The Israel conflict is terrible with unknown consequences and outcome
This article highlights just how perilous the world's economy's are and why there is absolutely no money to spend by governments
Also sorry to see @Farooq and @FrankBooth leave this forum but at times it does seem like an echo chamber, but it is important that as many different views are expressed as possible otherwise it will become an echo chamber
Why has @Farooq left? Great loss. I really enjoyed his posts. He often made me laugh out loud. Don't know enough about Frank, but generally sad to see anyone leave regardless of their views. I can only think of one exception, and that person was banned so clearly I wasn't alone in that view.
They are going travelling for some months, so a good time to switch off.
@Farooq objected to a few other posters calling for the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians and expulsion from their remaining lands.
I don't think our site or country can usefully contribute to resolving the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, so try to stay out of it, but is difficult to tolerate reading a site calling for further war crimes as answer to war crimes.
PB benefits from a diversity of voices and opinions, and is generally civil compared to other sites, but when any poster dominates thread after thread then it loses that charm.
One poster advocated genocide and another particularly loud poster last night graphically proposed a fate for girls/ young women held hostage by Hamas. Clearly a very, very concerning and challenging situation, and one has to fear for their safety, but projecting the tragedy as a race fuelled masturbatory fantasy was vile.
So I comment not on the issue, which is way beyond my understanding, but the quality of posting.
If it is the post I remember it was not advocating for or proposing a fate for the young girls but describing what was very likely to happen to them based on what we have already seen happen.
Rape has always been used as a weapon by men against women in wartime. Saying this does not make one an advocate for it.
Hamas were rounding up women and girls for kidnap. Having already raped at least one and then paraded her bloodied clothes whilst shouting about how great God is.
Ironically it appears that many of the kidnap and rape victims were peace protestors.
There was a peace music festival going on down there by the Gaza border, ironically. The German tourist who was murdered was an attendee.
The Israel conflict is terrible with unknown consequences and outcome
This article highlights just how perilous the world's economy's are and why there is absolutely no money to spend by governments
Also sorry to see @Farooq and @FrankBooth leave this forum but at times it does seem like an echo chamber, but it is important that as many different views are expressed as possible otherwise it will become an echo chamber
Why has @Farooq left? Great loss. I really enjoyed his posts. He often made me laugh out loud. Don't know enough about Frank, but generally sad to see anyone leave regardless of their views. I can only think of one exception, and that person was banned so clearly I wasn't alone in that view.
@Farooq is a troll and a complete and utter f**king d***head.
However, clenching my teeth, he did at least make vaguely half-intelligent posts at time, and hadn't yet crossed the boundary for being so deeply unpleasant and toxic that he needed evicting from the site, so I wouldn't support his expulsion.
I trust he will return after a few days.
People come, people go. So what.
I don’t mind Faarooq, but it’s all getting a bit like CHB when he was crying for some departed posters to return and then promptly flounced himself. It’s bizarre when people are nostalgic For posters on a message board.
People get far too invested in these debates and discussions. Especially on fucking Israel. Which is why I avoid the topic in any depth. No good ever comes out of it and on Twitter it’s far worse.
Well said. I got involved yesterday as I had a few moments free and such debates have been honed over the years on CiF. Everyone can spout the relevant UN Resolutions on the matter (181, 242, 338 if anyone is wondering) and it gets us nowhere.
I doubt many on here are anti-semitic but the equivalence drawn between Hamas and Netanyahu's government is interesting to see also imo.
Listening to Starmer on BBC just now his answer to the waiting lists is to pay doctors overtime to work evenings and weekends even though the overtime rate is less than they earn in the private sector
I would be interested in hearing the views of @Foxy and others on this
In the short term, what alternative is there?
Yes - employ the private sector to work with the NHS
There is a lot about this on medical Social Media.
There is a long tradition of non-medically trained assistants, from scrub nurses to other professions such as physiotherapists or radiographers, but these new roles of "Physician Associate" and "Anaesthetic Associate" are new to the UK. They are long established in the USA and I have also worked with them in Africa.
All other paramedical professions have their own regulatory bodies , but these new PA and AA roles do not at present. Some Trusts and General Practices are using them interchangeably with Doctors, and they are often incentivised financially to do so.
There is some protectiveness of medical perogative, but also genuine concern as to who is responsible for mistakes, and the diversion of skilled specialists to train these rather than the next generation of specialists.
There was the tragic death of a 30 year old woman with textbook Deep Vein Thrombosis recently, seen only by a PA in General Practice on a number of occasions, and never seen by a qualified doctor.
Tragic medical errors are not unique to PAs, but there is general concern as to who is responsible in such cases.
Do they have (can they?) liability insurance? Or does the employing NHS trust pick up the tab? Must be a real risk for them personally though.
No, they are covered by NHS indemnity. In theory they are not prescribing or ordering ionising radiation investigations, with those the responsibility of the medically qualified supervisor.
There will be a test case soon where an error leads to harm, and a doctor who is nominally supervising is in the dock, rather than the PA who made the error.
This isn't Tory incompetence - its mendaciousness. A deliberate choice to smash as many things as possible, salting the earth for Labour so that they can then postion Labour as the party who screwed everything up.
Sunak stood at his conference lectern railing against government failures, and that only he could lead the change needed to fix the country. As if he, and his party, weren't the people who had wrecked everything.
Never mind ballsy it is simply fantasy. When people keep ramping the supposed £36bn to be spent on northern transport, even as the reality is exposed more and more, it shows that they are so utterly disconnected from reality that they will swallow any lie as truth.
The Tories have had success in weaponising ignorance and stupidity. Polling shows that people have seen through their schtick and aren't listening any more
Labour's last government signed off with "theres no money". Perhaps if they had left some we'd all be in better shape.
Yes. And if "there is no money" was true back then, how true must it be now after your lot have vastly increased the amount of debt we are in?
I do rather enjoy the blank patches in your memory. Are you saying there should have been no support for people during Covid ? I seem to remember Starmer calling out for even more than Lord Bountiful Johnson. And on cost of living should we have told people to freeze last winter ?
An attack on mismanagement of HS2 or government current spending would of course be justified, but if HMG were to impose cuts you would be one of the first to break out in hysterics and say its was wrong.
Fascinating. What we spend money on is a separate thing. If we spend it, we spend it. So "there is no money" was you claim factually true in 2010 when debt was £1.2tn, then it also must be true now when it is £2.5tn.
Money doesn't care what it is spent on. It is either there or it isn't. You said "perhaps if they {Labour} had left some we'd all be in better shape". OK, so debt has doubled, we already factually had no money according to you, so now we're in worse shape with no no money. Logically, if we follow your argument.
Truss scored remarkably well on the damage to time in office metric - which shows the poll is a nonsense. Incompetent as she was, the idea that she did quite so much damage in so little time is risible. The UK's problems are far deeper seated than that. Sunak should score way higher, too.
Headline on the Mail article says: "As voters declare Starmer a serial flip-flopper on policy' Their own numbers say: Sticks to decisions he makes: KS 37%; RS 32%. Changes his mind and Flip Flops: KS42%; RS 53%
The Israel conflict is terrible with unknown consequences and outcome
This article highlights just how perilous the world's economy's are and why there is absolutely no money to spend by governments
Also sorry to see @Farooq and @FrankBooth leave this forum but at times it does seem like an echo chamber, but it is important that as many different views are expressed as possible otherwise it will become an echo chamber
Why has @Farooq left? Great loss. I really enjoyed his posts. He often made me laugh out loud. Don't know enough about Frank, but generally sad to see anyone leave regardless of their views. I can only think of one exception, and that person was banned so clearly I wasn't alone in that view.
They are going travelling for some months, so a good time to switch off.
@Farooq objected to a few other posters calling for the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians and expulsion from their remaining lands.
I don't think our site or country can usefully contribute to resolving the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, so try to stay out of it, but is difficult to tolerate reading a site calling for further war crimes as answer to war crimes.
PB benefits from a diversity of voices and opinions, and is generally civil compared to other sites, but when any poster dominates thread after thread then it loses that charm.
One poster advocated genocide and another particularly loud poster last night graphically proposed a fate for girls/ young women held hostage by Hamas. Clearly a very, very concerning and challenging situation, and one has to fear for their safety, but projecting the tragedy as a race fuelled masturbatory fantasy was vile.
So I comment not on the issue, which is way beyond my understanding, but the quality of posting.
If it is the post I remember it was not advocating for or proposing a fate for the young girls but describing what was very likely to happen to them based on what we have already seen happen.
Rape has always been used as a weapon by men against women in wartime. Saying this does not make one an advocate for it.
During the debate on women in combat in the US, one general was told to shut up.
His testimony to a Senate Committee was on the treatment of US women captured in war. Apparently, actual statistics were Bad Facts on that day.
The Israel conflict is terrible with unknown consequences and outcome
This article highlights just how perilous the world's economy's are and why there is absolutely no money to spend by governments
Also sorry to see @Farooq and @FrankBooth leave this forum but at times it does seem like an echo chamber, but it is important that as many different views are expressed as possible otherwise it will become an echo chamber
Why has @Farooq left? Great loss. I really enjoyed his posts. He often made me laugh out loud. Don't know enough about Frank, but generally sad to see anyone leave regardless of their views. I can only think of one exception, and that person was banned so clearly I wasn't alone in that view.
@Farooq is a troll and a complete and utter f**king d***head.
However, clenching my teeth, he did at least make vaguely half-intelligent posts at time, and hadn't yet crossed the boundary for being so deeply unpleasant and toxic that he needed evicting from the site, so I wouldn't support his expulsion.
I trust he will return after a few days.
People come, people go. So what.
I don’t mind Faarooq, but it’s all getting a bit like CHB when he was crying for some departed posters to return and then promptly flounced himself. It’s bizarre when people are nostalgic For posters on a message board.
People get far too invested in these debates and discussions. Especially on fucking Israel. Which is why I avoid the topic in any depth. No good ever comes out of it and on Twitter it’s far worse.
Well said. I got involved yesterday as I had a few moments free and such debates have been honed over the years on CiF. Everyone can spout the relevant UN Resolutions on the matter (181, 242, 338 if anyone is wondering) and it gets us nowhere.
I doubt many on here are anti-semitic but the equivalence drawn between Hamas and Netanyahu's government is interesting to see also imo.
I don't see any inconsistency in calling out wicked Hamas brutality AND the Netanyahu Government. Bibi's personal track record over decades speaks for itself.
This isn't Tory incompetence - its mendaciousness. A deliberate choice to smash as many things as possible, salting the earth for Labour so that they can then postion Labour as the party who screwed everything up.
Sunak stood at his conference lectern railing against government failures, and that only he could lead the change needed to fix the country. As if he, and his party, weren't the people who had wrecked everything.
Never mind ballsy it is simply fantasy. When people keep ramping the supposed £36bn to be spent on northern transport, even as the reality is exposed more and more, it shows that they are so utterly disconnected from reality that they will swallow any lie as truth.
The Tories have had success in weaponising ignorance and stupidity. Polling shows that people have seen through their schtick and aren't listening any more
There will be investment of £2bn to include a "brand new" railway station in Bradford.
That was previously cancelled in 2021 by Boris Johnson's government, reinstated by Liz Truss in 2022 and axed again when Rishi Sunak took office." (BBC)
Even Britain can't waste £2bn on a new station. The NN release said it would allow a 12 minute journey time to Huddersfield - so a new high speed line - and 30 minutes to Manchester. Via NPR and some exciting maths regarding journeytime and even more exciting maths regarding costs. Not that we can possibly state journey times as "Manchester" is via a route not yet fixed at a cost not yet agreed to a station not yet agreed.
It is - putting it bluntly - a lie. Delivery promised in the 2040s providing that it passes the usual treasury funding tests which it won't. I don't know who I feel more sorry for - the people this was aimed at ('these idiots will believe any crap we feed them') or the few people who still now parrot the £36bn of investment as if it is real and that people near them welcome it.
I'm rather pleased to discover that the £36bn of investment isn't real given the level of waste and mismanagement it always results in.
Perhaps we need a law banning government 'investment' above a certain level.
Both of you have recently announced that you wish to depart due to a preponderance of views you find dispiriting. Whilst I sympathize, PB should not be an echo chamber where one side agrees with itself: it is at its best when informed argument takes place. I would be grateful therefore if you could both stay.
People come and people go. Though it's very rarely the ones you want to fuck off that do.
I think that we should be given the opportunity to vote off one regular on the Feast of Saint Catherine every year. I reckon I know who would be the odds on fav to get the toe up the hoop.
Don't be so negative, you never know, you might escape the chop.
What this header fails to recognise is that it is their awful ideology which creates the failure to get things done.
Given they have been pursuing Blairism for the last 13 years its easy to agree with that
I don’t think Tone would have pursued Brexit, Rwanda or the War on Woke, Alan.
He would have in about two seconds if he thought it would win him a few extra votes. Blairism (and Clintonism for that matter) was just about winning elections by colonising the centre ground - and, in the benign economic climate of the time, it was spectacularly successful in doing so. It was only when Blair himself partly abandoned it and went to war in Iraq for ideological reasons that it started to come apart.
Even to call it an -ism rather oversells it I think because that implies a guiding ideology. When Randolph Churchill was asked what Tory Democracy was, he replied “To tell the truth I don’t know myself what Tory Democracy is, but I believe it to be principally opportunism.” And that's as good a definition of Blairism (or Cameronism or Sunakism or Starmerism) as I've ever heard.
There was a time when the opportunism was also at least partially motivated by the national interest, though.
Truss scored remarkably well on the damage to time in office metric - which shows the poll is a nonsense. Incompetent as she was, the idea that she did quite so much damage in so little time is risible. The UK's problems are far deeper seated than that. Sunak should score way higher, too.
Headline on the Mail article says: "As voters declare Starmer a serial flip-flopper on policy' Their own numbers say: Sticks to decisions he makes: KS 37%; RS 32%. Changes his mind and Flip Flops: KS42%; RS 53%
This isn't Tory incompetence - its mendaciousness. A deliberate choice to smash as many things as possible, salting the earth for Labour so that they can then postion Labour as the party who screwed everything up.
Sunak stood at his conference lectern railing against government failures, and that only he could lead the change needed to fix the country. As if he, and his party, weren't the people who had wrecked everything.
Never mind ballsy it is simply fantasy. When people keep ramping the supposed £36bn to be spent on northern transport, even as the reality is exposed more and more, it shows that they are so utterly disconnected from reality that they will swallow any lie as truth.
The Tories have had success in weaponising ignorance and stupidity. Polling shows that people have seen through their schtick and aren't listening any more
Labour's last government signed off with "theres no money". Perhaps if they had left some we'd all be in better shape.
Yes. And if "there is no money" was true back then, how true must it be now after your lot have vastly increased the amount of debt we are in?
I do rather enjoy the blank patches in your memory. Are you saying there should have been no support for people during Covid ? I seem to remember Starmer calling out for even more than Lord Bountiful Johnson. And on cost of living should we have told people to freeze last winter ?
An attack on mismanagement of HS2 or government current spending would of course be justified, but if HMG were to impose cuts you would be one of the first to break out in hysterics and say its was wrong.
Fascinating. What we spend money on is a separate thing. If we spend it, we spend it. So "there is no money" was you claim factually true in 2010 when debt was £1.2tn, then it also must be true now when it is £2.5tn.
Money doesn't care what it is spent on. It is either there or it isn't. You said "perhaps if they {Labour} had left some we'd all be in better shape". OK, so debt has doubled, we already factually had no money according to you, so now we're in worse shape with no no money. Logically, if we follow your argument.
The statement "Money doesn't care what it is spent on" is at the root of our current problems. Blair and the conservative tribute act took no real care of public finances. And yet if they had cut back your pavlovian instincts would have you wailing cuts cuts.
Listening to Starmer on BBC just now his answer to the waiting lists is to pay doctors overtime to work evenings and weekends even though the overtime rate is less than they earn in the private sector
I would be interested in hearing the views of @Foxy and others on this
In the short term, what alternative is there?
Yes - employ the private sector to work with the NHS
What this header fails to recognise is that it is their awful ideology which creates the failure to get things done.
Given they have been pursuing Blairism for the last 13 years its easy to agree with that
I don’t think Tone would have pursued Brexit, Rwanda or the War on Woke, Alan.
He would have in about two seconds if he thought it would win him a few extra votes. Blairism (and Clintonism for that matter) was just about winning elections by colonising the centre ground - and, in the benign economic climate of the time, it was spectacularly successful in doing so. It was only when Blair himself partly abandoned it and went to war in Iraq for ideological reasons that it started to come apart.
Even to call it an -ism rather oversells it I think because that implies a guiding ideology. When Randolph Churchill was asked what Tory Democracy was, he replied “To tell the truth I don’t know myself what Tory Democracy is, but I believe it to be principally opportunism.” And that's as good a definition of Blairism (or Cameronism or Sunakism or Starmerism) as I've ever heard.
This isn't Tory incompetence - its mendaciousness. A deliberate choice to smash as many things as possible, salting the earth for Labour so that they can then postion Labour as the party who screwed everything up.
Sunak stood at his conference lectern railing against government failures, and that only he could lead the change needed to fix the country. As if he, and his party, weren't the people who had wrecked everything.
Never mind ballsy it is simply fantasy. When people keep ramping the supposed £36bn to be spent on northern transport, even as the reality is exposed more and more, it shows that they are so utterly disconnected from reality that they will swallow any lie as truth.
The Tories have had success in weaponising ignorance and stupidity. Polling shows that people have seen through their schtick and aren't listening any more
Labour's last government signed off with "theres no money". Perhaps if they had left some we'd all be in better shape.
Yes. And if "there is no money" was true back then, how true must it be now after your lot have vastly increased the amount of debt we are in?
I do rather enjoy the blank patches in your memory. Are you saying there should have been no support for people during Covid ? I seem to remember Starmer calling out for even more than Lord Bountiful Johnson. And on cost of living should we have told people to freeze last winter ?
An attack on mismanagement of HS2 or government current spending would of course be justified, but if HMG were to impose cuts you would be one of the first to break out in hysterics and say its was wrong.
Fascinating. What we spend money on is a separate thing. If we spend it, we spend it. So "there is no money" was you claim factually true in 2010 when debt was £1.2tn, then it also must be true now when it is £2.5tn.
Money doesn't care what it is spent on. It is either there or it isn't. You said "perhaps if they {Labour} had left some we'd all be in better shape". OK, so debt has doubled, we already factually had no money according to you, so now we're in worse shape with no no money. Logically, if we follow your argument.
There's quite a few differences though.
Firstly the deficit was actually a budget surplus in 2002 and it was an entirely unnecessary spending splurge pre-recession that crashed the budget into a deficit prior to the recession even hitting.
Debt to GDP was falling prior to Covid hitting. Debt to GDP was rising even before Labour's recession.
As a result, despite Covid and the war in Ukraine being a bigger shock than the financial crisis, this time the deficit has been resolved much quicker. The deficit is in a much healthier state today than it was years after the last recession when the government changed hands.
I find leftwingers still excusing Brown's profligacy quite disconcerting. I could be tempted to vote for Sir Keir Starmer's Labour today, because Sunak's government is no good, but if the left still think that Brown did nothing wrong then that's a huge problem.
I can understand why people don't want to see - or have described - the reality of what rape - especially in wartime - looks like. It is deeply disturbing. It can easily stray into a sort of vile pornography or glorification.
But it is also necessary to understand the brutality of what happens and why there is the reaction there is.
Anyway I have seen and read enough. Like everyone else I too cannot bear so much reality. Social media is best avoided at times like these. And there is plenty of nicer stuff to be getting on with.
This isn't Tory incompetence - its mendaciousness. A deliberate choice to smash as many things as possible, salting the earth for Labour so that they can then postion Labour as the party who screwed everything up.
Sunak stood at his conference lectern railing against government failures, and that only he could lead the change needed to fix the country. As if he, and his party, weren't the people who had wrecked everything.
Never mind ballsy it is simply fantasy. When people keep ramping the supposed £36bn to be spent on northern transport, even as the reality is exposed more and more, it shows that they are so utterly disconnected from reality that they will swallow any lie as truth.
The Tories have had success in weaponising ignorance and stupidity. Polling shows that people have seen through their schtick and aren't listening any more
Labour's last government signed off with "theres no money". Perhaps if they had left some we'd all be in better shape.
Yes. And if "there is no money" was true back then, how true must it be now after your lot have vastly increased the amount of debt we are in?
I do rather enjoy the blank patches in your memory. Are you saying there should have been no support for people during Covid ? I seem to remember Starmer calling out for even more than Lord Bountiful Johnson. And on cost of living should we have told people to freeze last winter ?
An attack on mismanagement of HS2 or government current spending would of course be justified, but if HMG were to impose cuts you would be one of the first to break out in hysterics and say its was wrong.
