Another government service given over to a private monopoly that cannot be removed & has no inventive to serve it’s users in a timely or reasonable fashion whatsoever inevitably turns into an engine of misery and fury for everyone involved. Accountability is no where to be found, neither in the private company running the service, nor the NHS management.
It’s entirely plausible that NHS management were forced to privatise this service by past UK governments, in the vague hope that “savings” would result. Ever since, everyone involved has had a huge incentive to turn a blind eye to the actual experience of their end-users. Those who could afford to do so simply opt out of the service as far as possible, whilst those who can’t end up back in hospital & so no longer need to be serviced.
It’s this kind of thing that generates so much combined anger & depression amongst the electorate - it demonstrates that the government simply doesn’t care about the experiences of people on the receiving end, who are forced to endure whatever limited service the system can be bothered to give them. Money alone can’t solve this - indeed, throwing more money into this system will probably make it worse, as Blair discovered when he tried to “fix” the NHS the first time around.
The equipment service is similarly broken. They provide simple stuff like kitchen trolleys and walking frames to more complex stuff like beds. It can take ages for some things to turn up, and often it is a requirement that it does so before the recipient can be discharged from hospital.
My mother in law needed a hoist as she has very poor mobility (dementia).
She got a hoist, but the correct sling was not available at the time. One did turn up several months later but of course we'd had to buy one ourselves. Without it she would have been left in bed without the use of a commode for weeks, which would have not have been great, to put it mildly.
Soon after the contracted provider in this area went bust leaving everyone in the lurch. The new provider stopped collecting items for a while and we had some to get rid of, so we said we'll bring our stuff to the new depot as it was no longer needed.
It was ... interesting.
Whilst I understand questions over infections and the like, the skips full of discarded items which were more or less in new condition was disturbing.
Like re-usable PPE, it seems the preferred process is to throw out things that may only have been used for a couple of weeks and would be perfectly serviceable. The waste is awful.
The incentives are -
1) if something is slightly stained/broken there will be complaints. 2) fixing stuff is complicated 3) the NHS won’t buy more wheelchairs from you if they are cheaper. 4) no real questioning of prices.
You’d have to be a saint, not to supply brand new only and raise the price to cover any problems.
Indeed - the incentives are apparent - it is obvious why it happens. But it does seem wrong.
TESLA TROUGH: Tesla sales in the EU dived again in November: down 58% in France, minus 59% in Sweden, and down 49% in Denmark. Germany recorded just 750 vehicles sold in October. BYD sold more than twice as many cars. The only exception is Norway.
May I please trouble PBers for comments on a phenomenon I have mentioned here before and seems to be becoming more prevalent. It concerns pre-dating of letters from Government departments.
During a long-running dispute with HMRC a few years back I noted that their letters repeatedly bore a date many days before they flopped through the box. The post around here isn't bad so I assume the letters were being predated deliberately, often by as much as seven to ten days. This was particularly irritating when the letter stipulated a time limit for replying, which would typically be a fortnight. Since the reply would normally involve the production of documents this practice commonly created a scramble at my end to get the answer back in time.
Today I received a letter from HMRC dated 13th November 2025. That's nineteen days to reach me and is a new record even for them. Can anyone else beat this? What is going on here? Is it some kind of little scam to make them look more efficient than the people they are writing to?
The letter in question is a demand for payment, accompanied by the usual threats. The amount in question was paid without prompting on 12th November, a day before the demand was issued, so if it's a computer to blame, it is slacking.
Thanks
When I worked for a government department, I always assumed a *local* letter would take a week to arrive.
Part of it is the Royal Mail service is, generally, crap*
The other problem was that everything had to go to a massive, inefficient mail unit in Wolverhampton, be processed, and then sent out again.
So I would guess your letters would be dated the date they are generated. They are probably batch-printed not before the end of the day, processed the next day (so missing a couple of posting days already) and sent to a mail unit who fucks around with them for a week or so, before entrusting them to Royal Mail. Who probably then spend a few days sorting the big package from the Civil Service. And then put them in the delivery chain.
*Illustrated by the fact that when applying for my pension I twice sent off documents by guaranteed 24/48 hour delivery. Both missed the target delivery date by several days, and these are the ones we pay extra for.
So Rachel from accounts won the sack race against Richard Hughes, with the OBR chief forced out rather than testify to the Committee today.
American sack race next, who wins out of SecDef Peter Hegseth and Minnesota Gov Tim Walz, both on the front pages for separate scandals over the weekend?
Ed Balls reckons they should reject the resignation
I find it hard to feel that the OBR early report release was a resignation matter. It's a nice easy to understand Westminster gossip type story that the media can get excited about, but at bottom it's "we made a mistake with the config of our Wordpress site so it wasn't requiring authentication for the file the way we expected". Yes, there's the "market sensitive information" aspect, but in practice that doesn't seem to have actually caused major harm. The closest to a real management failure is that they probably should have assessed whether they were taking the risks seriously enough (e.g. testing that their embargoed docs process really did prevent access) and whether the system they set up in 2013 was still the right one given how important the OBR has become these days. But if we lose a decent head of the OBR and it spends the next six months leaderless while selecting a new one who then has to get up to speed with the organisation's issues, is that really a benefit to the country?
No accountability, eh?
Next week - “Bombed the shipwrecked survivors *twice*. But losing the head of the military, is that really a benefit to the country? At this point does it really matter?”
If no one is punished for anything, then anything goes.
“Just open the gates, Constable, it’s not like anyone does anything if a bunch of scousers get crushed.”
I think that if we treat every mistake and oversight as if it was a wilful decision that could foreseeably cause multiple deaths, then every senior leader of every organisation or enterprise in the country would be out of a job every three months, to absolutely no benefit -- and those who presided over the real horrors will be no worse off than those where some minor mishap happened under their watch, which I'm sure they'd be happy about. There should be accountability, yes. But it should be proportional.
So we should just do nothing?
Excellent news for those who have a major fuck up on their watch, every three months or so.
I was in a meeting in a bank, where they explained Sarbanes-Oxley. When it was bought in.
A manger put his hand up - “So if someone working for me fucks up, I could go to prison? in America?”
Answer - “Yes. If you can’t prove they acted against policy and systems weren’t there to stop them.”
Within hours, shit was being tightened up. No more developers with access to production, traders “fixing” trades using the “admin” login.
I think fundamentally I disagree that this is "a major fuckup". And as far as I'm aware it's not part of a pattern of the organisation having major screwups every three months.
What do graphs like this say?
Oh, and an early release like this is a sacking offence in many contexts.
The fact that a junior employee hasn’t been binned strongly suggests that they don’t have a proper system in place. Probably because a senior manager decided not to fund it.
It wasn’t an early release. It was someone typing website links in on spec
That was a mistake. It shouldn’t have happened. It should be fixed. It should even go on his review and impact his rating and his compensation for the year.
But this is a “stern talking to by your boss@ level error not a sacking offence.
I suspect the government have lit a ticking time bomb with the removal of the benefits cap.
Every time a story about a large non-working family comes out (there will be plenty), with taxpayers paying - it will be laid at their door.
They haven't removed the benefit cap (£22k); they've removed the two-child limit.
So stories about families on £60k worth of benefits won't be common*. Some child poverty think tanks have pointed out that the £22k limit significantly limits the effect of the change - they're not wrong, particularly somewhere like London where the just housing element could be £30k.
*There are a number of exemptions, particularly around disability benefits, but I reckon DWP will tighten that up.
If you're explaining, you're losing. And removing the two-child limit alone is politically damaging.
Taxes are going up by £3-4 billion to pay for it, and everyone knows that money is going on extra welfare and coming from their paycheck.
I don't disagree - just pointing out that the Mail will struggle to find those households.
The other thing that's interesting is what the Conservatives do. I had a flick through affected households by council area and it's not a bad proxy for areas where Reform are doing well. That's why Farage - by far our canniest politician - has come out in favour. Whether the Conservatives follow or not will be a signal into their strategy for the next 3 years.
Kemi has been clear the Conservatives would have kept the 2 child benefit cap. Though they should also back an increase in standard child benefit for most parents while keeping the two child benefit cap for parents on universal credit
But many people on UC are actually working ... your proposal is self-contradictory to a considerable degree.
Many aren’t whereas the vast majority on standard child benefit work and a parent out of work can only claim it for six months while on JSA
Go back and read what you wrote. You're demanding an increase in benefits for people who are well enough off not to need UC, while demanding the 2CC for people who are not well enough off not to need UC. That's *reverse* means testing.
If that's Modern Tory policy, heaven help the party.
No as you also cannot claim child benefit if your income is over £80k. It is working parents who are on middle income who earn less than that and don’t claim UC who would benefit from increased standard child benefit and given our low 1.4 fertility rate now that is why I back a rise in standard child benefit.
It would be a fantastic Tory pro middle income families policy
It would be unacceptable in the present climate
The two most unpopular decisions in the Budget according to YouGov were freezing thresholds and the 2 child benefit cap as the public draw the line on more taxes and benefits
Badenoch is correct to say she will reinstate the 2 child cap but needs to go further with abolishing the triple lock and means testing the state pension as part of a reduction in welfare spending and not adding to benefits other than by inflation
Means testing the state pension, as with other means testing, just creates an administrative burden. The better off already pay 40-60% tax on it.
Worse than that- if you means test the state pension, there isn't much point in making other arrangements for a lot of people. Why bother saving if it just reduces your state pension?
It would turn a small problem now into a much bigger problem in a few decades time. And nobody would want to be that short-sighted, would they?
What is obvious is that the present arrangements cannot continue so either the state pension has some form of means testing or the age will have to increase to 70+
Neither are easy but then cutting welfare is never going to be easy
What would be interesting (and probably political suicide) would be to have essentially an OAP budget per person and then acturial approach to dishing it out. So you can take it as soon as you like (maybe with some limit, say 60 or so) but if you wait longerthen you'll get more per year (and if you're actually in bad health with limited life expectancy, then you can access it sooner at a higher rate as the calculations say you'll fall off the perch sooner).
Given associations between health, wealth and life expectancy, it would of course penalise mostly the better off, older, voting pensioners, which is why it would be 'courageous'. It would however mean that those well able to work would work a bit longer. Those with severe COPD in their 60s would retire earlier. it could also shift some of the disability benefits into OAP, potentially, for those younger people with poor health.
Too complicated, especially with the UK rates of financial illiteracy - the simpler version is a graded pension, starting at 20% at around 63, then increasing by 20% every 2 or 3 years.
I suspect the government have lit a ticking time bomb with the removal of the benefits cap.
Every time a story about a large non-working family comes out (there will be plenty), with taxpayers paying - it will be laid at their door.
They haven't removed the benefit cap (£22k); they've removed the two-child limit.
So stories about families on £60k worth of benefits won't be common*. Some child poverty think tanks have pointed out that the £22k limit significantly limits the effect of the change - they're not wrong, particularly somewhere like London where the just housing element could be £30k.
*There are a number of exemptions, particularly around disability benefits, but I reckon DWP will tighten that up.
If you're explaining, you're losing. And removing the two-child limit alone is politically damaging.
Taxes are going up by £3-4 billion to pay for it, and everyone knows that money is going on extra welfare and coming from their paycheck.
I don't disagree - just pointing out that the Mail will struggle to find those households.
The other thing that's interesting is what the Conservatives do. I had a flick through affected households by council area and it's not a bad proxy for areas where Reform are doing well. That's why Farage - by far our canniest politician - has come out in favour. Whether the Conservatives follow or not will be a signal into their strategy for the next 3 years.
Kemi has been clear the Conservatives would have kept the 2 child benefit cap. Though they should also back an increase in standard child benefit for most parents while keeping the two child benefit cap for parents on universal credit
But many people on UC are actually working ... your proposal is self-contradictory to a considerable degree.
Many aren’t whereas the vast majority on standard child benefit work and a parent out of work can only claim it for 91 days while on JSA
Almost three quarters of children in poverty are in working households. This Tory division into strivers and shirkers is a fundamentally dishonest narrative.
Define 'poverty'.
Define 'working'.
The way in which such terms have had their meanings repeatedly stretched is very much part of the 'taking the piss' issue.
Quite. Daily T podcast recently had a bit about the calculations the TUC uses (which is where the Government is getting its '400,000 children lifted out of poverty' statistic from. The notion of poverty is based being some way below the median income - so the current outflux of millionaires and high earners is, in and of itself, 'lifting children out of poverty'. Huzzah!
Median not mean, the "outflux of millionaires and high earners" will have little to no effect on the median.
That is surely not correct. With less high earners being counted, median wealth would fall. Therefore the phenomena I suggested is correct.
By a fairly small amount, though.
Let's catastophise and say a million very rich people leave. That will only move the median down by half a million people, and in a bit of the graph that's much flatter. Think about all the nationwide jobs with tens, or hundreds, of thousands of people doing bascially the same thing for basically the same pay everywhere.
There is a point of principle involved in connection with the proposed Tourist Tax (to be levied by the directly-elected Mayors); how do you reconcile this tax with the fundamental principle of Democracy "No Taxation without Representation"?
So Rachel from accounts won the sack race against Richard Hughes, with the OBR chief forced out rather than testify to the Committee today.
American sack race next, who wins out of SecDef Peter Hegseth and Minnesota Gov Tim Walz, both on the front pages for separate scandals over the weekend?
Ed Balls reckons they should reject the resignation
I find it hard to feel that the OBR early report release was a resignation matter. It's a nice easy to understand Westminster gossip type story that the media can get excited about, but at bottom it's "we made a mistake with the config of our Wordpress site so it wasn't requiring authentication for the file the way we expected". Yes, there's the "market sensitive information" aspect, but in practice that doesn't seem to have actually caused major harm. The closest to a real management failure is that they probably should have assessed whether they were taking the risks seriously enough (e.g. testing that their embargoed docs process really did prevent access) and whether the system they set up in 2013 was still the right one given how important the OBR has become these days. But if we lose a decent head of the OBR and it spends the next six months leaderless while selecting a new one who then has to get up to speed with the organisation's issues, is that really a benefit to the country?
No accountability, eh?
Next week - “Bombed the shipwrecked survivors *twice*. But losing the head of the military, is that really a benefit to the country? At this point does it really matter?”
If no one is punished for anything, then anything goes.
“Just open the gates, Constable, it’s not like anyone does anything if a bunch of scousers get crushed.”
I think that if we treat every mistake and oversight as if it was a wilful decision that could foreseeably cause multiple deaths, then every senior leader of every organisation or enterprise in the country would be out of a job every three months, to absolutely no benefit -- and those who presided over the real horrors will be no worse off than those where some minor mishap happened under their watch, which I'm sure they'd be happy about. There should be accountability, yes. But it should be proportional.
So we should just do nothing?
Excellent news for those who have a major fuck up on their watch, every three months or so.
I was in a meeting in a bank, where they explained Sarbanes-Oxley. When it was bought in.
A manger put his hand up - “So if someone working for me fucks up, I could go to prison? in America?”
Answer - “Yes. If you can’t prove they acted against policy and systems weren’t there to stop them.”
Within hours, shit was being tightened up. No more developers with access to production, traders “fixing” trades using the “admin” login.
I think fundamentally I disagree that this is "a major fuckup". And as far as I'm aware it's not part of a pattern of the organisation having major screwups every three months.
What do graphs like this say?
Oh, and an early release like this is a sacking offence in many contexts.
The fact that a junior employee hasn’t been binned strongly suggests that they don’t have a proper system in place. Probably because a senior manager decided not to fund it.
It wasn’t an early release. It was someone typing website links in on spec
That was a mistake. It shouldn’t have happened. It should be fixed. It should even go on his review and impact his rating and his compensation for the year.
But this is a “stern talking to by your boss@ level error not a sacking offence.
The government is contriving to make Farage look like the leader who has the civil service's back.
May I please trouble PBers for comments on a phenomenon I have mentioned here before and seems to be becoming more prevalent. It concerns pre-dating of letters from Government departments.
During a long-running dispute with HMRC a few years back I noted that their letters repeatedly bore a date many days before they flopped through the box. The post around here isn't bad so I assume the letters were being predated deliberately, often by as much as seven to ten days. This was particularly irritating when the letter stipulated a time limit for replying, which would typically be a fortnight. Since the reply would normally involve the production of documents this practice commonly created a scramble at my end to get the answer back in time.
Today I received a letter from HMRC dated 13th November 2025. That's nineteen days to reach me and is a new record even for them. Can anyone else beat this? What is going on here? Is it some kind of little scam to make them look more efficient than the people they are writing to?
The letter in question is a demand for payment, accompanied by the usual threats. The amount in question was paid without prompting on 12th November, a day before the demand was issued, so if it's a computer to blame, it is slacking.
Thanks
When I worked for a government department, I always assumed a *local* letter would take a week to arrive.
Part of it is the Royal Mail service is, generally, crap*
The other problem was that everything had to go to a massive, inefficient mail unit in Wolverhampton, be processed, and then sent out again.
So I would guess your letters would be dated the date they are generated. They are probably batch-printed not before the end of the day, processed the next day (so missing a couple of posting days already) and sent to a mail unit who fucks around with them for a week or so, before entrusting them to Royal Mail. Who probably then spend a few days sorting the big package from the Civil Service. And then put them in the delivery chain.
*Illustrated by the fact that when applying for my pension I twice sent off documents by guaranteed 24/48 hour delivery. Both missed the target delivery date by several days, and these are the ones we pay extra for.
Thanks John, that's a helpful explanation, although I'm not sure about the Royal Mail thing. Non-government letters arrive promptly enough.
I suspect the government have lit a ticking time bomb with the removal of the benefits cap.
Every time a story about a large non-working family comes out (there will be plenty), with taxpayers paying - it will be laid at their door.
They haven't removed the benefit cap (£22k); they've removed the two-child limit.
So stories about families on £60k worth of benefits won't be common*. Some child poverty think tanks have pointed out that the £22k limit significantly limits the effect of the change - they're not wrong, particularly somewhere like London where the just housing element could be £30k.
*There are a number of exemptions, particularly around disability benefits, but I reckon DWP will tighten that up.
If you're explaining, you're losing. And removing the two-child limit alone is politically damaging.
Taxes are going up by £3-4 billion to pay for it, and everyone knows that money is going on extra welfare and coming from their paycheck.
I don't disagree - just pointing out that the Mail will struggle to find those households.
The other thing that's interesting is what the Conservatives do. I had a flick through affected households by council area and it's not a bad proxy for areas where Reform are doing well. That's why Farage - by far our canniest politician - has come out in favour. Whether the Conservatives follow or not will be a signal into their strategy for the next 3 years.
Kemi has been clear the Conservatives would have kept the 2 child benefit cap. Though they should also back an increase in standard child benefit for most parents while keeping the two child benefit cap for parents on universal credit
But many people on UC are actually working ... your proposal is self-contradictory to a considerable degree.
Many aren’t whereas the vast majority on standard child benefit work and a parent out of work can only claim it for 91 days while on JSA
Almost three quarters of children in poverty are in working households. This Tory division into strivers and shirkers is a fundamentally dishonest narrative.
Define 'poverty'.
Define 'working'.
The way in which such terms have had their meanings repeatedly stretched is very much part of the 'taking the piss' issue.
Quite. Daily T podcast recently had a bit about the calculations the TUC uses (which is where the Government is getting its '400,000 children lifted out of poverty' statistic from. The notion of poverty is based being some way below the median income - so the current outflux of millionaires and high earners is, in and of itself, 'lifting children out of poverty'. Huzzah!
Median not mean, the "outflux of millionaires and high earners" will have little to no effect on the median.
That is surely not correct. With less high earners being counted, median wealth would fall. Therefore the phenomena I suggested is correct.
So if you kick out the top 10% then the new median is the old 45th centile (halfway of the bottom 90%). So the median falls by £1900 and the relative poverty line by £1140
If you kick out the top 5%, it's more like a couple of hundred quid change.
You'd need a big outflux of high earners (top 10% would be huge) to make a substantial difference.
Individuals in the office of US Army Secretary Dan Driscoll have been orchestrating a Coup against Secretary of War Pete Hegseth @PeteHegseth in an effort to have him removed by President Trump and replaced by Dan Driscoll.
Over the last 2 weeks, the legacy media, which is incredibly hostile to Hegseth, has been posting puff pieces about Dan Driscoll and how he is a “rising star” at the Pentagon. Sources have told me that Jake Sullivan @jakejsullivan, the former National Security Advisor of the United States under Joe Biden, is very close friends with Dan Driscoll, and they have been friends since they both attended Yale Law School. Driscoll and Vice President Vance also met at Yale Law School, which is how Driscoll was nominated as Army Secretary.
High level sources at the Pentagon have confirmed to me that Sullivan has been planting stories in support of Driscoll because Sullivan wants Hegseth removed and replaced by Driscoll. Sullivan is worried Hegseth and President Trump are going to take action against the seditious 6, the 6 Democrat lawmakers who are now facing federal inquiries and an FBI investigation after they recorded a video in November 2025 urging US military service members not to follow “unlawful” orders, a message President Trump and Pete Hegseth have called “seditious."
During WWII, due to a combination of spy craft, ULTRA and incompetence by the Germans, every single spy sent to Britain was caught.
Once captured they were used as part of the “loop” masterminded by British Intelligence. False information was fed to the Germans, checked using ULTRA signals intelligence.
The fact that these spy’s were being caught was thus one of the most vital secrets of the war. Millions of lives depended on it. Literally.
As part of this, the spies were charged and sent to court as spies. Since they were guilty and faced the hangman*, they generally turned and worked for the U.K.
Some did not and were hanged.
The trials were conducted in camera. But they had a full jury and defence council etc. People “read in” on the operations attended as witnesses to the trials.
It would have been simpler, safer and cheaper to just tell them that they would be shot out of hand if they didn’t cooperate.
They were obviously guilty.
Yet no one considered this as an option. And I am glad they did not.
*under international, agreed law, at the time, spying was a crime. The penalty of death was in the same laws. As was the requirement for a fair trial of the accused.
There is a point of principle involved in connection with the proposed Tourist Tax (to be levied by the directly-elected Mayors); how do you reconcile this tax with the fundamental principle of Democracy "No Taxation without Representation"?
Tourists are not part of the demos.
You tax things you want less of.
I don't think we want less tourists - though in individual locales such as Skye, some do.
Personally I want more tourists, for example lots more Chinese. So I would reduce tax on them, namely VAT. Then we would compete with France for tourism, and that would be some way to redress the vast BOP deficit we have with that country.
I suspect the government have lit a ticking time bomb with the removal of the benefits cap.
Every time a story about a large non-working family comes out (there will be plenty), with taxpayers paying - it will be laid at their door.
They haven't removed the benefit cap (£22k); they've removed the two-child limit.
So stories about families on £60k worth of benefits won't be common*. Some child poverty think tanks have pointed out that the £22k limit significantly limits the effect of the change - they're not wrong, particularly somewhere like London where the just housing element could be £30k.
*There are a number of exemptions, particularly around disability benefits, but I reckon DWP will tighten that up.
If you're explaining, you're losing. And removing the two-child limit alone is politically damaging.
Taxes are going up by £3-4 billion to pay for it, and everyone knows that money is going on extra welfare and coming from their paycheck.
I don't disagree - just pointing out that the Mail will struggle to find those households.
The other thing that's interesting is what the Conservatives do. I had a flick through affected households by council area and it's not a bad proxy for areas where Reform are doing well. That's why Farage - by far our canniest politician - has come out in favour. Whether the Conservatives follow or not will be a signal into their strategy for the next 3 years.
Kemi has been clear the Conservatives would have kept the 2 child benefit cap. Though they should also back an increase in standard child benefit for most parents while keeping the two child benefit cap for parents on universal credit
But many people on UC are actually working ... your proposal is self-contradictory to a considerable degree.
Many aren’t whereas the vast majority on standard child benefit work and a parent out of work can only claim it for 91 days while on JSA
Almost three quarters of children in poverty are in working households. This Tory division into strivers and shirkers is a fundamentally dishonest narrative.
Would that be the nonsensical measure of relative poverty, cleverly redefining the term so it will always exist?
[Got to go out now, which is a shame, because I do like a debate about this sort of thing ]
Yeah we already had an argument on this topic. Tldr; you were wrong.
Can confirm that Morris_Dancer continues to be completely wrong about whether relative poverty can be eliminated or not.
(Relative poverty is defined as having below 50%/60% of median income. You could lift everyone above the poverty line and achieve 0% poverty).
Surely you can’t, mathematically speaking?
If you lift everyone above the poverty line the median income increases and some people fall back into poverty.
