Next cabinet minister to go – politicalbetting.com

System · June 17

Next cabinet minister to go – politicalbetting.com

Looking at this market from William Hill I wonder if the value might be with Bridget Phillipson who has been tipped to be sacked in a forthcoming reshuffle because her stint as Education Secretary has been suboptimal.

Read the full story here

AnneJGP · June 17

Even fewer young people to earn the money to pay for their parents' age-related needs.

FrancisUrquhart · June 17

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

glw said:

bondegezou said:

glw said:

MaxPB said:
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.)

But we know why he did this. Their total refusal to take real action / general incompetence to scale up testing.

Yes we know Hancock played a bit fast and loose to make his self imposed target, but before then if we kept at PHE rate of testing we might just be getting a testing appointment slot any day now.

bondegezou · June 17

I am saddened that my dad, who worked on the 1967 Abortion Act, died a few months ago and will miss the abortion vote today. The '67 Act was a mess of compromises to get the vote over the line and the reformers never wanted it to be the final say on the subject.

AnneJGP · June 17

bondegezou said:
I am saddened that my dad, who worked on the 1967 Abortion Act, died a few months ago and will miss the abortion vote today. The '67 Act was a mess of compromises to get the vote over the line and the reformers never wanted it to be the final say on the subject.

It would be a lot less messy to put something in the water to prevent women from conceiving.

FrancisUrquhart · June 17

logical_song said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

glw said:

bondegezou said:

glw said:

MaxPB said:
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/

It is something Patrick Vallance feels very strongly about. But a bit like Timpson after being hired he appears to have become the Invisible Man. Now maybe he is just getting on with the job and great things will happen, but its quite abnormal just how invisible he is especially when Starmer and MacFadden gives it the big'un about AI solving civil service productivity issues.

viewcode · June 17

AnneJGP said:
Even fewer young people to earn the money to pay for their parents' age-related needs.

That's alright. We'll have assisted dying soon. That will make things so much better /s

(narrator: viewcode hates the 2020s)

bondegezou · June 17

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

glw said:

bondegezou said:

glw said:

MaxPB said:
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.)
But we know why he did this. Their total refusal to take real action / general incompetence to scale up testing.

Yes we know Hancock played a bit fast and loose to make his self imposed target, but before then if we kept at PHE rate of testing we might just be getting a testing appointment slot any day now.

Testing was the responsibility of NHS Test & Trace, that Hancock had set up as a separate thing, putting the eminently qualified (smirk) Dido Harding in charge. The re-organisation then took half of PHE and merged it with NHS T&T and with the Joint Biosecurity Centre, which had also been created separately, to make UKHSA, while moving the other half of PHE into DHSC.

wooliedyed · June 17

Decriminalising abortion up to birth ought to be enough for any of them.
Kendall, for she is disgusting (and a massive rebellion looms)

FrancisUrquhart · June 17

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

glw said:

bondegezou said:

glw said:

MaxPB said:
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.)
But we know why he did this. Their total refusal to take real action / general incompetence to scale up testing.

Yes we know Hancock played a bit fast and loose to make his self imposed target, but before then if we kept at PHE rate of testing we might just be getting a testing appointment slot any day now.
Testing was the responsibility of NHS Test & Trace, that Hancock had set up as a separate thing, putting the eminently qualified (smirk) Dido Harding in charge. The re-organisation then took half of PHE and merged it with NHS T&T and with the Joint Biosecurity Centre, which had also been created separately, to make UKHSA, while moving the other half of PHE into DHSC.

Not originally it wasn't. The initial testing roll out was PHE when the UK could hardly manage a few 1000 tests and the refused to use private labs. Harding was appointed in May 2020 after the first lockdown.

Timeline....

March - PHE failed miserably on testing, barely managed 10k a day.
April - Hancock set goal of 100k tests a day by end of April
May - Managed 100k (with some postal votes)

Then Harding appointed.

We then built really good testing capacity. Where it went to shit was Hancock / Harding overpromised on the ability to tracing, which really turned out to be a fouls errand.

bondegezou · June 17

AnneJGP said:

bondegezou said:
I am saddened that my dad, who worked on the 1967 Abortion Act, died a few months ago and will miss the abortion vote today. The '67 Act was a mess of compromises to get the vote over the line and the reformers never wanted it to be the final say on the subject.
It would be a lot less messy to put something in the water to prevent women from conceiving.

I don't know what point you are making, Anne.

My dad's overwhelming professional concern was to give women (and men) the choice over their fertility.

williamglenn · June 17

Small boats situation getting worse, says No 10

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c39zk7pp29ko

bondegezou · June 17

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

glw said:

bondegezou said:

glw said:

MaxPB said:
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.)
But we know why he did this. Their total refusal to take real action / general incompetence to scale up testing.

Yes we know Hancock played a bit fast and loose to make his self imposed target, but before then if we kept at PHE rate of testing we might just be getting a testing appointment slot any day now.
Testing was the responsibility of NHS Test & Trace, that Hancock had set up as a separate thing, putting the eminently qualified (smirk) Dido Harding in charge. The re-organisation then took half of PHE and merged it with NHS T&T and with the Joint Biosecurity Centre, which had also been created separately, to make UKHSA, while moving the other half of PHE into DHSC.
Not originally it wasn't. The initial testing roll out was PHE when the UK could hardly manage a few 1000 tests and the refused to use private labs. Harding was appointed in May 2020.

All of which is some months before the big reorganisation, which is what we were talking about, so I am unclear what link you are making.

wooliedyed · June 17

viewcode said:

AnneJGP said:
Even fewer young people to earn the money to pay for their parents' age-related needs.
That's alright. We'll have assisted dying soon. That will make things so much better /s

(narrator: viewcode hates the 2020s)

Legalisation ------> brought up ---------> encouraged ------------> prescribed -------------> mandated

Obviously I'm.overdoing it but I'm frankly terrified of GPs being told to summon certain patients for a mandated discussion being the end game

Andy_JS · June 17

"Israel kills Iran’s military chief four days into job"

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/06/17/israel-iran-latest-news-missile-strikes-donald-trump/

wooliedyed · June 17

williamglenn said:
Small boats situation getting worse, says No 10

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c39zk7pp29ko

Gangs smashed into a position of dominance

Andy_JS · June 17

bondegezou said:

AnneJGP said:

bondegezou said:
I am saddened that my dad, who worked on the 1967 Abortion Act, died a few months ago and will miss the abortion vote today. The '67 Act was a mess of compromises to get the vote over the line and the reformers never wanted it to be the final say on the subject.
It would be a lot less messy to put something in the water to prevent women from conceiving.
I don't know what point you are making, Anne.

My dad's overwhelming professional concern was to give women (and men) the choice over their fertility.

Being anti-abortion is an honourable position to take imo.

FrancisUrquhart · June 17

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

glw said:

bondegezou said:

glw said:

MaxPB said:
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.)
But we know why he did this. Their total refusal to take real action / general incompetence to scale up testing.

Yes we know Hancock played a bit fast and loose to make his self imposed target, but before then if we kept at PHE rate of testing we might just be getting a testing appointment slot any day now.
Testing was the responsibility of NHS Test & Trace, that Hancock had set up as a separate thing, putting the eminently qualified (smirk) Dido Harding in charge. The re-organisation then took half of PHE and merged it with NHS T&T and with the Joint Biosecurity Centre, which had also been created separately, to make UKHSA, while moving the other half of PHE into DHSC.
Not originally it wasn't. The initial testing roll out was PHE when the UK could hardly manage a few 1000 tests and the refused to use private labs. Harding was appointed in May 2020.
All of which is some months before the big reorganisation, which is what we were talking about, so I am unclear what link you are making.

I simply said in that case I understand why Hancock thought the need to do this. They failed miserably. Not only failed, but were obstructive e.g. refused to use private lab equipment.

He employed the private sector to massive scale up testing. Which outside of the odd day were every parent in the lab demanded a test for their kid as they were going back to school, worked very well.

The trace part was the over-promise massively underdeliver. But on reflection it seems a fools errand to try and trace on individual levels rather than population levels.

Phil · June 17

FPT:

turbotubbs said:

williamglenn said:

Andy_JS said:
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 pricing. Subsidising / permitting in planning heat pumps that people could use to cool their homes in the summer, with the attendant vastly increased carbon output, would have appeared to be contrary to the Government’s net-zero goals.

Now that solar is dirt cheap & the UK grid has decarbonised by 75%, these arguments against aircon 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).

bondegezou · June 17

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

glw said:

bondegezou said:

glw said:

MaxPB said:
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.)
But we know why he did this. Their total refusal to take real action / general incompetence to scale up testing.

Yes we know Hancock played a bit fast and loose to make his self imposed target, but before then if we kept at PHE rate of testing we might just be getting a testing appointment slot any day now.
Testing was the responsibility of NHS Test & Trace, that Hancock had set up as a separate thing, putting the eminently qualified (smirk) Dido Harding in charge. The re-organisation then took half of PHE and merged it with NHS T&T and with the Joint Biosecurity Centre, which had also been created separately, to make UKHSA, while moving the other half of PHE into DHSC.
Not originally it wasn't. The initial testing roll out was PHE when the UK could hardly manage a few 1000 tests and the refused to use private labs. Harding was appointed in May 2020.
All of which is some months before the big reorganisation, which is what we were talking about, so I am unclear what link you are making.
I simply said in that case I understand why Hancock thought the need to do this. They failed miserably. Not only failed, but were obstructive e.g. refused to use private lab equipment.

If you accept that argument (which I don't), that explains why he set up NHS Test & Trace, but not why the later re-organisation.

Sean_F · June 17

wooliedyed said:

viewcode said:

AnneJGP said:
Even fewer young people to earn the money to pay for their parents' age-related needs.
That's alright. We'll have assisted dying soon. That will make things so much better /s

(narrator: viewcode hates the 2020s)
Legalisation ------> brought up ---------> encouraged ------------> prescribed -------------> mandated

Obviously I'm.overdoing it but I'm frankly terrified of GPs being told to summon certain patients for a mandated discussion being the end game

Eventually, it will be seen as inevitable, on fiscal grounds.

