Extraordinary levels of anger against the Labour government over on t'TwitterX
Never seen anything like it. Seething disgust
It will be interesting to see if this translates into polling....
You have to laugh when Rachel from Accunts wants people to invest money in British firms and at the same time want monto take away the £500 dividend TAX free Allowance
They are bonkers plain and simple.
Do they? I didn't know that. Successive Governments, starting with Brown have completely buggered up the relationship between Corporation Tax, ACT and dividends. We had a very sensible system that Brown, Osborne and Hammond have completely destroyed. Is Reeves about to put the nail in the coffin then?
Well look it up then. I am sure I read it somewhere admittedly on twitter but....
A former Conservative MP has pleaded guilty to harassing her ex-wife. Katie Wallis, formerly known as Jamie Wallis, admitted sending unwanted messages to Rebecca Lovell and is due to be sentenced next month.
The losses from GE 24 to that senate poll proportionately applied support Con on 17ish nationally but would see Labour on 16 or 17 Just as an indication of the scale of the Labour decline in Wales more than any sort of prediction They're not guaranteed third on the back of polling like this and YouGov in April - 10% chance maybe they come fourth in seats (senedd). They cannot afford to go any further backwards
Theo Bertram @theobertram · 3h The Catch 22 of British politics is that to win a second term you need to tackle the cost of living but to tackle the underlying causes of the cost of living (increase housing supply, build new energy plants) you need two terms. Theo Bertram @theobertram · 3h Solving this Catch 22 is the key to avoiding a doom loop of failed progress & populism. Part of my answer would be to make Permanent Secretaries not only accountable for progress on 10 year goals but for public confidence in those goals. Progress needs to be metered & clear.
In other words, the most patriotic thing the opposition can do right now is make themselves unelectable enough that the next election is a boring walkover. (One of Blair's failures was to largely fail to seize the opportunity presented to him by Hague, IDS and Howard.)
On that basis, the Conservatives are being true patriots right now.
China doesn't take a decade to build new energy plants, I'm not sure why we should.
China isn't a democracy.
EDIT: Also, I think 5 waste to energy plans are being built in Scotland right not, in less than a decade.
We didn’t take a decade back in the 50s or 60s either. See the Stonehaven report I linked to previously for an analysis of the legal barriers to “just building things” that have built up in the UK since the early 70s.
Dominic Cummings' (I know) recent lecture is also interesting on this topic.
I have a lot of respect for Cummings’ diagnoses of the problems the UK faces. Rather less respect (understatement of the year?) for his ability to actually implement solutions.
He is still ploughing the only solution is burn it all down and start again.
Anyone who has worked in IT is familiar with this. We could spend a day or two understanding what this program does and where the bug lies, but instead we need to rewrite the whole thing from scratch in a more fashionable language.
We saw this of course during the Covid pandemic. All the experts agreed there was a problem with Imperial's modelling but despite its source code being published, wanted to replace it rather than fix it.
In that scenario it's because the model was fundamentally flawed and in general the "make do and mend" method leads to the government paying Microsoft tens of millions per year to keep the lights on for Windows XP/7/NT.
When it comes to state services provision it really can't get much worse and throwing more resources at it is only going to lead to negative productivity per worker - that is to say every worker added brings more inefficiency to the system than they provide in incremental output.
Sometimes burning it down and starting again is the only way forwards and realising that early and acting on it is always better than putting it off and kicking the can down the road which stores up problems and makes the task ever more unmanageable - look at the NHS as an example.
Happy to be wrong but I thought the issues around Imperial's forecasting wasn't the code (old and rubbish thought it was) but the assumptions it was being fed (possibly deliberately, certainly exploring the worst case scenarios). Things like people isolating themselves in advance of a government order to do so etc. The streets and pubs were deathly quiet BEFORE the lockdowns etc.
It was both.
And then we saw the same again with the new models like the one from Warwick.
The fact that we can't have warm weather without an official alert being issued is a good example of everything that's wrong with this country. Bossy, interfering, and with completely the wrong priorities.
Sometimes burning it down and starting again is the only way forwards and realising that early and acting on it is always better than putting it off and kicking the can down the road which stores up problems and makes the task ever more unmanageable - look at the NHS as an example.
I think the clinical care in the NHS is generally very good, and I rarely have any complaints about the people that I've dealt with, but the systems and the processes are unbelievably bad. So slow, inefficient, lacking automation, prone to errors, with many, many gaps as well. The NHS only gets away with it because it really has no competition, any normal business operating the way the NHS does simply wouldn't last for long.
Healthcare is not a normal business. I think that's the more pertinent issue.
It doesn't matter what the application or service is, we shouldn't put up with crap systems and processes. If we actually fixed stuff rather than papering over it or excusing it, then we might have more to spend on the bits that are the purpose of the service in the first place.
The fact that we can't have warm weather without an official alert being issued is a good example of everything that's wrong with this country. Bossy, interfering, and with completely the wrong priorities.
Some times its linked to other things happening. E.g. cold weather alerts can trigger payments to old folks to heat their homes.
Sometimes burning it down and starting again is the only way forwards and realising that early and acting on it is always better than putting it off and kicking the can down the road which stores up problems and makes the task ever more unmanageable - look at the NHS as an example.
I think the clinical care in the NHS is generally very good, and I rarely have any complaints about the people that I've dealt with, but the systems and the processes are unbelievably bad. So slow, inefficient, lacking automation, prone to errors, with many, many gaps as well. The NHS only gets away with it because it really has no competition, any normal business operating the way the NHS does simply wouldn't last for long.
Healthcare is not a normal business. I think that's the more pertinent issue.
It doesn't matter what the application or service is, we shouldn't put up with crap systems and processes. If we actually fixed stuff rather than papering over it or excusing it, then we might have more to spend on the bits that are the purpose of the service in the first place.
The fact that we can't have warm weather without an official alert being issued is a good example of everything that's wrong with this country. Bossy, interfering, and with completely the wrong priorities.
We're the kind of country that warns people about hot weather and penalises them for having air conditioning.
Sometimes burning it down and starting again is the only way forwards and realising that early and acting on it is always better than putting it off and kicking the can down the road which stores up problems and makes the task ever more unmanageable - look at the NHS as an example.
I think the clinical care in the NHS is generally very good, and I rarely have any complaints about the people that I've dealt with, but the systems and the processes are unbelievably bad. So slow, inefficient, lacking automation, prone to errors, with many, many gaps as well. The NHS only gets away with it because it really has no competition, any normal business operating the way the NHS does simply wouldn't last for long.
Healthcare is not a normal business. I think that's the more pertinent issue.
It doesn't matter what the application or service is, we shouldn't put up with crap systems and processes. If we actually fixed stuff rather than papering over it or excusing it, then we might have more to spend on the bits that are the purpose of the service in the first place.
One of the valid criticisms Big Dom makes is they put together that dev team for the dashboard. Putting aside the data being recorded in the public sector is a shit show, they did any amazing job putting together that system. And then they were disbanded. Where as Hancock's NHS X team were a shit show, are they still in place?
Extraordinary levels of anger against the Labour government over on t'TwitterX
Never seen anything like it. Seething disgust
It will be interesting to see if this translates into polling....
You have to laugh when Rachel from Accounts wants people to invest money in British firms and at the same time wants to take away the £500 dividend TAX free Allowance
They are bonkers plain and simple.
This was predicted. You rule out NI (employees*), VAT, corporation tax, and income tax, and that leaves you with much smaller and less effective options for raising tax, which in turn means you make lots of fiddly and often counterproductive changes. This is entirely on Reeves and Starmer, they chose this path. It was obviously stupid and likely to cause them many problems.
* It's debatable that they should even be allowed that caveat.
Sometimes burning it down and starting again is the only way forwards and realising that early and acting on it is always better than putting it off and kicking the can down the road which stores up problems and makes the task ever more unmanageable - look at the NHS as an example.
