Tag Archives: reduce

Rishi Sunak’s NHS waiting lists excuses are nonsense

Rishi Sunak at a hospital: he made big speeches, rolled up his sleeves… and made matters worse.

Rishi Sunak has admitted that he has failed to cut NHS waiting lists, despite having promised to do so.

He made the confession in an interview with oily TV presenter Piers Morgan, but there’s a sting in the tail:

Did you spot the excuse? “Industrial action has had an impact.” Pathetic.

He also said nurses had received a pay rise – which was actually a real-terms pay cut.

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Peter Stefanovic put these lies to rest in the first few seconds of the following clip (and the rest is well worth watching too):

And Left Foot Forward has also had a few things to say:

Sunak wants you to believe that record-high waiting lists are the result of factors beyond the government’s control, such as the pandemic and subsequent strikes among NHS workers over low pay and poor conditions.

Except, as many have pointed out, the total number of people waiting for treatment was at a record level even before the pandemic, and had been rising every year since 2013.

In fact, the waiting list for treatment has been growing for much of the last decade, passing three million in 2014, four million in 2017, five million in 2021 and seven million in 2022.

In February 2020, the last full month before the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, the waiting list stood at 4.57 million.

The Royal College of Nursing has also previously hit back at Sunak’s claim that strike action has resulted in soaring waiting lists.

The RCN said last year: “Waiting lists were growing long before the pandemic and strike action – and the prime minister should take responsibility for the knife-edge position of the NHS and not point the finger.”

Do I have to point out how vital it is that you bear all this in mind when you consider where to put your ‘X’ on the ballot paper at the general election?

Source: Why Rishi Sunak’s excuse for failing to cut NHS waiting lists doesn’t add up – Left Foot Forward: Leading the UK’s progressive debate


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Tories agree to tackle sewage discharges – because they think it allowed them to humiliate Labour

Flushed out: the Tories have not only agreed to carry out impact assessments on the effects of dumping raw sewage into UK waterways, but they must also set targets for such dumping to be reduced, and introduce fines against privatised water companies that fail to do so, or fail to properly monitor such discharges.

Don’t be discouraged by the Tory carping; this is a victory for anyone who is concerned about raw sewage being dumped into UK waterways.

Labour used an Opposition Day debate in the House of Commons to put forward a motion calling on the government to

  • Set a target for the reduction of sewage discharges
  • Provide for financial penalties in relation to sewage discharges and breaches of monitoring requirements, and
  • Carry out an impact assessment of sewage discharges

The motion also included a provision that would have given the Opposition the ability to take control of the Commons order paper in future and introduce legislation of its own.

Now, why would it do that? It doesn’t have any specific relevance to the sewage issue, as far as This Writer can see.

The Conservatives leaped on what they saw as an opportunity to humiliate Labour, with an amendment that removed the fourth part of the motion but supported the first three.

Because the amendment only deleted words from the motion, Parliamentary procedure meant it would be the first aspect on which MPs would vote – and the Tories’ Parliamentary majority meant it was passed by 290 votes to 188 against.

They then forced a vote on the amended motion. Labour MPs were ordered to abstain on it, because the Tories had amended it in their favour.

Had they, though? Had they really? It still demanded all the measures on sewage that Labour wanted.

And I don’t think anybody in the Labour leadership believed the Tories would allow them to introduce their own legislation.

The amended motion passed with 286 Tory votes – so the Tories pushed through the changes that Labour had demanded.

That means that the Tories are now obliged to

  • Set a target for the reduction of sewage discharges
  • Provide for financial penalties in relation to sewage discharges and breaches of monitoring requirements, and
  • Carry out an impact assessment of sewage discharges

that they weren’t willing to do before.

And they’re saying they humiliated Labour?

Well, here’s a thing:

Those of us who are concerned about water pollution don’t care.

The changes have been supported – by the Tories who originally opposed them.

So who has been humiliated, really?


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Is Labour showing a shadow of intelligence over sewage?

This is happening more than 800 times a day: the routine dumping of raw sewage into rivers and the sea cannot be allowed to continue – but will the Tories be sunk, whether they support the Labour plan to stop it or not?

Take a look at this, courtesy of Feargal Sharkey:

It seems Labour wants to introduce a Parliamentary Bill to implement legally-binding targets to reduce sewage dumping on Tuesday (April 25). But that’s not the clever bit!

