Rather upsetting, historic abuse at a (partly) boarding school. The lawyer for the survivors' group:
'McLean also set out how boys, parents and the occasional junior staff member had been “threatened, menaced, suppressed” when they attempted to raise the alarm.
And just as chilling was the wider culture of complicity the evidence exposed – when the internationally acclaimed actor Iain Glen spoke out about his abuse in 2002, Campbell said “the wrath of Morningside and Muirfield and Murrayfield [wealthy Edinburgh suburbs] rained down on his head with biblical fury because he’d broken the code, the Edinburgh omertà.”
When speaking about the academy’s governor, who always held sway in Edinburgh, Moffatt said they were “senior professionals who you’d expect to be protecting children, and they did nothing – that’s the arrogance of the Edinburgh establishment.”'
It's been quite the precipitous, and thoroughly deserved, fall from grace for Baldy Ben. From oft-discussed tory leader candidate and potential NATO SecGen to Scotland's second best Bernard Manning tribute act in just a few months.
Conservative friend of mine in Surrey thinks this is the worst aspect of Rishi Sunak. "Completely out of touch" is her verdict.
Does it matter? Yes.
It always amazes me how many people know how their friends vote.
I think I have a fairly good idea of how my friends vote, especially if you allow borderline cases eg "I expect they voted LD last time, but it might have been Con". We talk with our friends, which means we get to know their political views, certainly on life in general if not party politics. People who rarely vote, or only ever vote at a GE are also fairly obvious.
OK so friends might say something and actually vote something else, but people who fell the need to lie to friends, don't usually stay friends for very long.
If you listen closely to what people say you don't need to ask or be told.
You live in Lancashire. I was just wondering if you had any insight into the new seat arrangements in Wallace's area.
It looks to me from the way the boundaries are redrawn that Lancaster suddenly becomes very much in play for the Tories by losing Fleetwood and picking up Garstang, while on current polls the revamped Blackpool North would surely look tempting for Labour.
Any thoughts?
Lancashire is a funny place with a lot of Tory and Labour wards quite close to each other.
So yes Labour currently hold the soon to be abolished Lancaster and Fleetwood, most of which is going to become Lancaster and Wyre, so that may seem a possible Tory pick-up, but Lancaster and Wyre used to be Ben Wallace's constituency which became Wyre and Preston North and is also being abolished. So is it becoming 'in play' or on a party-political basis should it be viewed as the already 'in play' Wyre and Preston North constituency?
My guess is that in a swing election then both of those constituencies would be in play as swing constituencies.
As I don't think the next election is going to be a swing election, I suspect they'll both be Labour next time.
Ok thanks. Something of a shame given it presumably means Cat Smith survives.
You'd have to be a pretty shit Labour MP not to survive the next election.
And even as a pretty shit Labour MP, Cat Smith seems safe.
Is Cat Smith an anagram with an m thrown in for good measure?
I still find it amusing that football manager Neil Warnock is an anagram of Colin W.....
I'd have liked to seen hs face when he first realised that.
Given billionaires like Berlusconi and Trump have won general elections I certainly don't think Sunak is too rich to be an election winner. The fact he made a lot of money in finance and had a successful career in hedge funds and at Goldman Sachs is also a good thing in a PM, even if much of it is inherited via his wife.
The idea of another Tory leadership election is also ludicrous. Given what they inherited from Truss and Kwarteng Sunak and Hunt are doing as best they can. It is the policies and record of the government that are relevant, especially on reducing inflation and the economy, another leadership election would make no difference and may even make it worse
Of course its ludicruous. But then again so was the last one. And the one before that. And the one before that. If the MPs decide that on balance they have a better prospect of saving their seat if they change leader next summer, they will do it.
The only alternative leader who might poll slightly better is Mordaunt but she is too woke for many Tory MPs and members so you may end up with PM Braverman or Badenoch instead or at best PM Barclay who would be little change from Sunak anyway
Good morning
What an utterly depressing state the conservative party is in if those are the choices
The Conservative Party has at least two problems there.
The acute one is that Boris surrounded himself with pinheads and nitwits because it made him look big by comparison. Sunak and Truss were put in the heir apparent roles because they weren't that good.
The chronic one is that Conservatism does need to be tempered by something humane. For a long time, it was The War that did that. Now, there's a real risk of the Conservatives becoming a party of self-made men worshipping their creator. I don't know what keeps them humble. A decade in opposition?
That's unfair with regards to Truss.
She was the longest-serving Cabinet member IIRC before she became PM, having been in the Cabinet continuously under Cameron, May and Johnson. She wasn't just appointed by Boris.
Truss was being touted as a future PM while Cameron was PM. Indeed, she was even mentioned as a possible future Tory leader before she even became an MP, while Labour were still in office.
Her rather unfortunate tenure as PM doesn't mean she's a complete oddball only appointed to make Boris look better.
In any case, I think it is to misunderstand Boris's motives in forming his Cabinet. It was not just that no-one must outshine the Prime Minister but also to provide a human shield for Boris against charges that he was both racist and sexist. Sunak became Chancellor because he had the same skin colour as The Saj, who had just been sacked; Jacob Rees-Mogg was brought in from the ERG so that Boris could shilly-shally on Brexit; Gove too.
You live in Lancashire. I was just wondering if you had any insight into the new seat arrangements in Wallace's area.
It looks to me from the way the boundaries are redrawn that Lancaster suddenly becomes very much in play for the Tories by losing Fleetwood and picking up Garstang, while on current polls the revamped Blackpool North would surely look tempting for Labour.
Any thoughts?
Lancashire is a funny place with a lot of Tory and Labour wards quite close to each other.
So yes Labour currently hold the soon to be abolished Lancaster and Fleetwood, most of which is going to become Lancaster and Wyre, so that may seem a possible Tory pick-up, but Lancaster and Wyre used to be Ben Wallace's constituency which became Wyre and Preston North and is also being abolished. So is it becoming 'in play' or on a party-political basis should it be viewed as the already 'in play' Wyre and Preston North constituency?
My guess is that in a swing election then both of those constituencies would be in play as swing constituencies.
As I don't think the next election is going to be a swing election, I suspect they'll both be Labour next time.
Ok thanks. Something of a shame given it presumably means Cat Smith survives.
You'd have to be a pretty shit Labour MP not to survive the next election.
And even as a pretty shit Labour MP, Cat Smith seems safe.
Is Cat Smith an anagram with an m thrown in for good measure?
I still find it amusing that football manager Neil Warnock is an anagram of Colin W.....
I'd have liked to seen hs face when he first realised that.
Given billionaires like Berlusconi and Trump have won general elections I certainly don't think Sunak is too rich to be an election winner. The fact he made a lot of money in finance and had a successful career in hedge funds and at Goldman Sachs is also a good thing in a PM, even if much of it is inherited via his wife.
The idea of another Tory leadership election is also ludicrous. Given what they inherited from Truss and Kwarteng Sunak and Hunt are doing as best they can. It is the policies and record of the government that are relevant, especially on reducing inflation and the economy, another leadership election would make no difference and may even make it worse
Of course its ludicruous. But then again so was the last one. And the one before that. And the one before that. If the MPs decide that on balance they have a better prospect of saving their seat if they change leader next summer, they will do it.
The only alternative leader who might poll slightly better is Mordaunt but she is too woke for many Tory MPs and members so you may end up with PM Braverman or Badenoch instead or at best PM Barclay who would be little change from Sunak anyway
Good morning
What an utterly depressing state the conservative party is in if those are the choices
The Conservative Party has at least two problems there.
The acute one is that Boris surrounded himself with pinheads and nitwits because it made him look big by comparison. Sunak and Truss were put in the heir apparent roles because they weren't that good.
The chronic one is that Conservatism does need to be tempered by something humane. For a long time, it was The War that did that. Now, there's a real risk of the Conservatives becoming a party of self-made men worshipping their creator. I don't know what keeps them humble. A decade in opposition?
Got to be at least a 25% chance that the current Conservative Party is in terminal decline. Because it's been around for all our lives, we assume the Tory/Lab duopoly will last forever but it won't - nothing lasts forever.
The problem with this argument is many were saying the same in 1997. The age profile f the Tories was similar then aswell, with hardly anyone under 30 voting Tory, and a Tory member under 40 was a novelty.
If the Conservatives disappear, another right wing party would take their place. Even now, 33-36% would vote for right wing parties.
You live in Lancashire. I was just wondering if you had any insight into the new seat arrangements in Wallace's area.
It looks to me from the way the boundaries are redrawn that Lancaster suddenly becomes very much in play for the Tories by losing Fleetwood and picking up Garstang, while on current polls the revamped Blackpool North would surely look tempting for Labour.
Any thoughts?
Lancashire is a funny place with a lot of Tory and Labour wards quite close to each other.
So yes Labour currently hold the soon to be abolished Lancaster and Fleetwood, most of which is going to become Lancaster and Wyre, so that may seem a possible Tory pick-up, but Lancaster and Wyre used to be Ben Wallace's constituency which became Wyre and Preston North and is also being abolished. So is it becoming 'in play' or on a party-political basis should it be viewed as the already 'in play' Wyre and Preston North constituency?
My guess is that in a swing election then both of those constituencies would be in play as swing constituencies.
As I don't think the next election is going to be a swing election, I suspect they'll both be Labour next time.
Ok thanks. Something of a shame given it presumably means Cat Smith survives.
You'd have to be a pretty shit Labour MP not to survive the next election.
And even as a pretty shit Labour MP, Cat Smith seems safe.
Is Cat Smith an anagram with an m thrown in for good measure?
I still find it amusing that football manager Neil Warnock is an anagram of Colin W.....
I'd have liked to seen hs face when he first realised that.
OK what in joke am I missing?
That Neil Warnock is an anagram of Colin W... fill in the other letters yourself.
Rather upsetting, historic abuse at a (partly) boarding school. The lawyer for the survivors' group:
'McLean also set out how boys, parents and the occasional junior staff member had been “threatened, menaced, suppressed” when they attempted to raise the alarm.
And just as chilling was the wider culture of complicity the evidence exposed – when the internationally acclaimed actor Iain Glen spoke out about his abuse in 2002, Campbell said “the wrath of Morningside and Muirfield and Murrayfield [wealthy Edinburgh suburbs] rained down on his head with biblical fury because he’d broken the code, the Edinburgh omertà.”
When speaking about the academy’s governor, who always held sway in Edinburgh, Moffatt said they were “senior professionals who you’d expect to be protecting children, and they did nothing – that’s the arrogance of the Edinburgh establishment.”'
You live in Lancashire. I was just wondering if you had any insight into the new seat arrangements in Wallace's area.
It looks to me from the way the boundaries are redrawn that Lancaster suddenly becomes very much in play for the Tories by losing Fleetwood and picking up Garstang, while on current polls the revamped Blackpool North would surely look tempting for Labour.
Any thoughts?
Lancashire is a funny place with a lot of Tory and Labour wards quite close to each other.
So yes Labour currently hold the soon to be abolished Lancaster and Fleetwood, most of which is going to become Lancaster and Wyre, so that may seem a possible Tory pick-up, but Lancaster and Wyre used to be Ben Wallace's constituency which became Wyre and Preston North and is also being abolished. So is it becoming 'in play' or on a party-political basis should it be viewed as the already 'in play' Wyre and Preston North constituency?
My guess is that in a swing election then both of those constituencies would be in play as swing constituencies.
As I don't think the next election is going to be a swing election, I suspect they'll both be Labour next time.
Ok thanks. Something of a shame given it presumably means Cat Smith survives.
You'd have to be a pretty shit Labour MP not to survive the next election.
And even as a pretty shit Labour MP, Cat Smith seems safe.
Is Cat Smith an anagram with an m thrown in for good measure?
I still find it amusing that football manager Neil Warnock is an anagram of Colin W.....
I'd have liked to seen hs face when he first realised that.
OK what in joke am I missing?
No in-joke, just it would have been a pretty shocking OMG moment for him.
If the reports are true about the appointment of Grant Shapps to be the new Defence Secretary... it reveals a bit about the Prime Minister's position. After all, Shapps is the man that everybody turns towards when there's a leadership challenge. He's the man with the spreadsheets that can successfully get a candidate to the magic number of votes.
Which begs the question... Is Rishi concerned that his grip on Number 10 isn't as secure as he thinks it is? Better to promote Shapps and have him on side rather than leave him at Energy and potentially become and ally of a challenger.
A long but worthwhile read from the brilliant Jennifer Williams in the FT. I went to college in Oldham so know the town well. To read so many problems at a big high school is disheartening.
The Tories have absolutely broken the ability of so many families to get by, and also broken the budgets of the schools who are left to pick up the pieces.
Christ, that is a tough read, it left me in tears. The Tories have utterly broken this country, and unforgivably they have ensured that children, and especially poor children, have borne the brunt of it. I find it hard to control my anger at them sometimes.
You live in Lancashire. I was just wondering if you had any insight into the new seat arrangements in Wallace's area.
It looks to me from the way the boundaries are redrawn that Lancaster suddenly becomes very much in play for the Tories by losing Fleetwood and picking up Garstang, while on current polls the revamped Blackpool North would surely look tempting for Labour.
Any thoughts?
Lancashire is a funny place with a lot of Tory and Labour wards quite close to each other.
So yes Labour currently hold the soon to be abolished Lancaster and Fleetwood, most of which is going to become Lancaster and Wyre, so that may seem a possible Tory pick-up, but Lancaster and Wyre used to be Ben Wallace's constituency which became Wyre and Preston North and is also being abolished. So is it becoming 'in play' or on a party-political basis should it be viewed as the already 'in play' Wyre and Preston North constituency?
My guess is that in a swing election then both of those constituencies would be in play as swing constituencies.
As I don't think the next election is going to be a swing election, I suspect they'll both be Labour next time.
Ok thanks. Something of a shame given it presumably means Cat Smith survives.
You'd have to be a pretty shit Labour MP not to survive the next election.
And even as a pretty shit Labour MP, Cat Smith seems safe.
Is Cat Smith an anagram with an m thrown in for good measure?
I still find it amusing that football manager Neil Warnock is an anagram of Colin W.....
I'd have liked to seen hs face when he first realised that.
OK what in joke am I missing?
That Neil Warnock is an anagram of Colin W... fill in the other letters yourself.
Given billionaires like Berlusconi and Trump have won general elections I certainly don't think Sunak is too rich to be an election winner. The fact he made a lot of money in finance and had a successful career in hedge funds and at Goldman Sachs is also a good thing in a PM, even if much of it is inherited via his wife.
The idea of another Tory leadership election is also ludicrous. Given what they inherited from Truss and Kwarteng Sunak and Hunt are doing as best they can. It is the policies and record of the government that are relevant, especially on reducing inflation and the economy, another leadership election would make no difference and may even make it worse
Of course its ludicruous. But then again so was the last one. And the one before that. And the one before that. If the MPs decide that on balance they have a better prospect of saving their seat if they change leader next summer, they will do it.