I think the clinical care in the NHS is generally very good, and I rarely have any complaints about the people that I've dealt with, but the systems and the processes are unbelievably bad. So slow, inefficient, lacking automation, prone to errors, with many, many gaps as well. The NHS only gets away with it because it really has no competition, any normal business operating the way the NHS does simply wouldn't last for long.
Healthcare is not a normal business. I think that's the more pertinent issue.
It doesn't matter what the application or service is, we shouldn't put up with crap systems and processes. If we actually fixed stuff rather than papering over it or excusing it, then we might have more to spend on the bits that are the purpose of the service in the first place.
One of the valid criticisms Big Dom makes is they put together that dev team for the dashboard. Putting aside the data being recorded in the public sector is a shit show, they did any amazing job putting together that system. And then they were disbanded. Where as Hancock's NHS X team were a shit show, are they still in place?
The civil service has a shutdown mindset instead of a startup mindset.
Not sure what that means but there is real anger towards Labour in Wales and no surprise in this poll
Of course this poll may be correct, but isn't it a Matt Goodwin poll? Which of course meets the BPC requirements, however...
Tories look too low, Reform looks high. And some of the subsamples look very odd.
Fund out now is a BPC member so are you suggesting it is not to be relied on
And no, I think the poll is fairly accurate as of now
If you think I am calling out the BPC you need to flag.
I was merely suggesting that Find Out Now are traditionally Reform heavy and Tory light.
Flag away. I don't care!
This poll is probably about what you'd exoect from FoN after YouGov in April and the national movement since. It doesnt seem out of the realms of likely outcomes. Id think Tories are probably hoping for 15 in the Senedd and Labour hoping to get into the 20s at worst, so its ballpark for a dissatisfied public
Mossad are successfully terrorising the entire Iranian elite. Even Khameni knows the evil Jews can get him, if Trump gives the nod
Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of islamofascists. Deploy the micro-violins
They can precisely target an individual 1,500km and two countries away but feel the need to indiscriminately fire missiles and shell people desperately waiting for the food to keep themselves alive. That's cutting them an inordinate amount of slack.
Except its not indiscriminate, if it was there'd be millions dead.
Stop being deliberately obtuse - a tank firing shells into a crowd at 400-500m range is purposefully indiscriminate of the inevitable result.
The fact that we can't have warm weather without an official alert being issued is a good example of everything that's wrong with this country. Bossy, interfering, and with completely the wrong priorities.
Some times its linked to other things happening. E.g. cold weather alerts can trigger payments to old folks to heat their homes.
It's over the top nannying. If there is a link between the average temperature in a specific area and benefits payments in that area, that can be done automatically in the background.
Sometimes burning it down and starting again is the only way forwards and realising that early and acting on it is always better than putting it off and kicking the can down the road which stores up problems and makes the task ever more unmanageable - look at the NHS as an example.
I think the clinical care in the NHS is generally very good, and I rarely have any complaints about the people that I've dealt with, but the systems and the processes are unbelievably bad. So slow, inefficient, lacking automation, prone to errors, with many, many gaps as well. The NHS only gets away with it because it really has no competition, any normal business operating the way the NHS does simply wouldn't last for long.
Healthcare is not a normal business. I think that's the more pertinent issue.
It doesn't matter what the application or service is, we shouldn't put up with crap systems and processes. If we actually fixed stuff rather than papering over it or excusing it, then we might have more to spend on the bits that are the purpose of the service in the first place.
One of the valid criticisms Big Dom makes is they put together that dev team for the dashboard. Putting aside the data being recorded in the public sector is a shit show, they did any amazing job putting together that system. And then they were disbanded. Where as Hancock's NHS X team were a shit show, are they still in place?
Yes. The public sector creates teams, who learn and do good work, and then get disbanded. But that's partly because we're "allowed" to fund investment and not running costs. Having a standing team is a running cost, but pulling a team together for a specific project to build a thing is an investment.
It's partly also that government loves re-organising. It's a cheap way for ministers to be seen as Doing Something.
Sometimes burning it down and starting again is the only way forwards and realising that early and acting on it is always better than putting it off and kicking the can down the road which stores up problems and makes the task ever more unmanageable - look at the NHS as an example.
I think the clinical care in the NHS is generally very good, and I rarely have any complaints about the people that I've dealt with, but the systems and the processes are unbelievably bad. So slow, inefficient, lacking automation, prone to errors, with many, many gaps as well. The NHS only gets away with it because it really has no competition, any normal business operating the way the NHS does simply wouldn't last for long.
Healthcare is not a normal business. I think that's the more pertinent issue.
It doesn't matter what the application or service is, we shouldn't put up with crap systems and processes. If we actually fixed stuff rather than papering over it or excusing it, then we might have more to spend on the bits that are the purpose of the service in the first place.
One of the valid criticisms Big Dom makes is they put together that dev team for the dashboard. Putting aside the data being recorded in the public sector is a shit show, they did any amazing job putting together that system. And then they were disbanded. Where as Hancock's NHS X team were a shit show, are they still in place?
The civil service has a shutdown mindset instead of a startup mindset.
I haven't been in academia for quite a while, but it was similar there. Particularly in comparison to the US. And then we wonder why we struggle with things like world leading AI start-ups. Instead is two blokes running a site only about fans that is making the big bucks for the UK.
Sometimes burning it down and starting again is the only way forwards and realising that early and acting on it is always better than putting it off and kicking the can down the road which stores up problems and makes the task ever more unmanageable - look at the NHS as an example.
I think the clinical care in the NHS is generally very good, and I rarely have any complaints about the people that I've dealt with, but the systems and the processes are unbelievably bad. So slow, inefficient, lacking automation, prone to errors, with many, many gaps as well. The NHS only gets away with it because it really has no competition, any normal business operating the way the NHS does simply wouldn't last for long.
Healthcare is not a normal business. I think that's the more pertinent issue.
It doesn't matter what the application or service is, we shouldn't put up with crap systems and processes. If we actually fixed stuff rather than papering over it or excusing it, then we might have more to spend on the bits that are the purpose of the service in the first place.
One of the valid criticisms Big Dom makes is they put together that dev team for the dashboard. Putting aside the data being recorded in the public sector is a shit show, they did any amazing job putting together that system. And then they were disbanded. Where as Hancock's NHS X team were a shit show, are they still in place?
Yes. The public sector creates teams, who learn and do good work, and then get disbanded. But that's partly because we're "allowed" to fund investment and not running costs. Having a standing team is a running cost, but pulling a team together for a specific project to build a thing is an investment.
It's partly also that government loves re-organising. It's a cheap way for ministers to be seen as Doing Something.
NHSX is being disbanded.
The last statement is rather telling...is...being....
Sometimes burning it down and starting again is the only way forwards and realising that early and acting on it is always better than putting it off and kicking the can down the road which stores up problems and makes the task ever more unmanageable - look at the NHS as an example.
I think the clinical care in the NHS is generally very good, and I rarely have any complaints about the people that I've dealt with, but the systems and the processes are unbelievably bad. So slow, inefficient, lacking automation, prone to errors, with many, many gaps as well. The NHS only gets away with it because it really has no competition, any normal business operating the way the NHS does simply wouldn't last for long.
Healthcare is not a normal business. I think that's the more pertinent issue.
It doesn't matter what the application or service is, we shouldn't put up with crap systems and processes. If we actually fixed stuff rather than papering over it or excusing it, then we might have more to spend on the bits that are the purpose of the service in the first place.
One of the valid criticisms Big Dom makes is they put together that dev team for the dashboard. Putting aside the data being recorded in the public sector is a shit show, they did any amazing job putting together that system. And then they were disbanded. Where as Hancock's NHS X team were a shit show, are they still in place?