If the Tories block this Bill, it seems Labour will then launch a series of attack adverts – in advance of the local elections – asserting that the Tories think “it’s right” to allow raw sewage to be pumped into our rivers and beaches more than 800 times a day.

This is quite shrewd from the Labour Party.

If the Tories don’t support the Bill, they sabotage their own local election chances.

If they do support it, they impose strictures on private business, which is against their neoliberal ideology.

Not only that, but the new rules would probably be ignored and go unregulated, making the Tories look weak. And this could sabotage their chances at a general election.

It really is rather clever.

So clever that I doubt Keir Starmer or any of his minister dreamed it up. I wonder who did?


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Party chairman lays out the DISGUSTING Tory line on too-high energy bills

Jake Berry: he looks like a far-right skinhead, and he acts like a far-right skinhead. Do you think it’s because he IS a far-right skinhead?

Jake Berry is the chairman of the Conservative Party. He can be expected to provide the party line on all the major issues.

So when he spoke out to address the concerns of ordinary people about energy bills that, even with Liz Truss’s price cap, are still too high, you can be sure it is what the Tories think.

Here’s what he said:

Let’s unpack that.

Firstly: the Conservative Party does not care if your bill is too much for you to pay.

Secondly: the Conservative Party is happy to let you freeze in your home, rather than take action to prevent that from happening.

Finally: the Conservative Party is happy to fob you off by saying you should try to take a non-existent “higher-paying job” if you want to heat your home properly.

Many of us have an opinion about that…:

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Boris Johnson said he would take control of energy prices. Another lie?

Duper’s delight yet again: was this the look on Boris Johnson’s face when he announced his new energy strategy that won’t reduce your bill or help you in any way at all?

Boris Johnson has short-changed the people of the United Kingdom yet again with his hopeless “energy strategy”.

I put the words “energy strategy” in quotation marks above because very little of it makes strategic sense and neither is it in any way energetic.

How is building hugely expensive and polluting nuclear power stations, that won’t be ready until 2050, going to reduce my energy bill today? It isn’t.

How is building offshore wind farms by 2030 going to reduce my energy bill today? It isn’t.

And when is Johnson going to order the privatised energy firms to cut their bills? Never.

That’s right – never.

If he had any intention of helping reduce your bills, his “strategy” would have started with a plan to insulate everybody’s home so that we wouldn’t have to use as much electricity and gas as we do now.

We’re told the Treasury has blocked such ideas but if Johnson really wanted to help us, he would have told Rishi Rich where to stuff his objections.

The fact is that, by his inaction, Johnson has condemned us to endure high energy costs for years, if not decades, to come. It’s what he wants.

It makes a nonsense of his claim that “we’re setting out bold plans to scale up and accelerate affordable, clean and secure energy made in Britain, for Britain… so we can enjoy greater energy self-sufficiency with cheaper bills.”

The people of the UK need cheaper bills now, not in 10 or 20 years time when other costs will have increased, when the energy company executives have become even more greedy and therefore when it won’t make a scrap of difference.

And why is nobody mentioning the elephant in the room – that if Johnson re-nationalised the energy firms, he could wipe away the unnecessary costs of making profits for their (mostly foreign) shareholders at a stroke?

For all the hot air he has spouted, Johnson isn’t helping you at all. He’s helping himself and his fatcat friends with a grotesque lie.

Source: PM promises to take back control of energy costs in long-awaited strategy | Evening Standard

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Is this really what the Tories call URGENT action to curb river pollution?

Boris Johnson’s Britain: “one of the most effluent nations in the world” as Dr Louise Raw put it when she tweeted this image.

How can the Tory government claim to be taking “urgent” action to curb river pollution when its targets are 13 and 28 years away?

Are we all expected to put up with being hip-deep in human waste in the meantime?

According to Environment Secretary George “Useless” Eustice, he’s taking “urgent” action to cut the “most damaging” overflows into rivers and the sea by 75 per cent – by 2035, with all discharges cut by 80 per cent by 2050.

If that’s “urgent” action, I’d hate to think what “Useless” describes as inconsequential!

Eustice said the government was investing £7 billion until 2025 to upgrade sewage infrastructure but admitted water bills will rise by about £12 a year to cover costs beyond that.

