Creative Midfielder

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.

Yep, she should be toast already as it seems a pretty clear breach of the ministerial code but doubtless she won't go of her own volition and Sunak is far too weak to sack her so she will probably survive, and whilst in some ways it would be very satisfying to see another obnoxious Tory minister receive their just deserts it's probably better for Starmer and the opposition parties generally that she stays in post and rather desperately trying to defend her & the government's indefensible conduct. I guess she gambled on Staunton staying stum to the extent that she didn't even bother to think up a plausible reason for sacking Staunton before she sacked him, which shows how dim she is on several levels, and I think Staunton's version of events ("someone's got to take the rap") have now confirmed what most of us assumed at the time anyway - since Badenoch's stated reasons at the time of the sacking made no real sense at all, it's difficult to reach any other than the obvious conclusion that Staunton is telling the truth.

Very sensible of them, maybe they are finally begining to learn from past mistakes although its hard to avoid the conclusion that its taken an incredibly long time for the penny to drop.....😂

Yep, absolutely none of us saw that coming!

Very much like our Government then, except I think most people would accept that even Goldman Sachs, for all their faults, are considerably more competent than the corrupt t*ssers that are currently running our country.

I'm not sure he does believe it - he knows that it would be electorally popular but whether he really believes it or even genuinely understands it I rather doubt. The Labour Party have long adopted a policy of cutting and pasting big chunks of the Green Party manifesto, of say a couple or three elections ago, into their own manifesto but that doesn't mean they ever really believed it or were genuinely committed to it. Nor do I think the economic realities argument washes - of course the Tories generally and Truss specifically have made everything harder across the board for the next Government but that clearly isn't the reason for dropping the target which is simply that even with a huge lead in the polls Starmer hasn't got the b@lls to go toe to toe with the Tories (or perhaps more accurately the Daily Mail) and put the case for the policies he (supposedly) believes in - this particular policy is far from an isolated example. And it isn't just Starmer, Rachel Reeves is supposed to know a bit about economics, certainly more than a succession of Tory chancellors, albeit that is an incredibly low bar, but in the end she has also turned out to be a major disappointment. When she announced this policy she spoke at some length to stress that it was nothing at all to do with 'signing blank checks' or even 'spending' taxpayers money - it was investing money into our economy with would produce a very significant (and pretty rapid) return on that investment, unlock a huge amount of private sector investment (which is currently going overseas) and give a huge stimulus to jobs and the economy generally. Unfortunately she seems to forgotten all that or again perhaps she never believed it in the first place which would would even more disappointing. As far as I can see the problem we have is that in our rotten two party system, we have two parties who are happy to talk all day long about the climate emergency and what they are going to do about but in reality they don't view it as an emergency at all. Its just another problem they need a policy for, like potholes in our roads or schools and hospitals with ceilings that are falling down - you know the sort of problems we'll try and fix in a few years time when we've got the time and money, but basically mañana. That isn't how governments, or potential governments, should deal with emergencies.

It certainly isn't and investing billions a year into producing clean and much lower cost energy would also certainly kickstart our economy and a massive rollout of insulating the worst insulated housing stock in Europe would also be a stimulus - shame it is only the Green Party (and to some extent the Lib Dems & SNP) that appear to believe in this.

I don't think any of us regard PR as a magic bullet, just a major upgrade on our genuinely rotten FPTP system. Whilst I don't entirely disagree with what you say about the downsides of PR I think you are over-staing them - the list MPs for instance as far as I can see are actually no worse (or even different) to some of our own truly appalling politicians who have been fortunate enough to be selected for one of the many extremely safe seats that our FPTP system produces for both the main parties and then remain in post for decades purely on the basis of their party allegiance. Likewise there can be elements of the tail wagging the dog but whilst there is obviously compromise between parties (which can actually be a good thing!) the really extreme 'tail wagging' type scenarios you outline I think are pretty rare in most countries with PR. But whatever the downsides, I don't think you can get past the point that PR produces Parliaments whose composition is a good approximation of the way the whole (voting) electorate voted whereas our system doesn't ever get close to that. In the last few years we've had a very vivid demonstration of just how damaging that can be for the country, and yet later this year our 'democracy' is going to present us with no real choice at all other than to confirm that its Buggin's turn for the Labour party - this is not democracy in any real sense of the word.