Yes. The public sector creates teams, who learn and do good work, and then get disbanded. But that's partly because we're "allowed" to fund investment and not running costs. Having a standing team is a running cost, but pulling a team together for a specific project to build a thing is an investment.
It's partly also that government loves re-organising. It's a cheap way for ministers to be seen as Doing Something.
NHSX is being disbanded.
The last statement is rather telling...is...being....
I am out of date. NHSX has been disbanded. The thing it was merged into is in the process of being disbanded.
Theo Bertram @theobertram · 3h The Catch 22 of British politics is that to win a second term you need to tackle the cost of living but to tackle the underlying causes of the cost of living (increase housing supply, build new energy plants) you need two terms. Theo Bertram @theobertram · 3h Solving this Catch 22 is the key to avoiding a doom loop of failed progress & populism. Part of my answer would be to make Permanent Secretaries not only accountable for progress on 10 year goals but for public confidence in those goals. Progress needs to be metered & clear.
In other words, the most patriotic thing the opposition can do right now is make themselves unelectable enough that the next election is a boring walkover. (One of Blair's failures was to largely fail to seize the opportunity presented to him by Hague, IDS and Howard.)
On that basis, the Conservatives are being true patriots right now.
China doesn't take a decade to build new energy plants, I'm not sure why we should.
China isn't a democracy.
EDIT: Also, I think 5 waste to energy plans are being built in Scotland right not, in less than a decade.
We didn’t take a decade back in the 50s or 60s either. See the Stonehaven report I linked to previously for an analysis of the legal barriers to “just building things” that have built up in the UK since the early 70s.
Dominic Cummings' (I know) recent lecture is also interesting on this topic.
I have a lot of respect for Cummings’ diagnoses of the problems the UK faces. Rather less respect (understatement of the year?) for his ability to actually implement solutions.
He is still ploughing the only solution is burn it all down and start again.
Anyone who has worked in IT is familiar with this. We could spend a day or two understanding what this program does and where the bug lies, but instead we need to rewrite the whole thing from scratch in a more fashionable language.
We saw this of course during the Covid pandemic. All the experts agreed there was a problem with Imperial's modelling but despite its source code being published, wanted to replace it rather than fix it.
As ever, it depends.
If you have a pile of spaghetti code, there is of course a very strong temptation to rewrite the lot from scratch in a (hopefully) much more structured way. Sometimes you really have little choice; the original code is so badly broken that it has become unmaintainable. Then a rewrite becomes unavoidable.
It's not a decison to be taken lightly, though. That old spaghetti code has had years and years to take into account every possible edge case, and its shiny new replacement will almost invariably take much more blood, sweat and tears to create than anticipated as well as reintroducing a whole load of bugs from edge cases that had previously been dealt with in the old version.
The best compromise is typically to methodically isolate particular functionality and rewrite just that part of the code in a modular fashion. Then move on to the next part, and so on. The iterative approach has a lot to be said for it.
Socially, it's the approach that Britain has generally taken over the years. We don't really do revolutions, but we have typically followed a policy of renewing the bits that need to be renewed. This way of doings things has served us well; we abandon it at our peril.
Sometimes burning it down and starting again is the only way forwards and realising that early and acting on it is always better than putting it off and kicking the can down the road which stores up problems and makes the task ever more unmanageable - look at the NHS as an example.
I think the clinical care in the NHS is generally very good, and I rarely have any complaints about the people that I've dealt with, but the systems and the processes are unbelievably bad. So slow, inefficient, lacking automation, prone to errors, with many, many gaps as well. The NHS only gets away with it because it really has no competition, any normal business operating the way the NHS does simply wouldn't last for long.
Healthcare is not a normal business. I think that's the more pertinent issue.
It doesn't matter what the application or service is, we shouldn't put up with crap systems and processes. If we actually fixed stuff rather than papering over it or excusing it, then we might have more to spend on the bits that are the purpose of the service in the first place.
One of the valid criticisms Big Dom makes is they put together that dev team for the dashboard. Putting aside the data being recorded in the public sector is a shit show, they did any amazing job putting together that system. And then they were disbanded. Where as Hancock's NHS X team were a shit show, are they still in place?
Yes. The public sector creates teams, who learn and do good work, and then get disbanded. But that's partly because we're "allowed" to fund investment and not running costs. Having a standing team is a running cost, but pulling a team together for a specific project to build a thing is an investment.
It's partly also that government loves re-organising. It's a cheap way for ministers to be seen as Doing Something.
NHSX is being disbanded.
The last statement is rather telling...is...being....
I am out of date. NHSX has been disbanded. The thing it was merged into is in the process of being disbanded.
The brand was disbanded but it was in reality merged / rebadged and now finally being disbanded. So again very telling.
Theo Bertram @theobertram · 3h The Catch 22 of British politics is that to win a second term you need to tackle the cost of living but to tackle the underlying causes of the cost of living (increase housing supply, build new energy plants) you need two terms. Theo Bertram @theobertram · 3h Solving this Catch 22 is the key to avoiding a doom loop of failed progress & populism. Part of my answer would be to make Permanent Secretaries not only accountable for progress on 10 year goals but for public confidence in those goals. Progress needs to be metered & clear.
In other words, the most patriotic thing the opposition can do right now is make themselves unelectable enough that the next election is a boring walkover. (One of Blair's failures was to largely fail to seize the opportunity presented to him by Hague, IDS and Howard.)
On that basis, the Conservatives are being true patriots right now.
China doesn't take a decade to build new energy plants, I'm not sure why we should.
China isn't a democracy.
EDIT: Also, I think 5 waste to energy plans are being built in Scotland right not, in less than a decade.
We didn’t take a decade back in the 50s or 60s either. See the Stonehaven report I linked to previously for an analysis of the legal barriers to “just building things” that have built up in the UK since the early 70s.
Dominic Cummings' (I know) recent lecture is also interesting on this topic.
I have a lot of respect for Cummings’ diagnoses of the problems the UK faces. Rather less respect (understatement of the year?) for his ability to actually implement solutions.
He is still ploughing the only solution is burn it all down and start again.
Anyone who has worked in IT is familiar with this. We could spend a day or two understanding what this program does and where the bug lies, but instead we need to rewrite the whole thing from scratch in a more fashionable language.
We saw this of course during the Covid pandemic. All the experts agreed there was a problem with Imperial's modelling but despite its source code being published, wanted to replace it rather than fix it.
As ever, it depends.
If you have a pile of spaghetti code, there is of course a very strong temptation to rewrite the lot from scratch in a (hopefully) much more structured way. Sometimes you really have little choice; the original code is so badly broken that it has become unmaintainable. Then a rewrite becomes unavoidable.
It's not a decison to be taken lightly, though. That old spaghetti code has had years and years to take into account every possible edge case, and its shiny new replacement will almost invariably take much more blood, sweat and tears to create than anticipated as well as reintroducing a whole load of bugs from edge cases that had previously been dealt with in the old version.
The best compromise is typically to methodically isolate particular functionality and rewrite just that part of the code in a modular fashion. Then move on to the next part, and so on. The iterative approach has a lot to be said for it.
Socially, it's the approach that Britain has generally taken over the years. We don't really do revolutions, but we have typically followed a policy of renewing the bits that need to be renewed. This way of doings things has served us well; we abandon it at our peril.
Interesting coding analogy!
It is notable that the populist right (and left) are so nihilist, burn it down so as to re-build it. This represents a dividing line with traditional conservatism that celebrated constancy and continuity.
Former Premier League referee David Coote has been charged by the Football Association for comments made about ex-Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp in a video that was leaked on social media. The 42-year-old was suspended in November 2024 after the clip showed him making derogatory comments about Klopp and Liverpool.
Sometimes burning it down and starting again is the only way forwards and realising that early and acting on it is always better than putting it off and kicking the can down the road which stores up problems and makes the task ever more unmanageable - look at the NHS as an example.
