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Mick Harper
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The Labour Party always lives in the past . If you are proposing that it move away from mid-19th century socialism to late 19th century Sherlockianism this will be progress. Draping oneself in the flag is older than both. My own new policy in this area is to voluntarily give up our seat on the Security Council. Yes, folks, it's to be Britain First!
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Boreades


In: finity and beyond
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Mick Harper wrote:
Take the NHS. (Please!) This is, as I keep pointing out, the third largest corporate body in the world and yet the whole thing is run from Richmond House, by civil servants who are neither health professionals nor corporate executives experienced in running large organisations. They report to a minister who has to learn on the job and will be moved long before he has done so. But who in any case reports to a Cabinet that can only devote, say, an hour a week to the NHS (imagine the board of BP devoting an hour a week to the oil business) but even that does not include considerations of efficiency, only an anxiety to deflect complaints about this or that 'scandal' that is currently assailing it. Universal solution: throw a bit more money at whatever it is.


Clearly running such a huge corporate body is not a clinical/health role. What the NHS needed was a corporate executive experienced in running large organisation, and experienced in dealing with failures at great cost, never mind what the customers wanted (or got).

Dido Harding was perfect for the job.

David Williams, the second permanent secretary at the Department of Health and Social Care ... said there were about 900 consultants from the firm Deloitte working for Test and Trace - down by approximately 100 since October - and said there was "a plan in place to see that number reduce markedly over the course of the next few months".

MPs said that, as recently as November, there were 2,300 consultants and contractors working on the scheme. Mr Williams added: "The average cost across our consultancy support - I imagine it is about the same for Deloitte - is around £1,000 per day."


Peanuts when compared to the overall cost.

Dido Harding's second in command at Test & Trace 'lost it' during months of chaos and was even forced to seek help from a psychiatrist whom she cried to. Sarah-Jane Marsh acted as director of testing at Test & Trace until six weeks ago and said that the chaos surrounding the roll-out of the scheme made her feel she 'couldn't make decisions'. She was forced to seek help from an NHS psychiatrist after she crashed her car but carried on driving without stopping. Test & Trace cost £22billion of taxpayers' money but has been beleaguered with problems since its inception in May.


Harsh! But somehow a car crash seems symbolic.

Sage, the Government's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, then said that the system only had a 'marginal impact' on tackling coronavirus.


Meanwhile, one can track & trace the Mars Perseverance Rover (Percy)

https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/mission/where-is-the-rover/

NASA expects to spend $2.7 billion over the project's life-cycle, according to research by The Planetary Society. The bulk of that funding was put into design and construction of the spacecraft itself which cost $2.2 billion. Launch services for the Atlas V rocket cost $243 million while the two years of prime mission operations are expected to work out at a further $300 million.


So .. Test & Trace costs about ten times more than Percy? Perhaps we should have asked NASA to build Test & Trace?

Or sent Dido Harding on the UK's Beagle Mars Explorer?
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-led-beagle-2-lander-found-on-mars
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Mick Harper
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The bit you got wrong was this

What the NHS needed was a corporate executive experienced in running large organisations

Nobody can run such large organisations. Sometimes this is a good thing, like the Chinese Red Army. Sometimes it's a bad thing but somebody else's problem, like the Indian State Railway. But when it's the NHS there is no alternative but to abolish it. So long as the principle of 'free at the point of delivery' is retained I couldn't care less what they replace it with. And so long as there are a lot of them obviously.
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Boreades


In: finity and beyond
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Mick Harper wrote:
The bit you got wrong was this

What the NHS needed was a corporate executive experienced in running large organisations
.


Well, yes, clearly a lack of the right kind of emphasis. What I really meant was that the NHS hoped they could find such mythical beasts. Like unicorns.
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Mick Harper
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The EU has 'called a meeting about Myanmar'. What business is it of theirs? Is some strategic Euro-trade at risk? Are Burmese refugees clamouring at the doors of the EU? Is some act of genocide likely to be triggered on a scale that any human being would feel the need to intervene to prevent it, come what may?

When are people going to realise that every country is entitled to develop in its own way. It won't be your way, it's their way. It doesn't matter if it is not 80% of Burmese people's way either. No country in the history of the world has developed the way 80% of its people thought it ought. Nobody knows how it ought. But one thing I know is that if well-meaning outsiders decide to add their two-pennyworth to the brew it won't be the Burmese way. And they know best, hard as it is to recognise that fact.

They'll end up doing it our way in all probability but only if you don't try to cram it down their throat so that forever our way will be associated with the non-Burmese way. They had to do it our way from 1824 to 1948 and look where that got them.
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Ishmael


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Mick Harper wrote:
When are people going to realise that every country is entitled to develop in its own way. It won't be your way, it's their way.


