3/ What it boils down to is this: the politicians pretend they have solutions to stem the tide of arrivals, but they are lying. The Tory lies about doing it by getting tough have been exposed as such for years, and continue to be so as their tactics fail. Labour makes noises about dealing with the problem through more effective international co-operation (which won't stop people who want to come here from coming anyway) and through creating safe, legal routes of migration (which is a laudable plan in isolation for providing refuge for some applicants, and thus sparing them the peril of long and hazardous journeys along irregular migration routes, but which still won't stop everyone else who wants to come here from coming anyway.)
Any honest discussion about irregular migration therefore involves beginning with an admission that, once they get as far as setting foot in Britain, a large majority of the boat people will get to stay whether we like it or not, simply because the costs of creating mechanisms that will enable the state to forcibly segregate or remove them all far exceed the costs of letting them stay, and that this is likely to continue to be the case for the foreseeable future. The money being burnt setting up crackpot wheezes like the failed Rwanda deportation scheme would be better spent on fostering integration, raising funding for local authorities so that they're better able to cope with the additional pressures created by resettlement, and above all on contributing toward the construction of vast numbers of homes. As with so many of our other problems as a nation, they would be eased considerably if there were simply a sufficiency of decent accommodation to cope with all the people that are already living here, and the ongoing expansion of the population in the years ahead.
But if we provide them with decent accommodation then that is an additional pull factor which will make the UK more attractive and increase the numbers coming here. The Labour policy of forming an orderly queue sounds quite British but the underlying premise is that those on the boats are the same people or that allowing more in by safe routes will do anything at all to diminish the number coming by boat.
The Rwanda policy is both a moral and practical disgrace and frankly should be abandoned. I do not approve of the courts interfering in public policy, this should be a matter for the ballot box not the court room, but they may be doing the government a favour.
As I have said before the only thing that will work is withdrawing the right to asylum and replacing it with a discretionary grant. As we reach the peak of asylum seekers from Africa as their population explodes I think that this will happen and not just in the UK. But not yet.
School fees are now the biggest expense for wealthy grandparents helping out their adult children, a report has shown.
A survey of people with assets of more than £250,000 found that the majority — 79 per cent — were supporting their adult children.
The most common reason was to help with private school fees. Independent school fees increased by 5.6 per cent this year, the biggest amount since the financial crash of 2009. They are expected to rise even more next year.
The fourth Saltus Wealth Index report surveyed 2,000 wealthy people, which it refers to as “high net worth individuals”. Among those who were helping their adult children, 42 per cent were covering school fees for grandchildren, 23 per cent were contributing to mortgage payments, 20 per cent to rent and 32 per cent to weekly grocery bills.
Many independent schools froze their fees during the pandemic but have now put them up considerably. The Independent Schools Council 2023 census said the fees could be likened to government levels of wage inflation.
The average day-school fee is £16,656, up by 37 per cent from the £12,153 in 2013. The average boarding fee is £39,000, up by 41 per cent from £27,600 ten years ago.
My dad's house clearance in progress. It is chaos.
@Foxy my wife worked in Leicester, although I suspect you were in short trousers when she was a junior doctor there. She ended up in St George's London teaching.
Interested in your views on the announcement today. My wife has often commented that on qualifying she was as useful as a chocolate teapot in the real job initially so even then it was years of on the job training.
I started in George's and finished here, so mirror careers by the sound of it!
I have no problem with the plan, just not able to deliver it on a shoestring budget.
Apprentice doctors and nurses, consideration of cutting medical degrees from five to four years (as they already are for graduate entry) and an expansion of physician assistants.
There is the small difficulty of who is going to train this horde to be let loose on the Great British public. Medical training is very intense and often one to one, and requires very careful supervision by skilled practitioners (like yours truly) to be done safely and ethically.
Which is all fine and dandy for me, as I am a skilled trainer with excellent trainee feedback and enjoy what I do to bring on these rookies. I cannot do it while simultaneously going gangbusters on the waiting list. It is one or the other.
To be fair, this is not a short term policy, and presumably the idea is to gradually bring in the change to more hands on training as numbers recruited increase ?
The £10bn saving quoted is over a number of years, so while less significant than the headline suggests, somewhat more realistic.
As you say, it's not simple, but they are at least pointing in the right direction with this ?
Good morning
Listening to Wes Streeting on Sky claiming the NHS proposals are labour's and as such he says labour will support it and give certainty to the NHS for this 15 year plan
Yes, Labour announced it last year as their plan.
The issue is resourcing the plan in terms of trainers, trainees, training infrastructure and time. Which is why Hunt has been delaying it so long and the financial impact falls next parliament.
I have no problem with the principle (though I think the apprentice doctor scheme needs to be restricted to those with an appropriate science degree), just very sceptical as to the quality of training.
A major gripe of current undergraduate and postgraduate trainees is the poor quality of training and supervision. Dilute it further and we may have homeopathic doctors in a different sense.
A major cause of burnout and stress related illness in junior staff is lack of supervision and mentoring. Nothing makes people more likely to quit than feeling dangerously out of their depth.
With current Physician Assosciates we have the opposite problem. All too often they are dangerously over confident, and don't know what they don't know.
Where is the retention Policy from either of the Tory Parties?
I wonder how many people decrying how awful Rwanda is have actually been there recently..
Rwanda being awful or not, or the policy being lawful or not, is a distraction from a) whether the policy would work as a deterrent, and b) if it did, would that make it appropriate?
My dad's house clearance in progress. It is chaos.
@Foxy my wife worked in Leicester, although I suspect you were in short trousers when she was a junior doctor there. She ended up in St George's London teaching.
Interested in your views on the announcement today. My wife has often commented that on qualifying she was as useful as a chocolate teapot in the real job initially so even then it was years of on the job training.
Good luck with it. The consolation is the feeling of relief once the damned thing is sold, and the gas, leccy , insuran ce and if relevant the CT are cancelled. Even though there is still paperwork to do.
Apprentice doctors and nurses, consideration of cutting medical degrees from five to four years (as they already are for graduate entry) and an expansion of physician assistants.
Sounds interesting - if the plans look workable I'll be the first to praise Sunak for attempting to reform the service.
Listening to Sky this morning there has not been one dissenting voice, indeed it seems to be welcomed across the whole of the NHS and even by labour, who of course are claiming it is their policy
If Rishi has actually achieved a break through on the NHS, and this favourable reporting continues at least it will be Rishi's legacy, and it would be so ironic if a conservative PM introduced wide and long lasting NHS reforms
The point of the Rwanda policy is deterrence. People don't get on channel boats because they want to make a life in Rwanda; they do it to make a life in the UK. The minute that regular flights to Rwanda start, boats stop. It's really that simple.
Not the hands up thing again. That's just an exercise in social proof.
If it were working you'd get a different response but audience members will think they'd be asked to defend a Government policy failure.
Worse than that - clips of them doing so will go viral on Twitter., they will be called racist and probably sacked.
Good because most of them will be. What a miserable bunch of shits we have for a government. An embarrassment to all of us. The Sunaks and the Bravermen should be particularly ashamed. Can't they picture a time when their not too distant relatives came looking for a better life? I suppose if they had any empathy they wouldn't be Tories.
Yougov have polled much more recently than that, as noted upthread. The policy is not a net positive for you - however much it might please your diehard core voters.
It seems Rwanda is the problem rather than the policy and it would make sense to seek alternatives
I expect Rishi is longing for the summer recess and hopefully take a long and considered review of not only Rwanda, but his cabinet generally, and in particular reshuffle Braverman away from the home office which is toxic under her
It's not obvious that there is any country in the overlap between "willing recipient for the UK's plans" and "sufficiently respecting of human rights to be a safe destination".
Hence the talk of changing British law or leaving ECHR. And whilst I would love to think in terms of Good Rishi/Bad Suella, the simplest conclusion from the observations of the last nine months is that Rishi is perfectly OK with what the Home Secretary wants to do.
But that is not the policy, is it? The policy is that if you arrive by small boat you have arrived illegally, have no right to claim UK asylum and are liable for removal to Rwanda with no right to return to the UK. No-one going to Rwanda will have a UK asylum request assessed from there.
For me there are two problems with this.
1 - The lack of safe routes for people to come to the UK in the first place. 2 - If you go to Rwanda you stay there, you do not have your request processed and can come to the UK if succesful.
3/ What it boils down to is this: the politicians pretend they have solutions to stem the tide of arrivals, but they are lying. The Tory lies about doing it by getting tough have been exposed as such for years, and continue to be so as their tactics fail. Labour makes noises about dealing with the problem through more effective international co-operation (which won't stop people who want to come here from coming anyway) and through creating safe, legal routes of migration (which is a laudable plan in isolation for providing refuge for some applicants, and thus sparing them the peril of long and hazardous journeys along irregular migration routes, but which still won't stop everyone else who wants to come here from coming anyway.)
Any honest discussion about irregular migration therefore involves beginning with an admission that, once they get as far as setting foot in Britain, a large majority of the boat people will get to stay whether we like it or not, simply because the costs of creating mechanisms that will enable the state to forcibly segregate or remove them all far exceed the costs of letting them stay, and that this is likely to continue to be the case for the foreseeable future. The money being burnt setting up crackpot wheezes like the failed Rwanda deportation scheme would be better spent on fostering integration, raising funding for local authorities so that they're better able to cope with the additional pressures created by resettlement, and above all on contributing toward the construction of vast numbers of homes. As with so many of our other problems as a nation, they would be eased considerably if there were simply a sufficiency of decent accommodation to cope with all the people that are already living here, and the ongoing expansion of the population in the years ahead.
But if we provide them with decent accommodation then that is an additional pull factor which will make the UK more attractive and increase the numbers coming here. The Labour policy of forming an orderly queue sounds quite British but the underlying premise is that those on the boats are the same people or that allowing more in by safe routes will do anything at all to diminish the number coming by boat.
The Rwanda policy is both a moral and practical disgrace and frankly should be abandoned. I do not approve of the courts interfering in public policy, this should be a matter for the ballot box not the court room, but they may be doing the government a favour.
As I have said before the only thing that will work is withdrawing the right to asylum and replacing it with a discretionary grant. As we reach the peak of asylum seekers from Africa as their population explodes I think that this will happen and not just in the UK. But not yet.
I think the right to asylum will have to go - as Matthew Parris said years ago. There are literally billions of people with a proper claim.
The better, impossible, course is for the UN to have a single remit: of having the authority to direct the governance of every member nation so as to remove grounds for fleeing it. It is a disgrace that you can belong to the UN at the same time as giving grounds for your population to flee the government.
BTW, courts did not 'interfere in public policy'. They decided, rightly, that government had broken its own laws in the Rwanda policy. The CA still let them off lightly. I hope the SC will be tougher.
Announcing a recruitment plan for the NHS is all well and good but looks rather strange when you’ve got junior doctors and consultants still planning strike action .
Apprentice doctors and nurses, consideration of cutting medical degrees from five to four years (as they already are for graduate entry) and an expansion of physician assistants.
There is the small difficulty of who is going to train this horde to be let loose on the Great British public. Medical training is very intense and often one to one, and requires very careful supervision by skilled practitioners (like yours truly) to be done safely and ethically.
Which is all fine and dandy for me, as I am a skilled trainer with excellent trainee feedback and enjoy what I do to bring on these rookies. I cannot do it while simultaneously going gangbusters on the waiting list. It is one or the other.
To be fair, this is not a short term policy, and presumably the idea is to gradually bring in the change to more hands on training as numbers recruited increase ?
The £10bn saving quoted is over a number of years, so while less significant than the headline suggests, somewhat more realistic.
As you say, it's not simple, but they are at least pointing in the right direction with this ?
Good morning
Listening to Wes Streeting on Sky claiming the NHS proposals are labour's and as such he says labour will support it and give certainty to the NHS for this 15 year plan
Yes, Labour announced it last year as their plan.
The issue is resourcing the plan in terms of trainers, trainees, training infrastructure and time. Which is why Hunt has been delaying it so long and the financial impact falls next parliament.
I have no problem with the principle (though I think the apprentice doctor scheme needs to be restricted to those with an appropriate science degree), just very sceptical as to the quality of training.
A major gripe of current undergraduate and postgraduate trainees is the poor quality of training and supervision. Dilute it further and we may have homeopathic doctors in a different sense.
A major cause of burnout and stress related illness in junior staff is lack of supervision and mentoring. Nothing makes people more likely to quit than feeling dangerously out of their depth.
With current Physician Assosciates we have the opposite problem. All too often they are dangerously over confident, and don't know what they don't know.
Where is the retention Policy from either of the Tory Parties?
I assumed you have not read the policy - it increases the NHS staff by 300,000
But that is not the policy, is it? The policy is that if you arrive by small boat you have arrived illegally, have no right to claim UK asylum and are liable for removal to Rwanda with no right to return to the UK. No-one going to Rwanda will have a UK asylum request assessed from there.
For me there are two problems with this.
1 - The lack of safe routes for people to come to the UK in the first place. 2 - If you go to Rwanda you stay there, you do not have your request processed and can come to the UK if succesful.
Exactly. If those two points were fixed it would be much tougher for anyone to oppose the policy. But the whole point of the policy is to create a populist dividing line, so neither can be done.
Apprentice doctors and nurses, consideration of cutting medical degrees from five to four years (as they already are for graduate entry) and an expansion of physician assistants.
Sounds interesting - if the plans look workable I'll be the first to praise Sunak for attempting to reform the service.
