I agree with him about the pointlessness of changing to a hemicycle, it's one of those ideas which is floated as leading to some grand change which is just nonsense, but his final response is definitely only one an ex-MP would make.
Very odd, has he forgotten Mr Heseltine and the Mace?
The Houses of Parliament need serious money spent - I've seen £10 billion quoted - on repair and refurbishment. This could mean MPs decamping for up to six years to Richmond House but there is an opportunity to try something different. Many other legislative chambers are less adversarial in shape than the House of Commons.
Could political culture be affected by environment?
I have a vague memory of JRM saying it was unacceptable for MPs to move out while the works were done on the building. Which doubled or quadrupled the cost.
It's hard to imagine an effective modern legislature who had to sit in different seats for a bit. Madness to even consider it really.
Imagine the chaos if people had to sit in a different room? Possibly several hundred yards from where they normally sat. I mean, really!
£20-40bn well spent, I say!
It makes me furious to even dwell on it - he is far from the only one bringing up such ideas, and they keep just kicking the can, making the problem worse with every passing day.
Plan to be out of it for 5 years, then assume you will be out for 10-15 since it will inevitably take twice as long as they plan for it to be, and be done with it.
"Wheelchair-bound driver, 96, becomes oldest woman in Britain to admit death by dangerous driving after she killed pensioner, 76, and injured pedestrian, 80, with her Vauxhall Corsa"
One benefit of 15-minute cities is they can help with the loss of independence that comes with losing the ability to drive (safely).
Nobody should be driving at 96.
Jeez.
I've met 90-year olds setting up anchors on Curved Ridge. That's the problem - some people keep going fine until they drop dead.
There was a 102-year-old skydiving a few days ago.
As a copilot, with an instructor.
We all need to have that chat with our parents at some point, and it’s really not an easy call to make if they rely on the car for daily life.
For many, driving means independence when they are young, and when they are old. Giving up on that is not easy - and when you are old, I fear it may be the start of, or hasten, the decline.
We have a neighbour in her late 80s who certainly has dementia and her son has tried to take her car keys off her and she absolutely lost it. She lives alone and all her neighbours know she should not be driving but apparently her son is powerless no matter the doctors have recommended she is persuaded not to drive
She has been known to park her car in town and forget where it is and come home on the bus and it only came to her sons attention tge first time when the local authority sent a parking penalty fine
He does track it but it is a horrible problem and one that hopefully will end soon with the DVLA withdrawal of her licence on health grounds but goodness only knows how she will react
Simple - sell the car or hide the keys. Forget her reaction, think about the lives you could save. It would stay with you for life.
You haven't a clue have you
There is nothing simple dealing with a dementia mother living on her own who will have spare keys or will just buy another car
Her son lives away and she is entirely on her own and has been told countless times not to drive but becomes abusive and is tormented by the idea she will lose her independence
It is a matter ultimately for the son and doctors to deal with
Tough. You have a responsibility to the rest of your community. It's how people end up dead, including a toddler in Edinburgh.
And I do have a clue - precisely the same battle happened in my family.
(I'm not suggesting you do it, obviously)
Been there too, with father-in-law. Now I’m not driving, not because of mental (can I say obvs?) but because of physical problems. My wife drives but is becoming less confident and doesn’t want to drive too far. We do wonder though.
"Wheelchair-bound driver, 96, becomes oldest woman in Britain to admit death by dangerous driving after she killed pensioner, 76, and injured pedestrian, 80, with her Vauxhall Corsa"
One benefit of 15-minute cities is they can help with the loss of independence that comes with losing the ability to drive (safely).
Nobody should be driving at 96.
Jeez.
I've met 90-year olds setting up anchors on Curved Ridge. That's the problem - some people keep going fine until they drop dead.
There was a 102-year-old skydiving a few days ago.
As a copilot, with an instructor.
We all need to have that chat with our parents at some point, and it’s really not an easy call to make if they rely on the car for daily life.
For many, driving means independence when they are young, and when they are old. Giving up on that is not easy - and when you are old, I fear it may be the start of, or hasten, the decline.
We have a neighbour in her late 80s who certainly has dementia and her son has tried to take her car keys off her and she absolutely lost it. She lives alone and all her neighbours know she should not be driving but apparently her son is powerless no matter the doctors have recommended she is persuaded not to drive
She has been known to park her car in town and forget where it is and come home on the bus and it only came to her sons attention tge first time when the local authority sent a parking penalty fine
He does track it but it is a horrible problem and one that hopefully will end soon with the DVLA withdrawal of her licence on health grounds but goodness only knows how she will react
Simple - sell the car or hide the keys. Forget her reaction, think about the lives you could save. It would stay with you for life.
You haven't a clue have you
There is nothing simple dealing with a dementia mother living on her own who will have spare keys or will just buy another car
Her son lives away and she is entirely on her own and has been told countless times not to drive but becomes abusive and is tormented by the idea she will lose her independence
It is a matter ultimately for the son and doctors to deal with
I'm sorry G. The fact she rails against these measures because of her loss of independence counts not a jot when she takes out someone's child, grandchild, parent or grandparent in her out of control one tonne killing machine. When my late father's eye sight became poor I spoke with the optician and his license was revoked.
That is the argument we are making but she has passed the eye test and the doctor will not stop her driving and believe me the neighbours want her stopped but she lives alone and her son is abroad though comes to see her regularly
I wonder how the GP would feel about his child on a zebra crossing as this menace passes?
Maybe @Foxy can explain the responsibility of the GP in these circumstances as we are all amazed they have not told her or her son she is unfit to drive
Anyone can report someone that they think is unfit, including a neighbour.
A doctor can, and is obliged to do so if they believe someone is driving against advice.
I agree with him about the pointlessness of changing to a hemicycle, it's one of those ideas which is floated as leading to some grand change which is just nonsense, but his final response is definitely only one an ex-MP would make.
Very odd, has he forgotten Mr Heseltine and the Mace?
The Houses of Parliament need serious money spent - I've seen £10 billion quoted - on repair and refurbishment. This could mean MPs decamping for up to six years to Richmond House but there is an opportunity to try something different. Many other legislative chambers are less adversarial in shape than the House of Commons.
Could political culture be affected by environment?
Having enough seats for all the legislators (HoC anyway) would be a considerable improvement.
Mr Cameron proposed easing the seat shortage by 8%, but it was never enacted.
But I find the premise that the shape of the chamber has that much impact on the political culture to be unlikely, I don't think architecture has that much of an impact over other issues unless there's spikes on all the seats jabbing into everyone's bums making them angry all the time.
Now I think about it I believe just such a parliament chamber was predicted in Ben Elton's This Other Eden, as part of a pyramidal light effect design, in a European Parliamentary building where all the nations designed their own Grand Chamber, because no one wanted to be in charge of designing the bogs.
"Wheelchair-bound driver, 96, becomes oldest woman in Britain to admit death by dangerous driving after she killed pensioner, 76, and injured pedestrian, 80, with her Vauxhall Corsa"
One benefit of 15-minute cities is they can help with the loss of independence that comes with losing the ability to drive (safely).
Nobody should be driving at 96.
Jeez.
I've met 90-year olds setting up anchors on Curved Ridge. That's the problem - some people keep going fine until they drop dead.
There was a 102-year-old skydiving a few days ago.
As a copilot, with an instructor.
We all need to have that chat with our parents at some point, and it’s really not an easy call to make if they rely on the car for daily life.
For many, driving means independence when they are young, and when they are old. Giving up on that is not easy - and when you are old, I fear it may be the start of, or hasten, the decline.
We have a neighbour in her late 80s who certainly has dementia and her son has tried to take her car keys off her and she absolutely lost it. She lives alone and all her neighbours know she should not be driving but apparently her son is powerless no matter the doctors have recommended she is persuaded not to drive
She has been known to park her car in town and forget where it is and come home on the bus and it only came to her sons attention tge first time when the local authority sent a parking penalty fine
He does track it but it is a horrible problem and one that hopefully will end soon with the DVLA withdrawal of her licence on health grounds but goodness only knows how she will react
Simple - sell the car or hide the keys. Forget her reaction, think about the lives you could save. It would stay with you for life.
You haven't a clue have you
There is nothing simple dealing with a dementia mother living on her own who will have spare keys or will just buy another car
Her son lives away and she is entirely on her own and has been told countless times not to drive but becomes abusive and is tormented by the idea she will lose her independence
It is a matter ultimately for the son and doctors to deal with
I'm sorry G. The fact she rails against these measures because of her loss of independence counts not a jot when she takes out someone's child, grandchild, parent or grandparent in her out of control one tonne killing machine. When my late father's eye sight became poor I spoke with the optician and his license was revoked.
That is the argument we are making but she has passed the eye test and the doctor will not stop her driving and believe me the neighbours want her stopped but she lives alone and her son is abroad though comes to see her regularly
I wonder how the GP would feel about his child on a zebra crossing as this menace passes?
Maybe @Foxy can explain the responsibility of the GP in these circumstances as we are all amazed they have not told her or her son she is unfit to drive
Anyone can report someone that they think is unfit, including a neighbour.
A doctor can, and is obliged to do so if they believe someone is driving against advice.
I agree with him about the pointlessness of changing to a hemicycle, it's one of those ideas which is floated as leading to some grand change which is just nonsense, but his final response is definitely only one an ex-MP would make.
Very odd, has he forgotten Mr Heseltine and the Mace?
The Houses of Parliament need serious money spent - I've seen £10 billion quoted - on repair and refurbishment. This could mean MPs decamping for up to six years to Richmond House but there is an opportunity to try something different. Many other legislative chambers are less adversarial in shape than the House of Commons.
Could political culture be affected by environment?
I have a vague memory of JRM saying it was unacceptable for MPs to move out while the works were done on the building. Which doubled or quadrupled the cost.
It's hard to imagine an effective modern legislature who had to sit in different seats for a bit. Madness to even consider it really.
Imagine the chaos if people had to sit in a different room? Possibly several hundred yards from where they normally sat. I mean, really!
£20-40bn well spent, I say!
It makes me furious to even dwell on it - he is far from the only one bringing up such ideas, and they keep just kicking the can, making the problem worse with every passing day.
Plan to be out of it for 5 years, then assume you will be out for 10-15 since it will inevitably take twice as long as they plan for it to be, and be done with it.
Why not treat the Parliament like all our other national assets, and sell it to the highest bidder? MPs can meet in the Cortes Generales, or the parliament of wherever it’s flogged off to.
Permitting reform is definitely on the Democrats' agenda this election. It will be interesting to see if they actually follow through on it, if elected - similarly with Starmer's government.
Two years ago, a single wind energy project in Germany with just three turbines required 36,000 pages of documentation.
Then they passed permitting reform to cut red tape.
Now Germany is a leader in clean energy deployment.
As someone who is vaguely 'Team Jenrick' at present, Kemi's is the most effective response to Starmers decade of misery speech, and the one I feel most aligned toward.
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy, book claims:
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy. In the immediate aftermath of the mini-Budget, Ms Truss and her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, launched a desperate attempt to find spending cuts in an effort to restore stock-market confidence in their strategy.
A group of Ms Truss’s Tory aides met to discuss the issue. One of her senior advisers, Alex Boyd, “was told that Truss and Kwarteng were thinking they could still sort out the black hole with severe cuts”: “We’ve been told that they’re looking at stopping cancer treatment on the NHS.” ....
"She’s shouting at everyone that ‘We’ve got to find the money.’ When we tell her it can’t be done, she shouts back: ‘It’s not true. The money is there. You go and find it,’” ...
Speaking to The Independent, Mr Kwarteng said: “I wasn’t involved in any conversations about restricting healthcare, but that doesn’t mean the prime minister and her team didn’t discuss this.”
So Kwasi says Alex Boyd said that an unnamed advisor said that Truss was considering cutting cancer treatment on the NHS. How would one even go about 'cutting cancer treatment on the NHS'? Loathsome drivel. I really pity Kwarteng that he's reduced to slagging off his former employer and close associate as a some sort of pseudo-career. It's like a poundshop version of Prince Harry.
Yeah.
There’s no NHS Cancer Treatment On/Off stop button.
So you’d have to try and tell all the trusts to stop. The first thing they’d do after making sure it wasn’t a prank call, is say no. And call all the lawyers.
Err, did the Tory government ever try to implement impossible policies that sounded like prank calls and were stopped by the lawyers. Unfortunately on a monthly basis.......
You could cut the NHS budget by 5% and leave trusts to sort out what to cut, there would be zero need or indeed mechanism by which you could target 'cancer treatment', and the only reason such a bizarre concept has been dreamed up is to smear the Truss Government. The fact the Independent published it, and that avowedly intelligent people have given it airtime on PB is proof that Truss derangement syndrome is real and dangerous.
Love to know where you think there is 5% spare space in an NHS Trust's budget?
To be fair, you could restrict or qualify medical treatments further and/or freeze or cut staff salaries by 5-10% on top and cut staff numbers.
You'd have massively strikes, and lots leaving the profession, but it's a political choice that's available.
Greece didn't do dissimilar in the depths of its crisis.
You could get rid of 50% of non patient facing staff in the NHS and no one would notice. There's a lot of fat that can be trimmed but no one is willing to do it.
I think there's still a lack of honesty about all of these discussions around spending. The public sector has added ~700k people since 2019 it is the source of our budget deficit alongside interest due from linkers. We're spending massively more money on staffing costs and the only sustainable way we can cut taxes is by cutting staff, the idea that public sector pay was too low is a myth, if it was true then we wouldn't have gained 700k employees.
The other big area of spending that needs to be addressed is benefits, specifically sickness benefits. The current system is far, far too easy to game and far too generous. Universal Credit was a good idea but fundamentally relies on people's honesty and there are millions of people in the country who are not honest. The older system under Labour before the Tories switched to UC was better. The assessments were tougher and people who didn't want to work weren't able to live a life on benefits by claiming mental health issues. Labour managed to get the million people saying they had "undetectable but debilitating" back problems back into work and now they have to clear up the Tory mess with "mental health".
I don't think Labour will do anything on either of these points, in fact I think it will get worse because Starmer is weak.
So, what percentage of the UK population will be applying for Oasis tickets?
45%?
I am going to give if a miss so that is one more available
They’ve got a couple of million tickets to sell, just for the UK and RoI dates announced today. They’ll likely all go in minutes on Sunday morning, quickly followed by a million of them being up for resale at massive markups, despite assurances that this won’t be the case.
By the way, I see he's also appealed Cannon's dismissal of the documents case.
You cannot amend an indictment apparently, you have to have a whole new one to supercede the old one if you want to add stuff, so I am assuming he's tweaking the charges in the DC case to try to take account of the Supreme Court doing their best to make Trump (and Harris, if she wants) immune from as much as they can get away with.
Personally, I won't apply. Their first two albums are iconic, but that was 3 decades ago, I wouldn't bother to see them now.
Not often I'm with the majority but this time I am. The media have an odd habit of treating selected minority pursuits as stories of intergalactic significance. Football is another. Perhaps BBC news should randomly give blanket wall to wall news coverage to some other minority interests, like the symphonic works of Humphrey Searle, the paintings of George Elgar Hicks or the poetry of Venantius Fortunatus.
His independent White House campaign has fizzled, but the flow of bizarre stories of Robert F Kennedy Jr’s unorthodox handling of the carcasses of wild mammals has experienced no similar suspension...
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy, book claims:
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy. In the immediate aftermath of the mini-Budget, Ms Truss and her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, launched a desperate attempt to find spending cuts in an effort to restore stock-market confidence in their strategy.
A group of Ms Truss’s Tory aides met to discuss the issue. One of her senior advisers, Alex Boyd, “was told that Truss and Kwarteng were thinking they could still sort out the black hole with severe cuts”: “We’ve been told that they’re looking at stopping cancer treatment on the NHS.” ....
"She’s shouting at everyone that ‘We’ve got to find the money.’ When we tell her it can’t be done, she shouts back: ‘It’s not true. The money is there. You go and find it,’” ...
Speaking to The Independent, Mr Kwarteng said: “I wasn’t involved in any conversations about restricting healthcare, but that doesn’t mean the prime minister and her team didn’t discuss this.”
So Kwasi says Alex Boyd said that an unnamed advisor said that Truss was considering cutting cancer treatment on the NHS. How would one even go about 'cutting cancer treatment on the NHS'? Loathsome drivel. I really pity Kwarteng that he's reduced to slagging off his former employer and close associate as a some sort of pseudo-career. It's like a poundshop version of Prince Harry.
Yeah.
There’s no NHS Cancer Treatment On/Off stop button.
So you’d have to try and tell all the trusts to stop. The first thing they’d do after making sure it wasn’t a prank call, is say no. And call all the lawyers.
Err, did the Tory government ever try to implement impossible policies that sounded like prank calls and were stopped by the lawyers. Unfortunately on a monthly basis.......
You could cut the NHS budget by 5% and leave trusts to sort out what to cut, there would be zero need or indeed mechanism by which you could target 'cancer treatment', and the only reason such a bizarre concept has been dreamed up is to smear the Truss Government. The fact the Independent published it, and that avowedly intelligent people have given it airtime on PB is proof that Truss derangement syndrome is real and dangerous.
Love to know where you think there is 5% spare space in an NHS Trust's budget?
To be fair, you could restrict or qualify medical treatments further and/or freeze or cut staff salaries by 5-10% on top and cut staff numbers.
You'd have massively strikes, and lots leaving the profession, but it's a political choice that's available.
Greece didn't do dissimilar in the depths of its crisis.
You could get rid of 50% of non patient facing staff in the NHS and no one would notice. There's a lot of fat that can be trimmed but no one is willing to do it.
I think there's still a lack of honesty about all of these discussions around spending. The public sector has added ~700k people since 2019 it is the source of our budget deficit alongside interest due from linkers. We're spending massively more money on staffing costs and the only sustainable way we can cut taxes is by cutting staff, the idea that public sector pay was too low is a myth, if it was true then we wouldn't have gained 700k employees.
The other big area of spending that needs to be addressed is benefits, specifically sickness benefits. The current system is far, far too easy to game and far too generous. Universal Credit was a good idea but fundamentally relies on people's honesty and there are millions of people in the country who are not honest. The older system under Labour before the Tories switched to UC was better. The assessments were tougher and people who didn't want to work weren't able to live a life on benefits by claiming mental health issues. Labour managed to get the million people saying they had "undetectable but debilitating" back problems back into work and now they have to clear up the Tory mess with "mental health".
I don't think Labour will do anything on either of these points, in fact I think it will get worse because Starmer is weak.
"You could get rid of 50% of non patient facing staff in the NHS and no one would notice."
The right wingers have been saying that for decades. But it's already been done. Privatisation of many functions. Hence many of the NHS problems - lack of hygiene, patient malnutrition, over charging by commercial firms ...
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy, book claims:
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy. In the immediate aftermath of the mini-Budget, Ms Truss and her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, launched a desperate attempt to find spending cuts in an effort to restore stock-market confidence in their strategy.
A group of Ms Truss’s Tory aides met to discuss the issue. One of her senior advisers, Alex Boyd, “was told that Truss and Kwarteng were thinking they could still sort out the black hole with severe cuts”: “We’ve been told that they’re looking at stopping cancer treatment on the NHS.” ....
"She’s shouting at everyone that ‘We’ve got to find the money.’ When we tell her it can’t be done, she shouts back: ‘It’s not true. The money is there. You go and find it,’” ...
Speaking to The Independent, Mr Kwarteng said: “I wasn’t involved in any conversations about restricting healthcare, but that doesn’t mean the prime minister and her team didn’t discuss this.”
So Kwasi says Alex Boyd said that an unnamed advisor said that Truss was considering cutting cancer treatment on the NHS. How would one even go about 'cutting cancer treatment on the NHS'? Loathsome drivel. I really pity Kwarteng that he's reduced to slagging off his former employer and close associate as a some sort of pseudo-career. It's like a poundshop version of Prince Harry.
Yeah.
There’s no NHS Cancer Treatment On/Off stop button.
So you’d have to try and tell all the trusts to stop. The first thing they’d do after making sure it wasn’t a prank call, is say no. And call all the lawyers.
Err, did the Tory government ever try to implement impossible policies that sounded like prank calls and were stopped by the lawyers. Unfortunately on a monthly basis.......
You could cut the NHS budget by 5% and leave trusts to sort out what to cut, there would be zero need or indeed mechanism by which you could target 'cancer treatment', and the only reason such a bizarre concept has been dreamed up is to smear the Truss Government. The fact the Independent published it, and that avowedly intelligent people have given it airtime on PB is proof that Truss derangement syndrome is real and dangerous.
Love to know where you think there is 5% spare space in an NHS Trust's budget?
To be fair, you could restrict or qualify medical treatments further and/or freeze or cut staff salaries by 5-10% on top and cut staff numbers.
You'd have massively strikes, and lots leaving the profession, but it's a political choice that's available.
Greece didn't do dissimilar in the depths of its crisis.
You could get rid of 50% of non patient facing staff in the NHS and no one would notice. There's a lot of fat that can be trimmed but no one is willing to do it.
I think there's still a lack of honesty about all of these discussions around spending. The public sector has added ~700k people since 2019 it is the source of our budget deficit alongside interest due from linkers. We're spending massively more money on staffing costs and the only sustainable way we can cut taxes is by cutting staff, the idea that public sector pay was too low is a myth, if it was true then we wouldn't have gained 700k employees.
The other big area of spending that needs to be addressed is benefits, specifically sickness benefits. The current system is far, far too easy to game and far too generous. Universal Credit was a good idea but fundamentally relies on people's honesty and there are millions of people in the country who are not honest. The older system under Labour before the Tories switched to UC was better. The assessments were tougher and people who didn't want to work weren't able to live a life on benefits by claiming mental health issues. Labour managed to get the million people saying they had "undetectable but debilitating" back problems back into work and now they have to clear up the Tory mess with "mental health".
I don't think Labour will do anything on either of these points, in fact I think it will get worse because Starmer is weak.
The situation feels a bit like the breakdown of the soviet union. Everything is starting to fail, all the systems and processes set up are not delivering tangible outcomes.
I didn't think that things could get worse than the tories but it feels like they are under Starmer. The tories still had a vague idea that the economy needs to grow, this seems to be absent from the labour party. It is austerity without growth, but still they have the inbuilt perception that the state is there to solve every problem by spending money.
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy, book claims:
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy. In the immediate aftermath of the mini-Budget, Ms Truss and her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, launched a desperate attempt to find spending cuts in an effort to restore stock-market confidence in their strategy.
A group of Ms Truss’s Tory aides met to discuss the issue. One of her senior advisers, Alex Boyd, “was told that Truss and Kwarteng were thinking they could still sort out the black hole with severe cuts”: “We’ve been told that they’re looking at stopping cancer treatment on the NHS.” ....
"She’s shouting at everyone that ‘We’ve got to find the money.’ When we tell her it can’t be done, she shouts back: ‘It’s not true. The money is there. You go and find it,’” ...
Speaking to The Independent, Mr Kwarteng said: “I wasn’t involved in any conversations about restricting healthcare, but that doesn’t mean the prime minister and her team didn’t discuss this.”
So Kwasi says Alex Boyd said that an unnamed advisor said that Truss was considering cutting cancer treatment on the NHS. How would one even go about 'cutting cancer treatment on the NHS'? Loathsome drivel. I really pity Kwarteng that he's reduced to slagging off his former employer and close associate as a some sort of pseudo-career. It's like a poundshop version of Prince Harry.
Yeah.
There’s no NHS Cancer Treatment On/Off stop button.
So you’d have to try and tell all the trusts to stop. The first thing they’d do after making sure it wasn’t a prank call, is say no. And call all the lawyers.
Err, did the Tory government ever try to implement impossible policies that sounded like prank calls and were stopped by the lawyers. Unfortunately on a monthly basis.......
You could cut the NHS budget by 5% and leave trusts to sort out what to cut, there would be zero need or indeed mechanism by which you could target 'cancer treatment', and the only reason such a bizarre concept has been dreamed up is to smear the Truss Government. The fact the Independent published it, and that avowedly intelligent people have given it airtime on PB is proof that Truss derangement syndrome is real and dangerous.
