A long but worthwhile read from the brilliant Jennifer Williams in the FT. I went to college in Oldham so know the town well. To read so many problems at a big high school is disheartening.
The Tories have absolutely broken the ability of so many families to get by, and also broken the budgets of the schools who are left to pick up the pieces.
Christ, that is a tough read, it left me in tears. The Tories have utterly broken this country, and unforgivably they have ensured that children, and especially poor children, have borne the brunt of it. I find it hard to control my anger at them sometimes.
Is this really the country we want? The society we believe to be just? I know PB Tories and their fellow travellers excuse almost everything, but is this what we have been reduced to? For what other benefit?
If we remove the (often) justified anger, then there's four simple questions which the politicans of all sides need to ask.
1) What are we currently spending money on? 2) What could we spend more money or or less on to make the changes which people want (and what are those changes)? 3) How can we increase the money to make the gap from 1 to 2?
Anything other than that is really just details.
The big one for me is thinking longer term.
Don't pay NHS staff at levels that mean we have a perma-shortage of staff and pay 3-5x that rate for agency staff to cover the ones who are left, off sick thru stress or striking.
Don't repair pot holes with the cheapest possible mix to keep this years budget low, when fixing it properly might be a third the cost over 10 years.
There are loads of similar examples where the govt ideology thinks it is (or it least claims it is) controlling the budget responsibly but are actually making things much more expensive by shifting costs down the line.
Borrowing and/or tax needs to go up for a few years, but over our lifetimes doing so will make public services better and cheaper. This should not be a matter of left or right, but common sense accounting.
"I'm willing to pay a little more tax so that we can have a lot better public services."
Now what are the likelihoods of:
This extra tax actually being higher than predicted.
The improvement in public services being lower than predicted.
We all know what the historic pattern has been so why should things change now ?
I don't think we are going to get the changes I would like to see. If I was in charge it is what I would do, and it would work.
The current batch of Tories are brainwashed by thinking controlling public finances is always the right thing to do regardless of the scenario.
Labour lack imagination and coherence, there is a small chance they are just hiding these away but I doubt it.
But we haven't been controlling public finances but rather living beyond the country's means to varying extents.
All we get is profligacy on buying votes and vanity projects with cuts elsewhere.
It happens under every government and will continue to do so.
Of course the government have been trying to control public finances, have you heard about all the pay strikes?
Govt completely unrealistic in its offer led to widespread strikes, loss of motivation in staff, more people leaving, very high agency pay and poor service levels.
And then govt ends up paying what could have been accepted six months earlier. It was all futile, in the name of controlling public spending, when all it really did is increase it.
I wouldn't see those as obvious stand outs. Indeed more spending on HMRC and DWP might actually enhance revenues by cutting fraud and evasion.
The glaring one missing is the £111 billion this FY on interest on government debt.
What I don't understand is why the Debt Management Office didn't restructure our debt during the ten years or more of incredibly low interest rates to lock in those low rates for years, if not decades. Maybe I'm being naive, but it does seem extraordinary that this golden opportunity was apparently thrown away.
Also odd that there's very little discussion of this in the media. For such a massive item of government expenditure, you'd have thought it would get some attention.
The issue was one of short-term thinking. 10-year bonds and 15-year bonds, were priced higher than 2-year bonds and 5-year bonds, so selling long-term debt would have cost more to service in the short term even though, with hindsight, they might have been better off now at insulating the government from the cost of debt servicing. Also, too much of the debt was index-linked, back when that meant 2%pa rather than 10%.
Also the yield curve at any time is the market consensus on rates incorporating expectations of the future. If you 'take a view' on it rather than being guided by liquidity needs you are slipping into trading, ie speculation. Of course this can work out, but it might not.
A long but worthwhile read from the brilliant Jennifer Williams in the FT. I went to college in Oldham so know the town well. To read so many problems at a big high school is disheartening.
The Tories have absolutely broken the ability of so many families to get by, and also broken the budgets of the schools who are left to pick up the pieces.
Christ, that is a tough read, it left me in tears. The Tories have utterly broken this country, and unforgivably they have ensured that children, and especially poor children, have borne the brunt of it. I find it hard to control my anger at them sometimes.
Is this really the country we want? The society we believe to be just? I know PB Tories and their fellow travellers excuse almost everything, but is this what we have been reduced to? For what other benefit?
If we remove the (often) justified anger, then there's four simple questions which the politicans of all sides need to ask.
1) What are we currently spending money on? 2) What could we spend more money or or less on to make the changes which people want (and what are those changes)? 3) How can we increase the money to make the gap from 1 to 2?
Anything other than that is really just details.
Given that there appears to be little appetite for tax rises (except for the idea of raising mythical billions from the top 1%), and the books are still a long way from balancing, the conversation really needs to be around the scope of government.
What does government do currently, that it could stop doing without too many adverse effects?
The obvious standout figures are £20bn on ‘Energy Security and Net Zero’, £10bn on “Science, Innovation and Technology”, and nearly £10bn on the Foreign Office. DWP also spends £8.5bn on its own admin, and HMRC £6.5bn, which suggests that reducing complexity in the tax and benefits system could lead to savings there.
In the current culture there is a problem. We are borrowing £100 bn per annum even now. So that needs to be found. But there isn't a single area of interest where there isn't pressure for government to spend more, usually much more. The media, especially the BBC give a perpetual free and unchallenged ride to all and everyone who are calling for higher expenditure on everything under the sun.
To see the size of the £100 bn deficit, if we abolished all state managed expenditure on education entirely, it still would not cover it. So bits of tinkering will make no real difference.
A long but worthwhile read from the brilliant Jennifer Williams in the FT. I went to college in Oldham so know the town well. To read so many problems at a big high school is disheartening.
The Tories have absolutely broken the ability of so many families to get by, and also broken the budgets of the schools who are left to pick up the pieces.
Christ, that is a tough read, it left me in tears. The Tories have utterly broken this country, and unforgivably they have ensured that children, and especially poor children, have borne the brunt of it. I find it hard to control my anger at them sometimes.
Is this really the country we want? The society we believe to be just? I know PB Tories and their fellow travellers excuse almost everything, but is this what we have been reduced to? For what other benefit?
If we remove the (often) justified anger, then there's four simple questions which the politicans of all sides need to ask.
1) What are we currently spending money on? 2) What could we spend more money or or less on to make the changes which people want (and what are those changes)? 3) How can we increase the money to make the gap from 1 to 2?
Anything other than that is really just details.
Given that there appears to be little appetite for tax rises (except for the idea of raising mythical billions from the top 1%), and the books are still a long way from balancing, the conversation really needs to be around the scope of government.
What does government do currently, that it could stop doing without too many adverse effects?
The obvious standout figures are £20bn on ‘Energy Security and Net Zero’, £10bn on “Science, Innovation and Technology”, and nearly £10bn on the Foreign Office. DWP also spends £8.5bn on its own admin, and HMRC £6.5bn, which suggests that reducing complexity in the tax and benefits system could lead to savings there.
It isn't just that department budgets are always being cut. Its what those budgets are spent on. We have endless webs of contractual frameworks, managers and administrators where the money goes to middlemen leaving very little left at the front line.
We don't have a space program in the UK, because, whenever asked, Big and Expensive said it would cost 20-50 billion to build a launcher.
An immigrant with impulse control problems showed that it could be done for about a billion.
There was no especial magic - apart from not giving contracts to people who give contracts to people who give contracts to people etc etc. With profit at every stage.
The space launch industry is full of such layering. Which is why the above mentioned chap and his company are running riot in the space launch market. They are The Thing That Should Not Be.
True but irrelevant. India has a robot exploring the moon as we speak.
Nope - it isn't irrelevant. It's at the very core of why we can't have nice things.
If cataloguing the contents of the British Museum *has* to be a 500 million pound project. Then we won't have a catalogue.
If building a mile of railway *has* to cost 1 billion. Then we won't have railways.
Getting rid of this will require going to war with a fair chunk of the structure of this country.
I wouldn't see those as obvious stand outs. Indeed more spending on HMRC and DWP might actually enhance revenues by cutting fraud and evasion.
The glaring one missing is the £111 billion this FY on interest on government debt.
What I don't understand is why the Debt Management Office didn't restructure our debt during the ten years or more of incredibly low interest rates to lock in those low rates for years, if not decades. Maybe I'm being naive, but it does seem extraordinary that this golden opportunity was apparently thrown away.
Also odd that there's very little discussion of this in the media. For such a massive item of government expenditure, you'd have thought it would get some attention.
I thought the point about UK government debt was that it was financed over the very long term? Did we have a change of policy?
I wouldn't see those as obvious stand outs. Indeed more spending on HMRC and DWP might actually enhance revenues by cutting fraud and evasion.
The glaring one missing is the £111 billion this FY on interest on government debt.
What I don't understand is why the Debt Management Office didn't restructure our debt during the ten years or more of incredibly low interest rates to lock in those low rates for years, if not decades. Maybe I'm being naive, but it does seem extraordinary that this golden opportunity was apparently thrown away.
Also odd that there's very little discussion of this in the media. For such a massive item of government expenditure, you'd have thought it would get some attention.
The issue was one of short-term thinking. 10-year bonds and 15-year bonds, were priced higher than 2-year bonds and 5-year bonds, so selling long-term debt would have cost more to service in the short term even though, with hindsight, they might have been better off now at insulating the government from the cost of debt servicing. Also, too much of the debt was index-linked, back when that meant 2%pa rather than 10%.
Also the yield curve at any time is the market consensus on rates incorporating expectations of the future. If you 'take a view' on it rather than being guided by liquidity needs you are slipping into trading, ie speculation. Of course this can work out, but it might not.
Yes. If there had been no war and no pandemic, and a minor recession that was due anyway in the past thre years, then the government would have been accused, by opponents, of reckless gambling with the public finances for selling long-dated bonds.
They are to announce Ben Wallace as new Defence Secretary? A bold move!
Watch them announce some utter twonk with no clue about defence. We had the story the other day that all our fast attack subs are docked and unserviceable, so they're bound to get some absolute spanner in the role to lie and sneer.
They don't really have to have a clue about defence. They need to be decisive, pragmatic and capable of leading a vast, high spending ministry.
They are slightly more likely to have a clue about defence than to be those things.
On-topic BTW - no, I don't think it's his wealth that is the issue. It's his inability to cover for his poshness. Cameron, Blair and Boris were all posh but managed to connect with folk despite that.
Also if he was actually any good at politics that would help too.
I wouldn't see those as obvious stand outs. Indeed more spending on HMRC and DWP might actually enhance revenues by cutting fraud and evasion.
The glaring one missing is the £111 billion this FY on interest on government debt.
What I don't understand is why the Debt Management Office didn't restructure our debt during the ten years or more of incredibly low interest rates to lock in those low rates for years, if not decades. Maybe I'm being naive, but it does seem extraordinary that this golden opportunity was apparently thrown away.
Also odd that there's very little discussion of this in the media. For such a massive item of government expenditure, you'd have thought it would get some attention.
The issue was one of short-term thinking. 10-year bonds and 15-year bonds, were priced higher than 2-year bonds and 5-year bonds, so selling long-term debt would have cost more to service in the short term even though, with hindsight, they might have been better off now at insulating the government from the cost of debt servicing. Also, too much of the debt was index-linked, back when that meant 2%pa rather than 10%.
Also the yield curve at any time is the market consensus on rates incorporating expectations of the future. If you 'take a view' on it rather than being guided by liquidity needs you are slipping into trading, ie speculation. Of course this can work out, but it might not.
Yes. If there had been no war and no pandemic, and a minor recession that was due anyway in the past thre years, then the government would have been accused, by opponents, of reckless gambling with the public finances for selling long-dated bonds.
Only by an idiot. When you are talking about the lowest interest rates since the Bank of England is founded, you start selling perpetuals.
I wouldn't see those as obvious stand outs. Indeed more spending on HMRC and DWP might actually enhance revenues by cutting fraud and evasion.
The glaring one missing is the £111 billion this FY on interest on government debt.
What I don't understand is why the Debt Management Office didn't restructure our debt during the ten years or more of incredibly low interest rates to lock in those low rates for years, if not decades. Maybe I'm being naive, but it does seem extraordinary that this golden opportunity was apparently thrown away.
Also odd that there's very little discussion of this in the media. For such a massive item of government expenditure, you'd have thought it would get some attention.
