What is the point of labour ?

[RuMoore]

1 hour ago, CambieBud said:

I’m sure you’re correct in that Sir Manofthepeople Starmer will be the next U.K. PM. However, what is the point of being elected at any cost, with no discernible policy differences from the present government. New Boss, same as the old boss. 
Remember when listening to his Stalinist approach to last nights vote, that this man was a Human Rights Lawyer! 

This is correct logically but completely lazy and inapplicable when taking more than 2 seconds to note the differences between Labour in its present form and the Conservatives in their present form. 

[effeffsee_the2nd]

I think we are all ignoring the elephant in the room,

This vote is a complete and utter waste of everyone's time and has absolutely no effect on the real world situation in Gaza because Israel is not beholden to the UK or any other parliament. They don't even care about the UN or international law, they will do as they see fit.  The only possible outside influence that might change the situation would be very serious pressure from the US, which isn't happening.

 

I actually laughed out loud last week when the news announced that the welsh government had called for a ceasefire! could just imagine all those commanders franticly trying to get orders to the front line.. "stop! Stop! hold your fire! what serg? "the welsh government have voted for a ceasefire! everyone stop where you are

aye ok mark 

[AyrAtlanta]

If Starmer keeps this form for the next 12 months I’d love to see, come election time, what his worshippers can actually say to defend him.

And ‘not the tories’ does not count.

[Wee-Bey]

The votes aren't a waste of time imo. I actually find it quite helpful to note which of our elected representatives are unwilling to make even the smallest gesture towards any attempt to stop ethnic cleansing and the industrial scale killing of civilians.

[oneteaminglasgow]

1 hour ago, effeffsee_the2nd said:

I think we are all ignoring the elephant in the room,

This vote is a complete and utter waste of everyone's time and has absolutely no effect on the real world situation in Gaza because Israel is not beholden to the UK or any other parliament. They don't even care about the UN or international law, they will do as they see fit.  The only possible outside influence that might change the situation would be very serious pressure from the US, which isn't happening.

 

I actually laughed out loud last week when the news announced that the welsh government had called for a ceasefire! could just imagine all those commanders franticly trying to get orders to the front line.. "stop! Stop! hold your fire! what serg? "the welsh government have voted for a ceasefire! everyone stop where you are

aye ok mark 

No the vote wouldn’t have stopped the genocide, but there are definitely concrete steps the U.K. Government could take to prevent it. Stopping the exports of weaponry to Israel, for example.

Symbolism matters anyway. Pardoning people convicted for being gay, for example, is unlikely to make much real world difference but still an important and right thing to do. And, as @Ziggy Sobotka notes, it’s good to see which MPs are opposed on principle to ethnic cleaning and which don’t. 

[GAD]

1 hour ago, Ziggy Sobotka said:

The votes aren't a waste of time imo. I actually find it quite helpful to note which of our elected representatives are unwilling to make even the smallest gesture towards any attempt to stop ethnic cleansing and the industrial scale killing of civilians.

Nah, the votes are not a waste of time. It's important to know where people stand on issues like this, and the UK has been quite happy to call for a ceasefire in other wars. The reason this one is, only now, being declared pointless is because Starmer and the Labour party absolutely shit the bed last night, and this is the best line his yes men can come up with as a "defence" for not voting to say genocide is bad.

[GTG_03]

4 hours ago, scottsdad said:

There are two layers of nuance here and a colossal mistake by Starmer at the end of it.

First, to de-Corbynise Labour Starter has had to do a lot of work to make it a party where Jews feel safe again. During Corbyn's time as leader a whole load of anti-semitism erupted and that was really damaging. With the Hamas attack the instant Labour position was made simple - Israel was a victim and Labour was standing by it.  

Second, what came next. Israel's extreme over-reaction which is verging on war crimes. There are many Labour MPs who are naturally sympathetic to Palestinians, and yet more who have strong Muslim populations in their constituencies. Since October 7 the depth of feeling here has gotten deeper. 

This left Starmer in a sticky position of both trying to show that is is pro-Israel and also pro-Palestinian. All he had to do yesterday was allow people to vote with their conscience and it wuldn;t have even made the papers. On a day when the Tories were forming a circular firing squad, Labour steal the headlines with shadow ministers resigning or being sacked. 

Indiscriminate bombing resulting in the deaths of thousands of innocent people, many of them children.

'Verging on war crimes'

[KirkieRR]

Just a corrective: the motion did also mention Hamas atrocities. It was an even-handed attempt to call on both sides to stop the killing. So why on earth Knighthood Boy should object to it and stick to these 'Humanitarian Pauses' that no one understands or expects to work...