The only alternative leader who might poll slightly better is Mordaunt but she is too woke for many Tory MPs and members so you may end up with PM Braverman or Badenoch instead or at best PM Barclay who would be little change from Sunak anyway
Good morning
What an utterly depressing state the conservative party is in if those are the choices
The Conservative Party has at least two problems there.
The acute one is that Boris surrounded himself with pinheads and nitwits because it made him look big by comparison. Sunak and Truss were put in the heir apparent roles because they weren't that good.
The chronic one is that Conservatism does need to be tempered by something humane. For a long time, it was The War that did that. Now, there's a real risk of the Conservatives becoming a party of self-made men worshipping their creator. I don't know what keeps them humble. A decade in opposition?
A re-examination of what Conservatism actually stands for, and presenting it as a coherent movement with a plan and policies. The ideological shift to Kipper/NatCon populism has become an entrenched and powerful chunk of the party, which is pretty wildly at odds with much of the Con tradition (including Thatcherism). But it's simply not going to win elections.
A strong and youthful leader who actually has the nerve to stand up to the ERG-ers, the NatCons and the Boris Cult, and to bin off clowns like Braverman - instead focusing on bringing through actually intelligent and talented MPs, is what they need. Sunak does come across as a fairly decent, humane chap, but he is weak and politically inept.
The system of patronage, which was at its worst under Spaffer, needs to be looked at too. Truss, a person utterly unsuitable for junior ministerial roles, let alone PM, managed to achieve the latter essentially through toadying her way up the ladder before imposing her lower-sixth form room economics on the nation with ruinous consequences for many.
All irrelevant until they remember that aspiration is a good thing.
What the Conservatives need to shed is their love of rentierism and crony capitalism.
A long but worthwhile read from the brilliant Jennifer Williams in the FT. I went to college in Oldham so know the town well. To read so many problems at a big high school is disheartening.
The Tories have absolutely broken the ability of so many families to get by, and also broken the budgets of the schools who are left to pick up the pieces.
Christ, that is a tough read, it left me in tears. The Tories have utterly broken this country, and unforgivably they have ensured that children, and especially poor children, have borne the brunt of it. I find it hard to control my anger at them sometimes.
A long but worthwhile read from the brilliant Jennifer Williams in the FT. I went to college in Oldham so know the town well. To read so many problems at a big high school is disheartening.
The Tories have absolutely broken the ability of so many families to get by, and also broken the budgets of the schools who are left to pick up the pieces.
Christ, that is a tough read, it left me in tears. The Tories have utterly broken this country, and unforgivably they have ensured that children, and especially poor children, have borne the brunt of it. I find it hard to control my anger at them sometimes.
The money has instead gone to the oldies via health and pension spending.
How many politicians opposed that and how many are willing to reverse it ?
Given billionaires like Berlusconi and Trump have won general elections I certainly don't think Sunak is too rich to be an election winner. The fact he made a lot of money in finance and had a successful career in hedge funds and at Goldman Sachs is also a good thing in a PM, even if much of it is inherited via his wife.
The idea of another Tory leadership election is also ludicrous. Given what they inherited from Truss and Kwarteng Sunak and Hunt are doing as best they can. It is the policies and record of the government that are relevant, especially on reducing inflation and the economy, another leadership election would make no difference and may even make it worse
Of course its ludicruous. But then again so was the last one. And the one before that. And the one before that. If the MPs decide that on balance they have a better prospect of saving their seat if they change leader next summer, they will do it.
The only alternative leader who might poll slightly better is Mordaunt but she is too woke for many Tory MPs and members so you may end up with PM Braverman or Badenoch instead or at best PM Barclay who would be little change from Sunak anyway
Good morning
What an utterly depressing state the conservative party is in if those are the choices
The Conservative Party has at least two problems there.
The acute one is that Boris surrounded himself with pinheads and nitwits because it made him look big by comparison. Sunak and Truss were put in the heir apparent roles because they weren't that good.
The chronic one is that Conservatism does need to be tempered by something humane. For a long time, it was The War that did that. Now, there's a real risk of the Conservatives becoming a party of self-made men worshipping their creator. I don't know what keeps them humble. A decade in opposition?
A re-examination of what Conservatism actually stands for, and presenting it as a coherent movement with a plan and policies. The ideological shift to Kipper/NatCon populism has become an entrenched and powerful chunk of the party, which is pretty wildly at odds with much of the Con tradition (including Thatcherism). But it's simply not going to win elections.
A strong and youthful leader who actually has the nerve to stand up to the ERG-ers, the NatCons and the Boris Cult, and to bin off clowns like Braverman - instead focusing on bringing through actually intelligent and talented MPs, is what they need. Sunak does come across as a fairly decent, humane chap, but he is weak and politically inept.
The system of patronage, which was at its worst under Spaffer, needs to be looked at too. Truss, a person utterly unsuitable for junior ministerial roles, let alone PM, managed to achieve the latter essentially through toadying her way up the ladder before imposing her lower-sixth form room economics on the nation with ruinous consequences for many.
All irrelevant until they remember that aspiration is a good thing.
What the Conservatives need to shed is their love of rentierism and crony capitalism.
Given billionaires like Berlusconi and Trump have won general elections I certainly don't think Sunak is too rich to be an election winner. The fact he made a lot of money in finance and had a successful career in hedge funds and at Goldman Sachs is also a good thing in a PM, even if much of it is inherited via his wife.
The idea of another Tory leadership election is also ludicrous. Given what they inherited from Truss and Kwarteng Sunak and Hunt are doing as best they can. It is the policies and record of the government that are relevant, especially on reducing inflation and the economy, another leadership election would make no difference and may even make it worse
Of course its ludicruous. But then again so was the last one. And the one before that. And the one before that. If the MPs decide that on balance they have a better prospect of saving their seat if they change leader next summer, they will do it.
The only alternative leader who might poll slightly better is Mordaunt but she is too woke for many Tory MPs and members so you may end up with PM Braverman or Badenoch instead or at best PM Barclay who would be little change from Sunak anyway
Good morning
What an utterly depressing state the conservative party is in if those are the choices
The Conservative Party has at least two problems there.
The acute one is that Boris surrounded himself with pinheads and nitwits because it made him look big by comparison. Sunak and Truss were put in the heir apparent roles because they weren't that good.
The chronic one is that Conservatism does need to be tempered by something humane. For a long time, it was The War that did that. Now, there's a real risk of the Conservatives becoming a party of self-made men worshipping their creator. I don't know what keeps them humble. A decade in opposition?
A re-examination of what Conservatism actually stands for, and presenting it as a coherent movement with a plan and policies. The ideological shift to Kipper/NatCon populism has become an entrenched and powerful chunk of the party, which is pretty wildly at odds with much of the Con tradition (including Thatcherism). But it's simply not going to win elections.
A strong and youthful leader who actually has the nerve to stand up to the ERG-ers, the NatCons and the Boris Cult, and to bin off clowns like Braverman - instead focusing on bringing through actually intelligent and talented MPs, is what they need. Sunak does come across as a fairly decent, humane chap, but he is weak and politically inept.
The system of patronage, which was at its worst under Spaffer, needs to be looked at too. Truss, a person utterly unsuitable for junior ministerial roles, let alone PM, managed to achieve the latter essentially through toadying her way up the ladder before imposing her lower-sixth form room economics on the nation with ruinous consequences for many.
All irrelevant until they remember that aspiration is a good thing.
What the Conservatives need to shed is their love of rentierism and crony capitalism.
What if you aspire to being a rentier or crony? That's many people's ambition these days. And why not? It makes far more sense than working hard or taking risks.
If the reports are true about the appointment of Grant Shapps to be the new Defence Secretary... it reveals a bit about the Prime Minister's position. After all, Shapps is the man that everybody turns towards when there's a leadership challenge. He's the man with the spreadsheets that can successfully get a candidate to the magic number of votes.
Which begs the question... Is Rishi concerned that his grip on Number 10 isn't as secure as he thinks it is? Better to promote Shapps and have him on side rather than leave him at Energy and potentially become and ally of a challenger.
That makes a kind of sense as Sunak definitely wouldn't want to elevate a leadership contender like Bingo Wings to SecDef and give them that platform. Imagine if, somehow, the SMO all works out and Mordaunt is filmed striding around the smouldering ruins of Sevastapol nodding pensively at rubble while being cheered by whey faced Ukrainian orphans. Unthinkable for the PM.
Better to have Shappsie and that hamster he carries round on his head in position being slavishly loyal and doing VLOOKUPs.
A long but worthwhile read from the brilliant Jennifer Williams in the FT. I went to college in Oldham so know the town well. To read so many problems at a big high school is disheartening.
The Tories have absolutely broken the ability of so many families to get by, and also broken the budgets of the schools who are left to pick up the pieces.
Christ, that is a tough read, it left me in tears. The Tories have utterly broken this country, and unforgivably they have ensured that children, and especially poor children, have borne the brunt of it. I find it hard to control my anger at them sometimes.
Anger is the right emotion. We have debated the Covid exclusion of most kids from on-site education at length, something we all agree was damaging to many.
What seems to be ignored is the gutting of the social safety net which drops more and more and more families into functional poverty, which is then made worse by the gutting of budgets for schools and councils to provide emergency help.
These effects started before Covid. They continue after Covid. They are deliberate, mendacious, immoral. Teachers are propelled into service as front-line medics, having to spend their own craopla wages on food and clothing to keep the kids in their school functioning in the education system. No wonder so many (Mrs RP included) quit education.
Is this really the country we want? The society we believe to be just? I know PB Tories and their fellow travellers excuse almost everything, but is this what we have been reduced to? For what other benefit?
A long but worthwhile read from the brilliant Jennifer Williams in the FT. I went to college in Oldham so know the town well. To read so many problems at a big high school is disheartening.
The Tories have absolutely broken the ability of so many families to get by, and also broken the budgets of the schools who are left to pick up the pieces.
Christ, that is a tough read, it left me in tears. The Tories have utterly broken this country, and unforgivably they have ensured that children, and especially poor children, have borne the brunt of it. I find it hard to control my anger at them sometimes.
The money has instead gone to the oldies via health and pension spending.
How many politicians opposed that and how many are willing to reverse it ?
You have identified the number one issue that no politician has an answer for that is politically expediant
Indeed it is not surprising that the public have little confidence in any party to make any change relevant to their lives
And as I have said before, lets not forget the pension crisis coming in the next 20 plus years when renters arrive at retirement and, unlike owner occupier mortgage free pensioners, have no relief from their rental commitments
If the reports are true about the appointment of Grant Shapps to be the new Defence Secretary... it reveals a bit about the Prime Minister's position. After all, Shapps is the man that everybody turns towards when there's a leadership challenge. He's the man with the spreadsheets that can successfully get a candidate to the magic number of votes.
Which begs the question... Is Rishi concerned that his grip on Number 10 isn't as secure as he thinks it is? Better to promote Shapps and have him on side rather than leave him at Energy and potentially become and ally of a challenger.
That makes a kind of sense as Sunak definitely wouldn't want to elevate a leadership contender like Bingo Wings to SecDef and give them that platform. Imagine if, somehow, the SMO all works out and Mordaunt is filmed striding around the smouldering ruins of Sevastapol nodding pensively at rubble while being cheered by whey faced Ukrainian orphans. Unthinkable for the PM.
Better to have Shappsie and that hamster he carries round on his head in position being slavishly loyal and doing VLOOKUPs.
A competent government would be using match and index.
I don’t think people generally care how rich their politicians are. In fact when people have tried to weaponise it (Labour against Cameron being one of the more recent ones) it has backfired.
That doesn’t however mean that there isn’t a place and importance to be put on personal narrative. Cameron’s experiences with the NHS, for instance.
Rishi’s problem isn’t his richness per se, but it is possibly that lack of narrative. We don’t really get an underlying reason why he is in politics and what he hopes to achieve. It is all very managerial, which I don’t think is helping the Tories at the moment (given the management is, to put it mildly, pretty bad). It’s not very inspiring.
That said, Labour seem to be doing their utmost to be as equally managerial and uninspiring by ruling out pretty much anything that shows any vision, so the next GE is shaping up to be - underwhelming.
A long but worthwhile read from the brilliant Jennifer Williams in the FT. I went to college in Oldham so know the town well. To read so many problems at a big high school is disheartening.
The Tories have absolutely broken the ability of so many families to get by, and also broken the budgets of the schools who are left to pick up the pieces.
Christ, that is a tough read, it left me in tears. The Tories have utterly broken this country, and unforgivably they have ensured that children, and especially poor children, have borne the brunt of it. I find it hard to control my anger at them sometimes.
Yet many of the issues identified are not 'because of the Tories' - PFI was a Labour initiative as was Labour's relentless focusing on dramatically improving standards in the capital and not really giving a shit about the rest of the country, including their natural heartlands.
There is also the not so small fact that Oldham is actually quite sh1t - growing up in Manchester, it had a bad reputation back in the 1980s and the divergence has gotten worse since then. Race relations are notoriously bad.and, while you have the Moors nearby, quite frankly not many tutors etc want to live there, a fact that is mentioned in the piece
If you don't get out of this attitude of "It's the Torrriiiieeezzzzz", you will never sort out the root causes. But maybe that it is not what a lot of politically active people want to do anyway...
Given billionaires like Berlusconi and Trump have won general elections I certainly don't think Sunak is too rich to be an election winner. The fact he made a lot of money in finance and had a successful career in hedge funds and at Goldman Sachs is also a good thing in a PM, even if much of it is inherited via his wife.
The idea of another Tory leadership election is also ludicrous. Given what they inherited from Truss and Kwarteng Sunak and Hunt are doing as best they can. It is the policies and record of the government that are relevant, especially on reducing inflation and the economy, another leadership election would make no difference and may even make it worse
Of course its ludicruous. But then again so was the last one. And the one before that. And the one before that. If the MPs decide that on balance they have a better prospect of saving their seat if they change leader next summer, they will do it.
The only alternative leader who might poll slightly better is Mordaunt but she is too woke for many Tory MPs and members so you may end up with PM Braverman or Badenoch instead or at best PM Barclay who would be little change from Sunak anyway
Good morning
What an utterly depressing state the conservative party is in if those are the choices
I do wonder if the state of Conservative membership is now even worse than Labour's was under Momentryism.
The race to be the most ludicrous right wing nutter seems almost Trump-cult-ish (see also IDS endorsing the smashing of ULEZ cameras). Wisely they've kept a degree of executive control in leadership elections, but still - the average Tory member seems now quite out of touch with the average Tory voter.