The issue was one of short-term thinking. 10-year bonds and 15-year bonds, were priced higher than 2-year bonds and 5-year bonds, so selling long-term debt would have cost more to service in the short term even though, with hindsight, they might have been better off now at insulating the government from the cost of debt servicing. Also, too much of the debt was index-linked, back when that meant 2%pa rather than 10%.
Also the yield curve at any time is the market consensus on rates incorporating expectations of the future. If you 'take a view' on it rather than being guided by liquidity needs you are slipping into trading, ie speculation. Of course this can work out, but it might not.
I wonder if the people in charge locked in their mortgage rates for more like 2-3 years or 5 years plus. I bet it was 5 years plus.....
On-topic BTW - no, I don't think it's his wealth that is the issue. It's his inability to cover for his poshness. Cameron, Blair and Boris were all posh but managed to connect with folk despite that.
Also if he was actually any good at politics that would help too.
It's not covering for it, exactly.
It's just too prominent, in his case.
Cameron, for example, never covered up who or what he was.
It's been quite the precipitous, and thoroughly deserved, fall from grace for Baldy Ben. From oft-discussed tory leader candidate and potential NATO SecGen to Scotland's second best Bernard Manning tribute act in just a few months.
My understanding is that Ben Wallace is resigning by choice, so he can step straight into lucrative defence business posts at the next election and not have to wait out restrictions on taking up conflicting interests.
Understanding based on?
Friends of Ben Wallace obviously. I am sure he deserves the lucrative sinecures and shouldn't have to wait unnecessarily for them.
A long but worthwhile read from the brilliant Jennifer Williams in the FT. I went to college in Oldham so know the town well. To read so many problems at a big high school is disheartening.
The Tories have absolutely broken the ability of so many families to get by, and also broken the budgets of the schools who are left to pick up the pieces.
Christ, that is a tough read, it left me in tears. The Tories have utterly broken this country, and unforgivably they have ensured that children, and especially poor children, have borne the brunt of it. I find it hard to control my anger at them sometimes.
Is this really the country we want? The society we believe to be just? I know PB Tories and their fellow travellers excuse almost everything, but is this what we have been reduced to? For what other benefit?
If we remove the (often) justified anger, then there's four simple questions which the politicans of all sides need to ask.
1) What are we currently spending money on? 2) What could we spend more money or or less on to make the changes which people want (and what are those changes)? 3) How can we increase the money to make the gap from 1 to 2?
Anything other than that is really just details.
The big one for me is thinking longer term.
Don't pay NHS staff at levels that mean we have a perma-shortage of staff and pay 3-5x that rate for agency staff to cover the ones who are left, off sick thru stress or striking.
Don't repair pot holes with the cheapest possible mix to keep this years budget low, when fixing it properly might be a third the cost over 10 years.
There are loads of similar examples where the govt ideology thinks it is (or it least claims it is) controlling the budget responsibly but are actually making things much more expensive by shifting costs down the line.
Borrowing and/or tax needs to go up for a few years, but over our lifetimes doing so will make public services better and cheaper. This should not be a matter of left or right, but common sense accounting.
"I'm willing to pay a little more tax so that we can have a lot better public services."
Now what are the likelihoods of:
This extra tax actually being higher than predicted.
The improvement in public services being lower than predicted.
We all know what the historic pattern has been so why should things change now ?
I don't think we are going to get the changes I would like to see. If I was in charge it is what I would do, and it would work.
The current batch of Tories are brainwashed by thinking controlling public finances is always the right thing to do regardless of the scenario.
Labour lack imagination and coherence, there is a small chance they are just hiding these away but I doubt it.
But we haven't been controlling public finances but rather living beyond the country's means to varying extents.
All we get is profligacy on buying votes and vanity projects with cuts elsewhere.
It happens under every government and will continue to do so.
Of course the government have been trying to control public finances, have you heard about all the pay strikes?
Govt completely unrealistic in its offer led to widespread strikes, loss of motivation in staff, more people leaving, very high agency pay and poor service levels.
And then govt ends up paying what could have been accepted six months earlier. It was all futile, in the name of controlling public spending, when all it really did is increase it.
But if the government had just accepted the initial pay demands it would have ended up paying even more and guaranteeing ever higher pay demands in future.
FPT on Trump: There's another set of Indictments (the fifth) being worked on in Arizona, for his and his teams' attempts to steal the 2020 Election there.
Given that parts of his former team have already started to peel away, and some are cooperating with the various prosecutions, or are testifying in their own hearings to what they claim Trump did *, I think he may end up taking the Ernest Saunders route - ie medical incapacity followed by an interestingly quick recovery.
There's also just been a motion (what an appropriate word) in Georgia State to start the trials of all 19 Defendents there in October, which would be .. quick.
I forecast a sudden deterioration in Trump's health soon after he reaches his legal dead end. Given his behaviour, it may be that he *is* mentally unstable.
* Mark Meadows, Trump's former Whitehouse Chief of Staff, spent hours testifying as he attempts to get his own case in Georgia transferred to a Federal Court (where convictions are pardonable by a President, for one thing - unlike State convictions). He has already testified to a lot of juicy material.
I wouldn't see those as obvious stand outs. Indeed more spending on HMRC and DWP might actually enhance revenues by cutting fraud and evasion.
The glaring one missing is the £111 billion this FY on interest on government debt.
What I don't understand is why the Debt Management Office didn't restructure our debt during the ten years or more of incredibly low interest rates to lock in those low rates for years, if not decades. Maybe I'm being naive, but it does seem extraordinary that this golden opportunity was apparently thrown away.
Also odd that there's very little discussion of this in the media. For such a massive item of government expenditure, you'd have thought it would get some attention.
The issue was one of short-term thinking. 10-year bonds and 15-year bonds, were priced higher than 2-year bonds and 5-year bonds, so selling long-term debt would have cost more to service in the short term even though, with hindsight, they might have been better off now at insulating the government from the cost of debt servicing. Also, too much of the debt was index-linked, back when that meant 2%pa rather than 10%.
Also the yield curve at any time is the market consensus on rates incorporating expectations of the future. If you 'take a view' on it rather than being guided by liquidity needs you are slipping into trading, ie speculation. Of course this can work out, but it might not.
I wonder if the people in charge locked in their mortgage rates for more like 2-3 years or 5 years plus. I bet it was 5 years plus.....
A long but worthwhile read from the brilliant Jennifer Williams in the FT. I went to college in Oldham so know the town well. To read so many problems at a big high school is disheartening.
The Tories have absolutely broken the ability of so many families to get by, and also broken the budgets of the schools who are left to pick up the pieces.
Christ, that is a tough read, it left me in tears. The Tories have utterly broken this country, and unforgivably they have ensured that children, and especially poor children, have borne the brunt of it. I find it hard to control my anger at them sometimes.
Is this really the country we want? The society we believe to be just? I know PB Tories and their fellow travellers excuse almost everything, but is this what we have been reduced to? For what other benefit?
If we remove the (often) justified anger, then there's four simple questions which the politicans of all sides need to ask.
1) What are we currently spending money on? 2) What could we spend more money or or less on to make the changes which people want (and what are those changes)? 3) How can we increase the money to make the gap from 1 to 2?
Anything other than that is really just details.
Given that there appears to be little appetite for tax rises (except for the idea of raising mythical billions from the top 1%), and the books are still a long way from balancing, the conversation really needs to be around the scope of government.
What does government do currently, that it could stop doing without too many adverse effects?
The obvious standout figures are £20bn on ‘Energy Security and Net Zero’, £10bn on “Science, Innovation and Technology”, and nearly £10bn on the Foreign Office. DWP also spends £8.5bn on its own admin, and HMRC £6.5bn, which suggests that reducing complexity in the tax and benefits system could lead to savings there.
In the current culture there is a problem. We are borrowing £100 bn per annum even now. So that needs to be found. But there isn't a single area of interest where there isn't pressure for government to spend more, usually much more. The media, especially the BBC give a perpetual free and unchallenged ride to all and everyone who are calling for higher expenditure on everything under the sun.
To see the size of the £100 bn deficit, if we abolished all state managed expenditure on education entirely, it still would not cover it. So bits of tinkering will make no real difference.
If you look at those figures it appears as if health/social care has had a big increase, education has kept steady and everything else has been bludgeoned. Doesn't include pensions of course.....
What will be interesting is if education gets cut once school numbers start falling. We are looking at perhaps 20% in Wales.
On-topic BTW - no, I don't think it's his wealth that is the issue. It's his inability to cover for his poshness. Cameron, Blair and Boris were all posh but managed to connect with folk despite that.
Also if he was actually any good at politics that would help too.
The gloating about energy prices last week a case in point.
For all those using the 'Vimes boots theory' to justify increasing government spending on their area of interest can I point out that its from a fantasy novel.
In the real world the law of diminishing returns is what should be assumed to apply.
A long but worthwhile read from the brilliant Jennifer Williams in the FT. I went to college in Oldham so know the town well. To read so many problems at a big high school is disheartening.
The Tories have absolutely broken the ability of so many families to get by, and also broken the budgets of the schools who are left to pick up the pieces.
Christ, that is a tough read, it left me in tears. The Tories have utterly broken this country, and unforgivably they have ensured that children, and especially poor children, have borne the brunt of it. I find it hard to control my anger at them sometimes.
Is this really the country we want? The society we believe to be just? I know PB Tories and their fellow travellers excuse almost everything, but is this what we have been reduced to? For what other benefit?
If we remove the (often) justified anger, then there's four simple questions which the politicans of all sides need to ask.
1) What are we currently spending money on? 2) What could we spend more money or or less on to make the changes which people want (and what are those changes)? 3) How can we increase the money to make the gap from 1 to 2?
Anything other than that is really just details.
The big one for me is thinking longer term.
Don't pay NHS staff at levels that mean we have a perma-shortage of staff and pay 3-5x that rate for agency staff to cover the ones who are left, off sick thru stress or striking.
Don't repair pot holes with the cheapest possible mix to keep this years budget low, when fixing it properly might be a third the cost over 10 years.
There are loads of similar examples where the govt ideology thinks it is (or it least claims it is) controlling the budget responsibly but are actually making things much more expensive by shifting costs down the line.
Borrowing and/or tax needs to go up for a few years, but over our lifetimes doing so will make public services better and cheaper. This should not be a matter of left or right, but common sense accounting.
"I'm willing to pay a little more tax so that we can have a lot better public services."
Now what are the likelihoods of:
This extra tax actually being higher than predicted.
The improvement in public services being lower than predicted.
We all know what the historic pattern has been so why should things change now ?
I don't think we are going to get the changes I would like to see. If I was in charge it is what I would do, and it would work.
The current batch of Tories are brainwashed by thinking controlling public finances is always the right thing to do regardless of the scenario.
Labour lack imagination and coherence, there is a small chance they are just hiding these away but I doubt it.
But we haven't been controlling public finances but rather living beyond the country's means to varying extents.
All we get is profligacy on buying votes and vanity projects with cuts elsewhere.
It happens under every government and will continue to do so.
Of course the government have been trying to control public finances, have you heard about all the pay strikes?
Govt completely unrealistic in its offer led to widespread strikes, loss of motivation in staff, more people leaving, very high agency pay and poor service levels.
And then govt ends up paying what could have been accepted six months earlier. It was all futile, in the name of controlling public spending, when all it really did is increase it.
But if the government had just accepted the initial pay demands it would have ended up paying even more and guaranteeing ever higher pay demands in future.
No. It doesn't lead to ever higher pay demands, you have just made that up. And of course they shouldn't have paid the initial demands, but something in the realms of reasonableness. You can't boast about raising wages for private sector workers, pay pensioners 10%+ and then offer 2% to public sectors and not expect a no. I don't understand why that is complicated.
A long but worthwhile read from the brilliant Jennifer Williams in the FT. I went to college in Oldham so know the town well. To read so many problems at a big high school is disheartening.
The Tories have absolutely broken the ability of so many families to get by, and also broken the budgets of the schools who are left to pick up the pieces.
Christ, that is a tough read, it left me in tears. The Tories have utterly broken this country, and unforgivably they have ensured that children, and especially poor children, have borne the brunt of it. I find it hard to control my anger at them sometimes.
Is this really the country we want? The society we believe to be just? I know PB Tories and their fellow travellers excuse almost everything, but is this what we have been reduced to? For what other benefit?
If we remove the (often) justified anger, then there's four simple questions which the politicans of all sides need to ask.
1) What are we currently spending money on? 2) What could we spend more money or or less on to make the changes which people want (and what are those changes)? 3) How can we increase the money to make the gap from 1 to 2?
