More Trouble for Left-Wing Lobbyists 38 Degrees
Since Guido published Stephen Phillips damning tirade against 38 Degrees this morning, another MP – Guy Opperman – has waded into the debate. He too is a former barrister and provides another comprehensive take-down of the deceitful misinterpretation of legal advice that the astro-turfing group are using to attack NHS reforms:
“The 38 Degrees website says: What our lawyers have identified within the Health and Social Care Bill:
“The bill will remove the duty of the Secretary of State to provide or secure the provision of health services which has been a common and critical feature of all previous NHS legislation since 1946.
The implication and actual stated paragraph on the site under the title “what this could all mean” is that there will “no longer be a National Health Service”.
Paragraph 2 of the opinion by another junior counsel states that “Currently, the duty in section 3(1) has been delegated to Primary Care Trusts (PCTs). However, this is pursuant to statutory powers of delegation (for example under section 7 of the NHS Act 2006), and these powers can be exercised in a different way, or not exercised at all, if the Secretary of State so chooses.”
As the opinion makes clear there is going to be no significant change.
The 38 Degrees slant and their opinion simply do not match up. The opinion finishes by saying: “thus, there is no change at all in section 1(1).”
To argue that the “the government washes its hands of the NHS” based upon and arising out of these opinions would be laughable if it was not such a serious and flawed accusation. It is unsurprising that one barrister has not signed or acknowledged authorship of their opinion, given how it has been so abused. “
Guido is awaiting comment from 38 Degrees who haven’t returned his call yet. And this is all a bit embarrassing for “evidence based” blog Left Foot Forward, who rather than look at the facts, decide to reprint 38 Degree’s copy to attack Guido. Counsel’s advice is they’re all full of it…
Which left wing think tank doesnt make things up?
Think tank/lobby group, Wonkers the lot of em.
By using the term “Think Tank” one would infer that there was some greater collective intellectual output.
However if they all thought alike and were not particularly diverse in their collective understanding then the output is the same as the input.
Garbage In Garbage Out, rather like climate models based on rigged data.
Is there a link to these imposters and public funds? There usually is somewhere.
Well done Billy, the first two comments on this thread is great. I am so proud of you, especially as nobody has torn your a new arsehole for more than a week now.
Climate models are worse than GIGO.
Recursion magnifies garbage.
e.g. say
99% accurate readings with 100% accurate model.
two week (hourly) time periods to study.
= 70% error!
0.99^120
“Guido is awaiting comment from 38 Degrees who haven’t returned his call yet.
They don’t return Losers calls.
Groupthink tank would be a better title. I am Locutus of Borg, assimilate, resistance is futile !
Well I am 7of9 and you wish your girlfriend was hot like me. Assimilate … resistance is futile!
Are they like the Three Degrees, only more of them?
Not so much melodic, more cacophonic.
Cameron and co are trying to tell us why it is important for us to help the EU countries in the Euro. Others commentate how the BoE might be considering QE3. Why can’t meaningful spending cuts be made without throwing billions of pounds away. Surely the Oxbridge brigade must know basic economics from their PPE courses? Stop spending and throwing money away before asking for money from tax payers, or printing inflationary money or reducing the national debt by inflation.
I will give another clue to help the Uk’s finances:
Stop overseas aid, £11 billion.
Stop or renegotiate EU contribution, £17 billion each year.
No moe EU bail outs- £7 billion just for Ireland, they wanted to be separate from the UK- support their wishes.
No more banking bail outs- RBS, LLoyds, Northern Rock. Or pension payouts to the likes of Sir Fred who caused it- sack him.
No more subsidising fart farms, 22 times more expensive to build and 35% less efficient costing UK citizens 20% on their energy bills.
Cut the number of local authorities and cap CEO pay to provide decent public services. Don’t ask, do it.
No more wasting money on AV votes for small number of Lie Dumb MPs- £80 million.
