If anyone is baffled about why so many people are considering the Greens, look at the comments from Sarwar yesterday about cycle lanes.
Now, I understand that the motoring/pensioner segment of the population is by far the most important electorally, but there is a real sense that the other parties simply do not care about you unless you’re over 60 and live in suburbia. This is particularly the case with the Scottish Lib Dems, I’m afraid. Reform actually directly attacked my age group.
There’s a reason the SNP have a 20 point lead. A very large proportion of the Scottish population live in dense urban areas and none of the UK parties are fighting in that space.
To be honest I feel like this in London where Reform seemingly only want to attack my city as a crime hole and full of awful people.
Nobody is really aiming at people that actually work between the ages of 25 and 40. I thought Reform might actually do it but they’ve gone for the triple lock.
If Labour somehow cut my taxes by 2029 (they won’t but just pretend) they’ll have done one more thing than anyone has done for us since 2010.
It’s honestly a joke how the people actually doing the work in this country get completely ignored in basically every debate.
No, they don't. If I had a pound for every time I heard a politician say "hard working families", I'd need new pockets in twenty pairs of trousers. I do agree it's become a mantra but it's as much an idealised version of Britain as the old Tory vision of villages with Vicars cycling past the cricket green.
If you're asking about practical policy for these "hard working families", that in many ways is the core of the debate. The Conservative Party does well when it's the party of aspiration but somewhere it turned away from aspiration to those who actually voted, the welthy, the retired and the comfortable.
Blair did well because he understood that and offered the grandparents the ideal of their grandchildren having nice schools or nurseries and libraries and all the rest of it and he knew people will always vote for something which makes their children's or grandchildren's lives better.
Talking to the aspirational has almost stopped - the man or woman who has to do two jobs just to pay the rent wants a better life but is that better life simply about more money or is it about a place they can afford or just some more time to themselves to rest and relax?
Aspiration can't just be on a material basis -having more "things" isn't the be-all and end-all any longer (I think the pandemic changed a lot of perceptions) and simply cutting taxes isn't the only solution. How do you make people's lives better in ways that work for them rather than ways that get more votes for your party?
But I am aspirational and they don’t speak to me. None of them do really that’s the point.
The reason I mentioned taxes is that all it seems to me is that our taxes go up and everything is still broken. The NHS seems to be almost crumbling, litter seems to be getting worse, anti social behaviour etc.
The elderly seem to complain but seem to get a nice pension at the end of it. What exactly do we get?
I’m putting in the hard yards and I just feel like a lot of the time I’m not really included in much of the debate.
I’d be happy with taxes going up if things were actually getting better but it feels like we’re just treading water, you know?
I am trying to make this a meme: We pay more and more for less and less.
That's certainly why we're unhappy, but maybe it's inevitable. We have had several decades when the fiscal situation was temporarily easy- favourable demographics, windfalls from the North Sea. We got used to quite a lot of something for nothing.
As the loveable rogues on Hustle used to say, that tends to be followed by getting nothing for something. But absent a time machine to go back and make more prudent choices from the mid 1980s onwards, we are where we are.
What is inevitable if we pay similar each year then with our demographics our services will trend downwards at a noticeable level. There are of course alternatives where we pay significantly more and get marginally more, or where we pay less and our services decline faster and harder.
Until the voting public accept this reality we are doomed to poor quality, ineffective, short term governments whatever the colour of their rosettes.
If anyone is baffled about why so many people are considering the Greens, look at the comments from Sarwar yesterday about cycle lanes.
Now, I understand that the motoring/pensioner segment of the population is by far the most important electorally, but there is a real sense that the other parties simply do not care about you unless you’re over 60 and live in suburbia. This is particularly the case with the Scottish Lib Dems, I’m afraid. Reform actually directly attacked my age group.
There’s a reason the SNP have a 20 point lead. A very large proportion of the Scottish population live in dense urban areas and none of the UK parties are fighting in that space.
To be honest I feel like this in London where Reform seemingly only want to attack my city as a crime hole and full of awful people.
Nobody is really aiming at people that actually work between the ages of 25 and 40. I thought Reform might actually do it but they’ve gone for the triple lock.
If Labour somehow cut my taxes by 2029 (they won’t but just pretend) they’ll have done one more thing than anyone has done for us since 2010.
It’s honestly a joke how the people actually doing the work in this country get completely ignored in basically every debate.
No, they don't. If I had a pound for every time I heard a politician say "hard working families", I'd need new pockets in twenty pairs of trousers. I do agree it's become a mantra but it's as much an idealised version of Britain as the old Tory vision of villages with Vicars cycling past the cricket green.
If you're asking about practical policy for these "hard working families", that in many ways is the core of the debate. The Conservative Party does well when it's the party of aspiration but somewhere it turned away from aspiration to those who actually voted, the welthy, the retired and the comfortable.
Blair did well because he understood that and offered the grandparents the ideal of their grandchildren having nice schools or nurseries and libraries and all the rest of it and he knew people will always vote for something which makes their children's or grandchildren's lives better.
Talking to the aspirational has almost stopped - the man or woman who has to do two jobs just to pay the rent wants a better life but is that better life simply about more money or is it about a place they can afford or just some more time to themselves to rest and relax?
Aspiration can't just be on a material basis -having more "things" isn't the be-all and end-all any longer (I think the pandemic changed a lot of perceptions) and simply cutting taxes isn't the only solution. How do you make people's lives better in ways that work for them rather than ways that get more votes for your party?
But I am aspirational and they don’t speak to me. None of them do really that’s the point.
The reason I mentioned taxes is that all it seems to me is that our taxes go up and everything is still broken. The NHS seems to be almost crumbling, litter seems to be getting worse, anti social behaviour etc.
The elderly seem to complain but seem to get a nice pension at the end of it. What exactly do we get?
I’m putting in the hard yards and I just feel like a lot of the time I’m not really included in much of the debate.
I’d be happy with taxes going up if things were actually getting better but it feels like we’re just treading water, you know?
I am trying to make this a meme: We pay more and more for less and less.
That's certainly why we're unhappy, but maybe it's inevitable. We have had several decades when the fiscal situation was temporarily easy- favourable demographics, windfalls from the North Sea. We got used to quite a lot of something for nothing.
As the loveable rogues on Hustle used to say, that tends to be followed by getting nothing for something. But absent a time machine to go back and make more prudent choices from the mid 1980s onwards, we are where we are.
We are see inflation on a number of areas - not just health, but infrastructure and others. Which far out strip regular inflation.
So literally we can do less for more money.
See the number of ships at sea in the RN etc.
This isn’t about DOGE style stupid slashing of spending. It’s about restraining costs in the way that many sensible organisations manage. Shop around, get better deals, reduce specifications to match the available money.
Some parts of the U.K. state can do this. Many can’t.
Public procurement is somewhere we need to do better, for example.
If anyone is baffled about why so many people are considering the Greens, look at the comments from Sarwar yesterday about cycle lanes.
Now, I understand that the motoring/pensioner segment of the population is by far the most important electorally, but there is a real sense that the other parties simply do not care about you unless you’re over 60 and live in suburbia. This is particularly the case with the Scottish Lib Dems, I’m afraid. Reform actually directly attacked my age group.
There’s a reason the SNP have a 20 point lead. A very large proportion of the Scottish population live in dense urban areas and none of the UK parties are fighting in that space.
To be honest I feel like this in London where Reform seemingly only want to attack my city as a crime hole and full of awful people.
Nobody is really aiming at people that actually work between the ages of 25 and 40. I thought Reform might actually do it but they’ve gone for the triple lock.
If Labour somehow cut my taxes by 2029 (they won’t but just pretend) they’ll have done one more thing than anyone has done for us since 2010.
It’s honestly a joke how the people actually doing the work in this country get completely ignored in basically every debate.
No, they don't. If I had a pound for every time I heard a politician say "hard working families", I'd need new pockets in twenty pairs of trousers. I do agree it's become a mantra but it's as much an idealised version of Britain as the old Tory vision of villages with Vicars cycling past the cricket green.
If you're asking about practical policy for these "hard working families", that in many ways is the core of the debate. The Conservative Party does well when it's the party of aspiration but somewhere it turned away from aspiration to those who actually voted, the welthy, the retired and the comfortable.
Blair did well because he understood that and offered the grandparents the ideal of their grandchildren having nice schools or nurseries and libraries and all the rest of it and he knew people will always vote for something which makes their children's or grandchildren's lives better.
Talking to the aspirational has almost stopped - the man or woman who has to do two jobs just to pay the rent wants a better life but is that better life simply about more money or is it about a place they can afford or just some more time to themselves to rest and relax?
Aspiration can't just be on a material basis -having more "things" isn't the be-all and end-all any longer (I think the pandemic changed a lot of perceptions) and simply cutting taxes isn't the only solution. How do you make people's lives better in ways that work for them rather than ways that get more votes for your party?
But I am aspirational and they don’t speak to me. None of them do really that’s the point.
The reason I mentioned taxes is that all it seems to me is that our taxes go up and everything is still broken. The NHS seems to be almost crumbling, litter seems to be getting worse, anti social behaviour etc.
The elderly seem to complain but seem to get a nice pension at the end of it. What exactly do we get?
I’m putting in the hard yards and I just feel like a lot of the time I’m not really included in much of the debate.
I’d be happy with taxes going up if things were actually getting better but it feels like we’re just treading water, you know?
I am trying to make this a meme: We pay more and more for less and less.
That's certainly why we're unhappy, but maybe it's inevitable. We have had several decades when the fiscal situation was temporarily easy- favourable demographics, windfalls from the North Sea. We got used to quite a lot of something for nothing.
As the loveable rogues on Hustle used to say, that tends to be followed by getting nothing for something. But absent a time machine to go back and make more prudent choices from the mid 1980s onwards, we are where we are.
We are see inflation on a number of areas - not just health, but infrastructure and others. Which far out strip regular inflation.
So literally we can do less for more money.
See the number of ships at sea in the RN etc.
This isn’t about DOGE style stupid slashing of spending. It’s about restraining costs in the way that many sensible organisations manage. Shop around, get better deals, reduce specifications to match the available money.
Some parts of the U.K. state can do this. Many can’t.
Public procurement is somewhere we need to do better, for example.
Am I correct that police forces don’t all buy their kit from the same supplier? Surely if all police cars, uniform and so on was tendered out to a supplier who all forces then had to use they could cut costs - if you are buying a few thousand patrol cars a year you surely get a massive deal from the manufacturer and then also economies of scale on parts, specialist kit for the cars, training being the same.
If anyone is baffled about why so many people are considering the Greens, look at the comments from Sarwar yesterday about cycle lanes.
Now, I understand that the motoring/pensioner segment of the population is by far the most important electorally, but there is a real sense that the other parties simply do not care about you unless you’re over 60 and live in suburbia. This is particularly the case with the Scottish Lib Dems, I’m afraid. Reform actually directly attacked my age group.
There’s a reason the SNP have a 20 point lead. A very large proportion of the Scottish population live in dense urban areas and none of the UK parties are fighting in that space.
To be honest I feel like this in London where Reform seemingly only want to attack my city as a crime hole and full of awful people.
Nobody is really aiming at people that actually work between the ages of 25 and 40. I thought Reform might actually do it but they’ve gone for the triple lock.
If Labour somehow cut my taxes by 2029 (they won’t but just pretend) they’ll have done one more thing than anyone has done for us since 2010.
It’s honestly a joke how the people actually doing the work in this country get completely ignored in basically every debate.
No, they don't. If I had a pound for every time I heard a politician say "hard working families", I'd need new pockets in twenty pairs of trousers. I do agree it's become a mantra but it's as much an idealised version of Britain as the old Tory vision of villages with Vicars cycling past the cricket green.
If you're asking about practical policy for these "hard working families", that in many ways is the core of the debate. The Conservative Party does well when it's the party of aspiration but somewhere it turned away from aspiration to those who actually voted, the welthy, the retired and the comfortable.
Blair did well because he understood that and offered the grandparents the ideal of their grandchildren having nice schools or nurseries and libraries and all the rest of it and he knew people will always vote for something which makes their children's or grandchildren's lives better.
Talking to the aspirational has almost stopped - the man or woman who has to do two jobs just to pay the rent wants a better life but is that better life simply about more money or is it about a place they can afford or just some more time to themselves to rest and relax?
Aspiration can't just be on a material basis -having more "things" isn't the be-all and end-all any longer (I think the pandemic changed a lot of perceptions) and simply cutting taxes isn't the only solution. How do you make people's lives better in ways that work for them rather than ways that get more votes for your party?
But I am aspirational and they don’t speak to me. None of them do really that’s the point.
The reason I mentioned taxes is that all it seems to me is that our taxes go up and everything is still broken. The NHS seems to be almost crumbling, litter seems to be getting worse, anti social behaviour etc.
The elderly seem to complain but seem to get a nice pension at the end of it. What exactly do we get?
I’m putting in the hard yards and I just feel like a lot of the time I’m not really included in much of the debate.
I’d be happy with taxes going up if things were actually getting better but it feels like we’re just treading water, you know?
I am trying to make this a meme: We pay more and more for less and less.
That's certainly why we're unhappy, but maybe it's inevitable. We have had several decades when the fiscal situation was temporarily easy- favourable demographics, windfalls from the North Sea. We got used to quite a lot of something for nothing.
As the loveable rogues on Hustle used to say, that tends to be followed by getting nothing for something. But absent a time machine to go back and make more prudent choices from the mid 1980s onwards, we are where we are.
We are see inflation on a number of areas - not just health, but infrastructure and others. Which far out strip regular inflation.
So literally we can do less for more money.
See the number of ships at sea in the RN etc.
This isn’t about DOGE style stupid slashing of spending. It’s about restraining costs in the way that many sensible organisations manage. Shop around, get better deals, reduce specifications to match the available money.
Some parts of the U.K. state can do this. Many can’t.
Public procurement is somewhere we need to do better, for example.
Am I correct that police forces don’t all buy their kit from the same supplier? Surely if all police cars, uniform and so on was tendered out to a supplier who all forces then had to use they could cut costs - if you are buying a few thousand patrol cars a year you surely get a massive deal from the manufacturer and then also economies of scale on parts, specialist kit for the cars, training being the same.
If anyone is baffled about why so many people are considering the Greens, look at the comments from Sarwar yesterday about cycle lanes.
Now, I understand that the motoring/pensioner segment of the population is by far the most important electorally, but there is a real sense that the other parties simply do not care about you unless you’re over 60 and live in suburbia. This is particularly the case with the Scottish Lib Dems, I’m afraid. Reform actually directly attacked my age group.
There’s a reason the SNP have a 20 point lead. A very large proportion of the Scottish population live in dense urban areas and none of the UK parties are fighting in that space.
To be honest I feel like this in London where Reform seemingly only want to attack my city as a crime hole and full of awful people.
Nobody is really aiming at people that actually work between the ages of 25 and 40. I thought Reform might actually do it but they’ve gone for the triple lock.
If Labour somehow cut my taxes by 2029 (they won’t but just pretend) they’ll have done one more thing than anyone has done for us since 2010.
It’s honestly a joke how the people actually doing the work in this country get completely ignored in basically every debate.
No, they don't. If I had a pound for every time I heard a politician say "hard working families", I'd need new pockets in twenty pairs of trousers. I do agree it's become a mantra but it's as much an idealised version of Britain as the old Tory vision of villages with Vicars cycling past the cricket green.
If you're asking about practical policy for these "hard working families", that in many ways is the core of the debate. The Conservative Party does well when it's the party of aspiration but somewhere it turned away from aspiration to those who actually voted, the welthy, the retired and the comfortable.
Blair did well because he understood that and offered the grandparents the ideal of their grandchildren having nice schools or nurseries and libraries and all the rest of it and he knew people will always vote for something which makes their children's or grandchildren's lives better.
