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.
You're conflating a few roles, some not even in the NHS, with the whole.
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.
Yes there is. Zero sum game (at least to some extent). And Starmer is visibly a dud, less than 8 weeks in.
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.
Isn't the anti-Labour vote in the Shires the Lib Dems?
That's what's missing from all this analysis. The Tories are caught between the Lib Dems and Reform. Labour isn't the real problem, oddly enough.
There might be something quite seismic happening on the right in Scotland; starting to look a little existential for the Scons. A microcosm, perhaps.
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.
Isn't the anti-Labour vote in the Shires the Lib Dems?
That's what's missing from all this analysis. The Tories are caught between the Lib Dems and Reform. Labour isn't the real problem, oddly enough.
There might be something quite seismic happening on the right in Scotland; starting to look a little existential for the Scons. A microcosm, perhaps.
Though that's partly like a dog, licking, and sphericals - because the voters can. The voters can vote for them without wasting their time (the only reason the Tories and Greens have much representation at Holyrood much of the time).
Reform would have a much greater representation in English seats at Westminster if that house didn't rely on such an, erm, historical voting system.
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.
Isn't the anti-Labour vote in the Shires the Lib Dems?
That's what's missing from all this analysis. The Tories are caught between the Lib Dems and Reform. Labour isn't the real problem, oddly enough.
There might be something quite seismic happening on the right in Scotland; starting to look a little existential for the Scons. A microcosm, perhaps.
My pre-GE theory was that Labour would win a big majority this time but then face a pincer movement between the Lib Dems and Reform in the next parliament. Whether there's a Tory revival depends a lot on who they chose as leader and whether they get a bit of luck.
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
Good spot, though he was not starting as far behind,
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.
Yes there is. Zero sum game (at least to some extent). And Starmer is visibly a dud, less than 8 weeks in.
The Lib Dems won 72 seats on 12-13% of the vote - they have been higher than that in recent memory, 18% under Ashdown, 22% with Kennedy and Clegg.
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.
Don't we? At least a review to check the current situation. The Tories sat on Dilnot for so long. Since 2011. Thirteen years!
wtf? She can't have been that bad. not sure I (want to) believe that
Yeh, can't be Liz. She's a v bright comp kid who made good so she will know that the way to save a ton of money in the NHS hospital system is to close A&E on a bank holiday weekend and not allow anyone - no matter how old - to be admitted for a UTI.
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.
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.
If you read the article, you will see that the concern is more with the general principles and problems of statistical evidence, well beyond this case.
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.
Don't we? At least a review to check the current situation. The Tories sat on Dilnot for so long. Since 2011. Thirteen years!
The PB Tories still clearly haven’t come to terms with either their defeat, or the scale of their defeat, or both. It will come, in time.
Denial. Starmer is not a dud.
Anger. How very dare you turn round after 14 years of misrule and accurately claim after 7 weeks that Starmer is a dud?
Bargaining. Please God let us get a month past the budget without any polls showing a 5 point Tory lead. And let the next winter of discontent be 2025-6 not 2024-5.
Depression. Self explanatory.
Acceptance. That the Tories are the natural party of government.
The sooner you start on this journey the quicker it will be over.
wtf? She can't have been that bad. not sure I (want to) believe that
Yeh, can't be Liz. She's a v bright comp kid who made good so she will know that the way to save a ton of money in the NHS hospital system is to close A&E on a bank holiday weekend and not allow anyone - no matter how old - to be admitted for a UTI.
Which is a prime cause of temporary dementia in the elderly. Happened to my great-aunt.
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.
Don't we? At least a review to check the current situation. The Tories sat on Dilnot for so long. Since 2011. Thirteen years!
Quick review: The same but worse.
Quite possibly: I'd nbe surprised if it were better. But a quick review still takes a few months at least to plug in the latest figures. I wouldn't dream of making a public comment on policy till October if I were the Labour leadership.
The PB Tories still clearly haven’t come to terms with either their defeat, or the scale of their defeat, or both. It will come, in time.
Denial. Starmer is not a dud.
Anger. How very dare you turn round after 14 years of misrule and accurately claim after 7 weeks that Starmer is a dud?
Bargaining. Please God let us get a month past the budget without any polls showing a 5 point Tory lead. And let the next winter of discontent be 2025-6 not 2024-5.
Depression. Self explanatory.
Acceptance. That the Tories are the natural party of government.
The sooner you start on this journey the quicker it will be over.
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.
And how many NHS workers does it take in 'public health' to tell us to eat 5 portions of fruit and veg a day, and not smoke (about as innovative and helpful as it gets), when the creative work, the deployment, media buying etc. in those campaigns is farmed out to marketing agencies anyway?
wtf? She can't have been that bad. not sure I (want to) believe that
Yeh, can't be Liz. She's a v bright comp kid who made good so she will know that the way to save a ton of money in the NHS hospital system is to close A&E on a bank holiday weekend and not allow anyone - no matter how old - to be admitted for a UTI.
Which is a prime cause of temporary dementia in the elderly. Happened to my great-aunt.
Yes. I wonder how much "dementia" is actually low level UTIs.
Weirdly quite a lot of care staff either don't seem to know this or believe you when you say that someone is actually worse than they should be and maybe, just maybe, they should do a urine test.
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.