Presumably that's why Mordaunt was recently wittering about the virtues of National Service: going for the over 90's vote.
A long but worthwhile read from the brilliant Jennifer Williams in the FT. I went to college in Oldham so know the town well. To read so many problems at a big high school is disheartening.
The Tories have absolutely broken the ability of so many families to get by, and also broken the budgets of the schools who are left to pick up the pieces.
Christ, that is a tough read, it left me in tears. The Tories have utterly broken this country, and unforgivably they have ensured that children, and especially poor children, have borne the brunt of it. I find it hard to control my anger at them sometimes.
Is this really the country we want? The society we believe to be just? I know PB Tories and their fellow travellers excuse almost everything, but is this what we have been reduced to? For what other benefit?
If we remove the (often) justified anger, then there's four simple questions which the politicans of all sides need to ask.
1) What are we currently spending money on? 2) What could we spend more money or or less on to make the changes which people want (and what are those changes)? 3) How can we increase the money to make the gap from 1 to 2?
Given billionaires like Berlusconi and Trump have won general elections I certainly don't think Sunak is too rich to be an election winner. The fact he made a lot of money in finance and had a successful career in hedge funds and at Goldman Sachs is also a good thing in a PM, even if much of it is inherited via his wife.
The idea of another Tory leadership election is also ludicrous. Given what they inherited from Truss and Kwarteng Sunak and Hunt are doing as best they can. It is the policies and record of the government that are relevant, especially on reducing inflation and the economy, another leadership election would make no difference and may even make it worse
Of course its ludicruous. But then again so was the last one. And the one before that. And the one before that. If the MPs decide that on balance they have a better prospect of saving their seat if they change leader next summer, they will do it.
The only alternative leader who might poll slightly better is Mordaunt but she is too woke for many Tory MPs and members so you may end up with PM Braverman or Badenoch instead or at best PM Barclay who would be little change from Sunak anyway
Good morning
What an utterly depressing state the conservative party is in if those are the choices
The Conservative Party has at least two problems there.
The acute one is that Boris surrounded himself with pinheads and nitwits because it made him look big by comparison. Sunak and Truss were put in the heir apparent roles because they weren't that good.
The chronic one is that Conservatism does need to be tempered by something humane. For a long time, it was The War that did that. Now, there's a real risk of the Conservatives becoming a party of self-made men worshipping their creator. I don't know what keeps them humble. A decade in opposition?
A re-examination of what Conservatism actually stands for, and presenting it as a coherent movement with a plan and policies. The ideological shift to Kipper/NatCon populism has become an entrenched and powerful chunk of the party, which is pretty wildly at odds with much of the Con tradition (including Thatcherism). But it's simply not going to win elections.
A strong and youthful leader who actually has the nerve to stand up to the ERG-ers, the NatCons and the Boris Cult, and to bin off clowns like Braverman - instead focusing on bringing through actually intelligent and talented MPs, is what they need. Sunak does come across as a fairly decent, humane chap, but he is weak and politically inept.
The system of patronage, which was at its worst under Spaffer, needs to be looked at too. Truss, a person utterly unsuitable for junior ministerial roles, let alone PM, managed to achieve the latter essentially through toadying her way up the ladder before imposing her lower-sixth form room economics on the nation with ruinous consequences for many.
All irrelevant until they remember that aspiration is a good thing.
What the Conservatives need to shed is their love of rentierism and crony capitalism.
What if you aspire to being a rentier or crony? That's many people's ambition these days. And why not? It makes far more sense than working hard or taking risks.
There's a limit on how many rentiers and crony capitalists a country can support.
And this country is already well above that limit.
So for wannabe rentiers and crony capitalists really need the current lot to die off at a quicker rate or they're going to remain wannabes.
A long but worthwhile read from the brilliant Jennifer Williams in the FT. I went to college in Oldham so know the town well. To read so many problems at a big high school is disheartening.
The Tories have absolutely broken the ability of so many families to get by, and also broken the budgets of the schools who are left to pick up the pieces.
Christ, that is a tough read, it left me in tears. The Tories have utterly broken this country, and unforgivably they have ensured that children, and especially poor children, have borne the brunt of it. I find it hard to control my anger at them sometimes.
Anger is the right emotion. We have debated the Covid exclusion of most kids from on-site education at length, something we all agree was damaging to many.
What seems to be ignored is the gutting of the social safety net which drops more and more and more families into functional poverty, which is then made worse by the gutting of budgets for schools and councils to provide emergency help.
These effects started before Covid. They continue after Covid. They are deliberate, mendacious, immoral. Teachers are propelled into service as front-line medics, having to spend their own craopla wages on food and clothing to keep the kids in their school functioning in the education system. No wonder so many (Mrs RP included) quit education.
Is this really the country we want? The society we believe to be just? I know PB Tories and their fellow travellers excuse almost everything, but is this what we have been reduced to? For what other benefit?
I have friend who is in the process of leaving her teaching job (UPS, in a nice grammar too) to become a Slimming World consultant - essentially the workload is just not sustainable for her with three young kids, and she can make as much money while having more time and control.
Fair play to her, but what a waste of her knowledge, experience and training. I think this all began with Gove, Cummings and all that crap about 'the blob'.
Rather upsetting, historic abuse at a (partly) boarding school. The lawyer for the survivors' group:
'McLean also set out how boys, parents and the occasional junior staff member had been “threatened, menaced, suppressed” when they attempted to raise the alarm.
And just as chilling was the wider culture of complicity the evidence exposed – when the internationally acclaimed actor Iain Glen spoke out about his abuse in 2002, Campbell said “the wrath of Morningside and Muirfield and Murrayfield [wealthy Edinburgh suburbs] rained down on his head with biblical fury because he’d broken the code, the Edinburgh omertà.”
When speaking about the academy’s governor, who always held sway in Edinburgh, Moffatt said they were “senior professionals who you’d expect to be protecting children, and they did nothing – that’s the arrogance of the Edinburgh establishment.”'
No surprise there.
A friend of mine went to EA 1986-1993. I remember his incomprehension that I, and othet friends, had mostly fond memories of our teachers. He was a cheerful, good hearted man, but he absolutely loathed his teachers,and, by extension, all teachers, with a passion. Now I understand why.
I see Antoinette Sandbach, former Conservative MP for Eddisbury (and briefly a LibDem defector), is in the news for being the descendant of a slave trader.
I'm disappointed not to be able to find a picture of her standing next to Rishi Sunak. Sandbach is 6ft 5in and Sunak, er, isn't.
A long but worthwhile read from the brilliant Jennifer Williams in the FT. I went to college in Oldham so know the town well. To read so many problems at a big high school is disheartening.
The Tories have absolutely broken the ability of so many families to get by, and also broken the budgets of the schools who are left to pick up the pieces.
Christ, that is a tough read, it left me in tears. The Tories have utterly broken this country, and unforgivably they have ensured that children, and especially poor children, have borne the brunt of it. I find it hard to control my anger at them sometimes.
Is this really the country we want? The society we believe to be just? I know PB Tories and their fellow travellers excuse almost everything, but is this what we have been reduced to? For what other benefit?
If we remove the (often) justified anger, then there's four simple questions which the politicans of all sides need to ask.
1) What are we currently spending money on? 2) What could we spend more money or or less on to make the changes which people want (and what are those changes)? 3) How can we increase the money to make the gap from 1 to 2?
Anything other than that is really just details.
The big one for me is thinking longer term.
Don't pay NHS staff at levels that mean we have a perma-shortage of staff and pay 3-5x that rate for agency staff to cover the ones who are left, off sick thru stress or striking.
Don't repair pot holes with the cheapest possible mix to keep this years budget low, when fixing it properly might be a third the cost over 10 years.
There are loads of similar examples where the govt ideology thinks it is (or it least claims it is) controlling the budget responsibly but are actually making things much more expensive by shifting costs down the line.
Borrowing and/or tax needs to go up for a few years, but over our lifetimes doing so will make public services better and cheaper. This should not be a matter of left or right, but common sense accounting.
It's been quite the precipitous, and thoroughly deserved, fall from grace for Baldy Ben. From oft-discussed tory leader candidate and potential NATO SecGen to Scotland's second best Bernard Manning tribute act in just a few months.
It's embarrassing, but was it technically a fall ftom grace?
I mean, he wanted the NATO gig and when it was clear he wasn't going to get it he announced he was flouncing off, having suddenly discovered he could not continue to undertake a high profile job after all. But its not as though his reputation among Tories nosedived or anything.
Maybe there is something we are all missing. I hope so. And he has been around the block, must know how Whitehall operates etc. I assumed it would be Tugendhat but he is a less experienced minister.
A long but worthwhile read from the brilliant Jennifer Williams in the FT. I went to college in Oldham so know the town well. To read so many problems at a big high school is disheartening.
The Tories have absolutely broken the ability of so many families to get by, and also broken the budgets of the schools who are left to pick up the pieces.
Christ, that is a tough read, it left me in tears. The Tories have utterly broken this country, and unforgivably they have ensured that children, and especially poor children, have borne the brunt of it. I find it hard to control my anger at them sometimes.
Yet many of the issues identified are not 'because of the Tories' - PFI was a Labour initiative as was Labour's relentless focusing on dramatically improving standards in the capital and not really giving a shit about the rest of the country, including their natural heartlands.
There is also the not so small fact that Oldham is actually quite sh1t - growing up in Manchester, it had a bad reputation back in the 1980s and the divergence has gotten worse since then. Race relations are notoriously bad.and, while you have the Moors nearby, quite frankly not many tutors etc want to live there, a fact that is mentioned in the piece
If you don't get out of this attitude of "It's the Torrriiiieeezzzzz", you will never sort out the root causes. But maybe that it is not what a lot of politically active people want to do anyway...
Oldham is a classic Lancashire mill town. Industrialised, prospered, then left to decay. We could talk about many similar towns and find similar issues.
I don't understand this PFI defence. It was a Tory creation. It was continued under Labour. It was continued under the coalition. For decades the Treasury have driven this funding model on a long succession of ministries.
PFI is a contract. Which means it can be renegotiated. In this specific case the article refers to penalties being paid for the poor finish of the building - and I assume that the contractor will also have to fix the leaks. If the "Labour PFI contracts" were that bad - and many of them were - why did Osbrown not renegotiate them as an alternative to what he actually did which was to hugely accellerate new PFI contracts?
But again, note the article. The penalties paid for the holes in the roof have to fill the holes in their budget. And they still don't have enough money to cope. So yes, it is the Tories who have cut the budget for education and for councils and smashed the economy so that millions of working people can't pay their bills.
I assume you want to deflect awat from this because you are a Tory fellow traveller? So to go back to the question, is this the society you want?
A long but worthwhile read from the brilliant Jennifer Williams in the FT. I went to college in Oldham so know the town well. To read so many problems at a big high school is disheartening.
The Tories have absolutely broken the ability of so many families to get by, and also broken the budgets of the schools who are left to pick up the pieces.
Christ, that is a tough read, it left me in tears. The Tories have utterly broken this country, and unforgivably they have ensured that children, and especially poor children, have borne the brunt of it. I find it hard to control my anger at them sometimes.
The money has instead gone to the oldies via health and pension spending.
How many politicians opposed that and how many are willing to reverse it ?
You have identified the number one issue that no politician has an answer for that is politically expediant
Indeed it is not surprising that the public have little confidence in any party to make any change relevant to their lives
And as I have said before, lets not forget the pension crisis coming in the next 20 plus years when renters arrive at retirement and, unlike owner occupier mortgage free pensioners, have no relief from their rental commitments
The state pension is below minimum wage. If you want to look at pension provision, maybe higher rate tax relief on contributions might be a better place, or oldies not paying NICs, although that would mean ending NICs as the qualifying criterion for pensions.
However, there may be other oddities lurking in the benefits system, if it is true people are reducing their hours rather than lose in-work childcare benefits above £100,000. One can sympathise with the idea of universal benefits but still wonder if we have the balance right.
O/T and picking up from discussions FPTs. One of the things that I have been surprised at on PB.com when it comes to discussing London and the Tories' prospects is that most commentators seem to treat London as a monolithic block when in fact it is two pretty much separate voting entities.
Yes the Conservatives have not got a chance in what most people think of London i.e. zones 1-3. Westminster gone, Wandsworth gone. Inner London has gone for now to the Conservatives given its population (professional, socially liberal urban (upper) middle class, ditto young graduate living in expensive rented accommodation or poor and living in social housing).
However, Outer London is a different game. Yes, Barnet went but it could be argued there were special factors, given the importance of the Jewish vote. The Tories won Harrow and seats in places like Enfield, kept their SE councils and took seats in Croydon.
Apologies if posters had pointed this out but Inner and Outer London nowadays are increasingly growing apart, I also wonder whether the Conservatives are also starting to make inroads into some of the ethnic communities not just the Indian heritage but also groups such as Greek / Turkish Cypriots etc.
Given billionaires like Berlusconi and Trump have won general elections I certainly don't think Sunak is too rich to be an election winner. The fact he made a lot of money in finance and had a successful career in hedge funds and at Goldman Sachs is also a good thing in a PM, even if much of it is inherited via his wife.
The idea of another Tory leadership election is also ludicrous. Given what they inherited from Truss and Kwarteng Sunak and Hunt are doing as best they can. It is the policies and record of the government that are relevant, especially on reducing inflation and the economy, another leadership election would make no difference and may even make it worse
Of course its ludicruous. But then again so was the last one. And the one before that. And the one before that. If the MPs decide that on balance they have a better prospect of saving their seat if they change leader next summer, they will do it.
The only alternative leader who might poll slightly better is Mordaunt but she is too woke for many Tory MPs and members so you may end up with PM Braverman or Badenoch instead or at best PM Barclay who would be little change from Sunak anyway
Good morning
What an utterly depressing state the conservative party is in if those are the choices
The Conservative Party has at least two problems there.
The acute one is that Boris surrounded himself with pinheads and nitwits because it made him look big by comparison. Sunak and Truss were put in the heir apparent roles because they weren't that good.
The chronic one is that Conservatism does need to be tempered by something humane. For a long time, it was The War that did that. Now, there's a real risk of the Conservatives becoming a party of self-made men worshipping their creator. I don't know what keeps them humble. A decade in opposition?
Got to be at least a 25% chance that the current Conservative Party is in terminal decline. Because it's been around for all our lives, we assume the Tory/Lab duopoly will last forever but it won't - nothing lasts forever.
The problem with this argument is many were saying the same in 1997. The age profile f the Tories was similar then aswell, with hardly anyone under 30 voting Tory, and a Tory member under 40 was a novelty.
I don't think this true. The age spread of voting was pretty similar to the national vote in 1997.
A long but worthwhile read from the brilliant Jennifer Williams in the FT. I went to college in Oldham so know the town well. To read so many problems at a big high school is disheartening.