Talking to the aspirational has almost stopped - the man or woman who has to do two jobs just to pay the rent wants a better life but is that better life simply about more money or is it about a place they can afford or just some more time to themselves to rest and relax?
Aspiration can't just be on a material basis -having more "things" isn't the be-all and end-all any longer (I think the pandemic changed a lot of perceptions) and simply cutting taxes isn't the only solution. How do you make people's lives better in ways that work for them rather than ways that get more votes for your party?
But I am aspirational and they don’t speak to me. None of them do really that’s the point.
The reason I mentioned taxes is that all it seems to me is that our taxes go up and everything is still broken. The NHS seems to be almost crumbling, litter seems to be getting worse, anti social behaviour etc.
The elderly seem to complain but seem to get a nice pension at the end of it. What exactly do we get?
I’m putting in the hard yards and I just feel like a lot of the time I’m not really included in much of the debate.
I’d be happy with taxes going up if things were actually getting better but it feels like we’re just treading water, you know?
I am trying to make this a meme: We pay more and more for less and less.
That's certainly why we're unhappy, but maybe it's inevitable. We have had several decades when the fiscal situation was temporarily easy- favourable demographics, windfalls from the North Sea. We got used to quite a lot of something for nothing.
As the loveable rogues on Hustle used to say, that tends to be followed by getting nothing for something. But absent a time machine to go back and make more prudent choices from the mid 1980s onwards, we are where we are.
We are see inflation on a number of areas - not just health, but infrastructure and others. Which far out strip regular inflation.
So literally we can do less for more money.
See the number of ships at sea in the RN etc.
This isn’t about DOGE style stupid slashing of spending. It’s about restraining costs in the way that many sensible organisations manage. Shop around, get better deals, reduce specifications to match the available money.
Some parts of the U.K. state can do this. Many can’t.
Public procurement is somewhere we need to do better, for example.
But that sounds a little bit like the New Managerialism beloved of New Labour, which often produced failures. We do need to restrain cost, but equally presuming you can do that in the same way private companies can can be an error. Shopping around for better deals usually means the contract gets awarded to one of an oligopoly of suppliers, who are leading experts on how to write tenders. Sometimes it’s better to do things in house.
If anyone is baffled about why so many people are considering the Greens, look at the comments from Sarwar yesterday about cycle lanes.
Now, I understand that the motoring/pensioner segment of the population is by far the most important electorally, but there is a real sense that the other parties simply do not care about you unless you’re over 60 and live in suburbia. This is particularly the case with the Scottish Lib Dems, I’m afraid. Reform actually directly attacked my age group.
There’s a reason the SNP have a 20 point lead. A very large proportion of the Scottish population live in dense urban areas and none of the UK parties are fighting in that space.
To be honest I feel like this in London where Reform seemingly only want to attack my city as a crime hole and full of awful people.
Nobody is really aiming at people that actually work between the ages of 25 and 40. I thought Reform might actually do it but they’ve gone for the triple lock.
If Labour somehow cut my taxes by 2029 (they won’t but just pretend) they’ll have done one more thing than anyone has done for us since 2010.
It’s honestly a joke how the people actually doing the work in this country get completely ignored in basically every debate.
No, they don't. If I had a pound for every time I heard a politician say "hard working families", I'd need new pockets in twenty pairs of trousers. I do agree it's become a mantra but it's as much an idealised version of Britain as the old Tory vision of villages with Vicars cycling past the cricket green.
If you're asking about practical policy for these "hard working families", that in many ways is the core of the debate. The Conservative Party does well when it's the party of aspiration but somewhere it turned away from aspiration to those who actually voted, the welthy, the retired and the comfortable.
Blair did well because he understood that and offered the grandparents the ideal of their grandchildren having nice schools or nurseries and libraries and all the rest of it and he knew people will always vote for something which makes their children's or grandchildren's lives better.
Talking to the aspirational has almost stopped - the man or woman who has to do two jobs just to pay the rent wants a better life but is that better life simply about more money or is it about a place they can afford or just some more time to themselves to rest and relax?
Aspiration can't just be on a material basis -having more "things" isn't the be-all and end-all any longer (I think the pandemic changed a lot of perceptions) and simply cutting taxes isn't the only solution. How do you make people's lives better in ways that work for them rather than ways that get more votes for your party?
But I am aspirational and they don’t speak to me. None of them do really that’s the point.
The reason I mentioned taxes is that all it seems to me is that our taxes go up and everything is still broken. The NHS seems to be almost crumbling, litter seems to be getting worse, anti social behaviour etc.
The elderly seem to complain but seem to get a nice pension at the end of it. What exactly do we get?
I’m putting in the hard yards and I just feel like a lot of the time I’m not really included in much of the debate.
I’d be happy with taxes going up if things were actually getting better but it feels like we’re just treading water, you know?
I am trying to make this a meme: We pay more and more for less and less.
That's certainly why we're unhappy, but maybe it's inevitable. We have had several decades when the fiscal situation was temporarily easy- favourable demographics, windfalls from the North Sea. We got used to quite a lot of something for nothing.
As the loveable rogues on Hustle used to say, that tends to be followed by getting nothing for something. But absent a time machine to go back and make more prudent choices from the mid 1980s onwards, we are where we are.
We are see inflation on a number of areas - not just health, but infrastructure and others. Which far out strip regular inflation.
So literally we can do less for more money.
See the number of ships at sea in the RN etc.
This isn’t about DOGE style stupid slashing of spending. It’s about restraining costs in the way that many sensible organisations manage. Shop around, get better deals, reduce specifications to match the available money.
Some parts of the U.K. state can do this. Many can’t.
Public procurement is somewhere we need to do better, for example.
Am I correct that police forces don’t all buy their kit from the same supplier? Surely if all police cars, uniform and so on was tendered out to a supplier who all forces then had to use they could cut costs - if you are buying a few thousand patrol cars a year you surely get a massive deal from the manufacturer and then also economies of scale on parts, specialist kit for the cars, training being the same.
That’s a seductive idea.
However, in practise, what happened (often) is that a National Deal is negotiated.
That’s locks in a price and specific piece of equipment for years.
I’ve seen this end up as a disaster in private and public procurement. In one private one, a company got locked into using a very expensive piece of software, worldwide. For five years. It’s didn’t work, basically.
This is why we need better professionals to manage such procurement - avoid lock-ins and inflexibility, while negotiating a balance between cost and quality.
If anyone is baffled about why so many people are considering the Greens, look at the comments from Sarwar yesterday about cycle lanes.
Now, I understand that the motoring/pensioner segment of the population is by far the most important electorally, but there is a real sense that the other parties simply do not care about you unless you’re over 60 and live in suburbia. This is particularly the case with the Scottish Lib Dems, I’m afraid. Reform actually directly attacked my age group.
There’s a reason the SNP have a 20 point lead. A very large proportion of the Scottish population live in dense urban areas and none of the UK parties are fighting in that space.
To be honest I feel like this in London where Reform seemingly only want to attack my city as a crime hole and full of awful people.
Nobody is really aiming at people that actually work between the ages of 25 and 40. I thought Reform might actually do it but they’ve gone for the triple lock.
If Labour somehow cut my taxes by 2029 (they won’t but just pretend) they’ll have done one more thing than anyone has done for us since 2010.
It’s honestly a joke how the people actually doing the work in this country get completely ignored in basically every debate.
No, they don't. If I had a pound for every time I heard a politician say "hard working families", I'd need new pockets in twenty pairs of trousers. I do agree it's become a mantra but it's as much an idealised version of Britain as the old Tory vision of villages with Vicars cycling past the cricket green.
If you're asking about practical policy for these "hard working families", that in many ways is the core of the debate. The Conservative Party does well when it's the party of aspiration but somewhere it turned away from aspiration to those who actually voted, the welthy, the retired and the comfortable.
Blair did well because he understood that and offered the grandparents the ideal of their grandchildren having nice schools or nurseries and libraries and all the rest of it and he knew people will always vote for something which makes their children's or grandchildren's lives better.
Talking to the aspirational has almost stopped - the man or woman who has to do two jobs just to pay the rent wants a better life but is that better life simply about more money or is it about a place they can afford or just some more time to themselves to rest and relax?
Aspiration can't just be on a material basis -having more "things" isn't the be-all and end-all any longer (I think the pandemic changed a lot of perceptions) and simply cutting taxes isn't the only solution. How do you make people's lives better in ways that work for them rather than ways that get more votes for your party?
But I am aspirational and they don’t speak to me. None of them do really that’s the point.
The reason I mentioned taxes is that all it seems to me is that our taxes go up and everything is still broken. The NHS seems to be almost crumbling, litter seems to be getting worse, anti social behaviour etc.
The elderly seem to complain but seem to get a nice pension at the end of it. What exactly do we get?
I’m putting in the hard yards and I just feel like a lot of the time I’m not really included in much of the debate.
I’d be happy with taxes going up if things were actually getting better but it feels like we’re just treading water, you know?
I am trying to make this a meme: We pay more and more for less and less.
That's certainly why we're unhappy, but maybe it's inevitable. We have had several decades when the fiscal situation was temporarily easy- favourable demographics, windfalls from the North Sea. We got used to quite a lot of something for nothing.
As the loveable rogues on Hustle used to say, that tends to be followed by getting nothing for something. But absent a time machine to go back and make more prudent choices from the mid 1980s onwards, we are where we are.
We are see inflation on a number of areas - not just health, but infrastructure and others. Which far out strip regular inflation.
So literally we can do less for more money.
See the number of ships at sea in the RN etc.
This isn’t about DOGE style stupid slashing of spending. It’s about restraining costs in the way that many sensible organisations manage. Shop around, get better deals, reduce specifications to match the available money.
Some parts of the U.K. state can do this. Many can’t.
Public procurement is somewhere we need to do better, for example.
Am I correct that police forces don’t all buy their kit from the same supplier? Surely if all police cars, uniform and so on was tendered out to a supplier who all forces then had to use they could cut costs - if you are buying a few thousand patrol cars a year you surely get a massive deal from the manufacturer and then also economies of scale on parts, specialist kit for the cars, training being the same.
You’re correct, same with Nurses uniforms.
Although certain ‘enthusiast’ websites sell versions of these uniforms for people with repressions.
If anyone is baffled about why so many people are considering the Greens, look at the comments from Sarwar yesterday about cycle lanes.
Now, I understand that the motoring/pensioner segment of the population is by far the most important electorally, but there is a real sense that the other parties simply do not care about you unless you’re over 60 and live in suburbia. This is particularly the case with the Scottish Lib Dems, I’m afraid. Reform actually directly attacked my age group.
There’s a reason the SNP have a 20 point lead. A very large proportion of the Scottish population live in dense urban areas and none of the UK parties are fighting in that space.
To be honest I feel like this in London where Reform seemingly only want to attack my city as a crime hole and full of awful people.
Nobody is really aiming at people that actually work between the ages of 25 and 40. I thought Reform might actually do it but they’ve gone for the triple lock.
If Labour somehow cut my taxes by 2029 (they won’t but just pretend) they’ll have done one more thing than anyone has done for us since 2010.
It’s honestly a joke how the people actually doing the work in this country get completely ignored in basically every debate.
No, they don't. If I had a pound for every time I heard a politician say "hard working families", I'd need new pockets in twenty pairs of trousers. I do agree it's become a mantra but it's as much an idealised version of Britain as the old Tory vision of villages with Vicars cycling past the cricket green.
If you're asking about practical policy for these "hard working families", that in many ways is the core of the debate. The Conservative Party does well when it's the party of aspiration but somewhere it turned away from aspiration to those who actually voted, the welthy, the retired and the comfortable.
Blair did well because he understood that and offered the grandparents the ideal of their grandchildren having nice schools or nurseries and libraries and all the rest of it and he knew people will always vote for something which makes their children's or grandchildren's lives better.
Talking to the aspirational has almost stopped - the man or woman who has to do two jobs just to pay the rent wants a better life but is that better life simply about more money or is it about a place they can afford or just some more time to themselves to rest and relax?
Aspiration can't just be on a material basis -having more "things" isn't the be-all and end-all any longer (I think the pandemic changed a lot of perceptions) and simply cutting taxes isn't the only solution. How do you make people's lives better in ways that work for them rather than ways that get more votes for your party?
But I am aspirational and they don’t speak to me. None of them do really that’s the point.
The reason I mentioned taxes is that all it seems to me is that our taxes go up and everything is still broken. The NHS seems to be almost crumbling, litter seems to be getting worse, anti social behaviour etc.
The elderly seem to complain but seem to get a nice pension at the end of it. What exactly do we get?
I’m putting in the hard yards and I just feel like a lot of the time I’m not really included in much of the debate.
I’d be happy with taxes going up if things were actually getting better but it feels like we’re just treading water, you know?
I am trying to make this a meme: We pay more and more for less and less.
That's certainly why we're unhappy, but maybe it's inevitable. We have had several decades when the fiscal situation was temporarily easy- favourable demographics, windfalls from the North Sea. We got used to quite a lot of something for nothing.
As the loveable rogues on Hustle used to say, that tends to be followed by getting nothing for something. But absent a time machine to go back and make more prudent choices from the mid 1980s onwards, we are where we are.
We are see inflation on a number of areas - not just health, but infrastructure and others. Which far out strip regular inflation.
So literally we can do less for more money.
See the number of ships at sea in the RN etc.
This isn’t about DOGE style stupid slashing of spending. It’s about restraining costs in the way that many sensible organisations manage. Shop around, get better deals, reduce specifications to match the available money.
Some parts of the U.K. state can do this. Many can’t.
Public procurement is somewhere we need to do better, for example.
Am I correct that police forces don’t all buy their kit from the same supplier? Surely if all police cars, uniform and so on was tendered out to a supplier who all forces then had to use they could cut costs - if you are buying a few thousand patrol cars a year you surely get a massive deal from the manufacturer and then also economies of scale on parts, specialist kit for the cars, training being the same.
You’re correct, same with Nurses uniforms.
No, you want competition between suppliers rather than one monopoly and the others out of business. It simply is not nessecary for all hospitals to have identical uniforms.
Defining certain national specifications, then an open market to whoever can meet those criteria.
If anyone is baffled about why so many people are considering the Greens, look at the comments from Sarwar yesterday about cycle lanes.
Now, I understand that the motoring/pensioner segment of the population is by far the most important electorally, but there is a real sense that the other parties simply do not care about you unless you’re over 60 and live in suburbia. This is particularly the case with the Scottish Lib Dems, I’m afraid. Reform actually directly attacked my age group.
There’s a reason the SNP have a 20 point lead. A very large proportion of the Scottish population live in dense urban areas and none of the UK parties are fighting in that space.
To be honest I feel like this in London where Reform seemingly only want to attack my city as a crime hole and full of awful people.
Nobody is really aiming at people that actually work between the ages of 25 and 40. I thought Reform might actually do it but they’ve gone for the triple lock.
If Labour somehow cut my taxes by 2029 (they won’t but just pretend) they’ll have done one more thing than anyone has done for us since 2010.
It’s honestly a joke how the people actually doing the work in this country get completely ignored in basically every debate.
No, they don't. If I had a pound for every time I heard a politician say "hard working families", I'd need new pockets in twenty pairs of trousers. I do agree it's become a mantra but it's as much an idealised version of Britain as the old Tory vision of villages with Vicars cycling past the cricket green.
If you're asking about practical policy for these "hard working families", that in many ways is the core of the debate. The Conservative Party does well when it's the party of aspiration but somewhere it turned away from aspiration to those who actually voted, the welthy, the retired and the comfortable.
Blair did well because he understood that and offered the grandparents the ideal of their grandchildren having nice schools or nurseries and libraries and all the rest of it and he knew people will always vote for something which makes their children's or grandchildren's lives better.
Talking to the aspirational has almost stopped - the man or woman who has to do two jobs just to pay the rent wants a better life but is that better life simply about more money or is it about a place they can afford or just some more time to themselves to rest and relax?
