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It now evens that HealthSec Barclay will be the first out – politicalbetting.com
It now evens that HealthSec Barclay will be the first out – politicalbetting.com
With the NHS going through a particularly difficult period it is perhaps no wonder that punters rate the Health Secretary Steve Barker as having the best chance of being the next cabinet exit.
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https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64149139
This was all about the EU getting its pound of flesh. Now the Tories look done for, they don't need go be so unnecessarily hardline any more.
But it says a lot they were prepared to hurt Northern Ireland just for vengeance on the UK.
Football: gosh! Troyes came back and Liverpool lost, so some green shoots of betting recovery appear.
Given the health situation, it wouldn't be too surprising if the Health Secretary found himself on the chopping block.
When at the Treasury in late 2020 he tried to stop the vaccine roll out on cost grounds, so is it any surprise that he doesn't care about the state of the Emergency and Ambulance services?
https://twitter.com/ShaunLintern/status/1544653718045556736?t=9VP3_9RPoAyHMdLsH_lF7w&s=19
Flexibility and reasonableness is fine, but nowhere in that article is Varadkar saying that it doesn't need to be enforced.
My bet on this market is Ben Wallace at 25/1.
House prices are on course to suffer their biggest decline since the financial crisis, with economists warning of a market “correction” this year caused by rising borrowing costs and a likely recession.
Two thirds of economists surveyed by The Times expected house prices to fall by more than 4 per cent, with most warning of near-double-digit declines, making 2023 the worst year for the housing market since 2009.
“A double-digit price fall would not be surprising,” Sanjay Raja, chief UK economist at Deutsche Bank, said. “If typical mortgage rates remain above 5 per cent, together with an unprecedented squeeze on household incomes, it is hard to see how house prices can avoid taking a significant hit in 2023.”
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/house-prices-set-to-slump-during-2023-8rkvf7ztw
MPs are wearing stab vests to constituency surgeries and considering hiring private security as they fear another politician will be killed before their safety is taken seriously.
Sir David Amess, Conservative MP for Southend West, was murdered at a constituency surgery in October 2021, prompting the promise of stronger security for MPs. Jo Cox, Labour MP for Batley & Spen, was murdered in 2016.
However, more than a year after the death of Amess politicians feel as vulnerable as ever and believe that there will be another murder before change comes.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/mps-stab-vests-security-fears-politician-killed-gg8mrsrtb
In fact, Boris gave the appearance of pulling it out of his hat (and it clearly being bewailed as worse on day 1 in terms of NI alignment than what came prior) at a meeting with Varadkar (on the Wirral iirc), and that was agreed very quickly and stood unchanged when Brexit was 'done' by January.
So, a quickly done full reworking based on a substantially changed UK position, which the UK broadly just waved through to Get Brexit Done, turned out to be suboptimal. Who'd have thunk?
OTOH, the goodwill and flexibility shown in the implementation both means some credit be given to the EU but also provides some cover for the UK's approach.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/russia-swinger-sex-parties-prostitution-ukraine-war-phf8zxt6j
(That's a reference to Spielman, not Wallace, by the way.)
Not long ago, a house on Cavendish Avenue (same street as Sir Paul and Lord's) wouldn't have even made it onto Zoopla - it would have been sold off-market in 24 hours.
Now, stuff has been listed for 3-4, even 6 months, and still isn't selling. And if it's on the market for that long, you know they'll be willing to take offer 5-10%, even 15% below asking.
Mind you, Transport is riddled with them.
This was a scheme where the NHS funded Social Care for up to six weeks, thereby freeing up acute hospital beds. During this six week period an assessment would be made as to whether a package of home care, or residential care was needed. It was used during the pandemic, including by my Mother in Law.
Such a scheme would have freed up beds in Acute Trusts, creating beds for admissions and getting patients out of ambulances on forecourts. It would have saved both money and lives.
https://www.hsj.co.uk/finance-and-efficiency/discharge-reform-could-save-nhs-7bn-claims-dhsc/7033675.article?mkt_tok=OTM2LUZSWi03MTkAAAGIGYJgVdjcoAalzM2EieHoyWwzRa6mPP0v9KLFgVUzTWZcpU_s5CMQmXo0KGvyYNyMoezpBr1385ODFT28w4sxelWCcG4mt4uLJWc756TSh9NjNA#commentsJump
All this talk about the halfwit Barclay but what about the Tory cretin running Transport?
