The bottom line tonight is that the military establishment didn’t win the argument with Labour cabinet and MPs that they needed to cut spending, raise borrowing, raise taxes or cut welfare to fund higher defence spending.
Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves do not agree with John Healey even now, and while I’m sure mast Labour MPs would like to raise defence spending more, there’s no consensus what gives to achieve this.
Voldemort's jacking in has precisely nothing to do with a principled/deluded stand on defence spending. He knows the Starmer project is over and wants to be the first in the lifeboats, harming SKS in the process in order to try and win the favour and patronage of Burnham. That's just politics.
The ritual humiliation of the Australian Defence Sec who JH was supposed to meet while they wanked each other off with eye contact over SSN Canva slides is a lolsome side effect. At the Aussies know now where they stand.
How. How is it possible that only two years after a landslide win this Labour government is collapsing in chaos?
Starmer is a very poor leader. Like, really poor. (I'm sure a better writer than me could come up with a Hitchhiker's style soliloquy about how mind-bendingly poor Starmer has been.)
He only won a landslide because he was up against the weakest performance by the Tory party in its history, after that party foisted a Prime Minister onto the country so inept they had to replace her in less than 50 days.
In those circumstances any averagely competent leader would have won a landslide of Baldwin (1931) proportions.
The landslide that Starmer did win probably bought him an extra year as PM. That and the split and weak nature of the opposition.
I have my doubts about Burnham. And I think Labour should be working out what to do different rather than concentrate on who to do it differently with. But Starmer is actively making the situation worse and has to go.
If you were Labour leader and looking a year or two away from a GE in which the worst combination of Liz Truss shite/Johnson open borders/Sunak mud sludge do nothing policy other than AI was the opposition --- would you not sit down with the great and the good in policy world and actually construction a manifesto and political economy policy that mattered??
But he couldn't do that because Labour is a socialist party and socialism doesn't work, as has been obvious since at least 1989.
To work economically, any such policy would have to involve some combination of deregulation, lower taxes and lower welfare spending.
But the activists and many MPs are still socialist, so the leadership's only recourse is a kind of weird doublethink, where they pretend they have a growth strategy while sabotaging the economy with endless tax rises and welfare spending, which infuriates the right, white leaving just enough of a free market to keep the economy stagnant rather than collapsing, which outrages the left.
And, unsurprisingly, nobody is happy.
Labour came in on Change. They are failing to Change. And somehow you think more of the same failing to Change is going to help.
I mean really, deregulation? Deregulation has given us the water industry. It’s given us the Fossil Fuel Industry with andd its authoritarian hideousness and climate change. Deregulation is not a panacea. It’s an utter fucking disaster for environment and humanity.
Tired old ideas from Labour and the right’s endemic corruption are supporting a genocide. FFS, blaming welfare recipients is so short sighted it cause me to face palm.
Change is required.
The failures of the water industry were the result of (a) zero interest rates (b) clever and unscrupulous financiers and (c) naive regulators. It wasn’t anything fundamental to do with ownership.
The answer is relatively simple: cap the amount of debt that the water companies are allowed to borrow. Require existing shareholders to pay in additional equity to reduce debt to those levels. If they won’t then the government can on penal terms
How. How is it possible that only two years after a landslide win this Labour government is collapsing in chaos?
Starmer is a very poor leader. Like, really poor. (I'm sure a better writer than me could come up with a Hitchhiker's style soliloquy about how mind-bendingly poor Starmer has been.)
He only won a landslide because he was up against the weakest performance by the Tory party in its history, after that party foisted a Prime Minister onto the country so inept they had to replace her in less than 50 days.
In those circumstances any averagely competent leader would have won a landslide of Baldwin (1931) proportions.
The landslide that Starmer did win probably bought him an extra year as PM. That and the split and weak nature of the opposition.
I have my doubts about Burnham. And I think Labour should be working out what to do different rather than concentrate on who to do it differently with. But Starmer is actively making the situation worse and has to go.
If you were Labour leader and looking a year or two away from a GE in which the worst combination of Liz Truss shite/Johnson open borders/Sunak mud sludge do nothing policy other than AI was the opposition --- would you not sit down with the great and the good in policy world and actually construction a manifesto and political economy policy that mattered??
But he couldn't do that because Labour is a socialist party and socialism doesn't work, as has been obvious since at least 1989.
To work economically, any such policy would have to involve some combination of deregulation, lower taxes and lower welfare spending.
But the activists and many MPs are still socialist, so the leadership's only recourse is a kind of weird doublethink, where they pretend they have a growth strategy while sabotaging the economy with endless tax rises and welfare spending, which infuriates the right, white leaving just enough of a free market to keep the economy stagnant rather than collapsing, which outrages the left.
And, unsurprisingly, nobody is happy.
Labour came in on Change. They are failing to Change. And somehow you think more of the same failing to Change is going to help.
I mean really, deregulation? Deregulation has given us the water industry. It’s given us the Fossil Fuel Industry with andd its authoritarian hideousness and climate change. Deregulation is not a panacea. It’s an utter fucking disaster for environment and humanity.
Tired old ideas from Labour and the right’s endemic corruption are supporting a genocide. FFS, blaming welfare recipients is so short sighted it cause me to face palm.