Listening to Sky this morning there has not been one dissenting voice, indeed it seems to be welcomed across the whole of the NHS and even by labour, who of course are claiming it is their policy
If Rishi has actually achieved a break through on the NHS, and this favourable reporting continues at least it will be Rishi's legacy, and it would be so ironic if a conservative PM introduced wide and long lasting NHS reforms
Bit too lat ethough. The staffing problems were obvious for years, and it was obvious from before the Brexit referendum that Brexit would make them worse. Does not show the Tory Party's managerial competence in a good light.
I cannot read it. It looks as if, overnight, Elon has blocked reading tweets without signing in.
Several updates have been giving nag screens to log in, but it does indeed look like the latest update is an attempt to make it compulsory. It’s probably going to break a bunch of embed stuff used by news sites and forums too.
My only Twitter account is an old work one I use for my consultancy business, I’m sure as hell not using that to go browsing politics feeds.
I’ve been mostly supportive of the changes at Twitter, but forcing the content behind the login screen makes it more like Facebook and less like the town square. A big own goal.
I am more interested in the politics of the policy than the actual policy. HY can quote as many polls as he likes - this is not a moral nor a workable policy and Tory voters are not as amoral as Braverman and HY would like.
Lutz has told the Tories their only remaining lever is go very negative. The 2023 version of Stop The Boats is a law more inhumane than the 2022 Stop The Boats law. So the 2024 edition will go totally tonto. And as we're already seeing, Tory voters have gone past the tipping point where they are no longer prepared to stomach these policies especially when told "these are your priorities"
We can expect the Tory vote to crater even lower than it is now.
We already have a particular sort of society - the one in which 30% of babies born here have a foreign born mother and where there is annual net migration of +500,000. The number of boat people is very small in comparison, and inevitably includes a high number of driven and motivated people.
Indeed. Around a million people enter and leave the UK every day. That's the real 'securing the borders' problem.
Does that include border crossings between NI and the Republic?
The point of the Rwanda policy is deterrence. People don't get on channel boats because they want to make a life in Rwanda; they do it to make a life in the UK. The minute that regular flights to Rwanda start, boats stop. It's really that simple.
Nope: 1. The boats need to be caught - not always are 2. The people need to be detained - we don't remotely have enough places to securely detain them all, and so many successfully abscond 3. The minute that any flights to Rwanda start, they will get stopped in the courts because this is *patently illegal*
"Send them to Rwanda" is policy written in crayon for political toddlers.
The point of the Rwanda policy is deterrence. People don't get on channel boats because they want to make a life in Rwanda; they do it to make a life in the UK. The minute that regular flights to Rwanda start, boats stop. It's really that simple.
No. There are 40,000+ boat people. Rwanda currently says it has capacity for 1,000. Arriving in the UK remains a better bet than living on much of the planet.
Announcing a recruitment plan for the NHS is all well and good but looks rather strange when you’ve got junior doctors and consultants still planning strike action .
I see no contradiction in it whatsoever, indeed it addresses virtually all the issues on recruitment, training and improvement over the next 15 years
One of the issues put forward by striking NHS workers is recruitment and retention
But that is not the policy, is it? The policy is that if you arrive by small boat you have arrived illegally, have no right to claim UK asylum and are liable for removal to Rwanda with no right to return to the UK. No-one going to Rwanda will have a UK asylum request assessed from there.
For me there are two problems with this.
1 - The lack of safe routes for people to come to the UK in the first place. 2 - If you go to Rwanda you stay there, you do not have your request processed and can come to the UK if succesful.
I agree on both counts.
The plan is underambitious. All UK assylum claims should be made at overseas reception centres. Successful claimants should then be granted assylum in the UK.
Apprentice doctors and nurses, consideration of cutting medical degrees from five to four years (as they already are for graduate entry) and an expansion of physician assistants.
There is the small difficulty of who is going to train this horde to be let loose on the Great British public. Medical training is very intense and often one to one, and requires very careful supervision by skilled practitioners (like yours truly) to be done safely and ethically.
Which is all fine and dandy for me, as I am a skilled trainer with excellent trainee feedback and enjoy what I do to bring on these rookies. I cannot do it while simultaneously going gangbusters on the waiting list. It is one or the other.
To be fair, this is not a short term policy, and presumably the idea is to gradually bring in the change to more hands on training as numbers recruited increase ?
The £10bn saving quoted is over a number of years, so while less significant than the headline suggests, somewhat more realistic.
As you say, it's not simple, but they are at least pointing in the right direction with this ?
Good morning
Listening to Wes Streeting on Sky claiming the NHS proposals are labour's and as such he says labour will support it and give certainty to the NHS for this 15 year plan
Yes, Labour announced it last year as their plan.
The issue is resourcing the plan in terms of trainers, trainees, training infrastructure and time. Which is why Hunt has been delaying it so long and the financial impact falls next parliament.
I have no problem with the principle (though I think the apprentice doctor scheme needs to be restricted to those with an appropriate science degree), just very sceptical as to the quality of training.
A major gripe of current undergraduate and postgraduate trainees is the poor quality of training and supervision. Dilute it further and we may have homeopathic doctors in a different sense.
A major cause of burnout and stress related illness in junior staff is lack of supervision and mentoring. Nothing makes people more likely to quit than feeling dangerously out of their depth.
With current Physician Assosciates we have the opposite problem. All too often they are dangerously over confident, and don't know what they don't know.
Where is the retention Policy from either of the Tory Parties?
I assumed you have not read the policy - it increases the NHS staff by 300,000
The policy is not yet published, just the government's press release. Like a budget the devil is in the detail.
It is incidentally a matter of fact, not a "Labour claim" that Streeting announced it was Labour's plan to double medical school places.
But that is not the policy, is it? The policy is that if you arrive by small boat you have arrived illegally, have no right to claim UK asylum and are liable for removal to Rwanda with no right to return to the UK. No-one going to Rwanda will have a UK asylum request assessed from there.
For me there are two problems with this.
1 - The lack of safe routes for people to come to the UK in the first place. 2 - If you go to Rwanda you stay there, you do not have your request processed and can come to the UK if succesful.
Exactly. If those two points were fixed it would be much tougher for anyone to oppose the policy. But the whole point of the policy is to create a populist dividing line, so neither can be done.
Point 2 should/could be fixed - the reason most people get to stay is I believe NOT because their asylum application is "successful" - it is because they can't be returned to their original country. If the applicants are already in a SAFE* third country (Which Rwanda looks to me like it is generally, unless for some specific reason with the applicant Rwanda specifically isn't) then there's a genuine dividing line between a successful asylum application and simply not being able to return someone to their home country. I'm not sure why the Gov't isn't pursuing that particular nuance.
2. Sunak pledged to stop boats. The pledge wasn’t to talk about stopping boats, or legislating to stop boats, or persuading courts to issue rulings about stopping boats - it was to actually stop boats, so if boats haven’t .
The little shit hedged and only pledged to pass laws to stop the boots/boats. From gov.uk...
Apprentice doctors and nurses, consideration of cutting medical degrees from five to four years (as they already are for graduate entry) and an expansion of physician assistants.
There is the small difficulty of who is going to train this horde to be let loose on the Great British public. Medical training is very intense and often one to one, and requires very careful supervision by skilled practitioners (like yours truly) to be done safely and ethically.
Which is all fine and dandy for me, as I am a skilled trainer with excellent trainee feedback and enjoy what I do to bring on these rookies. I cannot do it while simultaneously going gangbusters on the waiting list. It is one or the other.
To be fair, this is not a short term policy, and presumably the idea is to gradually bring in the change to more hands on training as numbers recruited increase ?
The £10bn saving quoted is over a number of years, so while less significant than the headline suggests, somewhat more realistic.
As you say, it's not simple, but they are at least pointing in the right direction with this ?
Good morning
Listening to Wes Streeting on Sky claiming the NHS proposals are labour's and as such he says labour will support it and give certainty to the NHS for this 15 year plan
Yes, Labour announced it last year as their plan.
The issue is resourcing the plan in terms of trainers, trainees, training infrastructure and time. Which is why Hunt has been delaying it so long and the financial impact falls next parliament.
I have no problem with the principle (though I think the apprentice doctor scheme needs to be restricted to those with an appropriate science degree), just very sceptical as to the quality of training.
A major gripe of current undergraduate and postgraduate trainees is the poor quality of training and supervision. Dilute it further and we may have homeopathic doctors in a different sense.
A major cause of burnout and stress related illness in junior staff is lack of supervision and mentoring. Nothing makes people more likely to quit than feeling dangerously out of their depth.
With current Physician Assosciates we have the opposite problem. All too often they are dangerously over confident, and don't know what they don't know.
Where is the retention Policy from either of the Tory Parties?
I assumed you have not read the policy - it increases the NHS staff by 300,000
The policy is not yet published, just the government's press release. Like a budget the devil is in the detail.
It is incidentally a matter of fact, not a "Labour claim" that Streeting announced it was Labour's plan to double medical school places.
3/ What it boils down to is this: the politicians pretend they have solutions to stem the tide of arrivals, but they are lying. The Tory lies about doing it by getting tough have been exposed as such for years, and continue to be so as their tactics fail. Labour makes noises about dealing with the problem through more effective international co-operation (which won't stop people who want to come here from coming anyway) and through creating safe, legal routes of migration (which is a laudable plan in isolation for providing refuge for some applicants, and thus sparing them the peril of long and hazardous journeys along irregular migration routes, but which still won't stop everyone else who wants to come here from coming anyway.)
Any honest discussion about irregular migration therefore involves beginning with an admission that, once they get as far as setting foot in Britain, a large majority of the boat people will get to stay whether we like it or not, simply because the costs of creating mechanisms that will enable the state to forcibly segregate or remove them all far exceed the costs of letting them stay, and that this is likely to continue to be the case for the foreseeable future. The money being burnt setting up crackpot wheezes like the failed Rwanda deportation scheme would be better spent on fostering integration, raising funding for local authorities so that they're better able to cope with the additional pressures created by resettlement, and above all on contributing toward the construction of vast numbers of homes. As with so many of our other problems as a nation, they would be eased considerably if there were simply a sufficiency of decent accommodation to cope with all the people that are already living here, and the ongoing expansion of the population in the years ahead.
But if we provide them with decent accommodation then that is an additional pull factor which will make the UK more attractive and increase the numbers coming here. The Labour policy of forming an orderly queue sounds quite British but the underlying premise is that those on the boats are the same people or that allowing more in by safe routes will do anything at all to diminish the number coming by boat.
The Rwanda policy is both a moral and practical disgrace and frankly should be abandoned. I do not approve of the courts interfering in public policy, this should be a matter for the ballot box not the court room, but they may be doing the government a favour.
As I have said before the only thing that will work is withdrawing the right to asylum and replacing it with a discretionary grant. As we reach the peak of asylum seekers from Africa as their population explodes I think that this will happen and not just in the UK. But not yet.
I think the right to asylum will have to go - as Matthew Parris said years ago. There are literally billions of people with a proper claim.
The better, impossible, course is for the UN to have a single remit: of having the authority to direct the governance of every member nation so as to remove grounds for fleeing it. It is a disgrace that you can belong to the UN at the same time as giving grounds for your population to flee the government.
BTW, courts did not 'interfere in public policy'. They decided, rightly, that government had broken its own laws in the Rwanda policy. The CA still let them off lightly. I hope the SC will be tougher.
Your second paragraph sounds like a one world dictatorship with unlimited rights to interfere in the domestic affairs of every country. Apart from the right of self determination one only has to think of Afghanistan to realise that such a policy is impractical as well as morally questionable.
On the Court of Appeal I would be surprised if the SC did not reverse the decision. They are much more cautious about ruling policies based on statutes passed by Parliament are "illegal". But that doesn't make the policy right.
Apprentice doctors and nurses, consideration of cutting medical degrees from five to four years (as they already are for graduate entry) and an expansion of physician assistants.
There is the small difficulty of who is going to train this horde to be let loose on the Great British public. Medical training is very intense and often one to one, and requires very careful supervision by skilled practitioners (like yours truly) to be done safely and ethically.
Which is all fine and dandy for me, as I am a skilled trainer with excellent trainee feedback and enjoy what I do to bring on these rookies. I cannot do it while simultaneously going gangbusters on the waiting list. It is one or the other.
To be fair, this is not a short term policy, and presumably the idea is to gradually bring in the change to more hands on training as numbers recruited increase ?
The £10bn saving quoted is over a number of years, so while less significant than the headline suggests, somewhat more realistic.
As you say, it's not simple, but they are at least pointing in the right direction with this ?
Good morning
Listening to Wes Streeting on Sky claiming the NHS proposals are labour's and as such he says labour will support it and give certainty to the NHS for this 15 year plan
Yes, Labour announced it last year as their plan.
The issue is resourcing the plan in terms of trainers, trainees, training infrastructure and time. Which is why Hunt has been delaying it so long and the financial impact falls next parliament.
I have no problem with the principle (though I think the apprentice doctor scheme needs to be restricted to those with an appropriate science degree), just very sceptical as to the quality of training.
A major gripe of current undergraduate and postgraduate trainees is the poor quality of training and supervision. Dilute it further and we may have homeopathic doctors in a different sense.
A major cause of burnout and stress related illness in junior staff is lack of supervision and mentoring. Nothing makes people more likely to quit than feeling dangerously out of their depth.
With current Physician Assosciates we have the opposite problem. All too often they are dangerously over confident, and don't know what they don't know.
Where is the retention Policy from either of the Tory Parties?