It’s like the guy who runs half the distance to the finishing post each stage
There is a point of principle involved in connection with the proposed Tourist Tax (to be levied by the directly-elected Mayors); how do you reconcile this tax with the fundamental principle of Democracy "No Taxation without Representation"?
Tourists are not part of the demos.
We tax people without representation all the time regardless, on all the major taxes. It is a slogan not a fundamental principle.
"Police inquiry into Post Office and Horizon may run out of cash Officers have told victims there will have to be ‘tough decisions’ on Operation Olympos despite the number of criminal suspects doubling to eight"
There never is. The British state is like an abuser who gets away with years of abuse but is never held properly accountable: it is untrustworthy, incompetent, malicious and unwilling / incapable of change, no matter what promises it makes or how many apologies are dragged out of it. We have a Potemkin justice system. And the inquiry reports lead to little more than a lot of bad headlines for a few days but no real change.
There is absolutely no point any more to any of it.
Budget eh?
Sorry I forgot to add that to my list -
Prediction - "It turned out that there 146 senior people potentially chargeable in matters arising from the Post Office. 3 are dead. 112 have taken early retirement. The rest have been diagnosed with stress and are in the luxury sections of various in-patient facilities paid for from their Post Office packages. So it would not be in the interests of justice to pursue them further. We have charged the lady who cleans on Thursdays with misconduct in a public office."
- the final report is being “trimmed” from thousands of pages to 400. In the interests of clarity - the full report will be archived, not released - all police officers involved are dead or retired.
So why, you ask, not release everything?
Well, *after* Hillsborough, for years, people in the system lied and covered up. Some of them are still alive. Some of them are still working in government.
Many will be The Right Sort. A Safe Pair of Hands.
#NU10K
What more is there to know?
The Police f*cked up, then they lied to cover this up, the Government supported them, and various members of the great and the good tried to write reports telling us all what we knew already but were hampered by concerns that they might upset too many of those who were to blame.
Need we spend more money on this?
I would add - the culture of football hooliganism was the main cause of the disaster. No need for fences to control hooligans = no one dying at Hillsborough. People don't like it but many of the fans who were at Hillsborough were also at Heysel, and some of them were probably amongst those who contributed to 39 Juventus fans dying. Then add in the poor condition of football stadia at the time. Then add in the fact that despite the awful conditions it had safety certificates.
And then add in the police making mistakes.
Swiss cheese model of accident prevention applies.
However the cover-up and lies were atrocious, and sadly, all too many people were prepared to believe them.
People have a natural instinct to want justice for wrongs, and sometimes revenge. Sometimes its better to have truth and reconciliation.
Well done, Turbo, for those comments.
I can attest to the contribution to the catastrophe made by outdated stadia. I went regularly to big matches in those days. It was obvious to a blind man that many grounds were not safe. Wembley was particularly bad.
"...I know I’ve said this before but I keep finding it very funny seeing people (mostly Americans) reacting to all this by saying “Wow Zarah Sultana needs to get out of that toxic party and join the Greens”, like saying Keith Richards needed to escape the Rolling Stones because they had a drug problem..."
So Rachel from accounts won the sack race against Richard Hughes, with the OBR chief forced out rather than testify to the Committee today.
American sack race next, who wins out of SecDef Peter Hegseth and Minnesota Gov Tim Walz, both on the front pages for separate scandals over the weekend?
Ed Balls reckons they should reject the resignation
I find it hard to feel that the OBR early report release was a resignation matter. It's a nice easy to understand Westminster gossip type story that the media can get excited about, but at bottom it's "we made a mistake with the config of our Wordpress site so it wasn't requiring authentication for the file the way we expected". Yes, there's the "market sensitive information" aspect, but in practice that doesn't seem to have actually caused major harm. The closest to a real management failure is that they probably should have assessed whether they were taking the risks seriously enough (e.g. testing that their embargoed docs process really did prevent access) and whether the system they set up in 2013 was still the right one given how important the OBR has become these days. But if we lose a decent head of the OBR and it spends the next six months leaderless while selecting a new one who then has to get up to speed with the organisation's issues, is that really a benefit to the country?
No accountability, eh?
Next week - “Bombed the shipwrecked survivors *twice*. But losing the head of the military, is that really a benefit to the country? At this point does it really matter?”
If no one is punished for anything, then anything goes.
“Just open the gates, Constable, it’s not like anyone does anything if a bunch of scousers get crushed.”
I think that if we treat every mistake and oversight as if it was a wilful decision that could foreseeably cause multiple deaths, then every senior leader of every organisation or enterprise in the country would be out of a job every three months, to absolutely no benefit -- and those who presided over the real horrors will be no worse off than those where some minor mishap happened under their watch, which I'm sure they'd be happy about. There should be accountability, yes. But it should be proportional.
So we should just do nothing?
Excellent news for those who have a major fuck up on their watch, every three months or so.
I was in a meeting in a bank, where they explained Sarbanes-Oxley. When it was bought in.
A manger put his hand up - “So if someone working for me fucks up, I could go to prison? in America?”
Answer - “Yes. If you can’t prove they acted against policy and systems weren’t there to stop them.”
Within hours, shit was being tightened up. No more developers with access to production, traders “fixing” trades using the “admin” login.
I think fundamentally I disagree that this is "a major fuckup". And as far as I'm aware it's not part of a pattern of the organisation having major screwups every three months.
What do graphs like this say?
Oh, and an early release like this is a sacking offence in many contexts.
The fact that a junior employee hasn’t been binned strongly suggests that they don’t have a proper system in place. Probably because a senior manager decided not to fund it.
It wasn’t an early release. It was someone typing website links in on spec
That was a mistake. It shouldn’t have happened. It should be fixed. It should even go on his review and impact his rating and his compensation for the year.
But this is a “stern talking to by your boss@ level error not a sacking offence.
Using Wordpress for this is gross incompetence. By itself. At the organisational level.
Imagine that it turned out the RNLI was using spare inner tubes from Halfords as life vests for lifeboat personnel.
It’s that grade of stupid.
If you read their report - they don’t know*, but suspect this has been the case for multiple years - that budgets were being made available early, with the only security being obscurity.
*not knowing is another unforgivable piece of incompetence. Logs, for the love of Cuthulu…
So Rachel from accounts won the sack race against Richard Hughes, with the OBR chief forced out rather than testify to the Committee today.
American sack race next, who wins out of SecDef Peter Hegseth and Minnesota Gov Tim Walz, both on the front pages for separate scandals over the weekend?
Ed Balls reckons they should reject the resignation
I find it hard to feel that the OBR early report release was a resignation matter. It's a nice easy to understand Westminster gossip type story that the media can get excited about, but at bottom it's "we made a mistake with the config of our Wordpress site so it wasn't requiring authentication for the file the way we expected". Yes, there's the "market sensitive information" aspect, but in practice that doesn't seem to have actually caused major harm. The closest to a real management failure is that they probably should have assessed whether they were taking the risks seriously enough (e.g. testing that their embargoed docs process really did prevent access) and whether the system they set up in 2013 was still the right one given how important the OBR has become these days. But if we lose a decent head of the OBR and it spends the next six months leaderless while selecting a new one who then has to get up to speed with the organisation's issues, is that really a benefit to the country?
No accountability, eh?
Next week - “Bombed the shipwrecked survivors *twice*. But losing the head of the military, is that really a benefit to the country? At this point does it really matter?”
If no one is punished for anything, then anything goes.
“Just open the gates, Constable, it’s not like anyone does anything if a bunch of scousers get crushed.”
I think that if we treat every mistake and oversight as if it was a wilful decision that could foreseeably cause multiple deaths, then every senior leader of every organisation or enterprise in the country would be out of a job every three months, to absolutely no benefit -- and those who presided over the real horrors will be no worse off than those where some minor mishap happened under their watch, which I'm sure they'd be happy about. There should be accountability, yes. But it should be proportional.
So we should just do nothing?
Excellent news for those who have a major fuck up on their watch, every three months or so.
I was in a meeting in a bank, where they explained Sarbanes-Oxley. When it was bought in.
A manger put his hand up - “So if someone working for me fucks up, I could go to prison? in America?”
Answer - “Yes. If you can’t prove they acted against policy and systems weren’t there to stop them.”
Within hours, shit was being tightened up. No more developers with access to production, traders “fixing” trades using the “admin” login.
I think fundamentally I disagree that this is "a major fuckup". And as far as I'm aware it's not part of a pattern of the organisation having major screwups every three months.
What do graphs like this say?
Oh, and an early release like this is a sacking offence in many contexts.
The fact that a junior employee hasn’t been binned strongly suggests that they don’t have a proper system in place. Probably because a senior manager decided not to fund it.
It wasn’t an early release. It was someone typing website links in on spec
That was a mistake. It shouldn’t have happened. It should be fixed. It should even go on his review and impact his rating and his compensation for the year.
But this is a “stern talking to by your boss@ level error not a sacking offence.
Using Wordpress for this is gross incompetence. By itself. At the organisational level.
Imagine that it turned out the RNLI was using spare inner tubes from Halfords as life vests for lifeboat personnel.
It’s that grade of stupid.
Yep, human errors happen all the time and deserve a small reprimand. A much bigger issue is what system and controls you have in place to stop them having the kind of effect this did.
May I please trouble PBers for comments on a phenomenon I have mentioned here before and seems to be becoming more prevalent. It concerns pre-dating of letters from Government departments.
During a long-running dispute with HMRC a few years back I noted that their letters repeatedly bore a date many days before they flopped through the box. The post around here isn't bad so I assume the letters were being predated deliberately, often by as much as seven to ten days. This was particularly irritating when the letter stipulated a time limit for replying, which would typically be a fortnight. Since the reply would normally involve the production of documents this practice commonly created a scramble at my end to get the answer back in time.
Today I received a letter from HMRC dated 13th November 2025. That's nineteen days to reach me and is a new record even for them. Can anyone else beat this? What is going on here? Is it some kind of little scam to make them look more efficient than the people they are writing to?
The letter in question is a demand for payment, accompanied by the usual threats. The amount in question was paid without prompting on 12th November, a day before the demand was issued, so if it's a computer to blame, it is slacking.
Thanks
When I worked for a government department, I always assumed a *local* letter would take a week to arrive.
Part of it is the Royal Mail service is, generally, crap*
The other problem was that everything had to go to a massive, inefficient mail unit in Wolverhampton, be processed, and then sent out again.
So I would guess your letters would be dated the date they are generated. They are probably batch-printed not before the end of the day, processed the next day (so missing a couple of posting days already) and sent to a mail unit who fucks around with them for a week or so, before entrusting them to Royal Mail. Who probably then spend a few days sorting the big package from the Civil Service. And then put them in the delivery chain.
*Illustrated by the fact that when applying for my pension I twice sent off documents by guaranteed 24/48 hour delivery. Both missed the target delivery date by several days, and these are the ones we pay extra for.
Thanks John, that's a helpful explanation, although I'm not sure about the Royal Mail thing. Non-government letters arrive promptly enough.
The post can be variable within a couple of days. I get the New Statesman, which sometimes arrives on time on a Thursday, more often on a Friday, and occasionally as late as Monday.
I suspect the government have lit a ticking time bomb with the removal of the benefits cap.
Every time a story about a large non-working family comes out (there will be plenty), with taxpayers paying - it will be laid at their door.
They haven't removed the benefit cap (£22k); they've removed the two-child limit.
So stories about families on £60k worth of benefits won't be common*. Some child poverty think tanks have pointed out that the £22k limit significantly limits the effect of the change - they're not wrong, particularly somewhere like London where the just housing element could be £30k.
*There are a number of exemptions, particularly around disability benefits, but I reckon DWP will tighten that up.
If you're explaining, you're losing. And removing the two-child limit alone is politically damaging.
Taxes are going up by £3-4 billion to pay for it, and everyone knows that money is going on extra welfare and coming from their paycheck.
I don't disagree - just pointing out that the Mail will struggle to find those households.
The other thing that's interesting is what the Conservatives do. I had a flick through affected households by council area and it's not a bad proxy for areas where Reform are doing well. That's why Farage - by far our canniest politician - has come out in favour. Whether the Conservatives follow or not will be a signal into their strategy for the next 3 years.
Kemi has been clear the Conservatives would have kept the 2 child benefit cap. Though they should also back an increase in standard child benefit for most parents while keeping the two child benefit cap for parents on universal credit
But many people on UC are actually working ... your proposal is self-contradictory to a considerable degree.
Many aren’t whereas the vast majority on standard child benefit work and a parent out of work can only claim it for 91 days while on JSA
Almost three quarters of children in poverty are in working households. This Tory division into strivers and shirkers is a fundamentally dishonest narrative.
Would that be the nonsensical measure of relative poverty, cleverly redefining the term so it will always exist?
[Got to go out now, which is a shame, because I do like a debate about this sort of thing ]
Yeah we already had an argument on this topic. Tldr; you were wrong.
Can confirm that Morris_Dancer continues to be completely wrong about whether relative poverty can be eliminated or not.
(Relative poverty is defined as having below 50%/60% of median income. You could lift everyone above the poverty line and achieve 0% poverty).
Surely you can’t, mathematically speaking?
If you lift everyone above the poverty line the median income increases and some people fall back into poverty.
It’s like the guy who runs half the distance to the finishing post each stage
I suspect the government have lit a ticking time bomb with the removal of the benefits cap.
Every time a story about a large non-working family comes out (there will be plenty), with taxpayers paying - it will be laid at their door.
They haven't removed the benefit cap (£22k); they've removed the two-child limit.
So stories about families on £60k worth of benefits won't be common*. Some child poverty think tanks have pointed out that the £22k limit significantly limits the effect of the change - they're not wrong, particularly somewhere like London where the just housing element could be £30k.
*There are a number of exemptions, particularly around disability benefits, but I reckon DWP will tighten that up.
If you're explaining, you're losing. And removing the two-child limit alone is politically damaging.
Taxes are going up by £3-4 billion to pay for it, and everyone knows that money is going on extra welfare and coming from their paycheck.
I don't disagree - just pointing out that the Mail will struggle to find those households.
The other thing that's interesting is what the Conservatives do. I had a flick through affected households by council area and it's not a bad proxy for areas where Reform are doing well. That's why Farage - by far our canniest politician - has come out in favour. Whether the Conservatives follow or not will be a signal into their strategy for the next 3 years.
Kemi has been clear the Conservatives would have kept the 2 child benefit cap. Though they should also back an increase in standard child benefit for most parents while keeping the two child benefit cap for parents on universal credit
But many people on UC are actually working ... your proposal is self-contradictory to a considerable degree.
Many aren’t whereas the vast majority on standard child benefit work and a parent out of work can only claim it for 91 days while on JSA
Almost three quarters of children in poverty are in working households. This Tory division into strivers and shirkers is a fundamentally dishonest narrative.
Would that be the nonsensical measure of relative poverty, cleverly redefining the term so it will always exist?
[Got to go out now, which is a shame, because I do like a debate about this sort of thing ]
Yeah we already had an argument on this topic. Tldr; you were wrong.
Can confirm that Morris_Dancer continues to be completely wrong about whether relative poverty can be eliminated or not.
(Relative poverty is defined as having below 50%/60% of median income. You could lift everyone above the poverty line and achieve 0% poverty).
Surely you can’t, mathematically speaking?
If you lift everyone above the poverty line the median income increases and some people fall back into poverty.
It’s like the guy who runs half the distance to the finishing post each stage
No, it's quite doable. Say median income is £30k (finger in air). 60% is £18k. If only the bottom 10% are at or below that and you raise all their incomes to £19k then you've eliminated relative poverty and not shifted the median.
ETA: Of course, income increaes at the bottom may put upwards pressure on wages at the median - increased inflation etc, demand for those jobs falls relative to the now better paid lower jobs. But that's not necessarily a given. It would be probably impossible to get everyone to 90% or more of median, 80%, maybe even 70% as the median would start to shift substantially (not mathematically, but due to realities of the job market)
Ah, relative poverty. The measure that concludes if everyone in the UK earned £100 a year, nobody would be poor.
What is the relative poverty line in terms of weekly income for eg a couple with 2 children? Is this poverty line too high in your view, or too low?
The measure itself is inherently wrong. You might as well ask me (an atheist) which of the deadly sins is the worst.
So you have no view on whether the poverty line is in the right place or not, you just think it's wrong. This isn't very helpful.
You can argue that the poverty line is different for different people, places, families etc. Measuring things is tough. Living in the countryside may be more expensive than living in the nearby town (need a car as there are few or no buses) etc.
The instinctive problem some have with relative poverty is the poverty part. It brings to mind beggars in Victorian England, or the third world etc. Perhaps using something like "reduced relative living standards" would be less of a trigger?
May I please trouble PBers for comments on a phenomenon I have mentioned here before and seems to be becoming more prevalent. It concerns pre-dating of letters from Government departments.
During a long-running dispute with HMRC a few years back I noted that their letters repeatedly bore a date many days before they flopped through the box. The post around here isn't bad so I assume the letters were being predated deliberately, often by as much as seven to ten days. This was particularly irritating when the letter stipulated a time limit for replying, which would typically be a fortnight. Since the reply would normally involve the production of documents this practice commonly created a scramble at my end to get the answer back in time.
Today I received a letter from HMRC dated 13th November 2025. That's nineteen days to reach me and is a new record even for them. Can anyone else beat this? What is going on here? Is it some kind of little scam to make them look more efficient than the people they are writing to?
The letter in question is a demand for payment, accompanied by the usual threats. The amount in question was paid without prompting on 12th November, a day before the demand was issued, so if it's a computer to blame, it is slacking.
Thanks
When I worked for a government department, I always assumed a *local* letter would take a week to arrive.
Part of it is the Royal Mail service is, generally, crap*
The other problem was that everything had to go to a massive, inefficient mail unit in Wolverhampton, be processed, and then sent out again.
So I would guess your letters would be dated the date they are generated. They are probably batch-printed not before the end of the day, processed the next day (so missing a couple of posting days already) and sent to a mail unit who fucks around with them for a week or so, before entrusting them to Royal Mail. Who probably then spend a few days sorting the big package from the Civil Service. And then put them in the delivery chain.
*Illustrated by the fact that when applying for my pension I twice sent off documents by guaranteed 24/48 hour delivery. Both missed the target delivery date by several days, and these are the ones we pay extra for.
Thanks John, that's a helpful explanation, although I'm not sure about the Royal Mail thing. Non-government letters arrive promptly enough.
The post can be variable within a couple of days. I get the New Statesman, which sometimes arrives on time on a Thursday, more often on a Friday, and occasionally as late as Monday.
Likewise with the Newstatesman.
My experience with DWP is as described - letters arriving many days and sometimes a couple of weeks or more after the actual date on letter.
I suspect the government have lit a ticking time bomb with the removal of the benefits cap.
Every time a story about a large non-working family comes out (there will be plenty), with taxpayers paying - it will be laid at their door.
They haven't removed the benefit cap (£22k); they've removed the two-child limit.
So stories about families on £60k worth of benefits won't be common*. Some child poverty think tanks have pointed out that the £22k limit significantly limits the effect of the change - they're not wrong, particularly somewhere like London where the just housing element could be £30k.
*There are a number of exemptions, particularly around disability benefits, but I reckon DWP will tighten that up.
If you're explaining, you're losing. And removing the two-child limit alone is politically damaging.
Taxes are going up by £3-4 billion to pay for it, and everyone knows that money is going on extra welfare and coming from their paycheck.
I don't disagree - just pointing out that the Mail will struggle to find those households.
The other thing that's interesting is what the Conservatives do. I had a flick through affected households by council area and it's not a bad proxy for areas where Reform are doing well. That's why Farage - by far our canniest politician - has come out in favour. Whether the Conservatives follow or not will be a signal into their strategy for the next 3 years.
Kemi has been clear the Conservatives would have kept the 2 child benefit cap. Though they should also back an increase in standard child benefit for most parents while keeping the two child benefit cap for parents on universal credit
But many people on UC are actually working ... your proposal is self-contradictory to a considerable degree.
Many aren’t whereas the vast majority on standard child benefit work and a parent out of work can only claim it for 91 days while on JSA
Almost three quarters of children in poverty are in working households. This Tory division into strivers and shirkers is a fundamentally dishonest narrative.
Define 'poverty'.
Define 'working'.
The way in which such terms have had their meanings repeatedly stretched is very much part of the 'taking the piss' issue.
Quite. Daily T podcast recently had a bit about the calculations the TUC uses (which is where the Government is getting its '400,000 children lifted out of poverty' statistic from. The notion of poverty is based being some way below the median income - so the current outflux of millionaires and high earners is, in and of itself, 'lifting children out of poverty'. Huzzah!
Median not mean, the "outflux of millionaires and high earners" will have little to no effect on the median.
That is surely not correct. With less high earners being counted, median wealth would fall. Therefore the phenomena I suggested is correct.
It would fall, but there are a lot of numbers clustered very close together, so the fall would be minimal.
May I please trouble PBers for comments on a phenomenon I have mentioned here before and seems to be becoming more prevalent. It concerns pre-dating of letters from Government departments.
During a long-running dispute with HMRC a few years back I noted that their letters repeatedly bore a date many days before they flopped through the box. The post around here isn't bad so I assume the letters were being predated deliberately, often by as much as seven to ten days. This was particularly irritating when the letter stipulated a time limit for replying, which would typically be a fortnight. Since the reply would normally involve the production of documents this practice commonly created a scramble at my end to get the answer back in time.
Today I received a letter from HMRC dated 13th November 2025. That's nineteen days to reach me and is a new record even for them. Can anyone else beat this? What is going on here? Is it some kind of little scam to make them look more efficient than the people they are writing to?
The letter in question is a demand for payment, accompanied by the usual threats. The amount in question was paid without prompting on 12th November, a day before the demand was issued, so if it's a computer to blame, it is slacking.
Thanks
When I worked for a government department, I always assumed a *local* letter would take a week to arrive.
Part of it is the Royal Mail service is, generally, crap*
The other problem was that everything had to go to a massive, inefficient mail unit in Wolverhampton, be processed, and then sent out again.
So I would guess your letters would be dated the date they are generated. They are probably batch-printed not before the end of the day, processed the next day (so missing a couple of posting days already) and sent to a mail unit who fucks around with them for a week or so, before entrusting them to Royal Mail. Who probably then spend a few days sorting the big package from the Civil Service. And then put them in the delivery chain.
*Illustrated by the fact that when applying for my pension I twice sent off documents by guaranteed 24/48 hour delivery. Both missed the target delivery date by several days, and these are the ones we pay extra for.
Thanks John, that's a helpful explanation, although I'm not sure about the Royal Mail thing. Non-government letters arrive promptly enough.
The post can be variable within a couple of days. I get the New Statesman, which sometimes arrives on time on a Thursday, more often on a Friday, and occasionally as late as Monday.
Trust me, John, I am making full allowance for the normal variables of post; we are well outside that range.
Another government service given over to a private monopoly that cannot be removed & has no inventive to serve it’s users in a timely or reasonable fashion whatsoever inevitably turns into an engine of misery and fury for everyone involved. Accountability is no where to be found, neither in the private company running the service, nor the NHS management.
It’s entirely plausible that NHS management were forced to privatise this service by past UK governments, in the vague hope that “savings” would result. Ever since, everyone involved has had a huge incentive to turn a blind eye to the actual experience of their end-users. Those who could afford to do so simply opt out of the service as far as possible, whilst those who can’t end up back in hospital & so no longer need to be serviced.
It’s this kind of thing that generates so much combined anger & depression amongst the electorate - it demonstrates that the government simply doesn’t care about the experiences of people on the receiving end, who are forced to endure whatever limited service the system can be bothered to give them. Money alone can’t solve this - indeed, throwing more money into this system will probably make it worse, as Blair discovered when he tried to “fix” the NHS the first time around.
How neoliberalism broke economics | Dr Abby Innes Is Keir Starmer a Brezhnev or a Khrushchev?
In this IAI Studio interview, political economist and LSE associate professor Abby Innes argues that Britain’s governing model has more in common with the Soviet Union than many would care to admit. Drawing on her book Late Soviet Britain, Innes explores how the UK’s embrace of managerialism and economic determinism has produced a system that promises technical neutrality but delivers ideological rigidity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb07GSYG_sY
There is a point of principle involved in connection with the proposed Tourist Tax (to be levied by the directly-elected Mayors); how do you reconcile this tax with the fundamental principle of Democracy "No Taxation without Representation"?
That's an incomplete "principle". People too young to vote have always paid tax, income tax if earning, petrol duty if they are a driver, VAT of course.
The other principle is of visitors taking advantage of local services without having paid for them.