Philip Schofield's Inbred Cousin might have to go if the run of appalling front pages continues and Rishi has to surrender.
Certainly the atmosphere of threat, amplified by Social Media, has often been cited particularly by female MPs as to why they are standing down.
Yet we are told that the NHS is resistant to change, and refuses to innovate. The reality is that it is the Health Secretary that refuses to allow innovation.
Nobody remembers the worst test bowler of all time - the one who tripped over his own feet in his delivery stride and broke an ankle - as a bowler, because he hardly ever bowled. He's remembered instead almost solely for the runs he scored - albeit also for *that* duck in his final innings in 1948.
All power to Patel and Henry's elbows, I say.
Edit - century stand. Babar Azam must feel his captaincy slipping away by the second...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xi3hd2lCIs
Deliberately make the railways unusable, especially in the north. Passengers stop using it, ministers can pull money AND cut the obviously unnecessary Northern Powerhouse Rail.
Remember to vote Conservative in the Red Wall.
Or, to be more exact, they've put forward a plan that's obviously fraudulent and unworkable (running at high speed on a 30mph curvy freight line FFS) so eventually it will have to be pulled.
Does Bazar go with some Bazball to try to get a rapid first innings lead, or will he try to bat and save the match?
I struggle to see what Labour will do, other than move much closer to the EU
It’s the downside of departments - they live for their budgets.
The problem was caused by Brexit.
I wonder if your favourite chatbot can suggest ANY remedy at all...
Get rid of him. Once he’s become the departments creature, there will be no change.
Most of which can be traced back to one George Osbourne and his "Austerity".
https://twitter.com/RachelReevesMP/status/1609831360507662336
Great, laudable aim, the public will I am sure support this.
BUT - how will this be achieved in practice? Expanding current medical schools? New schools? Who will provide the training?
Like many a popular opposition facing a very unpopular government I suspect detail will be very, very light, and promises will not have any details.
I want a labour government, and as soon as possible, but I want more detail.
(And I know this is a tweet, but does anyone truly expect Reeves would have the answers to my questions?)
If the government giving guns to ex-terrorists is the solution for *them*…
“Are Vaccines Fueling New Covid Variants?
The virus appears to be evolving in ways that evade immunity.”
“Growing evidence also suggests that repeated vaccinations may make people more susceptible to XBB and could be fueling the virus’s rapid evolution.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/are-vaccines-fueling-new-covid-variants-xbb-northeast-antibodies-mutation-strain-immune-imprinting-11672483618
Elsewhere in the north its basically a write-off. Avanti and TransPennine Express have largely given up, Northern are painfully unreliable. And they are unremittingly stupid / mendacious with their approach (Avanti have been leaving pax for places like Penrith stranded for hours by refusing to add stops to their trains still running and instead telling their passengers to catch TPE - which have been cancelled.
Travel between Liverpool / Manchester / Leeds / Sheffield has become a lottery. A brilliant way to remove passengers in large numbers so as to say "oh look, no demand, we can cancel what's left of NPR and other projects".
I could understand if if the replacement plan was "build more roads". At least Ernest "I own the company building the motorways" Marples was transparent in his plan. But the Tories aren't even building or improving the roads. So we just get more hours lost in frustrating travel and the economy shrinks that little bit more.
Whither Growth? They are the worst capitalists since Gerald Ratner.
The move would increase the chances of Johnson making a comeback as Tory leader.
Any bloody idiot can point out the problems in the country, but it will be a very long wait before you hear someone with some good answers. If you think that the NHS can be fixed by more bodies (which is fundamentally probably not the real problem) paid for by ending non-dom status (good luck with that) you are likely to be disappointed. The issues with the NHS run much deeper that a mere problem with capacity, and we need a root and branch look at taxation (NI, business rates, wealth taxes) as well as GROWING THE BLOODY ECONOMY to pay for things.
Unlike Proper Tories, who inherited 7 foot guage from Brunel….
Where’s this?
we haven't really had a Painful Epic Fail as a nation in collective memory - maybe ever. Most of continental Europe has (except Switzerland). Either World War 2 or holding on to authoritarian dictatorships far longer than was dignified.
