Creative Midfielder

Happy to oblige, I know you've always had a soft spot for Theresa May although it baffles me as to why, as she was the worst (in mine & many others' estimation) Prime Minister in living memory until Johnson came along and snatched the title from her. I doubt that we could ever achieve a consensus about what constitutes PM calibre but IMO there would have to be a number of key elements - two which immediately spring to mind, especially in the context of Theresa May who had neither, are leadership quality and the ability to be decisive when faced with difficult and complex decisions. Having a good set of policies helps quite a bit too, so on the basis of those three factors all five PMs of the last 14 years have been absolute cr@p, which in many ways is validated by the absolute mess the country is now in. Looking back a bit further, it is pretty obvious that both Thatcher and Blair had those qualities, and whilst there is a never ending debate about whether or not either of them were 'good' PMs, I would suggest that very people people would dispute that they were of Prime Ministerial calibre. I'm not suggesting for a minute that the three elements I've mentioned are anything like the whole story but they are pretty important ones and also quite easy to spot when people do, or more frequently don't, have them.

There would be no need for argument as Theresa May demonstrated very clearly and publically that she wasn't PM calibre although granted in far less spectacular fashion than Truss. A more pertinent argument/discussion might be whether any of the 5 PM's foisted upon us by the Tories over the last 14 years have been of Prime Ministerial calibre? My personal starter for 10 would be - no, not one of them.

That's fine then, and the only reason I asked the question was because of your comment: Have you actually listened to the Peston series? He was quite clear about it: There were no warnings. which to me suggested you felt that Truss was not responsible/blameworthy because she had been let down the Treasury officials/BoE/OBR because there were no warnings from them - when in fact she had quite deliberately avoided receiving advice from therm, which is a totally different scenario to the one your 'there were no warnings' implies As @How I Wrote Elastic Man has already pointed out, however you look at it Truss & Kwarteng were solely responsible for the utterly stupid decisions they made and Truss's delusional attempts to shift the blame are absolutely pathetic - by contrast Kwasi, despite being made the fall guy by Truss, has behaved with dignity and a certain amount of honesty - all of which seems totally beyond Truss.

Did he mention that she refused to let the OBR scrutinise the budget - they are the people who would have delivered the warnings officially and she deliberately broke the established procedure to avoid receiving their advice. No matter what Peston says, the idea that she received no warnings is for the birds - even old Kwasi himself, who of course was broadly in accord with her, warned her about some of the specifics and indeed the timing of some elements. As for the civil servants I also find it almost impossible to believe that there was no pushback at all from the Treasury although it may be that the Tories have unintentionally created a rod for their own back - over the last 14 years, and especially the last five, they have heavily politicised the top levels of the civil service - no more 'speaking truth to power' if you want your career in the civil service to prosper/continue. So some, such as the appalling Simon Case at No 10, just kept his head down and did what he was told by Johnson/Cummings but in the Treasury they had a bit more b*lls which is why several of their best economists have eirher been booted out or jumped ship because they weren't prepared to meekly follow the Tory Party line. So maybe those that were left did just toe the party line rather than do the job they were supposed to do - very disappointing if that was the case but symptomatic of a country where nothing, including apparently the civil service, seems to work properly any more.

You think? I'd suggest for most of us, not just on here, but within the country generally the consistently appalling track record of this government is sufficient information to make some very reasonable assumptions about how well this is going to work out.

No, that was PFI which as you say was basically just handing building hospitals (and schools!) over to the private sector and paying vastly over the odds but spread over a long term - purely, as far as I can see, to keep the debt off the government's books. It was actually the Tories that started PFI but Blair certainly (and foolishly) ran enthusiastically with it instead of doing a proper job which we could have afforded to do at the time. Completely agree with you second paragraph and EDF was the sort of example I was meaning into terms of public/private partnerships - I think until recently EDF was 70% owned by the French state and 30% private but that Macron bought out the 30% as the energy crisis got going so that the government had full control (and used it to keep energy prices in France at a fraction of the UK cost).