Leon · June 17

This header silently makes the unhinged assumption that there is a Cabinet Minister whose performance has been "optimal"

FrancisUrquhart · June 17

williamglenn said:
Small boats situation getting worse, says No 10

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c39zk7pp29ko

New slogan required...FURTHER AND FASTER....

FrancisUrquhart · June 17

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

glw said:

bondegezou said:

glw said:

MaxPB said:
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.)
But we know why he did this. Their total refusal to take real action / general incompetence to scale up testing.

Yes we know Hancock played a bit fast and loose to make his self imposed target, but before then if we kept at PHE rate of testing we might just be getting a testing appointment slot any day now.
Testing was the responsibility of NHS Test & Trace, that Hancock had set up as a separate thing, putting the eminently qualified (smirk) Dido Harding in charge. The re-organisation then took half of PHE and merged it with NHS T&T and with the Joint Biosecurity Centre, which had also been created separately, to make UKHSA, while moving the other half of PHE into DHSC.
Not originally it wasn't. The initial testing roll out was PHE when the UK could hardly manage a few 1000 tests and the refused to use private labs. Harding was appointed in May 2020.
All of which is some months before the big reorganisation, which is what we were talking about, so I am unclear what link you are making.
I simply said in that case I understand why Hancock thought the need to do this. They failed miserably. Not only failed, but were obstructive e.g. refused to use private lab equipment.
If you accept that argument (which I don't), that explains why he set up NHS Test & Trace, but not why the later re-organisation.

You don't accept that PHE failed on testing?

AnneJGP · June 17

bondegezou said:

AnneJGP said:

bondegezou said:
I am saddened that my dad, who worked on the 1967 Abortion Act, died a few months ago and will miss the abortion vote today. The '67 Act was a mess of compromises to get the vote over the line and the reformers never wanted it to be the final say on the subject.
It would be a lot less messy to put something in the water to prevent women from conceiving.
I don't know what point you are making, Anne.

My dad's overwhelming professional concern was to give women (and men) the choice over their fertility.

Abortion up to birth is quite drastic. Much better if choice could be achieved by deliberately taking something to counteract universal contraception. I don't recall that the original promoters of legal abortion expected such a wide scale development of the permission they fought for.

wooliedyed · June 17

Sean_F said:

wooliedyed said:

viewcode said:

AnneJGP said:
Even fewer young people to earn the money to pay for their parents' age-related needs.
That's alright. We'll have assisted dying soon. That will make things so much better /s

(narrator: viewcode hates the 2020s)
Legalisation ------> brought up ---------> encouraged ------------> prescribed -------------> mandated

Obviously I'm.overdoing it but I'm frankly terrified of GPs being told to summon certain patients for a mandated discussion being the end game
Eventually, it will be seen as inevitable, on fiscal grounds.

It will form part of inheritance tax planning meetings

turbotubbs · June 17

williamglenn said:
Small boats situation getting worse, says No 10

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c39zk7pp29ko

Or to put it another way - its summer.

FrancisUrquhart · June 17

turbotubbs said:

williamglenn said:
Small boats situation getting worse, says No 10

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c39zk7pp29ko
Or to put it another way - its summer.

42% higher than at the same point last year is the tricky thing for the government.

JosiasJessop · June 17

Andy_JS said:

bondegezou said:

AnneJGP said:

bondegezou said:
I am saddened that my dad, who worked on the 1967 Abortion Act, died a few months ago and will miss the abortion vote today. The '67 Act was a mess of compromises to get the vote over the line and the reformers never wanted it to be the final say on the subject.
It would be a lot less messy to put something in the water to prevent women from conceiving.
I don't know what point you are making, Anne.

My dad's overwhelming professional concern was to give women (and men) the choice over their fertility.
Being anti-abortion is an honourable position to take imo.

Indeed. Being pro-choice is also an honourable position to take imo.

Luckyguy1983 · June 17

Leon said:
This header silently makes the unhinged assumption that there is a Cabinet Minister whose performance has been "optimal"

Well, there's... ah
But there again, there's... oh
Ah, but what abou.. no.

FrancisUrquhart · June 17

Leon said:
This header silently makes the unhinged assumption that there is a ~~Cabinet~~ Minister whose performance has been "optimal"

I am still awaiting Timpson and Vallance's homework for marking.

williamglenn · June 17

FrancisUrquhart said:

williamglenn said:
Small boats situation getting worse, says No 10

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c39zk7pp29ko
New slogan required...FURTHER AND FASTER....

Ironic that in this clip he accuses the Tories of making empty promises.

https://x.com/keir_starmer/status/1889676987968479496

The Tories lost control of immigration.

My Labour government is smashing the gangs and securing our borders.

wooliedyed · June 17

turbotubbs said:

williamglenn said:
Small boats situation getting worse, says No 10

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c39zk7pp29ko
Or to put it another way - its summer.

Too sunny to smash any gangs. Leave it until the leaves change colour

FrancisUrquhart · June 17

williamglenn said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

williamglenn said:
Small boats situation getting worse, says No 10

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c39zk7pp29ko
New slogan required...FURTHER AND FASTER....
Ironic that in this clip he accuses the Tories of making empty promises.

https://x.com/keir_starmer/status/1889676987968479496

The Tories lost control of immigration.

My Labour government is smashing the gangs and securing our borders.

A bit like Trump, there is always a tweet...

AnneJGP · June 17

wooliedyed said:
Decriminalising abortion up to birth ought to be enough for any of them.
Kendall, for she is disgusting (and a massive rebellion looms)

There must be quite a few parents of extremely young infants who would wish they could turn the clock back a few days. Why not, what's the difference?

turbotubbs · June 17

FrancisUrquhart said:

turbotubbs said:

williamglenn said:
Small boats situation getting worse, says No 10

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c39zk7pp29ko
Or to put it another way - its summer.
42% higher than at the same point last year is the tricky thing for the government.

It it but its been a very pleasant spring and start to summer. Of course both governments will be happy to use bad weather to say "look, we are reducing crossings..."

Phil · June 17

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

glw said:

bondegezou said:

glw said:

MaxPB said:
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.)
But we know why he did this. Their total refusal to take real action / general incompetence to scale up testing.

Yes we know Hancock played a bit fast and loose to make his self imposed target, but before then if we kept at PHE rate of testing we might just be getting a testing appointment slot any day now.
Testing was the responsibility of NHS Test & Trace, that Hancock had set up as a separate thing, putting the eminently qualified (smirk) Dido Harding in charge. The re-organisation then took half of PHE and merged it with NHS T&T and with the Joint Biosecurity Centre, which had also been created separately, to make UKHSA, while moving the other half of PHE into DHSC.
Not originally it wasn't. The initial testing roll out was PHE when the UK could hardly manage a few 1000 tests and the refused to use private labs. Harding was appointed in May 2020 after the first lockdown.

Timeline....

March - PHE failed miserably on testing, barely managed 10k a day.
April - Hancock set goal of 100k tests a day by end of April
May - Managed 100k (with some postal votes)

Then Harding appointed.

We then built really good testing capacity. Where it went to shit was Hancock / Harding overpromised on the ability to tracing, which really turned out to be a fouls errand.

With another disease tracing might have worked if implemented hard & early. We didn’t know at that point just how infectious Covid was - way off the scale of known existing diseases IIRC (except possibly for measles, the most infectious disease known at the time?) Trying it wasn’t the problem - not abandoning it much earlier when it became clear that it was completely useless was the problem.

Eabhal · June 17

Phil said:
FPT:

turbotubbs said:

williamglenn said:

Andy_JS said:
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 pricing. Subsidising / permitting in planning heat pumps that people could use to cool their homes in the summer, with the attendant vastly increased carbon output, would have appeared to be contrary to the Government’s net-zero goals.

Now that solar is dirt cheap & the UK grid has decarbonised by 75%, these arguments against aircon 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).

That's the most infuriating PB post I've read in some time.

We do need to start moving towards adaptation, not just mitigation. Air con is going to become essential as (genuine) heat waves become more common.

wooliedyed · June 17

AnneJGP said:

wooliedyed said:
Decriminalising abortion up to birth ought to be enough for any of them.
Kendall, for she is disgusting (and a massive rebellion looms)
There must be quite a few parents of extremely young infants who would wish they could turn the clock back a few days. Why not, what's the difference?

Personally id be moving the latest time to abort a long way towards conception from 24 weeks

FrancisUrquhart · June 17

Phil said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

glw said:

bondegezou said:

glw said:

MaxPB said:
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.)
But we know why he did this. Their total refusal to take real action / general incompetence to scale up testing.

Yes we know Hancock played a bit fast and loose to make his self imposed target, but before then if we kept at PHE rate of testing we might just be getting a testing appointment slot any day now.
Testing was the responsibility of NHS Test & Trace, that Hancock had set up as a separate thing, putting the eminently qualified (smirk) Dido Harding in charge. The re-organisation then took half of PHE and merged it with NHS T&T and with the Joint Biosecurity Centre, which had also been created separately, to make UKHSA, while moving the other half of PHE into DHSC.
Not originally it wasn't. The initial testing roll out was PHE when the UK could hardly manage a few 1000 tests and the refused to use private labs. Harding was appointed in May 2020 after the first lockdown.

Timeline....

March - PHE failed miserably on testing, barely managed 10k a day.
April - Hancock set goal of 100k tests a day by end of April
May - Managed 100k (with some postal votes)

Then Harding appointed.

We then built really good testing capacity. Where it went to shit was Hancock / Harding overpromised on the ability to tracing, which really turned out to be a fouls errand.
With another disease tracing might have worked if implemented hard & early. We didn’t know at that point just how infectious Covid was - way off the scale of known existing diseases IIRC (except possibly for measles, the most infectious disease known at the time?) Trying it wasn’t the problem - not abandoning it much earlier when it became clear that it was completely useless was the problem.

Well there was also a problem that the app was a shit show, they refused to agree to Apple / Google T&Cs and thought they could hack around the system. This was NHSX bullshittery.

