In defence of PCCs they replaced police authorities.
Which were ineffective, remote and unresponsive to public priorities. And in some cases the police/police unions threatened difficult members to force them to resign from the authorities.
The PCCs are not perfect, but there is a need for civilian political oversight of police activities and some appointed committee somewhere in a smoke-filled room just doesn’t cut it
In Leics and Rutland our PCC recently defected to Reform.
That's worth a read for the guy talking about the difference that he thinks him joining RefUK will make. There's a lot of Farage talking points in it, and Leics will be a fascinating place to run the experiment.
I didn't vote for him when he was a Tory, and won't next time now that he is Reform. He won't by a very narrow margin over a split opposition last time.
I haven't noticed any change in policing, and don't anticipate any. Elected PCCs seem ideally suited to abolition as a cost cutting measure to my eyes.
Some like Roger Hirst in Essex have done a good job, he did a course in criminology too to prepare for the role.
Most PCCs are being scrapped anyway and their functions take over by Mayors in new combined authorities, including in Essex
WRT Starmer being replaced and the political future; a factor as yet not in play.
If we reach a 2027/8 with a reasonable chance that Reform heads the next government, but with perhaps 60%+ of voters being opposed to the idea, then there is a decent chance of 'Stop Farage' thinking coalescing around an alternative.
Few alternatives are available, and if by then the Tories are seen as an adjunct to Reform not an alternative, then 'Labour led' is the only one.
Who are the leaders who could lead Labour in that setting? Perhaps Streeting, but he is going to lose his seat next time. Not Rayner, not Burnham.
Rather like the joke about the lightbulb, the Labour leadership needs to want to change.
As we saw with Corbyn, the way the Labour Party is set up makes it pretty much impossible to depose a leader who doesn’t want to move on.
Starmer seems happy enough in the job, he does whatever the lawyers and courts tell him to do, and doesn’t care much for public opinion. Perhaps it will take a major financial crisis to wake him up?
Does 'major financial crisis' include the one we are in, where the only day to day solution is to place our grandchildren into bankruptcy instead of sorting stuff out ourselves and Labour MPs won't vote for tiny cuts?
That really is an excellent summary of our position and the challenges we face. Note debt interest's significant contribution to the increasing deficit.
Maybe Allister Heath is right - for once - and we will get a new election. If my friend is right and cutting spending is the only way, but Labour MPs refuse to do it, then either the government prints money and inflation explodes, then we go bust anyway (in the end), or we have an election to elect MPs who WILL cut spending
No, there is a third way, massively increase tax on the rich and wealthy and property and business owners, which Labour will go further on in the autumn. As mentioned most Labour MPs would lose their seats on current polls so won't vote for an early election
I may have mentioned our trade deficit from time to time in passing. This really isn't helping. Its time we had a government more focused on the day job.
The economy is only staying afloat because of services . The latest update to that is due out shortly .
Yes and to be fair that has largely been the case for 30 years or more. But what we are not seeing is any sign of investment in new production in the UK, any uplift in training, any growth in productivity, any facilitation of growth by removing planning hurdles or otherwise, any attempt to encourage entrepreneurial activity in the UK, it makes you despair. What we got instead was the increase in Employers NI and an above inflation increase in the minimum wage with inevitable consequences for the level of employment.
It just won't do. Our forthcoming budget needs to focus on growth (as Reeves herself recognised before the election). That means finding ways to boost investment through more generous allowances, encouraging training, not hammering Entrepreneurial Relief or Capital Gains or share based ISAs, looking at why London is struggling to compete in the IPO market, etc etc. I fear we are going to see the reverse as our Chancellor scrabbles around for a few billion more taxes to make her nonsensical targets and kick the can down the road for a few more months.
My new brainiac IQ 190 squillionaire friend, who was freaking out about the gilts market months ago (presciently) is now freaking out about gilts EVEN MORE
He says the government is “driving straight into a brick wall”. He thinks the present gilts “crisis” is maybe the markets reacting to Starmer’s “phase 2” speech which didn’t acknowledge the fiscal emergency at all
He says, as tax rises won’t work, borrowing can’t be done, and the government refuses to cut, we “may become Turkey or Argentina for a bit”
🫣
I am no brainiac, nor do I have an IQ of 190, nor, sadly, am I a squillionaire but this is kind of obvious. We are heading towards a fiscal crisis. It is not just that we need to borrow new money at penalty rates, we also have to roll over ever more debt taken out when interest rates were very, very low. 10 year gilts maturing just now were probably borrowed at less than 1%. To replace those borrowed funds we will be borrowing the same money at more than 5%. The cost of our debt is going to be rising for a long time, even if we manage to get current rates down. Every other category of spending is going to be squeezed by this.
Right, so what do we do? The "cut spending" brigade envisage that the sick and the poor are wasting the money so just take it off them. In reality they are sick and poor and when need remains and you cut the provision you spend more mopping up the various crises you create.
So we can't cut spending on the front line. We need to cut spending on everything else. How is it that we have an NHS where the budget goes up every year and front line provision shrinks? Its a bonfire burning our cash - and we can't afford to fuel it any more.
We set up a crisis team during Covid. Massive spike in patients, fewer resources, how do we do things. We need to do the same thing today. We simply cannot afford the vast bureaucracies and overlapping managers that we have in health and education. If that means that we have to make redundant the staff at NHS Trusts and Education Trusts then sobeit.
How about the extra 0.5m central government employees that have brochures in the last 5 years?
I may have mentioned our trade deficit from time to time in passing. This really isn't helping. Its time we had a government more focused on the day job.
The economy is only staying afloat because of services . The latest update to that is due out shortly .
Yes and to be fair that has largely been the case for 30 years or more. But what we are not seeing is any sign of investment in new production in the UK, any uplift in training, any growth in productivity, any facilitation of growth by removing planning hurdles or otherwise, any attempt to encourage entrepreneurial activity in the UK, it makes you despair. What we got instead was the increase in Employers NI and an above inflation increase in the minimum wage with inevitable consequences for the level of employment.
It just won't do. Our forthcoming budget needs to focus on growth (as Reeves herself recognised before the election). That means finding ways to boost investment through more generous allowances, encouraging training, not hammering Entrepreneurial Relief or Capital Gains or share based ISAs, looking at why London is struggling to compete in the IPO market, etc etc. I fear we are going to see the reverse as our Chancellor scrabbles around for a few billion more taxes to make her nonsensical targets and kick the can down the road for a few more months.
My new brainiac IQ 190 squillionaire friend, who was freaking out about the gilts market months ago (presciently) is now freaking out about gilts EVEN MORE
He says the government is “driving straight into a brick wall”. He thinks the present gilts “crisis” is maybe the markets reacting to Starmer’s “phase 2” speech which didn’t acknowledge the fiscal emergency at all
He says, as tax rises won’t work, borrowing can’t be done, and the government refuses to cut, we “may become Turkey or Argentina for a bit”
🫣
I am no brainiac, nor do I have an IQ of 190, nor, sadly, am I a squillionaire but this is kind of obvious. We are heading towards a fiscal crisis. It is not just that we need to borrow new money at penalty rates, we also have to roll over ever more debt taken out when interest rates were very, very low. 10 year gilts maturing just now were probably borrowed at less than 1%. To replace those borrowed funds we will be borrowing the same money at more than 5%. The cost of our debt is going to be rising for a long time, even if we manage to get current rates down. Every other category of spending is going to be squeezed by this.
Right, so what do we do? The "cut spending" brigade envisage that the sick and the poor are wasting the money so just take it off them. In reality they are sick and poor and when need remains and you cut the provision you spend more mopping up the various crises you create.
So we can't cut spending on the front line. We need to cut spending on everything else. How is it that we have an NHS where the budget goes up every year and front line provision shrinks? Its a bonfire burning our cash - and we can't afford to fuel it any more.
We set up a crisis team during Covid. Massive spike in patients, fewer resources, how do we do things. We need to do the same thing today. We simply cannot afford the vast bureaucracies and overlapping managers that we have in health and education. If that means that we have to make redundant the staff at NHS Trusts and Education Trusts then sobeit.
Maybe Foxy could explain the reasoning behind all the different NHS trusts as there might be a good reason - I understand that different areas of the UK have different demographics so different needs but I always wonder whether it would work more efficiently with one single management (the same with all the different police forces, would it be more efficient to just have a UK Police).
I think about the old story that the French Education minister could look at a piece of paper and know what every schoolchild in France was eating that day and wonder how many areas of the state in the UK could just be made identikit across the country rather than having individual fiefdoms and extra costs from not having the purchasing power of a larger institution (eg all police kit from cars to boots should be supplied from the same source to leverage the collective buying power - I can’t think of any reason why different police forces end up with different makes of car for the same roles).
The fragmentation of the NHS was largely a creation of an "internal market" by the Conservatives, I suggest. It does create many problems.
Even as a conservative I cannot see any value in an internal market for the NHS, it’s not like they need competition where people from Newcastle are looking at where to get their hip done and find they can get a two for the price of one in Plymouth if they can get there tomorrow.
Same [edit] sort of geographical problem with railway privatization (specifically the splitting up bit - no wonder that is being rectified now). And schools, as discussed also today here, in some of the UK.
But it does happen, for sausage machine stuff - plus you've got the private hospitals, lots of simple sausage machine stuff like varicose veins and cataracts.
Yet the other problem is that the consumers aren't informed consumers. And what happens to the hospitals that are supposed to lose out and go bust?
Surely it would make some sense to balance demand across the country. At one point I thought I would need a knee op. I would have happily gone to a national MRI scanning centre in, say, Birmingham to speed things up, and as I live on my own it would have made sense to have the op near friends in Hampshire or family in Essex, as I would likely be incapacitated for a while afterwards and could stay with them. But, oh no, it all has to be managed locally.
Anyone with a knee problem that is preventing them working should very much be offered the next op wherever it is in the country
I may have mentioned our trade deficit from time to time in passing. This really isn't helping. Its time we had a government more focused on the day job.
The economy is only staying afloat because of services . The latest update to that is due out shortly .
Yes and to be fair that has largely been the case for 30 years or more. But what we are not seeing is any sign of investment in new production in the UK, any uplift in training, any growth in productivity, any facilitation of growth by removing planning hurdles or otherwise, any attempt to encourage entrepreneurial activity in the UK, it makes you despair. What we got instead was the increase in Employers NI and an above inflation increase in the minimum wage with inevitable consequences for the level of employment.
It just won't do. Our forthcoming budget needs to focus on growth (as Reeves herself recognised before the election). That means finding ways to boost investment through more generous allowances, encouraging training, not hammering Entrepreneurial Relief or Capital Gains or share based ISAs, looking at why London is struggling to compete in the IPO market, etc etc. I fear we are going to see the reverse as our Chancellor scrabbles around for a few billion more taxes to make her nonsensical targets and kick the can down the road for a few more months.
My new brainiac IQ 190 squillionaire friend, who was freaking out about the gilts market months ago (presciently) is now freaking out about gilts EVEN MORE
He says the government is “driving straight into a brick wall”. He thinks the present gilts “crisis” is maybe the markets reacting to Starmer’s “phase 2” speech which didn’t acknowledge the fiscal emergency at all
He says, as tax rises won’t work, borrowing can’t be done, and the government refuses to cut, we “may become Turkey or Argentina for a bit”
🫣
I am no brainiac, nor do I have an IQ of 190, nor, sadly, am I a squillionaire but this is kind of obvious. We are heading towards a fiscal crisis. It is not just that we need to borrow new money at penalty rates, we also have to roll over ever more debt taken out when interest rates were very, very low. 10 year gilts maturing just now were probably borrowed at less than 1%. To replace those borrowed funds we will be borrowing the same money at more than 5%. The cost of our debt is going to be rising for a long time, even if we manage to get current rates down. Every other category of spending is going to be squeezed by this.
Right, so what do we do? The "cut spending" brigade envisage that the sick and the poor are wasting the money so just take it off them. In reality they are sick and poor and when need remains and you cut the provision you spend more mopping up the various crises you create.
So we can't cut spending on the front line. We need to cut spending on everything else. How is it that we have an NHS where the budget goes up every year and front line provision shrinks? Its a bonfire burning our cash - and we can't afford to fuel it any more.
We set up a crisis team during Covid. Massive spike in patients, fewer resources, how do we do things. We need to do the same thing today. We simply cannot afford the vast bureaucracies and overlapping managers that we have in health and education. If that means that we have to make redundant the staff at NHS Trusts and Education Trusts then sobeit.
How about the extra 0.5m central government employees that have brochures in the last 5 years?
I may have mentioned our trade deficit from time to time in passing. This really isn't helping. Its time we had a government more focused on the day job.
The economy is only staying afloat because of services . The latest update to that is due out shortly .
Yes and to be fair that has largely been the case for 30 years or more. But what we are not seeing is any sign of investment in new production in the UK, any uplift in training, any growth in productivity, any facilitation of growth by removing planning hurdles or otherwise, any attempt to encourage entrepreneurial activity in the UK, it makes you despair. What we got instead was the increase in Employers NI and an above inflation increase in the minimum wage with inevitable consequences for the level of employment.
It just won't do. Our forthcoming budget needs to focus on growth (as Reeves herself recognised before the election). That means finding ways to boost investment through more generous allowances, encouraging training, not hammering Entrepreneurial Relief or Capital Gains or share based ISAs, looking at why London is struggling to compete in the IPO market, etc etc. I fear we are going to see the reverse as our Chancellor scrabbles around for a few billion more taxes to make her nonsensical targets and kick the can down the road for a few more months.
My new brainiac IQ 190 squillionaire friend, who was freaking out about the gilts market months ago (presciently) is now freaking out about gilts EVEN MORE
He says the government is “driving straight into a brick wall”. He thinks the present gilts “crisis” is maybe the markets reacting to Starmer’s “phase 2” speech which didn’t acknowledge the fiscal emergency at all
He says, as tax rises won’t work, borrowing can’t be done, and the government refuses to cut, we “may become Turkey or Argentina for a bit”
🫣
I am no brainiac, nor do I have an IQ of 190, nor, sadly, am I a squillionaire but this is kind of obvious. We are heading towards a fiscal crisis. It is not just that we need to borrow new money at penalty rates, we also have to roll over ever more debt taken out when interest rates were very, very low. 10 year gilts maturing just now were probably borrowed at less than 1%. To replace those borrowed funds we will be borrowing the same money at more than 5%. The cost of our debt is going to be rising for a long time, even if we manage to get current rates down. Every other category of spending is going to be squeezed by this.
Right, so what do we do? The "cut spending" brigade envisage that the sick and the poor are wasting the money so just take it off them. In reality they are sick and poor and when need remains and you cut the provision you spend more mopping up the various crises you create.
So we can't cut spending on the front line. We need to cut spending on everything else. How is it that we have an NHS where the budget goes up every year and front line provision shrinks? Its a bonfire burning our cash - and we can't afford to fuel it any more.
We set up a crisis team during Covid. Massive spike in patients, fewer resources, how do we do things. We need to do the same thing today. We simply cannot afford the vast bureaucracies and overlapping managers that we have in health and education. If that means that we have to make redundant the staff at NHS Trusts and Education Trusts then sobeit.
Even the guy running a company that provides school transport for SEND kids has gone on record complaining of the complete madness & waste in the current system.
PIP payments appear to have gone from “I need money for transport because otherwise I can’t get to work” to ”I have ADHD and find using the bus a bit tricky & would like my own car”,
The NHS maternity service is spending more on compensating mothers & children for damage done to them due to lack of adequate staffing than it is on actually delivering maternity services.
We trapped many of the “sick and poor” in unemployment because we let large corporations argue that even jobs that paid less than minimum wage counted as “shortage professions” that deserved unlimited work visas. How are they going to get work when made to compete in that environment?
The legal profession has turned the Equality Acts into a tool to undermine market forces in the labour market, leading inevitably to the chaos in Birmingham & the further casualisation of labour as employers flatly refuse to take on employees who have been turned into future legal liabilities for the sin of paying different jobs different amounts of money in order to attract workers.
We’ve made it completely impossible to build anything at all, anywhere. Latest stupidity on this front is that the cheap rate for non-degradable landfill that can be used to fill old quarries (cement, soil etc) at £4/tonne is being removed & the standard rate of £136 / tonne is being applied across the board, adding something like ~£25k to the price of the average house & vastly increasing the costs of larger projects. But that’s a pinprick next to the new Building Regulations, which appear to have cut house-building in half from already pitiful levels & the marauding Environment Agency that believes spiders matter more than housing children.
I could (very easily) go on, but there is so much in this country that doesn’t require money spending on it - it needs saner review & regulation. Successive governments have made this situation worse and worse because every regulation has had a proponent who cares very much about it being implemented but the costs have been spread across all of us, so pushback has been difficult to organise. We have ended up with a diffuse rule by lawfare, where everyone has a very important job to do but in the aggregate their job is to prevent anything happening at all.
You have hit the nail on the head.
We need a bonfire of regulations.
Do you believe Labour will deliver that?
It is pretty much a universal feature of electoral campaigns that parties running for government promise "a bonfire of regulations" not just in Britain either. It features in the entirely of the developed world and even much of the under developed world, wherever elections occur.
The reality of government is such that very little changes, indeed calls for regulation increase. Calling for things to be banned and regulated is pretty much universal too.
So no, I don't expect Labour to deliver that, after all the Tories didn't, and from what we see in local government neither will Reform. Banning and regulating flags flying has been pretty much their only policy initiatives.
I may have mentioned our trade deficit from time to time in passing. This really isn't helping. Its time we had a government more focused on the day job.
The economy is only staying afloat because of services . The latest update to that is due out shortly .
Yes and to be fair that has largely been the case for 30 years or more. But what we are not seeing is any sign of investment in new production in the UK, any uplift in training, any growth in productivity, any facilitation of growth by removing planning hurdles or otherwise, any attempt to encourage entrepreneurial activity in the UK, it makes you despair. What we got instead was the increase in Employers NI and an above inflation increase in the minimum wage with inevitable consequences for the level of employment.
It just won't do. Our forthcoming budget needs to focus on growth (as Reeves herself recognised before the election). That means finding ways to boost investment through more generous allowances, encouraging training, not hammering Entrepreneurial Relief or Capital Gains or share based ISAs, looking at why London is struggling to compete in the IPO market, etc etc. I fear we are going to see the reverse as our Chancellor scrabbles around for a few billion more taxes to make her nonsensical targets and kick the can down the road for a few more months.
My new brainiac IQ 190 squillionaire friend, who was freaking out about the gilts market months ago (presciently) is now freaking out about gilts EVEN MORE
He says the government is “driving straight into a brick wall”. He thinks the present gilts “crisis” is maybe the markets reacting to Starmer’s “phase 2” speech which didn’t acknowledge the fiscal emergency at all
He says, as tax rises won’t work, borrowing can’t be done, and the government refuses to cut, we “may become Turkey or Argentina for a bit”
🫣
I am no brainiac, nor do I have an IQ of 190, nor, sadly, am I a squillionaire but this is kind of obvious. We are heading towards a fiscal crisis. It is not just that we need to borrow new money at penalty rates, we also have to roll over ever more debt taken out when interest rates were very, very low. 10 year gilts maturing just now were probably borrowed at less than 1%. To replace those borrowed funds we will be borrowing the same money at more than 5%. The cost of our debt is going to be rising for a long time, even if we manage to get current rates down. Every other category of spending is going to be squeezed by this.
Right, so what do we do? The "cut spending" brigade envisage that the sick and the poor are wasting the money so just take it off them. In reality they are sick and poor and when need remains and you cut the provision you spend more mopping up the various crises you create.
So we can't cut spending on the front line. We need to cut spending on everything else. How is it that we have an NHS where the budget goes up every year and front line provision shrinks? Its a bonfire burning our cash - and we can't afford to fuel it any more.
We set up a crisis team during Covid. Massive spike in patients, fewer resources, how do we do things. We need to do the same thing today. We simply cannot afford the vast bureaucracies and overlapping managers that we have in health and education. If that means that we have to make redundant the staff at NHS Trusts and Education Trusts then sobeit.
Even the guy running a company that provides school transport for SEND kids has gone on record complaining of the complete madness & waste in the current system.
PIP payments appear to have gone from “I need money for transport because otherwise I can’t get to work” to ”I have ADHD and find using the bus a bit tricky & would like my own car”,
The NHS maternity service is spending more on compensating mothers & children for damage done to them due to lack of adequate staffing than it is on actually delivering maternity services.
We trapped many of the “sick and poor” in unemployment because we let large corporations argue that even jobs that paid less than minimum wage counted as “shortage professions” that deserved unlimited work visas. How are they going to get work when made to compete in that environment?
The legal profession has turned the Equality Acts into a tool to undermine market forces in the labour market, leading inevitably to the chaos in Birmingham & the further casualisation of labour as employers flatly refuse to take on employees who have been turned into future legal liabilities for the sin of paying different jobs different amounts of money in order to attract workers.
We’ve made it completely impossible to build anything at all, anywhere. Latest stupidity on this front is that the cheap rate for non-degradable landfill that can be used to fill old quarries (cement, soil etc) at £4/tonne is being removed & the standard rate of £136 / tonne is being applied across the board, adding something like ~£25k to the price of the average house & vastly increasing the costs of larger projects. But that’s a pinprick next to the new Building Regulations, which appear to have cut house-building in half from already pitiful levels & the marauding Environment Agency that believes spiders matter more than housing children.
I could (very easily) go on, but there is so much in this country that doesn’t require money spending on it - it needs saner review & regulation. Successive governments have made this situation worse and worse because every regulation has had a proponent who cares very much about it being implemented but the costs have been spread across all of us, so pushback has been difficult to organise. We have ended up with a diffuse rule by lawfare, where everyone has a very important job to do but in the aggregate their job is to prevent anything happening at all.
You have hit the nail on the head.
We need a bonfire of regulations.
In a lot of cases, the regulations themselves aren’t the problem - it’s the interpretation of them via the legal system that has created the monster that now lies before us. We need to convince Parliament as an institution that following up on the interpretation of the law by the legal system is part & parcel of the job of lawmaking.
I may have mentioned our trade deficit from time to time in passing. This really isn't helping. Its time we had a government more focused on the day job.
The economy is only staying afloat because of services . The latest update to that is due out shortly .
Yes and to be fair that has largely been the case for 30 years or more. But what we are not seeing is any sign of investment in new production in the UK, any uplift in training, any growth in productivity, any facilitation of growth by removing planning hurdles or otherwise, any attempt to encourage entrepreneurial activity in the UK, it makes you despair. What we got instead was the increase in Employers NI and an above inflation increase in the minimum wage with inevitable consequences for the level of employment.
It just won't do. Our forthcoming budget needs to focus on growth (as Reeves herself recognised before the election). That means finding ways to boost investment through more generous allowances, encouraging training, not hammering Entrepreneurial Relief or Capital Gains or share based ISAs, looking at why London is struggling to compete in the IPO market, etc etc. I fear we are going to see the reverse as our Chancellor scrabbles around for a few billion more taxes to make her nonsensical targets and kick the can down the road for a few more months.
My new brainiac IQ 190 squillionaire friend, who was freaking out about the gilts market months ago (presciently) is now freaking out about gilts EVEN MORE
He says the government is “driving straight into a brick wall”. He thinks the present gilts “crisis” is maybe the markets reacting to Starmer’s “phase 2” speech which didn’t acknowledge the fiscal emergency at all
He says, as tax rises won’t work, borrowing can’t be done, and the government refuses to cut, we “may become Turkey or Argentina for a bit”
🫣
I am no brainiac, nor do I have an IQ of 190, nor, sadly, am I a squillionaire but this is kind of obvious. We are heading towards a fiscal crisis. It is not just that we need to borrow new money at penalty rates, we also have to roll over ever more debt taken out when interest rates were very, very low. 10 year gilts maturing just now were probably borrowed at less than 1%. To replace those borrowed funds we will be borrowing the same money at more than 5%. The cost of our debt is going to be rising for a long time, even if we manage to get current rates down. Every other category of spending is going to be squeezed by this.
Right, so what do we do? The "cut spending" brigade envisage that the sick and the poor are wasting the money so just take it off them. In reality they are sick and poor and when need remains and you cut the provision you spend more mopping up the various crises you create.
So we can't cut spending on the front line. We need to cut spending on everything else. How is it that we have an NHS where the budget goes up every year and front line provision shrinks? Its a bonfire burning our cash - and we can't afford to fuel it any more.
We set up a crisis team during Covid. Massive spike in patients, fewer resources, how do we do things. We need to do the same thing today. We simply cannot afford the vast bureaucracies and overlapping managers that we have in health and education. If that means that we have to make redundant the staff at NHS Trusts and Education Trusts then sobeit.
Even the guy running a company that provides school transport for SEND kids has gone on record complaining of the complete madness & waste in the current system.
PIP payments appear to have gone from “I need money for transport because otherwise I can’t get to work” to ”I have ADHD and find using the bus a bit tricky & would like my own car”,
The NHS maternity service is spending more on compensating mothers & children for damage done to them due to lack of adequate staffing than it is on actually delivering maternity services.
We trapped many of the “sick and poor” in unemployment because we let large corporations argue that even jobs that paid less than minimum wage counted as “shortage professions” that deserved unlimited work visas. How are they going to get work when made to compete in that environment?
The legal profession has turned the Equality Acts into a tool to undermine market forces in the labour market, leading inevitably to the chaos in Birmingham & the further casualisation of labour as employers flatly refuse to take on employees who have been turned into future legal liabilities for the sin of paying different jobs different amounts of money in order to attract workers.