If you don’t like paying a tourist tax you can vote by not visiting the town / city.
It’s worth saying that Ben Houchen has explicitly said he won’t use it as Teesside is really people visiting family or work so using that tax doesn’t work around there
People should be paid damages for having to stay in a hotel in Middlesbrough, not get taxed for the privilege.
There is a point of principle involved in connection with the proposed Tourist Tax (to be levied by the directly-elected Mayors); how do you reconcile this tax with the fundamental principle of Democracy "No Taxation without Representation"?
Tourists are not part of the demos.
You tax things you want less of.
I don't think we want less tourists - though in individual locales such as Skye, some do.
Personally I want more tourists, for example lots more Chinese. So I would reduce tax on them, namely VAT. Then we would compete with France for tourism, and that would be some way to redress the vast BOP deficit we have with that country.
Trouble is that that taxes serve (at least) two purposes.
One, as you say, is to signal disapproval- in extreme cases to punish bad actions. That is totally reasonable. See taxes on tobacco.
The other is to allow the government to pay the costs of the things we want the government to do. If I go on holiday somewhere, I will be making demands on its facilities and get rather annoyed if they aren't available.
But you can't just tax things you want less of- because what happens if you end up getting less of the things that you want less of? There was a whole episode of Yes, Prime Minister devoted to that dilemma.
So Rachel from accounts won the sack race against Richard Hughes, with the OBR chief forced out rather than testify to the Committee today.
American sack race next, who wins out of SecDef Peter Hegseth and Minnesota Gov Tim Walz, both on the front pages for separate scandals over the weekend?
Ed Balls reckons they should reject the resignation
I find it hard to feel that the OBR early report release was a resignation matter. It's a nice easy to understand Westminster gossip type story that the media can get excited about, but at bottom it's "we made a mistake with the config of our Wordpress site so it wasn't requiring authentication for the file the way we expected". Yes, there's the "market sensitive information" aspect, but in practice that doesn't seem to have actually caused major harm. The closest to a real management failure is that they probably should have assessed whether they were taking the risks seriously enough (e.g. testing that their embargoed docs process really did prevent access) and whether the system they set up in 2013 was still the right one given how important the OBR has become these days. But if we lose a decent head of the OBR and it spends the next six months leaderless while selecting a new one who then has to get up to speed with the organisation's issues, is that really a benefit to the country?
No accountability, eh?
Next week - “Bombed the shipwrecked survivors *twice*. But losing the head of the military, is that really a benefit to the country? At this point does it really matter?”
If no one is punished for anything, then anything goes.
“Just open the gates, Constable, it’s not like anyone does anything if a bunch of scousers get crushed.”
I think that if we treat every mistake and oversight as if it was a wilful decision that could foreseeably cause multiple deaths, then every senior leader of every organisation or enterprise in the country would be out of a job every three months, to absolutely no benefit -- and those who presided over the real horrors will be no worse off than those where some minor mishap happened under their watch, which I'm sure they'd be happy about. There should be accountability, yes. But it should be proportional.
So we should just do nothing?
Excellent news for those who have a major fuck up on their watch, every three months or so.
I was in a meeting in a bank, where they explained Sarbanes-Oxley. When it was bought in.
A manger put his hand up - “So if someone working for me fucks up, I could go to prison? in America?”
Answer - “Yes. If you can’t prove they acted against policy and systems weren’t there to stop them.”
Within hours, shit was being tightened up. No more developers with access to production, traders “fixing” trades using the “admin” login.
I think fundamentally I disagree that this is "a major fuckup". And as far as I'm aware it's not part of a pattern of the organisation having major screwups every three months.
What do graphs like this say?
Oh, and an early release like this is a sacking offence in many contexts.
The fact that a junior employee hasn’t been binned strongly suggests that they don’t have a proper system in place. Probably because a senior manager decided not to fund it.
It wasn’t an early release. It was someone typing website links in on spec
That was a mistake. It shouldn’t have happened. It should be fixed. It should even go on his review and impact his rating and his compensation for the year.
But this is a “stern talking to by your boss@ level error not a sacking offence.
Using Wordpress for this is gross incompetence. By itself. At the organisational level.
Imagine that it turned out the RNLI was using spare inner tubes from Halfords as life vests for lifeboat personnel.
It’s that grade of stupid.
Yep, human errors happen all the time and deserve a small reprimand. A much bigger issue is what system and controls you have in place to stop them having the kind of effect this did.
My understanding is that the person who hacked it chanced his arm by changing the year on the old url, like having a discount code '20OFF' and putting in '30OFF' and it works. It doesn't inspire confidence.
What will be interesting is who replaces Richard Hughes.
Apart from not scoring the effect of Rayner's employment rights bill (because they say it has not yet been finalised), the OBR has been less than helpful to this Government.
I do wonder actually if the Government's recent concession on the unfair dismissal bit of the employment rights bill was to demonstrate to the OBR that its provisions were still a work in progress.
May I please trouble PBers for comments on a phenomenon I have mentioned here before and seems to be becoming more prevalent. It concerns pre-dating of letters from Government departments.
During a long-running dispute with HMRC a few years back I noted that their letters repeatedly bore a date many days before they flopped through the box. The post around here isn't bad so I assume the letters were being predated deliberately, often by as much as seven to ten days. This was particularly irritating when the letter stipulated a time limit for replying, which would typically be a fortnight. Since the reply would normally involve the production of documents this practice commonly created a scramble at my end to get the answer back in time.
Today I received a letter from HMRC dated 13th November 2025. That's nineteen days to reach me and is a new record even for them. Can anyone else beat this? What is going on here? Is it some kind of little scam to make them look more efficient than the people they are writing to?
The letter in question is a demand for payment, accompanied by the usual threats. The amount in question was paid without prompting on 12th November, a day before the demand was issued, so if it's a computer to blame, it is slacking.
Thanks
When I worked for a government department, I always assumed a *local* letter would take a week to arrive.
Part of it is the Royal Mail service is, generally, crap*
The other problem was that everything had to go to a massive, inefficient mail unit in Wolverhampton, be processed, and then sent out again.
So I would guess your letters would be dated the date they are generated. They are probably batch-printed not before the end of the day, processed the next day (so missing a couple of posting days already) and sent to a mail unit who fucks around with them for a week or so, before entrusting them to Royal Mail. Who probably then spend a few days sorting the big package from the Civil Service. And then put them in the delivery chain.
*Illustrated by the fact that when applying for my pension I twice sent off documents by guaranteed 24/48 hour delivery. Both missed the target delivery date by several days, and these are the ones we pay extra for.
Thanks John, that's a helpful explanation, although I'm not sure about the Royal Mail thing. Non-government letters arrive promptly enough.
The post can be variable within a couple of days. I get the New Statesman, which sometimes arrives on time on a Thursday, more often on a Friday, and occasionally as late as Monday.
Likewise with the Newstatesman.
My experience with DWP is as described - letters arriving many days and sometimes a couple of weeks or more after the actual date on letter.
One suspects deliberate misdating, but on the whole I find it is wrong to attribute to mischief that which can as easily be explained by incompetence.
"Police inquiry into Post Office and Horizon may run out of cash Officers have told victims there will have to be ‘tough decisions’ on Operation Olympos despite the number of criminal suspects doubling to eight"
There never is. The British state is like an abuser who gets away with years of abuse but is never held properly accountable: it is untrustworthy, incompetent, malicious and unwilling / incapable of change, no matter what promises it makes or how many apologies are dragged out of it. We have a Potemkin justice system. And the inquiry reports lead to little more than a lot of bad headlines for a few days but no real change.
There is absolutely no point any more to any of it.
Budget eh?
Sorry I forgot to add that to my list -
Prediction - "It turned out that there 146 senior people potentially chargeable in matters arising from the Post Office. 3 are dead. 112 have taken early retirement. The rest have been diagnosed with stress and are in the luxury sections of various in-patient facilities paid for from their Post Office packages. So it would not be in the interests of justice to pursue them further. We have charged the lady who cleans on Thursdays with misconduct in a public office."
- the final report is being “trimmed” from thousands of pages to 400. In the interests of clarity - the full report will be archived, not released - all police officers involved are dead or retired.
So why, you ask, not release everything?
Well, *after* Hillsborough, for years, people in the system lied and covered up. Some of them are still alive. Some of them are still working in government.
Many will be The Right Sort. A Safe Pair of Hands.
#NU10K
What more is there to know?
The Police f*cked up, then they lied to cover this up, the Government supported them, and various members of the great and the good tried to write reports telling us all what we knew already but were hampered by concerns that they might upset too many of those who were to blame.
Need we spend more money on this?
I would add - the culture of football hooliganism was the main cause of the disaster. No need for fences to control hooligans = no one dying at Hillsborough. People don't like it but many of the fans who were at Hillsborough were also at Heysel, and some of them were probably amongst those who contributed to 39 Juventus fans dying. Then add in the poor condition of football stadia at the time. Then add in the fact that despite the awful conditions it had safety certificates.
And then add in the police making mistakes.
Swiss cheese model of accident prevention applies.
However the cover-up and lies were atrocious, and sadly, all too many people were prepared to believe them.
People have a natural instinct to want justice for wrongs, and sometimes revenge. Sometimes its better to have truth and reconciliation.
Truth? Too nuanced and complex. What they really want is for everyone to parrot the new narrative, e.g
- every single Liverpool fan at Hillsborough was an innocent victim and a wonderful person who never did anything wrong and certainly had nothing to do with an entirely unrelated Heysel incident.
- every single police officer there was a fascist bully scum.
- every single journalist reporting on it had evil intentions.
...and so on. This is the 'stunning and brave' version of 'truth' that we all must accept without question.
There is a point of principle involved in connection with the proposed Tourist Tax (to be levied by the directly-elected Mayors); how do you reconcile this tax with the fundamental principle of Democracy "No Taxation without Representation"?
That's an incomplete "principle". People too young to vote have always paid tax, income tax if earning, petrol duty if they are a driver, VAT of course.
The other principle is of visitors taking advantage of local services without having paid for them.
If you don’t like paying a tourist tax you can vote by not visiting the town / city.
It’s worth saying that Ben Houchen has explicitly said he won’t use it as Teesside is really people visiting family or work so using that tax doesn’t work around there
People should be paid damages for having to stay in a hotel in Middlesbrough, not get taxed for the privilege.
Only if they aren't industrial archaeologists or urban explorers. Those should pay double.
Ah, relative poverty. The measure that concludes if everyone in the UK earned £100 a year, nobody would be poor.
What is the relative poverty line in terms of weekly income for eg a couple with 2 children? Is this poverty line too high in your view, or too low?
The measure itself is inherently wrong. You might as well ask me (an atheist) which of the deadly sins is the worst.
So you have no view on whether the poverty line is in the right place or not, you just think it's wrong. This isn't very helpful.
Nothing wrong with measuring poverty. But this particular measure is a measure of inequality not poverty.
It's not, really. You could substantially reduce inequality in a country without changing the definition of relative poverty. Even, potentially, without changing the value defined as relative poverty (unlikely, as that would require trimming the tails of distribution without moving the median).
You could, for example, give the top 10% a 10% pay cut, not shift the median (I'm assuming the 10% pay cut doesn't shift any down to the previous median), reduce inequality and not change the meaning or numerical value of relative poverty.
(I'm not necessarily endorsing that as a good thing to do - and there could of course be knock on effects of that reduction - if that top 10% then left then there would be a small, direct, change in median and longer term indirect effects).
People who get hung up on the peg to median like to think about what if you doubled everyone's* incomes - now those at the relative poverty line are above the old median income! But we'd also see rampant inflation. Housing, in particular, would still be as scarce as now and would re-value according to what people can pay. After a period of readjustment - and feeling rich! - those in relative poverty would still be struggling.
*globally - if you could somehow just do it in UK then the housing point would still apply, but inflation on imported things might not be so bad in a well-functioning international market - if things in the UK got twice as expensive due to demand, people would import more to lower the prices
So Rachel from accounts won the sack race against Richard Hughes, with the OBR chief forced out rather than testify to the Committee today.
American sack race next, who wins out of SecDef Peter Hegseth and Minnesota Gov Tim Walz, both on the front pages for separate scandals over the weekend?
Ed Balls reckons they should reject the resignation
I find it hard to feel that the OBR early report release was a resignation matter. It's a nice easy to understand Westminster gossip type story that the media can get excited about, but at bottom it's "we made a mistake with the config of our Wordpress site so it wasn't requiring authentication for the file the way we expected". Yes, there's the "market sensitive information" aspect, but in practice that doesn't seem to have actually caused major harm. The closest to a real management failure is that they probably should have assessed whether they were taking the risks seriously enough (e.g. testing that their embargoed docs process really did prevent access) and whether the system they set up in 2013 was still the right one given how important the OBR has become these days. But if we lose a decent head of the OBR and it spends the next six months leaderless while selecting a new one who then has to get up to speed with the organisation's issues, is that really a benefit to the country?
No accountability, eh?
Next week - “Bombed the shipwrecked survivors *twice*. But losing the head of the military, is that really a benefit to the country? At this point does it really matter?”
If no one is punished for anything, then anything goes.
“Just open the gates, Constable, it’s not like anyone does anything if a bunch of scousers get crushed.”
I think that if we treat every mistake and oversight as if it was a wilful decision that could foreseeably cause multiple deaths, then every senior leader of every organisation or enterprise in the country would be out of a job every three months, to absolutely no benefit -- and those who presided over the real horrors will be no worse off than those where some minor mishap happened under their watch, which I'm sure they'd be happy about. There should be accountability, yes. But it should be proportional.
So we should just do nothing?
Excellent news for those who have a major fuck up on their watch, every three months or so.
I was in a meeting in a bank, where they explained Sarbanes-Oxley. When it was bought in.
A manger put his hand up - “So if someone working for me fucks up, I could go to prison? in America?”
Answer - “Yes. If you can’t prove they acted against policy and systems weren’t there to stop them.”
Within hours, shit was being tightened up. No more developers with access to production, traders “fixing” trades using the “admin” login.
I think fundamentally I disagree that this is "a major fuckup". And as far as I'm aware it's not part of a pattern of the organisation having major screwups every three months.
What do graphs like this say?
Oh, and an early release like this is a sacking offence in many contexts.
The fact that a junior employee hasn’t been binned strongly suggests that they don’t have a proper system in place. Probably because a senior manager decided not to fund it.
It wasn’t an early release. It was someone typing website links in on spec
That was a mistake. It shouldn’t have happened. It should be fixed. It should even go on his review and impact his rating and his compensation for the year.
But this is a “stern talking to by your boss@ level error not a sacking offence.
Hughes was the boss. It is right that he should be held responsible for not taking cybersecurity seriously. According to the report:-
All organisational risks, including those relating to IT, information security and website, are discussed at Oversight Board meetings, which take place three or four times a year. At each of these meetings OBR staff present an updated risk register. These registers have consistently included risks in relation to online publication and information security, although the former has focused on the key-person risks around the external web developer, and the latter around the security of sensitive information passing between the OBR and the Treasury in the weeks and days leading up to a Budget or fiscal event. This reflects the fact that the primary concern of the OBR’s leadership has been the security of information on iterations of the forecast, or the development of government policies, over the period of several weeks in which both are finalised via a highly iterative process between the two organisations. https://obr.uk/docs/dlm_uploads/01122025-Investigation-into-November-2025-EFO-publication-error.pdf
BIB shows the risks were known. Failing to properly investigate and fix them is a leadership problem.
It is not like the minister resigning on a point of honour, or scapegoating junior employees. There do remain wider questions, like why the OBR is outside gov.uk, whether there should have been external pen tests. and whether the government's audit agency and NCSC (National Cyber Security Centre) are fit for purpose.
There is a point of principle involved in connection with the proposed Tourist Tax (to be levied by the directly-elected Mayors); how do you reconcile this tax with the fundamental principle of Democracy "No Taxation without Representation"?
That's an incomplete "principle". People too young to vote have always paid tax, income tax if earning, petrol duty if they are a driver, VAT of course.
The other principle is of visitors taking advantage of local services without having paid for them.
If you don’t like paying a tourist tax you can vote by not visiting the town / city.
It’s worth saying that Ben Houchen has explicitly said he won’t use it as Teesside is really people visiting family or work so using that tax doesn’t work around there
People should be paid damages for having to stay in a hotel in Middlesbrough, not get taxed for the privilege.
Hold on there, Sandy, you have the germ of an excellent idea here. Why not twin places like Middlesbrough with ones that tourists flock to, like Bath? Charge a tourist tax in Bath and send the money to Middlesbrough. This stops the former being overrun and helps to improve the latter. If as a consequence one day Middlesboriugh is transformed to the extent it outshines its Regency benefactor the process can easily be reversed.
So Rachel from accounts won the sack race against Richard Hughes, with the OBR chief forced out rather than testify to the Committee today.
American sack race next, who wins out of SecDef Peter Hegseth and Minnesota Gov Tim Walz, both on the front pages for separate scandals over the weekend?
Ed Balls reckons they should reject the resignation
I find it hard to feel that the OBR early report release was a resignation matter. It's a nice easy to understand Westminster gossip type story that the media can get excited about, but at bottom it's "we made a mistake with the config of our Wordpress site so it wasn't requiring authentication for the file the way we expected". Yes, there's the "market sensitive information" aspect, but in practice that doesn't seem to have actually caused major harm. The closest to a real management failure is that they probably should have assessed whether they were taking the risks seriously enough (e.g. testing that their embargoed docs process really did prevent access) and whether the system they set up in 2013 was still the right one given how important the OBR has become these days. But if we lose a decent head of the OBR and it spends the next six months leaderless while selecting a new one who then has to get up to speed with the organisation's issues, is that really a benefit to the country?
No accountability, eh?
Next week - “Bombed the shipwrecked survivors *twice*. But losing the head of the military, is that really a benefit to the country? At this point does it really matter?”
If no one is punished for anything, then anything goes.
“Just open the gates, Constable, it’s not like anyone does anything if a bunch of scousers get crushed.”
I think that if we treat every mistake and oversight as if it was a wilful decision that could foreseeably cause multiple deaths, then every senior leader of every organisation or enterprise in the country would be out of a job every three months, to absolutely no benefit -- and those who presided over the real horrors will be no worse off than those where some minor mishap happened under their watch, which I'm sure they'd be happy about. There should be accountability, yes. But it should be proportional.
So we should just do nothing?
Excellent news for those who have a major fuck up on their watch, every three months or so.
I was in a meeting in a bank, where they explained Sarbanes-Oxley. When it was bought in.
A manger put his hand up - “So if someone working for me fucks up, I could go to prison? in America?”
Answer - “Yes. If you can’t prove they acted against policy and systems weren’t there to stop them.”
Within hours, shit was being tightened up. No more developers with access to production, traders “fixing” trades using the “admin” login.
I think fundamentally I disagree that this is "a major fuckup". And as far as I'm aware it's not part of a pattern of the organisation having major screwups every three months.
What do graphs like this say?
Oh, and an early release like this is a sacking offence in many contexts.
The fact that a junior employee hasn’t been binned strongly suggests that they don’t have a proper system in place. Probably because a senior manager decided not to fund it.
It wasn’t an early release. It was someone typing website links in on spec
That was a mistake. It shouldn’t have happened. It should be fixed. It should even go on his review and impact his rating and his compensation for the year.
But this is a “stern talking to by your boss@ level error not a sacking offence.
The government is contriving to make Farage look like the leader who has the civil service's back.
Whatever the OBR’s failings, they have not wilfully misled the public.
The wrong person resigned today. It should have been Rachel Reeves.
I’m now calling on Richard Hughes to release his correspondence with the Chancellor so we can see exactly what she knew.
Maybe Farage should spend his time on developing some sort of vaguely coherent tax and spending politics for Reform UK rather than wasting time with this.
Ah, relative poverty. The measure that concludes if everyone in the UK earned £100 a year, nobody would be poor.
What is the relative poverty line in terms of weekly income for eg a couple with 2 children? Is this poverty line too high in your view, or too low?
The measure itself is inherently wrong. You might as well ask me (an atheist) which of the deadly sins is the worst.
So you have no view on whether the poverty line is in the right place or not, you just think it's wrong. This isn't very helpful.
You can argue that the poverty line is different for different people, places, families etc. Measuring things is tough. Living in the countryside may be more expensive than living in the nearby town (need a car as there are few or no buses) etc.
The instinctive problem some have with relative poverty is the poverty part. It brings to mind beggars in Victorian England, or the third world etc. Perhaps using something like "reduced relative living standards" would be less of a trigger?
The poor are always with us, I don't think we need to torture the English language when 'poverty' already does the job. As you say, the poverty line dffers by time and place. This is why it is always a relative concept. To be poor in 21st century Britain is different from being poor in Bangladesh or in 19th century Britain. The 60% of median income measure tries to capture that truth. Now you may say that it is too crude. Personally I prefer the Joseph Rowntree approach of convening groups of normal people to decide what constitutes a minimum acceptable standard of living, and then defining the poverty line as the total cost of that. However, that approach leads to a far higher poverty line, and hence far more poor people, than the usual relative poverty approach. The latter is therefore a relatively conservative approach to measuring the number of poor people, rather than labeling people as poor when they are obviously not. Of course you might argue that poverty is just a state of mind, as Dolly Parton does in Coat of Many Colours. There is certainly some truth in that.
There is a point of principle involved in connection with the proposed Tourist Tax (to be levied by the directly-elected Mayors); how do you reconcile this tax with the fundamental principle of Democracy "No Taxation without Representation"?
That's an incomplete "principle". People too young to vote have always paid tax, income tax if earning, petrol duty if they are a driver, VAT of course.
The other principle is of visitors taking advantage of local services without having paid for them.
If you don’t like paying a tourist tax you can vote by not visiting the town / city.
It’s worth saying that Ben Houchen has explicitly said he won’t use it as Teesside is really people visiting family or work so using that tax doesn’t work around there
People should be paid damages for having to stay in a hotel in Middlesbrough, not get taxed for the privilege.
Hold on there, Sandy, you have the germ of an excellent idea here. Why not twin places like Middlesbrough with ones that tourists flock to, like Bath? Charge a tourist tax in Bath and send the money to Middlesbrough. This stops the former being overrun and helps to improve the latter. If as a consequence one day Middlesboriugh is transformed to the extent it outshines its Regency benefactor the process can easily be reversed.
Win-win, no?
Why should Bath residents see a drop in tourist income from a tax because Middlesbrough is a shit hole?
Another government service given over to a private monopoly that cannot be removed & has no inventive to serve it’s users in a timely or reasonable fashion whatsoever inevitably turns into an engine of misery and fury for everyone involved. Accountability is no where to be found, neither in the private company running the service, nor the NHS management.
It’s entirely plausible that NHS management were forced to privatise this service by past UK governments, in the vague hope that “savings” would result. Ever since, everyone involved has had a huge incentive to turn a blind eye to the actual experience of their end-users. Those who could afford to do so simply opt out of the service as far as possible, whilst those who can’t end up back in hospital & so no longer need to be serviced.
It’s this kind of thing that generates so much combined anger & depression amongst the electorate - it demonstrates that the government simply doesn’t care about the experiences of people on the receiving end, who are forced to endure whatever limited service the system can be bothered to give them. Money alone can’t solve this - indeed, throwing more money into this system will probably make it worse, as Blair discovered when he tried to “fix” the NHS the first time around.
The equipment service is similarly broken. They provide simple stuff like kitchen trolleys and walking frames to more complex stuff like beds. It can take ages for some things to turn up, and often it is a requirement that it does so before the recipient can be discharged from hospital.
My mother in law needed a hoist as she has very poor mobility (dementia).
She got a hoist, but the correct sling was not available at the time. One did turn up several months later but of course we'd had to buy one ourselves. Without it she would have been left in bed without the use of a commode for weeks, which would have not have been great, to put it mildly.
Soon after the contracted provider in this area went bust leaving everyone in the lurch. The new provider stopped collecting items for a while and we had some to get rid of, so we said we'll bring our stuff to the new depot as it was no longer needed.
It was ... interesting.
Whilst I understand questions over infections and the like, the skips full of discarded items which were more or less in new condition was disturbing.
Like re-usable PPE, it seems the preferred process is to throw out things that may only have been used for a couple of weeks and would be perfectly serviceable. The waste is awful.
The incentives are -
1) if something is slightly stained/broken there will be complaints. 2) fixing stuff is complicated 3) the NHS won’t buy more wheelchairs from you if they are cheaper. 4) no real questioning of prices.
You’d have to be a saint, not to supply brand new only and raise the price to cover any problems.