Aspiration can't just be on a material basis -having more "things" isn't the be-all and end-all any longer (I think the pandemic changed a lot of perceptions) and simply cutting taxes isn't the only solution. How do you make people's lives better in ways that work for them rather than ways that get more votes for your party?
But I am aspirational and they don’t speak to me. None of them do really that’s the point.
The reason I mentioned taxes is that all it seems to me is that our taxes go up and everything is still broken. The NHS seems to be almost crumbling, litter seems to be getting worse, anti social behaviour etc.
The elderly seem to complain but seem to get a nice pension at the end of it. What exactly do we get?
I’m putting in the hard yards and I just feel like a lot of the time I’m not really included in much of the debate.
I’d be happy with taxes going up if things were actually getting better but it feels like we’re just treading water, you know?
I am trying to make this a meme: We pay more and more for less and less.
That's certainly why we're unhappy, but maybe it's inevitable. We have had several decades when the fiscal situation was temporarily easy- favourable demographics, windfalls from the North Sea. We got used to quite a lot of something for nothing.
As the loveable rogues on Hustle used to say, that tends to be followed by getting nothing for something. But absent a time machine to go back and make more prudent choices from the mid 1980s onwards, we are where we are.
We are see inflation on a number of areas - not just health, but infrastructure and others. Which far out strip regular inflation.
So literally we can do less for more money.
See the number of ships at sea in the RN etc.
This isn’t about DOGE style stupid slashing of spending. It’s about restraining costs in the way that many sensible organisations manage. Shop around, get better deals, reduce specifications to match the available money.
Some parts of the U.K. state can do this. Many can’t.
Public procurement is somewhere we need to do better, for example.
Am I correct that police forces don’t all buy their kit from the same supplier? Surely if all police cars, uniform and so on was tendered out to a supplier who all forces then had to use they could cut costs - if you are buying a few thousand patrol cars a year you surely get a massive deal from the manufacturer and then also economies of scale on parts, specialist kit for the cars, training being the same.
That’s a seductive idea.
However, in practise, what happened (often) is that a National Deal is negotiated.
That’s locks in a price and specific piece of equipment for years.
I’ve seen this end up as a disaster in private and public procurement. In one private one, a company got locked into using a very expensive piece of software, worldwide. For five years. It’s didn’t work, basically.
This is why we need better professionals to manage such procurement - avoid lock-ins and inflexibility, while negotiating a balance between cost and quality.
Surely it’s not beyond the wit of those tasked with this to work out the minimum amount of new patrol cars, pursuit vehicles, vans, motorbikes are used each calendar year and have a tender for providing each of those to manufacturers and agree a discount and roll it annually if a better deal not offered before the renewal date by a competitor.
I wonder how many different types of stab vests, waterproofs, hi-viz kit are used when they could do bulk deals.
If anyone is baffled about why so many people are considering the Greens, look at the comments from Sarwar yesterday about cycle lanes.
Now, I understand that the motoring/pensioner segment of the population is by far the most important electorally, but there is a real sense that the other parties simply do not care about you unless you’re over 60 and live in suburbia. This is particularly the case with the Scottish Lib Dems, I’m afraid. Reform actually directly attacked my age group.
There’s a reason the SNP have a 20 point lead. A very large proportion of the Scottish population live in dense urban areas and none of the UK parties are fighting in that space.
To be honest I feel like this in London where Reform seemingly only want to attack my city as a crime hole and full of awful people.
Nobody is really aiming at people that actually work between the ages of 25 and 40. I thought Reform might actually do it but they’ve gone for the triple lock.
If Labour somehow cut my taxes by 2029 (they won’t but just pretend) they’ll have done one more thing than anyone has done for us since 2010.
It’s honestly a joke how the people actually doing the work in this country get completely ignored in basically every debate.
No, they don't. If I had a pound for every time I heard a politician say "hard working families", I'd need new pockets in twenty pairs of trousers. I do agree it's become a mantra but it's as much an idealised version of Britain as the old Tory vision of villages with Vicars cycling past the cricket green.
If you're asking about practical policy for these "hard working families", that in many ways is the core of the debate. The Conservative Party does well when it's the party of aspiration but somewhere it turned away from aspiration to those who actually voted, the welthy, the retired and the comfortable.
Blair did well because he understood that and offered the grandparents the ideal of their grandchildren having nice schools or nurseries and libraries and all the rest of it and he knew people will always vote for something which makes their children's or grandchildren's lives better.
Talking to the aspirational has almost stopped - the man or woman who has to do two jobs just to pay the rent wants a better life but is that better life simply about more money or is it about a place they can afford or just some more time to themselves to rest and relax?
Aspiration can't just be on a material basis -having more "things" isn't the be-all and end-all any longer (I think the pandemic changed a lot of perceptions) and simply cutting taxes isn't the only solution. How do you make people's lives better in ways that work for them rather than ways that get more votes for your party?
But I am aspirational and they don’t speak to me. None of them do really that’s the point.
The reason I mentioned taxes is that all it seems to me is that our taxes go up and everything is still broken. The NHS seems to be almost crumbling, litter seems to be getting worse, anti social behaviour etc.
The elderly seem to complain but seem to get a nice pension at the end of it. What exactly do we get?
I’m putting in the hard yards and I just feel like a lot of the time I’m not really included in much of the debate.
I’d be happy with taxes going up if things were actually getting better but it feels like we’re just treading water, you know?
I am trying to make this a meme: We pay more and more for less and less.
That's certainly why we're unhappy, but maybe it's inevitable. We have had several decades when the fiscal situation was temporarily easy- favourable demographics, windfalls from the North Sea. We got used to quite a lot of something for nothing.
As the loveable rogues on Hustle used to say, that tends to be followed by getting nothing for something. But absent a time machine to go back and make more prudent choices from the mid 1980s onwards, we are where we are.
We are see inflation on a number of areas - not just health, but infrastructure and others. Which far out strip regular inflation.
So literally we can do less for more money.
See the number of ships at sea in the RN etc.
This isn’t about DOGE style stupid slashing of spending. It’s about restraining costs in the way that many sensible organisations manage. Shop around, get better deals, reduce specifications to match the available money.
Some parts of the U.K. state can do this. Many can’t.
Public procurement is somewhere we need to do better, for example.
Am I correct that police forces don’t all buy their kit from the same supplier? Surely if all police cars, uniform and so on was tendered out to a supplier who all forces then had to use they could cut costs - if you are buying a few thousand patrol cars a year you surely get a massive deal from the manufacturer and then also economies of scale on parts, specialist kit for the cars, training being the same.
You’re correct, same with Nurses uniforms.
Although certain ‘enthusiast’ websites sell versions of these uniforms for people with repressions.
I think there is a significant gap in terms of quantity of material between those niche websites and more utilitarian ones. Ditto maids outfits.
If anyone is baffled about why so many people are considering the Greens, look at the comments from Sarwar yesterday about cycle lanes.
Now, I understand that the motoring/pensioner segment of the population is by far the most important electorally, but there is a real sense that the other parties simply do not care about you unless you’re over 60 and live in suburbia. This is particularly the case with the Scottish Lib Dems, I’m afraid. Reform actually directly attacked my age group.
There’s a reason the SNP have a 20 point lead. A very large proportion of the Scottish population live in dense urban areas and none of the UK parties are fighting in that space.
To be honest I feel like this in London where Reform seemingly only want to attack my city as a crime hole and full of awful people.
Nobody is really aiming at people that actually work between the ages of 25 and 40. I thought Reform might actually do it but they’ve gone for the triple lock.
If Labour somehow cut my taxes by 2029 (they won’t but just pretend) they’ll have done one more thing than anyone has done for us since 2010.
It’s honestly a joke how the people actually doing the work in this country get completely ignored in basically every debate.
No, they don't. If I had a pound for every time I heard a politician say "hard working families", I'd need new pockets in twenty pairs of trousers. I do agree it's become a mantra but it's as much an idealised version of Britain as the old Tory vision of villages with Vicars cycling past the cricket green.
If you're asking about practical policy for these "hard working families", that in many ways is the core of the debate. The Conservative Party does well when it's the party of aspiration but somewhere it turned away from aspiration to those who actually voted, the welthy, the retired and the comfortable.
Blair did well because he understood that and offered the grandparents the ideal of their grandchildren having nice schools or nurseries and libraries and all the rest of it and he knew people will always vote for something which makes their children's or grandchildren's lives better.
Talking to the aspirational has almost stopped - the man or woman who has to do two jobs just to pay the rent wants a better life but is that better life simply about more money or is it about a place they can afford or just some more time to themselves to rest and relax?
Aspiration can't just be on a material basis -having more "things" isn't the be-all and end-all any longer (I think the pandemic changed a lot of perceptions) and simply cutting taxes isn't the only solution. How do you make people's lives better in ways that work for them rather than ways that get more votes for your party?
But I am aspirational and they don’t speak to me. None of them do really that’s the point.
The reason I mentioned taxes is that all it seems to me is that our taxes go up and everything is still broken. The NHS seems to be almost crumbling, litter seems to be getting worse, anti social behaviour etc.
The elderly seem to complain but seem to get a nice pension at the end of it. What exactly do we get?
I’m putting in the hard yards and I just feel like a lot of the time I’m not really included in much of the debate.
I’d be happy with taxes going up if things were actually getting better but it feels like we’re just treading water, you know?
I am trying to make this a meme: We pay more and more for less and less.
That's certainly why we're unhappy, but maybe it's inevitable. We have had several decades when the fiscal situation was temporarily easy- favourable demographics, windfalls from the North Sea. We got used to quite a lot of something for nothing.
As the loveable rogues on Hustle used to say, that tends to be followed by getting nothing for something. But absent a time machine to go back and make more prudent choices from the mid 1980s onwards, we are where we are.
We are see inflation on a number of areas - not just health, but infrastructure and others. Which far out strip regular inflation.
So literally we can do less for more money.
See the number of ships at sea in the RN etc.
This isn’t about DOGE style stupid slashing of spending. It’s about restraining costs in the way that many sensible organisations manage. Shop around, get better deals, reduce specifications to match the available money.
Some parts of the U.K. state can do this. Many can’t.
Public procurement is somewhere we need to do better, for example.
Am I correct that police forces don’t all buy their kit from the same supplier? Surely if all police cars, uniform and so on was tendered out to a supplier who all forces then had to use they could cut costs - if you are buying a few thousand patrol cars a year you surely get a massive deal from the manufacturer and then also economies of scale on parts, specialist kit for the cars, training being the same.
There is always a tension between the centre and periphery, and pros and cons to both centralising or localising activity, including commissioning. The Tories have loved the idea of internal markets and competition to boost effectiveness. There are arguments about devolving decision making powers to local decision makers, to produce something better suited for local communities. Devolving decision making also makes the overall system more resilient than a “monoculture” (as in agriculture) can be. If you have one national supplier and that supplier makes a mistake, everyone is affected. Maybe innovation thrives better with more local control.
But, yes, there are also arguments for more uniform systems driven by the centre, including economies of scale. I work in health research and I think we need more central decision making in healthcare, but I know little about police forces.
The Government is centralising some services. Local government reform is all about centralising services. Merging the NHS with DHSC speaks to a greater willingness to centralise healthcare planning.
If anyone is baffled about why so many people are considering the Greens, look at the comments from Sarwar yesterday about cycle lanes.
Now, I understand that the motoring/pensioner segment of the population is by far the most important electorally, but there is a real sense that the other parties simply do not care about you unless you’re over 60 and live in suburbia. This is particularly the case with the Scottish Lib Dems, I’m afraid. Reform actually directly attacked my age group.
There’s a reason the SNP have a 20 point lead. A very large proportion of the Scottish population live in dense urban areas and none of the UK parties are fighting in that space.
To be honest I feel like this in London where Reform seemingly only want to attack my city as a crime hole and full of awful people.
Nobody is really aiming at people that actually work between the ages of 25 and 40. I thought Reform might actually do it but they’ve gone for the triple lock.
If Labour somehow cut my taxes by 2029 (they won’t but just pretend) they’ll have done one more thing than anyone has done for us since 2010.
It’s honestly a joke how the people actually doing the work in this country get completely ignored in basically every debate.
No, they don't. If I had a pound for every time I heard a politician say "hard working families", I'd need new pockets in twenty pairs of trousers. I do agree it's become a mantra but it's as much an idealised version of Britain as the old Tory vision of villages with Vicars cycling past the cricket green.
If you're asking about practical policy for these "hard working families", that in many ways is the core of the debate. The Conservative Party does well when it's the party of aspiration but somewhere it turned away from aspiration to those who actually voted, the welthy, the retired and the comfortable.
Blair did well because he understood that and offered the grandparents the ideal of their grandchildren having nice schools or nurseries and libraries and all the rest of it and he knew people will always vote for something which makes their children's or grandchildren's lives better.
Talking to the aspirational has almost stopped - the man or woman who has to do two jobs just to pay the rent wants a better life but is that better life simply about more money or is it about a place they can afford or just some more time to themselves to rest and relax?
Aspiration can't just be on a material basis -having more "things" isn't the be-all and end-all any longer (I think the pandemic changed a lot of perceptions) and simply cutting taxes isn't the only solution. How do you make people's lives better in ways that work for them rather than ways that get more votes for your party?
But I am aspirational and they don’t speak to me. None of them do really that’s the point.
The reason I mentioned taxes is that all it seems to me is that our taxes go up and everything is still broken. The NHS seems to be almost crumbling, litter seems to be getting worse, anti social behaviour etc.
The elderly seem to complain but seem to get a nice pension at the end of it. What exactly do we get?
I’m putting in the hard yards and I just feel like a lot of the time I’m not really included in much of the debate.
I’d be happy with taxes going up if things were actually getting better but it feels like we’re just treading water, you know?
I am trying to make this a meme: We pay more and more for less and less.
That's certainly why we're unhappy, but maybe it's inevitable. We have had several decades when the fiscal situation was temporarily easy- favourable demographics, windfalls from the North Sea. We got used to quite a lot of something for nothing.
As the loveable rogues on Hustle used to say, that tends to be followed by getting nothing for something. But absent a time machine to go back and make more prudent choices from the mid 1980s onwards, we are where we are.
I don't think it is inevitable but what it does require is a political class who are actually focused on less regulation, less bureaucracy, less form filling and far, far fewer administrators. Instead the calls are always for more, every time something goes wrong once we have an expensive and largely useless inquiry and then a further set of rules that make it impossible for the regulated activity to provide what they did before. Eventually, as in Social Work, or naval vessels or holes in the roads, you get to the point where the service basically collapses and all that remains is the bureaucracy supposedly administering it.
If anyone is baffled about why so many people are considering the Greens, look at the comments from Sarwar yesterday about cycle lanes.
Now, I understand that the motoring/pensioner segment of the population is by far the most important electorally, but there is a real sense that the other parties simply do not care about you unless you’re over 60 and live in suburbia. This is particularly the case with the Scottish Lib Dems, I’m afraid. Reform actually directly attacked my age group.
There’s a reason the SNP have a 20 point lead. A very large proportion of the Scottish population live in dense urban areas and none of the UK parties are fighting in that space.
To be honest I feel like this in London where Reform seemingly only want to attack my city as a crime hole and full of awful people.
Nobody is really aiming at people that actually work between the ages of 25 and 40. I thought Reform might actually do it but they’ve gone for the triple lock.
If Labour somehow cut my taxes by 2029 (they won’t but just pretend) they’ll have done one more thing than anyone has done for us since 2010.
It’s honestly a joke how the people actually doing the work in this country get completely ignored in basically every debate.
No, they don't. If I had a pound for every time I heard a politician say "hard working families", I'd need new pockets in twenty pairs of trousers. I do agree it's become a mantra but it's as much an idealised version of Britain as the old Tory vision of villages with Vicars cycling past the cricket green.
