Just one in ten Brits oppose an early election – politicalbetting.com
Just one in ten Brits oppose an early election – politicalbetting.com
Would the British public support or oppose the UK Government calling a General Election in the next six months? (26 November)Support: 62% (–)Oppose: 10% (-2)Changes +/- 19 November pic.twitter.com/GtZILufVTb
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https://tinyurl.com/4yw3dsnj
Telling its readers the UK economy is actually doing OK, Brexit is not a disaster, in some ways the EU is worse off = no way Rejoin will ever be a thing
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/05/brexit-disaster-rejoining-channel-europe-economy
Indeed there is now a chance for the UK to exploit Brexit freedoms. AI is a crucial area. It will be a deep irony if it is a Labour government under Starmer that “makes Brexit work”
But with a large side-order of early disappointment...
Even a lot of voters who dress on the right seem to be at the Just Make It Stop phase. Apart from doomed MPs hoping to eke out a few more months in office, is the current situation good for anyone?
From his perspective, Starmer and Sunak probably do look indistinguishable.
https://m.koreatimes.co.kr/pages/article.asp?newsIdx=364468
That will change, though, as EU production is starting to ramp up (and faster than in the U.S.).
A train fare cheat who posted tips on TikTok about how to avoid paying to travel has been caught and fined.
East Midlands Railway (EMR) said the woman shared numerous videos on social media urging other passengers to defraud the train operator by following her advice.
The fare dodger recorded herself talking about travelling in Derby, Tamworth and Burton-upon-Trent.
However she was caught following an investigation and has been fined £773.
In her posts, the TikToker - who has not been named by EMR - bragged about how she never paid full price to travel and regularly did not buy a ticket at all.
Among her "tips" were hiding in the toilet when conductors approached and pretending her mobile was out of battery so she could not access her tickets.
She was prosecuted for fraud following a joint investigation by EMR and British Transport Police and now also has a criminal record.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-derbyshire-67615588
He believes the EU enforces a neo-liberal orthodoxy and infringes political sovereignty. He also makes the interesting point that Brexit may be the reason the UK is now almost alone, in Europe, in not suffering a hard right swing
The people were heard. Eventually, their voice was obeyed. British democracy defeated the EU
Bit of a sine qua non for any PM.
More importantly, because I'm a version of Centrist Dad, grip on reality. For a while now, Conservatives have been in la la land, ignoring the existence of arithmetic, other people and nations as independent entities et cetera. There's too much "but I really really want X to happen", even when it can't.
No, I'm not expecting Starmer to be more than meh. And his direction of travel will be more left wing than I'd like.
But I'm expecting it to be better than this.
https://twitter.com/PhysInHistory/status/1731915692411134409/photo/1
No wonder most remaining Tory voters want an early election. Even they can see the party is poison.
'Himmler with a Goatee' vibes.
Not that the EU (or, perhaps, Cameron) were sensible when there was a real risk of our departure, which ended up coming true.
It took Sunak losing control of his party for it to be overturned.
I also don't understand why the BBC (or the police) has blurred the photograph of a convicted criminal.
Starmer plays a few moves ahead, so by controlling candidate selections is putting in place a supportive parliament.
I think opposition on the left will be nearly all outside parliamentary politics. I think the Tories will step further to the right, leaving no real place for a Farage insurgent party.
Home Secretaries who have been to Rwanda to celebrate their great scheme - 3. Migrants who have been sent - 0. Cost per Home Secretary so far (not including today’s visit) - £50million
Braverman et al are regarded as extreme right even by the right in most European Countries.
The funny thing is that the UK right wingers in the Tory Party demand even more extreme policies "otherwise we get Farage". Actually if they continue down that rabbit hole, it is probably the Conservatives who will "get Farage", and with a similar number of seats.
The Far Right may be a chimera when it comes to Farage himself, but clearly not when we examine the government policies of even a so-called "moderate" right winger like Sunak. The Tories ARE the far right.
Whatever his own instincts may have been, Sunak panders to the far right, as long as they are in his own party, while many Tory members pander to the far right, whether or not they are Conservatives, as we saw with the lionising of Farage at the Tory conference.
It matters not, the punishment for the Tories at the next election will be brutal, even as it stands, and another six months of Faragist cosplay will raise the coming disaster to an ELE for the Tories.