[O'Kelly Isley III]

1 hour ago, GAD said:

Nah, the votes are not a waste of time. It's important to know where people stand on issues like this, and the UK has been quite happy to call for a ceasefire in other wars. The reason this one is, only now, being declared pointless is because Starmer and the Labour party absolutely shit the bed last night, and this is the best line his yes men can come up with as a "defence" for not voting to say genocide is bad.

I agree, and I hope that many voters who still hold to old-fashioned notions like their elected representatives just 'doing the right thing' were paying attention to what went on last night.  Starmer had an ideal opportunity to serve advance notice of what sort of moral compass an incoming Labour Government would have and as you say, he shat it.

All the more odd too, considering that those who would have gone apeshit are hardly likely to be voting Labour anyway.  So, now he has festering anger in his own ranks and many Labour voters holding their noses a bit tighter today.  Poor political judgement.

[CambieBud]

7 hours ago, RuMoore said:

This is correct logically but completely lazy and inapplicable when taking more than 2 seconds to note the differences between Labour in its present form and the Conservatives in their present form. 

I remember a similar situation prior to Tony Blair’s first term. Labour swept to power after what seemed like decades of Tory misrule. There was genuine excitement at the prospect of a new government, elected on a mandate of what today would be regarded as radical change. I sense no such excitement about this Labour Government in waiting. They will undoubtedly win a huge mandate, but please name me ONE policy that Starmer can trumpet as a major change in direction from this shower that are in Downing Street today. 

[RuMoore]

40 minutes ago, CambieBud said:

I remember a similar situation prior to Tony Blair’s first term. Labour swept to power after what seemed like decades of Tory misrule. There was genuine excitement at the prospect of a new government, elected on a mandate of what today would be regarded as radical change. I sense no such excitement about this Labour Government in waiting. They will undoubtedly win a huge mandate, but please name me ONE policy that Starmer can trumpet as a major change in direction from this shower that are in Downing Street today. 

I think there's definitely a relative level of excitement from anyone that wants to see the Tories out of power. 

We'll have to wait til the manifestos to see either sides laughable attempts at policy promises but Labour definitely seem a better option to me. 

[oneteaminglasgow]

As much as I dislike the Labour party under Starmer, I don't think they're quite as bad as the Tories. Or at least, I think they'll make things worse a bit more slowly. 

I'm basing that on them still having a handful of vaguely sound MPs, who you'd hope they'd still want to keep vaguely on side some of the time. Whereas the Tories are 100% made up of irredeemable c***s. 

[Freedom Farter]

The vote was not just about symbolic value, it also had practical utility. This is a long game. The specific foreign conflict in question is a long game (bouts of extreme violence will continue for as long as the Greater Israel project continues) meaning it'll need revisited again in future. The opposition (SNP, Greens, Lib Dems even, and what should've been Labour) attempt to pressure the UK government on it. If you get the UK coming out against the untenable Greater Israel strategy being pursued by US and Israel, you embolden other European nations to do the same. Spain, Ireland, Belgium and France have actually already done this. That's a decent wee west European coalition to build with which we could've added our weight to this time or can in future. You're then half way towards a united European front, which is the aim. Canada, Japan and Australia would probably peel off at that point and you've isolated USA as the sole authors of this continually unfolding catastrophe. That then makes it far easier for a US president (certainly not Biden but a future one) to say "ok, that's enough, this nonsense of sponsoring the Israeli occupation ends now".

There's also the long game of trying to get more democratic control over our nation state's foreign policy. You must be able to see the problem here that our state is supporting something the majority of the electorate are against. Perhaps you might not be especially bothered by it in this instance but you probably were in 2003 when Iraq was invaded against our interests and our desires. Or when our state contributed to the Libyan government being toppled in 2011, creating a jihadist hub where one of our citizens trained before returning to massacre children in Manchester. A citizen whose Islamist father had first been awarded protection here by Thatcher because he was also trying to topple that same Libyan government. Well our elite finally got their change of Libyan government and their new oil contracts while we got an arena full of dead children. 

Foreign policy should not be thought of as beyond our democratic reach. This quote happens to be about NATO accession in central Europe which is obviously not our situation but I think it describes well how we're conditioned to think of foreign policy. You're not supposed to question it because we're told its just who we are. Of course we support 13 year old girls having their legs blown off in Gaza (https://twitter.com/CensoredMen/status/1722866600443834673). We have a cultural association with what USA and Israel are doing, its our identity. To oppose it is only for those unlearned in our ways, such as folk of recent immigrant heritage. Our foreign policy guarantees our democracy therefore its shielded from democracy. It guarantees our prosperity so our public purse gets emptied on it. Constant contradiction.

 

Quote

NATO has been simultaneously banalized—no longer a military alliance but a kind of cultural association—and fundamentalized—no longer a matter of politics but of deep identities and essences. As the alliance is linked to civil society, democracy, and economic growth, it is made too mundane to debate and too important to debate at the same time.