I assumed you have not read the policy - it increases the NHS staff by 300,000
The policy is not yet published, just the government's press release. Like a budget the devil is in the detail.
It is incidentally a matter of fact, not a "Labour claim" that Streeting announced it was Labour's plan to double medical school places.
But that is not the policy, is it? The policy is that if you arrive by small boat you have arrived illegally, have no right to claim UK asylum and are liable for removal to Rwanda with no right to return to the UK. No-one going to Rwanda will have a UK asylum request assessed from there.
For me there are two problems with this.
1 - The lack of safe routes for people to come to the UK in the first place. 2 - If you go to Rwanda you stay there, you do not have your request processed and can come to the UK if succesful.
I agree on both counts.
The plan is underambitious. All UK assylum claims should be made at overseas reception centres. Successful claimants should then be granted assylum in the UK.
This is without meaning.
1) It assumes that people arriving with a refugee claim but no prior permission will be sent somewhere. (Back to sea? North Korea? Australia? Peru?)
2) Under this system the UK would be an 'overseas reception centre' for all other countries, while all other countries would be 'overseas reception centre' for the UK.
2. Sunak pledged to stop boats. The pledge wasn’t to talk about stopping boats, or legislating to stop boats, or persuading courts to issue rulings about stopping boats - it was to actually stop boats, so if boats haven’t .
The little shit hedged and only pledged to pass laws to stop the boots/boats. From gov.uk...
How long before the priorities are replaced by one priority, something about "some are more equal than others"?
(The "judge me on these five things in a year" thing isn't new, Frank Luntz tried to get the Major government to do something similar. But to set your own targets and have a fair chance of scoring 0/5 at the end... That's special.)
Apprentice doctors and nurses, consideration of cutting medical degrees from five to four years (as they already are for graduate entry) and an expansion of physician assistants.
There is the small difficulty of who is going to train this horde to be let loose on the Great British public. Medical training is very intense and often one to one, and requires very careful supervision by skilled practitioners (like yours truly) to be done safely and ethically.
Which is all fine and dandy for me, as I am a skilled trainer with excellent trainee feedback and enjoy what I do to bring on these rookies. I cannot do it while simultaneously going gangbusters on the waiting list. It is one or the other.
To be fair, this is not a short term policy, and presumably the idea is to gradually bring in the change to more hands on training as numbers recruited increase ?
The £10bn saving quoted is over a number of years, so while less significant than the headline suggests, somewhat more realistic.
As you say, it's not simple, but they are at least pointing in the right direction with this ?
Good morning
Listening to Wes Streeting on Sky claiming the NHS proposals are labour's and as such he says labour will support it and give certainty to the NHS for this 15 year plan
Yes, Labour announced it last year as their plan.
The issue is resourcing the plan in terms of trainers, trainees, training infrastructure and time. Which is why Hunt has been delaying it so long and the financial impact falls next parliament.
I have no problem with the principle (though I think the apprentice doctor scheme needs to be restricted to those with an appropriate science degree), just very sceptical as to the quality of training.
A major gripe of current undergraduate and postgraduate trainees is the poor quality of training and supervision. Dilute it further and we may have homeopathic doctors in a different sense.
A major cause of burnout and stress related illness in junior staff is lack of supervision and mentoring. Nothing makes people more likely to quit than feeling dangerously out of their depth.
With current Physician Assosciates we have the opposite problem. All too often they are dangerously over confident, and don't know what they don't know.
Where is the retention Policy from either of the Tory Parties?
I assumed you have not read the policy - it increases the NHS staff by 300,000
2. Sunak pledged to stop boats. The pledge wasn’t to talk about stopping boats, or legislating to stop boats, or persuading courts to issue rulings about stopping boats - it was to actually stop boats, so if boats haven’t .
The little shit hedged and only pledged to pass laws to stop the boots/boats. From gov.uk...
Nuance won't cut it. The pledge is STOP THE BOATS. Writ large on signs, backdrops and even the lectern. "Ah but we didn't mean STOP the boats, we only meant pass a law which we have" will not work. Again, voters are not as stupid as the government assumes they are.
2. Sunak pledged to stop boats. The pledge wasn’t to talk about stopping boats, or legislating to stop boats, or persuading courts to issue rulings about stopping boats - it was to actually stop boats, so if boats haven’t .
The little shit hedged and only pledged to pass laws to stop the boots/boats. From gov.uk...
Ooh, making the mistake of trying to add detail as well. Most people only saw this:
But that is not the policy, is it? The policy is that if you arrive by small boat you have arrived illegally, have no right to claim UK asylum and are liable for removal to Rwanda with no right to return to the UK. No-one going to Rwanda will have a UK asylum request assessed from there.
For me there are two problems with this.
1 - The lack of safe routes for people to come to the UK in the first place. 2 - If you go to Rwanda you stay there, you do not have your request processed and can come to the UK if succesful.
Exactly. If those two points were fixed it would be much tougher for anyone to oppose the policy. But the whole point of the policy is to create a populist dividing line, so neither can be done.
Point 2 should/could be fixed - the reason most people get to stay is I believe NOT because their asylum application is "successful" - it is because they can't be returned to their original country. If the applicants are already in a SAFE* third country (Which Rwanda looks to me like it is generally, unless for some specific reason with the applicant Rwanda specifically isn't) then there's a genuine dividing line between a successful asylum application and simply not being able to return someone to their home country. I'm not sure why the Gov't isn't pursuing that particular nuance.
Because most asylum claims made by people arriving in small boats are granted.
But that is not the policy, is it? The policy is that if you arrive by small boat you have arrived illegally, have no right to claim UK asylum and are liable for removal to Rwanda with no right to return to the UK. No-one going to Rwanda will have a UK asylum request assessed from there.
For me there are two problems with this.
1 - The lack of safe routes for people to come to the UK in the first place. 2 - If you go to Rwanda you stay there, you do not have your request processed and can come to the UK if succesful.
I agree on both counts.
The plan is underambitious. All UK assylum claims should be made at overseas reception centres. Successful claimants should then be granted assylum in the UK.
Given that nearly 80% of asylum applications are ultimately successful (a massive increase) this would completely destroy the deterrent effect. There is an endless number of shitholes around the world that people have the right to seek asylum from. If we accept that responsibility, as we do at present, asylum numbers will be high and continue to grow.
Apprentice doctors and nurses, consideration of cutting medical degrees from five to four years (as they already are for graduate entry) and an expansion of physician assistants.
There is the small difficulty of who is going to train this horde to be let loose on the Great British public. Medical training is very intense and often one to one, and requires very careful supervision by skilled practitioners (like yours truly) to be done safely and ethically.
Which is all fine and dandy for me, as I am a skilled trainer with excellent trainee feedback and enjoy what I do to bring on these rookies. I cannot do it while simultaneously going gangbusters on the waiting list. It is one or the other.
To be fair, this is not a short term policy, and presumably the idea is to gradually bring in the change to more hands on training as numbers recruited increase ?
The £10bn saving quoted is over a number of years, so while less significant than the headline suggests, somewhat more realistic.
As you say, it's not simple, but they are at least pointing in the right direction with this ?
Good morning
Listening to Wes Streeting on Sky claiming the NHS proposals are labour's and as such he says labour will support it and give certainty to the NHS for this 15 year plan
Yes, Labour announced it last year as their plan.
The issue is resourcing the plan in terms of trainers, trainees, training infrastructure and time. Which is why Hunt has been delaying it so long and the financial impact falls next parliament.
I have no problem with the principle (though I think the apprentice doctor scheme needs to be restricted to those with an appropriate science degree), just very sceptical as to the quality of training.
A major gripe of current undergraduate and postgraduate trainees is the poor quality of training and supervision. Dilute it further and we may have homeopathic doctors in a different sense.
A major cause of burnout and stress related illness in junior staff is lack of supervision and mentoring. Nothing makes people more likely to quit than feeling dangerously out of their depth.
With current Physician Assosciates we have the opposite problem. All too often they are dangerously over confident, and don't know what they don't know.
Where is the retention Policy from either of the Tory Parties?
I assumed you have not read the policy - it increases the NHS staff by 300,000
The policy is not yet published, just the government's press release. Like a budget the devil is in the detail.
It is incidentally a matter of fact, not a "Labour claim" that Streeting announced it was Labour's plan to double medical school places.
I have no doubt elements of the policy are labour policy, but does it matter only for point scoring
The country should finally breath a sigh of relief that a widely accepted long term plan for the NHS is about to be enacted
But it isn't though. The government have announced this new policy. Great! But it is an announcement, like the "40 New Hospitals" announcement/lie.
This government lies. To people it assumes are stupid. All the time. Unless and until they actually enact this, it is not a plan. They continue to proclaim the 40 new hospitals even though it is now patently absurd. This will be the latest lie.
I am more interested in the politics of the policy than the actual policy. HY can quote as many polls as he likes - this is not a moral nor a workable policy and Tory voters are not as amoral as Braverman and HY would like.
Lutz has told the Tories their only remaining lever is go very negative. The 2023 version of Stop The Boats is a law more inhumane than the 2022 Stop The Boats law. So the 2024 edition will go totally tonto. And as we're already seeing, Tory voters have gone past the tipping point where they are no longer prepared to stomach these policies especially when told "these are your priorities"
We can expect the Tory vote to crater even lower than it is now.
We already have a particular sort of society - the one in which 30% of babies born here have a foreign born mother and where there is annual net migration of +500,000. The number of boat people is very small in comparison, and inevitably includes a high number of driven and motivated people.
Like many people on here I am a parent. I also have nieces and nephews. To put myself onto one of these dinghies with a high chance of drowning would be a hard decision to take. To put a child - mine, one of my brothers etc - on the boat with me and also put them at high risk of drowning? How bad must it be to take that risk? They are motivated alright - motivated to find a place they can rebuild their lives.
This is what othering does. It makes these people not human. That they aren't making the horrendous choice to get on a boat because to not do so is worse. That we don't need to and worse should not have a human response.
Do I need to post that horrendous photo of Alan Kurdi lying dead on that beach in Greece to illustrate that these people are human? The Tories want to demonise these people. To secure the votes of the pro-golliwog people. I'm not surprised that nobody on QT put their hands up in support. Its shameful and immoral. And sadly for the Tories voters actually do have human feelings still.
To be fair you can say that about their initial journey but not coming from France to UK. That is a personal choice.
Apprentice doctors and nurses, consideration of cutting medical degrees from five to four years (as they already are for graduate entry) and an expansion of physician assistants.
There is the small difficulty of who is going to train this horde to be let loose on the Great British public. Medical training is very intense and often one to one, and requires very careful supervision by skilled practitioners (like yours truly) to be done safely and ethically.
Which is all fine and dandy for me, as I am a skilled trainer with excellent trainee feedback and enjoy what I do to bring on these rookies. I cannot do it while simultaneously going gangbusters on the waiting list. It is one or the other.
To be fair, this is not a short term policy, and presumably the idea is to gradually bring in the change to more hands on training as numbers recruited increase ?
The £10bn saving quoted is over a number of years, so while less significant than the headline suggests, somewhat more realistic.
As you say, it's not simple, but they are at least pointing in the right direction with this ?
Good morning
Listening to Wes Streeting on Sky claiming the NHS proposals are labour's and as such he says labour will support it and give certainty to the NHS for this 15 year plan
Yes, Labour announced it last year as their plan.
The issue is resourcing the plan in terms of trainers, trainees, training infrastructure and time. Which is why Hunt has been delaying it so long and the financial impact falls next parliament.
I have no problem with the principle (though I think the apprentice doctor scheme needs to be restricted to those with an appropriate science degree), just very sceptical as to the quality of training.
A major gripe of current undergraduate and postgraduate trainees is the poor quality of training and supervision. Dilute it further and we may have homeopathic doctors in a different sense.
A major cause of burnout and stress related illness in junior staff is lack of supervision and mentoring. Nothing makes people more likely to quit than feeling dangerously out of their depth.
With current Physician Assosciates we have the opposite problem. All too often they are dangerously over confident, and don't know what they don't know.
Where is the retention Policy from either of the Tory Parties?
I assumed you have not read the policy - it increases the NHS staff by 300,000
The policy is not yet published, just the government's press release. Like a budget the devil is in the detail.
It is incidentally a matter of fact, not a "Labour claim" that Streeting announced it was Labour's plan to double medical school places.
I have no doubt elements of the policy are labour policy, but does it matter only for point scoring
The country should finally breath a sigh of relief that a widely accepted long term plan for the NHS is about to be enacted
But it isn't though. The government have announced this new policy. Great! But it is an announcement, like the "40 New Hospitals" announcement/lie.
This government lies. To people it assumes are stupid. All the time. Unless and until they actually enact this, it is not a plan. They continue to proclaim the 40 new hospitals even though it is now patently absurd. This will be the latest lie.
I think there are times, maybe justifiably, when you are overly cynical but on this I expect it to be enacted, not least as it seems to have widespread support in the NHS and in parliament
Lord Goldsmith, environment minister and ally of Boris Johnson, quits accusing govt of abandoning environmental commitments
He says that Rishi Sunak is ‘uninterested’ in the environment, accusing the govt of ‘apathy in the face of the greatest challenge we have faced’
Is this the same Lord Goldsmith named in yesterdays privilege committee report ?
Coincidentally, yes...
Interesting dilemma. If Mr Sunak et al say he only resigned because of the Cttee report, that will upset both the anti-climate change etc folk, and the ERG,
But that is not the policy, is it? The policy is that if you arrive by small boat you have arrived illegally, have no right to claim UK asylum and are liable for removal to Rwanda with no right to return to the UK. No-one going to Rwanda will have a UK asylum request assessed from there.