Fascinating. What we spend money on is a separate thing. If we spend it, we spend it. So "there is no money" was you claim factually true in 2010 when debt was £1.2tn, then it also must be true now when it is £2.5tn.
Money doesn't care what it is spent on. It is either there or it isn't. You said "perhaps if they {Labour} had left some we'd all be in better shape". OK, so debt has doubled, we already factually had no money according to you, so now we're in worse shape with no no money. Logically, if we follow your argument.
The statement "Money doesn't care what it is spent on" is at the root of our current problems. Blair and the conservative tribute act took no real care of public finances. And yet if they had cut back your pavlovian instincts would have you wailing cuts cuts.
I dread to think what you advise your clients.
Again, we're not discussing morality, we're discussing adding.
You said that there really was no money left when we had -£1.2tn Now we have -£2.5tn -£2.5tn is a bigger hole than -£1.2tn So if as you state we had no money left at -£1.2tn, how would you describe it now that it is -£2.5tn?
You may think that the £1.3tn has been gallantly spent on things we needed. But its been spent *after* you stated that there was no money left. But if there was no money left, how come your lot have spent an extra £1.3tn since?
I think the struggle for Israel is how it provides itself security without expelling people from Gaza. The status quo simply doesn't work, and a significant number there are pledged to the extermination of Israel and its people. Yes the hard right illegal settlers are crazy, yes they steal land, but they aren't pledged to genocide like Hamas.
Gaza is an open sore on the region, allowed to be sustained by other states. Egypt likes to blame Israel but has its own border wall at the south to keep Gazans imprisoned. Iran is after a fight and seem to be responsible for all those missiles arriving into Gaza. Russia seem to have armed and trained Hamas with drones to drop bombs.
Removing Gaza and pushing the people there back onto the arab diaspora isn't that crazy an idea. The idiocy of "refugee camps" has to end. These are not displaced refugees, they are several generations down the track from that. Resettle them in the other parts of the former Ottoman empire. So that they can also find peace.
I understand your logic, but the history of forcible resettlement is not encouraging, not least as you're likely to get a NIMBYist reaction (to put it mildly) from whichever area you decide to settle them. Leon's suggestion of offering them huge sums of money to resettle voluntarily might be better, but you'd probably only get the non-violent people seizing the chance to get out of the hellhole, and you still have to solve the question of where will accept them.
This isn't Tory incompetence - its mendaciousness. A deliberate choice to smash as many things as possible, salting the earth for Labour so that they can then postion Labour as the party who screwed everything up.
Sunak stood at his conference lectern railing against government failures, and that only he could lead the change needed to fix the country. As if he, and his party, weren't the people who had wrecked everything.
Never mind ballsy it is simply fantasy. When people keep ramping the supposed £36bn to be spent on northern transport, even as the reality is exposed more and more, it shows that they are so utterly disconnected from reality that they will swallow any lie as truth.
The Tories have had success in weaponising ignorance and stupidity. Polling shows that people have seen through their schtick and aren't listening any more
Labour's last government signed off with "theres no money". Perhaps if they had left some we'd all be in better shape.
Yes. And if "there is no money" was true back then, how true must it be now after your lot have vastly increased the amount of debt we are in?
I do rather enjoy the blank patches in your memory. Are you saying there should have been no support for people during Covid ? I seem to remember Starmer calling out for even more than Lord Bountiful Johnson. And on cost of living should we have told people to freeze last winter ?
An attack on mismanagement of HS2 or government current spending would of course be justified, but if HMG were to impose cuts you would be one of the first to break out in hysterics and say its was wrong.
Fascinating. What we spend money on is a separate thing. If we spend it, we spend it. So "there is no money" was you claim factually true in 2010 when debt was £1.2tn, then it also must be true now when it is £2.5tn.
Money doesn't care what it is spent on. It is either there or it isn't. You said "perhaps if they {Labour} had left some we'd all be in better shape". OK, so debt has doubled, we already factually had no money according to you, so now we're in worse shape with no no money. Logically, if we follow your argument.
The statement "Money doesn't care what it is spent on" is at the root of our current problems. Blair and the conservative tribute act took no real care of public finances. And yet if they had cut back your pavlovian instincts would have you wailing cuts cuts.
I dread to think what you advise your clients.
Again, we're not discussing morality, we're discussing adding.
You said that there really was no money left when we had -£1.2tn Now we have -£2.5tn -£2.5tn is a bigger hole than -£1.2tn So if as you state we had no money left at -£1.2tn, how would you describe it now that it is -£2.5tn?
You may think that the £1.3tn has been gallantly spent on things we needed. But its been spent *after* you stated that there was no money left. But if there was no money left, how come your lot have spent an extra £1.3tn since?
Thrilling as this debate is I have the call of a greater power as Mrs B wants to cut the ivy on a summerlike day.
This isn't Tory incompetence - its mendaciousness. A deliberate choice to smash as many things as possible, salting the earth for Labour so that they can then postion Labour as the party who screwed everything up.
Sunak stood at his conference lectern railing against government failures, and that only he could lead the change needed to fix the country. As if he, and his party, weren't the people who had wrecked everything.
Never mind ballsy it is simply fantasy. When people keep ramping the supposed £36bn to be spent on northern transport, even as the reality is exposed more and more, it shows that they are so utterly disconnected from reality that they will swallow any lie as truth.
The Tories have had success in weaponising ignorance and stupidity. Polling shows that people have seen through their schtick and aren't listening any more
There will be investment of £2bn to include a "brand new" railway station in Bradford.
That was previously cancelled in 2021 by Boris Johnson's government, reinstated by Liz Truss in 2022 and axed again when Rishi Sunak took office." (BBC)
Even Britain can't waste £2bn on a new station. The NN release said it would allow a 12 minute journey time to Huddersfield - so a new high speed line - and 30 minutes to Manchester. Via NPR and some exciting maths regarding journeytime and even more exciting maths regarding costs. Not that we can possibly state journey times as "Manchester" is via a route not yet fixed at a cost not yet agreed to a station not yet agreed.
It is - putting it bluntly - a lie. Delivery promised in the 2040s providing that it passes the usual treasury funding tests which it won't. I don't know who I feel more sorry for - the people this was aimed at ('these idiots will believe any crap we feed them') or the few people who still now parrot the £36bn of investment as if it is real and that people near them welcome it.
Talking of which, is this real?
The Transport Secretary Mark Harper asked why a series of commitments made by Rishi Sunak last week to build new transport projects around the country have now been deleted, says they were merely "examples" of the "sorts of things that that money could be spent on" #bbclaurak
Listening to Starmer on BBC just now his answer to the waiting lists is to pay doctors overtime to work evenings and weekends even though the overtime rate is less than they earn in the private sector
I would be interested in hearing the views of @Foxy and others on this
In the short term, what alternative is there?
Yes - employ the private sector to work with the NHS
Already very much the case. Indeed elective NHS work is now the bread and butter of most private hospitals in England.
There are limits to what can be done in these places. They are fine for elective surgeries for low risk procedures such as hernias, cholecystectomy, joint replacements in otherwise healthy patients.
The problem is that much of the waiting list is of people with more complex conditions, or simple conditions with a background of other long term disease like diabetes or heart failure, and these cannot be done safely in private facilities.
There is too a massive backlog in non surgical specialities such as dermatology, rheumatology, mental health etc etc that private facilities cannot or will not touch.
Overtime at NHS hospitals is the only viable possibility for these conditions, so Streeting is correct in that. The problem is that running such clinics evenings and weekends requires more staff. Even "office hours" 7 day working requires 40% more staff than 5 day working, before you get to unsocial hours. This needs to be all staff too for these services to be efficient, from receptionists, to porters, to secretaries, not just Doctors.
I have worked at least one weekend a month all my professional life, and never expected to work 9-5 with undisturbed evenings and nights. I intend to carry on for another decade the same, but you simply cannot force everyone to do so without either spreading staff dangerously thin or worsening the retention issue.
Hence the interest in PAs and AAs to build workforce, but ultimately the only way to increase capacity is to retain and train more staff.
I can understand why people don't want to see - or have described - the reality of what rape - especially in wartime - looks like. It is deeply disturbing. It can easily stray into a sort of vile pornography or glorification.
But it is also necessary to understand the brutality of what happens and why there is the reaction there is.
Anyway I have seen and read enough. Like everyone else I too cannot bear so much reality. Social media is best avoided at times like these. And there is plenty of nicer stuff to be getting on with.
I was not dimishing the wickedness of the violence in any way. This isn't the Observer colour supplement, did we need such detail here? Maybe we did. But I would have preferred to look at more obvious sources should the need arise.
Listening to Starmer on BBC just now his answer to the waiting lists is to pay doctors overtime to work evenings and weekends even though the overtime rate is less than they earn in the private sector
I would be interested in hearing the views of @Foxy and others on this
Reducing the waiting lists means doctors etc are under less pressure so there’s a certain symbiosis to them helping to reduce that .
To assume that those who work in the NHS are motivated just by money I think flies in the face of why you decide to become a doctor , nurse etc .
This isn't Tory incompetence - its mendaciousness. A deliberate choice to smash as many things as possible, salting the earth for Labour so that they can then postion Labour as the party who screwed everything up.
Sunak stood at his conference lectern railing against government failures, and that only he could lead the change needed to fix the country. As if he, and his party, weren't the people who had wrecked everything.
Never mind ballsy it is simply fantasy. When people keep ramping the supposed £36bn to be spent on northern transport, even as the reality is exposed more and more, it shows that they are so utterly disconnected from reality that they will swallow any lie as truth.
The Tories have had success in weaponising ignorance and stupidity. Polling shows that people have seen through their schtick and aren't listening any more
Labour's last government signed off with "theres no money". Perhaps if they had left some we'd all be in better shape.
Yes. And if "there is no money" was true back then, how true must it be now after your lot have vastly increased the amount of debt we are in?
‘There’s no credit left’ is the new version after 13 years of strong and stable.
This isn't Tory incompetence - its mendaciousness. A deliberate choice to smash as many things as possible, salting the earth for Labour so that they can then postion Labour as the party who screwed everything up.
Sunak stood at his conference lectern railing against government failures, and that only he could lead the change needed to fix the country. As if he, and his party, weren't the people who had wrecked everything.
Never mind ballsy it is simply fantasy. When people keep ramping the supposed £36bn to be spent on northern transport, even as the reality is exposed more and more, it shows that they are so utterly disconnected from reality that they will swallow any lie as truth.
The Tories have had success in weaponising ignorance and stupidity. Polling shows that people have seen through their schtick and aren't listening any more
Labour's last government signed off with "theres no money". Perhaps if they had left some we'd all be in better shape.
Yes. And if "there is no money" was true back then, how true must it be now after your lot have vastly increased the amount of debt we are in?
I do rather enjoy the blank patches in your memory. Are you saying there should have been no support for people during Covid ? I seem to remember Starmer calling out for even more than Lord Bountiful Johnson. And on cost of living should we have told people to freeze last winter ?
An attack on mismanagement of HS2 or government current spending would of course be justified, but if HMG were to impose cuts you would be one of the first to break out in hysterics and say its was wrong.
Fascinating. What we spend money on is a separate thing. If we spend it, we spend it. So "there is no money" was you claim factually true in 2010 when debt was £1.2tn, then it also must be true now when it is £2.5tn.
Money doesn't care what it is spent on. It is either there or it isn't. You said "perhaps if they {Labour} had left some we'd all be in better shape". OK, so debt has doubled, we already factually had no money according to you, so now we're in worse shape with no no money. Logically, if we follow your argument.
The statement "Money doesn't care what it is spent on" is at the root of our current problems. Blair and the conservative tribute act took no real care of public finances. And yet if they had cut back your pavlovian instincts would have you wailing cuts cuts.
I dread to think what you advise your clients.
Again, we're not discussing morality, we're discussing adding.
You said that there really was no money left when we had -£1.2tn Now we have -£2.5tn -£2.5tn is a bigger hole than -£1.2tn So if as you state we had no money left at -£1.2tn, how would you describe it now that it is -£2.5tn?
You may think that the £1.3tn has been gallantly spent on things we needed. But its been spent *after* you stated that there was no money left. But if there was no money left, how come your lot have spent an extra £1.3tn since?
2009/10 budget deficit: 11% of GDP 2023/24 budget deficit forecast: 5.1% of GDP
I think the struggle for Israel is how it provides itself security without expelling people from Gaza. The status quo simply doesn't work, and a significant number there are pledged to the extermination of Israel and its people. Yes the hard right illegal settlers are crazy, yes they steal land, but they aren't pledged to genocide like Hamas.
Gaza is an open sore on the region, allowed to be sustained by other states. Egypt likes to blame Israel but has its own border wall at the south to keep Gazans imprisoned. Iran is after a fight and seem to be responsible for all those missiles arriving into Gaza. Russia seem to have armed and trained Hamas with drones to drop bombs.
Removing Gaza and pushing the people there back onto the arab diaspora isn't that crazy an idea. The idiocy of "refugee camps" has to end. These are not displaced refugees, they are several generations down the track from that. Resettle them in the other parts of the former Ottoman empire. So that they can also find peace.
I understand your logic, but the history of forcible resettlement is not encouraging, not least as you're likely to get a NIMBYist reaction (to put it mildly) from whichever area you decide to settle them. Leon's suggestion of offering them huge sums of money to resettle voluntarily might be better, but you'd probably only get the non-violent people seizing the chance to get out of the hellhole, and you still have to solve the question of where will accept them.
There is a curious overlap between posters who want 2 million to be resettled from Gaza with those who want no refugees to come here (despite Britain being the historical colonial power in the area after the Ottomans and having at least some responsibility for the current state of affairs).
Listening to Starmer on BBC just now his answer to the waiting lists is to pay doctors overtime to work evenings and weekends even though the overtime rate is less than they earn in the private sector
I would be interested in hearing the views of @Foxy and others on this
In the short term, what alternative is there?
Yes - employ the private sector to work with the NHS
Already very much the case. Indeed elective NHS work is now the bread and butter of most private hospitals in England.
There are limits to what can be done in these places. They are fine for elective surgeries for low risk procedures such as hernias, cholecystectomy, joint replacements in otherwise healthy patients.
The problem is that much of the waiting list is of people with more complex conditions, or simple conditions with a background of other long term disease like diabetes or heart failure, and these cannot be done safely in private facilities.
There is too a massive backlog in non surgical specialities such as dermatology, rheumatology, mental health etc etc that private facilities cannot or will not touch.
Overtime at NHS hospitals is the only viable possibility for these conditions, so Streeting is correct in that. The problem is that running such clinics evenings and weekends requires more staff. Even "office hours" 7 day working requires 40% more staff than 5 day working, before you get to unsocial hours. This needs to be all staff too for these services to be efficient, from receptionists, to porters, to secretaries, not just Doctors.
I have worked at least one weekend a month all my professional life, and never expected to work 9-5 with undisturbed evenings and nights. I intend to carry on for another decade the same, but you simply cannot force everyone to do so without either spreading staff dangerously thin or worsening the retention issue.
Hence the interest in PAs and AAs to build workforce, but ultimately the only way to increase capacity is to retain and train more staff.
Office hours Monday to Friday is the problem.
Given the amount of machinery and investment in NHS Hospitals it has always struck me as mad that they're not operating to capacity 7 days a week for at least 12 hours a day.
Private sector industry with large industrial investments don't typically operate office hours Monday to Friday only.
Makes it informative, too. Civilised …. dare I say liberal ….. discussion is always better in leading to appreciation of others views than just shouting.
I tended to agree with Farooq and disagree with Frank Booth, but they were both always interesting, and I hope they'll return.
The main rule that I try to follow - with occasional exceptions which I do regret (sorry, Josiah)- is not to comment critically about other posters. After all, 90% of people here are anonymous, so who cares what they're really like? Disagreeing with what they say is fine, and sometimes being critical of how they say it, but not labelling each other in neat categories - racist, Putinist, sexist, or simply stupid. We are probably all more nuanced than we seem, or even realise ourselves.
This isn't Tory incompetence - its mendaciousness. A deliberate choice to smash as many things as possible, salting the earth for Labour so that they can then postion Labour as the party who screwed everything up.
Sunak stood at his conference lectern railing against government failures, and that only he could lead the change needed to fix the country. As if he, and his party, weren't the people who had wrecked everything.
Never mind ballsy it is simply fantasy. When people keep ramping the supposed £36bn to be spent on northern transport, even as the reality is exposed more and more, it shows that they are so utterly disconnected from reality that they will swallow any lie as truth.
The Tories have had success in weaponising ignorance and stupidity. Polling shows that people have seen through their schtick and aren't listening any more
Labour's last government signed off with "theres no money". Perhaps if they had left some we'd all be in better shape.
Yes. And if "there is no money" was true back then, how true must it be now after your lot have vastly increased the amount of debt we are in?
I do rather enjoy the blank patches in your memory. Are you saying there should have been no support for people during Covid ? I seem to remember Starmer calling out for even more than Lord Bountiful Johnson. And on cost of living should we have told people to freeze last winter ?
An attack on mismanagement of HS2 or government current spending would of course be justified, but if HMG were to impose cuts you would be one of the first to break out in hysterics and say its was wrong.
Fascinating. What we spend money on is a separate thing. If we spend it, we spend it. So "there is no money" was you claim factually true in 2010 when debt was £1.2tn, then it also must be true now when it is £2.5tn.
Money doesn't care what it is spent on. It is either there or it isn't. You said "perhaps if they {Labour} had left some we'd all be in better shape". OK, so debt has doubled, we already factually had no money according to you, so now we're in worse shape with no no money. Logically, if we follow your argument.
The statement "Money doesn't care what it is spent on" is at the root of our current problems. Blair and the conservative tribute act took no real care of public finances. And yet if they had cut back your pavlovian instincts would have you wailing cuts cuts.
I dread to think what you advise your clients.
Again, we're not discussing morality, we're discussing adding.
You said that there really was no money left when we had -£1.2tn Now we have -£2.5tn -£2.5tn is a bigger hole than -£1.2tn So if as you state we had no money left at -£1.2tn, how would you describe it now that it is -£2.5tn?
You may think that the £1.3tn has been gallantly spent on things we needed. But its been spent *after* you stated that there was no money left. But if there was no money left, how come your lot have spent an extra £1.3tn since?
2009/10 budget deficit: 11% of GDP 2023/24 budget deficit forecast: 5.1% of GDP
11% of GDP is a bigger hole than 5.1% of GDP
And a lower budget deficit is better than a higher budget deficit. That really becomes acute the more in debt you are. And having left us with "no money", somehow another £1.3tn has been found and spent since then.
What it shows is that fiscally sovereign countries - providing they do not dick the markets about and invest it on something sensible - can continue to borrow.
Alan's problem is that he objects to Labour spending anything on anything, and excuses the Tories spending anything on anything. Which is fine for party political hackery, but less fine when it comes to complex things like adding.
I can understand why people don't want to see - or have described - the reality of what rape - especially in wartime - looks like. It is deeply disturbing. It can easily stray into a sort of vile pornography or glorification.
But it is also necessary to understand the brutality of what happens and why there is the reaction there is.
Anyway I have seen and read enough. Like everyone else I too cannot bear so much reality. Social media is best avoided at times like these. And there is plenty of nicer stuff to be getting on with.
I was not dimishing the wickedness of the violence in any way. This isn't the Observer colour supplement, did we need such detail here? Maybe we did. But I would have preferred to look at more obvious sources should the need arise.
There is a case that by editing the news, it convinces people that the news is being “shaped”.
For example, on one of the Greek islands that was getting refugees landing there, to x hundred percent of the local population…. They started throwing stones at news crews. Why?
Well, whenever the locals were being interviewed by international news, the moment they started saying anything about the crime rate (fruit trees in orchards being stripped etc), it got cut from the report.
So the locals, who watched TV became convinced that the international media were “on the side of the migrants” and “against them”
Listening to Starmer on BBC just now his answer to the waiting lists is to pay doctors overtime to work evenings and weekends even though the overtime rate is less than they earn in the private sector
I would be interested in hearing the views of @Foxy and others on this
Reducing the waiting lists means doctors etc are under less pressure so there’s a certain symbiosis to them helping to reduce that .
To assume that those who work in the NHS are motivated just by money I think flies in the face of why you decide to become a doctor , nurse etc .
For some it is all about status. And being pushed into it by parents who have spent 25 years waiting for the day that they can start announcing to all and sundry "My son/daughter is a doctor".
This isn't Tory incompetence - its mendaciousness. A deliberate choice to smash as many things as possible, salting the earth for Labour so that they can then postion Labour as the party who screwed everything up.
Sunak stood at his conference lectern railing against government failures, and that only he could lead the change needed to fix the country. As if he, and his party, weren't the people who had wrecked everything.
Never mind ballsy it is simply fantasy. When people keep ramping the supposed £36bn to be spent on northern transport, even as the reality is exposed more and more, it shows that they are so utterly disconnected from reality that they will swallow any lie as truth.
