Coming soon …
I need to write an article about whether we are fighting modern Fascists. I think that we are. Should the Israelis and their Zionist supporters be recognised as Neo-Fascists? If Israelis are Neo-Fascists, then their supporters like the UK’s Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer are also Neo-Fascists. Should climate destroyers be recognised as Neo-Fascists? They’re often the same people.
Basic UK local elections maths
Math in the US, maths in the UK …
Summary of my basic maths on the UK election results so far. I’m starting from the interim results reported at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election/2024/england/results at 10.10 am BST, there are still a few results to be announced.
The Conservative Party has done very poorly, losing 48.5% of it’s elected councillors.
The Labour Party has only a 20% gain in elected councillors and so hasn’t done particularly well from Conservative losses.
The Liberal Democrats have a 25% gain, getting an extra 101 elected councillors.
The Green Party and Independents have a gain of between 69 and 70%, the big winners yet again.
Residents Associations have a 30% gain.
Reform UK have done well with 2 councillors, none before.
Workers Party of Britain – George Galloway’s party – have done very well with 4 councillors, none before.
My maths skills are not capable of calculating percentage increase from nothing to 2 or 4, don’t know how it is applied.
Morning Star: The Tories have wrecked the NHS – but that doesn’t mean Labour will rescue it
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/tories-have-wrecked-nhs-doesnt-mean-labour-will-rescue-it
The NHS overtook the economy as voters’ biggest concern in February, according to polling by Ipsos. Small wonder when waiting lists have hit 7.5 million: there can hardly be a person in the country who doesn’t have a friend or relative who has been affected.
And the Conservatives bear a heavy responsibility.
In the decade up to the pandemic, real-terms healthcare spending per head rose on average by just 0.4 per cent a year — in four years it actually fell, despite rising pressures on the service.
That compares very poorly to the record of the last Labour government, which raised spending by 5.7 per cent a year on average from 1997-2010. It even compares badly to that of the Thatcher and Major Conservative governments, which averaged a 2.1 per cent annual increase.
But we should be more cautious than Poulter about endorsing Keir Starmer’s solution.
Starmer and shadow health secretary Wes Streeting have pointedly refused to offer the increases in NHS budgets that the Tony Blair and Gordon Brown governments delivered. Streeting is emphatic that he will not “pour money into a 20th-century model,” instead demanding reforms which, in increasing reliance on the private sector, both mimic existing Conservative policy and are unlikely to make a difference to waiting lists (because private healthcare in Britain recruits from the NHS, so overall capacity will not grow).
…
Britain’s public services are collapsing under the strain of decades of neoliberal policy. In the NHS, hospitals have been undermined through outsourcing services to the private sector as well as by the cost of PFI debt — both issues with their origins in the Blair years.
To restore our NHS to health, we need a reversal of privatisation and outsourcing and a forced end to all PFI contracts, as well as a significant increase in overall funding to bring us closer to healthcare spending levels in France or Germany.
…
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/tories-have-wrecked-nhs-doesnt-mean-labour-will-rescue-it
The truth behind Labour’s plans to ‘renationalise’ rail
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/truth-behind-labour’s-plans-‘renationalise’-rail
One thing about an incoming Labour government looks great: taking the railways into public ownership. But we won’t actually own the trains, warns SOLOMON HUGHES
LABOUR’S plans to renationalise the rail firms by taking over the train operating companies (TOCs) as their contracts come to an end is a big deal.
These are privately run but very heavily publicly subsidised companies that want to pump cash out of the government and passengers and then pump it into their investors’ hands. They are so keen to get the cash that they are rubbish at running the railways. Renationalising them is a good idea.
But if you want to know how some rail privatisation will continue even after Labour’s plans — and how it will continue to squeeze private cash out of public services, it’s worth having a look at the annual accounts of Eversholt UK Rails Ltd, which were published to zero media interest at the end of last month.
The newspapers weren’t interested in the company’s accounts, even though they showed the movement of millions of pounds from the taxpayer to a Hong Kong billionaire’s company. Passengers also won’t generally know Eversholt even exists, which is part of the trick of privatisation.
When the nationally owned British Rail was privatised in the 1990s, it was broken up into three main parts. The track was privatised and handed over to Railtrack, which had to be renationalised in 2002 after the firm did such poor maintenance that passengers started dying in crashes and train speeds were cut to a crawl.
Different regional TOCs were given contracts to run the services on this track. Labour will slowly renationalise these. But TOCs don’t own the trains: the “rolling stock,” the actual engines and carriages were sold off cheaply to three private rolling stock companies or “Roscos.”
…
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/truth-behind-labour’s-plans-‘renationalise’-rail
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- …
- 44
- Go to the next page