Being better than Keir Starmer is hardly a ringing endorsement. It was a miserable Government and it folded and threw in the towel against Labour. Nobody forced Sunak to go to the polls.
wtf? She can't have been that bad. not sure I (want to) believe that
Yeh, can't be Liz. She's a v bright comp kid who made good so she will know that the way to save a ton of money in the NHS hospital system is to close A&E on a bank holiday weekend and not allow anyone - no matter how old - to be admitted for a UTI.
Which is a prime cause of temporary dementia in the elderly. Happened to my great-aunt.
Yes. I wonder how much "dementia" is actually low level UTIs.
Weirdly quite a lot of care staff either don't seem to know this or believe you when you say that someone is actually worse than they should be and maybe, just maybe, they should do a urine test.
My experience is care staff and nhs staff know all about UTI and delirium type symptoms to the point that that is all they want to consider when someone presents.
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.
Being better than Keir Starmer is hardly a ringing endorsement. It was a miserable Government and it folded and threw in the towel against Labour. Nobody forced Sunak to go to the polls.
Say what you like about Rishi and Hunt, they got the economy moving again after the years of mismanagement by Boris and Liz Truss with her awful 30 days of trashing our reputation among bond investors. I agree that he should have waited until November.
wtf? She can't have been that bad. not sure I (want to) believe that
Yeh, can't be Liz. She's a v bright comp kid who made good so she will know that the way to save a ton of money in the NHS hospital system is to close A&E on a bank holiday weekend and not allow anyone - no matter how old - to be admitted for a UTI.
Which is a prime cause of temporary dementia in the elderly. Happened to my great-aunt.
Yes. I wonder how much "dementia" is actually low level UTIs.
Weirdly quite a lot of care staff either don't seem to know this or believe you when you say that someone is actually worse than they should be and maybe, just maybe, they should do a urine test.
My experience is care staff and nhs staff know all about UTI and delirium type symptoms to the point that that is all they want to consider when someone presents.
OK, fair enough. Maybe we got them on a bad night.
I think our problem was that we had someone with actual dementia who just presented as a bit worse with a UTI and you had to know what they were like before in order to spot the change.
Long term low dose antibiotics now, which seems to have stopped the problem (and, oddly, slowed the Alzheimer's decline too, which raises all sorts of questions).
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.
Being better than Keir Starmer is hardly a ringing endorsement. It was a miserable Government and it folded and threw in the towel against Labour. Nobody forced Sunak to go to the polls.
Say what you like about Rishi and Hunt, they got the economy moving again after the years of mismanagement by Boris and Liz Truss with her awful 30 days of trashing our reputation among bond investors. I agree that he should have waited until November.
There has been a complete lack of business IT projects since about October last year.
Don’t take my word for it I can provide 10,000 recruiter confirmations….
wtf? She can't have been that bad. not sure I (want to) believe that
Yeh, can't be Liz. She's a v bright comp kid who made good so she will know that the way to save a ton of money in the NHS hospital system is to close A&E on a bank holiday weekend and not allow anyone - no matter how old - to be admitted for a UTI.
Which is a prime cause of temporary dementia in the elderly. Happened to my great-aunt.
Yes. I wonder how much "dementia" is actually low level UTIs.
Weirdly quite a lot of care staff either don't seem to know this or believe you when you say that someone is actually worse than they should be and maybe, just maybe, they should do a urine test.
My experience is care staff and nhs staff know all about UTI and delirium type symptoms to the point that that is all they want to consider when someone presents.
OK, fair enough. Maybe we got them on a bad night.
I think our problem was that we had someone with actual dementia who just presented as a bit worse with a UTI and you had to know what they were like before in order to spot the change.
Long term low dose antibiotics now, which seems to have stopped the problem (and, oddly, slowed the Alzheimer's decline too, which raises all sorts of questions).
Yes, it's incredibly difficult for staff to spot these slow incremental changes. I'm useful in some respects because I only turn up every few months or so, so pick up changes that my older relatives don't.
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.
Being better than Keir Starmer is hardly a ringing endorsement. It was a miserable Government and it folded and threw in the towel against Labour. Nobody forced Sunak to go to the polls.
Say what you like about Rishi and Hunt, they got the economy moving again after the years of mismanagement by Boris and Liz Truss with her awful 30 days of trashing our reputation among bond investors. I agree that he should have waited until November.
It does look like Labour are betting on improved relations with the EU helping with growth in the medium-term. It's probably the lowest hanging fruit; longer term issues around productivity, labour market participation and so on are much harder to fix.
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.
It doesn't require a coherant opposition. Labour can destroy itself from within on any number of issues, but most likely a combination of Gaza and austerity. It is hard to see what they are achieving whilst in power, they aren't giving their MP's anything to report back to their constituents.
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.
Being better than Keir Starmer is hardly a ringing endorsement. It was a miserable Government and it folded and threw in the towel against Labour. Nobody forced Sunak to go to the polls.
Say what you like about Rishi and Hunt, they got the economy moving again after the years of mismanagement by Boris and Liz Truss with her awful 30 days of trashing our reputation among bond investors. I agree that he should have waited until November.
It does look like Labour are betting on improved relations with the EU helping with growth in the medium-term. It's probably the lowest hanging fruit; longer term issues around productivity, labour market participation and so on are much harder to fix.
With the EU economy performing so poorly I don't we very much upside from this and if it means closer regulatory alignment, especially on AI/data where the EU is desperate to force other countries to adopt their stupid ideas, it will end up being a net negative. If anything I think easing import/export barriers will probably be a net negative for the only major economy showing signs of life as we spend more in Europe and get nothing back for it from them in the way of exports because the economy there is moribund.