For me there are two problems with this.
1 - The lack of safe routes for people to come to the UK in the first place. 2 - If you go to Rwanda you stay there, you do not have your request processed and can come to the UK if succesful.
Exactly. If those two points were fixed it would be much tougher for anyone to oppose the policy. But the whole point of the policy is to create a populist dividing line, so neither can be done.
Point 2 should/could be fixed - the reason most people get to stay is I believe NOT because their asylum application is "successful" - it is because they can't be returned to their original country. If the applicants are already in a SAFE* third country (Which Rwanda looks to me like it is generally, unless for some specific reason with the applicant Rwanda specifically isn't) then there's a genuine dividing line between a successful asylum application and simply not being able to return someone to their home country. I'm not sure why the Gov't isn't pursuing that particular nuance.
Because most asylum claims made by people arriving in small boats are granted.
Can you link me to the split between accepted claims and claims not refused because the claimant comes from an unsafe country ?
There's a difference there, Rwanda processing would 'find the split' so to speak.
The point of the Rwanda policy is deterrence. People don't get on channel boats because they want to make a life in Rwanda; they do it to make a life in the UK. The minute that regular flights to Rwanda start, boats stop. It's really that simple.
Except it's clearly not working - and nor will it work when asylum-seekers either don't know about the policy or don't believe it will be implemented.
Deterrence has to be credible to be effective. If people believe it to be a bluff then they will call that bluff, unless they perceive there still to be a substantial (if sub-50%) chance that it's not a bluff, and that the consequences of calling it would be unacceptable - which isn't the case here.
On topic, this is the socialism Nigel Lawson and Margaret Thatcher fought against whilst in opposition.
Rishi Sunak is facing a fresh backlash over stealth taxes after official figures showed that the number of higher-rate taxpayers has risen by 40 per cent in the past three years.
Almost 5.6 million people, equivalent to one in six taxpayers, will pay the higher rate this year after the government froze the threshold at which people start paying it
Carnyx, pensioners should not have to pay tax, they should be allowed to keep all their hard earned spondulas and be able to have a wonderful life after all that hard graft.
Apprentice doctors and nurses, consideration of cutting medical degrees from five to four years (as they already are for graduate entry) and an expansion of physician assistants.
There is the small difficulty of who is going to train this horde to be let loose on the Great British public. Medical training is very intense and often one to one, and requires very careful supervision by skilled practitioners (like yours truly) to be done safely and ethically.
Which is all fine and dandy for me, as I am a skilled trainer with excellent trainee feedback and enjoy what I do to bring on these rookies. I cannot do it while simultaneously going gangbusters on the waiting list. It is one or the other.
To be fair, this is not a short term policy, and presumably the idea is to gradually bring in the change to more hands on training as numbers recruited increase ?
The £10bn saving quoted is over a number of years, so while less significant than the headline suggests, somewhat more realistic.
As you say, it's not simple, but they are at least pointing in the right direction with this ?
Good morning
Listening to Wes Streeting on Sky claiming the NHS proposals are labour's and as such he says labour will support it and give certainty to the NHS for this 15 year plan
Yes, Labour announced it last year as their plan.
The issue is resourcing the plan in terms of trainers, trainees, training infrastructure and time. Which is why Hunt has been delaying it so long and the financial impact falls next parliament.
I have no problem with the principle (though I think the apprentice doctor scheme needs to be restricted to those with an appropriate science degree), just very sceptical as to the quality of training.
A major gripe of current undergraduate and postgraduate trainees is the poor quality of training and supervision. Dilute it further and we may have homeopathic doctors in a different sense.
A major cause of burnout and stress related illness in junior staff is lack of supervision and mentoring. Nothing makes people more likely to quit than feeling dangerously out of their depth.
With current Physician Assosciates we have the opposite problem. All too often they are dangerously over confident, and don't know what they don't know.
Where is the retention Policy from either of the Tory Parties?
I assumed you have not read the policy - it increases the NHS staff by 300,000
The policy is not yet published, just the government's press release. Like a budget the devil is in the detail.
It is incidentally a matter of fact, not a "Labour claim" that Streeting announced it was Labour's plan to double medical school places.
I have no doubt elements of the policy are labour policy, but does it matter only for point scoring
The country should finally breath a sigh of relief that a widely accepted long term plan for the NHS is about to be enacted
But it isn't though. The government have announced this new policy. Great! But it is an announcement, like the "40 New Hospitals" announcement/lie.
This government lies. To people it assumes are stupid. All the time. Unless and until they actually enact this, it is not a plan. They continue to proclaim the 40 new hospitals even though it is now patently absurd. This will be the latest lie.
I think there are times, maybe justifiably, when you are overly cynical but on this I expect it to be enacted, not lest as it seems to have widespread support in the NHS and in parliament
The same was true of the 40 "new" hospitals. Yet that has turned out to be so mendacious that, what with concrete rot, we may end up with a minus number of new hospitals.
3/ What it boils down to is this: the politicians pretend they have solutions to stem the tide of arrivals, but they are lying. The Tory lies about doing it by getting tough have been exposed as such for years, and continue to be so as their tactics fail. Labour makes noises about dealing with the problem through more effective international co-operation (which won't stop people who want to come here from coming anyway) and through creating safe, legal routes of migration (which is a laudable plan in isolation for providing refuge for some applicants, and thus sparing them the peril of long and hazardous journeys along irregular migration routes, but which still won't stop everyone else who wants to come here from coming anyway.)
Any honest discussion about irregular migration therefore involves beginning with an admission that, once they get as far as setting foot in Britain, a large majority of the boat people will get to stay whether we like it or not, simply because the costs of creating mechanisms that will enable the state to forcibly segregate or remove them all far exceed the costs of letting them stay, and that this is likely to continue to be the case for the foreseeable future. The money being burnt setting up crackpot wheezes like the failed Rwanda deportation scheme would be better spent on fostering integration, raising funding for local authorities so that they're better able to cope with the additional pressures created by resettlement, and above all on contributing toward the construction of vast numbers of homes. As with so many of our other problems as a nation, they would be eased considerably if there were simply a sufficiency of decent accommodation to cope with all the people that are already living here, and the ongoing expansion of the population in the years ahead.
But if we provide them with decent accommodation then that is an additional pull factor which will make the UK more attractive and increase the numbers coming here. The Labour policy of forming an orderly queue sounds quite British but the underlying premise is that those on the boats are the same people or that allowing more in by safe routes will do anything at all to diminish the number coming by boat.
The Rwanda policy is both a moral and practical disgrace and frankly should be abandoned. I do not approve of the courts interfering in public policy, this should be a matter for the ballot box not the court room, but they may be doing the government a favour.
As I have said before the only thing that will work is withdrawing the right to asylum and replacing it with a discretionary grant. As we reach the peak of asylum seekers from Africa as their population explodes I think that this will happen and not just in the UK. But not yet.
I think the right to asylum will have to go - as Matthew Parris said years ago. There are literally billions of people with a proper claim.
The better, impossible, course is for the UN to have a single remit: of having the authority to direct the governance of every member nation so as to remove grounds for fleeing it. It is a disgrace that you can belong to the UN at the same time as giving grounds for your population to flee the government.
BTW, courts did not 'interfere in public policy'. They decided, rightly, that government had broken its own laws in the Rwanda policy. The CA still let them off lightly. I hope the SC will be tougher.
Your second paragraph sounds like a one world dictatorship with unlimited rights to interfere in the domestic affairs of every country. Apart from the right of self determination one only has to think of Afghanistan to realise that such a policy is impractical as well as morally questionable.
On the Court of Appeal I would be surprised if the SC did not reverse the decision. They are much more cautious about ruling policies based on statutes passed by Parliament are "illegal". But that doesn't make the policy right.
My guess is that the SC will affirm and strengthen the CA (majority) judgement.
272. In short, the relocation of asylum-seekers to Rwanda under the MEDP would involve their claims being determined under a system which, on the evidence, has up to now had serious deficiencies, and at the date of the hearing in the Divisional Court those deficiencies had not been corrected and were not likely to be in the short term.
2. Sunak pledged to stop boats. The pledge wasn’t to talk about stopping boats, or legislating to stop boats, or persuading courts to issue rulings about stopping boats - it was to actually stop boats, so if boats haven’t .
The little shit hedged and only pledged to pass laws to stop the boots/boats. From gov.uk...
Nuance won't cut it. The pledge is STOP THE BOATS. Writ large on signs, backdrops and even the lectern. "Ah but we didn't mean STOP the boats, we only meant pass a law which we have" will not work. Again, voters are not as stupid as the government assumes they are.
Wrong on your final point. They have been voting in measures for decades to reduce immigration whereas the government has no such intention of doing so.
It's quite touching in a way although what was that definition of insanity...
On topic, this is the socialism Nigel Lawson and Margaret Thatcher fought against whilst in opposition.
Rishi Sunak is facing a fresh backlash over stealth taxes after official figures showed that the number of higher-rate taxpayers has risen by 40 per cent in the past three years.
Almost 5.6 million people, equivalent to one in six taxpayers, will pay the higher rate this year after the government froze the threshold at which people start paying it
Carnyx, pensioners should not have to pay tax, they should be allowed to keep all their hard earned spondulas and be able to have a wonderful life after all that hard graft.
I'll tell you something - I wish the bloody Pension Service issued P60s, ever since I started doing my late father's tax for him. I have real difficulty making sense of the rules applied by HMG to apportioning state pension income to calendar periods.
On topic, this is the socialism Nigel Lawson and Margaret Thatcher fought against whilst in opposition.
Rishi Sunak is facing a fresh backlash over stealth taxes after official figures showed that the number of higher-rate taxpayers has risen by 40 per cent in the past three years.
Almost 5.6 million people, equivalent to one in six taxpayers, will pay the higher rate this year after the government froze the threshold at which people start paying it
Carnyx, pensioners should not have to pay tax, they should be allowed to keep all their hard earned spondulas and be able to have a wonderful life after all that hard graft.
What about the ones who didn't graft hard all their lives?
2. Sunak pledged to stop boats. The pledge wasn’t to talk about stopping boats, or legislating to stop boats, or persuading courts to issue rulings about stopping boats - it was to actually stop boats, so if boats haven’t .
The little shit hedged and only pledged to pass laws to stop the boots/boats. From gov.uk...
Ooh, making the mistake of trying to add detail as well. Most people only saw this:
The only way to meet that pledge seems to be to flood the black market in France with large boats at discounted prices?
Apprentice doctors and nurses, consideration of cutting medical degrees from five to four years (as they already are for graduate entry) and an expansion of physician assistants.
There is the small difficulty of who is going to train this horde to be let loose on the Great British public. Medical training is very intense and often one to one, and requires very careful supervision by skilled practitioners (like yours truly) to be done safely and ethically.
Which is all fine and dandy for me, as I am a skilled trainer with excellent trainee feedback and enjoy what I do to bring on these rookies. I cannot do it while simultaneously going gangbusters on the waiting list. It is one or the other.
To be fair, this is not a short term policy, and presumably the idea is to gradually bring in the change to more hands on training as numbers recruited increase ?
The £10bn saving quoted is over a number of years, so while less significant than the headline suggests, somewhat more realistic.
As you say, it's not simple, but they are at least pointing in the right direction with this ?
Good morning
Listening to Wes Streeting on Sky claiming the NHS proposals are labour's and as such he says labour will support it and give certainty to the NHS for this 15 year plan
Yes, Labour announced it last year as their plan.
The issue is resourcing the plan in terms of trainers, trainees, training infrastructure and time. Which is why Hunt has been delaying it so long and the financial impact falls next parliament.
I have no problem with the principle (though I think the apprentice doctor scheme needs to be restricted to those with an appropriate science degree), just very sceptical as to the quality of training.
A major gripe of current undergraduate and postgraduate trainees is the poor quality of training and supervision. Dilute it further and we may have homeopathic doctors in a different sense.
A major cause of burnout and stress related illness in junior staff is lack of supervision and mentoring. Nothing makes people more likely to quit than feeling dangerously out of their depth.
With current Physician Assosciates we have the opposite problem. All too often they are dangerously over confident, and don't know what they don't know.
Where is the retention Policy from either of the Tory Parties?
I assumed you have not read the policy - it increases the NHS staff by 300,000
The policy is not yet published, just the government's press release. Like a budget the devil is in the detail.
It is incidentally a matter of fact, not a "Labour claim" that Streeting announced it was Labour's plan to double medical school places.
I have no doubt elements of the policy are labour policy, but does it matter only for point scoring
The country should finally breath a sigh of relief that a widely accepted long term plan for the NHS is about to be enacted
But it isn't though. The government have announced this new policy. Great! But it is an announcement, like the "40 New Hospitals" announcement/lie.
This government lies. To people it assumes are stupid. All the time. Unless and until they actually enact this, it is not a plan. They continue to proclaim the 40 new hospitals even though it is now patently absurd. This will be the latest lie.
I think there are times, maybe justifiably, when you are overly cynical but on this I expect it to be enacted, not lest as it seems to have widespread support in the NHS and in parliament
The same was true of the 40 "new" hospitals. Yet that has turned out to be so mendacious that, what with concrete rot, we may end up with a minus number of new hospitals.