Love to know where you think there is 5% spare space in an NHS Trust's budget?
To be fair, you could restrict or qualify medical treatments further and/or freeze or cut staff salaries by 5-10% on top and cut staff numbers.
You'd have massively strikes, and lots leaving the profession, but it's a political choice that's available.
Greece didn't do dissimilar in the depths of its crisis.
You could get rid of 50% of non patient facing staff in the NHS and no one would notice. There's a lot of fat that can be trimmed but no one is willing to do it.
I think there's still a lack of honesty about all of these discussions around spending. The public sector has added ~700k people since 2019 it is the source of our budget deficit alongside interest due from linkers. We're spending massively more money on staffing costs and the only sustainable way we can cut taxes is by cutting staff, the idea that public sector pay was too low is a myth, if it was true then we wouldn't have gained 700k employees.
The other big area of spending that needs to be addressed is benefits, specifically sickness benefits. The current system is far, far too easy to game and far too generous. Universal Credit was a good idea but fundamentally relies on people's honesty and there are millions of people in the country who are not honest. The older system under Labour before the Tories switched to UC was better. The assessments were tougher and people who didn't want to work weren't able to live a life on benefits by claiming mental health issues. Labour managed to get the million people saying they had "undetectable but debilitating" back problems back into work and now they have to clear up the Tory mess with "mental health".
I don't think Labour will do anything on either of these points, in fact I think it will get worse because Starmer is weak.
"You could get rid of 50% of non patient facing staff in the NHS and no one would notice."
The right wingers have been saying that for decades. But it's already been done. Privatisation of many functions. Hence many of the NHS problems - lack of hygiene, patient malnutrition, over charging by commercial firms ...
It's one reason that NHS productivity has dropped.
1/3 of the patients that I saw this morning didn't need to be there. They needed to be seen after, rather than before, their investigations were back. Administrative inefficiency brought them back.
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy, book claims:
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy. In the immediate aftermath of the mini-Budget, Ms Truss and her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, launched a desperate attempt to find spending cuts in an effort to restore stock-market confidence in their strategy.
A group of Ms Truss’s Tory aides met to discuss the issue. One of her senior advisers, Alex Boyd, “was told that Truss and Kwarteng were thinking they could still sort out the black hole with severe cuts”: “We’ve been told that they’re looking at stopping cancer treatment on the NHS.” ....
"She’s shouting at everyone that ‘We’ve got to find the money.’ When we tell her it can’t be done, she shouts back: ‘It’s not true. The money is there. You go and find it,’” ...
Speaking to The Independent, Mr Kwarteng said: “I wasn’t involved in any conversations about restricting healthcare, but that doesn’t mean the prime minister and her team didn’t discuss this.”
So Kwasi says Alex Boyd said that an unnamed advisor said that Truss was considering cutting cancer treatment on the NHS. How would one even go about 'cutting cancer treatment on the NHS'? Loathsome drivel. I really pity Kwarteng that he's reduced to slagging off his former employer and close associate as a some sort of pseudo-career. It's like a poundshop version of Prince Harry.
Yeah.
There’s no NHS Cancer Treatment On/Off stop button.
So you’d have to try and tell all the trusts to stop. The first thing they’d do after making sure it wasn’t a prank call, is say no. And call all the lawyers.
Err, did the Tory government ever try to implement impossible policies that sounded like prank calls and were stopped by the lawyers. Unfortunately on a monthly basis.......
You could cut the NHS budget by 5% and leave trusts to sort out what to cut, there would be zero need or indeed mechanism by which you could target 'cancer treatment', and the only reason such a bizarre concept has been dreamed up is to smear the Truss Government. The fact the Independent published it, and that avowedly intelligent people have given it airtime on PB is proof that Truss derangement syndrome is real and dangerous.
Love to know where you think there is 5% spare space in an NHS Trust's budget?
To be fair, you could restrict or qualify medical treatments further and/or freeze or cut staff salaries by 5-10% on top and cut staff numbers.
You'd have massively strikes, and lots leaving the profession, but it's a political choice that's available.
Greece didn't do dissimilar in the depths of its crisis.
You could get rid of 50% of non patient facing staff in the NHS and no one would notice. There's a lot of fat that can be trimmed but no one is willing to do it.
I think there's still a lack of honesty about all of these discussions around spending. The public sector has added ~700k people since 2019 it is the source of our budget deficit alongside interest due from linkers. We're spending massively more money on staffing costs and the only sustainable way we can cut taxes is by cutting staff, the idea that public sector pay was too low is a myth, if it was true then we wouldn't have gained 700k employees.
The other big area of spending that needs to be addressed is benefits, specifically sickness benefits. The current system is far, far too easy to game and far too generous. Universal Credit was a good idea but fundamentally relies on people's honesty and there are millions of people in the country who are not honest. The older system under Labour before the Tories switched to UC was better. The assessments were tougher and people who didn't want to work weren't able to live a life on benefits by claiming mental health issues. Labour managed to get the million people saying they had "undetectable but debilitating" back problems back into work and now they have to clear up the Tory mess with "mental health".
I don't think Labour will do anything on either of these points, in fact I think it will get worse because Starmer is weak.
"You could get rid of 50% of non patient facing staff in the NHS and no one would notice."
The right wingers have been saying that for decades. But it's already been done. Privatisation of many functions. Hence many of the NHS problems - lack of hygiene, patient malnutrition, over charging by commercial firms ...
There is vast headcount in the DOH, and NHS England (Scotland, Wales etc.) before you so much as get to an NHS trust, let alone a hospital.
for myself I see nothing in it, but it is going to run and run, with people who are much more than self publicising idiots getting involved. The Economist ran it a bit this week too. Also note that the professional implied criticism of prosecution and defence is slowly building pressure. (Also note the careful but landmine laden language in the Guardian story).
"Wheelchair-bound driver, 96, becomes oldest woman in Britain to admit death by dangerous driving after she killed pensioner, 76, and injured pedestrian, 80, with her Vauxhall Corsa"
One benefit of 15-minute cities is they can help with the loss of independence that comes with losing the ability to drive (safely).
Nobody should be driving at 96.
Jeez.
I've met 90-year olds setting up anchors on Curved Ridge. That's the problem - some people keep going fine until they drop dead.
There was a 102-year-old skydiving a few days ago.
As a copilot, with an instructor.
We all need to have that chat with our parents at some point, and it’s really not an easy call to make if they rely on the car for daily life.
For many, driving means independence when they are young, and when they are old. Giving up on that is not easy - and when you are old, I fear it may be the start of, or hasten, the decline.
We have a neighbour in her late 80s who certainly has dementia and her son has tried to take her car keys off her and she absolutely lost it. She lives alone and all her neighbours know she should not be driving but apparently her son is powerless no matter the doctors have recommended she is persuaded not to drive
She has been known to park her car in town and forget where it is and come home on the bus and it only came to her sons attention tge first time when the local authority sent a parking penalty fine
He does track it but it is a horrible problem and one that hopefully will end soon with the DVLA withdrawal of her licence on health grounds but goodness only knows how she will react
Simple - sell the car or hide the keys. Forget her reaction, think about the lives you could save. It would stay with you for life.
You haven't a clue have you
There is nothing simple dealing with a dementia mother living on her own who will have spare keys or will just buy another car
Her son lives away and she is entirely on her own and has been told countless times not to drive but becomes abusive and is tormented by the idea she will lose her independence
It is a matter ultimately for the son and doctors to deal with
Tough. You have a responsibility to the rest of your community. It's how people end up dead, including a toddler in Edinburgh.
And I do have a clue - precisely the same battle happened in my family.
You seem to think it is me in this story
It is not my mother and we with all the neighbours have done everything possible to stop her driving, as has her son but the doctor has not instructed her not to drive
You admit it was a battle in your family and so you prove my point - it is not simple as you put it
I'm not suggesting you do something.
But it is simple. You nick the keys.
Now I'm puzzled. You say you're not suggesting BigG do something, then you suggest he - does something. Moreover, something highly illegal.
Personally, I won't apply. Their first two albums are iconic, but that was 3 decades ago, I wouldn't bother to see them now.
Not often I'm with the majority but this time I am. The media have an odd habit of treating selected minority pursuits as stories of intergalactic significance. Football is another. Perhaps BBC news should randomly give blanket wall to wall news coverage to some other minority interests, like the symphonic works of Humphrey Searle, the paintings of George Elgar Hicks or the poetry of Venantius Fortunatus.
At least Taylor Swift is easy on the eye.
Oasis are in effect their own tribute band. Taylor Swift is herself
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy, book claims:
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy. In the immediate aftermath of the mini-Budget, Ms Truss and her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, launched a desperate attempt to find spending cuts in an effort to restore stock-market confidence in their strategy.
A group of Ms Truss’s Tory aides met to discuss the issue. One of her senior advisers, Alex Boyd, “was told that Truss and Kwarteng were thinking they could still sort out the black hole with severe cuts”: “We’ve been told that they’re looking at stopping cancer treatment on the NHS.” ....
"She’s shouting at everyone that ‘We’ve got to find the money.’ When we tell her it can’t be done, she shouts back: ‘It’s not true. The money is there. You go and find it,’” ...
Speaking to The Independent, Mr Kwarteng said: “I wasn’t involved in any conversations about restricting healthcare, but that doesn’t mean the prime minister and her team didn’t discuss this.”
So Kwasi says Alex Boyd said that an unnamed advisor said that Truss was considering cutting cancer treatment on the NHS. How would one even go about 'cutting cancer treatment on the NHS'? Loathsome drivel. I really pity Kwarteng that he's reduced to slagging off his former employer and close associate as a some sort of pseudo-career. It's like a poundshop version of Prince Harry.
Yeah.
There’s no NHS Cancer Treatment On/Off stop button.
So you’d have to try and tell all the trusts to stop. The first thing they’d do after making sure it wasn’t a prank call, is say no. And call all the lawyers.
It would be possible to save on expensive chemotherapy by announcing restrictions. Political suicide probably, but possible if one wanted to specifically to cut cancer treatments that would be the way.
The simple truth is that there isn't much fat left to cut. Cut the admin staff and make me the worlds most expensive clinic coordinator if you like, but not financially sensible.
IIRC most chemotherapy isn’t especially expensive, anyway.
for myself I see nothing in it, but it is going to run and run, with people who are much more than self publicising idiots getting involved. The Economist ran it a bit this week too. Also note that the professional implied criticism of prosecution and defence is slowly building pressure. (Also note the careful but landmine laden language in the Guardian story).
I have read some of the articles about the case. I have no idea if she did the crimes she has been convicted of, but there are seeming issues, yet again, with the use of statistics and juries in trials. The general public do not understand statistics and probability. Having a jury rule on a case that relies heavily on statistics, and often with experts who are themselves not experts in stats is always going to lead to some suspecting problems. In this case it's sometimes been suggested or implied that Letby was present when ALL deaths occured at the NICU but that was not the case. The chart showing her as at work for all the suspicious deaths was only a selection. If the deaths. It is enough to cast doubt for me. But if course some will still just complain that people are only doubting because she is a pretty white blond...
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy, book claims:
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy. In the immediate aftermath of the mini-Budget, Ms Truss and her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, launched a desperate attempt to find spending cuts in an effort to restore stock-market confidence in their strategy.
A group of Ms Truss’s Tory aides met to discuss the issue. One of her senior advisers, Alex Boyd, “was told that Truss and Kwarteng were thinking they could still sort out the black hole with severe cuts”: “We’ve been told that they’re looking at stopping cancer treatment on the NHS.” ....
"She’s shouting at everyone that ‘We’ve got to find the money.’ When we tell her it can’t be done, she shouts back: ‘It’s not true. The money is there. You go and find it,’” ...
Speaking to The Independent, Mr Kwarteng said: “I wasn’t involved in any conversations about restricting healthcare, but that doesn’t mean the prime minister and her team didn’t discuss this.”
So Kwasi says Alex Boyd said that an unnamed advisor said that Truss was considering cutting cancer treatment on the NHS. How would one even go about 'cutting cancer treatment on the NHS'? Loathsome drivel. I really pity Kwarteng that he's reduced to slagging off his former employer and close associate as a some sort of pseudo-career. It's like a poundshop version of Prince Harry.
Yeah.
There’s no NHS Cancer Treatment On/Off stop button.
So you’d have to try and tell all the trusts to stop. The first thing they’d do after making sure it wasn’t a prank call, is say no. And call all the lawyers.
Err, did the Tory government ever try to implement impossible policies that sounded like prank calls and were stopped by the lawyers. Unfortunately on a monthly basis.......
You could cut the NHS budget by 5% and leave trusts to sort out what to cut, there would be zero need or indeed mechanism by which you could target 'cancer treatment', and the only reason such a bizarre concept has been dreamed up is to smear the Truss Government. The fact the Independent published it, and that avowedly intelligent people have given it airtime on PB is proof that Truss derangement syndrome is real and dangerous.
Love to know where you think there is 5% spare space in an NHS Trust's budget?
To be fair, you could restrict or qualify medical treatments further and/or freeze or cut staff salaries by 5-10% on top and cut staff numbers.
You'd have massively strikes, and lots leaving the profession, but it's a political choice that's available.
Greece didn't do dissimilar in the depths of its crisis.
You could get rid of 50% of non patient facing staff in the NHS and no one would notice. There's a lot of fat that can be trimmed but no one is willing to do it.
I think there's still a lack of honesty about all of these discussions around spending. The public sector has added ~700k people since 2019 it is the source of our budget deficit alongside interest due from linkers. We're spending massively more money on staffing costs and the only sustainable way we can cut taxes is by cutting staff, the idea that public sector pay was too low is a myth, if it was true then we wouldn't have gained 700k employees.
The other big area of spending that needs to be addressed is benefits, specifically sickness benefits. The current system is far, far too easy to game and far too generous. Universal Credit was a good idea but fundamentally relies on people's honesty and there are millions of people in the country who are not honest. The older system under Labour before the Tories switched to UC was better. The assessments were tougher and people who didn't want to work weren't able to live a life on benefits by claiming mental health issues. Labour managed to get the million people saying they had "undetectable but debilitating" back problems back into work and now they have to clear up the Tory mess with "mental health".
I don't think Labour will do anything on either of these points, in fact I think it will get worse because Starmer is weak.
The situation feels a bit like the breakdown of the soviet union. Everything is starting to fail, all the systems and processes set up are not delivering tangible outcomes.
I didn't think that things could get worse than the tories but it feels like they are under Starmer. The tories still had a vague idea that the economy needs to grow, this seems to be absent from the labour party. It is austerity without growth, but still they have the inbuilt perception that the state is there to solve every problem by spending money.
IMHO at the this stage the new government had one central PR job to do: under the Tories your glass was half empty and getting emptier fast. Under Labour you glass is half full (here are six examples...) and we pledge to make the glass fuller, and this is how we are going to do it.
I think their approach to this essential has been haphazard.
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy, book claims:
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy. In the immediate aftermath of the mini-Budget, Ms Truss and her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, launched a desperate attempt to find spending cuts in an effort to restore stock-market confidence in their strategy.
A group of Ms Truss’s Tory aides met to discuss the issue. One of her senior advisers, Alex Boyd, “was told that Truss and Kwarteng were thinking they could still sort out the black hole with severe cuts”: “We’ve been told that they’re looking at stopping cancer treatment on the NHS.” ....
"She’s shouting at everyone that ‘We’ve got to find the money.’ When we tell her it can’t be done, she shouts back: ‘It’s not true. The money is there. You go and find it,’” ...
Speaking to The Independent, Mr Kwarteng said: “I wasn’t involved in any conversations about restricting healthcare, but that doesn’t mean the prime minister and her team didn’t discuss this.”
So Kwasi says Alex Boyd said that an unnamed advisor said that Truss was considering cutting cancer treatment on the NHS. How would one even go about 'cutting cancer treatment on the NHS'? Loathsome drivel. I really pity Kwarteng that he's reduced to slagging off his former employer and close associate as a some sort of pseudo-career. It's like a poundshop version of Prince Harry.
Yeah.
There’s no NHS Cancer Treatment On/Off stop button.
So you’d have to try and tell all the trusts to stop. The first thing they’d do after making sure it wasn’t a prank call, is say no. And call all the lawyers.
Err, did the Tory government ever try to implement impossible policies that sounded like prank calls and were stopped by the lawyers. Unfortunately on a monthly basis.......
You could cut the NHS budget by 5% and leave trusts to sort out what to cut, there would be zero need or indeed mechanism by which you could target 'cancer treatment', and the only reason such a bizarre concept has been dreamed up is to smear the Truss Government. The fact the Independent published it, and that avowedly intelligent people have given it airtime on PB is proof that Truss derangement syndrome is real and dangerous.
Love to know where you think there is 5% spare space in an NHS Trust's budget?
To be fair, you could restrict or qualify medical treatments further and/or freeze or cut staff salaries by 5-10% on top and cut staff numbers.
You'd have massively strikes, and lots leaving the profession, but it's a political choice that's available.
Greece didn't do dissimilar in the depths of its crisis.
You could get rid of 50% of non patient facing staff in the NHS and no one would notice. There's a lot of fat that can be trimmed but no one is willing to do it.
I think there's still a lack of honesty about all of these discussions around spending. The public sector has added ~700k people since 2019 it is the source of our budget deficit alongside interest due from linkers. We're spending massively more money on staffing costs and the only sustainable way we can cut taxes is by cutting staff, the idea that public sector pay was too low is a myth, if it was true then we wouldn't have gained 700k employees.
The other big area of spending that needs to be addressed is benefits, specifically sickness benefits. The current system is far, far too easy to game and far too generous. Universal Credit was a good idea but fundamentally relies on people's honesty and there are millions of people in the country who are not honest. The older system under Labour before the Tories switched to UC was better. The assessments were tougher and people who didn't want to work weren't able to live a life on benefits by claiming mental health issues. Labour managed to get the million people saying they had "undetectable but debilitating" back problems back into work and now they have to clear up the Tory mess with "mental health".
I don't think Labour will do anything on either of these points, in fact I think it will get worse because Starmer is weak.
"You could get rid of 50% of non patient facing staff in the NHS and no one would notice."
The right wingers have been saying that for decades. But it's already been done. Privatisation of many functions. Hence many of the NHS problems - lack of hygiene, patient malnutrition, over charging by commercial firms ...
There is vast headcount in the DOH, and NHS England (Scotland, Wales etc.) before you so much as get to an NHS trust, let alone a hospital.
My firm has been cutting non-frontline staff for years, wave after wave. The result is generally that people like me spend several hours a week doing our own admin, and we do it much less efficiently than the people who used to do it for a living. It's only now with proper investment in technology, rather than making fewer people do the same amount of unchanged activity, that we're starting to see some productivity savings coming back.
I daresay the health service has experienced much of the same. If you're going to do more with less then you absolutely have to change processes, not just headcount, and invest properly in automation.
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy, book claims:
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy. In the immediate aftermath of the mini-Budget, Ms Truss and her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, launched a desperate attempt to find spending cuts in an effort to restore stock-market confidence in their strategy.
A group of Ms Truss’s Tory aides met to discuss the issue. One of her senior advisers, Alex Boyd, “was told that Truss and Kwarteng were thinking they could still sort out the black hole with severe cuts”: “We’ve been told that they’re looking at stopping cancer treatment on the NHS.” ....
"She’s shouting at everyone that ‘We’ve got to find the money.’ When we tell her it can’t be done, she shouts back: ‘It’s not true. The money is there. You go and find it,’” ...
Speaking to The Independent, Mr Kwarteng said: “I wasn’t involved in any conversations about restricting healthcare, but that doesn’t mean the prime minister and her team didn’t discuss this.”
So Kwasi says Alex Boyd said that an unnamed advisor said that Truss was considering cutting cancer treatment on the NHS. How would one even go about 'cutting cancer treatment on the NHS'? Loathsome drivel. I really pity Kwarteng that he's reduced to slagging off his former employer and close associate as a some sort of pseudo-career. It's like a poundshop version of Prince Harry.
Yeah.
There’s no NHS Cancer Treatment On/Off stop button.
So you’d have to try and tell all the trusts to stop. The first thing they’d do after making sure it wasn’t a prank call, is say no. And call all the lawyers.
Err, did the Tory government ever try to implement impossible policies that sounded like prank calls and were stopped by the lawyers. Unfortunately on a monthly basis.......
You could cut the NHS budget by 5% and leave trusts to sort out what to cut, there would be zero need or indeed mechanism by which you could target 'cancer treatment', and the only reason such a bizarre concept has been dreamed up is to smear the Truss Government. The fact the Independent published it, and that avowedly intelligent people have given it airtime on PB is proof that Truss derangement syndrome is real and dangerous.
Love to know where you think there is 5% spare space in an NHS Trust's budget?
To be fair, you could restrict or qualify medical treatments further and/or freeze or cut staff salaries by 5-10% on top and cut staff numbers.
You'd have massively strikes, and lots leaving the profession, but it's a political choice that's available.
Greece didn't do dissimilar in the depths of its crisis.
You could get rid of 50% of non patient facing staff in the NHS and no one would notice. There's a lot of fat that can be trimmed but no one is willing to do it.
I think there's still a lack of honesty about all of these discussions around spending. The public sector has added ~700k people since 2019 it is the source of our budget deficit alongside interest due from linkers. We're spending massively more money on staffing costs and the only sustainable way we can cut taxes is by cutting staff, the idea that public sector pay was too low is a myth, if it was true then we wouldn't have gained 700k employees.
The other big area of spending that needs to be addressed is benefits, specifically sickness benefits. The current system is far, far too easy to game and far too generous. Universal Credit was a good idea but fundamentally relies on people's honesty and there are millions of people in the country who are not honest. The older system under Labour before the Tories switched to UC was better. The assessments were tougher and people who didn't want to work weren't able to live a life on benefits by claiming mental health issues. Labour managed to get the million people saying they had "undetectable but debilitating" back problems back into work and now they have to clear up the Tory mess with "mental health".
I don't think Labour will do anything on either of these points, in fact I think it will get worse because Starmer is weak.
Just worth noting almost all of that growth in the public sector has been in central Government - more than half a million since 2019. :Local Government headcount has been almost static (a very small decline in fact).
In 2010, the Coalition took the axe to local Government and about a million jobs were lost in the 2010s in that sector.
Central Government and especially the NHS were largely unaffected.
His independent White House campaign has fizzled, but the flow of bizarre stories of Robert F Kennedy Jr’s unorthodox handling of the carcasses of wild mammals has experienced no similar suspension...
Lord knows (and thankfully has NOT told the likes of us) what RFK Jr. is/was capable of doing to/with the mortal remains of some poor, blameless hedgehog.
for myself I see nothing in it, but it is going to run and run, with people who are much more than self publicising idiots getting involved. The Economist ran it a bit this week too. Also note that the professional implied criticism of prosecution and defence is slowly building pressure. (Also note the careful but landmine laden language in the Guardian story).
I have read some of the articles about the case. I have no idea if she did the crimes she has been convicted of, but there are seeming issues, yet again, with the use of statistics and juries in trials. The general public do not understand statistics and probability. Having a jury rule on a case that relies heavily on statistics, and often with experts who are themselves not experts in stats is always going to lead to some suspecting problems. In this case it's sometimes been suggested or implied that Letby was present when ALL deaths occured at the NICU but that was not the case. The chart showing her as at work for all the suspicious deaths was only a selection. If the deaths. It is enough to cast doubt for me. But if course some will still just complain that people are only doubting because she is a pretty white blond...
This view slightly overlooks the fact that Letby was defended by very senior counsel, the prosecution have to disclose all their evidence, including stuff they didn't use, and the defence could seek and call whatever expert evidence they wanted, and in neither trial did they call any. It is obvious that they would have used exculpatory expert evidence if available. (Though that fact was not obvious to Private Eye in their slightly strange coverage).
for myself I see nothing in it, but it is going to run and run, with people who are much more than self publicising idiots getting involved. The Economist ran it a bit this week too. Also note that the professional implied criticism of prosecution and defence is slowly building pressure. (Also note the careful but landmine laden language in the Guardian story).