We’ve made it completely impossible to build anything at all, anywhere. Latest stupidity on this front is that the cheap rate for non-degradable landfill that can be used to fill old quarries (cement, soil etc) at £4/tonne is being removed & the standard rate of £136 / tonne is being applied across the board, adding something like ~£25k to the price of the average house & vastly increasing the costs of larger projects. But that’s a pinprick next to the new Building Regulations, which appear to have cut house-building in half from already pitiful levels & the marauding Environment Agency that believes spiders matter more than housing children.
I could (very easily) go on, but there is so much in this country that doesn’t require money spending on it - it needs saner review & regulation. Successive governments have made this situation worse and worse because every regulation has had a proponent who cares very much about it being implemented but the costs have been spread across all of us, so pushback has been difficult to organise. We have ended up with a diffuse rule by lawfare, where everyone has a very important job to do but in the aggregate their job is to prevent anything happening at all.
Welcome to the process state that is run by unelected bureaucrats because the elected politicians are shit. I think we've been here for about 30 years.
We've all had a bit of a moan. Max makes the key point. I have no doubt that every single one of these directives is considered worthy - the landfill one is aimed at reducing waste as an example.
Great, but stack all of these worthy things together and you get a quagmire where nothing gets done despite fortunes being spent. Once again Reform ask the right question - "is there waste?" but have the wrong answer - "lets send in DOGE and create a scandal out of accounting!!!"
Phil made a point about NHS maternity services. We can't afford midwives, but can afford to pay for the pain and suffering caused by a lack of midwives. Similarly we can't afford police officers or to staff courts or build prison capacity but we can afford to pay for the economic damage caused by crime.
Can't we see the stupidity of the "we can't afford" mentality? We're spending more and more to get less and less...
I may have mentioned our trade deficit from time to time in passing. This really isn't helping. Its time we had a government more focused on the day job.
The economy is only staying afloat because of services . The latest update to that is due out shortly .
Yes and to be fair that has largely been the case for 30 years or more. But what we are not seeing is any sign of investment in new production in the UK, any uplift in training, any growth in productivity, any facilitation of growth by removing planning hurdles or otherwise, any attempt to encourage entrepreneurial activity in the UK, it makes you despair. What we got instead was the increase in Employers NI and an above inflation increase in the minimum wage with inevitable consequences for the level of employment.
It just won't do. Our forthcoming budget needs to focus on growth (as Reeves herself recognised before the election). That means finding ways to boost investment through more generous allowances, encouraging training, not hammering Entrepreneurial Relief or Capital Gains or share based ISAs, looking at why London is struggling to compete in the IPO market, etc etc. I fear we are going to see the reverse as our Chancellor scrabbles around for a few billion more taxes to make her nonsensical targets and kick the can down the road for a few more months.
My new brainiac IQ 190 squillionaire friend, who was freaking out about the gilts market months ago (presciently) is now freaking out about gilts EVEN MORE
He says the government is “driving straight into a brick wall”. He thinks the present gilts “crisis” is maybe the markets reacting to Starmer’s “phase 2” speech which didn’t acknowledge the fiscal emergency at all
He says, as tax rises won’t work, borrowing can’t be done, and the government refuses to cut, we “may become Turkey or Argentina for a bit”
🫣
I am no brainiac, nor do I have an IQ of 190, nor, sadly, am I a squillionaire but this is kind of obvious. We are heading towards a fiscal crisis. It is not just that we need to borrow new money at penalty rates, we also have to roll over ever more debt taken out when interest rates were very, very low. 10 year gilts maturing just now were probably borrowed at less than 1%. To replace those borrowed funds we will be borrowing the same money at more than 5%. The cost of our debt is going to be rising for a long time, even if we manage to get current rates down. Every other category of spending is going to be squeezed by this.
Right, so what do we do? The "cut spending" brigade envisage that the sick and the poor are wasting the money so just take it off them. In reality they are sick and poor and when need remains and you cut the provision you spend more mopping up the various crises you create.
So we can't cut spending on the front line. We need to cut spending on everything else. How is it that we have an NHS where the budget goes up every year and front line provision shrinks? Its a bonfire burning our cash - and we can't afford to fuel it any more.
We set up a crisis team during Covid. Massive spike in patients, fewer resources, how do we do things. We need to do the same thing today. We simply cannot afford the vast bureaucracies and overlapping managers that we have in health and education. If that means that we have to make redundant the staff at NHS Trusts and Education Trusts then sobeit.
Maybe Foxy could explain the reasoning behind all the different NHS trusts as there might be a good reason - I understand that different areas of the UK have different demographics so different needs but I always wonder whether it would work more efficiently with one single management (the same with all the different police forces, would it be more efficient to just have a UK Police).
I think about the old story that the French Education minister could look at a piece of paper and know what every schoolchild in France was eating that day and wonder how many areas of the state in the UK could just be made identikit across the country rather than having individual fiefdoms and extra costs from not having the purchasing power of a larger institution (eg all police kit from cars to boots should be supplied from the same source to leverage the collective buying power - I can’t think of any reason why different police forces end up with different makes of car for the same roles).
The fragmentation of the NHS was largely a creation of an "internal market" by the Conservatives, I suggest. It does create many problems.
Even as a conservative I cannot see any value in an internal market for the NHS, it’s not like they need competition where people from Newcastle are looking at where to get their hip done and find they can get a two for the price of one in Plymouth if they can get there tomorrow.
Same [edit] sort of geographical problem with railway privatization (specifically the splitting up bit - no wonder that is being rectified now). And schools, as discussed also today here, in some of the UK.
But it does happen, for sausage machine stuff - plus you've got the private hospitals, lots of simple sausage machine stuff like varicose veins and cataracts.
Yet the other problem is that the consumers aren't informed consumers. And what happens to the hospitals that are supposed to lose out and go bust?
Surely it would make some sense to balance demand across the country. At one point I thought I would need a knee op. I would have happily gone to a national MRI scanning centre in, say, Birmingham to speed things uo, and as I live on my own it would have made sense to have the op near friends in Hampshire or family in Essex, as I would likely be incapacitated for a while afterwards. But, oh no, it all has to be managed locally
Mm. Thinking about it, those seem to me too common needs to justify that sort of travel (leaving aside for the moment the need for local support afterwards, which - without wanting to discount your need - actually works the other way for many people of course). You need scanners all over the place anyway. Plus there is the issue of acute needs - for example, RTAs - and therefore local scanning.
We need the medics commenting on this ...
Edit: just seen your comment re the offer of ops the following day. No idea if there really are gaps in op room timetables, but bear in mind the suregon does need to assess the patient beforehand, starve them the night before, and so on.
I may have mentioned our trade deficit from time to time in passing. This really isn't helping. Its time we had a government more focused on the day job.
The economy is only staying afloat because of services . The latest update to that is due out shortly .
Yes and to be fair that has largely been the case for 30 years or more. But what we are not seeing is any sign of investment in new production in the UK, any uplift in training, any growth in productivity, any facilitation of growth by removing planning hurdles or otherwise, any attempt to encourage entrepreneurial activity in the UK, it makes you despair. What we got instead was the increase in Employers NI and an above inflation increase in the minimum wage with inevitable consequences for the level of employment.
It just won't do. Our forthcoming budget needs to focus on growth (as Reeves herself recognised before the election). That means finding ways to boost investment through more generous allowances, encouraging training, not hammering Entrepreneurial Relief or Capital Gains or share based ISAs, looking at why London is struggling to compete in the IPO market, etc etc. I fear we are going to see the reverse as our Chancellor scrabbles around for a few billion more taxes to make her nonsensical targets and kick the can down the road for a few more months.
My new brainiac IQ 190 squillionaire friend, who was freaking out about the gilts market months ago (presciently) is now freaking out about gilts EVEN MORE
He says the government is “driving straight into a brick wall”. He thinks the present gilts “crisis” is maybe the markets reacting to Starmer’s “phase 2” speech which didn’t acknowledge the fiscal emergency at all
He says, as tax rises won’t work, borrowing can’t be done, and the government refuses to cut, we “may become Turkey or Argentina for a bit”
🫣
I am no brainiac, nor do I have an IQ of 190, nor, sadly, am I a squillionaire but this is kind of obvious. We are heading towards a fiscal crisis. It is not just that we need to borrow new money at penalty rates, we also have to roll over ever more debt taken out when interest rates were very, very low. 10 year gilts maturing just now were probably borrowed at less than 1%. To replace those borrowed funds we will be borrowing the same money at more than 5%. The cost of our debt is going to be rising for a long time, even if we manage to get current rates down. Every other category of spending is going to be squeezed by this.
Right, so what do we do? The "cut spending" brigade envisage that the sick and the poor are wasting the money so just take it off them. In reality they are sick and poor and when need remains and you cut the provision you spend more mopping up the various crises you create.
So we can't cut spending on the front line. We need to cut spending on everything else. How is it that we have an NHS where the budget goes up every year and front line provision shrinks? Its a bonfire burning our cash - and we can't afford to fuel it any more.
We set up a crisis team during Covid. Massive spike in patients, fewer resources, how do we do things. We need to do the same thing today. We simply cannot afford the vast bureaucracies and overlapping managers that we have in health and education. If that means that we have to make redundant the staff at NHS Trusts and Education Trusts then sobeit.
When I was at school every local authority (normally the county council) had a team of a dozen, maybe two dozen managers. A 1000 pupil secondary school had a head, a couple of deputies, a Secretary and a caretaker. That was your "non productive" staff, and even then the deputies and even the head taught classes.
Now we have oversight by Ofsted, we have multi school academy management teams on astronomical salaries (and there are far, far more of them than there were County Council LEAs). Each school has around a dozen non teaching managers/ administrators . The education budget is syphoned off to these people before a student writes their first essay. Do we need all these leeches or can we return to the old model?
That's a very articulate and intelligent response.
Starmer should be afraid, very afraid...
As the tweets were from April, why has it taken so long?
The obvious answer is that the complaint is recent.
The second most obvious answer is that he has been out of the country for some time, which is disprovable and unlikely.
We also need to remember that elements in the Trans lobby have a long and nasty history of using fake and opportunistic complaints to police as a form of outsourced harassment. This could be one of those, whatever we think of Linehan.
Here for example was the experience of Caroline Farrow, who I have known on and off online since about 2007, when we were both interested in the "religion" sub-niche of the then new political blogging.
I may have mentioned our trade deficit from time to time in passing. This really isn't helping. Its time we had a government more focused on the day job.
The economy is only staying afloat because of services . The latest update to that is due out shortly .
Yes and to be fair that has largely been the case for 30 years or more. But what we are not seeing is any sign of investment in new production in the UK, any uplift in training, any growth in productivity, any facilitation of growth by removing planning hurdles or otherwise, any attempt to encourage entrepreneurial activity in the UK, it makes you despair. What we got instead was the increase in Employers NI and an above inflation increase in the minimum wage with inevitable consequences for the level of employment.
It just won't do. Our forthcoming budget needs to focus on growth (as Reeves herself recognised before the election). That means finding ways to boost investment through more generous allowances, encouraging training, not hammering Entrepreneurial Relief or Capital Gains or share based ISAs, looking at why London is struggling to compete in the IPO market, etc etc. I fear we are going to see the reverse as our Chancellor scrabbles around for a few billion more taxes to make her nonsensical targets and kick the can down the road for a few more months.
My new brainiac IQ 190 squillionaire friend, who was freaking out about the gilts market months ago (presciently) is now freaking out about gilts EVEN MORE
He says the government is “driving straight into a brick wall”. He thinks the present gilts “crisis” is maybe the markets reacting to Starmer’s “phase 2” speech which didn’t acknowledge the fiscal emergency at all
He says, as tax rises won’t work, borrowing can’t be done, and the government refuses to cut, we “may become Turkey or Argentina for a bit”
🫣
I am no brainiac, nor do I have an IQ of 190, nor, sadly, am I a squillionaire but this is kind of obvious. We are heading towards a fiscal crisis. It is not just that we need to borrow new money at penalty rates, we also have to roll over ever more debt taken out when interest rates were very, very low. 10 year gilts maturing just now were probably borrowed at less than 1%. To replace those borrowed funds we will be borrowing the same money at more than 5%. The cost of our debt is going to be rising for a long time, even if we manage to get current rates down. Every other category of spending is going to be squeezed by this.
Right, so what do we do? The "cut spending" brigade envisage that the sick and the poor are wasting the money so just take it off them. In reality they are sick and poor and when need remains and you cut the provision you spend more mopping up the various crises you create.
So we can't cut spending on the front line. We need to cut spending on everything else. How is it that we have an NHS where the budget goes up every year and front line provision shrinks? Its a bonfire burning our cash - and we can't afford to fuel it any more.
We set up a crisis team during Covid. Massive spike in patients, fewer resources, how do we do things. We need to do the same thing today. We simply cannot afford the vast bureaucracies and overlapping managers that we have in health and education. If that means that we have to make redundant the staff at NHS Trusts and Education Trusts then sobeit.
When I was at school every local authority (normally the county council) had a team of a dozen, maybe two dozen managers. A 1000 pupil secondary school had a head, a couple of deputies, a Secretary and a caretaker. That was your "non productive" staff, and even then the deputies and even the head taught classes.
Now we have oversight by Ofsted, we have multi school academy management teams on astronomical salaries (and there are far, far more of them than there were County Council LEAs). Each school has around a dozen non teaching managers/ administrators . The education budget is syphoned off to these people before a student writes their first essay. Do we need all these leeches or can we return to the old model?
It's great these questions are being asked imo.
TBF MP's omitting the catering staff, from when schools had proper food. And cleaners, and so on. But those should have their equivalents today, who are productive in enabling schooling.
And the IT in old times was a film loop projector and an OHP. Hard to make a direct comparison ...
In defence of PCCs they replaced police authorities.
Which were ineffective, remote and unresponsive to public priorities. And in some cases the police/police unions threatened difficult members to force them to resign from the authorities.
The PCCs are not perfect, but there is a need for civilian political oversight of police activities and some appointed committee somewhere in a smoke-filled room just doesn’t cut it
In Leics and Rutland our PCC recently defected to Reform.
That's worth a read for the guy talking about the difference that he thinks him joining RefUK will make. There's a lot of Farage talking points in it, and Leics will be a fascinating place to run the experiment.
I didn't vote for him when he was a Tory, and won't next time now that he is Reform. He won't by a very narrow margin over a split opposition last time.
I haven't noticed any change in policing, and don't anticipate any. Elected PCCs seem ideally suited to abolition as a cost cutting measure to my eyes.
Some like Roger Hirst in Essex have done a good job, he did a course in criminology too to prepare for the role.
Most PCCs are being scrapped anyway and their functions take over by Mayors in new combined authorities, including in Essex
And surely those PCCs will resurface as candidates for the mayoralty....
Well that is for Parliament to amend the Online Safety Act and Public Order Act and Malicious Communications Act then
Another great achievement of the Conservative government, in 2023, that the Conservatives of 2025 blame on Labour. Is it any wonder Conservatives go to Reform in ever increasing numbers?
Is there anything your government did that the party still stands by?
I may have mentioned our trade deficit from time to time in passing. This really isn't helping. Its time we had a government more focused on the day job.
The economy is only staying afloat because of services . The latest update to that is due out shortly .
Yes and to be fair that has largely been the case for 30 years or more. But what we are not seeing is any sign of investment in new production in the UK, any uplift in training, any growth in productivity, any facilitation of growth by removing planning hurdles or otherwise, any attempt to encourage entrepreneurial activity in the UK, it makes you despair. What we got instead was the increase in Employers NI and an above inflation increase in the minimum wage with inevitable consequences for the level of employment.
It just won't do. Our forthcoming budget needs to focus on growth (as Reeves herself recognised before the election). That means finding ways to boost investment through more generous allowances, encouraging training, not hammering Entrepreneurial Relief or Capital Gains or share based ISAs, looking at why London is struggling to compete in the IPO market, etc etc. I fear we are going to see the reverse as our Chancellor scrabbles around for a few billion more taxes to make her nonsensical targets and kick the can down the road for a few more months.
My new brainiac IQ 190 squillionaire friend, who was freaking out about the gilts market months ago (presciently) is now freaking out about gilts EVEN MORE
He says the government is “driving straight into a brick wall”. He thinks the present gilts “crisis” is maybe the markets reacting to Starmer’s “phase 2” speech which didn’t acknowledge the fiscal emergency at all
He says, as tax rises won’t work, borrowing can’t be done, and the government refuses to cut, we “may become Turkey or Argentina for a bit”
🫣
I am no brainiac, nor do I have an IQ of 190, nor, sadly, am I a squillionaire but this is kind of obvious. We are heading towards a fiscal crisis. It is not just that we need to borrow new money at penalty rates, we also have to roll over ever more debt taken out when interest rates were very, very low. 10 year gilts maturing just now were probably borrowed at less than 1%. To replace those borrowed funds we will be borrowing the same money at more than 5%. The cost of our debt is going to be rising for a long time, even if we manage to get current rates down. Every other category of spending is going to be squeezed by this.
Right, so what do we do? The "cut spending" brigade envisage that the sick and the poor are wasting the money so just take it off them. In reality they are sick and poor and when need remains and you cut the provision you spend more mopping up the various crises you create.
So we can't cut spending on the front line. We need to cut spending on everything else. How is it that we have an NHS where the budget goes up every year and front line provision shrinks? Its a bonfire burning our cash - and we can't afford to fuel it any more.
We set up a crisis team during Covid. Massive spike in patients, fewer resources, how do we do things. We need to do the same thing today. We simply cannot afford the vast bureaucracies and overlapping managers that we have in health and education. If that means that we have to make redundant the staff at NHS Trusts and Education Trusts then sobeit.
Maybe Foxy could explain the reasoning behind all the different NHS trusts as there might be a good reason - I understand that different areas of the UK have different demographics so different needs but I always wonder whether it would work more efficiently with one single management (the same with all the different police forces, would it be more efficient to just have a UK Police).
I think about the old story that the French Education minister could look at a piece of paper and know what every schoolchild in France was eating that day and wonder how many areas of the state in the UK could just be made identikit across the country rather than having individual fiefdoms and extra costs from not having the purchasing power of a larger institution (eg all police kit from cars to boots should be supplied from the same source to leverage the collective buying power - I can’t think of any reason why different police forces end up with different makes of car for the same roles).
The fragmentation of the NHS was largely a creation of an "internal market" by the Conservatives, I suggest. It does create many problems.
Even as a conservative I cannot see any value in an internal market for the NHS, it’s not like they need competition where people from Newcastle are looking at where to get their hip done and find they can get a two for the price of one in Plymouth if they can get there tomorrow.
Same [edit] sort of geographical problem with railway privatization (specifically the splitting up bit - no wonder that is being rectified now). And schools, as discussed also today here, in some of the UK.
But it does happen, for sausage machine stuff - plus you've got the private hospitals, lots of simple sausage machine stuff like varicose veins and cataracts.
Yet the other problem is that the consumers aren't informed consumers. And what happens to the hospitals that are supposed to lose out and go bust?
Surely it would make some sense to balance demand across the country. At one point I thought I would need a knee op. I would have happily gone to a national MRI scanning centre in, say, Birmingham to speed things up, and as I live on my own it would have made sense to have the op near friends in Hampshire or family in Essex, as I would likely be incapacitated for a while afterwards and could stay with them. But, oh no, it all has to be managed locally.
Anyone with a knee problem that is preventing them working should very much be offered the next op wherever it is in the country
I did wonder out loud here once about the feasibility of creating a few giant hub hospitals in the UK where they not only build the hospitals but accommodation for trainee/student doctors and for doctors who want to teach where they get grace and favour accommodation for them and dependents for the period they are teaching.
These hospitals could be in completely random places (back to the old airfields) and not sited based on population as long as there is easy provision or existing public transport or access.
These hospitals would then be open to anyone in the country to use so people like you could choose not to wait for ages because you want to be near family so want local hospital and are happy to travel anywhere so freeing up local hospitals longer term, it’s gives student/trainee doctors somewhere to put their skills into practice and might be attractive to foreign doctors who want to do a couple of years in the UK where they get free accommodation.
I think the main downside that was pointed out by those who know much more about medicine was that you would never fill the teaching roles which is a shame.
I may have mentioned our trade deficit from time to time in passing. This really isn't helping. Its time we had a government more focused on the day job.
The economy is only staying afloat because of services . The latest update to that is due out shortly .
Yes and to be fair that has largely been the case for 30 years or more. But what we are not seeing is any sign of investment in new production in the UK, any uplift in training, any growth in productivity, any facilitation of growth by removing planning hurdles or otherwise, any attempt to encourage entrepreneurial activity in the UK, it makes you despair. What we got instead was the increase in Employers NI and an above inflation increase in the minimum wage with inevitable consequences for the level of employment.
It just won't do. Our forthcoming budget needs to focus on growth (as Reeves herself recognised before the election). That means finding ways to boost investment through more generous allowances, encouraging training, not hammering Entrepreneurial Relief or Capital Gains or share based ISAs, looking at why London is struggling to compete in the IPO market, etc etc. I fear we are going to see the reverse as our Chancellor scrabbles around for a few billion more taxes to make her nonsensical targets and kick the can down the road for a few more months.
My new brainiac IQ 190 squillionaire friend, who was freaking out about the gilts market months ago (presciently) is now freaking out about gilts EVEN MORE
He says the government is “driving straight into a brick wall”. He thinks the present gilts “crisis” is maybe the markets reacting to Starmer’s “phase 2” speech which didn’t acknowledge the fiscal emergency at all
He says, as tax rises won’t work, borrowing can’t be done, and the government refuses to cut, we “may become Turkey or Argentina for a bit”
🫣
I am no brainiac, nor do I have an IQ of 190, nor, sadly, am I a squillionaire but this is kind of obvious. We are heading towards a fiscal crisis. It is not just that we need to borrow new money at penalty rates, we also have to roll over ever more debt taken out when interest rates were very, very low. 10 year gilts maturing just now were probably borrowed at less than 1%. To replace those borrowed funds we will be borrowing the same money at more than 5%. The cost of our debt is going to be rising for a long time, even if we manage to get current rates down. Every other category of spending is going to be squeezed by this.
Right, so what do we do? The "cut spending" brigade envisage that the sick and the poor are wasting the money so just take it off them. In reality they are sick and poor and when need remains and you cut the provision you spend more mopping up the various crises you create.
So we can't cut spending on the front line. We need to cut spending on everything else. How is it that we have an NHS where the budget goes up every year and front line provision shrinks? Its a bonfire burning our cash - and we can't afford to fuel it any more.
We set up a crisis team during Covid. Massive spike in patients, fewer resources, how do we do things. We need to do the same thing today. We simply cannot afford the vast bureaucracies and overlapping managers that we have in health and education. If that means that we have to make redundant the staff at NHS Trusts and Education Trusts then sobeit.
When I was at school every local authority (normally the county council) had a team of a dozen, maybe two dozen managers. A 1000 pupil secondary school had a head, a couple of deputies, a Secretary and a caretaker. That was your "non productive" staff, and even then the deputies and even the head taught classes.
Now we have oversight by Ofsted, we have multi school academy management teams on astronomical salaries (and there are far, far more of them than there were County Council LEAs). Each school has around a dozen non teaching managers/ administrators . The education budget is syphoned off to these people before a student writes their first essay. Do we need all these leeches or can we return to the old model?
Was this a secondary? Because my late 90s secondary had libarians, lab techs, DT techs, computer techs (for staff and student networks)...
I may have mentioned our trade deficit from time to time in passing. This really isn't helping. Its time we had a government more focused on the day job.
The economy is only staying afloat because of services . The latest update to that is due out shortly .
Yes and to be fair that has largely been the case for 30 years or more. But what we are not seeing is any sign of investment in new production in the UK, any uplift in training, any growth in productivity, any facilitation of growth by removing planning hurdles or otherwise, any attempt to encourage entrepreneurial activity in the UK, it makes you despair. What we got instead was the increase in Employers NI and an above inflation increase in the minimum wage with inevitable consequences for the level of employment.
It just won't do. Our forthcoming budget needs to focus on growth (as Reeves herself recognised before the election). That means finding ways to boost investment through more generous allowances, encouraging training, not hammering Entrepreneurial Relief or Capital Gains or share based ISAs, looking at why London is struggling to compete in the IPO market, etc etc. I fear we are going to see the reverse as our Chancellor scrabbles around for a few billion more taxes to make her nonsensical targets and kick the can down the road for a few more months.
My new brainiac IQ 190 squillionaire friend, who was freaking out about the gilts market months ago (presciently) is now freaking out about gilts EVEN MORE
He says the government is “driving straight into a brick wall”. He thinks the present gilts “crisis” is maybe the markets reacting to Starmer’s “phase 2” speech which didn’t acknowledge the fiscal emergency at all
He says, as tax rises won’t work, borrowing can’t be done, and the government refuses to cut, we “may become Turkey or Argentina for a bit”
🫣
I am no brainiac, nor do I have an IQ of 190, nor, sadly, am I a squillionaire but this is kind of obvious. We are heading towards a fiscal crisis. It is not just that we need to borrow new money at penalty rates, we also have to roll over ever more debt taken out when interest rates were very, very low. 10 year gilts maturing just now were probably borrowed at less than 1%. To replace those borrowed funds we will be borrowing the same money at more than 5%. The cost of our debt is going to be rising for a long time, even if we manage to get current rates down. Every other category of spending is going to be squeezed by this.
