you accuse Dura Ace of. You'll do fuck all blood wading, and once he gets in, you'll just snark on the sidelines here like we all do.
Not really. I do canvassing (despite hating it) and leafletting. I also donate.
Do you do any of those things?
I actually have a life, unlike you. Because I eat meat and don't spend all my time "meditating" I have the time and energy to do stuff.
Hope you enjoy the Grand National next weekend. Can't bloody wait £££.
I don't know what Starmer is like or if he'll be any good, but he's not a Tory and all he has to do once he gets in is not fuck up anything anymore than it's been fucked up already. If he can manage that, we'll all win.
He'll fuck up my kids education and my families welfare.
I will wade through blood to stop him.
The mellow 'early Doombar in the garden on this glorious Easter Sunday' vibe seems to have dissipated.
Only because wankshaft features has started posting.
If I only ate vegetables and pleasured myself over moles, I think I'd be the same.
Labour strategists are cock-a-hoop with how the adverts have landed. The first advert tweeted has received 20.8 million views, making it arguably the most successful Labour attack in recent memory. A party insider said: “Nice doesn’t win elections. They have got used to Labour shirking the dirty stuff. That’s changed.”...
...The party is not going to stop there. According to senior Labour sources, one of the next attack ads will suggest the PM has “effectively decriminalised rape”.
It will claim that under the Tories “only 1.6 per cent of rapists have been charged”. A source said: “We aren’t talking to Twitter. We are talking to the vast majority of the country who want to see child rapists locked up and know the Tories have destroyed the criminal justice system. [Sunak] is leading the government that is responsible and he has got the man [Jeremy Hunt] who butchered the NHS as his chancellor.”
It is understood Labour drew up the messages some time ago and have been waiting for the right time to deploy them....
...It has even been claimed that a group of former Tory election staffers have turned against their own party and approached Labour to help formulate their election strategy.
This is all ultimately for nought if the Labour Party won't advance a viable alternative. As with all the rest of the myriad problems with public services, they need to formulate a plan to fix them and find from somewhere the colossal sums of money needed to pay for the plan.
It's where the money's meant to come from that's likely to prove their undoing, in the end. They can probably get away with a certain amount of borrowing to invest for infrastructure projects, albeit that they're going to have to be extremely careful not to repeat the mistakes of PFI and end up saddling public sector organisations with even more debt servicing obligations. However, ultimately they need to service the ongoing costs of, for example, paying more for care home places so the staff can be paid enough not to sod off to Aldi, and putting tens of thousands of extra police on the streets, by raising an awful lot of tax.
Low and middle income earners have already been bled white and there's no indication that Labour are willing to milk the obvious source of extra revenue which is asset wealth - residential and commercial property, stocks and shares. So where's the money to pay for all this stuff?
And there's no indication that increasing spending on public services would lead to an equivalent improvement in them.
189k more employed by the NHS than at the 2019GE yet we're continually told that the NHS is a disaster which is about to collapse.
Voters have one fairly simple comparator to call upon. The state of public services under the last Labour government vs those now. Unfortunately for the Tories that comparator is pretty stark. No need for theory - there’s empirical evidence aplenty.
So you cannot explain how Labour (or anyone else) is going to wave this magic wand and turn 'a disaster about to collapse' back into 'the envy of the world'.
Not that it was 'the envy of the world' before 2010 even without Stafford, Maidstone and all the other hospital scandals of that era.
Now perhaps relying on false nostalgia for some none existent golden age of public services is all that is needed before an election but it rapidly wears out once in government.
“As success in reducing long waits in the early part of this century continued, the Labour government raised the stakes by announcing a new, more comprehensive target in 2005 that no more than 10% of patients should wait longer than 18 weeks from referral by a GP to treatment in hospital. This meant another change in waiting list data in 2007 to better capture what would now become a more overarching measure of the complete waiting list/time experience.
