It is hard to understand why people think more money for the NHS woukd solve anything. Australia spends marginally more per capita but has far superior outcomes. The problem is structural.
I am a governor(unpaid) at a local NHS trust, the clinicians work very hard to supply a good service but are bogged down by the legions managers and executives and departments who just complicate the issue. It has grown such beaurocracy that it is strangled.
yes, I think most of us realise that the funding is there but the use of that funding is the problem. In the mean time , people die ....and accepting that only the rocks live forever, what is the point of the NHS if it does not treat people in a timely manner ?
As a governor, do you and your colleagues have any say at all about the legions of managers etc that you refer to who are bogging down the clinicians? If not, what is the role of the governors in the trust? Or do none of your colleagues agree with you anyway?
my friend in Holland recently was referred to a women's heart clinic ,she had her appointment a week later ,she was seen by a female cardiologist , they did tests, bloods ,scans etc. She had the results in two hours ! My husband had a CT scan last week, a work up for urgent heart valve replacement , they said it might take 4- 6 weeks to write up the report.!!
Couldn't agrre more. After 49 years nursing at all levels I retired in 2011, the Hospital where I had been Director of Nursing in the 80's had 19 Matrons all Band 8 (about £45-50k pa.) Of 5200 Staff on the Payroll, 1300 were admin and secretarial. In my 49 years I am aware of many staff who were underpaid, management were never in tha position.
On the contrary, it’s easy to understand why people think this way. It’s because most people don’t think that way. They only see the front of house bit which in this case, is getting appointments with the GP, being seen promptly at A&E and having operations/surgery booked. If that’s not functioning and their experience is medical staff being overworked, the obvious answer is to have more of them which requires money.
I wish the Tories would call an election as soon as possible. They are a dead duck government clinging onto power simply to keep the pay packets coming in. It’s selfish and a disgrace. They are not taken seriously on the international stage and can make no positive difference nationally. The sooner they are gone the sooner we can look to what will come after the equally disastrous Labour Party that we will inevitably get.
Sorry, meant lame duck, my excuse is it’s late. But come to think of it, lame still implies a sense of the ability to move, so maybe dead duck is right.
The NHS doesn't need more money it needs more staff to cope with the exploding population. Perhaps if they hadn't pushed so many British staff out through the back door to replace us with cheap migrant labour we'd be in a better position. Perhaps if they'd stop training foreign health students in our universities and prioritised British kids to train we wouldn't need to bring migrants in.
We all know now they are not interested in British workers who demand decent salaries all they want is cheap so the flow of foreign staff will continue.
I signed up as an NHS returner.....what a farcical smokescreen that was. I'm still here, still locked out of returning, and still listening to people say we don't have enough staff. It's bloody infuriating listening to lies, deceit and gaslighting.
I think the reason they will want a summer election is that ReformUK are eating into their vote share and may soon surpass it. At that point the Tories may hit a tipping point there will be no way back from.
Keep in mind that it is in no way a Conservative party. Trouble is, they have so sullied the name we can never use it again for a really Conservative Party. Will one ever rise from the ashes? If so, what can it call itself? Britain First Party?
All those things that you say are true. But there's a couple of deeper underlying reasons why the Tories are going to get smashed in the GE. And they both involve a sense of betrayal.
Firstly, there have been too many broken promises. Too many elections, too many manifestoes, where the Tories have promised one thing, and delivered something completely different. From a half-assed Brexit to exponential mass immigration.
The second is a betrayal of conservative values. The cultural drift of the party to the left, which has seen it cave in to the civil service and MSM on so many issues - net zero, identity politics, radical Islam. Mix in the collusion in a pair of establishment coups d'etat that removed two democratically elected leaders - one by the whole country (Boris), and one by the party membership (Truss) - replacing them with an establishment puppet who nobody voted for. The fiddling around with laughable side issues like school exams and smoking bans, while Rome burns.
I believe this sense of betrayal is what will ensure the death sentence of the Tories as much as any single policy issue. Because essentially it's a betrayal of democracy - the kind of country, values and culture you thought you were voting for, for now and the future of your children, were a pack of lies. And that becomes an almost existential matter. Too many of the so-called 'conservative' politicians you thought you were voting for, were cultural marxists in blue ties. Policies may come and go, issues rise and fall in importance, but a betrayal that deep is something never forgotten.
