Pat McFadden announced this week that he was cancelling government procurement cards in a bid to tackle civil service waste. Though this is just a freeze – cardholders will now have to reapply and prove they really need them. No doubt Whitehall’s finest are already thinking of ways to pass that test…
Guido welcomes any effort to rein in taxpayer-funded excess, given what mandarins have been splashing out on. Between September and December last year, civil servants at the Home Office, Cabinet Office, DEFRA, and DCMS spent a staggering £11,650 on work-from-home office ‘equipment’, according to research by the Taxpayer’s Alliance. Despite the government’s best efforts to drag civil servants into the office three days a week, pen-pushers splashed the cash on home “footrests”, “noise dampeners”, chairs, and monitor risers. All very necessary of course for a productive day of shirking from home. Guido will be keeping an eye on how many of these mandarins manage to keep hold of their taxpayer-funded credit cards…
A recent DeltaPoll survey of 1,974 caught Guido’s eye. The pollster has the Tories and Labour on equal footing for the first time in a while. Labour down four, Reform up one, Tories stable…
Average voting intention across the major pollsters from the last couple of weeks is as below:
- Labour: 25.8%
- Reform UK: 24.3%
- Conservatives: 22.5%
- LibDems: 12.6%
- Greens : 8.5%
Not much of a Lowe-shaped dent in Reform’s polling. Party chiefs will be happy with that ahead of their locals launch…
When King of the North Andy Burnham isn’t taking shots at Starmer – his latest broadside aimed at Labour’s welfare cuts – he’s busy finding ever more inventive ways to splash taxpayers’ cash in his Greater Manchester Combined Authority. A cool £75,000 on “Race Equality Panels” comes to mind…
Burnham has been trumpeting Manchester’s Bee Network- a plan to streamline Greater Manchester’s transport system by rolling out contactless “tap and go” payments across buses and trams, and introducing hundreds of yellow bee-branded buses by 2026, with the aim of bringing all local bus services under central control. Yet, the latest budget papers presented to the GMCA reveal the sting in the tail: the annual net cost of running the Bee Network’s bus services is projected to hit a staggering £226 million. No surprise Burnham is pushing for a “proper” compulsory tourist tax for those visiting Manchester then…
For that, you could:
- Employ 6,848 bin lorry drivers.
- Fill 3,138,888 potholes.
- Buy 19,399 unmarked police cars.
The taxpayer may have a view on which should be prioritised. UK DOGE recommends costs are cut here…
Entries in the comments…
Keir Starmer’s major reset and pivot back to Europe has been the cornerstone of his foreign policy since he became PM. Multiple trips to Brussels, cosying up to EU leaders and generally getting back on the EU circuit was pitched to business leaders as Labour’s big plan…
But it’s all come to nothing as the EU has decided to exclude British defence companies from its new €150 billion defence fund. The new Security Action for Europe (SAFE) mechanism has published its terms and includes a ‘buy European’ clause banning arms purchases from the UK, US and other non-EU countries. The French are suspected of having secured the exclusion of the UK as a shot in an ongoing separate row over fishing rights (part of Starmer’s re-opened EU settlement). Despite Starmer’s Ukraine diplomacy, standing shoulder to shoulder with Macron, the French have totally shafted him…
A distraught Labour source told the newspapers: “Europe needs Britain’s defence industry a bit more than the French need a few extra fish. It is astonishing how puerile the French are behaving. They have not grasped the enormity of the moment.” Welcome to the real world…
Inevitably discourse around TV series Adolescence has now come to its “start banning things” stage. The government has been struggling to keep up with all of the new ‘action‘ it can now take since the show identified the main threat to the UK as the most deprived demographic in the UK: white working class boys. As ever it usually takes a few days for the real agenda to be unveiled by the artists/activists and the media which boosts them…
The media has promoted the drama’s political lessons for days now as Starmer says it has shown there is a need to tackle an “emerging and growing problem” and its creator Jack Thorne said “I want it to be shown in schools, I want it to be shown in Parliament. It’s crucial because this is only going to get worse.”
Now Thorne presents his solution: banning social media for kids and banning phones in school:
“We do believe perhaps the answer to this is in parliament and legislating – and taking kids away from their phones in school and taking kids away from social media altogether.”
That is being widely-reprinted. Next, cue a barrage of comment pieces, a new campaign from backbench MPs, and eventual move towards legislation. The public imagination to new regulation pipeline still in full effect…
Kemi Badenoch at the 1922-ConHome bash last night:
“I did praise [Burnham] for his stamina, it was amazing. All I had to do was sit back and lie there. I didn’t have to do anything at all…”