I think there is a lot in that, but I don't see it at as the fault of the public sectors bodies themselves - they have pretty much forced into it by economically illiterate governments which astonishingly still seem to believe (despite the huge mass of evidence that they are wrong) that the private sector will always do a better job. IMO all our public utilities need to be taken back into public ownership, not as per the 20th century ‘nationalised’ model but rather as the publicly owned not for profit company model that was used very successfully on the East Coast mainline between the repeated failures of the private sector with that franchise – it takes a very special kind of stupid to keep making the same mistakes over and over again as the Tories have done with that line (and many others). Also worth considering are public/private partnerships with the ‘public’ element holding control, that model seems to work pretty well in many places in Europe - sadly, it seems as though Thatcher has bequeathed us almost the worst of all possible worlds in terms of public services, thank heavens the NHS has always been held in such high regards that even she didn’t dare take health down the US road to hell.

Whilst that might seem an attractive option, I'm pretty sure that it would be illegal under current employment law - I know P&O got away with doing it (when they didn't even have the strike issue or any other issue) purely to avoid paying even minimum wage but as far as I understand it that was only because of some bizzare loophole that the ferries were registered in Panama or similar.

I'd say whether ASLEF are indulging in extortion is debateable and not particularly important as the real problem is highlighted by your second sentence. Our railways, much like the water companies, are prime examples of the utter stupidity of privatising vital public utilities. These two areas should never have even been considered for privatisation because the rationale of introducing competition into those industries was always understood to be impossible but Thatcher (who presumably already starting to go bonkers by this stage) pressed ahead anyway. In case of water they simply ignored the lack of competition and created a regulator who for many years has been utterly useless and for the railways they came up with an artificial, convoluted and very costly scheme of separating our railways into track, rolling stock and operating companies, creating the very expensive shambles we suffered with ever since. I think it’s pretty clear that in both industries the problems are so fundamental and longstanding that no progress is going to be made until they are brought back into public ownership.

Yep, almost a shame that Boris Johnson isn't still in Parliament so that he can't be held to account, not just for the shockingly bad deal that he and Frosty foisted on us but also that he lied through his teeth to everbody, politicians and public alike and especially in NI, about pretty much all the facets of the deal and what it would mean in practice. Par for the course for a serial liar obviously, and many of us knew so at the time (including many Tory MPs who still went ahead and voted it through anyway) but the Tories have been so slow and incompetent at implementing this shambles that we've still to experience the full impact.

Do we still have council houses, thought they had mostly been sold off.......

Couldn't have happened to a nicer chap 😂

Even if that were true, which of course it isn't, then it appears to be a plan which is working well enough to deliver its primary (and arguably only) objective which is to win the next election with a thumping majority. Personally I find Labour's announced plans for Government, of which there are quite a few if you care to take off your blinkers, pretty underwhelming. But if all the next election does actually achieve is a Labour government that is significantly more competent and much less corrupt than the current incumbents (which is pretty much a given), then that will still represent worthwhile progress even though it won't be sufficient to dig us out of the deep sh!t we are currently in - courtesy of 14 years of Tory misrule.

That seems highly unlikely to me, I would suggest that the real explanation is the utter incompetence at the top of the Home Office - after all this scarcely an isolated example, in fact it is totally consistent with the pattern of their complete inability to discharge any of their responsibilities in a sensible, timely or efficient manner. The two outstanding features of our recent Tory Governments have been corruption and incompetence but even within that context the Home Office stands out as a beacon of poor policy making, terrible or non-existent delivery and just total uselessness.

Certainly are - I've always thought that Angela Rayner should have stuck to her guns after calling the Tories out as scum a couple of years ago (or more?). That she was spot on then has become ever clearer since and it appears to be a continuing and ongoing process. You have to hope that there are still some decent Tories somewhere but hardly any, it seems, in the HoC or in the Tory Party as members or donors.