We have all had enough...
"You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. In the name of God, go!"
UK Labour Party admits it’s not ready for government — yet
“We’d be fucked if there was an election tomorrow,” party officials say, as talks with civil service put on ice.
https://www.politico.eu/article/uk-labour-party-admits-its-not-ready-for-government-yet/
...Given an election is all-but-certain in 2024, the process might have been anticipated to start soon for Keir Starmer’s Labour Party. The last time Labour came to power, under Tony Blair in 1997, the party began conversations with the civil service 16 months before the election.
Yet the Times reported Saturday that this time round, access talks are unlikely to start before the new year — a fact confirmed to POLITICO by four senior Labour Party figures, including the one quoted above.
“There hasn’t been enough time to get everything done yet,” a second of these officials said. They pointed to Starmer — who has to request talks in a letter to the PM — warning that he wants to “bombproof” each of his policies. “We need more time,” they added.
A third Labour official said: “We won’t rush into access talks because we need them to be more than just surface level. There is a delivery question. We really want to be ready and not caught out.”..
Sounds as though their priorities won't be fully decided until Jan/Feb next year.
The Tories have tried populist right with Boris, albeit sullied by all this woke levelling up nonsense. What people in Hartlepools want is No Services At All, but with a proper leader reminding them that its the fault of the foreigners and the scroungers and the world bank.
“The Tories ARE the Far Right”. Is that why we have historically unprecedented levels of immigration? Get a grip
That's the entire amount pretended to be saved per annum by the recent attacks on the BBC already tipped away, then.
AI Model uses quantum maths to learn like a human
Really, really bad at their job.
Useless.
Worthless.
They thank you for your vote...
In general the drift towards wishing a general election with time should be a given, in fact, if some people still oppose this next July you'd be entitled to wonder what they actually do want.
That and an unwillingness to invest so that the only way to keep the wheels turning is to import more working age people.
An unwillingness shared by the government.
By about 2028, we may be able to have some weak tea and have the curtains open a bit. And if so, the nation will be grateful.
We would feel much better if we could purge the toxins from the body politic instead of continuing to absorb them...
Being an inky scribe is not much of a qualification for office, it turns out. As the political/media complex of the Tory administrations of the past decade can testify.
You whip up some spurious outrage, offer some hyped gimmickry as policy and watch as it collapses like a wet souffle. The Tory "solutions" are not intended to be serious policy, they are populist garbage from start to finish.
Your government is industrial scale bullshitters playing a masquerade of politics. It has cost us a fortune and degraded our national self respect and you provide the Greek chorus for this drivel.
Time you apologised to the whole country I think.
Of course it’s almost certain he will recommend this but you don’t want to set a precedent
Is it more useful to make a lot of noise about wanting to tackle issue X but he too incompetent to make it work, or want to do less but actually achieve that?
Even Guardian journalists don't always get it right.
So we have left the EU, ended the right to live and work, and yet there are way more people now than there were then. Yes the Tories are incompetent, but there is a reality that few want to face up to:
We have too many economically inactive people unable to fill the jobs that we need doing. I am not blaming the inactive - many can't take the work on offer because of lack of childcare / transport / wrong part of the country etc etc etc. So we need migrants. We did before, we do now, we will in the future.
Or, we take an axe to things we need. Lets have a heavily downsized NHS because we don't want foreigners but we won't pay to train our own people. Lets have elderly care based in the family home rather than a care home which we can't find staff for. Lets have less hotels and coffee shops and food production and all the other things that rely on foreign labour.
A grown up conversation to hold reality up to the people whose natural parochial bigotry has been gaslit to terrifying levels for the benefit of right wing politicians. You can have what you want. Are you willing to pay the price for getting it?
So in this particular case, what you know is wrong.
Since 2009 the number of FTEs has increased by 25% to more than 1.4 million
What additional services are being delivered by those additional 300,000 employees?
The root problem we have is horrifically poor productivity. If we could redeploy even a small percentage of that staff for other roles, for example, then hiring pressures would be massively reduced in other sectors. Alternatively we might choose to significant enhance delivery of health outcomes using the additional resources
https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/projects/nhs-in-a-nutshell/nhs-workforce
Every PM since 1970 has been defeated at least once in the Commons.
Except for Liz Truss.