But yes, in my opinion, I am not actually that critical of the government for trying things and doing it rapidly, even if there were some negative sides to that e.g. I am sure loads of money was wasted on trying those early rapid tests, but in the end they formed a useful part of the strategy.

My major criticism was things going on too long e.g. while the media always bang on and on about Eat out to Help Out idea from Sunak, the far bigger misstep was furlough went on far too long. Zombie companies staggered on too long, people not working for over 2 years, is terrible for them and the country. Same with availability of near limitless rapid tests, that went on far too long. There was no need for most of the general public to be testing daily for as long as they did and it became their weird obsession to some.

Mexicanpete · June 17

williamglenn said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

williamglenn said:
Small boats situation getting worse, says No 10

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c39zk7pp29ko
New slogan required...FURTHER AND FASTER....
Ironic that in this clip he accuses the Tories of making empty promises.

https://x.com/keir_starmer/status/1889676987968479496

The Tories lost control of immigration.

My Labour government is smashing the gangs and securing our borders.

The Starmerwave has been one of Brexit's greatest failures.

Cyclefree · June 17

Lucy Powell ought to be sacked.

wooliedyed · June 17

Cyclefree said:
Lucy Powell ought to be sacked.

She should be considering her position, but she isnt

FrancisUrquhart · June 17

wooliedyed said:

Cyclefree said:
Lucy Powell ought to be sacked.
She should be considering her position, but she isnt

oh, we want to blow that little trumpet now do we....

FrancisUrquhart · June 17

Head in hands....

Turning to the new prison next to HMP Gartree, I can advise that Ministry of Justice have signed an order with Wates Construction Limited to complete the main works for the new prison, which we expect to be complete by early 2029. You are likely aware that the new prison will be given a new name. We are preparing to launch a consultation with both stakeholders and the local community to find a name for the prison, so that it will have its own clear identity separate to HMP Gartree. I think it is very important that local culture and history is appropriately reflected in the choice of name and that we hear and consult with those living close to the prison on what they would like it to be called.

https://order-order.com/2025/06/17/exc-labour-blocks-plan-to-build-240-places-at-existing-prison/

Its a f##king prison....it should take you 5 minutes to decide on one. Nobody living very close to a new prison will be going well at least they conducted a consultation and went with HMP Rainbow rather HMP Gulag for Slags.

moonshine · June 17

wooliedyed said:

AnneJGP said:

wooliedyed said:
Decriminalising abortion up to birth ought to be enough for any of them.
Kendall, for she is disgusting (and a massive rebellion looms)
There must be quite a few parents of extremely young infants who would wish they could turn the clock back a few days. Why not, what's the difference?
Personally id be moving the latest time to abort a long way towards conception from 24 weeks

Decriminalising full term abortions is grotesque, any MP backing it isn’t fit for office. Agreed that 24 weeks feels too late these days too. Ideally you’d want universal early dna screening and bringing the date back, not moving it forwards (or eliminating it).

wooliedyed · June 17

moonshine said:

wooliedyed said:

AnneJGP said:

wooliedyed said:
Decriminalising abortion up to birth ought to be enough for any of them.
Kendall, for she is disgusting (and a massive rebellion looms)
There must be quite a few parents of extremely young infants who would wish they could turn the clock back a few days. Why not, what's the difference?
Personally id be moving the latest time to abort a long way towards conception from 24 weeks
Decriminalising full term abortions is grotesque, any MP backing it isn’t fit for office. Agreed that 24 weeks feels too late these days too. Ideally you’d want universal early dna screening and bringing the date back, not moving it forwards (or eliminating it).

No argument here

rkrkrk · June 17

I think Wes Streeting is value there.
PM has just hired a new expert adviser on health:
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/appointment-of-axel-heitmueller-as-the-pms-expert-adviser-on-health?ref=healthpolicyinsight.com

I suspect that's a sign No. 10 is a little worried.
Streeting is also concerned about assisted dying. He's been given a generous settlement, but that increased pressure he has to deliver improvements. The progress on NHS waiting lists has been marginal to date. Finally, another angle is he is talked about as a rival to Starmer.

rkrkrk · June 17

Have checked £5 on at William hill, they wouldnt let me have a tenner. Been ages since I've been on there.

Stereodog · June 17

wooliedyed said:

moonshine said:

wooliedyed said:

AnneJGP said:

wooliedyed said:
Decriminalising abortion up to birth ought to be enough for any of them.
Kendall, for she is disgusting (and a massive rebellion looms)
There must be quite a few parents of extremely young infants who would wish they could turn the clock back a few days. Why not, what's the difference?
Personally id be moving the latest time to abort a long way towards conception from 24 weeks
Decriminalising full term abortions is grotesque, any MP backing it isn’t fit for office. Agreed that 24 weeks feels too late these days too. Ideally you’d want universal early dna screening and bringing the date back, not moving it forwards (or eliminating it).
No argument here

It's worth pointing out that there are two amendments to the Crime and Policing Bill that seems to be being bracketed together in people's minds. The Antoniazzi one is proposing that later term abortion be decriminalised for women doing it to themselves but would still be illegal for medical providers. Personally, I sympathise with this as if you're desperate enough to abort your own foetus that late in the pregnancy then I don't think the criminal justice system is where you need to be.

The second Creasy amendment proposes to decriminalise it for medical professionals too which I agree is more troubling. It's worth noting that the Antoniazzi one is much more likely to pass than the Creasy ones

FrancisUrquhart · June 17

rkrkrk said:
I think Wes Streeting is value there.
PM has just hired a new expert adviser on health:
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/appointment-of-axel-heitmueller-as-the-pms-expert-adviser-on-health?ref=healthpolicyinsight.com

I suspect that's a sign No. 10 is a little worried.
Streeting is also concerned about assisted dying. He's been given a generous settlement, but that increased pressure he has to deliver improvements. The progress on NHS waiting lists has been marginal to date. Finally, another angle is he is talked about as a rival to Starmer.

"served as Director for Strategy & Innovation at NHS Test and Trace"

Phil · June 17

The Spanish report into their Grid failure is out: https://www.euractiv.com/section/eet/news/spanish-government-blames-power-plant-and-grid-operators-for-catastrophic-blackout/

No big surprises. Basically what was speculated (a cascading failure of generators dropping off the grid after an initial perturbation) has turned out to be the case.

The one interesting wrinkle is that the report claims that electricity generators who were being paid to dampen grid oscillations completely failed to do so. It says that conventional generators were up & running & being paid to step in to compensate for grid power loss but failed to do so.

It’s not clear whether there was actually enough capacity available to compensate for the solar providers going offline though - the majority of the criticism is apparently aimed at the National Grid operator for not having the means to stabilise the grid.

williamglenn · June 17

FrancisUrquhart said:

rkrkrk said:
I think Wes Streeting is value there.
PM has just hired a new expert adviser on health:
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/appointment-of-axel-heitmueller-as-the-pms-expert-adviser-on-health?ref=healthpolicyinsight.com

I suspect that's a sign No. 10 is a little worried.
Streeting is also concerned about assisted dying. He's been given a generous settlement, but that increased pressure he has to deliver improvements. The progress on NHS waiting lists has been marginal to date. Finally, another angle is he is talked about as a rival to Starmer.
"served as Director for Strategy & Innovation at NHS Test and Trace"

Combining test and trace with assisted dying could be problematic.

JosiasJessop · June 17

Phil said:
The Spanish report into their Grid failure is out: https://www.euractiv.com/section/eet/news/spanish-government-blames-power-plant-and-grid-operators-for-catastrophic-blackout/

No big surprises. Basically what was speculated (a cascading failure of generators dropping off the grid after an initial perturbation) has turned out to be the case.

The one interesting wrinkle is that the report claims that electricity generators who were being paid to dampen grid oscillations completely failed to do so. It says that conventional generators were up & running & being paid to step in to compensate for grid power loss but failed to do so.

It’s not clear whether there was actually enough capacity available to compensate for the solar providers going offline though - the majority of the criticism is apparently aimed at the National Grid operator for not having the means to stabilise the grid.

So it was conventional power generators who failed to do their job? That wasn't the line one poster was taking...

tlg86 · June 17

Why is Heidi Hi favourite to go?

Selebian · June 17

AnneJGP said:

bondegezou said:
I am saddened that my dad, who worked on the 1967 Abortion Act, died a few months ago and will miss the abortion vote today. The '67 Act was a mess of compromises to get the vote over the line and the reformers never wanted it to be the final say on the subject.
It would be a lot less messy to put something in the water to prevent women from conceiving.

I believe we're already on it: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7139484/
(not intentionally though!)

Sunil_Prasannan · June 17

Everyone's bangin' on about the right to Assisted Dying? But what about the right to Assisted Living?

moonshine · June 17

Stereodog said:

wooliedyed said:

moonshine said:

wooliedyed said:

AnneJGP said:

wooliedyed said:
Decriminalising abortion up to birth ought to be enough for any of them.
Kendall, for she is disgusting (and a massive rebellion looms)
There must be quite a few parents of extremely young infants who would wish they could turn the clock back a few days. Why not, what's the difference?
Personally id be moving the latest time to abort a long way towards conception from 24 weeks
Decriminalising full term abortions is grotesque, any MP backing it isn’t fit for office. Agreed that 24 weeks feels too late these days too. Ideally you’d want universal early dna screening and bringing the date back, not moving it forwards (or eliminating it).
No argument here
It's worth pointing out that there are two amendments to the Crime and Policing Bill that seems to be being bracketed together in people's minds. The Antoniazzi one is proposing that later term abortion be decriminalised for women doing it to themselves but would still be illegal for medical providers. Personally, I sympathise with this as if you're desperate enough to abort your own foetus that late in the pregnancy then I don't think the criminal justice system is where you need to be.

The second Creasy amendment proposes to decriminalise it for medical professionals too which I agree is more troubling. It's worth noting that the Antoniazzi one is much more likely to pass than the Creasy ones

Nonsense on point 1. You might as well decriminalise raping and murdering your own children by that logic.

Dopermean · June 17

tlg86 said:
Why is Heidi Hi favourite to go?