If you're asking about practical policy for these "hard working families", that in many ways is the core of the debate. The Conservative Party does well when it's the party of aspiration but somewhere it turned away from aspiration to those who actually voted, the welthy, the retired and the comfortable.
Blair did well because he understood that and offered the grandparents the ideal of their grandchildren having nice schools or nurseries and libraries and all the rest of it and he knew people will always vote for something which makes their children's or grandchildren's lives better.
Talking to the aspirational has almost stopped - the man or woman who has to do two jobs just to pay the rent wants a better life but is that better life simply about more money or is it about a place they can afford or just some more time to themselves to rest and relax?
Aspiration can't just be on a material basis -having more "things" isn't the be-all and end-all any longer (I think the pandemic changed a lot of perceptions) and simply cutting taxes isn't the only solution. How do you make people's lives better in ways that work for them rather than ways that get more votes for your party?
But I am aspirational and they don’t speak to me. None of them do really that’s the point.
The reason I mentioned taxes is that all it seems to me is that our taxes go up and everything is still broken. The NHS seems to be almost crumbling, litter seems to be getting worse, anti social behaviour etc.
The elderly seem to complain but seem to get a nice pension at the end of it. What exactly do we get?
I’m putting in the hard yards and I just feel like a lot of the time I’m not really included in much of the debate.
I’d be happy with taxes going up if things were actually getting better but it feels like we’re just treading water, you know?
I am trying to make this a meme: We pay more and more for less and less.
But we don’t. I think that’s misleading. We get more, but we don’t always feel the more. For example, an older population means there are more old people getting pensions and NHS care, but as an individual, you don’t feel that “more”.
It depends on the "we". The 25-40 age group is paying much more and getting much less. The 60-99 age group is paying much less and getting much more. The 16-25 age group have been infantilised and earn little but get much less. House? Partner? Baby? What are those things?
And it was down to Bibi leading Trump by the nose into it too.
‘ @newrepublic The Iran war increasingly looks not only like another shocking humiliation, but perhaps the greatest strategic blunder in American military history.’
If anyone is baffled about why so many people are considering the Greens, look at the comments from Sarwar yesterday about cycle lanes.
Now, I understand that the motoring/pensioner segment of the population is by far the most important electorally, but there is a real sense that the other parties simply do not care about you unless you’re over 60 and live in suburbia. This is particularly the case with the Scottish Lib Dems, I’m afraid. Reform actually directly attacked my age group.
There’s a reason the SNP have a 20 point lead. A very large proportion of the Scottish population live in dense urban areas and none of the UK parties are fighting in that space.
To be honest I feel like this in London where Reform seemingly only want to attack my city as a crime hole and full of awful people.
Nobody is really aiming at people that actually work between the ages of 25 and 40. I thought Reform might actually do it but they’ve gone for the triple lock.
If Labour somehow cut my taxes by 2029 (they won’t but just pretend) they’ll have done one more thing than anyone has done for us since 2010.
It’s honestly a joke how the people actually doing the work in this country get completely ignored in basically every debate.
No, they don't. If I had a pound for every time I heard a politician say "hard working families", I'd need new pockets in twenty pairs of trousers. I do agree it's become a mantra but it's as much an idealised version of Britain as the old Tory vision of villages with Vicars cycling past the cricket green.
If you're asking about practical policy for these "hard working families", that in many ways is the core of the debate. The Conservative Party does well when it's the party of aspiration but somewhere it turned away from aspiration to those who actually voted, the welthy, the retired and the comfortable.
Blair did well because he understood that and offered the grandparents the ideal of their grandchildren having nice schools or nurseries and libraries and all the rest of it and he knew people will always vote for something which makes their children's or grandchildren's lives better.
Talking to the aspirational has almost stopped - the man or woman who has to do two jobs just to pay the rent wants a better life but is that better life simply about more money or is it about a place they can afford or just some more time to themselves to rest and relax?
Aspiration can't just be on a material basis -having more "things" isn't the be-all and end-all any longer (I think the pandemic changed a lot of perceptions) and simply cutting taxes isn't the only solution. How do you make people's lives better in ways that work for them rather than ways that get more votes for your party?
But I am aspirational and they don’t speak to me. None of them do really that’s the point.
The reason I mentioned taxes is that all it seems to me is that our taxes go up and everything is still broken. The NHS seems to be almost crumbling, litter seems to be getting worse, anti social behaviour etc.
The elderly seem to complain but seem to get a nice pension at the end of it. What exactly do we get?
I’m putting in the hard yards and I just feel like a lot of the time I’m not really included in much of the debate.
I’d be happy with taxes going up if things were actually getting better but it feels like we’re just treading water, you know?
I am trying to make this a meme: We pay more and more for less and less.
That's certainly why we're unhappy, but maybe it's inevitable. We have had several decades when the fiscal situation was temporarily easy- favourable demographics, windfalls from the North Sea. We got used to quite a lot of something for nothing.
As the loveable rogues on Hustle used to say, that tends to be followed by getting nothing for something. But absent a time machine to go back and make more prudent choices from the mid 1980s onwards, we are where we are.
We are see inflation on a number of areas - not just health, but infrastructure and others. Which far out strip regular inflation.
So literally we can do less for more money.
See the number of ships at sea in the RN etc.
This isn’t about DOGE style stupid slashing of spending. It’s about restraining costs in the way that many sensible organisations manage. Shop around, get better deals, reduce specifications to match the available money.
Some parts of the U.K. state can do this. Many can’t.
Public procurement is somewhere we need to do better, for example.
Am I correct that police forces don’t all buy their kit from the same supplier? Surely if all police cars, uniform and so on was tendered out to a supplier who all forces then had to use they could cut costs - if you are buying a few thousand patrol cars a year you surely get a massive deal from the manufacturer and then also economies of scale on parts, specialist kit for the cars, training being the same.
You’re correct, same with Nurses uniforms.
Although certain ‘enthusiast’ websites sell versions of these uniforms for people with repressions.
I think there is a significant gap in terms of quantity of material between those niche websites and more utilitarian ones. Ditto maids outfits.
If anyone is baffled about why so many people are considering the Greens, look at the comments from Sarwar yesterday about cycle lanes.
Now, I understand that the motoring/pensioner segment of the population is by far the most important electorally, but there is a real sense that the other parties simply do not care about you unless you’re over 60 and live in suburbia. This is particularly the case with the Scottish Lib Dems, I’m afraid. Reform actually directly attacked my age group.
There’s a reason the SNP have a 20 point lead. A very large proportion of the Scottish population live in dense urban areas and none of the UK parties are fighting in that space.
To be honest I feel like this in London where Reform seemingly only want to attack my city as a crime hole and full of awful people.
Nobody is really aiming at people that actually work between the ages of 25 and 40. I thought Reform might actually do it but they’ve gone for the triple lock.
If Labour somehow cut my taxes by 2029 (they won’t but just pretend) they’ll have done one more thing than anyone has done for us since 2010.
It’s honestly a joke how the people actually doing the work in this country get completely ignored in basically every debate.
No, they don't. If I had a pound for every time I heard a politician say "hard working families", I'd need new pockets in twenty pairs of trousers. I do agree it's become a mantra but it's as much an idealised version of Britain as the old Tory vision of villages with Vicars cycling past the cricket green.
If you're asking about practical policy for these "hard working families", that in many ways is the core of the debate. The Conservative Party does well when it's the party of aspiration but somewhere it turned away from aspiration to those who actually voted, the welthy, the retired and the comfortable.
Blair did well because he understood that and offered the grandparents the ideal of their grandchildren having nice schools or nurseries and libraries and all the rest of it and he knew people will always vote for something which makes their children's or grandchildren's lives better.
Talking to the aspirational has almost stopped - the man or woman who has to do two jobs just to pay the rent wants a better life but is that better life simply about more money or is it about a place they can afford or just some more time to themselves to rest and relax?
Aspiration can't just be on a material basis -having more "things" isn't the be-all and end-all any longer (I think the pandemic changed a lot of perceptions) and simply cutting taxes isn't the only solution. How do you make people's lives better in ways that work for them rather than ways that get more votes for your party?
But I am aspirational and they don’t speak to me. None of them do really that’s the point.
The reason I mentioned taxes is that all it seems to me is that our taxes go up and everything is still broken. The NHS seems to be almost crumbling, litter seems to be getting worse, anti social behaviour etc.
The elderly seem to complain but seem to get a nice pension at the end of it. What exactly do we get?
I’m putting in the hard yards and I just feel like a lot of the time I’m not really included in much of the debate.
I’d be happy with taxes going up if things were actually getting better but it feels like we’re just treading water, you know?
I am trying to make this a meme: We pay more and more for less and less.
That's certainly why we're unhappy, but maybe it's inevitable. We have had several decades when the fiscal situation was temporarily easy- favourable demographics, windfalls from the North Sea. We got used to quite a lot of something for nothing.
As the loveable rogues on Hustle used to say, that tends to be followed by getting nothing for something. But absent a time machine to go back and make more prudent choices from the mid 1980s onwards, we are where we are.
We are see inflation on a number of areas - not just health, but infrastructure and others. Which far out strip regular inflation.
So literally we can do less for more money.
See the number of ships at sea in the RN etc.
This isn’t about DOGE style stupid slashing of spending. It’s about restraining costs in the way that many sensible organisations manage. Shop around, get better deals, reduce specifications to match the available money.
Some parts of the U.K. state can do this. Many can’t.
Public procurement is somewhere we need to do better, for example.
Am I correct that police forces don’t all buy their kit from the same supplier? Surely if all police cars, uniform and so on was tendered out to a supplier who all forces then had to use they could cut costs - if you are buying a few thousand patrol cars a year you surely get a massive deal from the manufacturer and then also economies of scale on parts, specialist kit for the cars, training being the same.
Doesn't seem to work for school uniforms. Single supplier means ridiculous prices.
If anyone is baffled about why so many people are considering the Greens, look at the comments from Sarwar yesterday about cycle lanes.
Now, I understand that the motoring/pensioner segment of the population is by far the most important electorally, but there is a real sense that the other parties simply do not care about you unless you’re over 60 and live in suburbia. This is particularly the case with the Scottish Lib Dems, I’m afraid. Reform actually directly attacked my age group.
There’s a reason the SNP have a 20 point lead. A very large proportion of the Scottish population live in dense urban areas and none of the UK parties are fighting in that space.
To be honest I feel like this in London where Reform seemingly only want to attack my city as a crime hole and full of awful people.
Nobody is really aiming at people that actually work between the ages of 25 and 40. I thought Reform might actually do it but they’ve gone for the triple lock.
If Labour somehow cut my taxes by 2029 (they won’t but just pretend) they’ll have done one more thing than anyone has done for us since 2010.
It’s honestly a joke how the people actually doing the work in this country get completely ignored in basically every debate.
No, they don't. If I had a pound for every time I heard a politician say "hard working families", I'd need new pockets in twenty pairs of trousers. I do agree it's become a mantra but it's as much an idealised version of Britain as the old Tory vision of villages with Vicars cycling past the cricket green.
If you're asking about practical policy for these "hard working families", that in many ways is the core of the debate. The Conservative Party does well when it's the party of aspiration but somewhere it turned away from aspiration to those who actually voted, the welthy, the retired and the comfortable.
Blair did well because he understood that and offered the grandparents the ideal of their grandchildren having nice schools or nurseries and libraries and all the rest of it and he knew people will always vote for something which makes their children's or grandchildren's lives better.
Talking to the aspirational has almost stopped - the man or woman who has to do two jobs just to pay the rent wants a better life but is that better life simply about more money or is it about a place they can afford or just some more time to themselves to rest and relax?
Aspiration can't just be on a material basis -having more "things" isn't the be-all and end-all any longer (I think the pandemic changed a lot of perceptions) and simply cutting taxes isn't the only solution. How do you make people's lives better in ways that work for them rather than ways that get more votes for your party?
But I am aspirational and they don’t speak to me. None of them do really that’s the point.
The reason I mentioned taxes is that all it seems to me is that our taxes go up and everything is still broken. The NHS seems to be almost crumbling, litter seems to be getting worse, anti social behaviour etc.
The elderly seem to complain but seem to get a nice pension at the end of it. What exactly do we get?
I’m putting in the hard yards and I just feel like a lot of the time I’m not really included in much of the debate.
I’d be happy with taxes going up if things were actually getting better but it feels like we’re just treading water, you know?
I am trying to make this a meme: We pay more and more for less and less.
That's certainly why we're unhappy, but maybe it's inevitable. We have had several decades when the fiscal situation was temporarily easy- favourable demographics, windfalls from the North Sea. We got used to quite a lot of something for nothing.
As the loveable rogues on Hustle used to say, that tends to be followed by getting nothing for something. But absent a time machine to go back and make more prudent choices from the mid 1980s onwards, we are where we are.
We are see inflation on a number of areas - not just health, but infrastructure and others. Which far out strip regular inflation.
So literally we can do less for more money.
See the number of ships at sea in the RN etc.
This isn’t about DOGE style stupid slashing of spending. It’s about restraining costs in the way that many sensible organisations manage. Shop around, get better deals, reduce specifications to match the available money.
Some parts of the U.K. state can do this. Many can’t.
Public procurement is somewhere we need to do better, for example.
Am I correct that police forces don’t all buy their kit from the same supplier? Surely if all police cars, uniform and so on was tendered out to a supplier who all forces then had to use they could cut costs - if you are buying a few thousand patrol cars a year you surely get a massive deal from the manufacturer and then also economies of scale on parts, specialist kit for the cars, training being the same.
That’s a seductive idea.
However, in practise, what happened (often) is that a National Deal is negotiated.
That’s locks in a price and specific piece of equipment for years.
I’ve seen this end up as a disaster in private and public procurement. In one private one, a company got locked into using a very expensive piece of software, worldwide. For five years. It’s didn’t work, basically.
This is why we need better professionals to manage such procurement - avoid lock-ins and inflexibility, while negotiating a balance between cost and quality.
Surely it’s not beyond the wit of those tasked with this to work out the minimum amount of new patrol cars, pursuit vehicles, vans, motorbikes are used each calendar year and have a tender for providing each of those to manufacturers and agree a discount and roll it annually if a better deal not offered before the renewal date by a competitor.
I wonder how many different types of stab vests, waterproofs, hi-viz kit are used when they could do bulk deals.
And that’s where domain experts are required.
In this country, often, procurement is considered a generalist skill. Just like management. A Proper Person, preferably with law or accountancy conversion on their degree can do it, right? They can learn by doing.
If anyone is baffled about why so many people are considering the Greens, look at the comments from Sarwar yesterday about cycle lanes.
Now, I understand that the motoring/pensioner segment of the population is by far the most important electorally, but there is a real sense that the other parties simply do not care about you unless you’re over 60 and live in suburbia. This is particularly the case with the Scottish Lib Dems, I’m afraid. Reform actually directly attacked my age group.
There’s a reason the SNP have a 20 point lead. A very large proportion of the Scottish population live in dense urban areas and none of the UK parties are fighting in that space.
To be honest I feel like this in London where Reform seemingly only want to attack my city as a crime hole and full of awful people.
Nobody is really aiming at people that actually work between the ages of 25 and 40. I thought Reform might actually do it but they’ve gone for the triple lock.
If Labour somehow cut my taxes by 2029 (they won’t but just pretend) they’ll have done one more thing than anyone has done for us since 2010.
It’s honestly a joke how the people actually doing the work in this country get completely ignored in basically every debate.
No, they don't. If I had a pound for every time I heard a politician say "hard working families", I'd need new pockets in twenty pairs of trousers. I do agree it's become a mantra but it's as much an idealised version of Britain as the old Tory vision of villages with Vicars cycling past the cricket green.