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.
Being better than Keir Starmer is hardly a ringing endorsement. It was a miserable Government and it folded and threw in the towel against Labour. Nobody forced Sunak to go to the polls.
Say what you like about Rishi and Hunt, they got the economy moving again after the years of mismanagement by Boris and Liz Truss with her awful 30 days of trashing our reputation among bond investors. I agree that he should have waited until November.
It does look like Labour are betting on improved relations with the EU helping with growth in the medium-term. It's probably the lowest hanging fruit; longer term issues around productivity, labour market participation and so on are much harder to fix.
I've spent more of my career than I'd have liked in negotiations with the EU and nothing with them is low hanging fruit. They are mostly arrogant, inflexible and dogmatic (except when it suits them, e.g. over the definition of subsidiarity) and often surprisingly incompetent, especially DG-AG and DG-MOVE.
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.
Isn't the anti-Labour vote in the Shires the Lib Dems?
That's what's missing from all this analysis. The Tories are caught between the Lib Dems and Reform. Labour isn't the real problem, oddly enough.
There might be something quite seismic happening on the right in Scotland; starting to look a little existential for the Scons. A microcosm, perhaps.
The Tories lost 2019 voters to Labour, the LDs and Reform, if a high tax, high immigration Labour government is very unpopular and the Tories the best way to get rid of them both wings could come back. In Scotland too.
The PB Tories still clearly haven’t come to terms with either their defeat, or the scale of their defeat, or both. It will come, in time.
It would have been far worse for them (in terms of morale) if they'd lost by 20% or 15% [as the polls were continually saying] instead of 10%. They can also point to the fact that the combined Tory/RefUK share was 39% compared to 35% for Lab, (using GB figures, not UK).
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.
And how many NHS workers does it take in 'public health' to tell us to eat 5 portions of fruit and veg a day, and not smoke (about as innovative and helpful as it gets), when the creative work, the deployment, media buying etc. in those campaigns is farmed out to marketing agencies anyway?
Public health was passed to local authorities under Lansley's reforms. As well as telling us to eat more fruit, they are also responsible for capacity planning, health visitors and so on.
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.
It doesn't require a coherant opposition. Labour can destroy itself from within on any number of issues, but most likely a combination of Gaza and austerity. It is hard to see what they are achieving whilst in power, they aren't giving their MP's anything to report back to their constituents.
Another danger for Labour is internal unrest not on any policy but from the number of highly qualified new MPs who think themselves better, quite possibly rightly, than backbench fodder for incompetent ministers promoted above them, and recent charges of nepotism might not help there.
Been done. Bullshit. No surprise to see you spreading bollocks about a former Tory PM. With Tory activists like you, who needs Labour trolls?
After the 52mph cyclist debacle, I find myself in the unfamiliar position of siding with Liz Truss (and indeed Luckyguy).
I remember the Telegraph being a fairly standard paper; I read it in rotation with the Times and the Guardian on long train journeys. What happened?
It stopped trying to inform people and instead sought clicks.
From memory, it was going downhill well before internet revenue was dominant. Pretty women on the front page, and so on.
The Telegraph went downhill after it sacked @Leon, formerly of these pages. To be more serious, I do not know but do remember asking the same question when it lurched to the batshit right for no apparent reason (that is, no change of editor or proprietor).
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.
Seven weeks in and on PB we are looking at the inevitable end of the Labour Party in 2029. By February 2020 in the last Parliament we were pondering who might take over from Johnson during his fifth term.
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.
Seven weeks in and on PB we are looking at the inevitable end of the Labour Party in 2029. By February 2020 in the last Parliament we were pondering who might take over from Johnson during his fifth term.
An American plastic surgeon concludes Kamala Harris hasn't had any plastic surgery, which must be slightly unusual for top American politicians of a certain age.
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.
Seven weeks in and on PB we are looking at the inevitable end of the Labour Party in 2029. By February 2020 in the last Parliament we were pondering who might take over from Johnson during his fifth term.
The only mystery is why it has taken us 7 weeks.
It's what we do.
Fair play, you were on the case by close of business on 5th July.
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.
Being better than Keir Starmer is hardly a ringing endorsement. It was a miserable Government and it folded and threw in the towel against Labour. Nobody forced Sunak to go to the polls.
Say what you like about Rishi and Hunt, they got the economy moving again after the years of mismanagement by Boris and Liz Truss with her awful 30 days of trashing our reputation among bond investors. I agree that he should have waited until November.
It does look like Labour are betting on improved relations with the EU helping with growth in the medium-term. It's probably the lowest hanging fruit; longer term issues around productivity, labour market participation and so on are much harder to fix.
With the EU economy performing so poorly I don't we very much upside from this and if it means closer regulatory alignment, especially on AI/data where the EU is desperate to force other countries to adopt their stupid ideas, it will end up being a net negative. If anything I think easing import/export barriers will probably be a net negative for the only major economy showing signs of life as we spend more in Europe and get nothing back for it from them in the way of exports because the economy there is moribund.
With Keir's negotiating ability, we'll give them everything they want, including the strait jacket, and get next to nothing 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.
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.
Being better than Keir Starmer is hardly a ringing endorsement. It was a miserable Government and it folded and threw in the towel against Labour. Nobody forced Sunak to go to the polls.