I have read some of the articles about the case. I have no idea if she did the crimes she has been convicted of, but there are seeming issues, yet again, with the use of statistics and juries in trials. The general public do not understand statistics and probability. Having a jury rule on a case that relies heavily on statistics, and often with experts who are themselves not experts in stats is always going to lead to some suspecting problems. In this case it's sometimes been suggested or implied that Letby was present when ALL deaths occured at the NICU but that was not the case. The chart showing her as at work for all the suspicious deaths was only a selection. If the deaths. It is enough to cast doubt for me. But if course some will still just complain that people are only doubting because she is a pretty white blond...
This view slightly overlooks the fact that Letby was defended by very senior counsel, the prosecution have to disclose all their evidence, including stuff they didn't use, and the defence could seek and call whatever expert evidence they wanted, and in neither trial did they call any. It is obvious that they would have used exculpatory expert evidence if available. (Though that fact was not obvious to Private Eye in their slightly strange coverage).
for myself I see nothing in it, but it is going to run and run, with people who are much more than self publicising idiots getting involved. The Economist ran it a bit this week too. Also note that the professional implied criticism of prosecution and defence is slowly building pressure. (Also note the careful but landmine laden language in the Guardian story).
I have read some of the articles about the case. I have no idea if she did the crimes she has been convicted of, but there are seeming issues, yet again, with the use of statistics and juries in trials. The general public do not understand statistics and probability. Having a jury rule on a case that relies heavily on statistics, and often with experts who are themselves not experts in stats is always going to lead to some suspecting problems. In this case it's sometimes been suggested or implied that Letby was present when ALL deaths occured at the NICU but that was not the case. The chart showing her as at work for all the suspicious deaths was only a selection. If the deaths. It is enough to cast doubt for me. But if course some will still just complain that people are only doubting because she is a pretty white blond...
This view slightly overlooks the fact that Letby was defended by very senior counsel, the prosecution have to disclose all their evidence, including stuff they didn't use, and the defence could seek and call whatever expert evidence they wanted, and in neither trial did they call any. It is obvious that they would have used exculpatory expert evidence if available. (Though that fact was not obvious to Private Eye in their slightly strange coverage).
Was Sally Clarke not defended by senior counsel? Yet Meadows was still able to get it catastrophically wrong, leading to a conviction. I have less faith in the abilities of the defence team, senior or not, than perhaps you do. They don't tend to be statisticians either.
I agree with him about the pointlessness of changing to a hemicycle, it's one of those ideas which is floated as leading to some grand change which is just nonsense, but his final response is definitely only one an ex-MP would make.
Very odd, has he forgotten Mr Heseltine and the Mace?
The Houses of Parliament need serious money spent - I've seen £10 billion quoted - on repair and refurbishment. This could mean MPs decamping for up to six years to Richmond House but there is an opportunity to try something different. Many other legislative chambers are less adversarial in shape than the House of Commons.
Could political culture be affected by environment?
His independent White House campaign has fizzled, but the flow of bizarre stories of Robert F Kennedy Jr’s unorthodox handling of the carcasses of wild mammals has experienced no similar suspension...
Lord knows (and thankfully has NOT told the likes of us) what RFK Jr. is/was capable of doing to/with the mortal remains of some poor, blameless hedgehog.
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy, book claims:
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy. In the immediate aftermath of the mini-Budget, Ms Truss and her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, launched a desperate attempt to find spending cuts in an effort to restore stock-market confidence in their strategy.
A group of Ms Truss’s Tory aides met to discuss the issue. One of her senior advisers, Alex Boyd, “was told that Truss and Kwarteng were thinking they could still sort out the black hole with severe cuts”: “We’ve been told that they’re looking at stopping cancer treatment on the NHS.” ....
"She’s shouting at everyone that ‘We’ve got to find the money.’ When we tell her it can’t be done, she shouts back: ‘It’s not true. The money is there. You go and find it,’” ...
Speaking to The Independent, Mr Kwarteng said: “I wasn’t involved in any conversations about restricting healthcare, but that doesn’t mean the prime minister and her team didn’t discuss this.”
So Kwasi says Alex Boyd said that an unnamed advisor said that Truss was considering cutting cancer treatment on the NHS. How would one even go about 'cutting cancer treatment on the NHS'? Loathsome drivel. I really pity Kwarteng that he's reduced to slagging off his former employer and close associate as a some sort of pseudo-career. It's like a poundshop version of Prince Harry.
Yeah.
There’s no NHS Cancer Treatment On/Off stop button.
So you’d have to try and tell all the trusts to stop. The first thing they’d do after making sure it wasn’t a prank call, is say no. And call all the lawyers.
It would be possible to save on expensive chemotherapy by announcing restrictions. Political suicide probably, but possible if one wanted to specifically to cut cancer treatments that would be the way.
The simple truth is that there isn't much fat left to cut. Cut the admin staff and make me the worlds most expensive clinic coordinator if you like, but not financially sensible.
IIRC most chemotherapy isn’t especially expensive, anyway.
Sure, but you won't save money by cutting the cheap stuff.
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy, book claims:
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy. In the immediate aftermath of the mini-Budget, Ms Truss and her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, launched a desperate attempt to find spending cuts in an effort to restore stock-market confidence in their strategy.
A group of Ms Truss’s Tory aides met to discuss the issue. One of her senior advisers, Alex Boyd, “was told that Truss and Kwarteng were thinking they could still sort out the black hole with severe cuts”: “We’ve been told that they’re looking at stopping cancer treatment on the NHS.” ....
"She’s shouting at everyone that ‘We’ve got to find the money.’ When we tell her it can’t be done, she shouts back: ‘It’s not true. The money is there. You go and find it,’” ...
Speaking to The Independent, Mr Kwarteng said: “I wasn’t involved in any conversations about restricting healthcare, but that doesn’t mean the prime minister and her team didn’t discuss this.”
So Kwasi says Alex Boyd said that an unnamed advisor said that Truss was considering cutting cancer treatment on the NHS. How would one even go about 'cutting cancer treatment on the NHS'? Loathsome drivel. I really pity Kwarteng that he's reduced to slagging off his former employer and close associate as a some sort of pseudo-career. It's like a poundshop version of Prince Harry.
Yeah.
There’s no NHS Cancer Treatment On/Off stop button.
So you’d have to try and tell all the trusts to stop. The first thing they’d do after making sure it wasn’t a prank call, is say no. And call all the lawyers.
Err, did the Tory government ever try to implement impossible policies that sounded like prank calls and were stopped by the lawyers. Unfortunately on a monthly basis.......
You could cut the NHS budget by 5% and leave trusts to sort out what to cut, there would be zero need or indeed mechanism by which you could target 'cancer treatment', and the only reason such a bizarre concept has been dreamed up is to smear the Truss Government. The fact the Independent published it, and that avowedly intelligent people have given it airtime on PB is proof that Truss derangement syndrome is real and dangerous.
Love to know where you think there is 5% spare space in an NHS Trust's budget?
To be fair, you could restrict or qualify medical treatments further and/or freeze or cut staff salaries by 5-10% on top and cut staff numbers.
You'd have massively strikes, and lots leaving the profession, but it's a political choice that's available.
Greece didn't do dissimilar in the depths of its crisis.
You could get rid of 50% of non patient facing staff in the NHS and no one would notice. There's a lot of fat that can be trimmed but no one is willing to do it.
I think there's still a lack of honesty about all of these discussions around spending. The public sector has added ~700k people since 2019 it is the source of our budget deficit alongside interest due from linkers. We're spending massively more money on staffing costs and the only sustainable way we can cut taxes is by cutting staff, the idea that public sector pay was too low is a myth, if it was true then we wouldn't have gained 700k employees.
The other big area of spending that needs to be addressed is benefits, specifically sickness benefits. The current system is far, far too easy to game and far too generous. Universal Credit was a good idea but fundamentally relies on people's honesty and there are millions of people in the country who are not honest. The older system under Labour before the Tories switched to UC was better. The assessments were tougher and people who didn't want to work weren't able to live a life on benefits by claiming mental health issues. Labour managed to get the million people saying they had "undetectable but debilitating" back problems back into work and now they have to clear up the Tory mess with "mental health".
I don't think Labour will do anything on either of these points, in fact I think it will get worse because Starmer is weak.
"You could get rid of 50% of non patient facing staff in the NHS and no one would notice."
The right wingers have been saying that for decades. But it's already been done. Privatisation of many functions. Hence many of the NHS problems - lack of hygiene, patient malnutrition, over charging by commercial firms ...
There is vast headcount in the DOH, and NHS England (Scotland, Wales etc.) before you so much as get to an NHS trust, let alone a hospital.
My firm has been cutting non-frontline staff for years, wave after wave. The result is generally that people like me spend several hours a week doing our own admin, and we do it much less efficiently than the people who used to do it for a living. It's only now with proper investment in technology, rather than making fewer people do the same amount of unchanged activity, that we're starting to see some productivity savings coming back.
I daresay the health service has experienced much of the same. If you're going to do more with less then you absolutely have to change processes, not just headcount, and invest properly in automation.
I appreciate that, but I have described two layers of bureaucracy that really have no involvement, even in a supporting role, in patient care.
for myself I see nothing in it, but it is going to run and run, with people who are much more than self publicising idiots getting involved. The Economist ran it a bit this week too. Also note that the professional implied criticism of prosecution and defence is slowly building pressure. (Also note the careful but landmine laden language in the Guardian story).
I have read some of the articles about the case. I have no idea if she did the crimes she has been convicted of, but there are seeming issues, yet again, with the use of statistics and juries in trials. The general public do not understand statistics and probability. Having a jury rule on a case that relies heavily on statistics, and often with experts who are themselves not experts in stats is always going to lead to some suspecting problems. In this case it's sometimes been suggested or implied that Letby was present when ALL deaths occured at the NICU but that was not the case. The chart showing her as at work for all the suspicious deaths was only a selection. If the deaths. It is enough to cast doubt for me. But if course some will still just complain that people are only doubting because she is a pretty white blond...
This view slightly overlooks the fact that Letby was defended by very senior counsel, the prosecution have to disclose all their evidence, including stuff they didn't use, and the defence could seek and call whatever expert evidence they wanted, and in neither trial did they call any. It is obvious that they would have used exculpatory expert evidence if available. (Though that fact was not obvious to Private Eye in their slightly strange coverage).
for myself I see nothing in it, but it is going to run and run, with people who are much more than self publicising idiots getting involved. The Economist ran it a bit this week too. Also note that the professional implied criticism of prosecution and defence is slowly building pressure. (Also note the careful but landmine laden language in the Guardian story).
I have read some of the articles about the case. I have no idea if she did the crimes she has been convicted of, but there are seeming issues, yet again, with the use of statistics and juries in trials. The general public do not understand statistics and probability. Having a jury rule on a case that relies heavily on statistics, and often with experts who are themselves not experts in stats is always going to lead to some suspecting problems. In this case it's sometimes been suggested or implied that Letby was present when ALL deaths occured at the NICU but that was not the case. The chart showing her as at work for all the suspicious deaths was only a selection. If the deaths. It is enough to cast doubt for me. But if course some will still just complain that people are only doubting because she is a pretty white blond...
This view slightly overlooks the fact that Letby was defended by very senior counsel, the prosecution have to disclose all their evidence, including stuff they didn't use, and the defence could seek and call whatever expert evidence they wanted, and in neither trial did they call any. It is obvious that they would have used exculpatory expert evidence if available. (Though that fact was not obvious to Private Eye in their slightly strange coverage).
Was Sally Clarke not defended by senior counsel? Yet Meadows was still able to get it catastrophically wrong, leading to a conviction. I have less faith in the abilities of the defence team, senior or not, than perhaps you do. They don't tend to be statisticians either.
The Post Office retained a Very Senior Counsel. Who tried the genius idea of trying to get the Judge binned from the case for bias.
Perhaps Very Senior Counsel are legends in their own minds?
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy, book claims:
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy. In the immediate aftermath of the mini-Budget, Ms Truss and her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, launched a desperate attempt to find spending cuts in an effort to restore stock-market confidence in their strategy.
A group of Ms Truss’s Tory aides met to discuss the issue. One of her senior advisers, Alex Boyd, “was told that Truss and Kwarteng were thinking they could still sort out the black hole with severe cuts”: “We’ve been told that they’re looking at stopping cancer treatment on the NHS.” ....
"She’s shouting at everyone that ‘We’ve got to find the money.’ When we tell her it can’t be done, she shouts back: ‘It’s not true. The money is there. You go and find it,’” ...
Speaking to The Independent, Mr Kwarteng said: “I wasn’t involved in any conversations about restricting healthcare, but that doesn’t mean the prime minister and her team didn’t discuss this.”
So Kwasi says Alex Boyd said that an unnamed advisor said that Truss was considering cutting cancer treatment on the NHS. How would one even go about 'cutting cancer treatment on the NHS'? Loathsome drivel. I really pity Kwarteng that he's reduced to slagging off his former employer and close associate as a some sort of pseudo-career. It's like a poundshop version of Prince Harry.
Yeah.
There’s no NHS Cancer Treatment On/Off stop button.
So you’d have to try and tell all the trusts to stop. The first thing they’d do after making sure it wasn’t a prank call, is say no. And call all the lawyers.
Err, did the Tory government ever try to implement impossible policies that sounded like prank calls and were stopped by the lawyers. Unfortunately on a monthly basis.......
You could cut the NHS budget by 5% and leave trusts to sort out what to cut, there would be zero need or indeed mechanism by which you could target 'cancer treatment', and the only reason such a bizarre concept has been dreamed up is to smear the Truss Government. The fact the Independent published it, and that avowedly intelligent people have given it airtime on PB is proof that Truss derangement syndrome is real and dangerous.
Love to know where you think there is 5% spare space in an NHS Trust's budget?
To be fair, you could restrict or qualify medical treatments further and/or freeze or cut staff salaries by 5-10% on top and cut staff numbers.
You'd have massively strikes, and lots leaving the profession, but it's a political choice that's available.
Greece didn't do dissimilar in the depths of its crisis.
You could get rid of 50% of non patient facing staff in the NHS and no one would notice. There's a lot of fat that can be trimmed but no one is willing to do it.
I think there's still a lack of honesty about all of these discussions around spending. The public sector has added ~700k people since 2019 it is the source of our budget deficit alongside interest due from linkers. We're spending massively more money on staffing costs and the only sustainable way we can cut taxes is by cutting staff, the idea that public sector pay was too low is a myth, if it was true then we wouldn't have gained 700k employees.
The other big area of spending that needs to be addressed is benefits, specifically sickness benefits. The current system is far, far too easy to game and far too generous. Universal Credit was a good idea but fundamentally relies on people's honesty and there are millions of people in the country who are not honest. The older system under Labour before the Tories switched to UC was better. The assessments were tougher and people who didn't want to work weren't able to live a life on benefits by claiming mental health issues. Labour managed to get the million people saying they had "undetectable but debilitating" back problems back into work and now they have to clear up the Tory mess with "mental health".
I don't think Labour will do anything on either of these points, in fact I think it will get worse because Starmer is weak.
I'm not sure that's true.
For every revenue generator at an investment bank there are - what - 3 or 4 support staff. The same is true of the army, air force, etc.
Why would it not also be true for a medical service?
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy, book claims:
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy. In the immediate aftermath of the mini-Budget, Ms Truss and her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, launched a desperate attempt to find spending cuts in an effort to restore stock-market confidence in their strategy.
A group of Ms Truss’s Tory aides met to discuss the issue. One of her senior advisers, Alex Boyd, “was told that Truss and Kwarteng were thinking they could still sort out the black hole with severe cuts”: “We’ve been told that they’re looking at stopping cancer treatment on the NHS.” ....
"She’s shouting at everyone that ‘We’ve got to find the money.’ When we tell her it can’t be done, she shouts back: ‘It’s not true. The money is there. You go and find it,’” ...
Speaking to The Independent, Mr Kwarteng said: “I wasn’t involved in any conversations about restricting healthcare, but that doesn’t mean the prime minister and her team didn’t discuss this.”
So Kwasi says Alex Boyd said that an unnamed advisor said that Truss was considering cutting cancer treatment on the NHS. How would one even go about 'cutting cancer treatment on the NHS'? Loathsome drivel. I really pity Kwarteng that he's reduced to slagging off his former employer and close associate as a some sort of pseudo-career. It's like a poundshop version of Prince Harry.
Yeah.
There’s no NHS Cancer Treatment On/Off stop button.
So you’d have to try and tell all the trusts to stop. The first thing they’d do after making sure it wasn’t a prank call, is say no. And call all the lawyers.
It would be possible to save on expensive chemotherapy by announcing restrictions. Political suicide probably, but possible if one wanted to specifically to cut cancer treatments that would be the way.
The simple truth is that there isn't much fat left to cut. Cut the admin staff and make me the worlds most expensive clinic coordinator if you like, but not financially sensible.
IIRC most chemotherapy isn’t especially expensive, anyway.
Sure, but you won't save money by cutting the cheap stuff.
I just find the story farcical.
It’s three removed hearsay. Which puts it on a level with Farmy Farm.
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy, book claims:
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy. In the immediate aftermath of the mini-Budget, Ms Truss and her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, launched a desperate attempt to find spending cuts in an effort to restore stock-market confidence in their strategy.
A group of Ms Truss’s Tory aides met to discuss the issue. One of her senior advisers, Alex Boyd, “was told that Truss and Kwarteng were thinking they could still sort out the black hole with severe cuts”: “We’ve been told that they’re looking at stopping cancer treatment on the NHS.” ....
"She’s shouting at everyone that ‘We’ve got to find the money.’ When we tell her it can’t be done, she shouts back: ‘It’s not true. The money is there. You go and find it,’” ...
Speaking to The Independent, Mr Kwarteng said: “I wasn’t involved in any conversations about restricting healthcare, but that doesn’t mean the prime minister and her team didn’t discuss this.”
So Kwasi says Alex Boyd said that an unnamed advisor said that Truss was considering cutting cancer treatment on the NHS. How would one even go about 'cutting cancer treatment on the NHS'? Loathsome drivel. I really pity Kwarteng that he's reduced to slagging off his former employer and close associate as a some sort of pseudo-career. It's like a poundshop version of Prince Harry.
Yeah.
There’s no NHS Cancer Treatment On/Off stop button.
So you’d have to try and tell all the trusts to stop. The first thing they’d do after making sure it wasn’t a prank call, is say no. And call all the lawyers.
Err, did the Tory government ever try to implement impossible policies that sounded like prank calls and were stopped by the lawyers. Unfortunately on a monthly basis.......
You could cut the NHS budget by 5% and leave trusts to sort out what to cut, there would be zero need or indeed mechanism by which you could target 'cancer treatment', and the only reason such a bizarre concept has been dreamed up is to smear the Truss Government. The fact the Independent published it, and that avowedly intelligent people have given it airtime on PB is proof that Truss derangement syndrome is real and dangerous.
Love to know where you think there is 5% spare space in an NHS Trust's budget?
To be fair, you could restrict or qualify medical treatments further and/or freeze or cut staff salaries by 5-10% on top and cut staff numbers.
You'd have massively strikes, and lots leaving the profession, but it's a political choice that's available.
Greece didn't do dissimilar in the depths of its crisis.
You could get rid of 50% of non patient facing staff in the NHS and no one would notice. There's a lot of fat that can be trimmed but no one is willing to do it.
I think there's still a lack of honesty about all of these discussions around spending. The public sector has added ~700k people since 2019 it is the source of our budget deficit alongside interest due from linkers. We're spending massively more money on staffing costs and the only sustainable way we can cut taxes is by cutting staff, the idea that public sector pay was too low is a myth, if it was true then we wouldn't have gained 700k employees.
The other big area of spending that needs to be addressed is benefits, specifically sickness benefits. The current system is far, far too easy to game and far too generous. Universal Credit was a good idea but fundamentally relies on people's honesty and there are millions of people in the country who are not honest. The older system under Labour before the Tories switched to UC was better. The assessments were tougher and people who didn't want to work weren't able to live a life on benefits by claiming mental health issues. Labour managed to get the million people saying they had "undetectable but debilitating" back problems back into work and now they have to clear up the Tory mess with "mental health".
I don't think Labour will do anything on either of these points, in fact I think it will get worse because Starmer is weak.
The situation feels a bit like the breakdown of the soviet union. Everything is starting to fail, all the systems and processes set up are not delivering tangible outcomes.
I didn't think that things could get worse than the tories but it feels like they are under Starmer. The tories still had a vague idea that the economy needs to grow, this seems to be absent from the labour party. It is austerity without growth, but still they have the inbuilt perception that the state is there to solve every problem by spending money.
His independent White House campaign has fizzled, but the flow of bizarre stories of Robert F Kennedy Jr’s unorthodox handling of the carcasses of wild mammals has experienced no similar suspension...
Lord knows (and thankfully has NOT told the likes of us) what RFK Jr. is/was capable of doing to/with the mortal remains of some poor, blameless hedgehog.
There are so many moments in this most mad of all mad campaigns when I wish Tom Wolfe and Hunter were alive to bring their full literay guns to bear on this insanity.
Appointing two nutters, who've only just officially flipped themselves, to the transition team is a piece of genuine nuttery.
Confirmed: RFK Jr. and Tusli Gabbard are now working on the Trump transition team. Gabbard is also set to appear with Trump in battleground Wisconsin later this week.
for myself I see nothing in it, but it is going to run and run, with people who are much more than self publicising idiots getting involved. The Economist ran it a bit this week too. Also note that the professional implied criticism of prosecution and defence is slowly building pressure. (Also note the careful but landmine laden language in the Guardian story).
I have read some of the articles about the case. I have no idea if she did the crimes she has been convicted of, but there are seeming issues, yet again, with the use of statistics and juries in trials. The general public do not understand statistics and probability. Having a jury rule on a case that relies heavily on statistics, and often with experts who are themselves not experts in stats is always going to lead to some suspecting problems. In this case it's sometimes been suggested or implied that Letby was present when ALL deaths occured at the NICU but that was not the case. The chart showing her as at work for all the suspicious deaths was only a selection. If the deaths. It is enough to cast doubt for me. But if course some will still just complain that people are only doubting because she is a pretty white blond...
This is almost certainly a factor.
Were she unattractive and older, yet alone a male, there wouldn't be an appeal.
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy, book claims:
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy. In the immediate aftermath of the mini-Budget, Ms Truss and her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, launched a desperate attempt to find spending cuts in an effort to restore stock-market confidence in their strategy.
A group of Ms Truss’s Tory aides met to discuss the issue. One of her senior advisers, Alex Boyd, “was told that Truss and Kwarteng were thinking they could still sort out the black hole with severe cuts”: “We’ve been told that they’re looking at stopping cancer treatment on the NHS.” ....
"She’s shouting at everyone that ‘We’ve got to find the money.’ When we tell her it can’t be done, she shouts back: ‘It’s not true. The money is there. You go and find it,’” ...
Speaking to The Independent, Mr Kwarteng said: “I wasn’t involved in any conversations about restricting healthcare, but that doesn’t mean the prime minister and her team didn’t discuss this.”
So Kwasi says Alex Boyd said that an unnamed advisor said that Truss was considering cutting cancer treatment on the NHS. How would one even go about 'cutting cancer treatment on the NHS'? Loathsome drivel. I really pity Kwarteng that he's reduced to slagging off his former employer and close associate as a some sort of pseudo-career. It's like a poundshop version of Prince Harry.
Yeah.
There’s no NHS Cancer Treatment On/Off stop button.
So you’d have to try and tell all the trusts to stop. The first thing they’d do after making sure it wasn’t a prank call, is say no. And call all the lawyers.
Err, did the Tory government ever try to implement impossible policies that sounded like prank calls and were stopped by the lawyers. Unfortunately on a monthly basis.......
You could cut the NHS budget by 5% and leave trusts to sort out what to cut, there would be zero need or indeed mechanism by which you could target 'cancer treatment', and the only reason such a bizarre concept has been dreamed up is to smear the Truss Government. The fact the Independent published it, and that avowedly intelligent people have given it airtime on PB is proof that Truss derangement syndrome is real and dangerous.
Love to know where you think there is 5% spare space in an NHS Trust's budget?
