General British politics discussion thread

Johnson knows well that this baby talk crap out of him will take up headline space that would otherwise be talking about all the actual dodgy crap hes up to

Thats been pretty much the case for every PM of my lifetime. Either their own backbench starts to work against them or they screw it up for themselves.

Rare are they taken down by the opposition.

Private healthcare reps being allowed to sit on nhs boards, the health minister getting increased powers to intervene in certain local healthcare decisions and - mount everest sized red flag here - a relaxing of the stipulation for contracts to go out to tender (we could call this the "serco clause" perhaps).

If that doesn't constitute another piece of the nhs being sold off, i don't know what does. Piece by piece is how it goes, by stealth, just as Danny Hannan told his neoliberal American chums it would all those years ago.

They are outsourcing a lot of services, replacing them with contracts to private healthcare companies, so stealthy privatisation might be a better way of putting it. The services still exist but they're trading away the inefficiency and responsibility of a publicly run service for the profit and lack of control of privately run services.

BJ is simply runing out of steam/bluster whatever you want to call it. He is fundamentally very lazy and a pure populist. Well, I guess all politicians are populists to some extent but he really is a shameless populist. The funny guy at school that just wanted to be liked by everyone but underneath is deeply insecure.

In recent weeks I have found it quite peculiar how the NHS takes up so much national debate and airtime even before Covid struck. It made me think- "Is it a damining indictment on the general health of a population?"

I get that a nation's healthcare is a important in every country but in all the different countries I have lived, the obsession in the UK is on another level.

We do it in Ireland too. If the public services were efficient it wouldn't make sense to do so, but they're not efficient if a private company can run the service and take their cut for equal or less. The main pitfall is bringing the competency to run those services back into the public sector if the private companies fail to keep up standards or stop offering value for money.

I'm a regular user of a service outsourced in Ireland to a German company. Never had any trouble or reason for complaint, but if there were changes in the standard of service I would want the HSE to be able to get out of the contract and, if needed, provide the service themselves. They have some capacity themselves and outsource to more than one company, so if any one of them fails to meet requirements it's no big deal. The issue would be if a private company monopolised the service and there were no easy alternatives.

It's a fine line, but I think, all things considered, it's better to directly run a service rather than outsource it because you keep control, but I'm sure it's pretty convenient to be able to pass off the blame of any failure onto a third party.

Ah yes, the old public sector inefficiency. Sure, no one doubts you can have public sector inefficiency. Unlike, of course, the private sector that so covered itself in glory throughout the pandemic with a rolling cavalcade of missteps and screw ups, from lost or binned tests to ppe disasters to failed target deliveries. A monument to great know how and efficiency, for sure.

I know that no politician ever manages to evade political gravity forever but it really has been quite something to behold how quickly Johnsons's fortunes have changed in the past few weeks.

"ALL" I do is "fling around rhetoric about power grand." Really? Do you think that's ALL I do.

If you're up to speed on the heath and care bill, then you'll surely know the bill grants the health secretary quite extensive new powers to intervene in decisions about health provision. No rhetoric, it's just what's in the bill.

Here's what the independent Institute for Government think tank had to say about this proposal when the bill first appeared:

"These continue to risk taking the NHS back to the wrong sort of future – ending the operational independence of NHS England, and returning it to the days when ministers felt to the need to try to run the NHS themselves."

https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/ministerial-powers-health-care-bill

Erosion of services on a yearly basis. Cheerleaded on by people who won't be impacted one bit due to their income levels and assets. Conservative, libertarian call it what you like but same result.