That ship sank with Trump.
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Mick Harper
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I would give him full credit for it too but I am not sure his American First version of Isolationism was quite the same thing. Mostly he just played different favourites which meant withdrawing from the old favourites and occasionally, vide North Korea, eschewed interventionism because it had failed. The acid test was not Russia or China or Europe, too big for any single president to change course over, but Israel and Iran. Why didn't he leave them well alone?

And be careful over your answer if you agreed with his policies. We're talking principles here.
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Wile E. Coyote


In: Arizona
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Trump just fought cold wars rather than hot. This was no doubt a good thing as the alternative, ie gatherings of nations, assemblies, world leaders at G8s or summits etc. with a view to signing up to joint utopian ideals' accords, will never work. No, nations pursuing enlightened self-interest has worked well for the last 100 years or so, give or take a couple of world wars.
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Boreades


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Mick Harper wrote:
The EU has 'called a meeting about Myanmar'. What business is it of theirs? Is some strategic Euro-trade at risk? Are Burmese refugees clamouring at the doors of the EU? Is some act of genocide likely to be triggered on a scale that any human being would feel the need to intervene to prevent it, come what may?.


None of the above.

A United Nations fact-finding mission called for an arms embargo following its report that many foreign companies have supplied arms used in Myanmar’s brutal military operation against Rohingya Muslims, dubbed the world’s most prosecuted minority. The report’s finding identified 15 foreign companies from Ukraine, Russia, India, the Philippines, North Korea and China partnering with the country’s military conglomeration groups, Myanmar Economic Holdings Limited (MEHL) and Myanmar Economic Corporation (MEC), as well as 44 other firms with business connections to the Myanmar army, known as Tatmadaw.

It's a golden oportunity for Virtue Signalling. Myanmar was, and is, a country that EU & UK firms have (officially) failed to make any significant exports to. That makes it much easier to adopt a virtuous posture.

Look! None of us (EU) is the naughty boys selling arms to somewhere (this time). It's them wot dunnit, honest guv.

By contra example:

Arms export policies differ across European countries because there is little consensus on the threats to the EU or on the Union’s interests. This has been evident in the EU’s foreign policy towards Syria and Venezuela. In May 2013, the EU’s 28 foreign ministers failed to reach a consensus on renewing the embargo on arms sales to Syria, with some member-states vying to arm rebel groups. And when anti-government protests erupted in Venezuela in early 2017, EU member-states spent months debating whether or not to intervene, allowing the situation to deteriorate significantly before finally agreeing on a sanctions package that included an arms embargo. In both cases, the EU found itself unable to seize its opportunity to alleviate the situation.


The UK Foreign Office's official position is quite rightly that it "is not aware of any UK companies supplying arms to Myanmar".

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Grant



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Why didn’t Trump leave Iran and Israel alone?

Er, possibly that was down to appointing your Jewish son-in-law as your chief advisor. Just a hunch
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Mick Harper
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There's no need to be unpleasant about his physical deformities.
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Mick Harper
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What's going on with standards in public life? First we get French president Sarkozy getting three years (two suspended) for asking his lawyer to ring up a state prosecutor to get the lowdown on something or other. (Jeez, in the good old days the prosecutor would have got the legion d'honneur and/or ended up floating in the Seine.) Then the First Minister of Scotland (and Scottish independence) comes to a sticky end because she forgot she had been told something or other on the 28th February when she told Parliament she had been told it on the 3rd March. The hussy.

Nicola, Nicholas, knickerless ... you draw your own conclusion.
Sturgeon, Salmond, big fish... you draw your own conclusion.
Mick, Harper, lockdown ... you draw your own conclusion.
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Wile E. Coyote


In: Arizona
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I am not sure you have this right. Sarkozy has been told he cannot leave his home for a year. Given that he shares said home with Carla Bruni, and most folks will be locked down anyway as Macron and the EU have cocked up a vaccine programme, Wiles has to question whether he has been punished at all?
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Mick Harper
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I think you miss the point. Acting against him at all on such petty charges is lèse-majesté. If he'd killed Carla in a crime-passionnel, okay, a year of house arrest.
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Wile E. Coyote


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1960s, political scientist Peter Pulzer wrote:
"class is the basis of British party politics; all else is embellishment and detail".

According to YouGov on Friday there is now a 25-point lead for Conservatives among the working-class; Conservatives 52%, Labour 27%..

This would no doubt have Peter scratching his head, as Labour was the party of the working class when he wrote the above. It was set up, so I was led to believe, to represent the interests of the working class in parliament, wasn't it? Either YouGov has it massively wrong (possibly), or you are looking at a paradigm shift.
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