Politika u UK

[Hamlet Strašni]

Tja. I u Srbiji se dešava otimanje lokalnih organizacija, ali se to u 90% slučajeva radi iz biznis motiva a ne nekih ideoloških...

[Moonwalker]

2 hours ago, Zverilla said:

To uputstvo suvise dobro razume i sumira taktiku trumpa da bi bila lokalna (sumnjam da je neki lokalni u stanju da to uradi, jer bi se već izgurao na viši nivo)

 

Ja sam prilicno sigurna da ovo nije lokalno u konceptu, samo je iskliznulo. Taj konecpt se odlicno vidi i na nasim portalima.

 

8 minutes ago, Hamlet Strašni said:

Tja. I u Srbiji se dešava otimanje lokalnih organizacija, ali se to u 90% slučajeva radi iz biznis motiva a ne nekih ideoloških...

 

Ako se pogleda unazad u sta su umesani torijevci od izglasavanja Bregzita naovamo, videce se da je iz istih biznis motiva (ortacko dodeljivanje ogromnih infrastrukturnih poslova, korupcija najviseg ranga), samo su sume mnogo vece. Ideologija (smece sa 4chan ugledalo dan) sluzi kao ventil onima koji nisu u podeli kolaca, a frustraciju moraju negde da ispuste.

Edited December 16, 2020 by Moonwalker

[vememah]

 

 

 

Edited December 18, 2020 by vememah

[Skyhighatrist]

Waste, Negligence and Cronyism: Inside Britain’s Pandemic Spending

In the desperate scramble for protective gear and other equipment, politically connected companies reaped billions.

 

 

Mašala kapital što reko Rambo...

[vememah]

 

[Gojko & Stojko]

With the worst possible PM at the worst possible time, Britain's got no chance of a happy new year

 

...

 

Back in the mid-’90s, when Tony Blair and I were picking Paul Keating’s considerable political brain ahead of the 1997 election campaign, among the many wise, colourful observations made by the then Australian prime minister was his view that "you can’t polish a turd". Boris Johnson seems determined to prove him wrong.

 

Johnson and his team had two big challenges in 2020. One, Brexit, was "planned" in that he led and won the European Union referendum campaign in 2016, helped knock out two prime ministers to get the job himself, and then won a good majority on the promise to "get Brexit done".

 

The second, COVID-19, was anything but planned, and I do not blame the government that it has come to dominate our lives. But I do blame it for the absolute mess it has made of both challenges, and the damage done to lives, livelihoods and national reputation as a result. The thread that links them is a Prime Minister who prefers slogans to facts, promises of good times ahead to dealing with bad times now, cheery optimism to hard-headed analysis; who speaks of the world as he wants it to be, not as it is. That is Trumpian populism, and what is happening to our country now, on Brexit and on COVID-19, is what right-wing populism, and populists like Johnson, do.

 

His turd-polishing on COVID-19, presenting one of the world’s worst death rates and worst recessionary impacts as some great triumph, helped set him up for a huge turd-polishing operation on the Brexit deal, helped by the opposition announcing it would support the deal before it had seen it (provoking a rebellion not among Johnson’s ranks but Labour leader Keir Starmer’s), the limit of a single day of parliamentary scrutiny for a 1246-page document covering huge swathes of our lives, and by several national newspapers which would not look out of place on North Korean news-stands, covering the Great Triumphs of Kim Il-bojo.

 

...

 

 

SaE

[eumeswil]

[cedo]

Brexit changed the game on Scottish independence

 

Spoiler

The COVID crisis has reminded us as never before of our common humanity as countries across the world face the same huge challenge of keeping people safe.

With the development of vaccines — in itself an astonishing collaborative international project — we can now look ahead to better days. And as we start the process of rebuilding our economies and societies, that same collective spirit will be more important than ever.

Unfortunately for those of us in Scotland we are, at the same time, at the sharp end of a very different project, driven by very different values: Brexit.

The overwhelming majority of people in Scotland voted to remain within the EU.

That’s not surprising. The founding values of the EU — human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights — are Scotland’s values.

Over our nearly 50 years of membership, we have benefited enormously from the single market’s “four freedoms”, including freedom of movement.

More than 230,000 people from across Europe have made Scotland their home. They are part of who we are, they are our friends and family and we really want them to stay.

And in turn I believe Scotland has contributed a great deal to wider European goals.

Indeed, looking at the big challenges, aside from COVID, facing the EU, such as the climate emergency and building a much more inclusive “well-being” economy, Scotland has much to offer.

On climate, for example, we have around a quarter of Europe’s offshore wind and tidal potential.

In the Brexit vote back in 2016, the U.K. as a whole of course voted to leave the EU despite the strong vote for remain in Scotland.

Recognising the different preferences in the different countries of the U.K. (with Northern Ireland as well as Scotland voting to remain and England and Wales voting to leave) the Scottish government proposed a compromise.