I think the clinical care in the NHS is generally very good, and I rarely have any complaints about the people that I've dealt with, but the systems and the processes are unbelievably bad. So slow, inefficient, lacking automation, prone to errors, with many, many gaps as well. The NHS only gets away with it because it really has no competition, any normal business operating the way the NHS does simply wouldn't last for long.
Healthcare is not a normal business. I think that's the more pertinent issue.
It doesn't matter what the application or service is, we shouldn't put up with crap systems and processes. If we actually fixed stuff rather than papering over it or excusing it, then we might have more to spend on the bits that are the purpose of the service in the first place.
One of the valid criticisms Big Dom makes is they put together that dev team for the dashboard. Putting aside the data being recorded in the public sector is a shit show, they did any amazing job putting together that system. And then they were disbanded. Where as Hancock's NHS X team were a shit show, are they still in place?
Yes. The public sector creates teams, who learn and do good work, and then get disbanded. But that's partly because we're "allowed" to fund investment and not running costs. Having a standing team is a running cost, but pulling a team together for a specific project to build a thing is an investment.
It's partly also that government loves re-organising. It's a cheap way for ministers to be seen as Doing Something.
NHSX is being disbanded.
The last statement is rather telling...is...being....
I am out of date. NHSX has been disbanded. The thing it was merged into is in the process of being disbanded.
The brand was disbanded but it was in reality merged / rebadged and now finally being disbanded. So again very telling.
What do you think it is telling of?
I think it is telling of too many reorganisations.
Sometimes burning it down and starting again is the only way forwards and realising that early and acting on it is always better than putting it off and kicking the can down the road which stores up problems and makes the task ever more unmanageable - look at the NHS as an example.
I think the clinical care in the NHS is generally very good, and I rarely have any complaints about the people that I've dealt with, but the systems and the processes are unbelievably bad. So slow, inefficient, lacking automation, prone to errors, with many, many gaps as well. The NHS only gets away with it because it really has no competition, any normal business operating the way the NHS does simply wouldn't last for long.
Healthcare is not a normal business. I think that's the more pertinent issue.
It doesn't matter what the application or service is, we shouldn't put up with crap systems and processes. If we actually fixed stuff rather than papering over it or excusing it, then we might have more to spend on the bits that are the purpose of the service in the first place.
One of the valid criticisms Big Dom makes is they put together that dev team for the dashboard. Putting aside the data being recorded in the public sector is a shit show, they did any amazing job putting together that system. And then they were disbanded. Where as Hancock's NHS X team were a shit show, are they still in place?
Yes. The public sector creates teams, who learn and do good work, and then get disbanded. But that's partly because we're "allowed" to fund investment and not running costs. Having a standing team is a running cost, but pulling a team together for a specific project to build a thing is an investment.
It's partly also that government loves re-organising. It's a cheap way for ministers to be seen as Doing Something.
NHSX is being disbanded.
The last statement is rather telling...is...being....
I am out of date. NHSX has been disbanded. The thing it was merged into is in the process of being disbanded.
The brand was disbanded but it was in reality merged / rebadged and now finally being disbanded. So again very telling.
What do you think it is telling of?
I think it is telling of too many reorganisations.
That something / some people who failed disastrously and the response was rebrand / merge them into to something else and only another 5+ years down the line will they be disbanded and not really because they were crap, but because the government wanted a high profile target to try to claim some BS about cutting quangos.
Where as we said before, the ones that succeeded, disbanded immediately. Big Dom in his various interviews gives a number of other concrete examples of things that were setup during COVID and worked, but were disbanded ASAP.
This weekend gone, a Clapham teen smashes the windows of a Police car.
Resulting in nothing.
If a person forgets to SORN or insure their car. Even if only for 1 day, that’s a prosecution under the SJP, a conviction and a criminal record.
We live in a nation where rowdy lawless behaviour, or shoplifting, burglary, phone theft and the like goes virtually unpunished. The perpetrators act without fear of consequences.
Yet a small, even unintentional, breaking of some minor rules sees the system come down like a ton of bricks on people.
A former Conservative MP has pleaded guilty to harassing her ex-wife. Katie Wallis, formerly known as Jamie Wallis, admitted sending unwanted messages to Rebecca Lovell and is due to be sentenced next month.
The fact that we can't have warm weather without an official alert being issued is a good example of everything that's wrong with this country. Bossy, interfering, and with completely the wrong priorities.
We're the kind of country that warns people about hot weather and penalises them for having air conditioning.
How does it do the later? I have an air con unit. No one has penalised me yet.
Theo Bertram @theobertram · 3h The Catch 22 of British politics is that to win a second term you need to tackle the cost of living but to tackle the underlying causes of the cost of living (increase housing supply, build new energy plants) you need two terms. Theo Bertram @theobertram · 3h Solving this Catch 22 is the key to avoiding a doom loop of failed progress & populism. Part of my answer would be to make Permanent Secretaries not only accountable for progress on 10 year goals but for public confidence in those goals. Progress needs to be metered & clear.
This weekend gone, a Clapham teen smashes the windows of a Police car.
Resulting in nothing.
If a person forgets to SORN or insure their car. Even if only for 1 day, that’s a prosecution under the SJP, a conviction and a criminal record.
We live in a nation where rowdy lawless behaviour, or shoplifting, burglary, phone theft and the like goes virtually unpunished. The perpetrators act without fear of consequences.
Yet a small, even unintentional, breaking of some minor rules sees the system come down like a ton of bricks on people.
I recently was visiting a city and saw people shooting up opposite a police station in the middle of the day. Police cars were pulling up, the plod getting out and going into the station. You could see them taking drugs, you could smell the burning off, police not interested.
The fact that we can't have warm weather without an official alert being issued is a good example of everything that's wrong with this country. Bossy, interfering, and with completely the wrong priorities.
Some times its linked to other things happening. E.g. cold weather alerts can trigger payments to old folks to heat their homes.
It's over the top nannying. If there is a link between the average temperature in a specific area and benefits payments in that area, that can be done automatically in the background.
What about storm alerts? Snow and ice? Or is it just heat that you are objecting to?
The fact that we can't have warm weather without an official alert being issued is a good example of everything that's wrong with this country. Bossy, interfering, and with completely the wrong priorities.
We're the kind of country that warns people about hot weather and penalises them for having air conditioning.
How does it do the later? I have an air con unit. No one has penalised me yet.
Maybe I should have said discourages. We offer subsidies for air-to-water heatpumps but not air-to-air heatpumps.
Theo Bertram @theobertram · 3h The Catch 22 of British politics is that to win a second term you need to tackle the cost of living but to tackle the underlying causes of the cost of living (increase housing supply, build new energy plants) you need two terms. Theo Bertram @theobertram · 3h Solving this Catch 22 is the key to avoiding a doom loop of failed progress & populism. Part of my answer would be to make Permanent Secretaries not only accountable for progress on 10 year goals but for public confidence in those goals. Progress needs to be metered & clear.
In other words, the most patriotic thing the opposition can do right now is make themselves unelectable enough that the next election is a boring walkover. (One of Blair's failures was to largely fail to seize the opportunity presented to him by Hague, IDS and Howard.)
On that basis, the Conservatives are being true patriots right now.
China doesn't take a decade to build new energy plants, I'm not sure why we should.
China isn't a democracy.
EDIT: Also, I think 5 waste to energy plans are being built in Scotland right not, in less than a decade.
We didn’t take a decade back in the 50s or 60s either. See the Stonehaven report I linked to previously for an analysis of the legal barriers to “just building things” that have built up in the UK since the early 70s.
Dominic Cummings' (I know) recent lecture is also interesting on this topic.
I have a lot of respect for Cummings’ diagnoses of the problems the UK faces. Rather less respect (understatement of the year?) for his ability to actually implement solutions.