To be fair, you could restrict or qualify medical treatments further and/or freeze or cut staff salaries by 5-10% on top and cut staff numbers.
You'd have massively strikes, and lots leaving the profession, but it's a political choice that's available.
Greece didn't do dissimilar in the depths of its crisis.
You could get rid of 50% of non patient facing staff in the NHS and no one would notice. There's a lot of fat that can be trimmed but no one is willing to do it.
I think there's still a lack of honesty about all of these discussions around spending. The public sector has added ~700k people since 2019 it is the source of our budget deficit alongside interest due from linkers. We're spending massively more money on staffing costs and the only sustainable way we can cut taxes is by cutting staff, the idea that public sector pay was too low is a myth, if it was true then we wouldn't have gained 700k employees.
The other big area of spending that needs to be addressed is benefits, specifically sickness benefits. The current system is far, far too easy to game and far too generous. Universal Credit was a good idea but fundamentally relies on people's honesty and there are millions of people in the country who are not honest. The older system under Labour before the Tories switched to UC was better. The assessments were tougher and people who didn't want to work weren't able to live a life on benefits by claiming mental health issues. Labour managed to get the million people saying they had "undetectable but debilitating" back problems back into work and now they have to clear up the Tory mess with "mental health".
I don't think Labour will do anything on either of these points, in fact I think it will get worse because Starmer is weak.
I'm not sure that's true.
For every revenue generator at an investment bank there are - what - 3 or 4 support staff. The same is true of the army, air force, etc.
Why would it not also be true for a medical service?
Got to say the idea that the nhs has too many let alone enough admin staff is for the birds. Remember my job is to automate sales and customer service, there is only so much I can do to automate things away and once the first few stages of work is done I rapidly get to the point where it isn’t economically viable
Now a lot of companies will keep on going but I get to the point that I get bored and a new project is way more fun than the last few bits of pointless work.
Plus the worst thing you can do is give customer service staff all the difficult jobs, once in a while the random easy to fix one is fun to deal with..,
I agree with him about the pointlessness of changing to a hemicycle, it's one of those ideas which is floated as leading to some grand change which is just nonsense, but his final response is definitely only one an ex-MP would make.
Very odd, has he forgotten Mr Heseltine and the Mace?
The Houses of Parliament need serious money spent - I've seen £10 billion quoted - on repair and refurbishment. This could mean MPs decamping for up to six years to Richmond House but there is an opportunity to try something different. Many other legislative chambers are less adversarial in shape than the House of Commons.
Could political culture be affected by environment?
Having enough seats for all the legislators (HoC anyway) would be a considerable improvement.
Mr Cameron proposed easing the seat shortage by 8%, but it was never enacted.
The seat reduction was part of Cameron's gerrymandering scheme. The point was that such a reduction would need every boundary to be redrawn.
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy, book claims:
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy. In the immediate aftermath of the mini-Budget, Ms Truss and her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, launched a desperate attempt to find spending cuts in an effort to restore stock-market confidence in their strategy.
A group of Ms Truss’s Tory aides met to discuss the issue. One of her senior advisers, Alex Boyd, “was told that Truss and Kwarteng were thinking they could still sort out the black hole with severe cuts”: “We’ve been told that they’re looking at stopping cancer treatment on the NHS.” ....
"She’s shouting at everyone that ‘We’ve got to find the money.’ When we tell her it can’t be done, she shouts back: ‘It’s not true. The money is there. You go and find it,’” ...
Speaking to The Independent, Mr Kwarteng said: “I wasn’t involved in any conversations about restricting healthcare, but that doesn’t mean the prime minister and her team didn’t discuss this.”
So Kwasi says Alex Boyd said that an unnamed advisor said that Truss was considering cutting cancer treatment on the NHS. How would one even go about 'cutting cancer treatment on the NHS'? Loathsome drivel. I really pity Kwarteng that he's reduced to slagging off his former employer and close associate as a some sort of pseudo-career. It's like a poundshop version of Prince Harry.
Yeah.
There’s no NHS Cancer Treatment On/Off stop button.
So you’d have to try and tell all the trusts to stop. The first thing they’d do after making sure it wasn’t a prank call, is say no. And call all the lawyers.
Err, did the Tory government ever try to implement impossible policies that sounded like prank calls and were stopped by the lawyers. Unfortunately on a monthly basis.......
You could cut the NHS budget by 5% and leave trusts to sort out what to cut, there would be zero need or indeed mechanism by which you could target 'cancer treatment', and the only reason such a bizarre concept has been dreamed up is to smear the Truss Government. The fact the Independent published it, and that avowedly intelligent people have given it airtime on PB is proof that Truss derangement syndrome is real and dangerous.
Love to know where you think there is 5% spare space in an NHS Trust's budget?
To be fair, you could restrict or qualify medical treatments further and/or freeze or cut staff salaries by 5-10% on top and cut staff numbers.
You'd have massively strikes, and lots leaving the profession, but it's a political choice that's available.
Greece didn't do dissimilar in the depths of its crisis.
You could get rid of 50% of non patient facing staff in the NHS and no one would notice. There's a lot of fat that can be trimmed but no one is willing to do it.
I think there's still a lack of honesty about all of these discussions around spending. The public sector has added ~700k people since 2019 it is the source of our budget deficit alongside interest due from linkers. We're spending massively more money on staffing costs and the only sustainable way we can cut taxes is by cutting staff, the idea that public sector pay was too low is a myth, if it was true then we wouldn't have gained 700k employees.
The other big area of spending that needs to be addressed is benefits, specifically sickness benefits. The current system is far, far too easy to game and far too generous. Universal Credit was a good idea but fundamentally relies on people's honesty and there are millions of people in the country who are not honest. The older system under Labour before the Tories switched to UC was better. The assessments were tougher and people who didn't want to work weren't able to live a life on benefits by claiming mental health issues. Labour managed to get the million people saying they had "undetectable but debilitating" back problems back into work and now they have to clear up the Tory mess with "mental health".
I don't think Labour will do anything on either of these points, in fact I think it will get worse because Starmer is weak.
"You could get rid of 50% of non patient facing staff in the NHS and no one would notice."
The right wingers have been saying that for decades. But it's already been done. Privatisation of many functions. Hence many of the NHS problems - lack of hygiene, patient malnutrition, over charging by commercial firms ...
There is vast headcount in the DOH, and NHS England (Scotland, Wales etc.) before you so much as get to an NHS trust, let alone a hospital.
My firm has been cutting non-frontline staff for years, wave after wave. The result is generally that people like me spend several hours a week doing our own admin, and we do it much less efficiently than the people who used to do it for a living. It's only now with proper investment in technology, rather than making fewer people do the same amount of unchanged activity, that we're starting to see some productivity savings coming back.
I daresay the health service has experienced much of the same. If you're going to do more with less then you absolutely have to change processes, not just headcount, and invest properly in automation.
I appreciate that, but I have described two layers of bureaucracy that really have no involvement, even in a supporting role, in patient care.
Apart from Training, public health, administering screening programmes, assessing and policing quality of outcomes etc etc.
Just as there's more to an air force than pilots, there's more to a health system than doctors and nurses.
Want to improve Health Service productivity? Sort out Social Care.
WHY CAN’T HOSPITALS DISCHARGE PATIENTS?
UK population ⬆️7% - 2012-23
GPs ⬇️ 7% District nurses ⬇️42% Health Visitors ⬇️30% Learning Disability Nurses⬇️23% School Nurses⬇️25% Nursing home beds ⬇️ 12% Residential Care home beds ⬇️16% Social Services ⬇️⬇️
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy, book claims:
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy. In the immediate aftermath of the mini-Budget, Ms Truss and her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, launched a desperate attempt to find spending cuts in an effort to restore stock-market confidence in their strategy.
A group of Ms Truss’s Tory aides met to discuss the issue. One of her senior advisers, Alex Boyd, “was told that Truss and Kwarteng were thinking they could still sort out the black hole with severe cuts”: “We’ve been told that they’re looking at stopping cancer treatment on the NHS.” ....
"She’s shouting at everyone that ‘We’ve got to find the money.’ When we tell her it can’t be done, she shouts back: ‘It’s not true. The money is there. You go and find it,’” ...
Speaking to The Independent, Mr Kwarteng said: “I wasn’t involved in any conversations about restricting healthcare, but that doesn’t mean the prime minister and her team didn’t discuss this.”
So Kwasi says Alex Boyd said that an unnamed advisor said that Truss was considering cutting cancer treatment on the NHS. How would one even go about 'cutting cancer treatment on the NHS'? Loathsome drivel. I really pity Kwarteng that he's reduced to slagging off his former employer and close associate as a some sort of pseudo-career. It's like a poundshop version of Prince Harry.
Yeah.
There’s no NHS Cancer Treatment On/Off stop button.
So you’d have to try and tell all the trusts to stop. The first thing they’d do after making sure it wasn’t a prank call, is say no. And call all the lawyers.
Err, did the Tory government ever try to implement impossible policies that sounded like prank calls and were stopped by the lawyers. Unfortunately on a monthly basis.......
You could cut the NHS budget by 5% and leave trusts to sort out what to cut, there would be zero need or indeed mechanism by which you could target 'cancer treatment', and the only reason such a bizarre concept has been dreamed up is to smear the Truss Government. The fact the Independent published it, and that avowedly intelligent people have given it airtime on PB is proof that Truss derangement syndrome is real and dangerous.
Love to know where you think there is 5% spare space in an NHS Trust's budget?
To be fair, you could restrict or qualify medical treatments further and/or freeze or cut staff salaries by 5-10% on top and cut staff numbers.
You'd have massively strikes, and lots leaving the profession, but it's a political choice that's available.
Greece didn't do dissimilar in the depths of its crisis.
You could get rid of 50% of non patient facing staff in the NHS and no one would notice. There's a lot of fat that can be trimmed but no one is willing to do it.
I think there's still a lack of honesty about all of these discussions around spending. The public sector has added ~700k people since 2019 it is the source of our budget deficit alongside interest due from linkers. We're spending massively more money on staffing costs and the only sustainable way we can cut taxes is by cutting staff, the idea that public sector pay was too low is a myth, if it was true then we wouldn't have gained 700k employees.
The other big area of spending that needs to be addressed is benefits, specifically sickness benefits. The current system is far, far too easy to game and far too generous. Universal Credit was a good idea but fundamentally relies on people's honesty and there are millions of people in the country who are not honest. The older system under Labour before the Tories switched to UC was better. The assessments were tougher and people who didn't want to work weren't able to live a life on benefits by claiming mental health issues. Labour managed to get the million people saying they had "undetectable but debilitating" back problems back into work and now they have to clear up the Tory mess with "mental health".
I don't think Labour will do anything on either of these points, in fact I think it will get worse because Starmer is weak.
Just worth noting almost all of that growth in the public sector has been in central Government - more than half a million since 2019. :Local Government headcount has been almost static (a very small decline in fact).
In 2010, the Coalition took the axe to local Government and about a million jobs were lost in the 2010s in that sector.
Central Government and especially the NHS were largely unaffected.
I'd be interested in an exploration of a counter-factual where the opposite happened.
Massive increases in social care spending as NHS budgets are cut, for example. University education down, but secondary schools up. No HS2, but an expansion of local bus services rather than the 50% cut we got. I could dig into COFOG data and make it my first PB piece...
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy, book claims:
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy. In the immediate aftermath of the mini-Budget, Ms Truss and her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, launched a desperate attempt to find spending cuts in an effort to restore stock-market confidence in their strategy.
A group of Ms Truss’s Tory aides met to discuss the issue. One of her senior advisers, Alex Boyd, “was told that Truss and Kwarteng were thinking they could still sort out the black hole with severe cuts”: “We’ve been told that they’re looking at stopping cancer treatment on the NHS.” ....
"She’s shouting at everyone that ‘We’ve got to find the money.’ When we tell her it can’t be done, she shouts back: ‘It’s not true. The money is there. You go and find it,’” ...
Speaking to The Independent, Mr Kwarteng said: “I wasn’t involved in any conversations about restricting healthcare, but that doesn’t mean the prime minister and her team didn’t discuss this.”
So Kwasi says Alex Boyd said that an unnamed advisor said that Truss was considering cutting cancer treatment on the NHS. How would one even go about 'cutting cancer treatment on the NHS'? Loathsome drivel. I really pity Kwarteng that he's reduced to slagging off his former employer and close associate as a some sort of pseudo-career. It's like a poundshop version of Prince Harry.
Yeah.
There’s no NHS Cancer Treatment On/Off stop button.
So you’d have to try and tell all the trusts to stop. The first thing they’d do after making sure it wasn’t a prank call, is say no. And call all the lawyers.
Err, did the Tory government ever try to implement impossible policies that sounded like prank calls and were stopped by the lawyers. Unfortunately on a monthly basis.......
You could cut the NHS budget by 5% and leave trusts to sort out what to cut, there would be zero need or indeed mechanism by which you could target 'cancer treatment', and the only reason such a bizarre concept has been dreamed up is to smear the Truss Government. The fact the Independent published it, and that avowedly intelligent people have given it airtime on PB is proof that Truss derangement syndrome is real and dangerous.
Love to know where you think there is 5% spare space in an NHS Trust's budget?
To be fair, you could restrict or qualify medical treatments further and/or freeze or cut staff salaries by 5-10% on top and cut staff numbers.
You'd have massively strikes, and lots leaving the profession, but it's a political choice that's available.
Greece didn't do dissimilar in the depths of its crisis.
You could get rid of 50% of non patient facing staff in the NHS and no one would notice. There's a lot of fat that can be trimmed but no one is willing to do it.
I think there's still a lack of honesty about all of these discussions around spending. The public sector has added ~700k people since 2019 it is the source of our budget deficit alongside interest due from linkers. We're spending massively more money on staffing costs and the only sustainable way we can cut taxes is by cutting staff, the idea that public sector pay was too low is a myth, if it was true then we wouldn't have gained 700k employees.
The other big area of spending that needs to be addressed is benefits, specifically sickness benefits. The current system is far, far too easy to game and far too generous. Universal Credit was a good idea but fundamentally relies on people's honesty and there are millions of people in the country who are not honest. The older system under Labour before the Tories switched to UC was better. The assessments were tougher and people who didn't want to work weren't able to live a life on benefits by claiming mental health issues. Labour managed to get the million people saying they had "undetectable but debilitating" back problems back into work and now they have to clear up the Tory mess with "mental health".
I don't think Labour will do anything on either of these points, in fact I think it will get worse because Starmer is weak.
I'm not sure that's true.
For every revenue generator at an investment bank there are - what - 3 or 4 support staff. The same is true of the army, air force, etc.
Why would it not also be true for a medical service?
At my firm there are a lot who do nothing but harry, police and make demands of - but don't help - the revenue earning staff and are interested primarily covering their own arse with respect to due process rather than finding practical solutions to help the business.
It's those that need to be attacked. There's so much stuff that policy creates that absorbs huge amounts of time and doesn't make sense.
for myself I see nothing in it, but it is going to run and run, with people who are much more than self publicising idiots getting involved. The Economist ran it a bit this week too. Also note that the professional implied criticism of prosecution and defence is slowly building pressure. (Also note the careful but landmine laden language in the Guardian story).
I have read some of the articles about the case. I have no idea if she did the crimes she has been convicted of, but there are seeming issues, yet again, with the use of statistics and juries in trials. The general public do not understand statistics and probability. Having a jury rule on a case that relies heavily on statistics, and often with experts who are themselves not experts in stats is always going to lead to some suspecting problems. In this case it's sometimes been suggested or implied that Letby was present when ALL deaths occured at the NICU but that was not the case. The chart showing her as at work for all the suspicious deaths was only a selection. If the deaths. It is enough to cast doubt for me. But if course some will still just complain that people are only doubting because she is a pretty white blond...
This is almost certainly a factor.
Were she unattractive and older, yet alone a male, there wouldn't be an appeal.
So, what percentage of the UK population will be applying for Oasis tickets?
45%?
I am going to give if a miss so that is one more available
They’ve got a couple of million tickets to sell, just for the UK and RoI dates announced today. They’ll likely all go in minutes on Sunday morning, quickly followed by a million of them being up for resale at massive markups, despite assurances that this won’t be the case.
Rumour has it that oasis have 10 nights booked at Wembley and only 4 are on sale.
Once the weekends have gone the Tuesday / Wednesday Thursday nights will be made available and people will buy them.
Personally I don’t see the point, Jarvis is great live, Liam / Noel / Damon I ain’t bothered.
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy, book claims:
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy. In the immediate aftermath of the mini-Budget, Ms Truss and her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, launched a desperate attempt to find spending cuts in an effort to restore stock-market confidence in their strategy.
A group of Ms Truss’s Tory aides met to discuss the issue. One of her senior advisers, Alex Boyd, “was told that Truss and Kwarteng were thinking they could still sort out the black hole with severe cuts”: “We’ve been told that they’re looking at stopping cancer treatment on the NHS.” ....
"She’s shouting at everyone that ‘We’ve got to find the money.’ When we tell her it can’t be done, she shouts back: ‘It’s not true. The money is there. You go and find it,’” ...
Speaking to The Independent, Mr Kwarteng said: “I wasn’t involved in any conversations about restricting healthcare, but that doesn’t mean the prime minister and her team didn’t discuss this.”
So Kwasi says Alex Boyd said that an unnamed advisor said that Truss was considering cutting cancer treatment on the NHS. How would one even go about 'cutting cancer treatment on the NHS'? Loathsome drivel. I really pity Kwarteng that he's reduced to slagging off his former employer and close associate as a some sort of pseudo-career. It's like a poundshop version of Prince Harry.
Yeah.
There’s no NHS Cancer Treatment On/Off stop button.
So you’d have to try and tell all the trusts to stop. The first thing they’d do after making sure it wasn’t a prank call, is say no. And call all the lawyers.
Err, did the Tory government ever try to implement impossible policies that sounded like prank calls and were stopped by the lawyers. Unfortunately on a monthly basis.......
You could cut the NHS budget by 5% and leave trusts to sort out what to cut, there would be zero need or indeed mechanism by which you could target 'cancer treatment', and the only reason such a bizarre concept has been dreamed up is to smear the Truss Government. The fact the Independent published it, and that avowedly intelligent people have given it airtime on PB is proof that Truss derangement syndrome is real and dangerous.
Love to know where you think there is 5% spare space in an NHS Trust's budget?
To be fair, you could restrict or qualify medical treatments further and/or freeze or cut staff salaries by 5-10% on top and cut staff numbers.
You'd have massively strikes, and lots leaving the profession, but it's a political choice that's available.
Greece didn't do dissimilar in the depths of its crisis.
You could get rid of 50% of non patient facing staff in the NHS and no one would notice. There's a lot of fat that can be trimmed but no one is willing to do it.
I think there's still a lack of honesty about all of these discussions around spending. The public sector has added ~700k people since 2019 it is the source of our budget deficit alongside interest due from linkers. We're spending massively more money on staffing costs and the only sustainable way we can cut taxes is by cutting staff, the idea that public sector pay was too low is a myth, if it was true then we wouldn't have gained 700k employees.
The other big area of spending that needs to be addressed is benefits, specifically sickness benefits. The current system is far, far too easy to game and far too generous. Universal Credit was a good idea but fundamentally relies on people's honesty and there are millions of people in the country who are not honest. The older system under Labour before the Tories switched to UC was better. The assessments were tougher and people who didn't want to work weren't able to live a life on benefits by claiming mental health issues. Labour managed to get the million people saying they had "undetectable but debilitating" back problems back into work and now they have to clear up the Tory mess with "mental health".
I don't think Labour will do anything on either of these points, in fact I think it will get worse because Starmer is weak.
I'm not sure that's true.
For every revenue generator at an investment bank there are - what - 3 or 4 support staff. The same is true of the army, air force, etc.
Why would it not also be true for a medical service?
At my firm there are a lot who do nothing but harry, police and make demands of - but don't help - the revenue earning staff and are interested primarily covering their own arse with respect to due process rather than finding practical solutions to help the business.
It's those that need to be attacked. There's so much stuff that policy creates that absorbs huge amounts of time and doesn't make sense.
This will be the case in the public sector too.
Have you worked in the public sector, because if it’s not social care or directly attached to social care the job will have usually been cut by now.
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy, book claims:
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy. In the immediate aftermath of the mini-Budget, Ms Truss and her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, launched a desperate attempt to find spending cuts in an effort to restore stock-market confidence in their strategy.
A group of Ms Truss’s Tory aides met to discuss the issue. One of her senior advisers, Alex Boyd, “was told that Truss and Kwarteng were thinking they could still sort out the black hole with severe cuts”: “We’ve been told that they’re looking at stopping cancer treatment on the NHS.” ....
"She’s shouting at everyone that ‘We’ve got to find the money.’ When we tell her it can’t be done, she shouts back: ‘It’s not true. The money is there. You go and find it,’” ...
Speaking to The Independent, Mr Kwarteng said: “I wasn’t involved in any conversations about restricting healthcare, but that doesn’t mean the prime minister and her team didn’t discuss this.”
So Kwasi says Alex Boyd said that an unnamed advisor said that Truss was considering cutting cancer treatment on the NHS. How would one even go about 'cutting cancer treatment on the NHS'? Loathsome drivel. I really pity Kwarteng that he's reduced to slagging off his former employer and close associate as a some sort of pseudo-career. It's like a poundshop version of Prince Harry.
Yeah.
There’s no NHS Cancer Treatment On/Off stop button.
So you’d have to try and tell all the trusts to stop. The first thing they’d do after making sure it wasn’t a prank call, is say no. And call all the lawyers.
Err, did the Tory government ever try to implement impossible policies that sounded like prank calls and were stopped by the lawyers. Unfortunately on a monthly basis.......
You could cut the NHS budget by 5% and leave trusts to sort out what to cut, there would be zero need or indeed mechanism by which you could target 'cancer treatment', and the only reason such a bizarre concept has been dreamed up is to smear the Truss Government. The fact the Independent published it, and that avowedly intelligent people have given it airtime on PB is proof that Truss derangement syndrome is real and dangerous.
Love to know where you think there is 5% spare space in an NHS Trust's budget?
To be fair, you could restrict or qualify medical treatments further and/or freeze or cut staff salaries by 5-10% on top and cut staff numbers.
You'd have massively strikes, and lots leaving the profession, but it's a political choice that's available.
Greece didn't do dissimilar in the depths of its crisis.
You could get rid of 50% of non patient facing staff in the NHS and no one would notice. There's a lot of fat that can be trimmed but no one is willing to do it.
I think there's still a lack of honesty about all of these discussions around spending. The public sector has added ~700k people since 2019 it is the source of our budget deficit alongside interest due from linkers. We're spending massively more money on staffing costs and the only sustainable way we can cut taxes is by cutting staff, the idea that public sector pay was too low is a myth, if it was true then we wouldn't have gained 700k employees.
The other big area of spending that needs to be addressed is benefits, specifically sickness benefits. The current system is far, far too easy to game and far too generous. Universal Credit was a good idea but fundamentally relies on people's honesty and there are millions of people in the country who are not honest. The older system under Labour before the Tories switched to UC was better. The assessments were tougher and people who didn't want to work weren't able to live a life on benefits by claiming mental health issues. Labour managed to get the million people saying they had "undetectable but debilitating" back problems back into work and now they have to clear up the Tory mess with "mental health".
I don't think Labour will do anything on either of these points, in fact I think it will get worse because Starmer is weak.
The situation feels a bit like the breakdown of the soviet union. Everything is starting to fail, all the systems and processes set up are not delivering tangible outcomes.
I didn't think that things could get worse than the tories but it feels like they are under Starmer. The tories still had a vague idea that the economy needs to grow, this seems to be absent from the labour party. It is austerity without growth, but still they have the inbuilt perception that the state is there to solve every problem by spending money.
I find myself pining for having Sunak back.
Yes, really.
New Labour did everything in its power to prevent a Conservative revival.
Current Labour is doing all in its power to promote a Conservative revival.
I’m quite confident that a year from now, the Conservatives will be leading in the polls, and the 2026/27 local elections will be grim for Labour.