“Within two years – by 2009 – the total waiting list had nearly halved to 2.3 million, and the 18-week target continued to be met up until 2017. But from around 2012 the waiting list started to rise, nearly doubling to 4.34 million by February 2020.”
Thanks for proving my point that the NHS wasn't the 'envy of the world' before 2010.
Now could you tell us how many more tens of billions of pounds and hundreds of thousands more employees the NHS requires to get to some predicted output metric ?
Again with this narrative that any change is impossible. We had a better NHS under Labour; the NHS has deteriorated under the Conservatives. Voters might, understandably, want to go back to how things were under Labour (or some other non-Conservative alternative).
These repeated claims that there’s nothing that can be done aren’t going to win the Tories the election.
Most people understand we have just asked the NHS to cope with a once in a century workload, of a disease about which little was initially known and for which a range of treatments have been required. We are also learning that it has a from of "long Covid" which is going to put strains on the NHS for years to come, with perhaps a significantly increased cardiac workload. Not to get into the mental health issues which may take a decade to fully unravel.
That all happened on the Tories' watch. Most people understand those exact same issues would have arisen had Labour been in power.
Presume you'd recommend the same analysis of the SNHS and Yousaf's oversight of it.
The SNP can answer for Scotland's handling of the pandemic.
If anybody gets that far down the list of how they have handled government in Scotland.
Labour strategists are cock-a-hoop with how the adverts have landed. The first advert tweeted has received 20.8 million views, making it arguably the most successful Labour attack in recent memory. A party insider said: “Nice doesn’t win elections. They have got used to Labour shirking the dirty stuff. That’s changed.”...
...The party is not going to stop there. According to senior Labour sources, one of the next attack ads will suggest the PM has “effectively decriminalised rape”.
It will claim that under the Tories “only 1.6 per cent of rapists have been charged”. A source said: “We aren’t talking to Twitter. We are talking to the vast majority of the country who want to see child rapists locked up and know the Tories have destroyed the criminal justice system. [Sunak] is leading the government that is responsible and he has got the man [Jeremy Hunt] who butchered the NHS as his chancellor.”
It is understood Labour drew up the messages some time ago and have been waiting for the right time to deploy them....
...It has even been claimed that a group of former Tory election staffers have turned against their own party and approached Labour to help formulate their election strategy.
This is all ultimately for nought if the Labour Party won't advance a viable alternative. As with all the rest of the myriad problems with public services, they need to formulate a plan to fix them and find from somewhere the colossal sums of money needed to pay for the plan.
It's where the money's meant to come from that's likely to prove their undoing, in the end. They can probably get away with a certain amount of borrowing to invest for infrastructure projects, albeit that they're going to have to be extremely careful not to repeat the mistakes of PFI and end up saddling public sector organisations with even more debt servicing obligations. However, ultimately they need to service the ongoing costs of, for example, paying more for care home places so the staff can be paid enough not to sod off to Aldi, and putting tens of thousands of extra police on the streets, by raising an awful lot of tax.
Low and middle income earners have already been bled white and there's no indication that Labour are willing to milk the obvious source of extra revenue which is asset wealth - residential and commercial property, stocks and shares. So where's the money to pay for all this stuff?
And there's no indication that increasing spending on public services would lead to an equivalent improvement in them.
189k more employed by the NHS than at the 2019GE yet we're continually told that the NHS is a disaster which is about to collapse.
Voters have one fairly simple comparator to call upon. The state of public services under the last Labour government vs those now. Unfortunately for the Tories that comparator is pretty stark. No need for theory - there’s empirical evidence aplenty.
So you cannot explain how Labour (or anyone else) is going to wave this magic wand and turn 'a disaster about to collapse' back into 'the envy of the world'.
Not that it was 'the envy of the world' before 2010 even without Stafford, Maidstone and all the other hospital scandals of that era.
Now perhaps relying on false nostalgia for some none existent golden age of public services is all that is needed before an election but it rapidly wears out once in government.