If you're asking about practical policy for these "hard working families", that in many ways is the core of the debate. The Conservative Party does well when it's the party of aspiration but somewhere it turned away from aspiration to those who actually voted, the welthy, the retired and the comfortable.
Blair did well because he understood that and offered the grandparents the ideal of their grandchildren having nice schools or nurseries and libraries and all the rest of it and he knew people will always vote for something which makes their children's or grandchildren's lives better.
Talking to the aspirational has almost stopped - the man or woman who has to do two jobs just to pay the rent wants a better life but is that better life simply about more money or is it about a place they can afford or just some more time to themselves to rest and relax?
Aspiration can't just be on a material basis -having more "things" isn't the be-all and end-all any longer (I think the pandemic changed a lot of perceptions) and simply cutting taxes isn't the only solution. How do you make people's lives better in ways that work for them rather than ways that get more votes for your party?
But I am aspirational and they don’t speak to me. None of them do really that’s the point.
The reason I mentioned taxes is that all it seems to me is that our taxes go up and everything is still broken. The NHS seems to be almost crumbling, litter seems to be getting worse, anti social behaviour etc.
The elderly seem to complain but seem to get a nice pension at the end of it. What exactly do we get?
I’m putting in the hard yards and I just feel like a lot of the time I’m not really included in much of the debate.
I’d be happy with taxes going up if things were actually getting better but it feels like we’re just treading water, you know?
I am trying to make this a meme: We pay more and more for less and less.
That's certainly why we're unhappy, but maybe it's inevitable. We have had several decades when the fiscal situation was temporarily easy- favourable demographics, windfalls from the North Sea. We got used to quite a lot of something for nothing.
As the loveable rogues on Hustle used to say, that tends to be followed by getting nothing for something. But absent a time machine to go back and make more prudent choices from the mid 1980s onwards, we are where we are.
We are see inflation on a number of areas - not just health, but infrastructure and others. Which far out strip regular inflation.
So literally we can do less for more money.
See the number of ships at sea in the RN etc.
This isn’t about DOGE style stupid slashing of spending. It’s about restraining costs in the way that many sensible organisations manage. Shop around, get better deals, reduce specifications to match the available money.
Some parts of the U.K. state can do this. Many can’t.
Public procurement is somewhere we need to do better, for example.
Am I correct that police forces don’t all buy their kit from the same supplier? Surely if all police cars, uniform and so on was tendered out to a supplier who all forces then had to use they could cut costs - if you are buying a few thousand patrol cars a year you surely get a massive deal from the manufacturer and then also economies of scale on parts, specialist kit for the cars, training being the same.
That’s a seductive idea.
However, in practise, what happened (often) is that a National Deal is negotiated.
That’s locks in a price and specific piece of equipment for years.
I’ve seen this end up as a disaster in private and public procurement. In one private one, a company got locked into using a very expensive piece of software, worldwide. For five years. It’s didn’t work, basically.
This is why we need better professionals to manage such procurement - avoid lock-ins and inflexibility, while negotiating a balance between cost and quality.
Surely it’s not beyond the wit of those tasked with this to work out the minimum amount of new patrol cars, pursuit vehicles, vans, motorbikes are used each calendar year and have a tender for providing each of those to manufacturers and agree a discount and roll it annually if a better deal not offered before the renewal date by a competitor.
I wonder how many different types of stab vests, waterproofs, hi-viz kit are used when they could do bulk deals.
Of course I imagine government efficiency reviews have been written since the days of the rump parliament. Probably be more efficient to just run a reprint every ten years or so rather than get in some chancer angling for gong to state the obvious. It seems to me that what matters more than doing the review is attention to detail on implementation and execution of the recommendations.
If anyone is baffled about why so many people are considering the Greens, look at the comments from Sarwar yesterday about cycle lanes.
Now, I understand that the motoring/pensioner segment of the population is by far the most important electorally, but there is a real sense that the other parties simply do not care about you unless you’re over 60 and live in suburbia. This is particularly the case with the Scottish Lib Dems, I’m afraid. Reform actually directly attacked my age group.
There’s a reason the SNP have a 20 point lead. A very large proportion of the Scottish population live in dense urban areas and none of the UK parties are fighting in that space.
To be honest I feel like this in London where Reform seemingly only want to attack my city as a crime hole and full of awful people.
Nobody is really aiming at people that actually work between the ages of 25 and 40. I thought Reform might actually do it but they’ve gone for the triple lock.
If Labour somehow cut my taxes by 2029 (they won’t but just pretend) they’ll have done one more thing than anyone has done for us since 2010.
It’s honestly a joke how the people actually doing the work in this country get completely ignored in basically every debate.
No, they don't. If I had a pound for every time I heard a politician say "hard working families", I'd need new pockets in twenty pairs of trousers. I do agree it's become a mantra but it's as much an idealised version of Britain as the old Tory vision of villages with Vicars cycling past the cricket green.
If you're asking about practical policy for these "hard working families", that in many ways is the core of the debate. The Conservative Party does well when it's the party of aspiration but somewhere it turned away from aspiration to those who actually voted, the welthy, the retired and the comfortable.
Blair did well because he understood that and offered the grandparents the ideal of their grandchildren having nice schools or nurseries and libraries and all the rest of it and he knew people will always vote for something which makes their children's or grandchildren's lives better.
Talking to the aspirational has almost stopped - the man or woman who has to do two jobs just to pay the rent wants a better life but is that better life simply about more money or is it about a place they can afford or just some more time to themselves to rest and relax?
Aspiration can't just be on a material basis -having more "things" isn't the be-all and end-all any longer (I think the pandemic changed a lot of perceptions) and simply cutting taxes isn't the only solution. How do you make people's lives better in ways that work for them rather than ways that get more votes for your party?
But I am aspirational and they don’t speak to me. None of them do really that’s the point.
The reason I mentioned taxes is that all it seems to me is that our taxes go up and everything is still broken. The NHS seems to be almost crumbling, litter seems to be getting worse, anti social behaviour etc.
The elderly seem to complain but seem to get a nice pension at the end of it. What exactly do we get?
I’m putting in the hard yards and I just feel like a lot of the time I’m not really included in much of the debate.
I’d be happy with taxes going up if things were actually getting better but it feels like we’re just treading water, you know?
I am trying to make this a meme: We pay more and more for less and less.
That's certainly why we're unhappy, but maybe it's inevitable. We have had several decades when the fiscal situation was temporarily easy- favourable demographics, windfalls from the North Sea. We got used to quite a lot of something for nothing.
As the loveable rogues on Hustle used to say, that tends to be followed by getting nothing for something. But absent a time machine to go back and make more prudent choices from the mid 1980s onwards, we are where we are.
We are see inflation on a number of areas - not just health, but infrastructure and others. Which far out strip regular inflation.
So literally we can do less for more money.
See the number of ships at sea in the RN etc.
This isn’t about DOGE style stupid slashing of spending. It’s about restraining costs in the way that many sensible organisations manage. Shop around, get better deals, reduce specifications to match the available money.
Some parts of the U.K. state can do this. Many can’t.
Public procurement is somewhere we need to do better, for example.
Am I correct that police forces don’t all buy their kit from the same supplier? Surely if all police cars, uniform and so on was tendered out to a supplier who all forces then had to use they could cut costs - if you are buying a few thousand patrol cars a year you surely get a massive deal from the manufacturer and then also economies of scale on parts, specialist kit for the cars, training being the same.
That’s a seductive idea.
However, in practise, what happened (often) is that a National Deal is negotiated.
That’s locks in a price and specific piece of equipment for years.
I’ve seen this end up as a disaster in private and public procurement. In one private one, a company got locked into using a very expensive piece of software, worldwide. For five years. It’s didn’t work, basically.
This is why we need better professionals to manage such procurement - avoid lock-ins and inflexibility, while negotiating a balance between cost and quality.
Surely it’s not beyond the wit of those tasked with this to work out the minimum amount of new patrol cars, pursuit vehicles, vans, motorbikes are used each calendar year and have a tender for providing each of those to manufacturers and agree a discount and roll it annually if a better deal not offered before the renewal date by a competitor.
I wonder how many different types of stab vests, waterproofs, hi-viz kit are used when they could do bulk deals.
First, there are not that many car makers to choose from anyway. Second, different forces have different requirements – very few motorway patrols for City of London Police, for instance. More subtly though, if every force uses the same, nationally bought equipment, then that just creates a monopoly supplier. Where's your free market competition then?
Now, there could be an argument for supporting domestic manufacturers, as French, German and Italian police forces do, but that's a different kettle of fish.
If anyone is baffled about why so many people are considering the Greens, look at the comments from Sarwar yesterday about cycle lanes.
Now, I understand that the motoring/pensioner segment of the population is by far the most important electorally, but there is a real sense that the other parties simply do not care about you unless you’re over 60 and live in suburbia. This is particularly the case with the Scottish Lib Dems, I’m afraid. Reform actually directly attacked my age group.
There’s a reason the SNP have a 20 point lead. A very large proportion of the Scottish population live in dense urban areas and none of the UK parties are fighting in that space.
To be honest I feel like this in London where Reform seemingly only want to attack my city as a crime hole and full of awful people.
Nobody is really aiming at people that actually work between the ages of 25 and 40. I thought Reform might actually do it but they’ve gone for the triple lock.
If Labour somehow cut my taxes by 2029 (they won’t but just pretend) they’ll have done one more thing than anyone has done for us since 2010.
It’s honestly a joke how the people actually doing the work in this country get completely ignored in basically every debate.
No, they don't. If I had a pound for every time I heard a politician say "hard working families", I'd need new pockets in twenty pairs of trousers. I do agree it's become a mantra but it's as much an idealised version of Britain as the old Tory vision of villages with Vicars cycling past the cricket green.
If you're asking about practical policy for these "hard working families", that in many ways is the core of the debate. The Conservative Party does well when it's the party of aspiration but somewhere it turned away from aspiration to those who actually voted, the welthy, the retired and the comfortable.
Blair did well because he understood that and offered the grandparents the ideal of their grandchildren having nice schools or nurseries and libraries and all the rest of it and he knew people will always vote for something which makes their children's or grandchildren's lives better.
Talking to the aspirational has almost stopped - the man or woman who has to do two jobs just to pay the rent wants a better life but is that better life simply about more money or is it about a place they can afford or just some more time to themselves to rest and relax?
Aspiration can't just be on a material basis -having more "things" isn't the be-all and end-all any longer (I think the pandemic changed a lot of perceptions) and simply cutting taxes isn't the only solution. How do you make people's lives better in ways that work for them rather than ways that get more votes for your party?
But I am aspirational and they don’t speak to me. None of them do really that’s the point.
The reason I mentioned taxes is that all it seems to me is that our taxes go up and everything is still broken. The NHS seems to be almost crumbling, litter seems to be getting worse, anti social behaviour etc.
The elderly seem to complain but seem to get a nice pension at the end of it. What exactly do we get?
I’m putting in the hard yards and I just feel like a lot of the time I’m not really included in much of the debate.
I’d be happy with taxes going up if things were actually getting better but it feels like we’re just treading water, you know?
I am trying to make this a meme: We pay more and more for less and less.
That's certainly why we're unhappy, but maybe it's inevitable. We have had several decades when the fiscal situation was temporarily easy- favourable demographics, windfalls from the North Sea. We got used to quite a lot of something for nothing.
As the loveable rogues on Hustle used to say, that tends to be followed by getting nothing for something. But absent a time machine to go back and make more prudent choices from the mid 1980s onwards, we are where we are.
We are see inflation on a number of areas - not just health, but infrastructure and others. Which far out strip regular inflation.
So literally we can do less for more money.
See the number of ships at sea in the RN etc.
This isn’t about DOGE style stupid slashing of spending. It’s about restraining costs in the way that many sensible organisations manage. Shop around, get better deals, reduce specifications to match the available money.
Some parts of the U.K. state can do this. Many can’t.
Public procurement is somewhere we need to do better, for example.
Am I correct that police forces don’t all buy their kit from the same supplier? Surely if all police cars, uniform and so on was tendered out to a supplier who all forces then had to use they could cut costs - if you are buying a few thousand patrol cars a year you surely get a massive deal from the manufacturer and then also economies of scale on parts, specialist kit for the cars, training being the same.
That’s a seductive idea.
However, in practise, what happened (often) is that a National Deal is negotiated.
That’s locks in a price and specific piece of equipment for years.
I’ve seen this end up as a disaster in private and public procurement. In one private one, a company got locked into using a very expensive piece of software, worldwide. For five years. It’s didn’t work, basically.
This is why we need better professionals to manage such procurement - avoid lock-ins and inflexibility, while negotiating a balance between cost and quality.
Surely it’s not beyond the wit of those tasked with this to work out the minimum amount of new patrol cars, pursuit vehicles, vans, motorbikes are used each calendar year and have a tender for providing each of those to manufacturers and agree a discount and roll it annually if a better deal not offered before the renewal date by a competitor.
I wonder how many different types of stab vests, waterproofs, hi-viz kit are used when they could do bulk deals.
First, there are not that many car makers to choose from anyway. Second, different forces have different requirements – very few motorway patrols for City of London Police, for instance. More subtly though, if every force uses the same, nationally bought equipment, then that just creates a monopoly supplier. Where's your free market competition then?
Now, there could be an argument for supporting domestic manufacturers, as French, German and Italian police forces do, but that's a different kettle of fish.
Which all goes to show that government is difficult and there aren’t easy solutions.
If anyone is baffled about why so many people are considering the Greens, look at the comments from Sarwar yesterday about cycle lanes.
Now, I understand that the motoring/pensioner segment of the population is by far the most important electorally, but there is a real sense that the other parties simply do not care about you unless you’re over 60 and live in suburbia. This is particularly the case with the Scottish Lib Dems, I’m afraid. Reform actually directly attacked my age group.
There’s a reason the SNP have a 20 point lead. A very large proportion of the Scottish population live in dense urban areas and none of the UK parties are fighting in that space.
To be honest I feel like this in London where Reform seemingly only want to attack my city as a crime hole and full of awful people.
Nobody is really aiming at people that actually work between the ages of 25 and 40. I thought Reform might actually do it but they’ve gone for the triple lock.
If Labour somehow cut my taxes by 2029 (they won’t but just pretend) they’ll have done one more thing than anyone has done for us since 2010.
It’s honestly a joke how the people actually doing the work in this country get completely ignored in basically every debate.
No, they don't. If I had a pound for every time I heard a politician say "hard working families", I'd need new pockets in twenty pairs of trousers. I do agree it's become a mantra but it's as much an idealised version of Britain as the old Tory vision of villages with Vicars cycling past the cricket green.
If you're asking about practical policy for these "hard working families", that in many ways is the core of the debate. The Conservative Party does well when it's the party of aspiration but somewhere it turned away from aspiration to those who actually voted, the welthy, the retired and the comfortable.
Blair did well because he understood that and offered the grandparents the ideal of their grandchildren having nice schools or nurseries and libraries and all the rest of it and he knew people will always vote for something which makes their children's or grandchildren's lives better.
Talking to the aspirational has almost stopped - the man or woman who has to do two jobs just to pay the rent wants a better life but is that better life simply about more money or is it about a place they can afford or just some more time to themselves to rest and relax?
Aspiration can't just be on a material basis -having more "things" isn't the be-all and end-all any longer (I think the pandemic changed a lot of perceptions) and simply cutting taxes isn't the only solution. How do you make people's lives better in ways that work for them rather than ways that get more votes for your party?
But I am aspirational and they don’t speak to me. None of them do really that’s the point.
The reason I mentioned taxes is that all it seems to me is that our taxes go up and everything is still broken. The NHS seems to be almost crumbling, litter seems to be getting worse, anti social behaviour etc.
The elderly seem to complain but seem to get a nice pension at the end of it. What exactly do we get?
I’m putting in the hard yards and I just feel like a lot of the time I’m not really included in much of the debate.