Right, so what do we do? The "cut spending" brigade envisage that the sick and the poor are wasting the money so just take it off them. In reality they are sick and poor and when need remains and you cut the provision you spend more mopping up the various crises you create.
So we can't cut spending on the front line. We need to cut spending on everything else. How is it that we have an NHS where the budget goes up every year and front line provision shrinks? Its a bonfire burning our cash - and we can't afford to fuel it any more.
We set up a crisis team during Covid. Massive spike in patients, fewer resources, how do we do things. We need to do the same thing today. We simply cannot afford the vast bureaucracies and overlapping managers that we have in health and education. If that means that we have to make redundant the staff at NHS Trusts and Education Trusts then sobeit.
Maybe Foxy could explain the reasoning behind all the different NHS trusts as there might be a good reason - I understand that different areas of the UK have different demographics so different needs but I always wonder whether it would work more efficiently with one single management (the same with all the different police forces, would it be more efficient to just have a UK Police).
I think about the old story that the French Education minister could look at a piece of paper and know what every schoolchild in France was eating that day and wonder how many areas of the state in the UK could just be made identikit across the country rather than having individual fiefdoms and extra costs from not having the purchasing power of a larger institution (eg all police kit from cars to boots should be supplied from the same source to leverage the collective buying power - I can’t think of any reason why different police forces end up with different makes of car for the same roles).
The fragmentation of the NHS was largely a creation of an "internal market" by the Conservatives, I suggest. It does create many problems.
Even as a conservative I cannot see any value in an internal market for the NHS, it’s not like they need competition where people from Newcastle are looking at where to get their hip done and find they can get a two for the price of one in Plymouth if they can get there tomorrow.
Same [edit] sort of geographical problem with railway privatization (specifically the splitting up bit - no wonder that is being rectified now). And schools, as discussed also today here, in some of the UK.
But it does happen, for sausage machine stuff - plus you've got the private hospitals, lots of simple sausage machine stuff like varicose veins and cataracts.
Yet the other problem is that the consumers aren't informed consumers. And what happens to the hospitals that are supposed to lose out and go bust?
Surely it would make some sense to balance demand across the country. At one point I thought I would need a knee op. I would have happily gone to a national MRI scanning centre in, say, Birmingham to speed things uo, and as I live on my own it would have made sense to have the op near friends in Hampshire or family in Essex, as I would likely be incapacitated for a while afterwards. But, oh no, it all has to be managed locally
Mm. Thinking about it, those seem to me too common needs to justify that sort of travel (leaving aside for the moment the need for local support afterwards, which - without wanting to discount your need - actually works the other way for many people of course). You need scanners all over the place anyway. Plus there is the issue of acute needs - for example, RTAs - and therefore local scanning.
We need the medics commenting on this ...
Indeed, but it seems to me it is easier to balance need over a larger area. If you have an under employed surgeon in Durham, ship some people in from London. And we need to stop treating things *that stop people working* as elective procedures.
Rather like the joke about the lightbulb, the Labour leadership needs to want to change.
As we saw with Corbyn, the way the Labour Party is set up makes it pretty much impossible to depose a leader who doesn’t want to move on.
Starmer seems happy enough in the job, he does whatever the lawyers and courts tell him to do, and doesn’t care much for public opinion. Perhaps it will take a major financial crisis to wake him up?
Does 'major financial crisis' include the one we are in, where the only day to day solution is to place our grandchildren into bankruptcy instead of sorting stuff out ourselves and Labour MPs won't vote for tiny cuts?
That really is an excellent summary of our position and the challenges we face. Note debt interest's significant contribution to the increasing deficit.
Maybe Allister Heath is right - for once - and we will get a new election. If my friend is right and cutting spending is the only way, but Labour MPs refuse to do it, then either the government prints money and inflation explodes, then we go bust anyway (in the end), or we have an election to elect MPs who WILL cut spending
No, there is a third way, massively increase tax on the rich and wealthy and property and business owners, which Labour will go further on in the autumn. As mentioned most Labour MPs would lose their seats on current polls so won't vote for an early election
Labour voted for an early election in 2017 even though most of their MPs expected the party to lose seats at the time. But that was a very unusual set of circumstances.
I may have mentioned our trade deficit from time to time in passing. This really isn't helping. Its time we had a government more focused on the day job.
The economy is only staying afloat because of services . The latest update to that is due out shortly .
Yes and to be fair that has largely been the case for 30 years or more. But what we are not seeing is any sign of investment in new production in the UK, any uplift in training, any growth in productivity, any facilitation of growth by removing planning hurdles or otherwise, any attempt to encourage entrepreneurial activity in the UK, it makes you despair. What we got instead was the increase in Employers NI and an above inflation increase in the minimum wage with inevitable consequences for the level of employment.
It just won't do. Our forthcoming budget needs to focus on growth (as Reeves herself recognised before the election). That means finding ways to boost investment through more generous allowances, encouraging training, not hammering Entrepreneurial Relief or Capital Gains or share based ISAs, looking at why London is struggling to compete in the IPO market, etc etc. I fear we are going to see the reverse as our Chancellor scrabbles around for a few billion more taxes to make her nonsensical targets and kick the can down the road for a few more months.
My new brainiac IQ 190 squillionaire friend, who was freaking out about the gilts market months ago (presciently) is now freaking out about gilts EVEN MORE
He says the government is “driving straight into a brick wall”. He thinks the present gilts “crisis” is maybe the markets reacting to Starmer’s “phase 2” speech which didn’t acknowledge the fiscal emergency at all
He says, as tax rises won’t work, borrowing can’t be done, and the government refuses to cut, we “may become Turkey or Argentina for a bit”
🫣
I am no brainiac, nor do I have an IQ of 190, nor, sadly, am I a squillionaire but this is kind of obvious. We are heading towards a fiscal crisis. It is not just that we need to borrow new money at penalty rates, we also have to roll over ever more debt taken out when interest rates were very, very low. 10 year gilts maturing just now were probably borrowed at less than 1%. To replace those borrowed funds we will be borrowing the same money at more than 5%. The cost of our debt is going to be rising for a long time, even if we manage to get current rates down. Every other category of spending is going to be squeezed by this.
Right, so what do we do? The "cut spending" brigade envisage that the sick and the poor are wasting the money so just take it off them. In reality they are sick and poor and when need remains and you cut the provision you spend more mopping up the various crises you create.
So we can't cut spending on the front line. We need to cut spending on everything else. How is it that we have an NHS where the budget goes up every year and front line provision shrinks? Its a bonfire burning our cash - and we can't afford to fuel it any more.
We set up a crisis team during Covid. Massive spike in patients, fewer resources, how do we do things. We need to do the same thing today. We simply cannot afford the vast bureaucracies and overlapping managers that we have in health and education. If that means that we have to make redundant the staff at NHS Trusts and Education Trusts then sobeit.
When I was at school every local authority (normally the county council) had a team of a dozen, maybe two dozen managers. A 1000 pupil secondary school had a head, a couple of deputies, a Secretary and a caretaker. That was your "non productive" staff, and even then the deputies and even the head taught classes.
Now we have oversight by Ofsted, we have multi school academy management teams on astronomical salaries (and there are far, far more of them than there were County Council LEAs). Each school has around a dozen non teaching managers/ administrators . The education budget is syphoned off to these people before a student writes their first essay. Do we need all these leeches or can we return to the old model?
It's great these questions are being asked imo.
TBF MP's omitting the catering staff, from when schools had proper food. And cleaners, and so on. But those should have their equivalents today, who are productive in enabling schooling.
And the IT in old times was a film loop projector and an OHP. Hard to make a direct comparison ...
My old school is now a 9 school trust and has a "Strategic Director of IT" - part of the £2.25m spent by the trust on managers.
You know what IT stuff the schools in the trust need? The same stuff the schools not in the trust need. Why are we paying a fortune to have a 9-school "Strategic Director of IT" to negotiate shit deals with "Google" etc al. Because that is the reality. Tesco does not let store managers or even area managers negotiate with Heinz when buying beans. But we have a system where we now have thousands of well paid managers out to negotiate for a few beans at huge mark-up when all of them need the same beans.
This is what the Osborne free market revolution has delivered.
Well that is for Parliament to amend the Online Safety Act and Public Order Act and Malicious Communications Act then
Another great achievement of the Conservative government, in 2023, that the Conservatives of 2025 blame on Labour. Is it any wonder Conservatives go to Reform in ever increasing numbers?
Is there anything your government did that the party still stands by?
Chris Philip angrily berating Labour for not closing the Bell Hotel which was opened by Chris Philip...
I may have mentioned our trade deficit from time to time in passing. This really isn't helping. Its time we had a government more focused on the day job.
The economy is only staying afloat because of services . The latest update to that is due out shortly .
Yes and to be fair that has largely been the case for 30 years or more. But what we are not seeing is any sign of investment in new production in the UK, any uplift in training, any growth in productivity, any facilitation of growth by removing planning hurdles or otherwise, any attempt to encourage entrepreneurial activity in the UK, it makes you despair. What we got instead was the increase in Employers NI and an above inflation increase in the minimum wage with inevitable consequences for the level of employment.
It just won't do. Our forthcoming budget needs to focus on growth (as Reeves herself recognised before the election). That means finding ways to boost investment through more generous allowances, encouraging training, not hammering Entrepreneurial Relief or Capital Gains or share based ISAs, looking at why London is struggling to compete in the IPO market, etc etc. I fear we are going to see the reverse as our Chancellor scrabbles around for a few billion more taxes to make her nonsensical targets and kick the can down the road for a few more months.
My new brainiac IQ 190 squillionaire friend, who was freaking out about the gilts market months ago (presciently) is now freaking out about gilts EVEN MORE
He says the government is “driving straight into a brick wall”. He thinks the present gilts “crisis” is maybe the markets reacting to Starmer’s “phase 2” speech which didn’t acknowledge the fiscal emergency at all
He says, as tax rises won’t work, borrowing can’t be done, and the government refuses to cut, we “may become Turkey or Argentina for a bit”
🫣
I am no brainiac, nor do I have an IQ of 190, nor, sadly, am I a squillionaire but this is kind of obvious. We are heading towards a fiscal crisis. It is not just that we need to borrow new money at penalty rates, we also have to roll over ever more debt taken out when interest rates were very, very low. 10 year gilts maturing just now were probably borrowed at less than 1%. To replace those borrowed funds we will be borrowing the same money at more than 5%. The cost of our debt is going to be rising for a long time, even if we manage to get current rates down. Every other category of spending is going to be squeezed by this.
Right, so what do we do? The "cut spending" brigade envisage that the sick and the poor are wasting the money so just take it off them. In reality they are sick and poor and when need remains and you cut the provision you spend more mopping up the various crises you create.
So we can't cut spending on the front line. We need to cut spending on everything else. How is it that we have an NHS where the budget goes up every year and front line provision shrinks? Its a bonfire burning our cash - and we can't afford to fuel it any more.
We set up a crisis team during Covid. Massive spike in patients, fewer resources, how do we do things. We need to do the same thing today. We simply cannot afford the vast bureaucracies and overlapping managers that we have in health and education. If that means that we have to make redundant the staff at NHS Trusts and Education Trusts then sobeit.
Maybe Foxy could explain the reasoning behind all the different NHS trusts as there might be a good reason - I understand that different areas of the UK have different demographics so different needs but I always wonder whether it would work more efficiently with one single management (the same with all the different police forces, would it be more efficient to just have a UK Police).
I think about the old story that the French Education minister could look at a piece of paper and know what every schoolchild in France was eating that day and wonder how many areas of the state in the UK could just be made identikit across the country rather than having individual fiefdoms and extra costs from not having the purchasing power of a larger institution (eg all police kit from cars to boots should be supplied from the same source to leverage the collective buying power - I can’t think of any reason why different police forces end up with different makes of car for the same roles).
The fragmentation of the NHS was largely a creation of an "internal market" by the Conservatives, I suggest. It does create many problems.
Even as a conservative I cannot see any value in an internal market for the NHS, it’s not like they need competition where people from Newcastle are looking at where to get their hip done and find they can get a two for the price of one in Plymouth if they can get there tomorrow.
Same [edit] sort of geographical problem with railway privatization (specifically the splitting up bit - no wonder that is being rectified now). And schools, as discussed also today here, in some of the UK.
But it does happen, for sausage machine stuff - plus you've got the private hospitals, lots of simple sausage machine stuff like varicose veins and cataracts.
Yet the other problem is that the consumers aren't informed consumers. And what happens to the hospitals that are supposed to lose out and go bust?
Surely it would make some sense to balance demand across the country. At one point I thought I would need a knee op. I would have happily gone to a national MRI scanning centre in, say, Birmingham to speed things uo, and as I live on my own it would have made sense to have the op near friends in Hampshire or family in Essex, as I would likely be incapacitated for a while afterwards. But, oh no, it all has to be managed locally
Mm. Thinking about it, those seem to me too common needs to justify that sort of travel (leaving aside for the moment the need for local support afterwards, which - without wanting to discount your need - actually works the other way for many people of course). You need scanners all over the place anyway. Plus there is the issue of acute needs - for example, RTAs - and therefore local scanning.
We need the medics commenting on this ...
Travelling for imaging and an operation is all well and good provided the images are viewable in original form by the surgical team and there are no significant co-morbitities. This is how the ISTCs work.
Where it falls down is with the large number of people with more complex medical conditions and social support, or lack of it. There is also the profit motive for these companies to operate unnecessarily, very much a feature of private medicine, and one that sets up problems down the line as prosthesis loosen or wear out.
In defence of PCCs they replaced police authorities.
Which were ineffective, remote and unresponsive to public priorities. And in some cases the police/police unions threatened difficult members to force them to resign from the authorities.
The PCCs are not perfect, but there is a need for civilian political oversight of police activities and some appointed committee somewhere in a smoke-filled room just doesn’t cut it
In Leics and Rutland our PCC recently defected to Reform.
That's worth a read for the guy talking about the difference that he thinks him joining RefUK will make. There's a lot of Farage talking points in it, and Leics will be a fascinating place to run the experiment.
I didn't vote for him when he was a Tory, and won't next time now that he is Reform. He won't by a very narrow margin over a split opposition last time.
I haven't noticed any change in policing, and don't anticipate any. Elected PCCs seem ideally suited to abolition as a cost cutting measure to my eyes.
Some like Roger Hirst in Essex have done a good job, he did a course in criminology too to prepare for the role.
Most PCCs are being scrapped anyway and their functions take over by Mayors in new combined authorities, including in Essex
In defence of PCCs they replaced police authorities.
Which were ineffective, remote and unresponsive to public priorities. And in some cases the police/police unions threatened difficult members to force them to resign from the authorities.
The PCCs are not perfect, but there is a need for civilian political oversight of police activities and some appointed committee somewhere in a smoke-filled room just doesn’t cut it
In Leics and Rutland our PCC recently defected to Reform.
That's worth a read for the guy talking about the difference that he thinks him joining RefUK will make. There's a lot of Farage talking points in it, and Leics will be a fascinating place to run the experiment.
I didn't vote for him when he was a Tory, and won't next time now that he is Reform. He won't by a very narrow margin over a split opposition last time.
I haven't noticed any change in policing, and don't anticipate any. Elected PCCs seem ideally suited to abolition as a cost cutting measure to my eyes.
Some like Roger Hirst in Essex have done a good job, he did a course in criminology too to prepare for the role.
Most PCCs are being scrapped anyway and their functions take over by Mayors in new combined authorities, including in Essex
Mayors are another unnecessary level of bureaucracy.
I may have mentioned our trade deficit from time to time in passing. This really isn't helping. Its time we had a government more focused on the day job.
The economy is only staying afloat because of services . The latest update to that is due out shortly .
Yes and to be fair that has largely been the case for 30 years or more. But what we are not seeing is any sign of investment in new production in the UK, any uplift in training, any growth in productivity, any facilitation of growth by removing planning hurdles or otherwise, any attempt to encourage entrepreneurial activity in the UK, it makes you despair. What we got instead was the increase in Employers NI and an above inflation increase in the minimum wage with inevitable consequences for the level of employment.
It just won't do. Our forthcoming budget needs to focus on growth (as Reeves herself recognised before the election). That means finding ways to boost investment through more generous allowances, encouraging training, not hammering Entrepreneurial Relief or Capital Gains or share based ISAs, looking at why London is struggling to compete in the IPO market, etc etc. I fear we are going to see the reverse as our Chancellor scrabbles around for a few billion more taxes to make her nonsensical targets and kick the can down the road for a few more months.
My new brainiac IQ 190 squillionaire friend, who was freaking out about the gilts market months ago (presciently) is now freaking out about gilts EVEN MORE
He says the government is “driving straight into a brick wall”. He thinks the present gilts “crisis” is maybe the markets reacting to Starmer’s “phase 2” speech which didn’t acknowledge the fiscal emergency at all
He says, as tax rises won’t work, borrowing can’t be done, and the government refuses to cut, we “may become Turkey or Argentina for a bit”
🫣
I am no brainiac, nor do I have an IQ of 190, nor, sadly, am I a squillionaire but this is kind of obvious. We are heading towards a fiscal crisis. It is not just that we need to borrow new money at penalty rates, we also have to roll over ever more debt taken out when interest rates were very, very low. 10 year gilts maturing just now were probably borrowed at less than 1%. To replace those borrowed funds we will be borrowing the same money at more than 5%. The cost of our debt is going to be rising for a long time, even if we manage to get current rates down. Every other category of spending is going to be squeezed by this.
Right, so what do we do? The "cut spending" brigade envisage that the sick and the poor are wasting the money so just take it off them. In reality they are sick and poor and when need remains and you cut the provision you spend more mopping up the various crises you create.
So we can't cut spending on the front line. We need to cut spending on everything else. How is it that we have an NHS where the budget goes up every year and front line provision shrinks? Its a bonfire burning our cash - and we can't afford to fuel it any more.
We set up a crisis team during Covid. Massive spike in patients, fewer resources, how do we do things. We need to do the same thing today. We simply cannot afford the vast bureaucracies and overlapping managers that we have in health and education. If that means that we have to make redundant the staff at NHS Trusts and Education Trusts then sobeit.
When I was at school every local authority (normally the county council) had a team of a dozen, maybe two dozen managers. A 1000 pupil secondary school had a head, a couple of deputies, a Secretary and a caretaker. That was your "non productive" staff, and even then the deputies and even the head taught classes.
Now we have oversight by Ofsted, we have multi school academy management teams on astronomical salaries (and there are far, far more of them than there were County Council LEAs). Each school has around a dozen non teaching managers/ administrators . The education budget is syphoned off to these people before a student writes their first essay. Do we need all these leeches or can we return to the old model?
Yet another example of how the Tories really f****d everything up during their long period in office.
When people think of Tory failure, it's the obvious examples like the borders and boats that come first to mind, along with Brexit - but over many years they've forced re-organisations onto so many public services, and made them all worse...the NHS, schools, the railways, the water industry, energy, the postal service, local government, prisons...
...is there anything they actually managed to improve?
I may have mentioned our trade deficit from time to time in passing. This really isn't helping. Its time we had a government more focused on the day job.
The economy is only staying afloat because of services . The latest update to that is due out shortly .
Yes and to be fair that has largely been the case for 30 years or more. But what we are not seeing is any sign of investment in new production in the UK, any uplift in training, any growth in productivity, any facilitation of growth by removing planning hurdles or otherwise, any attempt to encourage entrepreneurial activity in the UK, it makes you despair. What we got instead was the increase in Employers NI and an above inflation increase in the minimum wage with inevitable consequences for the level of employment.
It just won't do. Our forthcoming budget needs to focus on growth (as Reeves herself recognised before the election). That means finding ways to boost investment through more generous allowances, encouraging training, not hammering Entrepreneurial Relief or Capital Gains or share based ISAs, looking at why London is struggling to compete in the IPO market, etc etc. I fear we are going to see the reverse as our Chancellor scrabbles around for a few billion more taxes to make her nonsensical targets and kick the can down the road for a few more months.
My new brainiac IQ 190 squillionaire friend, who was freaking out about the gilts market months ago (presciently) is now freaking out about gilts EVEN MORE
He says the government is “driving straight into a brick wall”. He thinks the present gilts “crisis” is maybe the markets reacting to Starmer’s “phase 2” speech which didn’t acknowledge the fiscal emergency at all
He says, as tax rises won’t work, borrowing can’t be done, and the government refuses to cut, we “may become Turkey or Argentina for a bit”
🫣
I am no brainiac, nor do I have an IQ of 190, nor, sadly, am I a squillionaire but this is kind of obvious. We are heading towards a fiscal crisis. It is not just that we need to borrow new money at penalty rates, we also have to roll over ever more debt taken out when interest rates were very, very low. 10 year gilts maturing just now were probably borrowed at less than 1%. To replace those borrowed funds we will be borrowing the same money at more than 5%. The cost of our debt is going to be rising for a long time, even if we manage to get current rates down. Every other category of spending is going to be squeezed by this.
Right, so what do we do? The "cut spending" brigade envisage that the sick and the poor are wasting the money so just take it off them. In reality they are sick and poor and when need remains and you cut the provision you spend more mopping up the various crises you create.
So we can't cut spending on the front line. We need to cut spending on everything else. How is it that we have an NHS where the budget goes up every year and front line provision shrinks? Its a bonfire burning our cash - and we can't afford to fuel it any more.
We set up a crisis team during Covid. Massive spike in patients, fewer resources, how do we do things. We need to do the same thing today. We simply cannot afford the vast bureaucracies and overlapping managers that we have in health and education. If that means that we have to make redundant the staff at NHS Trusts and Education Trusts then sobeit.
When I was at school every local authority (normally the county council) had a team of a dozen, maybe two dozen managers. A 1000 pupil secondary school had a head, a couple of deputies, a Secretary and a caretaker. That was your "non productive" staff, and even then the deputies and even the head taught classes.
Now we have oversight by Ofsted, we have multi school academy management teams on astronomical salaries (and there are far, far more of them than there were County Council LEAs). Each school has around a dozen non teaching managers/ administrators . The education budget is syphoned off to these people before a student writes their first essay. Do we need all these leeches or can we return to the old model?
It's great these questions are being asked imo.
TBF MP's omitting the catering staff, from when schools had proper food. And cleaners, and so on. But those should have their equivalents today, who are productive in enabling schooling.
And the IT in old times was a film loop projector and an OHP. Hard to make a direct comparison ...
My old school is now a 9 school trust and has a "Strategic Director of IT" - part of the £2.25m spent by the trust on managers.
You know what IT stuff the schools in the trust need? The same stuff the schools not in the trust need. Why are we paying a fortune to have a 9-school "Strategic Director of IT" to negotiate shit deals with "Google" etc al. Because that is the reality. Tesco does not let store managers or even area managers negotiate with Heinz when buying beans. But we have a system where we now have thousands of well paid managers out to negotiate for a few beans at huge mark-up when all of them need the same beans.
This is what the Osborne free market revolution has delivered.
Quite. How's your local and very non-Osbornian school comparing, under the lash of its Scottish local authority?
I may have mentioned our trade deficit from time to time in passing. This really isn't helping. Its time we had a government more focused on the day job.
The economy is only staying afloat because of services . The latest update to that is due out shortly .
Yes and to be fair that has largely been the case for 30 years or more. But what we are not seeing is any sign of investment in new production in the UK, any uplift in training, any growth in productivity, any facilitation of growth by removing planning hurdles or otherwise, any attempt to encourage entrepreneurial activity in the UK, it makes you despair. What we got instead was the increase in Employers NI and an above inflation increase in the minimum wage with inevitable consequences for the level of employment.
It just won't do. Our forthcoming budget needs to focus on growth (as Reeves herself recognised before the election). That means finding ways to boost investment through more generous allowances, encouraging training, not hammering Entrepreneurial Relief or Capital Gains or share based ISAs, looking at why London is struggling to compete in the IPO market, etc etc. I fear we are going to see the reverse as our Chancellor scrabbles around for a few billion more taxes to make her nonsensical targets and kick the can down the road for a few more months.
My new brainiac IQ 190 squillionaire friend, who was freaking out about the gilts market months ago (presciently) is now freaking out about gilts EVEN MORE
He says the government is “driving straight into a brick wall”. He thinks the present gilts “crisis” is maybe the markets reacting to Starmer’s “phase 2” speech which didn’t acknowledge the fiscal emergency at all
He says, as tax rises won’t work, borrowing can’t be done, and the government refuses to cut, we “may become Turkey or Argentina for a bit”
🫣
I am no brainiac, nor do I have an IQ of 190, nor, sadly, am I a squillionaire but this is kind of obvious. We are heading towards a fiscal crisis. It is not just that we need to borrow new money at penalty rates, we also have to roll over ever more debt taken out when interest rates were very, very low. 10 year gilts maturing just now were probably borrowed at less than 1%. To replace those borrowed funds we will be borrowing the same money at more than 5%. The cost of our debt is going to be rising for a long time, even if we manage to get current rates down. Every other category of spending is going to be squeezed by this.
Right, so what do we do? The "cut spending" brigade envisage that the sick and the poor are wasting the money so just take it off them. In reality they are sick and poor and when need remains and you cut the provision you spend more mopping up the various crises you create.
So we can't cut spending on the front line. We need to cut spending on everything else. How is it that we have an NHS where the budget goes up every year and front line provision shrinks? Its a bonfire burning our cash - and we can't afford to fuel it any more.