“As success in reducing long waits in the early part of this century continued, the Labour government raised the stakes by announcing a new, more comprehensive target in 2005 that no more than 10% of patients should wait longer than 18 weeks from referral by a GP to treatment in hospital. This meant another change in waiting list data in 2007 to better capture what would now become a more overarching measure of the complete waiting list/time experience.
“Within two years – by 2009 – the total waiting list had nearly halved to 2.3 million, and the 18-week target continued to be met up until 2017. But from around 2012 the waiting list started to rise, nearly doubling to 4.34 million by February 2020.”
Thanks for proving my point that the NHS wasn't the 'envy of the world' before 2010.
Now could you tell us how many more tens of billions of pounds and hundreds of thousands more employees the NHS requires to get to some predicted output metric ?
Again with this narrative that any change is impossible. We had a better NHS under Labour; the NHS has deteriorated under the Conservatives. Voters might, understandably, want to go back to how things were under Labour (or some other non-Conservative alternative).
These repeated claims that there’s nothing that can be done aren’t going to win the Tories the election.
But Labour can only plausibly offer an improved NHS if it throws more money at it, to cover all the costs of:
*Staff recruitment and retention *Building repair backlogs *Repair and replacement of expensive kit *Clearing massive treatment backlogs, and *Improving preventative medicine and public health
The fact that UK health spending per head is already relatively high doesn't help. The country is also rammed full of poor people, chronically ill people and extremely fat people (the three issues being intimately related,) which means that our costs are also relatively high. As with so many of the other deficient areas of the public sphere, more money must be found to put them right. Where is Labour going to get the money? That's what risks doing for them.
UK health spending isn't relatively high compared with most developed countries - it's actually relatively low. This is an interesting chart, as it also shows the balance of Government spending and private insurance in each country:
I was surprised how small a share of US health spending (which is of course humongous) is private - presumably the effect of Medicare for the elderly. As their life expectancy is much the same, they aren't getting much bang for their bucks.
I suspect a lot of the damage is done prior to people qualifying for Medicare for the elderly. At which point it's simply dealing as well as it can with the (relatively) unhealthy starting points it is given.
Those attack posters seem fine to me. Neither Labour or the Tories can claim any moral high ground after the last decade of shenanigans, so watching them rip the shite out of each other is good sport. I actually didn't even know it was Easter today, until I ordered some plumbing fittings from screwfix, and it said I couldn't pick them up until tomorrow. I sort of knew Easter was this month, as overpriced egg shaped chocolate was for sale in the supermarkets and local Facebook groups were full of mums asking if there were any Easter egg hunts they could take their kids to (what?) but that was the limit of my interest. In all the limited bits I've seen on posts about Easter, none have mentioned the actual religious significance of the day. I'm not religious in the slightest, but even I found that bizarre.
It was on breakfast news this morning, and the church bells have been peeling here in my village today too. Also, I took my children to a Good Friday service with real donkeys and a (very British) Jesus where the vicar led an outside storytelling of The Passion and my 4-year refused to shout for the release of Barrubus. I also listened to some sublime music and hymns from Kings last night.
So, we've certainly had a little bit of the Easter message in our family. And it was delightful.
What on earth is a "very British" Jesus?
One that isn't anti-imperialist or a child refugee.
You should throw your hat into the ring. The C of E needs a bit of livening up.
Fuck the CoE; it's full of people like HYUFD and Casino. My backup plan for if/when Mrs DA kicks me out is to convert to Islam, go to the Atlas Mountains and become a Sufi mystic.
Except you're full of shit, aren't you?
You a serene middle-aged man who sits in his armchair teaching teenagers A-level French and gives lectures in the Red Wall on the Harrier and yet pretends to be somesort of moonlighting Lenin/ Christopher Walken sleepy hollow love-of-carnage character when actually burning rubber on your local a-road is about as exciting as your life gets.
It's all an act. I don't believe you'd say boo to a goose.
