Andy Burnham has called his first COBRA meeting on the heat in Britain. After waiting 53 days in which he also went on holiday…
The meeting is mostly a PR exercise because response systems are all in place and extra management goes through the National Drought Group. You could try building a new reservoir for once…
There have been 37 consecutive heatwave days somewhere in the UK this year. If this was a Tory PM they would have been buried under criticism for not hosting a COBRA sooneer…
Temperatures are due to cool next week with some expectation of rain. Starmer sabotaged the weather machine on the way out…
Doubling down on Burnham’s claim yesterday that “all parts of the country need to play their part” in taking migrants, Home Office minister Anne Turley said on BBC Breakfast this morning:
“I think this is about fairness. And we won’t be asking anyone to take more than they can. It’s about their fair share. And we look across the country at what is appropriate for areas to take. What is the infrastructure, what is manageable with the local community. So this is about fairness… it’s important that everybody plays their fair share in that.”
Define ‘a fair share’…
Stop Funding Hate is struggling to get funding of its own. Oh dear…
The campaign spends its time demanding advertisers pull their money out of media it doesn’t like, including Daily Mail and GB News. It has spent its summer attacking GB News and X to persuade its band of pro-censorship supporters to stump up £50,000 by 7th August so it can “cut off the funding” of legitimate news platforms. Somehow people aren’t too interested…
But approaching its initial cut off, it had raised barely a quarter of the amount required (27%) and put out a post admitting failure that they “have not yet reached the ambitious target” with the deadline quietly extended to 11 September. Having spent over five years droning on about GB News the campaign’s supporters have seemingly dwindled to a small group of hard left cranks, with public profiles backing the appeal turning up to Green Party fundraisers and getting on a campaign to question Lucy Letby’s convictions...
The big fundraising failure comes in the same week as GB News was confirmed as Britain’s biggest news channel for a whole year. Timing is everything…
The Director General for Propriety and Constitution Group post has been vacant for a year. The government is only now bothering to fill it…
The Cabinet Office are advertising for a “Director General, Propriety and Constitution.” Cabinet Secretary Antonia Romeo says she is “seeking an individual with an outstanding record of leadership, with good judgement and political antennae, and the ability to set strategic direction for a number of teams in the Cabinet Office” whose responsibilities include providing “counsel to the Cabinet Secretary on the machinery of government, propriety, ethics, the Union, and constitutional matters across government.” For £135,000…
A big part of the brief: “Standards and Ethics: Oversee the implementation, interpretation, and enforcement of the Civil Service Code and Cabinet Manual standards; Public Appointments: Provide high-level guidance and administrative direction to departments on public appointments and Non-Executive Board member recruitment.” Applications close on 24th of this month…
The role has been vacant and filled only with an interim for a full year according to PQs by Shadow Cabinet Office minister Mike Wood. He told Guido: “Either nobody applied, or nobody could pass the vetting, and after Peter Mandelson, both explanations are equally damning. Labour have a vetting problem running through the whole of Government, and the one desk built to catch it has been empty for a year.” Guido can think of a man for the job and his name rhymes with Peter Pandelson…
On LBC today Angela Rayner got her own department’s policy wrong by claiming that Labour has cut VAT for some businesses. Have a look at this transcript:
LBC: And Andy Burnham writes in one of the newspapers today, The Daily Mirror, that he’d like to see the return of butchers and bakers and bookshops, and we all agree with that. But as James Cleverley, your political rival, says, just because you closed down a vape shop, Angela, it doesn’t mean automatically it’s going to reopen as a butcher’s, does it?
RAYNER: No, it doesn’t, and that’s one of the reasons that Andy Burnham announced the cuts to VAT for some businesses and that he wants to go further to support businesses on the high street. You know, shopping types of the way in which we shop has changed over time. I travel up and down the country. In some parts of the country, I see lots of independent shops. In other parts, it’s not as easy to see them. So we want to see our high streets invigorate and that’s why we’ve put an extra five billion pound into Pride of Place funding so that we can really revitalise our high streets, as well as crack down on the gambling and vaping shops that people don’t want to say.
Burnham had announced a one-fifth cut to business rates for some venues like night clubs and pubs – though not hotels and restaurants which are suffering the worst from those rates. You might hope the Housing Secretary – who deals with the high street – would know the difference between those two taxes…
A Tory source said: “Angela Rayner in a muddle with the tax system? Some things never change.” Indeed…
Members in the trade union representing parole officers, NAPO, have voted to strike in an indicative ballot. Prisons becoming the real headache…
90.67% of members have voted in favour, mostly over pay. National Chairman Ben Cockburn said:
“This ballot wasn’t about members being too busy. It was professionals warning they cannot protect the public properly when there are not enough people to do the work. Probation staff make decisions every day with life-changing consequences for the people we work with, victims and the public. If excessive workloads prevent those decisions being made properly, the consequences can be devastating.
The government cannot keep treating probation as the place where the consequences of failures elsewhere in the criminal justice system are dumped. If you overload probation, you increase risk. It really is that simple.”
The trade union wants more of the £700 million in funding for probation to go in pay increases to improve “retention” and “safer workplaces and manageable workloads.” I.e. don’t invest it in better tech…
There will now be a formal postal ballot and potential action, which could mean walkouts, by the end of the year. Just in time for the early releases to be in full swing…
Lord Khan in the Telegraph: “I hope, and I say this in a non-pompous way, that the public service I do will bring rewards in this world and the hereafter,” he says. “I’m hoping the work I do is earning me Brownie points.”