The government boasts that it is about to save lots of money on administrative costs, and will boost public service productivity. Indeed, the arithmetic for five years time to stay within fiscal rules makes this essential. facts4eu recently published my thoughts on this.
I have long highlighted the productivity collapse in public services since covid. Indeed I found the give away ONS figures buried in the detail and let them see the light of day. I was pleased when this government asked the civil service to come up with a cost reduction programme. I was not surprised to see Ministers adopted a delayed and implausible programme.
They confirm that health productivity is down a massive 9.6% since 2019. Presumably Ministers do not wish to stop recruiting to get numbers down at a time of rising unemployment, and with strong public sector unions wanting more.
They have done two things to the idea of reducing administrative overheads. They have delayed the breakthrough in cost reduction until 2029-30, conveniently after the next election. They have decided to spend another £3.25 bn of extra money on admin in a so called transformation fund over the current year and next year. This is money they can ill afford. There is no detail on why this addition to large computer budgets and systems can make a difference when all the other computer spend failed to do so.
The headline is a 16% real terms fall in back office costs by 2029-30 for government departments. “All departments will deliver at least 5% savings in efficiencies by 2028-9”. They must be expecting around 10% inflation by the end of the decade.
But look at the big budgets. Health is the largest by a long way. Admin costs are set to stay at £2958 m for 3 years, and to tumble in 2028-9 and 2029-30 by 8%. The third largest, Welfare, actually sees a rise from £1284 m to £1381 m by 2027-8, only to fall by a dramatic 30% in the last two years. The MOD does see falls each year to go down by 7.5% overall. The Transformation money adds to the cost figures in the first two years.
Meanwhile extra spending of £2 bn this year will be followed by £1 bn next year on transformation. That looks more believable than the bigger falls in cost around and just after the next election. This all looks like another piece of spin, with unlikely figures at the end of the decade to be able to invent a headline of lower costs. There does not seem to be any credible plan to cut costs any time soon.
June 22, 2025
For the first time since capital punishment was abolished in this country (in stages 1969-1998) the state has now taken upon itself the “right” (if not the obligation) to assist the terminally ill to end their lives. The vote in the House last week was close and I personally wrote to my MP asking them to vote against. They voted for.
Undoubtedly, this decision will prove to be the thin end of the wedge. The NHS is already putting signs on patients beds “do not resuscitate”. Doctors will now be asked to break their Hippocratic oath (do no harm to your patients) under pressure from families – and from the NHS on cost grounds. In ten years time fresh scandals over euthanising elderly who are unable to make decisions for themselves because of dementia will occupy the media. Remember Shipton? He was euthanising his patients decades ago. It was a crime then and it still should be now.
Along with hundreds of miscarriages of justice, the indefinite incarceration of people over decades for trivial offences, the contaminated blood scandal, Hillsborough, the Post Office scandal etc the agents of the state involved in euthanasia will cover their tracks. For shame.
Reply The combination of this and legalising the death of babies about to be born are strange priorities of this big cohort of Labour MPs given all the problems we face.
June 22, 2025
John, they are not strange priorities, like gay marriage they are seen as positive outcomes. They don’t cost anything and deflect from the real massive problems we have.
We are going bankrupt and this is the uniparty equivalent of bread and circuses.
The government is totally bereft of ideas to get the economy growing so they deflect with the continued channel invasion which they fail to address.
We are being led by shysters who hate this country
We now learn that Spain has a veto on visa applications to Gibraltar.
June 22, 2025
Goodness let’s blame the government again. Read Dominic Cummings and other commentators over the last few months.
The British State is fundamentally broken, rotten to the core. Inexperienced politicians only interested in survival, promoted above ability levels, Cabinet Office/Whitehall staffed with PPE/posh school sloping shoulders as is the wider service etc.
Promise everything fix nothing.
HS2 a metaphor. Political lies, no project/progress management. Tory ministers and treasury officials deliberately missing important meetings to avoid ‘guilt by association’
Starmer is an example not the reason.
June 22, 2025
For once, I agree with you entirely Sakara Gold. I too emailed my (LibDem) MP and asked him to vote against the Bill. He voted in favour. He also voted in favour of the Infanticide Bill.
Why are Socialists (LibDems are socialists) so enthusiastic about the State authorising the killing of people who have done nothing wrong …. yet refuse to authorise it for terrorists and murderers like Radakubana?
June 22, 2025
As usual dressed up in emotional language showing an obsession with ‘state intervention’ Have you actually been with someone terminally ill in indescribable pain pleading to bring the end early. I have and to see that over weeks was distressing. Equally someone else forced to commit suicide to end the pain.