No more free health care for the rest of the world at UK taxpayers expense. Make them pay, no pay no treatment.
Reduce welfare budget £80 billion each year. 370,000 households where no family member has ever worked. make them work or stop their benefit. No more welfare incentives to have bastard children by numerous fathers. Money is not spent on the kids in any event.
Stop free university and higher education for EU competitors and the rest of the world.
Stop Immigration and asylum seekers, they get more than pensioners who paid tax and NI. It is not even a life loan like university students. State pension age increased, not because we are living longer but because of artificial increase in population who have not contributed.
Stop MPs second homes: like Australia, build an accommodation block for MPs.
Cut MOD back room staff who are incompetent at procurement and save military personnel instead.
Non-sequitur
What DLLDF says! Anyone who knows it’s ‘more than’ instead of ‘more then’ gets my vote. Unfortunately, it is a common human failing often exploited by salesmen, that keeps us doing these things. You cannot simply whip the lefty rug out from under and let the cra*p … er chips fall where they may. You’d have the EU ‘bleedin arts’ all over you like flies on sh*ite (keeping to a theme begun previously). It ain’t fair guv!
Why is it we never learn from history? The US is in a world of pain now because of its decision to dump general isolationist policy in favour of getting its fingers in the global pie. Our steady assimilation into Europe, whilst offering some benefits, has brought with it more pain than it is worth. Europe has been low-balling us from the start, but drooling, sycophantic ministers have been too blinded by greed to notice.
Feh! First things first – get out of Europe …
They are more quasi religious group looking to radicalise anybody who’ll not look to deep behind the head lines
Doesn’t matter, the bbc will report it as fact, however fanciful it is !
Pity, The producer-captured NHS should be sold off, and made to bid to treat patients, rather than give staff treats.
As somebody pointed out, something as fundamentally important as the country’s food supply and distribution is left entirely to the private sector, and yet nobody seems to starve (except in NHS hospitals).
When soviet era officials came to London, post USSR, they were amazed at the sheer numbers of food items in all the shops and asked the reasonable question “Who organises the food supplies for this vast city?”
And they were even more amazed by the answer.
“Nobody.”
Exactly. Can you imagine how much food would cost if farming, distribution and retail were organised by the public sector?
Farmers all taking their two holidays during the harvest. ‘Working to rule’ when they wanted more money so that we’d starve or give in (like the miners used to do). D*r*iv*ing their combines out to the field for an hour. Working 5.5 hours (with breaks) and then d*r*i*iv*ing back to the government tool shed. Day’s work done. Double or treble time on the weekend.
Sitting around all winter doing fuck all but getting the same pay.
We’d all starve if food production and distribution were organised by the state. Just like the Russians used to.
On the other hand, if you haven’t got any money, you can’t buy food. So if you can’t afford that operation well, sorry, chum – perhaps you’d like to sell us one of your kidneys?
You’re confusing consumer with producer.
There is no reason why health care could not be privately run yet “free” to those that need it.
The NHS will get their claws into the food aswell. First they came for the crisps.
Then they came for the Mars bars …
But then there’d be no more jobs for the boys in NHS management.
Soon there will only be jobs at the BBC left for us to reward our supporters.
It’s jobs for the girls in NHS ‘management’ (and education).
Over 4,000 junior schools do not have a male teacher. Another labour legacy that needs cleaning up.
None of their diversity and equality penpushers picked that up, did they?
It is both racist and sexist.
Not in new britain:
only whites can be racist
only men can be sexist.
@MH that’s actually what’s indoctrinated at the Gramscian BBC. It’s the BBC that needs selling off first.
and the National Child Indoctrination service should go too.
38 Degrees should do a 180 degree turn.
Being lefties, however, the most they’ll manage is 90 degrees, and that to port.
Never, ever, trust a left wing lunatic; feckin liars the lot of them, and have told more tales than Enid Blyton.