Anything other than that is really just details.
Given that there appears to be little appetite for tax rises (except for the idea of raising mythical billions from the top 1%), and the books are still a long way from balancing, the conversation really needs to be around the scope of government.
What does government do currently, that it could stop doing without too many adverse effects?
The obvious standout figures are £20bn on ‘Energy Security and Net Zero’, £10bn on “Science, Innovation and Technology”, and nearly £10bn on the Foreign Office. DWP also spends £8.5bn on its own admin, and HMRC £6.5bn, which suggests that reducing complexity in the tax and benefits system could lead to savings there.
In the current culture there is a problem. We are borrowing £100 bn per annum even now. So that needs to be found. But there isn't a single area of interest where there isn't pressure for government to spend more, usually much more. The media, especially the BBC give a perpetual free and unchallenged ride to all and everyone who are calling for higher expenditure on everything under the sun.
To see the size of the £100 bn deficit, if we abolished all state managed expenditure on education entirely, it still would not cover it. So bits of tinkering will make no real difference.
If you look at those figures it appears as if health/social care has had a big increase, education has kept steady and everything else has been bludgeoned. Doesn't include pensions of course.....
What will be interesting is if education gets cut once school numbers start falling. We are looking at perhaps 20% in Wales.
Won't it simply fall automatically as school funding is hypothecated on a per pupil basis ?
On-topic BTW - no, I don't think it's his wealth that is the issue. It's his inability to cover for his poshness. Cameron, Blair and Boris were all posh but managed to connect with folk despite that.
Also if he was actually any good at politics that would help too.
Yes he's really surprised me on the downside. Or upside, rather, with my Labour hat on. I thought he'd be a difficult opponent.
I wouldn't see those as obvious stand outs. Indeed more spending on HMRC and DWP might actually enhance revenues by cutting fraud and evasion.
The glaring one missing is the £111 billion this FY on interest on government debt.
What I don't understand is why the Debt Management Office didn't restructure our debt during the ten years or more of incredibly low interest rates to lock in those low rates for years, if not decades. Maybe I'm being naive, but it does seem extraordinary that this golden opportunity was apparently thrown away.
Also odd that there's very little discussion of this in the media. For such a massive item of government expenditure, you'd have thought it would get some attention.
The issue was one of short-term thinking. 10-year bonds and 15-year bonds, were priced higher than 2-year bonds and 5-year bonds, so selling long-term debt would have cost more to service in the short term even though, with hindsight, they might have been better off now at insulating the government from the cost of debt servicing. Also, too much of the debt was index-linked, back when that meant 2%pa rather than 10%.
Also the yield curve at any time is the market consensus on rates incorporating expectations of the future. If you 'take a view' on it rather than being guided by liquidity needs you are slipping into trading, ie speculation. Of course this can work out, but it might not.
And the average maturity of UK government debt did rise by 1-2 years over the period, suggesting the DMO did take advantage of low rates to lock them in with longer duration debt to a certain extent. As you say, doing more than that might not have been prudent ex ante, even if ex post it would have been profitable. Issuing debt across the curve also helps to maintain the health of the gilt market and satisfy demand for the debt from different stakeholders. I wouldn't be overly critical of the DMO, personally.
On-topic BTW - no, I don't think it's his wealth that is the issue. It's his inability to cover for his poshness. Cameron, Blair and Boris were all posh but managed to connect with folk despite that.
Also if he was actually any good at politics that would help too.
It's not covering for it, exactly.
It's just too prominent, in his case.
Cameron, for example, never covered up who or what he was.
I think Camerons sad family tragedy probably gave a level of empathy and understanding for public services that Sunak does not have or show.
Opposition leader to start indefinite hunger strike against Yoon administration https://m.koreatimes.co.kr/pages/article.asp?newsIdx=358199 ..."The Yoon Suk Yeol administration has destroyed the constitutional order and democracy and declared a war on the people," Lee said. "I will prevent the destruction of democracy with the determination to sacrifice my life. As a last resort, I will go on an indefinite hunger strike starting today."
Lee put forward three demands: that Yoon apologize to the people for destroying their livelihoods and the democracy, express opposition to Japan's release of radioactive water into the ocean and thoroughly shake up the Cabinet. ..
It's been quite the precipitous, and thoroughly deserved, fall from grace for Baldy Ben. From oft-discussed tory leader candidate and potential NATO SecGen to Scotland's second best Bernard Manning tribute act in just a few months.
My understanding is that Ben Wallace is resigning by choice, so he can step straight into lucrative defence business posts at the next election and not have to wait out restrictions on taking up conflicting interests.
Understanding based on?
I have certainly heard that as well. Where from I can't remember. Could have been @FF43 of course.
A long but worthwhile read from the brilliant Jennifer Williams in the FT. I went to college in Oldham so know the town well. To read so many problems at a big high school is disheartening.
The Tories have absolutely broken the ability of so many families to get by, and also broken the budgets of the schools who are left to pick up the pieces.
Christ, that is a tough read, it left me in tears. The Tories have utterly broken this country, and unforgivably they have ensured that children, and especially poor children, have borne the brunt of it. I find it hard to control my anger at them sometimes.
Is this really the country we want? The society we believe to be just? I know PB Tories and their fellow travellers excuse almost everything, but is this what we have been reduced to? For what other benefit?
If we remove the (often) justified anger, then there's four simple questions which the politicans of all sides need to ask.
1) What are we currently spending money on? 2) What could we spend more money or or less on to make the changes which people want (and what are those changes)? 3) How can we increase the money to make the gap from 1 to 2?
Anything other than that is really just details.
Given that there appears to be little appetite for tax rises (except for the idea of raising mythical billions from the top 1%), and the books are still a long way from balancing, the conversation really needs to be around the scope of government.
What does government do currently, that it could stop doing without too many adverse effects?
The obvious standout figures are £20bn on ‘Energy Security and Net Zero’, £10bn on “Science, Innovation and Technology”, and nearly £10bn on the Foreign Office. DWP also spends £8.5bn on its own admin, and HMRC £6.5bn, which suggests that reducing complexity in the tax and benefits system could lead to savings there.
In the current culture there is a problem. We are borrowing £100 bn per annum even now. So that needs to be found. But there isn't a single area of interest where there isn't pressure for government to spend more, usually much more. The media, especially the BBC give a perpetual free and unchallenged ride to all and everyone who are calling for higher expenditure on everything under the sun.
To see the size of the £100 bn deficit, if we abolished all state managed expenditure on education entirely, it still would not cover it. So bits of tinkering will make no real difference.
If you look at those figures it appears as if health/social care has had a big increase, education has kept steady and everything else has been bludgeoned. Doesn't include pensions of course.....
What will be interesting is if education gets cut once school numbers start falling. We are looking at perhaps 20% in Wales.
Won't it simply fall automatically as school funding is hypothecated on a per pupil basis ?
That is part of the problem. Maintaining schools spending would allow education (or at least teacher/pupil ratios) to improve as pupil numbers fall. Instead, capacity will be cut along with spending.
A long but worthwhile read from the brilliant Jennifer Williams in the FT. I went to college in Oldham so know the town well. To read so many problems at a big high school is disheartening.
The Tories have absolutely broken the ability of so many families to get by, and also broken the budgets of the schools who are left to pick up the pieces.
Christ, that is a tough read, it left me in tears. The Tories have utterly broken this country, and unforgivably they have ensured that children, and especially poor children, have borne the brunt of it. I find it hard to control my anger at them sometimes.
Is this really the country we want? The society we believe to be just? I know PB Tories and their fellow travellers excuse almost everything, but is this what we have been reduced to? For what other benefit?
If we remove the (often) justified anger, then there's four simple questions which the politicans of all sides need to ask.
1) What are we currently spending money on? 2) What could we spend more money or or less on to make the changes which people want (and what are those changes)? 3) How can we increase the money to make the gap from 1 to 2?
Anything other than that is really just details.
Given that there appears to be little appetite for tax rises (except for the idea of raising mythical billions from the top 1%), and the books are still a long way from balancing, the conversation really needs to be around the scope of government.
What does government do currently, that it could stop doing without too many adverse effects?
The obvious standout figures are £20bn on ‘Energy Security and Net Zero’, £10bn on “Science, Innovation and Technology”, and nearly £10bn on the Foreign Office. DWP also spends £8.5bn on its own admin, and HMRC £6.5bn, which suggests that reducing complexity in the tax and benefits system could lead to savings there.
HMRC has been repeatedly cut down close to the bone over several rounds. Cutting resources to the department that collects tax is not clever at all. They are forced to take a “risk assessment” approach to compliance for smaller businesses, which - as with policing - means turning a cost constrained blind eye to smaller scale enforcement. Which means a load of uncollected tax an order of magnitude greater than the cost savings from trimming staff in the first place.
Contrast with the IRS which after years of similar austerity has had a huge recruitment drive and is now tangibly improving return on investment.
There is only one thing that really stands out in that chart: health and social care. Everything else is dwarfed. But we’ve made our bed - we have an ageing population and a shrinking working age population so it is what it is.
Agree on HMRC.
But on health - the effects of demographics has been small, and will likely be small in the future. The huge rate of growth in spending is down to something else. Possibly technological innovations (for example, cataract operations), age specific rates of chronic conditions (obesity etc). Some evidence suggests that the rate of this other growth is increasing, which is a bit scary.
And the average maturity of UK government debt did rise by 1-2 years over the period, suggesting the DMO did take advantage of low rates to lock them in with longer duration debt to a certain extent. As you say, doing more than that might not have been prudent ex ante, even if ex post it would have been profitable. Issuing debt across the curve also helps to maintain the health of the gilt market and satisfy demand for the debt from different stakeholders. I wouldn't be overly critical of the DMO, personally.
Maybe they did get it right, all things considered, but £110bn per annum is one hell of a lot of dosh, and surely worthy of more scrutiny than it gets. In particular it does seem questionable that we're landed with much more inflation-linked debt than most comparable economies.
I wouldn't see those as obvious stand outs. Indeed more spending on HMRC and DWP might actually enhance revenues by cutting fraud and evasion.
The glaring one missing is the £111 billion this FY on interest on government debt.
What I don't understand is why the Debt Management Office didn't restructure our debt during the ten years or more of incredibly low interest rates to lock in those low rates for years, if not decades. Maybe I'm being naive, but it does seem extraordinary that this golden opportunity was apparently thrown away.
Also odd that there's very little discussion of this in the media. For such a massive item of government expenditure, you'd have thought it would get some attention.
The issue was one of short-term thinking. 10-year bonds and 15-year bonds, were priced higher than 2-year bonds and 5-year bonds, so selling long-term debt would have cost more to service in the short term even though, with hindsight, they might have been better off now at insulating the government from the cost of debt servicing. Also, too much of the debt was index-linked, back when that meant 2%pa rather than 10%.
Also the yield curve at any time is the market consensus on rates incorporating expectations of the future. If you 'take a view' on it rather than being guided by liquidity needs you are slipping into trading, ie speculation. Of course this can work out, but it might not.
And the average maturity of UK government debt did rise by 1-2 years over the period, suggesting the DMO did take advantage of low rates to lock them in with longer duration debt to a certain extent. As you say, doing more than that might not have been prudent ex ante, even if ex post it would have been profitable. Issuing debt across the curve also helps to maintain the health of the gilt market and satisfy demand for the debt from different stakeholders. I wouldn't be overly critical of the DMO, personally.
Better gilt rates are also the saving of the private pensions and annuities. Another bung to the grey vote, but not entirely money down the drain.
Rather upsetting, historic abuse at a (partly) boarding school. The lawyer for the survivors' group:
'McLean also set out how boys, parents and the occasional junior staff member had been “threatened, menaced, suppressed” when they attempted to raise the alarm.
And just as chilling was the wider culture of complicity the evidence exposed – when the internationally acclaimed actor Iain Glen spoke out about his abuse in 2002, Campbell said “the wrath of Morningside and Muirfield and Murrayfield [wealthy Edinburgh suburbs] rained down on his head with biblical fury because he’d broken the code, the Edinburgh omertà.”
When speaking about the academy’s governor, who always held sway in Edinburgh, Moffatt said they were “senior professionals who you’d expect to be protecting children, and they did nothing – that’s the arrogance of the Edinburgh establishment.”'
I wonder why the wrath of Marchmont has been so unfairly ignored.
Haven't read the comments so this has probably been said multiple times.
