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I could definitely David Lammy coming out with something like this.

Specifically, I’m interested in the breakdown of non-season ticket sales. There’s a lot noise around the concession prices but if it’s a small %, it’s a storm in a teacup.

The FCS guarantee up to 31.7k for people and firms at that time. Which isn’t a lot for small business, but financial system collapses if people can’t do basic transactions or simple things like wages being paid. Bailing out the banks was a lesser of two weevils. To find common ground, people...

Suppose the government should’ve let Northern Rock and NatWest go to pop and with it, people’s savings…

The scenes at Villa Park are interesting… crowds waving Palestinian, Iranian, Syrian, Lebanese flags but of course it was Tel Aviv fans who were going to cause a ruckus…

Tactical voting works both ways and both main parties have hitherto been too hubristic to consider electoral pacts. This was evident in 2019 when pro-remain parties split the vote, whilst the Brexit Party stood aside in Tory seats. The funniest example was a ex-Tory Lib Dem fighting Chelsea and...

Did somebody say Singapore-on-Thames?! A lot of people felt this about Meloni in Italy and so far, it’s gone reasonably well for them.

Absolute scenes to see Tory-Lab on less than 50 seats combined. It’s credible that Labour get decimated across the board, a lot of polls had shown them only hanging in London and few other major metropolitan cities where they are particularly vulnerable to the Greens. The ‘Red Wall’ has always...

Not in my case because the leverage was on my side. It’s a great when you can play suppliers against one another. Likewise, a contract for an existing supplier has remained the same prices since 2021 because the competition in the sector has kept prices down otherwise businesses will change the...

Since we’re exchanging playful barbs… Do you even understand the difference between revenue and profit? 😉

On the macro level, the public sector produces less of it does and is measured on than pre-covid. Considering the technological advancements in the workplace, that tells you something. So we can go around in circles talking about how to measuring what nurses/teachers produce… the bottom line is...

They don’t and you know it deep down. Look at your comments on the NHS, £25bn or whatever has lead to no improvement. All the public sector pay rises and productivity is still behind COVID levels, this is an outlier in Europe. There’s no accountability in the public sector and when something...

So a small % of middle managers? What happens in the public sector if these people don’t deliver? In the private sector, they get sacked. Consider why public sector worker productivity is consistently behind that of the private sector. Without obfuscating about public sector productivity being...

Consultants are the worst. That is the one industry I cannot stand (especially and genuinely sneer at. They tell you the sky is blue and never actually make decisions of consequence themselves. Your second sentence supports what I said and exposes two things; 1) managers are in that small % I...

Not necessarily. The business I’m with had to absorb significant losses on 1-2 big contracts because of inflation driven by the war in Ukraine. Fixed term contracts are normal in the business world and in fact, a contract I’ve negotiated personally is fixed for 3 years. What you’re explaining...

With respect BSB, how many public sector workers ever had to do any of the following: - manage a budget - be responsible for cost saving initiatives - negotiate a contract/tender for business - fire someone for poor performance - make a business decision of consequences e.g. redundancies...

Do you ever tender for business or just accept the additional costs? One of the reasons I’ve kept operating costs in my area is that my supplier knows that I’ll tender their business if they increase my costs. Likewise, elsewhere in business, operating costs rose 30% post-COVID, so they...

It’s not sneering. If a cabinet was built of venture capitalists, we’d both be calling that out and be sceptical of their ability to manage public services. With that in mind, do you reckon the cabinet considered the impact of the NI hike on employers would play out in the real world? No...

Let’s explore the use of ‘real terms’, this is slippery. Have their budgets grown? Yes or no. In the private sector, if inflation is at ‘5%’ doesn’t mean you increase what you spend by 5%. That’s a terrible way of doing business. Whereas any budget increase below inflation in ‘public sector...

You can’t be serious? How many Labour run councils are bankrupt, or nearing bankruptcy? On the national level, Labour nicked one of Reform’s dumbest policy ideas (increasing NI on foreign workers) and applied it to the whole workforce. On Reform as a party, what are people’s reasonable...