Westministenders: Tell Boris it should be more Stokenders and Copenders

[RedToothBrush]

FINALLY this is the thread of the Copeland and Stoke By-Elections.
In the next few days we will be subjected to a whole pile of analysis from the media most of which will completely miss the point, and will waffle on about Brexit as if it’s the only issue ever and this is what matters to everyone.

Its bollocks.

This is the ‘Westminster Bubble’ that doesn’t report what is on the ground. It includes the media and the politicians who ran into town for the election, never to set foot there ever again. In one case pulling faces at the local children. In another desperately trying to prove how local he is.
Is it any wonder some think that all politicians are all the same?

You can learn far more about what really matters by reading the Stoke Sentinel and The Whitehaven News than reading The Sun or The Mail, those great champions of Leave. (Fancy that local papers being more relevant to a community than a national ones).

The by-election in Stoke has been a particular display of pond life style campaigning. We’ve had Hillsborough, ‘dodgy addresses’, arrest of a candidate, text messages saying you’ll go to hell for voting ‘wrong’, letters that say that MPs voted differently to the way they did, an activist being hunted by the police for trying to enter someone’s house and then pissing on her property, crying candidates, faked photos on twitter, dodgy sexist tweets from candidates dragged up, photographs with known far right activists, egg throwing and vandalism.

The word that keep coming out? Not ‘Brexit’. But ‘Change’.

What have the main parties in either election really added in terms of positive change?

Tomorrow’s weather will not help matters. The chances are that it will keep turnout down, making those postal votes more important. It will drive out the angry to vote whilst the apathetic and hopelessly disillusioned will stay home. The result will not be decided by the 60%+ of the electorate who voted to leave the EU. It will be decided by a fraction of that.

Someone has to lose. There will be political blood shed. Friday will see the political blame and finger pointing I doubt anyone will get it.
The real story is about how few people will vote and how few people think their vote counts for anything.

Immigrants and ‘benefit scroungers’ are not to blame for this. Nor is it even the ‘cultural elite’. Politicians have a duty to the whole country, to do the best for them all. Not to merely do the ‘will of the people’. Popularism does not help people. It merely starts a runaway train of the tyranny of the majority. You don’t give children sweets because they demand them. You educate children, and nurture them. If they are unaware of real issues, you make sure they learn and you explain why you are making unpopular decisions honestly, rather than feeding them a crock of shit. Because that’s your job as a PM, as MP, as a MEP, as an elected mayor, as a county councillor, as a borough councillor, as a parish councillor. To step up.

We need politicians with the back bone to do the right thing for all, rather than just worrying about their electoral strategy and how to con people to vote for you this time. We need politicians to actually take the responsibility of office rather than see it as a career opportunity.

The issues that matter most to people ultimately are not about the EU. They are not about immigration. It’s too easy to blame on immigration rather than tackle the infrastructure problems of the country and admit where you have gone wrong in the past. It’s easier to drive an hysterical fear of terrorism and cultural values being in danger from an enemy far away rather than look at who is really responsible.

If people don’t think that others are unaware of the problem, and don’t care about them and how they are being thrown under the bus, they are wrong. Plenty of people on both sides of the EU referendum debate get it.

Plenty on both sides don’t and are indulging the fantasy land excuses for domestic political failure.

The question is how do you get that message out, in a way that makes a difference and does change things? How do you break the stereotypes of the stupid and the patronising? How do you get people like the Nathan from Stoke to be heard and to believe in politics. Not believe in Brexit. Believe that politics can help them.