We set up a crisis team during Covid. Massive spike in patients, fewer resources, how do we do things. We need to do the same thing today. We simply cannot afford the vast bureaucracies and overlapping managers that we have in health and education. If that means that we have to make redundant the staff at NHS Trusts and Education Trusts then sobeit.
Even the guy running a company that provides school transport for SEND kids has gone on record complaining of the complete madness & waste in the current system.
PIP payments appear to have gone from “I need money for transport because otherwise I can’t get to work” to ”I have ADHD and find using the bus a bit tricky & would like my own car”,
The NHS maternity service is spending more on compensating mothers & children for damage done to them due to lack of adequate staffing than it is on actually delivering maternity services.
We trapped many of the “sick and poor” in unemployment because we let large corporations argue that even jobs that paid less than minimum wage counted as “shortage professions” that deserved unlimited work visas. How are they going to get work when made to compete in that environment?
The legal profession has turned the Equality Acts into a tool to undermine market forces in the labour market, leading inevitably to the chaos in Birmingham & the further casualisation of labour as employers flatly refuse to take on employees who have been turned into future legal liabilities for the sin of paying different jobs different amounts of money in order to attract workers.
We’ve made it completely impossible to build anything at all, anywhere. Latest stupidity on this front is that the cheap rate for non-degradable landfill that can be used to fill old quarries (cement, soil etc) at £4/tonne is being removed & the standard rate of £136 / tonne is being applied across the board, adding something like ~£25k to the price of the average house & vastly increasing the costs of larger projects. But that’s a pinprick next to the new Building Regulations, which appear to have cut house-building in half from already pitiful levels & the marauding Environment Agency that believes spiders matter more than housing children.
I could (very easily) go on, but there is so much in this country that doesn’t require money spending on it - it needs saner review & regulation. Successive governments have made this situation worse and worse because every regulation has had a proponent who cares very much about it being implemented but the costs have been spread across all of us, so pushback has been difficult to organise. We have ended up with a diffuse rule by lawfare, where everyone has a very important job to do but in the aggregate their job is to prevent anything happening at all.
Add Anti-Money Laundering rules to your list.
As a Charitable Trustee they are the bane of my life. It makes opening and closing accounts and changing signatories a protracted pain in the arse.
It doesn't seem to touch the real money laundering industry, which goes from strength to strength on both High St and offshore financial world.
Yes. I am retired and fairly active in volunteering. There are a number of roles I simply won't think about performing because of this particular pain. I know which roles they are because of experience before I retired so I am forewarned.
I accept, with regret, the similar impositions on willing volunteers such as me because of safeguarding, but I know plenty of people who won't and whose abilities are lost to the community.
I may have mentioned our trade deficit from time to time in passing. This really isn't helping. Its time we had a government more focused on the day job.
The economy is only staying afloat because of services . The latest update to that is due out shortly .
Yes and to be fair that has largely been the case for 30 years or more. But what we are not seeing is any sign of investment in new production in the UK, any uplift in training, any growth in productivity, any facilitation of growth by removing planning hurdles or otherwise, any attempt to encourage entrepreneurial activity in the UK, it makes you despair. What we got instead was the increase in Employers NI and an above inflation increase in the minimum wage with inevitable consequences for the level of employment.
It just won't do. Our forthcoming budget needs to focus on growth (as Reeves herself recognised before the election). That means finding ways to boost investment through more generous allowances, encouraging training, not hammering Entrepreneurial Relief or Capital Gains or share based ISAs, looking at why London is struggling to compete in the IPO market, etc etc. I fear we are going to see the reverse as our Chancellor scrabbles around for a few billion more taxes to make her nonsensical targets and kick the can down the road for a few more months.
My new brainiac IQ 190 squillionaire friend, who was freaking out about the gilts market months ago (presciently) is now freaking out about gilts EVEN MORE
He says the government is “driving straight into a brick wall”. He thinks the present gilts “crisis” is maybe the markets reacting to Starmer’s “phase 2” speech which didn’t acknowledge the fiscal emergency at all
He says, as tax rises won’t work, borrowing can’t be done, and the government refuses to cut, we “may become Turkey or Argentina for a bit”
🫣
I am no brainiac, nor do I have an IQ of 190, nor, sadly, am I a squillionaire but this is kind of obvious. We are heading towards a fiscal crisis. It is not just that we need to borrow new money at penalty rates, we also have to roll over ever more debt taken out when interest rates were very, very low. 10 year gilts maturing just now were probably borrowed at less than 1%. To replace those borrowed funds we will be borrowing the same money at more than 5%. The cost of our debt is going to be rising for a long time, even if we manage to get current rates down. Every other category of spending is going to be squeezed by this.
Right, so what do we do? The "cut spending" brigade envisage that the sick and the poor are wasting the money so just take it off them. In reality they are sick and poor and when need remains and you cut the provision you spend more mopping up the various crises you create.
So we can't cut spending on the front line. We need to cut spending on everything else. How is it that we have an NHS where the budget goes up every year and front line provision shrinks? Its a bonfire burning our cash - and we can't afford to fuel it any more.
We set up a crisis team during Covid. Massive spike in patients, fewer resources, how do we do things. We need to do the same thing today. We simply cannot afford the vast bureaucracies and overlapping managers that we have in health and education. If that means that we have to make redundant the staff at NHS Trusts and Education Trusts then sobeit.
Even the guy running a company that provides school transport for SEND kids has gone on record complaining of the complete madness & waste in the current system.
PIP payments appear to have gone from “I need money for transport because otherwise I can’t get to work” to ”I have ADHD and find using the bus a bit tricky & would like my own car”,
The NHS maternity service is spending more on compensating mothers & children for damage done to them due to lack of adequate staffing than it is on actually delivering maternity services.
We trapped many of the “sick and poor” in unemployment because we let large corporations argue that even jobs that paid less than minimum wage counted as “shortage professions” that deserved unlimited work visas. How are they going to get work when made to compete in that environment?
The legal profession has turned the Equality Acts into a tool to undermine market forces in the labour market, leading inevitably to the chaos in Birmingham & the further casualisation of labour as employers flatly refuse to take on employees who have been turned into future legal liabilities for the sin of paying different jobs different amounts of money in order to attract workers.
We’ve made it completely impossible to build anything at all, anywhere. Latest stupidity on this front is that the cheap rate for non-degradable landfill that can be used to fill old quarries (cement, soil etc) at £4/tonne is being removed & the standard rate of £136 / tonne is being applied across the board, adding something like ~£25k to the price of the average house & vastly increasing the costs of larger projects. But that’s a pinprick next to the new Building Regulations, which appear to have cut house-building in half from already pitiful levels & the marauding Environment Agency that believes spiders matter more than housing children.
I could (very easily) go on, but there is so much in this country that doesn’t require money spending on it - it needs saner review & regulation. Successive governments have made this situation worse and worse because every regulation has had a proponent who cares very much about it being implemented but the costs have been spread across all of us, so pushback has been difficult to organise. We have ended up with a diffuse rule by lawfare, where everyone has a very important job to do but in the aggregate their job is to prevent anything happening at all.
You have hit the nail on the head.
We need a bonfire of regulations.
Do you believe Labour will deliver that?
It is pretty much a universal feature of electoral campaigns that parties running for government promise "a bonfire of regulations" not just in Britain either. It features in the entirely of the developed world and even much of the under developed world, wherever elections occur.
The reality of government is such that very little changes, indeed calls for regulation increase. Calling for things to be banned and regulated is pretty much universal too.
So no, I don't expect Labour to deliver that, after all the Tories didn't, and from what we see in local government neither will Reform. Banning and regulating flags flying has been pretty much their only policy initiatives.
I have mentioned before that I suspect the only thing that would measurably move the dial on this topic is a significant economic shock, of the type where government simply cannot justify cuts elsewhere and need to inject dynamism back into the economy. It would likely be a global (or at least, Western) shift, not limited to one particular nation.
I am not blind to the fact that any significant deregulatory process would likely cause significant short term pain, as well. Any economic restructuring does.
Rather like the joke about the lightbulb, the Labour leadership needs to want to change.
As we saw with Corbyn, the way the Labour Party is set up makes it pretty much impossible to depose a leader who doesn’t want to move on.
Starmer seems happy enough in the job, he does whatever the lawyers and courts tell him to do, and doesn’t care much for public opinion. Perhaps it will take a major financial crisis to wake him up?
Does 'major financial crisis' include the one we are in, where the only day to day solution is to place our grandchildren into bankruptcy instead of sorting stuff out ourselves and Labour MPs won't vote for tiny cuts?
That really is an excellent summary of our position and the challenges we face. Note debt interest's significant contribution to the increasing deficit.
Maybe Allister Heath is right - for once - and we will get a new election. If my friend is right and cutting spending is the only way, but Labour MPs refuse to do it, then either the government prints money and inflation explodes, then we go bust anyway (in the end), or we have an election to elect MPs who WILL cut spending
No, there is a third way, massively increase tax on the rich and wealthy and property and business owners, which Labour will go further on in the autumn. As mentioned most Labour MPs would lose their seats on current polls so won't vote for an early election
Labour voted for an early election in 2017 even though most of their MPs expected the party to lose seats at the time. But that was a very unusual set of circumstances.
It was also in opposition. It is almost unknown for an opposition party to vote against an early election.
For a government to do it when it expects to lose seats is more unusual, the only situation being that they expect to lose even more by delaying, such as Sunak last summer.
Farage is weak, runny sauce. He won’t let Reform even stand up for their own people, eg punishing their Epping member, and he will change nothing of significance politically.
I may have mentioned our trade deficit from time to time in passing. This really isn't helping. Its time we had a government more focused on the day job.
The economy is only staying afloat because of services . The latest update to that is due out shortly .
Yes and to be fair that has largely been the case for 30 years or more. But what we are not seeing is any sign of investment in new production in the UK, any uplift in training, any growth in productivity, any facilitation of growth by removing planning hurdles or otherwise, any attempt to encourage entrepreneurial activity in the UK, it makes you despair. What we got instead was the increase in Employers NI and an above inflation increase in the minimum wage with inevitable consequences for the level of employment.
It just won't do. Our forthcoming budget needs to focus on growth (as Reeves herself recognised before the election). That means finding ways to boost investment through more generous allowances, encouraging training, not hammering Entrepreneurial Relief or Capital Gains or share based ISAs, looking at why London is struggling to compete in the IPO market, etc etc. I fear we are going to see the reverse as our Chancellor scrabbles around for a few billion more taxes to make her nonsensical targets and kick the can down the road for a few more months.
My new brainiac IQ 190 squillionaire friend, who was freaking out about the gilts market months ago (presciently) is now freaking out about gilts EVEN MORE
He says the government is “driving straight into a brick wall”. He thinks the present gilts “crisis” is maybe the markets reacting to Starmer’s “phase 2” speech which didn’t acknowledge the fiscal emergency at all
He says, as tax rises won’t work, borrowing can’t be done, and the government refuses to cut, we “may become Turkey or Argentina for a bit”
🫣
I am no brainiac, nor do I have an IQ of 190, nor, sadly, am I a squillionaire but this is kind of obvious. We are heading towards a fiscal crisis. It is not just that we need to borrow new money at penalty rates, we also have to roll over ever more debt taken out when interest rates were very, very low. 10 year gilts maturing just now were probably borrowed at less than 1%. To replace those borrowed funds we will be borrowing the same money at more than 5%. The cost of our debt is going to be rising for a long time, even if we manage to get current rates down. Every other category of spending is going to be squeezed by this.
Right, so what do we do? The "cut spending" brigade envisage that the sick and the poor are wasting the money so just take it off them. In reality they are sick and poor and when need remains and you cut the provision you spend more mopping up the various crises you create.
So we can't cut spending on the front line. We need to cut spending on everything else. How is it that we have an NHS where the budget goes up every year and front line provision shrinks? Its a bonfire burning our cash - and we can't afford to fuel it any more.
We set up a crisis team during Covid. Massive spike in patients, fewer resources, how do we do things. We need to do the same thing today. We simply cannot afford the vast bureaucracies and overlapping managers that we have in health and education. If that means that we have to make redundant the staff at NHS Trusts and Education Trusts then sobeit.
When I was at school every local authority (normally the county council) had a team of a dozen, maybe two dozen managers. A 1000 pupil secondary school had a head, a couple of deputies, a Secretary and a caretaker. That was your "non productive" staff, and even then the deputies and even the head taught classes.
Now we have oversight by Ofsted, we have multi school academy management teams on astronomical salaries (and there are far, far more of them than there were County Council LEAs). Each school has around a dozen non teaching managers/ administrators . The education budget is syphoned off to these people before a student writes their first essay. Do we need all these leeches or can we return to the old model?
Yet another example of how the Tories really f****d everything up during their long period in office.
When people think of Tory failure, it's the obvious examples like the borders and boats that come first to mind, along with Brexit - but over many years they've forced re-organisations onto so many public services, and made them all worse...the NHS, schools, the railways, the water industry, energy, the postal service, local government, prisons...
...is there anything they actually managed to improve?
Errr, what? Education was one of the few bright spots. Results have massively improved, for which Mr Gove should rightly be proud.
Well that is for Parliament to amend the Online Safety Act and Public Order Act and Malicious Communications Act then
Another great achievement of the Conservative government, in 2023, that the Conservatives of 2025 blame on Labour. Is it any wonder Conservatives go to Reform in ever increasing numbers?
Is there anything your government did that the party still stands by?
Chris Philip angrily berating Labour for not closing the Bell Hotel which was opened by Chris Philip...
I may have mentioned our trade deficit from time to time in passing. This really isn't helping. Its time we had a government more focused on the day job.
The economy is only staying afloat because of services . The latest update to that is due out shortly .
Yes and to be fair that has largely been the case for 30 years or more. But what we are not seeing is any sign of investment in new production in the UK, any uplift in training, any growth in productivity, any facilitation of growth by removing planning hurdles or otherwise, any attempt to encourage entrepreneurial activity in the UK, it makes you despair. What we got instead was the increase in Employers NI and an above inflation increase in the minimum wage with inevitable consequences for the level of employment.
It just won't do. Our forthcoming budget needs to focus on growth (as Reeves herself recognised before the election). That means finding ways to boost investment through more generous allowances, encouraging training, not hammering Entrepreneurial Relief or Capital Gains or share based ISAs, looking at why London is struggling to compete in the IPO market, etc etc. I fear we are going to see the reverse as our Chancellor scrabbles around for a few billion more taxes to make her nonsensical targets and kick the can down the road for a few more months.
My new brainiac IQ 190 squillionaire friend, who was freaking out about the gilts market months ago (presciently) is now freaking out about gilts EVEN MORE
He says the government is “driving straight into a brick wall”. He thinks the present gilts “crisis” is maybe the markets reacting to Starmer’s “phase 2” speech which didn’t acknowledge the fiscal emergency at all
He says, as tax rises won’t work, borrowing can’t be done, and the government refuses to cut, we “may become Turkey or Argentina for a bit”
🫣
I am no brainiac, nor do I have an IQ of 190, nor, sadly, am I a squillionaire but this is kind of obvious. We are heading towards a fiscal crisis. It is not just that we need to borrow new money at penalty rates, we also have to roll over ever more debt taken out when interest rates were very, very low. 10 year gilts maturing just now were probably borrowed at less than 1%. To replace those borrowed funds we will be borrowing the same money at more than 5%. The cost of our debt is going to be rising for a long time, even if we manage to get current rates down. Every other category of spending is going to be squeezed by this.
Right, so what do we do? The "cut spending" brigade envisage that the sick and the poor are wasting the money so just take it off them. In reality they are sick and poor and when need remains and you cut the provision you spend more mopping up the various crises you create.
So we can't cut spending on the front line. We need to cut spending on everything else. How is it that we have an NHS where the budget goes up every year and front line provision shrinks? Its a bonfire burning our cash - and we can't afford to fuel it any more.
We set up a crisis team during Covid. Massive spike in patients, fewer resources, how do we do things. We need to do the same thing today. We simply cannot afford the vast bureaucracies and overlapping managers that we have in health and education. If that means that we have to make redundant the staff at NHS Trusts and Education Trusts then sobeit.
Even the guy running a company that provides school transport for SEND kids has gone on record complaining of the complete madness & waste in the current system.
PIP payments appear to have gone from “I need money for transport because otherwise I can’t get to work” to ”I have ADHD and find using the bus a bit tricky & would like my own car”,
The NHS maternity service is spending more on compensating mothers & children for damage done to them due to lack of adequate staffing than it is on actually delivering maternity services.
We trapped many of the “sick and poor” in unemployment because we let large corporations argue that even jobs that paid less than minimum wage counted as “shortage professions” that deserved unlimited work visas. How are they going to get work when made to compete in that environment?
The legal profession has turned the Equality Acts into a tool to undermine market forces in the labour market, leading inevitably to the chaos in Birmingham & the further casualisation of labour as employers flatly refuse to take on employees who have been turned into future legal liabilities for the sin of paying different jobs different amounts of money in order to attract workers.
We’ve made it completely impossible to build anything at all, anywhere. Latest stupidity on this front is that the cheap rate for non-degradable landfill that can be used to fill old quarries (cement, soil etc) at £4/tonne is being removed & the standard rate of £136 / tonne is being applied across the board, adding something like ~£25k to the price of the average house & vastly increasing the costs of larger projects. But that’s a pinprick next to the new Building Regulations, which appear to have cut house-building in half from already pitiful levels & the marauding Environment Agency that believes spiders matter more than housing children.
I could (very easily) go on, but there is so much in this country that doesn’t require money spending on it - it needs saner review & regulation. Successive governments have made this situation worse and worse because every regulation has had a proponent who cares very much about it being implemented but the costs have been spread across all of us, so pushback has been difficult to organise. We have ended up with a diffuse rule by lawfare, where everyone has a very important job to do but in the aggregate their job is to prevent anything happening at all.
Add Anti-Money Laundering rules to your list.
As a Charitable Trustee they are the bane of my life. It makes opening and closing accounts and changing signatories a protracted pain in the arse.
It doesn't seem to touch the real money laundering industry, which goes from strength to strength on both High St and offshore financial world.
Anti-Money laundering rules are vital but again get “gold plated”. I don’t know if the same in the UK but here if you get to the stage of putting an offer in to buy a house the Estate Agents are required to take your KYC info and get source of funds.
The fact that to buy a house your funds have to be sent from your lawyer to the vendor’s lawyer who have to do their dd/AML and have the facilities and teams to do this to a high level makes it utterly pointless.
unfortunately there are always jobsworths who, in order to look like they contribute something with their job, will look for pointless things to bring up in order to create work and “worth” regardless of the extra burden for no benefit it puts on business.
The gold plating has been a big problem for a long time, most famously when EU law was translated into British law. The bureaucracy loves it, as it generates more bureaucracy, but to the rest of us it’s doing little but adding grit into the wheels of the economy.
Right. But AML is not the reason why conveyancing takes so long in England.
I may have mentioned our trade deficit from time to time in passing. This really isn't helping. Its time we had a government more focused on the day job.
The economy is only staying afloat because of services . The latest update to that is due out shortly .
Yes and to be fair that has largely been the case for 30 years or more. But what we are not seeing is any sign of investment in new production in the UK, any uplift in training, any growth in productivity, any facilitation of growth by removing planning hurdles or otherwise, any attempt to encourage entrepreneurial activity in the UK, it makes you despair. What we got instead was the increase in Employers NI and an above inflation increase in the minimum wage with inevitable consequences for the level of employment.
It just won't do. Our forthcoming budget needs to focus on growth (as Reeves herself recognised before the election). That means finding ways to boost investment through more generous allowances, encouraging training, not hammering Entrepreneurial Relief or Capital Gains or share based ISAs, looking at why London is struggling to compete in the IPO market, etc etc. I fear we are going to see the reverse as our Chancellor scrabbles around for a few billion more taxes to make her nonsensical targets and kick the can down the road for a few more months.
My new brainiac IQ 190 squillionaire friend, who was freaking out about the gilts market months ago (presciently) is now freaking out about gilts EVEN MORE
He says the government is “driving straight into a brick wall”. He thinks the present gilts “crisis” is maybe the markets reacting to Starmer’s “phase 2” speech which didn’t acknowledge the fiscal emergency at all
He says, as tax rises won’t work, borrowing can’t be done, and the government refuses to cut, we “may become Turkey or Argentina for a bit”
🫣
I am no brainiac, nor do I have an IQ of 190, nor, sadly, am I a squillionaire but this is kind of obvious. We are heading towards a fiscal crisis. It is not just that we need to borrow new money at penalty rates, we also have to roll over ever more debt taken out when interest rates were very, very low. 10 year gilts maturing just now were probably borrowed at less than 1%. To replace those borrowed funds we will be borrowing the same money at more than 5%. The cost of our debt is going to be rising for a long time, even if we manage to get current rates down. Every other category of spending is going to be squeezed by this.
Right, so what do we do? The "cut spending" brigade envisage that the sick and the poor are wasting the money so just take it off them. In reality they are sick and poor and when need remains and you cut the provision you spend more mopping up the various crises you create.
So we can't cut spending on the front line. We need to cut spending on everything else. How is it that we have an NHS where the budget goes up every year and front line provision shrinks? Its a bonfire burning our cash - and we can't afford to fuel it any more.
We set up a crisis team during Covid. Massive spike in patients, fewer resources, how do we do things. We need to do the same thing today. We simply cannot afford the vast bureaucracies and overlapping managers that we have in health and education. If that means that we have to make redundant the staff at NHS Trusts and Education Trusts then sobeit.
Maybe Foxy could explain the reasoning behind all the different NHS trusts as there might be a good reason - I understand that different areas of the UK have different demographics so different needs but I always wonder whether it would work more efficiently with one single management (the same with all the different police forces, would it be more efficient to just have a UK Police).
I think about the old story that the French Education minister could look at a piece of paper and know what every schoolchild in France was eating that day and wonder how many areas of the state in the UK could just be made identikit across the country rather than having individual fiefdoms and extra costs from not having the purchasing power of a larger institution (eg all police kit from cars to boots should be supplied from the same source to leverage the collective buying power - I can’t think of any reason why different police forces end up with different makes of car for the same roles).
The fragmentation of the NHS was largely a creation of an "internal market" by the Conservatives, I suggest. It does create many problems.
Even as a conservative I cannot see any value in an internal market for the NHS, it’s not like they need competition where people from Newcastle are looking at where to get their hip done and find they can get a two for the price of one in Plymouth if they can get there tomorrow.
Same [edit] sort of geographical problem with railway privatization (specifically the splitting up bit - no wonder that is being rectified now). And schools, as discussed also today here, in some of the UK.
But it does happen, for sausage machine stuff - plus you've got the private hospitals, lots of simple sausage machine stuff like varicose veins and cataracts.
Yet the other problem is that the consumers aren't informed consumers. And what happens to the hospitals that are supposed to lose out and go bust?
Surely it would make some sense to balance demand across the country. At one point I thought I would need a knee op. I would have happily gone to a national MRI scanning centre in, say, Birmingham to speed things up, and as I live on my own it would have made sense to have the op near friends in Hampshire or family in Essex, as I would likely be incapacitated for a while afterwards and could stay with them. But, oh no, it all has to be managed locally.
Anyone with a knee problem that is preventing them working should very much be offered the next op wherever it is in the country
In Scotland we already have the Golden Jubilee National Hospital in Clydebank, which is a national hospital for reducing waiting times. It admits patients from all over Scotland. I had a hip replacement there two months ago, although it’s not in my local health board area. The service was excellent, from surgeon to auxiliaries.
Angela Rayner is fighting for her political future after admitting that she failed to pay enough stamp duty when she bought her new £800,000 seaside flat
The deputy prime minister has spent weeks arguing that she did nothing wrong when she bought the property in Hove, East Sussex
Sir Keir Starmer this week stood by her, accusing people of 'briefing against her and talking her down'
The deputy prime minister asked tax lawyers to review her affairs following intense scrutiny and was told she has an outstanding tax liability
She has referred herself to the prime minister's independent ethics adviser
She told @BethRigby she has considered resigning over the issue
I may have mentioned our trade deficit from time to time in passing. This really isn't helping. Its time we had a government more focused on the day job.
The economy is only staying afloat because of services . The latest update to that is due out shortly .
Yes and to be fair that has largely been the case for 30 years or more. But what we are not seeing is any sign of investment in new production in the UK, any uplift in training, any growth in productivity, any facilitation of growth by removing planning hurdles or otherwise, any attempt to encourage entrepreneurial activity in the UK, it makes you despair. What we got instead was the increase in Employers NI and an above inflation increase in the minimum wage with inevitable consequences for the level of employment.
It just won't do. Our forthcoming budget needs to focus on growth (as Reeves herself recognised before the election). That means finding ways to boost investment through more generous allowances, encouraging training, not hammering Entrepreneurial Relief or Capital Gains or share based ISAs, looking at why London is struggling to compete in the IPO market, etc etc. I fear we are going to see the reverse as our Chancellor scrabbles around for a few billion more taxes to make her nonsensical targets and kick the can down the road for a few more months.
