Has Sunak misread the public mood on the strikes? – politicalbetting.com
Has Sunak misread the public mood on the strikes? – politicalbetting.com
We have had only had one published voting poll since the Christmas break and that had the Tories slipping even further.
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The delusion may not be as quickly damaging as it was to Truss but it is still really damaging and delusional.
U-turn incoming before February. What will the botched attempt at pay restraint have achieved? Nothing good and plenty bad.
Wonder if they are benefiting from a halo effect of nurses (everyone loves nurses) going on strike?
Not a good sign for the moderate right's "destroy the train drivers then see the nurses all right" plan. Not that the government has money to see any one all right.
My friend, whose wife is a judge, tells me she’s not busy anymore as the court system has “collapsed” and so trials are not able to be organised.
Will mean more waiting on trolleys in corridors with hospital staff stretched even more thinly. https://twitter.com/PaulBrandITV/status/1610229256373604353/photo/1
Email has been cascaded down by the NHS to London hospitals. It does make clear that critical patients will still be looked after until a nurse is available, but this is a clear departure from the policy of ambulance crews essentially having to wait as long as it takes.
All relates of course to the crisis in the ambulance service, with crews stuck waiting to hand over patients because hospitals are full. Means they can’t then answer further 999 calls, leading to long wait times for an ambulance, as we exposed in July.
https://twitter.com/PaulBrandITV/status/1552325719895719936/video/1
A queue only works when you can remove people from the front of it.
The current situation is that ambulances bring patients and wait until they can be seen by the hospital. This suggests they will now bring even more patients meaning the queue will grow even longer
Ironically of course the same strikes just further entrench in these workers that WFH is more essential than ever and so become less likely to travel to the office by train even when there's no strike.
You can paper over individual cracks, but once you have three or four intercrossing cracks, the whole thing starts to fall apart.
The British state crossed the line from efficiency to reckless gambling some time ago. It's a miracle that we got away with so much for so long, really.
What would they suggest as an alternative? Permanent lockdown?
After all, if we simply let it infect people unvaccinated, they'd still develop immunity (well, apart from those poor souls who die), so we'd be in the same position, but with a considerably higher impact on healthcare - both at the time and with the disease sequelae (such as significantly elevated cardiac, kidney, and liver disease and damage).
If high levels of immunity are going to fuel immune evasion, then either we get high levels of immunity and take the hit (as those with immunity are going to be shielded significantly from serious illness, anyway), or we somehow avoid anyone getting infected without getting high immunity levels. Can't really see an alternative (other than those who fetishize disease-generated immunity as being special)
Cutting public sector pay with below-inflation pay awards, along with fiscal drag on tax thresholds, is the way in which the deficit is being cut. I don't see any other spending cuts that will be less unpopular, or tax rises, likewise.
I can give you a list* of ways in which you can make the numbers add up by cutting spending or increasing taxes, but I'm pretty sure all the alternatives will be a lot less popular than cutting other people's pay.
And we've seen with Truss that we can't simply borrow the money now and work out how to pay it back later.
There simply isn't a way out of this situation where the incumbent PM and Chancellor are popular with the public.
* Something like:
- End the pensions triple lock.
- Tax housing wealth.
- Merge income tax and national insurance so that tax rates rise for pensioners and non-employment income.
These might all be sensible changes to make, but without a lot of political leadership invested in explaining to the public why they're sensible, they will be wildly, ruinously, unpopular.
Plus with the national average payrise only 6%, also below inflation at 10%, the average voter might be sympathetic to a 6% rise for nurses and rail workers and postal workers and teachers but not a rise more than they are getting and especially not the 19% payrise the RCN want which they would have to pay for out of their taxes.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/bulletins/averageweeklyearningsingreatbritain/october2022
Disappointed in OGH for attacking Rishi for being son in law of a billionaire, it smacks of class war from Labour and the LDs
So when the next election comes along that's another easy Labour attack point.
See problems with public sector pay, problems with Covid.
Here though is the problem. A country can't function when the trains don't run, the hospitals overflow with corpses at worst and needless suffering at best, when kids don't get taught and criminals get away with it because trials are years into the future.
Worse still, the people they picked a fight with and have started to blame are the very same people who in very recent memory were lauded as almost saintly in their sacrifices and heroism to the nation.
If the nurses weren't on strike, or teachers, then perhaps the government could have a go at pitching this as us (the workers) against them (communistical unions). But they appear uninterested and indifferent to trying to resolve those strikes either.
One of three things happen now:
The government reframes the debate, picks off striking saints and tries to fix broken things like justice and transport
The government keeps playing hardball until it is forced into a humiliating climbdown where they have to concede most of the ground to most of the striking groups.
The government keeps playing hardball and the nothing works crisis forces the collapse of their government as the same did in 1974 and 1979.
The middle option is most likely. They are too stupid to do the first option. And I can hear people asking how a government with a decent working majority could collapse due to strikes? Well have a look at Ted Heath. You cannot stay in office when everything has ground to a halt, no matter how much the flared trouser predecessor of HYUFD insisted the government had a working majority so there.
Thatcher stood her ground and did not
We also need to return National insurance to its original purpose ie funding contributory unemployment
benefit, the state pension and healthcare only not merging it into income tax
As usual, thick media types getting confused, as we saw with omicron (and indeed on here).
Going hardball when they haven't done the prep... It's a helluva gamble.
As for Rishi... His personal and family wealth don't disqualify him from office, sure. But "lack of money" messages would have been heard a lot better coming from Major or even Maggie, wouldn't they?
