Plenty to keep them busy for a full year. I couldn’t help wondering, as the TV cameras lingered on the cabinet members responsible for each area as it was mentioned, whether their passing smiles were relief that their plans were in, or nervousness at the size of the job. Of course, this is just laying the legislative groundwork for the actual delivery, which will be a hard row to hoe for some if not all of them.
Scrolling down from the linked post in the Guardian live blog above, you will find explanations and analysis of the different bills.
In summary, the government is engaging in a high level of supply side reforms in order to get teh economy moving. This is is really quite interventionist stuff, not a milllion miles away in spirit from America’s Inflation Reduction Act.
The Planning Reform Bill in particular is intended to dramatically ease the process of getting stuff built and to remove the abilty of NIMBY’s to block nationally significant infrastructure because they don’t like how it looks. Coupled iwth infrastructure investment and the new Great British Energy state owned power company, the aim is to encourge building and investment at rapid pace. At the same time, the Employment Rights bill aims to reduce exploitation.
I am broadly in favour of all of this, and just hope that it works as intended.
The thing that lots of people - Labour supporters very much included - think is missing of course is an end to the two child limit on benefits. Ending this would do an enormous amount to cut child poverty, an avowed government aim, but so far Labour have declined to make a move.
Yes, it must be an odd feeling to hear your bit read out, feel excited about it happening and then remember that the person who has to make it happen is you.
Thanks for the update. Very interesting and ambitious.
It almost sounds like a normal government, unlike the craziness since Cameron threw up his hands and walked out.
Apparently they found their focus groups of voters they were trying to lure away from the Tories were all in favour of it.
But AIUI we need all the happy, healthy, well educated kids we can get to make the money to keep our pensions coming.
That should be the key selling point!
Some pretty bold moves in there. Renationalising the railways could be interesting
Wait, he has a big, extensive plan? With a list of specific things he wants to accomplish? Are PMs allowed to do that?
…on the issue of trans rights: Keir Starmer’s Labour had been ideologically captured by the gender critical crowd, and if you are trans in the UK, things are looking increasingly grim.
Here is a lengthy Twitter post from Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Wes Streeting where he lays out the case for banning puberty blockers to trans (not cis) kids.
And here’s a rebuttal.
Jo points out that there has been an explosion of deaths due to suicide since the UK under the Tories introduced a “softer” version of the ban. What Streeting is proposing, with zero push back from his peers, is worse than what the Tories did and will cost lives. And I don’t think it’s going to stop with banning puberty blockers.
Streeting also has said very worrying things about the future of the NHS. And after Labour’s purge of the “left” from its ranks, its marginalization of BIPOC people still within its ranks, I’ve got no reason to be optimistic about Starmers Labour.
Has puberty been proven to be safe and effective?
Effective, yes. Nearly everybody come out the other end pubertized.
Safe? Not even remotely.
What would do even more to cut child poverty would be people not having kids they can’t afford. So I don’t think a restriction on government subsidy for kids people can’t afford is a terrible idea. Or at least, reversing it seems a backward step.
I believe the ‘replacement rate’ to maintain a stable population is (only just over) 2 children per family. I’m not sure what level of immigration that assumes, but given there is currently a surplus of people who want to come to the UK, most of whom bring more skills and motivation to work than newborn babies, that’s the avenue I’d favour for keeping up our balance of payments.
This is disappointing to say the least. The amount of transphobia dressed up as concern for women is sickening. We’ll just have to keep shouting it: trans people aren’t the problem, predatory people (a much smaller group) are the problem.
Eh, there’s been creeping renationalisation anyway as various franchise providers fail to deliver on their promises.
Speaking as someone involved in the initial round of passenger rail franchising, I can say that the old British Rail was deeply inefficient and corrupt and needed the upending it got. But the idea put forward by the government that there was some model in which risk was privatised and benefits nationalised was always a pipe dream - it’s something always promised with privatisation, and the result is always the other way around. (And the creation of Railtrack as infrastructure provider made no sense at all under any model.)
And the economy is so dependent on rail services that a model in which passenger needs take precedent over profitability could be a boon. So renationalisation isn’t a bad idea as long as you can avoid the worst aspects of British Rail coming back with it.
Interesting to get an inside perspective on it, as I’m too young to remember how bad BR was. But my general view is that most privatisations have proved a failed experiment. British Airways has (mostly) worked, I think because air travel is a global industry and genuine competition is possible. That’s also true of car manufacturing, but the British car industry was basically mismanaged into oblivion prior to privatisation, so never stood a chance. Other stuff (like the railways and utilities) are, it seems to me, just ways for private investors to receive dividends with little in the way of corresponding risk. Meaningful competition on the railway network isn’t really possible as they all use the same infrastructure. Likewise electricity, gas, and water. It was the one part of Corbyn’s manifesto that I was seriously tempted by, but sadly I suspect it will now be too complicated and expensive to unwind it all. The railways may (as you say) be an exception because so many franchises have effectively been nationalised already.
The privatisation of the rail network was a bit of a shitshow. The train services were devolved to different regional companies, but the maintenance of the infrastructure was split off into one separate company ‘Railtrack’, whose sole objective was to keep things safe and operational, but in practice they just went ‘yeah, but how about if we don’t?’ - dividend payouts were prioritised over spending on maintenance and repair of tracks; that worked OK for a while right up until it didn’t. Tracks and signals failed, trains crashed, people died.
Same sort of story with the water companies just recently. Sorry, we can’t spend money on doing our actual job, because directors need their bonuses and shareholders need their dividends, so all that raw sewage can just go in the rivers.
There are certain areas were privatization never seems to work, worldwide, and certain others were nationalization never works.
Trains seem to belong to the first category, agriculture (and oil extraction?) seem to belong to the the second.
I think there are cases of successful semi-private rail networks, but not of fully private ones.
I wonder why people are always so prone to market, or state, fundamentalism, either we try to privatize EVERYTHING or try to nationalize EVERYTHING, why it’s so hard to understand that not all problems can be fixed with the same tool?
In North America, all of the major freight railways are privately owned. It’s the passenger systems that are publicly owned (Via in Canada, Amtrak in the US).
Yes, I may be should’ve said “passenger trains”.
private enterprise built the railway network, not the British Transport Commission.