To deny that person the right to end his torment because of a dystopian obsession with the ‘State’ shows a complete lack of humanity.
Yes. It needs careful oversight but, as they say, walk some miles in their shoes before imposing your view on them.
June 22, 2025
Nothing to stop anyone killing themselves, mo reason to ask a professional to do it
June 23, 2025
My mother committed suicide.
June 22, 2025
Indeed but what about the Birminham 6, Guilford 4, Lucy Letby, Sally Clark, Angela Cannings … and many other miscarriages of justice from our rather dire legal system.
June 22, 2025
+1 Donna!
I too wrote to my Lib dem MP – yep, he voted for it!
Well said Sakara. I too agree with you!
June 22, 2025
Yes what a sick government we have
June 22, 2025
Indeed and have had dire PMs and governments since Thatcher foolishly appointed John Major (who failed nearly all his O levels) as Chancellor. The PMs Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, May, Boris, (I ignore the v. brief Truss period as she was given no chance), Sunak and now Starmer. All truly dire, all hooked on the net zero insanity, all essentially tax borrow and piss down the drain socialist in favour of open door immigration and either for the anti-democratic EU, or pro duff deals for the UK with the EU.
All increased the size of the state and debt when the reverse was needed. Boris with Sunak as chancellor perhaps the worse of all in this respect with their moronic, net harmful and evil Covid and net zero policies!
June 22, 2025
SG,
I also disagree with facilitating euthanasia.
At the beginning of life, abortion is now legal with few limits.
What next infanticide in the first few weeks/months?
June 22, 2025
No risk of harm to the mother.
June 22, 2025
Indeed but the biggest most appalling scandal of all is either the Net Zero fraud or the deliberate manufacture and lab leak of the Covid virus and the net harm lockdowns and the coercion of net harm unsafe and ineffective covid “vaccines” into people. The statistics are clear & appalling despite many countries like the UK and the duff MSM like the dire BBC trying to hide the truth. It will all come out in the end though.
June 22, 2025
Meanwhile Trump bombs Iran.
‘America First’ avoidance of ‘forever wars’ is out the window.
Will this alienates Trump’s base, or will he survive going full neocon?
June 22, 2025
Sometimes military action can be the best (or perhaps only) way to get more peace as doing nothing gives you worse chances of peace!
June 22, 2025
@Peter. His base will fragment if Iran doesn’t accede meekly, or implode (neither of which are certain). Pundits such as Steve Bannon and Yucker Carlson, who are fairly representative, were saying as much earlier in the week. Majorie Taylor Green said after the bombing announcement that America needed peace, not forever wars.
For all our sakes I hope Trump’s gamble will succeed, now he’s done it. But I don’t think it will. Grok AI supports my view, for what that’s worth (it says the likely outcome is Iran speedily acquiring nuclear weapons, regional instability and tit-for-tat fighting).
June 22, 2025
GOLD, you write ‘I personally wrote to my MP asking them to vote against. They voted for.’
You, like all of us have only 1 MP. Then you say ‘they’.
‘They’ should be used to refer to two or more people, OR used to refer to a person of unspecified gender.
Do I take it that your MP is of unspecified gender?
June 22, 2025
Notable also that neither measure was in Labours manifesto. Anyway that sets a precedent for a Reform government who can simply repeal these laws and impose whatever other non-manifesto measures they want. Imagine the outcry from the left.
June 22, 2025
Quite right. Indeed the only people the Government refuse to kill are the most heinous of criminals! People who while incarcerated attack the state employees.
June 23, 2025
We have been putting Do Not Resuscitate documents in patients notes for more than 25 years.
June 22, 2025
Good morning.
Asking Turkey’s to vote for Christmas is not going to get us far.
There needs to be a President Trump decree / law that says, “Before any new Civil Service job is created, two must be abolished.”
Stop funding NGO’s and fake charities.
Stop creating evermore government departments. We do not need a Minister for Women etc. We need, probably, just five people to head the country. The PM, Home Secretary, Justice Minister, Foreign Office and Defence. The rest can go.
Fix the size of the State to a percentage of GDP – Say 5 – 10%
Less is more.
June 22, 2025
@Mark B – Agreed, the whole Nation has to live day-to-day to manage and budget to feed the troughs of these at least the 50% in our Legislator that haven’t a clue. Why are they not constrained by similar parameters to the rest of us. Is it their ego, their ‘look-at-me’ I am in charge get on your knees and worship my existence. Is it is because they would prefer to fight the nation rather than ‘work with’ it to secure a better life for all.
