Sir Keir Starmer has some really poor allies and advisers – politicalbetting.com
Sir Keir Starmer has some really poor allies and advisers – politicalbetting.com
Whenever I try and understand Sir Keir Starmer’s government I am reminded of the quote by Sir Anthony Beever about Operation Market Garden, ‘it was a bad plan right from the start and right from the top’ and this story just reinforces that belief.
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With record highs in both the UK and the US, business seems to be quite happy with the economic environment. It's only the media and politicians that seem to want to create a narrative that not all is well.
However, no sooner has Jenrick gone, that Badenoch is stating that Britain isn't broken (as reported in today's Telegraph) And she adds that 'Britains best days are ahead' - under a Labour government?
Total Badenoch love-in in today's newspapers. We'll see how long that lasts.
Britain is not broken ...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd0y723mr3eo
But that progress on waiting lists is looking sketchy, unless it speeds up - which may happen with lessons being learned to add effectiveness
The reduction from peak is 7.75 million cases to 7.3 million, which is only a little over 5%.
Extrapolate, and I don't see 15% being enough over the whole term for a clear success; I'd say it needs to be at least a 1/3 reduction in waiting lists, which would be to just under 5 million cases - just above pre-Covid level.
However, that pairing is unusual: Keir Starmer is a lawyer-turned-politician who became Labour leader and then prime minister in peacetime, whereas Bernard Montgomery was a Second World War field marshal best known for battlefield command in North Africa and northwest Europe, so they are not figures who are commonly discussed together. [en.wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keir_Starmer)
But you are wrong. Look at the turnover in Number 10 staff. At some point we have to ask if it is the manager or the players who are at fault.
When he was eccentric but not bonkers, the late Scott Adams wrote that the key job of managers was to eliminate assholes from the staff. (That and model efficient working so that everyone goes home at 5 pm. Same principle as the four day week people.) No matter how technically capable such people are, if they are assholes, they always turn out to be more trouble than they are worth.
Boris failed to do that with Dom. Keir is failing to do that, presumably with Morgan. TMay failed to do it with her gruesome twosome. Is it a personal failure by those three, or is it structural? Do Prime Ministers currently need a terrible person at the top of their staff, for reasons unclear? If it's the latter, the structure needs to be fixed.
The problem tends to be no bed capacity, the same reason that we have patients on trolleys in ED corridors and queues of ambulances that cannt unload. It all comes back to the failure of Social Care.
It is difficult at distance, I was down in Romsey last weekend to support my 90 year old Dad look after my 88 year old mum after she was discharged. They are just about coping but it is a very fragile as a situation.
Boris, TMay and co don't see / suffer as from the years of engineering that got them into that position, just someone who gets things done..
Perhaps not.
Then we can say that the game is at least afoot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fg58hVEY5Og
1 - Immigration - figures and the small boats narrative
2 - Housebuilding
3 - NHS Waiting Lists
4 - Felt-better economic position
5 - And various smaller ones
(I've probbaly missed something out).
If he has noticeably not succeeded on 2 of those, he is likely to be sunk.
If it's only 1, he has a chance, but is still vulnerable to his ineffective politics, poor comms, a lot of issues "out there", and other things.
All the foreign policy questions come under point 5.
It's a sticky wicket.
‘You won’t believe who this eighties pop star is and how she looks now’
It was Susannah Hoffs. She looks great. People age !!
The reverse being why it's so high, the coalition thinking that letting waiting times increase a few weeks with the same resources was an equilibrium position when instead it was a worsening one.
On Streeting, I think this perception comes from the fact he's an aggressive and energetic communicator. That's a big contrast with the rest of the government, but it doesn't necessarily mean he's trying to outshine Starmer. It's almost impossible not to.
Some pretty extreme police brutality last night outside the London Iranian embassy, dished out against anti ayatollah exiles. Just what is becoming of this place.