He is still ploughing the only solution is burn it all down and start again.
It's a rather peaceful British burning down. He wants to remove the Cabinet Office and integrate its functions to the PM's office and other such moves that the man on the Clapham Omnibus would assume were already fact. Restoring democratic accountability mostly.
Another Number 10 power-grab. Turning the prime minister into a president, who at least would have the merit of being directly elected.
Might as well before the launchers are destroyed by an Israeli air strike.
Vote Fire early Vote fire often...
Presumably the Americans are all in on this too by around Friday/Saturday when the Nimitz arrives. Hunt and destroy all the launchers, before the Tom Cruise mountain fortress coup de grace. And then hope the mullahs listen to the warning to leave things there.
Sometimes burning it down and starting again is the only way forwards and realising that early and acting on it is always better than putting it off and kicking the can down the road which stores up problems and makes the task ever more unmanageable - look at the NHS as an example.
I think the clinical care in the NHS is generally very good, and I rarely have any complaints about the people that I've dealt with, but the systems and the processes are unbelievably bad. So slow, inefficient, lacking automation, prone to errors, with many, many gaps as well. The NHS only gets away with it because it really has no competition, any normal business operating the way the NHS does simply wouldn't last for long.
Healthcare is not a normal business. I think that's the more pertinent issue.
It doesn't matter what the application or service is, we shouldn't put up with crap systems and processes. If we actually fixed stuff rather than papering over it or excusing it, then we might have more to spend on the bits that are the purpose of the service in the first place.
One of the valid criticisms Big Dom makes is they put together that dev team for the dashboard. Putting aside the data being recorded in the public sector is a shit show, they did any amazing job putting together that system. And then they were disbanded. Where as Hancock's NHS X team were a shit show, are they still in place?
Putting together a dashboard is a GCSE practical. Drop in gui such as Grafana and feed in data. Or do what Malmesbury did for PB with, and this is a guess, a pipeline into R and gnuplot. Cummings' complaint was the pesky civil service pointing out legal restrictions around the confidentiality of patient data.
Sometimes burning it down and starting again is the only way forwards and realising that early and acting on it is always better than putting it off and kicking the can down the road which stores up problems and makes the task ever more unmanageable - look at the NHS as an example.
I think the clinical care in the NHS is generally very good, and I rarely have any complaints about the people that I've dealt with, but the systems and the processes are unbelievably bad. So slow, inefficient, lacking automation, prone to errors, with many, many gaps as well. The NHS only gets away with it because it really has no competition, any normal business operating the way the NHS does simply wouldn't last for long.
Healthcare is not a normal business. I think that's the more pertinent issue.
It doesn't matter what the application or service is, we shouldn't put up with crap systems and processes. If we actually fixed stuff rather than papering over it or excusing it, then we might have more to spend on the bits that are the purpose of the service in the first place.
One of the valid criticisms Big Dom makes is they put together that dev team for the dashboard. Putting aside the data being recorded in the public sector is a shit show, they did any amazing job putting together that system. And then they were disbanded. Where as Hancock's NHS X team were a shit show, are they still in place?
Yes. The public sector creates teams, who learn and do good work, and then get disbanded. But that's partly because we're "allowed" to fund investment and not running costs. Having a standing team is a running cost, but pulling a team together for a specific project to build a thing is an investment.
It's partly also that government loves re-organising. It's a cheap way for ministers to be seen as Doing Something.
NHSX is being disbanded.
The last statement is rather telling...is...being....
I am out of date. NHSX has been disbanded. The thing it was merged into is in the process of being disbanded.
The brand was disbanded but it was in reality merged / rebadged and now finally being disbanded. So again very telling.
What do you think it is telling of?
I think it is telling of too many reorganisations.
That something / some people who failed disastrously and the response was rebrand / merge them into to something else and only another 5+ years down the line will they be disbanded and not really because they were crap, but because the government wanted a high profile target to try to claim some BS about cutting quangos.
Where as we said before, the ones that succeeded, disbanded immediately. Big Dom in his various interviews gives a number of other concrete examples of things that were setup during COVID and worked, but were disbanded ASAP.
I'm not certain the comparison between the dashboard team and NHSX really holds. They were very different in scale: one a small team delivering a specific project, one a whole organisation. They're at least 100 times different in size (number of staff)!
NHSX had a broad remit. I think one can certainly criticise NHSX. It was never entirely clear what it was for and why we needed it on top of NHS Digital. But they did some good work before COVID-19. I wouldn't say they "failed disastrously" at all.
I agree that there were good things set-up during COVID that were then disbanded. That's because the Conservative government wanted to cut costs. When you say "rebrand / merge", while the process of dissolving NHSX did involve that, we're still talking about major job cuts. NHS England has cut over half its workforce in recent years, and half of the remainder are going as NHSE is merged into DHSC.
I've just done a long bike ride to Stowmarket in Suffolk. And it was wonderful: Britain at its best. The sun was shining; racehorses training outside Newmarket, a double windmill, stone bridges and fords. Ancient ruins and modern sportscars A train arriving a couple of minutes after I bought a ticket, and arriving at its destination on time. Friendly people waving "Hi!", and a woman who accidentally glued her mouth and lips together on the train...
Might as well before the launchers are destroyed by an Israeli air strike.
Vote Fire early Vote fire often...
Presumably the Americans are all in on this too by around Friday/Saturday when the Nimitz arrives. Hunt and destroy all the launchers, before the Tom Cruise mountain fortress coup de grace. And then hope the mullahs listen to the warning to leave things there.
Trump won't be happy that Bibi and the Neocons have bounced America into another war.
Sometimes burning it down and starting again is the only way forwards and realising that early and acting on it is always better than putting it off and kicking the can down the road which stores up problems and makes the task ever more unmanageable - look at the NHS as an example.
I think the clinical care in the NHS is generally very good, and I rarely have any complaints about the people that I've dealt with, but the systems and the processes are unbelievably bad. So slow, inefficient, lacking automation, prone to errors, with many, many gaps as well. The NHS only gets away with it because it really has no competition, any normal business operating the way the NHS does simply wouldn't last for long.
Healthcare is not a normal business. I think that's the more pertinent issue.
It doesn't matter what the application or service is, we shouldn't put up with crap systems and processes. If we actually fixed stuff rather than papering over it or excusing it, then we might have more to spend on the bits that are the purpose of the service in the first place.
One of the valid criticisms Big Dom makes is they put together that dev team for the dashboard. Putting aside the data being recorded in the public sector is a shit show, they did any amazing job putting together that system. And then they were disbanded. Where as Hancock's NHS X team were a shit show, are they still in place?
Putting together a dashboard is a GCSE practical. Drop in gui such as Grafana and feed in data. Or do what Malmesbury did for PB with, and this is a guess, a pipeline into R and gnuplot. Cummings' complaint was the pesky civil service pointing out legal restrictions around the confidentiality of patient data.
Actually that isn't true. The nice Web UI we saw wasn't the hard part of what they achieved. All the NHS data from each trust was a total shit show, different formats, repeated entries, it was all over the shop. The great work the team did was writing code to parse all this data into usable forms in a very short space of time. Also, this data wasn't just for our own weird obsession, we were only getting the summary info.
Might as well before the launchers are destroyed by an Israeli air strike.
Vote Fire early Vote fire often...
Presumably the Americans are all in on this too by around Friday/Saturday when the Nimitz arrives. Hunt and destroy all the launchers, before the Tom Cruise mountain fortress coup de grace. And then hope the mullahs listen to the warning to leave things there.
Trump won't be happy that Bibi and the Neocons have bounced America into another war.
He won't. Unfortunate for him, then, that he has the intellectual skills of a walnut and the diplomatic skills of a seagull.
"The oil tanker Adalynn, flagged by Antigua and Barbuda, which Ukraine imposed sanctions against for belonging to the shadow fleet of Russia, is burning after colliding with the oil tanker Front Eagle, flagged by Liberia."