Talking about the left-wing … there’s nothing on the BBC web-site
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/
about Margaret Moran facing charges over fraudulent claims she made for parliamentary expenses, although it’s on the sky web-site. I wonder why?
It got the briefest of mentions on tWaO, and was followed by a long and tedious smear on what young Murdoch said or didn’t say when questioned.
Yesterdays news is more important to B-bbc than today’s, if today’s is negative about liebore.
and the fact she was Liebour is only in paragraph 3.
Look a bit harder – it’s on the front page.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-14804698
It’s only on the front page if you get the ‘local’ Beds/Bucks/Herts news. The national news is taken up with another non-story about phone hacking.
Under beware of the leopard.
Let me give you a lesson here:
News is determined to be anything that is damaging to the Conservatives or Liberals.
News is NOT about what is going on with the party of the almighty Gadaffi huggers.
Pay your license fee, go to sleep and let us deal with it for you; you need nothing else, not even to think – it’s all laid on.
… or as we like to say: it’s in the database.
Massaging the Welsh and now Massaging the truth. Clever link Guido
I have always been off massage.
“And this is all a bit embarrassing for Evidence based blog Left Foot Forward, who rather than look at the facts, decide to reprint 38 Degree’s copy to attack Guido.”
Blogging on blogging tag?
Is Will Straw still smoking drugs or is he so brainwashed he believes he is doing the right thing?
Daddy changed colour when questioned yesterday. Hope he’s not alright
Will is even thicker than his dad, which is going some.
But does he have his fathers unparalled talent for bending in the wind and flip flopping into any position in which he sees advantage.
I’ll write that soon
Better hurry up and finish Midsummer Night’s Dream first
‘Better hurry up and finish Midsummer Night’s Dream first’ he said whilst gripping his hands together, wiping his brow and frowning at me.
Another nice little earner
I can’t help thinking that the NHS would benefit from an extended period of not being reorganised. By all means cull about a third of the ‘managers’ but otherwise try to sort things out a bit at a time. Ideally it would be ‘depoliticised’ so that it would no longer be felt necessary for each government to scrap all the reforms made by its predecessor.
The culling of NHS managers would only be acceptable if it’s done humanely. I would suggest the use of trained marksmen, and the work should be done as far as possible in their natural habitat to avoid stressing them. Trapping, or rounding up and delivering to an abbatoir, would not be acceptable.
A cull ratio of 2 out of every group of 5 would seem in line with current AW guidelines. cal of no less than .222, carcass ungralloched direct to knackery.
Naaah. Feed them to the pigs. Recycle the fuckers.
Or plough them in. Fertilize the soil a bit.
Given current concerns about recycling, as much as possible should be reused. Many carcasses would yield significant quantities of lard, which whilst obviously not suitable to enter the food chain, might be useful for soap production. The hides, being thick, would be ideal for heavy-duty saddlery and boot-soles.
Throw-rugs.
I have to agree.
It’s fucked by over-management. Less is more.
I’d fire 80% of the ‘managers’ to be on the safe side – no manager who isn’t a trained medical professional (doctor/nurse) would be clutching a P45 by return of post – but otherwise I’d leave them to it.
Have to disagree – the last thing you want are trained medical professionals wasting their skills pretending to be managers. The same problem afflicts state schools, which only employ ‘teachers’ to manage multi-million-pound budget schools, and look what a mess they are.
Management is a quite different skill-set. A good one can successfully manage any ‘technicians’ in a subject area of which he/she knows little – it’s about marshalling the resources to deliver performance.
One key reason the NHS is such a mess is the excessive influence the gold-plated medical closed-shop has been allowed to keep for 60+ years.
Just get the right people doing the right jobs and we might finally get a good service for all the billions we spend on it.
A good one can successfully manage any ‘technicians’ in a subject area of which he/she knows little
I disagree entirely.