Her sunny disposition?

wooliedyed · June 17

Stereodog said:

wooliedyed said:

moonshine said:

wooliedyed said:

AnneJGP said:

wooliedyed said:
Decriminalising abortion up to birth ought to be enough for any of them.
Kendall, for she is disgusting (and a massive rebellion looms)
There must be quite a few parents of extremely young infants who would wish they could turn the clock back a few days. Why not, what's the difference?
Personally id be moving the latest time to abort a long way towards conception from 24 weeks
Decriminalising full term abortions is grotesque, any MP backing it isn’t fit for office. Agreed that 24 weeks feels too late these days too. Ideally you’d want universal early dna screening and bringing the date back, not moving it forwards (or eliminating it).
No argument here
It's worth pointing out that there are two amendments to the Crime and Policing Bill that seems to be being bracketed together in people's minds. The Antoniazzi one is proposing that later term abortion be decriminalised for women doing it to themselves but would still be illegal for medical providers. Personally, I sympathise with this as if you're desperate enough to abort your own foetus that late in the pregnancy then I don't think the criminal justice system is where you need to be.

The second Creasy amendment proposes to decriminalise it for medical professionals too which I agree is more troubling. It's worth noting that the Antoniazzi one is much more likely to pass than the Creasy ones

I understand, but im not amenable to either

moonshine · June 17

German Chancellor publicly imploring America to take out what remains of Iran’s nuclear capability. Trump slaps down Gabbard and Tucker Carlson. The die is cast if you ask me.

AnneJGP · June 17

Stereodog said:

wooliedyed said:

moonshine said:

wooliedyed said:

AnneJGP said:

wooliedyed said:
Decriminalising abortion up to birth ought to be enough for any of them.
Kendall, for she is disgusting (and a massive rebellion looms)
There must be quite a few parents of extremely young infants who would wish they could turn the clock back a few days. Why not, what's the difference?
Personally id be moving the latest time to abort a long way towards conception from 24 weeks
Decriminalising full term abortions is grotesque, any MP backing it isn’t fit for office. Agreed that 24 weeks feels too late these days too. Ideally you’d want universal early dna screening and bringing the date back, not moving it forwards (or eliminating it).
No argument here
It's worth pointing out that there are two amendments to the Crime and Policing Bill that seems to be being bracketed together in people's minds. The Antoniazzi one is proposing that later term abortion be decriminalised for women doing it to themselves but would still be illegal for medical providers. Personally, I sympathise with this as if you're desperate enough to abort your own foetus that late in the pregnancy then I don't think the criminal justice system is where you need to be.

The second Creasy amendment proposes to decriminalise it for medical professionals too which I agree is more troubling. It's worth noting that the Antoniazzi one is much more likely to pass than the Creasy ones

That just kicks the can down the road. abortion was legalised to avoid DIY injuries/deaths. Is a DIY very late term abortion any safer?

Flatlander · June 17

FrancisUrquhart said:
Head in hands....

Turning to the new prison next to HMP Gartree, I can advise that Ministry of Justice have signed an order with Wates Construction Limited to complete the main works for the new prison, which we expect to be complete by early 2029. You are likely aware that the new prison will be given a new name. We are preparing to launch a consultation with both stakeholders and the local community to find a name for the prison, so that it will have its own clear identity separate to HMP Gartree. I think it is very important that local culture and history is appropriately reflected in the choice of name and that we hear and consult with those living close to the prison on what they would like it to be called.

https://order-order.com/2025/06/17/exc-labour-blocks-plan-to-build-240-places-at-existing-prison/

Its a f##king prison....it should take you 5 minutes to decide on one. Nobody living very close to a new prison will be going well at least they conducted a consultation and went with HMP Rainbow rather HMP Gulag for Slags.

It is all a bit Golgafrinchan isn't it.

People in the MoJ not qualified to discuss the design of the prison or the choice of structure spend weeks deciding what to call it in order to appear busy.

Leon · June 17

moonshine said:

wooliedyed said:

AnneJGP said:

wooliedyed said:
Decriminalising abortion up to birth ought to be enough for any of them.
Kendall, for she is disgusting (and a massive rebellion looms)
There must be quite a few parents of extremely young infants who would wish they could turn the clock back a few days. Why not, what's the difference?
Personally id be moving the latest time to abort a long way towards conception from 24 weeks
Decriminalising full term abortions is grotesque, any MP backing it isn’t fit for office. Agreed that 24 weeks feels too late these days too. Ideally you’d want universal early dna screening and bringing the date back, not moving it forwards (or eliminating it).

Is there some massive clamour amongst the public to hugely liberalise abortion? If so I must have missed it. Why on earth are Labour doing this, "decriminalising" full term abortions by doctors is a shocking change. Was it in the manifesto?

This is a government of cranks, traitors and incompetents, all pushing their own crazy theories

One of the few blessings of being British rather than a Yankee is that we don't have their horrible abortion arguments. This risks importing that toxic debate

Why??

williamglenn · June 17

moonshine said:
German Chancellor publicly imploring America to take out what remains of Iran’s nuclear capability. Trump slaps down Gabbard and Tucker Carlson. The die is cast if you ask me.

Trump is on rhetorical form with "Kooky Tucker"

AnneJGP · June 17

FrancisUrquhart said:
Head in hands....

Turning to the new prison next to HMP Gartree, I can advise that Ministry of Justice have signed an order with Wates Construction Limited to complete the main works for the new prison, which we expect to be complete by early 2029. You are likely aware that the new prison will be given a new name. We are preparing to launch a consultation with both stakeholders and the local community to find a name for the prison, so that it will have its own clear identity separate to HMP Gartree. I think it is very important that local culture and history is appropriately reflected in the choice of name and that we hear and consult with those living close to the prison on what they would like it to be called.

https://order-order.com/2025/06/17/exc-labour-blocks-plan-to-build-240-places-at-existing-prison/

Its a f##king prison....it should take you 5 minutes to decide on one. Nobody living very close to a new prison will be going well at least they conducted a consultation and went with HMP Rainbow rather HMP Gulag for Slags.

tlg86 said:
Why is Heidi Hi favourite to go?

HMP Heidi Hi?

RobD · June 17

Leon said:

moonshine said:

wooliedyed said:

AnneJGP said:

wooliedyed said:
Decriminalising abortion up to birth ought to be enough for any of them.
Kendall, for she is disgusting (and a massive rebellion looms)
There must be quite a few parents of extremely young infants who would wish they could turn the clock back a few days. Why not, what's the difference?
Personally id be moving the latest time to abort a long way towards conception from 24 weeks
Decriminalising full term abortions is grotesque, any MP backing it isn’t fit for office. Agreed that 24 weeks feels too late these days too. Ideally you’d want universal early dna screening and bringing the date back, not moving it forwards (or eliminating it).
Is there some massive clamour amongst the public to hugely liberalise abortion? If so I must have missed it. Why on earth are Labour doing this, "decriminalising" full term abortions by doctors is a shocking change. Was it in the manifesto?

This is a government of cranks, traitors and incompetents, all pushing their own crazy theories

One of the few blessings of being British rather than a Yankee is that we don't have their horrible abortion arguments. This risks importing that toxic debate

Why??

Yes, decriminalising abortion up to the point of birth is just ridiculous.

Nigelb · June 17

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

glw said:

bondegezou said:

glw said:

MaxPB said:
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.)
But we know why he did this. Their total refusal to take real action / general incompetence to scale up testing.

Yes we know Hancock played a bit fast and loose to make his self imposed target, but before then if we kept at PHE rate of testing we might just be getting a testing appointment slot any day now.
Testing was the responsibility of NHS Test & Trace, that Hancock had set up as a separate thing, putting the eminently qualified (smirk) Dido Harding in charge. The re-organisation then took half of PHE and merged it with NHS T&T and with the Joint Biosecurity Centre, which had also been created separately, to make UKHSA, while moving the other half of PHE into DHSC.
Not originally it wasn't. The initial testing roll out was PHE when the UK could hardly manage a few 1000 tests and the refused to use private labs. Harding was appointed in May 2020.
All of which is some months before the big reorganisation, which is what we were talking about, so I am unclear what link you are making.
I simply said in that case I understand why Hancock thought the need to do this. They failed miserably. Not only failed, but were obstructive e.g. refused to use private lab equipment.

He employed the private sector to massive scale up testing. Which outside of the odd day were every parent in the lab demanded a test for their kid as they were going back to school, worked very well.

The trace part was the over-promise massively underdeliver. But on reflection it seems a fools errand to try and trace on individual levels rather than population levels.

It was a fool's decision to spend tens of billions on a mass testing system using lab PCR, when a far cheaper and more practical solution which worked at home was already in development.

Stereodog · June 17

AnneJGP said:

Stereodog said:

wooliedyed said:

moonshine said:

wooliedyed said:

AnneJGP said:

wooliedyed said:
Decriminalising abortion up to birth ought to be enough for any of them.
Kendall, for she is disgusting (and a massive rebellion looms)
There must be quite a few parents of extremely young infants who would wish they could turn the clock back a few days. Why not, what's the difference?
Personally id be moving the latest time to abort a long way towards conception from 24 weeks
Decriminalising full term abortions is grotesque, any MP backing it isn’t fit for office. Agreed that 24 weeks feels too late these days too. Ideally you’d want universal early dna screening and bringing the date back, not moving it forwards (or eliminating it).
No argument here
It's worth pointing out that there are two amendments to the Crime and Policing Bill that seems to be being bracketed together in people's minds. The Antoniazzi one is proposing that later term abortion be decriminalised for women doing it to themselves but would still be illegal for medical providers. Personally, I sympathise with this as if you're desperate enough to abort your own foetus that late in the pregnancy then I don't think the criminal justice system is where you need to be.

The second Creasy amendment proposes to decriminalise it for medical professionals too which I agree is more troubling. It's worth noting that the Antoniazzi one is much more likely to pass than the Creasy ones
That just kicks the can down the road. abortion was legalised to avoid DIY injuries/deaths. Is a DIY very late term abortion any safer?