The Uniparty of which at least 720(50%) of the over-weight to large, 1400 plus legislators, some voted for the others mainly unaccountable and unrepresentative, have approved taking the fight to the Nation and its destruction. That is not government by the people, as the free world calls it ‘democracy’
June 22, 2025
I would give them up to 20%, but they should concentrate on defence, law and order, sensible border controls, a basic safety net for those really too ill to work and get out of nearly everything else. This 20% would the. be 20% of a much larger GDP as the private sector would be much larger.
June 22, 2025
Stop funding ALL Charities. You can’t morally forcibly remove money from people (taxation) to give to Charity.
June 22, 2025
Indeed governments should not be funding charities nor in many cases should they get tax relief. If taxes were at sensible 20% levels no charity tax relief would be needed. Charities are democratic and funded by donors they are not if the governments steal off you to give your money to certain charities that politicians usually use to push their agendas.
June 22, 2025
Agree we need a total reform of charities ….starting with ‘why’ have charities
June 22, 2025
The data about spending levels you expose reveals the mendacity of this government. The polls suggest increasingly that it has been rumbled by the electorate as unfit for office (although for a different reason). How long will the gilts market take to come to the conclusion that the government can’t do it’s sums accurately? When will it decide it will no longer lend it the cash to keep it running? The sooner the better. For the longer it remains in office the greater the lasting damage will be.
June 22, 2025
The gilts market will only come to that conclusion when there is short term large profit to be made from it.
The principle is safe as government can print it so the large movements are driven by profit taking at the taxpayer’s expense
June 22, 2025
Once the government starts printing money, it’s declaring the currency as worthless.
Worryingly I get the feeling a number of Labour backbenchers think it’s a good idea.
June 22, 2025
The current front bench has no understanding of the problem or how to deal with it. Knowing this, they will hand the task to civil servants within whose organisation the problem lies. The CS will duck and dive to avoid anything they see as self harm. Between now and 2029 the problem will grow and money they do not have will be worthlessly spent resulting in an even larger bill for the taxpayer.
Lets see what Reform highlight and correct at Kent County Council and others where they now have oversight. This will give an indication of what can be achieved before turning their guns on national financial waste. The national statistics you quote are largely a pathologists report. Reform need to go for the figurative overspend in paper clips and all the none jobs, before then concentrating on those areas that benefit their customers who pick up the tab. Pity we must wait until 2029. However should the unthinkable eruption happen in Wales next year and Reform take control we can then judge their performance against the inevitable Westminster hostility. Watch history being made.
June 22, 2025
@agricola – There are 650 MPs some 800plus in the House of Lords that make up our Legislators more than 50% have to approve of what this wayward Government is doing. So we must take it from what is happening to destroy this country they all have an equal hand in its destruction.
Reform needs to happen, not just the Party – although the should win if they keep their mouths shut for no other reason they are ‘not the others’ and don’t need policies to achieve the result.
June 22, 2025
You acknowledge they need to keep their mouths shut to get elected.
How dreadful – you expect us to vote blind!
Farage is revealing what we who know him have always said he was, pity it took Habib and Lowe so long to rumble him. Pity they refused to listen to people who have been steamrollered by him for his entire political career.
‘These people thing they are something but they are nothing’. Said Farage the Narcissistic – who knows he is nothing. He has no politics, no opinions, just a specialist at being what the audience want him to be.
In government his audience is The Blob.
June 22, 2025
and I thought this site was about criticising the Government.
Can’t you wait for the GE being called?
June 23, 2025
@Lynn Atkinson – the point is they are not the others, the Uniparty. The Others have tell you what they will do to get elected, then you find they lied as the do the opposite. The preference would be for the whole of our Legislators HoC & HoL to be retired. Then start over as a democracy – difficult the rot is everywhere
June 22, 2025
There are no/few Reform Lords so Reform needs to be very prescriptive in its manifesto to prevent the Lords from blocking their laws.
June 23, 2025
@Narrow Shoulders – remove the appointed unaccountable unrepresentative upper chamber should be the first priority. The US senate is 100 elected members the US population 450 million. The UK has more than 800 appointees from a population of 70 million. One country is a democracy the other is showing itself not to be.
Although should also be easy to get the number of MPs below 400 if not less then arrive at a fully function Parliament working for the nation, something we don’t have at the moment
June 22, 2025
The current bunch of Labour idiots running the country are rampant wasters. It wouldn’t make much difference if they saved as much as 20% on so-called efficiency savings, as whatever money exists they waste and waste over again on increasing worthlessness.