40-50% of the country would, right now, vote for Reform or the Greens. That’s not centrism
Similarly, 52% of the country voted for the extremely-non-centrist Brexit
One of the many many faults of middlebrow mediocre centrist dorks, such as those which infest PB, is to glibly presume “everyone is a boring clueless sensible centrist like me”
Weight loss jabs are 'opportunity' for @Leon, boss says
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd7z8j9j3ypo
Is this not really something for the family to consider once any children have finally been chucked out?
(In my case we finally moved my mum into my household in a "walkable to town" location when she was 75 and I was 47, but I do not have children.)
PB Lefties saying how right they are about everything has just made the site boring.
They cant even do it with a touch of humour.
"but 99% of the population is a centrist if you're the kind of person who advocates for locking COVID scientists up"
Govt has also made it easier to build granny flats through planning recently, which could be a big deal.
Probably many other things could be done also...
In order to become party leader, Starmer relied upon a faction whose extraordinary talent was its ability to comprehensively defeat the left of his party in internal party warfare. Starmer's problem is that he has relied solely upon the same faction (McSweeney, McFadden etc) to run his government. The problem is that their talent for factional warfare is their only talent.
Taking policy stances which invariably antagonise the left was and remains McSweeney's recipe for effective government. If it provides an excuse to remove the whip from MPs that rebel, so much the better. It's anything but what is needed for broad church effective government. A recipe for government by u-turn, because saner forces outside the inner sanctum cannot prevail until the damage is done.
That stance of openly seeking to antagonise left wing voters has cost Labour at least 5% in recent polling and probably a lot more if you go back further. It's evident not just from the close inverse correlation between the Greens' recent polling and that of Labour. The rot set in before the general election as those factional geniuses managed to reduce a projected Labour vote share of 45% to 34% in the space of a few weeks campaigning on an anaemic manifesto that totally misread the public's mood for real change.
It seems weird to Europeans. ( me included )
However probably about 25% of the USA was purchased from someone else.
Louisiana purchase in 1803 from France and Alaska in 1867 from Russia
The USA's last purchase was the Virgin Islands in 1917 from their old friends Denmark.
Likewise, Vance was part of the Lancet/Fauci cover-up of potential lab leak. The attempt to gaslight us all into thinking that was a “racist conspiracy theory”
He should be in a supermax jail in Nevada
"Four taken to hospital after Iranian Embassy protest"
The easiest thing psychologically (and hence politically) is to just accept that it was no one’s fault it started, blame those who were anti lockdown for making things worse and move on with your life.
The purchase seems wired to us but maybe less so to them.
- Increasing number of foreign students
- Current levels of skilled immigration
- Full staffing the NHS even if it means more immigration
- Assisted dying
- Closer ties with the EU
- The Monarchy
But not included ishttps://x.com/clashreport/status/2011842930265190720
This will stop the Ukranians from jamming them, and SpaceX are going to struggle to block them without taking out the Ukranians’ own drones heading for Moscow or an oil refinery.
Hopefully they can find a serial or batch number and trace them back to add to a blacklist.
Boris Johnson holds nothing back in attacking 'narcissistic defections and praising Kemi Badenoch [daily mail]
Any hope by the Boris disciples now in Reform of him joining them is for the birds
I feel it myself. The anger has ebbed. Not because the injustice was in fact modest, it was catastrophic and Satanic
I just can’t bear thinking about the pandemic. Worst time of my life. Move on
This isn't unique to him. Sunak's vision for the country was to possess a Green Card for somewhere else. Truss's was to destroy everything and rebuild in her image to be Ice Queen, Boris wanted to be World King but had no idea what that meant, May just wanted to make the Brexit thing work.
We haven't had a leader with a vision since Cameron. And before him Blair, Thatcher, Macmillan, Attlee. They don't come along very often.
It is not a part of the EU and there is no guarantee an independent Greenland would choose NATO either, with its ~50k residents available to the highest bidder. Which by the way in recent years has been China, when it comes to “minerals exploitation” deals (Operation Getting a Foothold).
