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I suspect this will go on every Labour leaflet during the general election campaign
I suspect this will go on every Labour leaflet during the general election campaign – politicalbetting.com
?NEW: Former Tory minister defects to Labour?Conservative MP Dan Poulter says Tories have become a “nationalist party of the right” which has abandoned compassion & the NHSStory: https://t.co/nA3qLE6YJD
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https://www.greenparty.org.uk/news/2023/05/05/greens-make-history-by-winning-majority-control-of-mid-suffolk-council/
I will be my objective self, even when I was in the Tory fold I advised laying the Tories/backing Labour when there was value.
Take the Angela Rayner story, I've described it as the thinnest of thin gruels, and advised backing her to remain Labour Deputy Leader at the election.
What it desperately needs is massive reform, and a switch to contributory welfare rather than “free to everyone, come on in”
- we are talking golf aren't we?
Looking at his majority I might have to agree that he might be genuine in his claimed reasons. That does look like one of the safer Tory seats.
To add: I am sure there wil be some attempts at defections from those with smaller majorities who think it might save them.
Whereas Wes Streeting is much more sensible, admits it is no longer “the envy of the world” and talks about real changes
🙏
He genuinely believes the Tories have been an ultra nationalist nasty right wing party.
Enough. We spend trillions on this thing. The NHS was acceptable when it was cheap and cheerful. Now it is no longer cheap and it certainly isn’t cheerful
If you’re going to be nasty, and the trains are still late, that’s a fail.
Rishi's "Britain, yourself together and get back to work" speech was last Friday. That speech doesn't look so clever today. Time to set the "Days since last f#£& up" counter back to zero.
Mental health in the NHS has always been low on the priority list. Things have improved somewhat in the last couple of decades. New Labour worked out that faster treatment of mental health has a pretty good benefit:cost ratio, as well as improving human happiness. That's kept going since 2010, but not enough.
And yes, some of that is the external pressures of COVID, smartphones and the worrying world we live in. But also how much is spent on healthcare and what types.
The pool of potential future ministers that have any merit is pretty dry. I've been trying to work out if Reform are in any way coherent, but I suspect not.
There's a candidate in the London mayoral elections under the SDP banner - maybe, maybe. Certainly not the LDs though.
I absolutely despise them. I hope they go extinct
What I do think is, we have an ex chancellor pm heavily beholden to the actual chancellor. Chancellors do stuff in Autumn Statements in late November (abolish iht and stamp duty and so on). The value in December GE at 8 and January at 20 is extraordinary.
No idea if it’s true. But the sources for this are unusual if it’s not true. Also no idea what “significant” means
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/apr/26/woman-found-too-late-under-coat-in-nottingham-ae-after-eight-hour-wait
Mind you, she wouldn't have got to theatre anywhere else in the East Midlands. All the neuro-surgery is at QMC.
It's pretty grim out there, but it's because of failures in parts of the system that other bits are a mess. That ED wouldn't be so busy if Primary Care and Social Care was functioning well. It's also a failure of training by whoever did the triage. That story had Subarachnoid haemorrhage all over it.
I was helping to run a Labour street stand in Wantage this morning, a small town where the LibDems dominated last year but Tories got 19-25% - Labour didn't stand at all. Plenty of Labour support today, three LibDems and also several Reform UK, but only one overt Tory (a nice very elderly lady). No special reason why people should volunteer their preference to another party's street stall, but I do sense that the party is withering away down to the "I always vote Tory out of habit" people. It's quite a while since someone said to me that they really like what Sunak is doing.
The present UK Conservative Party is importing 500K-1M people per year to stimulate growth, exporting profits to countries around the world at a rate of knots, and selling off bits of land to whichever foreign sovereign wealth fund has a surplus this week. It has ministers of many different faiths and race. It makes Michael Foot look like Margaret Thatcher. Its current incarnation is less nationalist than any British party in power that I can think of.
I will never get over how dumb some MPs are about politics.
https://kyivindependent.com/russia-wants-to-capture-chasiv-yar-why-is-this-town-so-important/
Rolls-Royce scales back plans to build nuclear factories in UK
Curtailing comes after repeated delays to an ongoing government design competition
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/04/27/rolls-royce-plans-build-smr-water-vessel-factory-uk/
Regardless , the optics of a doctor abandoning the Tories over the NHS is horrific for Sunak .
Soviet double agent Anthony Blunt may have helped Hitler too
In 1979 the art historian was outed as one of the Cambridge spies recruited by Stalin.