People working in socialist situations under mao etc were afraid to take, steal a pen from work. Everything was accounted for. In our NHS its a but of a free for all. From nurse cousin who worked in NHS and private. In private you account for everything in NHS far more than slack. There is failure to link up dots wasting time etc. There also seems to be a strong left cohort in it and what their agenda is goodness knows. We have seen doctors talking about asking for id as though it was a cardinal sin and a disgrace to even suggest it. America is always sighted as a reason for avoiding this. It's cold hearted, not right. AND YET in France this is exactly what happened to us after dd 3 sustained a head injury. We had long sit down and interview on address etc. I assumed this was all for medical stuff but it was for the bill, which we received back home which we paid. Same thing happened to df in Malta, elderly, warfrin, cut himself, bleeding out, desperate calls to me for his insurance details, they would not help him until they had them. Two eu countries, probably far more who would behave similarly. We are given false comparisons, NHS or America. Not true.

Health tourism is a relatively minor problem for the NHS, its small fry.

If you want to point the finger, look at pointless and costly government interventions like this;
www.google.co.uk/amp/www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/andrew-lansley-s-damaging-reforms-at-root-of-the-current-nhs-crisis-10027314.html%3Famp

I'll bang about this until the day that I die as for some reason it gets totally ignored whilst everyone blames patients for being ill, staff, immigrants etc. NHS problems are inherently linked to the ability of successive governments to do what they want with it. Which normally means ballsing it up. This goes back to Thatcher and her implementation of the internal market. The Torys have had it in for the NHS for the last 3 decades and they're sadly succeeding.

It is a complete myth that the NHS is stretched because its workers are using too many latex gloves or whatever; while I am sure that there are some efficiencies that could be made, it is the fact that the current crisis has been choked of funds for several years. The "wasteful NHS" narrative tries to put the blame - entirely unfairly - on its workers in the same way that right-wingers like to tut about families on benefits being poor because they buy big tellies and don't know how to cook a lasagna from scratch rather than they don't, um, receive much money .

NHS workers not only go well above their contracted hours in many cases but, if my friends' experiences are anything to go by, they say that efficiency savings are now costing more than they save as recording every biro and sticking plaster through a local and central purchasing system and audit is a hopelessly bureaucratic way of doing things that slows them and the supply down .

TheFullMrexit People working in socialist situations under mao etc were afraid to take, steal a pen from work.
If that was true, socialism would have long become dominant in the world. Because of endemic shortages of goods, the whole system was built on kleptocracy. There was simply no other way to make ends meet.

Not true at all for production under the Soviet system. Everyone inflated their inputs and understated their outputs in order to get lax quotas for production. This is the inefficiency that destroyed the system. Plus, the NHS runs on a lot of goodwill from its workers, who put in extra hours for free (the same is true for universities and schools, by the way). Privatise it, and you will lose that goodwill and the extra hours.

We are given false comparisons, NHS or America. Not true.

There is a small amount of truth in this, amid much uninformed bollocks.

There IS an alternative - a social insurance system, like France and Germany. But

• it would cost a shed load of money (both countries spend a lot more, per capita, on healthcare than the UK does)
• it would require the UK to get good at things it is terrible at, ie huge government IT projects (you could hire the French; they are much better at this)

All this while government's entire attention is consumed by brexit, and while the tax take is falling.

Utterly clueless.

Sorry, that was in response to TheFullMexrit

If anyone is interested in the economy of shortages Janos Kornai wrote a good book about it en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%A1nos_Kornai.

missmoon indeed. In the French social insurance (semi-private) system you won't find nurses working extra hours for nothing; apart from anything else, it would be illegal and fiercely resisted by the unions.

Introducing a French style system would be a lot better for NHS workers in many ways, but it would cost the taxpayer more, and would consume huge amounts of government resources for at least a couple of parliaments.

" There also seems to be a strong left cohort in it and what their agenda is goodness knows."

What does this mean? If the agenda isn't apparent what evidence is there that it exists?