Change is required.
Deregulation has exactly nothing to do with the fossil fuel industry. It's difficult to think of a *more* regulated industry. When exactly do you think it was deregulated?
Deregulation also has nothing to do with the water industry. It used to be an expensive stuff up run by the government that dumped loads of sewage in our rivers, it's now an expensive stuff up run by private equity which dumps considerably less sewage in rivers. It's under a lot *more* regulation now than it has ever been at any time in the past, including lots of monitoring and reporting obligations, which is how people realised it was still dumping loads of raw sewage into rivers.
Sensible deregulation might be things like absolving small businesses like mine of the need to generate filing cabinets full of risk assessments no one will ever read, and which will never prevent a single workplace injury but which are required in case HSE decide to pursecute you. You are currently exempt from needing written risk assessments you have under 4 employees (I think - I'm past that stage now), it should be at least 25, probably 50.
How. How is it possible that only two years after a landslide win this Labour government is collapsing in chaos?
Starmer is a very poor leader. Like, really poor. (I'm sure a better writer than me could come up with a Hitchhiker's style soliloquy about how mind-bendingly poor Starmer has been.)
He only won a landslide because he was up against the weakest performance by the Tory party in its history, after that party foisted a Prime Minister onto the country so inept they had to replace her in less than 50 days.
In those circumstances any averagely competent leader would have won a landslide of Baldwin (1931) proportions.
The landslide that Starmer did win probably bought him an extra year as PM. That and the split and weak nature of the opposition.
I have my doubts about Burnham. And I think Labour should be working out what to do different rather than concentrate on who to do it differently with. But Starmer is actively making the situation worse and has to go.
If you were Labour leader and looking a year or two away from a GE in which the worst combination of Liz Truss shite/Johnson open borders/Sunak mud sludge do nothing policy other than AI was the opposition --- would you not sit down with the great and the good in policy world and actually construction a manifesto and political economy policy that mattered??
But that would involve making a decision or two and sticking to them.
Indeed. The Ming Vase Strategy has destroyed Starmer.
Worked for Blair because he actually had a shed load of ideas/policy/minsters and, most of all, Gordon Brown, with ideas behind the softly softly.
This time...
... we have a PM without the ability to face down Rachel Reeves.
How. How is it possible that only two years after a landslide win this Labour government is collapsing in chaos?
Starmer is a very poor leader. Like, really poor. (I'm sure a better writer than me could come up with a Hitchhiker's style soliloquy about how mind-bendingly poor Starmer has been.)
He only won a landslide because he was up against the weakest performance by the Tory party in its history, after that party foisted a Prime Minister onto the country so inept they had to replace her in less than 50 days.
In those circumstances any averagely competent leader would have won a landslide of Baldwin (1931) proportions.
The landslide that Starmer did win probably bought him an extra year as PM. That and the split and weak nature of the opposition.
I have my doubts about Burnham. And I think Labour should be working out what to do different rather than concentrate on who to do it differently with. But Starmer is actively making the situation worse and has to go.
If you were Labour leader and looking a year or two away from a GE in which the worst combination of Liz Truss shite/Johnson open borders/Sunak mud sludge do nothing policy other than AI was the opposition --- would you not sit down with the great and the good in policy world and actually construction a manifesto and political economy policy that mattered??
But he couldn't do that because Labour is a socialist party and socialism doesn't work, as has been obvious since at least 1989.
To work economically, any such policy would have to involve some combination of deregulation, lower taxes and lower welfare spending.
But the activists and many MPs are still socialist, so the leadership's only recourse is a kind of weird doublethink, where they pretend they have a growth strategy while sabotaging the economy with endless tax rises and welfare spending, which infuriates the right, white leaving just enough of a free market to keep the economy stagnant rather than collapsing, which outrages the left.
And, unsurprisingly, nobody is happy.
Labour came in on Change. They are failing to Change. And somehow you think more of the same failing to Change is going to help.
I mean really, deregulation? Deregulation has given us the water industry. It’s given us the Fossil Fuel Industry with andd its authoritarian hideousness and climate change. Deregulation is not a panacea. It’s an utter fucking disaster for environment and humanity.
Tired old ideas from Labour and the right’s endemic corruption are supporting a genocide. FFS, blaming welfare recipients is so short sighted it cause me to face palm.
Change is required.
The failures of the water industry were the result of (a) zero interest rates (b) clever and unscrupulous financiers and (c) naive regulators. It wasn’t anything fundamental to do with ownership.
The answer is relatively simple: cap the amount of debt that the water companies are allowed to borrow. Require existing shareholders to pay in additional equity to reduce debt to those levels. If they won’t then the government can on penal terms
Absent privatisation it simply would have been possible for the financiers to extract tens of billions from the industry, crippling its ability to fund new infrastructure. That's pretty fundamental.
Your suggestion is fine so far as it goes, but it's effectively just another means of slow nationalisation. There are a dozen different ways to do that via regulation .
The businesses I run have nothing to do with Trump
April was a shit month because everone is holding on to their cash
Nobody has any confidence in the economy/
But is high inflation part of why they have no confidence in the economy? Be2.8%cause that high inflation is the fault of Trump.
No
Trading is just bad and inflation is 2.8% hardly stratospheric
My business has almost hit our 2025 revenues already this year. It’s frenetic.
