Tag Archives: recruit

Keir Starmer’s latest insulting betrayal of Labour is a doozy

Keir Starmer (right) is showing he is closer politically to Boris Johnson’s Tories with every rotten right-wing decision he makes.

If we ever needed more evidence that Keir Starmer thinks his job is to contain the Labour Party, rather than lead it, here it is:

He is trying to recruit people from outside Labour – who may never have considered even voting for it – to become Parliamentary candidates for the 2024 general election.

The insult on top of the injury is that the plan is a direct copy of a Conservative initiative – the so-called ‘A-list’ scheme. Here’s Elen Courea of The Times:

What incredible contempt for the party members who represent everything Labour should stand for.

He’ll take their membership money (let’s face it, he’s desperate for the funds).

He’ll tell them what to do – and punish them brutally if they don’t comply.

But he’s absolutely determined to exclude them from having anything to do with how the party is to be run. That’s for Tories, like him.

And we all know it, don’t we?

But there’s trouble on the horizon.

Once again, the UK’s biggest union – Unite – has spoken up in protest at Starmer’s plan that is “potentially bypassing the talent in our movement”.

The statement says:

“It is depressing that the latest offering from the Labour Party is a plan to imitate the Tories’ candidate selection model.

“Our party is packed with talented people who have dedicated themselves to their party, their union or public service.

“These should be our A-list candidates and we should be proud to nurture them to stand for Labour.

“This is where the trade unions come in, with successful programmes dedicated to supporting Labour members and trade unionists to become MPs.

“The briefing around the ‘calibre’ of the latest intake of Labour MPs is disrespectful snobbery towards people who give their all for Labour.

“Labour should be working with the trade unions – our living and breathing link back to workplaces – to develop a candidates programme that the whole movement can get behind.

“But if the party carries on alienating and offending members, it will be hard to find anyone inspired to stand for office as a Labour MP.”

Well, it will be hard to find anyone willing to be a Labour MP who is’nt a Tory.

And they’ll be second-class Tories, too – because all the top-tier Tories will be on the proper ‘A-list’ scheme.

With every step he takes, Starmer makes it more clear that his job is to bury Labour forever.

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Tories want to hire a new ‘head of pandemic preparedness’ – after they axed the old systems for doing that

Head of Pandemic Un-preparedness: Boris Johnson’s reaction to Covid-19 was so poor that he actually caught the disease himself and then sent us all letters, claiming to provide advice on how not to do the same.

The Tories have been accused of closing the barn door after the horse has bolted, after they advertised for a new ‘head of pandemic preparedness’ six months into the Covid crisis.

But the facts are actually worse than that.

The idea is to pay someone £61,000 a year to “learn the lessons” (how many times have we heard that?) from the crisis and ensure the UK is properly prepared for any similar situation in the future.

And yes, it is too late for all that.

But the reason it’s too late is that the Tories spent the last 10 years dismantling the UK’s system of preparation for any pandemic disease.

I wrote about this back in March so perhaps people have forgotten. Here’s the gist:

The UK government has strategies for dealing with events like this. The Cabinet Office keeps a National Risk Register of Civil Emergencies which it must keep up-to-date – and every single copy of this document ever made lists “pandemic flu” as the most probable and devastating threat to the UK.

This means the government has devised strategies to deal with such a threat. The problem is, they are all out of date.

Oldest of them all is the guide to dealing with the fatalities of the pandemic,  last published in 2008. This has never been updated since the Conservatives took over responsibility for it.

The last strategy written specifically to deal with pandemic flu was published in 2011 – the same year David Cameron’s Conservative-led Coalition government closed the dedicated government Pandemic Influenza Preparedness Team based in the Department of Health, which was tasked with tackling this type of crisis.

It may explain much that the government’s UK Pandemic Influenza Communications Strategy, the crucial document for getting the right messages across to the public, was written in 2012 and is now wildly inaccurate in its assumptions about how and where people get their information.