The fact that they're even talking up the left-of-centre, 'One Nation Tory' Mordaunt as the likely next leader following a GE disaster tells me they haven't got the foggiest idea why they're being rejected by millions of ordinary, hard-working, patriotic people up and down the country, from small c conservatives to red wall voters.
The best we can hope for is the complete annihilation of the party and a new party with genuinely right of centre conservative values to rise from its ashes. We may have to suffer 5 years of left-wing hell in the short term, but anything has to be better than this continual drift to the left of all the mainstream parties.
It hasn’t been the hue of their politics that has seen them fall. In my view it’s been the mass incompetence, ignorance, endemic corruption, pompous self-entitlement and hubris of a class of people, whose only objective ever was to stay in power by any means necessary. They failed because they were both corrupt and totally useless.
At 83 I am not resigned to My imminent demise. So it still a shock to be told , in person , that am in danger and she wants me in the hospital for possible speedy treatment.
6 hours later I go through a full check taking five departments .
End result - a consultant tells me that things are not a serious as first thought
Big tick NHS
But that hospital is staffed by 90% foreigners.
In America it is considered part of a ccareer to have a bankruptcy . Green card Rishi has GB as his black mark
As a cynical old so-and-so, I'd counsel the Tories to go for an early-summer election, i.e. a cut-and-run strategy. Let Starmer and his band deal with the insolvable problems, from the economy and illegal migrants to the NHS. That especially is a 'child of Labour' and has been transformed into a political weapon ever since T.B. - remember the '24-hours to save the NHS'? - so let them deal with all that, Rayner or not.
Perhaps, given their now unveiled penchant for all things socialist, the Whitehall mandarins might work towards making things better for us whose taxes pay for them rather than try and score political points by putting spokes into any Tory minister's wheel. Besides, I do look forward to see Mr Lammy as Foreign Sec. Any bets for the time it takes the FO to domesticate him?
Like, where does Sunak and his goons get the idea that putting the boot into the mentally ill, just for being mentally ill, and the many tens of thousands who were badly affected by Covid, like me, and also, like me, now face even more chronic health issues, and (probably) a much shortened life because of it - that this is going to make people like me vote for them? Where do they get the idea that we're not going to hold their feet to the fire over breaking their promises over Brexit, and how they are supposed to be improving our lives? Looking at who many of these Tories are, I can't say that we weren't warned.
Cameron and Osborne and Johnson all come from a world that has little or no contact with blue-collar workers, except those that clean their homes, pools, cars, kitchens and toilets. They would have never managed to get elected in 2010 if it hadn't been for the Sub-Prime world financial crisis. Osborne and Cameron made ordinary people pay for the sins of their buddies in 'The City', by imposing some of the cruellest financial cuts to public services in modern political history, demonising the poor, helpless, sick and disabled, and passing savage policies against housing, health, welfare and benefits. They kidded us that they and their party knew what they were doing - and now, fourteen years later we can see how they've grossly neglected much of the infrastructure of the country and left our services, economy, health service, and welfare system in ruins. All of this, whilst many of them have been feathering their own nests and those of their buddies in big business.
It's time that the privileged and self-entitled were shown the Exit. Labour might not have all of the answers, but hopefully they'll not sell the people out just for a tax cut for the wealthiest.
Nicely written - all in the usual angry, lashing out fashion of the SJW.
Pity it's nonsense.
I loathe the current Tory party and it's inept, incompetent, mediocre politicians.
Unfortunately Labour are the same, as are the Lib-Dims.
All bought into the WEF globalist rubbish of unicorns and rainbows if we stop travelling, eat bugs and hold hands across the sea.
Unfortunately, most of the rest of the world just sits and laughs and carries on taking away our jobs and industries, fighting each other - powered by America mainly - and sending their excess populations to colonise us.
I'm sure you had a bad time with the Covid virus. Most people didn't. And it was manufactured in a Chinese laboratory, probably as a putative bio-weapon, and financed at least partly by the American government.
The measures put in place by the UK government to supposedly mitigate this were destructive, largely irrelevant, took away individual rights, based on idiocy and the 'modelling' of supposed experts, and have basically bankrupted the country for virtually no good at all.
Your hyperbole is laughable.
Nothing is 'in ruins'.