What sector are you in?
I do something very neche in engineering, my business is OK at the moment,because I've a order book that literally stretches out years ahead (although I'm probably about to get shafted on cost by the new steel tariffs that are about to come on - I spend about 20% of our turnover on steel plate and bar).
All the more generic engineering contractors I know are saying business is dead. Firm over the other side of our yard is a stainless pipework contractor - they're talking about layoffs and short time working, the last time they did that was in the fall out from 2008.
The businesses I run have nothing to do with Trump
April was a shit month because everone is holding on to their cash
Nobody has any confidence in the economy/
But is high inflation part of why they have no confidence in the economy? Be2.8%cause that high inflation is the fault of Trump.
No
Trading is just bad and inflation is 2.8% hardly stratospheric
My business has almost hit our 2025 revenues already this year. It’s frenetic.
Well good luck, I hope you have a great year.
I work in manufacturing and it's just tumbleweed with rising costs
It seems to be grim in the jobs market too for manufacturing.
So many people I see on LinkedIn looking for work. People,I’ve worked with before. These aren’t the usual suspects but good people with a lot to offer. Its awful.
We had in PB yesterday people bemoaning youth unemployment rising. Some of whom were the same people who,supported Rayners so-called workers rights act and the rising in costs of employing people.
The businesses I run have nothing to do with Trump
April was a shit month because everone is holding on to their cash
Nobody has any confidence in the economy/
But is high inflation part of why they have no confidence in the economy? Be2.8%cause that high inflation is the fault of Trump.
No
Trading is just bad and inflation is 2.8% hardly stratospheric
My business has almost hit our 2025 revenues already this year. It’s frenetic.
Well good luck, I hope you have a great year.
I work in manufacturing and it's just tumbleweed with rising costs
It seems to be grim in the jobs market too for manufacturing.
So many people I see on LinkedIn looking for work. People,I’ve worked with before. These aren’t the usual suspects but good people with a lot to offer. Its awful.
We had in PB yesterday people bemoaning youth unemployment rising. Some of whom were the same people who,supported Rayners so-called workers rights act and the rising in costs of employing people.
They’re getting what they supported. Own it.
Im afraid thats the case.
I have factories in the Midlands and Hartlepool and they are in that hand to mouth phase., People in the industry keep telling themselves customers cant hold off placing orders for ever, but so far they seem to be able to do so.
I was going to get moving with some apprentices this year but I will leave it for 2026 and see what joys 2027 brings.
How. How is it possible that only two years after a landslide win this Labour government is collapsing in chaos?
Starmer is a very poor leader. Like, really poor. (I'm sure a better writer than me could come up with a Hitchhiker's style soliloquy about how mind-bendingly poor Starmer has been.)
He only won a landslide because he was up against the weakest performance by the Tory party in its history, after that party foisted a Prime Minister onto the country so inept they had to replace her in less than 50 days.
In those circumstances any averagely competent leader would have won a landslide of Baldwin (1931) proportions.
The landslide that Starmer did win probably bought him an extra year as PM. That and the split and weak nature of the opposition.
I have my doubts about Burnham. And I think Labour should be working out what to do different rather than concentrate on who to do it differently with. But Starmer is actively making the situation worse and has to go.
If you were Labour leader and looking a year or two away from a GE in which the worst combination of Liz Truss shite/Johnson open borders/Sunak mud sludge do nothing policy other than AI was the opposition --- would you not sit down with the great and the good in policy world and actually construction a manifesto and political economy policy that mattered??
But he couldn't do that because Labour is a socialist party and socialism doesn't work, as has been obvious since at least 1989.
To work economically, any such policy would have to involve some combination of deregulation, lower taxes and lower welfare spending.
But the activists and many MPs are still socialist, so the leadership's only recourse is a kind of weird doublethink, where they pretend they have a growth strategy while sabotaging the economy with endless tax rises and welfare spending, which infuriates the right, white leaving just enough of a free market to keep the economy stagnant rather than collapsing, which outrages the left.
And, unsurprisingly, nobody is happy.
Labour came in on Change. They are failing to Change. And somehow you think more of the same failing to Change is going to help.
I mean really, deregulation? Deregulation has given us the water industry. It’s given us the Fossil Fuel Industry with andd its authoritarian hideousness and climate change. Deregulation is not a panacea. It’s an utter fucking disaster for environment and humanity.
Tired old ideas from Labour and the right’s endemic corruption are supporting a genocide. FFS, blaming welfare recipients is so short sighted it cause me to face palm.
Change is required.
The failures of the water industry were the result of (a) zero interest rates (b) clever and unscrupulous financiers and (c) naive regulators. It wasn’t anything fundamental to do with ownership.
The answer is relatively simple: cap the amount of debt that the water companies are allowed to borrow. Require existing shareholders to pay in additional equity to reduce debt to those levels. If they won’t then the government can on penal terms
Absent privatisation it simply would have been possible for the financiers to extract tens of billions from the industry, crippling its ability to fund new infrastructure. That's pretty fundamental.
Your suggestion is fine so far as it goes, but it's effectively just another means of slow nationalisation. There are a dozen different ways to do that via regulation .
Instead you would have had the treasury crippling its ability to fund new infrastructure.