The Tories have absolutely broken the ability of so many families to get by, and also broken the budgets of the schools who are left to pick up the pieces.
Christ, that is a tough read, it left me in tears. The Tories have utterly broken this country, and unforgivably they have ensured that children, and especially poor children, have borne the brunt of it. I find it hard to control my anger at them sometimes.
Is this really the country we want? The society we believe to be just? I know PB Tories and their fellow travellers excuse almost everything, but is this what we have been reduced to? For what other benefit?
If we remove the (often) justified anger, then there's four simple questions which the politicans of all sides need to ask.
1) What are we currently spending money on? 2) What could we spend more money or or less on to make the changes which people want (and what are those changes)? 3) How can we increase the money to make the gap from 1 to 2?
Anything other than that is really just details.
The big one for me is thinking longer term.
Don't pay NHS staff at levels that mean we have a perma-shortage of staff and pay 3-5x that rate for agency staff to cover the ones who are left, off sick thru stress or striking.
Don't repair pot holes with the cheapest possible mix to keep this years budget low, when fixing it properly might be a third the cost over 10 years.
There are loads of similar examples where the govt ideology thinks it is (or it least claims it is) controlling the budget responsibly but are actually making things much more expensive by shifting costs down the line.
Borrowing and/or tax needs to go up for a few years, but over our lifetimes doing so will make public services better and cheaper. This should not be a matter of left or right, but common sense accounting.
We've had 13 years of self-defeating false economies now. Vimes' Boots etc.
Another Home Counties Tory promoted to the cabinet ranks. Rishi continuing to show disinterest re the red wall.
Another Tory merchant banker, you mean. After private school and Oxford, Coutinho worked for [fx: checks Wikipedia] Merrill Lynch prior to becoming Rishi's SpAd at the Treasury.
A long but worthwhile read from the brilliant Jennifer Williams in the FT. I went to college in Oldham so know the town well. To read so many problems at a big high school is disheartening.
The Tories have absolutely broken the ability of so many families to get by, and also broken the budgets of the schools who are left to pick up the pieces.
Christ, that is a tough read, it left me in tears. The Tories have utterly broken this country, and unforgivably they have ensured that children, and especially poor children, have borne the brunt of it. I find it hard to control my anger at them sometimes.
Is this really the country we want? The society we believe to be just? I know PB Tories and their fellow travellers excuse almost everything, but is this what we have been reduced to? For what other benefit?
If we remove the (often) justified anger, then there's four simple questions which the politicans of all sides need to ask.
1) What are we currently spending money on? 2) What could we spend more money or or less on to make the changes which people want (and what are those changes)? 3) How can we increase the money to make the gap from 1 to 2?
Anything other than that is really just details.
Given that there appears to be little appetite for tax rises (except for the idea of raising mythical billions from the top 1%), and the books are still a long way from balancing, the conversation really needs to be around the scope of government.
What does government do currently, that it could stop doing without too many adverse effects?
The obvious standout figures are £20bn on ‘Energy Security and Net Zero’, £10bn on “Science, Innovation and Technology”, and nearly £10bn on the Foreign Office. DWP also spends £8.5bn on its own admin, and HMRC £6.5bn, which suggests that reducing complexity in the tax and benefits system could lead to savings there.
A long but worthwhile read from the brilliant Jennifer Williams in the FT. I went to college in Oldham so know the town well. To read so many problems at a big high school is disheartening.
The Tories have absolutely broken the ability of so many families to get by, and also broken the budgets of the schools who are left to pick up the pieces.
Christ, that is a tough read, it left me in tears. The Tories have utterly broken this country, and unforgivably they have ensured that children, and especially poor children, have borne the brunt of it. I find it hard to control my anger at them sometimes.
The money has instead gone to the oldies via health and pension spending.
How many politicians opposed that and how many are willing to reverse it ?
You have identified the number one issue that no politician has an answer for that is politically expediant
Indeed it is not surprising that the public have little confidence in any party to make any change relevant to their lives
And as I have said before, lets not forget the pension crisis coming in the next 20 plus years when renters arrive at retirement and, unlike owner occupier mortgage free pensioners, have no relief from their rental commitments
The state pension is below minimum wage. If you want to look at pension provision, maybe higher rate tax relief on contributions might be a better place, or oldies not paying NICs, although that would mean ending NICs as the qualifying criterion for pensions.
However, there may be other oddities lurking in the benefits system, if it is true people are reducing their hours rather than lose in-work childcare benefits above £100,000. One can sympathise with the idea of universal benefits but still wonder if we have the balance right.
No it is not.
Minimum wage is per hours worked in that time period. Work 5 hours in a week and you get 5x minimum wage for that week. Work 37.5 hours you get 37.5x minimum wage for that week.
State pension is for zero hours worked in the time period it's paid out for, so it's not mathematically possible to determine it's hourly rate since you can't divide by zero.
Actually paying NICs are not a qualifying criteria for pensions, since if you don't earn enough to pay NICs and get benefits instead you still get NIC "contributions".
The only way you don't get them is if you opt out of paying NICs, so removing the ability to opt out is the solution. Have a single rate of income tax paid by everyone.
PFI is a contract. Which means it can be renegotiated. In this specific case the article refers to penalties being paid for the poor finish of the building - and I assume that the contractor will also have to fix the leaks. If the "Labour PFI contracts" were that bad - and many of them were - why did Osbrown not renegotiate them as an alternative to what he actually did which was to hugely accellerate new PFI contracts?
[snip]
Osborne and his team did an excellent job in mitigating the inherited disaster of Brown's spectacularly incompetent PFI contracts. They paused new contracts whilst they changed the framework, renegotiated where possible (which wasn't in very many cases obviously), and negotiated new ones under the new framework which was much better value for the taxpayer. If you were following at the time you'd know that they uncovered some real horrors in the old contracts - not surprising, because Brown's most frequent and bombastic boasts were always about how much of our our money he was spending, not about what value we were getting for that expenditure. The contractors, and civil servants doing his bidding, obliged by giving him plenty of expenditure to boast about.
May be home counties but it does show a Tory party that isn't simply white men (if we're bothering with identities). And she was a Brexit supporter apparently.
A long but worthwhile read from the brilliant Jennifer Williams in the FT. I went to college in Oldham so know the town well. To read so many problems at a big high school is disheartening.
The Tories have absolutely broken the ability of so many families to get by, and also broken the budgets of the schools who are left to pick up the pieces.
Christ, that is a tough read, it left me in tears. The Tories have utterly broken this country, and unforgivably they have ensured that children, and especially poor children, have borne the brunt of it. I find it hard to control my anger at them sometimes.
The money has instead gone to the oldies via health and pension spending.
How many politicians opposed that and how many are willing to reverse it ?
You have identified the number one issue that no politician has an answer for that is politically expediant
Indeed it is not surprising that the public have little confidence in any party to make any change relevant to their lives
And as I have said before, lets not forget the pension crisis coming in the next 20 plus years when renters arrive at retirement and, unlike owner occupier mortgage free pensioners, have no relief from their rental commitments
The state pension is below minimum wage. If you want to look at pension provision, maybe higher rate tax relief on contributions might be a better place, or oldies not paying NICs, although that would mean ending NICs as the qualifying criterion for pensions.
However, there may be other oddities lurking in the benefits system, if it is true people are reducing their hours rather than lose in-work childcare benefits above £100,000. One can sympathise with the idea of universal benefits but still wonder if we have the balance right.
To be honest I really do not know the answers to this and so many other intractable problems going forward into the future and am just grateful for all our blessings
Given billionaires like Berlusconi and Trump have won general elections I certainly don't think Sunak is too rich to be an election winner. The fact he made a lot of money in finance and had a successful career in hedge funds and at Goldman Sachs is also a good thing in a PM, even if much of it is inherited via his wife.
The idea of another Tory leadership election is also ludicrous. Given what they inherited from Truss and Kwarteng Sunak and Hunt are doing as best they can. It is the policies and record of the government that are relevant, especially on reducing inflation and the economy, another leadership election would make no difference and may even make it worse
Of course its ludicruous. But then again so was the last one. And the one before that. And the one before that. If the MPs decide that on balance they have a better prospect of saving their seat if they change leader next summer, they will do it.
The only alternative leader who might poll slightly better is Mordaunt but she is too woke for many Tory MPs and members so you may end up with PM Braverman or Badenoch instead or at best PM Barclay who would be little change from Sunak anyway
Good morning
What an utterly depressing state the conservative party is in if those are the choices
The Conservative Party has at least two problems there.
The acute one is that Boris surrounded himself with pinheads and nitwits because it made him look big by comparison. Sunak and Truss were put in the heir apparent roles because they weren't that good.
The chronic one is that Conservatism does need to be tempered by something humane. For a long time, it was The War that did that. Now, there's a real risk of the Conservatives becoming a party of self-made men worshipping their creator. I don't know what keeps them humble. A decade in opposition?
Got to be at least a 25% chance that the current Conservative Party is in terminal decline. Because it's been around for all our lives, we assume the Tory/Lab duopoly will last forever but it won't - nothing lasts forever.
The problem with this argument is many were saying the same in 1997. The age profile f the Tories was similar then aswell, with hardly anyone under 30 voting Tory, and a Tory member under 40 was a novelty.
That's a bit of a myth though.
Take the 1997 landslide- the Conservatives still got about 27 percent of the youth vote and only 36 percent of pensioners;
The latest Mori poll has the Conservatives on 12 percent with the youngest voters, 18 percent with people either side of forty, but 45 percent with pensioners.
A long but worthwhile read from the brilliant Jennifer Williams in the FT. I went to college in Oldham so know the town well. To read so many problems at a big high school is disheartening.
The Tories have absolutely broken the ability of so many families to get by, and also broken the budgets of the schools who are left to pick up the pieces.
Christ, that is a tough read, it left me in tears. The Tories have utterly broken this country, and unforgivably they have ensured that children, and especially poor children, have borne the brunt of it. I find it hard to control my anger at them sometimes.
Is this really the country we want? The society we believe to be just? I know PB Tories and their fellow travellers excuse almost everything, but is this what we have been reduced to? For what other benefit?
If we remove the (often) justified anger, then there's four simple questions which the politicans of all sides need to ask.
1) What are we currently spending money on? 2) What could we spend more money or or less on to make the changes which people want (and what are those changes)? 3) How can we increase the money to make the gap from 1 to 2?
Anything other than that is really just details.
The big one for me is thinking longer term.
Don't pay NHS staff at levels that mean we have a perma-shortage of staff and pay 3-5x that rate for agency staff to cover the ones who are left, off sick thru stress or striking.
Don't repair pot holes with the cheapest possible mix to keep this years budget low, when fixing it properly might be a third the cost over 10 years.
There are loads of similar examples where the govt ideology thinks it is (or it least claims it is) controlling the budget responsibly but are actually making things much more expensive by shifting costs down the line.
Borrowing and/or tax needs to go up for a few years, but over our lifetimes doing so will make public services better and cheaper. This should not be a matter of left or right, but common sense accounting.
"I'm willing to pay a little more tax so that we can have a lot better public services."
Now what are the likelihoods of:
This extra tax actually being higher than predicted.
The improvement in public services being lower than predicted.
We all know what the historic pattern has been so why should things change now ?
Rather upsetting, historic abuse at a (partly) boarding school. The lawyer for the survivors' group:
'McLean also set out how boys, parents and the occasional junior staff member had been “threatened, menaced, suppressed” when they attempted to raise the alarm.
And just as chilling was the wider culture of complicity the evidence exposed – when the internationally acclaimed actor Iain Glen spoke out about his abuse in 2002, Campbell said “the wrath of Morningside and Muirfield and Murrayfield [wealthy Edinburgh suburbs] rained down on his head with biblical fury because he’d broken the code, the Edinburgh omertà.”
When speaking about the academy’s governor, who always held sway in Edinburgh, Moffatt said they were “senior professionals who you’d expect to be protecting children, and they did nothing – that’s the arrogance of the Edinburgh establishment.”'
Since ignoring whistleblowers is flavour of the month, it's worth noting not just this case but that there were 2 schools - Edinburgh Academy and Fettes School - which admitted that they knew a teacher was a predatory paedophile but gave him a good reference and failed to inform the police.
It's not the first time the FCA has been accused of ignoring warnings. It admitted failings in relation to Link and its role in the Woodford saga and its supervision of London Capital & Finance and failures to follow up warnings it received. Andrew Bailey was bloody lucky to get out of the FCA when he did because his record at the FCA fell into the Cressida Dick category rather than the Sir Robert Mark one.
I have my own amusing story of repeatedly informing the FCA about an individual who should not have been authorised by them but was and being told - when the inevitable happened and they were trying to blame me for not telling them and then having to retreat very rapidly when I pointed out that I had written to them a year before - that, yes, they had received the material I'd sent but "they didn't always read everything" they were sent.
So those NHS managers are in good company.
The problem with organisations which depend on their reputation is that when something awful happens protecting reputation becomes the only thing that matters. Hiding the problem and sending the bad individual away somewhere else achieves that. It worked after all for those schools for decades, even if the price was a lot of abused children. Ditto the police, NHS etc.,.
The harm is felt years later and those in charge are not willing to endure the short-term pain caused by bringing in the police / dealing properly with a problem for the long-term gain. So they are willing to sacrifice the children, patients, investors, etc., in their care.
Breaking that perverse incentive is what is needed.
A long but worthwhile read from the brilliant Jennifer Williams in the FT. I went to college in Oldham so know the town well. To read so many problems at a big high school is disheartening.
The Tories have absolutely broken the ability of so many families to get by, and also broken the budgets of the schools who are left to pick up the pieces.
Christ, that is a tough read, it left me in tears. The Tories have utterly broken this country, and unforgivably they have ensured that children, and especially poor children, have borne the brunt of it. I find it hard to control my anger at them sometimes.
Is this really the country we want? The society we believe to be just? I know PB Tories and their fellow travellers excuse almost everything, but is this what we have been reduced to? For what other benefit?
If we remove the (often) justified anger, then there's four simple questions which the politicans of all sides need to ask.
1) What are we currently spending money on? 2) What could we spend more money or or less on to make the changes which people want (and what are those changes)? 3) How can we increase the money to make the gap from 1 to 2?
Anything other than that is really just details.
Given that there appears to be little appetite for tax rises (except for the idea of raising mythical billions from the top 1%), and the books are still a long way from balancing, the conversation really needs to be around the scope of government.
What does government do currently, that it could stop doing without too many adverse effects?
The obvious standout figures are £20bn on ‘Energy Security and Net Zero’, £10bn on “Science, Innovation and Technology”, and nearly £10bn on the Foreign Office. DWP also spends £8.5bn on its own admin, and HMRC £6.5bn, which suggests that reducing complexity in the tax and benefits system could lead to savings there.