The Tories have had success in weaponising ignorance and stupidity. Polling shows that people have seen through their schtick and aren't listening any more
Labour's last government signed off with "theres no money". Perhaps if they had left some we'd all be in better shape.
Yes. And if "there is no money" was true back then, how true must it be now after your lot have vastly increased the amount of debt we are in?
I do rather enjoy the blank patches in your memory. Are you saying there should have been no support for people during Covid ? I seem to remember Starmer calling out for even more than Lord Bountiful Johnson. And on cost of living should we have told people to freeze last winter ?
An attack on mismanagement of HS2 or government current spending would of course be justified, but if HMG were to impose cuts you would be one of the first to break out in hysterics and say its was wrong.
Fascinating. What we spend money on is a separate thing. If we spend it, we spend it. So "there is no money" was you claim factually true in 2010 when debt was £1.2tn, then it also must be true now when it is £2.5tn.
Money doesn't care what it is spent on. It is either there or it isn't. You said "perhaps if they {Labour} had left some we'd all be in better shape". OK, so debt has doubled, we already factually had no money according to you, so now we're in worse shape with no no money. Logically, if we follow your argument.
The statement "Money doesn't care what it is spent on" is at the root of our current problems. Blair and the conservative tribute act took no real care of public finances. And yet if they had cut back your pavlovian instincts would have you wailing cuts cuts.
I dread to think what you advise your clients.
Again, we're not discussing morality, we're discussing adding.
You said that there really was no money left when we had -£1.2tn Now we have -£2.5tn -£2.5tn is a bigger hole than -£1.2tn So if as you state we had no money left at -£1.2tn, how would you describe it now that it is -£2.5tn?
You may think that the £1.3tn has been gallantly spent on things we needed. But its been spent *after* you stated that there was no money left. But if there was no money left, how come your lot have spent an extra £1.3tn since?
2009/10 budget deficit: 11% of GDP 2023/24 budget deficit forecast: 5.1% of GDP
11% of GDP is a bigger hole than 5.1% of GDP
Deficit is the rate at which you are digging. Debt is the size of the hole.
This isn't Tory incompetence - its mendaciousness. A deliberate choice to smash as many things as possible, salting the earth for Labour so that they can then postion Labour as the party who screwed everything up.
Sunak stood at his conference lectern railing against government failures, and that only he could lead the change needed to fix the country. As if he, and his party, weren't the people who had wrecked everything.
Never mind ballsy it is simply fantasy. When people keep ramping the supposed £36bn to be spent on northern transport, even as the reality is exposed more and more, it shows that they are so utterly disconnected from reality that they will swallow any lie as truth.
The Tories have had success in weaponising ignorance and stupidity. Polling shows that people have seen through their schtick and aren't listening any more
Labour's last government signed off with "theres no money". Perhaps if they had left some we'd all be in better shape.
Yes. And if "there is no money" was true back then, how true must it be now after your lot have vastly increased the amount of debt we are in?
I do rather enjoy the blank patches in your memory. Are you saying there should have been no support for people during Covid ? I seem to remember Starmer calling out for even more than Lord Bountiful Johnson. And on cost of living should we have told people to freeze last winter ?
An attack on mismanagement of HS2 or government current spending would of course be justified, but if HMG were to impose cuts you would be one of the first to break out in hysterics and say its was wrong.
Fascinating. What we spend money on is a separate thing. If we spend it, we spend it. So "there is no money" was you claim factually true in 2010 when debt was £1.2tn, then it also must be true now when it is £2.5tn.
Money doesn't care what it is spent on. It is either there or it isn't. You said "perhaps if they {Labour} had left some we'd all be in better shape". OK, so debt has doubled, we already factually had no money according to you, so now we're in worse shape with no no money. Logically, if we follow your argument.
The statement "Money doesn't care what it is spent on" is at the root of our current problems. Blair and the conservative tribute act took no real care of public finances. And yet if they had cut back your pavlovian instincts would have you wailing cuts cuts.
I dread to think what you advise your clients.
Again, we're not discussing morality, we're discussing adding.
You said that there really was no money left when we had -£1.2tn Now we have -£2.5tn -£2.5tn is a bigger hole than -£1.2tn So if as you state we had no money left at -£1.2tn, how would you describe it now that it is -£2.5tn?
You may think that the £1.3tn has been gallantly spent on things we needed. But its been spent *after* you stated that there was no money left. But if there was no money left, how come your lot have spent an extra £1.3tn since?
2009/10 budget deficit: 11% of GDP 2023/24 budget deficit forecast: 5.1% of GDP
11% of GDP is a bigger hole than 5.1% of GDP
And a lower budget deficit is better than a higher budget deficit. That really becomes acute the more in debt you are. And having left us with "no money", somehow another £1.3tn has been found and spent since then.
What it shows is that fiscally sovereign countries - providing they do not dick the markets about and invest it on something sensible - can continue to borrow.
Alan's problem is that he objects to Labour spending anything on anything, and excuses the Tories spending anything on anything. Which is fine for party political hackery, but less fine when it comes to complex things like adding.
The absolute value of the debt in pounds is irrelevant.
The deficit to GDP is not.
At the turn of the previous decade the markets were being dicked around, austerity was absolutely necessary to turn around the profligacy from Brown.
Starmer is a lucky general in that the Tories have trashed their political brand far more than the economy, he's likely to inherit a not especially considerable deficit unlike Cameron so this time there will be money available for his spending priorities, just not much of it.
Interesting list; people have it wrong tbh; I’d put Cameron clear top, probably followed by Brown and then Truss. Johnson’s premiership was too fuddled by Covid to draw economic conclusions, I think.
Interesting choice to start the period in question from 1993.
I'd go 1 Cameron 2 Brown.
Not sure if Truss was that significant in the long-term.
Johnson's lack of attention to detail has been significant.
I think the struggle for Israel is how it provides itself security without expelling people from Gaza. The status quo simply doesn't work, and a significant number there are pledged to the extermination of Israel and its people. Yes the hard right illegal settlers are crazy, yes they steal land, but they aren't pledged to genocide like Hamas.
Gaza is an open sore on the region, allowed to be sustained by other states. Egypt likes to blame Israel but has its own border wall at the south to keep Gazans imprisoned. Iran is after a fight and seem to be responsible for all those missiles arriving into Gaza. Russia seem to have armed and trained Hamas with drones to drop bombs.
Removing Gaza and pushing the people there back onto the arab diaspora isn't that crazy an idea. The idiocy of "refugee camps" has to end. These are not displaced refugees, they are several generations down the track from that. Resettle them in the other parts of the former Ottoman empire. So that they can also find peace.
I understand your logic, but the history of forcible resettlement is not encouraging, not least as you're likely to get a NIMBYist reaction (to put it mildly) from whichever area you decide to settle them. Leon's suggestion of offering them huge sums of money to resettle voluntarily might be better, but you'd probably only get the non-violent people seizing the chance to get out of the hellhole, and you still have to solve the question of where will accept them.
I don't have logic. There is no logic to solve this mess. I am simply observing that the status quo does not work and something else needs to be done. Ideally the people of Gaza would be allowed a free election and move against Hamas. And the people of Israel would overthrow the crook and send him to jail.
That is unlikely to happen. I am clear that Israel are more in the right than the Gazans (Jeremy's crank left are still pumping the #freepalestine schtick this morning even as Hamas rape and kidnap women and girls whilst chanting about God). So will give them a little leeway.
It is hard to move against Hamas when they are embedded in the civilian population. So the options seem to be bomb them out or force them out. I am open to other options...
The Israel conflict is terrible with unknown consequences and outcome
This article highlights just how perilous the world's economy's are and why there is absolutely no money to spend by governments
Also sorry to see @Farooq and @FrankBooth leave this forum but at times it does seem like an echo chamber, but it is important that as many different views are expressed as possible otherwise it will become an echo chamber
Why has @Farooq left? Great loss. I really enjoyed his posts. He often made me laugh out loud. Don't know enough about Frank, but generally sad to see anyone leave regardless of their views. I can only think of one exception, and that person was banned so clearly I wasn't alone in that view.
They are going travelling for some months, so a good time to switch off.
@Farooq objected to a few other posters calling for the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians and expulsion from their remaining lands.
I don't think our site or country can usefully contribute to resolving the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, so try to stay out of it, but is difficult to tolerate reading a site calling for further war crimes as answer to war crimes.
PB benefits from a diversity of voices and opinions, and is generally civil compared to other sites, but when any poster dominates thread after thread then it loses that charm.
One poster advocated genocide and another particularly loud poster last night graphically proposed a fate for girls/ young women held hostage by Hamas. Clearly a very, very concerning and challenging situation, and one has to fear for their safety, but projecting the tragedy as a race fuelled masturbatory fantasy (the poster's) was vile.
So I comment not on the issue, which is way beyond my understanding, but the quality of posting.
Similar to what @Cyclefree said, if it was the post I remember, it was that Hamas must be destroyed, not the Palestinians. The analogy was then made that, just as in World War 2, while there were Germans opposed to the Nazis, they unfortunately would have been killed as the Allies fought to destroy the Nazi regime (especially in the East).
One poster here inferred the Americans deserved 9/11 because of the actions of the US. I obviously do not share that view but, if you do, then the deaths of those involved - even if they were innocent themselves - was a similar natural consequence of the actions of the US Government.
It was interesting to see though not only the equivalence of Israel's Government and Hamas displayed, but also (in many posts) that Hamas and the Palestinians were seen as interchangeable. And, finally, as a few posters have already done, equating the act of calling for Hamas to be destroyed as equating into calling for genocide. I think that is a theme we will hear increasingly played out especially amongst the pro-Palestinian / anti-Israel lobby.
Anyone (1) we will not solve the problem (2) there are a lot of things to do today and (3) watching the videos and social posts coming out of what has happened was horrific enough without having to ruin another day going through and debating them.
I can understand why people don't want to see - or have described - the reality of what rape - especially in wartime - looks like. It is deeply disturbing. It can easily stray into a sort of vile pornography or glorification.
But it is also necessary to understand the brutality of what happens and why there is the reaction there is.
Anyway I have seen and read enough. Like everyone else I too cannot bear so much reality. Social media is best avoided at times like these. And there is plenty of nicer stuff to be getting on with.
I was not dimishing the wickedness of the violence in any way. This isn't the Observer colour supplement, did we need such detail here? Maybe we did. But I would have preferred to look at more obvious sources should the need arise.
There is a case that by editing the news, it convinces people that the news is being “shaped”.
For example, on one of the Greek islands that was getting refugees landing there, to x hundred percent of the local population…. They started throwing stones at news crews. Why?
Well, whenever the locals were being interviewed by international news, the moment they started saying anything about the crime rate (fruit trees in orchards being stripped etc), it got cut from the report.
So the locals, who watched TV became convinced that the international media were “on the side of the migrants” and “against them”
I wouldn't advocate sanitising news.
I was merely offended at how graphic,and my interpretation as to why a poster on PB needed to be so graphic.
This isn't Tory incompetence - its mendaciousness. A deliberate choice to smash as many things as possible, salting the earth for Labour so that they can then postion Labour as the party who screwed everything up.
Sunak stood at his conference lectern railing against government failures, and that only he could lead the change needed to fix the country. As if he, and his party, weren't the people who had wrecked everything.
Never mind ballsy it is simply fantasy. When people keep ramping the supposed £36bn to be spent on northern transport, even as the reality is exposed more and more, it shows that they are so utterly disconnected from reality that they will swallow any lie as truth.
The Tories have had success in weaponising ignorance and stupidity. Polling shows that people have seen through their schtick and aren't listening any more
Labour's last government signed off with "theres no money". Perhaps if they had left some we'd all be in better shape.
Yes. And if "there is no money" was true back then, how true must it be now after your lot have vastly increased the amount of debt we are in?
I do rather enjoy the blank patches in your memory. Are you saying there should have been no support for people during Covid ? I seem to remember Starmer calling out for even more than Lord Bountiful Johnson. And on cost of living should we have told people to freeze last winter ?
An attack on mismanagement of HS2 or government current spending would of course be justified, but if HMG were to impose cuts you would be one of the first to break out in hysterics and say its was wrong.
Fascinating. What we spend money on is a separate thing. If we spend it, we spend it. So "there is no money" was you claim factually true in 2010 when debt was £1.2tn, then it also must be true now when it is £2.5tn.
Money doesn't care what it is spent on. It is either there or it isn't. You said "perhaps if they {Labour} had left some we'd all be in better shape". OK, so debt has doubled, we already factually had no money according to you, so now we're in worse shape with no no money. Logically, if we follow your argument.
The statement "Money doesn't care what it is spent on" is at the root of our current problems. Blair and the conservative tribute act took no real care of public finances. And yet if they had cut back your pavlovian instincts would have you wailing cuts cuts.
I dread to think what you advise your clients.
Again, we're not discussing morality, we're discussing adding.
You said that there really was no money left when we had -£1.2tn Now we have -£2.5tn -£2.5tn is a bigger hole than -£1.2tn So if as you state we had no money left at -£1.2tn, how would you describe it now that it is -£2.5tn?
You may think that the £1.3tn has been gallantly spent on things we needed. But its been spent *after* you stated that there was no money left. But if there was no money left, how come your lot have spent an extra £1.3tn since?
2009/10 budget deficit: 11% of GDP 2023/24 budget deficit forecast: 5.1% of GDP
11% of GDP is a bigger hole than 5.1% of GDP
Deficit is the rate at which you are digging. Debt is the size of the hole.
Improper analogy since you can just stop digging at will, you can't drop the deficit at will as momentum will keep you moving forwards. The deficit is the speed at which your finances are collapsing, you need to act just to slow down let alone reverse that momenum.
I can park 1 metre away from a brick wall perfectly safely. If I'm 2 metres away from a brick wall I'm heading towards at 70mph then that's far more catastrophic.
Listening to Starmer on BBC just now his answer to the waiting lists is to pay doctors overtime to work evenings and weekends even though the overtime rate is less than they earn in the private sector
I would be interested in hearing the views of @Foxy and others on this
In the short term, what alternative is there?
Yes - employ the private sector to work with the NHS
Already very much the case. Indeed elective NHS work is now the bread and butter of most private hospitals in England.
There are limits to what can be done in these places. They are fine for elective surgeries for low risk procedures such as hernias, cholecystectomy, joint replacements in otherwise healthy patients.
The problem is that much of the waiting list is of people with more complex conditions, or simple conditions with a background of other long term disease like diabetes or heart failure, and these cannot be done safely in private facilities.
There is too a massive backlog in non surgical specialities such as dermatology, rheumatology, mental health etc etc that private facilities cannot or will not touch.
Overtime at NHS hospitals is the only viable possibility for these conditions, so Streeting is correct in that. The problem is that running such clinics evenings and weekends requires more staff. Even "office hours" 7 day working requires 40% more staff than 5 day working, before you get to unsocial hours. This needs to be all staff too for these services to be efficient, from receptionists, to porters, to secretaries, not just Doctors.
I have worked at least one weekend a month all my professional life, and never expected to work 9-5 with undisturbed evenings and nights. I intend to carry on for another decade the same, but you simply cannot force everyone to do so without either spreading staff dangerously thin or worsening the retention issue.
Hence the interest in PAs and AAs to build workforce, but ultimately the only way to increase capacity is to retain and train more staff.
Office hours Monday to Friday is the problem.
Given the amount of machinery and investment in NHS Hospitals it has always struck me as mad that they're not operating to capacity 7 days a week for at least 12 hours a day.
Private sector industry with large industrial investments don't typically operate office hours Monday to Friday only.
And of course we do!
Capacity requires staff and beds. You cannot run an all day operating list on a Sunday without staff to do so, and a ward bed for them to recover in.
Peak productivity requires capacity in equipment, staff and hospital estate to be correctly aligned. It isn't at present. A functioning MRI service at weekends requires radiologists, radiographers and porters. It is more complicated than pressing a button.
Growing capacity in staff and estate is the only answer, and staff have to be the right skill mix.
This isn't Tory incompetence - its mendaciousness. A deliberate choice to smash as many things as possible, salting the earth for Labour so that they can then postion Labour as the party who screwed everything up.
Sunak stood at his conference lectern railing against government failures, and that only he could lead the change needed to fix the country. As if he, and his party, weren't the people who had wrecked everything.
Never mind ballsy it is simply fantasy. When people keep ramping the supposed £36bn to be spent on northern transport, even as the reality is exposed more and more, it shows that they are so utterly disconnected from reality that they will swallow any lie as truth.
The Tories have had success in weaponising ignorance and stupidity. Polling shows that people have seen through their schtick and aren't listening any more
Labour's last government signed off with "theres no money". Perhaps if they had left some we'd all be in better shape.
Yes. And if "there is no money" was true back then, how true must it be now after your lot have vastly increased the amount of debt we are in?
I do rather enjoy the blank patches in your memory. Are you saying there should have been no support for people during Covid ? I seem to remember Starmer calling out for even more than Lord Bountiful Johnson. And on cost of living should we have told people to freeze last winter ?
An attack on mismanagement of HS2 or government current spending would of course be justified, but if HMG were to impose cuts you would be one of the first to break out in hysterics and say its was wrong.
Fascinating. What we spend money on is a separate thing. If we spend it, we spend it. So "there is no money" was you claim factually true in 2010 when debt was £1.2tn, then it also must be true now when it is £2.5tn.
Money doesn't care what it is spent on. It is either there or it isn't. You said "perhaps if they {Labour} had left some we'd all be in better shape". OK, so debt has doubled, we already factually had no money according to you, so now we're in worse shape with no no money. Logically, if we follow your argument.
The statement "Money doesn't care what it is spent on" is at the root of our current problems. Blair and the conservative tribute act took no real care of public finances. And yet if they had cut back your pavlovian instincts would have you wailing cuts cuts.
I dread to think what you advise your clients.
Again, we're not discussing morality, we're discussing adding.
You said that there really was no money left when we had -£1.2tn Now we have -£2.5tn -£2.5tn is a bigger hole than -£1.2tn So if as you state we had no money left at -£1.2tn, how would you describe it now that it is -£2.5tn?
You may think that the £1.3tn has been gallantly spent on things we needed. But its been spent *after* you stated that there was no money left. But if there was no money left, how come your lot have spent an extra £1.3tn since?
2009/10 budget deficit: 11% of GDP 2023/24 budget deficit forecast: 5.1% of GDP
11% of GDP is a bigger hole than 5.1% of GDP
And a lower budget deficit is better than a higher budget deficit. That really becomes acute the more in debt you are. And having left us with "no money", somehow another £1.3tn has been found and spent since then.
What it shows is that fiscally sovereign countries - providing they do not dick the markets about and invest it on something sensible - can continue to borrow.
Alan's problem is that he objects to Labour spending anything on anything, and excuses the Tories spending anything on anything. Which is fine for party political hackery, but less fine when it comes to complex things like adding.
The absolute value of the debt in pounds is irrelevant.
The deficit to GDP is not.
At the turn of the previous decade the markets were being dicked around, austerity was absolutely necessary to turn around the profligacy from Brown.
Starmer is a lucky general in that the Tories have trashed their political brand far more than the economy, he's likely to inherit a not especially considerable deficit unlike Cameron so this time there will be money available for his spending priorities, just not much of it.
I agree with you to a point - you actual value of the debt is less important than the willingness of the markets to keep your line of credit open.
So why do the Tories even now still foam on about "there is no money left?" It wasn't true then, it isn't true now.
Where I disagree with you is that the size of the debt does matter the deeper you dig. the willingness to keep loaning you money reduces the deeper you go. And we're in very very deep now, hence Truss having degree zero of liberty to go on a spending spree.
The Israel conflict is terrible with unknown consequences and outcome
This article highlights just how perilous the world's economy's are and why there is absolutely no money to spend by governments
Also sorry to see @Farooq and @FrankBooth leave this forum but at times it does seem like an echo chamber, but it is important that as many different views are expressed as possible otherwise it will become an echo chamber
Why has @Farooq left? Great loss. I really enjoyed his posts. He often made me laugh out loud. Don't know enough about Frank, but generally sad to see anyone leave regardless of their views. I can only think of one exception, and that person was banned so clearly I wasn't alone in that view.
They are going travelling for some months, so a good time to switch off.
@Farooq objected to a few other posters calling for the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians and expulsion from their remaining lands.
I don't think our site or country can usefully contribute to resolving the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, so try to stay out of it, but is difficult to tolerate reading a site calling for further war crimes as answer to war crimes.
PB benefits from a diversity of voices and opinions, and is generally civil compared to other sites, but when any poster dominates thread after thread then it loses that charm.
One poster advocated genocide and another particularly loud poster last night graphically proposed a fate for girls/ young women held hostage by Hamas. Clearly a very, very concerning and challenging situation, and one has to fear for their safety, but projecting the tragedy as a race fuelled masturbatory fantasy (the poster's) was vile.