(It was really one firm - Macquarie - who did this. The guy responsible now has a houses in the Hamptons, New York, Park City and Sydney.)
I’m very happy for private investors to run the water companies. But they need to be capped at an 8% return on investment. That was the original plan for regulation - but the regulators missed how much cheap debt the bankers could put on the companies.
Hence you need to cap leverage and dividends based on the real equity. The precise ownership doesn’t matter. If private capital will do it then great. If not then use state capital and mutualise them
The businesses I run have nothing to do with Trump
April was a shit month because everone is holding on to their cash
Nobody has any confidence in the economy/
But is high inflation part of why they have no confidence in the economy? Be2.8%cause that high inflation is the fault of Trump.
No
Trading is just bad and inflation is 2.8% hardly stratospheric
My business has almost hit our 2025 revenues already this year. It’s frenetic.
What sector are you in?
I do something very neche in engineering, my business is OK at the moment,because I've a order book that literally stretches out years ahead (although I'm probably about to get shafted on cost by the new steel tariffs that are about to come on - I spend about 20% of our turnover on steel plate and bar).
All the more generic engineering contractors I know are saying business is dead. Firm over the other side of our yard is a stainless pipework contractor - they're talking about layoffs and short time working, the last time they did that was in the fall out from 2008.
The businesses I run have nothing to do with Trump
April was a shit month because everone is holding on to their cash
Nobody has any confidence in the economy/
But is high inflation part of why they have no confidence in the economy? Be2.8%cause that high inflation is the fault of Trump.
No
Trading is just bad and inflation is 2.8% hardly stratospheric
My business has almost hit our 2025 revenues already this year. It’s frenetic.
Well good luck, I hope you have a great year.
I work in manufacturing and it's just tumbleweed with rising costs
It seems to be grim in the jobs market too for manufacturing.
So many people I see on LinkedIn looking for work. People,I’ve worked with before. These aren’t the usual suspects but good people with a lot to offer. Its awful.
We had in PB yesterday people bemoaning youth unemployment rising. Some of whom were the same people who,supported Rayners so-called workers rights act and the rising in costs of employing people.
They’re getting what they supported. Own it.
Im afraid thats the case.
I have factories in the Midlands and Hartlepool and they are in that hand to mouth phase., People in the industry keep telling themselves customers cant hold off placing orders for ever, but so far they seem to be able to do so.
I was going to get moving with some apprentices this year but I will leave it for 2026 and see what joys 2027 brings.
Customers may be running down excess inventory but if they’ve little demand themselves then there’s no orders to place.
My old place has ended up being absorbed into another division to save costs as orders just were not there in sufficient quantity. They also no longer take in apprentices.
The businesses I run have nothing to do with Trump
April was a shit month because everone is holding on to their cash
Nobody has any confidence in the economy/
It would be a very unusual business that doesn’t have exposure to energy costs. I guess if you’re perfectly vertically integrated and have self-sufficiency via solar and wind it might be possible to an extent, but surely demand on your services/goods would still affected.
How. How is it possible that only two years after a landslide win this Labour government is collapsing in chaos?
Starmer is a very poor leader. Like, really poor. (I'm sure a better writer than me could come up with a Hitchhiker's style soliloquy about how mind-bendingly poor Starmer has been.)
He only won a landslide because he was up against the weakest performance by the Tory party in its history, after that party foisted a Prime Minister onto the country so inept they had to replace her in less than 50 days.
In those circumstances any averagely competent leader would have won a landslide of Baldwin (1931) proportions.
The landslide that Starmer did win probably bought him an extra year as PM. That and the split and weak nature of the opposition.
I have my doubts about Burnham. And I think Labour should be working out what to do different rather than concentrate on who to do it differently with. But Starmer is actively making the situation worse and has to go.
If you were Labour leader and looking a year or two away from a GE in which the worst combination of Liz Truss shite/Johnson open borders/Sunak mud sludge do nothing policy other than AI was the opposition --- would you not sit down with the great and the good in policy world and actually construction a manifesto and political economy policy that mattered??
But that would involve making a decision or two and sticking to them.
Indeed. The Ming Vase Strategy has destroyed Starmer.
Worked for Blair because he actually had a shed load of ideas/policy/minsters and, most of all, Gordon Brown, with ideas behind the softly softly.
This time...
... we have a PM without the ability to face down Rachel Reeves.
Or Ed Miliband
A PM who fails to understand that defence of the Realm is the first priority of government.
At a time when our largest ally has decided it’s fed up with subsidising European defence when they don’t make the effort themselves.
The businesses I run have nothing to do with Trump
April was a shit month because everone is holding on to their cash
Nobody has any confidence in the economy/
But is high inflation part of why they have no confidence in the economy? Be2.8%cause that high inflation is the fault of Trump.
No
Trading is just bad and inflation is 2.8% hardly stratospheric
My business has almost hit our 2025 revenues already this year. It’s frenetic.
Well good luck, I hope you have a great year.
I work in manufacturing and it's just tumbleweed with rising costs
It seems to be grim in the jobs market too for manufacturing.
So many people I see on LinkedIn looking for work. People,I’ve worked with before. These aren’t the usual suspects but good people with a lot to offer. Its awful.