Whilst there have been screwups (and this feels like one) they have been of the "bumble on and hope for the best" type. So where's the motion to eat some humble pie as a nation, even if it's the right thing to do? Because I'd rather that the National Fail didn't get to the Epic stage.
Actually, if you think about it, vaccines are of course driving viral evolution. It’s a classic genetic pressure.
However, viruses are not ‘super-heroes’, they cannot explore an infinite variety of mutation, at least mot withou potential costs. So in order to overcome vaccine induced immunity, often a mutation will arise that allows this, but may have consequences elsewhere.
It’s also important to to mistake a new variant taking over for it somehow being more dangerous and virulent than any other variant. As a wave of one variant goes through it runs out of people to infect, and the next wave is driven by a new variant that has some abiliy to evade the existing community immunity.
Note, this does not mean evading the whole immune response - no variant has come close to that - rather it is the neutralising antibody response.
There is a lot of wibbling in places, notably the US, about XB1.5 (or whatever the exact designation is), but little scientific concern. It’s mostly the media, as ever, failing to understand science.
“A very important and informative thread about why the Omicron XBB.1.5 subvariant is now dominating in the Northeast US and is expected to spread. Please protect yourselves and others by wearing N95 masks. I am truly concerned about the #longCOVID wave that follows this infection.”
https://twitter.com/virusesimmunity/status/1609928349551403010?s=46&t=_dzvZoVfbQepKY0z_cSdTQ
No need for panic. But concern? Yes
However, they would have been more likely to go with Robert Stephenson (Tory MP for Whitby) and the standard gauge. In fact, they did...
It's cut the price of the longest journeys by 80%.
To go into Toon is 1/3 of the price it was last week for me.
Yet I'm having to tell even frequent bus users of its existence. Why?
I agree the current malaise has a similar flavour to those. Hopefully it leads to Thatcher 2.0 and we don’t need a full on Nazi Invasion to stoke national renewal
In fact it was only when Brunel (an epic snob) utterly cocked up the first generation of Broad guage locos that he turned to Gooch out of desperation.
Waving long covid about is the same as the idiots who think that every covid infection is like playing Russian Roulette with long covid. There is no evidence that that is the case.
There has been a recent study which suggests in some patients covid spreads quite widely through the body, and it’s possible that this may act as a reservoir for recurrent illness. However we don’t really have a definition of long covid, and it means different things to different people.
Edit. Well, perhaps not.
This means that almost no-one knows the fares. There was a survey about this a while back….
Since the universe only exists in London, no journalist* will have noticed anything.
*who is anyone
Come on, try harder.
Fine, you wibble all you want, but please try to balance the doom tweets with some more grounded stuff. Try @BristOliver @kallmemeg for starters.
I do not doubt that both are very real for many people but our current models of health don't provide many answers since we don't understand how the shock of a viral infection leaves sequelae in some but not the majority or why most recover but some remain well below their previous capability. I suspect that unless we get a better grip of the causal connection between Covid and long Covid we will equally struggle for effective remedies but there is a risk that this will be significant enough to have economic impacts.
They certainly aren't cashless up here.
And as others have pointed out, it was negotiated by both sides. One of which was led by a grandstanding buffoon.
No one knows the fares in London because you can’t see them, by the way.
Momentarily displayed through multiple layers of scratched plastic on an LCD display with no illumination.
Treatment for FND is cognitive, as with ME, but there will be a lot of patients resisting this diagnosis.
And then there will be patients where long covid has resulted from damaged organs that will be very hard to treat. At least for these patients a physical injury can be identified.
I think the culture of fear around covid and indeed long covid, has helped generate some of the FND type long covid travelers.
I’m not “wibbling”. I explicitly said this is NOT a reason to panic, but it IS a cause for concern. I’m right
My complaints would be that not enough is done to address poor retention but that would take more than a tweet, and I suspect the numbers are being fudged so that 7,500 new medical students should be divided by the four, five or six years they will be in training.
Except of course it was @eadric who ended up in a nice Billionaires flat in Wales, not you. Maybe you think it’s your turn?😀
That's what 'both sides' means.
Fact is, though, that we had a decent (in comparison) deal under May, and binned it.
That wasn't the EU.