[The Weeping Angel]

I mean they've announced increases in defence spending. Also trying to make the civil service more efficent isnt Trumpian nor is it an attempt to distract from the Ukraine.

I didn't suggest that trying to sort out the civil service is "Trumpian", largely because I am not a bone idle journalist who grasps at tabloid straws to make sense of my bollocks reporting.

"The" Ukraine has been simply "Ukraine" since god was a wee lass. Moreover, Ukraine is fast becoming a fragile bulwark against Russian hegemony and the corner in to which Putin has painted himself. Once Trump hands him Ukraine, he has to try it on with the EU or declare illness and retreat to one of his many Dachas, hunkering down with al-Assad while the wannabe successors fight like rats in a sack. The latter looks as improbable as his suing for peace.

Therefore, a really nasty spat with Russia must potentially be on the cards, and the UK is poorly prepared and ill-equipped to face up to it.

I suspect - as the boy who might be crying wolf - that the flash point will come at sea, probably in the Baltic, when a Russian, cable-cutting agitator will be dispatched without ceremony, thereby precipitating an Article 5 escalation.

I am aware it's Ukraine.

[satnav]

The government really should be taking a very close look at how money is being spent on social care. ITV news did a report on how a young man with autism was being cared for by a private care company. The company were charging the local authority £5000 a week to provide round the clock care but the carers they provided were absolutely useless, they were untrained and unsupervised. Secret filming showed that many of the carers were asleep on the job, other carers were smoking in close proximity to the person they were caring for and very little was done to ensure that the person thy were caring for was properly fed.

When the CEO of the care company was challenged about the fact that she was earning nearly £1m a year whilst her company was failing to provide an adequate service she just said that she was earning the same as other CEOs in the sector. The company had over £250m of public service contracts. Given the carers were getting the minimum wage I calculated that staffing costs would be around £1500 a week meaning that the company was making the best part of £3500 on the contract. Surely this kind of stuff should be tackled before cutting benefits of people with long term illnesses and disabilities.

[The Weeping Angel]

The government really should be taking a very close look at how money is being spent on social care. ITV news did a report on how a young man with autism was being cared for by a private care company. The company were charging the local authority £5000 a week to provide round the clock care but the carers they provided were absolutely useless, they were untrained and unsupervised. Secret filming showed that many of the carers were asleep on the job, other carers were smoking in close proximity to the person they were caring for and very little was done to ensure that the person thy were caring for was properly fed.

When the CEO of the care company was challenged about the fact that she was earning nearly £1m a year whilst her company was failing to provide an adequate service she just said that she was earning the same as other CEOs in the sector. The company had over £250m of public service contracts. Given the carers were getting the minimum wage I calculated that staffing costs would be around £1500 a week meaning that the company was making the best part of £3500 on the contract. Surely this kind of stuff should be tackled before cutting benefits of people with long term illnesses and disabilities.

How exactly would Labour tackle this problem? I mean they should but how?

[Tubby Isaacs]

Streeting calle for an investigation by the CQC (who have the power, it's not the DoH).

[Tubby Isaacs]

Well here goes then. How shit are these benefit cuts? Not to say there aren't alarming trends post Covid, but do what they (mostly) did last time, change things over time.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Check out BTL. I'm old enough to remember when people on Bluesky actually knew stuff. BTLers here don't know that it's something created by Andrew Lansley.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Seems to be a row with the Sentencing Guidelines Council, who put (in my view) a rather clumsy reference to ethnicity in some guidelines. I doubt it would have made much difference to actual sentences, but it was a gift to the likes of Jenrick (even though his party actually signed them off). I think the Sentencing Guidelines Council are being a bit silly about independence here. If the previous government got to OK them, then it's not that unfair for the new government to get to make its feelings known very strongly. There'a review of sentences coming from Gauke anyway, plus new policies on women's imprisonment. Can't this all be allowed to come out in the wash?

[The Weeping Angel]

Well here goes then. How shit are these benefit cuts? Not to say there aren't alarming trends post Covid, but do what they (mostly) did last time, change things over time.

Well according to bluesky these cuts are evil.

[The Weeping Angel]

Check out BTL. I'm old enough to remember when people on Bluesky actually knew stuff. BTLers here don't know that it's something created by Andrew Lansley.

The headline is terrible but it really pisses me off that so many people won't read articles just the headline and react.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Well here goes then. How shit are these benefit cuts? Not to say there aren't alarming trends post Covid, but do what they (mostly) did last time, change things over time.

Well according to bluesky these cuts are evil.

I think they likely will be very bad. Kendall has some reasonable ideas, but it takes time.