Say what you like about Rishi and Hunt, they got the economy moving again after the years of mismanagement by Boris and Liz Truss with her awful 30 days of trashing our reputation among bond investors. I agree that he should have waited until November.
Meh. Liz Truss was politically inastute. But it wasn't her who caused the market turbulence.
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.
Being better than Keir Starmer is hardly a ringing endorsement. It was a miserable Government and it folded and threw in the towel against Labour. Nobody forced Sunak to go to the polls.
Say what you like about Rishi and Hunt, they got the economy moving again after the years of mismanagement by Boris and Liz Truss with her awful 30 days of trashing our reputation among bond investors. I agree that he should have waited until November.
It does look like Labour are betting on improved relations with the EU helping with growth in the medium-term. It's probably the lowest hanging fruit; longer term issues around productivity, labour market participation and so on are much harder to fix.
With the EU economy performing so poorly I don't we very much upside from this and if it means closer regulatory alignment, especially on AI/data where the EU is desperate to force other countries to adopt their stupid ideas, it will end up being a net negative. If anything I think easing import/export barriers will probably be a net negative for the only major economy showing signs of life as we spend more in Europe and get nothing back for it from them in the way of exports because the economy there is moribund.
With Keir's negotiating ability, we'll give them everything they want, including the strait jacket, and get next to nothing back.
Boris Johnson has already done that. Which means I sort of agree with you. Keir Starmer won't get much out of the EU.
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.
Being better than Keir Starmer is hardly a ringing endorsement. It was a miserable Government and it folded and threw in the towel against Labour. Nobody forced Sunak to go to the polls.
Say what you like about Rishi and Hunt, they got the economy moving again after the years of mismanagement by Boris and Liz Truss with her awful 30 days of trashing our reputation among bond investors. I agree that he should have waited until November.
Meh. Liz Truss was politically inastute. But it wasn't her who caused the market turbulence.
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.
Being better than Keir Starmer is hardly a ringing endorsement. It was a miserable Government and it folded and threw in the towel against Labour. Nobody forced Sunak to go to the polls.
Say what you like about Rishi and Hunt, they got the economy moving again after the years of mismanagement by Boris and Liz Truss with her awful 30 days of trashing our reputation among bond investors. I agree that he should have waited until November.
Meh. Liz Truss was politically inastute. But it wasn't her who caused the market turbulence.
Who was it that spooked the markets...
Rishi Sunak, and his friends in Parliament and the Treasury.
Why would any politician - even one as tin eared as Truss - scrap cancer treatment on the NHS? It's like the suggestion that politicians would want to keep covid restrictions: it depends on politicians not wanting to be reelected.
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.
Being better than Keir Starmer is hardly a ringing endorsement. It was a miserable Government and it folded and threw in the towel against Labour. Nobody forced Sunak to go to the polls.
Say what you like about Rishi and Hunt, they got the economy moving again after the years of mismanagement by Boris and Liz Truss with her awful 30 days of trashing our reputation among bond investors. I agree that he should have waited until November.
Meh. Liz Truss was politically inastute. But it wasn't her who caused the market turbulence.
Why would any politician - even one as tin eared as Truss - scrap cancer treatment on the NHS? It's like the suggestion that politicians would want to keep covid restrictions: it depends on politicians not wanting to be reelected.
Somehow I can see Liz Truss exploring all the options, rather like in Mitchell & Webb
It's morally wrong and that's why we can run it through the computer because we know whatever it says we're not going to do it ... we were pretty sure that child brothels would help with arts funding but does that mean we did it? No. Never got beyond the pilot scheme in Yeovil. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_4J4uor3JE
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.
Being better than Keir Starmer is hardly a ringing endorsement. It was a miserable Government and it folded and threw in the towel against Labour. Nobody forced Sunak to go to the polls.
Say what you like about Rishi and Hunt, they got the economy moving again after the years of mismanagement by Boris and Liz Truss with her awful 30 days of trashing our reputation among bond investors. I agree that he should have waited until November.
It does look like Labour are betting on improved relations with the EU helping with growth in the medium-term. It's probably the lowest hanging fruit; longer term issues around productivity, labour market participation and so on are much harder to fix.
With the EU economy performing so poorly I don't we very much upside from this and if it means closer regulatory alignment, especially on AI/data where the EU is desperate to force other countries to adopt their stupid ideas, it will end up being a net negative. If anything I think easing import/export barriers will probably be a net negative for the only major economy showing signs of life as we spend more in Europe and get nothing back for it from them in the way of exports because the economy there is moribund.
With Keir's negotiating ability, we'll give them everything they want, including the strait jacket, and get next to nothing back.
Boris Johnson has already done that. Which means I sort of agree with you. Keir Starmer won't get much out of the EU.
What's fascinating is how poorly even the established media in the UK understand the EU, like, err, The Times.
Leading news today about the UK striking a new treaty with Germany on market access, which isn't possible unless negotiated with the EU.
[What they probably mean is a political treaty and some bilateral negotiations that might influence the position that Germany might take as an EU member state in the European Council, but that isn't the same thing.]
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.
Being better than Keir Starmer is hardly a ringing endorsement. It was a miserable Government and it folded and threw in the towel against Labour. Nobody forced Sunak to go to the polls.
Say what you like about Rishi and Hunt, they got the economy moving again after the years of mismanagement by Boris and Liz Truss with her awful 30 days of trashing our reputation among bond investors. I agree that he should have waited until November.