His wealth may or may not be an issue but if they indulge in another leadership battle at this point it will surely kill any remaining chance of reelection stone dead.
And the average maturity of UK government debt did rise by 1-2 years over the period, suggesting the DMO did take advantage of low rates to lock them in with longer duration debt to a certain extent. As you say, doing more than that might not have been prudent ex ante, even if ex post it would have been profitable. Issuing debt across the curve also helps to maintain the health of the gilt market and satisfy demand for the debt from different stakeholders. I wouldn't be overly critical of the DMO, personally.
Maybe they did get it right, all things considered, but £110bn per annum is one hell of a lot of dosh, and surely worthy of more scrutiny than it gets. In particular it does seem questionable that we're landed with much more inflation-linked debt than most comparable economies.
That might be because we have tended to have higher and more variable inflation so nominal debt might be more expensive to issue relative to linkers here? Also we have a lot of demand for these products from the pensions industry. Why it's more than in other countries I don't know. Assuming inflation comes down our borrowing costs should fall significantly. But yes, we spend a lot of money servicing debt that would be better spent on things like education and infrastructure that will actually grow our economy.
A long but worthwhile read from the brilliant Jennifer Williams in the FT. I went to college in Oldham so know the town well. To read so many problems at a big high school is disheartening.
The Tories have absolutely broken the ability of so many families to get by, and also broken the budgets of the schools who are left to pick up the pieces.
Christ, that is a tough read, it left me in tears. The Tories have utterly broken this country, and unforgivably they have ensured that children, and especially poor children, have borne the brunt of it. I find it hard to control my anger at them sometimes.
Is this really the country we want? The society we believe to be just? I know PB Tories and their fellow travellers excuse almost everything, but is this what we have been reduced to? For what other benefit?
If we remove the (often) justified anger, then there's four simple questions which the politicans of all sides need to ask.
1) What are we currently spending money on? 2) What could we spend more money or or less on to make the changes which people want (and what are those changes)? 3) How can we increase the money to make the gap from 1 to 2?
Anything other than that is really just details.
Given that there appears to be little appetite for tax rises (except for the idea of raising mythical billions from the top 1%), and the books are still a long way from balancing, the conversation really needs to be around the scope of government.
What does government do currently, that it could stop doing without too many adverse effects?
The obvious standout figures are £20bn on ‘Energy Security and Net Zero’, £10bn on “Science, Innovation and Technology”, and nearly £10bn on the Foreign Office. DWP also spends £8.5bn on its own admin, and HMRC £6.5bn, which suggests that reducing complexity in the tax and benefits system could lead to savings there.
In the current culture there is a problem. We are borrowing £100 bn per annum even now. So that needs to be found. But there isn't a single area of interest where there isn't pressure for government to spend more, usually much more. The media, especially the BBC give a perpetual free and unchallenged ride to all and everyone who are calling for higher expenditure on everything under the sun.
To see the size of the £100 bn deficit, if we abolished all state managed expenditure on education entirely, it still would not cover it. So bits of tinkering will make no real difference.
If you look at those figures it appears as if health/social care has had a big increase, education has kept steady and everything else has been bludgeoned. Doesn't include pensions of course.....
What will be interesting is if education gets cut once school numbers start falling. We are looking at perhaps 20% in Wales.
Really?! 20% fewer pupils at school in Wales? Compared to when?
Number of school places in Trafford continues to increase, but not by as much as demand for school places - which means that presumably demand in Manchester, Cheshire East etc is also increasing.
And the average maturity of UK government debt did rise by 1-2 years over the period, suggesting the DMO did take advantage of low rates to lock them in with longer duration debt to a certain extent. As you say, doing more than that might not have been prudent ex ante, even if ex post it would have been profitable. Issuing debt across the curve also helps to maintain the health of the gilt market and satisfy demand for the debt from different stakeholders. I wouldn't be overly critical of the DMO, personally.
Maybe they did get it right, all things considered, but £110bn per annum is one hell of a lot of dosh, and surely worthy of more scrutiny than it gets. In particular it does seem questionable that we're landed with much more inflation-linked debt than most comparable economies.
That might be because we have tended to have higher and more variable inflation so nominal debt might be more expensive to issue relative to linkers here? Also we have a lot of demand for these products from the pensions industry. Why it's more than in other countries I don't know. Assuming inflation comes down our borrowing costs should fall significantly. But yes, we spend a lot of money servicing debt that would be better spent on things like education and infrastructure that will actually grow our economy.
For years we have had negative real interest rates and gilt yields, so borrowing has been free money both to public and government.
Those days are over now, and even if inflation does return to target, interest rates are likely to stay higher than we have had for 15 years.
The root problem is a stagnant economy, partly because of the "f**k business" approach of the government, but in large part due to demographics, as indeed is increasingly apparent in other countries too, even China now.
A long but worthwhile read from the brilliant Jennifer Williams in the FT. I went to college in Oldham so know the town well. To read so many problems at a big high school is disheartening.
The Tories have absolutely broken the ability of so many families to get by, and also broken the budgets of the schools who are left to pick up the pieces.
Children and families are a very low political priority. The consequences show up at the sharp end, as we read in this article. Unfortunately I don't see the priorities changing much under Starmer.
A long but worthwhile read from the brilliant Jennifer Williams in the FT. I went to college in Oldham so know the town well. To read so many problems at a big high school is disheartening.
The Tories have absolutely broken the ability of so many families to get by, and also broken the budgets of the schools who are left to pick up the pieces.
Christ, that is a tough read, it left me in tears. The Tories have utterly broken this country, and unforgivably they have ensured that children, and especially poor children, have borne the brunt of it. I find it hard to control my anger at them sometimes.
Is this really the country we want? The society we believe to be just? I know PB Tories and their fellow travellers excuse almost everything, but is this what we have been reduced to? For what other benefit?
If we remove the (often) justified anger, then there's four simple questions which the politicans of all sides need to ask.
1) What are we currently spending money on? 2) What could we spend more money or or less on to make the changes which people want (and what are those changes)? 3) How can we increase the money to make the gap from 1 to 2?
Anything other than that is really just details.
Given that there appears to be little appetite for tax rises (except for the idea of raising mythical billions from the top 1%), and the books are still a long way from balancing, the conversation really needs to be around the scope of government.
What does government do currently, that it could stop doing without too many adverse effects?
The obvious standout figures are £20bn on ‘Energy Security and Net Zero’, £10bn on “Science, Innovation and Technology”, and nearly £10bn on the Foreign Office. DWP also spends £8.5bn on its own admin, and HMRC £6.5bn, which suggests that reducing complexity in the tax and benefits system could lead to savings there.
In the current culture there is a problem. We are borrowing £100 bn per annum even now. So that needs to be found. But there isn't a single area of interest where there isn't pressure for government to spend more, usually much more. The media, especially the BBC give a perpetual free and unchallenged ride to all and everyone who are calling for higher expenditure on everything under the sun.
To see the size of the £100 bn deficit, if we abolished all state managed expenditure on education entirely, it still would not cover it. So bits of tinkering will make no real difference.
If you look at those figures it appears as if health/social care has had a big increase, education has kept steady and everything else has been bludgeoned. Doesn't include pensions of course.....
What will be interesting is if education gets cut once school numbers start falling. We are looking at perhaps 20% in Wales.
Really?! 20% fewer pupils at school in Wales? Compared to when?
Number of school places in Trafford continues to increase, but not by as much as demand for school places - which means that presumably demand in Manchester, Cheshire East etc is also increasing.
For the UK as a whole the number of under-5s has fallen by 7% in the last 5 years, which means a big drop in demand for school places is coming. You need to go back to the 70s to see an equivalent five year decline. Fewer people see the UK as a place where they want, or can afford, to raise a family. It's pretty damning but wholly unsurprising given the government's explicit policy is to stop the poor from breeding while siphoning off the middle class's income to featherbed pensioners and keeping housing unaffordable.
It's been quite the precipitous, and thoroughly deserved, fall from grace for Baldy Ben. From oft-discussed tory leader candidate and potential NATO SecGen to Scotland's second best Bernard Manning tribute act in just a few months.
My understanding is that Ben Wallace is resigning by choice, so he can step straight into lucrative defence business posts at the next election and not have to wait out restrictions on taking up conflicting interests.
Understanding based on?
Friends of Ben Wallace obviously. I am sure he deserves the lucrative sinecures and shouldn't have to wait unnecessarily for them.
It's been quite the precipitous, and thoroughly deserved, fall from grace for Baldy Ben. From oft-discussed tory leader candidate and potential NATO SecGen to Scotland's second best Bernard Manning tribute act in just a few months.
My understanding is that Ben Wallace is resigning by choice, so he can step straight into lucrative defence business posts at the next election and not have to wait out restrictions on taking up conflicting interests.
Understanding based on?
I have certainly heard that as well. Where from I can't remember. Could have been @FF43 of course.
Not from me. First time I have mentioned it. Ben Wallace has a highly developed sense of worth and entitlement.
Every young person will have to do 50 hours' voluntary work by the age of 19 if Labour wins the next election. Gordon Brown said a plan for compulsory community service would be included in Labour's manifesto.
There's a story in the Mirror that the Nightingale hospital beds are being sold off for £6 each, well below cost. Apparently they're already on the resale market at more. Care Homes are asking why they couldn't have had them cheaply!
Penny Mordant wants the young of this country to do national service.
The Tories have given up. Get rid.
Is it a terrible idea to ask young people to do some voluntary work or similar as part of their education and development, for instance? I haven’t interrogated the full proposals but I don’t think she’s talking about press-ganging 16 year olds into the military.
A long but worthwhile read from the brilliant Jennifer Williams in the FT. I went to college in Oldham so know the town well. To read so many problems at a big high school is disheartening.
The Tories have absolutely broken the ability of so many families to get by, and also broken the budgets of the schools who are left to pick up the pieces.
Children and families are a very low political priority. The consequences show up at the sharp end, as we read in this article. Unfortunately I don't see the priorities changing much under Starmer.
I think you may be pleasantly surprised. I think a focus on children and families is a clear dividing line between the parties. Of course old people have a vote and kids don't, so excessive largesse to pensioners is a feature of our political system whoever is in charge.
Every young person will have to do 50 hours' voluntary work by the age of 19 if Labour wins the next election. Gordon Brown said a plan for compulsory community service would be included in Labour's manifesto.
What an absolute joke from Gordon Brown.
Your attempt at whataboutism was not very effective
It's been quite the precipitous, and thoroughly deserved, fall from grace for Baldy Ben. From oft-discussed tory leader candidate and potential NATO SecGen to Scotland's second best Bernard Manning tribute act in just a few months.
My understanding is that Ben Wallace is resigning by choice, so he can step straight into lucrative defence business posts at the next election and not have to wait out restrictions on taking up conflicting interests.
Understanding based on?
Friends of Ben Wallace obviously. I am sure he deserves the lucrative sinecures and shouldn't have to wait unnecessarily for them.
Ah, so based on nothing then.
Ben Wallace is nothing? Your words, not mine.
Wait, now your claiming he himself told you those were his motives? Right.
Penny Mordant wants the young of this country to do national service.
The Tories have given up. Get rid.
Is it a terrible idea to ask young people to do some voluntary work or similar as part of their education and development, for instance? I haven’t interrogated the full proposals but I don’t think she’s talking about press-ganging 16 year olds into the military.
Don't sort out the problems young people are experiencing, force them to work instead. It is an insult.
Why not get the elderly to do it, they get everything else handed to them.
Every young person will have to do 50 hours' voluntary work by the age of 19 if Labour wins the next election. Gordon Brown said a plan for compulsory community service would be included in Labour's manifesto.
I would challenge the concept of compulsory voluntary work.
Penny Mordant wants the young of this country to do national service.
The Tories have given up. Get rid.
Is it a terrible idea to ask young people to do some voluntary work or similar as part of their education and development, for instance? I haven’t interrogated the full proposals but I don’t think she’s talking about press-ganging 16 year olds into the military.
Don't sort out the problems young people are experiencing, force them to work instead. It is an insult.
Why not get the elderly to do it, they get everything else handed to them.
We force them to go to school. What is the difference?
If it’s introduced as part of a way of helping young people develop non-academic skills and helping our young people to be community minded and spirited, I’m all for it. Clearly I don’t have much faith in the current government implementing it properly, but conceptually I see positives.
A long but worthwhile read from the brilliant Jennifer Williams in the FT. I went to college in Oldham so know the town well. To read so many problems at a big high school is disheartening.