Last week's revelations about cheaper wage hurdles for migrant workers just revealed how disingenuous the government are. They are happy to gaslight the "foreigners go home" contingent of their vote. Whilst understanding the economic need for foreign labour.
What I hope from Starmer is that we can have an honest conversation. The crank right will foam on about unchecked migration, but *they* have already given us that. We can have controlled migration or uncontrolled. Currently it is the latter. The former would be to everyone's benefit.
Neither of which are true or helpful remarks
They might also be less shit
You are forgetting that in order to elicit change elections have to be won first.
- hours per head may have gone done. This may be a good thing if people were overworked before. Alternatively it could be a management choice re: sustainability
- Feminisation of the workforce (especially GPs) adds complexity but my numbers were FTE
- Population growth and aging demographics will likely require additional staff as there is limited operating leverage in an organisation with high contact rates like healthcare
But there is also stuff that perhaps could be done better. In the King’s Fund report I linked earlier, for example:
- NHS Infrastructure Support employees fell 20% from 2009 - 2013. From 2013 to 2022 they have grown to 15% above 2009 so close to 50% between 2013 and 2022 (ie
+35/80).
- I don’t have absolute numbers to hand so may be we are not talking about a lot of people. And I don’t know what is captured by that job description (it sounds like IT rather than physical maintenance). But that’s a big rate of change
- That said, doctors, scientific and technical staff and support for clinical staff have all grown very substantially as well
Will this increase the cost of care? Of course. But care is only cheap because we pay carers - I think most people can agree - an unreasonably small amount for a job which most of us would not want to do; and we only do that because we are importing carers from abroad.
Immigration is very much the wrong answer to this particular problem.
Its this level of desperate incompetence which is why even the majority of your remaining voters want an election.
We don't want to pay for all the preventative measures to stop people sliding into care
We don't want to be stuck caring for our own relatives
We don't want to pay for care homes that aren't dangerously understaffed
We don't want to pay salaries for the people who care for our relatives
What the Tories and their handful of voters seem to want is for people to just die quickly and quietly and thus remove the problem. Not their relatives of course, the other people.
Caring is an much of a vocation as healthcare. We could and should elevate it as a priority. Brown proposed it in his dying months. Davey passionately advocates it. But the Tories and big media ensure that "why should I pay" is the prevalent mood. So we get what we pay for...
The suggestion about central procurement works for some items (see drug buying). And is used. But is often the poster child for how to spend far too much in a stupid, inflexible contract.
For example, years ago, my wife worked for a company that had done a deal with BT for broadband for home working. Usage of the system was mandated. A huge, fixed price contract had been negotiated. So they were stuck, after a couple of years, with an expensive, low performance offering.
It is actually better and cheaper for many simple items, for the hospital to negotiate its own toilet paper supply etc.
Good Management and Admin are utterly vital to the performance of an organisation.
We know who the victims are. We know what their losses are. We know already that the government was at fault. 3/4 of them have died. They are now dying at the rate of 1 every 4 days. If we wait any longer there won't be any victims to compensate, only their families. This is not good enough. The judge has already recommended that compensation be extended to others affected. There is no good reason to delay - unless your objective is to avoid paying anything altogether. Justice delayed is justice denied.
Other countries have managed to compensate victims and hold those responsible accountable. This ineffable slowness is a British disease and it has to stop - as I wrote here (https://www2.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2023/11/15/what-are-ministers-for/): -
"What we have instead is an unholy trinity of poor commissioning, false economies and weak supervision and oversight. Only when the matter goes “Splat” do we then roll out the best lawyers money can buy, embark on gold-plated, fantastically detailed and interminably long inquiries and produce splendid reports few read and even fewer act on. This is, bluntly, arse about face."
The state is now actively malign towards its citizens. There will be a price to pay for this one day, I hope.
But the vote last night was a small step towards correcting this and starting to play fair with individuals and their families who have suffered hugely at the hands of the state.
Now, as many might recall on here, I believe that there is a fundamental problem within the NHS (eg a few weeks ago headline in The Times: "Toxic NHS...."), regardless of funding but, as Lab found in 1997, although a huge waste of money, nevertheless hosing money at the problem will have an effect, albeit not structurally.
Is it not the case that the framework surrounding care is the cost? We're spending ever larger amounts trying to fund an ever larger and more complex regulatory framework?