Astute

David Lammy deploys army of top diplomats to kickstart economic growth and combat impact of Trump tariffs

David Lammy has brought a team of Britain’s elite diplomats home in a bid to finally kickstart economic growth and combat the global impact of Donald Trump’s tariffs.

Senior ambassadors and high commissioners have come back to the UK to take part in a roadshow around the country to encourage businesses to export more and link up with the countries they are posted in.

It comes as the E-Commerce Trade Commission recently reported that 70,000 businesses in Britain which are ready to export are still not exporting.

If 70,000 businesses in Britain which are ready to export are still not exporting, then sooner or later a radical MP may well suggest fining them. That's how astute they are. 

Fordow Assessment

 

Blairism with a smartphone

Kristian Niemietz has a very interesting CAPX piece on the close similarities between the Starmer government's 10-year plan for the NHS and a plan from the Blair years 25 years ago.


Labour’s NHS plan is just reheated Blairism

• The Government's 10-year plan for the NHS is almost identical to a document from 25 years ago
• Keeping up with developments in healthcare policy is like watching Groundhog Day
• Revitalising old agendas for reform will never sort out the issues facing the NHS

Yesterday, the Government published its policy paper ‘Fit For The Future: 10 Year Health Plan for England‘, which announced:

[I]nvestment has to be accompanied by reform. The NHS has to be redesigned around the needs of the patient. Local hospitals cannot be run from Whitehall. There will be a new relationship between the Department of Health and the NHS […]

The principles of subsidiarity will apply. A new system of earned autonomy will devolve power from the centre to the local health service as modernisation takes hold. […]

A Modernisation Agency will be set up to spread best practice. Local NHS organisations that perform well for patients will get more freedom to run their own affairs.

Or actually, it didn’t. That quote is from ‘The NHS Plan: A plan for investment. A plan for reform‘, published almost exactly 25 years ago today, during Tony Blair’s first term.


The whole piece is well worth reading as another indication that reforming the NHS has never been on any political agenda. Tinkering yes, reform no. Politicians still rely on technology and bombastic rhetoric to supply something they can sell as progress - smartphones in this case.


There are good things in the plan, even if they are not genuinely novel. The NHS App, which was useful enough during the pandemic, has largely been lying dormant since, because there was not much that one could do with it. The 10-year plan wants to add extra functions to the app, so that it becomes a tool for conveniently choosing healthcare providers, and a source of information about them. NHS Trusts will be given greater autonomy over their budgets, and payment formulas will be changed, to strengthen the principle that the money follows the patient. When patients are strongly dissatisfied with the care they receive, it will even be possible to withhold a part of the payment from the provider. These are all sensible extensions of Blair-era reforms.

And that is, perhaps, the most generous reading of ‘Fit For The Future’: it is a revitalisation of an earlier reform agenda, combined with some evergreen topics that, within the current system, never truly get sorted out.

In the current context, this is probably as good as it gets. But it comes nowhere near justifying the Government’s bombastic rhetoric of ‘transformational change’ or a ‘break with the past’. It is Blairism with a smartphone, nothing more, nothing less.

OCD Gardening

Ed Miliband now wants Brits to put wind turbines in their gardens

The Government has unveiled its plan to almost double onshore wind across England by 2030. Ministers want to expand the country's onshore wind capacity from 14.8GW to up to 29GW by the end of the decade.

It forms part of wider Government ambitions to transition towards a clean power system by 2030 in a bid to slash the UK's reliance on foreign gas and cut bills. But the Conservatives have slammed the strategy by accusing Energy Secretary Ed Miliband of making the country's energy "unreliable and expensive" through his "obsession with climate targets"

Mr Miliband's new plan will also make it simpler for Britons to install wind turbines in their back gardens, it has been reported. Planning rules on the building of wind turbines on residential land could be relaxed once a consultation has finished.


Eddy, Eddy, quite unsteady,
How does your garden grow?
With soaring bills and crooked shills
And nutty plans all in a row.
 

Source - but not quite

Managed decline and broken promises

Ex-Labour MP Sultana says she will set up new party with Jeremy Corbyn

A former Labour MP has said that she will set up a new party with Jeremy Corbyn.

Zarah Sultana – who had the Labour whip suspended last year – said she was resigning from Sir Keir Starmer’s party and would “co-lead the founding of a new party” with the ex-Labour leader.

In a statement posted on X, Ms Sultana, who represents Coventry South, said that the project would also involve “other independent MPs, campaigners and activists across the country”.

She said that “Westminster is broken but the real crisis is deeper” and the “two-party system offers nothing but managed decline and broken promises”.


Forming political parties has become very popular, but presumably Corbyn and Sultana aim to offer something different to "managed decline and broken promises." Hmm...

It may be an unfortunately obvious comment, but the best those two could offer is mismanaged decline and broken promises. 

Or worse.

Yes, probably worse.

The reckoning has arrived

Damian Pudner has an interesting and topical CAPX piece on the continuing disaster that is the Starmer Reeves duo.


Rachel Reeves is finished, and Keir Starmer is exposed

• Labour’s economic strategy was a mirage – now it is unravelling in real time
• The idea that Reeves can now deliver a politically tolerable Autumn Budget is laughable
• The Chancellor is discovering that tone is not policy, and style is not substance

It’s not yet official, but the markets have already passed their verdict. Gilt yields surged again yesterday – with ten-year rates brushing 4.68% – as investors digested yet another fiscal U-turn and a visibly shaken Chancellor. The message could not be clearer: there is no plan, no discipline and no credibility left. The much vaunted £10 billion in fiscal ‘headroom’ has been squandered. Growth remains anaemic, and Britain’s mounting debt burden is once again in the crosshairs. Rachel Reeves may still occupy the Treasury – but politically, she is done.


The whole piece may be familiar ground but is well worth reading. In Starmer and Reeves, we see not only political failure, but also the failure of narrative politics.

A political narrative for voters to swallow isn't enough. Maybe it was in the past when the government machine was less inefficient, corrupt and self-serving, but it isn't enough now. As Pudner says, the age of cost-free politics is over, the reckoning has arrived. It has arrived for voters too. 
.

The problem is not that Reeves is uniquely incompetent. She isn’t. The problem is that Labour’s entire economic strategy was a mirage, a carefully choreographed illusion of stability that collapsed in contact with reality. Now it is unravelling in real time.

And Starmer? He cannot escape the fallout. Whether Reeves is sacked before or after the Budget, it will be under a Prime Minister who pledged not to raise taxes on ordinary people – and who now must oversee exactly that.

The age of cost-free politics is over. The reckoning has arrived. And despite all the promises, it will be Labour that delivers it.

Reeves is finished. Starmer is exposed. And both voters – and markets – are watching.

Leisurely Ousting

Sir Keir Starmer could be ousted as PM within months, two senior Labour MPs tell Sky News

Sky News' deputy political editor Sam Coates said his sources - a member of the government and a prominent politician - have "put Sir Keir Starmer on notice".

Both warned that, if Labour performs badly in next May's elections across Wales, Scotland and London, it could mark the end of his time in Downing Street.

It sounds as if they don't have anyone else and they know it. The Labour HoC majority is too large, it has too many destructive ideologues and net zero collective competence.