Another problem in the NHS arguably, is conflicts of interest:

^NHS hires drugmaker-funded lobbyist. As the secondary headlines say:
‘Conflict of interest concerns as Specialised Healthcare Alliance (SHCA), funded by pharmaceutical companies, advises NHS England.’
A lobbying organisation with links to some of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies and medical equipment firms has been asked by NHS bosses to write a report that could influence health policy, it has been reported.’
It seems lobbying is now ‘so five minutes ago.’ Who needs a lobbyist when this organisation, the Specialised Healthcare Alliance (SHCA), which is entirely bought and paid for by the pharmaceutical industry, has been commissioned to write a report on funding specialised services for the NHS. Services worth £13,000,000,000.00p (£13Bn/$20Bn) per year^.
drmalcolmkendrick.org/2014/02/12/the-pharmaceutical-industry-now-controls-nhs-policy-hoorah/

For serious real illness, big pharma saves lives, but what about the 'illnesses' that didn't used to exist , that now make so much money for the pharma companies.

www.imdb.com/title/tt4505666/

In the move to make us into debtors and consumers, the medical business is key.

Misti Atos is a French company and it already handles most of the UK government IT projects. However the faults don't lie with it but in the procurement and specification process. You can't integrate a health service IT system if you have doctors protecting their fiefdoms and minimising opportunities for oversight, internal managers protecting their existence and politicians covering up the mistakes of the past while scoring points and tinkering at the edges.

www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/25/sadiq-khan-nationalism-can-be-as-divisive-as-bigotry-and-racism

Lovely, lovely Sadiq Khan. London is still such a relief with its beautiful mix of languages, people, free museums, fab art galleries and gorgeous TFL workers keeping the ancient under funded machine going.

EG Kornai is interesting but I think there are dangers in translating his observations beyond the command economics of Soviet Russia.

In the socialist system under Mao healthcare was reduced to the lowest common denominator, and politically driven at that. It would be hard to point to any success in the healthcare system other than the barefoot doctor scheme, which delivered basic healthcare where there was none, though arguably their control over women's reproductive capabilities was the one aim they were almost totally effective in achieving . Of course now the iron rice bowl has been shattered and care at it's best and most expensive is world class. During the SARS crisis when looking at how most effectively to make a difference a charity I was involved with equipped the barefoot doctors with recycled computers to provide them with diagnostic capability in the countryside, where it was practically non existent, rural peasants being almost entirely expendable as illustrated by the scandal of HIV infected needles being used to take blood.

And the Russian economy is tiny now( same size as Italy's), it must have been minuscule in Soviet times.
Everyone ate, everyone had homes, everyone had basic health care and education.

Compare with rich Britain now.

And the corruption of local officials is a tradition that goes back 2000 years without break, the Mao era no exception. It was total mind control through fear but the idea that there was bureaucratic control is myth.

Read Frank Dikotter "Maos Great Famine" for an account of the "effectiveness" of the bureaucratic machine, it should be compulsory reading for all those leading organisations

howabout You are right, Kornai mainly wrote about centralised planned economies, in his case Comecon countries. But that is what we talked about. The example was how people in communism countries would never dare to steal from their workplace.

Or have the workplace steal from them, which seems to be the economic model in Britain.

And the Russian economy is tiny now( same size as Italy's), it must have been minuscule in Soviet times.
Everyone ate, everyone had homes, everyone had basic health care and education.
Are you sure about everyone eating?
I thought millions of people starved in Soviet Russia.

You are right, dapple I was wrong:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_famine_of_1921–22

But the fondness with which a lot of Russians look back on the security of life under the Soviet era, partly explains Putin's iron grip on power.
No freedom, no free speech, government surveillance anti semitic, ( in Soviet, Putin's Russia and now in Trump's US) but post the great famine, enough in Soviet Russia, to live on. Which is why Soviet Russia was admired so much in the left wing west from the 1930s onwards.

EG I just worry that those on the right use this narrative to denigrate all State intervention in the economy which is what Thatcher did very successfully to lead the UK down the path of Friedman monetarism.

Irony is, we the tax payers are funding the capitalists:
housing benefit going to private landlords; paltry benefits payments subsiding employers not paying enough; endless payments to drugs companies through NHS; nationalised bank to prevent banking crisis.

There's more state subsidy than ever atm and none of it is going to the citizenry.

YY to your last post Woman.