The Tories have absolutely broken the ability of so many families to get by, and also broken the budgets of the schools who are left to pick up the pieces.
Christ, that is a tough read, it left me in tears. The Tories have utterly broken this country, and unforgivably they have ensured that children, and especially poor children, have borne the brunt of it. I find it hard to control my anger at them sometimes.
Is this really the country we want? The society we believe to be just? I know PB Tories and their fellow travellers excuse almost everything, but is this what we have been reduced to? For what other benefit?
If we remove the (often) justified anger, then there's four simple questions which the politicans of all sides need to ask.
1) What are we currently spending money on? 2) What could we spend more money or or less on to make the changes which people want (and what are those changes)? 3) How can we increase the money to make the gap from 1 to 2?
Anything other than that is really just details.
Given that there appears to be little appetite for tax rises (except for the idea of raising mythical billions from the top 1%), and the books are still a long way from balancing, the conversation really needs to be around the scope of government.
What does government do currently, that it could stop doing without too many adverse effects?
The obvious standout figures are £20bn on ‘Energy Security and Net Zero’, £10bn on “Science, Innovation and Technology”, and nearly £10bn on the Foreign Office. DWP also spends £8.5bn on its own admin, and HMRC £6.5bn, which suggests that reducing complexity in the tax and benefits system could lead to savings there.
In the current culture there is a problem. We are borrowing £100 bn per annum even now. So that needs to be found. But there isn't a single area of interest where there isn't pressure for government to spend more, usually much more. The media, especially the BBC give a perpetual free and unchallenged ride to all and everyone who are calling for higher expenditure on everything under the sun.
To see the size of the £100 bn deficit, if we abolished all state managed expenditure on education entirely, it still would not cover it. So bits of tinkering will make no real difference.
If you look at those figures it appears as if health/social care has had a big increase, education has kept steady and everything else has been bludgeoned. Doesn't include pensions of course.....
What will be interesting is if education gets cut once school numbers start falling. We are looking at perhaps 20% in Wales.
Really?! 20% fewer pupils at school in Wales? Compared to when?
Number of school places in Trafford continues to increase, but not by as much as demand for school places - which means that presumably demand in Manchester, Cheshire East etc is also increasing.
For the UK as a whole the number of under-5s has fallen by 7% in the last 5 years, which means a big drop in demand for school places is coming. You need to go back to the 70s to see an equivalent five year decline. Fewer people see the UK as a place where they want, or can afford, to raise a family. It's pretty damning but wholly unsurprising given the government's explicit policy is to stop the poor from breeding while siphoning off the middle class's income to featherbed pensioners and keeping housing unaffordable.
The 2010s seem to have mirrored the 1990s for birth trajectory with similar peaks at 2012 and 1990; 1977 -> 1990 and 2001 -> 2012 are the upswings.
Penny Mordant wants the young of this country to do national service.
The Tories have given up. Get rid.
Is it a terrible idea to ask young people to do some voluntary work or similar as part of their education and development, for instance? I haven’t interrogated the full proposals but I don’t think she’s talking about press-ganging 16 year olds into the military.
Don't sort out the problems young people are experiencing, force them to work instead. It is an insult.
Why not get the elderly to do it, they get everything else handed to them.
We force them to go to school. What is the difference?
If it’s introduced as part of a way of helping young people develop non-academic skills and helping our young people to be community minded and spirited, I’m all for it. Clearly I don’t have much faith in the current government implementing it properly, but conceptually I see positives.
How does making young people join the army help them develop in any way? It's just an excuse to get away from solving problems.
Rather upsetting, historic abuse at a (partly) boarding school. The lawyer for the survivors' group:
'McLean also set out how boys, parents and the occasional junior staff member had been “threatened, menaced, suppressed” when they attempted to raise the alarm.
And just as chilling was the wider culture of complicity the evidence exposed – when the internationally acclaimed actor Iain Glen spoke out about his abuse in 2002, Campbell said “the wrath of Morningside and Muirfield and Murrayfield [wealthy Edinburgh suburbs] rained down on his head with biblical fury because he’d broken the code, the Edinburgh omertà.”
When speaking about the academy’s governor, who always held sway in Edinburgh, Moffatt said they were “senior professionals who you’d expect to be protecting children, and they did nothing – that’s the arrogance of the Edinburgh establishment.”'
Since ignoring whistleblowers is flavour of the month, it's worth noting not just this case but that there were 2 schools - Edinburgh Academy and Fettes School - which admitted that they knew a teacher was a predatory paedophile but gave him a good reference and failed to inform the police.
It's not the first time the FCA has been accused of ignoring warnings. It admitted failings in relation to Link and its role in the Woodford saga and its supervision of London Capital & Finance and failures to follow up warnings it received. Andrew Bailey was bloody lucky to get out of the FCA when he did because his record at the FCA fell into the Cressida Dick category rather than the Sir Robert Mark one.
I have my own amusing story of repeatedly informing the FCA about an individual who should not have been authorised by them but was and being told - when the inevitable happened and they were trying to blame me for not telling them and then having to retreat very rapidly when I pointed out that I had written to them a year before - that, yes, they had received the material I'd sent but "they didn't always read everything" they were sent.
So those NHS managers are in good company.
The problem with organisations which depend on their reputation is that when something awful happens protecting reputation becomes the only thing that matters. Hiding the problem and sending the bad individual away somewhere else achieves that. It worked after all for those schools for decades, even if the price was a lot of abused children. Ditto the police, NHS etc.,.
The harm is felt years later and those in charge are not willing to endure the short-term pain caused by bringing in the police / dealing properly with a problem for the long-term gain. So they are willing to sacrifice the children, patients, investors, etc., in their care.
Breaking that perverse incentive is what is needed.
By all accounts, Theresa May's book, The Abuse of Power, has a similar theme.
From the Telegraph's review:-
... This brings her on to her wider theme: corruption within these systems, and what happens when those in charge care about themselves, not others – leaving the powerless without a voice.
Here we see Theresa May as something of an avenger, keen to hold the vain and powerful to account. This very much includes those in her own party. She attributes the Hillsborough calamity, for instance, to a cruel policing style built around the premise that “fans would only ever cause trouble” and were there to be controlled. After those 95 initial deaths, she says, South Yorkshire Police protected themselves – and were, in turn, protected by a Tory party in denial. Margaret Thatcher is quoted, being asked by a mother of one victim what the police were doing. Her reply: “Their job, my dear.” To May, this response showed a deep problem in her party: they were so keen on law and order that they couldn’t recognise police malpractice. ... Sir Lenny Henry emerges as an unlikely hero of the Windrush scandal, alerting May to the full horror of what was being asked of people if they wanted to avoid deportation. “Who’s got four pieces of documentation for every year they were alive?” he asked an audience at a memorial she attended. Shocked, she asked officials to investigate, yet she didn’t hear back until the inquiry reported, two years later. A case study in system failure – but May stops short of asking why, after her six years as Home Secretary, such mayhem could have continued until a comedian raised the alarm.
She says little about Boris Johnson and David Cameron, but it’s not hard to guess at whom she has in mind when she talks at length about vain MPs who see politics as a career, not a chance to serve. If we find politicians who put “the common good above personal interest,” she concludes, we “might be able to consign the abuse of power to the past”. But this optimistic thought is contradicted by the powerful examples in her book: where good people (herself included) presided over appalling injustices. That’s why the real villain of The Abuse of Power is a deserving one: the intransigent bureaucracies that, after 13 years of Tory rule, are more powerful than ever. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/non-fiction/review-theresa-may-abuse-power-fraser-nelson/ (£££)
May was in power and had a chance to do something about this.
Probably, I - along with colleagues - have achieved more practical worthwhile change in my work - even if restricted to a few workplaces - than she has. And yet the politicians with power are the ones who are praised and turned to for solutions despite their manifest failures and lack of curiosity about what is going on, even in areas they are responsible for.
The Tory party in the 1980's knew full well about police malpractice - there had been plenty of instances of it from the 1970's onwards, at least. They simply did not care so long as it was directed at people who were unimportant to them. The same could be said about every party and their favoured groups.
Politics has now been largely reduced to performative grandstanding, of which yesterday's pathetic "let's forcibly drag prisoners into the dock to hear their sentencing so that they can upset the victims" families by shouting abuse at them, at which point we'll reverse ferret" law, supported by Tories and Labour is an example.
Law and order is not an area of strength for either party. Too prone to grandstanding even compared to other areas.
It's been quite the precipitous, and thoroughly deserved, fall from grace for Baldy Ben. From oft-discussed tory leader candidate and potential NATO SecGen to Scotland's second best Bernard Manning tribute act in just a few months.
My understanding is that Ben Wallace is resigning by choice, so he can step straight into lucrative defence business posts at the next election and not have to wait out restrictions on taking up conflicting interests.
Understanding based on?
Friends of Ben Wallace obviously. I am sure he deserves the lucrative sinecures and shouldn't have to wait unnecessarily for them.
Ah, so based on nothing then.
Ben Wallace is nothing? Your words, not mine.
Wait, now your claiming he himself told you those were his motives? Right.
My very last comment on your obtuse challenge. The quoted source as I say is "friends of Ben Wallace". treat that as you will.
Penny Mordant wants the young of this country to do national service.
The Tories have given up. Get rid.
Is it a terrible idea to ask young people to do some voluntary work or similar as part of their education and development, for instance? I haven’t interrogated the full proposals but I don’t think she’s talking about press-ganging 16 year olds into the military.
Don't sort out the problems young people are experiencing, force them to work instead. It is an insult.
Why not get the elderly to do it, they get everything else handed to them.
We force them to go to school. What is the difference?
If it’s introduced as part of a way of helping young people develop non-academic skills and helping our young people to be community minded and spirited, I’m all for it. Clearly I don’t have much faith in the current government implementing it properly, but conceptually I see positives.
How does making young people join the army help them develop in any way? It's just an excuse to get away from solving problems.
In an increasingly technical armed forces, semi-trained cannon fodder isn't particularly a productive use of training time.
Perhaps sub-contract NS to the Ukes and solve two problems in one. Send the yobbos to Bakhmut.
Penny Mordant wants the young of this country to do national service.
The Tories have given up. Get rid.
Is it a terrible idea to ask young people to do some voluntary work or similar as part of their education and development, for instance? I haven’t interrogated the full proposals but I don’t think she’s talking about press-ganging 16 year olds into the military.
Don't sort out the problems young people are experiencing, force them to work instead. It is an insult.
Why not get the elderly to do it, they get everything else handed to them.
We force them to go to school. What is the difference?
If it’s introduced as part of a way of helping young people develop non-academic skills and helping our young people to be community minded and spirited, I’m all for it. Clearly I don’t have much faith in the current government implementing it properly, but conceptually I see positives.
How does making young people join the army help them develop in any way? It's just an excuse to get away from solving problems.
My understanding is we’re talking about community work etc rather than military service which I wouldn’t endorse. As I say above, I don’t profess to know the full details.
Wouldn’t it be good to help young people develop more non-academic skills and confidence?
Why not get the elderly to do it, they get everything else handed to them.
Unsarcastically: why not? Most armed forces jobs require physical fitness, but the admin jobs can be filled by conscripted Boomer retirees. They'll be perfectly capable and if the hours are short (say 3 days a week) the service will add to their lives.
Rather upsetting, historic abuse at a (partly) boarding school. The lawyer for the survivors' group:
'McLean also set out how boys, parents and the occasional junior staff member had been “threatened, menaced, suppressed” when they attempted to raise the alarm.
And just as chilling was the wider culture of complicity the evidence exposed – when the internationally acclaimed actor Iain Glen spoke out about his abuse in 2002, Campbell said “the wrath of Morningside and Muirfield and Murrayfield [wealthy Edinburgh suburbs] rained down on his head with biblical fury because he’d broken the code, the Edinburgh omertà.”
When speaking about the academy’s governor, who always held sway in Edinburgh, Moffatt said they were “senior professionals who you’d expect to be protecting children, and they did nothing – that’s the arrogance of the Edinburgh establishment.”'
Since ignoring whistleblowers is flavour of the month, it's worth noting not just this case but that there were 2 schools - Edinburgh Academy and Fettes School - which admitted that they knew a teacher was a predatory paedophile but gave him a good reference and failed to inform the police.
