theinspectorst @ theinspectorst @kbin.social

Liberal, Briton, FBPE. Co-mod of [m/neoliberal](http://kbin.social/m/neolib

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2 yr. ago

Maybe turn on the human being bit of your brain. The guy has cancer.

Imagine asking if it's good or bad news that an old man has cancer.

No, the NHS under the Tories received real terms budget increases every year but one (in the second year of the Coalition, when NHS spending rose by very slightly less than inflation).

The problem is that, with large sections of the general public living more and more unhealthy lives, the demands on the NHS have been growing even faster than the real-terms budget. Obesity is correlated with a range of serious health problems - diabetes, cardiovascular disease, various cancers - that devour NHS resources, so the real-terms NHS budget would need to grow at a much faster rate than inflation to cope with the continuing deterioration of public health.

Ultimately, this isn't a problem we should have been trying to spend our way out of anyway. The solution to an obesity epidemic shouldn't have been to try and load the consequences onto the NHS; it should have been to take strong preventative measures to head it off well before the point when a quarter of the adult population of England were technically obese (and as many again were overweight).

When Covid hit, we went into lockdown to avoid overwhelming the NHS - where was the obesity equivalent of the Covid lockdowns?

Yes, my point was that above-inflation budget increases (so real-terms budget increases) ought to have led to improving services, other things being equal. But other things aren't equal - partly because people are getting older, but also partly because people are living unhealthier lives.

So just to stand still, the NHS would have needed even larger above-inflation spending hikes than it got; or, heaven forbid, government policy would have had to start treating mass obesity as the public health emergency that it is, rather than fretting about the Tory press calling this a 'nanny state'...

This is a really big factor. The public discourse around the NHS would lead you to think that NHS spending had been squeezed over the last 14 years - but it hasn't. Cameron made a big political choice in 2010 that the NHS would be exempt from the budget cuts that affected the rest of the public sector; and the NHS budget has actually consistently grown faster than inflation under a decade and a half of Tory health secretaries.

So why does the NHS feel under so much more pressure today than under New Labour?

Broadly, two reasons. The first, outside the government's control, is that the population has aged since 2010, and old people are more likely to need GP appointments and hospital beds. And the second, at least somewhat more in the government's control, is that public health has continued its deteriorating trend of the last several decades - the share of people overweight or obese in particular, who also find themselves disproportionately taking up health services.

We can't do anything about people getting older but we can act on the public health problem. We should be treating combating obesity with the same urgency we treated Covid.

Bed bugs eunt domus!

For most things, the European Council already decides things by qualified majority voting (typically requiring the support of 55% of member states representing 65% of the EU's population). This was enshrined in the Lisbon Treaty. But extending QMV to matters that currently need unanimity would require treaty changes, which by definition would need every EU member to sign up. There are limited incentives for smaller members (let alone problematic members like Hungary) to agree to more QMV since unanimity gives them disproportionate influence.

It is really inspiring that so many Germans are coming out to make their voices heard like this. It's easy to tell a pollster you don't like Nazis; but coming out on the streets week-after-week in the middle of winter like they've been doing recently shows commitment.

Reminder also that whilst it's a very fun story, this claim was:

a. written as part of a hit job by two right-wing Brexiter journalists in the run-up to the referendum as part of a wider effort by the right to discredit the centrist establishment in the months before the vote (see also: Work and Pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith resigning from Cameron's cabinet in protest at the work and pensions policies he had conceived and implemented over the previous six years...); and

b. never substantiated by any evidence that those two Brexiter journalists were willing or able to provide, despite them claiming in the book there was a photo.

The 2016 Brexit referendum was the dirtiest election in living memory in the UK. It was plagued by fake news and Russian interference. Isabella Oakshott herself is known to have covered up evidence of Putin's links to the Brexit campaign and her domestic partner is literally the current leader of Reform UK (the party formerly known as Nigel Farage's Brexit Party). She is not a credible or impartial figure.

There are totally things Cameron should be criticised for over his time in government, but that is no excuse to parrot Brexiter (and possibly Russian) fake news that was designed to discredit moderates and favour the far-right.

And we'd like the refund, please.

Argentina was once one of the richest countries in the world, richer than France or Germany.

And much of that wealth was built on exports of beef, especially to Britain. But that was well over 100 years ago.

Now, thanks to a profound economic crisis, it languishes in around 70th place, according to the latest figures from the World Bank.

It wasn't 'an' economic crisis that caused that change. It was a long-term political crisis. The fundamental cause of Argentina's economic decline was political misrule - the combination of decades of political instability, military juntas, protectionist trade policies and hyperinflationary monetary policies, all of which discouraged long-term investment and left Argentine businesses and industries inefficient and uncompetitive.

Argentina dropped out of the developed world because the Argentine political class chose to drop out of the developed world.

Argentina is what those Americans flirting with the idea of re-electing Trump should be thinking about. Right now, MAGA, protectionism and political chaos are a one-term aberration in American politics. If they bring him back, if they make Trump's form of politics a regularised part of the American political culture, Argentina is their future.

He was the only candidate.

300-odd (and odd) Tory MPs.

'We have experienced something truly horrific. The city centres have become wastelands. People go hungry and homeless. There's a basic lack of provision of essential services ... How do the British get by like this?'

No, they can do more. The nuclear option is to use Article 7 to suspend Hungary's voting rights at the European Council if they deem that Hungary is acting against the EU's values.

Stopping the flow of EU funds is part of the escalation route towards that but they won't do it unless they've exhausted other options - it's a tricky balancing act to cajole Orban into behaving like a European, and once they use Article 7 there will be no more escalation threats available.

Could they play a Hexblade warlock?

Non-paywall link: https://archive.is/Kl4wC

It's a first-past-the-post election - the Tories changed the electoral system because they knew they couldn't win it in a fair vote. The Tories have also nominated Susan Hall as their candidate - a right-wing extremist, Trump-supporter, culture wars lunatic, swivel-eyed Islamphobic.

In an election like this, if you're going to vote for a joke candidate then you might as well just vote for the Tory directly.

They're pro-choice and pro-contraception.

They understand that abstinence is futile.

Non-paywall link: https://archive.is/Snnot