A ‘cost factor’ – no longer needed …

 

‘Tis astounding: Truss is kept in political suspended animation while the Tory MPs are showing their mettle, taking decisive actions (not!). The MSM have started labelling her latest Chancellor the ‘APM’, the Acting PM, because he’s doing all the work, even though this work dismantles not just Truss’ ‘economic programme’ but also Johnson’s. Funny how the ‘BJ Allies’ who’ve been so vociferous in their accusations have suddenly become quiet – as far as we peasants know because we’re only getting the gossip selected by the Westminster MSM. 

We’ll have to wait for today’s PMQ to see how the famous cookie crumbles. Meanwhile, the quick scan of the print editions’ front pages this morning shows a nice little rift between the lefty broadsheets, the FT and the Guardian, and the rest of the pack. The FT went with ‘Bank profits in line of fire’ and the Guardian with ‘Truss faces Tory unrest over toxic budget cuts’. The rest of the MSM pack went with the possible scrapping of the ‘pension triple lock’ (link). 

The treasury, we’re told, now wants to link the rise in state pension to wage rises, not inflation, and never mind the Truss’ manifesto ‘promise’ to reinstate this triple lock after it had been abandoned last year. The sums involved vary from paper to paper. The DT writes abandoning said triple lock could save the Treasury £5bn, the DM sets it at £4.5bn. Ah well, £0.5bn is neither here nor there for the Treasury. And since we’re all in it together, sacrificing an annual rise of £434p.a. or £8.35 per week (link) surely is acceptable, no?

The grauniad – I felt obliged to go there to see how the left is spinning this – hasn’t quite yet decided about what will make their readers howl with outrage: pension cuts or defence cuts:

“The prime minister’s official spokesperson refused four times to commit to keeping the pensions guarantee despite it being a key 2019 manifesto commitment that Truss confirmed she would stick with it just two weeks ago. In contrast, Truss backed off a plan to scrap the government’s commitment to raise defence spending to 3% of GDP by 2030 after the defence ministers Ben Wallace and James Heappey threatened to quit.” (link)

Difficult, innit: maintain the support for dear little Ukraine, facing the bully Putin – or help the pensioners, especially those on state pensions only. Shouldn’t that deserve an outcry from Labour and the combined left? There’s another hint that actually, the Westminster denizens are quite happy with letting the aged peasants face more hardship. Some of them are ‘wealthy’, you understand, having saved for their old age. So it cannot come as surprise that another of the former PM’s ‘promises’ looks to be scrapped. The Times – not the Guardian – reports:

“Jeremy Hunt is poised to delay Boris Johnson’s flagship social care reform and has been warned that his spending cuts may have to be tougher even than George Osborne’s era of austerity. The cap on the sum people pay for care in old age is set to be put back by a year or more in the first of a series of “eye-watering” cuts the new chancellor is considering to balance the books. Treasury officials suggested scrapping the reform entirely or kicking it into the long grass, but Hunt is said to believe that a one-year delay is politically feasible as he tries to save the public finances by ripping up Liz Truss’s plans.” (link, paywalled)

Doesn’t it look as if the Treasury mandarins are now publicly showing their might, actually deciding policies in order to balance those books which they happily unbalanced during the covid years? Given the Westminster attitude to home ownership and to the old generally it seems acceptable to impoverish the old even more. After all someone has to sacrifice when there are so many other mouths to feed – those which have been rolling in and are still coming in their dinghies.

The pernicious attitude of the Westminster swamp dwellers to the old still has a way to go. The tune will become rectifying the alleged ‘transfer of wealth from the young to the old’, as some tentative comment post in The Times pointed out without being criticised.

But that’s still to come. Meanwhile, there’s our Sacred Cow for which we also must make sacrifices. There were three reports in The Times today, worthy of being bookmarked for future use. The NHS, see, can do no wrong. We read that:

“The NHS is establishing “winter war rooms” in England to monitor A&E attendances, divert ambulances and identify spare hospital beds. Regional health bosses have been ordered to establish 24/7 “data-driven control centres”, which will provide accurate information on bed capacity in hospitals and care homes. They will be run by “clinicians and experts” who can identify pressure points and act to reduce deadly ambulance delays and lengthy waits in A&E.” (link, paywalled)

I must be amazingly naive to think that ‘clinicians’ might perhaps be better employed helping out in said A&E departments rather than work in ‘data-driven control centres’. The Times published another report though, accompanying their story on ‘NHS War Rooms’. It’s about a 95-year-old former RAF pilot who had to wait for 26 hours, on a trolley in A&E (link, paywalled). Obviously, The Times reporters didn’t see the article on the situation in A&E departments, published a few days ago in the Daily Sceptic (link).

So forgive me when this latest NHS exercise, ‘ordered’ from above, doesn’t fill me with trust, especially not when I read the third NHS-related report in The Times, headlined: “Just two in five junior doctors now UK-trained” (link, paywalled). We’re told that the General Medical Council:

“[…] said there had been “a dramatic increase” in international medical graduates (IMGs) practising in the UK. Its annual report on the medical workforce reveals that 50 per cent of doctors who joined last year were IMGs — that is, they went to medical school outside the UK and the European Economic Area. Only 39 per cent were UK graduates. In 2017, UK graduates made up 53 per cent of doctors joining the workforce, with IMGs accounting for about 32 per cent. Since then the number of IMGs has increased by 40 per cent but the number of UK graduates by only 10 per cent.” (link, paywalled)

Instead of demanding more places for UK medical students, the NHS is exhorted instead to ‘offer more support’ for those ‘IMGs’. Ah well – I suppose that’s only right because those IMGs can look after all our ‘new people’ much better, given that they probably speak the same languages – not English. 

I leave you with news that the Red Arrows are a horrible bunch of bullying misogynists, or so a ‘female officer’ said, after having been in that team for six weeks (link, paywalled). Let’s scrap the Red Arrows altogether, then. That would save money for the Treasury. In fact, why not scrap the Armed Forces altogether, misogynist bullies that they are!

We could instead invest in ‘24/7 military data centres’ which can fly all those drones we don’t have and which create such havoc in the Ukraine that Wallace has flown to the USA, to discuss ‘the Kremlin’s terrorising air strikes’ (paywalled link). Why hasn’t the treasury insisted he stay here and conduct said talks via Zoom? That would’ve saved money and it worked during the covid years, didn’t it!

That’s it for today – another compilation of what I regard as straws in the wind, pointing to a future where the old are being surreptitiously impoverished by the state while ‘our betters’ will be kept in the comfort they’ve allocated themselves. Have fun watching PMQs later this morning.



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