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy, book claims:
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy. In the immediate aftermath of the mini-Budget, Ms Truss and her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, launched a desperate attempt to find spending cuts in an effort to restore stock-market confidence in their strategy.
A group of Ms Truss’s Tory aides met to discuss the issue. One of her senior advisers, Alex Boyd, “was told that Truss and Kwarteng were thinking they could still sort out the black hole with severe cuts”: “We’ve been told that they’re looking at stopping cancer treatment on the NHS.” ....
"She’s shouting at everyone that ‘We’ve got to find the money.’ When we tell her it can’t be done, she shouts back: ‘It’s not true. The money is there. You go and find it,’” ...
Speaking to The Independent, Mr Kwarteng said: “I wasn’t involved in any conversations about restricting healthcare, but that doesn’t mean the prime minister and her team didn’t discuss this.”
So Kwasi says Alex Boyd said that an unnamed advisor said that Truss was considering cutting cancer treatment on the NHS. How would one even go about 'cutting cancer treatment on the NHS'? Loathsome drivel. I really pity Kwarteng that he's reduced to slagging off his former employer and close associate as a some sort of pseudo-career. It's like a poundshop version of Prince Harry.
Yeah.
There’s no NHS Cancer Treatment On/Off stop button.
So you’d have to try and tell all the trusts to stop. The first thing they’d do after making sure it wasn’t a prank call, is say no. And call all the lawyers.
Err, did the Tory government ever try to implement impossible policies that sounded like prank calls and were stopped by the lawyers. Unfortunately on a monthly basis.......
You could cut the NHS budget by 5% and leave trusts to sort out what to cut, there would be zero need or indeed mechanism by which you could target 'cancer treatment', and the only reason such a bizarre concept has been dreamed up is to smear the Truss Government. The fact the Independent published it, and that avowedly intelligent people have given it airtime on PB is proof that Truss derangement syndrome is real and dangerous.
Love to know where you think there is 5% spare space in an NHS Trust's budget?
To be fair, you could restrict or qualify medical treatments further and/or freeze or cut staff salaries by 5-10% on top and cut staff numbers.
You'd have massively strikes, and lots leaving the profession, but it's a political choice that's available.
Greece didn't do dissimilar in the depths of its crisis.
You could get rid of 50% of non patient facing staff in the NHS and no one would notice. There's a lot of fat that can be trimmed but no one is willing to do it.
I think there's still a lack of honesty about all of these discussions around spending. The public sector has added ~700k people since 2019 it is the source of our budget deficit alongside interest due from linkers. We're spending massively more money on staffing costs and the only sustainable way we can cut taxes is by cutting staff, the idea that public sector pay was too low is a myth, if it was true then we wouldn't have gained 700k employees.
The other big area of spending that needs to be addressed is benefits, specifically sickness benefits. The current system is far, far too easy to game and far too generous. Universal Credit was a good idea but fundamentally relies on people's honesty and there are millions of people in the country who are not honest. The older system under Labour before the Tories switched to UC was better. The assessments were tougher and people who didn't want to work weren't able to live a life on benefits by claiming mental health issues. Labour managed to get the million people saying they had "undetectable but debilitating" back problems back into work and now they have to clear up the Tory mess with "mental health".
I don't think Labour will do anything on either of these points, in fact I think it will get worse because Starmer is weak.
I'm not sure that's true.
For every revenue generator at an investment bank there are - what - 3 or 4 support staff. The same is true of the army, air force, etc.
Why would it not also be true for a medical service?
Process automation is what's needed, there are too many people in the NHS ticking too many boxes for forms that never get used after being filled in.
This is genuinely where the government should start to invest in AI solutions, three of our customers have deployed AI chat bots in the last year or so and all of them have had a marked increase in NPS. Obviously their datasets have been built in a way that the chat bots are able to access what they need about customers and resolutions but theres no reason government departments couldn't do the same. I'd rather have 3 or 4 ML Engineers and MLOps people plus a few analysts and analytics engineers to setup and maintain it all than a bunch of admin staff who barely make a difference to patients.
You don't want to dig into some of the nonsense on the internet relating to NFTs and Crypto.
Trump has discovered his fans will pay for anything, it really is reminiscent of some of those horrid televangelist 'churches' which harrangue people for cash constantly. But then again I'd not want to be on any party's mailing list out in the USA with all the begging emails.
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy, book claims:
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy. In the immediate aftermath of the mini-Budget, Ms Truss and her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, launched a desperate attempt to find spending cuts in an effort to restore stock-market confidence in their strategy.
A group of Ms Truss’s Tory aides met to discuss the issue. One of her senior advisers, Alex Boyd, “was told that Truss and Kwarteng were thinking they could still sort out the black hole with severe cuts”: “We’ve been told that they’re looking at stopping cancer treatment on the NHS.” ....
"She’s shouting at everyone that ‘We’ve got to find the money.’ When we tell her it can’t be done, she shouts back: ‘It’s not true. The money is there. You go and find it,’” ...
Speaking to The Independent, Mr Kwarteng said: “I wasn’t involved in any conversations about restricting healthcare, but that doesn’t mean the prime minister and her team didn’t discuss this.”
So Kwasi says Alex Boyd said that an unnamed advisor said that Truss was considering cutting cancer treatment on the NHS. How would one even go about 'cutting cancer treatment on the NHS'? Loathsome drivel. I really pity Kwarteng that he's reduced to slagging off his former employer and close associate as a some sort of pseudo-career. It's like a poundshop version of Prince Harry.
Yeah.
There’s no NHS Cancer Treatment On/Off stop button.
So you’d have to try and tell all the trusts to stop. The first thing they’d do after making sure it wasn’t a prank call, is say no. And call all the lawyers.
Err, did the Tory government ever try to implement impossible policies that sounded like prank calls and were stopped by the lawyers. Unfortunately on a monthly basis.......
You could cut the NHS budget by 5% and leave trusts to sort out what to cut, there would be zero need or indeed mechanism by which you could target 'cancer treatment', and the only reason such a bizarre concept has been dreamed up is to smear the Truss Government. The fact the Independent published it, and that avowedly intelligent people have given it airtime on PB is proof that Truss derangement syndrome is real and dangerous.
Love to know where you think there is 5% spare space in an NHS Trust's budget?
To be fair, you could restrict or qualify medical treatments further and/or freeze or cut staff salaries by 5-10% on top and cut staff numbers.
You'd have massively strikes, and lots leaving the profession, but it's a political choice that's available.
Greece didn't do dissimilar in the depths of its crisis.
You could get rid of 50% of non patient facing staff in the NHS and no one would notice. There's a lot of fat that can be trimmed but no one is willing to do it.
I think there's still a lack of honesty about all of these discussions around spending. The public sector has added ~700k people since 2019 it is the source of our budget deficit alongside interest due from linkers. We're spending massively more money on staffing costs and the only sustainable way we can cut taxes is by cutting staff, the idea that public sector pay was too low is a myth, if it was true then we wouldn't have gained 700k employees.
The other big area of spending that needs to be addressed is benefits, specifically sickness benefits. The current system is far, far too easy to game and far too generous. Universal Credit was a good idea but fundamentally relies on people's honesty and there are millions of people in the country who are not honest. The older system under Labour before the Tories switched to UC was better. The assessments were tougher and people who didn't want to work weren't able to live a life on benefits by claiming mental health issues. Labour managed to get the million people saying they had "undetectable but debilitating" back problems back into work and now they have to clear up the Tory mess with "mental health".
I don't think Labour will do anything on either of these points, in fact I think it will get worse because Starmer is weak.
"You could get rid of 50% of non patient facing staff in the NHS and no one would notice."
The right wingers have been saying that for decades. But it's already been done. Privatisation of many functions. Hence many of the NHS problems - lack of hygiene, patient malnutrition, over charging by commercial firms ...
There is vast headcount in the DOH, and NHS England (Scotland, Wales etc.) before you so much as get to an NHS trust, let alone a hospital.
My firm has been cutting non-frontline staff for years, wave after wave. The result is generally that people like me spend several hours a week doing our own admin, and we do it much less efficiently than the people who used to do it for a living. It's only now with proper investment in technology, rather than making fewer people do the same amount of unchanged activity, that we're starting to see some productivity savings coming back.
I daresay the health service has experienced much of the same. If you're going to do more with less then you absolutely have to change processes, not just headcount, and invest properly in automation.
I appreciate that, but I have described two layers of bureaucracy that really have no involvement, even in a supporting role, in patient care.
Apart from Training, public health, administering screening programmes, assessing and policing quality of outcomes etc etc.
Just as there's more to an air force than pilots, there's more to a health system than doctors and nurses.
Want to improve Health Service productivity? Sort out Social Care.
WHY CAN’T HOSPITALS DISCHARGE PATIENTS?
UK population ⬆️7% - 2012-23
GPs ⬇️ 7% District nurses ⬇️42% Health Visitors ⬇️30% Learning Disability Nurses⬇️23% School Nurses⬇️25% Nursing home beds ⬇️ 12% Residential Care home beds ⬇️16% Social Services ⬇️⬇️
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy, book claims:
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy. In the immediate aftermath of the mini-Budget, Ms Truss and her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, launched a desperate attempt to find spending cuts in an effort to restore stock-market confidence in their strategy.
A group of Ms Truss’s Tory aides met to discuss the issue. One of her senior advisers, Alex Boyd, “was told that Truss and Kwarteng were thinking they could still sort out the black hole with severe cuts”: “We’ve been told that they’re looking at stopping cancer treatment on the NHS.” ....
"She’s shouting at everyone that ‘We’ve got to find the money.’ When we tell her it can’t be done, she shouts back: ‘It’s not true. The money is there. You go and find it,’” ...
Speaking to The Independent, Mr Kwarteng said: “I wasn’t involved in any conversations about restricting healthcare, but that doesn’t mean the prime minister and her team didn’t discuss this.”
So Kwasi says Alex Boyd said that an unnamed advisor said that Truss was considering cutting cancer treatment on the NHS. How would one even go about 'cutting cancer treatment on the NHS'? Loathsome drivel. I really pity Kwarteng that he's reduced to slagging off his former employer and close associate as a some sort of pseudo-career. It's like a poundshop version of Prince Harry.
Yeah.
There’s no NHS Cancer Treatment On/Off stop button.
So you’d have to try and tell all the trusts to stop. The first thing they’d do after making sure it wasn’t a prank call, is say no. And call all the lawyers.
Err, did the Tory government ever try to implement impossible policies that sounded like prank calls and were stopped by the lawyers. Unfortunately on a monthly basis.......
You could cut the NHS budget by 5% and leave trusts to sort out what to cut, there would be zero need or indeed mechanism by which you could target 'cancer treatment', and the only reason such a bizarre concept has been dreamed up is to smear the Truss Government. The fact the Independent published it, and that avowedly intelligent people have given it airtime on PB is proof that Truss derangement syndrome is real and dangerous.
Love to know where you think there is 5% spare space in an NHS Trust's budget?
To be fair, you could restrict or qualify medical treatments further and/or freeze or cut staff salaries by 5-10% on top and cut staff numbers.
You'd have massively strikes, and lots leaving the profession, but it's a political choice that's available.
Greece didn't do dissimilar in the depths of its crisis.
You could get rid of 50% of non patient facing staff in the NHS and no one would notice. There's a lot of fat that can be trimmed but no one is willing to do it.
I think there's still a lack of honesty about all of these discussions around spending. The public sector has added ~700k people since 2019 it is the source of our budget deficit alongside interest due from linkers. We're spending massively more money on staffing costs and the only sustainable way we can cut taxes is by cutting staff, the idea that public sector pay was too low is a myth, if it was true then we wouldn't have gained 700k employees.
The other big area of spending that needs to be addressed is benefits, specifically sickness benefits. The current system is far, far too easy to game and far too generous. Universal Credit was a good idea but fundamentally relies on people's honesty and there are millions of people in the country who are not honest. The older system under Labour before the Tories switched to UC was better. The assessments were tougher and people who didn't want to work weren't able to live a life on benefits by claiming mental health issues. Labour managed to get the million people saying they had "undetectable but debilitating" back problems back into work and now they have to clear up the Tory mess with "mental health".
I don't think Labour will do anything on either of these points, in fact I think it will get worse because Starmer is weak.
I'm not sure that's true.
For every revenue generator at an investment bank there are - what - 3 or 4 support staff. The same is true of the army, air force, etc.
Why would it not also be true for a medical service?
At my firm there are a lot who do nothing but harry, police and make demands of - but don't help - the revenue earning staff and are interested primarily covering their own arse with respect to due process rather than finding practical solutions to help the business.
It's those that need to be attacked. There's so much stuff that policy creates that absorbs huge amounts of time and doesn't make sense.
This will be the case in the public sector too.
Some claim that's all there is in the public sector!
I think it was in David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs he tried to identify the various categories - Flunkies, Goons, Duct Tapers, Box Tickers, and Taskmasters.
Not that there is not any value in some of those (I'm midway between a box ticker and a duct taper myself, and would like to think there's value), but we all know examples which are valueless.
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy, book claims:
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy. In the immediate aftermath of the mini-Budget, Ms Truss and her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, launched a desperate attempt to find spending cuts in an effort to restore stock-market confidence in their strategy.
A group of Ms Truss’s Tory aides met to discuss the issue. One of her senior advisers, Alex Boyd, “was told that Truss and Kwarteng were thinking they could still sort out the black hole with severe cuts”: “We’ve been told that they’re looking at stopping cancer treatment on the NHS.” ....
"She’s shouting at everyone that ‘We’ve got to find the money.’ When we tell her it can’t be done, she shouts back: ‘It’s not true. The money is there. You go and find it,’” ...
Speaking to The Independent, Mr Kwarteng said: “I wasn’t involved in any conversations about restricting healthcare, but that doesn’t mean the prime minister and her team didn’t discuss this.”
So Kwasi says Alex Boyd said that an unnamed advisor said that Truss was considering cutting cancer treatment on the NHS. How would one even go about 'cutting cancer treatment on the NHS'? Loathsome drivel. I really pity Kwarteng that he's reduced to slagging off his former employer and close associate as a some sort of pseudo-career. It's like a poundshop version of Prince Harry.
Yeah.
There’s no NHS Cancer Treatment On/Off stop button.
So you’d have to try and tell all the trusts to stop. The first thing they’d do after making sure it wasn’t a prank call, is say no. And call all the lawyers.
Err, did the Tory government ever try to implement impossible policies that sounded like prank calls and were stopped by the lawyers. Unfortunately on a monthly basis.......
You could cut the NHS budget by 5% and leave trusts to sort out what to cut, there would be zero need or indeed mechanism by which you could target 'cancer treatment', and the only reason such a bizarre concept has been dreamed up is to smear the Truss Government. The fact the Independent published it, and that avowedly intelligent people have given it airtime on PB is proof that Truss derangement syndrome is real and dangerous.
Love to know where you think there is 5% spare space in an NHS Trust's budget?
To be fair, you could restrict or qualify medical treatments further and/or freeze or cut staff salaries by 5-10% on top and cut staff numbers.
You'd have massively strikes, and lots leaving the profession, but it's a political choice that's available.
Greece didn't do dissimilar in the depths of its crisis.
You could get rid of 50% of non patient facing staff in the NHS and no one would notice. There's a lot of fat that can be trimmed but no one is willing to do it.
I think there's still a lack of honesty about all of these discussions around spending. The public sector has added ~700k people since 2019 it is the source of our budget deficit alongside interest due from linkers. We're spending massively more money on staffing costs and the only sustainable way we can cut taxes is by cutting staff, the idea that public sector pay was too low is a myth, if it was true then we wouldn't have gained 700k employees.
The other big area of spending that needs to be addressed is benefits, specifically sickness benefits. The current system is far, far too easy to game and far too generous. Universal Credit was a good idea but fundamentally relies on people's honesty and there are millions of people in the country who are not honest. The older system under Labour before the Tories switched to UC was better. The assessments were tougher and people who didn't want to work weren't able to live a life on benefits by claiming mental health issues. Labour managed to get the million people saying they had "undetectable but debilitating" back problems back into work and now they have to clear up the Tory mess with "mental health".
I don't think Labour will do anything on either of these points, in fact I think it will get worse because Starmer is weak.
"You could get rid of 50% of non patient facing staff in the NHS and no one would notice."
The right wingers have been saying that for decades. But it's already been done. Privatisation of many functions. Hence many of the NHS problems - lack of hygiene, patient malnutrition, over charging by commercial firms ...
There is vast headcount in the DOH, and NHS England (Scotland, Wales etc.) before you so much as get to an NHS trust, let alone a hospital.
My firm has been cutting non-frontline staff for years, wave after wave. The result is generally that people like me spend several hours a week doing our own admin, and we do it much less efficiently than the people who used to do it for a living. It's only now with proper investment in technology, rather than making fewer people do the same amount of unchanged activity, that we're starting to see some productivity savings coming back.
I daresay the health service has experienced much of the same. If you're going to do more with less then you absolutely have to change processes, not just headcount, and invest properly in automation.
I appreciate that, but I have described two layers of bureaucracy that really have no involvement, even in a supporting role, in patient care.
Apart from Training, public health, administering screening programmes, assessing and policing quality of outcomes etc etc.
Just as there's more to an air force than pilots, there's more to a health system than doctors and nurses.
Want to improve Health Service productivity? Sort out Social Care.
WHY CAN’T HOSPITALS DISCHARGE PATIENTS?
UK population ⬆️7% - 2012-23
GPs ⬇️ 7% District nurses ⬇️42% Health Visitors ⬇️30% Learning Disability Nurses⬇️23% School Nurses⬇️25% Nursing home beds ⬇️ 12% Residential Care home beds ⬇️16% Social Services ⬇️⬇️
No chance now of social care being fixed in this parliament. Labour once again about to kick the can down the road with yet another commission to "look into the issues" as if we all had no fucking idea what the issues are.
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy, book claims:
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy. In the immediate aftermath of the mini-Budget, Ms Truss and her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, launched a desperate attempt to find spending cuts in an effort to restore stock-market confidence in their strategy.
A group of Ms Truss’s Tory aides met to discuss the issue. One of her senior advisers, Alex Boyd, “was told that Truss and Kwarteng were thinking they could still sort out the black hole with severe cuts”: “We’ve been told that they’re looking at stopping cancer treatment on the NHS.” ....
"She’s shouting at everyone that ‘We’ve got to find the money.’ When we tell her it can’t be done, she shouts back: ‘It’s not true. The money is there. You go and find it,’” ...
Speaking to The Independent, Mr Kwarteng said: “I wasn’t involved in any conversations about restricting healthcare, but that doesn’t mean the prime minister and her team didn’t discuss this.”
So Kwasi says Alex Boyd said that an unnamed advisor said that Truss was considering cutting cancer treatment on the NHS. How would one even go about 'cutting cancer treatment on the NHS'? Loathsome drivel. I really pity Kwarteng that he's reduced to slagging off his former employer and close associate as a some sort of pseudo-career. It's like a poundshop version of Prince Harry.
Yeah.
There’s no NHS Cancer Treatment On/Off stop button.
So you’d have to try and tell all the trusts to stop. The first thing they’d do after making sure it wasn’t a prank call, is say no. And call all the lawyers.
Err, did the Tory government ever try to implement impossible policies that sounded like prank calls and were stopped by the lawyers. Unfortunately on a monthly basis.......
You could cut the NHS budget by 5% and leave trusts to sort out what to cut, there would be zero need or indeed mechanism by which you could target 'cancer treatment', and the only reason such a bizarre concept has been dreamed up is to smear the Truss Government. The fact the Independent published it, and that avowedly intelligent people have given it airtime on PB is proof that Truss derangement syndrome is real and dangerous.
Love to know where you think there is 5% spare space in an NHS Trust's budget?
To be fair, you could restrict or qualify medical treatments further and/or freeze or cut staff salaries by 5-10% on top and cut staff numbers.
You'd have massively strikes, and lots leaving the profession, but it's a political choice that's available.
Greece didn't do dissimilar in the depths of its crisis.
You could get rid of 50% of non patient facing staff in the NHS and no one would notice. There's a lot of fat that can be trimmed but no one is willing to do it.
I think there's still a lack of honesty about all of these discussions around spending. The public sector has added ~700k people since 2019 it is the source of our budget deficit alongside interest due from linkers. We're spending massively more money on staffing costs and the only sustainable way we can cut taxes is by cutting staff, the idea that public sector pay was too low is a myth, if it was true then we wouldn't have gained 700k employees.
The other big area of spending that needs to be addressed is benefits, specifically sickness benefits. The current system is far, far too easy to game and far too generous. Universal Credit was a good idea but fundamentally relies on people's honesty and there are millions of people in the country who are not honest. The older system under Labour before the Tories switched to UC was better. The assessments were tougher and people who didn't want to work weren't able to live a life on benefits by claiming mental health issues. Labour managed to get the million people saying they had "undetectable but debilitating" back problems back into work and now they have to clear up the Tory mess with "mental health".
I don't think Labour will do anything on either of these points, in fact I think it will get worse because Starmer is weak.
The situation feels a bit like the breakdown of the soviet union. Everything is starting to fail, all the systems and processes set up are not delivering tangible outcomes.
I didn't think that things could get worse than the tories but it feels like they are under Starmer. The tories still had a vague idea that the economy needs to grow, this seems to be absent from the labour party. It is austerity without growth, but still they have the inbuilt perception that the state is there to solve every problem by spending money.
I find myself pining for having Sunak back.
Yes, really.
New Labour did everything in its power to prevent a Conservative revival.
Current Labour is doing all in its power to promote a Conservative revival.
I’m quite confident that a year from now, the Conservatives will be leading in the polls, and the 2026/27 local elections will be grim for Labour.
I cannot see things being so bad, and so unable to pin the blame on the last government, and the Tories able to present themselves in a compelling new light, to achieve it in only a year.
For such a turnaround you need the classic push and pull situation, and even if New New Labour are going to see a lot of push factors, I'm not convinced the Tories will be able to have enough people be listening to them to work as a pull factor - at the moment the Reform minded are still busy flirting with Farage.
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy, book claims:
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy. In the immediate aftermath of the mini-Budget, Ms Truss and her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, launched a desperate attempt to find spending cuts in an effort to restore stock-market confidence in their strategy.
A group of Ms Truss’s Tory aides met to discuss the issue. One of her senior advisers, Alex Boyd, “was told that Truss and Kwarteng were thinking they could still sort out the black hole with severe cuts”: “We’ve been told that they’re looking at stopping cancer treatment on the NHS.” ....
"She’s shouting at everyone that ‘We’ve got to find the money.’ When we tell her it can’t be done, she shouts back: ‘It’s not true. The money is there. You go and find it,’” ...
Speaking to The Independent, Mr Kwarteng said: “I wasn’t involved in any conversations about restricting healthcare, but that doesn’t mean the prime minister and her team didn’t discuss this.”
So Kwasi says Alex Boyd said that an unnamed advisor said that Truss was considering cutting cancer treatment on the NHS. How would one even go about 'cutting cancer treatment on the NHS'? Loathsome drivel. I really pity Kwarteng that he's reduced to slagging off his former employer and close associate as a some sort of pseudo-career. It's like a poundshop version of Prince Harry.
Yeah.
There’s no NHS Cancer Treatment On/Off stop button.
So you’d have to try and tell all the trusts to stop. The first thing they’d do after making sure it wasn’t a prank call, is say no. And call all the lawyers.
Err, did the Tory government ever try to implement impossible policies that sounded like prank calls and were stopped by the lawyers. Unfortunately on a monthly basis.......
You could cut the NHS budget by 5% and leave trusts to sort out what to cut, there would be zero need or indeed mechanism by which you could target 'cancer treatment', and the only reason such a bizarre concept has been dreamed up is to smear the Truss Government. The fact the Independent published it, and that avowedly intelligent people have given it airtime on PB is proof that Truss derangement syndrome is real and dangerous.
Love to know where you think there is 5% spare space in an NHS Trust's budget?
To be fair, you could restrict or qualify medical treatments further and/or freeze or cut staff salaries by 5-10% on top and cut staff numbers.
You'd have massively strikes, and lots leaving the profession, but it's a political choice that's available.
Greece didn't do dissimilar in the depths of its crisis.