The difference is that this is popular across the parties and of course will be legislated by this government and, if Wes Streeting is to be believed, will be continued under labour as he affirmed on Sky this morning
3/ What it boils down to is this: the politicians pretend they have solutions to stem the tide of arrivals, but they are lying. The Tory lies about doing it by getting tough have been exposed as such for years, and continue to be so as their tactics fail. Labour makes noises about dealing with the problem through more effective international co-operation (which won't stop people who want to come here from coming anyway) and through creating safe, legal routes of migration (which is a laudable plan in isolation for providing refuge for some applicants, and thus sparing them the peril of long and hazardous journeys along irregular migration routes, but which still won't stop everyone else who wants to come here from coming anyway.)
Any honest discussion about irregular migration therefore involves beginning with an admission that, once they get as far as setting foot in Britain, a large majority of the boat people will get to stay whether we like it or not, simply because the costs of creating mechanisms that will enable the state to forcibly segregate or remove them all far exceed the costs of letting them stay, and that this is likely to continue to be the case for the foreseeable future. The money being burnt setting up crackpot wheezes like the failed Rwanda deportation scheme would be better spent on fostering integration, raising funding for local authorities so that they're better able to cope with the additional pressures created by resettlement, and above all on contributing toward the construction of vast numbers of homes. As with so many of our other problems as a nation, they would be eased considerably if there were simply a sufficiency of decent accommodation to cope with all the people that are already living here, and the ongoing expansion of the population in the years ahead.
But if we provide them with decent accommodation then that is an additional pull factor which will make the UK more attractive and increase the numbers coming here. The Labour policy of forming an orderly queue sounds quite British but the underlying premise is that those on the boats are the same people or that allowing more in by safe routes will do anything at all to diminish the number coming by boat.
The Rwanda policy is both a moral and practical disgrace and frankly should be abandoned. I do not approve of the courts interfering in public policy, this should be a matter for the ballot box not the court room, but they may be doing the government a favour.
As I have said before the only thing that will work is withdrawing the right to asylum and replacing it with a discretionary grant. As we reach the peak of asylum seekers from Africa as their population explodes I think that this will happen and not just in the UK. But not yet.
I think the right to asylum will have to go - as Matthew Parris said years ago. There are literally billions of people with a proper claim.
The better, impossible, course is for the UN to have a single remit: of having the authority to direct the governance of every member nation so as to remove grounds for fleeing it. It is a disgrace that you can belong to the UN at the same time as giving grounds for your population to flee the government.
BTW, courts did not 'interfere in public policy'. They decided, rightly, that government had broken its own laws in the Rwanda policy. The CA still let them off lightly. I hope the SC will be tougher.
Your second paragraph sounds like a one world dictatorship with unlimited rights to interfere in the domestic affairs of every country. Apart from the right of self determination one only has to think of Afghanistan to realise that such a policy is impractical as well as morally questionable.
On the Court of Appeal I would be surprised if the SC did not reverse the decision. They are much more cautious about ruling policies based on statutes passed by Parliament are "illegal". But that doesn't make the policy right.
My guess is that the SC will affirm and strengthen the CA (majority) judgement.
272. In short, the relocation of asylum-seekers to Rwanda under the MEDP would involve their claims being determined under a system which, on the evidence, has up to now had serious deficiencies, and at the date of the hearing in the Divisional Court those deficiencies had not been corrected and were not likely to be in the short term.
Are the 'serious deficiencies' with Rwanda's system or ours ?
Apprentice doctors and nurses, consideration of cutting medical degrees from five to four years (as they already are for graduate entry) and an expansion of physician assistants.
Sounds interesting - if the plans look workable I'll be the first to praise Sunak for attempting to reform the service.
Listening to Sky this morning there has not been one dissenting voice, indeed it seems to be welcomed across the whole of the NHS and even by labour, who of course are claiming it is their policy
If Rishi has actually achieved a break through on the NHS, and this favourable reporting continues at least it will be Rishi's legacy, and it would be so ironic if a conservative PM introduced wide and long lasting NHS reforms
Note, of course, that it's not his plan, rather at root that of the NHS executive. And the NHS chief executive Amanda Pritchard was, you may recall, health team leader of the Prime Minister's Delivery Unit under Tony Blair.
The devil, as @Foxy note, will be in the funding, or lack of it.
The irony is that what's apparently a consensus policy has taken so long.
Apprentice doctors and nurses, consideration of cutting medical degrees from five to four years (as they already are for graduate entry) and an expansion of physician assistants.
There is the small difficulty of who is going to train this horde to be let loose on the Great British public. Medical training is very intense and often one to one, and requires very careful supervision by skilled practitioners (like yours truly) to be done safely and ethically.
Which is all fine and dandy for me, as I am a skilled trainer with excellent trainee feedback and enjoy what I do to bring on these rookies. I cannot do it while simultaneously going gangbusters on the waiting list. It is one or the other.
To be fair, this is not a short term policy, and presumably the idea is to gradually bring in the change to more hands on training as numbers recruited increase ?
The £10bn saving quoted is over a number of years, so while less significant than the headline suggests, somewhat more realistic.
As you say, it's not simple, but they are at least pointing in the right direction with this ?
Good morning
Listening to Wes Streeting on Sky claiming the NHS proposals are labour's and as such he says labour will support it and give certainty to the NHS for this 15 year plan
Yes, Labour announced it last year as their plan.
The issue is resourcing the plan in terms of trainers, trainees, training infrastructure and time. Which is why Hunt has been delaying it so long and the financial impact falls next parliament.
I have no problem with the principle (though I think the apprentice doctor scheme needs to be restricted to those with an appropriate science degree), just very sceptical as to the quality of training.
A major gripe of current undergraduate and postgraduate trainees is the poor quality of training and supervision. Dilute it further and we may have homeopathic doctors in a different sense.
A major cause of burnout and stress related illness in junior staff is lack of supervision and mentoring. Nothing makes people more likely to quit than feeling dangerously out of their depth.
With current Physician Assosciates we have the opposite problem. All too often they are dangerously over confident, and don't know what they don't know.
Where is the retention Policy from either of the Tory Parties?
I assumed you have not read the policy - it increases the NHS staff by 300,000
The policy is not yet published, just the government's press release. Like a budget the devil is in the detail.
It is incidentally a matter of fact, not a "Labour claim" that Streeting announced it was Labour's plan to double medical school places.
I have no doubt elements of the policy are labour policy, but does it matter only for point scoring
The country should finally breath a sigh of relief that a widely accepted long term plan for the NHS is about to be enacted
But it isn't though. The government have announced this new policy. Great! But it is an announcement, like the "40 New Hospitals" announcement/lie.
This government lies. To people it assumes are stupid. All the time. Unless and until they actually enact this, it is not a plan. They continue to proclaim the 40 new hospitals even though it is now patently absurd. This will be the latest lie.
I think there are times, maybe justifiably, when you are overly cynical but on this I expect it to be enacted, not lest as it seems to have widespread support in the NHS and in parliament
The same was true of the 40 "new" hospitals. Yet that has turned out to be so mendacious that, what with concrete rot, we may end up with a minus number of new hospitals.
The difference is that this is popular across the parties and of course will be legislated by this government and, if Wes Streeting is to be believed, will be continued under labour as he affirmed on Sky this morning
Oh, so Wes Streeting outlining the policy in December is continuing an announcement this morning? And who exactly was against 40 new hospitals (as opposed to Mr Johnson fibbing about what the words 'new hospital' actually meant)?
I am more interested in the politics of the policy than the actual policy. HY can quote as many polls as he likes - this is not a moral nor a workable policy and Tory voters are not as amoral as Braverman and HY would like.
Lutz has told the Tories their only remaining lever is go very negative. The 2023 version of Stop The Boats is a law more inhumane than the 2022 Stop The Boats law. So the 2024 edition will go totally tonto. And as we're already seeing, Tory voters have gone past the tipping point where they are no longer prepared to stomach these policies especially when told "these are your priorities"
We can expect the Tory vote to crater even lower than it is now.
We already have a particular sort of society - the one in which 30% of babies born here have a foreign born mother and where there is annual net migration of +500,000. The number of boat people is very small in comparison, and inevitably includes a high number of driven and motivated people.
Like many people on here I am a parent. I also have nieces and nephews. To put myself onto one of these dinghies with a high chance of drowning would be a hard decision to take. To put a child - mine, one of my brothers etc - on the boat with me and also put them at high risk of drowning? How bad must it be to take that risk? They are motivated alright - motivated to find a place they can rebuild their lives.
This is what othering does. It makes these people not human. That they aren't making the horrendous choice to get on a boat because to not do so is worse. That we don't need to and worse should not have a human response.
Do I need to post that horrendous photo of Alan Kurdi lying dead on that beach in Greece to illustrate that these people are human? The Tories want to demonise these people. To secure the votes of the pro-golliwog people. I'm not surprised that nobody on QT put their hands up in support. Its shameful and immoral. And sadly for the Tories voters actually do have human feelings still.
To be fair you can say that about their initial journey but not coming from France to UK. That is a personal choice.
Is it? They are seeking asylum - France is unlikely to have been the first safe country they got to either. They do not have to settle for whichever beach they first land on, international law is very clear about that. Perhaps the UK is a better option because thy have friends or family here. Because they speak English. Perhaps because they think we are a better country than the ones they passed through.
Lets all agree on reality. They are not claiming asylum here for money, as they get none. Sent to live in houses that nobody else want to in what usually are communities resembling a demilitarised zone, given a small value of non-cash vouchers to exchange for (not remotely enough) food and basics like clothes.
The right wing hate media suggests they live it large on our dollah. The opposite is true.
Apprentice doctors and nurses, consideration of cutting medical degrees from five to four years (as they already are for graduate entry) and an expansion of physician assistants.
Sounds interesting - if the plans look workable I'll be the first to praise Sunak for attempting to reform the service.
Listening to Sky this morning there has not been one dissenting voice, indeed it seems to be welcomed across the whole of the NHS and even by labour, who of course are claiming it is their policy
If Rishi has actually achieved a break through on the NHS, and this favourable reporting continues at least it will be Rishi's legacy, and it would be so ironic if a conservative PM introduced wide and long lasting NHS reforms
Note, of course, that it's not his plan, rather at root that of the NHS executive. And the NHS chief executive Amanda Pritchard was, you may recall, health team leader of the Prime Minister's Delivery Unit under Tony Blair.
The devil, as @Foxy note, will be in the funding, or lack of it.
The irony is that what's apparently a consensus policy has taken so long.
I didn't know that but it looks more certain than ever this will be the policy going forward, and I agree entirely with your last sentence
On topic, this is the socialism Nigel Lawson and Margaret Thatcher fought against whilst in opposition.
Rishi Sunak is facing a fresh backlash over stealth taxes after official figures showed that the number of higher-rate taxpayers has risen by 40 per cent in the past three years.
Almost 5.6 million people, equivalent to one in six taxpayers, will pay the higher rate this year after the government froze the threshold at which people start paying it
Carnyx, pensioners should not have to pay tax, they should be allowed to keep all their hard earned spondulas and be able to have a wonderful life after all that hard graft.
What about the ones who didn't graft hard all their lives?
Apprentice doctors and nurses, consideration of cutting medical degrees from five to four years (as they already are for graduate entry) and an expansion of physician assistants.
There is the small difficulty of who is going to train this horde to be let loose on the Great British public. Medical training is very intense and often one to one, and requires very careful supervision by skilled practitioners (like yours truly) to be done safely and ethically.
Which is all fine and dandy for me, as I am a skilled trainer with excellent trainee feedback and enjoy what I do to bring on these rookies. I cannot do it while simultaneously going gangbusters on the waiting list. It is one or the other.
To be fair, this is not a short term policy, and presumably the idea is to gradually bring in the change to more hands on training as numbers recruited increase ?
The £10bn saving quoted is over a number of years, so while less significant than the headline suggests, somewhat more realistic.
As you say, it's not simple, but they are at least pointing in the right direction with this ?
Good morning
Listening to Wes Streeting on Sky claiming the NHS proposals are labour's and as such he says labour will support it and give certainty to the NHS for this 15 year plan
Yes, Labour announced it last year as their plan.
The issue is resourcing the plan in terms of trainers, trainees, training infrastructure and time. Which is why Hunt has been delaying it so long and the financial impact falls next parliament.
I have no problem with the principle (though I think the apprentice doctor scheme needs to be restricted to those with an appropriate science degree), just very sceptical as to the quality of training.
A major gripe of current undergraduate and postgraduate trainees is the poor quality of training and supervision. Dilute it further and we may have homeopathic doctors in a different sense.
A major cause of burnout and stress related illness in junior staff is lack of supervision and mentoring. Nothing makes people more likely to quit than feeling dangerously out of their depth.
With current Physician Assosciates we have the opposite problem. All too often they are dangerously over confident, and don't know what they don't know.
Where is the retention Policy from either of the Tory Parties?
I assumed you have not read the policy - it increases the NHS staff by 300,000
The policy is not yet published, just the government's press release. Like a budget the devil is in the detail.
It is incidentally a matter of fact, not a "Labour claim" that Streeting announced it was Labour's plan to double medical school places.
I have no doubt elements of the policy are labour policy, but does it matter only for point scoring
The country should finally breath a sigh of relief that a widely accepted long term plan for the NHS is about to be enacted
But it isn't though. The government have announced this new policy. Great! But it is an announcement, like the "40 New Hospitals" announcement/lie.
This government lies. To people it assumes are stupid. All the time. Unless and until they actually enact this, it is not a plan. They continue to proclaim the 40 new hospitals even though it is now patently absurd. This will be the latest lie.