(Source: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2007.00521.x)

[dirty dingus]

Edit: I couldn't find a direct quote from Kendall saying it didn't go far enough.

Edited November 18, 2023 by dirty dingus

[Salt n Vinegar]

2 hours ago, dirty dingus said:

Edit: I couldn't find a direct quote from Kendall saying it didn't go far enough.

I used to worry about unionists leaving us in a position where the Tories romp back into government over us in about six years.

The way things are going, they'll be back in government no matter who wins the general election in about one year.

[GNU_Linux]

 

 

I'll pretend to be shocked

Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting has said he would “hold the door wide open” to private sector entrepreneurs who can improve the NHS if the Labour Party enter Government.

His remarks on the latest episode of i‘s podcast Labour’s Plan For Power came as his predecessors Alan Milburn and Andy Burnham clashed over just how much of a role outside firms should have in the health service.

Mr Streeting told i that he wants to get “quite tough on NHS England” to drive reform using new technologies and encourage the body to be more open to bringing private-sector companies into the health service.


I want those entrepreneurs that are coming up with cutting-edge treatments and technologies to know that when they come up with a great idea that can deliver better outcomes for patients and better value for taxpayers’ money, they’re not going to struggle to get through the front door of the NHS,” he said.

“We’re going to be holding the door wide open and encouraging them to come in.”

Mr Streeting’s comments are likely to prove controversial within Labour and spark wider debate about “creeping privatisation” of the NHS. Labour’s Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham told the podcast that private-sector involvement in public bodies “doesn’t get you the right answer for the public”.

Last month Rishi Sunak announced £100m investment in AI to tackle incurable diseases.

Mr Streeting that the NHS had some success in starting pilots for new innovations, but that the health service has “more pilots than the RAF”, adding: “What the NHS is terrible about is taking successful pilots and making sure they’re adopted and rolled out right across the whole system.”

He added that he noticed at a recent conference that countries as small as Albania appeared to be ahead of the UK on the digitisation of public services.

“I listened to Albania talking about the way in which they have revolutionised public service delivery using technology, they’re streets ahead of us here in the UK.”

The shadow health secretary reflected that NHS England had “started to move in the right direction” by bringing in more outside companies, but he wanted to see them “put our foot on the accelerator”.

Mr Streeting continued: “I mean sometimes they move at pedestrian pace. Why is it for example that where a treatment or technology is proven to work, proven to deliver better outcomes for patients and proven to deliver good value for taxpayers’ money in one NHS trust, do those innovators then have to try and tout their wares one by one around every other NHS trust?”

The shadow Health Secretary, who hopes to run the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) if Labour wins the next general election, went on to insist that he was “not naive enough to think that one person sat behind one desk can be the saviour of the National Health Service.”

Alan Milburn, who was Health Secretary in Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Cabinet, told i he is also in favour of radically reforming the NHS through greater use of the private sector.

He told the podcast: “It was only when the big reforms were introduced to devolve power, create NHS Foundation trusts, introducing choice and competition, opening the system up to greater transparency, that you then got the big changes and the big improvements. So I think what was true then remains so now.”

Mr Milburn added that the private sector was now “bigger today than it was” when he was in government, and that the country should “utilise the capacity and capabilities of the private sector to treat more NHS patients more quickly”.

He also said that Labour would be more successful at bringing in the private sector because they, unlike the Conservatives, are more trusted to keep the NHS free at the point of use.

Milburn advocates more private sector use, because Labour – unlike the Tories – is trusted to keep the NHS free he says, adding that Labour needs a plan ready to go.

“The way I put it is that the Right of politics when it comes to NHS reform, has the volition but lacks the permission. And usually, it’s the reverse for the left of politics. It has the permission but lacks the volition.”

He urged the next Labour Health Secretary to “go further and faster” when it came to NHS reform, but cautioned that they should go into “not just the general election, but hopefully into office with a well thought out framework of policy so that it can really hit the ground running”.

However, Andy Burnham, who was Health Secretary under Prime Minister Gordon Brown, took a far more cautious tone than his predecessor and warned the next Labour government against going too far with NHS reform.

“When it comes to reform, I mean, I’m certainly not against it, but I would caution against a reform with the connotations that it had in the last Labour government. Sometimes people saw that as a byword for outsourcing or fragmentation of the system,” he told the podcast.

Mr Burnham, who is now Mayor of Greater Manchester, said he had observed that bringing the private sector into other areas such as education “in the end doesn’t get you the right answer for the public”.

“This is something I feel really strongly and I feel it in relation to academy schools, foundation hospitals, you know, independent colleges, you name it,” he continued.