They haven't made 'the cruellest cuts to public services', or 'demonised the poor, helpless, sick and disabled' (do you write for the Guardian by any chance?).
where is it written that we are entitled ? Frankly all this talk of mental illness and the fact that 9 million people are not looking for work tells me that things need to get tougher. The lead swingers need to be weeded out and the TRULY unable to work helped.
Because the Anti-Lockdown Brigade is largely a phenomenon of the right. It believes Covid is no worse than flu and there is no such thing as long covid. Half of it believes the vaccines are causing a huge number of excess deaths. All BS but they won the political argument and Boris just gave up. So next time there will be no restrictions at all however bad the next pandemic.
and I disagree with you on every point. Clearly you need to get out more. You need to follow the money , ask why Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine were removed from sale and rubbished. The reason was so that Emergency Use Authorisation could be granted to the drug pushes Pfizer et al for their mRNA vaccines which needed a few guinea pigs. Now we know that Covid was 'produced ' by gain of function in the Wuhan institute and that the mRNA vaccine had been waiting in the wings for some time , to try out on a gullible public anyone who disputes this is truly blind. Long Covid may be in fact Long Vaccine.
Lockdown was a catastrophe. It cost £400bn. Even if it “saved” 400,000 lives the cost of £1m per life saved is absurd, and will probably be doubled by the additional lives lost through extended waiting lists. At the time and even in the Inquiry the opportunity cost of this massive bankrupting exercise is carefully suppressed. Boris gave into the media and one sub group of the expert class.l and in doing so left the country with debts that will paralyse government for decades.
UK debt to GDP was above danger levels long before Covid. Another difference from Australia, which could easily afford financial support. Profligacy, as in UK, always leads to disaster at some point.
Boris gave in to whoever made the most noise. In the end that was the Anti-lockdown brigade. He stuck a pin in the calendar to select a date to end restrictions. Totally arbitrary. Then afterwards cases and deaths rose sharply.
Like any sick , blind animal, it's kinder to put them out of their misery with a summer election. They are deaf to the public's cries to solve the Immigration disaster...ongoing. Blind to the NHS failings and how to remedy it. Unaware of the poverty some are suffering in the Country. It's a sick dog. Off to the Vet's.
Labour will be worse, of course. A dangerous Pit Bull as opposed to an aging Labrador..God help us all!
Let's just push the button and get on with it. The timing is largely irrelevant and the outcome is clear. Labour will be a train crash, but so what? The current conservative party is not fit for purpose and only a catastrophic defeat will induce the Tory civil war that's needed in the party. So let's get on with it. And let's get started on the elephant in the room: the UK desperately needs fundamental electoral reform.
Not because Labour will be any different - politics has become a Box and Cox pantomime anyway - but because the sooner the Tories are smashed, the sooner there can be a realignment on the Right and a conservative movement can arise out of the ashes.
I think the Conservatives are resigned to losing the next election but still have hope in “the Micawber” principal - something will always turn up. I would not rule anything out given the state that the world is in at the present even the possibility of a real or manufactured “crisis” that would give the pretext to suspend not only our election process but also the EU and USA ones. 2024 seems to be a very pivotal year in several ways. Desperate times call for desperate measures is an adage I think would be good to remember.
Whenever it happens in the next 8 months, it does not matter, aside from one issue I cover later. The Tories have hardly any front benchers who are remotely impressive, headed by Sunak who people recognise as an administrator. Of his five targets, four are missed and few believe that inflation is really 3%. (That issue has lacked credibility ever since RPI became CPI.) Sunak is, at last, making fairly unimpressive efforts to get recognition.
The country is economically and culturally sunk and even ordinary folk like me are not really allowed to cite a number of key issues that need addressing. Of the others: Tackling the NHS should include making it user-contributory; tackling retirement costs should include lifting the retirement age and scrapping the triple lock; tackling law and order might even include introducing corporal punishment; tackling education should include reversion to a 10% (maybe 15%) university population and not a Blair 50% population; tackling government might include getting rid of devolution - why do you need little parliaments for 5m, 2m and 2m populations out of an overall population of 65m; introducing severe controls on overseas corporates should stop UK milking by companies like Apple, Amazon, Tesla, Uber; I could go on. I accept that none of these will happen in 2024-29.
Now, aside from Covid, tell me what big-issue memorably things the Tories have delivered in the last 14 years. Tell me which of their five PMs have been impressive in either policy terms or leadership terms.