In October 2016, David Cameron’s now wholly-Conservative government carried out an exercise to estimate the impact of a hypothetical influenza pandemic on the United Kingdom. Exercise Cygnus showed that such a pandemic would cause the country’s health system to collapse, due to a lack of resources.

The Chief Medical Officer of the time said that a lack of medical ventilators was a serious problem that should be rectified, but in 2017 this advice was ignored by the Department of Health under Jeremy Hunt – because it would cost too much. The government was committed to austerity policies, remember.

So you see, we used to have whole teams dedicated to ensuring that the UK could weather a pandemic without serious harm to the population.

And the Tories got rid of the lot.

And now they want to replace them with a single person.

So let’s float a wild theory.

Is it possible that the Tories knew a pandemic like Covid-19 could cause huge numbers of unnecessary deaths, and decided to allow it to happen?

I’ll answer that for you: we know it is because it is exactly what Boris Johnson advocated on live television in early March.

Is it possible that all their decisions since then have been dedicated to this end, rather than towards saving people’s lives, and this is why every single strategy they have started has been a dismal failure?

And, in line with this thinking…

Is it possible that this position will be nothing more than a “figurehead” role, to be quietly dissolved after a few years so we can all fall victim to the next viral disaster?

Source: Government to hire ‘Head of Pandemic Preparedness’ six months into Covid-19 crisis – Mirror Online

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Johnson’s falsehood about nurse numbers: it’s not good to launch a manifesto with a lie

Nurses: Boris Johnson has promised more, but he has not been straight about the numbers to be recruited or the cost of recruiting them.

Boris Johnson has finally launched the Conservative Party’s manifesto for the 2019 general election – with a huge, and all-too-obvious, lie.

He promised 50,000 more nurses and the creation of 50 million more GP appointments.

The Tories’ spending document says the additional nurses will cost £879 million.

But fact checking organisation Full Fact says this is not true:

“According to reports since the manifesto launch, the 50,000 figure includes 18,500 existing nurses who will be encouraged to remain, or attracted to rejoin after leaving.”

So the Conservatives are really offering to recruit only 31,500 nurses.

What about the cost?

“The party claims in their spending document the policy to retain, recruit and train nurses for the NHS in England will cost £879 million in 2023/24. (Health is a devolved area, so the UK government is only directly responsible for it in England.)

“While it’s not clear how this has been calculated, that clearly isn’t the total cost of eventually having 50,000 more nurses on the NHS.

“A newly-qualified nurse on pay band 5 can expect a salary of about £24,000 a year. But this isn’t what it costs to employ that nurse. There’s a lot more to the cost of employing someone than just their salary—you also need to consider things like national insurance and pensions, as well as the costs of giving them places to work and training them on the job.

“Independent analysts estimate that once you add up the extra costs (excluding capital overheads), a band 5 nurse may cost around £53,000 a year.

“That doesn’t include the cost of recruiting or training those nurses, which is a significant factor in how much such a policy would eventually cost. Estimates suggest over the expected lifetime service of a nurse, that could amount to around £8,700 a year.

“Even without adding training costs, as a very rough indication, 50,000 nurses at pay band 5 cost the NHS in the region of £2.8 billion a year based on this estimate (or £2.6 billion excluding capital overheads). The actual cost will be higher as some move up the pay scale, and considering ongoing training costs as well.

So the cost is only around £1.9 billion out!

The 50 million GP appointments is derived from employing 6,000 more doctors.

The trouble is, the Conservatives promised 5,000 more GPs back in 2015, and more than 500 have left since then.

So there’s no reason to believe they’ll recruit anybody; they’re far more likely to push even more away.

Source: General election 2019: Boris Johnson vows to ‘forge a new Britain’ – BBC News

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Tory ‘law and order’ campaign falls flat on its… truncheon

Lawless: All those police officers behind Boris Johnson, and not one of them had the good sense to take him into custody.

That was short and not-very-sweet, wasn’t it?

Yesterday we heard that the Conservatives would try to make December’s general election about law and order. Today, that plan fell to ruin.