I’d be happy with taxes going up if things were actually getting better but it feels like we’re just treading water, you know?
I am trying to make this a meme: We pay more and more for less and less.
That's certainly why we're unhappy, but maybe it's inevitable. We have had several decades when the fiscal situation was temporarily easy- favourable demographics, windfalls from the North Sea. We got used to quite a lot of something for nothing.
As the loveable rogues on Hustle used to say, that tends to be followed by getting nothing for something. But absent a time machine to go back and make more prudent choices from the mid 1980s onwards, we are where we are.
We are see inflation on a number of areas - not just health, but infrastructure and others. Which far out strip regular inflation.
So literally we can do less for more money.
See the number of ships at sea in the RN etc.
This isn’t about DOGE style stupid slashing of spending. It’s about restraining costs in the way that many sensible organisations manage. Shop around, get better deals, reduce specifications to match the available money.
Some parts of the U.K. state can do this. Many can’t.
Public procurement is somewhere we need to do better, for example.
Am I correct that police forces don’t all buy their kit from the same supplier? Surely if all police cars, uniform and so on was tendered out to a supplier who all forces then had to use they could cut costs - if you are buying a few thousand patrol cars a year you surely get a massive deal from the manufacturer and then also economies of scale on parts, specialist kit for the cars, training being the same.
That’s a seductive idea.
However, in practise, what happened (often) is that a National Deal is negotiated.
That’s locks in a price and specific piece of equipment for years.
I’ve seen this end up as a disaster in private and public procurement. In one private one, a company got locked into using a very expensive piece of software, worldwide. For five years. It’s didn’t work, basically.
This is why we need better professionals to manage such procurement - avoid lock-ins and inflexibility, while negotiating a balance between cost and quality.
Surely it’s not beyond the wit of those tasked with this to work out the minimum amount of new patrol cars, pursuit vehicles, vans, motorbikes are used each calendar year and have a tender for providing each of those to manufacturers and agree a discount and roll it annually if a better deal not offered before the renewal date by a competitor.
I wonder how many different types of stab vests, waterproofs, hi-viz kit are used when they could do bulk deals.
First, there are not that many car makers to choose from anyway. Second, different forces have different requirements – very few motorway patrols for City of London Police, for instance. More subtly though, if every force uses the same, nationally bought equipment, then that just creates a monopoly supplier. Where's your free market competition then?
Now, there could be an argument for supporting domestic manufacturers, as French, German and Italian police forces do, but that's a different kettle of fish.
After Rover was bought by BMW, Matt put out a cartoon of two officers driving a Reliant Robin.
The caption was, 'Unfortunately it's still our policy to buy British.'
And it was down to Bibi leading Trump by the nose into it too.
‘ @newrepublic The Iran war increasingly looks not only like another shocking humiliation, but perhaps the greatest strategic blunder in American military history.’
If anyone is baffled about why so many people are considering the Greens, look at the comments from Sarwar yesterday about cycle lanes.
Now, I understand that the motoring/pensioner segment of the population is by far the most important electorally, but there is a real sense that the other parties simply do not care about you unless you’re over 60 and live in suburbia. This is particularly the case with the Scottish Lib Dems, I’m afraid. Reform actually directly attacked my age group.
There’s a reason the SNP have a 20 point lead. A very large proportion of the Scottish population live in dense urban areas and none of the UK parties are fighting in that space.
To be honest I feel like this in London where Reform seemingly only want to attack my city as a crime hole and full of awful people.
Nobody is really aiming at people that actually work between the ages of 25 and 40. I thought Reform might actually do it but they’ve gone for the triple lock.
If Labour somehow cut my taxes by 2029 (they won’t but just pretend) they’ll have done one more thing than anyone has done for us since 2010.
It’s honestly a joke how the people actually doing the work in this country get completely ignored in basically every debate.
No, they don't. If I had a pound for every time I heard a politician say "hard working families", I'd need new pockets in twenty pairs of trousers. I do agree it's become a mantra but it's as much an idealised version of Britain as the old Tory vision of villages with Vicars cycling past the cricket green.
If you're asking about practical policy for these "hard working families", that in many ways is the core of the debate. The Conservative Party does well when it's the party of aspiration but somewhere it turned away from aspiration to those who actually voted, the welthy, the retired and the comfortable.
Blair did well because he understood that and offered the grandparents the ideal of their grandchildren having nice schools or nurseries and libraries and all the rest of it and he knew people will always vote for something which makes their children's or grandchildren's lives better.
Talking to the aspirational has almost stopped - the man or woman who has to do two jobs just to pay the rent wants a better life but is that better life simply about more money or is it about a place they can afford or just some more time to themselves to rest and relax?
Aspiration can't just be on a material basis -having more "things" isn't the be-all and end-all any longer (I think the pandemic changed a lot of perceptions) and simply cutting taxes isn't the only solution. How do you make people's lives better in ways that work for them rather than ways that get more votes for your party?
But I am aspirational and they don’t speak to me. None of them do really that’s the point.
The reason I mentioned taxes is that all it seems to me is that our taxes go up and everything is still broken. The NHS seems to be almost crumbling, litter seems to be getting worse, anti social behaviour etc.
The elderly seem to complain but seem to get a nice pension at the end of it. What exactly do we get?
I’m putting in the hard yards and I just feel like a lot of the time I’m not really included in much of the debate.
I’d be happy with taxes going up if things were actually getting better but it feels like we’re just treading water, you know?
I am trying to make this a meme: We pay more and more for less and less.
That's certainly why we're unhappy, but maybe it's inevitable. We have had several decades when the fiscal situation was temporarily easy- favourable demographics, windfalls from the North Sea. We got used to quite a lot of something for nothing.
As the loveable rogues on Hustle used to say, that tends to be followed by getting nothing for something. But absent a time machine to go back and make more prudent choices from the mid 1980s onwards, we are where we are.
We are see inflation on a number of areas - not just health, but infrastructure and others. Which far out strip regular inflation.
So literally we can do less for more money.
See the number of ships at sea in the RN etc.
This isn’t about DOGE style stupid slashing of spending. It’s about restraining costs in the way that many sensible organisations manage. Shop around, get better deals, reduce specifications to match the available money.
Some parts of the U.K. state can do this. Many can’t.
Public procurement is somewhere we need to do better, for example.
Am I correct that police forces don’t all buy their kit from the same supplier? Surely if all police cars, uniform and so on was tendered out to a supplier who all forces then had to use they could cut costs - if you are buying a few thousand patrol cars a year you surely get a massive deal from the manufacturer and then also economies of scale on parts, specialist kit for the cars, training being the same.
That’s a seductive idea.
However, in practise, what happened (often) is that a National Deal is negotiated.
That’s locks in a price and specific piece of equipment for years.
I’ve seen this end up as a disaster in private and public procurement. In one private one, a company got locked into using a very expensive piece of software, worldwide. For five years. It’s didn’t work, basically.
This is why we need better professionals to manage such procurement - avoid lock-ins and inflexibility, while negotiating a balance between cost and quality.
Surely it’s not beyond the wit of those tasked with this to work out the minimum amount of new patrol cars, pursuit vehicles, vans, motorbikes are used each calendar year and have a tender for providing each of those to manufacturers and agree a discount and roll it annually if a better deal not offered before the renewal date by a competitor.
I wonder how many different types of stab vests, waterproofs, hi-viz kit are used when they could do bulk deals.
And that’s where domain experts are required.
In this country, often, procurement is considered a generalist skill. Just like management. A Proper Person, preferably with law or accountancy conversion on their degree can do it, right? They can learn by doing.
How hard can it be?
First of all, for Plod uniforms, would they be conformance or performance specs ?
Would different forces have different requirements from this workwear.
I used to buy gowns for the shop floor among many other things and, as part of a large group, you’d think it would be a central contract with one provider. However our different sites had different specific requirements depending on work environment so it was all dealt locally.
And it was down to Bibi leading Trump by the nose into it too.
‘ @newrepublic The Iran war increasingly looks not only like another shocking humiliation, but perhaps the greatest strategic blunder in American military history.’
I think that's unkind. I think it was a great military victory, up there with that one in the Texan War of Independence when they captured a mission statement.
And it was down to Bibi leading Trump by the nose into it too.
‘ @newrepublic The Iran war increasingly looks not only like another shocking humiliation, but perhaps the greatest strategic blunder in American military history.’
I think that's unkind. I think it was a great military victory, up there with that one in the Texan War of Independence when they captured a mission statement.
Yes, Trump is Santa Ana.
My only knowledge of Santa Ana was, at school in singing class, we had to sing a song about him.
And it was down to Bibi leading Trump by the nose into it too.
‘ @newrepublic The Iran war increasingly looks not only like another shocking humiliation, but perhaps the greatest strategic blunder in American military history.’
And it was down to Bibi leading Trump by the nose into it too.
‘ @newrepublic The Iran war increasingly looks not only like another shocking humiliation, but perhaps the greatest strategic blunder in American military history.’
America goes to war with some brown folks, America pulls out declaring victory, situation is not necessarily that much better afterwards, is pretty much the standard MO.
This one is at least far shorter in duration and less costly in British lives than they usually are.
And it was down to Bibi leading Trump by the nose into it too.
‘ @newrepublic The Iran war increasingly looks not only like another shocking humiliation, but perhaps the greatest strategic blunder in American military history.’
Unlike Bush in Iraq or several presidents in Vietnam, Trump has the flexibility to change course when required.
Unfortunately, the "when required" appears to be "losing".
If the mission goals were "kill the high command" then that worked. Few people in the hierarchy pre-2026 are still alive
If the mission gaols were "deprive Iran of uranium" then that does not appear to have worked
If the mission gaols were "regime change" then that does not appear to have worked. It is still the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Revolutionary Guards are still in place, women are still oppressed
And it was down to Bibi leading Trump by the nose into it too.
‘ @newrepublic The Iran war increasingly looks not only like another shocking humiliation, but perhaps the greatest strategic blunder in American military history.’
And it was down to Bibi leading Trump by the nose into it too.
‘ @newrepublic The Iran war increasingly looks not only like another shocking humiliation, but perhaps the greatest strategic blunder in American military history.’
I think that's unkind. I think it was a great military victory, up there with that one in the Texan War of Independence when they captured a mission statement.
Yes, Trump is Santa Ana.
My only knowledge of Santa Ana was, at school in singing class, we had to sing a song about him.
‘Santa Ana was a man on the Plains in Mexico’
Well, he managed to overwhelm a mission station* and kill 189 men with the loss of a mere 1000 of his own.
Meaning he was able to lose a war against an inferior enemy with zero supply and no prospect of reinforcement if he'd only waited six months.
Oh, and he was captured pretending to be a dragoon because he was scared the Texians would shoot him.
*I do not know what a 'mission statement' is either, and autocorrect hasn't enlightened me.
And it was down to Bibi leading Trump by the nose into it too.
‘ @newrepublic The Iran war increasingly looks not only like another shocking humiliation, but perhaps the greatest strategic blunder in American military history.’
And it was down to Bibi leading Trump by the nose into it too.
‘ @newrepublic The Iran war increasingly looks not only like another shocking humiliation, but perhaps the greatest strategic blunder in American military history.’
Unlike Bush in Iraq or several presidents in Vietnam, Trump has the flexibility to change course when required.
Unfortunately, the "when required" appears to be "losing".
If the mission goals were "kill the high command" then that worked. Few people in the hierarchy pre-2026 are still alive
If the mission gaols were "deprive Iran of uranium" then that does not appear to have worked
If the mission gaols were "regime change" then that does not appear to have worked. It is still the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Revolutionary Guards are still in place, women are still oppressed
Any others?
Demonstrate that Trump had a point about needing sovereign control over their most strategic bases.
And it was down to Bibi leading Trump by the nose into it too.
‘ @newrepublic The Iran war increasingly looks not only like another shocking humiliation, but perhaps the greatest strategic blunder in American military history.’
Unlike Bush in Iraq or several presidents in Vietnam, Trump has the flexibility to change course when required.
Unfortunately, the "when required" appears to be "losing".
If the mission goals were "kill the high command" then that worked. Few people in the hierarchy pre-2026 are still alive
If the mission gaols were "deprive Iran of uranium" then that does not appear to have worked
If the mission gaols were "regime change" then that does not appear to have worked. It is still the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Revolutionary Guards are still in place, women are still oppressed
Any others?
'Keep revelations about my sexual abuse of children in cahoots with Epstein off the front pages after my stupid AG accidentally released some of the wrong files.'
And it was down to Bibi leading Trump by the nose into it too.
‘ @newrepublic The Iran war increasingly looks not only like another shocking humiliation, but perhaps the greatest strategic blunder in American military history.’
America goes to war with some brown folks, America pulls out declaring victory, situation is not necessarily that much better afterwards, is pretty much the standard MO.
This one is at least far shorter in duration and less costly in British lives than they usually are.
It’s hardly the two decades of failure in Afghanistan, under four presidents of both colours, at a cost of hundreds of lives and trillions of dollars.
But hey, you get more likes and clicks if you start with OrgangeManWorst and work backwards.
It's Robert Jenrick. Of course it's mean spirited. And yes, what private businesses do is none of his damn business.
But there has always been a chunk of the Conservative Party who have been keen on the idea of a Nanny State, as long as Nanny gives a sound thrashing to naughty children who deserve it.
And it was down to Bibi leading Trump by the nose into it too.
‘ @newrepublic The Iran war increasingly looks not only like another shocking humiliation, but perhaps the greatest strategic blunder in American military history.’
Unlike Bush in Iraq or several presidents in Vietnam, Trump has the flexibility to change course when required.
Unfortunately, the "when required" appears to be "losing".
If the mission goals were "kill the high command" then that worked. Few people in the hierarchy pre-2026 are still alive
If the mission gaols were "deprive Iran of uranium" then that does not appear to have worked
If the mission gaols were "regime change" then that does not appear to have worked. It is still the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Revolutionary Guards are still in place, women are still oppressed
Any others?
Demonstrate that Trump had a point about needing sovereign control over their most strategic bases.
Is there anything Trump does that you won’t support or whatabout about?
If we’re going to go full Daily Mail, much prefer them to visit Westminster Abbey than spend it on other stuff. Price differentiation is a valid tactic from businesses too.
My usual comment that lots of families with kids will be on UC, even with both parents working full time (due to the size of the housing cost award in a city like London). It’s a slightly curious tactic from Reform because people on low incomes would be their key demographic, I’d have thought.
But then, plenty of benefit claimants consider themselves deserving of it, even while considering their neighbours frauds and work shy.
The 10 points of Iran's plan are genuinely shocking and the fact that Trump called them a basis for an agreement shows how absolutely desperate he had become. Rather than free access to the Straits $2m is to be paid to each ship to be shared between Iran and Oman. All of the existing sanctions are to be removed. The US is to remove all its bases in the ME. Reparations are to be paid for the damage. It just goes on and on. In the Farsi version there is even to be more enrichment of Uranium.
Not all of these will be in any final agreement but will any? What level of humiliation can Trump bear before his fingers start twitching towards the nuclear button? Is there a point where even Republicans lose all confidence in him?
The good news is it pretty much never goes off, because it’s already “off” when you buy it. I have a pot in the cupboard that’s so old the salt has started to crystallise on top. Still totally usable.
If we’re going to go full Daily Mail, much prefer them to visit Westminster Abbey than spend it on other stuff. Price differentiation is a valid tactic from businesses too.
My usual comment that lots of families with kids will be on UC, even with both parents working full time (due to the size of the housing cost award in a city like London). It’s a slightly curious tactic from Reform because people on low incomes would be their key demographic, I’d have thought.
But then, plenty of benefit claimants consider themselves deserving of it, even while considering their neighbours frauds and work shy.
So under Reform will broadband and phone contracts for those on UC be removed too?