He is a practically invisible caretaker PM who can only rule by consensus, has seen backbenchers and testy cabinets take down the last 3 Tory leaders and knows the Bring Back Boris brigade are waiting in the wings. He is incapable of leading.
Under Johnson and Truss is was all about the leader. Since as long as I can remember the Labour Party's personality and reputation has been all about the leader too, for good or ill. Suddenly that's no more. The Tories under Sunak are like the Tories under Major or the Lib Dems under Ming or Ed.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/1999/oct/13/welfarereform.society
Immunisations with new vaccines that cover the new variants (it should be possible to generate new mRNA vaccines far more quickly than older types. Safety testing is obviously still important & just as with flu we’re going to have to guess which variants are going to be a problem each winter & hope we get it right.)
Get serious about indoor air quality in places where infection spreads like wildfire. Schools in particular are spreading winter flu, covid, RSV and a bunch of other infections everywhere. UV air purification & simple filtering can make a massive difference & is cheap relative to the cost to the economy imposed by the current infection rate.
Encourage people to wear masks when they have a cold.
Normalise working at home when ill, where possible. (This one may have been cracked for much of the professional classes?)
There’s no “magic bullet” to this, but we can reduce the impact & the government appears to have it’s collective head in the sand due to a refusal to budge from pur hopium “Covid is over!” messaging. Hope doesn’t solve problems, action does.
Maybe it's the right policy to have, but it makes balancing the budget a lot harder, so it would be rather weird if it didn't come up in such discussions.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/dec/27/critics-mocked-rishi-sunak-homeless-man-business
And those who can be bothered to write letters to them too,
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/jan/02/criticism-of-sunak-at-homeless-shelter-exposes-our-own-prejudices
- A large one-off hike in the state pension equivalent to about 3 years of inflationary rises, accompanied by an ending to the triple lock and relinking the pension with average earnings.
- Maintaining the triple lock but increasing state pension age to 70 (just buys time though)
- Significantly increase the state pension on a long term basis, and at the same time reform and vastly increase employer and employee NI so that it is a proper social insurance payment along continental lines.
- Do it now knowing the next election is lost anyway
2) The unemployed are getting the same rises
3) Therefore the unemployed are all Tories.
Note that the "a few non-Tories who luxuriate in tax-payer paid public sector final salary pension scheme laziness " are not getting inflation indexed rises.
QED
(See TimS's 11.36 comment up thread.)
But the perception of it has entered the public consciousness in a way that will not dissipate.
I suspect that a lot of the sympathy is driven by those who wish to give the government a kicking, along with those who are gullible enough to think the doctorsannurses are all saints, and this is being exploited to the max by trade union leaders who are enjoying every minute of it.
They could tax the people who vote Labour more, as was the policy under Johnson with the super-NI, but either way it would be another major change of fiscal policy forced onto the government. Rudderless would seem rather understated as a description.
Where is the budget for this? We can't afford doors, printers, nor even welcome packs for new supply. Let alone supply.
How do we propose to source filtration systems even if they are cheap? There are a hundred other things which are also not costly we need. And who would install them?
You know about the Church. Remember (as Maggie did) Luke 14:31-32.
It is of course Ed Sheeran as any patriotic Brit fule kno.
Yeah, screwing over nurses and NHS employees is never a good look, then you have to remember the pandemic and the money pissed up against a wall with the PPE and it looks horrific.
As Thatcher's go to man, Ken Clarke said the NHS unions were the most militant trade unions he had ever dealt with.
As for the rail strikers, crush the fuckers, make them bankrupt, don't back down Rishi, the more strikes we get the more WFH I get.
As for the Royal Mail, they are signing their own death warrant.
Again, the Tories couldn't have chosen a worse group at a worse time to pick a fight with. They cannot win a hardline "we will not negotiate, take the independent pay review proposal" battle with Nurses. Not now.
As it is what we've got is everyone stayed home to protect the NHS and it just about limped through that, but the accumulated damage resulting from that plus damage accrued from then until now has basically finished it off anyway, tipped it over the edge and it's now doomed anyway - except now it looks much more clearly like a massive political failure.
Some nurses are brilliant and should be paid the same as consultants. Others appear to have been on strike since they day they started and are already paid far too much. Most are somewhere in the middle.
I'm not sure how you would frame a policy based on this observation but it struck me as all too likely to be accurate, and made me smile.
Not a 19% payrise ad the RCN wants which taxpayers would have to pay higher taxes to fund when they are getting just a 6% average payrise
On the train strikers, the problem is that they aren't thinking it through. If we don't need the trains because more people will work from home, why have they made such a fuss to get people back into the office? If we're going to use alternate transport why aren't they investing in roads like in the 80s?
We're going to contract our economy further because you won't reliably be able to travel by train, bus operations will go pop as the new £2 fare will require subsidy they won't get, and road projects are all way off into the future. I am a loud advocate from hybrid working and full WFH. But we can't all do it, and the government have no plan to get people travelling.
Now explain why your wazzocks refuse to negotiate - where even announcing they will do so would call off the strikes. And why they hide behind an "independent" pay review which they have just publicly instructed to come to a low figure next time.
Parcels are a growing area, if anything.
A sensible operation would be thinking in terms of pivoting to be a parcel service with a small side of letters.
Still no update on my claim other than we're very busy and the next update will be on the 18th of January.
DPD also lost a package, my claim was processed within a week.
Nothing will be done about the public sector pension greed because MPs also benefit from it.