The latest services PMI from S&P Global shows the sector is growing at its slowest for 11 months. Downturns…
Services PMI dropped sharply to 50.5 in March, down from 53.9 in February. This is the lowest reading since April 2025 and below the flash estimate of 51.2. New orders fell for the first time since November 2025 and the pace of contraction the sharpest in eight months…
Input cost and output charge inflation are both recorded at an 11-month high. Employment continues to fall…
The PMI notes:
“March data indicated that backlogs of work remained broadly unchanged, despite frequent reports of international shipping delays and worsening supply chain performance. Service providers generally suggested that they had sufficient capacity to meet new and existing workloads. A lack of pressure on business capacity, alongside the need to mitigate rising payroll costs, contributed to a further reduction in staffing numbers during March.”
Export sales declined at the fastest rate since April 2025 and business optimism is now at its lowest in nine months. Imagine for a moment a fantastical world in which Labour attempted to lower the operating costs for businesses…
An exasperated Wes Streeting has begun to plead with the British Medical Association now that the junior doctor strike has kicked off. A six-day walkout began at 7 a.m…
The Health Secretary told Sky News the strike will cost £300 million:
“Every time the BMA takes resident doctors out on strike, it costs the NHS about 50 million pounds a day. So this strike action is going to cost us about £300 million.
What I find extraordinary about the situation that we’re in is that the BMA when this government came in having been treated badly by the Conservatives, we don’t doubt that, this government came in and gave resident doctors a 28.9% pay rise and they still went on strike. We put a deal to the BMA which we had negotiated in good faith with their officers who endorsed the deal and put it to their committee. included a 4.9% pay rise this year on average, as high as 7.1% for some of their members. They still went on strike. It would have created an extra 4 a half thousand training places, a thousand materialising this month, and they still went on strike.“
Streeting essentially asked for more leniency from the union:
“I don’t pretend that in less than two years a Labour government has solved all of the issues facing resident doctors. But I would also ask the BMA not to pretend that a Labour government can solve all of the problems of more than a decade in the making in less than two years. Negotiation is about give and take. Getting this country out of the mess it is in thanks to more than a decade of Conservative government requires all of us to pull together. The government’s done a lot of giving. The BMA’s done a lot of taking.”
On the Today programme Streeting pleaded: “look at the state of our public finances… look at the state of the world… we’ve been enormously sympathetic.” Oh dear…
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You’re either in front of Guido, or you are behind…
To add insult to injury the bill for the restoration of the Churchill statue in Parliament Square is over a whopping £7,000. So much owed by so many…
The 12-foot Churchill was graffitied three separate times in 2020 and was targeted again in February this year when he was sprayed with red paint and slogans including “Zionist war criminal,” “Stop the Genocide,” “Free Palestine,” and “Globalise the Intifada.” Back in 2020 an Extinction Rebellion activist was fined £1,500 for daubing the statue…
These were the projected costs of restoring the statue this time:
The total emergency clean cost out of the GLA maintenance/restoration budget was £7,804.80. The police barrier hire was £734.40. A grand total of £8,539.20…
Former leader of the SNP in Westminster Ian Blackford told Times Radio why he believes Nicola Sturgeon’s claim that she spent no time in the kitchen and therefore didn’t see any of her husband’s purchases:
“She doesn’t have a passion for cooking.”