It’s the cult of management – this idea that a manager can transfer seamlessly from one industry to another that has totally fucked the public sector. Plus it leads to the situation where a potential manager who also happens to be a medical professional will be by-passed by a box-ticker simply to preserve their medical skills at the ‘coal-face’.
One of the reasons German companies are reckoned to be so much more successful then UK ones is that they tend to be managed by engineers etc who have risen through the ranks. As opposed to bean-counters and box-tickers who have no ‘feel’ for what the business involves at all beyond spreadsheets.
Which is quicker and cheaper? Sending a doctor/nurse to business school or a box-ticking ‘manager’ to medical school?
“It’s the cult of management – this idea that a manager can transfer seamlessly from one industry to another that has totally fucked the public sector.”
Well said! But although this is rife in the public sector, it is by no means absent from the private sector either.
Bollocks. If you don’t have a decent understanding of what you’re managing, you’ll be worse than useless.
See banking crisis for details. The banks were managed by ‘managers’, not by people with qualifications and experience in banking.
+1.
Likewise the UK government at the time (and now). Not a relevant qualification between them.
Exactly, clearly not all professionals whether Doctors, Engineers, Teachers etc make good managers but some do and have both the coal face experience and the aptitude and skill sets required for management. Its those individuals who need to be identified.Too many bullshitting, wankspeaking bean counters in charge at the moment.
What % of a head teachers day do you think is all about “managing budgets”.
Would you have someone else doing the politics, salesmanship, lay preaching, and even telling off kids?
And good lord, I’ve even seen one walking the corridors and … wait for it … standing in front of a bunch of kids for a few hours a week.
Only because the new girl is off with ‘stress’ again though.
AND! these budget decisions. The manager has to decide whether to spend the money on paper books, computers, older staff/cheaper staff/babysitter-level staff. Based on what? Quality of teaching? Ethos? Keeping parents happy? League table?
So the Manager has to know all sorts of details and “have a feeling” for what works in the classroom. Or perhaps he’d just be good with spreadsheets or excuses.
I say we let parents pay for their children and let bad schools close.
Next thing, you’ll be saying that bad -teachers- should be fired.
Normally 100% in agreement with jgm2 posts, but not on this one.
They do need managing – or esle like any other profession, they will go off into their own groupthink universe. Numbers matter, but the real waste is the “off-axis” makework functions, not direct line managers. Wife’s in the NHS – comes home and moans – her medically qualified senior managers make endless no-brainer wrong moves that anyone with decent generic managerial knowledge would not make – medically qualified or not.
( oh, + I’m an engineer )
At last – a like mind !
A lot of the problem comes down to money. There is no reason why a ‘manager’ should always be paid more than a ‘technician. I have managed operations where apparently subordinate technicians were paid more than I was, and rightly so, because their skilled input was of greater value to retain than mine.
If most of the posters above (and most employers) could get their heads round that situation, it would help overcome the problem of trying to force excellent technicians into management posts merely to reward/retain them, creating square pegs in round holes and wasting an excellent technician too.
‘Management’ is just another job description – it should not be an automatic (and only) channel to higher pay. Get that right, and you can then get the right people doing the right jobs, from which everyone benefits.
CCHQ’s little pet mouthpiece strikes again.
The actual legal advice reads:
“1. It is clear that the drafters of the Health and Social Care Bill intend that the functions of the Secretary of State in relation to the NHS in England are to be greatly curtailed. The most striking example of this is the loss of the duty to provide services pursuant to section 3 of the NHS Act 2006, which is currently placed on the Secretary of State. This will be transferred to the commissioning consortia, and reformulated accordingly. In real terms this means that, effectively, the government will be less accountable in legal terms for the services that the NHS provides”"
“It appears however that the government has simply failed to grapple with the frontline issues in procurement, has wholly underestimated the increasing rather than diminishing complexity in the area and has had no or perhaps little regard to the administrative and financial burdens arising from the regime.”