I assume Jenrick/Reform will also propose cutting my many OAP benefits such as free prescriptions, bus pass, senior railcard, reduced price season ticket, special OAP pizza restaurant deal, etc. etc. Or maybe he won't.
If this sort of thing continues then you can see how MAGA might drop Trump, gently, and embark on a new post-Trump path. Rather as the new populist Conservative Party dropped Boris and embarked on a new path, but still heading rightward.
The logical evolution would seem to be:
- US made a mistake embarking on another Middle East war. - It was Netanyahu’s fault for dragging them in - Opportunity to nod at a few popular far right conspiracy theories about the Jews - Trump wasn’t to blame, he was hoodwinked (and he was right about those awful Europeans) but time to put the old man out to pasture - Now let’s focus on domestic Gilead policies
I assume Jenrick/Reform will also propose cutting my many OAP benefits such as free prescriptions, bus pass, senior railcard, reduced price season ticket, special OAP pizza restaurant deal, etc. etc. Or maybe he won't.
Would actually be clever politics by the Tories to turn this into a scare about exactly that: Jenrick coming for your OAP discounts.
I assume Jenrick/Reform will also propose cutting my many OAP benefits such as free prescriptions, bus pass, senior railcard, reduced price season ticket, special OAP pizza restaurant deal, etc. etc. Or maybe he won't.
I assume Jenrick/Reform will also propose cutting my many OAP benefits such as free prescriptions, bus pass, senior railcard, reduced price season ticket, special OAP pizza restaurant deal, etc. etc. Or maybe he won't.
Would actually be clever politics by the Tories to turn this into a scare about exactly that: Jenrick coming for your OAP discounts.
If anyone is baffled about why so many people are considering the Greens, look at the comments from Sarwar yesterday about cycle lanes.
Now, I understand that the motoring/pensioner segment of the population is by far the most important electorally, but there is a real sense that the other parties simply do not care about you unless you’re over 60 and live in suburbia. This is particularly the case with the Scottish Lib Dems, I’m afraid. Reform actually directly attacked my age group.
There’s a reason the SNP have a 20 point lead. A very large proportion of the Scottish population live in dense urban areas and none of the UK parties are fighting in that space.
To be honest I feel like this in London where Reform seemingly only want to attack my city as a crime hole and full of awful people.
Nobody is really aiming at people that actually work between the ages of 25 and 40. I thought Reform might actually do it but they’ve gone for the triple lock.
If Labour somehow cut my taxes by 2029 (they won’t but just pretend) they’ll have done one more thing than anyone has done for us since 2010.
It’s honestly a joke how the people actually doing the work in this country get completely ignored in basically every debate.
No, they don't. If I had a pound for every time I heard a politician say "hard working families", I'd need new pockets in twenty pairs of trousers. I do agree it's become a mantra but it's as much an idealised version of Britain as the old Tory vision of villages with Vicars cycling past the cricket green.
If you're asking about practical policy for these "hard working families", that in many ways is the core of the debate. The Conservative Party does well when it's the party of aspiration but somewhere it turned away from aspiration to those who actually voted, the welthy, the retired and the comfortable.
Blair did well because he understood that and offered the grandparents the ideal of their grandchildren having nice schools or nurseries and libraries and all the rest of it and he knew people will always vote for something which makes their children's or grandchildren's lives better.
Talking to the aspirational has almost stopped - the man or woman who has to do two jobs just to pay the rent wants a better life but is that better life simply about more money or is it about a place they can afford or just some more time to themselves to rest and relax?
Aspiration can't just be on a material basis -having more "things" isn't the be-all and end-all any longer (I think the pandemic changed a lot of perceptions) and simply cutting taxes isn't the only solution. How do you make people's lives better in ways that work for them rather than ways that get more votes for your party?
But I am aspirational and they don’t speak to me. None of them do really that’s the point.
The reason I mentioned taxes is that all it seems to me is that our taxes go up and everything is still broken. The NHS seems to be almost crumbling, litter seems to be getting worse, anti social behaviour etc.
The elderly seem to complain but seem to get a nice pension at the end of it. What exactly do we get?
I’m putting in the hard yards and I just feel like a lot of the time I’m not really included in much of the debate.
I’d be happy with taxes going up if things were actually getting better but it feels like we’re just treading water, you know?
I am trying to make this a meme: We pay more and more for less and less.
That's certainly why we're unhappy, but maybe it's inevitable. We have had several decades when the fiscal situation was temporarily easy- favourable demographics, windfalls from the North Sea. We got used to quite a lot of something for nothing.
As the loveable rogues on Hustle used to say, that tends to be followed by getting nothing for something. But absent a time machine to go back and make more prudent choices from the mid 1980s onwards, we are where we are.
We are see inflation on a number of areas - not just health, but infrastructure and others. Which far out strip regular inflation.
So literally we can do less for more money.
See the number of ships at sea in the RN etc.
This isn’t about DOGE style stupid slashing of spending. It’s about restraining costs in the way that many sensible organisations manage. Shop around, get better deals, reduce specifications to match the available money.
Some parts of the U.K. state can do this. Many can’t.
Public procurement is somewhere we need to do better, for example.
Am I correct that police forces don’t all buy their kit from the same supplier? Surely if all police cars, uniform and so on was tendered out to a supplier who all forces then had to use they could cut costs - if you are buying a few thousand patrol cars a year you surely get a massive deal from the manufacturer and then also economies of scale on parts, specialist kit for the cars, training being the same.
That’s a seductive idea.
However, in practise, what happened (often) is that a National Deal is negotiated.
That’s locks in a price and specific piece of equipment for years.
I’ve seen this end up as a disaster in private and public procurement. In one private one, a company got locked into using a very expensive piece of software, worldwide. For five years. It’s didn’t work, basically.
This is why we need better professionals to manage such procurement - avoid lock-ins and inflexibility, while negotiating a balance between cost and quality.
Surely it’s not beyond the wit of those tasked with this to work out the minimum amount of new patrol cars, pursuit vehicles, vans, motorbikes are used each calendar year and have a tender for providing each of those to manufacturers and agree a discount and roll it annually if a better deal not offered before the renewal date by a competitor.
I wonder how many different types of stab vests, waterproofs, hi-viz kit are used when they could do bulk deals.
First, there are not that many car makers to choose from anyway. Second, different forces have different requirements – very few motorway patrols for City of London Police, for instance. More subtly though, if every force uses the same, nationally bought equipment, then that just creates a monopoly supplier. Where's your free market competition then?
Now, there could be an argument for supporting domestic manufacturers, as French, German and Italian police forces do, but that's a different kettle of fish.
Which all goes to show that government is difficult and there aren’t easy solutions.
Given the Government is a massive purchaser, it should be possible to agree call-off contracts with a variety of suppliers at the maximum discount for bulk (says someone who knows nothing about contracting)
They’ve done the immigrants now they’re after benefit claimants .
I have no problem with these discounts given as it allows people on benefits to get some pleasure out of life especially for the kids to have a day out .
I assume Jenrick/Reform will also propose cutting my many OAP benefits such as free prescriptions, bus pass, senior railcard, reduced price season ticket, special OAP pizza restaurant deal, etc. etc. Or maybe he won't.
Would actually be clever politics by the Tories to turn this into a scare about exactly that: Jenrick coming for your OAP discounts.
Yep. Jenrick is a mean-spirited scumbag. Call him out for it Tories. Badenoch: "his type of mean politician is not welcome in the Conservative Party" etc
I assume Jenrick/Reform will also propose cutting my many OAP benefits such as free prescriptions, bus pass, senior railcard, reduced price season ticket, special OAP pizza restaurant deal, etc. etc. Or maybe he won't.
Do OAPs vote Reform? If Yes, benefits are safe.
In 2024 they didn’t really. They had a very uniform distribution across age groups, unlike the Tories. This is a new tactic, directly fighting for pensioners in a way they didn’t previously.
I assume Jenrick/Reform will also propose cutting my many OAP benefits such as free prescriptions, bus pass, senior railcard, reduced price season ticket, special OAP pizza restaurant deal, etc. etc. Or maybe he won't.
Do OAPs vote Reform? If Yes, benefits are safe.
A lot of poor people are likely to vote Reform, and the party is planning to run a Number 6 on them.
If this sort of thing continues then you can see how MAGA might drop Trump, gently, and embark on a new post-Trump path. Rather as the new populist Conservative Party dropped Boris and embarked on a new path, but still heading rightward.
The logical evolution would seem to be:
- US made a mistake embarking on another Middle East war. - It was Netanyahu’s fault for dragging them in - Opportunity to nod at a few popular far right conspiracy theories about the Jews - Trump wasn’t to blame, he was hoodwinked (and he was right about those awful Europeans) but time to put the old man out to pasture - Now let’s focus on domestic Gilead policies
Tucker Carlson is eyeing up exactly this space. And Vance of course.
Thursday, 9 April: Last date for delivery of nomination papers (4pm) Friday, 10 April: Statement of Persons Nominated is published (the list of candidates standing in the election)
My papers went in on Tuesday.
Mine went in a week and a half ago, and there is a sad story to tell about what happened, but perhaps also a story interesting to election nerds.
I'm standing in a 3 member ward, so we put in 3 candidates. Shortly after the paperwork had gone in, we received the very sad news that one of the candidates had had a heart attack and died. Obviously, this was tragic at a personal level. He was in his early 70s, but the death was unexpected.
However, it also created a problem for the election. The Electoral Commission website says, "If the RO is notified of a candidate’s death during the election campaign or even on polling day itself (but before the declaration of the result), the poll will be cancelled." The election then has to be re-held, an expense for the Borough. However, our Borough's lawyer went back to the legislation, argued with the Electoral Commission and won. The Borough concluded that a candidate dying before the close of nominations does not invalidate the election. We are sticking with the normal timetable. We've been able to find a new, third candidate and have submitted the paperwork.
these black swan events happen. Well done for getting a sensible solution.
There was a time when the death of a candidate in a contested election was deemed a withdrawal by that candidate, and the other candidate if there was only one other was elected unopposed. If there was a contested election, it still went ahead. Any votes for the dead candidate were treated as spoiled ballot papers.
Not sure when it changed.
it hasn't changed. But the contest can't start until after close of nominations (i.e. 4pm today). If the guy had held onto until next week, THEN the RO would have had to cancel the election
He’s implied he has control over London Zoo. Is he planning to nationalise it?
In the early days, he was seen as an identikit centrist Cameroon. But he's been on "a journey", as they say. Only question is how much it is a) sincere belief, b) pouncing on an opportunity and c) being driven mad by the right wing media bubble.
And it was down to Bibi leading Trump by the nose into it too.
‘ @newrepublic The Iran war increasingly looks not only like another shocking humiliation, but perhaps the greatest strategic blunder in American military history.’
I think that's unkind. I think it was a great military victory, up there with that one in the Texan War of Independence when they captured a mission statement.
Yes, Trump is Santa Ana.
My only knowledge of Santa Ana was, at school in singing class, we had to sing a song about him.
‘Santa Ana was a man on the Plains in Mexico’
Also, Steely Dan.
..Babylon sisters shake it So fine so young Tell me I'm the only one Here comes those Santa Ana winds again..
Not surprising for a lot of reasons both at OpenAi and at the data centre site
OpenAI does look like it might be about to collapse, they are many billions in debt with little in revenue, and the New Yorker have just published quite the piece on the company in general and Sam Altman in particular.
I assume Jenrick/Reform will also propose cutting my many OAP benefits such as free prescriptions, bus pass, senior railcard, reduced price season ticket, special OAP pizza restaurant deal, etc. etc. Or maybe he won't.
Do OAPs vote Reform? If Yes, benefits are safe.
This OAP would rather have his toenails plucked out than vote Reform. So, not all of them.
I assume Jenrick/Reform will also propose cutting my many OAP benefits such as free prescriptions, bus pass, senior railcard, reduced price season ticket, special OAP pizza restaurant deal, etc. etc. Or maybe he won't.
Do OAPs vote Reform? If Yes, benefits are safe.
A lot of poor people are likely to vote Reform, and the party is planning to run a Number 6 on them.
What? Send them all to Portmeirion and ensure that they can't leave?
If this sort of thing continues then you can see how MAGA might drop Trump, gently, and embark on a new post-Trump path. Rather as the new populist Conservative Party dropped Boris and embarked on a new path, but still heading rightward.
The logical evolution would seem to be:
- US made a mistake embarking on another Middle East war. - It was Netanyahu’s fault for dragging them in - Opportunity to nod at a few popular far right conspiracy theories about the Jews - Trump wasn’t to blame, he was hoodwinked (and he was right about those awful Europeans) but time to put the old man out to pasture - Now let’s focus on domestic Gilead policies
Like the VP does ?
https://x.com/atrupar/status/2041863464264646669 JD Vance in Hungary: "Isn't it a scandal that middle class Brits, people who are working hard and playing by the rules, can't afford to heat their home? Can't afford to transport themselves to work because their leadership has made energy so expensive? There's just so much wrong with the political leadership."
And it was down to Bibi leading Trump by the nose into it too.
‘ @newrepublic The Iran war increasingly looks not only like another shocking humiliation, but perhaps the greatest strategic blunder in American military history.’
Unlike Bush in Iraq or several presidents in Vietnam, Trump has the flexibility to change course when required.
Unfortunately, the "when required" appears to be "losing".
If the mission goals were "kill the high command" then that worked. Few people in the hierarchy pre-2026 are still alive
If the mission gaols were "deprive Iran of uranium" then that does not appear to have worked
If the mission gaols were "regime change" then that does not appear to have worked. It is still the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Revolutionary Guards are still in place, women are still oppressed
Any others?
Killing the high command hasn’t worked much. They knocked out the top guy and several other important officials, but Iran is a large country. There is a lot of hierarchy. The UK has about 30 people sitting in Cabinet. Iran has a somewhat bigger population, so there are plenty of ministers there as well, and junior ministers etc.
I assume Jenrick/Reform will also propose cutting my many OAP benefits such as free prescriptions, bus pass, senior railcard, reduced price season ticket, special OAP pizza restaurant deal, etc. etc. Or maybe he won't.
Do OAPs vote Reform? If Yes, benefits are safe.
A lot of poor people are likely to vote Reform, and the party is planning to run a Number 6 on them.
What? Send them all to Portmeirion and ensure that they can't leave?
Ed Miliband has approved Britain’s biggest solar farm despite objections from nearby residents who likened it to Chernobyl.
It will cover seven square miles of farmland in solar panels, an area 10 times greater than London’s Hyde Park.
Hilarious from the locals. But a sensible decision.
If it’s like Chernobyl maybe Netflix could make a searing, award winning drama series about it.
We do miss lots of other opportunities for solar in this country though. In France, domestic solar is about as rare as in the UK (ie still the minority, but rising) but industrial and agricultural are way ahead.
Everywhere you go in the countryside are big new barns and hangars, built so the majority of the roof is South facing, and festooned with what looks like around 100kw of panels. New car parks all have solar canopies, with the double benefit of keeping the car cool in summer and generating electricity.
It does seem odd that all warehouses, data centres, industrial and office blocks aren’t already covered with the things, with big backup batteries.
He’s implied he has control over London Zoo. Is he planning to nationalise it?
He can ban discrimination based on benefits claimant status if he likes.
We (well, the EU) banned car insurance sex price differences, for example. Remember Sheila's Wheels?
He said London Zoo is a public institution, implying we have some control over it. But it’s run by a private charity?
As usual with these people, they hate government interference until they want do some political virtue signaling then they are all for it.
True.
The ZSL is, indeed, a private charity, although the land they’re on is leased from the Crown under its own statute, updated as the Zoological Society of London (Leases) Act 2024.
