Mailwatch(ed) Forum

Malcolm Armsteen wrote: ↑Fri Dec 08, 2023 7:12 pm I see that the party has declared its list of 'non-battleground' seats for the upcoming GE. My own constituency is one of them. The message is clear, we can't win this one, go and work elsewhere and vote tactically.

Full list here:

https://labourlist.org/2023/12/labour-s ... ituencies/

Excuse my ignorance, but is such public knowledge normal or does it imply some sort of unofficial pact?

davidjay wrote: ↑Fri Dec 08, 2023 9:33 pm

Malcolm Armsteen wrote: ↑Fri Dec 08, 2023 7:12 pm I see that the party has declared its list of 'non-battleground' seats for the upcoming GE. My own constituency is one of them. The message is clear, we can't win this one, go and work elsewhere and vote tactically.

Full list here:

https://labourlist.org/2023/12/labour-s ... ituencies/

Excuse my ignorance, but is such public knowledge normal or does it imply some sort of unofficial pact?

It’s not any sort of secret. The Labour Party always classifies parliamentary seats in this way at every election, and there are still a fair few so-called “non-battleground” seats, which doesn’t of course preclude unexpected events such as Stephen Twigg whipping Portillo’s arse in 1997. It’s about being able to husband resources. Such lists are always publicly available, and do not indicate any kind of electoral pact.

Thanks for that.

But there are all sorts of not-so-hidden messages. Our CLP is 'non-battleground' so we are exhorted by London Region to send our people to doorstep and deliver in two neighbouring constituencies which are winnable.
The choice of candidate (usually a local 'loser' not an up and coming star) also depresses the local appetite.

Well indeed.

People say they're worried about the "neoliberalism" of Labour. I'm worried about some of the non-neoliberal bits, assuming Rachel Chavez means a word of it.

(Of course, there's lots of neoliberal bits I don't like, but am hoping vaguely Labour will mitigate considerably, like last time, and hopefully go further).

Wes seems to have upset a lot of people online with this

https://www.theguardian.com/society/202 ... ney-labour

The shadow health secretary has accused the NHS of using every winter crisis and challenge it faces as an excuse to ask for more money.

Speaking on a visit to Singapore, Wes Streeting said the health service needs to accept “money is tight”, and that it must rethink how the care it provides could provide better value for money for the taxpayer.

“I think people working in the NHS and the patients using the NHS can see examples of waste and inefficiency,” he told the Sunday Times. “I don’t think it’s good enough that the NHS uses every winter crisis and every challenge it faces as an excuse to ask for more money.”

He added: “The NHS is going to have to get used to the fact that money is tight and it’s going to have to get used to switching spend, and rethinking where and how care is delivered to deliver better outcomes for patients and better value for taxpayers’ money. At the moment, I think we get the worst of all worlds, which is poor outcomes alongside poor value for taxpayers.

“I’m willing to give people more freedom to innovate and create as long as they deliver. That’s the tough love that people can look forward to if I become the health and social care secretary.”

The MP for Ilford North has previously said the NHS is not the “envy of the world”, and that the health service has been experiencing a deterioration of the care it provides owing to years of underinvestment.

Labour has pledged to double the number of CT and MRI scanners in hospitals, and to cut NHS waiting lists in England by funding 2 million more hospital appointments a year.

Streeting went on to compare the NHS with Singapore’s health service, saying that he wanted to replicate the country’s approach of using technology, data, and population-level health interventions to ensure the survival of the UK’s own health system.

He added: “What a contrast to back home, where I think patients in hospital don’t really know what’s going on. I definitely think there is an institutional and structural problem in the way the NHS works. It claims to be patient-centred, but it really isn’t.”

To be honest people talk of him as a star but I don’t think he’s that good.

If voters wish to pay Singaporean levels of health spending they can receive Singaporean levels of service.

He’s not wrong about NHS waste. However, a lot of that is due to the awful schemes and backdoor privatisation wheezes it has to operate under.

Consultant needs a new laptop? Well here’s a dogshit collection of underpowered, vastly overpriced devices from an approved vendor. Hotel for an overnight stay? Here are 4 options, all of them costing shitloads more than if you booked yourself and claimed expenses - and they’re all fucking miles from where you need to be. And so on, for everything from air travel to a box of tissues.

Crabcakes wrote: ↑Mon Dec 11, 2023 12:14 pm He’s not wrong about NHS waste. However, a lot of that is due to the awful schemes and backdoor privatisation wheezes it has to operate under.

Consultant needs a new laptop? Well here’s a dogshit collection of underpowered, vastly overpriced devices from an approved vendor. Hotel for an overnight stay? Here are 4 options, all of them costing shitloads more than if you booked yourself and claimed expenses - and they’re all fucking miles from where you need to be. And so on, for everything from air travel to a box of tissues.

And it reinforces the beliefs of twats who say the NHS has enough funding, it just all goes on overpaid pen-pushers and lazy nurses.

Preventative interventions ae a great way of reducing costs of emergency care.

Sadly, we've been subjected to decades of messaging about the nanny state and why anything that threatens the individual's freedom to do whatever they want is a bad thing.

The cunts have fucked us over, haven't they?

Malcolm Armsteen wrote: ↑Mon Dec 11, 2023 1:14 pm The cunts have fucked us over, haven't they?

Hopefully if Starmer becomes PM, the first thing he needs to say is that it's gonna take at least more than one term in office to sort through the sh*t the Tories have left GB in.

He already has.

I do think it says something that none of the people I know who either work, or have worked, in the NHS- at levels ranging from GP to consultant anaesthetist to junior doctor to harassed a&e nurse - could remotely be described as in love with management or prepared to trust Streeting as far as they could throw him. And my mates in nursing are used to bodily lifting patients out of their beds when necessary, sometimes solo (not strictly by the book, but staffing cuts are such a wonderful thing, particularly in the middle of the night) and could thus probably propel the wee sod a fair distance.

I'm reliably informed big changes are coming to the NHS under Labour. I'm absolutely open to that, and grow very tired of the discourse where anything that breaks with what people imagine the real NHS model to be is presented as imminent Texas, as if all the models in Western Europe don't exist. Wales does pretty much what everybody on the left says the NHS should do, and it's got excellent GP access, but some of the problems are worse than England. That's despite Wales, to its credit, mostly avoiding PFI. Not to say Wales is bad, but I'd certainly aspire to better than that.

And it's harder to make the argument now that the English NHS is underfunded like it was in the mid 90s. It's towards the higher end of the European averages, with a younger population than some of the other places.

I'm less open to Streeting being the right man for the job. He's obnoxious and not experienced enough.

A period of silence would be welcomed from Streeting, I don't think any utterance recently from him has helped.

The last decent one was using private to get waiting lists down, you had the gnashing of teeth but it's quite common and needed to be honest after this it's been a bit tech bro stuff. He has in my view been easily taken over by Darren Jones as a future leadership contender.

Though of course Phillipson and Nandy would get my nod, though I think Cooper would be the choice if anything drastic happened.

Come on. You can’t have a Prime Minister called Darren.

Hey, we've had 5 consecutive PMs, all with the middle name "fucking".

And the last name 'Cunt'.