I think there are times, maybe justifiably, when you are overly cynical but on this I expect it to be enacted, not least as it seems to have widespread support in the NHS and in parliament
I don't trust the government to tell the truth on the NHS or anything else because they are proven and repeated liars. Sunak is still claiming 40 New Hospitals. It Is A Lie.
Why would this be any different? Because they care about the NHS? Since when? And if they do care, why are they happy to let the strikes carry on indefinitely?
Zac Goldsmith has resigned his ministerial role to spend more time with his money.
No, he's genuinely primarily in politics for environmental issues and has been increasingly critical of the Government's approach (or non-approach). I've been surprised how long he's stayed on as a Minister. The fact that he's rich isn't relevant here.
On topic, this is the socialism Nigel Lawson and Margaret Thatcher fought against whilst in opposition.
Rishi Sunak is facing a fresh backlash over stealth taxes after official figures showed that the number of higher-rate taxpayers has risen by 40 per cent in the past three years.
Almost 5.6 million people, equivalent to one in six taxpayers, will pay the higher rate this year after the government froze the threshold at which people start paying it
Carnyx, pensioners should not have to pay tax, they should be allowed to keep all their hard earned spondulas and be able to have a wonderful life after all that hard graft.
What about the ones who didn't graft hard all their lives?
Let them eat cake.
Also they will be on the minimum pension , though with all the benefits added to these I wonder why they do not pay tax. Given rent and council tax paid , pension , additional cash etc etc they are well over tax allowance for sure but don't have to fill in tax forms, pay tax etc.
Zac Goldsmith has resigned his ministerial role to spend more time with his money.
No, he's genuinely primarily in politics for environmental issues and has been increasingly critical of the Government's approach (or non-approach). I've been surprised how long he's stayed on as a Minister. The fact that he's rich isn't relevant here.
He can afford to be an environmentalist. Many people are not so fortunate.
Apprentice doctors and nurses, consideration of cutting medical degrees from five to four years (as they already are for graduate entry) and an expansion of physician assistants.
There is the small difficulty of who is going to train this horde to be let loose on the Great British public. Medical training is very intense and often one to one, and requires very careful supervision by skilled practitioners (like yours truly) to be done safely and ethically.
Which is all fine and dandy for me, as I am a skilled trainer with excellent trainee feedback and enjoy what I do to bring on these rookies. I cannot do it while simultaneously going gangbusters on the waiting list. It is one or the other.
To be fair, this is not a short term policy, and presumably the idea is to gradually bring in the change to more hands on training as numbers recruited increase ?
The £10bn saving quoted is over a number of years, so while less significant than the headline suggests, somewhat more realistic.
As you say, it's not simple, but they are at least pointing in the right direction with this ?
Good morning
Listening to Wes Streeting on Sky claiming the NHS proposals are labour's and as such he says labour will support it and give certainty to the NHS for this 15 year plan
Yes, Labour announced it last year as their plan.
The issue is resourcing the plan in terms of trainers, trainees, training infrastructure and time. Which is why Hunt has been delaying it so long and the financial impact falls next parliament.
I have no problem with the principle (though I think the apprentice doctor scheme needs to be restricted to those with an appropriate science degree), just very sceptical as to the quality of training.
A major gripe of current undergraduate and postgraduate trainees is the poor quality of training and supervision. Dilute it further and we may have homeopathic doctors in a different sense.
A major cause of burnout and stress related illness in junior staff is lack of supervision and mentoring. Nothing makes people more likely to quit than feeling dangerously out of their depth.
With current Physician Assosciates we have the opposite problem. All too often they are dangerously over confident, and don't know what they don't know.
Where is the retention Policy from either of the Tory Parties?
I assumed you have not read the policy - it increases the NHS staff by 300,000
The policy is not yet published, just the government's press release. Like a budget the devil is in the detail.
It is incidentally a matter of fact, not a "Labour claim" that Streeting announced it was Labour's plan to double medical school places.
I have no doubt elements of the policy are labour policy, but does it matter only for point scoring
The country should finally breath a sigh of relief that a widely accepted long term plan for the NHS is about to be enacted
But it isn't though. The government have announced this new policy. Great! But it is an announcement, like the "40 New Hospitals" announcement/lie.
This government lies. To people it assumes are stupid. All the time. Unless and until they actually enact this, it is not a plan. They continue to proclaim the 40 new hospitals even though it is now patently absurd. This will be the latest lie.
I think there are times, maybe justifiably, when you are overly cynical but on this I expect it to be enacted, not least as it seems to have widespread support in the NHS and in parliament
I don't trust the government to tell the truth on the NHS or anything else because they are proven and repeated liars. Sunak is still claiming 40 New Hospitals. It Is A Lie.
Why would this be any different? Because they care about the NHS? Since when? And if they do care, why are they happy to let the strikes carry on indefinitely?
The strikes are a separate issue to a 15 year plan put forward by the NHS, adopted by the government and apparently labour
It won’t be lost on anyone that this comes just 24 hours after he was criticised for undermining privileges committee on Boris Johnson - who gave him peerage after he lost his seat.
Zac Goldsmith has resigned his ministerial role to spend more time with his money.
No, he's genuinely primarily in politics for environmental issues and has been increasingly critical of the Government's approach (or non-approach). I've been surprised how long he's stayed on as a Minister. The fact that he's rich isn't relevant here.
He can afford to be an environmentalist. Many people are not so fortunate.
Indeed, ask those who can’t afford to replace their car in outer London.
I am more interested in the politics of the policy than the actual policy. HY can quote as many polls as he likes - this is not a moral nor a workable policy and Tory voters are not as amoral as Braverman and HY would like.
Lutz has told the Tories their only remaining lever is go very negative. The 2023 version of Stop The Boats is a law more inhumane than the 2022 Stop The Boats law. So the 2024 edition will go totally tonto. And as we're already seeing, Tory voters have gone past the tipping point where they are no longer prepared to stomach these policies especially when told "these are your priorities"
We can expect the Tory vote to crater even lower than it is now.
We already have a particular sort of society - the one in which 30% of babies born here have a foreign born mother and where there is annual net migration of +500,000. The number of boat people is very small in comparison, and inevitably includes a high number of driven and motivated people.
Like many people on here I am a parent. I also have nieces and nephews. To put myself onto one of these dinghies with a high chance of drowning would be a hard decision to take. To put a child - mine, one of my brothers etc - on the boat with me and also put them at high risk of drowning? How bad must it be to take that risk? They are motivated alright - motivated to find a place they can rebuild their lives.
This is what othering does. It makes these people not human. That they aren't making the horrendous choice to get on a boat because to not do so is worse. That we don't need to and worse should not have a human response.
Do I need to post that horrendous photo of Alan Kurdi lying dead on that beach in Greece to illustrate that these people are human? The Tories want to demonise these people. To secure the votes of the pro-golliwog people. I'm not surprised that nobody on QT put their hands up in support. Its shameful and immoral. And sadly for the Tories voters actually do have human feelings still.
To be fair you can say that about their initial journey but not coming from France to UK. That is a personal choice.
Is it? They are seeking asylum - France is unlikely to have been the first safe country they got to either. They do not have to settle for whichever beach they first land on, international law is very clear about that. Perhaps the UK is a better option because thy have friends or family here. Because they speak English. Perhaps because they think we are a better country than the ones they passed through.
Lets all agree on reality. They are not claiming asylum here for money, as they get none. Sent to live in houses that nobody else want to in what usually are communities resembling a demilitarised zone, given a small value of non-cash vouchers to exchange for (not remotely enough) food and basics like clothes.
The right wing hate media suggests they live it large on our dollah. The opposite is true.
Well they get a roof over their heads, 3 meals a day and 40 quid pocket money. Once through eth system worst case will be free house , benefits etc or they can work so much better than what they left or they really are chancers. I still think it is rich to say they are asylum seekers by the time they get here, they are picking and choosing where they want to live and so economic migrants in reality. I understand why some/many want to leave their home countries but they are far from all being asylum seekers.
3/ What it boils down to is this: the politicians pretend they have solutions to stem the tide of arrivals, but they are lying. The Tory lies about doing it by getting tough have been exposed as such for years, and continue to be so as their tactics fail. Labour makes noises about dealing with the problem through more effective international co-operation (which won't stop people who want to come here from coming anyway) and through creating safe, legal routes of migration (which is a laudable plan in isolation for providing refuge for some applicants, and thus sparing them the peril of long and hazardous journeys along irregular migration routes, but which still won't stop everyone else who wants to come here from coming anyway.)
Any honest discussion about irregular migration therefore involves beginning with an admission that, once they get as far as setting foot in Britain, a large majority of the boat people will get to stay whether we like it or not, simply because the costs of creating mechanisms that will enable the state to forcibly segregate or remove them all far exceed the costs of letting them stay, and that this is likely to continue to be the case for the foreseeable future. The money being burnt setting up crackpot wheezes like the failed Rwanda deportation scheme would be better spent on fostering integration, raising funding for local authorities so that they're better able to cope with the additional pressures created by resettlement, and above all on contributing toward the construction of vast numbers of homes. As with so many of our other problems as a nation, they would be eased considerably if there were simply a sufficiency of decent accommodation to cope with all the people that are already living here, and the ongoing expansion of the population in the years ahead.
But if we provide them with decent accommodation then that is an additional pull factor which will make the UK more attractive and increase the numbers coming here. The Labour policy of forming an orderly queue sounds quite British but the underlying premise is that those on the boats are the same people or that allowing more in by safe routes will do anything at all to diminish the number coming by boat.
The Rwanda policy is both a moral and practical disgrace and frankly should be abandoned. I do not approve of the courts interfering in public policy, this should be a matter for the ballot box not the court room, but they may be doing the government a favour.
As I have said before the only thing that will work is withdrawing the right to asylum and replacing it with a discretionary grant. As we reach the peak of asylum seekers from Africa as their population explodes I think that this will happen and not just in the UK. But not yet.
I think the right to asylum will have to go - as Matthew Parris said years ago. There are literally billions of people with a proper claim.
The better, impossible, course is for the UN to have a single remit: of having the authority to direct the governance of every member nation so as to remove grounds for fleeing it. It is a disgrace that you can belong to the UN at the same time as giving grounds for your population to flee the government.
BTW, courts did not 'interfere in public policy'. They decided, rightly, that government had broken its own laws in the Rwanda policy. The CA still let them off lightly. I hope the SC will be tougher.
Your second paragraph sounds like a one world dictatorship with unlimited rights to interfere in the domestic affairs of every country. Apart from the right of self determination one only has to think of Afghanistan to realise that such a policy is impractical as well as morally questionable.
On the Court of Appeal I would be surprised if the SC did not reverse the decision. They are much more cautious about ruling policies based on statutes passed by Parliament are "illegal". But that doesn't make the policy right.
My guess is that the SC will affirm and strengthen the CA (majority) judgement.
272. In short, the relocation of asylum-seekers to Rwanda under the MEDP would involve their claims being determined under a system which, on the evidence, has up to now had serious deficiencies, and at the date of the hearing in the Divisional Court those deficiencies had not been corrected and were not likely to be in the short term.
There are enormous deficiencies in the Asylum scheme for those in the UK. It takes unconscionably long to reach decisions and the quality of the decision making is shockingly poor; it takes even longer to review those poor decisions and people spend years in limbo, with crushing uncertainty as well as being denied rights including the right to work. Is the whole scheme illegal or is the duty of the courts to determine rights as best it can within an underfunded system?
Apprentice doctors and nurses, consideration of cutting medical degrees from five to four years (as they already are for graduate entry) and an expansion of physician assistants.
There is the small difficulty of who is going to train this horde to be let loose on the Great British public. Medical training is very intense and often one to one, and requires very careful supervision by skilled practitioners (like yours truly) to be done safely and ethically.
Which is all fine and dandy for me, as I am a skilled trainer with excellent trainee feedback and enjoy what I do to bring on these rookies. I cannot do it while simultaneously going gangbusters on the waiting list. It is one or the other.
To be fair, this is not a short term policy, and presumably the idea is to gradually bring in the change to more hands on training as numbers recruited increase ?
The £10bn saving quoted is over a number of years, so while less significant than the headline suggests, somewhat more realistic.
As you say, it's not simple, but they are at least pointing in the right direction with this ?
Good morning
Listening to Wes Streeting on Sky claiming the NHS proposals are labour's and as such he says labour will support it and give certainty to the NHS for this 15 year plan
Yes, Labour announced it last year as their plan.
The issue is resourcing the plan in terms of trainers, trainees, training infrastructure and time. Which is why Hunt has been delaying it so long and the financial impact falls next parliament.
I have no problem with the principle (though I think the apprentice doctor scheme needs to be restricted to those with an appropriate science degree), just very sceptical as to the quality of training.
A major gripe of current undergraduate and postgraduate trainees is the poor quality of training and supervision. Dilute it further and we may have homeopathic doctors in a different sense.
A major cause of burnout and stress related illness in junior staff is lack of supervision and mentoring. Nothing makes people more likely to quit than feeling dangerously out of their depth.
With current Physician Assosciates we have the opposite problem. All too often they are dangerously over confident, and don't know what they don't know.
Where is the retention Policy from either of the Tory Parties?
I assumed you have not read the policy - it increases the NHS staff by 300,000
The policy is not yet published, just the government's press release. Like a budget the devil is in the detail.
It is incidentally a matter of fact, not a "Labour claim" that Streeting announced it was Labour's plan to double medical school places.