“In the end, it becomes a system that’s all about the individual entities, the schools or the colleges and they sometimes can put in a deregulated fragmented world their interests above the public interest.”

[HTG]

Labour's General Election candidate for Livingston and Linlithgow keen to represent Scots in whom she has no trust on the grounds that they're too anti-catholic. It's the sort of tweet that you'd think would fall into the "maths is shite" rantings of secondary school but seems to date from 2023.

 

[Freedom Farter]

Sultana says she was angry at her party's leadership for framing the SNP ceasefire amendment as "divisive". That was done knowing most Muslim MPs were going to vote for it and therefore immediately become "divisive", opening them up to targeting on that basis. It reminded her of last year when an anonymous Labour source went to the media to call her and some fellow Labour MPs "mouthpieces for the Kremlin". That accusation of national disloyalty was especially hurtful to her as a Muslim of immigrant family background who'd had to contend with such animus before in her life. She felt it was the Labour party serving her up on a plate and she was emailed a death threat following it. The Forde Report, published a year ago, found that anti-Muslim sentiment within the Labour party wasn't treated with the seriousness it should be. As if to prove the accuracy of that, party leadership ignored the report. She reveals party strategists openly say that Muslim votes should be written off. A senior Labour source told media that resignations in the wake of Starmer's Gaza position was the party "shaking off its fleas". The majority of those "fleas" were Muslims, something not lost on Sultana.

Edited November 20, 2023 by Freedom Farter

[coprolite]

13 hours ago, orfc said:

I worked with a few small it firms that looked at working with the NHS to improve their systems such as record keeping and access, or using AI to improve patient diagnosis etc. They never seemed to get much further than trials though. The 'nhs' as an institution doesn't have the skills or dynamism to do this itself, and they usually end up plumping to partner some similar corporate ultra-siloed turns like an oil tanker behemoth like Capita and wonder why it all takes 5 times longer and costs 10 times as much than they first thought

Apart from wages direct to staff, most NHS money ends up in private firms pockets anyways - big pharma, equipment providers etc. Which particular bit shouldn't be privatised? I get the feeling it's just the free at point of use that's sacred, not where the tax money ends up.

I don't think the NHS lacks the dynamism to do its own IT projects, or at least that's not its main issue. The main thing it lacks is its own IT staff and infrastructure because it's all oursourced. It's a bit chicken and egg. Hard to be dynamic if top down policy has tied you in to behemoth contracts that need managed. 

My experience in a large civil service department was that they outsourced everything because the quoted cost was cheaper than the in house budget. But things needed changed regularly and the costs for changes were huge. Not just the financial costs, the bandwidth and effort was massive too, business cases and comittees galore. They eventually re employed the contractors and took the system integration in house, outsourcing discreet projects. 

I challenged one of our directors about the outsourcing inefficiency at a "roadshow" event (with my union hat on) and he shut me down with the (incorrect) assertion that "it's been proved that private provision is more efficient" 

He's now head of strategy at the NHS. 

People should care how free at the point of use is financed. Private provision is usually far more expensive and the government pays for that. Which means they pay less for other stuff. Foreign ownership means that that the money creamed off in profit doesn't recycle in our economy. 

[HTG]

52 minutes ago, coprolite said:

I don't think the NHS lacks the dynamism to do its own IT projects, or at least that's not its main issue. The main thing it lacks is its own IT staff and infrastructure because it's all oursourced. It's a bit chicken and egg. Hard to be dynamic if top down policy has tied you in to behemoth contracts that need managed. 

My experience in a large civil service department was that they outsourced everything because the quoted cost was cheaper than the in house budget. But things needed changed regularly and the costs for changes were huge. Not just the financial costs, the bandwidth and effort was massive too, business cases and comittees galore. They eventually re employed the contractors and took the system integration in house, outsourcing discreet projects. 

I challenged one of our directors about the outsourcing inefficiency at a "roadshow" event (with my union hat on) and he shut me down with the (incorrect) assertion that "it's been proved that private provision is more efficient" 

He's now head of strategy at the NHS. 

People should care how free at the point of use is financed. Private provision is usually far more expensive and the government pays for that. Which means they pay less for other stuff. Foreign ownership means that that the money creamed off in profit doesn't recycle in our economy. 

One of the massive challenges for the Civil Service is that IT professionals who are capable of re-engineering or reconstructing IT systems used across govt command far higher wages than the graded pay structure within the public sector can support. It's almost impossible to recruit the right calibre of personnel (and keep them busy for the long term in the way that a company specialising in this stuff can). I've seen a couple of laudable attempts to pull that in-house capability together but they've been very frustrating to be part of. 

Anyway, back to the point of Labour - they'll not be able to change this as the horse has long since fucked off down the street.