The fastest way to efficiency is to dump Labour in its entirety.
June 22, 2025
“This all looks like another piece of spin….”
Or their fantasy? In due course it will probably prove to be yet another blatant lie from the most mendacious Government in our history.
June 22, 2025
Public frustration with poor public sector performance has reached breaking point. The problem is that no one is held accountable when services fail.
Public services must be run for the People and not for internal comfort or institutional survival. That means sacking the worst-performing public sector managers – with transparency, fairness and urgency
We need to set clear thresholds for failure (e.g. NHS waiting times, school results, court delays) that automatically prompt ministerial action.
Ministers should act now. Identify the bottom 5% of public service leadership by performance. Intervene. Replace. Report.
“If there are no consequences for failure, failure becomes the norm.”
June 22, 2025
Failure is certainly the norm in the state sector and many of the things delivered are damaging anyway Net Zero, road blocking, Covid “vaccines”, Covid lockdowns, subsidies for heat pumps, EVs…
June 22, 2025
5%! More like 50% needs to go and all of it need redirecting towards sensible goals. Everyone working towards net zero for example, all diversity officers, all the vast subsidies for public transport – what is the true unsubsidised demand for it?
June 23, 2025
@Kenneth – there was at time, or maybe it was an illusion that Minister were appointed to run department and take responsibility. That seem to rattle some MPs, responsibility!, so the Quango an unelected, unaccountable friends of friends cabals were set up. Even then this misses the point if taxpayer money goes somewhere a Government its MPs a Parliament is sanctioning the money. There is no empowerment or pay without responsibility.
June 22, 2025
I may have mentioned before that HMG is a master of theatre, and that’s what they are doing here with this so-called ‘efficiency drive’.
They don’t expect, and never intended anything get better or be improved by any degree. It’s all done for show, to make it appear that our PM is on a dozen stages at the same time working his miracles.
His latest magic trick was to fabricate a poll that tells us that a majority of people want us to re-join the EU. Given that the poll had almost zero publicity and was missed by many makes it invalid – Still, it will be all the excuse Starmer needs to cuddle up with Ursula von der Leyen, to surrender us lock, stock, and barrel, back into the evil empire.
June 22, 2025
It will be in opposition to our explicit instructions and we MUST renege because he does not have a mandate to enter into any Treaty against explicit instructions of the electorate.
Treaties are repealed all the time – not a big deal and surrendering land is deemed to be a treaty entered into under duress by International law and therefore null and void.
June 22, 2025
How about government just ditches some of the things it does? People have tried efficiency improvements and they just don’t seem to work.
Take the NHS for example, if they were allowed to exclude lifestyle disease treatment from the waiting list statistics, that would effectively mean they wouldn’t need to do them any more. Let people pay it themselves, get their family to pay or crowd fund if anyone has sympathy. Let the NHS divert all its attention to worthy cases.
Shrinking the NHS is likely to be the only way to reduce its mammoth costs. Efficiency savings are for the birds.
June 22, 2025
Why not remove the NHS from the Government competence? Why not remove other competences which the Government is proven to be incompetent too?
That would shrink the state and provide efficiency.
June 22, 2025
Government competence – that must be the oxymoron of the day!
If I may express one socialist view, I believe you do need to have healthcare for people who need it and can’t afford to pay for it themselves. A sick baby deserves to be treated and I’m happy to contribute via taxes.
June 23, 2025
@Dave Andrews – it would appear compulsory National Insurance started out with that intent. If is had been retained as insurance, it would by that that would buy the services from the best source providing the best outcomes. So-called national Health Trusts are supposed to be autonomous. There is no reason why they are not stand-alone businesses. The irony is your GP be will be a self-employed individual earning money wherever the wishe, so the intention is around
June 22, 2025
Sage advice.
Shrink government we do ot need cradle to grave support just a simple framework within which to operate.
June 22, 2025
I suggest people read Dominic Cummings sub stack. Yes a marmite character but a brain the size of a planet, achieved real success in Education and Brexit.
With inside knowledge of the workings of government overlaid by an encyclopaedic understanding of political history one get an understanding of the laborinthine complexity of problems we have.
The State needs more than simplistic knee jerk reactions.
No less than political revolution. Farage is the only person without any baggage. Could he do it is another matter.