It's not the first time the FCA has been accused of ignoring warnings. It admitted failings in relation to Link and its role in the Woodford saga and its supervision of London Capital & Finance and failures to follow up warnings it received. Andrew Bailey was bloody lucky to get out of the FCA when he did because his record at the FCA fell into the Cressida Dick category rather than the Sir Robert Mark one.
I have my own amusing story of repeatedly informing the FCA about an individual who should not have been authorised by them but was and being told - when the inevitable happened and they were trying to blame me for not telling them and then having to retreat very rapidly when I pointed out that I had written to them a year before - that, yes, they had received the material I'd sent but "they didn't always read everything" they were sent.
So those NHS managers are in good company.
The problem with organisations which depend on their reputation is that when something awful happens protecting reputation becomes the only thing that matters. Hiding the problem and sending the bad individual away somewhere else achieves that. It worked after all for those schools for decades, even if the price was a lot of abused children. Ditto the police, NHS etc.,.
The harm is felt years later and those in charge are not willing to endure the short-term pain caused by bringing in the police / dealing properly with a problem for the long-term gain. So they are willing to sacrifice the children, patients, investors, etc., in their care.
Breaking that perverse incentive is what is needed.
By all accounts, Theresa May's book, The Abuse of Power, has a similar theme.
From the Telegraph's review:-
... This brings her on to her wider theme: corruption within these systems, and what happens when those in charge care about themselves, not others – leaving the powerless without a voice.
Here we see Theresa May as something of an avenger, keen to hold the vain and powerful to account. This very much includes those in her own party. She attributes the Hillsborough calamity, for instance, to a cruel policing style built around the premise that “fans would only ever cause trouble” and were there to be controlled. After those 95 initial deaths, she says, South Yorkshire Police protected themselves – and were, in turn, protected by a Tory party in denial. Margaret Thatcher is quoted, being asked by a mother of one victim what the police were doing. Her reply: “Their job, my dear.” To May, this response showed a deep problem in her party: they were so keen on law and order that they couldn’t recognise police malpractice. ... Sir Lenny Henry emerges as an unlikely hero of the Windrush scandal, alerting May to the full horror of what was being asked of people if they wanted to avoid deportation. “Who’s got four pieces of documentation for every year they were alive?” he asked an audience at a memorial she attended. Shocked, she asked officials to investigate, yet she didn’t hear back until the inquiry reported, two years later. A case study in system failure – but May stops short of asking why, after her six years as Home Secretary, such mayhem could have continued until a comedian raised the alarm.
She says little about Boris Johnson and David Cameron, but it’s not hard to guess at whom she has in mind when she talks at length about vain MPs who see politics as a career, not a chance to serve. If we find politicians who put “the common good above personal interest,” she concludes, we “might be able to consign the abuse of power to the past”. But this optimistic thought is contradicted by the powerful examples in her book: where good people (herself included) presided over appalling injustices. That’s why the real villain of The Abuse of Power is a deserving one: the intransigent bureaucracies that, after 13 years of Tory rule, are more powerful than ever. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/non-fiction/review-theresa-may-abuse-power-fraser-nelson/ (£££)
May was in power and had a chance to do something about this.
Probably, I - along with colleagues - have achieved more practical worthwhile change in my work - even if restricted to a few workplaces - than she has. And yet the politicians with power are the ones who are praised and turned to for solutions despite their manifest failures and lack of curiosity about what is going on, even in areas they are responsible for.
The Tory party in the 1980's knew full well about police malpractice - there had been plenty of instances of it from the 1970's onwards, at least. They simply did not care so long as it was directed at people who were unimportant to them. The same could be said about every party and their favoured groups.
Politics has now been largely reduced to performative grandstanding, of which yesterday's pathetic "let's forcibly drag prisoners into the dock to hear their sentencing so that they can upset the victims" families by shouting abuse at them, at which point we'll reverse ferret" law, supported by Tories and Labour is an example.
Law and order is not an area of strength for either party. Too prone to grandstanding even compared to other areas.
The one thing I would expect from Starmer is a sorting out and investment in criminal justice.
Rather upsetting, historic abuse at a (partly) boarding school. The lawyer for the survivors' group:
'McLean also set out how boys, parents and the occasional junior staff member had been “threatened, menaced, suppressed” when they attempted to raise the alarm.
And just as chilling was the wider culture of complicity the evidence exposed – when the internationally acclaimed actor Iain Glen spoke out about his abuse in 2002, Campbell said “the wrath of Morningside and Muirfield and Murrayfield [wealthy Edinburgh suburbs] rained down on his head with biblical fury because he’d broken the code, the Edinburgh omertà.”
When speaking about the academy’s governor, who always held sway in Edinburgh, Moffatt said they were “senior professionals who you’d expect to be protecting children, and they did nothing – that’s the arrogance of the Edinburgh establishment.”'
Since ignoring whistleblowers is flavour of the month, it's worth noting not just this case but that there were 2 schools - Edinburgh Academy and Fettes School - which admitted that they knew a teacher was a predatory paedophile but gave him a good reference and failed to inform the police.
It's not the first time the FCA has been accused of ignoring warnings. It admitted failings in relation to Link and its role in the Woodford saga and its supervision of London Capital & Finance and failures to follow up warnings it received. Andrew Bailey was bloody lucky to get out of the FCA when he did because his record at the FCA fell into the Cressida Dick category rather than the Sir Robert Mark one.
I have my own amusing story of repeatedly informing the FCA about an individual who should not have been authorised by them but was and being told - when the inevitable happened and they were trying to blame me for not telling them and then having to retreat very rapidly when I pointed out that I had written to them a year before - that, yes, they had received the material I'd sent but "they didn't always read everything" they were sent.
So those NHS managers are in good company.
The problem with organisations which depend on their reputation is that when something awful happens protecting reputation becomes the only thing that matters. Hiding the problem and sending the bad individual away somewhere else achieves that. It worked after all for those schools for decades, even if the price was a lot of abused children. Ditto the police, NHS etc.,.
The harm is felt years later and those in charge are not willing to endure the short-term pain caused by bringing in the police / dealing properly with a problem for the long-term gain. So they are willing to sacrifice the children, patients, investors, etc., in their care.
Breaking that perverse incentive is what is needed.
By all accounts, Theresa May's book, The Abuse of Power, has a similar theme.
From the Telegraph's review:-
... This brings her on to her wider theme: corruption within these systems, and what happens when those in charge care about themselves, not others – leaving the powerless without a voice.
Here we see Theresa May as something of an avenger, keen to hold the vain and powerful to account. This very much includes those in her own party. She attributes the Hillsborough calamity, for instance, to a cruel policing style built around the premise that “fans would only ever cause trouble” and were there to be controlled. After those 95 initial deaths, she says, South Yorkshire Police protected themselves – and were, in turn, protected by a Tory party in denial. Margaret Thatcher is quoted, being asked by a mother of one victim what the police were doing. Her reply: “Their job, my dear.” To May, this response showed a deep problem in her party: they were so keen on law and order that they couldn’t recognise police malpractice. ... Sir Lenny Henry emerges as an unlikely hero of the Windrush scandal, alerting May to the full horror of what was being asked of people if they wanted to avoid deportation. “Who’s got four pieces of documentation for every year they were alive?” he asked an audience at a memorial she attended. Shocked, she asked officials to investigate, yet she didn’t hear back until the inquiry reported, two years later. A case study in system failure – but May stops short of asking why, after her six years as Home Secretary, such mayhem could have continued until a comedian raised the alarm.
She says little about Boris Johnson and David Cameron, but it’s not hard to guess at whom she has in mind when she talks at length about vain MPs who see politics as a career, not a chance to serve. If we find politicians who put “the common good above personal interest,” she concludes, we “might be able to consign the abuse of power to the past”. But this optimistic thought is contradicted by the powerful examples in her book: where good people (herself included) presided over appalling injustices. That’s why the real villain of The Abuse of Power is a deserving one: the intransigent bureaucracies that, after 13 years of Tory rule, are more powerful than ever. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/non-fiction/review-theresa-may-abuse-power-fraser-nelson/ (£££)
May was in power and had a chance to do something about this.
Probably, I - along with colleagues - have achieved more practical worthwhile change in my work - even if restricted to a few workplaces - than she has. And yet the politicians with power are the ones who are praised and turned to for solutions despite their manifest failures and lack of curiosity about what is going on, even in areas they are responsible for.
The Tory party in the 1980's knew full well about police malpractice - there had been plenty of instances of it from the 1970's onwards, at least. They simply did not care so long as it was directed at people who were unimportant to them. The same could be said about every party and their favoured groups.
Politics has now been largely reduced to performative grandstanding, of which yesterday's pathetic "let's forcibly drag prisoners into the dock to hear their sentencing so that they can upset the victims" families by shouting abuse at them, at which point we'll reverse ferret" law, supported by Tories and Labour is an example.
Law and order is not an area of strength for either party. Too prone to grandstanding even compared to other areas.
The one thing I would expect from Starmer is a sorting out and investment in criminal justice.
Probably. But in general the point stands. All chasing after headlines, new pointless laws and hang em and flog em talk.
Penny Mordant wants the young of this country to do national service.
The Tories have given up. Get rid.
That would require the Government to spend money on the British armed forces. Spot the problem.
Going off the Mail's coverage, it looks more like a beefed up version of the existing National Citizen Service scheme, by making it opt out rather than opt in.
It's not a bad thing, but it hasn't really taken off. Calling it National Service is just a way of fluffing the boomer generation who, lest we (or they) forget, didn't do the real thing.
Every young person will have to do 50 hours' voluntary work by the age of 19 if Labour wins the next election. Gordon Brown said a plan for compulsory community service would be included in Labour's manifesto.
It was a crap idea then, and it's a crap idea now. It's supposed to instill some sort of mythical sense of community (Ms Mordaunt enthusiastically endorsed the blueprint in an article for the Telegraph, saying it would foster the 'goodwill and community spirit, energy and imagination' of teens.) The best thing we could do for our young adults is give them some hope that they can get somewhere to live, get a job and that us oldies won't fuck everything up!
They said that about Mrs Thatcher and David Cameron, and by "they" I mean members of their Cabinets. I don't think people care enough to change their votes, and might even like the idea of a Prime Minister who has been successful.
That said, CCHQ might agree with OGH given this helicopter story:-
Why not get the elderly to do it, they get everything else handed to them.
Unsarcastically: why not? Most armed forces jobs require physical fitness, but the admin jobs can be filled by conscripted Boomer retirees. They'll be perfectly capable and if the hours are short (say 3 days a week) the service will add to their lives.
Until I developed my current, and probably eventually terminal problems, I found plenty to do in retirement.
Rather upsetting, historic abuse at a (partly) boarding school. The lawyer for the survivors' group:
'McLean also set out how boys, parents and the occasional junior staff member had been “threatened, menaced, suppressed” when they attempted to raise the alarm.
And just as chilling was the wider culture of complicity the evidence exposed – when the internationally acclaimed actor Iain Glen spoke out about his abuse in 2002, Campbell said “the wrath of Morningside and Muirfield and Murrayfield [wealthy Edinburgh suburbs] rained down on his head with biblical fury because he’d broken the code, the Edinburgh omertà.”
When speaking about the academy’s governor, who always held sway in Edinburgh, Moffatt said they were “senior professionals who you’d expect to be protecting children, and they did nothing – that’s the arrogance of the Edinburgh establishment.”'
Since ignoring whistleblowers is flavour of the month, it's worth noting not just this case but that there were 2 schools - Edinburgh Academy and Fettes School - which admitted that they knew a teacher was a predatory paedophile but gave him a good reference and failed to inform the police.
It's not the first time the FCA has been accused of ignoring warnings. It admitted failings in relation to Link and its role in the Woodford saga and its supervision of London Capital & Finance and failures to follow up warnings it received. Andrew Bailey was bloody lucky to get out of the FCA when he did because his record at the FCA fell into the Cressida Dick category rather than the Sir Robert Mark one.
I have my own amusing story of repeatedly informing the FCA about an individual who should not have been authorised by them but was and being told - when the inevitable happened and they were trying to blame me for not telling them and then having to retreat very rapidly when I pointed out that I had written to them a year before - that, yes, they had received the material I'd sent but "they didn't always read everything" they were sent.
So those NHS managers are in good company.
The problem with organisations which depend on their reputation is that when something awful happens protecting reputation becomes the only thing that matters. Hiding the problem and sending the bad individual away somewhere else achieves that. It worked after all for those schools for decades, even if the price was a lot of abused children. Ditto the police, NHS etc.,.
