Shadow Attorney-General Emily Thornberry missed a perfect opportunity to embarrass the Tory government over strikes when she was interviewed by Sky‘s Kay Burley.
Asked to comment on the government’s claim to have adhered to recommendations by the so-called Independent Pay Review Body, she agreed that it was an independent organisation.
It isn’t.
Here’s Maximilien Robespierre:
Only six days ago, This Site published an article highlighting that Health Secretary Steve Barclay has instructed the so-called Independent Pay Review Body to recommend a below-inflation pay rise of only two per cent for nurses in the next financial year.
He said the NHS budget has already been set until 2024/25.
The Pay Review Body is not independent. Its members are all government-appointed and the terms under which it operates were all set by the government. That’s the Conservative government.
Spread the word.
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Steve Barclay: sadly, none of the equipment behind him was able to jump-start his brain.
Remember before Christmas, when Tory spokespeople were all over the media telling us nurses couldn’t have the pay rise they were demanding because the “independent” pay review body had set the amount?
The Health Secretary has instructed the NHS pay review body to recommend a pay rise of around 2% for the 2023-2024 financial year.
So Steve Barclay has told the “independent” pay review body it can only recommend a tiny pay rise for nurses. That doesn’t seem independent to This Writer!
A recent letter from the secretary of state for health and social care Steve Barclay, to the NHS Pay Review Body (NHSPRB) suggests “it is particularly important that [the NHSPRB] have regard to the government’s inflation target when forming recommendations”.
Pay awards – most particularly when the government is doing the paying – don’t cause inflation.
Mr Barclay also warns “the NHS budget has already been set until 2024 to 2025”.
So any pay negotiation – of any kind, including that supposedly offered by the Pay Review Body – must be fake, then?
Obviously, two per cent is nowhere near enough when inflation is much higher; it’s a real-terms pay cut for nurses who are already £10,000 per year worse-off, in real terms, than they were in 2008.
The result will be more nurses leaving the NHS and a further decline in the service – which Barclay will claim is because public medicine can’t work as well as private, profiteering healthcare.
People will die because of this decision – and Barclay should be held responsible.
Barclay himself seems entirely unsuited to running any kind of organisation, let alone the largest one in the United Kingdom.
After a recent visit to a hospital, he tweeted how he marvelled at a fantastic innovation in healthcare that frees up many beds.
This innovation is called a chair. It has been used in the NHS for very nearly 75 years.
Here’s A Different Bias‘s account of this weirdness:
Steve Barclay is an idiot.
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This one is worth watching just for the reactions to Boris Johnson being booted out of power.
Here’s Russell Howard:
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Murdered by the police: This Site put out the infographic above after the kidnap, rape and murder of Sarah Everard by Metropolitan Police officer Wayne Couzens. Now a damning report has confirmed that criminals and sexual predators are being allowed into police services across England and Wales. But are we seeing a change in attitude that means these creatures will no longer be protected?
Criminals and sexual predators who should never have been allowed through the vetting process are now acting as police officers in England and Wales, according to a damning report.
His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, Fire and Rescue Services (HMICFRS) announced the finding after a review of eight police services in the wake of the abduction, rape and murder of Sarah Everard by a Metropolitan Police officer.
Of 725 sample cases closely examined in the review, there were concerns about 131 officers cleared to serve in police forces – but the watchdog said the true total could be much higher.
The authors questioned 11,000 officers and staff – and of the women who responded, “an alarming number alleged appalling behaviour by male colleagues”, raising concerns about risks to people outside the police.
“Almost without exception, they’d been on the receiving end of behaviour which absolutely has no place in the modern workplace,” [Inspector of Constabulary and report author Matt Parr] added.
The report adds: “We found a culture where misogyny, sexism and predatory behaviour towards female police officers and staff and members of the public still exists.”
In the first part of this interview, Transport Secretary Mark Harper said every police force must review their recruitment and disciplinary process:
But the government is currently trying to recruit 20,000 new police officers – and has been since late 2019. Considering the difficulty it is having, can there be any faith that corners aren’t being cut and more “bad apples” are being allowed in?
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The Treasury in London: if the latest history of it is to be believed, it seems to have become a lunatic asylum, that has been taken over by the inmates.
How wrong can you be?
I think the expectation of most people in the UK is that the minds dominating the Treasury – the financial engine room of the country – must be the most level, intelligent, and careful in the nation.
But if the picture painted of Bankruptcies, Bubbles and Bailouts, the new history of the Treasury since 1976 by Aeron Davies, on Professor Simon Wren-Lewis’s Mainly Macro site is accurate, it seems more accurately described as a madhouse taken over by the inmates.