We need to put up with five years of what I expect will be a dreadful Labour government, with the fairly illusory hope that Reform will be prospering and significant in 2029.
Sunak's best reason for going early is to halt any Reform initiative which might otherwise more effectively emerge in the autumn. Reform's current success is happening despite their current inactivity and because of Tory and Labour impotence - but it might flourish if they get their act together. Possible but improbable.
The Tories have been fixated on privatising public services forever. Clearly it doesn't work when we see the shambles of Thames Water and our rail transport.
I don't understand the reason behind the "privatisation" of Water. There is no choice given to the consumer so where is the usual incentive for private companies to compete for their business?
Yes quite. The same with the railways. There's only one company going to Cornwall where I go on holiday which is Great Western so they can do whatever they like which is quite often a poor service.
going to be deservedly smashed so they'll cling on as long as possible drawing their salaries and expenses. Many won't ever work again I imagine, even the most die hard Tory supporter and business owner isn't going to employ an ex MP from this shambles. With a summer recess then an election campaign they won't have any actual work to do anyway
It is hard to understand why people think more money for the NHS woukd solve anything. Australia spends marginally more per capita but has far superior outcomes. The problem is structural.
I am a governor(unpaid) at a local NHS trust, the clinicians work very hard to supply a good service but are bogged down by the legions managers and executives and departments who just complicate the issue. It has grown such beaurocracy that it is strangled.
yes, I think most of us realise that the funding is there but the use of that funding is the problem. In the mean time , people die ....and accepting that only the rocks live forever, what is the point of the NHS if it does not treat people in a timely manner ?
As a governor, do you and your colleagues have any say at all about the legions of managers etc that you refer to who are bogging down the clinicians? If not, what is the role of the governors in the trust? Or do none of your colleagues agree with you anyway?
The problem with every aspect of modern Britain's painful-to-observe and across-the-board dysfunction.....is structural.
my friend in Holland recently was referred to a women's heart clinic ,she had her appointment a week later ,she was seen by a female cardiologist , they did tests, bloods ,scans etc. She had the results in two hours ! My husband had a CT scan last week, a work up for urgent heart valve replacement , they said it might take 4- 6 weeks to write up the report.!!
For any reforming party, this must be explained to the electorate. We could sell it to most Tory voters as breaking up the last nationalised industry.
Couldn't agrre more. After 49 years nursing at all levels I retired in 2011, the Hospital where I had been Director of Nursing in the 80's had 19 Matrons all Band 8 (about £45-50k pa.) Of 5200 Staff on the Payroll, 1300 were admin and secretarial. In my 49 years I am aware of many staff who were underpaid, management were never in tha position.
On the contrary, it’s easy to understand why people think this way. It’s because most people don’t think that way. They only see the front of house bit which in this case, is getting appointments with the GP, being seen promptly at A&E and having operations/surgery booked. If that’s not functioning and their experience is medical staff being overworked, the obvious answer is to have more of them which requires money.
What's the solution though? Making the NHS more of an insurance scheme? I don't understand exactly how that would work.
I wish the Tories would call an election as soon as possible. They are a dead duck government clinging onto power simply to keep the pay packets coming in. It’s selfish and a disgrace. They are not taken seriously on the international stage and can make no positive difference nationally. The sooner they are gone the sooner we can look to what will come after the equally disastrous Labour Party that we will inevitably get.
Sorry, meant lame duck, my excuse is it’s late. But come to think of it, lame still implies a sense of the ability to move, so maybe dead duck is right.
They could also be a dead duck😀
personally , I would drag it out as long as possible. I fear what labour have in store for us.
The NHS doesn't need more money it needs more staff to cope with the exploding population. Perhaps if they hadn't pushed so many British staff out through the back door to replace us with cheap migrant labour we'd be in a better position. Perhaps if they'd stop training foreign health students in our universities and prioritised British kids to train we wouldn't need to bring migrants in.
We all know now they are not interested in British workers who demand decent salaries all they want is cheap so the flow of foreign staff will continue.
I signed up as an NHS returner.....what a farcical smokescreen that was. I'm still here, still locked out of returning, and still listening to people say we don't have enough staff. It's bloody infuriating listening to lies, deceit and gaslighting.
I think the reason they will want a summer election is that ReformUK are eating into their vote share and may soon surpass it. At that point the Tories may hit a tipping point there will be no way back from.