1. They want to keep the US onside so that they still receive the satellite intelligence data. 2. They're hoping that the US will change its mind to sell weapons to Ukraine. 3. They have to prove to some wavering European allies - such as France and Germany - they they're doing everything they can to keep the US onside. Germany is nervous of acting without US leadership and neither country have followed the British or Nordic example in replacing lost US support. 4. There are still plenty of high-value targets they can hit even if energy assets are ruled out. Ukraine have recently attacked drone production factories, and factories that create electronic components for missiles. So the opportunity cost of leaving energy assets unmolested is not as high as it might seem.
Sometimes burning it down and starting again is the only way forwards and realising that early and acting on it is always better than putting it off and kicking the can down the road which stores up problems and makes the task ever more unmanageable - look at the NHS as an example.
I think the clinical care in the NHS is generally very good, and I rarely have any complaints about the people that I've dealt with, but the systems and the processes are unbelievably bad. So slow, inefficient, lacking automation, prone to errors, with many, many gaps as well. The NHS only gets away with it because it really has no competition, any normal business operating the way the NHS does simply wouldn't last for long.
Healthcare is not a normal business. I think that's the more pertinent issue.
It doesn't matter what the application or service is, we shouldn't put up with crap systems and processes. If we actually fixed stuff rather than papering over it or excusing it, then we might have more to spend on the bits that are the purpose of the service in the first place.
One of the valid criticisms Big Dom makes is they put together that dev team for the dashboard. Putting aside the data being recorded in the public sector is a shit show, they did any amazing job putting together that system. And then they were disbanded. Where as Hancock's NHS X team were a shit show, are they still in place?
Yes. The public sector creates teams, who learn and do good work, and then get disbanded. But that's partly because we're "allowed" to fund investment and not running costs. Having a standing team is a running cost, but pulling a team together for a specific project to build a thing is an investment.
It's partly also that government loves re-organising. It's a cheap way for ministers to be seen as Doing Something.
NHSX is being disbanded.
The last statement is rather telling...is...being....
I am out of date. NHSX has been disbanded. The thing it was merged into is in the process of being disbanded.
The brand was disbanded but it was in reality merged / rebadged and now finally being disbanded. So again very telling.
What do you think it is telling of?
I think it is telling of too many reorganisations.
That something / some people who failed disastrously and the response was rebrand / merge them into to something else and only another 5+ years down the line will they be disbanded and not really because they were crap, but because the government wanted a high profile target to try to claim some BS about cutting quangos.
Where as we said before, the ones that succeeded, disbanded immediately. Big Dom in his various interviews gives a number of other concrete examples of things that were setup during COVID and worked, but were disbanded ASAP.
I'm not certain the comparison between the dashboard team and NHSX really holds. They were very different in scale: one a small team delivering a specific project, one a whole organisation. They're at least 100 times different in size (number of staff)!
NHSX had a broad remit. I think one can certainly criticise NHSX. It was never entirely clear what it was for and why we needed it on top of NHS Digital. But they did some good work before COVID-19. I wouldn't say they "failed disastrously" at all.
I agree that there were good things set-up during COVID that were then disbanded. That's because the Conservative government wanted to cut costs. When you say "rebrand / merge", while the process of dissolving NHSX did involve that, we're still talking about major job cuts. NHS England has cut over half its workforce in recent years, and half of the remainder are going as NHSE is merged into DHSC.
Cummings argument is that the civil service fought against many of these good things continuing, saying the civil service can already provide this. And that many individuals who failed that were dismissed ended up being rehired in new incarnations by the civil service.
Might as well before the launchers are destroyed by an Israeli air strike.
Vote Fire early Vote fire often...
Presumably the Americans are all in on this too by around Friday/Saturday when the Nimitz arrives. Hunt and destroy all the launchers, before the Tom Cruise mountain fortress coup de grace. And then hope the mullahs listen to the warning to leave things there.
Trump won't be happy that Bibi and the Neocons have bounced America into another war.
He won't. Unfortunate for him, then, that he has the intellectual skills of a walnut and the diplomatic skills of a seagull.
Sometimes burning it down and starting again is the only way forwards and realising that early and acting on it is always better than putting it off and kicking the can down the road which stores up problems and makes the task ever more unmanageable - look at the NHS as an example.
I think the clinical care in the NHS is generally very good, and I rarely have any complaints about the people that I've dealt with, but the systems and the processes are unbelievably bad. So slow, inefficient, lacking automation, prone to errors, with many, many gaps as well. The NHS only gets away with it because it really has no competition, any normal business operating the way the NHS does simply wouldn't last for long.
Healthcare is not a normal business. I think that's the more pertinent issue.
It doesn't matter what the application or service is, we shouldn't put up with crap systems and processes. If we actually fixed stuff rather than papering over it or excusing it, then we might have more to spend on the bits that are the purpose of the service in the first place.
One of the valid criticisms Big Dom makes is they put together that dev team for the dashboard. Putting aside the data being recorded in the public sector is a shit show, they did any amazing job putting together that system. And then they were disbanded. Where as Hancock's NHS X team were a shit show, are they still in place?
Yes. The public sector creates teams, who learn and do good work, and then get disbanded. But that's partly because we're "allowed" to fund investment and not running costs. Having a standing team is a running cost, but pulling a team together for a specific project to build a thing is an investment.
It's partly also that government loves re-organising. It's a cheap way for ministers to be seen as Doing Something.
NHSX is being disbanded.
The last statement is rather telling...is...being....
I am out of date. NHSX has been disbanded. The thing it was merged into is in the process of being disbanded.
The brand was disbanded but it was in reality merged / rebadged and now finally being disbanded. So again very telling.
What do you think it is telling of?
I think it is telling of too many reorganisations.
That something / some people who failed disastrously and the response was rebrand / merge them into to something else and only another 5+ years down the line will they be disbanded and not really because they were crap, but because the government wanted a high profile target to try to claim some BS about cutting quangos.
Where as we said before, the ones that succeeded, disbanded immediately. Big Dom in his various interviews gives a number of other concrete examples of things that were setup during COVID and worked, but were disbanded ASAP.
I'm not certain the comparison between the dashboard team and NHSX really holds. They were very different in scale: one a small team delivering a specific project, one a whole organisation. They're at least 100 times different in size (number of staff)!
NHSX had a broad remit. I think one can certainly criticise NHSX. It was never entirely clear what it was for and why we needed it on top of NHS Digital. But they did some good work before COVID-19. I wouldn't say they "failed disastrously" at all.
I agree that there were good things set-up during COVID that were then disbanded. That's because the Conservative government wanted to cut costs. When you say "rebrand / merge", while the process of dissolving NHSX did involve that, we're still talking about major job cuts. NHS England has cut over half its workforce in recent years, and half of the remainder are going as NHSE is merged into DHSC.
Cummings argument is that the civil service fought against many of these good things continuing, saying the civil service can already provide this. And that many individuals who failed that were dismissed ended up being rehired in new incarnations by the civil service.
Cummings has more experience of the civil service than I do. I can only speak from my more limited experience. The COVID research team I was in did meet Cummings early in 2020 and he was saying some sensible stuff then. However, he was also part of a government that thought the most sensible thing to do in a pandemic was to announce a big reorganisation of the country's public health body (Public Health England). (Admittedly that was Hancock's idea.)
Sometimes burning it down and starting again is the only way forwards and realising that early and acting on it is always better than putting it off and kicking the can down the road which stores up problems and makes the task ever more unmanageable - look at the NHS as an example.
I think the clinical care in the NHS is generally very good, and I rarely have any complaints about the people that I've dealt with, but the systems and the processes are unbelievably bad. So slow, inefficient, lacking automation, prone to errors, with many, many gaps as well. The NHS only gets away with it because it really has no competition, any normal business operating the way the NHS does simply wouldn't last for long.