Indeed - the incentives are apparent - it is obvious why it happens. But it does seem wrong.
If the incentives are perverse, then results tend to be perverse.
May I please trouble PBers for comments on a phenomenon I have mentioned here before and seems to be becoming more prevalent. It concerns pre-dating of letters from Government departments.
During a long-running dispute with HMRC a few years back I noted that their letters repeatedly bore a date many days before they flopped through the box. The post around here isn't bad so I assume the letters were being predated deliberately, often by as much as seven to ten days. This was particularly irritating when the letter stipulated a time limit for replying, which would typically be a fortnight. Since the reply would normally involve the production of documents this practice commonly created a scramble at my end to get the answer back in time.
Today I received a letter from HMRC dated 13th November 2025. That's nineteen days to reach me and is a new record even for them. Can anyone else beat this? What is going on here? Is it some kind of little scam to make them look more efficient than the people they are writing to?
The letter in question is a demand for payment, accompanied by the usual threats. The amount in question was paid without prompting on 12th November, a day before the demand was issued, so if it's a computer to blame, it is slacking.
Thanks
When I worked for a government department, I always assumed a *local* letter would take a week to arrive.
Part of it is the Royal Mail service is, generally, crap*
The other problem was that everything had to go to a massive, inefficient mail unit in Wolverhampton, be processed, and then sent out again.
So I would guess your letters would be dated the date they are generated. They are probably batch-printed not before the end of the day, processed the next day (so missing a couple of posting days already) and sent to a mail unit who fucks around with them for a week or so, before entrusting them to Royal Mail. Who probably then spend a few days sorting the big package from the Civil Service. And then put them in the delivery chain.
*Illustrated by the fact that when applying for my pension I twice sent off documents by guaranteed 24/48 hour delivery. Both missed the target delivery date by several days, and these are the ones we pay extra for.
Thanks John, that's a helpful explanation, although I'm not sure about the Royal Mail thing. Non-government letters arrive promptly enough.
The post can be variable within a couple of days. I get the New Statesman, which sometimes arrives on time on a Thursday, more often on a Friday, and occasionally as late as Monday.
Likewise with the Newstatesman.
My experience with DWP is as described - letters arriving many days and sometimes a couple of weeks or more after the actual date on letter.
One suspects deliberate misdating, but on the whole I find it is wrong to attribute to mischief that which can as easily be explained by incompetence.
Oh, I've seen letters like that before - years ago, if I remember rightly. Mostly they didn't matter as such, but I have a distinct memory of an elderly relative (who died in 2019) panicked by a letter from HMRC with a deadline uncomfortably close as a result. I had to reassure him and draft the reply to HMRC, making a point of saying 'Thank yo for your letter dated x but actually received y'.
Another government service given over to a private monopoly that cannot be removed & has no inventive to serve it’s users in a timely or reasonable fashion whatsoever inevitably turns into an engine of misery and fury for everyone involved. Accountability is no where to be found, neither in the private company running the service, nor the NHS management.
It’s entirely plausible that NHS management were forced to privatise this service by past UK governments, in the vague hope that “savings” would result. Ever since, everyone involved has had a huge incentive to turn a blind eye to the actual experience of their end-users. Those who could afford to do so simply opt out of the service as far as possible, whilst those who can’t end up back in hospital & so no longer need to be serviced.
It’s this kind of thing that generates so much combined anger & depression amongst the electorate - it demonstrates that the government simply doesn’t care about the experiences of people on the receiving end, who are forced to endure whatever limited service the system can be bothered to give them. Money alone can’t solve this - indeed, throwing more money into this system will probably make it worse, as Blair discovered when he tried to “fix” the NHS the first time around.
From the synopsis: “This book explores for the first time how the 'governing science' in Leninist and neoliberal revolutions fails for many of the same reasons. These systems may have been utterly opposed in their political values, but Abby Innes argues that when we grasp the kinship in their closed-system forms of economic reasoning and their strategies for government, we may better understand the causes of state failure in what remains an inescapably open-system reality.”
Huh. That does match an intuition I’ve been rolling around in my head - that we’ve somehow re-implemented the systemic failures of the Soviet Union from the other end.
It seems that this failure mode might be an attractor in the space of possible governance that you have to actively resist, lest you fall into it regardless of ideology.
May I please trouble PBers for comments on a phenomenon I have mentioned here before and seems to be becoming more prevalent. It concerns pre-dating of letters from Government departments.
During a long-running dispute with HMRC a few years back I noted that their letters repeatedly bore a date many days before they flopped through the box. The post around here isn't bad so I assume the letters were being predated deliberately, often by as much as seven to ten days. This was particularly irritating when the letter stipulated a time limit for replying, which would typically be a fortnight. Since the reply would normally involve the production of documents this practice commonly created a scramble at my end to get the answer back in time.
Today I received a letter from HMRC dated 13th November 2025. That's nineteen days to reach me and is a new record even for them. Can anyone else beat this? What is going on here? Is it some kind of little scam to make them look more efficient than the people they are writing to?
The letter in question is a demand for payment, accompanied by the usual threats. The amount in question was paid without prompting on 12th November, a day before the demand was issued, so if it's a computer to blame, it is slacking.
Thanks
When I worked for a government department, I always assumed a *local* letter would take a week to arrive.
Part of it is the Royal Mail service is, generally, crap*
The other problem was that everything had to go to a massive, inefficient mail unit in Wolverhampton, be processed, and then sent out again.
So I would guess your letters would be dated the date they are generated. They are probably batch-printed not before the end of the day, processed the next day (so missing a couple of posting days already) and sent to a mail unit who fucks around with them for a week or so, before entrusting them to Royal Mail. Who probably then spend a few days sorting the big package from the Civil Service. And then put them in the delivery chain.
*Illustrated by the fact that when applying for my pension I twice sent off documents by guaranteed 24/48 hour delivery. Both missed the target delivery date by several days, and these are the ones we pay extra for.
Thanks John, that's a helpful explanation, although I'm not sure about the Royal Mail thing. Non-government letters arrive promptly enough.
The post can be variable within a couple of days. I get the New Statesman, which sometimes arrives on time on a Thursday, more often on a Friday, and occasionally as late as Monday.
Likewise with the Newstatesman.
My experience with DWP is as described - letters arriving many days and sometimes a couple of weeks or more after the actual date on letter.
One suspects deliberate misdating, but on the whole I find it is wrong to attribute to mischief that which can as easily be explained by incompetence.
Oh, I've seen letters like that before - years ago, if I remember rightly. Mostly they didn't matter as such, but I have a distinct memory of an elderly relative (who died in 2019) panicked by a letter from HMRC with a deadline uncomfortably close as a result. I had to reassure him and draft the reply to HMRC, making a point of saying 'Thank yo for your letter dated x but actually received y'.
Noted with thanks, Carnyx, but my experience of HMRC suggests they rarely read what you write so such niceties are likely to be ineffectual.
"Police inquiry into Post Office and Horizon may run out of cash Officers have told victims there will have to be ‘tough decisions’ on Operation Olympos despite the number of criminal suspects doubling to eight"
There never is. The British state is like an abuser who gets away with years of abuse but is never held properly accountable: it is untrustworthy, incompetent, malicious and unwilling / incapable of change, no matter what promises it makes or how many apologies are dragged out of it. We have a Potemkin justice system. And the inquiry reports lead to little more than a lot of bad headlines for a few days but no real change.
There is absolutely no point any more to any of it.
Budget eh?
Sorry I forgot to add that to my list -
Prediction - "It turned out that there 146 senior people potentially chargeable in matters arising from the Post Office. 3 are dead. 112 have taken early retirement. The rest have been diagnosed with stress and are in the luxury sections of various in-patient facilities paid for from their Post Office packages. So it would not be in the interests of justice to pursue them further. We have charged the lady who cleans on Thursdays with misconduct in a public office."
- the final report is being “trimmed” from thousands of pages to 400. In the interests of clarity - the full report will be archived, not released - all police officers involved are dead or retired.
So why, you ask, not release everything?
Well, *after* Hillsborough, for years, people in the system lied and covered up. Some of them are still alive. Some of them are still working in government.
Many will be The Right Sort. A Safe Pair of Hands.
#NU10K
What more is there to know?
The Police f*cked up, then they lied to cover this up, the Government supported them, and various members of the great and the good tried to write reports telling us all what we knew already but were hampered by concerns that they might upset too many of those who were to blame.
Need we spend more money on this?
I would add - the culture of football hooliganism was the main cause of the disaster. No need for fences to control hooligans = no one dying at Hillsborough. People don't like it but many of the fans who were at Hillsborough were also at Heysel, and some of them were probably amongst those who contributed to 39 Juventus fans dying. Then add in the poor condition of football stadia at the time. Then add in the fact that despite the awful conditions it had safety certificates.
And then add in the police making mistakes.
Swiss cheese model of accident prevention applies.
However the cover-up and lies were atrocious, and sadly, all too many people were prepared to believe them.
People have a natural instinct to want justice for wrongs, and sometimes revenge. Sometimes its better to have truth and reconciliation.
Well done, Turbo, for those comments.
I can attest to the contribution to the catastrophe made by outdated stadia. I went regularly to big matches in those days. It was obvious to a blind man that many grounds were not safe. Wembley was particularly bad.
I was at Wembley for Serbia vs England - invited by a friend.
The avenue leading from the stadia to the station has obviously been designed on the same principles as the Euryalus Fortress in Syracuse.
Designed by Archimedes, some say, this funnelled potential attackers past walls from which the defenders could observe and attack them at their leisure.
So Rachel from accounts won the sack race against Richard Hughes, with the OBR chief forced out rather than testify to the Committee today.
American sack race next, who wins out of SecDef Peter Hegseth and Minnesota Gov Tim Walz, both on the front pages for separate scandals over the weekend?
Ed Balls reckons they should reject the resignation
I find it hard to feel that the OBR early report release was a resignation matter. It's a nice easy to understand Westminster gossip type story that the media can get excited about, but at bottom it's "we made a mistake with the config of our Wordpress site so it wasn't requiring authentication for the file the way we expected". Yes, there's the "market sensitive information" aspect, but in practice that doesn't seem to have actually caused major harm. The closest to a real management failure is that they probably should have assessed whether they were taking the risks seriously enough (e.g. testing that their embargoed docs process really did prevent access) and whether the system they set up in 2013 was still the right one given how important the OBR has become these days. But if we lose a decent head of the OBR and it spends the next six months leaderless while selecting a new one who then has to get up to speed with the organisation's issues, is that really a benefit to the country?
No accountability, eh?
Next week - “Bombed the shipwrecked survivors *twice*. But losing the head of the military, is that really a benefit to the country? At this point does it really matter?”
If no one is punished for anything, then anything goes.
“Just open the gates, Constable, it’s not like anyone does anything if a bunch of scousers get crushed.”
I think that if we treat every mistake and oversight as if it was a wilful decision that could foreseeably cause multiple deaths, then every senior leader of every organisation or enterprise in the country would be out of a job every three months, to absolutely no benefit -- and those who presided over the real horrors will be no worse off than those where some minor mishap happened under their watch, which I'm sure they'd be happy about. There should be accountability, yes. But it should be proportional.
So we should just do nothing?
Excellent news for those who have a major fuck up on their watch, every three months or so.
I was in a meeting in a bank, where they explained Sarbanes-Oxley. When it was bought in.
A manger put his hand up - “So if someone working for me fucks up, I could go to prison? in America?”
Answer - “Yes. If you can’t prove they acted against policy and systems weren’t there to stop them.”
Within hours, shit was being tightened up. No more developers with access to production, traders “fixing” trades using the “admin” login.
I think fundamentally I disagree that this is "a major fuckup". And as far as I'm aware it's not part of a pattern of the organisation having major screwups every three months.
What do graphs like this say?
Oh, and an early release like this is a sacking offence in many contexts.
The fact that a junior employee hasn’t been binned strongly suggests that they don’t have a proper system in place. Probably because a senior manager decided not to fund it.
It wasn’t an early release. It was someone typing website links in on spec
That was a mistake. It shouldn’t have happened. It should be fixed. It should even go on his review and impact his rating and his compensation for the year.
But this is a “stern talking to by your boss@ level error not a sacking offence.
Using Wordpress for this is gross incompetence. By itself. At the organisational level.
Imagine that it turned out the RNLI was using spare inner tubes from Halfords as life vests for lifeboat personnel.
It’s that grade of stupid.
Yep, human errors happen all the time and deserve a small reprimand. A much bigger issue is what system and controls you have in place to stop them having the kind of effect this did.
My understanding is that the person who hacked it chanced his arm by changing the year on the old url, like having a discount code '20OFF' and putting in '30OFF' and it works. It doesn't inspire confidence.
What will be interesting is who replaces Richard Hughes.
Apart from not scoring the effect of Rayner's employment rights bill (because they say it has not yet been finalised), the OBR has been less than helpful to this Government.
I do wonder actually if the Government's recent concession on the unfair dismissal bit of the employment rights bill was to demonstrate to the OBR that its provisions were still a work in progress.
It was the month they changed, but otherwise: yes, this is what happened.
So Rachel from accounts won the sack race against Richard Hughes, with the OBR chief forced out rather than testify to the Committee today.
American sack race next, who wins out of SecDef Peter Hegseth and Minnesota Gov Tim Walz, both on the front pages for separate scandals over the weekend?
Ed Balls reckons they should reject the resignation
I find it hard to feel that the OBR early report release was a resignation matter. It's a nice easy to understand Westminster gossip type story that the media can get excited about, but at bottom it's "we made a mistake with the config of our Wordpress site so it wasn't requiring authentication for the file the way we expected". Yes, there's the "market sensitive information" aspect, but in practice that doesn't seem to have actually caused major harm. The closest to a real management failure is that they probably should have assessed whether they were taking the risks seriously enough (e.g. testing that their embargoed docs process really did prevent access) and whether the system they set up in 2013 was still the right one given how important the OBR has become these days. But if we lose a decent head of the OBR and it spends the next six months leaderless while selecting a new one who then has to get up to speed with the organisation's issues, is that really a benefit to the country?
No accountability, eh?
Next week - “Bombed the shipwrecked survivors *twice*. But losing the head of the military, is that really a benefit to the country? At this point does it really matter?”
If no one is punished for anything, then anything goes.
“Just open the gates, Constable, it’s not like anyone does anything if a bunch of scousers get crushed.”
I think that if we treat every mistake and oversight as if it was a wilful decision that could foreseeably cause multiple deaths, then every senior leader of every organisation or enterprise in the country would be out of a job every three months, to absolutely no benefit -- and those who presided over the real horrors will be no worse off than those where some minor mishap happened under their watch, which I'm sure they'd be happy about. There should be accountability, yes. But it should be proportional.
So we should just do nothing?
Excellent news for those who have a major fuck up on their watch, every three months or so.
I was in a meeting in a bank, where they explained Sarbanes-Oxley. When it was bought in.
A manger put his hand up - “So if someone working for me fucks up, I could go to prison? in America?”
Answer - “Yes. If you can’t prove they acted against policy and systems weren’t there to stop them.”
Within hours, shit was being tightened up. No more developers with access to production, traders “fixing” trades using the “admin” login.
I think fundamentally I disagree that this is "a major fuckup". And as far as I'm aware it's not part of a pattern of the organisation having major screwups every three months.
What do graphs like this say?
Oh, and an early release like this is a sacking offence in many contexts.
The fact that a junior employee hasn’t been binned strongly suggests that they don’t have a proper system in place. Probably because a senior manager decided not to fund it.
It wasn’t an early release. It was someone typing website links in on spec
That was a mistake. It shouldn’t have happened. It should be fixed. It should even go on his review and impact his rating and his compensation for the year.
But this is a “stern talking to by your boss@ level error not a sacking offence.
The government is contriving to make Farage look like the leader who has the civil service's back.
Whatever the OBR’s failings, they have not wilfully misled the public.
The wrong person resigned today. It should have been Rachel Reeves.
I’m now calling on Richard Hughes to release his correspondence with the Chancellor so we can see exactly what she knew.
Maybe Farage should spend his time on developing some sort of vaguely coherent tax and spending politics for Reform UK rather than wasting time with this.
Because the next election is in the bag so he should focus on what comes next?
There is a point of principle involved in connection with the proposed Tourist Tax (to be levied by the directly-elected Mayors); how do you reconcile this tax with the fundamental principle of Democracy "No Taxation without Representation"?
That's an incomplete "principle". People too young to vote have always paid tax, income tax if earning, petrol duty if they are a driver, VAT of course.
The other principle is of visitors taking advantage of local services without having paid for them.
If you don’t like paying a tourist tax you can vote by not visiting the town / city.
It’s worth saying that Ben Houchen has explicitly said he won’t use it as Teesside is really people visiting family or work so using that tax doesn’t work around there
People should be paid damages for having to stay in a hotel in Middlesbrough, not get taxed for the privilege.
Hold on there, Sandy, you have the germ of an excellent idea here. Why not twin places like Middlesbrough with ones that tourists flock to, like Bath? Charge a tourist tax in Bath and send the money to Middlesbrough. This stops the former being overrun and helps to improve the latter. If as a consequence one day Middlesboriugh is transformed to the extent it outshines its Regency benefactor the process can easily be reversed.
Win-win, no?
Why should Bath residents see a drop in tourist income from a tax because Middlesbrough is a shit hole?
Because they are being overrun by the hoi-polloi, and they don't need the money. Come on Max, the good people of Bath have an obligation to help educate and improve the less fortunate.
May I please trouble PBers for comments on a phenomenon I have mentioned here before and seems to be becoming more prevalent. It concerns pre-dating of letters from Government departments.
During a long-running dispute with HMRC a few years back I noted that their letters repeatedly bore a date many days before they flopped through the box. The post around here isn't bad so I assume the letters were being predated deliberately, often by as much as seven to ten days. This was particularly irritating when the letter stipulated a time limit for replying, which would typically be a fortnight. Since the reply would normally involve the production of documents this practice commonly created a scramble at my end to get the answer back in time.
Today I received a letter from HMRC dated 13th November 2025. That's nineteen days to reach me and is a new record even for them. Can anyone else beat this? What is going on here? Is it some kind of little scam to make them look more efficient than the people they are writing to?
The letter in question is a demand for payment, accompanied by the usual threats. The amount in question was paid without prompting on 12th November, a day before the demand was issued, so if it's a computer to blame, it is slacking.
Thanks
When I worked for a government department, I always assumed a *local* letter would take a week to arrive.
Part of it is the Royal Mail service is, generally, crap*
The other problem was that everything had to go to a massive, inefficient mail unit in Wolverhampton, be processed, and then sent out again.
So I would guess your letters would be dated the date they are generated. They are probably batch-printed not before the end of the day, processed the next day (so missing a couple of posting days already) and sent to a mail unit who fucks around with them for a week or so, before entrusting them to Royal Mail. Who probably then spend a few days sorting the big package from the Civil Service. And then put them in the delivery chain.
*Illustrated by the fact that when applying for my pension I twice sent off documents by guaranteed 24/48 hour delivery. Both missed the target delivery date by several days, and these are the ones we pay extra for.
Thanks John, that's a helpful explanation, although I'm not sure about the Royal Mail thing. Non-government letters arrive promptly enough.
The post can be variable within a couple of days. I get the New Statesman, which sometimes arrives on time on a Thursday, more often on a Friday, and occasionally as late as Monday.
Likewise with the Newstatesman.
My experience with DWP is as described - letters arriving many days and sometimes a couple of weeks or more after the actual date on letter.
One suspects deliberate misdating, but on the whole I find it is wrong to attribute to mischief that which can as easily be explained by incompetence.
Oh, I've seen letters like that before - years ago, if I remember rightly. Mostly they didn't matter as such, but I have a distinct memory of an elderly relative (who died in 2019) panicked by a letter from HMRC with a deadline uncomfortably close as a result. I had to reassure him and draft the reply to HMRC, making a point of saying 'Thank yo for your letter dated x but actually received y'.
Noted with thanks, Carnyx, but my experience of HMRC suggests they rarely read what you write so such niceties are likely to be ineffectual.
To tell the truth, it was a bit of getting one's backside covering in first in case things escalated to fines/charges, just politely put. Plus my relative was *very* upset, so it also reassured him. (This was a time when HMRC were making the most minatory remarks in their letters if people were at all late or incomplete with their returns, and this sort of thing really spooked him.)
I suspect the government have lit a ticking time bomb with the removal of the benefits cap.
Every time a story about a large non-working family comes out (there will be plenty), with taxpayers paying - it will be laid at their door.
They haven't removed the benefit cap (£22k); they've removed the two-child limit.
So stories about families on £60k worth of benefits won't be common*. Some child poverty think tanks have pointed out that the £22k limit significantly limits the effect of the change - they're not wrong, particularly somewhere like London where the just housing element could be £30k.
*There are a number of exemptions, particularly around disability benefits, but I reckon DWP will tighten that up.
If you're explaining, you're losing. And removing the two-child limit alone is politically damaging.
Taxes are going up by £3-4 billion to pay for it, and everyone knows that money is going on extra welfare and coming from their paycheck.
I don't disagree - just pointing out that the Mail will struggle to find those households.
The other thing that's interesting is what the Conservatives do. I had a flick through affected households by council area and it's not a bad proxy for areas where Reform are doing well. That's why Farage - by far our canniest politician - has come out in favour. Whether the Conservatives follow or not will be a signal into their strategy for the next 3 years.
Kemi has been clear the Conservatives would have kept the 2 child benefit cap. Though they should also back an increase in standard child benefit for most parents while keeping the two child benefit cap for parents on universal credit
But many people on UC are actually working ... your proposal is self-contradictory to a considerable degree.
Many aren’t whereas the vast majority on standard child benefit work and a parent out of work can only claim it for 91 days while on JSA
Almost three quarters of children in poverty are in working households. This Tory division into strivers and shirkers is a fundamentally dishonest narrative.
Would that be the nonsensical measure of relative poverty, cleverly redefining the term so it will always exist?
[Got to go out now, which is a shame, because I do like a debate about this sort of thing ]
Yeah we already had an argument on this topic. Tldr; you were wrong.
Can confirm that Morris_Dancer continues to be completely wrong about whether relative poverty can be eliminated or not.
(Relative poverty is defined as having below 50%/60% of median income. You could lift everyone above the poverty line and achieve 0% poverty).
Surely you can’t, mathematically speaking?
If you lift everyone above the poverty line the median income increases and some people fall back into poverty.
It’s like the guy who runs half the distance to the finishing post each stage
*Median* income. Not mean.
How can everybody be above the median? Everybody could be at the median, but not above it.
So Rachel from accounts won the sack race against Richard Hughes, with the OBR chief forced out rather than testify to the Committee today.
American sack race next, who wins out of SecDef Peter Hegseth and Minnesota Gov Tim Walz, both on the front pages for separate scandals over the weekend?
Ed Balls reckons they should reject the resignation
I find it hard to feel that the OBR early report release was a resignation matter. It's a nice easy to understand Westminster gossip type story that the media can get excited about, but at bottom it's "we made a mistake with the config of our Wordpress site so it wasn't requiring authentication for the file the way we expected". Yes, there's the "market sensitive information" aspect, but in practice that doesn't seem to have actually caused major harm. The closest to a real management failure is that they probably should have assessed whether they were taking the risks seriously enough (e.g. testing that their embargoed docs process really did prevent access) and whether the system they set up in 2013 was still the right one given how important the OBR has become these days. But if we lose a decent head of the OBR and it spends the next six months leaderless while selecting a new one who then has to get up to speed with the organisation's issues, is that really a benefit to the country?
No accountability, eh?
Next week - “Bombed the shipwrecked survivors *twice*. But losing the head of the military, is that really a benefit to the country? At this point does it really matter?”
If no one is punished for anything, then anything goes.
“Just open the gates, Constable, it’s not like anyone does anything if a bunch of scousers get crushed.”
I think that if we treat every mistake and oversight as if it was a wilful decision that could foreseeably cause multiple deaths, then every senior leader of every organisation or enterprise in the country would be out of a job every three months, to absolutely no benefit -- and those who presided over the real horrors will be no worse off than those where some minor mishap happened under their watch, which I'm sure they'd be happy about. There should be accountability, yes. But it should be proportional.
So we should just do nothing?
Excellent news for those who have a major fuck up on their watch, every three months or so.
I was in a meeting in a bank, where they explained Sarbanes-Oxley. When it was bought in.
A manger put his hand up - “So if someone working for me fucks up, I could go to prison? in America?”
Answer - “Yes. If you can’t prove they acted against policy and systems weren’t there to stop them.”