We had in PB yesterday people bemoaning youth unemployment rising. Some of whom were the same people who,supported Rayners so-called workers rights act and the rising in costs of employing people.
They’re getting what they supported. Own it.
Im afraid thats the case.
I have factories in the Midlands and Hartlepool and they are in that hand to mouth phase., People in the industry keep telling themselves customers cant hold off placing orders for ever, but so far they seem to be able to do so.
I was going to get moving with some apprentices this year but I will leave it for 2026 and see what joys 2027 brings.
Customers may be running down excess inventory but if they’ve little demand themselves then there’s no orders to place.
My old place has ended up being absorbed into another division to save costs as orders just were not there in sufficient quantity. They also no longer take in apprentices.
A recession is definitely coming - the only question is how deep and long will it be.
How. How is it possible that only two years after a landslide win this Labour government is collapsing in chaos?
Starmer is a very poor leader. Like, really poor. (I'm sure a better writer than me could come up with a Hitchhiker's style soliloquy about how mind-bendingly poor Starmer has been.)
He only won a landslide because he was up against the weakest performance by the Tory party in its history, after that party foisted a Prime Minister onto the country so inept they had to replace her in less than 50 days.
In those circumstances any averagely competent leader would have won a landslide of Baldwin (1931) proportions.
The landslide that Starmer did win probably bought him an extra year as PM. That and the split and weak nature of the opposition.
I have my doubts about Burnham. And I think Labour should be working out what to do different rather than concentrate on who to do it differently with. But Starmer is actively making the situation worse and has to go.
If you were Labour leader and looking a year or two away from a GE in which the worst combination of Liz Truss shite/Johnson open borders/Sunak mud sludge do nothing policy other than AI was the opposition --- would you not sit down with the great and the good in policy world and actually construction a manifesto and political economy policy that mattered??
But he couldn't do that because Labour is a socialist party and socialism doesn't work, as has been obvious since at least 1989.
To work economically, any such policy would have to involve some combination of deregulation, lower taxes and lower welfare spending.
But the activists and many MPs are still socialist, so the leadership's only recourse is a kind of weird doublethink, where they pretend they have a growth strategy while sabotaging the economy with endless tax rises and welfare spending, which infuriates the right, white leaving just enough of a free market to keep the economy stagnant rather than collapsing, which outrages the left.
And, unsurprisingly, nobody is happy.
Labour came in on Change. They are failing to Change. And somehow you think more of the same failing to Change is going to help.
I mean really, deregulation? Deregulation has given us the water industry. It’s given us the Fossil Fuel Industry with andd its authoritarian hideousness and climate change. Deregulation is not a panacea. It’s an utter fucking disaster for environment and humanity.
Tired old ideas from Labour and the right’s endemic corruption are supporting a genocide. FFS, blaming welfare recipients is so short sighted it cause me to face palm.
Change is required.
The water industry deregulated?
You must be joking.
I actually know a lot about the industry's regulation professionally and it's incredibly heavily regulated. In fact, water companies answer to no fewer than seven regulators. So many that not even I can remember them all (Ofwat, DWI, RAPID, the Environment Agency, the National Rivers Authority are the ones I dealt with).
Similar with the energy industry - what do you think the 2,200 people in Ofgem do all day?
And the financial services industry.
The problem with many of those industries is not inadequate regulation, it's incompetent regulation.
Very different. And it doesn't change the fact that excessive regulation, which many industries do suffer from (housing is a particularly glaring example) and taxes strangle economic growth.
So, we are spending nearly £60bn on defence this year. We struggle to put a single ship to sea. Our carriers seem to spend all their time in dock. We have a pitiful number of planes. Our army is one of the smallest we have ever had and almost certainly incapable of putting 5k soldiers on the front line for anything other than the briefest of times (which is how long their ammunition would last anyway).
John Healey may well be right that we need to invest in defence but what, as Secretary of State, has he done to improve our return on that £60bn. Last time I checked we had something like 31 flag officers for that frigate that we managed, with a fair bit of effort, to make seaworthy. According to CoPilot, the British Army currently has three full generals, nine lieutenant generals, and approximately 44 major generals on active duty. How many of these are in charge of a platoon? The money blown on the Atlas vehicle is almost beyond belief.
This chronic waste of resources is by no means all Healey's fault, of course, but I see precious little evidence that he has done much, if anything, to improve this chronic situation.
There's certainly a lot of waste and the MoD's procurement process is a disaster that needs nuked from orbit, but I think it's fair to point out that a lot of the current operational issues are down to penny pinching in the last 20 years.
A ship that develops problems gets tied up at Portsmouth because there's no money in this year's budget to fix it. It sits there for two or three years, quietly deteriorating. When the money is found for repairs engineers get aboard and find those years of neglect have caused a whole set of new issues the repair budget can't cover. So it sits there for more months or years, and eventually gets raided for parts, further increasing the cost of actually getting it back into service.
Lack of a stable pipeline for new ships and submarines exacerbates this by forcing the few serviceable units to be worked to death (see Type 23).
I agree that these are not new problems or, on the whole, problems that have arisen on Healey's watch. But I still await an answer about what he has done about it.