Shocking new evidence suggests he may also have passed deadly secrets to the Nazis, Robert Verkaik reports
This is not the story I intended to tell. I set out to write a book about a distant relative, Eddy Verkaik, who had fought in the Dutch resistance during the Second World War. Eddy had helped alert the British to the treachery of a fellow Dutch resistance fighter — a terrifying giant of a man known as “King Kong”: Christiaan Lindemans.
Lindemans had betrayed Operation Market Garden, the ambitious and ill-fated Allied airborne mission that dropped thousands of paratroopers into the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, the 80th anniversary of which falls this September. Had it succeeded, it would have kicked open the door to the heart of Germany and brought the conflict to a speedy end. In the event the Allies lost more than 17,000 men in what was to be their final defeat of the war.
But one day in the archive everything changed. I discovered a second double agent had betrayed Operation Market Garden to the Germans — a spy codenamed Josephine, whom history had all but forgotten and whose identity has never been revealed. As I started to pull on that thread, who should pop out but Anthony Blunt, one of the Cambridge spies — the group of upper-class double agents who, for years during the Second World War and the Cold War, passed British and American secrets to their communist masters in Russia.
For decades Blunt has widely been regarded as one of the more harmless of that group. But my research would suggest he was perhaps the most devastatingly treacherous — and without realising it I had uncovered one of the greatest spy mysteries of the 20th century, a story with ramifications that are still felt to this day.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/anthony-blunt-soviet-russian-spy-nazis-xsn37f8dx
https://xxtomcooperxx.substack.com/
That said, I suspect it's Russia trying to exploit the position before the new US supplies arrive, and we'll be back to stalemate in a month or two.
The fundamental problems with this Government are it is inept, dishonest, vindictive and corrupt. It is also, at its heart, globalist, which is neither necessarily good nor bad with a Government that is not inept, dishonest, vindictive and corrupt but is disastrous with one that is because it is unable to deal with the strains and contradictions that globalism brings. So it responds by picking on little people as a scape goat.
2. Poulter does not want to be a Labour MP - he's getting out.
3. Anybody who questions the genuineness of Poulter's motives is ignoring 1. and 2.
However, I think this is a British institutional thing with our government structures and civil service and not a political one. Labour certainly wouldn't be able to do it any faster.
All that done, I was back for the results 3 days later. Another 10 minutes and done.
Seemed like a very streamlined setup to me.
It was his war record that saved him. And even then he was a bit odd in his final premiership too, which essentially was quasi-Victorian - focused largely on imperial and foreign policy and domestically ineffective.
Also, a bit strange that they don't say where.
The people who voted for it may have been largely nationalists, hoping for some version of a nationalist project.
But the people at the top were globalists, who hoped to appease the plebs with some flag-waving rhetoric. That's why we ended up here.
I'm not bothered about Rishi's past, but I'm interested in how he sees his future. Does anyone seriously think he will stay in the UK a second longer than strictly necessary?
Big brother is coming ... to a bank near you
He'll need more than good luck to get both Labour and the NHS to support that.
Keir Starmer
@Keir_Starmer
It’s fantastic to welcome Dr Dan Poulter MP to today’s changed Labour Party.
It’s time to end the Conservative chaos, turn the page, and get Britain’s future back. I’m really pleased that Dan has decided to join us on this journey.
https://twitter.com/Keir_Starmer/status/1784260677390987666
Not just at county level but quite a few local clubs provide it now as well.
@mrjamesob
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1h
Hours after Downing Street briefed friendly journalists that they'd had a great week, a former Minister defects to Labour...
https://twitter.com/mrjamesob
End of Saturday post? Royal Mail may cut deliveries after union gives in
CWU, which represents 110,000 postal workers, has signalled that it would back a change to universal service obligation rules — which could mean up to 9,000 daily rounds are stopped
Union leaders have conceded for the first time that they will accept an end to six-day-a-week letter deliveries, clearing the way for Royal Mail to enact historic cuts to postal services.
The Communication Workers Union (CWU), which represents 110,000 postal workers and brought services to a standstill with industrial action in 2022, has been one of the biggest hurdles to Royal Mail reducing its loss-making daily deliveries.
But it is now ready to back the company’s proposed reforms, admitting that the current service is “no longer financially viable”.
Royal Mail is pushing to reform the universal service obligation (USO) — legally binding rules that stipulate letters must be delivered to every UK household six days a week. It wants to shift to delivering second-class post only every other day, and slowing down bulk letters from government organisations and businesses.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/end-of-saturday-post-royal-mail-could-cut-deliveries-after-union-gives-up-c68bcjbhs
Some years ago a chap I worked with bid on a small piece of IT work. He sneaked into the contract a no changes clause - he could refuse changes. He delivered the work onto time and on budget. His description of the horror and anger when he rebuffed attempts at pointless changes.
He actually accepted a couple of real changes.