My new brainiac IQ 190 squillionaire friend, who was freaking out about the gilts market months ago (presciently) is now freaking out about gilts EVEN MORE
He says the government is “driving straight into a brick wall”. He thinks the present gilts “crisis” is maybe the markets reacting to Starmer’s “phase 2” speech which didn’t acknowledge the fiscal emergency at all
He says, as tax rises won’t work, borrowing can’t be done, and the government refuses to cut, we “may become Turkey or Argentina for a bit”
🫣
I am no brainiac, nor do I have an IQ of 190, nor, sadly, am I a squillionaire but this is kind of obvious. We are heading towards a fiscal crisis. It is not just that we need to borrow new money at penalty rates, we also have to roll over ever more debt taken out when interest rates were very, very low. 10 year gilts maturing just now were probably borrowed at less than 1%. To replace those borrowed funds we will be borrowing the same money at more than 5%. The cost of our debt is going to be rising for a long time, even if we manage to get current rates down. Every other category of spending is going to be squeezed by this.
Right, so what do we do? The "cut spending" brigade envisage that the sick and the poor are wasting the money so just take it off them. In reality they are sick and poor and when need remains and you cut the provision you spend more mopping up the various crises you create.
So we can't cut spending on the front line. We need to cut spending on everything else. How is it that we have an NHS where the budget goes up every year and front line provision shrinks? Its a bonfire burning our cash - and we can't afford to fuel it any more.
We set up a crisis team during Covid. Massive spike in patients, fewer resources, how do we do things. We need to do the same thing today. We simply cannot afford the vast bureaucracies and overlapping managers that we have in health and education. If that means that we have to make redundant the staff at NHS Trusts and Education Trusts then sobeit.
Even the guy running a company that provides school transport for SEND kids has gone on record complaining of the complete madness & waste in the current system.
PIP payments appear to have gone from “I need money for transport because otherwise I can’t get to work” to ”I have ADHD and find using the bus a bit tricky & would like my own car”,
The NHS maternity service is spending more on compensating mothers & children for damage done to them due to lack of adequate staffing than it is on actually delivering maternity services.
We trapped many of the “sick and poor” in unemployment because we let large corporations argue that even jobs that paid less than minimum wage counted as “shortage professions” that deserved unlimited work visas. How are they going to get work when made to compete in that environment?
The legal profession has turned the Equality Acts into a tool to undermine market forces in the labour market, leading inevitably to the chaos in Birmingham & the further casualisation of labour as employers flatly refuse to take on employees who have been turned into future legal liabilities for the sin of paying different jobs different amounts of money in order to attract workers.
We’ve made it completely impossible to build anything at all, anywhere. Latest stupidity on this front is that the cheap rate for non-degradable landfill that can be used to fill old quarries (cement, soil etc) at £4/tonne is being removed & the standard rate of £136 / tonne is being applied across the board, adding something like ~£25k to the price of the average house & vastly increasing the costs of larger projects. But that’s a pinprick next to the new Building Regulations, which appear to have cut house-building in half from already pitiful levels & the marauding Environment Agency that believes spiders matter more than housing children.
I could (very easily) go on, but there is so much in this country that doesn’t require money spending on it - it needs saner review & regulation. Successive governments have made this situation worse and worse because every regulation has had a proponent who cares very much about it being implemented but the costs have been spread across all of us, so pushback has been difficult to organise. We have ended up with a diffuse rule by lawfare, where everyone has a very important job to do but in the aggregate their job is to prevent anything happening at all.
Add Anti-Money Laundering rules to your list.
As a Charitable Trustee they are the bane of my life. It makes opening and closing accounts and changing signatories a protracted pain in the arse.
It doesn't seem to touch the real money laundering industry, which goes from strength to strength on both High St and offshore financial world.
Yes. I am retired and fairly active in volunteering. There are a number of roles I simply won't think about performing because of this particular pain. I know which roles they are because of experience before I retired so I am forewarned.
I accept, with regret, the similar impositions on willing volunteers such as me because of safeguarding, but I know plenty of people who won't and whose abilities are lost to the community.
My Church has an interesting conundrum with safeguarding now that we have a numbers of elderly members active in pastoral matters who have been arrested under the Terrorism legislation.
I may have mentioned our trade deficit from time to time in passing. This really isn't helping. Its time we had a government more focused on the day job.
The economy is only staying afloat because of services . The latest update to that is due out shortly .
Yes and to be fair that has largely been the case for 30 years or more. But what we are not seeing is any sign of investment in new production in the UK, any uplift in training, any growth in productivity, any facilitation of growth by removing planning hurdles or otherwise, any attempt to encourage entrepreneurial activity in the UK, it makes you despair. What we got instead was the increase in Employers NI and an above inflation increase in the minimum wage with inevitable consequences for the level of employment.
It just won't do. Our forthcoming budget needs to focus on growth (as Reeves herself recognised before the election). That means finding ways to boost investment through more generous allowances, encouraging training, not hammering Entrepreneurial Relief or Capital Gains or share based ISAs, looking at why London is struggling to compete in the IPO market, etc etc. I fear we are going to see the reverse as our Chancellor scrabbles around for a few billion more taxes to make her nonsensical targets and kick the can down the road for a few more months.
My new brainiac IQ 190 squillionaire friend, who was freaking out about the gilts market months ago (presciently) is now freaking out about gilts EVEN MORE
He says the government is “driving straight into a brick wall”. He thinks the present gilts “crisis” is maybe the markets reacting to Starmer’s “phase 2” speech which didn’t acknowledge the fiscal emergency at all
He says, as tax rises won’t work, borrowing can’t be done, and the government refuses to cut, we “may become Turkey or Argentina for a bit”
🫣
I am no brainiac, nor do I have an IQ of 190, nor, sadly, am I a squillionaire but this is kind of obvious. We are heading towards a fiscal crisis. It is not just that we need to borrow new money at penalty rates, we also have to roll over ever more debt taken out when interest rates were very, very low. 10 year gilts maturing just now were probably borrowed at less than 1%. To replace those borrowed funds we will be borrowing the same money at more than 5%. The cost of our debt is going to be rising for a long time, even if we manage to get current rates down. Every other category of spending is going to be squeezed by this.
Right, so what do we do? The "cut spending" brigade envisage that the sick and the poor are wasting the money so just take it off them. In reality they are sick and poor and when need remains and you cut the provision you spend more mopping up the various crises you create.
So we can't cut spending on the front line. We need to cut spending on everything else. How is it that we have an NHS where the budget goes up every year and front line provision shrinks? Its a bonfire burning our cash - and we can't afford to fuel it any more.
We set up a crisis team during Covid. Massive spike in patients, fewer resources, how do we do things. We need to do the same thing today. We simply cannot afford the vast bureaucracies and overlapping managers that we have in health and education. If that means that we have to make redundant the staff at NHS Trusts and Education Trusts then sobeit.
When I was at school every local authority (normally the county council) had a team of a dozen, maybe two dozen managers. A 1000 pupil secondary school had a head, a couple of deputies, a Secretary and a caretaker. That was your "non productive" staff, and even then the deputies and even the head taught classes.
Now we have oversight by Ofsted, we have multi school academy management teams on astronomical salaries (and there are far, far more of them than there were County Council LEAs). Each school has around a dozen non teaching managers/ administrators . The education budget is syphoned off to these people before a student writes their first essay. Do we need all these leeches or can we return to the old model?
No, we don't need them and the idiotic inefficiency. My old school now sits as the lead property of a trust running 9 schools. They spent £2.259m on management remuneration last year. They have a "Strategic Head of IT" who negotiates with the likes of Google.
We can't afford this idiocy.
This sounds to be one area where some benchmarking would be useful.
I have no knowledge of what the profile of the sector is, other that in the Church of England part they seem to be done as a multi-academy trust by diocese (and there are 35-40 of those, depending on how you count it).
Lincs, for example, has 23 schools, and the CEO of the MAT is paid 85-90k per annum: https://thelaat.co.uk/ .
I have no idea whether the organisation is leaner or not than other types of MATs, or if schools have more or less autonomy, or better or worse, by comparison.
Rather like the joke about the lightbulb, the Labour leadership needs to want to change.
As we saw with Corbyn, the way the Labour Party is set up makes it pretty much impossible to depose a leader who doesn’t want to move on.
Starmer seems happy enough in the job, he does whatever the lawyers and courts tell him to do, and doesn’t care much for public opinion. Perhaps it will take a major financial crisis to wake him up?
Does 'major financial crisis' include the one we are in, where the only day to day solution is to place our grandchildren into bankruptcy instead of sorting stuff out ourselves and Labour MPs won't vote for tiny cuts?
That really is an excellent summary of our position and the challenges we face. Note debt interest's significant contribution to the increasing deficit.
Maybe Allister Heath is right - for once - and we will get a new election. If my friend is right and cutting spending is the only way, but Labour MPs refuse to do it, then either the government prints money and inflation explodes, then we go bust anyway (in the end), or we have an election to elect MPs who WILL cut spending
No, there is a third way, massively increase tax on the rich and wealthy and property and business owners, which Labour will go further on in the autumn. As mentioned most Labour MPs would lose their seats on current polls so won't vote for an early election
Labour voted for an early election in 2017 even though most of their MPs expected the party to lose seats at the time. But that was a very unusual set of circumstances.
Labour were in opposition then not in government with a majority of over 150 and most polls actually predicted most Labour MPs would hold their seats even those taken in 2017, even if May increased the Tory majority as forecast, wrongly as it turned out
I may have mentioned our trade deficit from time to time in passing. This really isn't helping. Its time we had a government more focused on the day job.
The economy is only staying afloat because of services . The latest update to that is due out shortly .
Yes and to be fair that has largely been the case for 30 years or more. But what we are not seeing is any sign of investment in new production in the UK, any uplift in training, any growth in productivity, any facilitation of growth by removing planning hurdles or otherwise, any attempt to encourage entrepreneurial activity in the UK, it makes you despair. What we got instead was the increase in Employers NI and an above inflation increase in the minimum wage with inevitable consequences for the level of employment.
It just won't do. Our forthcoming budget needs to focus on growth (as Reeves herself recognised before the election). That means finding ways to boost investment through more generous allowances, encouraging training, not hammering Entrepreneurial Relief or Capital Gains or share based ISAs, looking at why London is struggling to compete in the IPO market, etc etc. I fear we are going to see the reverse as our Chancellor scrabbles around for a few billion more taxes to make her nonsensical targets and kick the can down the road for a few more months.
My new brainiac IQ 190 squillionaire friend, who was freaking out about the gilts market months ago (presciently) is now freaking out about gilts EVEN MORE
He says the government is “driving straight into a brick wall”. He thinks the present gilts “crisis” is maybe the markets reacting to Starmer’s “phase 2” speech which didn’t acknowledge the fiscal emergency at all
He says, as tax rises won’t work, borrowing can’t be done, and the government refuses to cut, we “may become Turkey or Argentina for a bit”
🫣
I am no brainiac, nor do I have an IQ of 190, nor, sadly, am I a squillionaire but this is kind of obvious. We are heading towards a fiscal crisis. It is not just that we need to borrow new money at penalty rates, we also have to roll over ever more debt taken out when interest rates were very, very low. 10 year gilts maturing just now were probably borrowed at less than 1%. To replace those borrowed funds we will be borrowing the same money at more than 5%. The cost of our debt is going to be rising for a long time, even if we manage to get current rates down. Every other category of spending is going to be squeezed by this.
Right, so what do we do? The "cut spending" brigade envisage that the sick and the poor are wasting the money so just take it off them. In reality they are sick and poor and when need remains and you cut the provision you spend more mopping up the various crises you create.
So we can't cut spending on the front line. We need to cut spending on everything else. How is it that we have an NHS where the budget goes up every year and front line provision shrinks? Its a bonfire burning our cash - and we can't afford to fuel it any more.
We set up a crisis team during Covid. Massive spike in patients, fewer resources, how do we do things. We need to do the same thing today. We simply cannot afford the vast bureaucracies and overlapping managers that we have in health and education. If that means that we have to make redundant the staff at NHS Trusts and Education Trusts then sobeit.
When I was at school every local authority (normally the county council) had a team of a dozen, maybe two dozen managers. A 1000 pupil secondary school had a head, a couple of deputies, a Secretary and a caretaker. That was your "non productive" staff, and even then the deputies and even the head taught classes.
Now we have oversight by Ofsted, we have multi school academy management teams on astronomical salaries (and there are far, far more of them than there were County Council LEAs). Each school has around a dozen non teaching managers/ administrators . The education budget is syphoned off to these people before a student writes their first essay. Do we need all these leeches or can we return to the old model?
It's great these questions are being asked imo.
TBF MP's omitting the catering staff, from when schools had proper food. And cleaners, and so on. But those should have their equivalents today, who are productive in enabling schooling.
And the IT in old times was a film loop projector and an OHP. Hard to make a direct comparison ...
My old school is now a 9 school trust and has a "Strategic Director of IT" - part of the £2.25m spent by the trust on managers.
You know what IT stuff the schools in the trust need? The same stuff the schools not in the trust need. Why are we paying a fortune to have a 9-school "Strategic Director of IT" to negotiate shit deals with "Google" etc al. Because that is the reality. Tesco does not let store managers or even area managers negotiate with Heinz when buying beans. But we have a system where we now have thousands of well paid managers out to negotiate for a few beans at huge mark-up when all of them need the same beans.
This is what the Osborne free market revolution has delivered.
The logical end point is surely consolidation into a few mega-academy chains - the economies of scale will become obvious - so you end up with less local autonomy than before and no ability to vote in a different local council that might change things in LEAs.
Can Rayner actually be sacked due to her curious position within the Labour Party? I guess she would need to voluntarily resign the deputy leadership? Presumably she could get her government job taken away.
I may have mentioned our trade deficit from time to time in passing. This really isn't helping. Its time we had a government more focused on the day job.
The economy is only staying afloat because of services . The latest update to that is due out shortly .
Yes and to be fair that has largely been the case for 30 years or more. But what we are not seeing is any sign of investment in new production in the UK, any uplift in training, any growth in productivity, any facilitation of growth by removing planning hurdles or otherwise, any attempt to encourage entrepreneurial activity in the UK, it makes you despair. What we got instead was the increase in Employers NI and an above inflation increase in the minimum wage with inevitable consequences for the level of employment.
It just won't do. Our forthcoming budget needs to focus on growth (as Reeves herself recognised before the election). That means finding ways to boost investment through more generous allowances, encouraging training, not hammering Entrepreneurial Relief or Capital Gains or share based ISAs, looking at why London is struggling to compete in the IPO market, etc etc. I fear we are going to see the reverse as our Chancellor scrabbles around for a few billion more taxes to make her nonsensical targets and kick the can down the road for a few more months.
My new brainiac IQ 190 squillionaire friend, who was freaking out about the gilts market months ago (presciently) is now freaking out about gilts EVEN MORE
He says the government is “driving straight into a brick wall”. He thinks the present gilts “crisis” is maybe the markets reacting to Starmer’s “phase 2” speech which didn’t acknowledge the fiscal emergency at all
He says, as tax rises won’t work, borrowing can’t be done, and the government refuses to cut, we “may become Turkey or Argentina for a bit”
🫣
I am no brainiac, nor do I have an IQ of 190, nor, sadly, am I a squillionaire but this is kind of obvious. We are heading towards a fiscal crisis. It is not just that we need to borrow new money at penalty rates, we also have to roll over ever more debt taken out when interest rates were very, very low. 10 year gilts maturing just now were probably borrowed at less than 1%. To replace those borrowed funds we will be borrowing the same money at more than 5%. The cost of our debt is going to be rising for a long time, even if we manage to get current rates down. Every other category of spending is going to be squeezed by this.
Right, so what do we do? The "cut spending" brigade envisage that the sick and the poor are wasting the money so just take it off them. In reality they are sick and poor and when need remains and you cut the provision you spend more mopping up the various crises you create.
So we can't cut spending on the front line. We need to cut spending on everything else. How is it that we have an NHS where the budget goes up every year and front line provision shrinks? Its a bonfire burning our cash - and we can't afford to fuel it any more.
We set up a crisis team during Covid. Massive spike in patients, fewer resources, how do we do things. We need to do the same thing today. We simply cannot afford the vast bureaucracies and overlapping managers that we have in health and education. If that means that we have to make redundant the staff at NHS Trusts and Education Trusts then sobeit.
Even the guy running a company that provides school transport for SEND kids has gone on record complaining of the complete madness & waste in the current system.
PIP payments appear to have gone from “I need money for transport because otherwise I can’t get to work” to ”I have ADHD and find using the bus a bit tricky & would like my own car”,
The NHS maternity service is spending more on compensating mothers & children for damage done to them due to lack of adequate staffing than it is on actually delivering maternity services.
We trapped many of the “sick and poor” in unemployment because we let large corporations argue that even jobs that paid less than minimum wage counted as “shortage professions” that deserved unlimited work visas. How are they going to get work when made to compete in that environment?
The legal profession has turned the Equality Acts into a tool to undermine market forces in the labour market, leading inevitably to the chaos in Birmingham & the further casualisation of labour as employers flatly refuse to take on employees who have been turned into future legal liabilities for the sin of paying different jobs different amounts of money in order to attract workers.
We’ve made it completely impossible to build anything at all, anywhere. Latest stupidity on this front is that the cheap rate for non-degradable landfill that can be used to fill old quarries (cement, soil etc) at £4/tonne is being removed & the standard rate of £136 / tonne is being applied across the board, adding something like ~£25k to the price of the average house & vastly increasing the costs of larger projects. But that’s a pinprick next to the new Building Regulations, which appear to have cut house-building in half from already pitiful levels & the marauding Environment Agency that believes spiders matter more than housing children.
I could (very easily) go on, but there is so much in this country that doesn’t require money spending on it - it needs saner review & regulation. Successive governments have made this situation worse and worse because every regulation has had a proponent who cares very much about it being implemented but the costs have been spread across all of us, so pushback has been difficult to organise. We have ended up with a diffuse rule by lawfare, where everyone has a very important job to do but in the aggregate their job is to prevent anything happening at all.
Welcome to the process state that is run by unelected bureaucrats because the elected politicians are shit. I think we've been here for about 30 years.
We've all had a bit of a moan. Max makes the key point. I have no doubt that every single one of these directives is considered worthy - the landfill one is aimed at reducing waste as an example.
Great, but stack all of these worthy things together and you get a quagmire where nothing gets done despite fortunes being spent. Once again Reform ask the right question - "is there waste?" but have the wrong answer - "lets send in DOGE and create a scandal out of accounting!!!"
Phil made a point about NHS maternity services. We can't afford midwives, but can afford to pay for the pain and suffering caused by a lack of midwives. Similarly we can't afford police officers or to staff courts or build prison capacity but we can afford to pay for the economic damage caused by crime.
Can't we see the stupidity of the "we can't afford" mentality? We're spending more and more to get less and less...
And again this is part of the process state. The maternity spend, as an example - the money for compensation is court ordered so I'd legally enforceable therefore it has to be paid. The bureaucrats, instead of looking for the causes of why so much compensation is being paid just take it out of the existing maternity services budget creating a doom loop of worse services and more compensation payments. Their process is more important than improving patient outcomes, patients are simply a nuisance that can be paid off and told to shut up.
Actually looking into the causes of why so much compensation needs to be paid would shine a light on these bureaucrats and their shitty processes and likely result in them being sacked for incompetence, instead the useless and weak politicians leave them to it.
So what we end up with is bureaucrats doing things in a way that protects themselves to the detriment of patient outcomes which steadily degrade over time as more of the budget is spent on compensation and hiring more bureaucrats to oversee these legal cases.
Farage is weak, runny sauce. He won’t let Reform even stand up for their own people, eg punishing their Epping member, and he will change nothing of significance politically.
It's coming. I predict a Farage ousting, Lowe installed as Reform leader and then a pact with AdvanceUK. Farage is only really clinging on for sentimental reasons and that just won't last in the current climate.
Well that is for Parliament to amend the Online Safety Act and Public Order Act and Malicious Communications Act then
Another great achievement of the Conservative government, in 2023, that the Conservatives of 2025 blame on Labour. Is it any wonder Conservatives go to Reform in ever increasing numbers?
Is there anything your government did that the party still stands by?
Brexit, UC, took the lowest earners out of tax, the inheritance tax cut, the Covid vaccines etc.
I have not seen Kemi say she would repeal any of those Acts anyway even if she might back amendments
In defence of PCCs they replaced police authorities.
Which were ineffective, remote and unresponsive to public priorities. And in some cases the police/police unions threatened difficult members to force them to resign from the authorities.
The PCCs are not perfect, but there is a need for civilian political oversight of police activities and some appointed committee somewhere in a smoke-filled room just doesn’t cut it
In Leics and Rutland our PCC recently defected to Reform.
That's worth a read for the guy talking about the difference that he thinks him joining RefUK will make. There's a lot of Farage talking points in it, and Leics will be a fascinating place to run the experiment.
I didn't vote for him when he was a Tory, and won't next time now that he is Reform. He won't by a very narrow margin over a split opposition last time.
I haven't noticed any change in policing, and don't anticipate any. Elected PCCs seem ideally suited to abolition as a cost cutting measure to my eyes.
Some like Roger Hirst in Essex have done a good job, he did a course in criminology too to prepare for the role.
Most PCCs are being scrapped anyway and their functions take over by Mayors in new combined authorities, including in Essex
And surely those PCCs will resurface as candidates for the mayoralty....
Some might but in Essex ECC deputy leader Louise McKinlay narrowly beat PCC Roger Hirst for the Tory Mayoral nomination
I may have mentioned our trade deficit from time to time in passing. This really isn't helping. Its time we had a government more focused on the day job.
The economy is only staying afloat because of services . The latest update to that is due out shortly .
Yes and to be fair that has largely been the case for 30 years or more. But what we are not seeing is any sign of investment in new production in the UK, any uplift in training, any growth in productivity, any facilitation of growth by removing planning hurdles or otherwise, any attempt to encourage entrepreneurial activity in the UK, it makes you despair. What we got instead was the increase in Employers NI and an above inflation increase in the minimum wage with inevitable consequences for the level of employment.
It just won't do. Our forthcoming budget needs to focus on growth (as Reeves herself recognised before the election). That means finding ways to boost investment through more generous allowances, encouraging training, not hammering Entrepreneurial Relief or Capital Gains or share based ISAs, looking at why London is struggling to compete in the IPO market, etc etc. I fear we are going to see the reverse as our Chancellor scrabbles around for a few billion more taxes to make her nonsensical targets and kick the can down the road for a few more months.
My new brainiac IQ 190 squillionaire friend, who was freaking out about the gilts market months ago (presciently) is now freaking out about gilts EVEN MORE
He says the government is “driving straight into a brick wall”. He thinks the present gilts “crisis” is maybe the markets reacting to Starmer’s “phase 2” speech which didn’t acknowledge the fiscal emergency at all
He says, as tax rises won’t work, borrowing can’t be done, and the government refuses to cut, we “may become Turkey or Argentina for a bit”
🫣
I am no brainiac, nor do I have an IQ of 190, nor, sadly, am I a squillionaire but this is kind of obvious. We are heading towards a fiscal crisis. It is not just that we need to borrow new money at penalty rates, we also have to roll over ever more debt taken out when interest rates were very, very low. 10 year gilts maturing just now were probably borrowed at less than 1%. To replace those borrowed funds we will be borrowing the same money at more than 5%. The cost of our debt is going to be rising for a long time, even if we manage to get current rates down. Every other category of spending is going to be squeezed by this.
Right, so what do we do? The "cut spending" brigade envisage that the sick and the poor are wasting the money so just take it off them. In reality they are sick and poor and when need remains and you cut the provision you spend more mopping up the various crises you create.
So we can't cut spending on the front line. We need to cut spending on everything else. How is it that we have an NHS where the budget goes up every year and front line provision shrinks? Its a bonfire burning our cash - and we can't afford to fuel it any more.
We set up a crisis team during Covid. Massive spike in patients, fewer resources, how do we do things. We need to do the same thing today. We simply cannot afford the vast bureaucracies and overlapping managers that we have in health and education. If that means that we have to make redundant the staff at NHS Trusts and Education Trusts then sobeit.
When I was at school every local authority (normally the county council) had a team of a dozen, maybe two dozen managers. A 1000 pupil secondary school had a head, a couple of deputies, a Secretary and a caretaker. That was your "non productive" staff, and even then the deputies and even the head taught classes.
Now we have oversight by Ofsted, we have multi school academy management teams on astronomical salaries (and there are far, far more of them than there were County Council LEAs). Each school has around a dozen non teaching managers/ administrators . The education budget is syphoned off to these people before a student writes their first essay. Do we need all these leeches or can we return to the old model?
Was this a secondary? Because my late 90s secondary had libarians, lab techs, DT techs, computer techs (for staff and student networks)...
Techs are one thing. (And most tech staff in schools and colleges do lots of work for not much money, often on term-time only contracts. Recruitment was only possible because of holidays that match up with school holidays, and the numbers have been steadily cut over the years.)
What RP is rightly highlighting is the rise of the B Ark class. Some of the tasks need doing, but it's crazily inefficient and ineffective to do them on the scale we do. Others are just irrelevant.
I hate to think how much schools and colleges spend on marketing. It makes sense for the institution (each extra student is probably pure gain), but at system level it's pure expense, and the benefits are pretty much zero sum.
Farage is weak, runny sauce. He won’t let Reform even stand up for their own people, eg punishing their Epping member, and he will change nothing of significance politically.
It's coming. I predict a Farage ousting, Lowe installed as Reform leader and then a pact with AdvanceUK. Farage is only really clinging on for sentimental reasons and that just won't last in the current climate.
I doubt it, the Tories and Labour would be delighted though if Farage was removed, he is Reform's biggest and most charismatic asset
I may have mentioned our trade deficit from time to time in passing. This really isn't helping. Its time we had a government more focused on the day job.