Can l propose an alteration to the end of your last sentence.
I think it should be 'at least it would put the country out of it's misery'.
Frankly l beleive the Tory party deserves to suffer and hope it continues to do so for as long as possible.
Keep in mind that it is in no way a Conservative party. Trouble is, they have so sullied the name we can never use it again for a really Conservative Party. Will one ever rise from the ashes? If so, what can it call itself? Britain First Party?
All those things that you say are true. But there's a couple of deeper underlying reasons why the Tories are going to get smashed in the GE. And they both involve a sense of betrayal.
Firstly, there have been too many broken promises. Too many elections, too many manifestoes, where the Tories have promised one thing, and delivered something completely different. From a half-assed Brexit to exponential mass immigration.
The second is a betrayal of conservative values. The cultural drift of the party to the left, which has seen it cave in to the civil service and MSM on so many issues - net zero, identity politics, radical Islam. Mix in the collusion in a pair of establishment coups d'etat that removed two democratically elected leaders - one by the whole country (Boris), and one by the party membership (Truss) - replacing them with an establishment puppet who nobody voted for. The fiddling around with laughable side issues like school exams and smoking bans, while Rome burns.
I believe this sense of betrayal is what will ensure the death sentence of the Tories as much as any single policy issue. Because essentially it's a betrayal of democracy - the kind of country, values and culture you thought you were voting for, for now and the future of your children, were a pack of lies. And that becomes an almost existential matter. Too many of the so-called 'conservative' politicians you thought you were voting for, were cultural marxists in blue ties. Policies may come and go, issues rise and fall in importance, but a betrayal that deep is something never forgotten.
The fact that they're even talking up the left-of-centre, 'One Nation Tory' Mordaunt as the likely next leader following a GE disaster tells me they haven't got the foggiest idea why they're being rejected by millions of ordinary, hard-working, patriotic people up and down the country, from small c conservatives to red wall voters.
The best we can hope for is the complete annihilation of the party and a new party with genuinely right of centre conservative values to rise from its ashes. We may have to suffer 5 years of left-wing hell in the short term, but anything has to be better than this continual drift to the left of all the mainstream parties.
I agree with all that . Total betrayal. Anger lives on. You missed out the enoblement of Cameron a truly gigantic piece of jiggerypokery !
Fair enough, TBH if I'd included everything, it would have been ten pages long. :-)
Possibly piggerypokerly.
yes, indeed , I'd forgotten about the pig's head episode.
That was just 100% confirmation that Sunak had totally lost the plot.
It hasn’t been the hue of their politics that has seen them fall. In my view it’s been the mass incompetence, ignorance, endemic corruption, pompous self-entitlement and hubris of a class of people, whose only objective ever was to stay in power by any means necessary. They failed because they were both corrupt and totally useless.
At 83 I am not resigned to My imminent demise. So it still a shock to be told , in person , that am in danger and she wants me in the hospital for possible speedy treatment.
6 hours later I go through a full check taking five departments .
End result - a consultant tells me that things are not a serious as first thought
Big tick NHS
But that hospital is staffed by 90% foreigners.
In America it is considered part of a ccareer to have a bankruptcy . Green card Rishi has GB as his black mark
Sooner gone the better
As a cynical old so-and-so, I'd counsel the Tories to go for an early-summer election, i.e. a cut-and-run strategy. Let Starmer and his band deal with the insolvable problems, from the economy and illegal migrants to the NHS. That especially is a 'child of Labour' and has been transformed into a political weapon ever since T.B. - remember the '24-hours to save the NHS'? - so let them deal with all that, Rayner or not.
Perhaps, given their now unveiled penchant for all things socialist, the Whitehall mandarins might work towards making things better for us whose taxes pay for them rather than try and score political points by putting spokes into any Tory minister's wheel. Besides, I do look forward to see Mr Lammy as Foreign Sec. Any bets for the time it takes the FO to domesticate him?
Like, where does Sunak and his goons get the idea that putting the boot into the mentally ill, just for being mentally ill, and the many tens of thousands who were badly affected by Covid, like me, and also, like me, now face even more chronic health issues, and (probably) a much shortened life because of it - that this is going to make people like me vote for them? Where do they get the idea that we're not going to hold their feet to the fire over breaking their promises over Brexit, and how they are supposed to be improving our lives? Looking at who many of these Tories are, I can't say that we weren't warned.