You could get rid of 50% of non patient facing staff in the NHS and no one would notice. There's a lot of fat that can be trimmed but no one is willing to do it.
I think there's still a lack of honesty about all of these discussions around spending. The public sector has added ~700k people since 2019 it is the source of our budget deficit alongside interest due from linkers. We're spending massively more money on staffing costs and the only sustainable way we can cut taxes is by cutting staff, the idea that public sector pay was too low is a myth, if it was true then we wouldn't have gained 700k employees.
The other big area of spending that needs to be addressed is benefits, specifically sickness benefits. The current system is far, far too easy to game and far too generous. Universal Credit was a good idea but fundamentally relies on people's honesty and there are millions of people in the country who are not honest. The older system under Labour before the Tories switched to UC was better. The assessments were tougher and people who didn't want to work weren't able to live a life on benefits by claiming mental health issues. Labour managed to get the million people saying they had "undetectable but debilitating" back problems back into work and now they have to clear up the Tory mess with "mental health".
I don't think Labour will do anything on either of these points, in fact I think it will get worse because Starmer is weak.
I'm not sure that's true.
For every revenue generator at an investment bank there are - what - 3 or 4 support staff. The same is true of the army, air force, etc.
Why would it not also be true for a medical service?
Process automation is what's needed, there are too many people in the NHS ticking too many boxes for forms that never get used after being filled in.
This is genuinely where the government should start to invest in AI solutions, three of our customers have deployed AI chat bots in the last year or so and all of them have had a marked increase in NPS. Obviously their datasets have been built in a way that the chat bots are able to access what they need about customers and resolutions but theres no reason government departments couldn't do the same. I'd rather have 3 or 4 ML Engineers and MLOps people plus a few analysts and analytics engineers to setup and maintain it all than a bunch of admin staff who barely make a difference to patients.
The problem with bots is how do you stop them hallucinating policies such as the Air Canada customer bereavement that don’t exist?
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy, book claims:
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy. In the immediate aftermath of the mini-Budget, Ms Truss and her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, launched a desperate attempt to find spending cuts in an effort to restore stock-market confidence in their strategy.
A group of Ms Truss’s Tory aides met to discuss the issue. One of her senior advisers, Alex Boyd, “was told that Truss and Kwarteng were thinking they could still sort out the black hole with severe cuts”: “We’ve been told that they’re looking at stopping cancer treatment on the NHS.” ....
"She’s shouting at everyone that ‘We’ve got to find the money.’ When we tell her it can’t be done, she shouts back: ‘It’s not true. The money is there. You go and find it,’” ...
Speaking to The Independent, Mr Kwarteng said: “I wasn’t involved in any conversations about restricting healthcare, but that doesn’t mean the prime minister and her team didn’t discuss this.”
So Kwasi says Alex Boyd said that an unnamed advisor said that Truss was considering cutting cancer treatment on the NHS. How would one even go about 'cutting cancer treatment on the NHS'? Loathsome drivel. I really pity Kwarteng that he's reduced to slagging off his former employer and close associate as a some sort of pseudo-career. It's like a poundshop version of Prince Harry.
Yeah.
There’s no NHS Cancer Treatment On/Off stop button.
So you’d have to try and tell all the trusts to stop. The first thing they’d do after making sure it wasn’t a prank call, is say no. And call all the lawyers.
Err, did the Tory government ever try to implement impossible policies that sounded like prank calls and were stopped by the lawyers. Unfortunately on a monthly basis.......
You could cut the NHS budget by 5% and leave trusts to sort out what to cut, there would be zero need or indeed mechanism by which you could target 'cancer treatment', and the only reason such a bizarre concept has been dreamed up is to smear the Truss Government. The fact the Independent published it, and that avowedly intelligent people have given it airtime on PB is proof that Truss derangement syndrome is real and dangerous.
Love to know where you think there is 5% spare space in an NHS Trust's budget?
To be fair, you could restrict or qualify medical treatments further and/or freeze or cut staff salaries by 5-10% on top and cut staff numbers.
You'd have massively strikes, and lots leaving the profession, but it's a political choice that's available.
Greece didn't do dissimilar in the depths of its crisis.
You could get rid of 50% of non patient facing staff in the NHS and no one would notice. There's a lot of fat that can be trimmed but no one is willing to do it.
I think there's still a lack of honesty about all of these discussions around spending. The public sector has added ~700k people since 2019 it is the source of our budget deficit alongside interest due from linkers. We're spending massively more money on staffing costs and the only sustainable way we can cut taxes is by cutting staff, the idea that public sector pay was too low is a myth, if it was true then we wouldn't have gained 700k employees.
The other big area of spending that needs to be addressed is benefits, specifically sickness benefits. The current system is far, far too easy to game and far too generous. Universal Credit was a good idea but fundamentally relies on people's honesty and there are millions of people in the country who are not honest. The older system under Labour before the Tories switched to UC was better. The assessments were tougher and people who didn't want to work weren't able to live a life on benefits by claiming mental health issues. Labour managed to get the million people saying they had "undetectable but debilitating" back problems back into work and now they have to clear up the Tory mess with "mental health".
I don't think Labour will do anything on either of these points, in fact I think it will get worse because Starmer is weak.
"You could get rid of 50% of non patient facing staff in the NHS and no one would notice."
The right wingers have been saying that for decades. But it's already been done. Privatisation of many functions. Hence many of the NHS problems - lack of hygiene, patient malnutrition, over charging by commercial firms ...
There is vast headcount in the DOH, and NHS England (Scotland, Wales etc.) before you so much as get to an NHS trust, let alone a hospital.
My firm has been cutting non-frontline staff for years, wave after wave. The result is generally that people like me spend several hours a week doing our own admin, and we do it much less efficiently than the people who used to do it for a living. It's only now with proper investment in technology, rather than making fewer people do the same amount of unchanged activity, that we're starting to see some productivity savings coming back.
I daresay the health service has experienced much of the same. If you're going to do more with less then you absolutely have to change processes, not just headcount, and invest properly in automation.
I appreciate that, but I have described two layers of bureaucracy that really have no involvement, even in a supporting role, in patient care.
Apart from Training, public health, administering screening programmes, assessing and policing quality of outcomes etc etc.
Just as there's more to an air force than pilots, there's more to a health system than doctors and nurses.
Want to improve Health Service productivity? Sort out Social Care.
WHY CAN’T HOSPITALS DISCHARGE PATIENTS?
UK population ⬆️7% - 2012-23
GPs ⬇️ 7% District nurses ⬇️42% Health Visitors ⬇️30% Learning Disability Nurses⬇️23% School Nurses⬇️25% Nursing home beds ⬇️ 12% Residential Care home beds ⬇️16% Social Services ⬇️⬇️
No chance now of social care being fixed in this parliament. Labour once again about to kick the can down the road with yet another commission to "look into the issues" as if we all had no fucking idea what the issues are.
Don't parties in opposition have resources, and think tanks to rely on, so they can formulate policies without the levers of government to use? That's how they then proclaim their policies to be better at election time.
So whilst you need to do some diligence on the big issues it is not massively credible if an incoming party claim to still be at the whiteboard stage.
BTW - So you have a choice for Veep of Vance or Kennedy and that might be tricky for Trump but why wouldn't you have Gabbard as your Veep. She is probably more loyal than any GOP and she might bring some votes with her. Not many - but any is more than Vance will.
And what if your presidential candidate is a misogynistic sex offender?
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy, book claims:
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy. In the immediate aftermath of the mini-Budget, Ms Truss and her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, launched a desperate attempt to find spending cuts in an effort to restore stock-market confidence in their strategy.
A group of Ms Truss’s Tory aides met to discuss the issue. One of her senior advisers, Alex Boyd, “was told that Truss and Kwarteng were thinking they could still sort out the black hole with severe cuts”: “We’ve been told that they’re looking at stopping cancer treatment on the NHS.” ....
"She’s shouting at everyone that ‘We’ve got to find the money.’ When we tell her it can’t be done, she shouts back: ‘It’s not true. The money is there. You go and find it,’” ...
Speaking to The Independent, Mr Kwarteng said: “I wasn’t involved in any conversations about restricting healthcare, but that doesn’t mean the prime minister and her team didn’t discuss this.”
So Kwasi says Alex Boyd said that an unnamed advisor said that Truss was considering cutting cancer treatment on the NHS. How would one even go about 'cutting cancer treatment on the NHS'? Loathsome drivel. I really pity Kwarteng that he's reduced to slagging off his former employer and close associate as a some sort of pseudo-career. It's like a poundshop version of Prince Harry.
Yeah.
There’s no NHS Cancer Treatment On/Off stop button.
So you’d have to try and tell all the trusts to stop. The first thing they’d do after making sure it wasn’t a prank call, is say no. And call all the lawyers.
Err, did the Tory government ever try to implement impossible policies that sounded like prank calls and were stopped by the lawyers. Unfortunately on a monthly basis.......
You could cut the NHS budget by 5% and leave trusts to sort out what to cut, there would be zero need or indeed mechanism by which you could target 'cancer treatment', and the only reason such a bizarre concept has been dreamed up is to smear the Truss Government. The fact the Independent published it, and that avowedly intelligent people have given it airtime on PB is proof that Truss derangement syndrome is real and dangerous.
Love to know where you think there is 5% spare space in an NHS Trust's budget?
To be fair, you could restrict or qualify medical treatments further and/or freeze or cut staff salaries by 5-10% on top and cut staff numbers.
You'd have massively strikes, and lots leaving the profession, but it's a political choice that's available.
Greece didn't do dissimilar in the depths of its crisis.
You could get rid of 50% of non patient facing staff in the NHS and no one would notice. There's a lot of fat that can be trimmed but no one is willing to do it.
I think there's still a lack of honesty about all of these discussions around spending. The public sector has added ~700k people since 2019 it is the source of our budget deficit alongside interest due from linkers. We're spending massively more money on staffing costs and the only sustainable way we can cut taxes is by cutting staff, the idea that public sector pay was too low is a myth, if it was true then we wouldn't have gained 700k employees.
The other big area of spending that needs to be addressed is benefits, specifically sickness benefits. The current system is far, far too easy to game and far too generous. Universal Credit was a good idea but fundamentally relies on people's honesty and there are millions of people in the country who are not honest. The older system under Labour before the Tories switched to UC was better. The assessments were tougher and people who didn't want to work weren't able to live a life on benefits by claiming mental health issues. Labour managed to get the million people saying they had "undetectable but debilitating" back problems back into work and now they have to clear up the Tory mess with "mental health".
I don't think Labour will do anything on either of these points, in fact I think it will get worse because Starmer is weak.
The situation feels a bit like the breakdown of the soviet union. Everything is starting to fail, all the systems and processes set up are not delivering tangible outcomes.
I didn't think that things could get worse than the tories but it feels like they are under Starmer. The tories still had a vague idea that the economy needs to grow, this seems to be absent from the labour party. It is austerity without growth, but still they have the inbuilt perception that the state is there to solve every problem by spending money.
I find myself pining for having Sunak back.
Yes, really.
Me too, CR, me too. Starmer talks about being a grown up but there's nothing grown up about giving into the unions and telling lies about the state of the economy to justify mega tax rises. Sunak and Hunt got the economy growing despite all of the negativity from international bodies, domestic media and public sentiment driven by that relentlessly negative media coverage.
The economy is going to bleed out by a thousand spending rises and tax rises. It really might be time to make plans to exit, there's clearly no point in working hard in the UK, Labour will just punish us.
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy, book claims:
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy. In the immediate aftermath of the mini-Budget, Ms Truss and her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, launched a desperate attempt to find spending cuts in an effort to restore stock-market confidence in their strategy.
A group of Ms Truss’s Tory aides met to discuss the issue. One of her senior advisers, Alex Boyd, “was told that Truss and Kwarteng were thinking they could still sort out the black hole with severe cuts”: “We’ve been told that they’re looking at stopping cancer treatment on the NHS.” ....
"She’s shouting at everyone that ‘We’ve got to find the money.’ When we tell her it can’t be done, she shouts back: ‘It’s not true. The money is there. You go and find it,’” ...
Speaking to The Independent, Mr Kwarteng said: “I wasn’t involved in any conversations about restricting healthcare, but that doesn’t mean the prime minister and her team didn’t discuss this.”
So Kwasi says Alex Boyd said that an unnamed advisor said that Truss was considering cutting cancer treatment on the NHS. How would one even go about 'cutting cancer treatment on the NHS'? Loathsome drivel. I really pity Kwarteng that he's reduced to slagging off his former employer and close associate as a some sort of pseudo-career. It's like a poundshop version of Prince Harry.
Yeah.
There’s no NHS Cancer Treatment On/Off stop button.
So you’d have to try and tell all the trusts to stop. The first thing they’d do after making sure it wasn’t a prank call, is say no. And call all the lawyers.
Err, did the Tory government ever try to implement impossible policies that sounded like prank calls and were stopped by the lawyers. Unfortunately on a monthly basis.......
You could cut the NHS budget by 5% and leave trusts to sort out what to cut, there would be zero need or indeed mechanism by which you could target 'cancer treatment', and the only reason such a bizarre concept has been dreamed up is to smear the Truss Government. The fact the Independent published it, and that avowedly intelligent people have given it airtime on PB is proof that Truss derangement syndrome is real and dangerous.
Love to know where you think there is 5% spare space in an NHS Trust's budget?
To be fair, you could restrict or qualify medical treatments further and/or freeze or cut staff salaries by 5-10% on top and cut staff numbers.
You'd have massively strikes, and lots leaving the profession, but it's a political choice that's available.
Greece didn't do dissimilar in the depths of its crisis.
You could get rid of 50% of non patient facing staff in the NHS and no one would notice. There's a lot of fat that can be trimmed but no one is willing to do it.
I think there's still a lack of honesty about all of these discussions around spending. The public sector has added ~700k people since 2019 it is the source of our budget deficit alongside interest due from linkers. We're spending massively more money on staffing costs and the only sustainable way we can cut taxes is by cutting staff, the idea that public sector pay was too low is a myth, if it was true then we wouldn't have gained 700k employees.
The other big area of spending that needs to be addressed is benefits, specifically sickness benefits. The current system is far, far too easy to game and far too generous. Universal Credit was a good idea but fundamentally relies on people's honesty and there are millions of people in the country who are not honest. The older system under Labour before the Tories switched to UC was better. The assessments were tougher and people who didn't want to work weren't able to live a life on benefits by claiming mental health issues. Labour managed to get the million people saying they had "undetectable but debilitating" back problems back into work and now they have to clear up the Tory mess with "mental health".
I don't think Labour will do anything on either of these points, in fact I think it will get worse because Starmer is weak.
The situation feels a bit like the breakdown of the soviet union. Everything is starting to fail, all the systems and processes set up are not delivering tangible outcomes.
I didn't think that things could get worse than the tories but it feels like they are under Starmer. The tories still had a vague idea that the economy needs to grow, this seems to be absent from the labour party. It is austerity without growth, but still they have the inbuilt perception that the state is there to solve every problem by spending money.
I find myself pining for having Sunak back.
Yes, really.
New Labour did everything in its power to prevent a Conservative revival.
Current Labour is doing all in its power to promote a Conservative revival.
I’m quite confident that a year from now, the Conservatives will be leading in the polls, and the 2026/27 local elections will be grim for Labour.
I cannot see things being so bad, and so unable to pin the blame on the last government, and the Tories able to present themselves in a compelling new light, to achieve it in only a year.
For such a turnaround you need the classic push and pull situation, and even if New New Labour are going to see a lot of push factors, I'm not convinced the Tories will be able to have enough people be listening to them to work as a pull factor - at the moment the Reform minded are still busy flirting with Farage.
Well precisely. There's no guarantee that dissatisfaction with Labour will directly beenfit the tories.
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy, book claims:
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy. In the immediate aftermath of the mini-Budget, Ms Truss and her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, launched a desperate attempt to find spending cuts in an effort to restore stock-market confidence in their strategy.
A group of Ms Truss’s Tory aides met to discuss the issue. One of her senior advisers, Alex Boyd, “was told that Truss and Kwarteng were thinking they could still sort out the black hole with severe cuts”: “We’ve been told that they’re looking at stopping cancer treatment on the NHS.” ....
"She’s shouting at everyone that ‘We’ve got to find the money.’ When we tell her it can’t be done, she shouts back: ‘It’s not true. The money is there. You go and find it,’” ...
Speaking to The Independent, Mr Kwarteng said: “I wasn’t involved in any conversations about restricting healthcare, but that doesn’t mean the prime minister and her team didn’t discuss this.”
So Kwasi says Alex Boyd said that an unnamed advisor said that Truss was considering cutting cancer treatment on the NHS. How would one even go about 'cutting cancer treatment on the NHS'? Loathsome drivel. I really pity Kwarteng that he's reduced to slagging off his former employer and close associate as a some sort of pseudo-career. It's like a poundshop version of Prince Harry.
Yeah.
There’s no NHS Cancer Treatment On/Off stop button.
So you’d have to try and tell all the trusts to stop. The first thing they’d do after making sure it wasn’t a prank call, is say no. And call all the lawyers.
Err, did the Tory government ever try to implement impossible policies that sounded like prank calls and were stopped by the lawyers. Unfortunately on a monthly basis.......
You could cut the NHS budget by 5% and leave trusts to sort out what to cut, there would be zero need or indeed mechanism by which you could target 'cancer treatment', and the only reason such a bizarre concept has been dreamed up is to smear the Truss Government. The fact the Independent published it, and that avowedly intelligent people have given it airtime on PB is proof that Truss derangement syndrome is real and dangerous.
Love to know where you think there is 5% spare space in an NHS Trust's budget?
To be fair, you could restrict or qualify medical treatments further and/or freeze or cut staff salaries by 5-10% on top and cut staff numbers.
You'd have massively strikes, and lots leaving the profession, but it's a political choice that's available.
Greece didn't do dissimilar in the depths of its crisis.
You could get rid of 50% of non patient facing staff in the NHS and no one would notice. There's a lot of fat that can be trimmed but no one is willing to do it.
I think there's still a lack of honesty about all of these discussions around spending. The public sector has added ~700k people since 2019 it is the source of our budget deficit alongside interest due from linkers. We're spending massively more money on staffing costs and the only sustainable way we can cut taxes is by cutting staff, the idea that public sector pay was too low is a myth, if it was true then we wouldn't have gained 700k employees.
The other big area of spending that needs to be addressed is benefits, specifically sickness benefits. The current system is far, far too easy to game and far too generous. Universal Credit was a good idea but fundamentally relies on people's honesty and there are millions of people in the country who are not honest. The older system under Labour before the Tories switched to UC was better. The assessments were tougher and people who didn't want to work weren't able to live a life on benefits by claiming mental health issues. Labour managed to get the million people saying they had "undetectable but debilitating" back problems back into work and now they have to clear up the Tory mess with "mental health".
I don't think Labour will do anything on either of these points, in fact I think it will get worse because Starmer is weak.
I'm not sure that's true.
For every revenue generator at an investment bank there are - what - 3 or 4 support staff. The same is true of the army, air force, etc.
Why would it not also be true for a medical service?
Process automation is what's needed, there are too many people in the NHS ticking too many boxes for forms that never get used after being filled in.
This is genuinely where the government should start to invest in AI solutions, three of our customers have deployed AI chat bots in the last year or so and all of them have had a marked increase in NPS. Obviously their datasets have been built in a way that the chat bots are able to access what they need about customers and resolutions but theres no reason government departments couldn't do the same. I'd rather have 3 or 4 ML Engineers and MLOps people plus a few analysts and analytics engineers to setup and maintain it all than a bunch of admin staff who barely make a difference to patients.
The problem with bots is how do you stop them hallucinating policies such as the Air Canada customer bereavement that don’t exist?
That seems like a poorly trained model. Non existent policies shouldn't be in the training data.
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy, book claims:
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy. In the immediate aftermath of the mini-Budget, Ms Truss and her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, launched a desperate attempt to find spending cuts in an effort to restore stock-market confidence in their strategy.
A group of Ms Truss’s Tory aides met to discuss the issue. One of her senior advisers, Alex Boyd, “was told that Truss and Kwarteng were thinking they could still sort out the black hole with severe cuts”: “We’ve been told that they’re looking at stopping cancer treatment on the NHS.” ....
"She’s shouting at everyone that ‘We’ve got to find the money.’ When we tell her it can’t be done, she shouts back: ‘It’s not true. The money is there. You go and find it,’” ...
Speaking to The Independent, Mr Kwarteng said: “I wasn’t involved in any conversations about restricting healthcare, but that doesn’t mean the prime minister and her team didn’t discuss this.”
So Kwasi says Alex Boyd said that an unnamed advisor said that Truss was considering cutting cancer treatment on the NHS. How would one even go about 'cutting cancer treatment on the NHS'? Loathsome drivel. I really pity Kwarteng that he's reduced to slagging off his former employer and close associate as a some sort of pseudo-career. It's like a poundshop version of Prince Harry.
Yeah.
There’s no NHS Cancer Treatment On/Off stop button.
So you’d have to try and tell all the trusts to stop. The first thing they’d do after making sure it wasn’t a prank call, is say no. And call all the lawyers.
Err, did the Tory government ever try to implement impossible policies that sounded like prank calls and were stopped by the lawyers. Unfortunately on a monthly basis.......
You could cut the NHS budget by 5% and leave trusts to sort out what to cut, there would be zero need or indeed mechanism by which you could target 'cancer treatment', and the only reason such a bizarre concept has been dreamed up is to smear the Truss Government. The fact the Independent published it, and that avowedly intelligent people have given it airtime on PB is proof that Truss derangement syndrome is real and dangerous.
Love to know where you think there is 5% spare space in an NHS Trust's budget?
To be fair, you could restrict or qualify medical treatments further and/or freeze or cut staff salaries by 5-10% on top and cut staff numbers.
You'd have massively strikes, and lots leaving the profession, but it's a political choice that's available.
Greece didn't do dissimilar in the depths of its crisis.
You could get rid of 50% of non patient facing staff in the NHS and no one would notice. There's a lot of fat that can be trimmed but no one is willing to do it.
I think there's still a lack of honesty about all of these discussions around spending. The public sector has added ~700k people since 2019 it is the source of our budget deficit alongside interest due from linkers. We're spending massively more money on staffing costs and the only sustainable way we can cut taxes is by cutting staff, the idea that public sector pay was too low is a myth, if it was true then we wouldn't have gained 700k employees.
The other big area of spending that needs to be addressed is benefits, specifically sickness benefits. The current system is far, far too easy to game and far too generous. Universal Credit was a good idea but fundamentally relies on people's honesty and there are millions of people in the country who are not honest. The older system under Labour before the Tories switched to UC was better. The assessments were tougher and people who didn't want to work weren't able to live a life on benefits by claiming mental health issues. Labour managed to get the million people saying they had "undetectable but debilitating" back problems back into work and now they have to clear up the Tory mess with "mental health".
I don't think Labour will do anything on either of these points, in fact I think it will get worse because Starmer is weak.
"You could get rid of 50% of non patient facing staff in the NHS and no one would notice."
The right wingers have been saying that for decades. But it's already been done. Privatisation of many functions. Hence many of the NHS problems - lack of hygiene, patient malnutrition, over charging by commercial firms ...
There is vast headcount in the DOH, and NHS England (Scotland, Wales etc.) before you so much as get to an NHS trust, let alone a hospital.
My firm has been cutting non-frontline staff for years, wave after wave. The result is generally that people like me spend several hours a week doing our own admin, and we do it much less efficiently than the people who used to do it for a living. It's only now with proper investment in technology, rather than making fewer people do the same amount of unchanged activity, that we're starting to see some productivity savings coming back.
I daresay the health service has experienced much of the same. If you're going to do more with less then you absolutely have to change processes, not just headcount, and invest properly in automation.
I appreciate that, but I have described two layers of bureaucracy that really have no involvement, even in a supporting role, in patient care.
Apart from Training, public health, administering screening programmes, assessing and policing quality of outcomes etc etc.
Just as there's more to an air force than pilots, there's more to a health system than doctors and nurses.
Want to improve Health Service productivity? Sort out Social Care.