The harm is felt years later and those in charge are not willing to endure the short-term pain caused by bringing in the police / dealing properly with a problem for the long-term gain. So they are willing to sacrifice the children, patients, investors, etc., in their care.
Breaking that perverse incentive is what is needed.
By all accounts, Theresa May's book, The Abuse of Power, has a similar theme.
From the Telegraph's review:-
... This brings her on to her wider theme: corruption within these systems, and what happens when those in charge care about themselves, not others – leaving the powerless without a voice.
Here we see Theresa May as something of an avenger, keen to hold the vain and powerful to account. This very much includes those in her own party. She attributes the Hillsborough calamity, for instance, to a cruel policing style built around the premise that “fans would only ever cause trouble” and were there to be controlled. After those 95 initial deaths, she says, South Yorkshire Police protected themselves – and were, in turn, protected by a Tory party in denial. Margaret Thatcher is quoted, being asked by a mother of one victim what the police were doing. Her reply: “Their job, my dear.” To May, this response showed a deep problem in her party: they were so keen on law and order that they couldn’t recognise police malpractice. ... Sir Lenny Henry emerges as an unlikely hero of the Windrush scandal, alerting May to the full horror of what was being asked of people if they wanted to avoid deportation. “Who’s got four pieces of documentation for every year they were alive?” he asked an audience at a memorial she attended. Shocked, she asked officials to investigate, yet she didn’t hear back until the inquiry reported, two years later. A case study in system failure – but May stops short of asking why, after her six years as Home Secretary, such mayhem could have continued until a comedian raised the alarm.
She says little about Boris Johnson and David Cameron, but it’s not hard to guess at whom she has in mind when she talks at length about vain MPs who see politics as a career, not a chance to serve. If we find politicians who put “the common good above personal interest,” she concludes, we “might be able to consign the abuse of power to the past”. But this optimistic thought is contradicted by the powerful examples in her book: where good people (herself included) presided over appalling injustices. That’s why the real villain of The Abuse of Power is a deserving one: the intransigent bureaucracies that, after 13 years of Tory rule, are more powerful than ever. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/non-fiction/review-theresa-may-abuse-power-fraser-nelson/ (£££)
May was in power and had a chance to do something about this.
Probably, I - along with colleagues - have achieved more practical worthwhile change in my work - even if restricted to a few workplaces - than she has. And yet the politicians with power are the ones who are praised and turned to for solutions despite their manifest failures and lack of curiosity about what is going on, even in areas they are responsible for.
The Tory party in the 1980's knew full well about police malpractice - there had been plenty of instances of it from the 1970's onwards, at least. They simply did not care so long as it was directed at people who were unimportant to them. The same could be said about every party and their favoured groups.
Politics has now been largely reduced to performative grandstanding, of which yesterday's pathetic "let's forcibly drag prisoners into the dock to hear their sentencing so that they can upset the victims" families by shouting abuse at them, at which point we'll reverse ferret" law, supported by Tories and Labour is an example.
Law and order is not an area of strength for either party. Too prone to grandstanding even compared to other areas.
The one thing I would expect from Starmer is a sorting out and investment in criminal justice.
Some continuity in ministerial posts would be nice. " I congratulate Claire Coutinho on her appointment as Energy Secretary. But it speaks volumes about the failures of Tory policy that we are now onto the 6th Secretary of State since 2019..."
Why not get the elderly to do it, they get everything else handed to them.
Unsarcastically: why not? Most armed forces jobs require physical fitness, but the admin jobs can be filled by conscripted Boomer retirees. They'll be perfectly capable and if the hours are short (say 3 days a week) the service will add to their lives.
Until I developed my current, and probably eventually terminal problems, I found plenty to do in retirement.
The truly galling thing about the appointment of Grant Shapps as Defence Secretary, it is his fifth cabinet job in a year.
That is why the Tories are buggered.
I remember a more innocent time when many critics of the last Labour government (myself included) used to believe the generally annual reshuffle (usually timed to coincide with the day after a local election drubbing) to be so counterproductive in terms of producing stable policy. Indeed there was relative stability in a number of government departments during the 2010-2015 government.
Recently the number of changes have been absolutely atrocious and far dwarf anything Blair/Brown could be accused of
By the time we get to the mayoral election the outer ULEZ will have been in position for 8 months and most people will have found their lives totally unaffected and quite a few less affected than they feared. I think we've been here before.
Rather upsetting, historic abuse at a (partly) boarding school. The lawyer for the survivors' group:
'McLean also set out how boys, parents and the occasional junior staff member had been “threatened, menaced, suppressed” when they attempted to raise the alarm.
And just as chilling was the wider culture of complicity the evidence exposed – when the internationally acclaimed actor Iain Glen spoke out about his abuse in 2002, Campbell said “the wrath of Morningside and Muirfield and Murrayfield [wealthy Edinburgh suburbs] rained down on his head with biblical fury because he’d broken the code, the Edinburgh omertà.”
When speaking about the academy’s governor, who always held sway in Edinburgh, Moffatt said they were “senior professionals who you’d expect to be protecting children, and they did nothing – that’s the arrogance of the Edinburgh establishment.”'
Since ignoring whistleblowers is flavour of the month, it's worth noting not just this case but that there were 2 schools - Edinburgh Academy and Fettes School - which admitted that they knew a teacher was a predatory paedophile but gave him a good reference and failed to inform the police.
It's not the first time the FCA has been accused of ignoring warnings. It admitted failings in relation to Link and its role in the Woodford saga and its supervision of London Capital & Finance and failures to follow up warnings it received. Andrew Bailey was bloody lucky to get out of the FCA when he did because his record at the FCA fell into the Cressida Dick category rather than the Sir Robert Mark one.
I have my own amusing story of repeatedly informing the FCA about an individual who should not have been authorised by them but was and being told - when the inevitable happened and they were trying to blame me for not telling them and then having to retreat very rapidly when I pointed out that I had written to them a year before - that, yes, they had received the material I'd sent but "they didn't always read everything" they were sent.
So those NHS managers are in good company.
The problem with organisations which depend on their reputation is that when something awful happens protecting reputation becomes the only thing that matters. Hiding the problem and sending the bad individual away somewhere else achieves that. It worked after all for those schools for decades, even if the price was a lot of abused children. Ditto the police, NHS etc.,.
The harm is felt years later and those in charge are not willing to endure the short-term pain caused by bringing in the police / dealing properly with a problem for the long-term gain. So they are willing to sacrifice the children, patients, investors, etc., in their care.
Breaking that perverse incentive is what is needed.
By all accounts, Theresa May's book, The Abuse of Power, has a similar theme.
From the Telegraph's review:-
... This brings her on to her wider theme: corruption within these systems, and what happens when those in charge care about themselves, not others – leaving the powerless without a voice.
Here we see Theresa May as something of an avenger, keen to hold the vain and powerful to account. This very much includes those in her own party. She attributes the Hillsborough calamity, for instance, to a cruel policing style built around the premise that “fans would only ever cause trouble” and were there to be controlled. After those 95 initial deaths, she says, South Yorkshire Police protected themselves – and were, in turn, protected by a Tory party in denial. Margaret Thatcher is quoted, being asked by a mother of one victim what the police were doing. Her reply: “Their job, my dear.” To May, this response showed a deep problem in her party: they were so keen on law and order that they couldn’t recognise police malpractice. ... Sir Lenny Henry emerges as an unlikely hero of the Windrush scandal, alerting May to the full horror of what was being asked of people if they wanted to avoid deportation. “Who’s got four pieces of documentation for every year they were alive?” he asked an audience at a memorial she attended. Shocked, she asked officials to investigate, yet she didn’t hear back until the inquiry reported, two years later. A case study in system failure – but May stops short of asking why, after her six years as Home Secretary, such mayhem could have continued until a comedian raised the alarm.
She says little about Boris Johnson and David Cameron, but it’s not hard to guess at whom she has in mind when she talks at length about vain MPs who see politics as a career, not a chance to serve. If we find politicians who put “the common good above personal interest,” she concludes, we “might be able to consign the abuse of power to the past”. But this optimistic thought is contradicted by the powerful examples in her book: where good people (herself included) presided over appalling injustices. That’s why the real villain of The Abuse of Power is a deserving one: the intransigent bureaucracies that, after 13 years of Tory rule, are more powerful than ever. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/non-fiction/review-theresa-may-abuse-power-fraser-nelson/ (£££)
May was in power and had a chance to do something about this.
Probably, I - along with colleagues - have achieved more practical worthwhile change in my work - even if restricted to a few workplaces - than she has. And yet the politicians with power are the ones who are praised and turned to for solutions despite their manifest failures and lack of curiosity about what is going on, even in areas they are responsible for.
The Tory party in the 1980's knew full well about police malpractice - there had been plenty of instances of it from the 1970's onwards, at least. They simply did not care so long as it was directed at people who were unimportant to them. The same could be said about every party and their favoured groups.
Politics has now been largely reduced to performative grandstanding, of which yesterday's pathetic "let's forcibly drag prisoners into the dock to hear their sentencing so that they can upset the victims" families by shouting abuse at them, at which point we'll reverse ferret" law, supported by Tories and Labour is an example.
Law and order is not an area of strength for either party. Too prone to grandstanding even compared to other areas.
The one thing I would expect from Starmer is a sorting out and investment in criminal justice.
Some continuity in ministerial posts would be nice. " I congratulate Claire Coutinho on her appointment as Energy Secretary. But it speaks volumes about the failures of Tory policy that we are now onto the 6th Secretary of State since 2019..."
Some positions have long been very rotating - culture for example, or pensions. Since Camerons coalition ministry it has gotten very silly, but inevitable with so many PMs, many of which had to shuffle around multiple resignations.
The abortive summer reboot for Boris and Trussian diversion adds to it all, since it means several people in place for only a month, or only days, then the same people put back in, making the number so much higher.
The truly galling thing about the appointment of Grant Shapps as Defence Secretary, it is his fifth cabinet job in a year.
That is why the Tories are buggered.
I remember a more innocent time when many critics of the last Labour government (myself included) used to believe the generally annual reshuffle (usually timed to coincide with the day after a local election drubbing) to be so counterproductive in terms of producing stable policy. Indeed there was relative stability in a number of government departments during the 2010-2015 government.
Recently the number of changes have been absolutely atrocious and far dwarf anything Blair/Brown could be accused of
Bit distasteful to use the word "dwarf" in relation to Rishi Sunak's government.
The truly galling thing about the appointment of Grant Shapps as Defence Secretary, it is his fifth cabinet job in a year.
That is why the Tories are buggered.
I remember a more innocent time when many critics of the last Labour government (myself included) used to believe the generally annual reshuffle (usually timed to coincide with the day after a local election drubbing) to be so counterproductive in terms of producing stable policy. Indeed there was relative stability in a number of government departments during the 2010-2015 government.
Recently the number of changes have been absolutely atrocious and far dwarf anything Blair/Brown could be accused of
To be fair, three Prime Ministers in as many months is mainly to blame. Remember the Daily Star's take:-
Rather upsetting, historic abuse at a (partly) boarding school. The lawyer for the survivors' group:
'McLean also set out how boys, parents and the occasional junior staff member had been “threatened, menaced, suppressed” when they attempted to raise the alarm.
And just as chilling was the wider culture of complicity the evidence exposed – when the internationally acclaimed actor Iain Glen spoke out about his abuse in 2002, Campbell said “the wrath of Morningside and Muirfield and Murrayfield [wealthy Edinburgh suburbs] rained down on his head with biblical fury because he’d broken the code, the Edinburgh omertà.”
When speaking about the academy’s governor, who always held sway in Edinburgh, Moffatt said they were “senior professionals who you’d expect to be protecting children, and they did nothing – that’s the arrogance of the Edinburgh establishment.”'
I wonder why the wrath of Marchmont has been so unfairly ignored.
Too many students in nice flats, who had recently been pupils.
Every young person will have to do 50 hours' voluntary work by the age of 19 if Labour wins the next election. Gordon Brown said a plan for compulsory community service would be included in Labour's manifesto.
It was a crap idea then, and it's a crap idea now. It's supposed to instill some sort of mythical sense of community (Ms Mordaunt enthusiastically endorsed the blueprint in an article for the Telegraph, saying it would foster the 'goodwill and community spirit, energy and imagination' of teens.) The best thing we could do for our young adults is give them some hope that they can get somewhere to live, get a job and that us oldies won't fuck everything up!
