Meanwhile over on the NHS consultation website, we have a new winner
Chris Smyth
7,415 posts
Chris Smyth
@Smyth_Chris
Joined September 2009
- Three quarters of Brits now too poor to marry a foreignerIt is deeply unconservative to say that only people earning above the 73rd percentile of the income distribution can live with who they love. A very very misguided policy.
- Labour now planning to go further than lifting the ban on onshore wind and class it as nationally significant infrastructure This would mean Ed Miliband would decide on approving large windfarms, rather than local councils No mucking aboutFirst actual policy change made by Labour is allowing new onshore wind farms from today Symbolic of their priorities
- Away from Cummings, today's case data makes pretty clear we are on an upward slope again. Infection rates are now 25% higher than on May 3. Given what we've been hearing today: what's the plan?
- Breakig: biggest advance yet in Covid treatment announced by Oxford scientists. Death rate cut by a third in patients on ventilator when given dexamethasone, a cheap steroid. Probably the best news we have had so far in this pandemic.
- Today is the first day of local election purdah. So obviously the government will be making no major and politically sensitive policy announcements
- NHS Test & Trace is laying off 6,000 idle contact tracers and allocating the rest to regional teams to work with councils, in acknowledgement that a centralised call handling system isn't the best way to fight local outbreaks
- Tory MP and chair of the intelligence and security committee Julian Lewis has a pop at the company owned by Tory co-chair Ben Elliot in the Commons "Cleansing British public life of dirty Russian money is not 'Quintessentially' difficult," he says.
- Neil Ferguson of Imperial says his modelling shows that with NHS ICU surge and new national lockdown, Covid-19 demand on hospitals likely to be "within capacity" This could work...
- Transport projects set out by Reeves today are remarkably similar to 2023 Tory plans Greater Manchester Then: £2,474m Now: £2,474m Liverpool Then: £1,581m Now: £1,581m S Yorks Then: £1,455m Now: £1,455m W Yorks Then: £2,115m Now: £2,115m Tees Valley Then: £978m Now: £978m
- Replying to @Smyth_ChrisReeves tells Treasury: "I will judge my time in office a success if I know that, at the end of it, there are working-class kids from ordinary backgrounds living richer lives, their horizons expanded, and their potential realised."
- Peak Matt Hancock anecdote from Helen MacNamara in spring 2020. She asked how he was coping: "He reassured me that he was ‘loving responsibility’ and to demonstrate this took up a batsman's stance outside the Cabinet Room, and said, ‘they bowl them at me, I knock them away’”.
- HMRC figures out today show most pensioners now pay income tax Up 2m since 2020 to 8.5m. Awkward for Sunak as he makes threat of Labour "retirement tax" central to his campaign Quite a lot of caveats to his promise of no pensioners paying income tax
- Very gloomy sign - Germany may have to re-tighten lockdown only a week after easing began because the virus is now spreading too fast UK is watching this experience closely and it's likely to strengthen those urging caution about relaxing lockdown