Perhaps it would more accurately have been titled Carry On Up The Treasury…
Consider this:
How to deal with the bonanza of North Sea Oil[:] It is today standard in the macroeconomics of resource rich countries that any temporary gain due to the discovery of a finite resource should be largely invested… The basic choice for the government of consumption (cutting taxes) or investment was discussed at reasonably senior levels while I was there. Norway made the right choice but the UK did not, although how much that was down to politicians at the time is difficult to tell.
The money wasn’t invested but was splurged on tax cuts, of course. And did anyone learn from that waste?
No:
This failure wasn’t just about North Sea Oil revenues, but was repeated with privatisation and council house sales. During the Thatcher period selling off public capital was treated as just another form of revenue, which is nonsense because unlike taxes it is not permanent.
It would be easy to say this wastage was due to the influence of politicians, but both Wren-Lewis and Davies seem to say that consensus within the Treasury (where it existed) could also cause huge blunders:
A good example, which Davis is right to discuss at length, is the pervasive doctrine within HMT that national firm ownership didn’t matter. A quote from an interview with John Grieve sums up the issue:
“On ownership, right from the ’80s, from Big Bang onwards, and indeed before, there’s been a running worry in government and in commentary about are we wise to let foreigners buy everything? … but in fact, there’s been a longstanding policy, successive governments have decided not to do anything about it … And, you know, of course most other countries think this is mad, and that ownership does matter.”
Ownership does indeed matter because at the time of writing, the UK’s railways and England’s water and power companies are primarily owned by foreign governments who are milking us for all they are worth. That money goes out of this country to subsidise others’ infrastructure for them.
But political influence is shown to have the upper hand most of the time – with the prominent example being austerity:
What Aeron Davis calls the ‘posh boys’ regarded economics as a political means to an end[:]
“For those leading the Coalition, economics was just another consideration in the wider matrix of Westminster party strategizing and news media lobby management.”
What Osborne and Cameron were interested in was media management, and they were experts at it. Unfortunately the advice they were getting proved no corrective to their macroeconomic ignorance. Here is a quote from Aeron reflecting on his interview with Rupert Harrison, Osborne’s economics advisor and now advising Jeremy Hunt.
“When I asked him directly about the broader inspirations of his economic thinking, Harrison responded that he had no interest in macroeconomic thought. His policy views were ‘shaped by more general reading’ and by being ‘a centre-right leaning person’.”
I’m afraid this was painfully obvious from Osborne’s speeches at the time. Austerity, by which I mean embarking on spending cuts in a liquidity trap recession, represented ignorance of everything Keynes talked about in the General Theory, as well as state of the art macroeconomics. The origin of the last twelve years of economic decline can be found in politicians who put party political interest above the health of the economy.
And then there’s Brexit, about which the author becomes positively festive:
Aeron Davis argues that the Leave vote was not only devastating to most Treasury officials (many were economists, after all) but also that it reflected past failures in Treasury management. To quote
“For one, I hold the Treasury (and successive governments) responsible for ushering in an economy that was so unbalanced and unequal. Years of trickle-down economics, and years of favouring finance over manufacturing, large foreign multinationals over home-grown companies, large asset-holders and rentiers over others, London over the regions, monetary rather than fiscal activism had had a cumulative impact. Austerity economics only exacerbated such trends, with several commentators linking that to the vote outcome.”
Of course any vote that close can have many things that help tip the balance. To the extent he is right, the Brexit vote represents a fitting ending for the book, as it represents many of the themes the author examines coming home to roost.
It isn’t the end of the book, because there’s a postscript which covers Boris Johnson and Partygate (but doesn’t get to Liz Truss’s “ill-fated” (as Wren-Lewis describes it) reign. The title says it all: “Reckless opportunists gain control.”
It’s a great review, and I’ll tell you why: it takes a subject that should be dry as a desert bone and makes me want to read the whole book.
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I promised to publish alternative takes on Prime Minister’s Questions – and here’s one now.
But it doesn’t say much that I haven’t already.
There’s a bit of context: Rishi Sunak recycled lots of Boris Johnson’s old lines against the Labour Party because he was coached by Michael Gove, apparently.
But much of the rest of the commentary follows This Writer’s initial take, as PMQs was happening:
What do you think?
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Michelle Donelan: this is the only image of her that This Writer could find, in which she didn’t have an enormous, daft grin all over her face.