The economy is only staying afloat because of services . The latest update to that is due out shortly .
Yes and to be fair that has largely been the case for 30 years or more. But what we are not seeing is any sign of investment in new production in the UK, any uplift in training, any growth in productivity, any facilitation of growth by removing planning hurdles or otherwise, any attempt to encourage entrepreneurial activity in the UK, it makes you despair. What we got instead was the increase in Employers NI and an above inflation increase in the minimum wage with inevitable consequences for the level of employment.
It just won't do. Our forthcoming budget needs to focus on growth (as Reeves herself recognised before the election). That means finding ways to boost investment through more generous allowances, encouraging training, not hammering Entrepreneurial Relief or Capital Gains or share based ISAs, looking at why London is struggling to compete in the IPO market, etc etc. I fear we are going to see the reverse as our Chancellor scrabbles around for a few billion more taxes to make her nonsensical targets and kick the can down the road for a few more months.
My new brainiac IQ 190 squillionaire friend, who was freaking out about the gilts market months ago (presciently) is now freaking out about gilts EVEN MORE
He says the government is “driving straight into a brick wall”. He thinks the present gilts “crisis” is maybe the markets reacting to Starmer’s “phase 2” speech which didn’t acknowledge the fiscal emergency at all
He says, as tax rises won’t work, borrowing can’t be done, and the government refuses to cut, we “may become Turkey or Argentina for a bit”
🫣
I am no brainiac, nor do I have an IQ of 190, nor, sadly, am I a squillionaire but this is kind of obvious. We are heading towards a fiscal crisis. It is not just that we need to borrow new money at penalty rates, we also have to roll over ever more debt taken out when interest rates were very, very low. 10 year gilts maturing just now were probably borrowed at less than 1%. To replace those borrowed funds we will be borrowing the same money at more than 5%. The cost of our debt is going to be rising for a long time, even if we manage to get current rates down. Every other category of spending is going to be squeezed by this.
Right, so what do we do? The "cut spending" brigade envisage that the sick and the poor are wasting the money so just take it off them. In reality they are sick and poor and when need remains and you cut the provision you spend more mopping up the various crises you create.
So we can't cut spending on the front line. We need to cut spending on everything else. How is it that we have an NHS where the budget goes up every year and front line provision shrinks? Its a bonfire burning our cash - and we can't afford to fuel it any more.
We set up a crisis team during Covid. Massive spike in patients, fewer resources, how do we do things. We need to do the same thing today. We simply cannot afford the vast bureaucracies and overlapping managers that we have in health and education. If that means that we have to make redundant the staff at NHS Trusts and Education Trusts then sobeit.
How about the extra 0.5m central government employees that have brochures in the last 5 years?
I may have mentioned our trade deficit from time to time in passing. This really isn't helping. Its time we had a government more focused on the day job.
The economy is only staying afloat because of services . The latest update to that is due out shortly .
Yes and to be fair that has largely been the case for 30 years or more. But what we are not seeing is any sign of investment in new production in the UK, any uplift in training, any growth in productivity, any facilitation of growth by removing planning hurdles or otherwise, any attempt to encourage entrepreneurial activity in the UK, it makes you despair. What we got instead was the increase in Employers NI and an above inflation increase in the minimum wage with inevitable consequences for the level of employment.
It just won't do. Our forthcoming budget needs to focus on growth (as Reeves herself recognised before the election). That means finding ways to boost investment through more generous allowances, encouraging training, not hammering Entrepreneurial Relief or Capital Gains or share based ISAs, looking at why London is struggling to compete in the IPO market, etc etc. I fear we are going to see the reverse as our Chancellor scrabbles around for a few billion more taxes to make her nonsensical targets and kick the can down the road for a few more months.
My new brainiac IQ 190 squillionaire friend, who was freaking out about the gilts market months ago (presciently) is now freaking out about gilts EVEN MORE
He says the government is “driving straight into a brick wall”. He thinks the present gilts “crisis” is maybe the markets reacting to Starmer’s “phase 2” speech which didn’t acknowledge the fiscal emergency at all
He says, as tax rises won’t work, borrowing can’t be done, and the government refuses to cut, we “may become Turkey or Argentina for a bit”
🫣
I am no brainiac, nor do I have an IQ of 190, nor, sadly, am I a squillionaire but this is kind of obvious. We are heading towards a fiscal crisis. It is not just that we need to borrow new money at penalty rates, we also have to roll over ever more debt taken out when interest rates were very, very low. 10 year gilts maturing just now were probably borrowed at less than 1%. To replace those borrowed funds we will be borrowing the same money at more than 5%. The cost of our debt is going to be rising for a long time, even if we manage to get current rates down. Every other category of spending is going to be squeezed by this.
Right, so what do we do? The "cut spending" brigade envisage that the sick and the poor are wasting the money so just take it off them. In reality they are sick and poor and when need remains and you cut the provision you spend more mopping up the various crises you create.
So we can't cut spending on the front line. We need to cut spending on everything else. How is it that we have an NHS where the budget goes up every year and front line provision shrinks? Its a bonfire burning our cash - and we can't afford to fuel it any more.
We set up a crisis team during Covid. Massive spike in patients, fewer resources, how do we do things. We need to do the same thing today. We simply cannot afford the vast bureaucracies and overlapping managers that we have in health and education. If that means that we have to make redundant the staff at NHS Trusts and Education Trusts then sobeit.
Even the guy running a company that provides school transport for SEND kids has gone on record complaining of the complete madness & waste in the current system.
PIP payments appear to have gone from “I need money for transport because otherwise I can’t get to work” to ”I have ADHD and find using the bus a bit tricky & would like my own car”,
The NHS maternity service is spending more on compensating mothers & children for damage done to them due to lack of adequate staffing than it is on actually delivering maternity services.
We trapped many of the “sick and poor” in unemployment because we let large corporations argue that even jobs that paid less than minimum wage counted as “shortage professions” that deserved unlimited work visas. How are they going to get work when made to compete in that environment?
The legal profession has turned the Equality Acts into a tool to undermine market forces in the labour market, leading inevitably to the chaos in Birmingham & the further casualisation of labour as employers flatly refuse to take on employees who have been turned into future legal liabilities for the sin of paying different jobs different amounts of money in order to attract workers.
We’ve made it completely impossible to build anything at all, anywhere. Latest stupidity on this front is that the cheap rate for non-degradable landfill that can be used to fill old quarries (cement, soil etc) at £4/tonne is being removed & the standard rate of £136 / tonne is being applied across the board, adding something like ~£25k to the price of the average house & vastly increasing the costs of larger projects. But that’s a pinprick next to the new Building Regulations, which appear to have cut house-building in half from already pitiful levels & the marauding Environment Agency that believes spiders matter more than housing children.
I could (very easily) go on, but there is so much in this country that doesn’t require money spending on it - it needs saner review & regulation. Successive governments have made this situation worse and worse because every regulation has had a proponent who cares very much about it being implemented but the costs have been spread across all of us, so pushback has been difficult to organise. We have ended up with a diffuse rule by lawfare, where everyone has a very important job to do but in the aggregate their job is to prevent anything happening at all.
You have hit the nail on the head.
We need a bonfire of regulations.
In a lot of cases, the regulations themselves aren’t the problem - it’s the interpretation of them via the legal system that has created the monster that now lies before us. We need to convince Parliament as an institution that following up on the interpretation of the law by the legal system is part & parcel of the job of lawmaking.
NB. To give an example of this - the last Parliament made a sensible change to the planning regulations that said that it would be permitted to add an extra floor to your property (with reasonable restrictions on which properties were allowed to do this), with only your neighbours being allowed object. The justification being that adding a floor to suburban houses in London would be a cheap way to add housing space without needing huge housing developments & with minimal impact.
A householder in London duly applied to extend their property upwards & the planning application was immediately opposed by people in neighbouring streets, horrified by the idea that “their” area might be defaced in this fashion. The case went to the courts, where a judge decided that the word “neighbouring” in the law in question didn’t mean “adjacent” as the lawmakers had intended - it meant anyone living within a mile or so.
Unsurprisingly, no one has bothered to make any planning applications of this kind since, as the inevitability of opposition by someone in a 1 mile radius circle makes it completely impossible to get through planning.
Parliament could have noticed this & issued a one line change to the law saying “no, when we said neighbouring we meant immediately adjacent”. But no one involved appears to have realised that this useful bit of planning reform that was carefully shepherded through the Parliamentary law-making maze was shot in the back by the judiciary the moment it became law.
Angela Rayner is fighting for her political future after admitting that she failed to pay enough stamp duty when she bought her new £800,000 seaside flat
The deputy prime minister has spent weeks arguing that she did nothing wrong when she bought the property in Hove, East Sussex
Sir Keir Starmer this week stood by her, accusing people of 'briefing against her and talking her down'
The deputy prime minister asked tax lawyers to review her affairs following intense scrutiny and was told she has an outstanding tax liability
She has referred herself to the prime minister's independent ethics adviser
She told @BethRigby she has considered resigning over the issue
I hope she survives. She is obviously feared by right wingers.
Angela Rayner is fighting for her political future after admitting that she failed to pay enough stamp duty when she bought her new £800,000 seaside flat
The deputy prime minister has spent weeks arguing that she did nothing wrong when she bought the property in Hove, East Sussex
Sir Keir Starmer this week stood by her, accusing people of 'briefing against her and talking her down'
The deputy prime minister asked tax lawyers to review her affairs following intense scrutiny and was told she has an outstanding tax liability
She has referred herself to the prime minister's independent ethics adviser
She told @BethRigby she has considered resigning over the issue
I hope she survives. She is obviously feared by right wingers.
I may have mentioned our trade deficit from time to time in passing. This really isn't helping. Its time we had a government more focused on the day job.
The economy is only staying afloat because of services . The latest update to that is due out shortly .
Yes and to be fair that has largely been the case for 30 years or more. But what we are not seeing is any sign of investment in new production in the UK, any uplift in training, any growth in productivity, any facilitation of growth by removing planning hurdles or otherwise, any attempt to encourage entrepreneurial activity in the UK, it makes you despair. What we got instead was the increase in Employers NI and an above inflation increase in the minimum wage with inevitable consequences for the level of employment.
It just won't do. Our forthcoming budget needs to focus on growth (as Reeves herself recognised before the election). That means finding ways to boost investment through more generous allowances, encouraging training, not hammering Entrepreneurial Relief or Capital Gains or share based ISAs, looking at why London is struggling to compete in the IPO market, etc etc. I fear we are going to see the reverse as our Chancellor scrabbles around for a few billion more taxes to make her nonsensical targets and kick the can down the road for a few more months.
My new brainiac IQ 190 squillionaire friend, who was freaking out about the gilts market months ago (presciently) is now freaking out about gilts EVEN MORE
He says the government is “driving straight into a brick wall”. He thinks the present gilts “crisis” is maybe the markets reacting to Starmer’s “phase 2” speech which didn’t acknowledge the fiscal emergency at all
He says, as tax rises won’t work, borrowing can’t be done, and the government refuses to cut, we “may become Turkey or Argentina for a bit”
🫣
I am no brainiac, nor do I have an IQ of 190, nor, sadly, am I a squillionaire but this is kind of obvious. We are heading towards a fiscal crisis. It is not just that we need to borrow new money at penalty rates, we also have to roll over ever more debt taken out when interest rates were very, very low. 10 year gilts maturing just now were probably borrowed at less than 1%. To replace those borrowed funds we will be borrowing the same money at more than 5%. The cost of our debt is going to be rising for a long time, even if we manage to get current rates down. Every other category of spending is going to be squeezed by this.
Right, so what do we do? The "cut spending" brigade envisage that the sick and the poor are wasting the money so just take it off them. In reality they are sick and poor and when need remains and you cut the provision you spend more mopping up the various crises you create.
So we can't cut spending on the front line. We need to cut spending on everything else. How is it that we have an NHS where the budget goes up every year and front line provision shrinks? Its a bonfire burning our cash - and we can't afford to fuel it any more.
We set up a crisis team during Covid. Massive spike in patients, fewer resources, how do we do things. We need to do the same thing today. We simply cannot afford the vast bureaucracies and overlapping managers that we have in health and education. If that means that we have to make redundant the staff at NHS Trusts and Education Trusts then sobeit.
Maybe Foxy could explain the reasoning behind all the different NHS trusts as there might be a good reason - I understand that different areas of the UK have different demographics so different needs but I always wonder whether it would work more efficiently with one single management (the same with all the different police forces, would it be more efficient to just have a UK Police).
I think about the old story that the French Education minister could look at a piece of paper and know what every schoolchild in France was eating that day and wonder how many areas of the state in the UK could just be made identikit across the country rather than having individual fiefdoms and extra costs from not having the purchasing power of a larger institution (eg all police kit from cars to boots should be supplied from the same source to leverage the collective buying power - I can’t think of any reason why different police forces end up with different makes of car for the same roles).
The fragmentation of the NHS was largely a creation of an "internal market" by the Conservatives, I suggest. It does create many problems.
Even as a conservative I cannot see any value in an internal market for the NHS, it’s not like they need competition where people from Newcastle are looking at where to get their hip done and find they can get a two for the price of one in Plymouth if they can get there tomorrow.
Same [edit] sort of geographical problem with railway privatization (specifically the splitting up bit - no wonder that is being rectified now). And schools, as discussed also today here, in some of the UK.
But it does happen, for sausage machine stuff - plus you've got the private hospitals, lots of simple sausage machine stuff like varicose veins and cataracts.
Yet the other problem is that the consumers aren't informed consumers. And what happens to the hospitals that are supposed to lose out and go bust?
Surely it would make some sense to balance demand across the country. At one point I thought I would need a knee op. I would have happily gone to a national MRI scanning centre in, say, Birmingham to speed things up, and as I live on my own it would have made sense to have the op near friends in Hampshire or family in Essex, as I would likely be incapacitated for a while afterwards and could stay with them. But, oh no, it all has to be managed locally.
Anyone with a knee problem that is preventing them working should very much be offered the next op wherever it is in the country
In Scotland we already have the Golden Jubilee National Hospital in Clydebank, which is a national hospital for reducing waiting times. It admits patients from all over Scotland. I had a hip replacement there two months ago, although it’s not in my local health board area. The service was excellent, from surgeon to auxiliaries.
Several family members have been sent there, from outwith the West Central. Cataracts.
Well that is for Parliament to amend the Online Safety Act and Public Order Act and Malicious Communications Act then
Another great achievement of the Conservative government, in 2023, that the Conservatives of 2025 blame on Labour. Is it any wonder Conservatives go to Reform in ever increasing numbers?
Is there anything your government did that the party still stands by?
Brexit, UC, took the lowest earners out of tax, the inheritance tax cut, the Covid vaccines etc.
I have not seen Kemi say she would repeal any of those Acts anyway even if she might back amendments
Brexit led to the Boriswave. UC is a good idea, terribly implemented - lack of attention to detail or understanding of how connected things are. Lowest earners out of tax was 15 years ago under a coalition, for the last few years you have frozen tax allowances dragging them back into tax. Covid vaccines - the pandemic is over.
So you are left with a cut on a tax paid by only 28,000 estates per year. Well done.
Can Rayner actually be sacked due to her curious position within the Labour Party? I guess she would need to voluntarily resign the deputy leadership? Presumably she could get her government job taken away.
Luckily she is very frugal and will have easy access to the £40k tax shortfall and whatever the expert lawyers she says are working with HMRC for her charge.
She would probably do more for the country if she had a ti-tok channel telling the youth how to generate money and property so efficiently whilst not having to give up a clothes budget or going out and having fun.
I may have mentioned our trade deficit from time to time in passing. This really isn't helping. Its time we had a government more focused on the day job.
The economy is only staying afloat because of services . The latest update to that is due out shortly .
Yes and to be fair that has largely been the case for 30 years or more. But what we are not seeing is any sign of investment in new production in the UK, any uplift in training, any growth in productivity, any facilitation of growth by removing planning hurdles or otherwise, any attempt to encourage entrepreneurial activity in the UK, it makes you despair. What we got instead was the increase in Employers NI and an above inflation increase in the minimum wage with inevitable consequences for the level of employment.
It just won't do. Our forthcoming budget needs to focus on growth (as Reeves herself recognised before the election). That means finding ways to boost investment through more generous allowances, encouraging training, not hammering Entrepreneurial Relief or Capital Gains or share based ISAs, looking at why London is struggling to compete in the IPO market, etc etc. I fear we are going to see the reverse as our Chancellor scrabbles around for a few billion more taxes to make her nonsensical targets and kick the can down the road for a few more months.
My new brainiac IQ 190 squillionaire friend, who was freaking out about the gilts market months ago (presciently) is now freaking out about gilts EVEN MORE
He says the government is “driving straight into a brick wall”. He thinks the present gilts “crisis” is maybe the markets reacting to Starmer’s “phase 2” speech which didn’t acknowledge the fiscal emergency at all
He says, as tax rises won’t work, borrowing can’t be done, and the government refuses to cut, we “may become Turkey or Argentina for a bit”
🫣
I am no brainiac, nor do I have an IQ of 190, nor, sadly, am I a squillionaire but this is kind of obvious. We are heading towards a fiscal crisis. It is not just that we need to borrow new money at penalty rates, we also have to roll over ever more debt taken out when interest rates were very, very low. 10 year gilts maturing just now were probably borrowed at less than 1%. To replace those borrowed funds we will be borrowing the same money at more than 5%. The cost of our debt is going to be rising for a long time, even if we manage to get current rates down. Every other category of spending is going to be squeezed by this.
Right, so what do we do? The "cut spending" brigade envisage that the sick and the poor are wasting the money so just take it off them. In reality they are sick and poor and when need remains and you cut the provision you spend more mopping up the various crises you create.
So we can't cut spending on the front line. We need to cut spending on everything else. How is it that we have an NHS where the budget goes up every year and front line provision shrinks? Its a bonfire burning our cash - and we can't afford to fuel it any more.
We set up a crisis team during Covid. Massive spike in patients, fewer resources, how do we do things. We need to do the same thing today. We simply cannot afford the vast bureaucracies and overlapping managers that we have in health and education. If that means that we have to make redundant the staff at NHS Trusts and Education Trusts then sobeit.
When I was at school every local authority (normally the county council) had a team of a dozen, maybe two dozen managers. A 1000 pupil secondary school had a head, a couple of deputies, a Secretary and a caretaker. That was your "non productive" staff, and even then the deputies and even the head taught classes.
Now we have oversight by Ofsted, we have multi school academy management teams on astronomical salaries (and there are far, far more of them than there were County Council LEAs). Each school has around a dozen non teaching managers/ administrators . The education budget is syphoned off to these people before a student writes their first essay. Do we need all these leeches or can we return to the old model?
It's great these questions are being asked imo.
TBF MP's omitting the catering staff, from when schools had proper food. And cleaners, and so on. But those should have their equivalents today, who are productive in enabling schooling.
And the IT in old times was a film loop projector and an OHP. Hard to make a direct comparison ...
My old school is now a 9 school trust and has a "Strategic Director of IT" - part of the £2.25m spent by the trust on managers.
You know what IT stuff the schools in the trust need? The same stuff the schools not in the trust need. Why are we paying a fortune to have a 9-school "Strategic Director of IT" to negotiate shit deals with "Google" etc al. Because that is the reality. Tesco does not let store managers or even area managers negotiate with Heinz when buying beans. But we have a system where we now have thousands of well paid managers out to negotiate for a few beans at huge mark-up when all of them need the same beans.
This is what the Osborne free market revolution has delivered.
Quite. How's your local and very non-Osbornian school comparing, under the lash of its Scottish local authority?
Its awful. My daughter started back a few weeks ago, is enjoying the Girls in Energy course sponsored by Shell, has stepped up from acting in last year's school drama club to becoming stage manager this year, and continues to smash grades out of the park. She gets opportunities here that we never available at the academy school she would have gone to before we moved
Of course, this is the second time she has played fast and loose with their living arrangements.
One thing that seems crazy in his day and age is that you can register to vote in 3 different places and its just trusted that you don't abuse that. I am not suggesting she has or would, just that you can, and that the fact you can do this to aid your claims to your tax situation seems mental.
Angela Rayner is fighting for her political future after admitting that she failed to pay enough stamp duty when she bought her new £800,000 seaside flat
The deputy prime minister has spent weeks arguing that she did nothing wrong when she bought the property in Hove, East Sussex
Sir Keir Starmer this week stood by her, accusing people of 'briefing against her and talking her down'
The deputy prime minister asked tax lawyers to review her affairs following intense scrutiny and was told she has an outstanding tax liability
She has referred herself to the prime minister's independent ethics adviser
She told @BethRigby she has considered resigning over the issue
I hope she survives. She is obviously feared by right wingers.
The question is would a conservative survive ?
Of course they would. Tax dodging is in their DNA.
I may have mentioned our trade deficit from time to time in passing. This really isn't helping. Its time we had a government more focused on the day job.
The economy is only staying afloat because of services . The latest update to that is due out shortly .
Yes and to be fair that has largely been the case for 30 years or more. But what we are not seeing is any sign of investment in new production in the UK, any uplift in training, any growth in productivity, any facilitation of growth by removing planning hurdles or otherwise, any attempt to encourage entrepreneurial activity in the UK, it makes you despair. What we got instead was the increase in Employers NI and an above inflation increase in the minimum wage with inevitable consequences for the level of employment.
It just won't do. Our forthcoming budget needs to focus on growth (as Reeves herself recognised before the election). That means finding ways to boost investment through more generous allowances, encouraging training, not hammering Entrepreneurial Relief or Capital Gains or share based ISAs, looking at why London is struggling to compete in the IPO market, etc etc. I fear we are going to see the reverse as our Chancellor scrabbles around for a few billion more taxes to make her nonsensical targets and kick the can down the road for a few more months.
My new brainiac IQ 190 squillionaire friend, who was freaking out about the gilts market months ago (presciently) is now freaking out about gilts EVEN MORE
He says the government is “driving straight into a brick wall”. He thinks the present gilts “crisis” is maybe the markets reacting to Starmer’s “phase 2” speech which didn’t acknowledge the fiscal emergency at all
He says, as tax rises won’t work, borrowing can’t be done, and the government refuses to cut, we “may become Turkey or Argentina for a bit”
🫣
I am no brainiac, nor do I have an IQ of 190, nor, sadly, am I a squillionaire but this is kind of obvious. We are heading towards a fiscal crisis. It is not just that we need to borrow new money at penalty rates, we also have to roll over ever more debt taken out when interest rates were very, very low. 10 year gilts maturing just now were probably borrowed at less than 1%. To replace those borrowed funds we will be borrowing the same money at more than 5%. The cost of our debt is going to be rising for a long time, even if we manage to get current rates down. Every other category of spending is going to be squeezed by this.
Right, so what do we do? The "cut spending" brigade envisage that the sick and the poor are wasting the money so just take it off them. In reality they are sick and poor and when need remains and you cut the provision you spend more mopping up the various crises you create.
So we can't cut spending on the front line. We need to cut spending on everything else. How is it that we have an NHS where the budget goes up every year and front line provision shrinks? Its a bonfire burning our cash - and we can't afford to fuel it any more.
We set up a crisis team during Covid. Massive spike in patients, fewer resources, how do we do things. We need to do the same thing today. We simply cannot afford the vast bureaucracies and overlapping managers that we have in health and education. If that means that we have to make redundant the staff at NHS Trusts and Education Trusts then sobeit.
Even the guy running a company that provides school transport for SEND kids has gone on record complaining of the complete madness & waste in the current system.
PIP payments appear to have gone from “I need money for transport because otherwise I can’t get to work” to ”I have ADHD and find using the bus a bit tricky & would like my own car”,
The NHS maternity service is spending more on compensating mothers & children for damage done to them due to lack of adequate staffing than it is on actually delivering maternity services.
We trapped many of the “sick and poor” in unemployment because we let large corporations argue that even jobs that paid less than minimum wage counted as “shortage professions” that deserved unlimited work visas. How are they going to get work when made to compete in that environment?
The legal profession has turned the Equality Acts into a tool to undermine market forces in the labour market, leading inevitably to the chaos in Birmingham & the further casualisation of labour as employers flatly refuse to take on employees who have been turned into future legal liabilities for the sin of paying different jobs different amounts of money in order to attract workers.
We’ve made it completely impossible to build anything at all, anywhere. Latest stupidity on this front is that the cheap rate for non-degradable landfill that can be used to fill old quarries (cement, soil etc) at £4/tonne is being removed & the standard rate of £136 / tonne is being applied across the board, adding something like ~£25k to the price of the average house & vastly increasing the costs of larger projects. But that’s a pinprick next to the new Building Regulations, which appear to have cut house-building in half from already pitiful levels & the marauding Environment Agency that believes spiders matter more than housing children.
I could (very easily) go on, but there is so much in this country that doesn’t require money spending on it - it needs saner review & regulation. Successive governments have made this situation worse and worse because every regulation has had a proponent who cares very much about it being implemented but the costs have been spread across all of us, so pushback has been difficult to organise. We have ended up with a diffuse rule by lawfare, where everyone has a very important job to do but in the aggregate their job is to prevent anything happening at all.
You have hit the nail on the head.
We need a bonfire of regulations.
In a lot of cases, the regulations themselves aren’t the problem - it’s the interpretation of them via the legal system that has created the monster that now lies before us. We need to convince Parliament as an institution that following up on the interpretation of the law by the legal system is part & parcel of the job of lawmaking.
