Would this be the same Chancellor who's just resigned in disgrace over ordering HMRC not to investigate him for not paying tax, then threatening any journalist who mentioned it with a libel lawsuit?
> Britain has no shortage of extremely competent politicians
We have a massive shortage of competent politicians at delivering benefits to the country. They're only competent at delivering benefits to themselves. If there wasn't a shortage, Truss would never have been put in charge.
Anyone trying to defend the Tory record has to defend Truss without just memory-holing that whole 45 day period.
No.
> Anyone trying to defend the Tory record has to defend Truss without just memory-holing that whole 45 day period.
And anyone criticizing the system has to explain how someone incompetent was removed so quickly. In any other country, she would have been in power for years.
And the shortage theory would only follow logically if the Tories had then elected someone who was at least as bad...which didn't happen. Truss was bad, but that is all you can really say.
She was polling so badly it was seen as the equivalent of her party coming fourth, behind not only Labour, but also the SNP and the LibDems:
"""That could see the Tories win just 22 seats, behind the SNP on 42, the Lib Dems on 47 and Labour on 515.""" - https://metro.co.uk/2022/10/18/liz-truss-silent-as-poll-poin...
> And the shortage theory would only follow logically if the Tories had then elected someone who was at least as bad...which didn't happen.
Not so; while competence and popularity aren't the same things, none of the candidates for leadership of the Tory party have been of a high standard at least since Cameron left.
Cameron said Sunak was going to lead the party. He is leagues above Cameron (who, for a British politician, was quite average). If you look in the Cabinet, you see the same thing.
Truss was one of the weakest members of the Cabinet (alongside her stooges). But Johnson, for all his faults, was the right man at the right time, and left when he was supposed to. Again, another one of the strengths of our system. And we didn't get a Brown situation (you may have forgotten that Brown also polled under the Lib Dems in the run-up to 2010, Corbyn was leader for how long...and he actually polled under the Lib Dems too in 2019).
Still allowed to criticise the system for allowing her to gain power. No brownie points for the fact that her party recognised she was such a disaster they would cease to be a meaningful political force at the next election, and therefore made it clear that she should resign. This can easily be replicated in other systems. They don't need to have an official way to force leaders out: she, officially, resigned.
> But Johnson, for all his faults, was the right man at the right time, and left when he was supposed to.
Oh god no, he was a walking disaster area well before he became the uncontested replacement for May. He was fundamentally unfit for office and shouldn't have even been allowed to stand as a Tory candidate MP given his pathological incomprehension of the concept of truth as something deeper than an ad hominem attack. Allowing him to be PM has almost certainly undermined UK national security given his complete lack of restraint or self control in either lust or money.
Only reason he won the election is because Corbyn was so unappealing that even the parliamentary Labour party overwhelming rejected him (what was it, all MPs not in the shadow cabinet?), which is exactly him sticking around for years in the way that you're saying doesn't happen in the UK.
But why did he stick around when the Tory MPs could kick out their leaders? Because Labour's leadership contest allowed candidates rejected by the party to be on the ballot, while the Tories (do they still change their method with each leader or was that just the Blair years?) don't.
> And we didn't get a Brown situation (you may have forgotten that Brown also polled under the Lib Dems in the run-up to 2010, Corbyn was leader for how long...and he actually polled under the Lib Dems too in 2019).
That was unusually high LibDem support of 29% instead of the usual 10-15%, not a spectacular catastrophic nose-dive by Brown.
Corbyn should've gone after the first election or the leadership contest. That he didn't proves the UK being parliamentary didn't help.
No, actually
You don't have to know. If they aren't being paid enough, why are so many choosing not to work FT?
And before, you explain how much they are paid...remember that many staff aren't earning FT wages anymore. Because so many are working PT, those that are working PT are being paid locum wages 3x FT.
A first year Junior Doctor has a entry point of £25.5k-£29k.
I will ask you a different question: number of doctors has gone up 10-15% since 2020...why is output lower? If you talk to anyone in the NHS, you will hear about staff shortages...okay...why?
I am leaving you to fill in the gaps here because I suspect you are bone from the eyebrows up and if I told you, you wouldn't believe it.
You talk about senior consultant wages and imply junior doctors are on similar wages when, in reality, theu are no where close.
And I have friends who work in the NHS if you want to play the anecdote game.
I don't imply at any point that junior doctors have the same wage as senior consultants. I have no idea how poor your comprehension has to be to think this.
Okay, then why are we arguing? How many PT per shift? How many locums per shift? This is all stuff that isn't disputed by any side in this debate. You are arguing about stuff that is obvious and self-evident.
It mostly consisted of me pointing out the salary bands for Junior doctors and the person I was replying too angrily denying reality and substituting in their own.
Maybe not as impressive as billionaires, but still impressive. And certainly as a family more valuable than hedge funds.
Whether this is the case or not, Von der Leyen is a visibly average politician. Juncker-tier. You actually wonder if there was some kind of competition to elect the biggest idiot.
Germany works much better than the UK. Just look at salary growth or at the number of strikes that the past 12 years of idiocy unleashed on the UK.
