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.

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.