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@nostrildamus said in British Politics:
@sparky does not make sense to me. Why would he rather be fired than resign early? What advantange does it give him?
Means he can go on maneuvers in a big way against Johnson & Sunak. Cummings doesn't like that his plans to re-organise Whitehall and spend big on engineering/AI projects were dumped in the summer in the COVID spending review. He's been on the sidelines for months. Cummings would like the next PM to be someone ideologically closer to himself than Johnson & Sunak who he has come to regard as part of the Establishment.
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God knows what actually happened, Sparky,
One newspaper quotes multiple sources about the alleged txts on BoJo's missus and other papers quote the original papers assertions. Meanwhile Cummings has called the reports and that he left in bad odour "a pure invention".... FWIW, I think he was off anyway and they decided it was better to get it done and kill the story.
Perhaps BoJo's agenda to shake up the things like house-building has upset a lot of back-benchers and Cummings had become a lightning rod. I'd also imagine there's still a lot of nutters on both sides of the Brexit debate who hate Boris for either being soft on Brexit or actually winning the election and making happen.
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@Victor-Meldrew Sebastian Payne of the FT and Harry Cole of The Sun are close friends of Carrie Symonds. I suspect their "No 10" source is Ms Symonds. Certainly she wants people to think Cummings went because of her.
Given Dominic Cummings' wife, Mary Wakefield, is Comissioning Editor of The Spectator, I expect that publication to give something closer to Dominic Cummings' version of events.
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@Catogrande said in British Politics:
Is there a natural, Brexit successor?
Javid isn't sitting on the backbench because he has nothing better to do. Pitted against Sunak I'd back him to win the party vote.
Would Johnson's blessing carry any great weight? People seemingly back Johnson because of a cult of personality not because he represents an ideology or faction.
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Owen Jones was mentioned earlier on this thread in a rather negative way. To be clear, I cannot stand the guy. Not sure if I hate him, as that's a hell of a word. So I'm not writing this with any objectivity at all. There is no doubt many causes he fully gets behind are worthy. However, here is what has happened.
He was doing talk show today about Corby & antisemitism. To his credit, he's never shied away from the problem & has agreed it existed. He says the recommended changes must take place so Labour can move forwards. Anyway, as usual with him, he did his very best to deflect the problem on todays show to commentators from the right, saying they are the racists and have no right to judge etc. So he started a rant against the Spectator about the Golden Dawn, a Greek far right party. Fraser Nelson, the editor of the spectator was also on the panel. So it was basically a rant against him & his paper supporting it.
Fraser Nelson, when was finally allowed to speak, 100% absolutely obliterated Jones position. Nelson stated quite clearly that that did not support any such movement, they explained the movement and why it got into power. Nelson even states himself (and you can see the video below) that you must understand the reasons why results like this happen if you want to fight them. So, like the child that he is, Jones twitter timeline (which has 1mm followers, of which I think are about 90% haters) is full of clips from the interviews & links to the articles. The thing is that Jones honestly think's he's won some sort of battle or proved some point when he simply hasn't. See the tweets / clicks for yourself. It's honestly worth a watch.
Jones honest to god has no interest in debate. He absolutely wants to shut down anything which mentions, discusses, research or basically talks bout political positions he doesn't agree with. Completely and utterly deluded. The fact he laughs off cancel culture, when is the absolute king of trying to remove views he doesn't agree with, is irony to the extreme.
Panel part 1:
Panel part 2:
Excerpt from the Spectator article which Jones has a problem with : -
Owen Jones in that clip reminded me of Donald Trump in the infamous 2020 first Presidential TV debate: shouting down his opponent, slandering him, trying to stop any debate.
Fraser Nelson is a smart customer and a cool head. A great example of how to deal with idiots.
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Priti Patel, the Home Secretary has had accusations of bullying following her around from job to job with little done about it until the senior Civil Servant in the HO resigned citing her bullying and he is now suing the Government for constructive dismissal. The independent report into he conduct has found that she has broken the ministerial code of conduct, normally a precursor to resignation. Boris has dismissed the report and now the independent assessor, appointed by Boris has resigned in protest. From the outside it looks as though Boris doesn’t have a firm control of his team or maybe is rife with cronyism.
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@Catogrande I'm a massive fan of Priti. She takes not an ounce of bullshit, and unquestionably has had to be like this to get to where she is. But my favourite reason for being a fan is how much the left absolutely hate her. And they can harp on as much about this that and whatever, but the sole reason is that she is a BAME woman, and thus is expected to be part of their mandate and support party.
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Priti Patel broke the the Ministerial Code which says "ministers should be professional in their working relationships with the civil service and treat all those with whom they come into contact with consideration and respect."
The question is whether the reported shouting and swearing during a discussion on both sides amounted to bullying while acknowledging the Home Office leadership's lack of responsiveness - without knowing more details of what happened I suspect a fair opinion will be difficult to decide as neither side is completely innocent.
Having dealt with the Home Office for both personal and professional matters, I can understand that there maybe frustrations at the Home Offices ideas of work or acceptable time frames. i.e. for professional matters, the time frames are likely to involve months instead of days for "simple" requests and years for "small" projects. Large projects will take decades or careers.