“”The reforms introduced by the Bill however will serve to reinforce that conclusionand introduce elements which make it even more likely that domestic and European competition law applies to the NHS”"
You’d better go and read the thread posted earlier in the day on the same subject. Your conclusions do not accord with a least one MP who is also a QC, and who has read the full ‘legal advice’ transcript. His conclusion is that the ‘legal advice’ does not conclude what 38 Degrees says it does.
These aren’t my conclusions. These are quotes straight from the legal advice.
Selective ones. Read the whole thing, as others have done.
Little wonder that this spat had to happen: we live in a world in which the Sophists have become victorious. Words only mean what we thinkthey mean. We have become so accustomed to this state of affairs that we are shocked whenever we meet somebody who believes in the plain meaning of words.
The opening words of the first Treaty of the EU refers to creating ‘an ever-closer union’. To us, this sounds as legally binding as a manifest commitment to upholding the core values of ‘apple pie and motherhood’. Beware; this is literal truth to some – and we are primed to see this become as much a matter of contention as the interpretation of the US Constitution.
So we are to be buried under an avalanche of untruths?
If you try sending the link to some of 38 Degrees supporters on Twitter they bloc you.
To paraphrase Desmond Tutu you cannot get through to those pretending to be deaf
Pardon?
The one time you want the scaremongering from the left to be true it turns they are lying.
Bloody typical!
What are you doing, Guido?
The comments are in white on beige and are about six point size.
Your contact lenses are in back-to-front.
Try refreshing the page. Seems to work for me, temporarily anyway.
And me
…and having posted the above comment everything has reverted to normal.
Think Fawkes mucking about with software upgrade.
I think you are a twat.
Thanks. It’s been a good weak for commeny though, ain’t it Guido?
So do I
+1
One short!
+38
Meanwhile….”Dave” is busy bullshitting on europe,referendums and repatriation of powers to Bill Cash in the Liason Committee
“Dave” now giving a masterclass in bullshitting on eurozone bail-out to Bernard Jenkin having “seen off” Bill Cash earlier,,,give it up lads…he’s outta your league ….no one can lay a glove on him when it comes to bullshitting….he’s got awards for it !!!
I loved walking by a stand at my local shops yesterday. Socialist Worker.
“Stop the Cuts” they shouted as passed them, “Cut more” I shouted back.
Well said!
Will try that when I am in Scum on saturday – they usually have some deluded socialist worker (oxymoron?) looney at a paste table, you know the one – next to the looney with the bible and the easel shouting about his make-believe sky-pixie.
You never see a socialist worker actually working…
COOEEEE.
Just popped in from your futures to tell you that, despite the madness of it all, Labour win the general election in May 2015 by a huge margin.
Righto. Gotta get off to Qatar coz England is a quarter-final penalty shoot out with The Krauts.
Laters.
We lost.
Don’t tell us what happens
Cold in Italy today!
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/3798191/Knox-DNA-was-not-contaminated.html
What a waste
She can put a plastic bag over my head, strangle me and cut my throat any day.
She’d kill for some of that.
The judge decided to examine a couple of outstanding points.
I know a good one. Send an email to the 38 degress group asking what the name stands for.
Better still, have an attempt at it by asking, is that how many students will get one next year due to the costs?
Come on guido, the left have history with making evidence match thier claims.
(WMD)
Too much interference and meddling by amateurs and political/economical/media point scorers and other chancers! No wonder it is a mess! Health is now a pawn to be played with by idiots.
That’s almost inevitably what happens when governments get involved in running anything.
Years ago, I worked with a hoary old engineer who’d served his time on the railways, about the time they were first nationalised (1948). A couple of fitters crowed to him about how things would be improve now that it was everybody’s railway. He sourly replied that it was far more likely to become nobody’s railway. He was about right.