Healthcare is not a normal business. I think that's the more pertinent issue.
It doesn't matter what the application or service is, we shouldn't put up with crap systems and processes. If we actually fixed stuff rather than papering over it or excusing it, then we might have more to spend on the bits that are the purpose of the service in the first place.
One of the valid criticisms Big Dom makes is they put together that dev team for the dashboard. Putting aside the data being recorded in the public sector is a shit show, they did any amazing job putting together that system. And then they were disbanded. Where as Hancock's NHS X team were a shit show, are they still in place?
It's not just the NHS most data held by companies and organisations is wrong, out of date and/or duplicated. Data cleansing should be a higher priority. https://www.verify-it.co.uk/
Yes, Trump back in The White House will be good for Ukraine.
Well, the Russian speaking bits.
Most Russian-speaking Ukrainians, I believe, are pro-Ukraine and anti-Russia.
They certainly are. The descent of Donetsk, Luhansk and Mariupol into mafia gang ridden hell holes has been a massive thing for the populations of Kharkiv and Sumy.
Sometimes burning it down and starting again is the only way forwards and realising that early and acting on it is always better than putting it off and kicking the can down the road which stores up problems and makes the task ever more unmanageable - look at the NHS as an example.
I think the clinical care in the NHS is generally very good, and I rarely have any complaints about the people that I've dealt with, but the systems and the processes are unbelievably bad. So slow, inefficient, lacking automation, prone to errors, with many, many gaps as well. The NHS only gets away with it because it really has no competition, any normal business operating the way the NHS does simply wouldn't last for long.
Healthcare is not a normal business. I think that's the more pertinent issue.
It doesn't matter what the application or service is, we shouldn't put up with crap systems and processes. If we actually fixed stuff rather than papering over it or excusing it, then we might have more to spend on the bits that are the purpose of the service in the first place.
One of the valid criticisms Big Dom makes is they put together that dev team for the dashboard. Putting aside the data being recorded in the public sector is a shit show, they did any amazing job putting together that system. And then they were disbanded. Where as Hancock's NHS X team were a shit show, are they still in place?
Yes. The public sector creates teams, who learn and do good work, and then get disbanded. But that's partly because we're "allowed" to fund investment and not running costs. Having a standing team is a running cost, but pulling a team together for a specific project to build a thing is an investment.
It's partly also that government loves re-organising. It's a cheap way for ministers to be seen as Doing Something.
NHSX is being disbanded.
The last statement is rather telling...is...being....
I am out of date. NHSX has been disbanded. The thing it was merged into is in the process of being disbanded.
The brand was disbanded but it was in reality merged / rebadged and now finally being disbanded. So again very telling.
What do you think it is telling of?
I think it is telling of too many reorganisations.
That something / some people who failed disastrously and the response was rebrand / merge them into to something else and only another 5+ years down the line will they be disbanded and not really because they were crap, but because the government wanted a high profile target to try to claim some BS about cutting quangos.
Where as we said before, the ones that succeeded, disbanded immediately. Big Dom in his various interviews gives a number of other concrete examples of things that were setup during COVID and worked, but were disbanded ASAP.
I'm not certain the comparison between the dashboard team and NHSX really holds. They were very different in scale: one a small team delivering a specific project, one a whole organisation. They're at least 100 times different in size (number of staff)!
NHSX had a broad remit. I think one can certainly criticise NHSX. It was never entirely clear what it was for and why we needed it on top of NHS Digital. But they did some good work before COVID-19. I wouldn't say they "failed disastrously" at all.
I agree that there were good things set-up during COVID that were then disbanded. That's because the Conservative government wanted to cut costs. When you say "rebrand / merge", while the process of dissolving NHSX did involve that, we're still talking about major job cuts. NHS England has cut over half its workforce in recent years, and half of the remainder are going as NHSE is merged into DHSC.
Cummings argument is that the civil service fought against many of these good things continuing, saying the civil service can already provide this. And that many individuals who failed that were dismissed ended up being rehired in new incarnations by the civil service.
Cummings has more experience of the civil service than I do. I can only speak from my more limited experience. The COVID research team I was in did meet Cummings early in 2020 and he was saying some sensible stuff then. However, he was also part of a government that thought the most sensible thing to do in a pandemic was to announce a big reorganisation of the country's public health body (Public Health England). (Admittedly that was Hancock's idea.)
I think getting rid of PHE was spite as I think there were some failures early on (not going for less accurate but abundant lateral flow testing, for example - was perfect the enemy of good?) But a lot of the people that were in PHE are in UKHSA, just as previous to PHE they were in the Health Protection Agency and so on.
The fact that we can't have warm weather without an official alert being issued is a good example of everything that's wrong with this country. Bossy, interfering, and with completely the wrong priorities.
We're the kind of country that warns people about hot weather and penalises them for having air conditioning.
How does it do the later? I have an air con unit. No one has penalised me yet.
You can’t get central government subsidy for a heat pump if it can cool as well as heat (unless this changed under the most recent update to the rules?). You also can’t use aircon to compensate for heating load on domestic property under Part O IIRC - leading to new builds with tiny windows. Even if you’ve put solar panels on the property & modelling shows that aircon will run at a net energy excess at peak heating times.
Central government attitude to aircon is locked in a 2010s mindset, where the CO2 output of the UK grid was so high that arguably aircon /was/ a bad idea on net & at that time “normal” people weren’t predicting the continued exponential decline in solar priced.
Now that solar is dirt cheap & the UK grid has decarbonised by 75%, these arguments against arcon just don’t stack up any more, but the Dept of the Environment (or whichever entity is responsible for planning rules) keeps lumbering on regardless, because no one wants to stick their head above the parapet internally & point out that the Emperor has no clothes (probably because he has no aircon & his house is overheating).
Theo Bertram @theobertram · 3h The Catch 22 of British politics is that to win a second term you need to tackle the cost of living but to tackle the underlying causes of the cost of living (increase housing supply, build new energy plants) you need two terms. Theo Bertram @theobertram · 3h Solving this Catch 22 is the key to avoiding a doom loop of failed progress & populism. Part of my answer would be to make Permanent Secretaries not only accountable for progress on 10 year goals but for public confidence in those goals. Progress needs to be metered & clear.
In other words, the most patriotic thing the opposition can do right now is make themselves unelectable enough that the next election is a boring walkover. (One of Blair's failures was to largely fail to seize the opportunity presented to him by Hague, IDS and Howard.)
On that basis, the Conservatives are being true patriots right now.
China doesn't take a decade to build new energy plants, I'm not sure why we should.
China isn't a democracy.
EDIT: Also, I think 5 waste to energy plans are being built in Scotland right not, in less than a decade.
We didn’t take a decade back in the 50s or 60s either. See the Stonehaven report I linked to previously for an analysis of the legal barriers to “just building things” that have built up in the UK since the early 70s.
Dominic Cummings' (I know) recent lecture is also interesting on this topic.
I have a lot of respect for Cummings’ diagnoses of the problems the UK faces. Rather less respect (understatement of the year?) for his ability to actually implement solutions.
He is still ploughing the only solution is burn it all down and start again.
It's a rather peaceful British burning down. He wants to remove the Cabinet Office and integrate its functions to the PM's office and other such moves that the man on the Clapham Omnibus would assume were already fact. Restoring democratic accountability mostly.
Another Number 10 power-grab. Turning the prime minister into a president, who at least would have the merit of being directly elected.
Yes, a power grab by the people who are believed (quite rightly) to wield executive power, and certainly have the responsibility, from those who currently wield it and shouldn't. Simon Case was not elected and has no business running the country.