Within hours, shit was being tightened up. No more developers with access to production, traders “fixing” trades using the “admin” login.
I think fundamentally I disagree that this is "a major fuckup". And as far as I'm aware it's not part of a pattern of the organisation having major screwups every three months.
What do graphs like this say?
Oh, and an early release like this is a sacking offence in many contexts.
The fact that a junior employee hasn’t been binned strongly suggests that they don’t have a proper system in place. Probably because a senior manager decided not to fund it.
It wasn’t an early release. It was someone typing website links in on spec
That was a mistake. It shouldn’t have happened. It should be fixed. It should even go on his review and impact his rating and his compensation for the year.
But this is a “stern talking to by your boss@ level error not a sacking offence.
Using Wordpress for this is gross incompetence. By itself. At the organisational level.
Imagine that it turned out the RNLI was using spare inner tubes from Halfords as life vests for lifeboat personnel.
It’s that grade of stupid.
Yep, human errors happen all the time and deserve a small reprimand. A much bigger issue is what system and controls you have in place to stop them having the kind of effect this did.
Wrong
If the RNLI was using cheap inner tubes as life vests, this would be *criminally* irresponsible.
As others have pointed out, the OBR dutifully filled out a risk register. The issue of security was reported to the board.
Just as how the risk function in every bank told the board in the run up to 2008 that the emperor was low on clothes.
The bank boards looked at the profits and looked at the costs of doing something. And moved on to the topic of bonuses.
They had a Process. They followed The Process. Why is that familiar?
Robin Smith has died, like his test career, an innings cut far too short.
Sad news. I think he was dropped from the team in 1996 far too early and abruptly. Remember watching him batting at Old Trafford in 1995 when he carried on batting despite being hit in the face by a ball from Ian Bishop.
He was probably discarded much too soon, at only 32, think ? Warne's emergence was rather a lot to do with that.
The Judge has gone to meet a greater judge of form than any of us.
May I please trouble PBers for comments on a phenomenon I have mentioned here before and seems to be becoming more prevalent. It concerns pre-dating of letters from Government departments.
During a long-running dispute with HMRC a few years back I noted that their letters repeatedly bore a date many days before they flopped through the box. The post around here isn't bad so I assume the letters were being predated deliberately, often by as much as seven to ten days. This was particularly irritating when the letter stipulated a time limit for replying, which would typically be a fortnight. Since the reply would normally involve the production of documents this practice commonly created a scramble at my end to get the answer back in time.
Today I received a letter from HMRC dated 13th November 2025. That's nineteen days to reach me and is a new record even for them. Can anyone else beat this? What is going on here? Is it some kind of little scam to make them look more efficient than the people they are writing to?
The letter in question is a demand for payment, accompanied by the usual threats. The amount in question was paid without prompting on 12th November, a day before the demand was issued, so if it's a computer to blame, it is slacking.
Thanks
I've had letters from the local council taking 8 days to reach me. Mind you, the deadline for responding was 2 months later so not really a problem.
What I do is to email back stating the date on which the hard copy letter was received and stating that I will therefore treat any time period as starting from the received date since if the matter was really urgent they would have emailed me or sent the letter by guaranteed next day delivery.
Another government service given over to a private monopoly that cannot be removed & has no inventive to serve it’s users in a timely or reasonable fashion whatsoever inevitably turns into an engine of misery and fury for everyone involved. Accountability is no where to be found, neither in the private company running the service, nor the NHS management.
It’s entirely plausible that NHS management were forced to privatise this service by past UK governments, in the vague hope that “savings” would result. Ever since, everyone involved has had a huge incentive to turn a blind eye to the actual experience of their end-users. Those who could afford to do so simply opt out of the service as far as possible, whilst those who can’t end up back in hospital & so no longer need to be serviced.
It’s this kind of thing that generates so much combined anger & depression amongst the electorate - it demonstrates that the government simply doesn’t care about the experiences of people on the receiving end, who are forced to endure whatever limited service the system can be bothered to give them. Money alone can’t solve this - indeed, throwing more money into this system will probably make it worse, as Blair discovered when he tried to “fix” the NHS the first time around.
From the synopsis: “This book explores for the first time how the 'governing science' in Leninist and neoliberal revolutions fails for many of the same reasons. These systems may have been utterly opposed in their political values, but Abby Innes argues that when we grasp the kinship in their closed-system forms of economic reasoning and their strategies for government, we may better understand the causes of state failure in what remains an inescapably open-system reality.”
Huh. That does match an intuition I’ve been rolling around in my head - that we’ve somehow re-implemented the systemic failures of the Soviet Union from the other end.
It seems that this failure mode might be an attractor in the space of possible governance that you have to actively resist, lest you fall into it regardless of ideology.
I think Innes is making a very specific point as part of her broader critique of neoliberalism. I don’t think we are, broadly speaking, anything like the Soviet Union. If you think we are, you don’t know the Soviet Union!
So Rachel from accounts won the sack race against Richard Hughes, with the OBR chief forced out rather than testify to the Committee today.
American sack race next, who wins out of SecDef Peter Hegseth and Minnesota Gov Tim Walz, both on the front pages for separate scandals over the weekend?
Ed Balls reckons they should reject the resignation
I find it hard to feel that the OBR early report release was a resignation matter. It's a nice easy to understand Westminster gossip type story that the media can get excited about, but at bottom it's "we made a mistake with the config of our Wordpress site so it wasn't requiring authentication for the file the way we expected". Yes, there's the "market sensitive information" aspect, but in practice that doesn't seem to have actually caused major harm. The closest to a real management failure is that they probably should have assessed whether they were taking the risks seriously enough (e.g. testing that their embargoed docs process really did prevent access) and whether the system they set up in 2013 was still the right one given how important the OBR has become these days. But if we lose a decent head of the OBR and it spends the next six months leaderless while selecting a new one who then has to get up to speed with the organisation's issues, is that really a benefit to the country?
No accountability, eh?
Next week - “Bombed the shipwrecked survivors *twice*. But losing the head of the military, is that really a benefit to the country? At this point does it really matter?”
If no one is punished for anything, then anything goes.
“Just open the gates, Constable, it’s not like anyone does anything if a bunch of scousers get crushed.”
I think that if we treat every mistake and oversight as if it was a wilful decision that could foreseeably cause multiple deaths, then every senior leader of every organisation or enterprise in the country would be out of a job every three months, to absolutely no benefit -- and those who presided over the real horrors will be no worse off than those where some minor mishap happened under their watch, which I'm sure they'd be happy about. There should be accountability, yes. But it should be proportional.
So we should just do nothing?
Excellent news for those who have a major fuck up on their watch, every three months or so.
I was in a meeting in a bank, where they explained Sarbanes-Oxley. When it was bought in.
A manger put his hand up - “So if someone working for me fucks up, I could go to prison? in America?”
Answer - “Yes. If you can’t prove they acted against policy and systems weren’t there to stop them.”
Within hours, shit was being tightened up. No more developers with access to production, traders “fixing” trades using the “admin” login.
I think fundamentally I disagree that this is "a major fuckup". And as far as I'm aware it's not part of a pattern of the organisation having major screwups every three months.
What do graphs like this say?
Oh, and an early release like this is a sacking offence in many contexts.
The fact that a junior employee hasn’t been binned strongly suggests that they don’t have a proper system in place. Probably because a senior manager decided not to fund it.
It wasn’t an early release. It was someone typing website links in on spec
That was a mistake. It shouldn’t have happened. It should be fixed. It should even go on his review and impact his rating and his compensation for the year.
But this is a “stern talking to by your boss@ level error not a sacking offence.
Hughes was the boss. It is right that he should be held responsible for not taking cybersecurity seriously. According to the report:-
All organisational risks, including those relating to IT, information security and website, are discussed at Oversight Board meetings, which take place three or four times a year. At each of these meetings OBR staff present an updated risk register. These registers have consistently included risks in relation to online publication and information security, although the former has focused on the key-person risks around the external web developer, and the latter around the security of sensitive information passing between the OBR and the Treasury in the weeks and days leading up to a Budget or fiscal event. This reflects the fact that the primary concern of the OBR’s leadership has been the security of information on iterations of the forecast, or the development of government policies, over the period of several weeks in which both are finalised via a highly iterative process between the two organisations. https://obr.uk/docs/dlm_uploads/01122025-Investigation-into-November-2025-EFO-publication-error.pdf
BIB shows the risks were known. Failing to properly investigate and fix them is a leadership problem.
It is not like the minister resigning on a point of honour, or scapegoating junior employees. There do remain wider questions, like why the OBR is outside gov.uk, whether there should have been external pen tests. and whether the government's audit agency and NCSC (National Cyber Security Centre) are fit for purpose.
Exactly.
This was a *core part of their business*
I know that techie stuff is a bit boring, especially to generalist managers. But this is the life they’ve chosen.
May I please trouble PBers for comments on a phenomenon I have mentioned here before and seems to be becoming more prevalent. It concerns pre-dating of letters from Government departments.
During a long-running dispute with HMRC a few years back I noted that their letters repeatedly bore a date many days before they flopped through the box. The post around here isn't bad so I assume the letters were being predated deliberately, often by as much as seven to ten days. This was particularly irritating when the letter stipulated a time limit for replying, which would typically be a fortnight. Since the reply would normally involve the production of documents this practice commonly created a scramble at my end to get the answer back in time.
Today I received a letter from HMRC dated 13th November 2025. That's nineteen days to reach me and is a new record even for them. Can anyone else beat this? What is going on here? Is it some kind of little scam to make them look more efficient than the people they are writing to?
The letter in question is a demand for payment, accompanied by the usual threats. The amount in question was paid without prompting on 12th November, a day before the demand was issued, so if it's a computer to blame, it is slacking.
Thanks
When I worked for a government department, I always assumed a *local* letter would take a week to arrive.
Part of it is the Royal Mail service is, generally, crap*
The other problem was that everything had to go to a massive, inefficient mail unit in Wolverhampton, be processed, and then sent out again.
So I would guess your letters would be dated the date they are generated. They are probably batch-printed not before the end of the day, processed the next day (so missing a couple of posting days already) and sent to a mail unit who fucks around with them for a week or so, before entrusting them to Royal Mail. Who probably then spend a few days sorting the big package from the Civil Service. And then put them in the delivery chain.
*Illustrated by the fact that when applying for my pension I twice sent off documents by guaranteed 24/48 hour delivery. Both missed the target delivery date by several days, and these are the ones we pay extra for.
Thanks John, that's a helpful explanation, although I'm not sure about the Royal Mail thing. Non-government letters arrive promptly enough.
The post can be variable within a couple of days. I get the New Statesman, which sometimes arrives on time on a Thursday, more often on a Friday, and occasionally as late as Monday.
Likewise with the Newstatesman.
My experience with DWP is as described - letters arriving many days and sometimes a couple of weeks or more after the actual date on letter.
One suspects deliberate misdating, but on the whole I find it is wrong to attribute to mischief that which can as easily be explained by incompetence.
Oh, I've seen letters like that before - years ago, if I remember rightly. Mostly they didn't matter as such, but I have a distinct memory of an elderly relative (who died in 2019) panicked by a letter from HMRC with a deadline uncomfortably close as a result. I had to reassure him and draft the reply to HMRC, making a point of saying 'Thank yo for your letter dated x but actually received y'.
Noted with thanks, Carnyx, but my experience of HMRC suggests they rarely read what you write so such niceties are likely to be ineffectual.
To tell the truth, it was a bit of getting one's backside covering in first in case things escalated to fines/charges, just politely put. Plus my relative was *very* upset, so it also reassured him. (This was a time when HMRC were making the most minatory remarks in their letters if people were at all late or incomplete with their returns, and this sort of thing really spooked him.)
The heavy-handed iteration of interest and penalties contingent upon delays in responding to their communications is entirely characteristic of their approach to their clients. It irritates people like me, and scares the shits out of the likes of your relative and my wife.
I used to get on well with the Inland Revenue but found that when they were taken over by Customs & Excise attitudes changed and as HMRC they became very much more abrasive. As a consequence I now cooperate as little as possible.
So Rachel from accounts won the sack race against Richard Hughes, with the OBR chief forced out rather than testify to the Committee today.
American sack race next, who wins out of SecDef Peter Hegseth and Minnesota Gov Tim Walz, both on the front pages for separate scandals over the weekend?
Ed Balls reckons they should reject the resignation
I find it hard to feel that the OBR early report release was a resignation matter. It's a nice easy to understand Westminster gossip type story that the media can get excited about, but at bottom it's "we made a mistake with the config of our Wordpress site so it wasn't requiring authentication for the file the way we expected". Yes, there's the "market sensitive information" aspect, but in practice that doesn't seem to have actually caused major harm. The closest to a real management failure is that they probably should have assessed whether they were taking the risks seriously enough (e.g. testing that their embargoed docs process really did prevent access) and whether the system they set up in 2013 was still the right one given how important the OBR has become these days. But if we lose a decent head of the OBR and it spends the next six months leaderless while selecting a new one who then has to get up to speed with the organisation's issues, is that really a benefit to the country?
No accountability, eh?
Next week - “Bombed the shipwrecked survivors *twice*. But losing the head of the military, is that really a benefit to the country? At this point does it really matter?”
If no one is punished for anything, then anything goes.
“Just open the gates, Constable, it’s not like anyone does anything if a bunch of scousers get crushed.”
I think that if we treat every mistake and oversight as if it was a wilful decision that could foreseeably cause multiple deaths, then every senior leader of every organisation or enterprise in the country would be out of a job every three months, to absolutely no benefit -- and those who presided over the real horrors will be no worse off than those where some minor mishap happened under their watch, which I'm sure they'd be happy about. There should be accountability, yes. But it should be proportional.
So we should just do nothing?
Excellent news for those who have a major fuck up on their watch, every three months or so.
I was in a meeting in a bank, where they explained Sarbanes-Oxley. When it was bought in.
A manger put his hand up - “So if someone working for me fucks up, I could go to prison? in America?”
Answer - “Yes. If you can’t prove they acted against policy and systems weren’t there to stop them.”
Within hours, shit was being tightened up. No more developers with access to production, traders “fixing” trades using the “admin” login.
I think fundamentally I disagree that this is "a major fuckup". And as far as I'm aware it's not part of a pattern of the organisation having major screwups every three months.
What do graphs like this say?
Oh, and an early release like this is a sacking offence in many contexts.
The fact that a junior employee hasn’t been binned strongly suggests that they don’t have a proper system in place. Probably because a senior manager decided not to fund it.
It wasn’t an early release. It was someone typing website links in on spec
That was a mistake. It shouldn’t have happened. It should be fixed. It should even go on his review and impact his rating and his compensation for the year.
But this is a “stern talking to by your boss@ level error not a sacking offence.
The government is contriving to make Farage look like the leader who has the civil service's back.
Whatever the OBR’s failings, they have not wilfully misled the public.
The wrong person resigned today. It should have been Rachel Reeves.
I’m now calling on Richard Hughes to release his correspondence with the Chancellor so we can see exactly what she knew.
Maybe Farage should spend his time on developing some sort of vaguely coherent tax and spending politics for Reform UK rather than wasting time with this.
Because the next election is in the bag so he should focus on what comes next?
What? I am asking him to focus on what comes next. He’s not doing that: he’s just constantly wishcasting the fall of the current government.
So Rachel from accounts won the sack race against Richard Hughes, with the OBR chief forced out rather than testify to the Committee today.
American sack race next, who wins out of SecDef Peter Hegseth and Minnesota Gov Tim Walz, both on the front pages for separate scandals over the weekend?
Ed Balls reckons they should reject the resignation
I find it hard to feel that the OBR early report release was a resignation matter. It's a nice easy to understand Westminster gossip type story that the media can get excited about, but at bottom it's "we made a mistake with the config of our Wordpress site so it wasn't requiring authentication for the file the way we expected". Yes, there's the "market sensitive information" aspect, but in practice that doesn't seem to have actually caused major harm. The closest to a real management failure is that they probably should have assessed whether they were taking the risks seriously enough (e.g. testing that their embargoed docs process really did prevent access) and whether the system they set up in 2013 was still the right one given how important the OBR has become these days. But if we lose a decent head of the OBR and it spends the next six months leaderless while selecting a new one who then has to get up to speed with the organisation's issues, is that really a benefit to the country?
No accountability, eh?
Next week - “Bombed the shipwrecked survivors *twice*. But losing the head of the military, is that really a benefit to the country? At this point does it really matter?”
If no one is punished for anything, then anything goes.
“Just open the gates, Constable, it’s not like anyone does anything if a bunch of scousers get crushed.”
I think that if we treat every mistake and oversight as if it was a wilful decision that could foreseeably cause multiple deaths, then every senior leader of every organisation or enterprise in the country would be out of a job every three months, to absolutely no benefit -- and those who presided over the real horrors will be no worse off than those where some minor mishap happened under their watch, which I'm sure they'd be happy about. There should be accountability, yes. But it should be proportional.
So we should just do nothing?
Excellent news for those who have a major fuck up on their watch, every three months or so.
I was in a meeting in a bank, where they explained Sarbanes-Oxley. When it was bought in.
A manger put his hand up - “So if someone working for me fucks up, I could go to prison? in America?”
Answer - “Yes. If you can’t prove they acted against policy and systems weren’t there to stop them.”
Within hours, shit was being tightened up. No more developers with access to production, traders “fixing” trades using the “admin” login.
I think fundamentally I disagree that this is "a major fuckup". And as far as I'm aware it's not part of a pattern of the organisation having major screwups every three months.
What do graphs like this say?
Oh, and an early release like this is a sacking offence in many contexts.
The fact that a junior employee hasn’t been binned strongly suggests that they don’t have a proper system in place. Probably because a senior manager decided not to fund it.
It wasn’t an early release. It was someone typing website links in on spec
That was a mistake. It shouldn’t have happened. It should be fixed. It should even go on his review and impact his rating and his compensation for the year.
But this is a “stern talking to by your boss@ level error not a sacking offence.
Using Wordpress for this is gross incompetence. By itself. At the organisational level.
Imagine that it turned out the RNLI was using spare inner tubes from Halfords as life vests for lifeboat personnel.
It’s that grade of stupid.
Yep, human errors happen all the time and deserve a small reprimand. A much bigger issue is what system and controls you have in place to stop them having the kind of effect this did.
Wrong
If the RNLI was using cheap inner tubes as life vests, this would be *criminally* irresponsible.
As others have pointed out, the OBR dutifully filled out a risk register. The issue of security was reported to the board.
Just as how the risk function in every bank told the board in the run up to 2008 that the emperor was low on clothes.
The bank boards looked at the profits and looked at the costs of doing something. And moved on to the topic of bonuses.
They had a Process. They followed The Process. Why is that familiar?
If the RNLI's controls had picked up they had dodgy equipment and they did nothing about it, then you're talking about serious culpability.
It would also be (deadly) serious if they had no such controls in place. The act of accidentally or naively ordering crappy tubes isn't the fundamental problem here. You should never rely on a single person getting it right when it's something like this.
My Dad knows someone at con club who knows someone who knows for certain Lammy isn’t releasing prisoners by accident, it’s policy. They are deliberately releasing people who eat too much in order to reduce costs. Big knucklehead people with ravenous appetites. No? Then how come early escape due to paper not digital system doesn’t involve lady prisoners?
I suspect the government have lit a ticking time bomb with the removal of the benefits cap.
Every time a story about a large non-working family comes out (there will be plenty), with taxpayers paying - it will be laid at their door.
They haven't removed the benefit cap (£22k); they've removed the two-child limit.
So stories about families on £60k worth of benefits won't be common*. Some child poverty think tanks have pointed out that the £22k limit significantly limits the effect of the change - they're not wrong, particularly somewhere like London where the just housing element could be £30k.
*There are a number of exemptions, particularly around disability benefits, but I reckon DWP will tighten that up.
If you're explaining, you're losing. And removing the two-child limit alone is politically damaging.
Taxes are going up by £3-4 billion to pay for it, and everyone knows that money is going on extra welfare and coming from their paycheck.
I don't disagree - just pointing out that the Mail will struggle to find those households.
The other thing that's interesting is what the Conservatives do. I had a flick through affected households by council area and it's not a bad proxy for areas where Reform are doing well. That's why Farage - by far our canniest politician - has come out in favour. Whether the Conservatives follow or not will be a signal into their strategy for the next 3 years.
Kemi has been clear the Conservatives would have kept the 2 child benefit cap. Though they should also back an increase in standard child benefit for most parents while keeping the two child benefit cap for parents on universal credit
But many people on UC are actually working ... your proposal is self-contradictory to a considerable degree.
Many aren’t whereas the vast majority on standard child benefit work and a parent out of work can only claim it for 91 days while on JSA
Almost three quarters of children in poverty are in working households. This Tory division into strivers and shirkers is a fundamentally dishonest narrative.
Would that be the nonsensical measure of relative poverty, cleverly redefining the term so it will always exist?
[Got to go out now, which is a shame, because I do like a debate about this sort of thing ]
Yeah we already had an argument on this topic. Tldr; you were wrong.
Can confirm that Morris_Dancer continues to be completely wrong about whether relative poverty can be eliminated or not.
(Relative poverty is defined as having below 50%/60% of median income. You could lift everyone above the poverty line and achieve 0% poverty).
Surely you can’t, mathematically speaking?
If you lift everyone above the poverty line the median income increases and some people fall back into poverty.
It’s like the guy who runs half the distance to the finishing post each stage
*Median* income. Not mean.
How can everybody be above the median? Everybody could be at the median, but not above it.
The poverty line isn't the same as median income. It's 60% of it.
The cabinet told him it’s Mexico flooding US with drugs, not Venezuela and the voters are not fools to this fact, proven by DefSec tied in absolute knots trying to argue to the contrary. So declaration of war on Mexico it is.
There is a point of principle involved in connection with the proposed Tourist Tax (to be levied by the directly-elected Mayors); how do you reconcile this tax with the fundamental principle of Democracy "No Taxation without Representation"?
My Dad knows someone at con club who knows someone who knows for certain Lammy isn’t releasing prisoners by accident, it’s policy. They are deliberately releasing people who eat too much in order to reduce costs. Big knucklehead people with ravenous appetites. No? Then how come early escape due to paper not digital system doesn’t involve lady prisoners?
Um. When they say that x dozen have been let out early by mistake, do they actually say whether they are boys or girls? I'm not sure they do. All part of the same prison system, after all.
The ones we do hear about are the sex offenders because they are the ones the Tories and DM love. And very few of them are female.
Another government service given over to a private monopoly that cannot be removed & has no inventive to serve it’s users in a timely or reasonable fashion whatsoever inevitably turns into an engine of misery and fury for everyone involved. Accountability is no where to be found, neither in the private company running the service, nor the NHS management.
It’s entirely plausible that NHS management were forced to privatise this service by past UK governments, in the vague hope that “savings” would result. Ever since, everyone involved has had a huge incentive to turn a blind eye to the actual experience of their end-users. Those who could afford to do so simply opt out of the service as far as possible, whilst those who can’t end up back in hospital & so no longer need to be serviced.
It’s this kind of thing that generates so much combined anger & depression amongst the electorate - it demonstrates that the government simply doesn’t care about the experiences of people on the receiving end, who are forced to endure whatever limited service the system can be bothered to give them. Money alone can’t solve this - indeed, throwing more money into this system will probably make it worse, as Blair discovered when he tried to “fix” the NHS the first time around.
From the synopsis: “This book explores for the first time how the 'governing science' in Leninist and neoliberal revolutions fails for many of the same reasons. These systems may have been utterly opposed in their political values, but Abby Innes argues that when we grasp the kinship in their closed-system forms of economic reasoning and their strategies for government, we may better understand the causes of state failure in what remains an inescapably open-system reality.”
Huh. That does match an intuition I’ve been rolling around in my head - that we’ve somehow re-implemented the systemic failures of the Soviet Union from the other end.
It seems that this failure mode might be an attractor in the space of possible governance that you have to actively resist, lest you fall into it regardless of ideology.
I think Innes is making a very specific point as part of her broader critique of neoliberalism. I don’t think we are, broadly speaking, anything like the Soviet Union. If you think we are, you don’t know the Soviet Union!
My step-mother, who lived and worked in the Soviet Union, has remarked how some aspects of the behaviour of government, in every day matters, remind her of The Good Old Days.
It’s the stupid rules, enforced with official savagery.
In medical matters, it’s going private, instead of Going On The Left (phrase meaning paying off an official or crook to get something in the USSR)
See the latest one - to fight fly tipping, local government is going through the waste to find individuals (letters and parcel packaging) and fining them. When it turns out, as it often does, that the material was collected by the binmen and entered the illegal waste industry via the council, no apologies or refunds.