I have to establish my “street cred” you understand, like my Dad when he was President of the National Union of Students
I will then turn my vest as often as Dad has to keep myself “in” with Labour and have nice juicy jobs…
I am of the same Ilk
You should add this excellent wiki entry (getter fuller by the day) on Daddy “Jack” Straw’s shannigans throughout his life)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Straw
Wiki is not yet up to date on the recent “rendition” disgraces proven against the British government by fresh (abandoned) Libyan intelligence documents the said dodgy dossier Daddy Straw said in the HoC yesterday that the Labour Government at the time (under Moral Collapse Blair) never condoned etorture” etc
ROFL
Pull the other one Jacko !
A case of the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.
It’s about time the NHS was privatised. The poor should fund their own health care. And if they can”t afford it, well that’s their fault for being lefty-life’s losers.
Let’s get rid of all benefits, too. It’s not my fault you’re disabled, and it’s not my fault nobody will hire cancer patients. Time for the sick and disabled to suck it up as well and fend for themselves.
Does trolling pay well, then?
So easy to see through these leftie trolls, strange though what goes on in their wolly heads.
No its better with the NHS. The token number of CT scanners
and a £9bn database that doesn’t work are trivial matters compared to how humanely we treat our staff. At least you’ve got the certainty of death. None of this hanging about.
p@ulwaugh profile
p@ulwaugh Cameron rubs Blair’s nose in it: “I’m not godfather, so far as I’m aware, to any media..folk” 4 minutes ago · reply · retweet · favorite
Just off to another pyjama party..
Loser – I’m off to sit on Nat’s boat….
o/t Assange accuses UK paper of negligence – Guess which one? Guess who the reporter was?
The Guardian, David Leigh
http://news.theage.com.au/breaking-news-world/assange-accuses-uk-paper-of-negligence-20110906-1jw5i.html
Can they both lose?
The Left in Britain (and elsewhere) now represents COMPULSIVE LYING
We see it EVERY DAY…
Why ?
Because they have no policies apart from printing money
No convictions apart from lining their own pockets
So they are becoming NIHILISTS out of pure frustration (throughout the world)
Next step terrorism for them perhaps ? (or mass looting and violence)
At the risk of repeating myself…again……….
Mendacity and hypocrisy; it’s in Liebour’s D-N-A.
We don’t have a National Health Service anymore. Not since devolution. the NHS in Wales and Scotland has diverged from that in England. check out prescription prices, parking charges and the organisations such as SMC and Welsh Medicines Partnership.
This is bound to be highlighted by the BBC any time now- yeah right
I is been in A & E when I lobbed a brick at JD Sports. It bounced back and smacked my hed. I is bleeding for ate hours before da bytch nurse saw it. Way bad when u handkuffed to dat old bill. Dat bytch know me from when I is getting my guts pumped from too much cider n tings. NSH is well bad innit.
G. campaign to hang ‘em high – or am I missing a Degree or 2.
Perhaps th 32nd one
The influential political blog, 38 Degrees, which obtains it name from the lattitude of the twin economic powerhouses of Athens and Lisbon, has today published a series of searing reports regarding the future of the NHS. Prominent solicitors have provided a wealth of legal opinions on the coalition’s shaky reform plans and concluded that ministers are not being honest with voters on the depth or direction of the reforms. In other news, Andy Coulson, the Prime Minister’s disgraced former director of communications, whose recent resignation sent shock waves around Westminster, was overheard adding Nectar points to an old till receipt in a Wandsworth branch of Sainsbury’s.
What about setting up a private clinics for the Saturday night piss heads and piss takers. They can be privately treated and pay the bill. It would ease up emergency services &nhs. Then these services can be used to help the ‘non wasters’ in need of help.
And a Saturday afternoon one for all those amateur sportsmen who get injured playing football and rugby.
Silly fuckers.
Yes but we know that the Govt with the backing of lots of nice multi national health companies want to privatise the NHS so we end up with a really shit and expensive
set up like in the States
Why on earth should 38 Degrees reply to Guido instantly? Pompous, self involved twits…
Like other left wing blogs, they also delete comments that are not helpful to their cause.