As far as I know Sufi mystics are not terribly big on extreme violence. They're more into whirling until they get pleasantly dizzy.
I don't know what Starmer is like or if he'll be any good, but he's not a Tory and all he has to do once he gets in is not fuck up anything anymore than it's been fucked up already. If he can manage that, we'll all win.
He'll fuck up my kids education and my families welfare.
I will wade through blood to stop him.
No you won't - you will write a few letters and post somethings on line but you won't and will finally realize you can't do anything about it.
Now once upon a time you could have left to somewhere like Vienna but that isn't an option nowadays.
Lol. Such UTOA Remainer bullshit.
If I wanted to leave I'd go to Australia, Canada, the US or even the Middle East.
Don't give a fuck about Vienna. No-one does unless they want a classical music concert or a good mountain hiking holiday.
As far as I can tell the Tory offer is going to be another penny or two off income tax and continued public service collapse, plus disgraceful dog-whistling to excite the GBNews class.
The Labour offer is going to be to keep income tax as it is and borrow more to try to address public service dysfunction, while trying to appear less woke than they instinctively are.
I don't know what Starmer is like or if he'll be any good, but he's not a Tory and all he has to do once he gets in is not fuck up anything anymore than it's been fucked up already. If he can manage that, we'll all win.
He'll fuck up my kids education and my families welfare.
I will wade through blood to stop him.
The Conservatives have already done that. And a lot more of our services too. That is what they do best.
Owen Jones having a rare lucid moment. The BBC clip of Braverman is extremely enlightening. From thinking Keir Starmer demeaned himself I am now wondering whether it was a deliberate pointer to a Powellite Home Secretary who would have been thrown out of most Tory Cabinets of the past and a Prime Minister who clearly backs her.
Of course it doesn't mean that such crimes were exclusive to Pakistani men. And after Rochdale, Rotherham and Telford, I don't know whether it's still an ongoing problem now.
Indeed, it seems a bit of a confected outrage. Imprecise language may still lead to offensive implications, but there seems to be a pushback on facts which were accepted years ago after reports
Especially since the perpetrators (and supporters) in a couple of these instances were quite vocal about their worldview.
I don't know what Starmer is like or if he'll be any good, but he's not a Tory and all he has to do once he gets in is not fuck up anything anymore than it's been fucked up already. If he can manage that, we'll all win.
He'll fuck up my kids education and my families welfare.
I will wade through blood to stop him.
With respect, that's as full of shit as anything you accuse Dura Ace of. You'll do fuck all blood wading, and once he gets in, you'll just snark on the sidelines here like we all do.
Not really. I do canvassing (despite hating it) and leafletting. I also donate.
Do you do any of those things?
I actually have a life, unlike you. Because I eat meat and don't spend all my time "meditating" I have the time and energy to do stuff.
Hope you enjoy the Grand National next weekend. Can't bloody wait £££.
I'm a Green party member and do my fair bit to help with leaflets and shit like that. I also have a life that doesn't revolve around God bothering and tormenting animals. I could always eat meat if I wanted, but you'll always be a c@#t. Now about that blood you're going to be wading through, who are you going you get to do the killing?
It seems that after an election when most voters decided “they’re both as bad as each other”, and put their vote against the bad one with the blue rosette, Labour have decided to run on “they’re both as bad as each other” again. Not a winning tactic. Need to get back on to the parlous state of public services, and if they want to do attack ads on Sunak they should focus on the super rich out of touch thing - much easier to get that to stick.
How much of the current Sunak fightback is just one of those tides in the affairs of men is hard to know. Certainly the lower Starmer ratings in these polls don’t really come off the back of any particularly bad news for him. The ads were too recent. I think they’re just the equal and opposite of rising Sunak ratings rather than any kind of apocalyptic Gotterstarmerrung news cycle.
In brighter topical news it’s a lovely bright but chilly Easter morning on the galerie mâconnaise of our French place, the Easter bunny has been and most mini-eggs found, the wood pigeon is cooing over the sound of spring birdsong and I have Blessed be the God and Father off Easter Day from Hereford Cathedral playing on the Bluetooth speaker with my coffee.