Meh. Liz Truss was politically inastute. But it wasn't her who caused the market turbulence.
Who was it that spooked the markets...
Rishi Sunak, and his friends in Parliament and the Treasury.
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.
Being better than Keir Starmer is hardly a ringing endorsement. It was a miserable Government and it folded and threw in the towel against Labour. Nobody forced Sunak to go to the polls.
Say what you like about Rishi and Hunt, they got the economy moving again after the years of mismanagement by Boris and Liz Truss with her awful 30 days of trashing our reputation among bond investors. I agree that he should have waited until November.
Meh. Liz Truss was politically inastute. But it wasn't her who caused the market turbulence.
Who was it that spooked the markets...
The anti-growth dinner-party-going coalition crashed the economy, according to Liz Truss, who surely must know.
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.
Being better than Keir Starmer is hardly a ringing endorsement. It was a miserable Government and it folded and threw in the towel against Labour. Nobody forced Sunak to go to the polls.
Say what you like about Rishi and Hunt, they got the economy moving again after the years of mismanagement by Boris and Liz Truss with her awful 30 days of trashing our reputation among bond investors. I agree that he should have waited until November.
Meh. Liz Truss was politically inastute. But it wasn't her who caused the market turbulence.
Who was it that spooked the markets...
Rishi Sunak, and his friends in Parliament and the Treasury.
Sunak was a backbench MP at the time.
Doesn't matter. He was part of the anti-growth coalition and went to dinner parties.
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.
Being better than Keir Starmer is hardly a ringing endorsement. It was a miserable Government and it folded and threw in the towel against Labour. Nobody forced Sunak to go to the polls.
Say what you like about Rishi and Hunt, they got the economy moving again after the years of mismanagement by Boris and Liz Truss with her awful 30 days of trashing our reputation among bond investors. I agree that he should have waited until November.
It does look like Labour are betting on improved relations with the EU helping with growth in the medium-term. It's probably the lowest hanging fruit; longer term issues around productivity, labour market participation and so on are much harder to fix.
With the EU economy performing so poorly I don't we very much upside from this and if it means closer regulatory alignment, especially on AI/data where the EU is desperate to force other countries to adopt their stupid ideas, it will end up being a net negative. If anything I think easing import/export barriers will probably be a net negative for the only major economy showing signs of life as we spend more in Europe and get nothing back for it from them in the way of exports because the economy there is moribund.
With Keir's negotiating ability, we'll give them everything they want, including the strait jacket, and get next to nothing back.
Boris Johnson has already done that. Which means I sort of agree with you. Keir Starmer won't get much out of the EU.
What's fascinating is how poorly even the established media in the UK understand the EU, like, err, The Times.
Leading news today about the UK striking a new treaty with Germany on market access, which isn't possible unless negotiated with the EU.
[What they probably mean is a political treaty and some bilateral negotiations that might influence the position that Germany might take as an EU member state in the European Council, but that isn't the same thing.]
It is the same mistake David Cameron made: believing the eurosceptic line that the EU is a racket run from Berlin for Germany's benefit. It is slightly more complicated than that.
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.
Being better than Keir Starmer is hardly a ringing endorsement. It was a miserable Government and it folded and threw in the towel against Labour. Nobody forced Sunak to go to the polls.
Say what you like about Rishi and Hunt, they got the economy moving again after the years of mismanagement by Boris and Liz Truss with her awful 30 days of trashing our reputation among bond investors. I agree that he should have waited until November.
It does look like Labour are betting on improved relations with the EU helping with growth in the medium-term. It's probably the lowest hanging fruit; longer term issues around productivity, labour market participation and so on are much harder to fix.
With the EU economy performing so poorly I don't we very much upside from this and if it means closer regulatory alignment, especially on AI/data where the EU is desperate to force other countries to adopt their stupid ideas, it will end up being a net negative. If anything I think easing import/export barriers will probably be a net negative for the only major economy showing signs of life as we spend more in Europe and get nothing back for it from them in the way of exports because the economy there is moribund.
With Keir's negotiating ability, we'll give them everything they want, including the strait jacket, and get next to nothing back.
Boris Johnson has already done that. Which means I sort of agree with you. Keir Starmer won't get much out of the EU.
What's fascinating is how poorly even the established media in the UK understand the EU, like, err, The Times.
Leading news today about the UK striking a new treaty with Germany on market access, which isn't possible unless negotiated with the EU.
[What they probably mean is a political treaty and some bilateral negotiations that might influence the position that Germany might take as an EU member state in the European Council, but that isn't the same thing.]
The BBC described the bilateral talks - as bilateral talks - in some detail.
In any event, such agreements with Germany and France are probably essential precursors to being able to negotiate new arrangements with the EU.
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.
Being better than Keir Starmer is hardly a ringing endorsement. It was a miserable Government and it folded and threw in the towel against Labour. Nobody forced Sunak to go to the polls.
Say what you like about Rishi and Hunt, they got the economy moving again after the years of mismanagement by Boris and Liz Truss with her awful 30 days of trashing our reputation among bond investors. I agree that he should have waited until November.
It does look like Labour are betting on improved relations with the EU helping with growth in the medium-term. It's probably the lowest hanging fruit; longer term issues around productivity, labour market participation and so on are much harder to fix.