New Culture Secretary Michelle Donelan is reviewing plans by her forerunner Nadine Dorries to privatise Channel 4 and scrap the BBC licence fee, and also the proposed Online Harms Bill.
Doesn’t this suggest that those plans were not widely supported by the Tory Party and that Dorries was put at the top of that department by Boris Johnson to do nothing more than distract attention away from him?
Also being revisited are provisions around “legal but harmful” speech in the Online Harms legislation.
The review of Channel 4 comes amid criticisms that privatising the channel would harm the future of many TV production companies at a time when new prime minister Liz Truss wants to create growth. The two policies would therefore appear to contradict each other.
With the BBC, Ms Donelan has admitted being sceptical about the viability of the licence fee. But she has said that coverage of the Queen’s funeral was excellent – and the kind of thing that streaming services could not provide.
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Red tape Britain: and the Tories are making it worse.
This will be hilarious in hindsight. Not so funny now, though:
Plans to cut down needless regulations by reviewing policies every two years have faced criticism from Whitehall departments who claim the proposals will be time consuming and burdensome.
It was hoped the proposals would help businesses but cutting needless regulation, however civil servants have warned the requirement will increase administrative burdens on departments.
The Department for Transport and the Department for Levelling Up would oppose the changes.
So plans to cut down on needless regulation are in fact creating more needless regulation.
What typical Tory incompetence.
Even when they mean to do what they say, they cock it up.
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Satire? This image suggesting the Tories were lying about their Covid-19 strategy may be more accurate now than at the time it was made. Why is an inquiry into the handling of the Covid-19 pandemic being delayed? Is evidence being altered or destroyed before it becomes illegal to do so?
Families who lost loved ones in the Covid-19 crisis are preparing a court challenge against the Tory government, which they fear is delaying an inquiry into its handling of the pandemic.
Boris Johnson appointed Baroness Hallett to chair the inquiry in December 2021, and has said it would begin in spring this year. But spring is over and no terms of reference have been published nor setting-up-date specified.
Under the 2005 Inquiries Act, an inquiry “must not begin considering evidence before the setting up date” and once an inquiry is under way it is an offence under the Act to destroy or tamper with evidence.
So the longer the setting up date is delayed, the more evidence it is possible for … someone… to alter or destroy.
That’s the concern of the group Covid-19 bereaved families for justice, who are planning a judicial review into the failure.
Elkan Abrahamson, head of major inquiries at Broudie Jackson Canter, who is representing the group, said taking legal action is the “last thing” families want but they may be left with no choice. He said: “In the vast majority of inquiries a setting-up date is given within days or weeks of the chair being appointed, so this delay of over six months is both unprecedented and totally inexplicable.
“The consequences are extremely serious, as it only becomes a criminal offence to destroy or tamper with evidence after the inquiry’s start date. By failing to give one, the Prime Minister is opening the door to key evidence being destroyed.”
Not only that, but a delay like this means it will take longer, and be more difficult, to learn lessons from the pandemic and the government’s failures in handling it.
Perhaps most to the point, though, is this: Boris Johnson has claimed that he needs to stay on as prime minister to “get on” with tackling the issues that matter most to people – but instead he is delaying a vital inquiry.
He can’t say it’s because he had to deal with the challenges to his own leadership because he has already told us he considers them to have been nothing more than a time-wasting sideshow; he should have been handling the issues that matter – not diverting time and energy to his own self-preservation.
All the government has been able to say is that the inquiry’s terms of reference will be published shortly. Nothing has been said about the setting-up date.
So, what’s really going on here? And do we need a judicial review to establish what’s really going on at the heart of our government?
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Here’s where the bluff and bluster of Boris Johnson hits painful reality.
He has vowed to improve the nation’s health after the pandemic exposed entrenched social inequalities, worsened by poor diet and smoking.
A plan to cut smoking has been published today, proposing to raise the age at which cigarettes may be bought by one year each year, after ex-charity boss Javed Khan was asked to review the issue by ministers.
But there is one big reason why it won’t happen – comprised of two big problems.
Firstly, raising the legal smoking age over 18 would see a Conservative government telling adults they are not free to make bad decisions – and they are ideologically opposed to that.
After all, the smoking electorate may decide that voting Conservative is a bad decision – and stop doing it.
Secondly, it would look extremely bad for a prime minister who was fined for breaking lockdown rules and spent tens of thousands of pounds on a gold wallpapered renovation of Downing Street to lecture us on poor choices.
Expect this policy choice to be quietly retired. Smoking may create huge burdens for the NHS but Johnson won’t be the PM who stops it.
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