Having only seen a couple in ten years here, this spring we seem to have acquired a beautiful green woodpecker, who is filling the air with his crazy cackling call.
Chiffchaff have been calling for the best part of three weeks, but no sign yet of the blackcap.
Saw the first swallow on Friday out on our local NNR and also got my first mosquito bite, so they've timed it well. Willow warblers were also out in force. Though similarly, not heard a blackcap here yet.
The Marsh harriers were doing their usual stunts - saw one stoop from a great height and pull a full 360 loop, though they usually flipped into what I suppose would be called an Immelmann. Nuts!
Spring definitely here.
Love the half barrel-rolls the local ravens perform in their courtship. Lots of kronk-kronk-kronk calls. The buzzards are also very active.
Also had the first Willow Warbler of the year yesterday. Brimstone butterflies have been out a while, but my first Speckled Wood was out in the garden today, looking pristine, so presumably not one that has overwintered. A few hoverflies out too. Deffo spring - minimum of 10 degrees tonight.
Comments
Voters by and large care about results more than policies. YouGov has health as the second most important issue facing the country, according to the public, at 45%. (The economy is first.) Moaning about “NHS worshippers” isn’t going to win the Tories votes on this issue.
You can stop there.
*Staff recruitment and retention
*Building repair backlogs
*Repair and replacement of expensive kit
*Clearing massive treatment backlogs, and
*Improving preventative medicine and public health
The fact that UK health spending per head is already relatively high doesn't help. The country is also rammed full of poor people, chronically ill people and extremely fat people (the three issues being intimately related,) which means that our costs are also relatively high. As with so many of the other deficient areas of the public sphere, more money must be found to put them right. Where is Labour going to get the money? That's what risks doing for them.
But surely it's obvious that there is a very difficult problem here. It's bad news if politicians have decided that this is an area that's fair game for cartoon rhetoric.
For decades, western Europe’s national healthcare systems have been widely touted as among the best in the world.
But an ageing population, more long-term illnesses, a continuing recruitment and retainment crisis plus post-Covid exhaustion have combined, this winter, to create a perfect healthcare storm that is likely to get worse before it gets better.
“All countries of the region face severe problems related to their health and care workforce,” the World Health Organization’s Europe region said in a report earlier this year, warning of potentially dire consequences without urgent government action.
In France, there are fewer doctors now than in 2012. More than 6 million people, including 600,000 with chronic illnesses, do not have a regular GP and 30% of the population does not have adequate access to health services.
In Germany, 35,000 care sector posts were vacant last year, 40% more than a decade ago, while a report this summer said that by 2035 more than a third of all health jobs could be unfilled. Facing unprecedented hospital overcrowding due to “a severe shortage of nurses”, even Finland will need 200,000 new workers in the health and social care sector by 2030.
In Spain, the health ministry announced in May that more than 700,000 people were waiting for surgery, and 5,000 frontline GPs and paediatricians in Madrid have been on strike for nearly a month in protest at years of underfunding and overwork.
Efforts to replace retiring workers were already “suboptimal”, the WHO Europe report said, but had to now be urgently extended to “improve retention and tackle an expected increase in younger people leaving the workforce due to burnout, ill health and general dissatisfaction”.
In a third of countries in the region, at least 40% of doctors were aged 55 or over, the report said. Even when younger practitioners stayed despite stress, long hours and often low pay, their reluctance to work in remote rural areas or deprived inner cities had created “medical deserts” that were proving almost impossible to fill.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/dec/14/a-ticking-time-bomb-healthcare-under-threat-across-western-europe
Generally speaking, voters blame governments for things that aren’t their fault, and give them credit for things that aren’t their responsibility. If you want the Conservatives to do well at the next election, yes, you can hope that voters will blame the pandemic more than they blame the Tories for the parlous state of the NHS, but I suggest psephological history is against you.