Cameron and Osborne and Johnson all come from a world that has little or no contact with blue-collar workers, except those that clean their homes, pools, cars, kitchens and toilets. They would have never managed to get elected in 2010 if it hadn't been for the Sub-Prime world financial crisis. Osborne and Cameron made ordinary people pay for the sins of their buddies in 'The City', by imposing some of the cruellest financial cuts to public services in modern political history, demonising the poor, helpless, sick and disabled, and passing savage policies against housing, health, welfare and benefits. They kidded us that they and their party knew what they were doing - and now, fourteen years later we can see how they've grossly neglected much of the infrastructure of the country and left our services, economy, health service, and welfare system in ruins. All of this, whilst many of them have been feathering their own nests and those of their buddies in big business.
It's time that the privileged and self-entitled were shown the Exit. Labour might not have all of the answers, but hopefully they'll not sell the people out just for a tax cut for the wealthiest.
Nicely written - all in the usual angry, lashing out fashion of the SJW.
Pity it's nonsense.
I loathe the current Tory party and it's inept, incompetent, mediocre politicians.
Unfortunately Labour are the same, as are the Lib-Dims.
All bought into the WEF globalist rubbish of unicorns and rainbows if we stop travelling, eat bugs and hold hands across the sea.
Unfortunately, most of the rest of the world just sits and laughs and carries on taking away our jobs and industries, fighting each other - powered by America mainly - and sending their excess populations to colonise us.
I'm sure you had a bad time with the Covid virus. Most people didn't. And it was manufactured in a Chinese laboratory, probably as a putative bio-weapon, and financed at least partly by the American government.
The measures put in place by the UK government to supposedly mitigate this were destructive, largely irrelevant, took away individual rights, based on idiocy and the 'modelling' of supposed experts, and have basically bankrupted the country for virtually no good at all.
Your hyperbole is laughable.
Nothing is 'in ruins'.
They haven't made 'the cruellest cuts to public services', or 'demonised the poor, helpless, sick and disabled' (do you write for the Guardian by any chance?).
They're just spineless, incompetent morons.
Blimey…! Where are you on the lizard conspiracy!
where is it written that we are entitled ? Frankly all this talk of mental illness and the fact that 9 million people are not looking for work tells me that things need to get tougher. The lead swingers need to be weeded out and the TRULY unable to work helped.
Because the Anti-Lockdown Brigade is largely a phenomenon of the right. It believes Covid is no worse than flu and there is no such thing as long covid. Half of it believes the vaccines are causing a huge number of excess deaths. All BS but they won the political argument and Boris just gave up. So next time there will be no restrictions at all however bad the next pandemic.
and I disagree with you on every point. Clearly you need to get out more. You need to follow the money , ask why Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine were removed from sale and rubbished. The reason was so that Emergency Use Authorisation could be granted to the drug pushes Pfizer et al for their mRNA vaccines which needed a few guinea pigs. Now we know that Covid was 'produced ' by gain of function in the Wuhan institute and that the mRNA vaccine had been waiting in the wings for some time , to try out on a gullible public anyone who disputes this is truly blind. Long Covid may be in fact Long Vaccine.
Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine were discredited for use against coronavirus because they were inappropriate. Simple as that. No conspiracy.
And Long covid was identified before vaccine use was widespread.
You really need to acknowledge facts other than those that seem to you to support your conspiracy theories.
To be granted EAU for the vaccine there had to be NO drugs available which had been tried and tested. There were at least two, those I mentioned which were withdrawn from use. It seems now , also that there are direct correlations between Midazolam and excess deaths and even a culture of euthanasia. You believe what you want , there are many people like you who do not enquire too closely. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/377266988_Excess_Deaths_in_the_United_Kingdom_Midazolam_and_Euthanasia_in_the_COVID-19_Pandemic
Lockdown was a catastrophe. It cost £400bn. Even if it “saved” 400,000 lives the cost of £1m per life saved is absurd, and will probably be doubled by the additional lives lost through extended waiting lists. At the time and even in the Inquiry the opportunity cost of this massive bankrupting exercise is carefully suppressed. Boris gave into the media and one sub group of the expert class.l and in doing so left the country with debts that will paralyse government for decades.