[The Weeping Angel]

I don't think they'll believe good although I would like to see what is actually being proposed.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Worth pointing out that McFadden/ Starmer aren't pulling issues with he civil service out of their arse because they've "run out of ideas" or whatever. There's evidence the issues are real enough.

https://www.civilserviceworld.com/profe ... orm-survey

Two-thirds of the 771 respondents to the poll said they think line managers are incentivised to move poor performers around rather than manage them out​, while six in ten respondents said they were aware of disciplinary issues where action should have been taken but had not been. On the other side of the spectrum, less than a third agreed with the statement "talented people rise to the top of the civil service".

A subset of questions directed only at line managers found similar levels of frustrations about the support that supervisors get to manage poor performance. More than three-quarters of line managers said they don’t think processes for managing poor performance or disciplinary issues are straightforward and efficient, and a majority said they don’t feel supported through training to manage poor performance and disciplinary matters.

https://www.civilserviceworld.com/profe ... orm-survey

[Tubby Isaacs]

I don't think they'll believe good although I would like to see what is actually being proposed.

I agree, We've already had "farmers going to get concessions" and "working rights to be watered down", neither of which happened.

But the briefing alone will have caused a lot of unnecessary anxiety even if the actual proposals are OK.

[Tubby Isaacs]

This from the Institute of Government goes further than McFadden is proposing to at this stage.

https://www.instituteforgovernment.org. ... f4_k7h7y05

Pat McFadden is right: the civil service needs to lose poor performers
It is time to introduce regular civil service compulsory redundancy rounds.

Think it's wishful thinking that it would address public concerns with civil service performance seeing the numbers are (rightly) going to be small. And I think it might well provoke strikes- people aren't going to think "only 3%, that's fine".

So I wouldn't do this.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Sounds like the Whitehall changes could be pretty extensive. Starmer's spox has said that he thinks that decision making takes too long, with quangos deciding stuff that ministers should decide. Quangos were being cut even before 2010, so it's not new. See whether quangos get abolished or just have executive powers transferred to ministers.

[The Weeping Angel]

Sounds like the Whitehall changes could be pretty extensive. Starmer's spox has said that he thinks that decision making takes too long, with quangos deciding stuff that ministers should decide. Quangos were being cut even before 2010, so it's not new. See whether quangos get abolished or just have executive powers transferred to ministers.

TRUMPIAN

[Tubby Isaacs]

Admittedly, using "operation chainsaw" even ironically isn't particularly helpful. But see how well thought out it is. There is also regional devolution happening. So not clear to me why they need the Ministry and a large NHS England as well.

[The Weeping Angel]

Yeah that wasn't good although guardian live blog said they pushed back against it.

[Abernathy]

I‘m entirely confident, if not supremely comfortable, that everything that Keir Starmer’s government is doing, it is doing because it is something that simply has to be done. None of it is stuff that we’d ordinarily choose to do, nor stuff that necessarily chimes immediately with “Labour values”. But it is stuff that all the good things that Labour wants to do in government are dependent on . So for Labour people, it’s bite the bullet time. If you like, a continuation in government of the “priceless Ming vase” strategy.

What I am a bit more uncomfortable with is Starmer’s rhetoric . Today at PMQS, he described the benefits system as “morally indefensible”. It is, but only because it is pitifully inadequate. What would be truly morally indefensible would be to neglect those people that need and depend on state benefits to remain alive. Or worse, make those peoples’ lives much harder. Keir says Labour will reform the system, but it needs to get it absolutely right.

People stuck on benefits who can go to work and who can be helped to do so absolutely should be, but Labour absolutely must be very careful about this. The Tories supposedly tried to do the same thing that Starmer aspires to - getting people off benefits and into paid work. But under the Tories, it was fucking brutal. Horrific sanctions for being five minutes late for an appointment or not trying hard enough to find work. Unsympathetic little Hitlers working in job centres on a power trip being set absurd performance targets that led them to make peoples’ lives even more miserable. It was dreadful, and it didn’t work, mostly because the Tories never gave a fuck.

If Labour avoids the elephant trap of just doing the same stuff as the Tories did, then reforming the benefits system and reducing the cost of it stands a chance of succeeding. If not, the government risks having the charge of being just the same as the Tories (beloved of the Corbyn tendency and Owen Jones) stick, which politically, is not good, and at worst could jeopardise Starmer’s second term.

It’s a cunt of a difficult balancing act, but if anybody can pull it off, it’s Starmer.

[Tubby Isaacs]

I don't see how the sort of cuts being talked about now are consistent with reforming and improving.