No but decriminalising it doesn't imply the approval of the state. It's like how suicide was decriminalised, every authority will try to prevent you from doing it but it's recognised that desperate people shouldn't be hauled through the courts.

Andy_JS · June 17

moonshine said:
German Chancellor publicly imploring America to take out what remains of Iran’s nuclear capability. Trump slaps down Gabbard and Tucker Carlson. The die is cast if you ask me.

Interesting from Merz.

Phil · June 17

Leon said:

moonshine said:

wooliedyed said:

AnneJGP said:

wooliedyed said:
Decriminalising abortion up to birth ought to be enough for any of them.
Kendall, for she is disgusting (and a massive rebellion looms)
There must be quite a few parents of extremely young infants who would wish they could turn the clock back a few days. Why not, what's the difference?
Personally id be moving the latest time to abort a long way towards conception from 24 weeks
Decriminalising full term abortions is grotesque, any MP backing it isn’t fit for office. Agreed that 24 weeks feels too late these days too. Ideally you’d want universal early dna screening and bringing the date back, not moving it forwards (or eliminating it).
Is there some massive clamour amongst the public to hugely liberalise abortion? If so I must have missed it. Why on earth are Labour doing this, "decriminalising" full term abortions by doctors is a shocking change. Was it in the manifesto?

This is a government of cranks, traitors and incompetents, all pushing their own crazy theories

One of the few blessings of being British rather than a Yankee is that we don't have their horrible abortion arguments. This risks importing that toxic debate

Why??

Because a number of women were being prosecuted for procuring abortions for themselves during the pandemic & many female MPs were surprised to discover that abortion is still illegal in the UK & that their right to access abortion at all rested on the figleaf of medical need introduced by the Abortion Act 1967.

The expansion of the right to abortion to full-term abortions is separate to this, but it’s unsurprising that some amongst those that believe that access to abortion is a right take an expansive view of that right & are pushing for that.

moonshine · June 17

Leon said:

moonshine said:

wooliedyed said:

AnneJGP said:

wooliedyed said:
Decriminalising abortion up to birth ought to be enough for any of them.
Kendall, for she is disgusting (and a massive rebellion looms)
There must be quite a few parents of extremely young infants who would wish they could turn the clock back a few days. Why not, what's the difference?
Personally id be moving the latest time to abort a long way towards conception from 24 weeks
Decriminalising full term abortions is grotesque, any MP backing it isn’t fit for office. Agreed that 24 weeks feels too late these days too. Ideally you’d want universal early dna screening and bringing the date back, not moving it forwards (or eliminating it).
Is there some massive clamour amongst the public to hugely liberalise abortion? If so I must have missed it. Why on earth are Labour doing this, "decriminalising" full term abortions by doctors is a shocking change. Was it in the manifesto?

This is a government of cranks, traitors and incompetents, all pushing their own crazy theories

One of the few blessings of being British rather than a Yankee is that we don't have their horrible abortion arguments. This risks importing that toxic debate

Why??

British society has been very sensible on this issue, appreciating that it’s the most nuanced of debates, and you have to wade heavily through the shades of grey to find your own line. That said, I have no problem saying this bill is more morally bankrupt by far than a total ban.

FrancisUrquhart · June 17

Nigelb said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

glw said:

bondegezou said:

glw said:

MaxPB said:
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.)
But we know why he did this. Their total refusal to take real action / general incompetence to scale up testing.

Yes we know Hancock played a bit fast and loose to make his self imposed target, but before then if we kept at PHE rate of testing we might just be getting a testing appointment slot any day now.
Testing was the responsibility of NHS Test & Trace, that Hancock had set up as a separate thing, putting the eminently qualified (smirk) Dido Harding in charge. The re-organisation then took half of PHE and merged it with NHS T&T and with the Joint Biosecurity Centre, which had also been created separately, to make UKHSA, while moving the other half of PHE into DHSC.
Not originally it wasn't. The initial testing roll out was PHE when the UK could hardly manage a few 1000 tests and the refused to use private labs. Harding was appointed in May 2020.
All of which is some months before the big reorganisation, which is what we were talking about, so I am unclear what link you are making.
I simply said in that case I understand why Hancock thought the need to do this. They failed miserably. Not only failed, but were obstructive e.g. refused to use private lab equipment.

He employed the private sector to massive scale up testing. Which outside of the odd day were every parent in the lab demanded a test for their kid as they were going back to school, worked very well.

The trace part was the over-promise massively underdeliver. But on reflection it seems a fools errand to try and trace on individual levels rather than population levels.
It was a fool's decision to spend tens of billions on a mass testing system using lab PCR, when a far cheaper and more practical solution which worked at home was already in development.

Not in 2020. If you remember we had a couple of false starts where even the Eggheads said oh look we have these instant home tests they are a miracle total game charger and then had a U-Turn and say we tested their accuracy and they are bollocks.

It was only 2021 when there was the ability to get huge supplies of those tests that worked to a decent level of accuracy.

williamglenn · June 17

RobD said:

Leon said:

moonshine said:

wooliedyed said:

AnneJGP said:

wooliedyed said:
Decriminalising abortion up to birth ought to be enough for any of them.
Kendall, for she is disgusting (and a massive rebellion looms)
There must be quite a few parents of extremely young infants who would wish they could turn the clock back a few days. Why not, what's the difference?
Personally id be moving the latest time to abort a long way towards conception from 24 weeks
Decriminalising full term abortions is grotesque, any MP backing it isn’t fit for office. Agreed that 24 weeks feels too late these days too. Ideally you’d want universal early dna screening and bringing the date back, not moving it forwards (or eliminating it).
Is there some massive clamour amongst the public to hugely liberalise abortion? If so I must have missed it. Why on earth are Labour doing this, "decriminalising" full term abortions by doctors is a shocking change. Was it in the manifesto?

This is a government of cranks, traitors and incompetents, all pushing their own crazy theories

One of the few blessings of being British rather than a Yankee is that we don't have their horrible abortion arguments. This risks importing that toxic debate

Why??
Yes, decriminalising abortion up to the point of birth is just ridiculous.

Stella Creasy is calling it a pre-emptive move against the right.

https://x.com/TheNewsAgents/status/1934853519900856573

Leon · June 17

Phil said:

Leon said:

moonshine said:

wooliedyed said:

AnneJGP said:

wooliedyed said:
Decriminalising abortion up to birth ought to be enough for any of them.
Kendall, for she is disgusting (and a massive rebellion looms)
There must be quite a few parents of extremely young infants who would wish they could turn the clock back a few days. Why not, what's the difference?
Personally id be moving the latest time to abort a long way towards conception from 24 weeks
Decriminalising full term abortions is grotesque, any MP backing it isn’t fit for office. Agreed that 24 weeks feels too late these days too. Ideally you’d want universal early dna screening and bringing the date back, not moving it forwards (or eliminating it).
Is there some massive clamour amongst the public to hugely liberalise abortion? If so I must have missed it. Why on earth are Labour doing this, "decriminalising" full term abortions by doctors is a shocking change. Was it in the manifesto?

This is a government of cranks, traitors and incompetents, all pushing their own crazy theories

One of the few blessings of being British rather than a Yankee is that we don't have their horrible abortion arguments. This risks importing that toxic debate

Why??
Because a number of women were being prosecuted for procuring abortions for themselves during the pandemic & many female MPs were surprised to discover that abortion is still illegal in the UK & that their right to access abortion at all rested on the figleaf of medical need introduced by the Abortion Act 1967.

The expansion of the right to abortion to full-term abortions is separate to this, but it’s unsurprising that some amongst those that believe that access to abortion is a right take an expansive view of that right & are pushing for that.

What about the rights of a nine month old, fully viable fetus/baby, to live - to stay alive - rather than having its brains sucked out of its skull even as it prepares to enter the world?

RobD · June 17

williamglenn said:

RobD said:

Leon said:

moonshine said:

wooliedyed said:

AnneJGP said:

wooliedyed said:
Decriminalising abortion up to birth ought to be enough for any of them.
Kendall, for she is disgusting (and a massive rebellion looms)
There must be quite a few parents of extremely young infants who would wish they could turn the clock back a few days. Why not, what's the difference?
Personally id be moving the latest time to abort a long way towards conception from 24 weeks
Decriminalising full term abortions is grotesque, any MP backing it isn’t fit for office. Agreed that 24 weeks feels too late these days too. Ideally you’d want universal early dna screening and bringing the date back, not moving it forwards (or eliminating it).
Is there some massive clamour amongst the public to hugely liberalise abortion? If so I must have missed it. Why on earth are Labour doing this, "decriminalising" full term abortions by doctors is a shocking change. Was it in the manifesto?

This is a government of cranks, traitors and incompetents, all pushing their own crazy theories

One of the few blessings of being British rather than a Yankee is that we don't have their horrible abortion arguments. This risks importing that toxic debate

Why??
Yes, decriminalising abortion up to the point of birth is just ridiculous.
Stella Creasy is calling it a pre-emptive move against the right.

https://x.com/TheNewsAgents/status/1934853519900856573

How utterly dense is she? It was seemingly a settled issue, with no public debate on restricting it further.

Stereodog · June 17

moonshine said:

Stereodog said:

wooliedyed said:

moonshine said:

wooliedyed said:

AnneJGP said:

wooliedyed said:
Decriminalising abortion up to birth ought to be enough for any of them.
Kendall, for she is disgusting (and a massive rebellion looms)
There must be quite a few parents of extremely young infants who would wish they could turn the clock back a few days. Why not, what's the difference?
Personally id be moving the latest time to abort a long way towards conception from 24 weeks
Decriminalising full term abortions is grotesque, any MP backing it isn’t fit for office. Agreed that 24 weeks feels too late these days too. Ideally you’d want universal early dna screening and bringing the date back, not moving it forwards (or eliminating it).
No argument here
It's worth pointing out that there are two amendments to the Crime and Policing Bill that seems to be being bracketed together in people's minds. The Antoniazzi one is proposing that later term abortion be decriminalised for women doing it to themselves but would still be illegal for medical providers. Personally, I sympathise with this as if you're desperate enough to abort your own foetus that late in the pregnancy then I don't think the criminal justice system is where you need to be.