Current polling suggests voters have plenty of blame to lay on the Tories. As time moves on, do you think voters will become more likely to blame the incumbent Govt or more like to blame the pandemic? I suggest that, if anything, the blame allocation will shift towards blaming the incumbents.
On a Thursday in mid-August, the doors of a hospital's emergency department two hours west of Toronto were shut.
A note posted on the front said the ER was closed for the day. It would reopen the following morning at 08:00, but close again for the evening. Patients who needed urgent care were asked to go to nearby hospitals - a 15- to 35-minute drive away.
It was the ninth time since April that the Huron Public Healthcare Alliance - a network of four hospitals serving around 150,000 people in western Ontario - had to temporarily close or cut back hours at one of its emergency departments.
And it won't be the last, said the organisation's CEO Andrew Williams.
The reason? There aren't enough nurses to staff the ER.
"You are seeing - almost weekly - hospitals having to reduce their services," Mr Williams told the BBC.
It's a dilemma playing out at emergency departments across Canada, particularly at smaller hospitals where reduced services have become commonplace.
In the maritime province of Nova Scotia, one hospital's ER has been closed since June 2021 due to staffing shortages.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-62716710
I don't think I need to reference the problems the US health system has.
Who knew?
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/apr/08/yvette-cooper-was-not-told-about-labours-sunak-attack-ad-in-advance
But no one's going to talk about that
The author moves from describing where Starmer is to where he hopes/believes he will end up.
It usually pays to read the whole thing - as we saw with some of the “clever” responses to the Stock article the other day.
Paul Waugh
@paulwaugh
One frontbencher says a current online video of Starmer’s flip-flops is a taste of things to come.
"The general election campaign is going to be full of videos of Keir, ‘he said this, now he’s says that’.”
https://twitter.com/paulwaugh/status/1644644024010063872
One gets the distinct impression that Labour wants to make lots of promises to pay for shiny new things but doesn't want to say where the vast bulk of the cash will come from. Making posh parents cough up VAT on private school fees or something is not going to cover the costs of resolving the social care calamity, never mind anything else.
So, we've certainly had a little bit of the Easter message in our family. And it was delightful.
Different political parties have different ideas about how you achieve economic growth, what taxes should be and what borrowing is appropriate, and of course on how you then spend the money. Within a democracy, we have a debate over those different answers, which are correct, which aren’t. We will go on having those debates as long as PB.com exists.
What I’m railing against is the idea put forward by some right-wing posters that there is no possible alternative, that nothing can be done, that increased spending is an impossibility. They can’t defend the Tories’ record in government, so instead they argue that doing anything else is impossible. This is bullshit.
Alternatives exist. You might think they’re bad ideas, but it is clearly possible for an alternative government to borrow more, to tax more, to impact economic growth positively. To spend better. We’ve had governments in the past that did things differently. We can see countries around us doing things differently. One can clearly advance an argument that some of those past governments, some of those other countries, seem to have done things better.
From a campaigning point of view, saying “we can’t do anything” or “there’s no magic money tree” aren’t, I suggest, going to win the Tories the next general election.
So it is devolution to nation states and local authorities but "better together" where the issue cannot be effectively dealt with locally.
I call it glocalization - local decision-making within a light global policy framework.
It is how the EU should operate and why Lib Dems support it. Unfortunately power always accretes power to itself. That happens with Brussels and Westminster and so it needs continual push back.
For the LIb Dems in Scotland, the policy is federalism, not top down unionism which distinguishes it from Tory and Labour policy.
I agree it's a pro-Starmer article, but I didn't takeaway the warm fuzzy feeling the author intended.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-cwcCJEf6I
Another factor is a recognition among Tory strategists of the unmitigated mess Sir Keir Starmer is getting himself into as he blunders blindly through the cultural minefield sown by his progressive allies. Addressing the trans issue last weekend, Labour's leader bizarrely proclaimed: 'For 99.9 per cent of women, it is completely biological… and of course they haven't got a penis.'