I have no doubt elements of the policy are labour policy, but does it matter only for point scoring
The country should finally breath a sigh of relief that a widely accepted long term plan for the NHS is about to be enacted
But it isn't though. The government have announced this new policy. Great! But it is an announcement, like the "40 New Hospitals" announcement/lie.
This government lies. To people it assumes are stupid. All the time. Unless and until they actually enact this, it is not a plan. They continue to proclaim the 40 new hospitals even though it is now patently absurd. This will be the latest lie.
I think there are times, maybe justifiably, when you are overly cynical but on this I expect it to be enacted, not least as it seems to have widespread support in the NHS and in parliament
I don't trust the government to tell the truth on the NHS or anything else because they are proven and repeated liars. Sunak is still claiming 40 New Hospitals. It Is A Lie.
Why would this be any different? Because they care about the NHS? Since when? And if they do care, why are they happy to let the strikes carry on indefinitely?
The strikes are a separate issue to a 15 year plan put forward by the NHS, adopted by the government and apparently labour
All I can say is that you are a better person than I, always generously prepared to give people the benefit of the doubt. Even when they are egregious liars.
Zac Goldsmith has resigned his ministerial role to spend more time with his money.
No, he's genuinely primarily in politics for environmental issues and has been increasingly critical of the Government's approach (or non-approach). I've been surprised how long he's stayed on as a Minister. The fact that he's rich isn't relevant here.
No, but the fact that he was criticised by the Privileges Committee earlier this week is.
If he really wanted to resign over the government's environment policy, then he'd have done so at a time when it didn't look so obviously like a cover for something else.
If his stated reasons are his prime concern, then the timing can only be because he thought he was going to be sacked anyway (which may well be right - Sunak will probably have time for one reshuffle before the election, and the obvious time is this summer).
The point of the Rwanda policy is deterrence. People don't get on channel boats because they want to make a life in Rwanda; they do it to make a life in the UK. The minute that regular flights to Rwanda start, boats stop. It's really that simple.
Except it's clearly not working - and nor will it work when asylum-seekers either don't know about the policy or don't believe it will be implemented.
Deterrence has to be credible to be effective. If people believe it to be a bluff then they will call that bluff, unless they perceive there still to be a substantial (if sub-50%) chance that it's not a bluff, and that the consequences of calling it would be unacceptable - which isn't the case here.
Of course it isn't working - at the moment nobody has been sent to Rwanda. If they do, it will. Even the announcement of the policy had the effect of radically driving down the price of a boat crossing. Obviously that's not a brilliant effect (though I am glad traffickers' profits were hit), but it proves that these policies have a fast and marked impact on peoples' decisions.
Zac Goldsmith has resigned his ministerial role to spend more time with his money.
Ah, a remider of that golden age when the Tories put up semi serious candidates for London mayor. I say semi but Goldsmith was barely tumescent, still better than now though.
Zac Goldsmith has resigned his ministerial role to spend more time with his money.
Ah, a remider of that golden age when the Tories put up semi serious candidates for London mayor. I say semi but Goldsmith was barely tumescent, still better than now though.
Semi serious. What short memories people have. His campaign was deeply unpleasant and was alleged to be racist and using dog whistles on more than one occasion. It attracted criticism across the political divide.
Khan may be a waste of space but if I had been in London and had a vote I would have voted for him over the Goldsmith campaign without a second thought.
3/ What it boils down to is this: the politicians pretend they have solutions to stem the tide of arrivals, but they are lying. The Tory lies about doing it by getting tough have been exposed as such for years, and continue to be so as their tactics fail. Labour makes noises about dealing with the problem through more effective international co-operation (which won't stop people who want to come here from coming anyway) and through creating safe, legal routes of migration (which is a laudable plan in isolation for providing refuge for some applicants, and thus sparing them the peril of long and hazardous journeys along irregular migration routes, but which still won't stop everyone else who wants to come here from coming anyway.)
Any honest discussion about irregular migration therefore involves beginning with an admission that, once they get as far as setting foot in Britain, a large majority of the boat people will get to stay whether we like it or not, simply because the costs of creating mechanisms that will enable the state to forcibly segregate or remove them all far exceed the costs of letting them stay, and that this is likely to continue to be the case for the foreseeable future. The money being burnt setting up crackpot wheezes like the failed Rwanda deportation scheme would be better spent on fostering integration, raising funding for local authorities so that they're better able to cope with the additional pressures created by resettlement, and above all on contributing toward the construction of vast numbers of homes. As with so many of our other problems as a nation, they would be eased considerably if there were simply a sufficiency of decent accommodation to cope with all the people that are already living here, and the ongoing expansion of the population in the years ahead.
But if we provide them with decent accommodation then that is an additional pull factor which will make the UK more attractive and increase the numbers coming here. The Labour policy of forming an orderly queue sounds quite British but the underlying premise is that those on the boats are the same people or that allowing more in by safe routes will do anything at all to diminish the number coming by boat.
The Rwanda policy is both a moral and practical disgrace and frankly should be abandoned. I do not approve of the courts interfering in public policy, this should be a matter for the ballot box not the court room, but they may be doing the government a favour.
As I have said before the only thing that will work is withdrawing the right to asylum and replacing it with a discretionary grant. As we reach the peak of asylum seekers from Africa as their population explodes I think that this will happen and not just in the UK. But not yet.
I think the right to asylum will have to go - as Matthew Parris said years ago. There are literally billions of people with a proper claim.
The better, impossible, course is for the UN to have a single remit: of having the authority to direct the governance of every member nation so as to remove grounds for fleeing it. It is a disgrace that you can belong to the UN at the same time as giving grounds for your population to flee the government.
BTW, courts did not 'interfere in public policy'. They decided, rightly, that government had broken its own laws in the Rwanda policy. The CA still let them off lightly. I hope the SC will be tougher.
Your second paragraph sounds like a one world dictatorship with unlimited rights to interfere in the domestic affairs of every country. Apart from the right of self determination one only has to think of Afghanistan to realise that such a policy is impractical as well as morally questionable.
On the Court of Appeal I would be surprised if the SC did not reverse the decision. They are much more cautious about ruling policies based on statutes passed by Parliament are "illegal". But that doesn't make the policy right.
My guess is that the SC will affirm and strengthen the CA (majority) judgement.
272. In short, the relocation of asylum-seekers to Rwanda under the MEDP would involve their claims being determined under a system which, on the evidence, has up to now had serious deficiencies, and at the date of the hearing in the Divisional Court those deficiencies had not been corrected and were not likely to be in the short term.
There are enormous deficiencies in the Asylum scheme for those in the UK. It takes unconscionably long to reach decisions and the quality of the decision making is shockingly poor; it takes even longer to review those poor decisions and people spend years in limbo, with crushing uncertainty as well as being denied rights including the right to work. Is the whole scheme illegal or is the duty of the courts to determine rights as best it can within an underfunded system?
Good questions to which I don't know the answer. The courts have the responsibility of answering the question they are asked (literally in the case of the SC) and resolving the dispute before them.
Increasingly in actions involving government the issue is whether policy/law X is in conflict with duty/treaty/law Y.
It would good if the court could issue an order requiring the government to behave in a civilised way, or require ministers to answer the question, but they can't.
Apprentice doctors and nurses, consideration of cutting medical degrees from five to four years (as they already are for graduate entry) and an expansion of physician assistants.
Sounds interesting - if the plans look workable I'll be the first to praise Sunak for attempting to reform the service.
As others have said, it looks very similar to Labour's policy, so whatever happens at the election, we might find out if it works.
Apprentice doctors and nurses, consideration of cutting medical degrees from five to four years (as they already are for graduate entry) and an expansion of physician assistants.
There is the small difficulty of who is going to train this horde to be let loose on the Great British public. Medical training is very intense and often one to one, and requires very careful supervision by skilled practitioners (like yours truly) to be done safely and ethically.
Which is all fine and dandy for me, as I am a skilled trainer with excellent trainee feedback and enjoy what I do to bring on these rookies. I cannot do it while simultaneously going gangbusters on the waiting list. It is one or the other.
To be fair, this is not a short term policy, and presumably the idea is to gradually bring in the change to more hands on training as numbers recruited increase ?
The £10bn saving quoted is over a number of years, so while less significant than the headline suggests, somewhat more realistic.
As you say, it's not simple, but they are at least pointing in the right direction with this ?
Good morning
Listening to Wes Streeting on Sky claiming the NHS proposals are labour's and as such he says labour will support it and give certainty to the NHS for this 15 year plan
Yes, Labour announced it last year as their plan.
The issue is resourcing the plan in terms of trainers, trainees, training infrastructure and time. Which is why Hunt has been delaying it so long and the financial impact falls next parliament.
I have no problem with the principle (though I think the apprentice doctor scheme needs to be restricted to those with an appropriate science degree), just very sceptical as to the quality of training.
A major gripe of current undergraduate and postgraduate trainees is the poor quality of training and supervision. Dilute it further and we may have homeopathic doctors in a different sense.
A major cause of burnout and stress related illness in junior staff is lack of supervision and mentoring. Nothing makes people more likely to quit than feeling dangerously out of their depth.
With current Physician Assosciates we have the opposite problem. All too often they are dangerously over confident, and don't know what they don't know.
Where is the retention Policy from either of the Tory Parties?
I assumed you have not read the policy - it increases the NHS staff by 300,000
The policy is not yet published, just the government's press release. Like a budget the devil is in the detail.
It is incidentally a matter of fact, not a "Labour claim" that Streeting announced it was Labour's plan to double medical school places.
I have no doubt elements of the policy are labour policy, but does it matter only for point scoring
The country should finally breath a sigh of relief that a widely accepted long term plan for the NHS is about to be enacted
But it isn't though. The government have announced this new policy. Great! But it is an announcement, like the "40 New Hospitals" announcement/lie.
This government lies. To people it assumes are stupid. All the time. Unless and until they actually enact this, it is not a plan. They continue to proclaim the 40 new hospitals even though it is now patently absurd. This will be the latest lie.
I think there are times, maybe justifiably, when you are overly cynical but on this I expect it to be enacted, not least as it seems to have widespread support in the NHS and in parliament
I don't trust the government to tell the truth on the NHS or anything else because they are proven and repeated liars. Sunak is still claiming 40 New Hospitals. It Is A Lie.
Why would this be any different? Because they care about the NHS? Since when? And if they do care, why are they happy to let the strikes carry on indefinitely?
The new hospitals policy is pretty nuanced. In some cases they are indeed new hospitals…
3/ What it boils down to is this: the politicians pretend they have solutions to stem the tide of arrivals, but they are lying. The Tory lies about doing it by getting tough have been exposed as such for years, and continue to be so as their tactics fail. Labour makes noises about dealing with the problem through more effective international co-operation (which won't stop people who want to come here from coming anyway) and through creating safe, legal routes of migration (which is a laudable plan in isolation for providing refuge for some applicants, and thus sparing them the peril of long and hazardous journeys along irregular migration routes, but which still won't stop everyone else who wants to come here from coming anyway.)
Any honest discussion about irregular migration therefore involves beginning with an admission that, once they get as far as setting foot in Britain, a large majority of the boat people will get to stay whether we like it or not, simply because the costs of creating mechanisms that will enable the state to forcibly segregate or remove them all far exceed the costs of letting them stay, and that this is likely to continue to be the case for the foreseeable future. The money being burnt setting up crackpot wheezes like the failed Rwanda deportation scheme would be better spent on fostering integration, raising funding for local authorities so that they're better able to cope with the additional pressures created by resettlement, and above all on contributing toward the construction of vast numbers of homes. As with so many of our other problems as a nation, they would be eased considerably if there were simply a sufficiency of decent accommodation to cope with all the people that are already living here, and the ongoing expansion of the population in the years ahead.
But if we provide them with decent accommodation then that is an additional pull factor which will make the UK more attractive and increase the numbers coming here. The Labour policy of forming an orderly queue sounds quite British but the underlying premise is that those on the boats are the same people or that allowing more in by safe routes will do anything at all to diminish the number coming by boat.
The Rwanda policy is both a moral and practical disgrace and frankly should be abandoned. I do not approve of the courts interfering in public policy, this should be a matter for the ballot box not the court room, but they may be doing the government a favour.
As I have said before the only thing that will work is withdrawing the right to asylum and replacing it with a discretionary grant. As we reach the peak of asylum seekers from Africa as their population explodes I think that this will happen and not just in the UK. But not yet.
I think the right to asylum will have to go - as Matthew Parris said years ago. There are literally billions of people with a proper claim.
The better, impossible, course is for the UN to have a single remit: of having the authority to direct the governance of every member nation so as to remove grounds for fleeing it. It is a disgrace that you can belong to the UN at the same time as giving grounds for your population to flee the government.
BTW, courts did not 'interfere in public policy'. They decided, rightly, that government had broken its own laws in the Rwanda policy. The CA still let them off lightly. I hope the SC will be tougher.
Your second paragraph sounds like a one world dictatorship with unlimited rights to interfere in the domestic affairs of every country. Apart from the right of self determination one only has to think of Afghanistan to realise that such a policy is impractical as well as morally questionable.
On the Court of Appeal I would be surprised if the SC did not reverse the decision. They are much more cautious about ruling policies based on statutes passed by Parliament are "illegal". But that doesn't make the policy right.
My guess is that the SC will affirm and strengthen the CA (majority) judgement.
272. In short, the relocation of asylum-seekers to Rwanda under the MEDP would involve their claims being determined under a system which, on the evidence, has up to now had serious deficiencies, and at the date of the hearing in the Divisional Court those deficiencies had not been corrected and were not likely to be in the short term.