With the EU economy performing so poorly I don't we very much upside from this and if it means closer regulatory alignment, especially on AI/data where the EU is desperate to force other countries to adopt their stupid ideas, it will end up being a net negative. If anything I think easing import/export barriers will probably be a net negative for the only major economy showing signs of life as we spend more in Europe and get nothing back for it from them in the way of exports because the economy there is moribund.
With Keir's negotiating ability, we'll give them everything they want, including the strait jacket, and get next to nothing back.
Boris Johnson has already done that. Which means I sort of agree with you. Keir Starmer won't get much out of the EU.
What's fascinating is how poorly even the established media in the UK understand the EU, like, err, The Times.
Leading news today about the UK striking a new treaty with Germany on market access, which isn't possible unless negotiated with the EU.
[What they probably mean is a political treaty and some bilateral negotiations that might influence the position that Germany might take as an EU member state in the European Council, but that isn't the same thing.]
It is the same mistake David Cameron made: believing the eurosceptic line that the EU is a racket run from Berlin for Germany's benefit. It is slightly more complicated than that.
Noteworthy about the last Conservative government is the amount of long term damage they have incurred with short term expedients. Brexit is an example. Also abolishing Sure start, two child cap that blights peoples lives.
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.
You're conflating a few roles, some not even in the NHS, with the whole.
Small state enthusiasts love to go on about how we could cut NHS non-patient-facing staff and that would solve everything. They seem to ignore that we HAVE cut such staff. There were 40% staff cuts in NHS England under the last government: https://www.nhsprocurement.org.uk/news/6000-plus-jobs-be-cut-new-nhs-england
The result has been that so much important activity ground to a half for months. Lots of the good staff up and left before the redundancies came in. Activity to support innovation and the adoption of digital tech to save money has stalled.
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.
Being better than Keir Starmer is hardly a ringing endorsement. It was a miserable Government and it folded and threw in the towel against Labour. Nobody forced Sunak to go to the polls.
Say what you like about Rishi and Hunt, they got the economy moving again after the years of mismanagement by Boris and Liz Truss with her awful 30 days of trashing our reputation among bond investors. I agree that he should have waited until November.
It does look like Labour are betting on improved relations with the EU helping with growth in the medium-term. It's probably the lowest hanging fruit; longer term issues around productivity, labour market participation and so on are much harder to fix.
With the EU economy performing so poorly I don't we very much upside from this and if it means closer regulatory alignment, especially on AI/data where the EU is desperate to force other countries to adopt their stupid ideas, it will end up being a net negative. If anything I think easing import/export barriers will probably be a net negative for the only major economy showing signs of life as we spend more in Europe and get nothing back for it from them in the way of exports because the economy there is moribund.
With Keir's negotiating ability, we'll give them everything they want, including the strait jacket, and get next to nothing back.
Boris Johnson has already done that. Which means I sort of agree with you. Keir Starmer won't get much out of the EU.
What's fascinating is how poorly even the established media in the UK understand the EU, like, err, The Times.
Leading news today about the UK striking a new treaty with Germany on market access, which isn't possible unless negotiated with the EU.
[What they probably mean is a political treaty and some bilateral negotiations that might influence the position that Germany might take as an EU member state in the European Council, but that isn't the same thing.]
It is the same mistake David Cameron made: believing the eurosceptic line that the EU is a racket run from Berlin for Germany's benefit. It is slightly more complicated than that.
Noteworthy about the last Conservative government is the amount of long term damage they have incurred with short term expedients. Brexit is an example. Also abolishing Sure start, two child cap that blights peoples lives.
The Conservatives raised our education standards to a very high level in the international league table, got on top of the deficit, reformed pensions so everyone now takes an interest, kept unemployment low, lowered direct taxation for low to middle earners, and resolved a longstanding political sore with our neighbours that had been running for decades.
There are plenty of things I'd prefer they'd done differently or better at on top but the propaganda about their time in office is just that.
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.
Being better than Keir Starmer is hardly a ringing endorsement. It was a miserable Government and it folded and threw in the towel against Labour. Nobody forced Sunak to go to the polls.
Say what you like about Rishi and Hunt, they got the economy moving again after the years of mismanagement by Boris and Liz Truss with her awful 30 days of trashing our reputation among bond investors. I agree that he should have waited until November.
It does look like Labour are betting on improved relations with the EU helping with growth in the medium-term. It's probably the lowest hanging fruit; longer term issues around productivity, labour market participation and so on are much harder to fix.
With the EU economy performing so poorly I don't we very much upside from this and if it means closer regulatory alignment, especially on AI/data where the EU is desperate to force other countries to adopt their stupid ideas, it will end up being a net negative. If anything I think easing import/export barriers will probably be a net negative for the only major economy showing signs of life as we spend more in Europe and get nothing back for it from them in the way of exports because the economy there is moribund.
With Keir's negotiating ability, we'll give them everything they want, including the strait jacket, and get next to nothing back.
Boris Johnson has already done that. Which means I sort of agree with you. Keir Starmer won't get much out of the EU.
What's fascinating is how poorly even the established media in the UK understand the EU, like, err, The Times.
Leading news today about the UK striking a new treaty with Germany on market access, which isn't possible unless negotiated with the EU.
[What they probably mean is a political treaty and some bilateral negotiations that might influence the position that Germany might take as an EU member state in the European Council, but that isn't the same thing.]
The BBC described the bilateral talks - as bilateral talks - in some detail.
In any event, such agreements with Germany and France are probably essential precursors to being able to negotiate new arrangements with the EU.
They weren't during Cameron's renegotiation or the Brexit negotiations, were they?