That would have meant the U.K. leaving the EU but staying in the single market but that compromise offer was rejected out of hand by the U.K. government, which wanted then, and still does now, a more distant relationship for reasons it has never been able to explain.

We are now faced with a hard Brexit against our will, at the worst possible time in the middle of a pandemic and economic recession.

It will mean disruption in the short term, while establishing new, long-term barriers.

Our people will be less safe and their right to work, study and live elsewhere in Europe will be restricted. This includes the loss of Erasmus which saw more than 2,000 Scottish students, staff and learners use the scheme each year.

It is therefore not surprising that a consistent majority of people in Scotland now say they are in favour of becoming an independent country.

Scotland, like all nations, is unique. The same can be said of our constitutional circumstances.

The U.K. is a voluntary union of countries, in which Scotland has its own distinct legal and education system, and a government and parliament in charge of a range of domestic affairs, such as health and the environment, but not currently — as Brexit has so clearly exposed — issues such as international and European affairs.

The idea of Scottish independence has never been about separatism. It is instead about the right of people to decide the form of government best suited to their needs.

That right has never been more important given the threat Brexit poses to the internationalist, welcoming European ethos held by so many people in Scotland.

We are comfortable with multiple identities and the other countries of the U.K. will always be not just our closest neighbours, but our closest friends as well.

But for too long, successive U.K. governments have taken Scotland in the wrong direction, culminating in Brexit and the introduction of legislation that had threatened to break international law, and which still undermines the Scottish Parliament.

It’s no wonder so many people in Scotland have had enough.

 

We are committed to a legal, constitutional route to becoming an independent state.

As an independent member of the European Union, Scotland would be a partner and a bridge-builder — not just a bridge to building a stronger economy and fairer society, but a bridge to aid understanding between the EU and UK.

More and more people in Scotland believe our aspirations can best be met by continuing to contribute to the shared endeavour and solidarity that the EU represents.

Because of Brexit, we can now only do this as an independent member state in our own right.

We have been inside the European Union family of nations for nearly 50 years.

We didn’t want to leave and we hope to join you again soon as an equal partner as we face the opportunities and challenges of the future together.

[Meazza]

Good luck with Spain not vetoing you.

[dragance]

14 hours ago, Meazza said:

Good luck with Spain not vetoing you.

Ako bude referendum za otcepljenje, i budu prvo priznati kao država, onda teško da mogu uložiti veto. Pre će to uraditi kada bude da li će EU priznati nezavisnost.

[Hamlet Strašni]

Zašto ne bi mogli. Kao Grci Makedoniji...

[eumeswil]

Kakvo iznenađenje od teksta od Daily Torygrapha.

 

Quote

From Rolls Royce to Skoda: How the pandemic has exposed Britain’s failed ‘regulatory state’

As the UK death toll passes 100,000, we examine how our hollowed-out state not only broke down but failed to plan to stop a pandemic

By Lee Jones
26 January 2021 • 10:01pm


Why has Britain fared so poorly with Covid-19? Although blaming this or that minister or official offers an easy answer, the deeper causes lie in the transformation of the British state.

Britain inherited from World War II a “command and control” state; a state that could govern. Whitehall was well-practised in strategic planning, good at the rapid and efficient mobilisation of resources and people, and it regularly took authoritative, direct action to meet society’s needs.

Back then, the state could deliver what democratically elected politicians asked of it – to build the NHS, for instance – because it retained the powers, people and resources to do so.

Today, after 40 years of reform, the “command and control” state has been replaced by a “regulatory state”. Decision-making has shifted from parliament to an archipelago of some 400 “arms-length” quangos, employing more than 278,000 people and costing £205 billion per year. Moreover, the state’s assets – its capacity to execute policy on its own accord – have been outsourced or rationalised.

As the regulatory state has grown, its ambition has shrunk. Politicians no longer offer grand visions of the future, just technocratic tweaks. Having dismantled or sold off the levers of power, they downplay public expectations, insisting there is no alternative.

The outsourcing of responsibility and decision-making is clear with respect to the NHS. After successive reforms under governments of all stripes, the Department for Health and Social Care no longer has operational control. Responsibility has been outsourced to dozens of quangos and local commissioners, operating within a fragmented internal market, with scant strategic oversight.

Britain’s pandemic preparations followed the same approach. The government’s latest strategy, issued in 2011, created no additional capacity to deal with an outbreak: no extra laboratories, no spare hospital beds, no new manufacturing centres to supply medical equipment, no new stockpiles of PPE. In true regulatory state style, it merely established bureaucratic guidelines that outsourced all the real work to local government, healthcare providers and others, gathered in “local resilience fora”.

Indeed, key capacities were actually undermined. While public health laboratories were first centralised and downsized under New Labour, the Conservative-LibDem government devolved public health responsibilities to local government, whose funding was then cut by £700 million from 2015 to 2019.