It seems the Conservatives wanted to trumpet their claim to be adding 20,000 police officers to our streets. There was only one problem:

It has already been debunked.

We know that it was the Tories who cut the service by 21,000 in the first place.

We also know that, with natural wastage occurring all the time (such as retirements or resignations), adding 20,000 won’t even make up the staffing level we have at the moment.

So we know that any claim to be restoring law and order to a higher standard in this way is false advertising, if not an outright lie.

Also, of course, there’s no point in having police if the Tories are going to use them as political tools – as seems to have been the case in the Extinction Rebellion protests, when they victimised vulnerable people with disabilities.

But health secretary Matt Hancock didn’t seem to know that, when he appeared on Good Morning Britain.

The result was a train crash for him, and a killing for the show’s co-presenter, Susannah Reid:

Now, to judge from Nadhim Zahawi’s performance on the BBC’s Politics Live, the Tories want to make it about the NHS.

But wasn’t there a scandal about a dodgy US trade deal to rig the price of drugs, only yesterday?

Ah yes, that’s right: Price-rigging is now to be known as “valuing innovation”.

Hopefully the Tories’ innovative valuing system will price them right out of being re-elected.

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The Tories have been cutting police for years; why start recruiting again NOW?

British police: No, they’re NOT goose-stepping. What do you think this is, some kind of police state like Nazi Germany?

They’re bound to be nicknamed “Boris Bobbies” or something similar, so let’s get that out of the way first.

Yes, it seems that after nearly a decade in which police numbers have been cut by more than 20,500, Boris Johnson’s new Conservative government is recruiting again – and intends to replace almost all the lost officers.

Why? More importantly: Why now?

What does BoJob see coming up in the future that might require a larger police force? You know the Conservatives would not be recruiting cops just to sort out crime; they don’t care about poor people preying on each other.

So, what’s coming?

Do you think it might be something to do with Brexit?

Could Mr Johnson’s advisors be predicting some form of unrest as a result of the manner in which he is planning to take us out of the European Union (let’s be honest – he wants a “no deal” Brexit because he couldn’t negotiate a drinks order with the EU27 leaders, let alone a decoupling agreement)?

Just a thought.

And you know the new Tory government isn’t spending any money on crime prevention, like the “public health” model pioneered in Glasgow that offered alternatives to crime and reduced offences by half.

So it’s not about cutting crime in general – or at least, it doesn’t seem to be. Does it?

Apparently it will be quite tricky to fill all the places because of a lack of instructors (redundancies?) and police stations in which to put them (sell-offs?), and there are issues with the possible candidates, too.

Rules mean recruits must have a degree, or train for one on the job; and competition to recruit skilled workers in some jobs is likely to be so fierce that targets may not be reached – which suggests that there aren’t enough people with the right skills living in the UK (or they’ve all got better jobs already).

But Downing Street has said a recruitment campaign will begin in September, with forces held to account for meeting the target by a new board composed of police leaders and Home Secretary Priti Patel. What happens when they fail?

And it seems the budget for this initiative is unlimited. Policing minister Kit Malthouse said the plans would cost around £500 million in the first year, but “we still have to work out the exact number”.

The funds will come from taxation and borrowing – a U-turn for the Conservatives after nine years of austerity. As Mr Malthouse said: “You deal with what the priority is and you make the rest fit.”

So the priority for the last nine years has been starving the public sector of cash, creating a plethora of social problems including increased crime, and now the priority is to recruit more people to arrest those new criminals.

And Ms Patel will be pursuing preventative measures in order to reduce the prison population? That doesn’t add up – unless she really is planning to reintroduce the death penalty, and extend it to crimes running down to, and including, shoplifting.

Ms Patel apparently said this was the start of a new relationship between the government and the police.

Considering all of the above – and the way the Tories have historically used the police as political weapons – I cannot help but find this whole initiative…

Suspect.

Source: Recruitment of 20,000 new police officers to begin ‘within weeks’ – BBC News

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