The businesses I run have nothing to do with Trump
April was a shit month because everone is holding on to their cash
Nobody has any confidence in the economy/
But is high inflation part of why they have no confidence in the economy? Be2.8%cause that high inflation is the fault of Trump.
No
Trading is just bad and inflation is 2.8% hardly stratospheric
My business has almost hit our 2025 revenues already this year. It’s frenetic.
The overall manufacturing figures look very good but if you dig into the tables it’s really varied, which is quite interesting. Machinery and equipment has collapsed in the last three months , but electronics and pharmaceuticals are doing well.
How. How is it possible that only two years after a landslide win this Labour government is collapsing in chaos?
Starmer is a very poor leader. Like, really poor. (I'm sure a better writer than me could come up with a Hitchhiker's style soliloquy about how mind-bendingly poor Starmer has been.)
He only won a landslide because he was up against the weakest performance by the Tory party in its history, after that party foisted a Prime Minister onto the country so inept they had to replace her in less than 50 days.
In those circumstances any averagely competent leader would have won a landslide of Baldwin (1931) proportions.
The landslide that Starmer did win probably bought him an extra year as PM. That and the split and weak nature of the opposition.
I have my doubts about Burnham. And I think Labour should be working out what to do different rather than concentrate on who to do it differently with. But Starmer is actively making the situation worse and has to go.
If you were Labour leader and looking a year or two away from a GE in which the worst combination of Liz Truss shite/Johnson open borders/Sunak mud sludge do nothing policy other than AI was the opposition --- would you not sit down with the great and the good in policy world and actually construction a manifesto and political economy policy that mattered??
But that would involve making a decision or two and sticking to them.
Indeed. The Ming Vase Strategy has destroyed Starmer.
Worked for Blair because he actually had a shed load of ideas/policy/minsters and, most of all, Gordon Brown, with ideas behind the softly softly.
This time...
... we have a PM without the ability to face down Rachel Reeves.
Or Ed Miliband
A PM who fails to understand that defence of the Realm is the first priority of government.
At a time when our largest ally has decided it’s fed up with subsidising European defence when they don’t make the effort themselves.
Is the Treasury threatening Britain’s safety? I think the answer is yes. Not just by underfunding defence, but also by underfunding the immigration system.
How. How is it possible that only two years after a landslide win this Labour government is collapsing in chaos?
Starmer is a very poor leader. Like, really poor. (I'm sure a better writer than me could come up with a Hitchhiker's style soliloquy about how mind-bendingly poor Starmer has been.)
He only won a landslide because he was up against the weakest performance by the Tory party in its history, after that party foisted a Prime Minister onto the country so inept they had to replace her in less than 50 days.
In those circumstances any averagely competent leader would have won a landslide of Baldwin (1931) proportions.
The landslide that Starmer did win probably bought him an extra year as PM. That and the split and weak nature of the opposition.
I have my doubts about Burnham. And I think Labour should be working out what to do different rather than concentrate on who to do it differently with. But Starmer is actively making the situation worse and has to go.
If you were Labour leader and looking a year or two away from a GE in which the worst combination of Liz Truss shite/Johnson open borders/Sunak mud sludge do nothing policy other than AI was the opposition --- would you not sit down with the great and the good in policy world and actually construction a manifesto and political economy policy that mattered??
But he couldn't do that because Labour is a socialist party and socialism doesn't work, as has been obvious since at least 1989.
To work economically, any such policy would have to involve some combination of deregulation, lower taxes and lower welfare spending.
But the activists and many MPs are still socialist, so the leadership's only recourse is a kind of weird doublethink, where they pretend they have a growth strategy while sabotaging the economy with endless tax rises and welfare spending, which infuriates the right, white leaving just enough of a free market to keep the economy stagnant rather than collapsing, which outrages the left.
And, unsurprisingly, nobody is happy.
Labour came in on Change. They are failing to Change. And somehow you think more of the same failing to Change is going to help.
I mean really, deregulation? Deregulation has given us the water industry. It’s given us the Fossil Fuel Industry with andd its authoritarian hideousness and climate change. Deregulation is not a panacea. It’s an utter fucking disaster for environment and humanity.
Tired old ideas from Labour and the right’s endemic corruption are supporting a genocide. FFS, blaming welfare recipients is so short sighted it cause me to face palm.
Change is required.
The water industry deregulated?
You must be joking.
I actually know a lot about the industry's regulation professionally and it's incredibly heavily regulated. In fact, water companies answer to no fewer than seven regulators. So many that not even I can remember them all (Ofwat, DWI, RAPID, the Environment Agency, the National Rivers Authority are the ones I dealt with).
Similar with the energy industry - what do you think the 2,200 people in Ofgem do all day?
And the financial services industry.
The problem with many of those industries is not inadequate regulation, it's incompetent regulation.
Very different. And it doesn't change the fact that excessive regulation, which many industries do suffer from (housing is a particularly glaring example) and taxes strangle economic growth.
Yup, it’s like @Malmesbury says, Grenfell Tower had a room full of paperwork saying it was awesome, but the actual building had flammable cladding.
The water regulator has screwed up on the financial side, allowing the companies to both load themselves with debt and pay extraordinary dividends. Of all the things that unwind when interest rates go up after a decade on the floor, bog-standard (sic) utilities companies souldn’t be on the list.