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.
Being better than Keir Starmer is hardly a ringing endorsement. It was a miserable Government and it folded and threw in the towel against Labour. Nobody forced Sunak to go to the polls.
Say what you like about Rishi and Hunt, they got the economy moving again after the years of mismanagement by Boris and Liz Truss with her awful 30 days of trashing our reputation among bond investors. I agree that he should have waited until November.
It does look like Labour are betting on improved relations with the EU helping with growth in the medium-term. It's probably the lowest hanging fruit; longer term issues around productivity, labour market participation and so on are much harder to fix.
With the EU economy performing so poorly I don't we very much upside from this and if it means closer regulatory alignment, especially on AI/data where the EU is desperate to force other countries to adopt their stupid ideas, it will end up being a net negative. If anything I think easing import/export barriers will probably be a net negative for the only major economy showing signs of life as we spend more in Europe and get nothing back for it from them in the way of exports because the economy there is moribund.
With Keir's negotiating ability, we'll give them everything they want, including the strait jacket, and get next to nothing back.
Boris Johnson has already done that. Which means I sort of agree with you. Keir Starmer won't get much out of the EU.
What's fascinating is how poorly even the established media in the UK understand the EU, like, err, The Times.
Leading news today about the UK striking a new treaty with Germany on market access, which isn't possible unless negotiated with the EU.
[What they probably mean is a political treaty and some bilateral negotiations that might influence the position that Germany might take as an EU member state in the European Council, but that isn't the same thing.]
It is the same mistake David Cameron made: believing the eurosceptic line that the EU is a racket run from Berlin for Germany's benefit. It is slightly more complicated than that.
Yep. The very fact Remainy type media still get this wrong show how little all Britons understand the EU, and why it really wasn't for 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.
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.
Being better than Keir Starmer is hardly a ringing endorsement. It was a miserable Government and it folded and threw in the towel against Labour. Nobody forced Sunak to go to the polls.
Say what you like about Rishi and Hunt, they got the economy moving again after the years of mismanagement by Boris and Liz Truss with her awful 30 days of trashing our reputation among bond investors. I agree that he should have waited until November.
Meh. Liz Truss was politically inastute. But it wasn't her who caused the market turbulence.
Who was it that spooked the markets...
Rishi Sunak, and his friends in Parliament and the Treasury.
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.
And how many NHS workers does it take in 'public health' to tell us to eat 5 portions of fruit and veg a day, and not smoke (about as innovative and helpful as it gets), when the creative work, the deployment, media buying etc. in those campaigns is farmed out to marketing agencies anyway?
“TV advertising spending of companies in the food sector stood at 816.18 million U.S. dollars in the United Kingdom (UK) in 2021. That constitutes an increase of 215.8 million dollars or 35.95 percent compared to the value of 600.36 million reported a year earlier.”
When most of that advertising spend is trying to get us to eat unhealthily, you would need a lot of money to counter that with effective public health messages.
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.
Being better than Keir Starmer is hardly a ringing endorsement. It was a miserable Government and it folded and threw in the towel against Labour. Nobody forced Sunak to go to the polls.
Say what you like about Rishi and Hunt, they got the economy moving again after the years of mismanagement by Boris and Liz Truss with her awful 30 days of trashing our reputation among bond investors. I agree that he should have waited until November.
It does look like Labour are betting on improved relations with the EU helping with growth in the medium-term. It's probably the lowest hanging fruit; longer term issues around productivity, labour market participation and so on are much harder to fix.
With the EU economy performing so poorly I don't we very much upside from this and if it means closer regulatory alignment, especially on AI/data where the EU is desperate to force other countries to adopt their stupid ideas, it will end up being a net negative. If anything I think easing import/export barriers will probably be a net negative for the only major economy showing signs of life as we spend more in Europe and get nothing back for it from them in the way of exports because the economy there is moribund.
With Keir's negotiating ability, we'll give them everything they want, including the strait jacket, and get next to nothing back.
Boris Johnson has already done that. Which means I sort of agree with you. Keir Starmer won't get much out of the EU.
What's fascinating is how poorly even the established media in the UK understand the EU, like, err, The Times.
Leading news today about the UK striking a new treaty with Germany on market access, which isn't possible unless negotiated with the EU.
[What they probably mean is a political treaty and some bilateral negotiations that might influence the position that Germany might take as an EU member state in the European Council, but that isn't the same thing.]
It is the same mistake David Cameron made: believing the eurosceptic line that the EU is a racket run from Berlin for Germany's benefit. It is slightly more complicated than that.
Noteworthy about the last Conservative government is the amount of long term damage they have incurred with short term expedients. Brexit is an example. Also abolishing Sure start, two child cap that blights peoples lives.
The Conservatives raised our education standards to a very high level in the international league table, got on top of the deficit, reformed pensions so everyone now takes an interest, kept unemployment low, lowered direct taxation for low to middle earners, and resolved a longstanding political sore with our neighbours that had been running for decades.
There are plenty of things I'd prefer they'd done differently or better at on top but the propaganda about their time in office is just that.
The previous government can take credit for improved educational standards in England IMO.
Fiscal position is mixed but mostly negative. Deficit is steady, public debt is up, interest payments massively up, while public services are significantly worse..This is partly driven by COVID but largely the government's austerity policy.
Don't know about pension reform. Not sure the Conservative government can take credit for low unemployment.