So I comment not on the issue, which is way beyond my understanding, but the quality of posting.
Similar to what @Cyclefree said, if it was the post I remember, it was that Hamas must be destroyed, not the Palestinians. The analogy was then made that, just as in World War 2, while there were Germans opposed to the Nazis, they unfortunately would have been killed as the Allies fought to destroy the Nazi regime (especially in the East).
One poster here inferred the Americans deserved 9/11 because of the actions of the US. I obviously do not share that view but, if you do, then the deaths of those involved - even if they were innocent themselves - was a similar natural consequence of the actions of the US Government.
It was interesting to see though not only the equivalence of Israel's Government and Hamas displayed, but also (in many posts) that Hamas and the Palestinians were seen as interchangeable. And, finally, as a few posters have already done, equating the act of calling for Hamas to be destroyed as equating into calling for genocide. I think that is a theme we will hear increasingly played out especially amongst the pro-Palestinian / anti-Israel lobby.
Anyone (1) we will not solve the problem (2) there are a lot of things to do today and (3) watching the videos and social posts coming out of what has happened was horrific enough without having to ruin another day going through and debating them.
By criticising a particular post I seem to have become an apologist for 9/11. I am not sure how I arrived at that junction.
Listening to Starmer on BBC just now his answer to the waiting lists is to pay doctors overtime to work evenings and weekends even though the overtime rate is less than they earn in the private sector
I would be interested in hearing the views of @Foxy and others on this
In the short term, what alternative is there?
Yes - employ the private sector to work with the NHS
Already very much the case. Indeed elective NHS work is now the bread and butter of most private hospitals in England.
There are limits to what can be done in these places. They are fine for elective surgeries for low risk procedures such as hernias, cholecystectomy, joint replacements in otherwise healthy patients.
The problem is that much of the waiting list is of people with more complex conditions, or simple conditions with a background of other long term disease like diabetes or heart failure, and these cannot be done safely in private facilities.
There is too a massive backlog in non surgical specialities such as dermatology, rheumatology, mental health etc etc that private facilities cannot or will not touch.
Overtime at NHS hospitals is the only viable possibility for these conditions, so Streeting is correct in that. The problem is that running such clinics evenings and weekends requires more staff. Even "office hours" 7 day working requires 40% more staff than 5 day working, before you get to unsocial hours. This needs to be all staff too for these services to be efficient, from receptionists, to porters, to secretaries, not just Doctors.
I have worked at least one weekend a month all my professional life, and never expected to work 9-5 with undisturbed evenings and nights. I intend to carry on for another decade the same, but you simply cannot force everyone to do so without either spreading staff dangerously thin or worsening the retention issue.
Hence the interest in PAs and AAs to build workforce, but ultimately the only way to increase capacity is to retain and train more staff.
Office hours Monday to Friday is the problem.
Given the amount of machinery and investment in NHS Hospitals it has always struck me as mad that they're not operating to capacity 7 days a week for at least 12 hours a day.
Private sector industry with large industrial investments don't typically operate office hours Monday to Friday only.
And of course we do!
Capacity requires staff and beds. You cannot run an all day operating list on a Sunday without staff to do so, and a ward bed for them to recover in.
Peak productivity requires capacity in equipment, staff and hospital estate to be correctly aligned. It isn't at present. A functioning MRI service at weekends requires radiologists, radiographers and porters. It is more complicated than pressing a button.
Growing capacity in staff and estate is the only answer, and staff have to be the right skill mix.
Agreed more capacity in staff is the answer, more capacity in investment in infrastructure isn't as important as the infrastructure [mostly] already exists.
An attitude change is required too, to treat Saturday and Sunday as normal working days.
Listening to Starmer on BBC just now his answer to the waiting lists is to pay doctors overtime to work evenings and weekends even though the overtime rate is less than they earn in the private sector
I would be interested in hearing the views of @Foxy and others on this
In the short term, what alternative is there?
Yes - employ the private sector to work with the NHS
Already very much the case. Indeed elective NHS work is now the bread and butter of most private hospitals in England.
There are limits to what can be done in these places. They are fine for elective surgeries for low risk procedures such as hernias, cholecystectomy, joint replacements in otherwise healthy patients.
The problem is that much of the waiting list is of people with more complex conditions, or simple conditions with a background of other long term disease like diabetes or heart failure, and these cannot be done safely in private facilities.
There is too a massive backlog in non surgical specialities such as dermatology, rheumatology, mental health etc etc that private facilities cannot or will not touch.
Overtime at NHS hospitals is the only viable possibility for these conditions, so Streeting is correct in that. The problem is that running such clinics evenings and weekends requires more staff. Even "office hours" 7 day working requires 40% more staff than 5 day working, before you get to unsocial hours. This needs to be all staff too for these services to be efficient, from receptionists, to porters, to secretaries, not just Doctors.
I have worked at least one weekend a month all my professional life, and never expected to work 9-5 with undisturbed evenings and nights. I intend to carry on for another decade the same, but you simply cannot force everyone to do so without either spreading staff dangerously thin or worsening the retention issue.
Hence the interest in PAs and AAs to build workforce, but ultimately the only way to increase capacity is to retain and train more staff.
BTW, Trump had a terrible week in the courts. He collapsed his $500m case against Michael Cohen after Trump was forced into a deposition. He got served with gagging orders to stop abusing court staff (this is the New York civil trial, where the New York Attorney General Letitia James has brought a $250 million lawsuit accusing Trump and co-defendants of committing repeated fraud by inflating assets to get better terms on commercial real estate loans and insurance policies.)
How long before his legal woes break into political woes?
This isn't Tory incompetence - its mendaciousness. A deliberate choice to smash as many things as possible, salting the earth for Labour so that they can then postion Labour as the party who screwed everything up.
Sunak stood at his conference lectern railing against government failures, and that only he could lead the change needed to fix the country. As if he, and his party, weren't the people who had wrecked everything.
Never mind ballsy it is simply fantasy. When people keep ramping the supposed £36bn to be spent on northern transport, even as the reality is exposed more and more, it shows that they are so utterly disconnected from reality that they will swallow any lie as truth.
The Tories have had success in weaponising ignorance and stupidity. Polling shows that people have seen through their schtick and aren't listening any more
Labour's last government signed off with "theres no money". Perhaps if they had left some we'd all be in better shape.
Yes. And if "there is no money" was true back then, how true must it be now after your lot have vastly increased the amount of debt we are in?
I do rather enjoy the blank patches in your memory. Are you saying there should have been no support for people during Covid ? I seem to remember Starmer calling out for even more than Lord Bountiful Johnson. And on cost of living should we have told people to freeze last winter ?
An attack on mismanagement of HS2 or government current spending would of course be justified, but if HMG were to impose cuts you would be one of the first to break out in hysterics and say its was wrong.
Fascinating. What we spend money on is a separate thing. If we spend it, we spend it. So "there is no money" was you claim factually true in 2010 when debt was £1.2tn, then it also must be true now when it is £2.5tn.
Money doesn't care what it is spent on. It is either there or it isn't. You said "perhaps if they {Labour} had left some we'd all be in better shape". OK, so debt has doubled, we already factually had no money according to you, so now we're in worse shape with no no money. Logically, if we follow your argument.
The statement "Money doesn't care what it is spent on" is at the root of our current problems. Blair and the conservative tribute act took no real care of public finances. And yet if they had cut back your pavlovian instincts would have you wailing cuts cuts.
I dread to think what you advise your clients.
Again, we're not discussing morality, we're discussing adding.
You said that there really was no money left when we had -£1.2tn Now we have -£2.5tn -£2.5tn is a bigger hole than -£1.2tn So if as you state we had no money left at -£1.2tn, how would you describe it now that it is -£2.5tn?
You may think that the £1.3tn has been gallantly spent on things we needed. But its been spent *after* you stated that there was no money left. But if there was no money left, how come your lot have spent an extra £1.3tn since?
2009/10 budget deficit: 11% of GDP 2023/24 budget deficit forecast: 5.1% of GDP
11% of GDP is a bigger hole than 5.1% of GDP
And a lower budget deficit is better than a higher budget deficit. That really becomes acute the more in debt you are. And having left us with "no money", somehow another £1.3tn has been found and spent since then.
What it shows is that fiscally sovereign countries - providing they do not dick the markets about and invest it on something sensible - can continue to borrow.
Alan's problem is that he objects to Labour spending anything on anything, and excuses the Tories spending anything on anything. Which is fine for party political hackery, but less fine when it comes to complex things like adding.
The absolute value of the debt in pounds is irrelevant.
The deficit to GDP is not.
At the turn of the previous decade the markets were being dicked around, austerity was absolutely necessary to turn around the profligacy from Brown.
Starmer is a lucky general in that the Tories have trashed their political brand far more than the economy, he's likely to inherit a not especially considerable deficit unlike Cameron so this time there will be money available for his spending priorities, just not much of it.
I agree with you to a point - you actual value of the debt is less important than the willingness of the markets to keep your line of credit open.
So why do the Tories even now still foam on about "there is no money left?" It wasn't true then, it isn't true now.
Where I disagree with you is that the size of the debt does matter the deeper you dig. the willingness to keep loaning you money reduces the deeper you go. And we're in very very deep now, hence Truss having degree zero of liberty to go on a spending spree.
It was true then. 11% of GDP being a deficit was no money left.
It took pretty much a decade of annual deficit to GDP falls to almost finish closing the deficit before Covid hit.
Had Cameron or Osborne increased the deficit from 2010 onwards then there'd have been money left.
I think the struggle for Israel is how it provides itself security without expelling people from Gaza. The status quo simply doesn't work, and a significant number there are pledged to the extermination of Israel and its people. Yes the hard right illegal settlers are crazy, yes they steal land, but they aren't pledged to genocide like Hamas.
Gaza is an open sore on the region, allowed to be sustained by other states. Egypt likes to blame Israel but has its own border wall at the south to keep Gazans imprisoned. Iran is after a fight and seem to be responsible for all those missiles arriving into Gaza. Russia seem to have armed and trained Hamas with drones to drop bombs.
Removing Gaza and pushing the people there back onto the arab diaspora isn't that crazy an idea. The idiocy of "refugee camps" has to end. These are not displaced refugees, they are several generations down the track from that. Resettle them in the other parts of the former Ottoman empire. So that they can also find peace.
I understand your logic, but the history of forcible resettlement is not encouraging, not least as you're likely to get a NIMBYist reaction (to put it mildly) from whichever area you decide to settle them. Leon's suggestion of offering them huge sums of money to resettle voluntarily might be better, but you'd probably only get the non-violent people seizing the chance to get out of the hellhole, and you still have to solve the question of where will accept them.
Forcible resettlement is what happened at the end of WW2. Not advocating it, obviously. Just saying that it has been used throughout history. And bluntly sometimes it has worked. Europe's perennial German question has been solved - at a cost of huge injustice and suffering - because the alternative was even worse. Germans now no longer live in the lands they have historically lived in for centuries.
Last night I said my preferred solution would actually be a "One-State Solution", where members of both the communities could live, pray and work wherever they wanted. Something akin to Bosnia. I confess, it would be completely crazy.
And yet, Dayton 1995 ended the Bosnian conflict, and the Serbs and Bosniaks (and Croats) are no longer lobbing rockets and/or tank shells at one another, correct? Something akin to the Dayton settlement.
The thing that unsettles me about the "TWO-STATE" solution, is that any Israelis living in putative Palestinian land would be seen as "settlers", "Zionists", etc., whereas any Arabs living in Israel would be seen as "fifth columists", "terrorists", etc., correct? A recipe for Apartheid and ethnic cleansing by both sides, I would think.
Listening to Starmer on BBC just now his answer to the waiting lists is to pay doctors overtime to work evenings and weekends even though the overtime rate is less than they earn in the private sector
I would be interested in hearing the views of @Foxy and others on this
In the short term, what alternative is there?
Yes - employ the private sector to work with the NHS
Already very much the case. Indeed elective NHS work is now the bread and butter of most private hospitals in England.
There are limits to what can be done in these places. They are fine for elective surgeries for low risk procedures such as hernias, cholecystectomy, joint replacements in otherwise healthy patients.
The problem is that much of the waiting list is of people with more complex conditions, or simple conditions with a background of other long term disease like diabetes or heart failure, and these cannot be done safely in private facilities.
There is too a massive backlog in non surgical specialities such as dermatology, rheumatology, mental health etc etc that private facilities cannot or will not touch.
Overtime at NHS hospitals is the only viable possibility for these conditions, so Streeting is correct in that. The problem is that running such clinics evenings and weekends requires more staff. Even "office hours" 7 day working requires 40% more staff than 5 day working, before you get to unsocial hours. This needs to be all staff too for these services to be efficient, from receptionists, to porters, to secretaries, not just Doctors.
I have worked at least one weekend a month all my professional life, and never expected to work 9-5 with undisturbed evenings and nights. I intend to carry on for another decade the same, but you simply cannot force everyone to do so without either spreading staff dangerously thin or worsening the retention issue.
Hence the interest in PAs and AAs to build workforce, but ultimately the only way to increase capacity is to retain and train more staff.
Office hours Monday to Friday is the problem.
Given the amount of machinery and investment in NHS Hospitals it has always struck me as mad that they're not operating to capacity 7 days a week for at least 12 hours a day.
Private sector industry with large industrial investments don't typically operate office hours Monday to Friday only.
The entire system of employment in the NHS seems designed to maximise strife, stop stuff getting done and piss off the staff as much as possible.
Designing support systems (human and machine) so that extremely expensive medical staff can just get on with medical stuff is the way to go.
On one occasion, I got chatting to a Dr. at A&E, as he was treating me. They had actual clipboard wielders doing 1895 style time and motion studies on them - are you seeing enough patients an hour? - at the time I was there.
That was consider stupid in about 1920. It pisses people off better than nearly everything else. If you want those numbers, you can see them trivially from the paperwork.
Listening to Starmer on BBC just now his answer to the waiting lists is to pay doctors overtime to work evenings and weekends even though the overtime rate is less than they earn in the private sector
I would be interested in hearing the views of @Foxy and others on this
In the short term, what alternative is there?
Fair point, but this just illustrates the problem. We don't have long-term solutions.
This isn't Tory incompetence - its mendaciousness. A deliberate choice to smash as many things as possible, salting the earth for Labour so that they can then postion Labour as the party who screwed everything up.
Sunak stood at his conference lectern railing against government failures, and that only he could lead the change needed to fix the country. As if he, and his party, weren't the people who had wrecked everything.
Never mind ballsy it is simply fantasy. When people keep ramping the supposed £36bn to be spent on northern transport, even as the reality is exposed more and more, it shows that they are so utterly disconnected from reality that they will swallow any lie as truth.
The Tories have had success in weaponising ignorance and stupidity. Polling shows that people have seen through their schtick and aren't listening any more
Labour's last government signed off with "theres no money". Perhaps if they had left some we'd all be in better shape.
Yes. And if "there is no money" was true back then, how true must it be now after your lot have vastly increased the amount of debt we are in?
I do rather enjoy the blank patches in your memory. Are you saying there should have been no support for people during Covid ? I seem to remember Starmer calling out for even more than Lord Bountiful Johnson. And on cost of living should we have told people to freeze last winter ?
An attack on mismanagement of HS2 or government current spending would of course be justified, but if HMG were to impose cuts you would be one of the first to break out in hysterics and say its was wrong.
Fascinating. What we spend money on is a separate thing. If we spend it, we spend it. So "there is no money" was you claim factually true in 2010 when debt was £1.2tn, then it also must be true now when it is £2.5tn.
Money doesn't care what it is spent on. It is either there or it isn't. You said "perhaps if they {Labour} had left some we'd all be in better shape". OK, so debt has doubled, we already factually had no money according to you, so now we're in worse shape with no no money. Logically, if we follow your argument.
The statement "Money doesn't care what it is spent on" is at the root of our current problems. Blair and the conservative tribute act took no real care of public finances. And yet if they had cut back your pavlovian instincts would have you wailing cuts cuts.
I dread to think what you advise your clients.
Again, we're not discussing morality, we're discussing adding.
You said that there really was no money left when we had -£1.2tn Now we have -£2.5tn -£2.5tn is a bigger hole than -£1.2tn So if as you state we had no money left at -£1.2tn, how would you describe it now that it is -£2.5tn?
You may think that the £1.3tn has been gallantly spent on things we needed. But its been spent *after* you stated that there was no money left. But if there was no money left, how come your lot have spent an extra £1.3tn since?
2009/10 budget deficit: 11% of GDP 2023/24 budget deficit forecast: 5.1% of GDP
11% of GDP is a bigger hole than 5.1% of GDP
Deficit is the rate at which you are digging. Debt is the size of the hole.
Improper analogy since you can just stop digging at will, you can't drop the deficit at will as momentum will keep you moving forwards. The deficit is the speed at which your finances are collapsing, you need to act just to slow down let alone reverse that momenum.
I can park 1 metre away from a brick wall perfectly safely. If I'm 2 metres away from a brick wall I'm heading towards at 70mph then that's far more catastrophic.
Let's try a beer analogy. Deficit is how quickly you are drinking, debt is how drunk you are.
Labour were necking pints during a lunchtime session, but were still capable of catching the right bus home.
The Tories have been on the lash all day and are staying for a lock in. They'll be sleeping in a gutter.
Martin Lewis @MartinSLewis Shocked to have just been messaged that as I write, the London regional party at #LabourPartyConference is sponsored by a Buy Now Pay Later firm. And the founder was given platform to speak against regulation.
Have these firms bought influence with every UK polical party? @Keir_Starmer are you now anti regulation too?
This isn't Tory incompetence - its mendaciousness. A deliberate choice to smash as many things as possible, salting the earth for Labour so that they can then postion Labour as the party who screwed everything up.
Sunak stood at his conference lectern railing against government failures, and that only he could lead the change needed to fix the country. As if he, and his party, weren't the people who had wrecked everything.
Never mind ballsy it is simply fantasy. When people keep ramping the supposed £36bn to be spent on northern transport, even as the reality is exposed more and more, it shows that they are so utterly disconnected from reality that they will swallow any lie as truth.
The Tories have had success in weaponising ignorance and stupidity. Polling shows that people have seen through their schtick and aren't listening any more
There will be investment of £2bn to include a "brand new" railway station in Bradford.
That was previously cancelled in 2021 by Boris Johnson's government, reinstated by Liz Truss in 2022 and axed again when Rishi Sunak took office." (BBC)
Even Britain can't waste £2bn on a new station. The NN release said it would allow a 12 minute journey time to Huddersfield - so a new high speed line - and 30 minutes to Manchester. Via NPR and some exciting maths regarding journeytime and even more exciting maths regarding costs. Not that we can possibly state journey times as "Manchester" is via a route not yet fixed at a cost not yet agreed to a station not yet agreed.
It is - putting it bluntly - a lie. Delivery promised in the 2040s providing that it passes the usual treasury funding tests which it won't. I don't know who I feel more sorry for - the people this was aimed at ('these idiots will believe any crap we feed them') or the few people who still now parrot the £36bn of investment as if it is real and that people near them welcome it.
Talking of which, is this real?
The Transport Secretary Mark Harper asked why a series of commitments made by Rishi Sunak last week to build new transport projects around the country have now been deleted, says they were merely "examples" of the "sorts of things that that money could be spent on" #bbclaurak
That's a different and not particularly pleasant side to him.
In the new AI imbued world I do wonder if this is real. I guess if if’s not the Labour presentation machine will be down on it like a ton of bricks.
Yes, that is always a possibility today. But SKS has a whinny voice at the best of times. Feeling sorry for himself, which is what this sounded like to me, really doesn't help. He needs to deal with stress better than that.
This isn't Tory incompetence - its mendaciousness. A deliberate choice to smash as many things as possible, salting the earth for Labour so that they can then postion Labour as the party who screwed everything up.
Sunak stood at his conference lectern railing against government failures, and that only he could lead the change needed to fix the country. As if he, and his party, weren't the people who had wrecked everything.
Never mind ballsy it is simply fantasy. When people keep ramping the supposed £36bn to be spent on northern transport, even as the reality is exposed more and more, it shows that they are so utterly disconnected from reality that they will swallow any lie as truth.
The Tories have had success in weaponising ignorance and stupidity. Polling shows that people have seen through their schtick and aren't listening any more
Labour's last government signed off with "theres no money". Perhaps if they had left some we'd all be in better shape.
Yes. And if "there is no money" was true back then, how true must it be now after your lot have vastly increased the amount of debt we are in?
I do rather enjoy the blank patches in your memory. Are you saying there should have been no support for people during Covid ? I seem to remember Starmer calling out for even more than Lord Bountiful Johnson. And on cost of living should we have told people to freeze last winter ?
An attack on mismanagement of HS2 or government current spending would of course be justified, but if HMG were to impose cuts you would be one of the first to break out in hysterics and say its was wrong.