June 23, 2025
He’s appeared on a number of podcasts recently. I deduce that he has done his time in seclusion and is now one of the “serious people lining up behind Farage” …. as Dr David Starkey mentioned recently.
June 22, 2025
Using headlines in today’s Telegraph to contribute on Sir Johns observations
“Why ‘naive’ Labour can’t fix broken Britain – Keir Starmer is fast discovering the levers of state machinery no longer work,“ and form the same source “Dominic Cummings: The British state is fundamentally broken”
The so-called lever of State? Broken State?
There is perverse thinking running through those that have become disciples of this religion called ‘Politics’ they have it in their mind that a one size all approach and will fix everything, but only if they are the ones taking charge, running things. Although they know nothing about anything let alone on a day-to-day basis.
There has never been a shower that has had it so wrong. The only people that can fix things, make things happen and deliver are the ones physically being allowed to do the job. The NHS cant deliver because the virtual signalling remote management with instruction from those in power have placed Discrimination ahead of medical outcomes – the facilities should be clinically lead. The State at its best is there to provide the framework to release others to fulfil the needs for themselves, their communities and the nation as a whole. 2TK’s Marxism approach is destruction They (Our Legislators) are not there to constrain but release potential, encourage drive and self-fulfilment, they are not there to steal from the economy for personal self-esteem but to allow and promote the economy to be able to feed itself. The State, Parliament, its MP’s, its Government should be remote and not seen in the day-to-day affairs of moving forward. Self publicity for the next election is not managing that is egotistical naivety
June 22, 2025
“I was not surprised to see Ministers adopted a delayed and implausible programme”!! Easier for Ministers than facing the truth I suppose but is this habitual Ministerial behaviour that we must expect?
Perhaps Ministers are listening to AI gurus who predict material manpower reductions as jobs are lost to be replaced by jobs done by AI with human assistance. Geoffrey Hinton (“godfather of AI”) gives as an example work done by his niece answering complaint letters for a health authority. Pre-AI she spent c. 25 minutes handling each reply but now she scans the incoming letter to AI software that composes a reply that she just checks to confirm suitability, all within 5 minutes. So, a fifth of the human workforce needed for the same output as pre-AI.
June 22, 2025
Get all the complaints letter sent by emails and don’t check the AI response and we are there…. Better still get rid of the patients and there will be no complaints.
June 22, 2025
Yes! – or maybe have patients’ AI software write their complaints letters and then provide the likely response so they can see no follow-up is needed or likely to change anything and the complained of organization is wholly untroubled.
June 22, 2025
Somewhat O/T but it occurs to me that now the niece because of her past composing experience is well-skilled at undertaking the new confirmation of suitability task. Her successor (if any), deprived of the learning and insight that flows from composition, will be very much less skilled: a problem obviated by having better AI in future that can be relied upon to generate suitable letters. This points to a deskilling effect that could be corrosive to human feelings of well-being and achievement.
June 22, 2025
There will be no savings until the Civil Service is drastically reduced in size. We now have 550,000 Civil Servants, and I have no doubt they will be advertising for more! Until serious numbers are made redundant, there will be no savings or reduction in costs.
We have a third-rate government with 3rd and 4th rate Ministers, and a PM who is hopelessly out of his depth.
We have a government of idiots, see Angela Rayner’s employment bill as an example, and they will bankrupt the UK.
As the private sector horse carries the public sector cart, it struggles as the load gets heavier and heavier; the horse will eventually collapse.
June 22, 2025
Talking to a lady at the hairdressers, who until recently, worked in the city, and had cause to work with the civil service. She said that with working from home, doing the washing, fetching the kids from school etc, meant they struggled to do their job, so need more staff. I thought she was joking or being sarcastic, but looking at her expression – she was being serious!
June 22, 2025
“Back Office” is an appropriate term to describe the massive bureaucratic deadweight or heavyweight Public Sector killing the country.
Instead of backing the proverbial Horse that pulls the Cart Labour thinks the reverse nonsense!
Loading up the Public Sector with increased costs we are heading for massive future debt risks. Playing fast and loose (per Gordon Brown) is now Labour’s default modus operandi.
June 22, 2025
Cutting public expenditure has proven difficult for all governments. The easiest budget to cut is Defence because the Armed Forces always do as their told, even in equipment procurement although that is run largely by civil servants, and the Forces have no union. Against that Labour favours expenditure on public procurement, including defence equipment, because it employs people in industry – it may mean making the wrong kit but the important thing is that it employs people.