Twenty-four hours later, he went on the radio to lecture all those women concerned about men invading their changing rooms and other protected spaces.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-11952767/DAN-HODGES-Rishi-Sunak-not-culture-warrior-stomach-Keir-Starmer.html
Why can't Britain always be like this?
It's like paradise.
Genuinely think Keir Starmer and Boris Johnson are the two most dishonest frontline politicians in British democratic history
https://twitter.com/OwenJones84/status/1644822516186193920
Labour's lead is the product of things being a bit rubbish and a lot of people feeling miserable. It hasn't had to explain why it would do a better job yet.
No one knows better than huge consumer facing brands what the future looks like. And what Nike is saying, by choosing a trans woman ambassador, is that the future is trans inclusive.
Hang on in there: the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice
https://twitter.com/JolyonMaugham/status/1644384615455391772?s=20
There’s a world of difference between being “trans inclusive” and having a trans woman represent biological women.
Women get 1% of the USA sports sponsorship cash! Let that figure really sink in… In a world where they represent 51% of the population! And we’re supposed to be happy males now get to advertise our sports bras - just say NO #boycottnike
https://twitter.com/sharrond62/status/1644712675643891713?s=20
This is the only one I can think of:
So, I suspect Labour's long term plan is that it will be able to change things round by getting the economy to grow... and to do that's in going to need to some borrowing to invest in things which will generate revenue.
As well as Employees NI ?
I've never seen that before.
But having both NIs plus income tax listed as deductions shows how much the government takes from your employment compared to your net earnings.
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon Englands mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On Englands pleasant pastures seen!
And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?
Bring me my Bow of burning gold:
Bring me my arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!
I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land.
*admittedly the current Tory party also qualifies as anti-business, pace Mr Hunt's latest efforts.
Are you sure?
https://www.english-heritageshop.org.uk/mug-charles-iii-coronation
https://shop.royalacademy.org.uk/king-charles-iii-coronation-mug?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI6-2iwtGc_gIVkMftCh25ewBNEAQYAyABEgLr8_D_BwE
https://shop.nationalarchives.gov.uk/collections/coronation-of-king-charles-iii
https://www.hellomagazine.com/shopping/20230308166239/coronation-mugs-and-tea-cups-for-king-charles-celebration/
Labour can get away with quite a lot of extra borrowing for investment, but it's also going to need a lot more in tax to fund day-to-day spending on all its extra nurses, police officers and whatever other initiatives it identifies as necessary to help begin to put our tatty old country back together again. It's going to have to explain where all that tax is meant to come from, and the rationale behind who gets clobbered and who gets excused from paying.
My concern is that Labour will be too scared to go after the asset wealth of the old so it will go return, once again, to the well of earned incomes, just like the Conservatives. In which case, what is the point? Middle income earners aren't going to vote for a shiny new hospital getting built down the road in five years' time if it means they can't pay their mortgages in five months' time.
So, what’s the Tories’ pitch? Do they say, “There’s no money, so the NHS will not get any better than this.” I can’t see that winning an election.
Do they say, “We’ll make the NHS better without spending anything more.” That seems likely to be met with a sceptical reaction.
Do they say, “We’ll spend more on the NHS,” at which point they face the same questions you are posing to Labour.
An election is a choice. Solving the problems of the NHS, of public services generally, will not be easy. Yes, of course, Labour will face questions over how they will do these things, where will the money come from. But so will the Conservatives, and the Conservatives’ problem is that we’ve seen what they’ve done over the last 13 years.
10 contenders compete to be recognised as the rightful son of God by competing against each other in a series of weekly tasks, voted off by the Reverend Richard Coles and Prue Leith.
The crowd was very amused.
When the English forget how to make tea...
You utter nutcase. Happy Easter.
BTW churches full round here this morning; mostly of normal people, few of them with two heads, from Mars or religious lunatics.