Fascinating. What we spend money on is a separate thing. If we spend it, we spend it. So "there is no money" was you claim factually true in 2010 when debt was £1.2tn, then it also must be true now when it is £2.5tn.
Money doesn't care what it is spent on. It is either there or it isn't. You said "perhaps if they {Labour} had left some we'd all be in better shape". OK, so debt has doubled, we already factually had no money according to you, so now we're in worse shape with no no money. Logically, if we follow your argument.
The statement "Money doesn't care what it is spent on" is at the root of our current problems. Blair and the conservative tribute act took no real care of public finances. And yet if they had cut back your pavlovian instincts would have you wailing cuts cuts.
I dread to think what you advise your clients.
Again, we're not discussing morality, we're discussing adding.
You said that there really was no money left when we had -£1.2tn Now we have -£2.5tn -£2.5tn is a bigger hole than -£1.2tn So if as you state we had no money left at -£1.2tn, how would you describe it now that it is -£2.5tn?
You may think that the £1.3tn has been gallantly spent on things we needed. But its been spent *after* you stated that there was no money left. But if there was no money left, how come your lot have spent an extra £1.3tn since?
2009/10 budget deficit: 11% of GDP 2023/24 budget deficit forecast: 5.1% of GDP
11% of GDP is a bigger hole than 5.1% of GDP
Deficit is the rate at which you are digging. Debt is the size of the hole.
Improper analogy since you can just stop digging at will, you can't drop the deficit at will as momentum will keep you moving forwards. The deficit is the speed at which your finances are collapsing, you need to act just to slow down let alone reverse that momenum.
I can park 1 metre away from a brick wall perfectly safely. If I'm 2 metres away from a brick wall I'm heading towards at 70mph then that's far more catastrophic.
Let's try a beer analogy. Deficit is how quickly you are drinking, debt is how drunk you are.
Labour were necking pints during a lunchtime session, but were still capable of catching the right bus home.
The Tories have been on the lash all day and are staying for a lock in. They'll be sleeping in a gutter.
Again the analogy doesn't work, because you can stop drinking at will, you can't stop a deficit at will.
Which is more deadly, jumping and being 1 metre off the ground, or being 2 metres above the ground while falling to the ground at 6m/s after falling off a tall building?
It is the rate of motion that matters far more when it comes to safety, that applies to the deficit as much as anything else.
Makes it informative, too. Civilised …. dare I say liberal ….. discussion is always better in leading to appreciation of others views than just shouting.
I tended to agree with Farooq and disagree with Frank Booth, but they were both always interesting, and I hope they'll return.
The main rule that I try to follow - with occasional exceptions which I do regret (sorry, Josiah)- is not to comment critically about other posters. After all, 90% of people here are anonymous, so who cares what they're really like? Disagreeing with what they say is fine, and sometimes being critical of how they say it, but not labelling each other in neat categories - racist, Putinist, sexist, or simply stupid. We are probably all more nuanced than we seem, or even realise ourselves.
Absolutely agree.
Some like to label and belittle. Last wee I was told I was a Putinist for not wanting British troops sent to Ukraine.
It will be white feathers next. 😀
But life really is too short and we are all going to be complex individuals and probably all really pleasant IRL. If people want to get so invested in this place or the debate they resort to abuse or trite comments then so be it.
It’s better than Facebook politics groups for sure.
The Israel conflict is terrible with unknown consequences and outcome
This article highlights just how perilous the world's economy's are and why there is absolutely no money to spend by governments
Also sorry to see @Farooq and @FrankBooth leave this forum but at times it does seem like an echo chamber, but it is important that as many different views are expressed as possible otherwise it will become an echo chamber
Surely not more flouncing off because people disagree with you, need to man up. If you cannot take it then you should not be giving it out. This is not a place to be if thin skinned.
I think the struggle for Israel is how it provides itself security without expelling people from Gaza. The status quo simply doesn't work, and a significant number there are pledged to the extermination of Israel and its people. Yes the hard right illegal settlers are crazy, yes they steal land, but they aren't pledged to genocide like Hamas.
Gaza is an open sore on the region, allowed to be sustained by other states. Egypt likes to blame Israel but has its own border wall at the south to keep Gazans imprisoned. Iran is after a fight and seem to be responsible for all those missiles arriving into Gaza. Russia seem to have armed and trained Hamas with drones to drop bombs.
Removing Gaza and pushing the people there back onto the arab diaspora isn't that crazy an idea. The idiocy of "refugee camps" has to end. These are not displaced refugees, they are several generations down the track from that. Resettle them in the other parts of the former Ottoman empire. So that they can also find peace.
I understand your logic, but the history of forcible resettlement is not encouraging, not least as you're likely to get a NIMBYist reaction (to put it mildly) from whichever area you decide to settle them. Leon's suggestion of offering them huge sums of money to resettle voluntarily might be better, but you'd probably only get the non-violent people seizing the chance to get out of the hellhole, and you still have to solve the question of where will accept them.
Forcible resettlement is what happened at the end of WW2. Not advocating it, obviously. Just saying that it has been used throughout history. And bluntly sometimes it has worked. Europe's perennial German question has been solved - at a cost of huge injustice and suffering - because the alternative was even worse. Germans now no longer live in the lands they have historically lived in for centuries.
Yes, I agree. Ultimately the right to return where you used to be, possibly at the expense of someone else, isn't as important as avoiding permanent conflict. That doesn't mean approving of the wars or forcible resettlement that led to it. Almost nobody now favours reversing the India-Pakistan split, despite the horrors that led to it.
I can understand why people don't want to see - or have described - the reality of what rape - especially in wartime - looks like. It is deeply disturbing. It can easily stray into a sort of vile pornography or glorification.
But it is also necessary to understand the brutality of what happens and why there is the reaction there is.
Anyway I have seen and read enough. Like everyone else I too cannot bear so much reality. Social media is best avoided at times like these. And there is plenty of nicer stuff to be getting on with.
I was not dimishing the wickedness of the violence in any way. This isn't the Observer colour supplement, did we need such detail here? Maybe we did. But I would have preferred to look at more obvious sources should the need arise.
There is a case that by editing the news, it convinces people that the news is being “shaped”.
For example, on one of the Greek islands that was getting refugees landing there, to x hundred percent of the local population…. They started throwing stones at news crews. Why?
Well, whenever the locals were being interviewed by international news, the moment they started saying anything about the crime rate (fruit trees in orchards being stripped etc), it got cut from the report.
So the locals, who watched TV became convinced that the international media were “on the side of the migrants” and “against them”
I wouldn't advocate sanitising news.
I was merely offended at how graphic,and my interpretation as to why a poster on PB needed to be so graphic.
My bad.
The level of horror and violence of sexual violence is not I think fully understood. We shy away from it precisely because it is so horrible and out of a sense of decency and self-protection - some things once seen cannot be unseen or unheard.
The danger in doing that it is that it risks it being overlooked and the victims forgotten and it being seen as just one of those things that happen. I think there is a tendency for that to happen with all forms of sexual violence. Precisely because it is a perversion of something wonderful we cannot bear to learn what happens when it is used to harm.
I do not know what the right balance is. I only pray that those girls will come home alive and be given the help and care they need.
Listening to Starmer on BBC just now his answer to the waiting lists is to pay doctors overtime to work evenings and weekends even though the overtime rate is less than they earn in the private sector
I would be interested in hearing the views of @Foxy and others on this
These doctors and consultants really are greed personified nowadays. Rolling in money but still no milk of human kindness, just greedy and grasping.
This isn't Tory incompetence - its mendaciousness. A deliberate choice to smash as many things as possible, salting the earth for Labour so that they can then postion Labour as the party who screwed everything up.
Sunak stood at his conference lectern railing against government failures, and that only he could lead the change needed to fix the country. As if he, and his party, weren't the people who had wrecked everything.
Never mind ballsy it is simply fantasy. When people keep ramping the supposed £36bn to be spent on northern transport, even as the reality is exposed more and more, it shows that they are so utterly disconnected from reality that they will swallow any lie as truth.
The Tories have had success in weaponising ignorance and stupidity. Polling shows that people have seen through their schtick and aren't listening any more
Labour's last government signed off with "theres no money". Perhaps if they had left some we'd all be in better shape.
Yes. And if "there is no money" was true back then, how true must it be now after your lot have vastly increased the amount of debt we are in?
I do rather enjoy the blank patches in your memory. Are you saying there should have been no support for people during Covid ? I seem to remember Starmer calling out for even more than Lord Bountiful Johnson. And on cost of living should we have told people to freeze last winter ?
An attack on mismanagement of HS2 or government current spending would of course be justified, but if HMG were to impose cuts you would be one of the first to break out in hysterics and say its was wrong.
Fascinating. What we spend money on is a separate thing. If we spend it, we spend it. So "there is no money" was you claim factually true in 2010 when debt was £1.2tn, then it also must be true now when it is £2.5tn.
Money doesn't care what it is spent on. It is either there or it isn't. You said "perhaps if they {Labour} had left some we'd all be in better shape". OK, so debt has doubled, we already factually had no money according to you, so now we're in worse shape with no no money. Logically, if we follow your argument.
The statement "Money doesn't care what it is spent on" is at the root of our current problems. Blair and the conservative tribute act took no real care of public finances. And yet if they had cut back your pavlovian instincts would have you wailing cuts cuts.
I dread to think what you advise your clients.
Again, we're not discussing morality, we're discussing adding.
You said that there really was no money left when we had -£1.2tn Now we have -£2.5tn -£2.5tn is a bigger hole than -£1.2tn So if as you state we had no money left at -£1.2tn, how would you describe it now that it is -£2.5tn?
You may think that the £1.3tn has been gallantly spent on things we needed. But its been spent *after* you stated that there was no money left. But if there was no money left, how come your lot have spent an extra £1.3tn since?
2009/10 budget deficit: 11% of GDP 2023/24 budget deficit forecast: 5.1% of GDP
11% of GDP is a bigger hole than 5.1% of GDP
And a lower budget deficit is better than a higher budget deficit. That really becomes acute the more in debt you are. And having left us with "no money", somehow another £1.3tn has been found and spent since then.
What it shows is that fiscally sovereign countries - providing they do not dick the markets about and invest it on something sensible - can continue to borrow.
Alan's problem is that he objects to Labour spending anything on anything, and excuses the Tories spending anything on anything. Which is fine for party political hackery, but less fine when it comes to complex things like adding.
The absolute value of the debt in pounds is irrelevant.
The deficit to GDP is not.
At the turn of the previous decade the markets were being dicked around, austerity was absolutely necessary to turn around the profligacy from Brown.
Starmer is a lucky general in that the Tories have trashed their political brand far more than the economy, he's likely to inherit a not especially considerable deficit unlike Cameron so this time there will be money available for his spending priorities, just not much of it.
I agree with you to a point - you actual value of the debt is less important than the willingness of the markets to keep your line of credit open.
So why do the Tories even now still foam on about "there is no money left?" It wasn't true then, it isn't true now.
Where I disagree with you is that the size of the debt does matter the deeper you dig. the willingness to keep loaning you money reduces the deeper you go. And we're in very very deep now, hence Truss having degree zero of liberty to go on a spending spree.
It was true then. 11% of GDP being a deficit was no money left.
It took pretty much a decade of annual deficit to GDP falls to almost finish closing the deficit before Covid hit.
Had Cameron or Osborne increased the deficit from 2010 onwards then there'd have been money left.
This is silly. Money is cash. You can't spend a percentage. Your argument about the percentage being all is rather negated by the Liz Truss episode. A much lower % deficit than Cameron operated post 2010 and yet the cash tap was rapidly turned off for her and kept open for him.
Its very simple. We *cannot* run out of a currency we print to repay debts denominated in that currency. What we can do is run out of creditors...
This isn't Tory incompetence - its mendaciousness. A deliberate choice to smash as many things as possible, salting the earth for Labour so that they can then postion Labour as the party who screwed everything up.
Sunak stood at his conference lectern railing against government failures, and that only he could lead the change needed to fix the country. As if he, and his party, weren't the people who had wrecked everything.
Never mind ballsy it is simply fantasy. When people keep ramping the supposed £36bn to be spent on northern transport, even as the reality is exposed more and more, it shows that they are so utterly disconnected from reality that they will swallow any lie as truth.
The Tories have had success in weaponising ignorance and stupidity. Polling shows that people have seen through their schtick and aren't listening any more
Labour's last government signed off with "theres no money". Perhaps if they had left some we'd all be in better shape.
Yes. And if "there is no money" was true back then, how true must it be now after your lot have vastly increased the amount of debt we are in?
I do rather enjoy the blank patches in your memory. Are you saying there should have been no support for people during Covid ? I seem to remember Starmer calling out for even more than Lord Bountiful Johnson. And on cost of living should we have told people to freeze last winter ?
An attack on mismanagement of HS2 or government current spending would of course be justified, but if HMG were to impose cuts you would be one of the first to break out in hysterics and say its was wrong.
Fascinating. What we spend money on is a separate thing. If we spend it, we spend it. So "there is no money" was you claim factually true in 2010 when debt was £1.2tn, then it also must be true now when it is £2.5tn.
Money doesn't care what it is spent on. It is either there or it isn't. You said "perhaps if they {Labour} had left some we'd all be in better shape". OK, so debt has doubled, we already factually had no money according to you, so now we're in worse shape with no no money. Logically, if we follow your argument.
The statement "Money doesn't care what it is spent on" is at the root of our current problems. Blair and the conservative tribute act took no real care of public finances. And yet if they had cut back your pavlovian instincts would have you wailing cuts cuts.
I dread to think what you advise your clients.
Again, we're not discussing morality, we're discussing adding.
You said that there really was no money left when we had -£1.2tn Now we have -£2.5tn -£2.5tn is a bigger hole than -£1.2tn So if as you state we had no money left at -£1.2tn, how would you describe it now that it is -£2.5tn?
You may think that the £1.3tn has been gallantly spent on things we needed. But its been spent *after* you stated that there was no money left. But if there was no money left, how come your lot have spent an extra £1.3tn since?
2009/10 budget deficit: 11% of GDP 2023/24 budget deficit forecast: 5.1% of GDP
11% of GDP is a bigger hole than 5.1% of GDP
Deficit is the rate at which you are digging. Debt is the size of the hole.
Improper analogy since you can just stop digging at will, you can't drop the deficit at will as momentum will keep you moving forwards. The deficit is the speed at which your finances are collapsing, you need to act just to slow down let alone reverse that momenum.
I can park 1 metre away from a brick wall perfectly safely. If I'm 2 metres away from a brick wall I'm heading towards at 70mph then that's far more catastrophic.
Let's try a beer analogy. Deficit is how quickly you are drinking, debt is how drunk you are.
Labour were necking pints during a lunchtime session, but were still capable of catching the right bus home.
The Tories have been on the lash all day and are staying for a lock in. They'll be sleeping in a gutter.
Again the analogy doesn't work, because you can stop drinking at will, you can't stop a deficit at will.
Which is more deadly, jumping and being 1 metre off the ground, or being 2 metres above the ground while falling to the ground at 6m/s after falling off a tall building?
It is the rate of motion that matters far more when it comes to safety, that applies to the deficit as much as anything else.
The bigger the debt, the greater the interest payable on the debt. The Chancellor becomes more and more boxed in covering the debt, leaving less and less room to spend on useful stuff.
Makes it informative, too. Civilised …. dare I say liberal ….. discussion is always better in leading to appreciation of others views than just shouting.
I tended to agree with Farooq and disagree with Frank Booth, but they were both always interesting, and I hope they'll return.
The main rule that I try to follow - with occasional exceptions which I do regret (sorry, Josiah)- is not to comment critically about other posters. After all, 90% of people here are anonymous, so who cares what they're really like? Disagreeing with what they say is fine, and sometimes being critical of how they say it, but not labelling each other in neat categories - racist, Putinist, sexist, or simply stupid. We are probably all more nuanced than we seem, or even realise ourselves.
Absolutely agree.
Some like to label and belittle. Last wee I was told I was a Putinist for not wanting British troops sent to Ukraine.
It will be white feathers next. 😀
But life really is too short and we are all going to be complex individuals and probably all really pleasant IRL. If people want to get so invested in this place or the debate they resort to abuse or trite comments then so be it.
It’s better than Facebook politics groups for sure.
@NickPalmer is one of the nicest, fairest, and sensible posters on here and whilst we do differ on topics I have the greatest respect for him and not least on one of his most surprising and amusing recent revelations
This isn't Tory incompetence - its mendaciousness. A deliberate choice to smash as many things as possible, salting the earth for Labour so that they can then postion Labour as the party who screwed everything up.
Sunak stood at his conference lectern railing against government failures, and that only he could lead the change needed to fix the country. As if he, and his party, weren't the people who had wrecked everything.
Never mind ballsy it is simply fantasy. When people keep ramping the supposed £36bn to be spent on northern transport, even as the reality is exposed more and more, it shows that they are so utterly disconnected from reality that they will swallow any lie as truth.
The Tories have had success in weaponising ignorance and stupidity. Polling shows that people have seen through their schtick and aren't listening any more
Labour's last government signed off with "theres no money". Perhaps if they had left some we'd all be in better shape.
Yes. And if "there is no money" was true back then, how true must it be now after your lot have vastly increased the amount of debt we are in?
I do rather enjoy the blank patches in your memory. Are you saying there should have been no support for people during Covid ? I seem to remember Starmer calling out for even more than Lord Bountiful Johnson. And on cost of living should we have told people to freeze last winter ?
An attack on mismanagement of HS2 or government current spending would of course be justified, but if HMG were to impose cuts you would be one of the first to break out in hysterics and say its was wrong.
Fascinating. What we spend money on is a separate thing. If we spend it, we spend it. So "there is no money" was you claim factually true in 2010 when debt was £1.2tn, then it also must be true now when it is £2.5tn.
Money doesn't care what it is spent on. It is either there or it isn't. You said "perhaps if they {Labour} had left some we'd all be in better shape". OK, so debt has doubled, we already factually had no money according to you, so now we're in worse shape with no no money. Logically, if we follow your argument.
The statement "Money doesn't care what it is spent on" is at the root of our current problems. Blair and the conservative tribute act took no real care of public finances. And yet if they had cut back your pavlovian instincts would have you wailing cuts cuts.
I dread to think what you advise your clients.
Again, we're not discussing morality, we're discussing adding.
You said that there really was no money left when we had -£1.2tn Now we have -£2.5tn -£2.5tn is a bigger hole than -£1.2tn So if as you state we had no money left at -£1.2tn, how would you describe it now that it is -£2.5tn?
You may think that the £1.3tn has been gallantly spent on things we needed. But its been spent *after* you stated that there was no money left. But if there was no money left, how come your lot have spent an extra £1.3tn since?
2009/10 budget deficit: 11% of GDP 2023/24 budget deficit forecast: 5.1% of GDP
11% of GDP is a bigger hole than 5.1% of GDP
The hole is the debt, not the deficit. One year's deficit is the size of the shovelful being taken out of the hole.
This isn't Tory incompetence - its mendaciousness. A deliberate choice to smash as many things as possible, salting the earth for Labour so that they can then postion Labour as the party who screwed everything up.
Sunak stood at his conference lectern railing against government failures, and that only he could lead the change needed to fix the country. As if he, and his party, weren't the people who had wrecked everything.
Never mind ballsy it is simply fantasy. When people keep ramping the supposed £36bn to be spent on northern transport, even as the reality is exposed more and more, it shows that they are so utterly disconnected from reality that they will swallow any lie as truth.
The Tories have had success in weaponising ignorance and stupidity. Polling shows that people have seen through their schtick and aren't listening any more
There will be investment of £2bn to include a "brand new" railway station in Bradford.
That was previously cancelled in 2021 by Boris Johnson's government, reinstated by Liz Truss in 2022 and axed again when Rishi Sunak took office." (BBC)
Even Britain can't waste £2bn on a new station. The NN release said it would allow a 12 minute journey time to Huddersfield - so a new high speed line - and 30 minutes to Manchester. Via NPR and some exciting maths regarding journeytime and even more exciting maths regarding costs. Not that we can possibly state journey times as "Manchester" is via a route not yet fixed at a cost not yet agreed to a station not yet agreed.
It is - putting it bluntly - a lie. Delivery promised in the 2040s providing that it passes the usual treasury funding tests which it won't. I don't know who I feel more sorry for - the people this was aimed at ('these idiots will believe any crap we feed them') or the few people who still now parrot the £36bn of investment as if it is real and that people near them welcome it.
Talking of which, is this real?
The Transport Secretary Mark Harper asked why a series of commitments made by Rishi Sunak last week to build new transport projects around the country have now been deleted, says they were merely "examples" of the "sorts of things that that money could be spent on" #bbclaurak
Why Good grief? This was self evident within an hour or so of the details being published. It was all bullshit. The shock is that some people fell for it and are still parroting that Sunak will definitely be spending £36bn on schemes like North Wales Coast electrification.