Years before Covid-19, the UK government tested the regulatory state to see if it could withstand a pandemic. It could not. In 2016, Exercise Cygnus “war gamed” a pandemic, finding that local agencies had not or could not develop the capacities and strategies needed.

Some organisations named in the 2011 pandemic strategy document no longer existed, while others had yet to develop any plans. Capacity in health and social care was rapidly overwhelmed in the simulation, with participants forced to ration treatment, discharge patients into care homes, dig mass graves, and turn desperately to the voluntary sector and armed forces.

The official report from the exercise concluded that Britain’s “plans, policies and capability” were “not sufficient to cope” with “a severe pandemic”. However, the report was stamped “official – sensitive” and put on a shelf to rot. It was only officially published in October 2020, following pressure from the Telegraph and other newspapers.

When Covid-19 finally hit, many were baffled by the government’s initially low-key, “business-as-usual” response, blaming Boris Johnson’s indecisiveness or the idiosyncratic views of advisors like Dominic Cummings. In fact, ministers were just following the agreed playbook and the diminished ambitions of Britain’s regulatory state.

The 2011 pandemic strategy stipulated it would “not be possible to halt the spread of a new pandemic… and it would be a waste of public health resources and capacity to attempt to do so”. Instead, the strategy prioritised “business as usual”, anticipating healthcare rationing and 210,000 to 315,000 excess deaths over a fifteen-week period. This plan, hatched by technocrats without democratic debate, could not survive contact with public opinion. No wonder the Cygnus report was buried.

Political failure was compounded by institutional failure, as the hollowed-out regulatory state all but collapsed. Test-and-tracing was abandoned on March 12, as the system could only conduct five tests per week. NHS surge planning, on which the 2011 strategy relied so heavily, led to the discharging of over 25,000 elderly patients into care homes by mid-April, seeding the virus directly into the most vulnerable part of the population. By May, more than half of England’s excess deaths had occurred in care homes.

Meanwhile, the outsourced NHS procurement system failed miserably, as private firms relying on “just-in-time” delivery faced surging demands and collapsing global supply chains. Even the pandemic PPE stockpile had been outsourced to a private company. Their warehouses lacked key equipment like gowns, and 45 per cent of their supplies had expired on the shelf. Resultant shortages were linked to over 8,000 cases and 126 deaths among health and social care workers.

The government’s panicked retreat into lockdown symbolises the failure of Britain’s regulatory state. In a desperate attempt to devise new policies and institutions, the government has had to rely on the very same management consultants and outsourcing firms that have eroded the state’s command and control capacities.

McKinsey was brought in to define the “vision, purpose and narrative” of a new NHS Test and Trace service, which was then staffed by over 2,300 consultants – outnumbering the civil servants at the Treasury and Department for Trade. Companies were given contracts to supply food to shielding households and school children, delivering small and sometimes barely edible portions. PA Consulting led the ill-fated “ventilator challenge”, delivering just four per cent of its target before the first wave peaked.

Deloitte, architects of the disastrous outsourcing of NHS procurement, were tasked with establishing new supply chains. As the National Audit Office found, the firm largely pushed aside domestic offers of help, instead spendinghundreds of millions of pounds on overseas procurement. By July 2020, Britain had spent £12.5 billion on items that would have cost £2.5 billion in 2019, and may now be saddled with five years of surplus supplies.

Criticism of contracts awarded to “cronies” and itinerant middlemen, while justified, is a distraction from the bigger picture. The more disturbing conclusion is that the British state is so lacking in basic vision and leadership, its bureaucratic institutions are so divorced from meaningful delivery capacities that it cannot even provide security to its own citizens.

This is not a product of one government’s incompetence. It reflects deep-seated changes in the way state power is conceived and organised – by political parties of left and right, not just in Britain but in many other “advanced” economies. A system built around dispersing responsibility, accountability and control is, unsurprisingly, irresponsible, unaccountable, and not in control of its fate.

While Britain’s experience has been mirrored across the West, it stands in stark contrast to countries that have retained aspects of the post-war “command and control” state, including Taiwan, Japan and South Korea, and even developing countries like Vietnam. These states have not simply outsourced decision-making and delivery to quangos and private firms. They have retained and built their own public health capacity, centrally and locally, while exerting power over vital businesses, instead of becoming dependent upon them.

 

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/rolls-royce-skoda-pandemic-has-exposed-britains-failed-regulatory/

Edited January 28, 2021 by eumeswil

[Seabass]

 

DDN uz Byline Times su rijetki mediji iz UK koje vrijedi pratiti.

[dragance]

Filip The Grk hitno odvezen u bolnicu! Ako on ode, dajem kraljici godinu dana max. 

[adam]

kazu nije mu bilo dobro pa za svaki slucaj, nije nista ozbiljno. a odveden sinoc i objavili pre par sati. sto su tolko vecali ako nije ozbiljno. cuj nije ozbiljno a pozililo mu u stotoj.