The second Creasy amendment proposes to decriminalise it for medical professionals too which I agree is more troubling. It's worth noting that the Antoniazzi one is much more likely to pass than the Creasy ones
Nonsense on point 1. You might as well decriminalise raping and murdering your own children by that logic.

I think that's a disgusting comparison. No one rapes a child out of fear and desperation which is why the vast majority of women choose to abort their own foetus. The medical and legal authorities should do everything they can to prevent a woman aborting her own foetus late term just like it does with suicidal people. I just can't see what possible purpose it serves to drag these women through the legal system.

Scott_xP · June 17

@KianpourWorld

I was just told that Iranians have been informed the internet will be cut off from tonight. Unless they have Starlink, they won’t have connection.

https://x.com/KianpourWorld/status/1935000795323170989

Cookie · June 17

Flatlander said:

FrancisUrquhart said:
Head in hands....

Turning to the new prison next to HMP Gartree, I can advise that Ministry of Justice have signed an order with Wates Construction Limited to complete the main works for the new prison, which we expect to be complete by early 2029. You are likely aware that the new prison will be given a new name. We are preparing to launch a consultation with both stakeholders and the local community to find a name for the prison, so that it will have its own clear identity separate to HMP Gartree. I think it is very important that local culture and history is appropriately reflected in the choice of name and that we hear and consult with those living close to the prison on what they would like it to be called.

https://order-order.com/2025/06/17/exc-labour-blocks-plan-to-build-240-places-at-existing-prison/

Its a f##king prison....it should take you 5 minutes to decide on one. Nobody living very close to a new prison will be going well at least they conducted a consultation and went with HMP Rainbow rather HMP Gulag for Slags.
It is all a bit Golgafrinchan isn't it.

People in the MoJ not qualified to discuss the design of the prison or the choice of structure spend weeks deciding what to call it in order to appear busy.

HMP Prisony McPrisonface.

FrancisUrquhart · June 17

williamglenn said:

RobD said:

Leon said:

moonshine said:

wooliedyed said:

AnneJGP said:

wooliedyed said:
Decriminalising abortion up to birth ought to be enough for any of them.
Kendall, for she is disgusting (and a massive rebellion looms)
There must be quite a few parents of extremely young infants who would wish they could turn the clock back a few days. Why not, what's the difference?
Personally id be moving the latest time to abort a long way towards conception from 24 weeks
Decriminalising full term abortions is grotesque, any MP backing it isn’t fit for office. Agreed that 24 weeks feels too late these days too. Ideally you’d want universal early dna screening and bringing the date back, not moving it forwards (or eliminating it).
Is there some massive clamour amongst the public to hugely liberalise abortion? If so I must have missed it. Why on earth are Labour doing this, "decriminalising" full term abortions by doctors is a shocking change. Was it in the manifesto?

This is a government of cranks, traitors and incompetents, all pushing their own crazy theories

One of the few blessings of being British rather than a Yankee is that we don't have their horrible abortion arguments. This risks importing that toxic debate

Why??
Yes, decriminalising abortion up to the point of birth is just ridiculous.
Stella Creasy is calling it a pre-emptive move against the right.

https://x.com/TheNewsAgents/status/1934853519900856573

Have they apologised to Rupert Lowe yet? Interesting that their tweet on this verboten issue is "All of this is a gift to the racists."

wooliedyed · June 17

Scott_xP said:
@KianpourWorld

I was just told that Iranians have been informed the internet will be cut off from tonight. Unless they have Starlink, they won’t have connection.

https://x.com/KianpourWorld/status/1935000795323170989

Lol, the counter revolution is here

Leon · June 17

Stereodog said:

moonshine said:

Stereodog said:

wooliedyed said:

moonshine said:

wooliedyed said:

AnneJGP said:

wooliedyed said:
Decriminalising abortion up to birth ought to be enough for any of them.
Kendall, for she is disgusting (and a massive rebellion looms)
There must be quite a few parents of extremely young infants who would wish they could turn the clock back a few days. Why not, what's the difference?
Personally id be moving the latest time to abort a long way towards conception from 24 weeks
Decriminalising full term abortions is grotesque, any MP backing it isn’t fit for office. Agreed that 24 weeks feels too late these days too. Ideally you’d want universal early dna screening and bringing the date back, not moving it forwards (or eliminating it).
No argument here
It's worth pointing out that there are two amendments to the Crime and Policing Bill that seems to be being bracketed together in people's minds. The Antoniazzi one is proposing that later term abortion be decriminalised for women doing it to themselves but would still be illegal for medical providers. Personally, I sympathise with this as if you're desperate enough to abort your own foetus that late in the pregnancy then I don't think the criminal justice system is where you need to be.

The second Creasy amendment proposes to decriminalise it for medical professionals too which I agree is more troubling. It's worth noting that the Antoniazzi one is much more likely to pass than the Creasy ones
Nonsense on point 1. You might as well decriminalise raping and murdering your own children by that logic.
I think that's a disgusting comparison. No one rapes a child out of fear and desperation which is why the vast majority of women choose to abort their own foetus. The medical and legal authorities should do everything they can to prevent a woman aborting her own foetus late term just like it does with suicidal people. I just can't see what possible purpose it serves to drag these women through the legal system.

Because if you kill a viable baby, that is murder

By your argument we shouldn't prosecute a woman who givies birth then strangles her baby immediately, because she is clearly distressed and suicidal, "what purpose does it serve", blah blah

Then how long do we wait until we CAN prosecute a disturbed woman for killing her own child? A day after birth? A week? A year?

Stereodog · June 17

Leon said:

moonshine said:

wooliedyed said:

AnneJGP said:

wooliedyed said:
Decriminalising abortion up to birth ought to be enough for any of them.
Kendall, for she is disgusting (and a massive rebellion looms)
There must be quite a few parents of extremely young infants who would wish they could turn the clock back a few days. Why not, what's the difference?
Personally id be moving the latest time to abort a long way towards conception from 24 weeks
Decriminalising full term abortions is grotesque, any MP backing it isn’t fit for office. Agreed that 24 weeks feels too late these days too. Ideally you’d want universal early dna screening and bringing the date back, not moving it forwards (or eliminating it).
Is there some massive clamour amongst the public to hugely liberalise abortion? If so I must have missed it. Why on earth are Labour doing this, "decriminalising" full term abortions by doctors is a shocking change. Was it in the manifesto?

This is a government of cranks, traitors and incompetents, all pushing their own crazy theories

One of the few blessings of being British rather than a Yankee is that we don't have their horrible abortion arguments. This risks importing that toxic debate

Why??

If by Labour you mean the government then they are not doing this. They are two backbench amendments to the Police and Crime Bill which the government have no power to stop. They have promised a free vote on them which is entirely usual on matters of conscience. This would have been handled in exactly the same way by a Tory government.

Phil · June 17

JosiasJessop said:

Phil said:
The Spanish report into their Grid failure is out: https://www.euractiv.com/section/eet/news/spanish-government-blames-power-plant-and-grid-operators-for-catastrophic-blackout/

No big surprises. Basically what was speculated (a cascading failure of generators dropping off the grid after an initial perturbation) has turned out to be the case.

The one interesting wrinkle is that the report claims that electricity generators who were being paid to dampen grid oscillations completely failed to do so. It says that conventional generators were up & running & being paid to step in to compensate for grid power loss but failed to do so.

It’s not clear whether there was actually enough capacity available to compensate for the solar providers going offline though - the majority of the criticism is apparently aimed at the National Grid operator for not having the means to stabilise the grid.
So it was conventional power generators who failed to do their job? That wasn't the line one poster was taking...

It’s possible that, had the conventional power plants done the job they were being paid for, the grid fluctuations might have been kept small enough that the solar generators would not have dropped off the grid en masse but I don’t know whether the report says that.

The implication of the reporting is that the fluctuations were too large, but a) I don’t know if the report has been published anywhere yet and b) I don’t speak Spanish, so wouldn’t be able to read it anyway. (I guess I could push it through AI, but that sounds like a recipe for confusion given the technical depth.)

Apparently the grid survived similar fluctuations in two previous periods in the year or two before this grid failure, with very similar generation mixes so there’s some plausibility to that idea though.

Ultimately, it seems that the National Grid hasn’t invested enough in grid stability & that needs fixing.

FrancisUrquhart · June 17

RobD said:

williamglenn said:

RobD said:

Leon said:

moonshine said:

wooliedyed said:

AnneJGP said:

wooliedyed said:
Decriminalising abortion up to birth ought to be enough for any of them.
Kendall, for she is disgusting (and a massive rebellion looms)
There must be quite a few parents of extremely young infants who would wish they could turn the clock back a few days. Why not, what's the difference?
Personally id be moving the latest time to abort a long way towards conception from 24 weeks
Decriminalising full term abortions is grotesque, any MP backing it isn’t fit for office. Agreed that 24 weeks feels too late these days too. Ideally you’d want universal early dna screening and bringing the date back, not moving it forwards (or eliminating it).
Is there some massive clamour amongst the public to hugely liberalise abortion? If so I must have missed it. Why on earth are Labour doing this, "decriminalising" full term abortions by doctors is a shocking change. Was it in the manifesto?

This is a government of cranks, traitors and incompetents, all pushing their own crazy theories

One of the few blessings of being British rather than a Yankee is that we don't have their horrible abortion arguments. This risks importing that toxic debate

Why??
Yes, decriminalising abortion up to the point of birth is just ridiculous.
Stella Creasy is calling it a pre-emptive move against the right.

https://x.com/TheNewsAgents/status/1934853519900856573
How utterly dense is she? It was seemingly a settled issue, with no public debate on restricting it further.