He won't. He was never going to do. Even if he somehow wins reelection there will be minimal money spent on any of this. Like the towns fund and other levelling-up money its just a big lie. Which is why the latest mega poll shows every red wall seat going back to red.
People dislike being lied to, and especially dislike being tret like morons.
I am very much against ethnic cleansing, even if it is wrapped up in nice words such as 'forcible resettlement'.
I also don't think it would work much with the Israel/Palestine issue. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced out of Israel from 1948 in the Naqba, taking refuge in surrounding countries such as Jordan, Egypt or Lebanon.
When there was ethnic cleansing (say) between Greece and Turkey post-WW1 (which was based not on ethnicity or language, but religion), the new states pretty much accepted the immigrants and assimilated them, albeit with lots of problems that eventually got worked out.
In the case of the Palestinians, most have not been able to assimilate into their new home countries, instead living in camps. For some this is out of choice - they see themselves as Palestinians, who should be living in Palestine. But the surrounding states have also made it very difficult to become citizens, esp. Egypt.
Foricble resettlement only works if they can be genuinely resettled in their new home country - otherwise they just become stateless and lacking fundamental rights, which does f-all for peace.
Listening to Starmer on BBC just now his answer to the waiting lists is to pay doctors overtime to work evenings and weekends even though the overtime rate is less than they earn in the private sector
I would be interested in hearing the views of @Foxy and others on this
In the short term, what alternative is there?
Yes - employ the private sector to work with the NHS
Already very much the case. Indeed elective NHS work is now the bread and butter of most private hospitals in England.
There are limits to what can be done in these places. They are fine for elective surgeries for low risk procedures such as hernias, cholecystectomy, joint replacements in otherwise healthy patients.
The problem is that much of the waiting list is of people with more complex conditions, or simple conditions with a background of other long term disease like diabetes or heart failure, and these cannot be done safely in private facilities.
There is too a massive backlog in non surgical specialities such as dermatology, rheumatology, mental health etc etc that private facilities cannot or will not touch.
Overtime at NHS hospitals is the only viable possibility for these conditions, so Streeting is correct in that. The problem is that running such clinics evenings and weekends requires more staff. Even "office hours" 7 day working requires 40% more staff than 5 day working, before you get to unsocial hours. This needs to be all staff too for these services to be efficient, from receptionists, to porters, to secretaries, not just Doctors.
I have worked at least one weekend a month all my professional life, and never expected to work 9-5 with undisturbed evenings and nights. I intend to carry on for another decade the same, but you simply cannot force everyone to do so without either spreading staff dangerously thin or worsening the retention issue.
Hence the interest in PAs and AAs to build workforce, but ultimately the only way to increase capacity is to retain and train more staff.
Office hours Monday to Friday is the problem.
Given the amount of machinery and investment in NHS Hospitals it has always struck me as mad that they're not operating to capacity 7 days a week for at least 12 hours a day.
Private sector industry with large industrial investments don't typically operate office hours Monday to Friday only.
The entire system of employment in the NHS seems designed to maximise strife, stop stuff getting done and piss off the staff as much as possible.
Designing support systems (human and machine) so that extremely expensive medical staff can just get on with medical stuff is the way to go.
On one occasion, I got chatting to a Dr. at A&E, as he was treating me. They had actual clipboard wielders doing 1895 style time and motion studies on them - are you seeing enough patients an hour? - at the time I was there.
That was consider stupid in about 1920. It pisses people off better than nearly everything else. If you want those numbers, you can see them trivially from the paperwork.
Sounds like Management Consultants at work!
You cannot just look at figures to understand a problem. There lies the fate of HS2 when Spreadsheet Sunak doesn't look at wider issues. You need to talk to people on the ground and observe process.
For example, you cannot see why the doctor has large gaps between seeing patients. Are they being interrupted by phone calls? Is the IT too slow to record and order investigations? Are they checking a Physician Associates decisions? Are they skiving? You need to be there to find out, or at least actually talk to them.
This isn't Tory incompetence - its mendaciousness. A deliberate choice to smash as many things as possible, salting the earth for Labour so that they can then postion Labour as the party who screwed everything up.
Sunak stood at his conference lectern railing against government failures, and that only he could lead the change needed to fix the country. As if he, and his party, weren't the people who had wrecked everything.
Never mind ballsy it is simply fantasy. When people keep ramping the supposed £36bn to be spent on northern transport, even as the reality is exposed more and more, it shows that they are so utterly disconnected from reality that they will swallow any lie as truth.
The Tories have had success in weaponising ignorance and stupidity. Polling shows that people have seen through their schtick and aren't listening any more
Labour's last government signed off with "theres no money". Perhaps if they had left some we'd all be in better shape.
Yes. And if "there is no money" was true back then, how true must it be now after your lot have vastly increased the amount of debt we are in?
I do rather enjoy the blank patches in your memory. Are you saying there should have been no support for people during Covid ? I seem to remember Starmer calling out for even more than Lord Bountiful Johnson. And on cost of living should we have told people to freeze last winter ?
An attack on mismanagement of HS2 or government current spending would of course be justified, but if HMG were to impose cuts you would be one of the first to break out in hysterics and say its was wrong.
Fascinating. What we spend money on is a separate thing. If we spend it, we spend it. So "there is no money" was you claim factually true in 2010 when debt was £1.2tn, then it also must be true now when it is £2.5tn.
Money doesn't care what it is spent on. It is either there or it isn't. You said "perhaps if they {Labour} had left some we'd all be in better shape". OK, so debt has doubled, we already factually had no money according to you, so now we're in worse shape with no no money. Logically, if we follow your argument.
The statement "Money doesn't care what it is spent on" is at the root of our current problems. Blair and the conservative tribute act took no real care of public finances. And yet if they had cut back your pavlovian instincts would have you wailing cuts cuts.
I dread to think what you advise your clients.
Again, we're not discussing morality, we're discussing adding.
You said that there really was no money left when we had -£1.2tn Now we have -£2.5tn -£2.5tn is a bigger hole than -£1.2tn So if as you state we had no money left at -£1.2tn, how would you describe it now that it is -£2.5tn?
You may think that the £1.3tn has been gallantly spent on things we needed. But its been spent *after* you stated that there was no money left. But if there was no money left, how come your lot have spent an extra £1.3tn since?
2009/10 budget deficit: 11% of GDP 2023/24 budget deficit forecast: 5.1% of GDP
11% of GDP is a bigger hole than 5.1% of GDP
Deficit is the rate at which you are digging. Debt is the size of the hole.
Improper analogy since you can just stop digging at will, you can't drop the deficit at will as momentum will keep you moving forwards. The deficit is the speed at which your finances are collapsing, you need to act just to slow down let alone reverse that momenum.
I can park 1 metre away from a brick wall perfectly safely. If I'm 2 metres away from a brick wall I'm heading towards at 70mph then that's far more catastrophic.
Let's try a beer analogy. Deficit is how quickly you are drinking, debt is how drunk you are.
Labour were necking pints during a lunchtime session, but were still capable of catching the right bus home.
The Tories have been on the lash all day and are staying for a lock in. They'll be sleeping in a gutter.
Labour up to 2008 were buying rounds and popularity from the pub absolutely confident that the 2.15 at Haydock was going to come in yet again and cover the tab. When it didn't and their popularity collapsed the Tories had to tidy up the mess but faced the problem that a bar that is used to free rounds think that they have some sort of right to them and moan and moan when the drink slows down.
The Israel conflict is terrible with unknown consequences and outcome
This article highlights just how perilous the world's economy's are and why there is absolutely no money to spend by governments
Also sorry to see @Farooq and @FrankBooth leave this forum but at times it does seem like an echo chamber, but it is important that as many different views are expressed as possible otherwise it will become an echo chamber
Why has @Farooq left? Great loss. I really enjoyed his posts. He often made me laugh out loud. Don't know enough about Frank, but generally sad to see anyone leave regardless of their views. I can only think of one exception, and that person was banned so clearly I wasn't alone in that view.
@Farooq is a troll and a complete and utter f**king d***head.
However, clenching my teeth, he did at least make vaguely half-intelligent posts at time, and hadn't yet crossed the boundary for being so deeply unpleasant and toxic that he needed evicting from the site, so I wouldn't support his expulsion.
I trust he will return after a few days.
People come, people go. So what.
I don’t mind Faarooq, but it’s all getting a bit like CHB when he was crying for some departed posters to return and then promptly flounced himself. It’s bizarre when people are nostalgic For posters on a message board.
People get far too invested in these debates and discussions. Especially on fucking Israel. Which is why I avoid the topic in any depth. No good ever comes out of it and on Twitter it’s far worse.
I agree with getting too invested, but some people of evil want good people to have exactly the attitude of: "The conversation on this issue is far too toxic: I'll keep out."
Hence leaving the playing field to the extremists. And it's not just issues like Israel / Palestine / Hamas, either.
No, the trans debate is another. I won’t even post on that in public using my own name. I don’t discuss it here now. My views are my views.
This isn't Tory incompetence - its mendaciousness. A deliberate choice to smash as many things as possible, salting the earth for Labour so that they can then postion Labour as the party who screwed everything up.
Sunak stood at his conference lectern railing against government failures, and that only he could lead the change needed to fix the country. As if he, and his party, weren't the people who had wrecked everything.
Never mind ballsy it is simply fantasy. When people keep ramping the supposed £36bn to be spent on northern transport, even as the reality is exposed more and more, it shows that they are so utterly disconnected from reality that they will swallow any lie as truth.
The Tories have had success in weaponising ignorance and stupidity. Polling shows that people have seen through their schtick and aren't listening any more
There will be investment of £2bn to include a "brand new" railway station in Bradford.
That was previously cancelled in 2021 by Boris Johnson's government, reinstated by Liz Truss in 2022 and axed again when Rishi Sunak took office." (BBC)
Even Britain can't waste £2bn on a new station. The NN release said it would allow a 12 minute journey time to Huddersfield - so a new high speed line - and 30 minutes to Manchester. Via NPR and some exciting maths regarding journeytime and even more exciting maths regarding costs. Not that we can possibly state journey times as "Manchester" is via a route not yet fixed at a cost not yet agreed to a station not yet agreed.
It is - putting it bluntly - a lie. Delivery promised in the 2040s providing that it passes the usual treasury funding tests which it won't. I don't know who I feel more sorry for - the people this was aimed at ('these idiots will believe any crap we feed them') or the few people who still now parrot the £36bn of investment as if it is real and that people near them welcome it.
Talking of which, is this real?
The Transport Secretary Mark Harper asked why a series of commitments made by Rishi Sunak last week to build new transport projects around the country have now been deleted, says they were merely "examples" of the "sorts of things that that money could be spent on" #bbclaurak
Why Good grief? This was self evident within an hour or so of the details being published. It was all bullshit. The shock is that some people fell for it and are still parroting that Sunak will definitely be spending £36bn on schemes like North Wales Coast electrification.
He won't. He was never going to do. Even if he somehow wins reelection there will be minimal money spent on any of this. Like the towns fund and other levelling-up money its just a big lie. Which is why the latest mega poll shows every red wall seat going back to red.
People dislike being lied to, and especially dislike being tret like morons.
As predicted, there are also new calls to scrap other infrastructure projects from 'green' groups. An example being the new section of the East-West railway line. For a number of reasons, it is now going to be much harder to get large infrastructure projects off (or probably more accurately into) the ground.
Last week was a disaster not just for the HS2 project, not just for rail projects, but all infrastructure projects.
This isn't Tory incompetence - its mendaciousness. A deliberate choice to smash as many things as possible, salting the earth for Labour so that they can then postion Labour as the party who screwed everything up.
Sunak stood at his conference lectern railing against government failures, and that only he could lead the change needed to fix the country. As if he, and his party, weren't the people who had wrecked everything.
Never mind ballsy it is simply fantasy. When people keep ramping the supposed £36bn to be spent on northern transport, even as the reality is exposed more and more, it shows that they are so utterly disconnected from reality that they will swallow any lie as truth.
The Tories have had success in weaponising ignorance and stupidity. Polling shows that people have seen through their schtick and aren't listening any more
Labour's last government signed off with "theres no money". Perhaps if they had left some we'd all be in better shape.
Yes. And if "there is no money" was true back then, how true must it be now after your lot have vastly increased the amount of debt we are in?
I do rather enjoy the blank patches in your memory. Are you saying there should have been no support for people during Covid ? I seem to remember Starmer calling out for even more than Lord Bountiful Johnson. And on cost of living should we have told people to freeze last winter ?
An attack on mismanagement of HS2 or government current spending would of course be justified, but if HMG were to impose cuts you would be one of the first to break out in hysterics and say its was wrong.
Fascinating. What we spend money on is a separate thing. If we spend it, we spend it. So "there is no money" was you claim factually true in 2010 when debt was £1.2tn, then it also must be true now when it is £2.5tn.
Money doesn't care what it is spent on. It is either there or it isn't. You said "perhaps if they {Labour} had left some we'd all be in better shape". OK, so debt has doubled, we already factually had no money according to you, so now we're in worse shape with no no money. Logically, if we follow your argument.
The statement "Money doesn't care what it is spent on" is at the root of our current problems. Blair and the conservative tribute act took no real care of public finances. And yet if they had cut back your pavlovian instincts would have you wailing cuts cuts.
I dread to think what you advise your clients.
Again, we're not discussing morality, we're discussing adding.
You said that there really was no money left when we had -£1.2tn Now we have -£2.5tn -£2.5tn is a bigger hole than -£1.2tn So if as you state we had no money left at -£1.2tn, how would you describe it now that it is -£2.5tn?
You may think that the £1.3tn has been gallantly spent on things we needed. But its been spent *after* you stated that there was no money left. But if there was no money left, how come your lot have spent an extra £1.3tn since?
2009/10 budget deficit: 11% of GDP 2023/24 budget deficit forecast: 5.1% of GDP
11% of GDP is a bigger hole than 5.1% of GDP
And a lower budget deficit is better than a higher budget deficit. That really becomes acute the more in debt you are. And having left us with "no money", somehow another £1.3tn has been found and spent since then.
What it shows is that fiscally sovereign countries - providing they do not dick the markets about and invest it on something sensible - can continue to borrow.
Alan's problem is that he objects to Labour spending anything on anything, and excuses the Tories spending anything on anything. Which is fine for party political hackery, but less fine when it comes to complex things like adding.
The absolute value of the debt in pounds is irrelevant.
The deficit to GDP is not.
At the turn of the previous decade the markets were being dicked around, austerity was absolutely necessary to turn around the profligacy from Brown.
Starmer is a lucky general in that the Tories have trashed their political brand far more than the economy, he's likely to inherit a not especially considerable deficit unlike Cameron so this time there will be money available for his spending priorities, just not much of it.
I agree with you to a point - you actual value of the debt is less important than the willingness of the markets to keep your line of credit open.
So why do the Tories even now still foam on about "there is no money left?" It wasn't true then, it isn't true now.
Where I disagree with you is that the size of the debt does matter the deeper you dig. the willingness to keep loaning you money reduces the deeper you go. And we're in very very deep now, hence Truss having degree zero of liberty to go on a spending spree.
It was true then. 11% of GDP being a deficit was no money left.
It took pretty much a decade of annual deficit to GDP falls to almost finish closing the deficit before Covid hit.
Had Cameron or Osborne increased the deficit from 2010 onwards then there'd have been money left.
This is silly. Money is cash. You can't spend a percentage. Your argument about the percentage being all is rather negated by the Liz Truss episode. A much lower % deficit than Cameron operated post 2010 and yet the cash tap was rapidly turned off for her and kept open for him.
Its very simple. We *cannot* run out of a currency we print to repay debts denominated in that currency. What we can do is run out of creditors...
No you're being silly, dogs are animals but not all animals are dogs; cash is money but money is not all cash. Cash is useless little coins in your pocket, that's not how macroeconomics works.
When it comes to macroeconomics, the money spent in a deficit as a percentage of GDP matters infinitely more than absolute cash figures.
The Liz Truss episode is inconsequential compared to the Brown episode, but her biggest issues were that she couldn't say what her deficit would be, not a pathway back to a balanced budget. Again, it's the deficit that matters.
I think the struggle for Israel is how it provides itself security without expelling people from Gaza. The status quo simply doesn't work, and a significant number there are pledged to the extermination of Israel and its people. Yes the hard right illegal settlers are crazy, yes they steal land, but they aren't pledged to genocide like Hamas.
Gaza is an open sore on the region, allowed to be sustained by other states. Egypt likes to blame Israel but has its own border wall at the south to keep Gazans imprisoned. Iran is after a fight and seem to be responsible for all those missiles arriving into Gaza. Russia seem to have armed and trained Hamas with drones to drop bombs.
Removing Gaza and pushing the people there back onto the arab diaspora isn't that crazy an idea. The idiocy of "refugee camps" has to end. These are not displaced refugees, they are several generations down the track from that. Resettle them in the other parts of the former Ottoman empire. So that they can also find peace.
I understand your logic, but the history of forcible resettlement is not encouraging, not least as you're likely to get a NIMBYist reaction (to put it mildly) from whichever area you decide to settle them. Leon's suggestion of offering them huge sums of money to resettle voluntarily might be better, but you'd probably only get the non-violent people seizing the chance to get out of the hellhole, and you still have to solve the question of where will accept them.
Forcible resettlement is what happened at the end of WW2. Not advocating it, obviously. Just saying that it has been used throughout history. And bluntly sometimes it has worked. Europe's perennial German question has been solved - at a cost of huge injustice and suffering - because the alternative was even worse. Germans now no longer live in the lands they have historically lived in for centuries.
Yes, I agree. Ultimately the right to return where you used to be, possibly at the expense of someone else, isn't as important as avoiding permanent conflict. That doesn't mean approving of the wars or forcible resettlement that led to it. Almost nobody now favours reversing the India-Pakistan split, despite the horrors that led to it.
Surely, the realist position is that the Palestinians need to accept whatever the Israelis offer? Because Peace.
Yesterday we received a newsletter through the door from our honourable member, Phillip Davies. Full of articles bigging himself up, as you might expect.
However, the main article went like this: - Bradford Council applied for funding for Bingley - Government refused to provide the funding - Bradford Council to blame
Martin Lewis @MartinSLewis Shocked to have just been messaged that as I write, the London regional party at #LabourPartyConference is sponsored by a Buy Now Pay Later firm. And the founder was given platform to speak against regulation.
Have these firms bought influence with every UK polical party? @Keir_Starmer are you now anti regulation too?
Buy Now, Pay Later? So, basically a modern form of the catalogue? Sorry, I cannot get worked up about that.
Listening to Starmer on BBC just now his answer to the waiting lists is to pay doctors overtime to work evenings and weekends even though the overtime rate is less than they earn in the private sector
I would be interested in hearing the views of @Foxy and others on this
Reducing the waiting lists means doctors etc are under less pressure so there’s a certain symbiosis to them helping to reduce that .
To assume that those who work in the NHS are motivated just by money I think flies in the face of why you decide to become a doctor , nurse etc .
The old doctor's , nurse's etc doing it as a vocation is long gone , it is all about money now. Oliver Twist like nowadys , More More More.
The Israel conflict is terrible with unknown consequences and outcome
This article highlights just how perilous the world's economy's are and why there is absolutely no money to spend by governments
Also sorry to see @Farooq and @FrankBooth leave this forum but at times it does seem like an echo chamber, but it is important that as many different views are expressed as possible otherwise it will become an echo chamber
Why has @Farooq left? Great loss. I really enjoyed his posts. He often made me laugh out loud. Don't know enough about Frank, but generally sad to see anyone leave regardless of their views. I can only think of one exception, and that person was banned so clearly I wasn't alone in that view.
@Farooq is a troll and a complete and utter f**king d***head.
However, clenching my teeth, he did at least make vaguely half-intelligent posts at time, and hadn't yet crossed the boundary for being so deeply unpleasant and toxic that he needed evicting from the site, so I wouldn't support his expulsion.
I trust he will return after a few days.
People come, people go. So what.
I don’t mind Faarooq, but it’s all getting a bit like CHB when he was crying for some departed posters to return and then promptly flounced himself. It’s bizarre when people are nostalgic For posters on a message board.
People get far too invested in these debates and discussions. Especially on fucking Israel. Which is why I avoid the topic in any depth. No good ever comes out of it and on Twitter it’s far worse.
I agree with getting too invested, but some people of evil want good people to have exactly the attitude of: "The conversation on this issue is far too toxic: I'll keep out."
Hence leaving the playing field to the extremists. And it's not just issues like Israel / Palestine / Hamas, either.
I think there's a bit of colonialist mentality on both sides of the debate in this country, the idea that we must have a position. Maybe it's just a really bloody complicated issue, it is a zero sum game, there are no goodies and baddies, there is no neat solution, it is a long way away and we don't need to get overly involved other than doing what we can to lower the bloodshed. It's a very sad situation but when you have people disputing who has ownership over land and then you throw a load of religious mumbo jumbo into the equation too it's unsurprising it is so intractable.