WHY CAN’T HOSPITALS DISCHARGE PATIENTS?
UK population ⬆️7% - 2012-23
GPs ⬇️ 7% District nurses ⬇️42% Health Visitors ⬇️30% Learning Disability Nurses⬇️23% School Nurses⬇️25% Nursing home beds ⬇️ 12% Residential Care home beds ⬇️16% Social Services ⬇️⬇️
for myself I see nothing in it, but it is going to run and run, with people who are much more than self publicising idiots getting involved. The Economist ran it a bit this week too. Also note that the professional implied criticism of prosecution and defence is slowly building pressure. (Also note the careful but landmine laden language in the Guardian story).
I have read some of the articles about the case. I have no idea if she did the crimes she has been convicted of, but there are seeming issues, yet again, with the use of statistics and juries in trials. The general public do not understand statistics and probability. Having a jury rule on a case that relies heavily on statistics, and often with experts who are themselves not experts in stats is always going to lead to some suspecting problems. In this case it's sometimes been suggested or implied that Letby was present when ALL deaths occured at the NICU but that was not the case. The chart showing her as at work for all the suspicious deaths was only a selection. If the deaths. It is enough to cast doubt for me. But if course some will still just complain that people are only doubting because she is a pretty white blond...
I agree on the chart. The trouble is that if the chart was a selection, then that alone causes major questions. You *just don't pick and choose data*. And with a larger database then random perfect matches appear anyway by chance. If the database is them trimmed ...
The other disturbing thing for me was that the data were not that accurate, or at least so it seems - the timetable records didn't reflect reality.
The Guardian article emphasises the wider issues for the system, actually, as mcuh as this particular case.
I wonder if a panel of expert assessors would be required in future, answerable only to the judge?
Sir Keir Starmer is seeking priority access to the German economy for British businesses in what the prime minister has called a “once in a generation opportunity” to fix the country’s relationship with the EU.
On Wednesday the prime minister will begin talks on a new treaty with Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor. He said closer working with Europe would be “crucial” to boosting the economy and controlling immigration — and that Britain needed to “turn a corner” on Brexit.
No 10 hopes that the agreement with Berlin will stimulate business and trade, and help to build defence and security co-operation.
As someone who is vaguely 'Team Jenrick' at present, Kemi's is the most effective response to Starmers decade of misery speech, and the one I feel most aligned toward.
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy, book claims:
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy. In the immediate aftermath of the mini-Budget, Ms Truss and her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, launched a desperate attempt to find spending cuts in an effort to restore stock-market confidence in their strategy.
A group of Ms Truss’s Tory aides met to discuss the issue. One of her senior advisers, Alex Boyd, “was told that Truss and Kwarteng were thinking they could still sort out the black hole with severe cuts”: “We’ve been told that they’re looking at stopping cancer treatment on the NHS.” ....
"She’s shouting at everyone that ‘We’ve got to find the money.’ When we tell her it can’t be done, she shouts back: ‘It’s not true. The money is there. You go and find it,’” ...
Speaking to The Independent, Mr Kwarteng said: “I wasn’t involved in any conversations about restricting healthcare, but that doesn’t mean the prime minister and her team didn’t discuss this.”
So Kwasi says Alex Boyd said that an unnamed advisor said that Truss was considering cutting cancer treatment on the NHS. How would one even go about 'cutting cancer treatment on the NHS'? Loathsome drivel. I really pity Kwarteng that he's reduced to slagging off his former employer and close associate as a some sort of pseudo-career. It's like a poundshop version of Prince Harry.
Yeah.
There’s no NHS Cancer Treatment On/Off stop button.
So you’d have to try and tell all the trusts to stop. The first thing they’d do after making sure it wasn’t a prank call, is say no. And call all the lawyers.
Err, did the Tory government ever try to implement impossible policies that sounded like prank calls and were stopped by the lawyers. Unfortunately on a monthly basis.......
You could cut the NHS budget by 5% and leave trusts to sort out what to cut, there would be zero need or indeed mechanism by which you could target 'cancer treatment', and the only reason such a bizarre concept has been dreamed up is to smear the Truss Government. The fact the Independent published it, and that avowedly intelligent people have given it airtime on PB is proof that Truss derangement syndrome is real and dangerous.
Love to know where you think there is 5% spare space in an NHS Trust's budget?
To be fair, you could restrict or qualify medical treatments further and/or freeze or cut staff salaries by 5-10% on top and cut staff numbers.
You'd have massively strikes, and lots leaving the profession, but it's a political choice that's available.
Greece didn't do dissimilar in the depths of its crisis.
You could get rid of 50% of non patient facing staff in the NHS and no one would notice. There's a lot of fat that can be trimmed but no one is willing to do it.
I think there's still a lack of honesty about all of these discussions around spending. The public sector has added ~700k people since 2019 it is the source of our budget deficit alongside interest due from linkers. We're spending massively more money on staffing costs and the only sustainable way we can cut taxes is by cutting staff, the idea that public sector pay was too low is a myth, if it was true then we wouldn't have gained 700k employees.
The other big area of spending that needs to be addressed is benefits, specifically sickness benefits. The current system is far, far too easy to game and far too generous. Universal Credit was a good idea but fundamentally relies on people's honesty and there are millions of people in the country who are not honest. The older system under Labour before the Tories switched to UC was better. The assessments were tougher and people who didn't want to work weren't able to live a life on benefits by claiming mental health issues. Labour managed to get the million people saying they had "undetectable but debilitating" back problems back into work and now they have to clear up the Tory mess with "mental health".
I don't think Labour will do anything on either of these points, in fact I think it will get worse because Starmer is weak.
The situation feels a bit like the breakdown of the soviet union. Everything is starting to fail, all the systems and processes set up are not delivering tangible outcomes.
I didn't think that things could get worse than the tories but it feels like they are under Starmer. The tories still had a vague idea that the economy needs to grow, this seems to be absent from the labour party. It is austerity without growth, but still they have the inbuilt perception that the state is there to solve every problem by spending money.
I find myself pining for having Sunak back.
Yes, really.
New Labour did everything in its power to prevent a Conservative revival.
Current Labour is doing all in its power to promote a Conservative revival.
I’m quite confident that a year from now, the Conservatives will be leading in the polls, and the 2026/27 local elections will be grim for Labour.
I cannot see things being so bad, and so unable to pin the blame on the last government, and the Tories able to present themselves in a compelling new light, to achieve it in only a year.
For such a turnaround you need the classic push and pull situation, and even if New New Labour are going to see a lot of push factors, I'm not convinced the Tories will be able to have enough people be listening to them to work as a pull factor - at the moment the Reform minded are still busy flirting with Farage.
Well precisely. There's no guarantee that dissatisfaction with Labour will directly beenfit the tories.
Overwhelmingly, it’s the Conservatives who in second place in Labour seats.
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy, book claims:
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy. In the immediate aftermath of the mini-Budget, Ms Truss and her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, launched a desperate attempt to find spending cuts in an effort to restore stock-market confidence in their strategy.
A group of Ms Truss’s Tory aides met to discuss the issue. One of her senior advisers, Alex Boyd, “was told that Truss and Kwarteng were thinking they could still sort out the black hole with severe cuts”: “We’ve been told that they’re looking at stopping cancer treatment on the NHS.” ....
"She’s shouting at everyone that ‘We’ve got to find the money.’ When we tell her it can’t be done, she shouts back: ‘It’s not true. The money is there. You go and find it,’” ...
Speaking to The Independent, Mr Kwarteng said: “I wasn’t involved in any conversations about restricting healthcare, but that doesn’t mean the prime minister and her team didn’t discuss this.”
So Kwasi says Alex Boyd said that an unnamed advisor said that Truss was considering cutting cancer treatment on the NHS. How would one even go about 'cutting cancer treatment on the NHS'? Loathsome drivel. I really pity Kwarteng that he's reduced to slagging off his former employer and close associate as a some sort of pseudo-career. It's like a poundshop version of Prince Harry.
Yeah.
There’s no NHS Cancer Treatment On/Off stop button.
So you’d have to try and tell all the trusts to stop. The first thing they’d do after making sure it wasn’t a prank call, is say no. And call all the lawyers.
Err, did the Tory government ever try to implement impossible policies that sounded like prank calls and were stopped by the lawyers. Unfortunately on a monthly basis.......
You could cut the NHS budget by 5% and leave trusts to sort out what to cut, there would be zero need or indeed mechanism by which you could target 'cancer treatment', and the only reason such a bizarre concept has been dreamed up is to smear the Truss Government. The fact the Independent published it, and that avowedly intelligent people have given it airtime on PB is proof that Truss derangement syndrome is real and dangerous.
Love to know where you think there is 5% spare space in an NHS Trust's budget?
To be fair, you could restrict or qualify medical treatments further and/or freeze or cut staff salaries by 5-10% on top and cut staff numbers.
You'd have massively strikes, and lots leaving the profession, but it's a political choice that's available.
Greece didn't do dissimilar in the depths of its crisis.
You could get rid of 50% of non patient facing staff in the NHS and no one would notice. There's a lot of fat that can be trimmed but no one is willing to do it.
I think there's still a lack of honesty about all of these discussions around spending. The public sector has added ~700k people since 2019 it is the source of our budget deficit alongside interest due from linkers. We're spending massively more money on staffing costs and the only sustainable way we can cut taxes is by cutting staff, the idea that public sector pay was too low is a myth, if it was true then we wouldn't have gained 700k employees.
The other big area of spending that needs to be addressed is benefits, specifically sickness benefits. The current system is far, far too easy to game and far too generous. Universal Credit was a good idea but fundamentally relies on people's honesty and there are millions of people in the country who are not honest. The older system under Labour before the Tories switched to UC was better. The assessments were tougher and people who didn't want to work weren't able to live a life on benefits by claiming mental health issues. Labour managed to get the million people saying they had "undetectable but debilitating" back problems back into work and now they have to clear up the Tory mess with "mental health".
I don't think Labour will do anything on either of these points, in fact I think it will get worse because Starmer is weak.
"You could get rid of 50% of non patient facing staff in the NHS and no one would notice."
The right wingers have been saying that for decades. But it's already been done. Privatisation of many functions. Hence many of the NHS problems - lack of hygiene, patient malnutrition, over charging by commercial firms ...
There is vast headcount in the DOH, and NHS England (Scotland, Wales etc.) before you so much as get to an NHS trust, let alone a hospital.
My firm has been cutting non-frontline staff for years, wave after wave. The result is generally that people like me spend several hours a week doing our own admin, and we do it much less efficiently than the people who used to do it for a living. It's only now with proper investment in technology, rather than making fewer people do the same amount of unchanged activity, that we're starting to see some productivity savings coming back.
I daresay the health service has experienced much of the same. If you're going to do more with less then you absolutely have to change processes, not just headcount, and invest properly in automation.
I appreciate that, but I have described two layers of bureaucracy that really have no involvement, even in a supporting role, in patient care.
Apart from Training, public health, administering screening programmes, assessing and policing quality of outcomes etc etc.
Just as there's more to an air force than pilots, there's more to a health system than doctors and nurses.
Want to improve Health Service productivity? Sort out Social Care.
WHY CAN’T HOSPITALS DISCHARGE PATIENTS?
UK population ⬆️7% - 2012-23
GPs ⬇️ 7% District nurses ⬇️42% Health Visitors ⬇️30% Learning Disability Nurses⬇️23% School Nurses⬇️25% Nursing home beds ⬇️ 12% Residential Care home beds ⬇️16% Social Services ⬇️⬇️
Until your 'etc etc' part, you had accounted for a very low quantity of people in my opinion.
Indeed, that's a list of front line roles that seem to be falling yet NHS employment is up 200k, so if front line workers are falling back but overall employment is up it adds up to a fairly obvious conclusion.
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy, book claims:
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy. In the immediate aftermath of the mini-Budget, Ms Truss and her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, launched a desperate attempt to find spending cuts in an effort to restore stock-market confidence in their strategy.
A group of Ms Truss’s Tory aides met to discuss the issue. One of her senior advisers, Alex Boyd, “was told that Truss and Kwarteng were thinking they could still sort out the black hole with severe cuts”: “We’ve been told that they’re looking at stopping cancer treatment on the NHS.” ....
"She’s shouting at everyone that ‘We’ve got to find the money.’ When we tell her it can’t be done, she shouts back: ‘It’s not true. The money is there. You go and find it,’” ...
Speaking to The Independent, Mr Kwarteng said: “I wasn’t involved in any conversations about restricting healthcare, but that doesn’t mean the prime minister and her team didn’t discuss this.”
So Kwasi says Alex Boyd said that an unnamed advisor said that Truss was considering cutting cancer treatment on the NHS. How would one even go about 'cutting cancer treatment on the NHS'? Loathsome drivel. I really pity Kwarteng that he's reduced to slagging off his former employer and close associate as a some sort of pseudo-career. It's like a poundshop version of Prince Harry.
Yeah.
There’s no NHS Cancer Treatment On/Off stop button.
So you’d have to try and tell all the trusts to stop. The first thing they’d do after making sure it wasn’t a prank call, is say no. And call all the lawyers.
Err, did the Tory government ever try to implement impossible policies that sounded like prank calls and were stopped by the lawyers. Unfortunately on a monthly basis.......
You could cut the NHS budget by 5% and leave trusts to sort out what to cut, there would be zero need or indeed mechanism by which you could target 'cancer treatment', and the only reason such a bizarre concept has been dreamed up is to smear the Truss Government. The fact the Independent published it, and that avowedly intelligent people have given it airtime on PB is proof that Truss derangement syndrome is real and dangerous.
Love to know where you think there is 5% spare space in an NHS Trust's budget?
To be fair, you could restrict or qualify medical treatments further and/or freeze or cut staff salaries by 5-10% on top and cut staff numbers.
You'd have massively strikes, and lots leaving the profession, but it's a political choice that's available.
Greece didn't do dissimilar in the depths of its crisis.
You could get rid of 50% of non patient facing staff in the NHS and no one would notice. There's a lot of fat that can be trimmed but no one is willing to do it.
I think there's still a lack of honesty about all of these discussions around spending. The public sector has added ~700k people since 2019 it is the source of our budget deficit alongside interest due from linkers. We're spending massively more money on staffing costs and the only sustainable way we can cut taxes is by cutting staff, the idea that public sector pay was too low is a myth, if it was true then we wouldn't have gained 700k employees.
The other big area of spending that needs to be addressed is benefits, specifically sickness benefits. The current system is far, far too easy to game and far too generous. Universal Credit was a good idea but fundamentally relies on people's honesty and there are millions of people in the country who are not honest. The older system under Labour before the Tories switched to UC was better. The assessments were tougher and people who didn't want to work weren't able to live a life on benefits by claiming mental health issues. Labour managed to get the million people saying they had "undetectable but debilitating" back problems back into work and now they have to clear up the Tory mess with "mental health".
I don't think Labour will do anything on either of these points, in fact I think it will get worse because Starmer is weak.
The situation feels a bit like the breakdown of the soviet union. Everything is starting to fail, all the systems and processes set up are not delivering tangible outcomes.
I didn't think that things could get worse than the tories but it feels like they are under Starmer. The tories still had a vague idea that the economy needs to grow, this seems to be absent from the labour party. It is austerity without growth, but still they have the inbuilt perception that the state is there to solve every problem by spending money.
I find myself pining for having Sunak back.
Yes, really.
New Labour did everything in its power to prevent a Conservative revival.
Current Labour is doing all in its power to promote a Conservative revival.
I’m quite confident that a year from now, the Conservatives will be leading in the polls, and the 2026/27 local elections will be grim for Labour.
I cannot see things being so bad, and so unable to pin the blame on the last government, and the Tories able to present themselves in a compelling new light, to achieve it in only a year.
For such a turnaround you need the classic push and pull situation, and even if New New Labour are going to see a lot of push factors, I'm not convinced the Tories will be able to have enough people be listening to them to work as a pull factor - at the moment the Reform minded are still busy flirting with Farage.
Ed Miliband achieved it within 6 months, the first Labour poll lead after the May 2010 election was late September 2010 with Yougov.
The Labour tax bombshell rises coming in the autumn will be as unpopular with Middle England as Cameron and Clegg's austerity was with the public sector, students and unions if not more so
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy, book claims:
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy. In the immediate aftermath of the mini-Budget, Ms Truss and her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, launched a desperate attempt to find spending cuts in an effort to restore stock-market confidence in their strategy.
A group of Ms Truss’s Tory aides met to discuss the issue. One of her senior advisers, Alex Boyd, “was told that Truss and Kwarteng were thinking they could still sort out the black hole with severe cuts”: “We’ve been told that they’re looking at stopping cancer treatment on the NHS.” ....
"She’s shouting at everyone that ‘We’ve got to find the money.’ When we tell her it can’t be done, she shouts back: ‘It’s not true. The money is there. You go and find it,’” ...
Speaking to The Independent, Mr Kwarteng said: “I wasn’t involved in any conversations about restricting healthcare, but that doesn’t mean the prime minister and her team didn’t discuss this.”
So Kwasi says Alex Boyd said that an unnamed advisor said that Truss was considering cutting cancer treatment on the NHS. How would one even go about 'cutting cancer treatment on the NHS'? Loathsome drivel. I really pity Kwarteng that he's reduced to slagging off his former employer and close associate as a some sort of pseudo-career. It's like a poundshop version of Prince Harry.
Yeah.
There’s no NHS Cancer Treatment On/Off stop button.
So you’d have to try and tell all the trusts to stop. The first thing they’d do after making sure it wasn’t a prank call, is say no. And call all the lawyers.
Err, did the Tory government ever try to implement impossible policies that sounded like prank calls and were stopped by the lawyers. Unfortunately on a monthly basis.......
You could cut the NHS budget by 5% and leave trusts to sort out what to cut, there would be zero need or indeed mechanism by which you could target 'cancer treatment', and the only reason such a bizarre concept has been dreamed up is to smear the Truss Government. The fact the Independent published it, and that avowedly intelligent people have given it airtime on PB is proof that Truss derangement syndrome is real and dangerous.
Love to know where you think there is 5% spare space in an NHS Trust's budget?
To be fair, you could restrict or qualify medical treatments further and/or freeze or cut staff salaries by 5-10% on top and cut staff numbers.
You'd have massively strikes, and lots leaving the profession, but it's a political choice that's available.
Greece didn't do dissimilar in the depths of its crisis.
You could get rid of 50% of non patient facing staff in the NHS and no one would notice. There's a lot of fat that can be trimmed but no one is willing to do it.
I think there's still a lack of honesty about all of these discussions around spending. The public sector has added ~700k people since 2019 it is the source of our budget deficit alongside interest due from linkers. We're spending massively more money on staffing costs and the only sustainable way we can cut taxes is by cutting staff, the idea that public sector pay was too low is a myth, if it was true then we wouldn't have gained 700k employees.
The other big area of spending that needs to be addressed is benefits, specifically sickness benefits. The current system is far, far too easy to game and far too generous. Universal Credit was a good idea but fundamentally relies on people's honesty and there are millions of people in the country who are not honest. The older system under Labour before the Tories switched to UC was better. The assessments were tougher and people who didn't want to work weren't able to live a life on benefits by claiming mental health issues. Labour managed to get the million people saying they had "undetectable but debilitating" back problems back into work and now they have to clear up the Tory mess with "mental health".
I don't think Labour will do anything on either of these points, in fact I think it will get worse because Starmer is weak.
The situation feels a bit like the breakdown of the soviet union. Everything is starting to fail, all the systems and processes set up are not delivering tangible outcomes.
I didn't think that things could get worse than the tories but it feels like they are under Starmer. The tories still had a vague idea that the economy needs to grow, this seems to be absent from the labour party. It is austerity without growth, but still they have the inbuilt perception that the state is there to solve every problem by spending money.
I find myself pining for having Sunak back.
Yes, really.
Me too, CR, me too. Starmer talks about being a grown up but there's nothing grown up about giving into the unions and telling lies about the state of the economy to justify mega tax rises. Sunak and Hunt got the economy growing despite all of the negativity from international bodies, domestic media and public sentiment driven by that relentlessly negative media coverage.
The economy is going to bleed out by a thousand spending rises and tax rises. It really might be time to make plans to exit, there's clearly no point in working hard in the UK, Labour will just punish us.
This government is as dismal as its predecessor and no doubt will prove as venial,
for myself I see nothing in it, but it is going to run and run, with people who are much more than self publicising idiots getting involved. The Economist ran it a bit this week too. Also note that the professional implied criticism of prosecution and defence is slowly building pressure. (Also note the careful but landmine laden language in the Guardian story).
I have read some of the articles about the case. I have no idea if she did the crimes she has been convicted of, but there are seeming issues, yet again, with the use of statistics and juries in trials. The general public do not understand statistics and probability. Having a jury rule on a case that relies heavily on statistics, and often with experts who are themselves not experts in stats is always going to lead to some suspecting problems. In this case it's sometimes been suggested or implied that Letby was present when ALL deaths occured at the NICU but that was not the case. The chart showing her as at work for all the suspicious deaths was only a selection. If the deaths. It is enough to cast doubt for me. But if course some will still just complain that people are only doubting because she is a pretty white blond...
I agree on the chart. The trouble is that if the chart was a selection, then that alone causes major questions. You *just don't pick and choose data*. And with a larger database then random perfect matches appear anyway by chance. If the database is them trimmed ...
The other disturbing thing for me was that the data were not that accurate, or at least so it seems - the timetable records didn't reflect reality.
The Guardian article emphasises the wider issues for the system, actually, as mcuh as this particular case.
I wonder if a panel of expert assessors would be required in future, answerable only to the judge?
Edit: been trying to remember where one finds assessors. Just remembered: in judicial inquiries, eg maritime ones.
"Wheelchair-bound driver, 96, becomes oldest woman in Britain to admit death by dangerous driving after she killed pensioner, 76, and injured pedestrian, 80, with her Vauxhall Corsa"
One benefit of 15-minute cities is they can help with the loss of independence that comes with losing the ability to drive (safely).
Nobody should be driving at 96.
Jeez.
I've met 90-year olds setting up anchors on Curved Ridge. That's the problem - some people keep going fine until they drop dead.
There was a 102-year-old skydiving a few days ago.
As a copilot, with an instructor.
We all need to have that chat with our parents at some point, and it’s really not an easy call to make if they rely on the car for daily life.
For many, driving means independence when they are young, and when they are old. Giving up on that is not easy - and when you are old, I fear it may be the start of, or hasten, the decline.
We have a neighbour in her late 80s who certainly has dementia and her son has tried to take her car keys off her and she absolutely lost it. She lives alone and all her neighbours know she should not be driving but apparently her son is powerless no matter the doctors have recommended she is persuaded not to drive
She has been known to park her car in town and forget where it is and come home on the bus and it only came to her sons attention tge first time when the local authority sent a parking penalty fine
He does track it but it is a horrible problem and one that hopefully will end soon with the DVLA withdrawal of her licence on health grounds but goodness only knows how she will react
Simple - sell the car or hide the keys. Forget her reaction, think about the lives you could save. It would stay with you for life.
You haven't a clue have you
There is nothing simple dealing with a dementia mother living on her own who will have spare keys or will just buy another car
Her son lives away and she is entirely on her own and has been told countless times not to drive but becomes abusive and is tormented by the idea she will lose her independence
It is a matter ultimately for the son and doctors to deal with
I'm sorry G. The fact she rails against these measures because of her loss of independence counts not a jot when she takes out someone's child, grandchild, parent or grandparent in her out of control one tonne killing machine. When my late father's eye sight became poor I spoke with the optician and his license was revoked.
That is the argument we are making but she has passed the eye test and the doctor will not stop her driving and believe me the neighbours want her stopped but she lives alone and her son is abroad though comes to see her regularly
I wonder how the GP would feel about his child on a zebra crossing as this menace passes?
Maybe @Foxy can explain the responsibility of the GP in these circumstances as we are all amazed they have not told her or her son she is unfit to drive
Anyone can report someone that they think is unfit, including a neighbour.
A doctor can, and is obliged to do so if they believe someone is driving against advice.
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy, book claims:
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy. In the immediate aftermath of the mini-Budget, Ms Truss and her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, launched a desperate attempt to find spending cuts in an effort to restore stock-market confidence in their strategy.