Labour cannot prioritise expenditure on the right things that are in the national interest because it does not believe in the nation state. It believes in trans-national or preferably supra-national governance. It hates Britain’s history, so it will offer to pay reparations as in the Chagos deal. And, of course the proudest achievement of the Red Flagged socialist movement in Britain, the NHS, is on a continuous transfusion from the tax-payer. Now there is Net Zero too, a wonderful boondoggle to transfer money to China.
SO as a soaialist international technocratic Government, Starmer’s gang has no concept of national interest.
June 22, 2025
I don’t expect much from a Labour government. But I seem to recall 14 years of Conservatism produced the mess?
June 22, 2025
Oh it’s taken 40 years to reach this pass. Major-Balls was the start of the end.
June 22, 2025
Or even the Wilson/Heath eras.
June 22, 2025
The 14 years had to culminate in the Electorate shouting ENOUGH.
A MESS was not a certain result, many hoped for instant cures for some of the deterioration, but sadly Starmer’s crew is exceeding all negative expectations.
June 22, 2025
If we all had to pay per service we used efficiency would go up because individual cost of delivery would be exposed.
Put a till in every public sector office (including hospitals and doctors’ surgeries and make them run up every transaction they deliver. They can then be repaid by delivery and not by grant.
June 22, 2025
583 criminals were smuggled, into the UK yesterday 21st ; from the safe country of France…
June 22, 2025
Glen they will all be needed to fill the new prisons the Govt needs to build to ‘create’ jobs in the construction industry. So be grateful because otherwise they will have to arrest everyone who posted a tweet expressing upset at our little children being hacked to death at dance classes.
Be afraid – it’s the full force of British law and it’s indiscriminate. Equality demands the law-abiding see the inside of prison cells too.
June 22, 2025
gc :
They’re not “smuggled”. They’re invited into the country with collection in the Channel (often in French waters) by our own Border Force, given free 4 star hotel (or a house) accomodation, free healthcare, £40/week pocket money, free entertainment, training and travel, free translation and legal services plus the freedom to roam our streets (even outside schools) and take black market jobs. The PM is obviously quite happy for this to continue. They don’t get this 5 star treatment in France despite France also being a signatory to the ECHR.
June 23, 2025
Smuggled …. or deliberately imported via a taxpayer-funded free ferry service?
June 22, 2025
“There does not seem to be any credible plan to cut costs any time soon.”
No, but it sounds good! So far, if you’re told to look up – best to look down! They lie!
June 22, 2025
Oh but there is a credible plan to cut costs. It will become evident even to these socialists that taxing more will bring in less, and borrowing becomes prohibitive, leaving cuts as the only remaining option.
June 22, 2025
The government boasts of abolishing NHS England but I have yet to hear of any staff being dispensed with. Are we still paying the same people under a different cost centre?
June 22, 2025
On the efficiency theme, ‘New soldiers should be offered a £10,000 bonus to rapidly boost troop numbers to deal with an increasingly unpredictable world’, the Lib Dems have said.
The government should also distribute pamphlets to make sure every British home is “war-ready” and able to deal with blackouts and chaos caused by the outbreak of conflict or cyber-attacks, Lib Dem Leader Sir Ed Davey said.
The Lib Dems claim the plans will “urgently” boost to the number of trained soldiers from just under 71,000, external to more than 73,000.
In the face of a “barbaric” Russian President Vladimir Putin and an “erratic” US President Donald Trump, Sir Ed said the UK must be better prepared.
Anyone got an Andersen shelter, or Morrison ‘table’ no longer wanted?
June 22, 2025
“There does not seem to be any credible plan to cut costs any time soon.”
There won’t be. Parliament has handed control over to the Civil Service, quangos, the regulators, the BoE and the judiciary. The judiciary even now determine our energy polcy. This was Blair’s idea with the expectation that Robert Conquest’s second and third laws of politics would apply that 1)Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing. And 2) The simplest way to explain the behaviour of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it led by a cabal of its enemies. So of course there will be no efficiency drive. In fact quite the reverse. The NHS and Civil Service are still recruiting DEI officers for instance. Not that our current PM wants to cut costs anyway. Socialism depends upon making and keeping people poor.
June 25, 2025
I have had the profound misfortune to have to spend a lot of time in a hospital visiting a family member, there is a lot that I’d do logistically, staffing wise and I’d save a lot of money by reviewing equipment provided when people are sent home (two sets of mattresses for one bed! One thats had to be stored in the garage because they can’t recollect it!). I’d organise the collection of expensive equipment when it’s finished, and address issues such as overprescribing and duplicating medication.