NB. To give an example of this - the last Parliament made a sensible change to the planning regulations that said that it would be permitted to add an extra floor to your property (with reasonable restrictions on which properties were allowed to do this), with only your neighbours being allowed object. The justification being that adding a floor to suburban houses in London would be a cheap way to add housing space without needing huge housing developments & with minimal impact.
A householder in London duly applied to extend their property upwards & the planning application was immediately opposed by people in neighbouring streets, horrified by the idea that “their” area might be defaced in this fashion. The case went to the courts, where a judge decided that the word “neighbouring” in the law in question didn’t mean “adjacent” as the lawmakers had intended - it meant anyone living within a mile or so.
Unsurprisingly, no one has bothered to make any planning applications of this kind since, as the inevitability of opposition by someone in a 1 mile radius circle makes it completely impossible to get through planning.
Parliament could have noticed this & issued a one line change to the law saying “no, when we said neighbouring we meant immediately adjacent”. But no one involved appears to have realised that this useful bit of planning reform that was carefully shepherded through the Parliamentary law-making maze was shot in the back by the judiciary the moment it became law.
The judge did his job - he created potential new income opportunities for other members of the legal cartel.
Farage is weak, runny sauce. He won’t let Reform even stand up for their own people, eg punishing their Epping member, and he will change nothing of significance politically.
It's coming. I predict a Farage ousting, Lowe installed as Reform leader and then a pact with AdvanceUK. Farage is only really clinging on for sentimental reasons and that just won't last in the current climate.
I doubt it, the Tories and Labour would be delighted though if Farage was removed, he is Reform's biggest and most charismatic asset
The British Right are becoming increasingly intoxicated and are starting to believe their own hype of revolutions and days of reckoning. The feeling will be that Farage is little more than a centrist-dad type who simply needs to be swept aside.
Well that is for Parliament to amend the Online Safety Act and Public Order Act and Malicious Communications Act then
Another great achievement of the Conservative government, in 2023, that the Conservatives of 2025 blame on Labour. Is it any wonder Conservatives go to Reform in ever increasing numbers?
Is there anything your government did that the party still stands by?
Brexit, UC, took the lowest earners out of tax, the inheritance tax cut, the Covid vaccines etc.
I have not seen Kemi say she would repeal any of those Acts anyway even if she might back amendments
Brexit led to the Boriswave. UC is a good idea, terribly implemented - lack of attention to detail or understanding of how connected things are. Lowest earners out of tax was 15 years ago under a coalition, for the last few years you have frozen tax allowances dragging them back into tax. Covid vaccines - the pandemic is over.
So you are left with a cut on a tax paid by only 28,000 estates per year. Well done.
Only after it ended EU free movement and Sunak ended the Boriswave by raising the wage requirement for all immigrants.
UC is far better than the Brown welfare system so you don't lose all your benefit income with part time work.
Lowest earners out of tax was Tory led government, Reeves still freezing tax allowances.
The pandemic only over due to the vaccines.
The tax cut on IHT helped small business and farmers too who Reeves has hammered
I’ve only read the guardian story so that might have spin, but it seems like a cock up (she probably relied on her conveyancing solicitor rather than asking the trust team) rather than deliberately trying to minimise stamp duty
The optics of this always looked awful. It doesn't matter what the legality is - and that is now in question anyway. She's the MP for Ashton-under-Lyne whose primary residence is in Hove and who isn't paying the tax that she thinks other people should pay.
I have a real problem with holier-than-thouism in politics, especially with things said / done before politics. But she is *Deputy Prime Minister* and she's chosen to do this now...
Question - did anyone in Number 10 feed information to the media?
I see the Starmer administration and consider a government utterly mired in the mundane. I have no doubt that ministers are in their departments beavering away being busy on policy initiatives, feeling like they are making a difference. The problem is that largely they are not - busy fools.
If Starmer is to break this current political zeitgeist then he needs to change plan and do so significantly. @Leon suggests he call an EU referendum - that would do it! Or something similarly bold. I'd even welcome him coming out and calling out the racist women-beating child-molesting scum at the heart of the protect our women / raise the colours movement.
He won't do anything. Because he's frit.
Zack Polanski probably will though.
His landslide victory in the leadership contest in a party that gets 8-10% of the vote is the political news of the week.
Gay, Vegan and Jewish it's enough to have the PB blimps clutching their smelling salts...
Why do people on here insist on using Colonel Blimp as some sort of alternate for Gammon or social conservative right winger?
Whilst Blimp is a stickler for things being done properly, especially military issues, he is clearly, especially for his era, a liberal, open minded and kind honourable man. His attitude to women and to his German “adversary”, his internationalism and his dislike of war don’t put him in the category people think he was when they think they are being sharp using him as a criticism.
Maybe watch the film and know about the ciphers you use rather than just lazily throw them out there.
Sorry, I love the film but it is accepted usage, just like Hoover describes an overpriced dust sucking machine made in the far east with a UJ sticker bunged on it.
Then I shall fight and campaign until people see the real Blimp once more. It does annoy me though because his character is supposed to reflect the national character of the time where he is disciplined and resolute but caring and open minded as opposed to those Nazi chaps.
The other thing that is interesting, now, is the ending of the film. Blimp rejects “Nazi methods” - even if it loses the war. He is forced to retire by his friends, for whom winning the war is paramount.
Obviously, that seemed a simple choice at the time. And by “Nazi methods” they meant, in the film a bit of lying and skullduggery. See SOE.
Farage is weak, runny sauce. He won’t let Reform even stand up for their own people, eg punishing their Epping member, and he will change nothing of significance politically.
Which Epping Member has been punished, do we know?
Aha, I guess he means James Regan, of Ongar Town Council, who was reported as being a District Councillor in the Independent in error, and was at the Epping demos, who put out material like:
In one video seen by the I Paper, recorded outside the hotel and published on TikTok, he said: “Thanks to the British Government, we now have a third world paedophile babysitting centre in the middle of Epping.”
I may have mentioned our trade deficit from time to time in passing. This really isn't helping. Its time we had a government more focused on the day job.
The economy is only staying afloat because of services . The latest update to that is due out shortly .
Yes and to be fair that has largely been the case for 30 years or more. But what we are not seeing is any sign of investment in new production in the UK, any uplift in training, any growth in productivity, any facilitation of growth by removing planning hurdles or otherwise, any attempt to encourage entrepreneurial activity in the UK, it makes you despair. What we got instead was the increase in Employers NI and an above inflation increase in the minimum wage with inevitable consequences for the level of employment.
It just won't do. Our forthcoming budget needs to focus on growth (as Reeves herself recognised before the election). That means finding ways to boost investment through more generous allowances, encouraging training, not hammering Entrepreneurial Relief or Capital Gains or share based ISAs, looking at why London is struggling to compete in the IPO market, etc etc. I fear we are going to see the reverse as our Chancellor scrabbles around for a few billion more taxes to make her nonsensical targets and kick the can down the road for a few more months.
My new brainiac IQ 190 squillionaire friend, who was freaking out about the gilts market months ago (presciently) is now freaking out about gilts EVEN MORE
He says the government is “driving straight into a brick wall”. He thinks the present gilts “crisis” is maybe the markets reacting to Starmer’s “phase 2” speech which didn’t acknowledge the fiscal emergency at all
He says, as tax rises won’t work, borrowing can’t be done, and the government refuses to cut, we “may become Turkey or Argentina for a bit”
🫣
I am no brainiac, nor do I have an IQ of 190, nor, sadly, am I a squillionaire but this is kind of obvious. We are heading towards a fiscal crisis. It is not just that we need to borrow new money at penalty rates, we also have to roll over ever more debt taken out when interest rates were very, very low. 10 year gilts maturing just now were probably borrowed at less than 1%. To replace those borrowed funds we will be borrowing the same money at more than 5%. The cost of our debt is going to be rising for a long time, even if we manage to get current rates down. Every other category of spending is going to be squeezed by this.
Right, so what do we do? The "cut spending" brigade envisage that the sick and the poor are wasting the money so just take it off them. In reality they are sick and poor and when need remains and you cut the provision you spend more mopping up the various crises you create.
So we can't cut spending on the front line. We need to cut spending on everything else. How is it that we have an NHS where the budget goes up every year and front line provision shrinks? Its a bonfire burning our cash - and we can't afford to fuel it any more.
We set up a crisis team during Covid. Massive spike in patients, fewer resources, how do we do things. We need to do the same thing today. We simply cannot afford the vast bureaucracies and overlapping managers that we have in health and education. If that means that we have to make redundant the staff at NHS Trusts and Education Trusts then sobeit.
When I was at school every local authority (normally the county council) had a team of a dozen, maybe two dozen managers. A 1000 pupil secondary school had a head, a couple of deputies, a Secretary and a caretaker. That was your "non productive" staff, and even then the deputies and even the head taught classes.
Now we have oversight by Ofsted, we have multi school academy management teams on astronomical salaries (and there are far, far more of them than there were County Council LEAs). Each school has around a dozen non teaching managers/ administrators . The education budget is syphoned off to these people before a student writes their first essay. Do we need all these leeches or can we return to the old model?
Yet another example of how the Tories really f****d everything up during their long period in office.
When people think of Tory failure, it's the obvious examples like the borders and boats that come first to mind, along with Brexit - but over many years they've forced re-organisations onto so many public services, and made them all worse...the NHS, schools, the railways, the water industry, energy, the postal service, local government, prisons...
...is there anything they actually managed to improve?
Errr, what? Education was one of the few bright spots. Results have massively improved, for which Mr Gove should rightly be proud.
You have a point that schools are maybe the exception - according to the IFS, "..of the nine public services we assess in our Performance Tracker series, state-funded schools are alone in having performed better in 2024 than in 2010", although they say that much of this improvement has fallen away since the pandemic, especially for disadvantaged white children, a lot of whom simply aren't turning up.
Behind the earlier imrovement is also demographics - the rising number of children from Asian parents who take education more seriously (a particular factor behind the London improvement) - and the LibDems' focus on disadvantaged children and schools during the coalition.
It's untrue that the only way to get on top of our government finances is huge spending cuts. Making that claim is simply a statement of political preference for spending cuts over tax rises. Our tax burden is not particularly high for a developed economy and it's lower than many. We can raise more in taxes. Of course we can. Bad for growth? Yes, but so are spending cuts. And in both cases the impact on growth varies depends on specifics. Some taxes inhibit growth more than others, some types of spending are more productive than others.
I may have mentioned our trade deficit from time to time in passing. This really isn't helping. Its time we had a government more focused on the day job.
The economy is only staying afloat because of services . The latest update to that is due out shortly .
Yes and to be fair that has largely been the case for 30 years or more. But what we are not seeing is any sign of investment in new production in the UK, any uplift in training, any growth in productivity, any facilitation of growth by removing planning hurdles or otherwise, any attempt to encourage entrepreneurial activity in the UK, it makes you despair. What we got instead was the increase in Employers NI and an above inflation increase in the minimum wage with inevitable consequences for the level of employment.
It just won't do. Our forthcoming budget needs to focus on growth (as Reeves herself recognised before the election). That means finding ways to boost investment through more generous allowances, encouraging training, not hammering Entrepreneurial Relief or Capital Gains or share based ISAs, looking at why London is struggling to compete in the IPO market, etc etc. I fear we are going to see the reverse as our Chancellor scrabbles around for a few billion more taxes to make her nonsensical targets and kick the can down the road for a few more months.
My new brainiac IQ 190 squillionaire friend, who was freaking out about the gilts market months ago (presciently) is now freaking out about gilts EVEN MORE
He says the government is “driving straight into a brick wall”. He thinks the present gilts “crisis” is maybe the markets reacting to Starmer’s “phase 2” speech which didn’t acknowledge the fiscal emergency at all
He says, as tax rises won’t work, borrowing can’t be done, and the government refuses to cut, we “may become Turkey or Argentina for a bit”
🫣
I am no brainiac, nor do I have an IQ of 190, nor, sadly, am I a squillionaire but this is kind of obvious. We are heading towards a fiscal crisis. It is not just that we need to borrow new money at penalty rates, we also have to roll over ever more debt taken out when interest rates were very, very low. 10 year gilts maturing just now were probably borrowed at less than 1%. To replace those borrowed funds we will be borrowing the same money at more than 5%. The cost of our debt is going to be rising for a long time, even if we manage to get current rates down. Every other category of spending is going to be squeezed by this.
Right, so what do we do? The "cut spending" brigade envisage that the sick and the poor are wasting the money so just take it off them. In reality they are sick and poor and when need remains and you cut the provision you spend more mopping up the various crises you create.
So we can't cut spending on the front line. We need to cut spending on everything else. How is it that we have an NHS where the budget goes up every year and front line provision shrinks? Its a bonfire burning our cash - and we can't afford to fuel it any more.
We set up a crisis team during Covid. Massive spike in patients, fewer resources, how do we do things. We need to do the same thing today. We simply cannot afford the vast bureaucracies and overlapping managers that we have in health and education. If that means that we have to make redundant the staff at NHS Trusts and Education Trusts then sobeit.
Maybe Foxy could explain the reasoning behind all the different NHS trusts as there might be a good reason - I understand that different areas of the UK have different demographics so different needs but I always wonder whether it would work more efficiently with one single management (the same with all the different police forces, would it be more efficient to just have a UK Police).
I think about the old story that the French Education minister could look at a piece of paper and know what every schoolchild in France was eating that day and wonder how many areas of the state in the UK could just be made identikit across the country rather than having individual fiefdoms and extra costs from not having the purchasing power of a larger institution (eg all police kit from cars to boots should be supplied from the same source to leverage the collective buying power - I can’t think of any reason why different police forces end up with different makes of car for the same roles).
The fragmentation of the NHS was largely a creation of an "internal market" by the Conservatives, I suggest. It does create many problems.
Even as a conservative I cannot see any value in an internal market for the NHS, it’s not like they need competition where people from Newcastle are looking at where to get their hip done and find they can get a two for the price of one in Plymouth if they can get there tomorrow.
Same [edit] sort of geographical problem with railway privatization (specifically the splitting up bit - no wonder that is being rectified now). And schools, as discussed also today here, in some of the UK.
But it does happen, for sausage machine stuff - plus you've got the private hospitals, lots of simple sausage machine stuff like varicose veins and cataracts.
Yet the other problem is that the consumers aren't informed consumers. And what happens to the hospitals that are supposed to lose out and go bust?
Surely it would make some sense to balance demand across the country. At one point I thought I would need a knee op. I would have happily gone to a national MRI scanning centre in, say, Birmingham to speed things uo, and as I live on my own it would have made sense to have the op near friends in Hampshire or family in Essex, as I would likely be incapacitated for a while afterwards. But, oh no, it all has to be managed locally
Mm. Thinking about it, those seem to me too common needs to justify that sort of travel (leaving aside for the moment the need for local support afterwards, which - without wanting to discount your need - actually works the other way for many people of course). You need scanners all over the place anyway. Plus there is the issue of acute needs - for example, RTAs - and therefore local scanning.
We need the medics commenting on this ...
Indeed, but it seems to me it is easier to balance need over a larger area. If you have an under employed surgeon in Durham, ship some people in from London. And we need to stop treating things *that stop people working* as elective procedures.
Is this not standard operating procedure going back a long time?
I may have mentioned our trade deficit from time to time in passing. This really isn't helping. Its time we had a government more focused on the day job.
The economy is only staying afloat because of services . The latest update to that is due out shortly .
Yes and to be fair that has largely been the case for 30 years or more. But what we are not seeing is any sign of investment in new production in the UK, any uplift in training, any growth in productivity, any facilitation of growth by removing planning hurdles or otherwise, any attempt to encourage entrepreneurial activity in the UK, it makes you despair. What we got instead was the increase in Employers NI and an above inflation increase in the minimum wage with inevitable consequences for the level of employment.
It just won't do. Our forthcoming budget needs to focus on growth (as Reeves herself recognised before the election). That means finding ways to boost investment through more generous allowances, encouraging training, not hammering Entrepreneurial Relief or Capital Gains or share based ISAs, looking at why London is struggling to compete in the IPO market, etc etc. I fear we are going to see the reverse as our Chancellor scrabbles around for a few billion more taxes to make her nonsensical targets and kick the can down the road for a few more months.
My new brainiac IQ 190 squillionaire friend, who was freaking out about the gilts market months ago (presciently) is now freaking out about gilts EVEN MORE
He says the government is “driving straight into a brick wall”. He thinks the present gilts “crisis” is maybe the markets reacting to Starmer’s “phase 2” speech which didn’t acknowledge the fiscal emergency at all
He says, as tax rises won’t work, borrowing can’t be done, and the government refuses to cut, we “may become Turkey or Argentina for a bit”
🫣
I am no brainiac, nor do I have an IQ of 190, nor, sadly, am I a squillionaire but this is kind of obvious. We are heading towards a fiscal crisis. It is not just that we need to borrow new money at penalty rates, we also have to roll over ever more debt taken out when interest rates were very, very low. 10 year gilts maturing just now were probably borrowed at less than 1%. To replace those borrowed funds we will be borrowing the same money at more than 5%. The cost of our debt is going to be rising for a long time, even if we manage to get current rates down. Every other category of spending is going to be squeezed by this.
Right, so what do we do? The "cut spending" brigade envisage that the sick and the poor are wasting the money so just take it off them. In reality they are sick and poor and when need remains and you cut the provision you spend more mopping up the various crises you create.
So we can't cut spending on the front line. We need to cut spending on everything else. How is it that we have an NHS where the budget goes up every year and front line provision shrinks? Its a bonfire burning our cash - and we can't afford to fuel it any more.
We set up a crisis team during Covid. Massive spike in patients, fewer resources, how do we do things. We need to do the same thing today. We simply cannot afford the vast bureaucracies and overlapping managers that we have in health and education. If that means that we have to make redundant the staff at NHS Trusts and Education Trusts then sobeit.
Maybe Foxy could explain the reasoning behind all the different NHS trusts as there might be a good reason - I understand that different areas of the UK have different demographics so different needs but I always wonder whether it would work more efficiently with one single management (the same with all the different police forces, would it be more efficient to just have a UK Police).
I think about the old story that the French Education minister could look at a piece of paper and know what every schoolchild in France was eating that day and wonder how many areas of the state in the UK could just be made identikit across the country rather than having individual fiefdoms and extra costs from not having the purchasing power of a larger institution (eg all police kit from cars to boots should be supplied from the same source to leverage the collective buying power - I can’t think of any reason why different police forces end up with different makes of car for the same roles).
There is common belief that a single organisation is cheaper than the same job done by multiple organisation. This is often not true. The larger organisation just has a higher pyramid.
When it comes to buying at a national level, it is quite common for the deals to be worse. I can think of a few examples of this.
Some things it works for - NHS drug buying, for example.
The biggest problem is creating monolithic organisations with long reporting lines. Which can’t handle change, at all.
I may have mentioned our trade deficit from time to time in passing. This really isn't helping. Its time we had a government more focused on the day job.
The economy is only staying afloat because of services . The latest update to that is due out shortly .
Yes and to be fair that has largely been the case for 30 years or more. But what we are not seeing is any sign of investment in new production in the UK, any uplift in training, any growth in productivity, any facilitation of growth by removing planning hurdles or otherwise, any attempt to encourage entrepreneurial activity in the UK, it makes you despair. What we got instead was the increase in Employers NI and an above inflation increase in the minimum wage with inevitable consequences for the level of employment.
It just won't do. Our forthcoming budget needs to focus on growth (as Reeves herself recognised before the election). That means finding ways to boost investment through more generous allowances, encouraging training, not hammering Entrepreneurial Relief or Capital Gains or share based ISAs, looking at why London is struggling to compete in the IPO market, etc etc. I fear we are going to see the reverse as our Chancellor scrabbles around for a few billion more taxes to make her nonsensical targets and kick the can down the road for a few more months.
My new brainiac IQ 190 squillionaire friend, who was freaking out about the gilts market months ago (presciently) is now freaking out about gilts EVEN MORE
He says the government is “driving straight into a brick wall”. He thinks the present gilts “crisis” is maybe the markets reacting to Starmer’s “phase 2” speech which didn’t acknowledge the fiscal emergency at all
He says, as tax rises won’t work, borrowing can’t be done, and the government refuses to cut, we “may become Turkey or Argentina for a bit”
🫣
I am no brainiac, nor do I have an IQ of 190, nor, sadly, am I a squillionaire but this is kind of obvious. We are heading towards a fiscal crisis. It is not just that we need to borrow new money at penalty rates, we also have to roll over ever more debt taken out when interest rates were very, very low. 10 year gilts maturing just now were probably borrowed at less than 1%. To replace those borrowed funds we will be borrowing the same money at more than 5%. The cost of our debt is going to be rising for a long time, even if we manage to get current rates down. Every other category of spending is going to be squeezed by this.
Right, so what do we do? The "cut spending" brigade envisage that the sick and the poor are wasting the money so just take it off them. In reality they are sick and poor and when need remains and you cut the provision you spend more mopping up the various crises you create.
So we can't cut spending on the front line. We need to cut spending on everything else. How is it that we have an NHS where the budget goes up every year and front line provision shrinks? Its a bonfire burning our cash - and we can't afford to fuel it any more.
We set up a crisis team during Covid. Massive spike in patients, fewer resources, how do we do things. We need to do the same thing today. We simply cannot afford the vast bureaucracies and overlapping managers that we have in health and education. If that means that we have to make redundant the staff at NHS Trusts and Education Trusts then sobeit.
Maybe Foxy could explain the reasoning behind all the different NHS trusts as there might be a good reason - I understand that different areas of the UK have different demographics so different needs but I always wonder whether it would work more efficiently with one single management (the same with all the different police forces, would it be more efficient to just have a UK Police).
I think about the old story that the French Education minister could look at a piece of paper and know what every schoolchild in France was eating that day and wonder how many areas of the state in the UK could just be made identikit across the country rather than having individual fiefdoms and extra costs from not having the purchasing power of a larger institution (eg all police kit from cars to boots should be supplied from the same source to leverage the collective buying power - I can’t think of any reason why different police forces end up with different makes of car for the same roles).
The fragmentation of the NHS was largely a creation of an "internal market" by the Conservatives, I suggest. It does create many problems.
Even as a conservative I cannot see any value in an internal market for the NHS, it’s not like they need competition where people from Newcastle are looking at where to get their hip done and find they can get a two for the price of one in Plymouth if they can get there tomorrow.
Same [edit] sort of geographical problem with railway privatization (specifically the splitting up bit - no wonder that is being rectified now). And schools, as discussed also today here, in some of the UK.
But it does happen, for sausage machine stuff - plus you've got the private hospitals, lots of simple sausage machine stuff like varicose veins and cataracts.
Yet the other problem is that the consumers aren't informed consumers. And what happens to the hospitals that are supposed to lose out and go bust?
It is quite possible to be an informed user of healthcare. There’s tons of data out there, if you want to look.
The thing to remember is that when you see units, hospitals or entire trusts failing, this is what happens as well in the unitary monolith. Too big to fail doesn’t eliminate failure - it institutionalises it.
I may have mentioned our trade deficit from time to time in passing. This really isn't helping. Its time we had a government more focused on the day job.
The economy is only staying afloat because of services . The latest update to that is due out shortly .
Yes and to be fair that has largely been the case for 30 years or more. But what we are not seeing is any sign of investment in new production in the UK, any uplift in training, any growth in productivity, any facilitation of growth by removing planning hurdles or otherwise, any attempt to encourage entrepreneurial activity in the UK, it makes you despair. What we got instead was the increase in Employers NI and an above inflation increase in the minimum wage with inevitable consequences for the level of employment.
It just won't do. Our forthcoming budget needs to focus on growth (as Reeves herself recognised before the election). That means finding ways to boost investment through more generous allowances, encouraging training, not hammering Entrepreneurial Relief or Capital Gains or share based ISAs, looking at why London is struggling to compete in the IPO market, etc etc. I fear we are going to see the reverse as our Chancellor scrabbles around for a few billion more taxes to make her nonsensical targets and kick the can down the road for a few more months.
My new brainiac IQ 190 squillionaire friend, who was freaking out about the gilts market months ago (presciently) is now freaking out about gilts EVEN MORE
He says the government is “driving straight into a brick wall”. He thinks the present gilts “crisis” is maybe the markets reacting to Starmer’s “phase 2” speech which didn’t acknowledge the fiscal emergency at all
He says, as tax rises won’t work, borrowing can’t be done, and the government refuses to cut, we “may become Turkey or Argentina for a bit”
🫣
I am no brainiac, nor do I have an IQ of 190, nor, sadly, am I a squillionaire but this is kind of obvious. We are heading towards a fiscal crisis. It is not just that we need to borrow new money at penalty rates, we also have to roll over ever more debt taken out when interest rates were very, very low. 10 year gilts maturing just now were probably borrowed at less than 1%. To replace those borrowed funds we will be borrowing the same money at more than 5%. The cost of our debt is going to be rising for a long time, even if we manage to get current rates down. Every other category of spending is going to be squeezed by this.
Right, so what do we do? The "cut spending" brigade envisage that the sick and the poor are wasting the money so just take it off them. In reality they are sick and poor and when need remains and you cut the provision you spend more mopping up the various crises you create.
So we can't cut spending on the front line. We need to cut spending on everything else. How is it that we have an NHS where the budget goes up every year and front line provision shrinks? Its a bonfire burning our cash - and we can't afford to fuel it any more.