It isn't just that department budgets are always being cut. Its what those budgets are spent on. We have endless webs of contractual frameworks, managers and administrators where the money goes to middlemen leaving very little left at the front line.
May be home counties but it does show a Tory party that isn't simply white men (if we're bothering with identities). And she was a Brexit supporter apparently.
He won the World Cup and was good for Liverpool so can't be all that bad. Didn't realise he'd gone into politics. Or was British.
A long but worthwhile read from the brilliant Jennifer Williams in the FT. I went to college in Oldham so know the town well. To read so many problems at a big high school is disheartening.
The Tories have absolutely broken the ability of so many families to get by, and also broken the budgets of the schools who are left to pick up the pieces.
Christ, that is a tough read, it left me in tears. The Tories have utterly broken this country, and unforgivably they have ensured that children, and especially poor children, have borne the brunt of it. I find it hard to control my anger at them sometimes.
Is this really the country we want? The society we believe to be just? I know PB Tories and their fellow travellers excuse almost everything, but is this what we have been reduced to? For what other benefit?
If we remove the (often) justified anger, then there's four simple questions which the politicans of all sides need to ask.
1) What are we currently spending money on? 2) What could we spend more money or or less on to make the changes which people want (and what are those changes)? 3) How can we increase the money to make the gap from 1 to 2?
Anything other than that is really just details.
Given that there appears to be little appetite for tax rises (except for the idea of raising mythical billions from the top 1%), and the books are still a long way from balancing, the conversation really needs to be around the scope of government.
What does government do currently, that it could stop doing without too many adverse effects?
The obvious standout figures are £20bn on ‘Energy Security and Net Zero’, £10bn on “Science, Innovation and Technology”, and nearly £10bn on the Foreign Office. DWP also spends £8.5bn on its own admin, and HMRC £6.5bn, which suggests that reducing complexity in the tax and benefits system could lead to savings there.
The appointment of Grant Shapps is sensible enough. He's by no means the worst appointee to the role (remember Geoff Hoon, anyone?), he's a good communicator, and he won't be disruptive.
O/T and picking up from discussions FPTs. One of the things that I have been surprised at on PB.com when it comes to discussing London and the Tories' prospects is that most commentators seem to treat London as a monolithic block when in fact it is two pretty much separate voting entities.
Yes the Conservatives have not got a chance in what most people think of London i.e. zones 1-3. Westminster gone, Wandsworth gone. Inner London has gone for now to the Conservatives given its population (professional, socially liberal urban (upper) middle class, ditto young graduate living in expensive rented accommodation or poor and living in social housing).
However, Outer London is a different game. Yes, Barnet went but it could be argued there were special factors, given the importance of the Jewish vote. The Tories won Harrow and seats in places like Enfield, kept their SE councils and took seats in Croydon.
Apologies if posters had pointed this out but Inner and Outer London nowadays are increasingly growing apart, I also wonder whether the Conservatives are also starting to make inroads into some of the ethnic communities not just the Indian heritage but also groups such as Greek / Turkish Cypriots etc.
Assuming the Conservatives lose the next election, I think they’d be sure to win back Barnet, Enfield, Croydon in 2026, as well as winning back a lot of wards in Brent North.
A long but worthwhile read from the brilliant Jennifer Williams in the FT. I went to college in Oldham so know the town well. To read so many problems at a big high school is disheartening.
The Tories have absolutely broken the ability of so many families to get by, and also broken the budgets of the schools who are left to pick up the pieces.
Christ, that is a tough read, it left me in tears. The Tories have utterly broken this country, and unforgivably they have ensured that children, and especially poor children, have borne the brunt of it. I find it hard to control my anger at them sometimes.
Is this really the country we want? The society we believe to be just? I know PB Tories and their fellow travellers excuse almost everything, but is this what we have been reduced to? For what other benefit?
If we remove the (often) justified anger, then there's four simple questions which the politicans of all sides need to ask.
1) What are we currently spending money on? 2) What could we spend more money or or less on to make the changes which people want (and what are those changes)? 3) How can we increase the money to make the gap from 1 to 2?
Anything other than that is really just details.
The big one for me is thinking longer term.
Don't pay NHS staff at levels that mean we have a perma-shortage of staff and pay 3-5x that rate for agency staff to cover the ones who are left, off sick thru stress or striking.
Don't repair pot holes with the cheapest possible mix to keep this years budget low, when fixing it properly might be a third the cost over 10 years.
There are loads of similar examples where the govt ideology thinks it is (or it least claims it is) controlling the budget responsibly but are actually making things much more expensive by shifting costs down the line.
Borrowing and/or tax needs to go up for a few years, but over our lifetimes doing so will make public services better and cheaper. This should not be a matter of left or right, but common sense accounting.
"I'm willing to pay a little more tax so that we can have a lot better public services."
Now what are the likelihoods of:
This extra tax actually being higher than predicted.
The improvement in public services being lower than predicted.
We all know what the historic pattern has been so why should things change now ?
I don't think we are going to get the changes I would like to see. If I was in charge it is what I would do, and it would work.
The current batch of Tories are brainwashed by thinking controlling public finances is always the right thing to do regardless of the scenario.
Labour lack imagination and coherence, there is a small chance they are just hiding these away but I doubt it.
It'll be interesting to see a ULEZ poll in say 3 or 6 months time as ULEZ! becomes ULEZzzzzz
People are now realising daily that, remarkably, their Teslas are compliant (as are 80-90% of other cars in London), and that the Tories are full of shit.
Rather upsetting, historic abuse at a (partly) boarding school. The lawyer for the survivors' group:
'McLean also set out how boys, parents and the occasional junior staff member had been “threatened, menaced, suppressed” when they attempted to raise the alarm.
And just as chilling was the wider culture of complicity the evidence exposed – when the internationally acclaimed actor Iain Glen spoke out about his abuse in 2002, Campbell said “the wrath of Morningside and Muirfield and Murrayfield [wealthy Edinburgh suburbs] rained down on his head with biblical fury because he’d broken the code, the Edinburgh omertà.”
When speaking about the academy’s governor, who always held sway in Edinburgh, Moffatt said they were “senior professionals who you’d expect to be protecting children, and they did nothing – that’s the arrogance of the Edinburgh establishment.”'
“senior professionals who you’d expect to be protecting children, and they did nothing – that’s the arrogance of the Edinburghany establishment.”
it's copy and pasta from... all such scandals. Rotherham, Baby P, Letby, Horizon. All the energy was expended on treading on the whistleblowers.
I'll bet their paperwork was immaculate.
We just need to apply criminal sanction.
In finance, if I suspect a crime and I do nothing, I get it in the neck. If I actively covered it up, that's Club HMP. If I threatened someone to stop it being reported, that would Club HMP Premium - for those stays when you just can't get away.
It's been quite the precipitous, and thoroughly deserved, fall from grace for Baldy Ben. From oft-discussed tory leader candidate and potential NATO SecGen to Scotland's second best Bernard Manning tribute act in just a few months.
No offence and I'm not being funny but he is a Jock Guard ffs. Look at what happened to the last one of those the Cons decided to over-promote.
At least the party's Grenadiers are properly bonkers eg David Tredinnick and "Mad" Adam Holloway.
Rather upsetting, historic abuse at a (partly) boarding school. The lawyer for the survivors' group:
'McLean also set out how boys, parents and the occasional junior staff member had been “threatened, menaced, suppressed” when they attempted to raise the alarm.
And just as chilling was the wider culture of complicity the evidence exposed – when the internationally acclaimed actor Iain Glen spoke out about his abuse in 2002, Campbell said “the wrath of Morningside and Muirfield and Murrayfield [wealthy Edinburgh suburbs] rained down on his head with biblical fury because he’d broken the code, the Edinburgh omertà.”
When speaking about the academy’s governor, who always held sway in Edinburgh, Moffatt said they were “senior professionals who you’d expect to be protecting children, and they did nothing – that’s the arrogance of the Edinburgh establishment.”'
Since ignoring whistleblowers is flavour of the month, it's worth noting not just this case but that there were 2 schools - Edinburgh Academy and Fettes School - which admitted that they knew a teacher was a predatory paedophile but gave him a good reference and failed to inform the police.
It's not the first time the FCA has been accused of ignoring warnings. It admitted failings in relation to Link and its role in the Woodford saga and its supervision of London Capital & Finance and failures to follow up warnings it received. Andrew Bailey was bloody lucky to get out of the FCA when he did because his record at the FCA fell into the Cressida Dick category rather than the Sir Robert Mark one.
I have my own amusing story of repeatedly informing the FCA about an individual who should not have been authorised by them but was and being told - when the inevitable happened and they were trying to blame me for not telling them and then having to retreat very rapidly when I pointed out that I had written to them a year before - that, yes, they had received the material I'd sent but "they didn't always read everything" they were sent.
So those NHS managers are in good company.
The problem with organisations which depend on their reputation is that when something awful happens protecting reputation becomes the only thing that matters. Hiding the problem and sending the bad individual away somewhere else achieves that. It worked after all for those schools for decades, even if the price was a lot of abused children. Ditto the police, NHS etc.,.
The harm is felt years later and those in charge are not willing to endure the short-term pain caused by bringing in the police / dealing properly with a problem for the long-term gain. So they are willing to sacrifice the children, patients, investors, etc., in their care.
Breaking that perverse incentive is what is needed.
By all accounts, Theresa May's book, The Abuse of Power, has a similar theme.
From the Telegraph's review:-
... This brings her on to her wider theme: corruption within these systems, and what happens when those in charge care about themselves, not others – leaving the powerless without a voice.
Here we see Theresa May as something of an avenger, keen to hold the vain and powerful to account. This very much includes those in her own party. She attributes the Hillsborough calamity, for instance, to a cruel policing style built around the premise that “fans would only ever cause trouble” and were there to be controlled. After those 95 initial deaths, she says, South Yorkshire Police protected themselves – and were, in turn, protected by a Tory party in denial. Margaret Thatcher is quoted, being asked by a mother of one victim what the police were doing. Her reply: “Their job, my dear.” To May, this response showed a deep problem in her party: they were so keen on law and order that they couldn’t recognise police malpractice. ... Sir Lenny Henry emerges as an unlikely hero of the Windrush scandal, alerting May to the full horror of what was being asked of people if they wanted to avoid deportation. “Who’s got four pieces of documentation for every year they were alive?” he asked an audience at a memorial she attended. Shocked, she asked officials to investigate, yet she didn’t hear back until the inquiry reported, two years later. A case study in system failure – but May stops short of asking why, after her six years as Home Secretary, such mayhem could have continued until a comedian raised the alarm.
She says little about Boris Johnson and David Cameron, but it’s not hard to guess at whom she has in mind when she talks at length about vain MPs who see politics as a career, not a chance to serve. If we find politicians who put “the common good above personal interest,” she concludes, we “might be able to consign the abuse of power to the past”. But this optimistic thought is contradicted by the powerful examples in her book: where good people (herself included) presided over appalling injustices. That’s why the real villain of The Abuse of Power is a deserving one: the intransigent bureaucracies that, after 13 years of Tory rule, are more powerful than ever. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/non-fiction/review-theresa-may-abuse-power-fraser-nelson/ (£££)
A long but worthwhile read from the brilliant Jennifer Williams in the FT. I went to college in Oldham so know the town well. To read so many problems at a big high school is disheartening.
The Tories have absolutely broken the ability of so many families to get by, and also broken the budgets of the schools who are left to pick up the pieces.
Christ, that is a tough read, it left me in tears. The Tories have utterly broken this country, and unforgivably they have ensured that children, and especially poor children, have borne the brunt of it. I find it hard to control my anger at them sometimes.
Is this really the country we want? The society we believe to be just? I know PB Tories and their fellow travellers excuse almost everything, but is this what we have been reduced to? For what other benefit?
If we remove the (often) justified anger, then there's four simple questions which the politicans of all sides need to ask.
1) What are we currently spending money on? 2) What could we spend more money or or less on to make the changes which people want (and what are those changes)? 3) How can we increase the money to make the gap from 1 to 2?
Anything other than that is really just details.
Given that there appears to be little appetite for tax rises (except for the idea of raising mythical billions from the top 1%), and the books are still a long way from balancing, the conversation really needs to be around the scope of government.
What does government do currently, that it could stop doing without too many adverse effects?
The obvious standout figures are £20bn on ‘Energy Security and Net Zero’, £10bn on “Science, Innovation and Technology”, and nearly £10bn on the Foreign Office. DWP also spends £8.5bn on its own admin, and HMRC £6.5bn, which suggests that reducing complexity in the tax and benefits system could lead to savings there.
It isn't just that department budgets are always being cut. Its what those budgets are spent on. We have endless webs of contractual frameworks, managers and administrators where the money goes to middlemen leaving very little left at the front line.
We don't have a space program in the UK, because, whenever asked, Big and Expensive said it would cost 20-50 billion to build a launcher.
An immigrant with impulse control problems showed that it could be done for about a billion.
There was no especial magic - apart from not giving contracts to people who give contracts to people who give contracts to people etc etc. With profit at every stage.
The space launch industry is full of such layering. Which is why the above mentioned chap and his company are running riot in the space launch market. They are The Thing That Should Not Be.
A long but worthwhile read from the brilliant Jennifer Williams in the FT. I went to college in Oldham so know the town well. To read so many problems at a big high school is disheartening.
The Tories have absolutely broken the ability of so many families to get by, and also broken the budgets of the schools who are left to pick up the pieces.
Christ, that is a tough read, it left me in tears. The Tories have utterly broken this country, and unforgivably they have ensured that children, and especially poor children, have borne the brunt of it. I find it hard to control my anger at them sometimes.
Is this really the country we want? The society we believe to be just? I know PB Tories and their fellow travellers excuse almost everything, but is this what we have been reduced to? For what other benefit?
If we remove the (often) justified anger, then there's four simple questions which the politicans of all sides need to ask.
1) What are we currently spending money on? 2) What could we spend more money or or less on to make the changes which people want (and what are those changes)? 3) How can we increase the money to make the gap from 1 to 2?
Anything other than that is really just details.
Given that there appears to be little appetite for tax rises (except for the idea of raising mythical billions from the top 1%), and the books are still a long way from balancing, the conversation really needs to be around the scope of government.
What does government do currently, that it could stop doing without too many adverse effects?
The obvious standout figures are £20bn on ‘Energy Security and Net Zero’, £10bn on “Science, Innovation and Technology”, and nearly £10bn on the Foreign Office. DWP also spends £8.5bn on its own admin, and HMRC £6.5bn, which suggests that reducing complexity in the tax and benefits system could lead to savings there.
Extend NI to all income. Sorted.