We have interests. It’s nothing to do with colonialism (why is it the left always rabbits on about the Empire? It’s gone guys, 70+ years ago, it’s not coming back).
We have to stand up for a democracy, however flawed and however much we dislike the incumbent. We have to stand against terrorism and radical Islamic militants. Those are fundamental strategic priorities for this country and the whole of the West.
This isn't Tory incompetence - its mendaciousness. A deliberate choice to smash as many things as possible, salting the earth for Labour so that they can then postion Labour as the party who screwed everything up.
Sunak stood at his conference lectern railing against government failures, and that only he could lead the change needed to fix the country. As if he, and his party, weren't the people who had wrecked everything.
Never mind ballsy it is simply fantasy. When people keep ramping the supposed £36bn to be spent on northern transport, even as the reality is exposed more and more, it shows that they are so utterly disconnected from reality that they will swallow any lie as truth.
The Tories have had success in weaponising ignorance and stupidity. Polling shows that people have seen through their schtick and aren't listening any more
Labour's last government signed off with "theres no money". Perhaps if they had left some we'd all be in better shape.
Yes. And if "there is no money" was true back then, how true must it be now after your lot have vastly increased the amount of debt we are in?
I do rather enjoy the blank patches in your memory. Are you saying there should have been no support for people during Covid ? I seem to remember Starmer calling out for even more than Lord Bountiful Johnson. And on cost of living should we have told people to freeze last winter ?
An attack on mismanagement of HS2 or government current spending would of course be justified, but if HMG were to impose cuts you would be one of the first to break out in hysterics and say its was wrong.
Fascinating. What we spend money on is a separate thing. If we spend it, we spend it. So "there is no money" was you claim factually true in 2010 when debt was £1.2tn, then it also must be true now when it is £2.5tn.
Money doesn't care what it is spent on. It is either there or it isn't. You said "perhaps if they {Labour} had left some we'd all be in better shape". OK, so debt has doubled, we already factually had no money according to you, so now we're in worse shape with no no money. Logically, if we follow your argument.
The statement "Money doesn't care what it is spent on" is at the root of our current problems. Blair and the conservative tribute act took no real care of public finances. And yet if they had cut back your pavlovian instincts would have you wailing cuts cuts.
I dread to think what you advise your clients.
Again, we're not discussing morality, we're discussing adding.
You said that there really was no money left when we had -£1.2tn Now we have -£2.5tn -£2.5tn is a bigger hole than -£1.2tn So if as you state we had no money left at -£1.2tn, how would you describe it now that it is -£2.5tn?
You may think that the £1.3tn has been gallantly spent on things we needed. But its been spent *after* you stated that there was no money left. But if there was no money left, how come your lot have spent an extra £1.3tn since?
2009/10 budget deficit: 11% of GDP 2023/24 budget deficit forecast: 5.1% of GDP
11% of GDP is a bigger hole than 5.1% of GDP
Deficit is the rate at which you are digging. Debt is the size of the hole.
Improper analogy since you can just stop digging at will, you can't drop the deficit at will as momentum will keep you moving forwards. The deficit is the speed at which your finances are collapsing, you need to act just to slow down let alone reverse that momenum.
I can park 1 metre away from a brick wall perfectly safely. If I'm 2 metres away from a brick wall I'm heading towards at 70mph then that's far more catastrophic.
Let's try a beer analogy. Deficit is how quickly you are drinking, debt is how drunk you are.
Labour were necking pints during a lunchtime session, but were still capable of catching the right bus home.
The Tories have been on the lash all day and are staying for a lock in. They'll be sleeping in a gutter.
Labour up to 2008 were buying rounds and popularity from the pub absolutely confident that the 2.15 at Haydock was going to come in yet again and cover the tab. When it didn't and their popularity collapsed the Tories had to tidy up the mess but faced the problem that a bar that is used to free rounds think that they have some sort of right to them and moan and moan when the drink slows down.
Impossible to try and justify anything good about the Tories David, their austerity while filling their own and their pals pockets is much much worse than Labour hosing money on the great unwashed.
I think the struggle for Israel is how it provides itself security without expelling people from Gaza. The status quo simply doesn't work, and a significant number there are pledged to the extermination of Israel and its people. Yes the hard right illegal settlers are crazy, yes they steal land, but they aren't pledged to genocide like Hamas.
Gaza is an open sore on the region, allowed to be sustained by other states. Egypt likes to blame Israel but has its own border wall at the south to keep Gazans imprisoned. Iran is after a fight and seem to be responsible for all those missiles arriving into Gaza. Russia seem to have armed and trained Hamas with drones to drop bombs.
Removing Gaza and pushing the people there back onto the arab diaspora isn't that crazy an idea. The idiocy of "refugee camps" has to end. These are not displaced refugees, they are several generations down the track from that. Resettle them in the other parts of the former Ottoman empire. So that they can also find peace.
I understand your logic, but the history of forcible resettlement is not encouraging, not least as you're likely to get a NIMBYist reaction (to put it mildly) from whichever area you decide to settle them. Leon's suggestion of offering them huge sums of money to resettle voluntarily might be better, but you'd probably only get the non-violent people seizing the chance to get out of the hellhole, and you still have to solve the question of where will accept them.
I don't have logic. There is no logic to solve this mess. I am simply observing that the status quo does not work and something else needs to be done. Ideally the people of Gaza would be allowed a free election and move against Hamas. And the people of Israel would overthrow the crook and send him to jail.
That is unlikely to happen. I am clear that Israel are more in the right than the Gazans (Jeremy's crank left are still pumping the #freepalestine schtick this morning even as Hamas rape and kidnap women and girls whilst chanting about God). So will give them a little leeway.
It is hard to move against Hamas when they are embedded in the civilian population. So the options seem to be bomb them out or force them out. I am open to other options...
Broadly speaking there are four possible options.
1. The Israelis win outright. The occupied territories are incorporated into Israel. Most of the Palestinians flee, give up on returning, and assimilate into other countries.
2. The Palestinians win outright. Israel is destroyed. Jews flee, give up on returning, and assimilate into other countries.
3. There is a grand compromise that involves both sides giving up on a lot, accepting grievances and concerns of the other party as legitimate, and making efforts to provide reassurance, security and reconciliation.
4. There's a deus ex machina where some external power sweeps in and makes everything okay by providing masses of money and land to smooth over the pain of the compromises necessary for option 3, or the other options. Perhaps Musk could build a New Palestine on Mars?
Ultimately the reason the Oslo process failed is that the situation is the best example of a negative-sum game. Any compromise involves both sides having to make enormous concessions and giving up on objectives that they believe to be reasonable and just. It's very hard for people to crystallise their losses to such an extent. And impossible without any degree of trust.
Given that the Israelis seem to have the stronger military I can see why some people are looking to option 1. It looks like the one most likely to happen.
Listening to Starmer on BBC just now his answer to the waiting lists is to pay doctors overtime to work evenings and weekends even though the overtime rate is less than they earn in the private sector
I would be interested in hearing the views of @Foxy and others on this
In the short term, what alternative is there?
Yes - employ the private sector to work with the NHS
Already very much the case. Indeed elective NHS work is now the bread and butter of most private hospitals in England.
There are limits to what can be done in these places. They are fine for elective surgeries for low risk procedures such as hernias, cholecystectomy, joint replacements in otherwise healthy patients.
The problem is that much of the waiting list is of people with more complex conditions, or simple conditions with a background of other long term disease like diabetes or heart failure, and these cannot be done safely in private facilities.
There is too a massive backlog in non surgical specialities such as dermatology, rheumatology, mental health etc etc that private facilities cannot or will not touch.
Overtime at NHS hospitals is the only viable possibility for these conditions, so Streeting is correct in that. The problem is that running such clinics evenings and weekends requires more staff. Even "office hours" 7 day working requires 40% more staff than 5 day working, before you get to unsocial hours. This needs to be all staff too for these services to be efficient, from receptionists, to porters, to secretaries, not just Doctors.
I have worked at least one weekend a month all my professional life, and never expected to work 9-5 with undisturbed evenings and nights. I intend to carry on for another decade the same, but you simply cannot force everyone to do so without either spreading staff dangerously thin or worsening the retention issue.
Hence the interest in PAs and AAs to build workforce, but ultimately the only way to increase capacity is to retain and train more staff.
Office hours Monday to Friday is the problem.
Given the amount of machinery and investment in NHS Hospitals it has always struck me as mad that they're not operating to capacity 7 days a week for at least 12 hours a day.
Private sector industry with large industrial investments don't typically operate office hours Monday to Friday only.
The entire system of employment in the NHS seems designed to maximise strife, stop stuff getting done and piss off the staff as much as possible.
Designing support systems (human and machine) so that extremely expensive medical staff can just get on with medical stuff is the way to go.
On one occasion, I got chatting to a Dr. at A&E, as he was treating me. They had actual clipboard wielders doing 1895 style time and motion studies on them - are you seeing enough patients an hour? - at the time I was there.
That was consider stupid in about 1920. It pisses people off better than nearly everything else. If you want those numbers, you can see them trivially from the paperwork.
Sounds like Management Consultants at work!
You cannot just look at figures to understand a problem. There lies the fate of HS2 when Spreadsheet Sunak doesn't look at wider issues. You need to talk to people on the ground and observe process.
For example, you cannot see why the doctor has large gaps between seeing patients. Are they being interrupted by phone calls? Is the IT too slow to record and order investigations? Are they checking a Physician Associates decisions? Are they skiving? You need to be there to find out, or at least actually talk to them.
Or are they actually thinking and planning? An essential part of any job. Too often people are not given the time to do this and rush around from task to task without actually thinking about what they are doing.
This isn't Tory incompetence - its mendaciousness. A deliberate choice to smash as many things as possible, salting the earth for Labour so that they can then postion Labour as the party who screwed everything up.
Sunak stood at his conference lectern railing against government failures, and that only he could lead the change needed to fix the country. As if he, and his party, weren't the people who had wrecked everything.
Never mind ballsy it is simply fantasy. When people keep ramping the supposed £36bn to be spent on northern transport, even as the reality is exposed more and more, it shows that they are so utterly disconnected from reality that they will swallow any lie as truth.
The Tories have had success in weaponising ignorance and stupidity. Polling shows that people have seen through their schtick and aren't listening any more
Labour's last government signed off with "theres no money". Perhaps if they had left some we'd all be in better shape.
Yes. And if "there is no money" was true back then, how true must it be now after your lot have vastly increased the amount of debt we are in?
I do rather enjoy the blank patches in your memory. Are you saying there should have been no support for people during Covid ? I seem to remember Starmer calling out for even more than Lord Bountiful Johnson. And on cost of living should we have told people to freeze last winter ?
An attack on mismanagement of HS2 or government current spending would of course be justified, but if HMG were to impose cuts you would be one of the first to break out in hysterics and say its was wrong.
Fascinating. What we spend money on is a separate thing. If we spend it, we spend it. So "there is no money" was you claim factually true in 2010 when debt was £1.2tn, then it also must be true now when it is £2.5tn.
Money doesn't care what it is spent on. It is either there or it isn't. You said "perhaps if they {Labour} had left some we'd all be in better shape". OK, so debt has doubled, we already factually had no money according to you, so now we're in worse shape with no no money. Logically, if we follow your argument.
The statement "Money doesn't care what it is spent on" is at the root of our current problems. Blair and the conservative tribute act took no real care of public finances. And yet if they had cut back your pavlovian instincts would have you wailing cuts cuts.
I dread to think what you advise your clients.
Again, we're not discussing morality, we're discussing adding.
You said that there really was no money left when we had -£1.2tn Now we have -£2.5tn -£2.5tn is a bigger hole than -£1.2tn So if as you state we had no money left at -£1.2tn, how would you describe it now that it is -£2.5tn?
You may think that the £1.3tn has been gallantly spent on things we needed. But its been spent *after* you stated that there was no money left. But if there was no money left, how come your lot have spent an extra £1.3tn since?
2009/10 budget deficit: 11% of GDP 2023/24 budget deficit forecast: 5.1% of GDP
11% of GDP is a bigger hole than 5.1% of GDP
Deficit is the rate at which you are digging. Debt is the size of the hole.
Improper analogy since you can just stop digging at will, you can't drop the deficit at will as momentum will keep you moving forwards. The deficit is the speed at which your finances are collapsing, you need to act just to slow down let alone reverse that momenum.
I can park 1 metre away from a brick wall perfectly safely. If I'm 2 metres away from a brick wall I'm heading towards at 70mph then that's far more catastrophic.
Let's try a beer analogy. Deficit is how quickly you are drinking, debt is how drunk you are.
Labour were necking pints during a lunchtime session, but were still capable of catching the right bus home.
The Tories have been on the lash all day and are staying for a lock in. They'll be sleeping in a gutter.
Labour up to 2008 were buying rounds and popularity from the pub absolutely confident that the 2.15 at Haydock was going to come in yet again and cover the tab. When it didn't and their popularity collapsed the Tories had to tidy up the mess but faced the problem that a bar that is used to free rounds think that they have some sort of right to them and moan and moan when the drink slows down.
I gave you a Like for creativity, not in agreement!
Listening to Starmer on BBC just now his answer to the waiting lists is to pay doctors overtime to work evenings and weekends even though the overtime rate is less than they earn in the private sector
I would be interested in hearing the views of @Foxy and others on this
In the short term, what alternative is there?
Yes - employ the private sector to work with the NHS
Already very much the case. Indeed elective NHS work is now the bread and butter of most private hospitals in England.
There are limits to what can be done in these places. They are fine for elective surgeries for low risk procedures such as hernias, cholecystectomy, joint replacements in otherwise healthy patients.
The problem is that much of the waiting list is of people with more complex conditions, or simple conditions with a background of other long term disease like diabetes or heart failure, and these cannot be done safely in private facilities.
There is too a massive backlog in non surgical specialities such as dermatology, rheumatology, mental health etc etc that private facilities cannot or will not touch.
Overtime at NHS hospitals is the only viable possibility for these conditions, so Streeting is correct in that. The problem is that running such clinics evenings and weekends requires more staff. Even "office hours" 7 day working requires 40% more staff than 5 day working, before you get to unsocial hours. This needs to be all staff too for these services to be efficient, from receptionists, to porters, to secretaries, not just Doctors.
I have worked at least one weekend a month all my professional life, and never expected to work 9-5 with undisturbed evenings and nights. I intend to carry on for another decade the same, but you simply cannot force everyone to do so without either spreading staff dangerously thin or worsening the retention issue.
Hence the interest in PAs and AAs to build workforce, but ultimately the only way to increase capacity is to retain and train more staff.
Office hours Monday to Friday is the problem.
Given the amount of machinery and investment in NHS Hospitals it has always struck me as mad that they're not operating to capacity 7 days a week for at least 12 hours a day.
Private sector industry with large industrial investments don't typically operate office hours Monday to Friday only.
The entire system of employment in the NHS seems designed to maximise strife, stop stuff getting done and piss off the staff as much as possible.
Designing support systems (human and machine) so that extremely expensive medical staff can just get on with medical stuff is the way to go.
On one occasion, I got chatting to a Dr. at A&E, as he was treating me. They had actual clipboard wielders doing 1895 style time and motion studies on them - are you seeing enough patients an hour? - at the time I was there.
That was consider stupid in about 1920. It pisses people off better than nearly everything else. If you want those numbers, you can see them trivially from the paperwork.
Sounds like Management Consultants at work!
You cannot just look at figures to understand a problem. There lies the fate of HS2 when Spreadsheet Sunak doesn't look at wider issues. You need to talk to people on the ground and observe process.
For example, you cannot see why the doctor has large gaps between seeing patients. Are they being interrupted by phone calls? Is the IT too slow to record and order investigations? Are they checking a Physician Associates decisions? Are they skiving? You need to be there to find out, or at least actually talk to them.
Sending a bloke with a clipboard in is one of the great ways to wreck morale. In fact, in a couple of cases in the US, back in the day, this was done deliberately, to provoke strikes. At financially opportune times, that is.
Strangely, productivity investigations and their methodologies have advanced in the last 100 years.
I think that the NHS should recklessly charge into the future. And only use management techniques that have been obsolete for 50 years.
Martin Lewis @MartinSLewis Shocked to have just been messaged that as I write, the London regional party at #LabourPartyConference is sponsored by a Buy Now Pay Later firm. And the founder was given platform to speak against regulation.
Have these firms bought influence with every UK polical party? @Keir_Starmer are you now anti regulation too?
Buy Now, Pay Later? So, basically a modern form of the catalogue? Sorry, I cannot get worked up about that.
Its not quite that. There are concerns about the business model / operations of the likes of Klarna, the way that as soon as you try and buy anything online anywhere, don't pay full price today, you don't want to do that, pay in easy installments...allowing people to easy rack large debts.
Yes that's similar to catalogue system, but Klarna are a 3rd party incentivised to get you to buy as much crap as possible to get their kick back, where as the catalogue model was much more limited in scope / availability.
Listening to Starmer on BBC just now his answer to the waiting lists is to pay doctors overtime to work evenings and weekends even though the overtime rate is less than they earn in the private sector
I would be interested in hearing the views of @Foxy and others on this
These doctors and consultants really are greed personified nowadays. Rolling in money but still no milk of human kindness, just greedy and grasping.
The solution is to destroy the passport of any doctor still working in the UK and to send the SAS in to abduct those UK doctors working overseas.
I am very much against ethnic cleansing, even if it is wrapped up in nice words such as 'forcible resettlement'.
I also don't think it would work much with the Israel/Palestine issue. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced out of Israel from 1948 in the Naqba, taking refuge in surrounding countries such as Jordan, Egypt or Lebanon.
When there was ethnic cleansing (say) between Greece and Turkey post-WW1 (which was based not on ethnicity or language, but religion), the new states pretty much accepted the immigrants and assimilated them, albeit with lots of problems that eventually got worked out.
In the case of the Palestinians, most have not been able to assimilate into their new home countries, instead living in camps. For some this is out of choice - they see themselves as Palestinians, who should be living in Palestine. But the surrounding states have also made it very difficult to become citizens, esp. Egypt.
Foricble resettlement only works if they can be genuinely resettled in their new home country - otherwise they just become stateless and lacking fundamental rights, which does f-all for peace.
Increasingly though countries including our own are not willing to accept and resettle refugees. Hence "Stop the Boats".
There are a lot of refugees in the world, the vast majority either internally displaced or in neighbouring countries. No country wants more, so these refugees become the new un-people, to be shipped off anywhere that can be browbeaten or bribed to take them.
I suspect that poll reflects name recognition as much as anything else.
It has to be. I would love to know the reasons why anyone said Blair because I really can’t think of any reasons - everyone else has a big issue you could attach to them but Blair’s time was benign
He was a generally capable PM who got Iraq badly wrong. Hard to see why he should be blamed for the current economic situation.
It rather makes you question how meaningful the poll might be.
I’d say that he had a lot to do with the productivity issue. It was easier, politically, to reinforce the cheap labour route.
Yes, but that's a bit abstract and a long time ago.
I think the rating is either a reflection of brainwashing or a meaningless poll.
Some Leonesque comments on Israel- Hamas situation - this is going to escalate...badly. This attack might have been conducted by Hamas but was directed by Iran. Iran want to create conflict to derail the upcoming Saudi/UAE-Israel peace talks. Before the year ends I expect to see Iran and Saudi in a state of war - with troubles in Bahrain and Qatar. Sorry for the doom...
At least it would remove the godawful Qatar and Saudi grand prix from next year's F1 calendar
Listening to Starmer on BBC just now his answer to the waiting lists is to pay doctors overtime to work evenings and weekends even though the overtime rate is less than they earn in the private sector
I would be interested in hearing the views of @Foxy and others on this
In the short term, what alternative is there?
Yes - employ the private sector to work with the NHS
Already very much the case. Indeed elective NHS work is now the bread and butter of most private hospitals in England.
There are limits to what can be done in these places. They are fine for elective surgeries for low risk procedures such as hernias, cholecystectomy, joint replacements in otherwise healthy patients.
The problem is that much of the waiting list is of people with more complex conditions, or simple conditions with a background of other long term disease like diabetes or heart failure, and these cannot be done safely in private facilities.
There is too a massive backlog in non surgical specialities such as dermatology, rheumatology, mental health etc etc that private facilities cannot or will not touch.
Overtime at NHS hospitals is the only viable possibility for these conditions, so Streeting is correct in that. The problem is that running such clinics evenings and weekends requires more staff. Even "office hours" 7 day working requires 40% more staff than 5 day working, before you get to unsocial hours. This needs to be all staff too for these services to be efficient, from receptionists, to porters, to secretaries, not just Doctors.