Uncanny similarity to European energy dependency on Russia. “How could we EVER have foreseen such a problem?”. An entirely avoidable slow motion train wreck, precipitated by the complacency and arrogance of the european body politik.
The Danes should just come out and say that Greenland has been an integral part of their territory for centuries and will not be permitted independence under any circumstances. Further, autonomous governance has gone too far, as illustrated by minerals deals with China that threaten Western security, and direct control will be assumed. Job done.
All Wes Streeting's fault.
But I reserve my anger for the politicians. It's their job to get this right. Be honest - if it was Starmer rather than Johnson, Biden rather than Trump, it wouldn't be the scientists being threatened with jail.
I suppose the Starmer/Sweeting situation, rather like the Badenoch/Jenrick situation, is down to the confidence of the leader and the degree to which they are prepared to tolerate internal dissent in the name of keeping the broader coalition intact.
If a party becomes a leader cult (I said cult, it's not that early) then it's not only bad for the party, it's bad for democracy. A degree of internal dissent, argument, debate is actually no bad thing but the line from those who claim to know is the electorate prefers strong leaders and united parties - well, perhaps but again that doesn't make it right.
Given parties are, by their very nature, coalitions or even factions, the fact you can have different views is symptomatic of the reality and reflective, I'd argue, of wider opinion which is often nuanced. The ability of a party to have a debate in public about key issues isn't a sign of weakness, I'd argue, but one of strength.
Thus, we end up with democracy outside the party and totalitarianism within it and that seems unfortunately to be the response to the modern world of the 24/7 news cycle and social media where every hint of dissent becomes portrayed as a split and is played and replayed every hour on GB News or any other outlet with nothing to fill the time.
There's another truth about being in a political party - you may well end up with people with whom you agree politically but who you cannot abide personally - it happens a lot in council groups. Working with people you don't like on a personal level would be my idea of employment purgatory and I was fortunate inasmuch as in my working life I got on well with 99% of my colleagues 99% of the time (but then I'm a nice person). The other side of it is there may be people in another party who you like personally but disagree with politically. That dynamic is often the unspoken aspect of defection.
I hated the COVID lockdowns myself and knew they would be disastrous, and not necessarily stop the pandemic spreading at all, though they could have slowed it by a few days. But locking people up just because you disagree with them is wrong and a dangerous precedent anyway, no matter how satisfying. COVID measures were implemented by Parliament, with no more than the usual amount of official lying that accompanies anything the government really wants to do, and had overwhelming public support.
Indeed many wanted COVID measures to be much harsher. So in a way, we have to admire the government's restraint - unlike if the current cretins had been in charge.
I think Ted definitely had a vision which was Eurofederalism, and might have worked if it hadn't been for Cameron saving the Conservative Party from itself.
And how dare you miss out Harold (W). Harold's vision was to keep Butskellism running forever, and to my mind that was desirable and laudable.
There has been a frightening lack of insight or debate on the economic and fiscal policies, in particular, which underpin a number of the challenges we face now. All too often I fear this is because they were enabled by an unquestioning mainstream media who consistently sided with a more restrictions/more support mindset throughout the pandemic.
The current lot would have been considerably worse.
https://x.com/marlene4719/status/2012174062907204008?s=20
They should have quickly ditched the media and politics graduates for scientists with media training.
The debate is still stuck at the time of Covid.
That debate won’t move on until the key players in it have left the stage. And the current PM/Chancellor are too involved in the arguments at the time (fundamentally being on the side of spending more).
So, I don't think about it. We remember wars and forget plagues, for this reason, as a wise writer noted, quite early in the pando
https://unherd.com/2020/05/why-we-remember-wars-but-forget-plagues/
May 2020!
Let’s hope the next chapter is better, at looking forward to how government might better deal with the next massive national emergency.
Boris was keen on freedom, sure.
But the consequence of that was his failure to apply the brakes when the lights turned amber. So when they turned red a few days later (which they were always likely to) we ended up with the emergency stop of lockdowns.
Sometimes, wanting something is what stops you having it.