Didn’t the Thatcher Tory government of the 1980s, in its push to privatise water, say that bills would be cheaper and private firms would upgrade infrastructure using their profits? Yes, it did.

So why are we paying for it, in money provided by the government and directly through our own bills?

Some background: last autumn, the Tory government gave polluters the green light to dump risky sewage that has not been properly cleaned into rivers and the sea, after it turned out that Brexit had closed the UK’s borders to chemicals that are used to treat effluent.

The Conservatives followed this up by defeating Lords Amendment 45 to the then Environment Bill, which would have placed a legal duty on water companies in England and Wales “to make improvements to their sewerage systems and demonstrate progressive reductions in the harm caused by discharges of untreated sewage.

One Conservative, This Writer’s MP Fay Jones, said the amendment would have forced taxpayers to stump up £600 billion to “dig up” and modernise the UK’s sewer system, that has remained unchanged since Victorian times (apparently).

She then blocked responses that requested a breakdown of the figures. Considering her party is now saying £7 billion will cover the work, with an increase in bills to fund further costs, I think it’s fair to say that she overinflated the figures somewhat.

Mind you, she’s not the only one who seems to have – inadvertently? – misled the public. On October 25 last year, The Big Issue published a tweet, and an article, reporting that the water companies were saying they did not know how much sewage they were dumping into England’s rivers because the technology did not exist to monitor it.

But new data released on Thursday showed that in 2021, there were more than 372,000 spill events from from storm overflows, which release untreated sewage and rainwater into the environment to ease pressure on the system.

The Environment Agency said it has made water companies fit monitors to their storm overflows in order to capture information on how they are performing. 2021 was the second year the organisation published figures so it seems the firms were being economical with the facts.

And the facts are that we are being forced to live in our own effluent – along with muck imported from the Netherlands, due to EU restrictions on what can be dumped there – while water companies that are mostly owned by foreign governments coin it in.

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Priti Patel takes herself too seriously and that’s why this blunder is so satisfying

Gone is the trademark smirk: perhaps Ms Patel doesn’t think it’s funny when she makes a stupid mistake.

This is so funny I can’t let it pass by.

Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, announced over the weekend…

Without the slightest hint of self-consciousness, This Writer should add…

That shoplifting in the UK has fallen, when compared with the same time last year.

It seems she had forgotten a small detail:

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Labour lowers requirement to trigger selection of new Parliamentary candidates

Labour’s ruling National Executive Committee has reduced the required number of votes needed to trigger the selection of new Parliamentary candidates.

The decision means constituency Labour parties may more easily rid themselves of MPs who members feel no longer have the good of the party at heart.

This may include those who have spoken out against party leader Jeremy Corbyn because they do not share his political views, rather than over any wrong-doing he may be perceived to have carried out.

It may also include those who have deliberately attempted to hinder Labour’s electoral chances while Mr Corbyn is leader.

But the rule change also means members of the party’s right-wing may take advantage too – in order to remove supporters of Mr Corbyn and/or his policies.

Skwawkbox (quoted below) suggests that all those who wish to ensure the Parliamentary Labour Party more adequately resembles its left-wing membership need to get organised now, contacting their CLP secretaries to ensure they can make the necessary arrangements, and This Writer agrees.

The full procedures document can be downloaded here.

Labour members eager for the opportunity to choose a new parliamentary representative now have a green light to start the ‘trigger’ process – and some will face a lower hurdle to successfully force a full selection contest, after the party’s National Executive Committee (NEC) agreed a change to the application of the ‘one in three branches’ trigger threshold.

In Labour’s new trigger rules, one in three member branches must vote for a selection contest in order to ‘trigger’ one.

However, the total from which ‘one in three’ will be calculated will be of those branches participating in the vote’, not of all branches in the CLP. Moribund branches therefore cannot be used by supporters of MPs hoping to avoid a selection contest to raise the bar.

Source: Excl: green light for triggers as Labour NEC lowers bar further | The SKWAWKBOX

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Labour retains Newport West – with lower proportion of the vote, triggering media hysteria. Deservedly?

Smiling: Labour’s Ruth Jones [Image from The Guardian‘s coverage of the Newport West by-election].

No.