I have worked at least one weekend a month all my professional life, and never expected to work 9-5 with undisturbed evenings and nights. I intend to carry on for another decade the same, but you simply cannot force everyone to do so without either spreading staff dangerously thin or worsening the retention issue.
Hence the interest in PAs and AAs to build workforce, but ultimately the only way to increase capacity is to retain and train more staff.
Office hours Monday to Friday is the problem.
Given the amount of machinery and investment in NHS Hospitals it has always struck me as mad that they're not operating to capacity 7 days a week for at least 12 hours a day.
Private sector industry with large industrial investments don't typically operate office hours Monday to Friday only.
The entire system of employment in the NHS seems designed to maximise strife, stop stuff getting done and piss off the staff as much as possible.
Designing support systems (human and machine) so that extremely expensive medical staff can just get on with medical stuff is the way to go.
On one occasion, I got chatting to a Dr. at A&E, as he was treating me. They had actual clipboard wielders doing 1895 style time and motion studies on them - are you seeing enough patients an hour? - at the time I was there.
That was consider stupid in about 1920. It pisses people off better than nearly everything else. If you want those numbers, you can see them trivially from the paperwork.
Sounds like Management Consultants at work!
You cannot just look at figures to understand a problem. There lies the fate of HS2 when Spreadsheet Sunak doesn't look at wider issues. You need to talk to people on the ground and observe process.
For example, you cannot see why the doctor has large gaps between seeing patients. Are they being interrupted by phone calls? Is the IT too slow to record and order investigations? Are they checking a Physician Associates decisions? Are they skiving? You need to be there to find out, or at least actually talk to them.
Speaking as a management consultant, my client value is that I know how things work and how to get things done, not just arguing about costs. Understanding and managing the financial side is also important, but too many decisions are made as short term cost savings and cost more long term.
The magic words are "best value". Which so often isn't the same as "cheapest"
Makes it informative, too. Civilised …. dare I say liberal ….. discussion is always better in leading to appreciation of others views than just shouting.
I tended to agree with Farooq and disagree with Frank Booth, but they were both always interesting, and I hope they'll return.
The main rule that I try to follow - with occasional exceptions which I do regret (sorry, Josiah)- is not to comment critically about other posters. After all, 90% of people here are anonymous, so who cares what they're really like? Disagreeing with what they say is fine, and sometimes being critical of how they say it, but not labelling each other in neat categories - racist, Putinist, sexist, or simply stupid. We are probably all more nuanced than we seem, or even realise ourselves.
Absolutely agree.
Some like to label and belittle. Last wee I was told I was a Putinist for not wanting British troops sent to Ukraine.
It will be white feathers next. 😀
But life really is too short and we are all going to be complex individuals and probably all really pleasant IRL. If people want to get so invested in this place or the debate they resort to abuse or trite comments then so be it.
It’s better than Facebook politics groups for sure.
Taz, most people on here are ok ( very very few nasty exceptions), and in grand scheme of things it is good to get many opinions. A lot of it is to draw out opinions etc and debate is always good. Should not be taken too seriously for sure. In real life I am a gentleman and a scholar and extremely polite.
Listening to Starmer on BBC just now his answer to the waiting lists is to pay doctors overtime to work evenings and weekends even though the overtime rate is less than they earn in the private sector
I would be interested in hearing the views of @Foxy and others on this
In the short term, what alternative is there?
Yes - employ the private sector to work with the NHS
Already very much the case. Indeed elective NHS work is now the bread and butter of most private hospitals in England.
There are limits to what can be done in these places. They are fine for elective surgeries for low risk procedures such as hernias, cholecystectomy, joint replacements in otherwise healthy patients.
The problem is that much of the waiting list is of people with more complex conditions, or simple conditions with a background of other long term disease like diabetes or heart failure, and these cannot be done safely in private facilities.
There is too a massive backlog in non surgical specialities such as dermatology, rheumatology, mental health etc etc that private facilities cannot or will not touch.
Overtime at NHS hospitals is the only viable possibility for these conditions, so Streeting is correct in that. The problem is that running such clinics evenings and weekends requires more staff. Even "office hours" 7 day working requires 40% more staff than 5 day working, before you get to unsocial hours. This needs to be all staff too for these services to be efficient, from receptionists, to porters, to secretaries, not just Doctors.
I have worked at least one weekend a month all my professional life, and never expected to work 9-5 with undisturbed evenings and nights. I intend to carry on for another decade the same, but you simply cannot force everyone to do so without either spreading staff dangerously thin or worsening the retention issue.
Hence the interest in PAs and AAs to build workforce, but ultimately the only way to increase capacity is to retain and train more staff.
Office hours Monday to Friday is the problem.
Given the amount of machinery and investment in NHS Hospitals it has always struck me as mad that they're not operating to capacity 7 days a week for at least 12 hours a day.
Private sector industry with large industrial investments don't typically operate office hours Monday to Friday only.
The entire system of employment in the NHS seems designed to maximise strife, stop stuff getting done and piss off the staff as much as possible.
Designing support systems (human and machine) so that extremely expensive medical staff can just get on with medical stuff is the way to go.
On one occasion, I got chatting to a Dr. at A&E, as he was treating me. They had actual clipboard wielders doing 1895 style time and motion studies on them - are you seeing enough patients an hour? - at the time I was there.
That was consider stupid in about 1920. It pisses people off better than nearly everything else. If you want those numbers, you can see them trivially from the paperwork.
Sounds like Management Consultants at work!
You cannot just look at figures to understand a problem. There lies the fate of HS2 when Spreadsheet Sunak doesn't look at wider issues. You need to talk to people on the ground and observe process.
For example, you cannot see why the doctor has large gaps between seeing patients. Are they being interrupted by phone calls? Is the IT too slow to record and order investigations? Are they checking a Physician Associates decisions? Are they skiving? You need to be there to find out, or at least actually talk to them.
Sending a bloke with a clipboard in is one of the great ways to wreck morale. In fact, in a couple of cases in the US, back in the day, this was done deliberately, to provoke strikes. At financially opportune times, that is.
Strangely, productivity investigations and their methodologies have advanced in the last 100 years.
I think that the NHS should recklessly charge into the future. And only use management techniques that have been obsolete for 50 years.
I agree that we need to attract better management into the NHS. That may well involve paying more, but I suspect won't go down well with Joe Public.
Listening to Starmer on BBC just now his answer to the waiting lists is to pay doctors overtime to work evenings and weekends even though the overtime rate is less than they earn in the private sector
I would be interested in hearing the views of @Foxy and others on this
Not just doctors. Did he mention receptionists, and porters, and security, and administrators, and nurses, and technicians ...?
Comments
I doubt many on here are anti-semitic but the equivalence drawn between Hamas and Netanyahu's government is interesting to see also imo.
There will be a test case soon where an error leads to harm, and a doctor who is nominally supervising is in the dock, rather than the PA who made the error.
Money doesn't care what it is spent on. It is either there or it isn't. You said "perhaps if they {Labour} had left some we'd all be in better shape". OK, so debt has doubled, we already factually had no money according to you, so now we're in worse shape with no no money. Logically, if we follow your argument.
Their own numbers say: Sticks to decisions he makes: KS 37%; RS 32%. Changes his mind and Flip Flops: KS42%; RS 53%
His testimony to a Senate Committee was on the treatment of US women captured in war. Apparently, actual statistics were Bad Facts on that day.
Perhaps we need a law banning government 'investment' above a certain level.
Well, a few of them do, tbf.
And yet if they had cut back your pavlovian instincts would have you wailing cuts cuts.
I dread to think what you advise your clients.
Firstly the deficit was actually a budget surplus in 2002 and it was an entirely unnecessary spending splurge pre-recession that crashed the budget into a deficit prior to the recession even hitting.
Debt to GDP was falling prior to Covid hitting. Debt to GDP was rising even before Labour's recession.
As a result, despite Covid and the war in Ukraine being a bigger shock than the financial crisis, this time the deficit has been resolved much quicker. The deficit is in a much healthier state today than it was years after the last recession when the government changed hands.
I find leftwingers still excusing Brown's profligacy quite disconcerting. I could be tempted to vote for Sir Keir Starmer's Labour today, because Sunak's government is no good, but if the left still think that Brown did nothing wrong then that's a huge problem.
But it is also necessary to understand the brutality of what happens and why there is the reaction there is.
Anyway I have seen and read enough. Like everyone else I too cannot bear so much reality. Social media is best avoided at times like these. And there is plenty of nicer stuff to be getting on with.
You said that there really was no money left when we had -£1.2tn
Now we have -£2.5tn
-£2.5tn is a bigger hole than -£1.2tn
So if as you state we had no money left at -£1.2tn, how would you describe it now that it is -£2.5tn?
You may think that the £1.3tn has been gallantly spent on things we needed. But its been spent *after* you stated that there was no money left. But if there was no money left, how come your lot have spent an extra £1.3tn since?
Have a nice morning.
The Transport Secretary Mark Harper asked why a series of commitments made by Rishi Sunak last week to build new transport projects around the country have now been deleted, says they were merely "examples" of the "sorts of things that that money could be spent on" #bbclaurak
https://twitter.com/AdamBienkov/status/1710939845105692995
There are limits to what can be done in these places. They are fine for elective surgeries for low risk procedures such as hernias, cholecystectomy, joint replacements in otherwise healthy patients.
The problem is that much of the waiting list is of people with more complex conditions, or simple conditions with a background of other long term disease like diabetes or heart failure, and these cannot be done safely in private facilities.
There is too a massive backlog in non surgical specialities such as dermatology, rheumatology, mental health etc etc that private facilities cannot or will not touch.
Overtime at NHS hospitals is the only viable possibility for these conditions, so Streeting is correct in that. The problem is that running such clinics evenings and weekends requires more staff. Even "office hours" 7 day working requires 40% more staff than 5 day working, before you get to unsocial hours. This needs to be all staff too for these services to be efficient, from receptionists, to porters, to secretaries, not just Doctors.
I have worked at least one weekend a month all my professional life, and never expected to work 9-5 with undisturbed evenings and nights. I intend to carry on for another decade the same, but you simply cannot force everyone to do so without either spreading staff dangerously thin or worsening the retention issue.
Hence the interest in PAs and AAs to build workforce, but ultimately the only way to increase capacity is to retain and train more staff.
To assume that those who work in the NHS are motivated just by money I think flies in the face of why you decide to become a doctor , nurse etc .
2023/24 budget deficit forecast: 5.1% of GDP
11% of GDP is a bigger hole than 5.1% of GDP
https://twitter.com/leo_hutz/status/1710932453362143584
Given the amount of machinery and investment in NHS Hospitals it has always struck me as mad that they're not operating to capacity 7 days a week for at least 12 hours a day.
Private sector industry with large industrial investments don't typically operate office hours Monday to Friday only.
What it shows is that fiscally sovereign countries - providing they do not dick the markets about and invest it on something sensible - can continue to borrow.
Alan's problem is that he objects to Labour spending anything on anything, and excuses the Tories spending anything on anything. Which is fine for party political hackery, but less fine when it comes to complex things like adding.
For example, on one of the Greek islands that was getting refugees landing there, to x hundred percent of the local population…. They started throwing stones at news crews. Why?
Well, whenever the locals were being interviewed by international news, the moment they started saying anything about the crime rate (fruit trees in orchards being stripped etc), it got cut from the report.
So the locals, who watched TV became convinced that the international media were “on the side of the migrants” and “against them”
The deficit to GDP is not.
At the turn of the previous decade the markets were being dicked around, austerity was absolutely necessary to turn around the profligacy from Brown.
Starmer is a lucky general in that the Tories have trashed their political brand far more than the economy, he's likely to inherit a not especially considerable deficit unlike Cameron so this time there will be money available for his spending priorities, just not much of it.
I'd go 1 Cameron 2 Brown.
Not sure if Truss was that significant in the long-term.
Johnson's lack of attention to detail has been significant.
That is unlikely to happen. I am clear that Israel are more in the right than the Gazans (Jeremy's crank left are still pumping the #freepalestine schtick this morning even as Hamas rape and kidnap women and girls whilst chanting about God). So will give them a little leeway.
It is hard to move against Hamas when they are embedded in the civilian population. So the options seem to be bomb them out or force them out. I am open to other options...
One poster here inferred the Americans deserved 9/11 because of the actions of the US. I obviously do not share that view but, if you do, then the deaths of those involved - even if they were innocent themselves - was a similar natural consequence of the actions of the US Government.
It was interesting to see though not only the equivalence of Israel's Government and Hamas displayed, but also (in many posts) that Hamas and the Palestinians were seen as interchangeable. And, finally, as a few posters have already done, equating the act of calling for Hamas to be destroyed as equating into calling for genocide. I think that is a theme we will hear increasingly played out especially amongst the pro-Palestinian / anti-Israel lobby.
Anyone (1) we will not solve the problem (2) there are a lot of things to do today and (3) watching the videos and social posts coming out of what has happened was horrific enough without having to ruin another day going through and debating them.
I was merely offended at how graphic,and my interpretation as to why a poster on PB needed to be so graphic.
My bad.
I can park 1 metre away from a brick wall perfectly safely. If I'm 2 metres away from a brick wall I'm heading towards at 70mph then that's far more catastrophic.
Capacity requires staff and beds. You cannot run an all day operating list on a Sunday without staff to do so, and a ward bed for them to recover in.
Peak productivity requires capacity in equipment, staff and hospital estate to be correctly aligned. It isn't at present. A functioning MRI service at weekends requires radiologists, radiographers and porters. It is more complicated than pressing a button.
Growing capacity in staff and estate is the only answer, and staff have to be the right skill mix.
So why do the Tories even now still foam on about "there is no money left?" It wasn't true then, it isn't true now.
Where I disagree with you is that the size of the debt does matter the deeper you dig. the willingness to keep loaning you money reduces the deeper you go. And we're in very very deep now, hence Truss having degree zero of liberty to go on a spending spree.
I'd better stfu.
An attitude change is required too, to treat Saturday and Sunday as normal working days.
How long before his legal woes break into political woes?
It took pretty much a decade of annual deficit to GDP falls to almost finish closing the deficit before Covid hit.
Had Cameron or Osborne increased the deficit from 2010 onwards then there'd have been money left.
Just imagine the outcry on here if it was Jezza
And yet, Dayton 1995 ended the Bosnian conflict, and the Serbs and Bosniaks (and Croats) are no longer lobbing rockets and/or tank shells at one another, correct? Something akin to the Dayton settlement.
The thing that unsettles me about the "TWO-STATE" solution, is that any Israelis living in putative Palestinian land would be seen as "settlers", "Zionists", etc., whereas any Arabs living in Israel would be seen as "fifth columists", "terrorists", etc., correct? A recipe for Apartheid and ethnic cleansing by both sides, I would think.
Designing support systems (human and machine) so that extremely expensive medical staff can just get on with medical stuff is the way to go.
On one occasion, I got chatting to a Dr. at A&E, as he was treating me. They had actual clipboard wielders doing 1895 style time and motion studies on them - are you seeing enough patients an hour? - at the time I was there.
That was consider stupid in about 1920. It pisses people off better than nearly everything else. If you want those numbers, you can see them trivially from the paperwork.
Labour were necking pints during a lunchtime session, but were still capable of catching the right bus home.
The Tories have been on the lash all day and are staying for a lock in. They'll be sleeping in a gutter.
Martin Lewis
@MartinSLewis
Shocked to have just been messaged that as I write, the London regional party at #LabourPartyConference is sponsored by a Buy Now Pay Later firm. And the founder was given platform to speak against regulation.
Have these firms bought influence with every UK polical party?
@Keir_Starmer
are you now anti regulation too?
Which is more deadly, jumping and being 1 metre off the ground, or being 2 metres above the ground while falling to the ground at 6m/s after falling off a tall building?
It is the rate of motion that matters far more when it comes to safety, that applies to the deficit as much as anything else.
Some like to label and belittle. Last wee I was told I was a Putinist for not wanting British troops sent to Ukraine.
It will be white feathers next. 😀
But life really is too short and we are all going to be complex individuals and probably all really pleasant IRL. If people want to get so invested in this place or the debate they resort to abuse or trite comments then so be it.
It’s better than Facebook politics groups for sure.
This is not a place to be if thin skinned.
The level of horror and violence of sexual violence is not I think fully understood. We shy away from it precisely because it is so horrible and out of a sense of decency and self-protection - some things once seen cannot be unseen or unheard.
The danger in doing that it is that it risks it being overlooked and the victims forgotten and it being seen as just one of those things that happen. I think there is a tendency for that to happen with all forms of sexual violence. Precisely because it is a perversion of something wonderful we cannot bear to learn what happens when it is used to harm.
I do not know what the right balance is. I only pray that those girls will come home alive and be given the help and care they need.
Its very simple. We *cannot* run out of a currency we print to repay debts denominated in that currency. What we can do is run out of creditors...
Congrats to the Green Tories for coming a gallant fifth in the Rutherglen by-election
And I've run out of analogies.
He won't. He was never going to do. Even if he somehow wins reelection there will be minimal money spent on any of this. Like the towns fund and other levelling-up money its just a big lie. Which is why the latest mega poll shows every red wall seat going back to red.
People dislike being lied to, and especially dislike being tret like morons.
I also don't think it would work much with the Israel/Palestine issue. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced out of Israel from 1948 in the Naqba, taking refuge in surrounding countries such as Jordan, Egypt or Lebanon.
When there was ethnic cleansing (say) between Greece and Turkey post-WW1 (which was based not on ethnicity or language, but religion), the new states pretty much accepted the immigrants and assimilated them, albeit with lots of problems that eventually got worked out.
In the case of the Palestinians, most have not been able to assimilate into their new home countries, instead living in camps. For some this is out of choice - they see themselves as Palestinians, who should be living in Palestine. But the surrounding states have also made it very difficult to become citizens, esp. Egypt.
Foricble resettlement only works if they can be genuinely resettled in their new home country - otherwise they just become stateless and lacking fundamental rights, which does f-all for peace.
You cannot just look at figures to understand a problem. There lies the fate of HS2 when Spreadsheet Sunak doesn't look at wider issues. You need to talk to people on the ground and observe process.
For example, you cannot see why the doctor has large gaps between seeing patients. Are they being interrupted by phone calls? Is the IT too slow to record and order investigations? Are they checking a Physician Associates decisions? Are they skiving? You need to be there to find out, or at least actually talk to them.
Last week was a disaster not just for the HS2 project, not just for rail projects, but all infrastructure projects.
When it comes to macroeconomics, the money spent in a deficit as a percentage of GDP matters infinitely more than absolute cash figures.
The Liz Truss episode is inconsequential compared to the Brown episode, but her biggest issues were that she couldn't say what her deficit would be, not a pathway back to a balanced budget. Again, it's the deficit that matters.
However, the main article went like this:
- Bradford Council applied for funding for Bingley
- Government refused to provide the funding
- Bradford Council to blame
If it rains, he blames it on Bradford Council.
At the very least it does seem edited down, as it doesn't have a counter-party to the conversation to make it coherent.
We have to stand up for a democracy, however flawed and however much we dislike the incumbent. We have to stand against terrorism and radical Islamic militants. Those are fundamental strategic priorities for this country and the whole of the West.
1. The Israelis win outright. The occupied territories are incorporated into Israel. Most of the Palestinians flee, give up on returning, and assimilate into other countries.
2. The Palestinians win outright. Israel is destroyed. Jews flee, give up on returning, and assimilate into other countries.
3. There is a grand compromise that involves both sides giving up on a lot, accepting grievances and concerns of the other party as legitimate, and making efforts to provide reassurance, security and reconciliation.
4. There's a deus ex machina where some external power sweeps in and makes everything okay by providing masses of money and land to smooth over the pain of the compromises necessary for option 3, or the other options. Perhaps Musk could build a New Palestine on Mars?
Ultimately the reason the Oslo process failed is that the situation is the best example of a negative-sum game. Any compromise involves both sides having to make enormous concessions and giving up on objectives that they believe to be reasonable and just. It's very hard for people to crystallise their losses to such an extent. And impossible without any degree of trust.
Given that the Israelis seem to have the stronger military I can see why some people are looking to option 1. It looks like the one most likely to happen.
Strangely, productivity investigations and their methodologies have advanced in the last 100 years.
I think that the NHS should recklessly charge into the future. And only use management techniques that have been obsolete for 50 years.
Yes that's similar to catalogue system, but Klarna are a 3rd party incentivised to get you to buy as much crap as possible to get their kick back, where as the catalogue model was much more limited in scope / availability.
There are a lot of refugees in the world, the vast majority either internally displaced or in neighbouring countries. No country wants more, so these refugees become the new un-people, to be shipped off anywhere that can be browbeaten or bribed to take them.
I think the rating is either a reflection of brainwashing or a meaningless poll.
The magic words are "best value". Which so often isn't the same as "cheapest"
Many of whom have, you know, families.