We set up a crisis team during Covid. Massive spike in patients, fewer resources, how do we do things. We need to do the same thing today. We simply cannot afford the vast bureaucracies and overlapping managers that we have in health and education. If that means that we have to make redundant the staff at NHS Trusts and Education Trusts then sobeit.
Maybe Foxy could explain the reasoning behind all the different NHS trusts as there might be a good reason - I understand that different areas of the UK have different demographics so different needs but I always wonder whether it would work more efficiently with one single management (the same with all the different police forces, would it be more efficient to just have a UK Police).
I think about the old story that the French Education minister could look at a piece of paper and know what every schoolchild in France was eating that day and wonder how many areas of the state in the UK could just be made identikit across the country rather than having individual fiefdoms and extra costs from not having the purchasing power of a larger institution (eg all police kit from cars to boots should be supplied from the same source to leverage the collective buying power - I can’t think of any reason why different police forces end up with different makes of car for the same roles).
The fragmentation of the NHS was largely a creation of an "internal market" by the Conservatives, I suggest. It does create many problems.
Even as a conservative I cannot see any value in an internal market for the NHS, it’s not like they need competition where people from Newcastle are looking at where to get their hip done and find they can get a two for the price of one in Plymouth if they can get there tomorrow.
Same [edit] sort of geographical problem with railway privatization (specifically the splitting up bit - no wonder that is being rectified now). And schools, as discussed also today here, in some of the UK.
But it does happen, for sausage machine stuff - plus you've got the private hospitals, lots of simple sausage machine stuff like varicose veins and cataracts.
Yet the other problem is that the consumers aren't informed consumers. And what happens to the hospitals that are supposed to lose out and go bust?
Surely it would make some sense to balance demand across the country. At one point I thought I would need a knee op. I would have happily gone to a national MRI scanning centre in, say, Birmingham to speed things up, and as I live on my own it would have made sense to have the op near friends in Hampshire or family in Essex, as I would likely be incapacitated for a while afterwards and could stay with them. But, oh no, it all has to be managed locally.
Anyone with a knee problem that is preventing them working should very much be offered the next op wherever it is in the country
When Blair was in Downing Street, a European court ruled that a right to prompt treatment existed. In the U.K. we rapidly had tales of people taking the Eurostar to get ingrown toenail* ops in France.
The ruling said that if you couldn’t get a prompt op at home (x months) you could get the op in any European country and get it paid for on your home country medical system.
So ops in France pays for by the NHS.
Doesn’t sound too bad? Well, the next point was that, unlike the U.K., most European countries have a big chunk of private healthcare as an integrated part of the system. So NHS money was paying for ops at private hospitals abroad. {uneasy stirrings}
The final point was that under European competition and commercial law, all providers are equal. So the judgement also meant the effective right to use *UK* private healthcare, paid for by the NHS. NHS paying for BUPA….
There was a rather rapid change in European law, IIRC, when it was realised by a number of governments that this would mean open ended spending on healthcare to the limit of what patients wanted/needed, rather than national budgets. No more rationing by budget….
*ingrown toenails are often seen as a joke. They are often pushed to the back of the queue for ops. In fact they often lead to persistent, repeated infections and massively effect mobility. When older people loose mobility, their health can crumble rapidly.
Rather like the joke about the lightbulb, the Labour leadership needs to want to change.
As we saw with Corbyn, the way the Labour Party is set up makes it pretty much impossible to depose a leader who doesn’t want to move on.
Starmer seems happy enough in the job, he does whatever the lawyers and courts tell him to do, and doesn’t care much for public opinion. Perhaps it will take a major financial crisis to wake him up?
As we know with Jeremy Corbyn, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, the Labour party rules make it incredible difficult for their Parliamentary party to ever remove a party leader until they want to go at a time of their choosing in Opposition or in Government. Starmer may seem happy enough in the job especially with the mandate that that huge majority delivered just over a year ago, but its now clear that the voters, his own backbenchers and even senior members of the Cabinet recognise that his first year as PM has been a complete disaster and he is totally disinengaged from both domestic and foreign politics and not across his brief as PM even within his own No10 team, the Cabinet and his backbenchers and seems happy to be led in which ever direction the wind blows from one week to the next.
As a result it is now pretty clear that he not only doesn't care much for public opinion but seems totally oblivious to just how out of touch he is with the very cross party of voters who voted Labour at the 2024 GE to give the Conservatives a severe electoral punishment beating after 14 years in power. Looking back its not hard to spot the political flaws that explain why so many party leaders and PMs over the last 15 years would then turn out to be poor PMs despite their popularity among their party grassroots when elected, Brown, Corbyn, May, Johnson and Truss all ended up clearly unsuited to the role despite their clear and passionate political ambitions.
And that is why Starmer's rise to power is so utterly incomprehensible because he literally has been the biggest political nonentity to become a major party leader and PM in my lifetime, he stood out during Corbyn's tenure for accepting and remaining a member of his Shadow Cabinet and being utterly usesless during the brexit chaos between 2017-2019. In the Labour leadership contest he was initially up against four women who were all better media performers and still the only male in a grey suit without a hint of charisma and who always looks like he is rabbit caught in headlights won. I cannot think of a party leader and PM more unsuited to lead us through any future financial or energy crisis in the next few years and I have bet accordingly.
Sensible comments from Wes Streeting. I hope the Home Secretary is listening and has words with the Police. We may need to look at free speech laws, says Streeting. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2922w73e1o
Credit where it’s due, at least one minister is prepared to put his head above the parapet on free speech. Obviously worried about losing his seat to Reform next time out.
I may have mentioned our trade deficit from time to time in passing. This really isn't helping. Its time we had a government more focused on the day job.
The economy is only staying afloat because of services . The latest update to that is due out shortly .
Yes and to be fair that has largely been the case for 30 years or more. But what we are not seeing is any sign of investment in new production in the UK, any uplift in training, any growth in productivity, any facilitation of growth by removing planning hurdles or otherwise, any attempt to encourage entrepreneurial activity in the UK, it makes you despair. What we got instead was the increase in Employers NI and an above inflation increase in the minimum wage with inevitable consequences for the level of employment.
It just won't do. Our forthcoming budget needs to focus on growth (as Reeves herself recognised before the election). That means finding ways to boost investment through more generous allowances, encouraging training, not hammering Entrepreneurial Relief or Capital Gains or share based ISAs, looking at why London is struggling to compete in the IPO market, etc etc. I fear we are going to see the reverse as our Chancellor scrabbles around for a few billion more taxes to make her nonsensical targets and kick the can down the road for a few more months.
My new brainiac IQ 190 squillionaire friend, who was freaking out about the gilts market months ago (presciently) is now freaking out about gilts EVEN MORE
He says the government is “driving straight into a brick wall”. He thinks the present gilts “crisis” is maybe the markets reacting to Starmer’s “phase 2” speech which didn’t acknowledge the fiscal emergency at all
He says, as tax rises won’t work, borrowing can’t be done, and the government refuses to cut, we “may become Turkey or Argentina for a bit”
🫣
I am no brainiac, nor do I have an IQ of 190, nor, sadly, am I a squillionaire but this is kind of obvious. We are heading towards a fiscal crisis. It is not just that we need to borrow new money at penalty rates, we also have to roll over ever more debt taken out when interest rates were very, very low. 10 year gilts maturing just now were probably borrowed at less than 1%. To replace those borrowed funds we will be borrowing the same money at more than 5%. The cost of our debt is going to be rising for a long time, even if we manage to get current rates down. Every other category of spending is going to be squeezed by this.
Right, so what do we do? The "cut spending" brigade envisage that the sick and the poor are wasting the money so just take it off them. In reality they are sick and poor and when need remains and you cut the provision you spend more mopping up the various crises you create.
So we can't cut spending on the front line. We need to cut spending on everything else. How is it that we have an NHS where the budget goes up every year and front line provision shrinks? Its a bonfire burning our cash - and we can't afford to fuel it any more.
We set up a crisis team during Covid. Massive spike in patients, fewer resources, how do we do things. We need to do the same thing today. We simply cannot afford the vast bureaucracies and overlapping managers that we have in health and education. If that means that we have to make redundant the staff at NHS Trusts and Education Trusts then sobeit.
Maybe Foxy could explain the reasoning behind all the different NHS trusts as there might be a good reason - I understand that different areas of the UK have different demographics so different needs but I always wonder whether it would work more efficiently with one single management (the same with all the different police forces, would it be more efficient to just have a UK Police).
I think about the old story that the French Education minister could look at a piece of paper and know what every schoolchild in France was eating that day and wonder how many areas of the state in the UK could just be made identikit across the country rather than having individual fiefdoms and extra costs from not having the purchasing power of a larger institution (eg all police kit from cars to boots should be supplied from the same source to leverage the collective buying power - I can’t think of any reason why different police forces end up with different makes of car for the same roles).
The fragmentation of the NHS was largely a creation of an "internal market" by the Conservatives, I suggest. It does create many problems.
Even as a conservative I cannot see any value in an internal market for the NHS, it’s not like they need competition where people from Newcastle are looking at where to get their hip done and find they can get a two for the price of one in Plymouth if they can get there tomorrow.
Same [edit] sort of geographical problem with railway privatization (specifically the splitting up bit - no wonder that is being rectified now). And schools, as discussed also today here, in some of the UK.
But it does happen, for sausage machine stuff - plus you've got the private hospitals, lots of simple sausage machine stuff like varicose veins and cataracts.
Yet the other problem is that the consumers aren't informed consumers. And what happens to the hospitals that are supposed to lose out and go bust?
Surely it would make some sense to balance demand across the country. At one point I thought I would need a knee op. I would have happily gone to a national MRI scanning centre in, say, Birmingham to speed things up, and as I live on my own it would have made sense to have the op near friends in Hampshire or family in Essex, as I would likely be incapacitated for a while afterwards and could stay with them. But, oh no, it all has to be managed locally.
Anyone with a knee problem that is preventing them working should very much be offered the next op wherever it is in the country
I did wonder out loud here once about the feasibility of creating a few giant hub hospitals in the UK where they not only build the hospitals but accommodation for trainee/student doctors and for doctors who want to teach where they get grace and favour accommodation for them and dependents for the period they are teaching.
These hospitals could be in completely random places (back to the old airfields) and not sited based on population as long as there is easy provision or existing public transport or access.
These hospitals would then be open to anyone in the country to use so people like you could choose not to wait for ages because you want to be near family so want local hospital and are happy to travel anywhere so freeing up local hospitals longer term, it’s gives student/trainee doctors somewhere to put their skills into practice and might be attractive to foreign doctors who want to do a couple of years in the UK where they get free accommodation.
I think the main downside that was pointed out by those who know much more about medicine was that you would never fill the teaching roles which is a shame.
My long-standing suggestion was to build the hospitals abroad, in Mumbai, Manila, or Nairobi, and use them to train locals towards recognised UK qualifications. Two of the major issues in NHS are not enough training places and qualifications equivalence for overseas recruits.
Another option is sending people to places like Dubai where there’s excess hospital and hotel capacity, and high medical standards at reasonable cost. If you can find enough volunteers to go there it can make a huge dent in the waiting lists.
Rather like the joke about the lightbulb, the Labour leadership needs to want to change.
As we saw with Corbyn, the way the Labour Party is set up makes it pretty much impossible to depose a leader who doesn’t want to move on.
Starmer seems happy enough in the job, he does whatever the lawyers and courts tell him to do, and doesn’t care much for public opinion. Perhaps it will take a major financial crisis to wake him up?
Does 'major financial crisis' include the one we are in, where the only day to day solution is to place our grandchildren into bankruptcy instead of sorting stuff out ourselves and Labour MPs won't vote for tiny cuts?
That really is an excellent summary of our position and the challenges we face. Note debt interest's significant contribution to the increasing deficit.
Maybe Allister Heath is right - for once - and we will get a new election. If my friend is right and cutting spending is the only way, but Labour MPs refuse to do it, then either the government prints money and inflation explodes, then we go bust anyway (in the end), or we have an election to elect MPs who WILL cut spending
No, there is a third way, massively increase tax on the rich and wealthy and property and business owners, which Labour will go further on in the autumn. As mentioned most Labour MPs would lose their seats on current polls so won't vote for an early election
Labour voted for an early election in 2017 even though most of their MPs expected the party to lose seats at the time. But that was a very unusual set of circumstances.
They were in opposition at the time. The opposition will always and everywhere vote for an election tomorrow.
Sensible comments from Wes Streeting. I hope the Home Secretary is listening and has words with the Police. We may need to look at free speech laws, says Streeting. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2922w73e1o
Credit where it’s due, at least one minister is prepared to put his head above the parapet on free speech. Obviously worried about losing his seat to Reform next time out.
Streeting is the preferred candidate of the Blair Institute (Blair is the Sauron to Streeting's Saruman) and 55Tufton Street and is the recipient of large campaign contributions from private healthcare. He is also ambitious, which is why he is giving interviews on issues of the day outside his remit.
Sensible comments from Wes Streeting. I hope the Home Secretary is listening and has words with the Police. We may need to look at free speech laws, says Streeting. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2922w73e1o
Credit where it’s due, at least one minister is prepared to put his head above the parapet on free speech. Obviously worried about losing his seat to Reform next time out.
Streeting is the preferred candidate of the Blair Institute (Blair is the Sauron to Streeting's Saruman) and 55Tufton Street and is the recipient of large campaign contributions from private healthcare. He is also ambitious, which is why he is giving interviews on issues of the day outside his remit.
Sounds like the Gavin Newsom of British politics. A totally empty suit who can change his mind on anything if the political wind changes direction.
But at least the party has someone standing up for freedom of speech.
Sensible comments from Wes Streeting. I hope the Home Secretary is listening and has words with the Police. We may need to look at free speech laws, says Streeting. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2922w73e1o
Credit where it’s due, at least one minister is prepared to put his head above the parapet on free speech. Obviously worried about losing his seat to Reform next time out.
Streeting is the preferred candidate of the Blair Institute (Blair is the Sauron to Streeting's Saruman) and 55Tufton Street and is the recipient of large campaign contributions from private healthcare. He is also ambitious, which is why he is giving interviews on issues of the day outside his remit.
Sounds like the Gavin Newsom of British politics. A totally empty suit who can change his mind on anything if the political wind changes direction.
Pretty much, and I think he will succeed for the same reason. A year ago he was disliked in the party and MPs but he is creeping/crept up and is now higher rated. Raynor has better stats but she isn't making the weather. I don't think he'll be PM unless Labour wins in 2029 but he's a good bet for LOTO in 2030
Comments
Most PCCs are being scrapped anyway and their functions take over by Mayors in new combined authorities, including in Essex
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/sep/03/i-felt-doomed-social-media-guessed-i-was-pregnant-my-feed-soon-grew-horrifying
Anyone with a knee problem that is preventing them working should very much be offered the next op wherever it is in the country
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/09/02/graham-linehan-claims-he-was-arrested-for-tweets-heathrow
The reality of government is such that very little changes, indeed calls for regulation increase. Calling for things to be banned and regulated is pretty much universal too.
So no, I don't expect Labour to deliver that, after all the Tories didn't, and from what we see in local government neither will Reform. Banning and regulating flags flying has been pretty much their only policy initiatives.
Great, but stack all of these worthy things together and you get a quagmire where nothing gets done despite fortunes being spent. Once again Reform ask the right question - "is there waste?" but have the wrong answer - "lets send in DOGE and create a scandal out of accounting!!!"
Phil made a point about NHS maternity services. We can't afford midwives, but can afford to pay for the pain and suffering caused by a lack of midwives. Similarly we can't afford police officers or to staff courts or build prison capacity but we can afford to pay for the economic damage caused by crime.
Can't we see the stupidity of the "we can't afford" mentality? We're spending more and more to get less and less...
We need the medics commenting on this ...
Edit: just seen your comment re the offer of ops the following day. No idea if there really are gaps in op room timetables, but bear in mind the suregon does need to assess the patient beforehand, starve them the night before, and so on.
But it's not much of a focus for me, so I've not peered very far down the rabbit hole.
And the IT in old times was a film loop projector and an OHP. Hard to make a direct comparison ...
Is there anything your government did that the party still stands by?
These hospitals could be in completely random places (back to the old airfields) and not sited based on population as long as there is easy provision or existing public transport or access.
These hospitals would then be open to anyone in the country to use so people like you could choose not to wait for ages because you want to be near family so want local hospital and are happy to travel anywhere so freeing up local hospitals longer term, it’s gives student/trainee doctors somewhere to put their skills into practice and might be attractive to foreign doctors who want to do a couple of years in the UK where they get free accommodation.
I think the main downside that was pointed out by those who know much more about medicine was that you would never fill the teaching roles which is a shame.
You know what IT stuff the schools in the trust need? The same stuff the schools not in the trust need. Why are we paying a fortune to have a 9-school "Strategic Director of IT" to negotiate shit deals with "Google" etc al. Because that is the reality. Tesco does not let store managers or even area managers negotiate with Heinz when buying beans. But we have a system where we now have thousands of well paid managers out to negotiate for a few beans at huge mark-up when all of them need the same beans.
This is what the Osborne free market revolution has delivered.
Where it falls down is with the large number of people with more complex medical conditions and social support, or lack of it. There is also the profit motive for these companies to operate unnecessarily, very much a feature of private medicine, and one that sets up problems down the line as prosthesis loosen or wear out.
When people think of Tory failure, it's the obvious examples like the borders and boats that come first to mind, along with Brexit - but over many years they've forced re-organisations onto so many public services, and made them all worse...the NHS, schools, the railways, the water industry, energy, the postal service, local government, prisons...
...is there anything they actually managed to improve?
I accept, with regret, the similar impositions on willing volunteers such as me because of safeguarding, but I know plenty of people who won't and whose abilities are lost to the community.
I am not blind to the fact that any significant deregulatory process would likely cause significant short term pain, as well. Any economic restructuring does.
For a government to do it when it expects to lose seats is more unusual, the only situation being that they expect to lose even more by delaying, such as Sunak last summer.
Go with
@_AdvanceUK
, Ben and Tommy for the real change that’s needed to save Britain! 🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1962942210745454844
BREAKING:
Angela Rayner is fighting for her political future after admitting that she failed to pay enough stamp duty when she bought her new £800,000 seaside flat
The deputy prime minister has spent weeks arguing that she did nothing wrong when she bought the property in Hove, East Sussex
Sir Keir Starmer this week stood by her, accusing people of 'briefing against her and talking her down'
The deputy prime minister asked tax lawyers to review her affairs following intense scrutiny and was told she has an outstanding tax liability
She has referred herself to the prime minister's independent ethics adviser
She told
@BethRigby
she has considered resigning over the issue
Rayner admits wrong doing over tax affairs
I suspect we need a policy on this...
I have no knowledge of what the profile of the sector is, other that in the Church of England part they seem to be done as a multi-academy trust by diocese (and there are 35-40 of those, depending on how you count it).
Lincs, for example, has 23 schools, and the CEO of the MAT is paid 85-90k per annum: https://thelaat.co.uk/ .
I have no idea whether the organisation is leaner or not than other types of MATs, or if schools have more or less autonomy, or better or worse, by comparison.
Actually looking into the causes of why so much compensation needs to be paid would shine a light on these bureaucrats and their shitty processes and likely result in them being sacked for incompetence, instead the useless and weak politicians leave them to it.
So what we end up with is bureaucrats doing things in a way that protects themselves to the detriment of patient outcomes which steadily degrade over time as more of the budget is spent on compensation and hiring more bureaucrats to oversee these legal cases.
I have not seen Kemi say she would repeal any of those Acts anyway even if she might back amendments
What RP is rightly highlighting is the rise of the B Ark class. Some of the tasks need doing, but it's crazily inefficient and ineffective to do them on the scale we do. Others are just irrelevant.
I hate to think how much schools and colleges spend on marketing. It makes sense for the institution (each extra student is probably pure gain), but at system level it's pure expense, and the benefits are pretty much zero sum.
A householder in London duly applied to extend their property upwards & the planning application was immediately opposed by people in neighbouring streets, horrified by the idea that “their” area might be defaced in this fashion. The case went to the courts, where a judge decided that the word “neighbouring” in the law in question didn’t mean “adjacent” as the lawmakers had intended - it meant anyone living within a mile or so.
Unsurprisingly, no one has bothered to make any planning applications of this kind since, as the inevitability of opposition by someone in a 1 mile radius circle makes it completely impossible to get through planning.
Parliament could have noticed this & issued a one line change to the law saying “no, when we said neighbouring we meant immediately adjacent”. But no one involved appears to have realised that this useful bit of planning reform that was carefully shepherded through the Parliamentary law-making maze was shot in the back by the judiciary the moment it became law.
UC is a good idea, terribly implemented - lack of attention to detail or understanding of how connected things are.
Lowest earners out of tax was 15 years ago under a coalition, for the last few years you have frozen tax allowances dragging them back into tax.
Covid vaccines - the pandemic is over.
So you are left with a cut on a tax paid by only 28,000 estates per year. Well done.
She would probably do more for the country if she had a ti-tok channel telling the youth how to generate money and property so efficiently whilst not having to give up a clothes budget or going out and having fun.
One thing that seems crazy in his day and age is that you can register to vote in 3 different places and its just trusted that you don't abuse that. I am not suggesting she has or would, just that you can, and that the fact you can do this to aid your claims to your tax situation seems mental.
NEW THREAD
UC is far better than the Brown welfare system so you don't lose all your benefit income with part time work.
Lowest earners out of tax was Tory led government, Reeves still freezing tax allowances.
The pandemic only over due to the vaccines.
The tax cut on IHT helped small business and farmers too who Reeves has hammered
I have a real problem with holier-than-thouism in politics, especially with things said / done before politics. But she is *Deputy Prime Minister* and she's chosen to do this now...
Question - did anyone in Number 10 feed information to the media?
Obviously, that seemed a simple choice at the time. And by “Nazi methods” they meant, in the film a bit of lying and skullduggery. See SOE.
Morality vs immediate Utility.
Aha, I guess he means James Regan, of Ongar Town Council, who was reported as being a District Councillor in the Independent in error, and was at the Epping demos, who put out material like:
In one video seen by the I Paper, recorded outside the hotel and published on TikTok, he said: “Thanks to the British Government, we now have a third world paedophile babysitting centre in the middle of Epping.”
https://inews.co.uk/news/reform-councillor-suspended-racist-posts-epping-hotel-protests-3883933?srsltid=AfmBOoqlyDyq7MlXU26_2VpBmyrfXX25OhQWiPVj5HpAyKaPntH34uy3
He was reportedly far out enough to worry Jaymey McIvor, Reform's Head of Local Government.
Behind the earlier imrovement is also demographics - the rising number of children from Asian parents who take education more seriously (a particular factor behind the London improvement) - and the LibDems' focus on disadvantaged children and schools during the coalition.
When it comes to buying at a national level, it is quite common for the deals to be worse. I can think of a few examples of this.
Some things it works for - NHS drug buying, for example.
The biggest problem is creating monolithic organisations with long reporting lines. Which can’t handle change, at all.
The thing to remember is that when you see units, hospitals or entire trusts failing, this is what happens as well in the unitary monolith. Too big to fail doesn’t eliminate failure - it institutionalises it.
The ruling said that if you couldn’t get a prompt op at home (x months) you could get the op in any European country and get it paid for on your home country medical system.
So ops in France pays for by the NHS.
Doesn’t sound too bad? Well, the next point was that, unlike the U.K., most European countries have a big chunk of private healthcare as an integrated part of the system. So NHS money was paying for ops at private hospitals abroad. {uneasy stirrings}
The final point was that under European competition and commercial law, all providers are equal. So the judgement also meant the effective right to use *UK* private healthcare, paid for by the NHS. NHS paying for BUPA….
There was a rather rapid change in European law, IIRC, when it was realised by a number of governments that this would mean open ended spending on healthcare to the limit of what patients wanted/needed, rather than national budgets. No more rationing by budget….
*ingrown toenails are often seen as a joke. They are often pushed to the back of the queue for ops. In fact they often lead to persistent, repeated infections and massively effect mobility. When older people loose mobility, their health can crumble rapidly.
Angela RaynerKemi BadenochAs a result it is now pretty clear that he not only doesn't care much for public opinion but seems totally oblivious to just how out of touch he is with the very cross party of voters who voted Labour at the 2024 GE to give the Conservatives a severe electoral punishment beating after 14 years in power. Looking back its not hard to spot the political flaws that explain why so many party leaders and PMs over the last 15 years would then turn out to be poor PMs despite their popularity among their party grassroots when elected, Brown, Corbyn, May, Johnson and Truss all ended up clearly unsuited to the role despite their clear and passionate political ambitions.
And that is why Starmer's rise to power is so utterly incomprehensible because he literally has been the biggest political nonentity to become a major party leader and PM in my lifetime, he stood out during Corbyn's tenure for accepting and remaining a member of his Shadow Cabinet and being utterly usesless during the brexit chaos between 2017-2019. In the Labour leadership contest he was initially up against four women who were all better media performers and still the only male in a grey suit without a hint of charisma and who always looks like he is rabbit caught in headlights won. I cannot think of a party leader and PM more unsuited to lead us through any future financial or energy crisis in the next few years and I have bet accordingly.
Another option is sending people to places like Dubai where there’s excess hospital and hotel capacity, and high medical standards at reasonable cost. If you can find enough volunteers to go there it can make a huge dent in the waiting lists.
But at least the party has someone standing up for freedom of speech.