The Conservatives left taxation higher than it ever has been. Because of COVID again but also of low growth in part caused by its Brexit policy.
It massively aggravated rather than resolved a longstanding political sore with our neighbours.
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.
Being better than Keir Starmer is hardly a ringing endorsement. It was a miserable Government and it folded and threw in the towel against Labour. Nobody forced Sunak to go to the polls.
Say what you like about Rishi and Hunt, they got the economy moving again after the years of mismanagement by Boris and Liz Truss with her awful 30 days of trashing our reputation among bond investors. I agree that he should have waited until November.
Meh. Liz Truss was politically inastute. But it wasn't her who caused the market turbulence.
Who was it that spooked the markets...
The WEF globalist conspiracy infesting Whitehall?
The WEF conspiracy makes it to some strange places.
I keep meeting it in the BCP & Dorset Motorists FB Group, amongst all the other kittens they keep having. And also on certain Youtube channels - especially a slightly strange middle aged urban explorer Sheffield Youtuber, who is obsessed with how cycle lanes are destroying the world.
Comments
That's what's missing from all this analysis. The Tories are caught between the Lib Dems and Reform. Labour isn't the real problem, oddly enough.
There might be something quite seismic happening on the right in Scotland; starting to look a little existential for the Scons. A microcosm, perhaps.
Reform would have a much greater representation in English seats at Westminster if that house didn't rely on such an, erm, historical voting system.
oh or https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/21/this-founder-had-to-train-his-ai-to-not-rickroll-people/ when the user asks for a video tutorial
The same but worse.
Anger. How very dare you turn round after 14 years of misrule and accurately claim after 7 weeks that Starmer is a dud?
Bargaining. Please God let us get a month past the budget without any polls showing a 5 point Tory lead. And let the next winter of discontent be 2025-6 not 2024-5.
Depression. Self explanatory.
Acceptance. That the Tories are the natural party of government.
The sooner you start on this journey the quicker it will be over.
Weirdly quite a lot of care staff either don't seem to know this or believe you when you say that someone is actually worse than they should be and maybe, just maybe, they should do a urine test.
I remember the Telegraph being a fairly standard paper; I read it in rotation with the Times and the Guardian on long train journeys. What happened?
I think our problem was that we had someone with actual dementia who just presented as a bit worse with a UTI and you had to know what they were like before in order to spot the change.
Long term low dose antibiotics now, which seems to have stopped the problem (and, oddly, slowed the Alzheimer's decline too, which raises all sorts of questions).
Don’t take my word for it I can provide 10,000 recruiter confirmations….
And that was when we were members ...
Labour could also leak to its left to the Greens
Harris 2.04 / 2.06
Trump 2.04 / 2.06
https://www.betfair.com/exchange/plus/politics/market/1.176878927
From NPR’s @QuilLawrence: Arlington National Cemetery officials say Trump campaign staff verbally abused and pushed aside cemetery official who objected to filming and photography at gravesites
https://x.com/davidfolkenflik/status/1828564672490152400
It's what we do.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKXkSznjP-8
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/liz-truss-book-kwarteng-energy-norway-deal-b2602401.html
Thank heaven it was not Keir Starmer negotiating!
Why would any politician - even one as tin eared as Truss - scrap cancer treatment on the NHS? It's like the suggestion that politicians would want to keep covid restrictions: it depends on politicians not wanting to be reelected.
It's morally wrong and that's why we can run it through the computer because we know whatever it says we're not going to do it ... we were pretty sure that child brothels would help with arts funding but does that mean we did it? No. Never got beyond the pilot scheme in Yeovil.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_4J4uor3JE
Leading news today about the UK striking a new treaty with Germany on market access, which isn't possible unless negotiated with the EU.
[What they probably mean is a political treaty and some bilateral negotiations that might influence the position that Germany might take as an EU member state in the European Council, but that isn't the same thing.]
https://x.com/ArmyofNaveed/status/1828582244279005507
In any event, such agreements with Germany and France are probably essential precursors to being able to negotiate new arrangements with the EU.
NEW THREAD
The result has been that so much important activity ground to a half for months. Lots of the good staff up and left before the redundancies came in. Activity to support innovation and the adoption of digital tech to save money has stalled.
There are plenty of things I'd prefer they'd done differently or better at on top but the propaganda about their time in office is just that.
Talk to the hand Von Der Leyen.
“TV advertising spending of companies in the food sector stood at 816.18 million U.S. dollars in the United Kingdom (UK) in 2021. That constitutes an increase of 215.8 million dollars or 35.95 percent compared to the value of 600.36 million reported a year earlier.”
When most of that advertising spend is trying to get us to eat unhealthily, you would need a lot of money to counter that with effective public health messages.
Fiscal position is mixed but mostly negative. Deficit is steady, public debt is up, interest payments massively up, while public services are significantly worse..This is partly driven by COVID but largely the government's austerity policy.
Don't know about pension reform. Not sure the Conservative government can take credit for low unemployment.
The Conservatives left taxation higher than it ever has been. Because of COVID again but also of low growth in part caused by its Brexit policy.
It massively aggravated rather than resolved a longstanding political sore with our neighbours.
What happened - did they discover this thing called "journalism"?
I keep meeting it in the BCP & Dorset Motorists FB Group, amongst all the other kittens they keep having. And also on certain Youtube channels - especially a slightly strange middle aged urban explorer Sheffield Youtuber, who is obsessed with how cycle lanes are destroying the world.