Labour’s Ruth Jones has taken the Newport West Parliamentary seat in a by-election prompted by the death of the hugely popular Paul Flynn, but fewer people turned out to vote, Labour’s share of the vote fell, and all parties reported unrest over Brexit on the doorstep.

It doesn’t mean Labour is losing popularity, and it is possible that the result shows support for the party’s policy on Brexit, but media spin may suggest otherwise (especially if you caught the BBC’s Politics Live today (April 5).

I tried to encourage a debate about it on Twitter, and the responses were revealing.

My first tweet was deliberately provocative:

And I followed it up with another that was intended to prompt response, claiming: “It’s pretty close to the most recent opinion polls!”

I was referring to polls that put Labour ahead of the Conservatives, with 41 per cent against the Tories’ 36, according to DeltaPollUK, and you can see that I exaggerated slightly.

Some of the responses took that on board:

https://twitter.com/architectishly/status/1114132499100258306

I took a different tack, pointing out that the seat had been held by veteran Labour MP Paul Flynn for 32 years until his death, and that he had huge personal support – and one response showed up the failings in the arguments above:

So there we are: The result is consistent with previous polls on Newport West, with 2017 being an exception – perhaps a response to the pathetic Conservative campaign and Theresa May’s then-complacent belief that she would win a huge majority against Jeremy Corbyn, allowing her to bulldoze her (as we were to learn) dire Brexit plan over us all.

Newport West is a Labour heartland, and the weather did put some of the electorate off voting. The uptick in percentage support for the smaller parties may be a reflection of the lower turnout.

But the result broadly upheld the findings of recent national opinion polls, and suggests that Labour’s Brexit policy is not a vote-loser.

The big question now is, what kind of Labour MP will Ruth Jones be?

Initial evidence is positive – she opposes Tory austerity that has taken £1 billion in investment away from Wales; she opposes Universal Credit and the huge financial harm it represents to her constituents; and Tory cuts mean fear of crime in her city is rising. On top of that, there is huge controversy over plans to build a new motorway in Newport.

Ms Jones said she regretted the low turnout but was hoping to engage with all voters to ensure their voices are heard and that they re-engage with politics.

That could be difficult, considering the bad publicity that has been attracted by Labour’s own treatment of its members recently.

The National Constitutional Committee, which handles disputes involving Labour members, has been dubbed a “National Kangaroo Court”, and the party has been accused of pandering to its critics, rather than listening to members. The most obvious example is the response to often-spurious claims of anti-Semitism against members who are then automatically treated as guilty before any inquiry takes place, with the results of the disciplinary process pre-determined to support the prejudicial behaviour.

Will Ruth Jones support changes that could restore justice to that process? Or will she keep her head down and allow the wrongs to continue – because supporting justice may create adverse publicity?

We’ll be watching.

Could this exhibition challenge dehumanisation and abuse of the homeless?

Real people: The exhibition combines images of formerly-homeless people with a line of text describing their character.

This is a terrific idea because it reminds us that homeless people are human too.

It is easy to de-humanise the people sleeping rough or begging – to view them as obstacles to be passed or ignored.

That seems an easy route to the kind of behaviour that has been connected to the deaths of rough sleepers recently.

But the Inspirational Voices exhibition at Manchester’s Piccadilly railway station will present huge portraits of people who have been homeless, along with a label chosen by the model to represent their personality.

Homelessness charity The Booth Centre, which provides advice on finding accommodation, education and training as well as helping to secure long-term employment, is to be praised for this idea.

And Greater Manchester is leading the way in its monitoring of what happens to the homeless. Labour mayor Andy Burnham has launched an initiative to record the deaths of homeless people after the Westminster government showed it couldn’t care less.

The exhibition will take place in the railway station’s concourse from November 12-18, and will then move to Media City for a week. It would be welcome if we saw it on television, then.

No doubt most people will walk past this exhibition without giving it a second thought.

But if even a minority are influenced by it, some good will have been done.

Huge portraits of former rough sleepers and homeless people will take pride of place at Manchester’s biggest train station.

The Inspirational Voices exhibition aims to challenge misconceptions of homelessness by capturing each person’s individual achievements and hopes.

Source: Huge portraits of homeless people will be put on display at Piccadilly – with an important message – Manchester Evening News

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