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Smokescreen to bypass the scrutiny which should be afforded the Government's handling/handing out of contracts related to COVID
Especially the £21 million finder's fee to the Spaniard.
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@MajorRage I’ve been a fan too, as much as I am able with a polly. She gets a pass from me too for how she screws with the leftie ideology. The thing that irks me here though is that the agreed due process has been gone through only for Boris to ignore it. This despite the resignation of two senior people.
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@PecoTrain said in British Politics:
Priti Patel broke the the Ministerial Code which says "ministers should be professional in their working relationships with the civil service and treat all those with whom they come into contact with consideration and respect."
The question is whether the reported shouting and swearing during a discussion on both sides amounted to bullying while acknowledging the Home Office leadership's lack of responsiveness - without knowing more details of what happened I suspect a fair opinion will be difficult to decide as neither side is completely innocent.
Having dealt with the Home Office for both personal and professional matters, I can understand that there maybe frustrations at the Home Offices ideas of work or acceptable time frames. i.e. for professional matters, the time frames are likely to involve months instead of days for "simple" requests and years for "small" projects. Large projects will take decades or careers.
That is what the report has concluded. She broke the code. A breach of the agreed, self imposed standards. That is the accepted “fair opinion”. As I mentioned before, this has been deemed serious enough for two high level resignations. Not to be taken lightly.
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@Catogrande said in British Politics:
@PecoTrain said in British Politics:
Priti Patel broke the the Ministerial Code which says "ministers should be professional in their working relationships with the civil service and treat all those with whom they come into contact with consideration and respect."
The question is whether the reported shouting and swearing during a discussion on both sides amounted to bullying while acknowledging the Home Office leadership's lack of responsiveness - without knowing more details of what happened I suspect a fair opinion will be difficult to decide as neither side is completely innocent.
Having dealt with the Home Office for both personal and professional matters, I can understand that there maybe frustrations at the Home Offices ideas of work or acceptable time frames. i.e. for professional matters, the time frames are likely to involve months instead of days for "simple" requests and years for "small" projects. Large projects will take decades or careers.
That is what the report has concluded. She broke the code. A breach of the agreed, self imposed standards. That is the accepted “fair opinion”. As I mentioned before, this has been deemed serious enough for two high level resignations. Not to be taken lightly.
That said, what is the procedure for dealing with wilfully obstructive officials?
The Home Office has been breathtakingly incompetent for last decade, so I'd be prepared to give her benefit of doubt.
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@pakman said in British Politics:
@Catogrande said in British Politics:
@PecoTrain said in British Politics:
Priti Patel broke the the Ministerial Code which says "ministers should be professional in their working relationships with the civil service and treat all those with whom they come into contact with consideration and respect."
The question is whether the reported shouting and swearing during a discussion on both sides amounted to bullying while acknowledging the Home Office leadership's lack of responsiveness - without knowing more details of what happened I suspect a fair opinion will be difficult to decide as neither side is completely innocent.
Having dealt with the Home Office for both personal and professional matters, I can understand that there maybe frustrations at the Home Offices ideas of work or acceptable time frames. i.e. for professional matters, the time frames are likely to involve months instead of days for "simple" requests and years for "small" projects. Large projects will take decades or careers.
That is what the report has concluded. She broke the code. A breach of the agreed, self imposed standards. That is the accepted “fair opinion”. As I mentioned before, this has been deemed serious enough for two high level resignations. Not to be taken lightly.
That said, what is the procedure for dealing with wilfully obstructive officials?
The Home Office has been breathtakingly incompetent for last decade, so I'd be prepared to give her benefit of doubt.
Agreed, but a different argument.
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A colleague of mine decided to wind me up and sent me St Owens' latest column. All about the pay freeze for govt sectors.
It blows my mind that a paper allows such utter crap to be published. Real-Terms pay cuts?? Seriously? I am a London landlord, and rents are dropping like crazy. 25% on average. Cash financing is the cheapest it's ever been at a bees dick above zero.
Given unemployment in private sector, and companies basically burning through cash like anything to stay afloat, I have zero idea how the hell he could say it's a pay cut. I think if you offered all private sector works 3 year at current pay, but no redundancy .. a huge proportion would take it.
The guy really is a fucking idiot.
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@Catogrande said in British Politics:
That is what the report has concluded. She broke the code. A breach of the agreed, self imposed standards. That is the accepted “fair opinion”. As I mentioned before, this has been deemed serious enough for two high level resignations. Not to be taken lightly.
I suspect the Prime Minister is prepared to risk trial by media with this - on one hand you have the Home Office who have a long list of public failures where they have embarrassed the sitting Home Secretary over the last 20+ years across Labour and Tory governments and on the other hand you have a Secretary of State that apparently yelled and swore at senior figures after they repeatedly failed to carry out requests.
As for the resignations, Sir Philip Rutnam gets his day in court regardless of this report and Sir Alex Allan resigned because his report was ignored - if the government chooses to fight this, I can't see them losing public support based on the current details. Maybe resignations is the best way of getting rid of the dead wood?
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I'm more than happy to support a Minister who takes obvious umbrage at the lazy incompetence of public servants. What a misnomer.
Given some of the meetings I've been in, I'd probably give them an alibi if they beat them to death.
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