On topic, the take out the public has about this budget is wrong, and will actually change over time.
The budget now comes across a bit like pleasing the markets with buffer/war chest building, and that’s perfectly sensible of second year of a new change of government getting in on back of cost of living crisis. Has it not left a feeling, after some difficult economic years a corner has been turned?
Now the dust has settled, maybe we bigged up the big Kemi comeback on Budget Day. Apart from a near the knuckle personal attack on Reeves that divided people like marmite, what has Badenoch actually said on the Conservative economic policy in the last week, other than cavemen didn’t have a welfare state and they did okay didn’t they?
"Police inquiry into Post Office and Horizon may run out of cash Officers have told victims there will have to be ‘tough decisions’ on Operation Olympos despite the number of criminal suspects doubling to eight"
There never is. The British state is like an abuser who gets away with years of abuse but is never held properly accountable: it is untrustworthy, incompetent, malicious and unwilling / incapable of change, no matter what promises it makes or how many apologies are dragged out of it. We have a Potemkin justice system. And the inquiry reports lead to little more than a lot of bad headlines for a few days but no real change.
There is absolutely no point any more to any of it.
Budget eh?
Sorry I forgot to add that to my list -
Prediction - "It turned out that there 146 senior people potentially chargeable in matters arising from the Post Office. 3 are dead. 112 have taken early retirement. The rest have been diagnosed with stress and are in the luxury sections of various in-patient facilities paid for from their Post Office packages. So it would not be in the interests of justice to pursue them further. We have charged the lady who cleans on Thursdays with misconduct in a public office."
- the final report is being “trimmed” from thousands of pages to 400. In the interests of clarity - the full report will be archived, not released - all police officers involved are dead or retired.
So why, you ask, not release everything?
Well, *after* Hillsborough, for years, people in the system lied and covered up. Some of them are still alive. Some of them are still working in government.
Many will be The Right Sort. A Safe Pair of Hands.
#NU10K
What more is there to know?
The Police f*cked up, then they lied to cover this up, the Government supported them, and various members of the great and the good tried to write reports telling us all what we knew already but were hampered by concerns that they might upset too many of those who were to blame.
Need we spend more money on this?
I would add - the culture of football hooliganism was the main cause of the disaster. No need for fences to control hooligans = no one dying at Hillsborough. People don't like it but many of the fans who were at Hillsborough were also at Heysel, and some of them were probably amongst those who contributed to 39 Juventus fans dying. Then add in the poor condition of football stadia at the time. Then add in the fact that despite the awful conditions it had safety certificates.
And then add in the police making mistakes.
Swiss cheese model of accident prevention applies.
However the cover-up and lies were atrocious, and sadly, all too many people were prepared to believe them.
People have a natural instinct to want justice for wrongs, and sometimes revenge. Sometimes its better to have truth and reconciliation.
Truth? Too nuanced and complex. What they really want is for everyone to parrot the new narrative, e.g
- every single Liverpool fan at Hillsborough was an innocent victim and a wonderful person who never did anything wrong and certainly had nothing to do with an entirely unrelated Heysel incident.
- every single police officer there was a fascist bully scum.
- every single journalist reporting on it had evil intentions.
...and so on. This is the 'stunning and brave' version of 'truth' that we all must accept without question.
That is not what we are being asked to believe.
- The authorities knew very well there was a problem with football hooliganism which is why they were under an obligation to ensure that the steps taken were effective and safe. They failed in that. - We know exactly who died at Hillsborough. Do you have evidence that any of them were at Heysel or responsible for the rioting there? - The police did not do their job as well as they should have done. Some lied. Others tried to cover up what happened. - Journalists jumped to conclusions and wrote stories they had been fed by the police without doing any checking. - It took one hell of an effort to get the truth out of the authorities. That compounded a sense of victimhood, which was entirely justified for the families of those who died. - The fact that some of those at that football match have been less than saints does not justify anything the authorities did. Nor the untrue statements they made about those present who did not die.
Tennesee 7th Distrct special election (by election in our lingo) looks to be close, probably stay Republican but this in a district that gave Trump a 61-39 majority last time.
May I please trouble PBers for comments on a phenomenon I have mentioned here before and seems to be becoming more prevalent. It concerns pre-dating of letters from Government departments.
During a long-running dispute with HMRC a few years back I noted that their letters repeatedly bore a date many days before they flopped through the box. The post around here isn't bad so I assume the letters were being predated deliberately, often by as much as seven to ten days. This was particularly irritating when the letter stipulated a time limit for replying, which would typically be a fortnight. Since the reply would normally involve the production of documents this practice commonly created a scramble at my end to get the answer back in time.
Today I received a letter from HMRC dated 13th November 2025. That's nineteen days to reach me and is a new record even for them. Can anyone else beat this? What is going on here? Is it some kind of little scam to make them look more efficient than the people they are writing to?
The letter in question is a demand for payment, accompanied by the usual threats. The amount in question was paid without prompting on 12th November, a day before the demand was issued, so if it's a computer to blame, it is slacking.
Thanks
I've had letters from the local council taking 8 days to reach me. Mind you, the deadline for responding was 2 months later so not really a problem.
What I do is to email back stating the date on which the hard copy letter was received and stating that I will therefore treat any time period as starting from the received date since if the matter was really urgent they would have emailed me or sent the letter by guaranteed next day delivery.
All very well, but that assumes someone at the other end who is actually reading what you send. It was obvious to us that we were on a conveyor belt where our replies were irrelevant. It only ended when we went to London for a tribunal. HMRC did not attend and the case was thrown out. We concluded, correctly I am sure, that they simply throw as many cases onto the conveyor belt as possible, knowing that most respondents will give up before the tribunal phase. It's a numbers game, and they can easily afford to lose the odd case such as ours when someone has the nous and determination to fight through to the end.
We got a letter of apology and a trivial sum in compensation in the end, but it was a dispiriting experience and has colored my attitude towards HMRC and government agencies generally.
I suspect the government have lit a ticking time bomb with the removal of the benefits cap.
Every time a story about a large non-working family comes out (there will be plenty), with taxpayers paying - it will be laid at their door.
They haven't removed the benefit cap (£22k); they've removed the two-child limit.
So stories about families on £60k worth of benefits won't be common*. Some child poverty think tanks have pointed out that the £22k limit significantly limits the effect of the change - they're not wrong, particularly somewhere like London where the just housing element could be £30k.
*There are a number of exemptions, particularly around disability benefits, but I reckon DWP will tighten that up.
If you're explaining, you're losing. And removing the two-child limit alone is politically damaging.
Taxes are going up by £3-4 billion to pay for it, and everyone knows that money is going on extra welfare and coming from their paycheck.
I don't disagree - just pointing out that the Mail will struggle to find those households.
The other thing that's interesting is what the Conservatives do. I had a flick through affected households by council area and it's not a bad proxy for areas where Reform are doing well. That's why Farage - by far our canniest politician - has come out in favour. Whether the Conservatives follow or not will be a signal into their strategy for the next 3 years.
Kemi has been clear the Conservatives would have kept the 2 child benefit cap. Though they should also back an increase in standard child benefit for most parents while keeping the two child benefit cap for parents on universal credit
But many people on UC are actually working ... your proposal is self-contradictory to a considerable degree.
Many aren’t whereas the vast majority on standard child benefit work and a parent out of work can only claim it for 91 days while on JSA
Almost three quarters of children in poverty are in working households. This Tory division into strivers and shirkers is a fundamentally dishonest narrative.
Would that be the nonsensical measure of relative poverty, cleverly redefining the term so it will always exist?
[Got to go out now, which is a shame, because I do like a debate about this sort of thing ]
Yeah we already had an argument on this topic. Tldr; you were wrong.
Can confirm that Morris_Dancer continues to be completely wrong about whether relative poverty can be eliminated or not.
(Relative poverty is defined as having below 50%/60% of median income. You could lift everyone above the poverty line and achieve 0% poverty).
Surely you can’t, mathematically speaking?
If you lift everyone above the poverty line the median income increases and some people fall back into poverty.
It’s like the guy who runs half the distance to the finishing post each stage
*Median* income. Not mean.
How can everybody be above the median? Everybody could be at the median, but not above it.
The poverty line isn't the same as median income. It's 60% of it.
My Dad knows someone at con club who knows someone who knows for certain Lammy isn’t releasing prisoners by accident, it’s policy. They are deliberately releasing people who eat too much in order to reduce costs. Big knucklehead people with ravenous appetites. No? Then how come early escape due to paper not digital system doesn’t involve lady prisoners?
Um. When they say that x dozen have been let out early by mistake, do they actually say whether they are boys or girls? I'm not sure they do. All part of the same prison system, after all.
The ones we do hear about are the sex offenders because they are the ones the Tories and DM love. And very few of them are female.
Men make up 96% of prisoners in the U.K.
And an even higher percentage of prisoners who have committed violent offences.
Obviously something needs to be done about the shocking levels of sexism in the Legally Challenged Industry.
I suspect the government have lit a ticking time bomb with the removal of the benefits cap.
Every time a story about a large non-working family comes out (there will be plenty), with taxpayers paying - it will be laid at their door.
They haven't removed the benefit cap (£22k); they've removed the two-child limit.
So stories about families on £60k worth of benefits won't be common*. Some child poverty think tanks have pointed out that the £22k limit significantly limits the effect of the change - they're not wrong, particularly somewhere like London where the just housing element could be £30k.
*There are a number of exemptions, particularly around disability benefits, but I reckon DWP will tighten that up.
If you're explaining, you're losing. And removing the two-child limit alone is politically damaging.
Taxes are going up by £3-4 billion to pay for it, and everyone knows that money is going on extra welfare and coming from their paycheck.
I don't disagree - just pointing out that the Mail will struggle to find those households.
The other thing that's interesting is what the Conservatives do. I had a flick through affected households by council area and it's not a bad proxy for areas where Reform are doing well. That's why Farage - by far our canniest politician - has come out in favour. Whether the Conservatives follow or not will be a signal into their strategy for the next 3 years.
Kemi has been clear the Conservatives would have kept the 2 child benefit cap. Though they should also back an increase in standard child benefit for most parents while keeping the two child benefit cap for parents on universal credit
But many people on UC are actually working ... your proposal is self-contradictory to a considerable degree.
Many aren’t whereas the vast majority on standard child benefit work and a parent out of work can only claim it for 91 days while on JSA
Almost three quarters of children in poverty are in working households. This Tory division into strivers and shirkers is a fundamentally dishonest narrative.
Would that be the nonsensical measure of relative poverty, cleverly redefining the term so it will always exist?
[Got to go out now, which is a shame, because I do like a debate about this sort of thing ]
Yeah we already had an argument on this topic. Tldr; you were wrong.
Can confirm that Morris_Dancer continues to be completely wrong about whether relative poverty can be eliminated or not.
(Relative poverty is defined as having below 50%/60% of median income. You could lift everyone above the poverty line and achieve 0% poverty).
Surely you can’t, mathematically speaking?
If you lift everyone above the poverty line the median income increases and some people fall back into poverty.
It’s like the guy who runs half the distance to the finishing post each stage
*Median* income. Not mean.
How can everybody be above the median? Everybody could be at the median, but not above it.
The poverty line isn't the same as median income. It's 60% of it.
Which is a stupid definition because it means it's impossible to eliminate poverty. It should be measured on an absolute basis, a relative poverty measure is complete bullshit and it becomes a rod for our own back because it's impossible to win.
My Dad knows someone at con club who knows someone who knows for certain Lammy isn’t releasing prisoners by accident, it’s policy. They are deliberately releasing people who eat too much in order to reduce costs. Big knucklehead people with ravenous appetites. No? Then how come early escape due to paper not digital system doesn’t involve lady prisoners?
Um. When they say that x dozen have been let out early by mistake, do they actually say whether they are boys or girls? I'm not sure they do. All part of the same prison system, after all.
The ones we do hear about are the sex offenders because they are the ones the Tories and DM love. And very few of them are female.
Men make up 96% of prisoners in the U.K.
And an even higher percentage of prisoners who have committed violent offences.
Obviously something needs to be done about the shocking levels of sexism in the Legally Challenged Industry.
Absolutely. And because they are great big lumps, they are costing too much board in these state run hotels.
It’s so obvious what’s going on here, clerical errors it ain’t!
@StillWaters who I think commented a few weeks ago about instances of it raining one side of the house and not the other. We have just had that. Raining out of the front (quite heavily), dry at the back and sunny. Bonus of a lovely rainbow.
And no I don't live in an enormous building. It is just 2 rooms deep.
I suspect the government have lit a ticking time bomb with the removal of the benefits cap.
Every time a story about a large non-working family comes out (there will be plenty), with taxpayers paying - it will be laid at their door.
They haven't removed the benefit cap (£22k); they've removed the two-child limit.
So stories about families on £60k worth of benefits won't be common*. Some child poverty think tanks have pointed out that the £22k limit significantly limits the effect of the change - they're not wrong, particularly somewhere like London where the just housing element could be £30k.
*There are a number of exemptions, particularly around disability benefits, but I reckon DWP will tighten that up.
If you're explaining, you're losing. And removing the two-child limit alone is politically damaging.
Taxes are going up by £3-4 billion to pay for it, and everyone knows that money is going on extra welfare and coming from their paycheck.
I don't disagree - just pointing out that the Mail will struggle to find those households.
The other thing that's interesting is what the Conservatives do. I had a flick through affected households by council area and it's not a bad proxy for areas where Reform are doing well. That's why Farage - by far our canniest politician - has come out in favour. Whether the Conservatives follow or not will be a signal into their strategy for the next 3 years.
Kemi has been clear the Conservatives would have kept the 2 child benefit cap. Though they should also back an increase in standard child benefit for most parents while keeping the two child benefit cap for parents on universal credit
But many people on UC are actually working ... your proposal is self-contradictory to a considerable degree.
Many aren’t whereas the vast majority on standard child benefit work and a parent out of work can only claim it for 91 days while on JSA
Almost three quarters of children in poverty are in working households. This Tory division into strivers and shirkers is a fundamentally dishonest narrative.
Would that be the nonsensical measure of relative poverty, cleverly redefining the term so it will always exist?
[Got to go out now, which is a shame, because I do like a debate about this sort of thing ]
Yeah we already had an argument on this topic. Tldr; you were wrong.
Can confirm that Morris_Dancer continues to be completely wrong about whether relative poverty can be eliminated or not.
(Relative poverty is defined as having below 50%/60% of median income. You could lift everyone above the poverty line and achieve 0% poverty).
Surely you can’t, mathematically speaking?
If you lift everyone above the poverty line the median income increases and some people fall back into poverty.
It’s like the guy who runs half the distance to the finishing post each stage
*Median* income. Not mean.
How can everybody be above the median? Everybody could be at the median, but not above it.
The poverty line isn't the same as median income. It's 60% of it.
Which is a stupid definition because it means it's impossible to eliminate poverty. It should be measured on an absolute basis, a relative poverty measure is complete bullshit and it becomes a rod for our own back because it's impossible to win.
It's not impossible, an income distribution with nobody below 60% of median income is perfectly feasible.
My Dad knows someone at con club who knows someone who knows for certain Lammy isn’t releasing prisoners by accident, it’s policy. They are deliberately releasing people who eat too much in order to reduce costs. Big knucklehead people with ravenous appetites. No? Then how come early escape due to paper not digital system doesn’t involve lady prisoners?
Um. When they say that x dozen have been let out early by mistake, do they actually say whether they are boys or girls? I'm not sure they do. All part of the same prison system, after all.
The ones we do hear about are the sex offenders because they are the ones the Tories and DM love. And very few of them are female.
However, the most high profile sex offender in the US is Ghislaine Maxwell.
The thing that strikes me looking at the graph is how similar that’s all now looking to how it went in France and Italy, historical main and winning parties obliterated by the extremes and unable to come back.
I suspect the government have lit a ticking time bomb with the removal of the benefits cap.
Every time a story about a large non-working family comes out (there will be plenty), with taxpayers paying - it will be laid at their door.
They haven't removed the benefit cap (£22k); they've removed the two-child limit.
So stories about families on £60k worth of benefits won't be common*. Some child poverty think tanks have pointed out that the £22k limit significantly limits the effect of the change - they're not wrong, particularly somewhere like London where the just housing element could be £30k.
*There are a number of exemptions, particularly around disability benefits, but I reckon DWP will tighten that up.
If you're explaining, you're losing. And removing the two-child limit alone is politically damaging.
Taxes are going up by £3-4 billion to pay for it, and everyone knows that money is going on extra welfare and coming from their paycheck.
I don't disagree - just pointing out that the Mail will struggle to find those households.
The other thing that's interesting is what the Conservatives do. I had a flick through affected households by council area and it's not a bad proxy for areas where Reform are doing well. That's why Farage - by far our canniest politician - has come out in favour. Whether the Conservatives follow or not will be a signal into their strategy for the next 3 years.
Kemi has been clear the Conservatives would have kept the 2 child benefit cap. Though they should also back an increase in standard child benefit for most parents while keeping the two child benefit cap for parents on universal credit
But many people on UC are actually working ... your proposal is self-contradictory to a considerable degree.
Many aren’t whereas the vast majority on standard child benefit work and a parent out of work can only claim it for 91 days while on JSA
Almost three quarters of children in poverty are in working households. This Tory division into strivers and shirkers is a fundamentally dishonest narrative.
Would that be the nonsensical measure of relative poverty, cleverly redefining the term so it will always exist?
[Got to go out now, which is a shame, because I do like a debate about this sort of thing ]
Yeah we already had an argument on this topic. Tldr; you were wrong.
Can confirm that Morris_Dancer continues to be completely wrong about whether relative poverty can be eliminated or not.
(Relative poverty is defined as having below 50%/60% of median income. You could lift everyone above the poverty line and achieve 0% poverty).
Surely you can’t, mathematically speaking?
If you lift everyone above the poverty line the median income increases and some people fall back into poverty.
It’s like the guy who runs half the distance to the finishing post each stage
*Median* income. Not mean.
How can everybody be above the median? Everybody could be at the median, but not above it.
The poverty line isn't the same as median income. It's 60% of it.
Which is a stupid definition because it means it's impossible to eliminate poverty. It should be measured on an absolute basis, a relative poverty measure is complete bullshit and it becomes a rod for our own back because it's impossible to win.
It's not impossible, an income distribution with nobody below 60% of median income is perfectly feasible.
Theoretically, you could have a society, where everyone is guaranteed at least 60% of the median income. In practice you could only achieve that by a huge degree of coercion and injustice.
I suspect the government have lit a ticking time bomb with the removal of the benefits cap.
Every time a story about a large non-working family comes out (there will be plenty), with taxpayers paying - it will be laid at their door.
They haven't removed the benefit cap (£22k); they've removed the two-child limit.
So stories about families on £60k worth of benefits won't be common*. Some child poverty think tanks have pointed out that the £22k limit significantly limits the effect of the change - they're not wrong, particularly somewhere like London where the just housing element could be £30k.
*There are a number of exemptions, particularly around disability benefits, but I reckon DWP will tighten that up.
If you're explaining, you're losing. And removing the two-child limit alone is politically damaging.
Taxes are going up by £3-4 billion to pay for it, and everyone knows that money is going on extra welfare and coming from their paycheck.
I don't disagree - just pointing out that the Mail will struggle to find those households.
The other thing that's interesting is what the Conservatives do. I had a flick through affected households by council area and it's not a bad proxy for areas where Reform are doing well. That's why Farage - by far our canniest politician - has come out in favour. Whether the Conservatives follow or not will be a signal into their strategy for the next 3 years.
Kemi has been clear the Conservatives would have kept the 2 child benefit cap. Though they should also back an increase in standard child benefit for most parents while keeping the two child benefit cap for parents on universal credit
But many people on UC are actually working ... your proposal is self-contradictory to a considerable degree.
Many aren’t whereas the vast majority on standard child benefit work and a parent out of work can only claim it for 91 days while on JSA
Almost three quarters of children in poverty are in working households. This Tory division into strivers and shirkers is a fundamentally dishonest narrative.
Would that be the nonsensical measure of relative poverty, cleverly redefining the term so it will always exist?
[Got to go out now, which is a shame, because I do like a debate about this sort of thing ]
Yeah we already had an argument on this topic. Tldr; you were wrong.
Can confirm that Morris_Dancer continues to be completely wrong about whether relative poverty can be eliminated or not.
(Relative poverty is defined as having below 50%/60% of median income. You could lift everyone above the poverty line and achieve 0% poverty).
Surely you can’t, mathematically speaking?
If you lift everyone above the poverty line the median income increases and some people fall back into poverty.
It’s like the guy who runs half the distance to the finishing post each stage
*Median* income. Not mean.
How can everybody be above the median? Everybody could be at the median, but not above it.
The poverty line isn't the same as median income. It's 60% of it.
Which is a stupid definition because it means it's impossible to eliminate poverty. It should be measured on an absolute basis, a relative poverty measure is complete bullshit and it becomes a rod for our own back because it's impossible to win.
It's not impossible, an income distribution with nobody below 60% of median income is perfectly feasible.
And probably desirable given that, on the whole, more equitable societies tend to be happier societies. The trick is to find the point at which there is sufficient income distribution to incentivise people but not to leave any people at a serious disadvantage.
I suspect the government have lit a ticking time bomb with the removal of the benefits cap.
Every time a story about a large non-working family comes out (there will be plenty), with taxpayers paying - it will be laid at their door.
They haven't removed the benefit cap (£22k); they've removed the two-child limit.
So stories about families on £60k worth of benefits won't be common*. Some child poverty think tanks have pointed out that the £22k limit significantly limits the effect of the change - they're not wrong, particularly somewhere like London where the just housing element could be £30k.
*There are a number of exemptions, particularly around disability benefits, but I reckon DWP will tighten that up.
If you're explaining, you're losing. And removing the two-child limit alone is politically damaging.
Taxes are going up by £3-4 billion to pay for it, and everyone knows that money is going on extra welfare and coming from their paycheck.
I don't disagree - just pointing out that the Mail will struggle to find those households.
The other thing that's interesting is what the Conservatives do. I had a flick through affected households by council area and it's not a bad proxy for areas where Reform are doing well. That's why Farage - by far our canniest politician - has come out in favour. Whether the Conservatives follow or not will be a signal into their strategy for the next 3 years.
Kemi has been clear the Conservatives would have kept the 2 child benefit cap. Though they should also back an increase in standard child benefit for most parents while keeping the two child benefit cap for parents on universal credit
But many people on UC are actually working ... your proposal is self-contradictory to a considerable degree.
Many aren’t whereas the vast majority on standard child benefit work and a parent out of work can only claim it for 91 days while on JSA
Almost three quarters of children in poverty are in working households. This Tory division into strivers and shirkers is a fundamentally dishonest narrative.
Would that be the nonsensical measure of relative poverty, cleverly redefining the term so it will always exist?
[Got to go out now, which is a shame, because I do like a debate about this sort of thing ]
Yeah we already had an argument on this topic. Tldr; you were wrong.
Can confirm that Morris_Dancer continues to be completely wrong about whether relative poverty can be eliminated or not.
(Relative poverty is defined as having below 50%/60% of median income. You could lift everyone above the poverty line and achieve 0% poverty).
Surely you can’t, mathematically speaking?
If you lift everyone above the poverty line the median income increases and some people fall back into poverty.
It’s like the guy who runs half the distance to the finishing post each stage
*Median* income. Not mean.
How can everybody be above the median? Everybody could be at the median, but not above it.
The poverty line isn't the same as median income. It's 60% of it.
Which is a stupid definition because it means it's impossible to eliminate poverty. It should be measured on an absolute basis, a relative poverty measure is complete bullshit and it becomes a rod for our own back because it's impossible to win.
It's not impossible, an income distribution with nobody below 60% of median income is perfectly feasible.
Weird how many people can't grasp this - and from posters who are usually pretty good at the numbers.
I suspect the government have lit a ticking time bomb with the removal of the benefits cap.
Every time a story about a large non-working family comes out (there will be plenty), with taxpayers paying - it will be laid at their door.
They haven't removed the benefit cap (£22k); they've removed the two-child limit.
So stories about families on £60k worth of benefits won't be common*. Some child poverty think tanks have pointed out that the £22k limit significantly limits the effect of the change - they're not wrong, particularly somewhere like London where the just housing element could be £30k.
*There are a number of exemptions, particularly around disability benefits, but I reckon DWP will tighten that up.
If you're explaining, you're losing. And removing the two-child limit alone is politically damaging.