I would say that its probably the only issue that in so many place is highly controversial that no matter what your politics you really have to search out people in the UK who would disagree that the rules seem about right.

moonshine · June 17

Stereodog said:

moonshine said:

Stereodog said:

wooliedyed said:

moonshine said:

wooliedyed said:

AnneJGP said:

wooliedyed said:
Decriminalising abortion up to birth ought to be enough for any of them.
Kendall, for she is disgusting (and a massive rebellion looms)
There must be quite a few parents of extremely young infants who would wish they could turn the clock back a few days. Why not, what's the difference?
Personally id be moving the latest time to abort a long way towards conception from 24 weeks
Decriminalising full term abortions is grotesque, any MP backing it isn’t fit for office. Agreed that 24 weeks feels too late these days too. Ideally you’d want universal early dna screening and bringing the date back, not moving it forwards (or eliminating it).
No argument here
It's worth pointing out that there are two amendments to the Crime and Policing Bill that seems to be being bracketed together in people's minds. The Antoniazzi one is proposing that later term abortion be decriminalised for women doing it to themselves but would still be illegal for medical providers. Personally, I sympathise with this as if you're desperate enough to abort your own foetus that late in the pregnancy then I don't think the criminal justice system is where you need to be.

The second Creasy amendment proposes to decriminalise it for medical professionals too which I agree is more troubling. It's worth noting that the Antoniazzi one is much more likely to pass than the Creasy ones
Nonsense on point 1. You might as well decriminalise raping and murdering your own children by that logic.
I think that's a disgusting comparison. No one rapes a child out of fear and desperation which is why the vast majority of women choose to abort their own foetus. The medical and legal authorities should do everything they can to prevent a woman aborting her own foetus late term just like it does with suicidal people. I just can't see what possible purpose it serves to drag these women through the legal system.

I don’t give two fucks what motivates anyone to murder a child. I see no difference if it occurs a week before or a week after its birth.

Luckyguy1983 · June 17

Stereodog said:

moonshine said:

Stereodog said:

wooliedyed said:

moonshine said:

wooliedyed said:

AnneJGP said:

wooliedyed said:
Decriminalising abortion up to birth ought to be enough for any of them.
Kendall, for she is disgusting (and a massive rebellion looms)
There must be quite a few parents of extremely young infants who would wish they could turn the clock back a few days. Why not, what's the difference?
Personally id be moving the latest time to abort a long way towards conception from 24 weeks
Decriminalising full term abortions is grotesque, any MP backing it isn’t fit for office. Agreed that 24 weeks feels too late these days too. Ideally you’d want universal early dna screening and bringing the date back, not moving it forwards (or eliminating it).
No argument here
It's worth pointing out that there are two amendments to the Crime and Policing Bill that seems to be being bracketed together in people's minds. The Antoniazzi one is proposing that later term abortion be decriminalised for women doing it to themselves but would still be illegal for medical providers. Personally, I sympathise with this as if you're desperate enough to abort your own foetus that late in the pregnancy then I don't think the criminal justice system is where you need to be.

The second Creasy amendment proposes to decriminalise it for medical professionals too which I agree is more troubling. It's worth noting that the Antoniazzi one is much more likely to pass than the Creasy ones
Nonsense on point 1. You might as well decriminalise raping and murdering your own children by that logic.
I think that's a disgusting comparison. No one rapes a child out of fear and desperation which is why the vast majority of women choose to abort their own foetus. The medical and legal authorities should do everything they can to prevent a woman aborting her own foetus late term just like it does with suicidal people. I just can't see what possible purpose it serves to drag these women through the legal system.

It serves as a punishment for what they have done, and a disincentive to others to do the same, just as every criminal sanction does. Mitigating factors such as distress or desperation should of course be taken into account, as they are with every crime.

Flatlander · June 17

Stereodog said:

moonshine said:

Stereodog said:

wooliedyed said:

moonshine said:

wooliedyed said:

AnneJGP said:

wooliedyed said:
Decriminalising abortion up to birth ought to be enough for any of them.
Kendall, for she is disgusting (and a massive rebellion looms)
There must be quite a few parents of extremely young infants who would wish they could turn the clock back a few days. Why not, what's the difference?
Personally id be moving the latest time to abort a long way towards conception from 24 weeks
Decriminalising full term abortions is grotesque, any MP backing it isn’t fit for office. Agreed that 24 weeks feels too late these days too. Ideally you’d want universal early dna screening and bringing the date back, not moving it forwards (or eliminating it).
No argument here
It's worth pointing out that there are two amendments to the Crime and Policing Bill that seems to be being bracketed together in people's minds. The Antoniazzi one is proposing that later term abortion be decriminalised for women doing it to themselves but would still be illegal for medical providers. Personally, I sympathise with this as if you're desperate enough to abort your own foetus that late in the pregnancy then I don't think the criminal justice system is where you need to be.

The second Creasy amendment proposes to decriminalise it for medical professionals too which I agree is more troubling. It's worth noting that the Antoniazzi one is much more likely to pass than the Creasy ones
Nonsense on point 1. You might as well decriminalise raping and murdering your own children by that logic.
I think that's a disgusting comparison. No one rapes a child out of fear and desperation which is why the vast majority of women choose to abort their own foetus. The medical and legal authorities should do everything they can to prevent a woman aborting her own foetus late term just like it does with suicidal people. I just can't see what possible purpose it serves to drag these women through the legal system.

What if the fear and desperation is because the foetus is female?

tlg86 · June 17

RobD said:

williamglenn said:

RobD said:

Leon said:

moonshine said:

wooliedyed said:

AnneJGP said:

wooliedyed said:
Decriminalising abortion up to birth ought to be enough for any of them.
Kendall, for she is disgusting (and a massive rebellion looms)
There must be quite a few parents of extremely young infants who would wish they could turn the clock back a few days. Why not, what's the difference?
Personally id be moving the latest time to abort a long way towards conception from 24 weeks
Decriminalising full term abortions is grotesque, any MP backing it isn’t fit for office. Agreed that 24 weeks feels too late these days too. Ideally you’d want universal early dna screening and bringing the date back, not moving it forwards (or eliminating it).
Is there some massive clamour amongst the public to hugely liberalise abortion? If so I must have missed it. Why on earth are Labour doing this, "decriminalising" full term abortions by doctors is a shocking change. Was it in the manifesto?

This is a government of cranks, traitors and incompetents, all pushing their own crazy theories

One of the few blessings of being British rather than a Yankee is that we don't have their horrible abortion arguments. This risks importing that toxic debate

Why??
Yes, decriminalising abortion up to the point of birth is just ridiculous.
Stella Creasy is calling it a pre-emptive move against the right.

https://x.com/TheNewsAgents/status/1934853519900856573
How utterly dense is she? It was seemingly a settled issue, with no public debate on restricting it further.

The irony is, they are bringing US politics to this country. And there will be a backlash.

Leon · June 17

Stereodog said:

Leon said:

moonshine said:

wooliedyed said:

AnneJGP said:

wooliedyed said:
Decriminalising abortion up to birth ought to be enough for any of them.
Kendall, for she is disgusting (and a massive rebellion looms)
There must be quite a few parents of extremely young infants who would wish they could turn the clock back a few days. Why not, what's the difference?
Personally id be moving the latest time to abort a long way towards conception from 24 weeks
Decriminalising full term abortions is grotesque, any MP backing it isn’t fit for office. Agreed that 24 weeks feels too late these days too. Ideally you’d want universal early dna screening and bringing the date back, not moving it forwards (or eliminating it).
Is there some massive clamour amongst the public to hugely liberalise abortion? If so I must have missed it. Why on earth are Labour doing this, "decriminalising" full term abortions by doctors is a shocking change. Was it in the manifesto?

This is a government of cranks, traitors and incompetents, all pushing their own crazy theories

One of the few blessings of being British rather than a Yankee is that we don't have their horrible abortion arguments. This risks importing that toxic debate

Why??
If by Labour you mean the government then they are not doing this. They are two backbench amendments to the Police and Crime Bill which the government have no power to stop. They have promised a free vote on them which is entirely usual on matters of conscience. This would have been handled in exactly the same way by a Tory government.

Well, Creasy is claiming this is a leftwing move to "head off the right"

Tragic politicisation of the debate. So stupid

AnneJGP · June 17

Sunil_Prasannan said:
Everyone's bangin' on about the right to Assisted Dying? But what about the right to Assisted Living?

Every new born baby used to have that right, but probably not for very much longer.

Nigelb · June 17

FrancisUrquhart said:

Nigelb said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

glw said:

bondegezou said:

glw said:

MaxPB said:
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.)
But we know why he did this. Their total refusal to take real action / general incompetence to scale up testing.

Yes we know Hancock played a bit fast and loose to make his self imposed target, but before then if we kept at PHE rate of testing we might just be getting a testing appointment slot any day now.
Testing was the responsibility of NHS Test & Trace, that Hancock had set up as a separate thing, putting the eminently qualified (smirk) Dido Harding in charge. The re-organisation then took half of PHE and merged it with NHS T&T and with the Joint Biosecurity Centre, which had also been created separately, to make UKHSA, while moving the other half of PHE into DHSC.
Not originally it wasn't. The initial testing roll out was PHE when the UK could hardly manage a few 1000 tests and the refused to use private labs. Harding was appointed in May 2020.
All of which is some months before the big reorganisation, which is what we were talking about, so I am unclear what link you are making.
I simply said in that case I understand why Hancock thought the need to do this. They failed miserably. Not only failed, but were obstructive e.g. refused to use private lab equipment.

He employed the private sector to massive scale up testing. Which outside of the odd day were every parent in the lab demanded a test for their kid as they were going back to school, worked very well.

The trace part was the over-promise massively underdeliver. But on reflection it seems a fools errand to try and trace on individual levels rather than population levels.
It was a fool's decision to spend tens of billions on a mass testing system using lab PCR, when a far cheaper and more practical solution which worked at home was already in development.
Not in 2020. If you remember we had a couple of false starts where even the Eggheads said oh look we have these instant home tests they are a miracle total game charger and then had a U-Turn and say we tested their accuracy and they are bollocks.

It was only 2021 when there was the ability to get huge supplies of those tests.

It was fairly clear back then that they weren't going to be bollocks, though.

