"Mr Slater also suggested that ministers preferred to spend money on opening shiny new schools with opportunities for photos in hard hats, than the more routine job of ensuring the existing stock of school buildings were up to date."
Ministers aren't supposed to have experience, they're there to make decisions. All the expertise is held in the Civil Service, and they don't get shuffled around.
They just get occasionally fired by vandals.
The decision of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwaerteng to instantly sack two top civil servants damaged the running of government and seemed intended to give the message that they valued political alignment above competence, former senior officials have said.
The watchdog said that in previous winters some electricity generators had deliberately stopped generating power early in the afternoon, meaning plants were switched off during the crucial evening spike in demand. They would then offer to resume generating power later in the day, cashing in on the greatly increased prices on offer via the balancing mechanism.
Sounds rather similar to the behaviour of a little energy company based in the USA called Enron:
After the passage of the deregulation law, California had a total of 38 Stage 3 rolling blackouts declared, until federal regulators intervened in June 2001. [...] Subsequently, Enron traders were revealed as intentionally encouraging the removal of power from the market during California's energy crisis by encouraging suppliers to shut down plants to perform unnecessary maintenance, as documented in recordings made at the time. These acts contributed to the need for rolling blackouts, which adversely affected many businesses dependent upon a reliable supply of electricity, and inconvenienced a large number of retail customers. This scattered supply increased the price, and Enron traders were thus able to sell power at premium prices, sometimes up to a factor of 20 × its normal peak value.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron
In an earlier interview this month with Fox News, Ramaswamy said of the layoffs: “What [Musk] did at Twitter is a good example of what I want to do with the administrative state … Take out the 75% of the dead weight cost, improve the actual experience of what it’s supposed to do.”
"The outgoing MP, a staunch ally of Sunak’s predecessor Boris Johnson, last spoke in the Commons more than 400 days ago and has voted only six times so far this year."
It seemed quite clear at the time that the decision to force (untested) people out of hospitals and into care homes was a decision made because the government wanted hospital capacity freed up, & considered the lives of care home residents a reasonable price to pay for genpop capacity.
Not a nice decision. And one that could have been avoided entirely if the gov hadn't botched pandemic preparedness, and then prevaricated to the point of disaster when a pandemic actually arrived.
When the people who claimed "masks don't work" convince the Royal Society to publish an 80 page report similarly supported by academics at Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, St Andrews, UCL, and Edinburgh (among others) then they will definitely deserve to be equally confident.
Your brain is not as good at some things -- for example, complex statistical analysis -- as the collective brains of lots of other people who specialise in that thing all working together.
"Before Brexit, exporters could send chilled and fresh food to the EU without any paperwork because the UK was a member of the single market.
"However, the UK’s corresponding post-Brexit import checks have been pushed back on four occasions already: in 2020, twice in 2021 – partly because border infrastructure was not going to be ready on time – and then again last year by the then Brexit opportunities minister, Jacob Rees-Mogg."
"Questioned by Labour MP Catherine McKinnell over why the payment doubles if workers sign up through an agency, and whether he had anything to declare in relation to the government’s childcare reforms, the PM said: “No, all my disclosures are declared in the normal way.”
He did not mention that Ms Murty was an investor in Koru Kids, one of six private childcare agencies consulted on the scheme as part of the government’s childcare overhaul."
"When looking at the use of face masks and mask mandates, studies consistently reported the measures were an effective approach to reduce infection. The evidence further indicates higher-quality respirator masks (such as N95 masks) were more effective than surgical-type masks."
"Mr Slater also suggested that ministers preferred to spend money on opening shiny new schools with opportunities for photos in hard hats, than the more routine job of ensuring the existing stock of school buildings were up to date."