How. How is it possible that only two years after a landslide win this Labour government is collapsing in chaos?
Starmer is a very poor leader. Like, really poor. (I'm sure a better writer than me could come up with a Hitchhiker's style soliloquy about how mind-bendingly poor Starmer has been.)
He only won a landslide because he was up against the weakest performance by the Tory party in its history, after that party foisted a Prime Minister onto the country so inept they had to replace her in less than 50 days.
In those circumstances any averagely competent leader would have won a landslide of Baldwin (1931) proportions.
The landslide that Starmer did win probably bought him an extra year as PM. That and the split and weak nature of the opposition.
I have my doubts about Burnham. And I think Labour should be working out what to do different rather than concentrate on who to do it differently with. But Starmer is actively making the situation worse and has to go.
If you were Labour leader and looking a year or two away from a GE in which the worst combination of Liz Truss shite/Johnson open borders/Sunak mud sludge do nothing policy other than AI was the opposition --- would you not sit down with the great and the good in policy world and actually construction a manifesto and political economy policy that mattered??
But he couldn't do that because Labour is a socialist party and socialism doesn't work, as has been obvious since at least 1989.
To work economically, any such policy would have to involve some combination of deregulation, lower taxes and lower welfare spending.
But the activists and many MPs are still socialist, so the leadership's only recourse is a kind of weird doublethink, where they pretend they have a growth strategy while sabotaging the economy with endless tax rises and welfare spending, which infuriates the right, white leaving just enough of a free market to keep the economy stagnant rather than collapsing, which outrages the left.
And, unsurprisingly, nobody is happy.
Labour came in on Change. They are failing to Change. And somehow you think more of the same failing to Change is going to help.
I mean really, deregulation? Deregulation has given us the water industry. It’s given us the Fossil Fuel Industry with andd its authoritarian hideousness and climate change. Deregulation is not a panacea. It’s an utter fucking disaster for environment and humanity.
Tired old ideas from Labour and the right’s endemic corruption are supporting a genocide. FFS, blaming welfare recipients is so short sighted it cause me to face palm.
Change is required.
The water industry deregulated?
You must be joking.
I actually know a lot about the industry's regulation professionally and it's incredibly heavily regulated. In fact, water companies answer to no fewer than seven regulators. So many that not even I can remember them all (Ofwat, DWI, RAPID, the Environment Agency, the National Rivers Authority are the ones I dealt with).
Similar with the energy industry - what do you think the 2,200 people in Ofgem do all day?
And the financial services industry.
The problem with many of those industries is not inadequate regulation, it's incompetent regulation.
Very different. And it doesn't change the fact that excessive regulation, which many industries do suffer from (housing is a particularly glaring example) and taxes strangle economic growth.
It doesn't stop them taking any opportunity to pump untreated water into the rivers and sea though does it. The fundamental problem is that the water companies are ethically bereft profit maximising companies that the regulators struggle to regulate. Renationalise them and make the target not pumping untreated water into rivers and sea.
The businesses I run have nothing to do with Trump
April was a shit month because everone is holding on to their cash
Nobody has any confidence in the economy/
But is high inflation part of why they have no confidence in the economy? Be2.8%cause that high inflation is the fault of Trump.
No
Trading is just bad and inflation is 2.8% hardly stratospheric
My business has almost hit our 2025 revenues already this year. It’s frenetic.
The overall manufacturing figures look very good but if you dig into the tables it’s really varied, which is quite interesting. Machinery and equipment has collapsed in the last three months , but electronics and pharmaceuticals are doing well.
So, we are spending nearly £60bn on defence this year. We struggle to put a single ship to sea. Our carriers seem to spend all their time in dock. We have a pitiful number of planes. Our army is one of the smallest we have ever had and almost certainly incapable of putting 5k soldiers on the front line for anything other than the briefest of times (which is how long their ammunition would last anyway).
John Healey may well be right that we need to invest in defence but what, as Secretary of State, has he done to improve our return on that £60bn. Last time I checked we had something like 31 flag officers for that frigate that we managed, with a fair bit of effort, to make seaworthy. According to CoPilot, the British Army currently has three full generals, nine lieutenant generals, and approximately 44 major generals on active duty. How many of these are in charge of a platoon? The money blown on the Atlas vehicle is almost beyond belief.
This chronic waste of resources is by no means all Healey's fault, of course, but I see precious little evidence that he has done much, if anything, to improve this chronic situation.
There's certainly a lot of waste and the MoD's procurement process is a disaster that needs nuked from orbit, but I think it's fair to point out that a lot of the current operational issues are down to penny pinching in the last 20 years.
A ship that develops problems gets tied up at Portsmouth because there's no money in this year's budget to fix it. It sits there for two or three years, quietly deteriorating. When the money is found for repairs engineers get aboard and find those years of neglect have caused a whole set of new issues the repair budget can't cover. So it sits there for more months or years, and eventually gets raided for parts, further increasing the cost of actually getting it back into service.
Lack of a stable pipeline for new ships and submarines exacerbates this by forcing the few serviceable units to be worked to death (see Type 23).
I agree that these are not new problems or, on the whole, problems that have arisen on Healey's watch. But I still await an answer about what he has done about it.
How many of those had butlers?
Sorry - replying to the wrong post. Please ignore !