Sunak as a chancellor is responsible for idiocies like Eat Out to Help Out, the stamp duty holiday and losing billions of pound of taxpayers’ money to fraudsters during the pandemic. As a prime minister he can’t manage the strikes and half his cabinet is under investigation (by HMRC or for violations of the ministerial code or bullying). He’s clearly not fit for the role and doesn’t know what he’s doing. And at this point I’m not even expecting a strategic vision, I’d just like somebody that doesn’t increase my tax bill by 10 % every year and loses half of the money like a toddler sent to buy milk and bread.
An NHS consultant makes 70K, that in London is not enough to send a child to nursery and pay the rent (that is: they are poor). A junior doctor makes a fraction of that. For those unaware, depending on the specialty, a junior doctor may be even 35-40 year old. A private doctor may make a lot of money, but I wrote specifically that the NHS can’t hire, not that I can’t find a doctor in Harley Street.
Finally, taxes have gone up (I would have payed £800 less a month in 2009). Sunak alone increased my tax bill by £2-300 a month, while inflation reduced my real income by more than 10%. I don’t have time to find the data, but last time I checked public capital investment as a share of GDP was lower than in 2007.
Or take Covid - our press pushed this tale about South Korea having such effective contact tracing they could lift restrictions and reopen society, whereas our incompetent government failed to do so, but in reality they were actually less successful at doing so and even had their own equivalent of Eat Out to Help Out planned that they completely failed to launch in 2020 because they couldn't keep restrictions lifted for long enough. It's just that tbe British press only reported on them attempting to lift restrictions as proof they succeeded and ignored the part where it kept on failingg and they were almost immediately reimposed, whilst their UK coverage only focused on failures and not on the country being largely out of lockdown for most of summer 2020.
Also, the only zero-fraud option for something like furlough or business support is to deny everyone - every real-world set of anti-fraud checks inevitably blocks some genuine people and permits some fraudsters, I'm sure HN must be familiar with this concept by now, and of course the media attacked the government as incompetent for both. (For example, complaining that businesses couldn't just add people to payroll and immediately claim furlough for them - which would enable massive, trivial fraud - and also that they had no way of detecting if employers were making people come into work whilst claming they were furloughed.) On the other hand, Germany's financial regulator actually opened a criminal investigation into the journalists who investigated the Wirecard fraud, and Germany's own press and politicians failed so hard at challenging this that it fell to journalists from outside the country working for the Financial Times to finally prove it. Those are, qualititively, very different kinds of fraud problems and not in a way that makes Germany look good.
Should we start with the Libor fixing scandal and continue all the way through to the recent PPE scandal? Is this how it works?
The significance of Wirecard may be the fact that one of the biggest German frauds of all time was uncovered by a British newspaper. And after it was discovered, top politicians continued to lobby aggressively for the country for over a year.
The level of corruption is unimaginable to Brits (imagine if Cameron was working directly for Putin...that is what Schroder is doing, indeed most of the SPD male parliamentarians have, one hears, been compromised in Moscow) precisely because of our open institutions. These do not exist in Germany (as has been widely acknowledged even within Germany after Wirecard).
The reason cases do not play out the same way here is because of the Auditor General, because of the FT...this kind of scrutiny is unimaginable to most countries in the EU (why would voters even have such a puerile interest in their representatives? They vote, we lead).
This is a very misleading statement. Here’s a Wikipedia summary of her career, which you could easily have checked:
> In 1980, she switched to studying medicine and enrolled at the Hannover Medical School, where she graduated in 1987 and acquired her medical license.[33] From 1988 to 1992, she worked as an assistant physician at the Women's Clinic of the Hannover Medical School. Upon completing her doctoral studies, she graduated as a Doctor of Medicine in 1991. Following the birth of twins, she was a housewife in Stanford, California, from 1992 to 1996, while her husband was a faculty member of Stanford University.[34]
> From 1998 to 2002, she taught at the Department of Epidemiology, Social Medicine and Health System Research at the Hannover Medical School.[citation needed] In 2001 she earned a Master of Public Health degree at the institution.[35][36][37]
A bit partial I think, for those interested, maybe a more complete profile from BBC (2021): https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000vp0r
There is no comparison possible with German politics. German politicians wouldn't be councillors in the UK, and their system is totally cooked (Russia appears to have purchased almost all of the SPD, the media is non-existent, the farce around the Merkel transition was incredible).
Junior doctors do not have less purchasing power than a German janitor. One of the main issues with the NHS is doctors going part-time because the pay is so high. The BMA have actually mooted the idea of tax cuts for doctors only between the band of £100-125k in order to get more of them into work (and btw, part of the issue with pay is regional inequality, doctors in London can work two days a week and earn £300k/year...London is distinct). One of the negative aspects of the UK political system is that the BMA has massive political/media/PR influence so people will say things like doctors are underpaid, without connecting to this any other information that they have.
Nurses are generally overpaid too. One of the problems in the NHS has been low productivity, and part of that has been significant growth in nurse numbers. But there is a hard cap on their productivity (and a result pay). Starting pay is £27k/year...for reference, this is as much as engineering grads make (generally speaking, almost all grads are underpaid in the UK apart from those going into tech/finance/medicine...relatively low-skill work is almost always overpaid).
I actually agree with your point in part, a lot of it is naval-gazing but there is a need for more local powers (if you look at what is happening around Manchester, it is clear that this can work). Thankfully, leading politicians of both parties today are largely past it.
Also, public investment isn't being cut whilst taxes are rising...taxes are significantly below the level required to fund public investment. One of the main political issues is that voters don't understand this.