Even for the idiot Sunak that seems particularly crass and very foolish - I'm beginning to think he may be almost as stupid as Truss, so we'll just have to hope that his complete lack of authority over his own party will prevent him from pulling any disastrously similar stunts to her.

Yes, there were and they all fall into the large group of people who have questions to answer. which also includes some very senior civil servants. But their questions will be around whether they asked enough questions themselves or were gullible in believing the lies they were told, and even if it is established that they discharged their ministerial responsibilities poorly I guess that amount to sins of omission and certainly makes them far less culpable than the Tory ministers/PMs who had knowledge of the injustices being done and helped cover them up instead of taking action to stop them - those are sins of commission. So I’m afraid it still seems like a deflection from the real culprits.

Well if there is ever a full and proper investigation of this whole sorry saga and Davy is proved culpable in some way and punished appropriately then that is fine by me. But I can't help feeling the whole discussion around him is because as the only non-Tory (ex-)minister with even a tenuous connection to this mess he is, as @Well b back has pointed out, a very convenient distraction from a whole string of Tory ministers (and possibly/probably PMs) who we now know definitely are culpable.

And you think that trumps the Tory ministers who had knowledge of the PO cover up, which Davy didn't, and who had ministerial responsibility for the Post Office (which Davy hadn't had since 2012) - that makes no sense to me. As I said the first time around, I agree there are plenty of politicians and civil servants who have a variety of questions to answer but in terms of who has the most, or perhaps the hardest, questions to answer it is clearly the series of Tory ministers who knew the Post Office had mounted an comprehensive cover up and yet took no action - worse than that they became part of the cover up themselves at a time when the postmaster's campaign, backbench MPs and Select Committees were all trying unsuccessfully to get at the truth. One of those MPs was of course a senior Tory, back in the days when decent Tories weren't quite as rare as hen's teeth and he appears to take exactly the same view as to where responsiblity lies: Lord Arbuthnot, a former MP and vocal critic of the handling of victims in this scandal told the BBC that the government has to take responsibility "for everything that went wrong" in relation to the sub-postmasters. He said, "It's a distinctly corrupt murky story that goes right the way into government and it's deeply worrying."

I didn't intend to be - he isn't someone I have a very high regard for, although ironically he was a far more capable energy minster than anyone we've had since but that apart......... I was only intending to question, probably at too great a length, why you thought he had 'more to answer than most' when in practice he has a lot less to answer than all his Tory successors. I couldn't be bothered to look up just how many ministers that amounts to but based on the almost continous Governmental musical chairs that have been going on for years now I imagine that its quite a few, although we can perhaps excuse whoever notionally held the post for a few days whilst Liz Truss was PM.

Nice try but unfortunately for you the revelation that the Government became aware of what was going on relates to 2014 onwards by which time Ed Davey had been Energy Minister for 2 years (in what to all intents and purposes was a Tory government anyway). In addition Davey has already been questioned publically about his tenure as Minister responsible for the PO (which ended in 2012) and has insisted that he did ask questions of the PO himself at the time and was lied to - that may have seemed like a cop out at the time he was asked but it now seems not just plausible but certainly true as we now that there was organised cover up in which the PO lied to everyone including the courts, MPs and initially the Government. Why would Davy have more questions to answer than his multiple Tory successors in that post who were in charge as the truth about the misdeeds of the Post Office started to emerge, not just through the campaign but via the High Court cases and yet they still did nothing? But whilst it's true to say that lots of people, and not just ministers, have questions to answer - some senior civil servants must already be looking for new jobs. But it is only a series of Tory ministers who will have to answer the question 'Why did you not take any action when you were informed that the Post Office had mounted an organised cover up?' which is a question they are going to find pretty difficult to answer in the current climate.

No doubt about it, hope it all goes well for you.

Wow - I hadn't seen that when I posted that it just keeps getting worse.............turns out it had already got a lot worse and not just for the Post Office - hopefully this is the final nail in the coffin for the Tory Party. Think you are right about Starmer - thought it was a bit odd that although the Tories did have a quick go at their usual dirty tricks early on, they very quickly went quiet again and now we know why. Really looking forward to listening to their explanations/justifications of this one - reckon they can look forward to the mother of all kickings from most of the press and media, although I dare say that GB News idiots will still be trying to pin it on Ed Davey 😂