Yes, I’d merge employee NI into income tax, which both simplifies the system and brings unearned income into scope. You could make it revenue-positive while cutting the ‘basic rate’ for most full-time employees and raising the basic rate threshold.
The legislation would be complex though, needing to calculate future entitlements from income tax rather than NI contributions, which is why it’s been in the ‘too-difficult’ box for so long.
A long but worthwhile read from the brilliant Jennifer Williams in the FT. I went to college in Oldham so know the town well. To read so many problems at a big high school is disheartening.
The Tories have absolutely broken the ability of so many families to get by, and also broken the budgets of the schools who are left to pick up the pieces.
Christ, that is a tough read, it left me in tears. The Tories have utterly broken this country, and unforgivably they have ensured that children, and especially poor children, have borne the brunt of it. I find it hard to control my anger at them sometimes.
Is this really the country we want? The society we believe to be just? I know PB Tories and their fellow travellers excuse almost everything, but is this what we have been reduced to? For what other benefit?
If we remove the (often) justified anger, then there's four simple questions which the politicans of all sides need to ask.
1) What are we currently spending money on? 2) What could we spend more money or or less on to make the changes which people want (and what are those changes)? 3) How can we increase the money to make the gap from 1 to 2?
Anything other than that is really just details.
Given that there appears to be little appetite for tax rises (except for the idea of raising mythical billions from the top 1%), and the books are still a long way from balancing, the conversation really needs to be around the scope of government.
What does government do currently, that it could stop doing without too many adverse effects?
The obvious standout figures are £20bn on ‘Energy Security and Net Zero’, £10bn on “Science, Innovation and Technology”, and nearly £10bn on the Foreign Office. DWP also spends £8.5bn on its own admin, and HMRC £6.5bn, which suggests that reducing complexity in the tax and benefits system could lead to savings there.
I wouldn't see those as obvious stand outs. Indeed more spending on HMRC and DWP might actually enhance revenues by cutting fraud and evasion.
The glaring one missing is the £111 billion this FY on interest on government debt.
May be home counties but it does show a Tory party that isn't simply white men (if we're bothering with identities). And she was a Brexit supporter apparently.
I predict that by the time any new “up and coming” potential leaders are ready to take the helm, being a Brexit supporter may even be a millstone…:
It's been quite the precipitous, and thoroughly deserved, fall from grace for Baldy Ben. From oft-discussed tory leader candidate and potential NATO SecGen to Scotland's second best Bernard Manning tribute act in just a few months.
My understanding is that Ben Wallace is resigning by choice, so he can step straight into lucrative defence business posts at the next election and not have to wait out restrictions on taking up conflicting interests.
A long but worthwhile read from the brilliant Jennifer Williams in the FT. I went to college in Oldham so know the town well. To read so many problems at a big high school is disheartening.
The Tories have absolutely broken the ability of so many families to get by, and also broken the budgets of the schools who are left to pick up the pieces.
Christ, that is a tough read, it left me in tears. The Tories have utterly broken this country, and unforgivably they have ensured that children, and especially poor children, have borne the brunt of it. I find it hard to control my anger at them sometimes.
Is this really the country we want? The society we believe to be just? I know PB Tories and their fellow travellers excuse almost everything, but is this what we have been reduced to? For what other benefit?
If we remove the (often) justified anger, then there's four simple questions which the politicans of all sides need to ask.
1) What are we currently spending money on? 2) What could we spend more money or or less on to make the changes which people want (and what are those changes)? 3) How can we increase the money to make the gap from 1 to 2?
Anything other than that is really just details.
Given that there appears to be little appetite for tax rises (except for the idea of raising mythical billions from the top 1%), and the books are still a long way from balancing, the conversation really needs to be around the scope of government.
What does government do currently, that it could stop doing without too many adverse effects?
The obvious standout figures are £20bn on ‘Energy Security and Net Zero’, £10bn on “Science, Innovation and Technology”, and nearly £10bn on the Foreign Office. DWP also spends £8.5bn on its own admin, and HMRC £6.5bn, which suggests that reducing complexity in the tax and benefits system could lead to savings there.
It isn't just that department budgets are always being cut. Its what those budgets are spent on. We have endless webs of contractual frameworks, managers and administrators where the money goes to middlemen leaving very little left at the front line.
We don't have a space program in the UK, because, whenever asked, Big and Expensive said it would cost 20-50 billion to build a launcher.
An immigrant with impulse control problems showed that it could be done for about a billion.
There was no especial magic - apart from not giving contracts to people who give contracts to people who give contracts to people etc etc. With profit at every stage.
The space launch industry is full of such layering. Which is why the above mentioned chap and his company are running riot in the space launch market. They are The Thing That Should Not Be.
True but irrelevant. India has a robot exploring the moon as we speak.
Rather upsetting, historic abuse at a (partly) boarding school. The lawyer for the survivors' group:
'McLean also set out how boys, parents and the occasional junior staff member had been “threatened, menaced, suppressed” when they attempted to raise the alarm.
And just as chilling was the wider culture of complicity the evidence exposed – when the internationally acclaimed actor Iain Glen spoke out about his abuse in 2002, Campbell said “the wrath of Morningside and Muirfield and Murrayfield [wealthy Edinburgh suburbs] rained down on his head with biblical fury because he’d broken the code, the Edinburgh omertà.”
When speaking about the academy’s governor, who always held sway in Edinburgh, Moffatt said they were “senior professionals who you’d expect to be protecting children, and they did nothing – that’s the arrogance of the Edinburgh establishment.”'
Since ignoring whistleblowers is flavour of the month, it's worth noting not just this case but that there were 2 schools - Edinburgh Academy and Fettes School - which admitted that they knew a teacher was a predatory paedophile but gave him a good reference and failed to inform the police.
It's not the first time the FCA has been accused of ignoring warnings. It admitted failings in relation to Link and its role in the Woodford saga and its supervision of London Capital & Finance and failures to follow up warnings it received. Andrew Bailey was bloody lucky to get out of the FCA when he did because his record at the FCA fell into the Cressida Dick category rather than the Sir Robert Mark one.
I have my own amusing story of repeatedly informing the FCA about an individual who should not have been authorised by them but was and being told - when the inevitable happened and they were trying to blame me for not telling them and then having to retreat very rapidly when I pointed out that I had written to them a year before - that, yes, they had received the material I'd sent but "they didn't always read everything" they were sent.
So those NHS managers are in good company.
The problem with organisations which depend on their reputation is that when something awful happens protecting reputation becomes the only thing that matters. Hiding the problem and sending the bad individual away somewhere else achieves that. It worked after all for those schools for decades, even if the price was a lot of abused children. Ditto the police, NHS etc.,.
The harm is felt years later and those in charge are not willing to endure the short-term pain caused by bringing in the police / dealing properly with a problem for the long-term gain. So they are willing to sacrifice the children, patients, investors, etc., in their care.
Breaking that perverse incentive is what is needed.
By all accounts, Theresa May's book, The Abuse of Power, has a similar theme.
From the Telegraph's review:-
... This brings her on to her wider theme: corruption within these systems, and what happens when those in charge care about themselves, not others – leaving the powerless without a voice.
Here we see Theresa May as something of an avenger, keen to hold the vain and powerful to account. This very much includes those in her own party. She attributes the Hillsborough calamity, for instance, to a cruel policing style built around the premise that “fans would only ever cause trouble” and were there to be controlled. After those 95 initial deaths, she says, South Yorkshire Police protected themselves – and were, in turn, protected by a Tory party in denial. Margaret Thatcher is quoted, being asked by a mother of one victim what the police were doing. Her reply: “Their job, my dear.” To May, this response showed a deep problem in her party: they were so keen on law and order that they couldn’t recognise police malpractice. ... Sir Lenny Henry emerges as an unlikely hero of the Windrush scandal, alerting May to the full horror of what was being asked of people if they wanted to avoid deportation. “Who’s got four pieces of documentation for every year they were alive?” he asked an audience at a memorial she attended. Shocked, she asked officials to investigate, yet she didn’t hear back until the inquiry reported, two years later. A case study in system failure – but May stops short of asking why, after her six years as Home Secretary, such mayhem could have continued until a comedian raised the alarm.
She says little about Boris Johnson and David Cameron, but it’s not hard to guess at whom she has in mind when she talks at length about vain MPs who see politics as a career, not a chance to serve. If we find politicians who put “the common good above personal interest,” she concludes, we “might be able to consign the abuse of power to the past”. But this optimistic thought is contradicted by the powerful examples in her book: where good people (herself included) presided over appalling injustices. That’s why the real villain of The Abuse of Power is a deserving one: the intransigent bureaucracies that, after 13 years of Tory rule, are more powerful than ever. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/non-fiction/review-theresa-may-abuse-power-fraser-nelson/ (£££)
Problem with May is that she often gives the impression of being rather insightful about issues but didn’t do very well at sorting them out when she actually got put in charge.
I wouldn't see those as obvious stand outs. Indeed more spending on HMRC and DWP might actually enhance revenues by cutting fraud and evasion.
The glaring one missing is the £111 billion this FY on interest on government debt.
What I don't understand is why the Debt Management Office didn't restructure our debt during the ten years or more of incredibly low interest rates to lock in those low rates for years, if not decades. Maybe I'm being naive, but it does seem extraordinary that this golden opportunity was apparently thrown away.
Also odd that there's very little discussion of this in the media. For such a massive item of government expenditure, you'd have thought it would get some attention.
It's been quite the precipitous, and thoroughly deserved, fall from grace for Baldy Ben. From oft-discussed tory leader candidate and potential NATO SecGen to Scotland's second best Bernard Manning tribute act in just a few months.
My understanding is that Ben Wallace is resigning by choice, so he can step straight into lucrative defence business posts at the next election and not have to wait out restrictions on taking up conflicting interests.
Ben Wallace is an arse, but I do note it was he, not Johnson, who was the early supporter of Ukraine. Johnson took the credit of course.
Rather upsetting, historic abuse at a (partly) boarding school. The lawyer for the survivors' group:
'McLean also set out how boys, parents and the occasional junior staff member had been “threatened, menaced, suppressed” when they attempted to raise the alarm.
And just as chilling was the wider culture of complicity the evidence exposed – when the internationally acclaimed actor Iain Glen spoke out about his abuse in 2002, Campbell said “the wrath of Morningside and Muirfield and Murrayfield [wealthy Edinburgh suburbs] rained down on his head with biblical fury because he’d broken the code, the Edinburgh omertà.”
When speaking about the academy’s governor, who always held sway in Edinburgh, Moffatt said they were “senior professionals who you’d expect to be protecting children, and they did nothing – that’s the arrogance of the Edinburgh establishment.”'
Since ignoring whistleblowers is flavour of the month, it's worth noting not just this case but that there were 2 schools - Edinburgh Academy and Fettes School - which admitted that they knew a teacher was a predatory paedophile but gave him a good reference and failed to inform the police.
It's not the first time the FCA has been accused of ignoring warnings. It admitted failings in relation to Link and its role in the Woodford saga and its supervision of London Capital & Finance and failures to follow up warnings it received. Andrew Bailey was bloody lucky to get out of the FCA when he did because his record at the FCA fell into the Cressida Dick category rather than the Sir Robert Mark one.
I have my own amusing story of repeatedly informing the FCA about an individual who should not have been authorised by them but was and being told - when the inevitable happened and they were trying to blame me for not telling them and then having to retreat very rapidly when I pointed out that I had written to them a year before - that, yes, they had received the material I'd sent but "they didn't always read everything" they were sent.
So those NHS managers are in good company.
The problem with organisations which depend on their reputation is that when something awful happens protecting reputation becomes the only thing that matters. Hiding the problem and sending the bad individual away somewhere else achieves that. It worked after all for those schools for decades, even if the price was a lot of abused children. Ditto the police, NHS etc.,.
The harm is felt years later and those in charge are not willing to endure the short-term pain caused by bringing in the police / dealing properly with a problem for the long-term gain. So they are willing to sacrifice the children, patients, investors, etc., in their care.
Breaking that perverse incentive is what is needed.
On the FCA, I briefly invested (And manged to get out ahead in a manner akin to charging out of a burning building with my shirt and some bonus & interest earnt) in lendy.com and fundingsecure.com.
The FCA to my mind seemed to focus entirely on the wrong things. You accept that with pawn-broking and property charges there comes an inherent risk. The borrower might abscond. If the borrower absconds, the goods or property might not sell at auction for the valuation. But fundamentally the charges should be correctly registered, the goods being pawned should be in a secure location. The RICS valuation of a property should be within a 'corridor of correctness'. Client accounts should be wholly separate from the operating cashflows of the business. It is obvious that money invested in lending on artwork or second charges or whatever can't be FSCS protected. But there's a role for the FCA ensuring things are and were being done properly. Bailey was asleep at the wheel on regulation.
It's been quite the precipitous, and thoroughly deserved, fall from grace for Baldy Ben. From oft-discussed tory leader candidate and potential NATO SecGen to Scotland's second best Bernard Manning tribute act in just a few months.
My understanding is that Ben Wallace is resigning by choice, so he can step straight into lucrative defence business posts at the next election and not have to wait out restrictions on taking up conflicting interests.
A long but worthwhile read from the brilliant Jennifer Williams in the FT. I went to college in Oldham so know the town well. To read so many problems at a big high school is disheartening.
The Tories have absolutely broken the ability of so many families to get by, and also broken the budgets of the schools who are left to pick up the pieces.
Christ, that is a tough read, it left me in tears. The Tories have utterly broken this country, and unforgivably they have ensured that children, and especially poor children, have borne the brunt of it. I find it hard to control my anger at them sometimes.
Is this really the country we want? The society we believe to be just? I know PB Tories and their fellow travellers excuse almost everything, but is this what we have been reduced to? For what other benefit?
If we remove the (often) justified anger, then there's four simple questions which the politicans of all sides need to ask.
1) What are we currently spending money on? 2) What could we spend more money or or less on to make the changes which people want (and what are those changes)? 3) How can we increase the money to make the gap from 1 to 2?
Anything other than that is really just details.
Given that there appears to be little appetite for tax rises (except for the idea of raising mythical billions from the top 1%), and the books are still a long way from balancing, the conversation really needs to be around the scope of government.
What does government do currently, that it could stop doing without too many adverse effects?
The obvious standout figures are £20bn on ‘Energy Security and Net Zero’, £10bn on “Science, Innovation and Technology”, and nearly £10bn on the Foreign Office. DWP also spends £8.5bn on its own admin, and HMRC £6.5bn, which suggests that reducing complexity in the tax and benefits system could lead to savings there.
HMRC has been repeatedly cut down close to the bone over several rounds. Cutting resources to the department that collects tax is not clever at all. They are forced to take a “risk assessment” approach to compliance for smaller businesses, which - as with policing - means turning a cost constrained blind eye to smaller scale enforcement. Which means a load of uncollected tax an order of magnitude greater than the cost savings from trimming staff in the first place.