I doubt we have ever been so helpless in the eye of such a storm
Without being unkind, Starmer looks like a middle manager on a tourist visa in the middle east, and with each EU country acting in different ways with only Italy, Spain and Austria able to claim it is nothing to do with us
A few days ago the Ministry of Defence stated that the RN could board Russia's dark fleet tankers in the channel so in response Russia deploys their warships to accompany them and we just look on
And today a bewildered looking John Healey announces Russian submarines and warships operating close to our waters are threatening our cable communications
When asked by Deborah Haynes, Sky's defence correspondent when the defence review would be published and defence spending accelerated no answer was forthcoming
In all of this madmen in Washington, Tel Aviv, and Tehran threaten death and destruction with no solution in sight
To be fair I have no idea how any UK or EU government can think they have any influence over this as circumstances are beyond their control
This morning, just sold 60% of my ISA Equities fund. I'm not inside Trump's circle and this is not financial advice!
I have been about 1/3 cash in my portfolio, and most of the rest fairly defensive for a few months, but the markets still seem to be defying gravity. Down slightly today, but not by much, despire little movement at Hormuz.
I have moved 40% to cash/MMF's. Have recovered a bit over last few weeks , regained >20K of previous months losses but still dangerous times for sure.
I think we know what life will be like under Reform .
A further move towards capitalism on steroids , continued othering of groups wheeled out as punchbags and blamed for the UKs problems.
An orgy of hate and performative cruelty .
Is this the country people want to live in ?
We already do. Have you missed the hatred and performative cruelty - and serious criminality, including murder and attempted murder - aimed at the Jewish community for the last few years? Or don't they count in your eyes?
A new scandal is unfolding in Rome: For political reasons the Meloni Government has fired Roberto Cingolani, the highly respected CEO of the Leonardo defence group. He has generated huge growth and European integration. He is better than his counterparts at Rheinmetall or Thales. https://x.com/alanfriedmanit/status/2042177346162110833
What reasons ?
There is speculation about US shenanigans - can anyone explain ?
He’s implied he has control over London Zoo. Is he planning to nationalise it?
You do realise govt legislation affects London Zoo already. He can simply legislate, in power, to ban those promotions.
Some promotions in Supermarkets are already banned, for example.
That wasn’t the point. He was implying he had control over London Zoo in particular.
To your point though, he can do that. Just sends the message to me that they’re like the others and give the elderly a free ride as usual.
I don’t think it’s for him, or any govt, to legislate to tell organisations what their pricing policy should be for anything. But I’d apply that to supermarkets or any other business too.
He’s implied he has control over London Zoo. Is he planning to nationalise it?
You do realise govt legislation affects London Zoo already. He can simply legislate, in power, to ban those promotions.
Some promotions in Supermarkets are already banned, for example.
That wasn’t the point. He was implying he had control over London Zoo in particular.
To your point though, he can do that. Just sends the message to me that they’re like the others and give the elderly a free ride as usual.
I don’t think it’s for him, or any govt, to legislate to tell organisations what their pricing policy should be for anything. But I’d apply that to supermarkets or any other business too.
A new scandal is unfolding in Rome: For political reasons the Meloni Government has fired Roberto Cingolani, the highly respected CEO of the Leonardo defence group. He has generated huge growth and European integration. He is better than his counterparts at Rheinmetall or Thales. https://x.com/alanfriedmanit/status/2042177346162110833
What reasons ?
There is speculation about US shenanigans - can anyone explain ?
They’re a listed company in Italy. How can the government fire the CEO?
And it was down to Bibi leading Trump by the nose into it too.
‘ @newrepublic The Iran war increasingly looks not only like another shocking humiliation, but perhaps the greatest strategic blunder in American military history.’
I assume Jenrick/Reform will also propose cutting my many OAP benefits such as free prescriptions, bus pass, senior railcard, reduced price season ticket, special OAP pizza restaurant deal, etc. etc. Or maybe he won't.
Do OAPs vote Reform? If Yes, benefits are safe.
A lot of poor people are likely to vote Reform, and the party is planning to run a Number 6 on them.
What? Send them all to Portmeirion and ensure that they can't leave?
There are worse fates.
Blazing Saddles: go riding into town whipping and a whopping every living thing within an inch of its life
Ed Miliband has approved Britain’s biggest solar farm despite objections from nearby residents who likened it to Chernobyl.
It will cover seven square miles of farmland in solar panels, an area 10 times greater than London’s Hyde Park.
Hilarious from the locals. But a sensible decision.
If it’s like Chernobyl maybe Netflix could make a searing, award winning drama series about it.
We do miss lots of other opportunities for solar in this country though. In France, domestic solar is about as rare as in the UK (ie still the minority, but rising) but industrial and agricultural are way ahead.
Everywhere you go in the countryside are big new barns and hangars, built so the majority of the roof is South facing, and festooned with what looks like around 100kw of panels. New car parks all have solar canopies, with the double benefit of keeping the car cool in summer and generating electricity.
It does seem odd that all warehouses, data centres, industrial and office blocks aren’t already covered with the things, with big backup batteries.
Easier and cheaper to do when you are building something new from scratch. And in Britain, we don't like building new things from scratch.
A new scandal is unfolding in Rome: For political reasons the Meloni Government has fired Roberto Cingolani, the highly respected CEO of the Leonardo defence group. He has generated huge growth and European integration. He is better than his counterparts at Rheinmetall or Thales. https://x.com/alanfriedmanit/status/2042177346162110833
What reasons ?
There is speculation about US shenanigans - can anyone explain ?
They’re a listed company in Italy. How can the government fire the CEO?
The Italian government owns about 30% of Leonardo. Presumably this means they appoint a certain portion of the Board.
And it was down to Bibi leading Trump by the nose into it too.
‘ @newrepublic The Iran war increasingly looks not only like another shocking humiliation, but perhaps the greatest strategic blunder in American military history.’
America goes to war with some brown folks, America pulls out declaring victory, situation is not necessarily that much better afterwards, is pretty much the standard MO.
This one is at least far shorter in duration and less costly in British lives than they usually are.
It’s hardly the two decades of failure in Afghanistan, under four presidents of both colours, at a cost of hundreds of lives and trillions of dollars.
But hey, you get more likes and clicks if you start with OrgangeManWorst and work backwards.
We also need to get our story straight on Trump's psycopathy - either he is a hardened nutter who would gladly wipe Iran off the map, or he is a blowhard who never means it. He can't be both.
And it was down to Bibi leading Trump by the nose into it too.
‘ @newrepublic The Iran war increasingly looks not only like another shocking humiliation, but perhaps the greatest strategic blunder in American military history.’
America goes to war with some brown folks, America pulls out declaring victory, situation is not necessarily that much better afterwards, is pretty much the standard MO.
This one is at least far shorter in duration and less costly in British lives than they usually are.
It’s hardly the two decades of failure in Afghanistan, under four presidents of both colours, at a cost of hundreds of lives and trillions of dollars.
But hey, you get more likes and clicks if you start with OrgangeManWorst and work backwards.
We also need to get our story straight on Trump's psycopathy - either he is a hardened nutter who would gladly wipe Iran off the map, or he is a blowhard who never means it. He can't be both.
He can be both. He is a man ruled by base instincts, but with the long-term planning of a mayfly, so he can easily switch from genocide to backing down.
Comments
Until the voting public accept this reality we are doomed to poor quality, ineffective, short term governments whatever the colour of their rosettes.
So literally we can do less for more money.
See the number of ships at sea in the RN etc.
This isn’t about DOGE style stupid slashing of spending. It’s about restraining costs in the way that many sensible organisations manage. Shop around, get better deals, reduce specifications to match the available money.
Some parts of the U.K. state can do this. Many can’t.
Public procurement is somewhere we need to do better, for example.
However, in practise, what happened (often) is that a National Deal is negotiated.
That’s locks in a price and specific piece of equipment for years.
I’ve seen this end up as a disaster in private and public procurement. In one private one, a company got locked into using a very expensive piece of software, worldwide. For five years. It’s didn’t work, basically.
This is why we need better professionals to manage such procurement - avoid lock-ins and inflexibility, while negotiating a balance between cost and quality.
Defining certain national specifications, then an open market to whoever can meet those criteria.
I wonder how many different types of stab vests, waterproofs, hi-viz kit are used when they could do bulk deals.
But, yes, there are also arguments for more uniform systems driven by the centre, including economies of scale. I work in health research and I think we need more central decision making in healthcare, but I know little about police forces.
The Government is centralising some services. Local government reform is all about centralising services. Merging the NHS with DHSC speaks to a greater willingness to centralise healthcare planning.
And it was down to Bibi leading Trump by the nose into it too.
‘
@newrepublic
The Iran war increasingly looks not only like another shocking humiliation, but perhaps the greatest strategic blunder in American military history.’
https://x.com/newrepublic/status/2042057389902381534?s=61
In this country, often, procurement is considered a generalist skill. Just like management. A Proper Person, preferably with law or accountancy conversion on their degree can do it, right? They can learn by doing.
How hard can it be?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/czjwp1vjn9lo
Of course I imagine government efficiency reviews have been written since the days of the rump parliament. Probably be more efficient to just run a reprint every ten years or so rather than get in some chancer angling for gong to state the obvious. It seems to me that what matters more than doing the review is attention to detail on implementation and execution of the recommendations.
Now, there could be an argument for supporting domestic manufacturers, as French, German and Italian police forces do, but that's a different kettle of fish.
The caption was, 'Unfortunately it's still our policy to buy British.'
Would different forces have different requirements from this workwear.
I used to buy gowns for the shop floor among many other things and, as part of a large group, you’d think it would be a central contract with one provider. However our different sites had different specific requirements depending on work environment so it was all dealt locally.
Kentucky - 4th GOP House Polling:
Massie: 47%*
Gallrein: 37% - (Endorsed By Trump)
Quantus / April 7, 2026
https://x.com/USA_Polling/status/2042046205480300988
Yes, Trump is Santa Ana.
‘Santa Ana was a man on the Plains in Mexico’
America goes to war with some brown folks, America pulls out declaring victory, situation is not necessarily that much better afterwards, is pretty much the standard MO.
This one is at least far shorter in duration and less costly in British lives than they usually are.
- If the mission goals were "kill the high command" then that worked. Few people in the hierarchy pre-2026 are still alive
- If the mission gaols were "deprive Iran of uranium" then that does not appear to have worked
- If the mission gaols were "regime change" then that does not appear to have worked. It is still the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Revolutionary Guards are still in place, women are still oppressed
Any others?Businesses offer deep discounts for benefits claimants. Is it fair. Probably not. But is it for the state to tell them they can do this or not.
Of course you wage slaves are being mugged off. However the solution is not this
‘ No.
Working people are being taken for a ride.
Under a Reform UK government you won’t be able to use benefits to get discounts like this.’
https://x.com/robertjenrick/status/2042165630929977616?s=61
Meaning he was able to lose a war against an inferior enemy with zero supply and no prospect of reinforcement if he'd only waited six months.
Oh, and he was captured pretending to be a dragoon because he was scared the Texians would shoot him.
*I do not know what a 'mission statement' is either, and autocorrect hasn't enlightened me.
That seems to have worked...
But hey, you get more likes and clicks if you start with OrgangeManWorst and work backwards.
But there has always been a chunk of the Conservative Party who have been keen on the idea of a Nanny State, as long as Nanny gives a sound thrashing to naughty children who deserve it.
Maybe Jenrick should be attacking those employers who are taking the piss out of their own employees by not paying them enough.
This is merely another iteration of painting over children's murals. Jenrick is performative cruelty personified.
My usual comment that lots of families with kids will be on UC, even with both parents working full time (due to the size of the housing cost award in a city like London). It’s a slightly curious tactic from Reform because people on low incomes would be their key demographic, I’d have thought.
But then, plenty of benefit claimants consider themselves deserving of it, even while considering their neighbours frauds and work shy.
Zack being given a very, very easy ride on the BBC.
Not all of these will be in any final agreement but will any? What level of humiliation can Trump bear before his fingers start twitching towards the nuclear button? Is there a point where even Republicans lose all confidence in him?
https://spectator.com/article/gentlemans-relish-is-no-more/
https://x.com/ft/status/2042215321348522146
He’s implied he has control over London Zoo. Is he planning to nationalise it?
Or maybe he won't.
We are utterly screwed if they knock something out. Probably already happened to Orkney a few months back.
The logical evolution would seem to be:
- US made a mistake embarking on another Middle East war.
- It was Netanyahu’s fault for dragging them in
- Opportunity to nod at a few popular far right conspiracy theories about the Jews
- Trump wasn’t to blame, he was hoodwinked (and he was right about those awful Europeans) but time to put the old man out to pasture
- Now let’s focus on domestic Gilead policies
They’ve done the immigrants now they’re after benefit claimants .
I have no problem with these discounts given as it allows people on benefits to get some pleasure out of life especially for the kids to have a day out .
Jenrick really is a vile individual.
One off travel I can understand but this one baffles me.
We (well, the EU) banned car insurance sex price differences, for example. Remember Sheila's Wheels?
..Babylon sisters shake it
So fine so young
Tell me I'm the only one
Here comes those Santa Ana winds again..
https://x.com/ronanfarrow/status/2041127882429206532
So, not all of them.
As usual with these people, they hate government interference until they want do some political virtue signaling then they are all for it.
There are worse fates.
https://x.com/atrupar/status/2041863464264646669
JD Vance in Hungary: "Isn't it a scandal that middle class Brits, people who are working hard and playing by the rules, can't afford to heat their home? Can't afford to transport themselves to work because their leadership has made energy so expensive? There's just so much wrong with the political leadership."
Oh, you mean domestic US politics,
A further move towards capitalism on steroids , continued othering of groups wheeled out as punchbags and blamed for the UKs problems.
An orgy of hate and performative cruelty .
Is this the country people want to live in ?
Ed Miliband has approved Britain’s biggest solar farm despite objections from nearby residents who likened it to Chernobyl.
It will cover seven square miles of farmland in solar panels, an area 10 times greater than London’s Hyde Park.
Hilarious from the locals. But a sensible decision.
We do miss lots of other opportunities for solar in this country though. In France, domestic solar is about as rare as in the UK (ie still the minority, but rising) but industrial and agricultural are way ahead.
Everywhere you go in the countryside are big new barns and hangars, built so the majority of the roof is South facing, and festooned with what looks like around 100kw of panels. New car parks all have solar canopies, with the double benefit of keeping the car cool in summer and generating electricity.
It does seem odd that all warehouses, data centres, industrial and office blocks aren’t already covered with the things, with big backup batteries.
Some promotions in Supermarkets are already banned, for example.
The ZSL is, indeed, a private charity, although the land they’re on is leased from the Crown under its own statute, updated as the Zoological Society of London (Leases) Act 2024.
Without being unkind, Starmer looks like a middle manager on a tourist visa in the middle east, and with each EU country acting in different ways with only Italy, Spain and Austria able to claim it is nothing to do with us
A few days ago the Ministry of Defence stated that the RN could board Russia's dark fleet tankers in the channel so in response Russia deploys their warships to accompany them and we just look on
And today a bewildered looking John Healey announces Russian submarines and warships operating close to our waters are threatening our cable communications
When asked by Deborah Haynes, Sky's defence correspondent when the defence review would be published and defence spending accelerated no answer was forthcoming
In all of this madmen in Washington, Tel Aviv, and Tehran threaten death and destruction with no solution in sight
To be fair I have no idea how any UK or EU government can think they have any influence over this as circumstances are beyond their control
‘ BREAKING: US GDP growth falls from 4.4% to 0.5% in Q4 2025, well below the initially expected +2.8% growth.’
https://x.com/kobeissiletter/status/2042219787690844598?s=61
To your point though, he can do that. Just sends the message to me that they’re like the others and give the elderly a free ride as usual.
https://x.com/alanfriedmanit/status/2042177346162110833
What reasons ?
There is speculation about US shenanigans - can anyone explain ?
‘ BREAKING: Israeli military issues evacuation warning for Beirut's southern suburbs ’
https://x.com/skynews/status/2042227137269100983?s=61