Theo Bertram @theobertram · 3h The Catch 22 of British politics is that to win a second term you need to tackle the cost of living but to tackle the underlying causes of the cost of living (increase housing supply, build new energy plants) you need two terms. Theo Bertram @theobertram · 3h Solving this Catch 22 is the key to avoiding a doom loop of failed progress & populism. Part of my answer would be to make Permanent Secretaries not only accountable for progress on 10 year goals but for public confidence in those goals. Progress needs to be metered & clear.
If you automate, then #3 leads to #2 and in some cases #1 if a job is de-skilled. (Been there, done that).
If you want true productivity then more #3 required (investment) rather than labour subsidised by the taxpayer through UC. We seem to be unable to wean UK plc off taxpayer subsidies. Plenty of cash about as US Private Equity snaps up UK companies which, with investment, will pay them handsome bonuses (Been there, had that)
“ "There is no UK leadership here, no medical team, no crisis professionals stationed at the hospital," said a family spokesperson.”
I’m not certain why there should be a UK medical team or crisis professionals stationed at a hospital in India. It is a terrible, terrible tragedy for the families, but these things are not the responsibility of the UK government, are they?
50+ victims were British citizens.
So say it had happened in Birmingham - would we be expecting an Indian medical team to fly over to here?
Seems to be evidence of growing problems with Downing Street comms and the media. Cant go into why because of the 'ammer but todays briefing was apparently a disaster with no answers to any of the questions. SKS hiding away overseas where he is most comfortable
To be fair to SKS, attending the G7 & signing a trade agreement with the US are a more immediate priority that cannot be moved to suit domestic politics, no matter how important a given topic might be.
yes doing a trade give away and grovelling on his knees before the Orange one are really important. Gave Trump a £20 and got a £10 back , what a negotiator.
Comments
And no, I think the poll is fairly accurate as of now
A former Conservative MP has pleaded guilty to harassing her ex-wife. Katie Wallis, formerly known as Jamie Wallis, admitted sending unwanted messages to Rebecca Lovell and is due to be sentenced next month.
https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/former-tory-mp-jamie-wallis-31872927
https://www.itv.com/news/wales/2025-05-06/labour-support-collapses-as-plaid-cymru-and-reform-battle-it-out-itv-poll
Just as an indication of the scale of the Labour decline in Wales more than any sort of prediction
They're not guaranteed third on the back of polling like this and YouGov in April - 10% chance maybe they come fourth in seats (senedd). They cannot afford to go any further backwards
And then we saw the same again with the new models like the one from Warwick.
https://youtu.be/sywWI6OhmL0?si=S5FT-sP5lpRRoB5o
I was merely suggesting that Find Out Now are traditionally Reform heavy and Tory light.
Flag away. I don't care!
* It's debatable that they should even be allowed that caveat.
It doesnt seem out of the realms of likely outcomes. Id think Tories are probably hoping for 15 in the Senedd and Labour hoping to get into the 20s at worst, so its ballpark for a dissatisfied public
It's partly also that government loves re-organising. It's a cheap way for ministers to be seen as Doing Something.
NHSX is being disbanded.
BRUCE!
BRICE!
No, i mean BRAYCE
The former Corbyn wing of the party will be overjoyed.
If you have a pile of spaghetti code, there is of course a very strong temptation to rewrite the lot from scratch in a (hopefully) much more structured way. Sometimes you really have little choice; the original code is so badly broken that it has become unmaintainable. Then a rewrite becomes unavoidable.
It's not a decison to be taken lightly, though. That old spaghetti code has had years and years to take into account every possible edge case, and its shiny new replacement will almost invariably take much more blood, sweat and tears to create than anticipated as well as reintroducing a whole load of bugs from edge cases that had previously been dealt with in the old version.
The best compromise is typically to methodically isolate particular functionality and rewrite just that part of the code in a modular fashion. Then move on to the next part, and so on. The iterative approach has a lot to be said for it.
Socially, it's the approach that Britain has generally taken over the years. We don't really do revolutions, but we have typically followed a policy of renewing the bits that need to be renewed. This way of doings things has served us well; we abandon it at our peril.
It is notable that the populist right (and left) are so nihilist, burn it down so as to re-build it. This represents a dividing line with traditional conservatism that celebrated constancy and continuity.
https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/articles/crrqlnqqrzyo
We was doing the investigation for the FA, the same people who took 2 years to work out Red Ken had said some dodgy stuff on live TV?
I think it is telling of too many reorganisations.
Where as we said before, the ones that succeeded, disbanded immediately. Big Dom in his various interviews gives a number of other concrete examples of things that were setup during COVID and worked, but were disbanded ASAP.
Resulting in nothing.
If a person forgets to SORN or insure their car. Even if only for 1 day, that’s a prosecution under the SJP, a conviction and a criminal record.
We live in a nation where rowdy lawless behaviour, or shoplifting, burglary, phone theft and the like goes virtually unpunished. The perpetrators act without fear of consequences.
Yet a small, even unintentional, breaking of some minor rules sees the system come down like a ton of bricks on people.
That’s your two tier justice
https://x.com/crimeldn/status/1934719373060530319?s=61
It's currently denying their requests to purchase weapons.
And the US administration is functionally ignoring the daily bombardment and killing of Ukrainian civilians.
Why are they still taking notice of this stuff ?
Unless it's the fear of Trump turning actively, as opposed to passively hostile.
Now confirmed that the US is blocking Ukraine from striking Russian energy assets, protecting Putin's cash cow.
https://x.com/KyivInsider/status/1934715021113872596
"No, not like that"
VoteFire earlyVotefire often...NHSX had a broad remit. I think one can certainly criticise NHSX. It was never entirely clear what it was for and why we needed it on top of NHS Digital. But they did some good work before COVID-19. I wouldn't say they "failed disastrously" at all.
I agree that there were good things set-up during COVID that were then disbanded. That's because the Conservative government wanted to cut costs. When you say "rebrand / merge", while the process of dissolving NHSX did involve that, we're still talking about major job cuts. NHS England has cut over half its workforce in recent years, and half of the remainder are going as NHSE is merged into DHSC.
Westminster Voting Intention:
RFM: 30% (-1)
LAB: 24% (-1)
CON: 18% (+1)
LDM: 12% (+1)
GRN: 9% (-1)
SNP: 3% (+1)
Via @OpiniumResearch, 11-13 Jun.
Changes w/ 28-30 May.
https://x.com/Maks_NAFO_FELLA/status/1934976394330821062
1. They want to keep the US onside so that they still receive the satellite intelligence data.
2. They're hoping that the US will change its mind to sell weapons to Ukraine.
3. They have to prove to some wavering European allies - such as France and Germany - they they're doing everything they can to keep the US onside. Germany is nervous of acting without US leadership and neither country have followed the British or Nordic example in replacing lost US support.
4. There are still plenty of high-value targets they can hit even if energy assets are ruled out. Ukraine have recently attacked drone production factories, and factories that create electronic components for missiles. So the opportunity cost of leaving energy assets unmolested is not as high as it might seem.
NEW THREAD
https://www.verify-it.co.uk/
As for Trump. Beneath contempt.
Central government attitude to aircon is locked in a 2010s mindset, where the CO2 output of the UK grid was so high that arguably aircon /was/ a bad idea on net & at that time “normal” people weren’t predicting the continued exponential decline in solar priced.
Now that solar is dirt cheap & the UK grid has decarbonised by 75%, these arguments against arcon just don’t stack up any more, but the Dept of the Environment (or whichever entity is responsible for planning rules) keeps lumbering on regardless, because no one wants to stick their head above the parapet internally & point out that the Emperor has no clothes (probably because he has no aircon & his house is overheating).
If you want true productivity then more #3 required (investment) rather than labour subsidised by the taxpayer through UC. We seem to be unable to wean UK plc off taxpayer subsidies. Plenty of cash about as US Private Equity snaps up UK companies which, with investment, will pay them handsome bonuses (Been there, had that)