Contrast with the IRS which after years of similar austerity has had a huge recruitment drive and is now tangibly improving return on investment.
There is only one thing that really stands out in that chart: health and social care. Everything else is dwarfed. But we’ve made our bed - we have an ageing population and a shrinking working age population so it is what it is.
I wouldn't see those as obvious stand outs. Indeed more spending on HMRC and DWP might actually enhance revenues by cutting fraud and evasion.
The glaring one missing is the £111 billion this FY on interest on government debt.
What I don't understand is why the Debt Management Office didn't restructure our debt during the ten years or more of incredibly low interest rates to lock in those low rates for years, if not decades. Maybe I'm being naive, but it does seem extraordinary that this golden opportunity was apparently thrown away.
Also odd that there's very little discussion of this in the media. For such a massive item of government expenditure, you'd have thought it would get some attention.
The issue was one of short-term thinking. 10-year bonds and 15-year bonds, were priced higher than 2-year bonds and 5-year bonds, so selling long-term debt would have cost more to service in the short term even though, with hindsight, they might have been better off now at insulating the government from the cost of debt servicing. Also, too much of the debt was index-linked, back when that meant 2%pa rather than 10%.
A long but worthwhile read from the brilliant Jennifer Williams in the FT. I went to college in Oldham so know the town well. To read so many problems at a big high school is disheartening.
The Tories have absolutely broken the ability of so many families to get by, and also broken the budgets of the schools who are left to pick up the pieces.
Christ, that is a tough read, it left me in tears. The Tories have utterly broken this country, and unforgivably they have ensured that children, and especially poor children, have borne the brunt of it. I find it hard to control my anger at them sometimes.
Is this really the country we want? The society we believe to be just? I know PB Tories and their fellow travellers excuse almost everything, but is this what we have been reduced to? For what other benefit?
If we remove the (often) justified anger, then there's four simple questions which the politicans of all sides need to ask.
1) What are we currently spending money on? 2) What could we spend more money or or less on to make the changes which people want (and what are those changes)? 3) How can we increase the money to make the gap from 1 to 2?
Anything other than that is really just details.
Given that there appears to be little appetite for tax rises (except for the idea of raising mythical billions from the top 1%), and the books are still a long way from balancing, the conversation really needs to be around the scope of government.
What does government do currently, that it could stop doing without too many adverse effects?
The obvious standout figures are £20bn on ‘Energy Security and Net Zero’, £10bn on “Science, Innovation and Technology”, and nearly £10bn on the Foreign Office. DWP also spends £8.5bn on its own admin, and HMRC £6.5bn, which suggests that reducing complexity in the tax and benefits system could lead to savings there.
That's always known yet never achieved apparently.
It's why we get vague assertions that unspecified 'reform' will achieve all savings.
A long but worthwhile read from the brilliant Jennifer Williams in the FT. I went to college in Oldham so know the town well. To read so many problems at a big high school is disheartening.
The Tories have absolutely broken the ability of so many families to get by, and also broken the budgets of the schools who are left to pick up the pieces.
Christ, that is a tough read, it left me in tears. The Tories have utterly broken this country, and unforgivably they have ensured that children, and especially poor children, have borne the brunt of it. I find it hard to control my anger at them sometimes.
The money has instead gone to the oldies via health and pension spending.
How many politicians opposed that and how many are willing to reverse it ?
You have identified the number one issue that no politician has an answer for that is politically expediant
Indeed it is not surprising that the public have little confidence in any party to make any change relevant to their lives
And as I have said before, lets not forget the pension crisis coming in the next 20 plus years when renters arrive at retirement and, unlike owner occupier mortgage free pensioners, have no relief from their rental commitments
The state pension is below minimum wage. If you want to look at pension provision, maybe higher rate tax relief on contributions might be a better place, or oldies not paying NICs, although that would mean ending NICs as the qualifying criterion for pensions.
However, there may be other oddities lurking in the benefits system, if it is true people are reducing their hours rather than lose in-work childcare benefits above £100,000. One can sympathise with the idea of universal benefits but still wonder if we have the balance right.
No it is not.
Minimum wage is per hours worked in that time period. Work 5 hours in a week and you get 5x minimum wage for that week. Work 37.5 hours you get 37.5x minimum wage for that week.
State pension is for zero hours worked in the time period it's paid out for, so it's not mathematically possible to determine it's hourly rate since you can't divide by zero.
Actually paying NICs are not a qualifying criteria for pensions, since if you don't earn enough to pay NICs and get benefits instead you still get NIC "contributions".
The only way you don't get them is if you opt out of paying NICs, so removing the ability to opt out is the solution. Have a single rate of income tax paid by everyone.
Enough sophistry. I see you do not question people earning £100,000 getting childcare payments, while railing against a £10k state pension, or higher rate tax relief on contributions for the better-off.
It's been quite the precipitous, and thoroughly deserved, fall from grace for Baldy Ben. From oft-discussed tory leader candidate and potential NATO SecGen to Scotland's second best Bernard Manning tribute act in just a few months.
My understanding is that Ben Wallace is resigning by choice, so he can step straight into lucrative defence business posts at the next election and not have to wait out restrictions on taking up conflicting interests.
Understanding based on?
The timing for a start. Makes it inherently plausible.
It's been quite the precipitous, and thoroughly deserved, fall from grace for Baldy Ben. From oft-discussed tory leader candidate and potential NATO SecGen to Scotland's second best Bernard Manning tribute act in just a few months.
My understanding is that Ben Wallace is resigning by choice, so he can step straight into lucrative defence business posts at the next election and not have to wait out restrictions on taking up conflicting interests.
Understanding based on?
Friends of Ben Wallace obviously. I am sure he deserves the lucrative sinecures and shouldn't have to wait unnecessarily for them.
Rather upsetting, historic abuse at a (partly) boarding school. The lawyer for the survivors' group:
'McLean also set out how boys, parents and the occasional junior staff member had been “threatened, menaced, suppressed” when they attempted to raise the alarm.
And just as chilling was the wider culture of complicity the evidence exposed – when the internationally acclaimed actor Iain Glen spoke out about his abuse in 2002, Campbell said “the wrath of Morningside and Muirfield and Murrayfield [wealthy Edinburgh suburbs] rained down on his head with biblical fury because he’d broken the code, the Edinburgh omertà.”
When speaking about the academy’s governor, who always held sway in Edinburgh, Moffatt said they were “senior professionals who you’d expect to be protecting children, and they did nothing – that’s the arrogance of the Edinburgh establishment.”'
Since ignoring whistleblowers is flavour of the month, it's worth noting not just this case but that there were 2 schools - Edinburgh Academy and Fettes School - which admitted that they knew a teacher was a predatory paedophile but gave him a good reference and failed to inform the police.
It's not the first time the FCA has been accused of ignoring warnings. It admitted failings in relation to Link and its role in the Woodford saga and its supervision of London Capital & Finance and failures to follow up warnings it received. Andrew Bailey was bloody lucky to get out of the FCA when he did because his record at the FCA fell into the Cressida Dick category rather than the Sir Robert Mark one.
I have my own amusing story of repeatedly informing the FCA about an individual who should not have been authorised by them but was and being told - when the inevitable happened and they were trying to blame me for not telling them and then having to retreat very rapidly when I pointed out that I had written to them a year before - that, yes, they had received the material I'd sent but "they didn't always read everything" they were sent.
So those NHS managers are in good company.
The problem with organisations which depend on their reputation is that when something awful happens protecting reputation becomes the only thing that matters. Hiding the problem and sending the bad individual away somewhere else achieves that. It worked after all for those schools for decades, even if the price was a lot of abused children. Ditto the police, NHS etc.,.
The harm is felt years later and those in charge are not willing to endure the short-term pain caused by bringing in the police / dealing properly with a problem for the long-term gain. So they are willing to sacrifice the children, patients, investors, etc., in their care.
Breaking that perverse incentive is what is needed.
By all accounts, Theresa May's book, The Abuse of Power, has a similar theme.
From the Telegraph's review:-
... This brings her on to her wider theme: corruption within these systems, and what happens when those in charge care about themselves, not others – leaving the powerless without a voice.
Here we see Theresa May as something of an avenger, keen to hold the vain and powerful to account. This very much includes those in her own party. She attributes the Hillsborough calamity, for instance, to a cruel policing style built around the premise that “fans would only ever cause trouble” and were there to be controlled. After those 95 initial deaths, she says, South Yorkshire Police protected themselves – and were, in turn, protected by a Tory party in denial. Margaret Thatcher is quoted, being asked by a mother of one victim what the police were doing. Her reply: “Their job, my dear.” To May, this response showed a deep problem in her party: they were so keen on law and order that they couldn’t recognise police malpractice. ... Sir Lenny Henry emerges as an unlikely hero of the Windrush scandal, alerting May to the full horror of what was being asked of people if they wanted to avoid deportation. “Who’s got four pieces of documentation for every year they were alive?” he asked an audience at a memorial she attended. Shocked, she asked officials to investigate, yet she didn’t hear back until the inquiry reported, two years later. A case study in system failure – but May stops short of asking why, after her six years as Home Secretary, such mayhem could have continued until a comedian raised the alarm.
She says little about Boris Johnson and David Cameron, but it’s not hard to guess at whom she has in mind when she talks at length about vain MPs who see politics as a career, not a chance to serve. If we find politicians who put “the common good above personal interest,” she concludes, we “might be able to consign the abuse of power to the past”. But this optimistic thought is contradicted by the powerful examples in her book: where good people (herself included) presided over appalling injustices. That’s why the real villain of The Abuse of Power is a deserving one: the intransigent bureaucracies that, after 13 years of Tory rule, are more powerful than ever. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/non-fiction/review-theresa-may-abuse-power-fraser-nelson/ (£££)
May was in power and had a chance to do something about this.
Probably, I - along with colleagues - have achieved more practical worthwhile change in my work - even if restricted to a few workplaces - than she has. And yet the politicians with power are the ones who are praised and turned to for solutions despite their manifest failures and lack of curiosity about what is going on, even in areas they are responsible for.
The Tory party in the 1980's knew full well about police malpractice - there had been plenty of instances of it from the 1970's onwards, at least. They simply did not care so long as it was directed at people who were unimportant to them. The same could be said about every party and their favoured groups.
Politics has now been largely reduced to performative grandstanding, of which yesterday's pathetic "let's forcibly drag prisoners into the dock to hear their sentencing so that they can upset the victims" families by shouting abuse at them, at which point we'll reverse ferret" law, supported by Tories and Labour is an example.
A long but worthwhile read from the brilliant Jennifer Williams in the FT. I went to college in Oldham so know the town well. To read so many problems at a big high school is disheartening.
The Tories have absolutely broken the ability of so many families to get by, and also broken the budgets of the schools who are left to pick up the pieces.
Christ, that is a tough read, it left me in tears. The Tories have utterly broken this country, and unforgivably they have ensured that children, and especially poor children, have borne the brunt of it. I find it hard to control my anger at them sometimes.
Is this really the country we want? The society we believe to be just? I know PB Tories and their fellow travellers excuse almost everything, but is this what we have been reduced to? For what other benefit?
If we remove the (often) justified anger, then there's four simple questions which the politicans of all sides need to ask.
1) What are we currently spending money on? 2) What could we spend more money or or less on to make the changes which people want (and what are those changes)? 3) How can we increase the money to make the gap from 1 to 2?
Anything other than that is really just details.
The big one for me is thinking longer term.
Don't pay NHS staff at levels that mean we have a perma-shortage of staff and pay 3-5x that rate for agency staff to cover the ones who are left, off sick thru stress or striking.
Don't repair pot holes with the cheapest possible mix to keep this years budget low, when fixing it properly might be a third the cost over 10 years.
There are loads of similar examples where the govt ideology thinks it is (or it least claims it is) controlling the budget responsibly but are actually making things much more expensive by shifting costs down the line.
Borrowing and/or tax needs to go up for a few years, but over our lifetimes doing so will make public services better and cheaper. This should not be a matter of left or right, but common sense accounting.
"I'm willing to pay a little more tax so that we can have a lot better public services."
Now what are the likelihoods of:
This extra tax actually being higher than predicted.
The improvement in public services being lower than predicted.
We all know what the historic pattern has been so why should things change now ?
I don't think we are going to get the changes I would like to see. If I was in charge it is what I would do, and it would work.
The current batch of Tories are brainwashed by thinking controlling public finances is always the right thing to do regardless of the scenario.
Labour lack imagination and coherence, there is a small chance they are just hiding these away but I doubt it.
But we haven't been controlling public finances but rather living beyond the country's means to varying extents.
All we get is profligacy on buying votes and vanity projects with cuts elsewhere.
It happens under every government and will continue to do so.
I wouldn't see those as obvious stand outs. Indeed more spending on HMRC and DWP might actually enhance revenues by cutting fraud and evasion.
The glaring one missing is the £111 billion this FY on interest on government debt.
What I don't understand is why the Debt Management Office didn't restructure our debt during the ten years or more of incredibly low interest rates to lock in those low rates for years, if not decades. Maybe I'm being naive, but it does seem extraordinary that this golden opportunity was apparently thrown away.
Also odd that there's very little discussion of this in the media. For such a massive item of government expenditure, you'd have thought it would get some attention.
The issue was one of short-term thinking. 10-year bonds and 15-year bonds, were priced higher than 2-year bonds and 5-year bonds, so selling long-term debt would have cost more to service in the short term even though, with hindsight, they might have been better off now at insulating the government from the cost of debt servicing. Also, too much of the debt was index-linked, back when that meant 2%pa rather than 10%.
I wouldn't see those as obvious stand outs. Indeed more spending on HMRC and DWP might actually enhance revenues by cutting fraud and evasion.
The glaring one missing is the £111 billion this FY on interest on government debt.
What I don't understand is why the Debt Management Office didn't restructure our debt during the ten years or more of incredibly low interest rates to lock in those low rates for years, if not decades. Maybe I'm being naive, but it does seem extraordinary that this golden opportunity was apparently thrown away.
Also odd that there's very little discussion of this in the media. For such a massive item of government expenditure, you'd have thought it would get some attention.
I would have thought that we would have had to pay a premium at the time to lock-in the lower rates, and the Treasury/Chancellor would rather have had the extra cash then for tax cuts/increased spending.
Comments
Rather upsetting, historic abuse at a (partly) boarding school. The lawyer for the survivors' group:
'McLean also set out how boys, parents and the occasional junior staff member had been “threatened, menaced, suppressed” when they attempted to raise the alarm.
And just as chilling was the wider culture of complicity the evidence exposed – when the internationally acclaimed actor Iain Glen spoke out about his abuse in 2002, Campbell said “the wrath of Morningside and Muirfield and Murrayfield [wealthy Edinburgh suburbs] rained down on his head with biblical fury because he’d broken the code, the Edinburgh omertà.”