Giving young people opportunities to volunteer is a good thing. My two older children have both done voluntary work under the aegis of the brilliant DofE scheme and they've got a lot out of it as well as giving back to the community. Where I think it falls down is if young people are presented to an ageing electorate as a problem that needs fixing, and if some kind of poorly resourced mandatory scheme crowds out the excellent and worthwhile volunteering opportunities that already exist, while undermining the very concept of volunteering - that it should be voluntary. My view is that everyone of all ages should seek out volunteering opportunities, they can be very rewarding and a great way to connect with people.
I know we have issues with the quality of our politicians, but by and large they're still all functioning physically.
Oddly, since Mitch McConnell started freezing, the usual suspects have been less vocal about Joe Biden's age and frailty. Coincidence, I expect.
I don't imagine Trumpists would stop - he was yelled at non stop during a speech recently to just retire, I believe from the right and left.
I've done something like that a few times recently. Just go 'out' for a few minutes, but I've not been able to breathe either. Come round after a couple of minutes and rapidly return to normal. Doctor's puzzled.
Despite this, a level of ethnic block voting is objectively a relevant factor here and I concur with Slade that this should see Labour safe this time round.
Every young person will have to do 50 hours' voluntary work by the age of 19 if Labour wins the next election. Gordon Brown said a plan for compulsory community service would be included in Labour's manifesto.
It was a crap idea then, and it's a crap idea now. It's supposed to instill some sort of mythical sense of community (Ms Mordaunt enthusiastically endorsed the blueprint in an article for the Telegraph, saying it would foster the 'goodwill and community spirit, energy and imagination' of teens.) The best thing we could do for our young adults is give them some hope that they can get somewhere to live, get a job and that us oldies won't fuck everything up!
Giving young people opportunities to volunteer is a good thing. My two older children have both done voluntary work under the aegis of the brilliant DofE scheme and they've got a lot out of it as well as giving back to the community. Where I think it falls down is if young people are presented to an ageing electorate as a problem that needs fixing, and if some kind of poorly resourced mandatory scheme crowds out the excellent and worthwhile volunteering opportunities that already exist, while undermining the very concept of volunteering - that it should be voluntary. My view is that everyone of all ages should seek out volunteering opportunities, they can be very rewarding and a great way to connect with people.
Volunteering is great, but the Tory fascination wirh "National Service" has nowt to do with proper volunteering. They want it to bring discipline and a sense of patriotism. That isn't what modern young 'uns need.
Penny Mordant wants the young of this country to do national service.
The Tories have given up. Get rid.
Is it a terrible idea to ask young people to do some voluntary work or similar as part of their education and development, for instance? I haven’t interrogated the full proposals but I don’t think she’s talking about press-ganging 16 year olds into the military.
Don't sort out the problems young people are experiencing, force them to work instead. It is an insult.
Why not get the elderly to do it, they get everything else handed to them.
We force them to go to school. What is the difference?
If it’s introduced as part of a way of helping young people develop non-academic skills and helping our young people to be community minded and spirited, I’m all for it. Clearly I don’t have much faith in the current government implementing it properly, but conceptually I see positives.
How does making young people join the army help them develop in any way? It's just an excuse to get away from solving problems.
In an increasingly technical armed forces, semi-trained cannon fodder isn't particularly a productive use of training time.
Conscripts would be a net negative as they can't really contribute much in the short time they are in and take up a lot of NCO time with discipline, training and welfare. Unless we are going to go in for Basij human wave tactics which admittedly is a 2023 tory type thing to do.
Even Mordaunt knows all this. She is just chucking out shit ideas that might appeal to the over 70 C2DEs who now sit at the focal point of all tory policy formulation in anticipation of an inevitably doomed third (or is it fourth?} tilt at the tory leadership.
A long but worthwhile read from the brilliant Jennifer Williams in the FT. I went to college in Oldham so know the town well. To read so many problems at a big high school is disheartening.
The Tories have absolutely broken the ability of so many families to get by, and also broken the budgets of the schools who are left to pick up the pieces.
Christ, that is a tough read, it left me in tears. The Tories have utterly broken this country, and unforgivably they have ensured that children, and especially poor children, have borne the brunt of it. I find it hard to control my anger at them sometimes.
Is this really the country we want? The society we believe to be just? I know PB Tories and their fellow travellers excuse almost everything, but is this what we have been reduced to? For what other benefit?
If we remove the (often) justified anger, then there's four simple questions which the politicans of all sides need to ask.
1) What are we currently spending money on? 2) What could we spend more money or or less on to make the changes which people want (and what are those changes)? 3) How can we increase the money to make the gap from 1 to 2?
Anything other than that is really just details.
Given that there appears to be little appetite for tax rises (except for the idea of raising mythical billions from the top 1%), and the books are still a long way from balancing, the conversation really needs to be around the scope of government.
What does government do currently, that it could stop doing without too many adverse effects?
The obvious standout figures are £20bn on ‘Energy Security and Net Zero’, £10bn on “Science, Innovation and Technology”, and nearly £10bn on the Foreign Office. DWP also spends £8.5bn on its own admin, and HMRC £6.5bn, which suggests that reducing complexity in the tax and benefits system could lead to savings there.
In the current culture there is a problem. We are borrowing £100 bn per annum even now. So that needs to be found. But there isn't a single area of interest where there isn't pressure for government to spend more, usually much more. The media, especially the BBC give a perpetual free and unchallenged ride to all and everyone who are calling for higher expenditure on everything under the sun.
To see the size of the £100 bn deficit, if we abolished all state managed expenditure on education entirely, it still would not cover it. So bits of tinkering will make no real difference.
The philosophy that the solution is always cut, cut, cut has gotten us to where we are today.
We pay less in tax than many other developed countries that enjoy higher standards of living than us. Let’s be more like them. Well-funded public services are a worthwhile investment.
Comments
Govt completely unrealistic in its offer led to widespread strikes, loss of motivation in staff, more people leaving, very high agency pay and poor service levels.
And then govt ends up paying what could have been accepted six months earlier. It was all futile, in the name of controlling public spending, when all it really did is increase it.
To see the size of the £100 bn deficit, if we abolished all state managed expenditure on education entirely, it still would not cover it. So bits of tinkering will make no real difference.
If cataloguing the contents of the British Museum *has* to be a 500 million pound project. Then we won't have a catalogue.
If building a mile of railway *has* to cost 1 billion. Then we won't have railways.
Getting rid of this will require going to war with a fair chunk of the structure of this country.
My coat? So kind
Also if he was actually any good at politics that would help too.
It's just too prominent, in his case.
Cameron, for example, never covered up who or what he was.
Proposed amendments to the Boiler Upgrade Scheme Regulations
https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/proposed-amendments-to-the-boiler-upgrade-scheme-regulations
FPT on Trump:
There's another set of Indictments (the fifth) being worked on in Arizona, for his and his teams' attempts to steal the 2020 Election there.
Given that parts of his former team have already started to peel away, and some are cooperating with the various prosecutions, or are testifying in their own hearings to what they claim Trump did *, I think he may end up taking the Ernest Saunders route - ie medical incapacity followed by an interestingly quick recovery.
There's also just been a motion (what an appropriate word) in Georgia State to start the trials of all 19 Defendents there in October, which would be .. quick.
I forecast a sudden deterioration in Trump's health soon after he reaches his legal dead end. Given his behaviour, it may be that he *is* mentally unstable.
* Mark Meadows, Trump's former Whitehouse Chief of Staff, spent hours testifying as he attempts to get his own case in Georgia transferred to a Federal Court (where convictions are pardonable by a President, for one thing - unlike State convictions). He has already testified to a lot of juicy material.
This is the official state GOP - and not even one if the nuttier states:
America is a CONSTITUTIONAL REPUBLIC, NOT a democracy!!!!!
https://twitter.com/MIGOP/status/1696677478679339308
What will be interesting is if education gets cut once school numbers start falling. We are looking at perhaps 20% in Wales.
In the real world the law of diminishing returns is what should be assumed to apply.
Because it nearly always does.
Opposition leader to start indefinite hunger strike against Yoon administration
https://m.koreatimes.co.kr/pages/article.asp?newsIdx=358199
..."The Yoon Suk Yeol administration has destroyed the constitutional order and democracy and declared a war on the people," Lee said. "I will prevent the destruction of democracy with the determination to sacrifice my life. As a last resort, I will go on an indefinite hunger strike starting today."
Lee put forward three demands: that Yoon apologize to the people for destroying their livelihoods and the democracy, express opposition to Japan's release of radioactive water into the ocean and thoroughly shake up the Cabinet. ..
"Reshuffle your cabinet, or I'll kill myself"...
But on health - the effects of demographics has been small, and will likely be small in the future. The huge rate of growth in spending is down to something else. Possibly technological innovations (for example, cataract operations), age specific rates of chronic conditions (obesity etc). Some evidence suggests that the rate of this other growth is increasing, which is a bit scary.
His wealth may or may not be an issue but if they indulge in another leadership battle at this point it will surely kill any remaining chance of reelection stone dead.
Good morning everybody.
Number of school places in Trafford continues to increase, but not by as much as demand for school places - which means that presumably demand in Manchester, Cheshire East etc is also increasing.
The Tories have given up. Get rid.
Those days are over now, and even if inflation does return to target, interest rates are likely to stay higher than we have had for 15 years.
The root problem is a stagnant economy, partly because of the "f**k business" approach of the government, but in large part due to demographics, as indeed is increasingly apparent in other countries too, even China now.
Fewer people see the UK as a place where they want, or can afford, to raise a family. It's pretty damning but wholly unsurprising given the government's explicit policy is to stop the poor from breeding while siphoning off the middle class's income to featherbed pensioners and keeping housing unaffordable.
Every young person will have to do 50 hours' voluntary work by the age of 19 if Labour wins the next election. Gordon Brown said a plan for compulsory community service would be included in Labour's manifesto.
Care Homes are asking why they couldn't have had them cheaply!
Your attempt at whataboutism was not very effective
Why not get the elderly to do it, they get everything else handed to them.
If it’s introduced as part of a way of helping young people develop non-academic skills and helping our young people to be community minded and spirited, I’m all for it. Clearly I don’t have much faith in the current government implementing it properly, but conceptually I see positives.
Perhaps sub-contract NS to the Ukes and solve two problems in one. Send the yobbos to Bakhmut.
Wouldn’t it be good to help young people develop more non-academic skills and confidence?
It's not a bad thing, but it hasn't really taken off. Calling it National Service is just a way of fluffing the boomer generation who, lest we (or they) forget, didn't do the real thing.
The best thing we could do for our young adults is give them some hope that they can get somewhere to live, get a job and that us oldies won't fuck everything up!
That is why the Tories are buggered.
https://www2.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2023/08/13/rishi-sunaks-chopper-is-going-to-get-him-into-a-lot-of-trouble/
"momentum has only increased in the wake of the IRA's passage"
IRA referring to Inflation Reduction Act rather than the lads in balaclavas.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/aug/30/mcconnell-freezes-again-kentucky-press-conference
I know we have issues with the quality of our politicians, but by and large they're still all functioning physically.
" I congratulate Claire Coutinho on her appointment as Energy Secretary. But it speaks volumes about the failures of Tory policy that we are now onto the 6th Secretary of State since 2019..."
Recently the number of changes have been absolutely atrocious and far dwarf anything Blair/Brown could be accused of
Trump would love to get rid of him and get someone more pliant in charge.
https://twitter.com/DAaronovitch/status/1696783861475131399
The abortive summer reboot for Boris and Trussian diversion adds to it all, since it means several people in place for only a month, or only days, then the same people put back in, making the number so much higher.
(sorry)
Doctor's puzzled.
https://twitter.com/worgztheowl/status/1697205828611104960
BBC News - Batley East by-election to be held after councillor jailed
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leeds-66659561
Despite this, a level of ethnic block voting is objectively a relevant factor here and I concur with Slade that this should see Labour safe this time round.
Even Mordaunt knows all this. She is just chucking out shit ideas that might appeal to the over 70 C2DEs who now sit at the focal point of all tory policy formulation in anticipation of an inevitably doomed third (or is it fourth?} tilt at the tory leadership.
We pay less in tax than many other developed countries that enjoy higher standards of living than us. Let’s be more like them. Well-funded public services are a worthwhile investment.
100 explosions a year, and another hundred thwarted. Plus 60 fatal shootings last year.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/31/bomb-experts-called-in-after-swedish-cities-see-four-explosions-in-just-over-an-hour