ALEZALIENOS SEBETE THEOU
but I can't make sense of it apart from the last word ('of God', probably).
https://data.oecd.org/healthres/health-spending.htm
I was surprised how small a share of US health spending (which is of course humongous) is private - presumably the effect of Medicare for the elderly. As their life expectancy is much the same, they aren't getting much bang for their bucks.
Which is why I provided another excerpt, to avoid any misleading impression.
Did you realise that one in every 67 Muslims is transgender? That adults with no educational qualifications are almost twice as likely to identify as transgender as university graduates? That the London boroughs of Brent and Newham are home to higher proportions of transgender people than Brighton and Oxford? These are some of the astonishing results from the 2021 census of England and Wales, which was the first in the world to ask about gender identity……
How did the ONS manage to produce such implausible data on gender identity? In ‘a case study of policy capture’, the statisticians were guided by lobby groups like Stonewall. It is surely no coincidence that the gender question replicated, with minor variation, Stonewall’s definition of ‘cisgender’: ‘Someone whose gender identity is the same as the sex they were assigned at birth’.
The question, according to the ONS, was ‘evaluated via community testing at LGBT History Month events’. But did the ONS consider how immigrants whose first language is not English – and who may be blissfully ignorant of esoteric concepts like ‘cisgender’ – might understand the question, or rather could misunderstand it?
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-does-the-census-say-there-are-more-trans-people-in-newham-than-brighton/
You a serene middle-aged man who sits in his armchair teaching teenagers A-level French and gives lectures in the Red Wall on the Harrier and yet pretends to be somesort of moonlighting Lenin/ Christopher Walken sleepy hollow love-of-carnage character when actually burning rubber on your local a-road is about as exciting as your life gets.
It's all an act. I don't believe you'd say boo to a goose.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/06/sexual-abuse-rotherham-abusers-victims
Of course it doesn't mean that such crimes were exclusive to Pakistani men. And after Rochdale, Rotherham and Telford, I don't know whether it's still an ongoing problem now.
This has consequences. Nation wide campaigns encouraging cervix-havers to book a pap smear test will not reach people who don’t understand what a cervix is. Inclusive language needs to be genuinely inclusive.
https://twitter.com/michaelpforan/status/1645022998259277824?s=20
Jesus was indeed a radical, but not a revolutionary.
This year (unless Sunak has an unlikely rush of blood to the head) is phoney war.
https://twitter.com/johncferguson/status/1644984578732335105?s=20
I will wade through blood to stop him.
But hey, what do you expect in a banana republic?
https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/fifes-bananas-934785
Now once upon a time you could have left to somewhere like Vienna but that isn't an option nowadays.
Do you do any of those things?
I actually have a life, unlike you. Because I eat meat and don't spend all my time "meditating" I have the time and energy to do stuff.
Hope you enjoy the Grand National next weekend. Can't bloody wait £££.
If I only ate vegetables and pleasured myself over moles, I think I'd be the same.
If anybody gets that far down the list of how they have handled government in Scotland.
If I wanted to leave I'd go to Australia, Canada, the US or even the Middle East.
Don't give a fuck about Vienna. No-one does unless they want a classical music concert or a good mountain hiking holiday.
*in my vile wokeness, have agreed with Mrs C to have pheasant for dinner*
The Labour offer is going to be to keep income tax as it is and borrow more to try to address public service dysfunction, while trying to appear less woke than they instinctively are.
Choose your poison.
Too late to start wading through blood now.
I could always eat meat if I wanted, but you'll always be a c@#t.
Now about that blood you're going to be wading through, who are you going you get to do the killing?
Also had the first Willow Warbler of the year yesterday. Brimstone butterflies have been out a while, but my first Speckled Wood was out in the garden today, looking pristine, so presumably not one that has overwintered. A few hoverflies out too. Deffo spring - minimum of 10 degrees tonight.
We'll probably have snow next week now!