A group of Ms Truss’s Tory aides met to discuss the issue. One of her senior advisers, Alex Boyd, “was told that Truss and Kwarteng were thinking they could still sort out the black hole with severe cuts”: “We’ve been told that they’re looking at stopping cancer treatment on the NHS.” ....
"She’s shouting at everyone that ‘We’ve got to find the money.’ When we tell her it can’t be done, she shouts back: ‘It’s not true. The money is there. You go and find it,’” ...
Speaking to The Independent, Mr Kwarteng said: “I wasn’t involved in any conversations about restricting healthcare, but that doesn’t mean the prime minister and her team didn’t discuss this.”
So Kwasi says Alex Boyd said that an unnamed advisor said that Truss was considering cutting cancer treatment on the NHS. How would one even go about 'cutting cancer treatment on the NHS'? Loathsome drivel. I really pity Kwarteng that he's reduced to slagging off his former employer and close associate as a some sort of pseudo-career. It's like a poundshop version of Prince Harry.
Yeah.
There’s no NHS Cancer Treatment On/Off stop button.
So you’d have to try and tell all the trusts to stop. The first thing they’d do after making sure it wasn’t a prank call, is say no. And call all the lawyers.
Err, did the Tory government ever try to implement impossible policies that sounded like prank calls and were stopped by the lawyers. Unfortunately on a monthly basis.......
You could cut the NHS budget by 5% and leave trusts to sort out what to cut, there would be zero need or indeed mechanism by which you could target 'cancer treatment', and the only reason such a bizarre concept has been dreamed up is to smear the Truss Government. The fact the Independent published it, and that avowedly intelligent people have given it airtime on PB is proof that Truss derangement syndrome is real and dangerous.
Love to know where you think there is 5% spare space in an NHS Trust's budget?
To be fair, you could restrict or qualify medical treatments further and/or freeze or cut staff salaries by 5-10% on top and cut staff numbers.
You'd have massively strikes, and lots leaving the profession, but it's a political choice that's available.
Greece didn't do dissimilar in the depths of its crisis.
You could get rid of 50% of non patient facing staff in the NHS and no one would notice. There's a lot of fat that can be trimmed but no one is willing to do it.
I think there's still a lack of honesty about all of these discussions around spending. The public sector has added ~700k people since 2019 it is the source of our budget deficit alongside interest due from linkers. We're spending massively more money on staffing costs and the only sustainable way we can cut taxes is by cutting staff, the idea that public sector pay was too low is a myth, if it was true then we wouldn't have gained 700k employees.
The other big area of spending that needs to be addressed is benefits, specifically sickness benefits. The current system is far, far too easy to game and far too generous. Universal Credit was a good idea but fundamentally relies on people's honesty and there are millions of people in the country who are not honest. The older system under Labour before the Tories switched to UC was better. The assessments were tougher and people who didn't want to work weren't able to live a life on benefits by claiming mental health issues. Labour managed to get the million people saying they had "undetectable but debilitating" back problems back into work and now they have to clear up the Tory mess with "mental health".
I don't think Labour will do anything on either of these points, in fact I think it will get worse because Starmer is weak.
The situation feels a bit like the breakdown of the soviet union. Everything is starting to fail, all the systems and processes set up are not delivering tangible outcomes.
I didn't think that things could get worse than the tories but it feels like they are under Starmer. The tories still had a vague idea that the economy needs to grow, this seems to be absent from the labour party. It is austerity without growth, but still they have the inbuilt perception that the state is there to solve every problem by spending money.
I find myself pining for having Sunak back.
Yes, really.
New Labour did everything in its power to prevent a Conservative revival.
Current Labour is doing all in its power to promote a Conservative revival.
I’m quite confident that a year from now, the Conservatives will be leading in the polls, and the 2026/27 local elections will be grim for Labour.
I cannot see things being so bad, and so unable to pin the blame on the last government, and the Tories able to present themselves in a compelling new light, to achieve it in only a year.
For such a turnaround you need the classic push and pull situation, and even if New New Labour are going to see a lot of push factors, I'm not convinced the Tories will be able to have enough people be listening to them to work as a pull factor - at the moment the Reform minded are still busy flirting with Farage.
Well precisely. There's no guarantee that dissatisfaction with Labour will directly beenfit the tories.
Overwhelmingly, it’s the Conservatives who in second place in Labour seats.
Labour could face a bigger wipeout than the Tories did in 2024 because the anti-Labour vote will be very efficient, like a mirror image of their big majority on a low share of the vote.
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy, book claims:
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy. In the immediate aftermath of the mini-Budget, Ms Truss and her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, launched a desperate attempt to find spending cuts in an effort to restore stock-market confidence in their strategy.
A group of Ms Truss’s Tory aides met to discuss the issue. One of her senior advisers, Alex Boyd, “was told that Truss and Kwarteng were thinking they could still sort out the black hole with severe cuts”: “We’ve been told that they’re looking at stopping cancer treatment on the NHS.” ....
"She’s shouting at everyone that ‘We’ve got to find the money.’ When we tell her it can’t be done, she shouts back: ‘It’s not true. The money is there. You go and find it,’” ...
Speaking to The Independent, Mr Kwarteng said: “I wasn’t involved in any conversations about restricting healthcare, but that doesn’t mean the prime minister and her team didn’t discuss this.”
So Kwasi says Alex Boyd said that an unnamed advisor said that Truss was considering cutting cancer treatment on the NHS. How would one even go about 'cutting cancer treatment on the NHS'? Loathsome drivel. I really pity Kwarteng that he's reduced to slagging off his former employer and close associate as a some sort of pseudo-career. It's like a poundshop version of Prince Harry.
Yeah.
There’s no NHS Cancer Treatment On/Off stop button.
So you’d have to try and tell all the trusts to stop. The first thing they’d do after making sure it wasn’t a prank call, is say no. And call all the lawyers.
Err, did the Tory government ever try to implement impossible policies that sounded like prank calls and were stopped by the lawyers. Unfortunately on a monthly basis.......
You could cut the NHS budget by 5% and leave trusts to sort out what to cut, there would be zero need or indeed mechanism by which you could target 'cancer treatment', and the only reason such a bizarre concept has been dreamed up is to smear the Truss Government. The fact the Independent published it, and that avowedly intelligent people have given it airtime on PB is proof that Truss derangement syndrome is real and dangerous.
Love to know where you think there is 5% spare space in an NHS Trust's budget?
To be fair, you could restrict or qualify medical treatments further and/or freeze or cut staff salaries by 5-10% on top and cut staff numbers.
You'd have massively strikes, and lots leaving the profession, but it's a political choice that's available.
Greece didn't do dissimilar in the depths of its crisis.
You could get rid of 50% of non patient facing staff in the NHS and no one would notice. There's a lot of fat that can be trimmed but no one is willing to do it.
I think there's still a lack of honesty about all of these discussions around spending. The public sector has added ~700k people since 2019 it is the source of our budget deficit alongside interest due from linkers. We're spending massively more money on staffing costs and the only sustainable way we can cut taxes is by cutting staff, the idea that public sector pay was too low is a myth, if it was true then we wouldn't have gained 700k employees.
The other big area of spending that needs to be addressed is benefits, specifically sickness benefits. The current system is far, far too easy to game and far too generous. Universal Credit was a good idea but fundamentally relies on people's honesty and there are millions of people in the country who are not honest. The older system under Labour before the Tories switched to UC was better. The assessments were tougher and people who didn't want to work weren't able to live a life on benefits by claiming mental health issues. Labour managed to get the million people saying they had "undetectable but debilitating" back problems back into work and now they have to clear up the Tory mess with "mental health".
I don't think Labour will do anything on either of these points, in fact I think it will get worse because Starmer is weak.
The situation feels a bit like the breakdown of the soviet union. Everything is starting to fail, all the systems and processes set up are not delivering tangible outcomes.
I didn't think that things could get worse than the tories but it feels like they are under Starmer. The tories still had a vague idea that the economy needs to grow, this seems to be absent from the labour party. It is austerity without growth, but still they have the inbuilt perception that the state is there to solve every problem by spending money.
I find myself pining for having Sunak back.
Yes, really.
New Labour did everything in its power to prevent a Conservative revival.
Current Labour is doing all in its power to promote a Conservative revival.
I’m quite confident that a year from now, the Conservatives will be leading in the polls, and the 2026/27 local elections will be grim for Labour.
I cannot see things being so bad, and so unable to pin the blame on the last government, and the Tories able to present themselves in a compelling new light, to achieve it in only a year.
For such a turnaround you need the classic push and pull situation, and even if New New Labour are going to see a lot of push factors, I'm not convinced the Tories will be able to have enough people be listening to them to work as a pull factor - at the moment the Reform minded are still busy flirting with Farage.
Well precisely. There's no guarantee that dissatisfaction with Labour will directly beenfit the tories.
Indeed, while polling for Starmer is at best indifferent, it is highly negative for any of the 6 Tory leadership candidates.
Those frustrated by Starmer want him to shift left, not right.
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy, book claims:
Liz Truss considered scrapping all NHS cancer treatment after crashing economy. In the immediate aftermath of the mini-Budget, Ms Truss and her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, launched a desperate attempt to find spending cuts in an effort to restore stock-market confidence in their strategy.
A group of Ms Truss’s Tory aides met to discuss the issue. One of her senior advisers, Alex Boyd, “was told that Truss and Kwarteng were thinking they could still sort out the black hole with severe cuts”: “We’ve been told that they’re looking at stopping cancer treatment on the NHS.” ....
"She’s shouting at everyone that ‘We’ve got to find the money.’ When we tell her it can’t be done, she shouts back: ‘It’s not true. The money is there. You go and find it,’” ...
Speaking to The Independent, Mr Kwarteng said: “I wasn’t involved in any conversations about restricting healthcare, but that doesn’t mean the prime minister and her team didn’t discuss this.”
So Kwasi says Alex Boyd said that an unnamed advisor said that Truss was considering cutting cancer treatment on the NHS. How would one even go about 'cutting cancer treatment on the NHS'? Loathsome drivel. I really pity Kwarteng that he's reduced to slagging off his former employer and close associate as a some sort of pseudo-career. It's like a poundshop version of Prince Harry.
Yeah.
There’s no NHS Cancer Treatment On/Off stop button.
So you’d have to try and tell all the trusts to stop. The first thing they’d do after making sure it wasn’t a prank call, is say no. And call all the lawyers.
Err, did the Tory government ever try to implement impossible policies that sounded like prank calls and were stopped by the lawyers. Unfortunately on a monthly basis.......
You could cut the NHS budget by 5% and leave trusts to sort out what to cut, there would be zero need or indeed mechanism by which you could target 'cancer treatment', and the only reason such a bizarre concept has been dreamed up is to smear the Truss Government. The fact the Independent published it, and that avowedly intelligent people have given it airtime on PB is proof that Truss derangement syndrome is real and dangerous.
Love to know where you think there is 5% spare space in an NHS Trust's budget?
To be fair, you could restrict or qualify medical treatments further and/or freeze or cut staff salaries by 5-10% on top and cut staff numbers.
You'd have massively strikes, and lots leaving the profession, but it's a political choice that's available.
Greece didn't do dissimilar in the depths of its crisis.
You could get rid of 50% of non patient facing staff in the NHS and no one would notice. There's a lot of fat that can be trimmed but no one is willing to do it.
I think there's still a lack of honesty about all of these discussions around spending. The public sector has added ~700k people since 2019 it is the source of our budget deficit alongside interest due from linkers. We're spending massively more money on staffing costs and the only sustainable way we can cut taxes is by cutting staff, the idea that public sector pay was too low is a myth, if it was true then we wouldn't have gained 700k employees.
The other big area of spending that needs to be addressed is benefits, specifically sickness benefits. The current system is far, far too easy to game and far too generous. Universal Credit was a good idea but fundamentally relies on people's honesty and there are millions of people in the country who are not honest. The older system under Labour before the Tories switched to UC was better. The assessments were tougher and people who didn't want to work weren't able to live a life on benefits by claiming mental health issues. Labour managed to get the million people saying they had "undetectable but debilitating" back problems back into work and now they have to clear up the Tory mess with "mental health".
I don't think Labour will do anything on either of these points, in fact I think it will get worse because Starmer is weak.
"You could get rid of 50% of non patient facing staff in the NHS and no one would notice."
The right wingers have been saying that for decades. But it's already been done. Privatisation of many functions. Hence many of the NHS problems - lack of hygiene, patient malnutrition, over charging by commercial firms ...
There is vast headcount in the DOH, and NHS England (Scotland, Wales etc.) before you so much as get to an NHS trust, let alone a hospital.
My firm has been cutting non-frontline staff for years, wave after wave. The result is generally that people like me spend several hours a week doing our own admin, and we do it much less efficiently than the people who used to do it for a living. It's only now with proper investment in technology, rather than making fewer people do the same amount of unchanged activity, that we're starting to see some productivity savings coming back.
I daresay the health service has experienced much of the same. If you're going to do more with less then you absolutely have to change processes, not just headcount, and invest properly in automation.
I appreciate that, but I have described two layers of bureaucracy that really have no involvement, even in a supporting role, in patient care.
Apart from Training, public health, administering screening programmes, assessing and policing quality of outcomes etc etc.
Just as there's more to an air force than pilots, there's more to a health system than doctors and nurses.
Want to improve Health Service productivity? Sort out Social Care.
WHY CAN’T HOSPITALS DISCHARGE PATIENTS?
UK population ⬆️7% - 2012-23
GPs ⬇️ 7% District nurses ⬇️42% Health Visitors ⬇️30% Learning Disability Nurses⬇️23% School Nurses⬇️25% Nursing home beds ⬇️ 12% Residential Care home beds ⬇️16% Social Services ⬇️⬇️
No chance now of social care being fixed in this parliament. Labour once again about to kick the can down the road with yet another commission to "look into the issues" as if we all had no fucking idea what the issues are.
Don't parties in opposition have resources, and think tanks to rely on, so they can formulate policies without the levers of government to use? That's how they then proclaim their policies to be better at election time.
So whilst you need to do some diligence on the big issues it is not massively credible if an incoming party claim to still be at the whiteboard stage.
Yep.
It is can kicking of the highest order.
As Dilnot has said - I paraphrase - : we don't need another fucking inquiry to tell us what the problem is we need people to make a decision on what the solution is.
Comments
Plan to be out of it for 5 years, then assume you will be out for 10-15 since it will inevitably take twice as long as they plan for it to be, and be done with it.
We do wonder though.
A doctor can, and is obliged to do so if they believe someone is driving against advice.
Dementia doesn't automatically disqualify:
https://www.alzheimers.org.uk/get-support/staying-independent/driving-dementia#:~:text=As dementia gets worse, it,the middle stage of dementia.
The vast majority of elderly drivers drive within their own limitations, the highest risk drivers are young males.
45%?
A quarter of Britons (24%) are excited about the Oasis reunion tour
Very excited: 9%
Fairly excited: 15%
Not very excited: 19%
Not excited at all: 51%
Never heard of Oasis: 3%
https://x.com/YouGov/status/1828464262336966993?t=Nop2qQUuSVkYTU79FXsBzQ&s=19
Personally, I won't apply. Their first two albums are iconic, but that was 3 decades ago, I wouldn't bother to see them now.
It will be interesting to see if they actually follow through on it, if elected - similarly with Starmer's government.
Two years ago, a single wind energy project in Germany with just three turbines required 36,000 pages of documentation.
Then they passed permitting reform to cut red tape.
Now Germany is a leader in clean energy deployment.
Some lessons here for the United States...
https://x.com/AlecStapp/status/1828523281525416050
Special Counsel Jack Smith has charged former President Donald Trump in a superseding indictment in his federal election subversion case.
https://x.com/KFaulders/status/1828523934976782406
https://conservativehome.com/2024/08/27/conservative-leadership-candidates-respond-to-the-prime-ministers-speech/
I think there's still a lack of honesty about all of these discussions around spending. The public sector has added ~700k people since 2019 it is the source of our budget deficit alongside interest due from linkers. We're spending massively more money on staffing costs and the only sustainable way we can cut taxes is by cutting staff, the idea that public sector pay was too low is a myth, if it was true then we wouldn't have gained 700k employees.
The other big area of spending that needs to be addressed is benefits, specifically sickness benefits. The current system is far, far too easy to game and far too generous. Universal Credit was a good idea but fundamentally relies on people's honesty and there are millions of people in the country who are not honest. The older system under Labour before the Tories switched to UC was better. The assessments were tougher and people who didn't want to work weren't able to live a life on benefits by claiming mental health issues. Labour managed to get the million people saying they had "undetectable but debilitating" back problems back into work and now they have to clear up the Tory mess with "mental health".
I don't think Labour will do anything on either of these points, in fact I think it will get worse because Starmer is weak.
By the way, I see he's also appealed Cannon's dismissal of the documents case.
At least Taylor Swift is easy on the eye.
RFK Jr faces call for investigation into claim he chainsawed whale’s head off
Activists say Kennedy could’ve committed felony violation for allegedly driving with whale skull strapped to car roof
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/aug/27/rfk-jr-dead-whale
I'm jealous of this opening paragraph.
His independent White House campaign has fizzled, but the flow of bizarre stories of Robert F Kennedy Jr’s unorthodox handling of the carcasses of wild mammals has experienced no similar suspension...
The right wingers have been saying that for decades. But it's already been done. Privatisation of many functions. Hence many of the NHS problems - lack of hygiene, patient malnutrition, over charging by commercial firms ...
I didn't think that things could get worse than the tories but it feels like they are under Starmer. The tories still had a vague idea that the economy needs to grow, this seems to be absent from the labour party. It is austerity without growth, but still they have the inbuilt perception that the state is there to solve every problem by spending money.
1/3 of the patients that I saw this morning didn't need to be there. They needed to be seen after, rather than before, their investigations were back. Administrative inefficiency brought them back.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/aug/27/lucy-letby-inquiry-should-be-postponed-changed-experts
for myself I see nothing in it, but it is going to run and run, with people who are much more than self publicising idiots getting involved. The Economist ran it a bit this week too. Also note that the professional implied criticism of prosecution and defence is slowly building pressure. (Also note the careful but landmine laden language in the Guardian story).
In this case it's sometimes been suggested or implied that Letby was present when ALL deaths occured at the NICU but that was not the case. The chart showing her as at work for all the suspicious deaths was only a selection. If the deaths. It is enough to cast doubt for me.
But if course some will still just complain that people are only doubting because she is a pretty white blond...
I think their approach to this essential has been haphazard.
I daresay the health service has experienced much of the same. If you're going to do more with less then you absolutely have to change processes, not just headcount, and invest properly in automation.
In 2010, the Coalition took the axe to local Government and about a million jobs were lost in the 2010s in that sector.
Central Government and especially the NHS were largely unaffected.
He saw them coming!!
Everyone’s golden era of popular culture is what happened between their 16th and 21st birthday. My golden era straddled Major and Blair.
https://x.com/Holden_Culotta/status/1828197572588048481
Cooper: The Trump Administration forced the Afghan government to release 5,000 Taliban?
McMaster: Correct.
https://x.com/Acyn/status/1828230324729594045
Not exactly John Keates, is it?
Perhaps Very Senior Counsel are legends in their own minds?
For every revenue generator at an investment bank there are - what - 3 or 4 support staff. The same is true of the army, air force, etc.
Why would it not also be true for a medical service?
It’s three removed hearsay. Which puts it on a level with Farmy Farm.
Yes, really.
America is lost.
Were she unattractive and older, yet alone a male, there wouldn't be an appeal.
Now a lot of companies will keep on going but I get to the point that I get bored and a new project is way more fun than the last few bits of pointless work.
Plus the worst thing you can do is give customer service staff all the difficult jobs, once in a while the random easy to fix one is fun to deal with..,
Just as there's more to an air force than pilots, there's more to a health system than doctors and nurses.
Want to improve Health Service productivity? Sort out Social Care.
WHY CAN’T HOSPITALS DISCHARGE PATIENTS?
UK population ⬆️7% - 2012-23
GPs ⬇️ 7%
District nurses ⬇️42%
Health Visitors ⬇️30%
Learning Disability Nurses⬇️23%
School Nurses⬇️25%
Nursing home beds ⬇️ 12%
Residential Care home beds ⬇️16%
Social Services ⬇️⬇️
THEY ARE CONNECTED - FUND COMMUNITY CARE
https://bsky.app/profile/drstevetaylor.bsky.social/post/3l2mg6zwxdw2k
Massive increases in social care spending as NHS budgets are cut, for example. University education down, but secondary schools up. No HS2, but an expansion of local bus services rather than the 50% cut we got. I could dig into COFOG data and make it my first PB piece...
It's those that need to be attacked. There's so much stuff that policy creates that absorbs huge amounts of time and doesn't make sense.
This will be the case in the public sector too.
Once the weekends have gone the Tuesday / Wednesday Thursday nights will be made available and people will buy them.
Personally I don’t see the point, Jarvis is great live, Liam / Noel / Damon I ain’t bothered.
Current Labour is doing all in its power to promote a Conservative revival.
I’m quite confident that a year from now, the Conservatives will be leading in the polls, and the 2026/27 local elections will be grim for Labour.
This is genuinely where the government should start to invest in AI solutions, three of our customers have deployed AI chat bots in the last year or so and all of them have had a marked increase in NPS. Obviously their datasets have been built in a way that the chat bots are able to access what they need about customers and resolutions but theres no reason government departments couldn't do the same. I'd rather have 3 or 4 ML Engineers and MLOps people plus a few analysts and analytics engineers to setup and maintain it all than a bunch of admin staff who barely make a difference to patients.
Trump has discovered his fans will pay for anything, it really is reminiscent of some of those horrid televangelist 'churches' which harrangue people for cash constantly. But then again I'd not want to be on any party's mailing list out in the USA with all the begging emails.
1) the district nurses weren’t available
2) 5 minutes sorting out at dressing was easy when they had some down time at 9-10am..
Plus a decent lemon drizzle cake or 2 keeps everyone happy.
I think it was in David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs he tried to identify the various categories - Flunkies, Goons, Duct Tapers, Box Tickers, and Taskmasters.
Not that there is not any value in some of those (I'm midway between a box ticker and a duct taper myself, and would like to think there's value), but we all know examples which are valueless.
For such a turnaround you need the classic push and pull situation, and even if New New Labour are going to see a lot of push factors, I'm not convinced the Tories will be able to have enough people be listening to them to work as a pull factor - at the moment the Reform minded are still busy flirting with Farage.
So whilst you need to do some diligence on the big issues it is not massively credible if an incoming party claim to still be at the whiteboard stage.
The economy is going to bleed out by a thousand spending rises and tax rises. It really might be time to make plans to exit, there's clearly no point in working hard in the UK, Labour will just punish us.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/08/27/liz-truss-considered-scrapping-cancer-treatment-on-the-nhs/
The other disturbing thing for me was that the data were not that accurate, or at least so it seems - the timetable records didn't reflect reality.
The Guardian article emphasises the wider issues for the system, actually, as mcuh as this particular case.
I wonder if a panel of expert assessors would be required in future, answerable only to the judge?
My uncle lost his pension pot and a couple of rental homes before anyone realised. My mum may kill someone by inattentive driving. It has been raised.
We can look out for people but it is very difficult to take their control away.
On Wednesday the prime minister will begin talks on a new treaty with Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor. He said closer working with Europe would be “crucial” to boosting the economy and controlling immigration — and that Britain needed to “turn a corner” on Brexit.
No 10 hopes that the agreement with Berlin will stimulate business and trade, and help to build defence and security co-operation.
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/keir-starmer-seeks-german-deal-to-turn-corner-on-brexit-vk2hbp0s8
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2015_United_Kingdom_general_election
The Labour tax bombshell rises coming in the autumn will be as unpopular with Middle England as Cameron and Clegg's austerity was with the public sector, students and unions if not more so
Those frustrated by Starmer want him to shift left, not right.
It is can kicking of the highest order.
As Dilnot has said - I paraphrase - : we don't need another fucking inquiry to tell us what the problem is we need people to make a decision on what the solution is.