When speaking about the academy’s governor, who always held sway in Edinburgh, Moffatt said they were “senior professionals who you’d expect to be protecting children, and they did nothing – that’s the arrogance of the Edinburgh establishment.”'
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/22/grant-shapps-tory-green-aliens-stewart-lee
Which begs the question... Is Rishi concerned that his grip on Number 10 isn't as secure as he thinks it is? Better to promote Shapps and have him on side rather than leave him at Energy and potentially become and ally of a challenger.
What the Conservatives need to shed is their love of rentierism and crony capitalism.
I took Shapps at Defence to be a joke.
Irony meter must have re-calibrated to "in sane times" setting over the Summer.
How many politicians opposed that and how many are willing to reverse it ?
That's many people's ambition these days.
And why not? It makes far more sense than working hard or taking risks.
Better to have Shappsie and that hamster he carries round on his head in position being slavishly loyal and doing VLOOKUPs.
What seems to be ignored is the gutting of the social safety net which drops more and more and more families into functional poverty, which is then made worse by the gutting of budgets for schools and councils to provide emergency help.
These effects started before Covid. They continue after Covid. They are deliberate, mendacious, immoral. Teachers are propelled into service as front-line medics, having to spend their own craopla wages on food and clothing to keep the kids in their school functioning in the education system. No wonder so many (Mrs RP included) quit education.
Is this really the country we want? The society we believe to be just? I know PB Tories and their fellow travellers excuse almost everything, but is this what we have been reduced to? For what other benefit?
Indeed it is not surprising that the public have little confidence in any party to make any change relevant to their lives
And as I have said before, lets not forget the pension crisis coming in the next 20 plus years when renters arrive at retirement and, unlike owner occupier mortgage free pensioners, have no relief from their rental commitments
"Grant Shapps is an excellent choice."
I don’t think people generally care how rich their politicians are. In fact when people have tried to weaponise it (Labour against Cameron being one of the more recent ones) it has backfired.
That doesn’t however mean that there isn’t a place and importance to be put on personal narrative. Cameron’s experiences with the NHS, for instance.
Rishi’s problem isn’t his richness per se, but it is possibly that lack of narrative. We don’t really get an underlying reason why he is in politics and what he hopes to achieve. It is all very managerial, which I don’t think is helping the Tories at the moment (given the management is, to put it mildly, pretty bad). It’s not very inspiring.
That said, Labour seem to be doing their utmost to be as equally managerial and uninspiring by ruling out pretty much anything that shows any vision, so the next GE is shaping up to be - underwhelming.
There is also the not so small fact that Oldham is actually quite sh1t - growing up in Manchester, it had a bad reputation back in the 1980s and the divergence has gotten worse since then. Race relations are notoriously bad.and, while you have the Moors nearby, quite frankly not many tutors etc want to live there, a fact that is mentioned in the piece
If you don't get out of this attitude of "It's the Torrriiiieeezzzzz", you will never sort out the root causes. But maybe that it is not what a lot of politically active people want to do anyway...
1) What are we currently spending money on?
2) What could we spend more money or or less on to make the changes which people want (and what are those changes)?
3) How can we increase the money to make the gap from 1 to 2?
Anything other than that is really just details.
And this country is already well above that limit.
So for wannabe rentiers and crony capitalists really need the current lot to die off at a quicker rate or they're going to remain wannabes.
Bad luck to Sebastian Fox, who misses out.
Fair play to her, but what a waste of her knowledge, experience and training. I think this all began with Gove, Cummings and all that crap about 'the blob'.
I am joking of course. Or at least I think I am.
I'm disappointed not to be able to find a picture of her standing next to Rishi Sunak. Sandbach is 6ft 5in and Sunak, er, isn't.
Don't pay NHS staff at levels that mean we have a perma-shortage of staff and pay 3-5x that rate for agency staff to cover the ones who are left, off sick thru stress or striking.
Don't repair pot holes with the cheapest possible mix to keep this years budget low, when fixing it properly might be a third the cost over 10 years.
There are loads of similar examples where the govt ideology thinks it is (or it least claims it is) controlling the budget responsibly but are actually making things much more expensive by shifting costs down the line.
Borrowing and/or tax needs to go up for a few years, but over our lifetimes doing so will make public services better and cheaper. This should not be a matter of left or right, but common sense accounting.
I mean, he wanted the NATO gig and when it was clear he wasn't going to get it he announced he was flouncing off, having suddenly discovered he could not continue to undertake a high profile job after all. But its not as though his reputation among Tories nosedived or anything.
Maybe there is something we are all missing. I hope so. And he has been around the block, must know how Whitehall operates etc. I assumed it would be Tugendhat but he is a less experienced minister.
I don't understand this PFI defence. It was a Tory creation. It was continued under Labour. It was continued under the coalition. For decades the Treasury have driven this funding model on a long succession of ministries.
PFI is a contract. Which means it can be renegotiated. In this specific case the article refers to penalties being paid for the poor finish of the building - and I assume that the contractor will also have to fix the leaks. If the "Labour PFI contracts" were that bad - and many of them were - why did Osbrown not renegotiate them as an alternative to what he actually did which was to hugely accellerate new PFI contracts?
But again, note the article. The penalties paid for the holes in the roof have to fill the holes in their budget. And they still don't have enough money to cope. So yes, it is the Tories who have cut the budget for education and for councils and smashed the economy so that millions of working people can't pay their bills.
I assume you want to deflect awat from this because you are a Tory fellow traveller? So to go back to the question, is this the society you want?
However, there may be other oddities lurking in the benefits system, if it is true people are reducing their hours rather than lose in-work childcare benefits above £100,000. One can sympathise with the idea of universal benefits but still wonder if we have the balance right.
No, I’ve never heard of her either.
Another Home Counties Tory promoted to the cabinet ranks. Rishi continuing to show disinterest re the red wall.
Yes the Conservatives have not got a chance in what most people think of London i.e. zones 1-3. Westminster gone, Wandsworth gone. Inner London has gone for now to the Conservatives given its population (professional, socially liberal urban (upper) middle class, ditto young graduate living in expensive rented accommodation or poor and living in social housing).
However, Outer London is a different game. Yes, Barnet went but it could be argued there were special factors, given the importance of the Jewish vote. The Tories won Harrow and seats in places like Enfield, kept their SE councils and took seats in Croydon.
Apologies if posters had pointed this out but Inner and Outer London nowadays are increasingly growing apart, I also wonder whether the Conservatives are also starting to make inroads into some of the ethnic communities not just the Indian heritage but also groups such as Greek / Turkish Cypriots etc.
https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/how-britain-voted-1997
What does government do currently, that it could stop doing without too many adverse effects?
Here’s a list of current spending by department:
Source: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/public-spending-statistics-release-may-2022/public-spending-statistics-may-2022
The obvious standout figures are £20bn on ‘Energy Security and Net Zero’, £10bn on “Science, Innovation and Technology”, and nearly £10bn on the Foreign Office. DWP also spends £8.5bn on its own admin, and HMRC £6.5bn, which suggests that reducing complexity in the tax and benefits system could lead to savings there.
(Though tbf ydoethur has the advantage of time-travel)
Minimum wage is per hours worked in that time period. Work 5 hours in a week and you get 5x minimum wage for that week. Work 37.5 hours you get 37.5x minimum wage for that week.
State pension is for zero hours worked in the time period it's paid out for, so it's not mathematically possible to determine it's hourly rate since you can't divide by zero.
Actually paying NICs are not a qualifying criteria for pensions, since if you don't earn enough to pay NICs and get benefits instead you still get NIC "contributions".
The only way you don't get them is if you opt out of paying NICs, so removing the ability to opt out is the solution. Have a single rate of income tax paid by everyone.
May be home counties but it does show a Tory party that isn't simply white men (if we're bothering with identities). And she was a Brexit supporter apparently.
Take the 1997 landslide- the Conservatives still got about 27 percent of the youth vote and only 36 percent of pensioners;
https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/how-britain-voted-1997
The latest Mori poll has the Conservatives on 12 percent with the youngest voters, 18 percent with people either side of forty, but 45 percent with pensioners.
https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/uk-opinion-polls
Conservatives have set themselves a much harder task in hoping people will become more right wing as they age.
Now what are the likelihoods of:
This extra tax actually being higher than predicted.
The improvement in public services being lower than predicted.
We all know what the historic pattern has been so why should things change now ?
And it's not just schools. The FCA too is being accused of ignoring whistleblowers who warned it about WealthTek - https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/fca-ignored-whistleblower-claims-of-wealthtek-fraud-lx8cqgddf.
It's not the first time the FCA has been accused of ignoring warnings. It admitted failings in relation to Link and its role in the Woodford saga and its supervision of London Capital & Finance and failures to follow up warnings it received. Andrew Bailey was bloody lucky to get out of the FCA when he did because his record at the FCA fell into the Cressida Dick category rather than the Sir Robert Mark one.
I have my own amusing story of repeatedly informing the FCA about an individual who should not have been authorised by them but was and being told - when the inevitable happened and they were trying to blame me for not telling them and then having to retreat very rapidly when I pointed out that I had written to them a year before - that, yes, they had received the material I'd sent but "they didn't always read everything" they were sent.
So those NHS managers are in good company.
The problem with organisations which depend on their reputation is that when something awful happens protecting reputation becomes the only thing that matters. Hiding the problem and sending the bad individual away somewhere else achieves that. It worked after all for those schools for decades, even if the price was a lot of abused children. Ditto the police, NHS etc.,.
The harm is felt years later and those in charge are not willing to endure the short-term pain caused by bringing in the police / dealing properly with a problem for the long-term gain. So they are willing to sacrifice the children, patients, investors, etc., in their care.
Breaking that perverse incentive is what is needed.
The current batch of Tories are brainwashed by thinking controlling public finances is always the right thing to do regardless of the scenario.
Labour lack imagination and coherence, there is a small chance they are just hiding these away but I doubt it.
it's copy and pasta from... all such scandals. Rotherham, Baby P, Letby, Horizon. All the energy was expended on treading on the whistleblowers.
I'll bet their paperwork was immaculate.
We just need to apply criminal sanction.
In finance, if I suspect a crime and I do nothing, I get it in the neck.
If I actively covered it up, that's Club HMP.
If I threatened someone to stop it being reported, that would Club HMP Premium - for those stays when you just can't get away.
At least the party's Grenadiers are properly bonkers eg David Tredinnick and "Mad" Adam Holloway.
From the Telegraph's review:-
...
This brings her on to her wider theme: corruption within these systems, and what happens when those in charge care about themselves, not others – leaving the powerless without a voice.
Here we see Theresa May as something of an avenger, keen to hold the vain and powerful to account. This very much includes those in her own party. She attributes the Hillsborough calamity, for instance, to a cruel policing style built around the premise that “fans would only ever cause trouble” and were there to be controlled. After those 95 initial deaths, she says, South Yorkshire Police protected themselves – and were, in turn, protected by a Tory party in denial. Margaret Thatcher is quoted, being asked by a mother of one victim what the police were doing. Her reply: “Their job, my dear.” To May, this response showed a deep problem in her party: they were so keen on law and order that they couldn’t recognise police malpractice.
...
Sir Lenny Henry emerges as an unlikely hero of the Windrush scandal, alerting May to the full horror of what was being asked of people if they wanted to avoid deportation. “Who’s got four pieces of documentation for every year they were alive?” he asked an audience at a memorial she attended. Shocked, she asked officials to investigate, yet she didn’t hear back until the inquiry reported, two years later. A case study in system failure – but May stops short of asking why, after her six years as Home Secretary, such mayhem could have continued until a comedian raised the alarm.
She says little about Boris Johnson and David Cameron, but it’s not hard to guess at whom she has in mind when she talks at length about vain MPs who see politics as a career, not a chance to serve. If we find politicians who put “the common good above personal interest,” she concludes, we “might be able to consign the abuse of power to the past”. But this optimistic thought is contradicted by the powerful examples in her book: where good people (herself included) presided over appalling injustices. That’s why the real villain of The Abuse of Power is a deserving one: the intransigent bureaucracies that, after 13 years of Tory rule, are more powerful than ever.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/non-fiction/review-theresa-may-abuse-power-fraser-nelson/ (£££)
An immigrant with impulse control problems showed that it could be done for about a billion.
There was no especial magic - apart from not giving contracts to people who give contracts to people who give contracts to people etc etc. With profit at every stage.
The space launch industry is full of such layering. Which is why the above mentioned chap and his company are running riot in the space launch market. They are The Thing That Should Not Be.
The legislation would be complex though, needing to calculate future entitlements from income tax rather than NI contributions, which is why it’s been in the ‘too-difficult’ box for so long.
The glaring one missing is the £111 billion this FY on interest on government debt.
Also odd that there's very little discussion of this in the media. For such a massive item of government expenditure, you'd have thought it would get some attention.
The FCA to my mind seemed to focus entirely on the wrong things. You accept that with pawn-broking and property charges there comes an inherent risk. The borrower might abscond. If the borrower absconds, the goods or property might not sell at auction for the valuation.
But fundamentally the charges should be correctly registered, the goods being pawned should be in a secure location. The RICS valuation of a property should be within a 'corridor of correctness'. Client accounts should be wholly separate from the operating cashflows of the business. It is obvious that money invested in lending on artwork or second charges or whatever can't be FSCS protected. But there's a role for the FCA ensuring things are and were being done properly. Bailey was asleep at the wheel on regulation.
Contrast with the IRS which after years of similar austerity has had a huge recruitment drive and is now tangibly improving return on investment.
There is only one thing that really stands out in that chart: health and social care. Everything else is dwarfed. But we’ve made our bed - we have an ageing population and a shrinking working age population so it is what it is.
It's why we get vague assertions that unspecified 'reform' will achieve all savings.
Probably, I - along with colleagues - have achieved more practical worthwhile change in my work - even if restricted to a few workplaces - than she has. And yet the politicians with power are the ones who are praised and turned to for solutions despite their manifest failures and lack of curiosity about what is going on, even in areas they are responsible for.
The Tory party in the 1980's knew full well about police malpractice - there had been plenty of instances of it from the 1970's onwards, at least. They simply did not care so long as it was directed at people who were unimportant to them. The same could be said about every party and their favoured groups.
Politics has now been largely reduced to performative grandstanding, of which yesterday's pathetic "let's forcibly drag prisoners into the dock to hear their sentencing so that they can upset the victims" families by shouting abuse at them, at which point we'll reverse ferret" law, supported by Tories and Labour is an example.
All we get is profligacy on buying votes and vanity projects with cuts elsewhere.
It happens under every government and will continue to do so.
It's a running theme.
The short-term rules.