I recall a number of eggheads getting inextricably confused between sensitivity, specificity, and actual utility in preventing disease spread.
The "gold standard" PCR testing, while great on the first two, was a miserable failure on the last metric, once more than a small number of people were infected, as by the time people tested - let alone by the time results were available - they had already had the opportunity to infect others.

Even the early imperfect lateral flow tests were better on that measure.

Luckyguy1983 · June 17

Phil said:

JosiasJessop said:

Phil said:
The Spanish report into their Grid failure is out: https://www.euractiv.com/section/eet/news/spanish-government-blames-power-plant-and-grid-operators-for-catastrophic-blackout/

No big surprises. Basically what was speculated (a cascading failure of generators dropping off the grid after an initial perturbation) has turned out to be the case.

The one interesting wrinkle is that the report claims that electricity generators who were being paid to dampen grid oscillations completely failed to do so. It says that conventional generators were up & running & being paid to step in to compensate for grid power loss but failed to do so.

It’s not clear whether there was actually enough capacity available to compensate for the solar providers going offline though - the majority of the criticism is apparently aimed at the National Grid operator for not having the means to stabilise the grid.
So it was conventional power generators who failed to do their job? That wasn't the line one poster was taking...
It’s possible that, had the conventional power plants done the job they were being paid for, the grid fluctuations might have been kept small enough that the solar generators would not have dropped off the grid en masse but I don’t know whether the report says that.

The implication of the reporting is that the fluctuations were too large, but a) I don’t know if the report has been published anywhere yet and b) I don’t speak Spanish, so wouldn’t be able to read it anyway. (I guess I could push it through AI, but that sounds like a recipe for confusion given the technical depth.)

Apparently the grid survived similar fluctuations in two previous periods in the year or two before this grid failure, with very similar generation mixes so there’s some plausibility to that idea though.

Ultimately, it seems that the National Grid hasn’t invested enough in grid stability & that needs fixing.

So I was right.

Scott_xP · June 17

Yesterday the Mad King launched a new mobile phone brand

Last night he was interviewed on AF1

Q: What can you do in Washington that you couldn't do in Canada?

TRUMP: Just be a little bit, ah, I think more well-versed. Not having to use telephones so much, because I don't believe in telephones, because people like you listen to them.

FrancisUrquhart · June 17

Nigelb said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

Nigelb said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

bondegezou said:

FrancisUrquhart said:

glw said:

bondegezou said:

glw said:

MaxPB said:
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.)
But we know why he did this. Their total refusal to take real action / general incompetence to scale up testing.

Yes we know Hancock played a bit fast and loose to make his self imposed target, but before then if we kept at PHE rate of testing we might just be getting a testing appointment slot any day now.
Testing was the responsibility of NHS Test & Trace, that Hancock had set up as a separate thing, putting the eminently qualified (smirk) Dido Harding in charge. The re-organisation then took half of PHE and merged it with NHS T&T and with the Joint Biosecurity Centre, which had also been created separately, to make UKHSA, while moving the other half of PHE into DHSC.
Not originally it wasn't. The initial testing roll out was PHE when the UK could hardly manage a few 1000 tests and the refused to use private labs. Harding was appointed in May 2020.
All of which is some months before the big reorganisation, which is what we were talking about, so I am unclear what link you are making.
I simply said in that case I understand why Hancock thought the need to do this. They failed miserably. Not only failed, but were obstructive e.g. refused to use private lab equipment.

He employed the private sector to massive scale up testing. Which outside of the odd day were every parent in the lab demanded a test for their kid as they were going back to school, worked very well.

The trace part was the over-promise massively underdeliver. But on reflection it seems a fools errand to try and trace on individual levels rather than population levels.
It was a fool's decision to spend tens of billions on a mass testing system using lab PCR, when a far cheaper and more practical solution which worked at home was already in development.
Not in 2020. If you remember we had a couple of false starts where even the Eggheads said oh look we have these instant home tests they are a miracle total game charger and then had a U-Turn and say we tested their accuracy and they are bollocks.

It was only 2021 when there was the ability to get huge supplies of those tests.
It was fairly clear back then that they weren't going to be bollocks, though.

I recall a number of eggheads getting inextricably confused between sensitivity, specificity, and actual utility in preventing disease spread.
The "gold standard" PCR testing, while great on the first two, was a miserable failure on the last metric, once more than a small number of people were infected, as by the time people tested - let alone by the time results were available - they had already had the opportunity to infect others.

Even the early imperfect lateral flow tests were better on that measure.

Well that is why the government were very early on to them and Hancock I believe thought that is how we could test our way out of this via home kits. We were ahead of lots of other countries on this and placed orders for them, but the first few ones they got hold of and tested were very very poor and it took time to get the test right.

Also, the companies early on providing them were small outfits e.g. a lab in NI, that couldn't supply squillions even if they worked. In the end, it was China that stepped in to produce the crazy number that were required, which still took until 2021.

Malmesbury · June 17

wooliedyed said:

Scott_xP said:
@KianpourWorld

I was just told that Iranians have been informed the internet will be cut off from tonight. Unless they have Starlink, they won’t have connection.

https://x.com/KianpourWorld/status/1935000795323170989
Lol, the counter revolution is here

Starlink has been available in Iran, since it was turned on at the request of the Biden administration. Which was seen as rather interesting, since this went against ITU rules, which require consent from the countries government.

williamglenn · June 17

tlg86 said:

RobD said:

williamglenn said:

RobD said:

Leon said:

moonshine said:

wooliedyed said:

AnneJGP said:

wooliedyed said:
Decriminalising abortion up to birth ought to be enough for any of them.
Kendall, for she is disgusting (and a massive rebellion looms)
There must be quite a few parents of extremely young infants who would wish they could turn the clock back a few days. Why not, what's the difference?
Personally id be moving the latest time to abort a long way towards conception from 24 weeks
Decriminalising full term abortions is grotesque, any MP backing it isn’t fit for office. Agreed that 24 weeks feels too late these days too. Ideally you’d want universal early dna screening and bringing the date back, not moving it forwards (or eliminating it).
Is there some massive clamour amongst the public to hugely liberalise abortion? If so I must have missed it. Why on earth are Labour doing this, "decriminalising" full term abortions by doctors is a shocking change. Was it in the manifesto?

This is a government of cranks, traitors and incompetents, all pushing their own crazy theories

One of the few blessings of being British rather than a Yankee is that we don't have their horrible abortion arguments. This risks importing that toxic debate

Why??
Yes, decriminalising abortion up to the point of birth is just ridiculous.
Stella Creasy is calling it a pre-emptive move against the right.

https://x.com/TheNewsAgents/status/1934853519900856573
How utterly dense is she? It was seemingly a settled issue, with no public debate on restricting it further.
The irony is, they are bringing US politics to this country. And there will be a backlash.

The UK status quo of it being illegal but permitted is actually the best way to reconcile the inherent contradictions and avoids obvious absurdities like arguing that a viable foetus is just a bunch of cells.

moonshine · June 17

Malmesbury said:

wooliedyed said:

Scott_xP said:
@KianpourWorld

I was just told that Iranians have been informed the internet will be cut off from tonight. Unless they have Starlink, they won’t have connection.

https://x.com/KianpourWorld/status/1935000795323170989
Lol, the counter revolution is here
Starlink has been available in Iran, since it was turned on at the request of the Biden administration. Which was seen as rather interesting, since this went against ITU rules, which require consent from the countries government.

There’s gonna be a coup before long isn’t there.

FrancisUrquhart · June 17

Malmesbury said:

wooliedyed said:

Scott_xP said:
@KianpourWorld

I was just told that Iranians have been informed the internet will be cut off from tonight. Unless they have Starlink, they won’t have connection.

https://x.com/KianpourWorld/status/1935000795323170989
Lol, the counter revolution is here
Starlink has been available in Iran, since it was turned on at the request of the Biden administration. Which was seen as rather interesting, since this went against ITU rules, which require consent from the countries government.

That Bloody Elon Musk bloke gets everywhere.

Leon · June 17

moonshine said:

Malmesbury said:

wooliedyed said:

Scott_xP said:
@KianpourWorld

I was just told that Iranians have been informed the internet will be cut off from tonight. Unless they have Starlink, they won’t have connection.

https://x.com/KianpourWorld/status/1935000795323170989
Lol, the counter revolution is here
Starlink has been available in Iran, since it was turned on at the request of the Biden administration. Which was seen as rather interesting, since this went against ITU rules, which require consent from the countries government.
There’s gonna be a coup before long isn’t there.

In the UK? The way things are going, Yes

Cookie · June 17

Leon said:

Stereodog said:

Leon said:

moonshine said:

wooliedyed said:

AnneJGP said:

wooliedyed said:
Decriminalising abortion up to birth ought to be enough for any of them.
Kendall, for she is disgusting (and a massive rebellion looms)
There must be quite a few parents of extremely young infants who would wish they could turn the clock back a few days. Why not, what's the difference?
Personally id be moving the latest time to abort a long way towards conception from 24 weeks
Decriminalising full term abortions is grotesque, any MP backing it isn’t fit for office. Agreed that 24 weeks feels too late these days too. Ideally you’d want universal early dna screening and bringing the date back, not moving it forwards (or eliminating it).
Is there some massive clamour amongst the public to hugely liberalise abortion? If so I must have missed it. Why on earth are Labour doing this, "decriminalising" full term abortions by doctors is a shocking change. Was it in the manifesto?

This is a government of cranks, traitors and incompetents, all pushing their own crazy theories

One of the few blessings of being British rather than a Yankee is that we don't have their horrible abortion arguments. This risks importing that toxic debate

Why??
If by Labour you mean the government then they are not doing this. They are two backbench amendments to the Police and Crime Bill which the government have no power to stop. They have promised a free vote on them which is entirely usual on matters of conscience. This would have been handled in exactly the same way by a Tory government.
Well, Creasy is claiming this is a leftwing move to "head off the right"

Tragic politicisation of the debate. So stupid

So much of what tbe state does seems to be done with the sole aim of pissing off the right. And it works, but it's no way to run a country.

Next cabinet minister to go – politicalbetting.com

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