There are enormous deficiencies in the Asylum scheme for those in the UK. It takes unconscionably long to reach decisions and the quality of the decision making is shockingly poor; it takes even longer to review those poor decisions and people spend years in limbo, with crushing uncertainty as well as being denied rights including the right to work. Is the whole scheme illegal or is the duty of the courts to determine rights as best it can within an underfunded system?
Good questions to which I don't know the answer. The courts have the responsibility of answering the question they are asked (literally in the case of the SC) and resolving the dispute before them.
Increasingly in actions involving government the issue is whether policy/law X is in conflict with duty/treaty/law Y.
It would good if the court could issue an order requiring the government to behave in a civilised way, or require ministers to answer the question, but they can't.
The SNP says it’s on course to file accounts on time - but they won’t be “unqualified” accounts, as there is some paperwork missing relating to some income. Party says they have responded to recommendations from auditors and “there is no suggestion of misappropriation of funds”
The SNP says it’s on course to file accounts on time - but they won’t be “unqualified” accounts, as there is some paperwork missing relating to some income. Party says they have responded to recommendations from auditors and “there is no suggestion of misappropriation of funds”
Zac Goldsmith has resigned his ministerial role to spend more time with his money.
Ah, a remider of that golden age when the Tories put up semi serious candidates for London mayor. I say semi but Goldsmith was barely tumescent, still better than now though.
Semi serious. What short memories people have. His campaign was deeply unpleasant and was alleged to be racist and using dog whistles on more than one occasion. It attracted criticism across the political divide.
Khan may be a waste of space but if I had been in London and had a vote I would have voted for him over the Goldsmith campaign without a second thought.
True. But on paper, before the campaign he looked like a serious candidate with some cross-party appeal on environmental issues. He (or his election team/advisers - but he must still take ultimate responsibility) turned out to be a reprehensible tosser, but that wasn't obvious at selection. Nowadays we can all scan the Conservative mayoral shortlist and feel wistful for the WTF button.
1. Does anyone who isn’t a very political activist watch QT any more?
2. Sunak pledged to stop boats. The pledge wasn’t to talk about stopping boats, or legislating to stop boats, or persuading courts to issue rulings about stopping boats - it was to actually stop boats, so if boats haven’t stopped then it’s a failure. I’m still not sure he understands the expectations of the electorate, even if many of them won’t put their hand up in public.
I don’t particularly like the guy, although he doesn’t deserve to have his bank accounts closed, but it’s not difficult to see the return of Farage or someone like him at the next election, running on boats as a single issue campaign.
To add: 3. Your average voter, who doesn’t pay attention to these things, has no understanding of why people arriving from France on boats are not quickly transported to Dover, and put on the first ferry back from where they came.
The SNP says it’s on course to file accounts on time - but they won’t be “unqualified” accounts, as there is some paperwork missing relating to some income. Party says they have responded to recommendations from auditors and “there is no suggestion of misappropriation of funds”
The SNP says it’s on course to file accounts on time - but they won’t be “unqualified” accounts, as there is some paperwork missing relating to some income. Party says they have responded to recommendations from auditors and “there is no suggestion of misappropriation of funds”
The SNP says it’s on course to file accounts on time - but they won’t be “unqualified” accounts, as there is some paperwork missing relating to some income. Party says they have responded to recommendations from auditors and “there is no suggestion of misappropriation of funds”
No point in posting tweets now. That nice Mr Musk has made them impossible to read.
Thankfully the text is posted above the link.
Sure, but often it's not clear who is actually commenting (PB poster, tweeter) or whether the text is verbatim and intact. And the twatter thread is often well worth investigating. Or was.
2. Sunak pledged to stop boats. The pledge wasn’t to talk about stopping boats, or legislating to stop boats, or persuading courts to issue rulings about stopping boats - it was to actually stop boats, so if boats haven’t .
The little shit hedged and only pledged to pass laws to stop the boots/boats. From gov.uk...
Ooh, making the mistake of trying to add detail as well. Most people only saw this:
The only way to meet that pledge seems to be to flood the black market in France with large boats at discounted prices?
He's just going to ban the sale of kayaks. Technically that would fulfil the pledge.
But that is not the policy, is it? The policy is that if you arrive by small boat you have arrived illegally, have no right to claim UK asylum and are liable for removal to Rwanda with no right to return to the UK. No-one going to Rwanda will have a UK asylum request assessed from there.
For me there are two problems with this.
1 - The lack of safe routes for people to come to the UK in the first place. 2 - If you go to Rwanda you stay there, you do not have your request processed and can come to the UK if succesful.
Exactly. If those two points were fixed it would be much tougher for anyone to oppose the policy. But the whole point of the policy is to create a populist dividing line, so neither can be done.
It's now too late. Braverman has demonised asylum seekers to the extent that in the public imagination Rwanda is An Exile for Undesirables'.
Of course the Question Time audience wouldn't support the government. What human being with just a modicum of compassion who ave witnessed their journeys would?
Talking about floods coming into SE England, this is an interesting read. Basically the Thames Barrier is using up its design life more quickly than expected, partly because of you know what, but also the impact of *river* not tidal floods.
I cannot read it. It looks as if, overnight, Elon has blocked reading tweets without signing in.
Yes, I get that as well. Oh that wacky Elon, he's such a scamp.
Spin doctors must be scratching their heads about Elon reducing the reach of their tweets.
It's part of the pattern where nuTwitter is more about saying stuff (longer tweets, everyone can have a blue tick if their money is good enough) and less about listening to stuff (way worse signal to noise ratio, now this).
I'm sure we all know people whose interest in speaking exceeds their interest in listening. Or even in checking whether anyone else is listening to them.
I cannot read it. It looks as if, overnight, Elon has blocked reading tweets without signing in.
Yes, I get that as well. Oh that wacky Elon, he's such a scamp.
Spin doctors must be scratching their heads about Elon reducing the reach of their tweets.
I’ve just spent half an hour playing with Twitter on various devices and settings. It’s pretty much broken if you’re not logged in.
I did once manage to get an iPad, with an ad-blocker, in private browsing mode, to a front page of random Tweets, and could click through from there but not search or type in a url.
Must be working wonders for the server load today though!
Comments
The Rwanda policy is both a moral and practical disgrace and frankly should be abandoned. I do not approve of the courts interfering in public policy, this should be a matter for the ballot box not the court room, but they may be doing the government a favour.
As I have said before the only thing that will work is withdrawing the right to asylum and replacing it with a discretionary grant. As we reach the peak of asylum seekers from Africa as their population explodes I think that this will happen and not just in the UK. But not yet.
I have no problem with the plan, just not able to deliver it on a shoestring budget.
If Rishi has actually achieved a break through on the NHS, and this favourable reporting continues at least it will be Rishi's legacy, and it would be so ironic if a conservative PM introduced wide and long lasting NHS reforms
Hence the talk of changing British law or leaving ECHR. And whilst I would love to think in terms of Good Rishi/Bad Suella, the simplest conclusion from the observations of the last nine months is that Rishi is perfectly OK with what the Home Secretary wants to do.
1 - The lack of safe routes for people to come to the UK in the first place.
2 - If you go to Rwanda you stay there, you do not have your request processed and can come to the UK if succesful.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anmCSICgs8M&t=896s
On the Arsenal point, it looks like the UK Gov't has directly sponsored Arsenal through the Rwandan Gov't.
The better, impossible, course is for the UN to have a single remit: of having the authority to direct the governance of every member nation so as to remove grounds for fleeing it. It is a disgrace that you can belong to the UN at the same time as giving grounds for your population to flee the government.
BTW, courts did not 'interfere in public policy'. They decided, rightly, that government had broken its own laws in the Rwanda policy. The CA still let them off lightly. I hope the SC will be tougher.
Bit too lat ethough. The staffing problems were obvious for years, and it was obvious from before the Brexit referendum that Brexit would make them worse. Does not show the Tory Party's managerial competence in a good light.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5n0DLYbYqc
1. The boats need to be caught - not always are
2. The people need to be detained - we don't remotely have enough places to securely detain them all, and so many successfully abscond
3. The minute that any flights to Rwanda start, they will get stopped in the courts because this is *patently illegal*
"Send them to Rwanda" is policy written in crayon for political toddlers.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/explainers-61782866
One of the issues put forward by striking NHS workers is recruitment and retention
The plan is underambitious. All UK assylum claims should be made at overseas reception centres. Successful claimants should then be granted assylum in the UK.
It is incidentally a matter of fact, not a "Labour claim" that Streeting announced it was Labour's plan to double medical school places.
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/labour-set-back-plan-double-uk-medical-school-places
I'm not sure why the Gov't isn't pursuing that particular nuance.
On the Court of Appeal I would be surprised if the SC did not reverse the decision. They are much more cautious about ruling policies based on statutes passed by Parliament are "illegal". But that doesn't make the policy right.
Breaking:
Lord Goldsmith, environment minister and ally of Boris Johnson, quits accusing govt of abandoning environmental commitments
He says that Rishi Sunak is ‘uninterested’ in the environment, accusing the govt of ‘apathy in the face of the greatest challenge we have faced’
The country should finally breath a sigh of relief that a widely accepted long term plan for the NHS is about to be enacted
1) It assumes that people arriving with a refugee claim but no prior permission will be sent somewhere. (Back to sea? North Korea? Australia? Peru?)
2) Under this system the UK would be an 'overseas reception centre' for all other countries, while all other countries would be 'overseas reception centre' for the UK.
(The "judge me on these five things in a year" thing isn't new, Frank Luntz tried to get the Major government to do something similar. But to set your own targets and have a fair chance of scoring 0/5 at the end... That's special.)
This government lies. To people it assumes are stupid. All the time. Unless and until they actually enact this, it is not a plan. They continue to proclaim the 40 new hospitals even though it is now patently absurd. This will be the latest lie.
NEW: Labour ahead by 19 points.
It's the highest poll lead we’ve recorded in 4 months in our weekly tracker:
Lab 46% (+1)
Con 27% (-2)
LibDem 11% (+1)
Reform 6% (+1)
Green 5% (nc)
SNP 3% (nc)
1,631 questioned on 28-29 June
+/- 21-22 June
There's a difference there, Rwanda processing would 'find the split' so to speak.
Deterrence has to be credible to be effective. If people believe it to be a bluff then they will call that bluff, unless they perceive there still to be a substantial (if sub-50%) chance that it's not a bluff, and that the consequences of calling it would be unacceptable - which isn't the case here.
272. In short, the relocation of asylum-seekers to Rwanda under the MEDP would involve their claims being determined under a system which, on the evidence, has up to now had serious deficiencies, and at the date of the hearing in the Divisional Court those
deficiencies had not been corrected and were not likely to be in the short term.
It's quite touching in a way although what was that definition of insanity...
https://twitter.com/politlcsuk/status/1674689296131936256?s=46&t=DAL2KhM-jGR2dcWuPR0SEg
And the NHS chief executive Amanda Pritchard was, you may recall, health team leader of the Prime Minister's Delivery Unit under Tony Blair.
The devil, as @Foxy note, will be in the funding, or lack of it.
The irony is that what's apparently a consensus policy has taken so long.
Lets all agree on reality. They are not claiming asylum here for money, as they get none. Sent to live in houses that nobody else want to in what usually are communities resembling a demilitarised zone, given a small value of non-cash vouchers to exchange for (not remotely enough) food and basics like clothes.
The right wing hate media suggests they live it large on our dollah. The opposite is true.
Why would this be any different? Because they care about the NHS? Since when? And if they do care, why are they happy to let the strikes carry on indefinitely?
It won’t be lost on anyone that this comes just 24 hours after he was criticised for undermining privileges committee on Boris Johnson - who gave him peerage after he lost his seat.
https://twitter.com/pippacrerar/status/1674693575861231616
I understand why some/many want to leave their home countries but they are far from all being asylum seekers.
If he really wanted to resign over the government's environment policy, then he'd have done so at a time when it didn't look so obviously like a cover for something else.
If his stated reasons are his prime concern, then the timing can only be because he thought he was going to be sacked anyway (which may well be right - Sunak will probably have time for one reshuffle before the election, and the obvious time is this summer).
I say semi but Goldsmith was barely tumescent, still better than now though.
Khan may be a waste of space but if I had been in London and had a vote I would have voted for him over the Goldsmith campaign without a second thought.
Increasingly in actions involving government the issue is whether policy/law X is in conflict with duty/treaty/law Y.
It would good if the court could issue an order requiring the government to behave in a civilised way, or require ministers to answer the question, but they can't.
If they can’t do their own books…..
The SNP says it’s on course to file accounts on time - but they won’t be “unqualified” accounts, as there is some paperwork missing relating to some income. Party says they have responded to recommendations from auditors and “there is no suggestion of misappropriation of funds”
https://twitter.com/BBCPhilipSim/status/1674695122850664449?s=20
3. Your average voter, who doesn’t pay attention to these things, has no understanding of why people arriving from France on boats are not quickly transported to Dover, and put on the first ferry back from where they came.
Of course the Question Time audience wouldn't support the government. What human being with just a modicum of compassion who ave witnessed their journeys would?
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/30/before-the-flood-how-much-longer-will-the-thames-barrier-protect-london
I'm sure we all know people whose interest in speaking exceeds their interest in listening. Or even in checking whether anyone else is listening to them.
I did once manage to get an iPad, with an ad-blocker, in private browsing mode, to a front page of random Tweets, and could click through from there but not search or type in a url.
Must be working wonders for the server load today though!