Taxes are going up by £3-4 billion to pay for it, and everyone knows that money is going on extra welfare and coming from their paycheck.
I don't disagree - just pointing out that the Mail will struggle to find those households.
The other thing that's interesting is what the Conservatives do. I had a flick through affected households by council area and it's not a bad proxy for areas where Reform are doing well. That's why Farage - by far our canniest politician - has come out in favour. Whether the Conservatives follow or not will be a signal into their strategy for the next 3 years.
Kemi has been clear the Conservatives would have kept the 2 child benefit cap. Though they should also back an increase in standard child benefit for most parents while keeping the two child benefit cap for parents on universal credit
But many people on UC are actually working ... your proposal is self-contradictory to a considerable degree.
Many aren’t whereas the vast majority on standard child benefit work and a parent out of work can only claim it for 91 days while on JSA
Almost three quarters of children in poverty are in working households. This Tory division into strivers and shirkers is a fundamentally dishonest narrative.
Would that be the nonsensical measure of relative poverty, cleverly redefining the term so it will always exist?
[Got to go out now, which is a shame, because I do like a debate about this sort of thing ]
Yeah we already had an argument on this topic. Tldr; you were wrong.
Can confirm that Morris_Dancer continues to be completely wrong about whether relative poverty can be eliminated or not.
(Relative poverty is defined as having below 50%/60% of median income. You could lift everyone above the poverty line and achieve 0% poverty).
Surely you can’t, mathematically speaking?
If you lift everyone above the poverty line the median income increases and some people fall back into poverty.
It’s like the guy who runs half the distance to the finishing post each stage
*Median* income. Not mean.
How can everybody be above the median? Everybody could be at the median, but not above it.
The poverty line isn't the same as median income. It's 60% of it.
Which is a stupid definition because it means it's impossible to eliminate poverty. It should be measured on an absolute basis, a relative poverty measure is complete bullshit and it becomes a rod for our own back because it's impossible to win.
It's not impossible, an income distribution with nobody below 60% of median income is perfectly feasible.
Theoretically, you could have a society, where everyone is guaranteed at least 60% of the median income. In practice you could only achieve that by a huge degree of coercion and injustice.
I would arguewe are no stranger to injustice in this country already, when children are going to bed hungry.
I suspect the government have lit a ticking time bomb with the removal of the benefits cap.
Every time a story about a large non-working family comes out (there will be plenty), with taxpayers paying - it will be laid at their door.
They haven't removed the benefit cap (£22k); they've removed the two-child limit.
So stories about families on £60k worth of benefits won't be common*. Some child poverty think tanks have pointed out that the £22k limit significantly limits the effect of the change - they're not wrong, particularly somewhere like London where the just housing element could be £30k.
*There are a number of exemptions, particularly around disability benefits, but I reckon DWP will tighten that up.
If you're explaining, you're losing. And removing the two-child limit alone is politically damaging.
Taxes are going up by £3-4 billion to pay for it, and everyone knows that money is going on extra welfare and coming from their paycheck.
I don't disagree - just pointing out that the Mail will struggle to find those households.
The other thing that's interesting is what the Conservatives do. I had a flick through affected households by council area and it's not a bad proxy for areas where Reform are doing well. That's why Farage - by far our canniest politician - has come out in favour. Whether the Conservatives follow or not will be a signal into their strategy for the next 3 years.
Kemi has been clear the Conservatives would have kept the 2 child benefit cap. Though they should also back an increase in standard child benefit for most parents while keeping the two child benefit cap for parents on universal credit
But many people on UC are actually working ... your proposal is self-contradictory to a considerable degree.
Many aren’t whereas the vast majority on standard child benefit work and a parent out of work can only claim it for 91 days while on JSA
Almost three quarters of children in poverty are in working households. This Tory division into strivers and shirkers is a fundamentally dishonest narrative.
Would that be the nonsensical measure of relative poverty, cleverly redefining the term so it will always exist?
[Got to go out now, which is a shame, because I do like a debate about this sort of thing ]
Yeah we already had an argument on this topic. Tldr; you were wrong.
Can confirm that Morris_Dancer continues to be completely wrong about whether relative poverty can be eliminated or not.
(Relative poverty is defined as having below 50%/60% of median income. You could lift everyone above the poverty line and achieve 0% poverty).
Surely you can’t, mathematically speaking?
If you lift everyone above the poverty line the median income increases and some people fall back into poverty.
It’s like the guy who runs half the distance to the finishing post each stage
*Median* income. Not mean.
How can everybody be above the median? Everybody could be at the median, but not above it.
The poverty line isn't the same as median income. It's 60% of it.
Which is a stupid definition because it means it's impossible to eliminate poverty. It should be measured on an absolute basis, a relative poverty measure is complete bullshit and it becomes a rod for our own back because it's impossible to win.
It's not impossible, an income distribution with nobody below 60% of median income is perfectly feasible.
Theoretically, you could have a society, where everyone is guaranteed at least 60% of the median income. In practice you could only achieve that by a huge degree of coercion and injustice.
Denmark/Finland had got it down to 6% below 50% median income without too much in the way of coercion and injustice (actually two of the happiest countries on earth).
I think that's a reasonable target, and would mean us halving the number if people in poverty.
I suspect the government have lit a ticking time bomb with the removal of the benefits cap.
Every time a story about a large non-working family comes out (there will be plenty), with taxpayers paying - it will be laid at their door.
They haven't removed the benefit cap (£22k); they've removed the two-child limit.
So stories about families on £60k worth of benefits won't be common*. Some child poverty think tanks have pointed out that the £22k limit significantly limits the effect of the change - they're not wrong, particularly somewhere like London where the just housing element could be £30k.
*There are a number of exemptions, particularly around disability benefits, but I reckon DWP will tighten that up.
If you're explaining, you're losing. And removing the two-child limit alone is politically damaging.
Taxes are going up by £3-4 billion to pay for it, and everyone knows that money is going on extra welfare and coming from their paycheck.
I don't disagree - just pointing out that the Mail will struggle to find those households.
The other thing that's interesting is what the Conservatives do. I had a flick through affected households by council area and it's not a bad proxy for areas where Reform are doing well. That's why Farage - by far our canniest politician - has come out in favour. Whether the Conservatives follow or not will be a signal into their strategy for the next 3 years.
Kemi has been clear the Conservatives would have kept the 2 child benefit cap. Though they should also back an increase in standard child benefit for most parents while keeping the two child benefit cap for parents on universal credit
But many people on UC are actually working ... your proposal is self-contradictory to a considerable degree.
Many aren’t whereas the vast majority on standard child benefit work and a parent out of work can only claim it for 91 days while on JSA
Almost three quarters of children in poverty are in working households. This Tory division into strivers and shirkers is a fundamentally dishonest narrative.
Would that be the nonsensical measure of relative poverty, cleverly redefining the term so it will always exist?
[Got to go out now, which is a shame, because I do like a debate about this sort of thing ]
Yeah we already had an argument on this topic. Tldr; you were wrong.
Can confirm that Morris_Dancer continues to be completely wrong about whether relative poverty can be eliminated or not.
(Relative poverty is defined as having below 50%/60% of median income. You could lift everyone above the poverty line and achieve 0% poverty).
Surely you can’t, mathematically speaking?
If you lift everyone above the poverty line the median income increases and some people fall back into poverty.
It’s like the guy who runs half the distance to the finishing post each stage
*Median* income. Not mean.
How can everybody be above the median? Everybody could be at the median, but not above it.
The poverty line isn't the same as median income. It's 60% of it.
Which is a stupid definition because it means it's impossible to eliminate poverty. It should be measured on an absolute basis, a relative poverty measure is complete bullshit and it becomes a rod for our own back because it's impossible to win.
It's not impossible, an income distribution with nobody below 60% of median income is perfectly feasible.
It's not feasible at all. It would require huge redistribution to the extent that even the Soviet Union would blush.
I suspect the government have lit a ticking time bomb with the removal of the benefits cap.
Every time a story about a large non-working family comes out (there will be plenty), with taxpayers paying - it will be laid at their door.
They haven't removed the benefit cap (£22k); they've removed the two-child limit.
So stories about families on £60k worth of benefits won't be common*. Some child poverty think tanks have pointed out that the £22k limit significantly limits the effect of the change - they're not wrong, particularly somewhere like London where the just housing element could be £30k.
*There are a number of exemptions, particularly around disability benefits, but I reckon DWP will tighten that up.
If you're explaining, you're losing. And removing the two-child limit alone is politically damaging.
Taxes are going up by £3-4 billion to pay for it, and everyone knows that money is going on extra welfare and coming from their paycheck.
I don't disagree - just pointing out that the Mail will struggle to find those households.
The other thing that's interesting is what the Conservatives do. I had a flick through affected households by council area and it's not a bad proxy for areas where Reform are doing well. That's why Farage - by far our canniest politician - has come out in favour. Whether the Conservatives follow or not will be a signal into their strategy for the next 3 years.
Kemi has been clear the Conservatives would have kept the 2 child benefit cap. Though they should also back an increase in standard child benefit for most parents while keeping the two child benefit cap for parents on universal credit
But many people on UC are actually working ... your proposal is self-contradictory to a considerable degree.
Many aren’t whereas the vast majority on standard child benefit work and a parent out of work can only claim it for 91 days while on JSA
Almost three quarters of children in poverty are in working households. This Tory division into strivers and shirkers is a fundamentally dishonest narrative.
Would that be the nonsensical measure of relative poverty, cleverly redefining the term so it will always exist?
[Got to go out now, which is a shame, because I do like a debate about this sort of thing ]
Yeah we already had an argument on this topic. Tldr; you were wrong.
Can confirm that Morris_Dancer continues to be completely wrong about whether relative poverty can be eliminated or not.
(Relative poverty is defined as having below 50%/60% of median income. You could lift everyone above the poverty line and achieve 0% poverty).
Surely you can’t, mathematically speaking?
If you lift everyone above the poverty line the median income increases and some people fall back into poverty.
It’s like the guy who runs half the distance to the finishing post each stage
*Median* income. Not mean.
How can everybody be above the median? Everybody could be at the median, but not above it.
The poverty line isn't the same as median income. It's 60% of it.
Which is a stupid definition because it means it's impossible to eliminate poverty. It should be measured on an absolute basis, a relative poverty measure is complete bullshit and it becomes a rod for our own back because it's impossible to win.
So sure there would be no '1925-level absolute poverty' but there would still be a problem, just not one we were measuring.
(*Actually, there would probably still be some people who were unable to access welfare benefits because of their mental state, immigration status, or some bureaucratic cock-up.)
Another government service given over to a private monopoly that cannot be removed & has no inventive to serve it’s users in a timely or reasonable fashion whatsoever inevitably turns into an engine of misery and fury for everyone involved. Accountability is no where to be found, neither in the private company running the service, nor the NHS management.
It’s entirely plausible that NHS management were forced to privatise this service by past UK governments, in the vague hope that “savings” would result. Ever since, everyone involved has had a huge incentive to turn a blind eye to the actual experience of their end-users. Those who could afford to do so simply opt out of the service as far as possible, whilst those who can’t end up back in hospital & so no longer need to be serviced.
It’s this kind of thing that generates so much combined anger & depression amongst the electorate - it demonstrates that the government simply doesn’t care about the experiences of people on the receiving end, who are forced to endure whatever limited service the system can be bothered to give them. Money alone can’t solve this - indeed, throwing more money into this system will probably make it worse, as Blair discovered when he tried to “fix” the NHS the first time around.
From the synopsis: “This book explores for the first time how the 'governing science' in Leninist and neoliberal revolutions fails for many of the same reasons. These systems may have been utterly opposed in their political values, but Abby Innes argues that when we grasp the kinship in their closed-system forms of economic reasoning and their strategies for government, we may better understand the causes of state failure in what remains an inescapably open-system reality.”
Huh. That does match an intuition I’ve been rolling around in my head - that we’ve somehow re-implemented the systemic failures of the Soviet Union from the other end.
It seems that this failure mode might be an attractor in the space of possible governance that you have to actively resist, lest you fall into it regardless of ideology.
I think Innes is making a very specific point as part of her broader critique of neoliberalism. I don’t think we are, broadly speaking, anything like the Soviet Union. If you think we are, you don’t know the Soviet Union!
My step-mother, who lived and worked in the Soviet Union, has remarked how some aspects of the behaviour of government, in every day matters, remind her of The Good Old Days.
It’s the stupid rules, enforced with official savagery.
In medical matters, it’s going private, instead of Going On The Left (phrase meaning paying off an official or crook to get something in the USSR)
See the latest one - to fight fly tipping, local government is going through the waste to find individuals (letters and parcel packaging) and fining them. When it turns out, as it often does, that the material was collected by the binmen and entered the illegal waste industry via the council, no apologies or refunds.
Oh, yes, officious enforcement of fly-tipping. That is, indeed, clearly comparable to, say, Stalin’s deportation of half a million Chechens and Ingush in 1944, or the 680,000 executed in the Great Purge of 1937.
I suspect the government have lit a ticking time bomb with the removal of the benefits cap.
Every time a story about a large non-working family comes out (there will be plenty), with taxpayers paying - it will be laid at their door.
They haven't removed the benefit cap (£22k); they've removed the two-child limit.
So stories about families on £60k worth of benefits won't be common*. Some child poverty think tanks have pointed out that the £22k limit significantly limits the effect of the change - they're not wrong, particularly somewhere like London where the just housing element could be £30k.
*There are a number of exemptions, particularly around disability benefits, but I reckon DWP will tighten that up.
If you're explaining, you're losing. And removing the two-child limit alone is politically damaging.
Taxes are going up by £3-4 billion to pay for it, and everyone knows that money is going on extra welfare and coming from their paycheck.
I don't disagree - just pointing out that the Mail will struggle to find those households.
The other thing that's interesting is what the Conservatives do. I had a flick through affected households by council area and it's not a bad proxy for areas where Reform are doing well. That's why Farage - by far our canniest politician - has come out in favour. Whether the Conservatives follow or not will be a signal into their strategy for the next 3 years.
Kemi has been clear the Conservatives would have kept the 2 child benefit cap. Though they should also back an increase in standard child benefit for most parents while keeping the two child benefit cap for parents on universal credit
But many people on UC are actually working ... your proposal is self-contradictory to a considerable degree.
Many aren’t whereas the vast majority on standard child benefit work and a parent out of work can only claim it for 91 days while on JSA
Almost three quarters of children in poverty are in working households. This Tory division into strivers and shirkers is a fundamentally dishonest narrative.
Would that be the nonsensical measure of relative poverty, cleverly redefining the term so it will always exist?
[Got to go out now, which is a shame, because I do like a debate about this sort of thing ]
Yeah we already had an argument on this topic. Tldr; you were wrong.
Can confirm that Morris_Dancer continues to be completely wrong about whether relative poverty can be eliminated or not.
(Relative poverty is defined as having below 50%/60% of median income. You could lift everyone above the poverty line and achieve 0% poverty).
Surely you can’t, mathematically speaking?
If you lift everyone above the poverty line the median income increases and some people fall back into poverty.
It’s like the guy who runs half the distance to the finishing post each stage
*Median* income. Not mean.
How can everybody be above the median? Everybody could be at the median, but not above it.
The poverty line isn't the same as median income. It's 60% of it.
Which is a stupid definition because it means it's impossible to eliminate poverty. It should be measured on an absolute basis, a relative poverty measure is complete bullshit and it becomes a rod for our own back because it's impossible to win.
It's not impossible, an income distribution with nobody below 60% of median income is perfectly feasible.
Weird how many people can't grasp this - and from posters who are usually pretty good at the numbers.
I don't think it's a numeracy issue, it's a 'not reading the question' issue. Well at least it was in my case.
My Dad knows someone at con club who knows someone who knows for certain Lammy isn’t releasing prisoners by accident, it’s policy. They are deliberately releasing people who eat too much in order to reduce costs. Big knucklehead people with ravenous appetites. No? Then how come early escape due to paper not digital system doesn’t involve lady prisoners?
Um. When they say that x dozen have been let out early by mistake, do they actually say whether they are boys or girls? I'm not sure they do. All part of the same prison system, after all.
The ones we do hear about are the sex offenders because they are the ones the Tories and DM love. And very few of them are female.
Men make up 96% of prisoners in the U.K.
And an even higher percentage of prisoners who have committed violent offences.
Obviously something needs to be done about the shocking levels of sexism in the Legally Challenged Industry.
Absolutely. And because they are great big lumps, they are costing too much board in these state run hotels.
It’s so obvious what’s going on here, clerical errors it ain’t!
Convict more women to bring the numbers up?
Impose targets on organised crime to promote women?
The thing that strikes me looking at the graph is how similar that’s all now looking to how it went in France and Italy, historical main and winning parties obliterated by the extremes and unable to come back.
“Globalisation, the invention of social media and pre-WW3 European politics 2010-2035”.
Someone’s history PhD thesis in 2080, except nobody will be doing PhDs by then because of AI or because we’re all back living in caves.
My Dad knows someone at con club who knows someone who knows for certain Lammy isn’t releasing prisoners by accident, it’s policy. They are deliberately releasing people who eat too much in order to reduce costs. Big knucklehead people with ravenous appetites. No? Then how come early escape due to paper not digital system doesn’t involve lady prisoners?
Um. When they say that x dozen have been let out early by mistake, do they actually say whether they are boys or girls? I'm not sure they do. All part of the same prison system, after all.
The ones we do hear about are the sex offenders because they are the ones the Tories and DM love. And very few of them are female.
Men make up 96% of prisoners in the U.K.
And an even higher percentage of prisoners who have committed violent offences.
Obviously something needs to be done about the shocking levels of sexism in the Legally Challenged Industry.
"Police inquiry into Post Office and Horizon may run out of cash Officers have told victims there will have to be ‘tough decisions’ on Operation Olympos despite the number of criminal suspects doubling to eight"
There never is. The British state is like an abuser who gets away with years of abuse but is never held properly accountable: it is untrustworthy, incompetent, malicious and unwilling / incapable of change, no matter what promises it makes or how many apologies are dragged out of it. We have a Potemkin justice system. And the inquiry reports lead to little more than a lot of bad headlines for a few days but no real change.
There is absolutely no point any more to any of it.
Budget eh?
Sorry I forgot to add that to my list -
Prediction - "It turned out that there 146 senior people potentially chargeable in matters arising from the Post Office. 3 are dead. 112 have taken early retirement. The rest have been diagnosed with stress and are in the luxury sections of various in-patient facilities paid for from their Post Office packages. So it would not be in the interests of justice to pursue them further. We have charged the lady who cleans on Thursdays with misconduct in a public office."
- the final report is being “trimmed” from thousands of pages to 400. In the interests of clarity - the full report will be archived, not released - all police officers involved are dead or retired.
So why, you ask, not release everything?
Well, *after* Hillsborough, for years, people in the system lied and covered up. Some of them are still alive. Some of them are still working in government.
Many will be The Right Sort. A Safe Pair of Hands.
#NU10K
What more is there to know?
The Police f*cked up, then they lied to cover this up, the Government supported them, and various members of the great and the good tried to write reports telling us all what we knew already but were hampered by concerns that they might upset too many of those who were to blame.
Need we spend more money on this?
I would add - the culture of football hooliganism was the main cause of the disaster. No need for fences to control hooligans = no one dying at Hillsborough. People don't like it but many of the fans who were at Hillsborough were also at Heysel, and some of them were probably amongst those who contributed to 39 Juventus fans dying. Then add in the poor condition of football stadia at the time. Then add in the fact that despite the awful conditions it had safety certificates.
And then add in the police making mistakes.
Swiss cheese model of accident prevention applies.
However the cover-up and lies were atrocious, and sadly, all too many people were prepared to believe them.
People have a natural instinct to want justice for wrongs, and sometimes revenge. Sometimes its better to have truth and reconciliation.
Truth? Too nuanced and complex. What they really want is for everyone to parrot the new narrative, e.g
- every single Liverpool fan at Hillsborough was an innocent victim and a wonderful person who never did anything wrong and certainly had nothing to do with an entirely unrelated Heysel incident.
- every single police officer there was a fascist bully scum.
- every single journalist reporting on it had evil intentions.
...and so on. This is the 'stunning and brave' version of 'truth' that we all must accept without question.
That is not what we are being asked to believe.
- The authorities knew very well there was a problem with football hooliganism which is why they were under an obligation to ensure that the steps taken were effective and safe. They failed in that. - We know exactly who died at Hillsborough. Do you have evidence that any of them were at Heysel or responsible for the rioting there? - The police did not do their job as well as they should have done. Some lied. Others tried to cover up what happened. - Journalists jumped to conclusions and wrote stories they had been fed by the police without doing any checking. - It took one hell of an effort to get the truth out of the authorities. That compounded a sense of victimhood, which was entirely justified for the families of those who died. - The fact that some of those at that football match have been less than saints does not justify anything the authorities did. Nor the untrue statements they made about those present who did not die.
The existence if such alternative narratives is, in itself, a very strong justification for releasing the report in full. I don't see a good argument against that, other than a blanket wish for enforced forgetfulness. (Which is also a regrettable development in law, IMO.)
I suspect the government have lit a ticking time bomb with the removal of the benefits cap.
Every time a story about a large non-working family comes out (there will be plenty), with taxpayers paying - it will be laid at their door.
They haven't removed the benefit cap (£22k); they've removed the two-child limit.
So stories about families on £60k worth of benefits won't be common*. Some child poverty think tanks have pointed out that the £22k limit significantly limits the effect of the change - they're not wrong, particularly somewhere like London where the just housing element could be £30k.
*There are a number of exemptions, particularly around disability benefits, but I reckon DWP will tighten that up.
If you're explaining, you're losing. And removing the two-child limit alone is politically damaging.
Taxes are going up by £3-4 billion to pay for it, and everyone knows that money is going on extra welfare and coming from their paycheck.
I don't disagree - just pointing out that the Mail will struggle to find those households.
The other thing that's interesting is what the Conservatives do. I had a flick through affected households by council area and it's not a bad proxy for areas where Reform are doing well. That's why Farage - by far our canniest politician - has come out in favour. Whether the Conservatives follow or not will be a signal into their strategy for the next 3 years.
Kemi has been clear the Conservatives would have kept the 2 child benefit cap. Though they should also back an increase in standard child benefit for most parents while keeping the two child benefit cap for parents on universal credit
But many people on UC are actually working ... your proposal is self-contradictory to a considerable degree.
Many aren’t whereas the vast majority on standard child benefit work and a parent out of work can only claim it for 91 days while on JSA
Almost three quarters of children in poverty are in working households. This Tory division into strivers and shirkers is a fundamentally dishonest narrative.
Would that be the nonsensical measure of relative poverty, cleverly redefining the term so it will always exist?
[Got to go out now, which is a shame, because I do like a debate about this sort of thing ]
Yeah we already had an argument on this topic. Tldr; you were wrong.
Can confirm that Morris_Dancer continues to be completely wrong about whether relative poverty can be eliminated or not.
(Relative poverty is defined as having below 50%/60% of median income. You could lift everyone above the poverty line and achieve 0% poverty).
Surely you can’t, mathematically speaking?
If you lift everyone above the poverty line the median income increases and some people fall back into poverty.
It’s like the guy who runs half the distance to the finishing post each stage
*Median* income. Not mean.
How can everybody be above the median? Everybody could be at the median, but not above it.
The poverty line isn't the same as median income. It's 60% of it.
Which is a stupid definition because it means it's impossible to eliminate poverty. It should be measured on an absolute basis, a relative poverty measure is complete bullshit and it becomes a rod for our own back because it's impossible to win.
So sure there would be no '1925-level absolute poverty' but there would still be a problem, just not one we were measuring.
(*Actually, there would probably still be some people who were unable to access welfare benefits because of their mental state, immigration status, or some bureaucratic cock-up.)
So there should be some reasonable metric as to what is a reasonable level of income (and given housing costs that likely would be higher than it was a century ago) but inequality is not the same as that.
The problem with the percentage of median income metric is it is fundamentally flawed, as you can lower "poverty" by boosting poor people's income (great you probably think) or you can lower "poverty" by suppressing the median income. The latter is not so great.
The problem is that in too many fields the minimum wage has become a maximum wage. Get 51% of people working on minimum wage and then poverty is eliminated for anyone working full time, no matter how shoddy or poor the minimum wage is or how much that fails or succeeds at meeting living standards.
It also leads to perverse incentives on politics like enabling the poverty trap whereby people are given just enough to artificially tip them over the line, but then with draconianly high withdrawal rates on benefits meaning they can't lift themselves any further even they work overtime or get a pay rise as they won't keep any of that income.