The businesses I run have nothing to do with Trump
April was a shit month because everone is holding on to their cash
Nobody has any confidence in the economy/
Nobody has any confidence in the economy; decisions on discretionary spend items like home improvements are being delayed.
As a small anecdotal example my brother, a plumber, had two replacement bathrooms cancelled on him yesterday, both customers citing the uncertainty caused by Trump's mad Iranian adventure as the reason.
Good luck to those in manufacturing in Europe. (It not just an UK problem). You either have to have a global product, niche product or "last man standing" in a particular market product.
Comments
April was a shit month because everone is holding on to their cash
Nobody has any confidence in the economy/
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jun/12/emergency-hospital-admissions-reduced-london-t-charge-ulez-air-quality
London has the best Mayor.
Who could have predicted dramatically whacking up taxes on jobs might be counterproductive?
Trading is just bad and inflation is 2.8% hardly stratospheric
The answer is relatively simple: cap the amount of debt that the water companies are allowed to borrow. Require existing shareholders to pay in additional equity to reduce debt to those levels. If they won’t then the government can on penal terms
Lib Dem Hold
Lib Dem - 742
Reform 552
Con 404
Ind 213
Green 181
Lab 161
Deregulation also has nothing to do with the water industry. It used to be an expensive stuff up run by the government that dumped loads of sewage in our rivers, it's now an expensive stuff up run by private equity which dumps considerably less sewage in rivers. It's under a lot *more* regulation now than it has ever been at any time in the past, including lots of monitoring and reporting obligations, which is how people realised it was still dumping loads of raw sewage into rivers.
Sensible deregulation might be things like absolving small businesses like mine of the need to generate filing cabinets full of risk assessments no one will ever read, and which will never prevent a single workplace injury but which are required in case HSE decide to pursecute you. You are currently exempt from needing written risk assessments you have under 4 employees (I think - I'm past that stage now), it should be at least 25, probably 50.
When it goes up Rachel is a genius. When it falls it’s someone else’s fault 😂😂😂😂
You’re going to rival Brixian for partisan shilling soon.
I work in manufacturing and it's just tumbleweed with rising costs
That's pretty fundamental.
Your suggestion is fine so far as it goes, but it's effectively just another means of slow nationalisation. There are a dozen different ways to do that via regulation .
The bods who churn out this stuff need to learn the difference between accuracy and precision.
I do something very neche in engineering, my business is OK at the moment,because I've a order book that literally stretches out years ahead (although I'm probably about to get shafted on cost by the new steel tariffs that are about to come on - I spend about 20% of our turnover on steel plate and bar).
All the more generic engineering contractors I know are saying business is dead. Firm over the other side of our yard is a stainless pipework contractor - they're talking about layoffs and short time working, the last time they did that was in the fall out from 2008.
So many people I see on LinkedIn looking for work. People,I’ve worked with before. These aren’t the usual suspects but good people with a lot to offer. Its awful.
We had in PB yesterday people bemoaning youth unemployment rising. Some of whom were the same people who,supported Rayners so-called workers rights act and the rising in costs of employing people.
They’re getting what they supported. Own it.
I have factories in the Midlands and Hartlepool and they are in that hand to mouth phase., People in the industry keep telling themselves customers cant hold off placing orders for ever, but so far they seem to be able to do so.
I was going to get moving with some apprentices this year but I will leave it for 2026 and see what joys 2027 brings.
(It was really one firm - Macquarie - who did this. The guy responsible now has a houses in the Hamptons, New York, Park City and Sydney.)
I’m very happy for private investors to run the water companies. But they need to be capped at an 8% return on investment. That was the original plan for regulation - but the regulators missed how much cheap debt the bankers could put on the companies.
Hence you need to cap leverage and dividends based on the real equity. The precise ownership doesn’t matter. If private capital will do it then great. If not then use state capital and mutualise them
My old place has ended up being absorbed into another division to save costs as orders just were not there in sufficient quantity. They also no longer take in apprentices.
At a time when our largest ally has decided it’s fed up with subsidising European defence when they don’t make the effort themselves.
You must be joking.
I actually know a lot about the industry's regulation professionally and it's incredibly heavily regulated. In fact, water companies answer to no fewer than seven regulators. So many that not even I can remember them all (Ofwat, DWI, RAPID, the Environment Agency, the National Rivers Authority are the ones I dealt with).
Similar with the energy industry - what do you think the 2,200 people in Ofgem do all day?
And the financial services industry.
The problem with many of those industries is not inadequate regulation, it's incompetent regulation.
Very different. And it doesn't change the fact that excessive regulation, which many industries do suffer from (housing is a particularly glaring example) and taxes strangle economic growth.
NEW THREAD
The water regulator has screwed up on the financial side, allowing the companies to both load themselves with debt and pay extraordinary dividends. Of all the things that unwind when interest rates go up after a decade on the floor, bog-standard (sic) utilities companies souldn’t be on the list.
https://x.com/etnowlive/status/2065318572042465679?s=46&t=d8CnRhyZJ-m4vy0k55W8XQ
As a small anecdotal example my brother, a plumber, had two replacement bathrooms cancelled on him yesterday, both customers citing the uncertainty caused by Trump's mad Iranian adventure as the reason.