Giving £500,000 to Liz Truss to help her promote her fundamental ideology that the best way to allocate resources in society is exclusively via the decisions of the individual

In the future, everyone will be a senior member of Keir Starmers team before having to resign due to matters he had no knowledge of for 15 minutes

Healthy life expectancy is falling across the UK, according to new data published today. Read more on the urgent action we need Government to take. www.bma.org.uk/what-we-do/p...

Every January we get stories about economic recovery, and then by May realise it was all because people were frontloading activity to avoid tax changes, and the economy is actually flatlining, and we actually need more minor tax adjustments and then the cycle repeats

Tbf who knows more about creating a weaker, poorer nation

Ironic how the political right have convinced themselves unis are hotbeds of radical leftism providing no real skills, when the most consistently popular courses are things like business management, computer science and law where the general student mindset is get a good job and make lots of money

Need some sort of Brave New World style job allocation programme for newborns to be immediately placed on a pathway to the 3 key professions of the future British economy under reform: plumber, electrician, right wing podcast host

The youth unemployment figures are especially grim 50,000 more apprenticeships is great and all, but since April-June 2024 there are more than 100,000 additional people aged 18-24 who are unemployed Not sure the gov are really grappling with the scale of the crisis www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Me reading through the shortlist Starmer and McSweeney came up with for the US ambassador role...

Spinning interest rate cuts, a consequence of our stagnating economy, as a sign everything is going according to plan is quite bold

Failure from Nandy to condemn such ugly rhetoric is awful, but also, why are you sagely nodding along to the ridiculous things Ratcliffe is saying when you could be highlighting things like the youth unemployment scheme, which the government you are a minister in has launched

Could you imagine a world where Labour goes full speed ahead to uber woke, net-zeroist, rejoinerism...

Labour have lurched from scandal to scandal, u-turned on a series of major policies, their missions have been discarded and their popularity is in free fall If this is what exceptional big picture strategic thinking gets them, you'd hate to see what a bad strategist would deliver

Morgan McSweeney will return in Revolving Door 2: Electoral Meltdown

The obvious endpoint when your country has too few healthcare resources to meet demand and a government that has ruled out a level of investment anywhere close to what is needed

To have to claim Mandelson was dishonest once would be unfortunate, but 3,372 times would look like carelessness

It's very funny that these people think that someone else would lose the mandate to govern because they would veer too far off course from a manifesto which was essentially 130 pages of "economic growth is good" and vague mission statements this government stopped caring about 16 months ago

They will also be inheriting a multi-year spending plan which has baked in real term spending cuts for most departments by 2028 just as the next election approaches...

Excellent thread as the Health Foundation adds further evidence the government are not being entirely transparent with claims of reduced waiting lists Fixing the NHS requires an honest appraisal of the challenges so we can allocate resources appropriately. The gov really needs to do better

Fair play to the government creating an Ethics and Integrity Commission to promote high ethical standards in public life and giving them plenty of work to do

Good report on the new findings from the Health Foundation, the latest organisation to provide evidence that the slow fall in NHS waiting lists is being driven by unreported removals and lower referral rates rather than increased activity www.hsj.co.uk/quality-and-...

The point of economic migration is to maximise the benefits for your society Trapping workers and their families in poverty because you want to make it harder for them to settle, and because you are unwilling to fund vital services fails on what should be a basic ambition

A big reason this gov has struggled is because its leadership spent years in opposition desperately signalling they are absolutely not a bunch of dreaded lefties, and have tried continuing this even as everything around them crumbles

Nothing says your historic mandate has been squandered quite like loudly wondering how brief the honeymoon period is going to be for the imminent replacement of your party leader

This is especially true given Labour came to power crowing the adults were back in the room and that they would restore high standards to public life A severe failure in competence and morals

Think it's revealing labour conflate best and brightest with high earners Not really interested in the underlying dynamics of immigration or the contribution of migrants beyond a high salary which I don't think is the foundation for good policy

Adam Smith writing that the "disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition...[is] the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments" feels very relevant here

Everything about this story is heinous and vulgar and the fact this is what a minister was doing during a moment of national crisis, when millions of lives were being upended by the financial crisis is so abhorrent

This whole affair is grotesque and immoral on so many levels

The "coincidence" of Epstein's cash payments to Peter Mandelson's partner/husband in 2009/10 and the then industry secretary's lobbying within cabinet for a softer post-crash policy towards bankers looks on the face of it like outright corruption. Certainly demands police investigation.

the story now makes clear it was far more than just £10,000, regular payments from Epstein to Mandelson partner

CCPalace

No mention here of the upcoming cut to Universal Credit, which will cost 700,000+ disabled people an average of £3,000 a year. From April, the health element of UC will be cut by nearly 50% for new claimants. Set out by @victoria-anns.bsky.social here: www.citizensadvice.org.uk/policy/publi...

I know it's stupid to keep getting annoyed at there attempts to reassure everyone they're not silly lefties but 1) it's comical to not recognise the huge positive externalities of HE and 2) strange to make the argument that the cost of public goods should only be borne by direct beneficiaries

Willing to turn a blind eye to this stuff that fails to even remotely compensate for systemic underinvestment in education and youth services if they call it AIristotle

Some young Labour member in 2016 wishing for one good win in an election, while the genie laughs maniacally at the chain of events they're about to set in motion

Maybe there should be one department with a specific focus on the economy which is given power over things like fiscal policy to achieve the ambitions of government, so every other department can focus on other, more relevant objectives

Now Burnham is no longer a threat, Starmer and his allies can get down to the important business of rushing out half baked policies that repel the majority of voters before doing a humiliating u-turn only after maximum damage has been inflicted leading to a further -2 in opinion polls

If I were a Starmer supporter, I would simply not tell the press his leadership has brought Labour to the brink of losing Greater Manchester

The combination of the collective sacrifice of young people during the pandemic and the fact this gov has actively increased the cost of employing young people makes this attempt at using false mental health stats and downplaying real health conditions seem particularly cruel

The BMA is gravely concerned about reports of violations of medical neutrality in Iran. Read our statement below.

Feel like if you're going to make a threat on remembering you can't be getting the country mixed up in the next sentence

Another example of the government not really recognising, let alone presenting to the public, that there are growing economic pressures and shifting priorities which are going to make their original ambitions unlikely to be achieved

I think the approach of placating Trump would be justified if the UK was taking any action to make itself a bit more independent Instead, the gov are doubling down on how they're doing amazing deals, while conceding they are happy for UK firms to become less competitive than US firms...

Struck by how Carney not only explicitly states the challenges and new realities we face, but seems to be far more open on the efforts of Canada to adapt and strengthen their position

"You shouldn't prepare for a hypothetical" is the sort of stupid thing Jeremy would say in Peep Show followed my an inner monologue from Mark explaining that you very much should plan for a hypothetical

Watching Minority Report and loudly booing at the end so everyone knows I disagree with the pre-crime unit being shut down

Not just a case of not presenting the trade-offs, but relying on imminent growth to deny they exist Making the case for lower consumption in the name of national security is harder when you're also telling people now is the moment of national renewal and you'll feel the difference in your pocket