[The Weeping Angel]

Out Reforming Reform.

[Killer Whale]

Showtowt to Wales where all primary age pupils are already entitled to free school dinners thanks to Plaid bending Labour's arm when then were in a hurry to get a budget through.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Out Reforming Reform.

Also known as "tinkering at the edges".

There's some pretty hard rain heading for new sickness benefit claimants, but the policy towards children seems pretty good.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Latest "who can we find to slag of the Government article" from our friends here.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... osses-told

Palantir’s NHS England contract ‘opens door to government abuse of power’, health bosses told
Health justice charity Medact says data-sharing potential could be used for UK version of US immigration raids

What does a health justice charity look like? Pages on the various issues of health inequality in the UK? Pages on general world wide health issues, vaccination, access to drugs, that sort of thing?

https://www.medact.org/our-work/

First two items- nuclear weapons and Palestine. They also want divestment from the arms industry- who else do they think should supply Ukraine?

The fourth one is "Abolitionist Approach to Health", which is 'to challenge policing, criminalisation and securitisation practices within and beyond sites of healthcare'. A particular target is Prevent, and they talk of healthworkers themselves as being "enactors of violent practices". Or you know, the victims of violent practices from patients.

This is so obviously a bunch of Trots who've stuck "health" on to their pet subjects. What do you reckon they know about health IT? The logic seems to be "don't join anything up, continue wasting a load of money, because Nigel Farage".

But send a report into the Guardian, goes straight in.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Some of the BTL brains trust were gleefully putting together a conspiracy whereby the government was being directed by Maurice Glasman, who supports the EDL, via Labour Together and Shabana Mahmood. I didn't follow the links to Declassified, funnily enough. They seem to be very bad at this Machiavelli stuff, if that's the case.

New anti-Muslim hate definition announced by government
A special representative will also be appointed to help facilitate the understanding and implementation of the definition.

https://news.sky.com/story/government-a ... y-13517508

This is, in fairness, overdue. But clearly they've worked on this for a while, and credit for it arriving. I'm sure Kemi will rise to the issue.

This is the sort of stuff she'll be happy to reduce to the worst party politics.

Zubir Ahmed, a health minister, tries not to read the comments under his social media feeds, but sometimes curiosity gets the better of him.

After performing a transplant on Christmas Day, the vascular surgeon scanned a post about the operation.

He recalled: “It went viral on the internet, but I have also never seen anything like the abuse. There was one comment that stuck out for me that just said: ‘Thanks for the transplant, now go home.’”

Dr Zubir Ahmed is strongly supportive of the government on this issue, you may not be surprised to hear.

(I generally laugh at people who make up what politicians have said and then ridicule them, like I've done with Kemi there. I am though very confident she'll be appalling).

[Tubby Isaacs]

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... ay-sources

Starmer may face more resignations after release of Mandelson WhatsApp messages, say sources
PM has apologised for his handling of Peter Mandelson’s appointment as US ambassador, but next tranche of files could contain further damaging details

Resignations from embarrassing WhatsApp messages connected with the pandemic that killed 230,000= zero

Resignations from appointing Peter Mandelson= lots, apparently.

If this were a Tory Prime Minister, he'd have been allowed to apologize and "draw a line under it, and by the way it was a brilliant idea to appoint someone with a rapport with Trump because billions of pounds of trade were at stake, they just couldn't possibly have known, and you need to look for people with experience outside the narrow confines of the civil service etc"

It seems though that not everybody comes out badly from this. Jonathan Powell criticized the process. That becomes "Starmer was warned", and that's another load of shitty headlines. Hard to avoid the impression that the media who said Starmer was finished are not exactly being disinterested in this stuff.

Still a shit appointment, mind.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Showtowt to Wales where all primary age pupils are already entitled to free school dinners thanks to Plaid bending Labour's arm when then were in a hurry to get a budget through.

Given the overall level of funding of Wales, this is an impressive thing to have got in the budget.

[Tubby Isaacs]

One perhaps to file under "long term policy you'll get no thanks for". Actually that's an understatement. I can already hear a certain party leader rediscovering his interest in the environment, and taking a potshot.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... d-miliband

Miliband unveils plans to speed up nuclear power generation for UK
Ministers face accusations of carrying out ‘irresponsible deregulation’ as they push through ‘clean energy’ proposals

Who's accusing them?

However, top environmental planning lawyer Alexa Culver of RSK Wilding said: “No ecologists or environmental specialists were invited to shape these proposals into anything that resembles a ‘win’ for nature.

“Recently popularised and devastating environmental scandals – like within the water industry – prove that high-stakes regulation is complex and easily manipulated when ‘simplified’ without checks and balances. This was a chance for the government to design resilience into our industrial strategy and the government didn’t take it.”

Lawyer objects to the law being cheaper, more as we get it.

And I've no idea what "design resilience into out industrial strategy" is supposed to mean. The best way presumably to get the industrial strategy going is to reduce the overheads on the actual industrial work. And water company regulation, whatever else has been wrong with it, hasn't exactly oversupplied us with questionable infrastructure- or indeed infrastructure of any kind. That's an odd point to make. The win for nature is that this should mean that climate change policy becomes more affordable (as of course it is anyway, but it's not easy to "just raise income tax" or whatever).

I'm sure there are people who don't have vested interests, academics etc, who will oppose the new regulation. Could the paper maybe phone some of them up, perhaps give them a column, and we might be informed about the issue rather than the political controversy.