UK debt to GDP was above danger levels long before Covid. Another difference from Australia, which could easily afford financial support. Profligacy, as in UK, always leads to disaster at some point.
Boris gave in to whoever made the most noise. In the end that was the Anti-lockdown brigade. He stuck a pin in the calendar to select a date to end restrictions. Totally arbitrary. Then afterwards cases and deaths rose sharply.
I don’t agree with your recollection of events.
Let's sum up your drivel.
'Everyone who disagrees with me is Hitler'.
Pretty much business as usual....
You have got not even half his intellect and none of his charisma so there is no comparison to be made.
WOW.... Absolutely flattened by the force of that comment....
Like any sick , blind animal, it's kinder to put them out of their misery with a summer election. They are deaf to the public's cries to solve the Immigration disaster...ongoing. Blind to the NHS failings and how to remedy it. Unaware of the poverty some are suffering in the Country. It's a sick dog. Off to the Vet's.
Labour will be worse, of course. A dangerous Pit Bull as opposed to an aging Labrador..God help us all!
Reform for me.
Let's just push the button and get on with it. The timing is largely irrelevant and the outcome is clear. Labour will be a train crash, but so what? The current conservative party is not fit for purpose and only a catastrophic defeat will induce the Tory civil war that's needed in the party. So let's get on with it. And let's get started on the elephant in the room: the UK desperately needs fundamental electoral reform.
The sooner the better, imo.
Not because Labour will be any different - politics has become a Box and Cox pantomime anyway - but because the sooner the Tories are smashed, the sooner there can be a realignment on the Right and a conservative movement can arise out of the ashes.
Bring it on...
I think the Conservatives are resigned to losing the next election but still have hope in “the Micawber” principal - something will always turn up. I would not rule anything out given the state that the world is in at the present even the possibility of a real or manufactured “crisis” that would give the pretext to suspend not only our election process but also the EU and USA ones. 2024 seems to be a very pivotal year in several ways. Desperate times call for desperate measures is an adage I think would be good to remember.
Another one is, keep your heads down! It's going to be rough going..
Whenever it happens in the next 8 months, it does not matter, aside from one issue I cover later. The Tories have hardly any front benchers who are remotely impressive, headed by Sunak who people recognise as an administrator. Of his five targets, four are missed and few believe that inflation is really 3%. (That issue has lacked credibility ever since RPI became CPI.) Sunak is, at last, making fairly unimpressive efforts to get recognition.
The country is economically and culturally sunk and even ordinary folk like me are not really allowed to cite a number of key issues that need addressing. Of the others: Tackling the NHS should include making it user-contributory; tackling retirement costs should include lifting the retirement age and scrapping the triple lock; tackling law and order might even include introducing corporal punishment; tackling education should include reversion to a 10% (maybe 15%) university population and not a Blair 50% population; tackling government might include getting rid of devolution - why do you need little parliaments for 5m, 2m and 2m populations out of an overall population of 65m; introducing severe controls on overseas corporates should stop UK milking by companies like Apple, Amazon, Tesla, Uber; I could go on. I accept that none of these will happen in 2024-29.
Now, aside from Covid, tell me what big-issue memorably things the Tories have delivered in the last 14 years. Tell me which of their five PMs have been impressive in either policy terms or leadership terms.
We need to put up with five years of what I expect will be a dreadful Labour government, with the fairly illusory hope that Reform will be prospering and significant in 2029.
Sunak's best reason for going early is to halt any Reform initiative which might otherwise more effectively emerge in the autumn. Reform's current success is happening despite their current inactivity and because of Tory and Labour impotence - but it might flourish if they get their act together. Possible but improbable.
The Tories have been fixated on privatising public services forever. Clearly it doesn't work when we see the shambles of Thames Water and our rail transport.
I don't understand the reason behind the "privatisation" of Water. There is no choice given to the consumer so where is the usual incentive for private companies to compete for their business?
Yes quite. The same with the railways. There's only one company going to Cornwall where I go on holiday which is Great Western so they can do whatever they like which is quite often a poor service.
They Tories know they are
going to be deservedly smashed so they'll cling on as long as possible drawing their salaries and expenses. Many won't ever work again I imagine, even the most die hard Tory supporter and business owner isn't going to employ an ex MP from this shambles. With a summer recess then an election campaign they won't have any actual work to do anyway