Another government service given over to a private monopoly that cannot be removed & has no inventive to serve it’s users in a timely or reasonable fashion whatsoever inevitably turns into an engine of misery and fury for everyone involved. Accountability is no where to be found, neither in the private company running the service, nor the NHS management.
It’s entirely plausible that NHS management were forced to privatise this service by past UK governments, in the vague hope that “savings” would result. Ever since, everyone involved has had a huge incentive to turn a blind eye to the actual experience of their end-users. Those who could afford to do so simply opt out of the service as far as possible, whilst those who can’t end up back in hospital & so no longer need to be serviced.
It’s this kind of thing that generates so much combined anger & depression amongst the electorate - it demonstrates that the government simply doesn’t care about the experiences of people on the receiving end, who are forced to endure whatever limited service the system can be bothered to give them. Money alone can’t solve this - indeed, throwing more money into this system will probably make it worse, as Blair discovered when he tried to “fix” the NHS the first time around.
From the synopsis: “This book explores for the first time how the 'governing science' in Leninist and neoliberal revolutions fails for many of the same reasons. These systems may have been utterly opposed in their political values, but Abby Innes argues that when we grasp the kinship in their closed-system forms of economic reasoning and their strategies for government, we may better understand the causes of state failure in what remains an inescapably open-system reality.”
Huh. That does match an intuition I’ve been rolling around in my head - that we’ve somehow re-implemented the systemic failures of the Soviet Union from the other end.
It seems that this failure mode might be an attractor in the space of possible governance that you have to actively resist, lest you fall into it regardless of ideology.
I think Innes is making a very specific point as part of her broader critique of neoliberalism. I don’t think we are, broadly speaking, anything like the Soviet Union. If you think we are, you don’t know the Soviet Union!
My step-mother, who lived and worked in the Soviet Union, has remarked how some aspects of the behaviour of government, in every day matters, remind her of The Good Old Days.
It’s the stupid rules, enforced with official savagery.
In medical matters, it’s going private, instead of Going On The Left (phrase meaning paying off an official or crook to get something in the USSR)
See the latest one - to fight fly tipping, local government is going through the waste to find individuals (letters and parcel packaging) and fining them. When it turns out, as it often does, that the material was collected by the binmen and entered the illegal waste industry via the council, no apologies or refunds.
Oh, yes, officious enforcement of fly-tipping. That is, indeed, clearly comparable to, say, Stalin’s deportation of half a million Chechens and Ingush in 1944, or the 680,000 executed in the Great Purge of 1937.
Enforced, and unappealable petty bureaucracy was also a feature of life (and a more general one) in the Soviet Union. Particularly postwar.
Another government service given over to a private monopoly that cannot be removed & has no inventive to serve it’s users in a timely or reasonable fashion whatsoever inevitably turns into an engine of misery and fury for everyone involved. Accountability is no where to be found, neither in the private company running the service, nor the NHS management.
It’s entirely plausible that NHS management were forced to privatise this service by past UK governments, in the vague hope that “savings” would result. Ever since, everyone involved has had a huge incentive to turn a blind eye to the actual experience of their end-users. Those who could afford to do so simply opt out of the service as far as possible, whilst those who can’t end up back in hospital & so no longer need to be serviced.
It’s this kind of thing that generates so much combined anger & depression amongst the electorate - it demonstrates that the government simply doesn’t care about the experiences of people on the receiving end, who are forced to endure whatever limited service the system can be bothered to give them. Money alone can’t solve this - indeed, throwing more money into this system will probably make it worse, as Blair discovered when he tried to “fix” the NHS the first time around.
From the synopsis: “This book explores for the first time how the 'governing science' in Leninist and neoliberal revolutions fails for many of the same reasons. These systems may have been utterly opposed in their political values, but Abby Innes argues that when we grasp the kinship in their closed-system forms of economic reasoning and their strategies for government, we may better understand the causes of state failure in what remains an inescapably open-system reality.”
Huh. That does match an intuition I’ve been rolling around in my head - that we’ve somehow re-implemented the systemic failures of the Soviet Union from the other end.
It seems that this failure mode might be an attractor in the space of possible governance that you have to actively resist, lest you fall into it regardless of ideology.
I think Innes is making a very specific point as part of her broader critique of neoliberalism. I don’t think we are, broadly speaking, anything like the Soviet Union. If you think we are, you don’t know the Soviet Union!
My step-mother, who lived and worked in the Soviet Union, has remarked how some aspects of the behaviour of government, in every day matters, remind her of The Good Old Days.
It’s the stupid rules, enforced with official savagery.
In medical matters, it’s going private, instead of Going On The Left (phrase meaning paying off an official or crook to get something in the USSR)
See the latest one - to fight fly tipping, local government is going through the waste to find individuals (letters and parcel packaging) and fining them. When it turns out, as it often does, that the material was collected by the binmen and entered the illegal waste industry via the council, no apologies or refunds.
Oh, yes, officious enforcement of fly-tipping. That is, indeed, clearly comparable to, say, Stalin’s deportation of half a million Chechens and Ingush in 1944, or the 680,000 executed in the Great Purge of 1937.
For my step-mother, the reality of the USSR was the totally fucked system. It wasn't so much being randomly arrested etc - though she, and her then husband defected to get away.
Imagine that HMRC, at its worst, controlled everything and anything.
To her, the punishment of people who are plainly innocent (see the fly tipping), while the actual criminals carry on, is exactly USSR thinking.
"Hello, single-mother-on-benefits. Have a £500 fine because we, the council, accidentally got into bed with criminals. If you don't pay, you go to court."
I suspect the government have lit a ticking time bomb with the removal of the benefits cap.
Every time a story about a large non-working family comes out (there will be plenty), with taxpayers paying - it will be laid at their door.
They haven't removed the benefit cap (£22k); they've removed the two-child limit.
So stories about families on £60k worth of benefits won't be common*. Some child poverty think tanks have pointed out that the £22k limit significantly limits the effect of the change - they're not wrong, particularly somewhere like London where the just housing element could be £30k.
*There are a number of exemptions, particularly around disability benefits, but I reckon DWP will tighten that up.
If you're explaining, you're losing. And removing the two-child limit alone is politically damaging.
Taxes are going up by £3-4 billion to pay for it, and everyone knows that money is going on extra welfare and coming from their paycheck.
I don't disagree - just pointing out that the Mail will struggle to find those households.
The other thing that's interesting is what the Conservatives do. I had a flick through affected households by council area and it's not a bad proxy for areas where Reform are doing well. That's why Farage - by far our canniest politician - has come out in favour. Whether the Conservatives follow or not will be a signal into their strategy for the next 3 years.
Kemi has been clear the Conservatives would have kept the 2 child benefit cap. Though they should also back an increase in standard child benefit for most parents while keeping the two child benefit cap for parents on universal credit
But many people on UC are actually working ... your proposal is self-contradictory to a considerable degree.
Many aren’t whereas the vast majority on standard child benefit work and a parent out of work can only claim it for 91 days while on JSA
Almost three quarters of children in poverty are in working households. This Tory division into strivers and shirkers is a fundamentally dishonest narrative.
Would that be the nonsensical measure of relative poverty, cleverly redefining the term so it will always exist?
[Got to go out now, which is a shame, because I do like a debate about this sort of thing ]
Yeah we already had an argument on this topic. Tldr; you were wrong.
Can confirm that Morris_Dancer continues to be completely wrong about whether relative poverty can be eliminated or not.
(Relative poverty is defined as having below 50%/60% of median income. You could lift everyone above the poverty line and achieve 0% poverty).
Surely you can’t, mathematically speaking?
If you lift everyone above the poverty line the median income increases and some people fall back into poverty.
It’s like the guy who runs half the distance to the finishing post each stage
*Median* income. Not mean.
How can everybody be above the median? Everybody could be at the median, but not above it.
The poverty line isn't the same as median income. It's 60% of it.
Which is a stupid definition because it means it's impossible to eliminate poverty. It should be measured on an absolute basis, a relative poverty measure is complete bullshit and it becomes a rod for our own back because it's impossible to win.
Learn some maths, people. It is entirely possible to eliminate poverty when poverty is defined as 60% of median income. You just need the left hand side of your distribution to be short-tailed.
My Dad knows someone at con club who knows someone who knows for certain Lammy isn’t releasing prisoners by accident, it’s policy. They are deliberately releasing people who eat too much in order to reduce costs. Big knucklehead people with ravenous appetites. No? Then how come early escape due to paper not digital system doesn’t involve lady prisoners?
Um. When they say that x dozen have been let out early by mistake, do they actually say whether they are boys or girls? I'm not sure they do. All part of the same prison system, after all.
The ones we do hear about are the sex offenders because they are the ones the Tories and DM love. And very few of them are female.
Men make up 96% of prisoners in the U.K.
And an even higher percentage of prisoners who have committed violent offences.
Obviously something needs to be done about the shocking levels of sexism in the Legally Challenged Industry.
Absolutely. And because they are great big lumps, they are costing too much board in these state run hotels.
It’s so obvious what’s going on here, clerical errors it ain’t!
Comments
Just wait for model Y@jeremywired.bsky.social
TESLA TROUGH: Tesla sales in the EU dived again in November: down 58% in France, minus 59% in Sweden, and down 49% in Denmark. Germany recorded just 750 vehicles sold in October. BYD sold more than twice as many cars. The only exception is Norway.
https://bsky.app/profile/jeremywired.bsky.social/post/3m6yryigkpc2e
Part of it is the Royal Mail service is, generally, crap*
The other problem was that everything had to go to a massive, inefficient mail unit in Wolverhampton, be processed, and then sent out again.
So I would guess your letters would be dated the date they are generated. They are probably batch-printed not before the end of the day, processed the next day (so missing a couple of posting days already) and sent to a mail unit who fucks around with them for a week or so, before entrusting them to Royal Mail. Who probably then spend a few days sorting the big package from the Civil Service. And then put them in the delivery chain.
*Illustrated by the fact that when applying for my pension I twice sent off documents by guaranteed 24/48 hour delivery. Both missed the target delivery date by several days, and these are the ones we pay extra for.
That was a mistake. It shouldn’t have happened. It should be fixed. It should even go on his review and impact his rating and his compensation for the year.
But this is a “stern talking to by your boss@ level error not a sacking offence.
Let's catastophise and say a million very rich people leave. That will only move the median down by half a million people, and in a bit of the graph that's much flatter. Think about all the nationwide jobs with tens, or hundreds, of thousands of people doing bascially the same thing for basically the same pay everywhere.
https://x.com/Nigel_Farage/status/1995544145809785154
Whatever the OBR’s failings, they have not wilfully misled the public.
The wrong person resigned today. It should have been Rachel Reeves.
I’m now calling on Richard Hughes to release his correspondence with the Chancellor so we can see exactly what she knew.
So if you kick out the top 10% then the new median is the old 45th centile (halfway of the bottom 90%). So the median falls by £1900 and the relative poverty line by £1140
If you kick out the top 5%, it's more like a couple of hundred quid change.
You'd need a big outflux of high earners (top 10% would be huge) to make a substantial difference.
https://x.com/lauraloomer/status/1995659808205111780
Individuals in the office of US Army Secretary Dan Driscoll have been orchestrating a Coup against Secretary of War Pete Hegseth @PeteHegseth in an effort to have him removed by President Trump and replaced by Dan Driscoll.
Over the last 2 weeks, the legacy media, which is incredibly hostile to Hegseth, has been posting puff pieces about Dan Driscoll and how he is a “rising star” at the Pentagon. Sources have told me that Jake Sullivan @jakejsullivan, the former National Security Advisor of the United States under Joe Biden, is very close friends with Dan Driscoll, and they have been friends since they both attended Yale Law School. Driscoll and Vice President Vance also met at Yale Law School, which is how Driscoll was nominated as Army Secretary.
High level sources at the Pentagon have confirmed to me that Sullivan has been planting stories in support of Driscoll because Sullivan wants Hegseth removed and replaced by Driscoll. Sullivan is worried Hegseth and President Trump are going to take action against the seditious 6, the 6 Democrat lawmakers who are now facing federal inquiries and an FBI investigation after they recorded a video in November 2025 urging US military service members not to follow “unlawful” orders, a message President Trump and Pete Hegseth have called “seditious."
During WWII, due to a combination of spy craft, ULTRA and incompetence by the Germans, every single spy sent to Britain was caught.
Once captured they were used as part of the “loop” masterminded by British Intelligence. False information was fed to the Germans, checked using ULTRA signals intelligence.
The fact that these spy’s were being caught was thus one of the most vital secrets of the war. Millions of lives depended on it. Literally.
As part of this, the spies were charged and sent to court as spies. Since they were guilty and faced the hangman*, they generally turned and worked for the U.K.
Some did not and were hanged.
The trials were conducted in camera. But they had a full jury and defence council etc. People “read in” on the operations attended as witnesses to the trials.
It would have been simpler, safer and cheaper to just tell them that they would be shot out of hand if they didn’t cooperate.
They were obviously guilty.
Yet no one considered this as an option. And I am glad they did not.
*under international, agreed law, at the time, spying was a crime. The penalty of death was in the same laws. As was the requirement for a fair trial of the accused.
I don't think we want less tourists - though in individual locales such as Skye, some do.
Personally I want more tourists, for example lots more Chinese. So I would reduce tax on them, namely VAT. Then we would compete with France for tourism, and that would be some way to redress the vast BOP deficit we have with that country.
If you lift everyone above the poverty line the median income increases and some people fall back into poverty.
It’s like the guy who runs half the distance to the finishing post each stage
I can attest to the contribution to the catastrophe made by outdated stadia. I went regularly to big matches in those days. It was obvious to a blind man that many grounds were not safe. Wembley was particularly bad.
https://bsky.app/profile/nutedawn.bsky.social/post/3m6s4rxxcqc2z
Imagine that it turned out the RNLI was using spare inner tubes from Halfords as life vests for lifeboat personnel.
It’s that grade of stupid.
If you read their report - they don’t know*, but suspect this has been the case for multiple years - that budgets were being made available early, with the only security being obscurity.
*not knowing is another unforgivable piece of incompetence. Logs, for the love of Cuthulu…
ETA: Of course, income increaes at the bottom may put upwards pressure on wages at the median - increased inflation etc, demand for those jobs falls relative to the now better paid lower jobs. But that's not necessarily a given. It would be probably impossible to get everyone to 90% or more of median, 80%, maybe even 70% as the median would start to shift substantially (not mathematically, but due to realities of the job market)
The instinctive problem some have with relative poverty is the poverty part. It brings to mind beggars in Victorian England, or the third world etc. Perhaps using something like "reduced relative living standards" would be less of a trigger?
My experience with DWP is as described - letters arriving many days and sometimes a couple of weeks or more after the actual date on letter.
Like the avatar.
Is Keir Starmer a Brezhnev or a Khrushchev?
In this IAI Studio interview, political economist and LSE associate professor Abby Innes argues that Britain’s governing model has more in common with the Soviet Union than many would care to admit. Drawing on her book Late Soviet Britain, Innes explores how the UK’s embrace of managerialism and economic determinism has produced a system that promises technical neutrality but delivers ideological rigidity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb07GSYG_sY
One, as you say, is to signal disapproval- in extreme cases to punish bad actions. That is totally reasonable. See taxes on tobacco.
The other is to allow the government to pay the costs of the things we want the government to do. If I go on holiday somewhere, I will be making demands on its facilities and get rather annoyed if they aren't available.
But you can't just tax things you want less of- because what happens if you end up getting less of the things that you want less of? There was a whole episode of Yes, Prime Minister devoted to that dilemma.
What will be interesting is who replaces Richard Hughes.
Apart from not scoring the effect of Rayner's employment rights bill (because they say it has not yet been finalised), the OBR has been less than helpful to this Government.
I do wonder actually if the Government's recent concession on the unfair dismissal bit of the employment rights bill was to demonstrate to the OBR that its provisions were still a work in progress.
Truth? Too nuanced and complex. What they really want is for everyone to parrot the new narrative, e.g
- every single Liverpool fan at Hillsborough was an innocent victim and a wonderful person who never did anything wrong and certainly had nothing to do with an entirely unrelated Heysel incident.
- every single police officer there was a fascist bully scum.
- every single journalist reporting on it had evil intentions.
...and so on. This is the 'stunning and brave' version of 'truth' that we all must accept without question.
You could, for example, give the top 10% a 10% pay cut, not shift the median (I'm assuming the 10% pay cut doesn't shift any down to the previous median), reduce inequality and not change the meaning or numerical value of relative poverty.
(I'm not necessarily endorsing that as a good thing to do - and there could of course be knock on effects of that reduction - if that top 10% then left then there would be a small, direct, change in median and longer term indirect effects).
People who get hung up on the peg to median like to think about what if you doubled everyone's* incomes - now those at the relative poverty line are above the old median income! But we'd also see rampant inflation. Housing, in particular, would still be as scarce as now and would re-value according to what people can pay. After a period of readjustment - and feeling rich! - those in relative poverty would still be struggling.
*globally - if you could somehow just do it in UK then the housing point would still apply, but inflation on imported things might not be so bad in a well-functioning international market - if things in the UK got twice as expensive due to demand, people would import more to lower the prices
All organisational risks, including those relating to IT, information security and website, are discussed at Oversight Board meetings, which take place three or four times a year. At each of these meetings OBR staff present an updated risk register. These registers have consistently included risks in relation to online publication and information security, although the former has focused on the key-person risks around the external web developer, and the latter around the security of sensitive information passing between the OBR and the Treasury in the weeks and days leading up to a Budget or fiscal event. This reflects the fact that the primary concern of the OBR’s leadership has been the security of information on iterations of the forecast, or the development of government policies, over the period of several weeks in which both are finalised via a highly iterative process between the two organisations.
https://obr.uk/docs/dlm_uploads/01122025-Investigation-into-November-2025-EFO-publication-error.pdf
BIB shows the risks were known. Failing to properly investigate and fix them is a leadership problem.
It is not like the minister resigning on a point of honour, or scapegoating junior employees. There do remain wider questions, like why the OBR is outside gov.uk, whether there should have been external pen tests. and whether the government's audit agency and NCSC (National Cyber Security Centre) are fit for purpose.
Win-win, no?
‘Behind my eyes is a deep and sorry story’ — Robin Smith’s alcoholism fight
https://www.thetimes.com/article/79da204b-43af-4845-9ec2-8ca4f57608d8?shareToken=5350c4794dfa9253a3862a4434443a07
As you say, the poverty line dffers by time and place. This is why it is always a relative concept. To be poor in 21st century Britain is different from being poor in Bangladesh or in 19th century Britain. The 60% of median income measure tries to capture that truth. Now you may say that it is too crude. Personally I prefer the Joseph Rowntree approach of convening groups of normal people to decide what constitutes a minimum acceptable standard of living, and then defining the poverty line as the total cost of that. However, that approach leads to a far higher poverty line, and hence far more poor people, than the usual relative poverty approach. The latter is therefore a relatively conservative approach to measuring the number of poor people, rather than labeling people as poor when they are obviously not.
Of course you might argue that poverty is just a state of mind, as Dolly Parton does in Coat of Many Colours. There is certainly some truth in that.
Huh. That does match an intuition I’ve been rolling around in my head - that we’ve somehow re-implemented the systemic failures of the Soviet Union from the other end.
It seems that this failure mode might be an attractor in the space of possible governance that you have to actively resist, lest you fall into it regardless of ideology.
The avenue leading from the stadia to the station has obviously been designed on the same principles as the Euryalus Fortress in Syracuse.
Designed by Archimedes, some say, this funnelled potential attackers past walls from which the defenders could observe and attack them at their leisure.
If the RNLI was using cheap inner tubes as life vests, this would be *criminally* irresponsible.
As others have pointed out, the OBR dutifully filled out a risk register. The issue of security was reported to the board.
Just as how the risk function in every bank told the board in the run up to 2008 that the emperor was low on clothes.
The bank boards looked at the profits and looked at the costs of doing something. And moved on to the topic of bonuses.
They had a Process. They followed The Process. Why is that familiar?
Warne's emergence was rather a lot to do with that.
The Judge has gone to meet a greater judge of form than any of us.
RIP
What I do is to email back stating the date on which the hard copy letter was received and stating that I will therefore treat any time period as starting from the received date since if the matter was really urgent they would have emailed me or sent the letter by guaranteed next day delivery.
https://x.com/nicksortor/status/1995683777855848950
This was a *core part of their business*
I know that techie stuff is a bit boring, especially to generalist managers. But this is the life they’ve chosen.
I used to get on well with the Inland Revenue but found that when they were taken over by Customs & Excise attitudes changed and as HMRC they became very much more abrasive. As a consequence I now cooperate as little as possible.
It would also be (deadly) serious if they had no such controls in place. The act of accidentally or naively ordering crappy tubes isn't the fundamental problem here. You should never rely on a single person getting it right when it's something like this.
The ones we do hear about are the sex offenders because they are the ones the Tories and DM love. And very few of them are female.
It’s the stupid rules, enforced with official savagery.
In medical matters, it’s going private, instead of Going On The Left (phrase meaning paying off an official or crook to get something in the USSR)
See the latest one - to fight fly tipping, local government is going through the waste to find individuals (letters and parcel packaging) and fining them. When it turns out, as it often does, that the material was collected by the binmen and entered the illegal waste industry via the council, no apologies or refunds.
The budget now comes across a bit like pleasing the markets with buffer/war chest building, and that’s perfectly sensible of second year of a new change of government getting in on back of cost of living crisis. Has it not left a feeling, after some difficult economic years a corner has been turned?
Now the dust has settled, maybe we bigged up the big Kemi comeback on Budget Day. Apart from a near the knuckle personal attack on Reeves that divided people like marmite, what has Badenoch actually said on the Conservative economic policy in the last week, other than cavemen didn’t have a welfare state and they did okay didn’t they?
- The authorities knew very well there was a problem with football hooliganism which is why they were under an obligation to ensure that the steps taken were effective and safe. They failed in that.
- We know exactly who died at Hillsborough. Do you have evidence that any of them were at Heysel or responsible for the rioting there?
- The police did not do their job as well as they should have done. Some lied. Others tried to cover up what happened.
- Journalists jumped to conclusions and wrote stories they had been fed by the police without doing any checking.
- It took one hell of an effort to get the truth out of the authorities. That compounded a sense of victimhood, which was entirely justified for the families of those who died.
- The fact that some of those at that football match have been less than saints does not justify anything the authorities did. Nor the untrue statements they made about those present who did not die.
We got a letter of apology and a trivial sum in compensation in the end, but it was a dispiriting experience and has colored my attitude towards HMRC and government agencies generally.
And an even higher percentage of prisoners who have committed violent offences.
Obviously something needs to be done about the shocking levels of sexism in the Legally Challenged Industry.
https://x.com/LeftieStats/status/1995827789380157840?s=19
It’s so obvious what’s going on here, clerical errors it ain’t!
Be nice to see them fall back in the next one...
And no I don't live in an enormous building. It is just 2 rooms deep.
Stopped now.
I think that's a reasonable target, and would mean us halving the number if people in poverty.
So sure there would be no '1925-level absolute poverty' but there would still be a problem, just not one we were measuring.
(*Actually, there would probably still be some people who were unable to access welfare benefits because of their mental state, immigration status, or some bureaucratic cock-up.)
Impose targets on organised crime to promote women?
Promote crime as a career among girls in school?
Someone’s history PhD thesis in 2080, except nobody will be doing PhDs by then because of AI or because we’re all back living in caves.
I don't see a good argument against that, other than a blanket wish for enforced forgetfulness. (Which is also a regrettable development in law, IMO.)
The problem with the percentage of median income metric is it is fundamentally flawed, as you can lower "poverty" by boosting poor people's income (great you probably think) or you can lower "poverty" by suppressing the median income. The latter is not so great.
The problem is that in too many fields the minimum wage has become a maximum wage. Get 51% of people working on minimum wage and then poverty is eliminated for anyone working full time, no matter how shoddy or poor the minimum wage is or how much that fails or succeeds at meeting living standards.
It also leads to perverse incentives on politics like enabling the poverty trap whereby people are given just enough to artificially tip them over the line, but then with draconianly high withdrawal rates on benefits meaning they can't lift themselves any further even they work overtime or get a pay rise as they won't keep any of that income.
Particularly postwar.
Imagine that HMRC, at its worst, controlled everything and anything.
To her, the punishment of people who are plainly innocent (see the fly tipping), while the actual criminals carry on, is exactly USSR thinking.
"Hello, single-mother-on-benefits. Have a £500 fine because we, the council, accidentally got into bed with criminals. If you don't pay, you go to court."