Maybe Owl needs to take an eye test (can you still get them these days?).
An eagle-eyed correspondent has just spotted a third mistake in the Tory Pledges:
Our “Commissionaire” whose mission is to “improve asses” is now called “HerMandez”.
With so many mistakes in such a small section of the leaflet, Owl’s advice is to take no notice of any of it.
Maybe it was intended as an April Fool.
Remember it was the Tories who got rid of most of the local cottage hospitals – Owl
Michael Savage www.theguardian.com
A prolonged NHS crisis stoked by further strikes risks derailing Rishi Sunak’s local election plans amid Tory concern that the prime minister is already facing pressure over flagship pledges on health and the economy.
The prime minister will head to the south-east this week as he attempts to shore up Tory heartland seats where traditional supporters had been put off by the chaos of the Johnson and Truss regimes. However, opposition parties have reported findings that the NHS remains the most salient issue among soft Tory voters.
The decision by the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) to reject the government’s pay offer and announce further strike action, together with the threat of coordinated strikes by junior doctors, has heaped new pressure on Sunak’s pledge to reduce waiting lists by the end of the year.
It has also handed Labour and the Lib Dems a boost ahead of a huge set of local elections in England that represents Sunak’s first electoral test since entering Downing Street. “The RCN rejecting the nursing pay deal and the likelihood of further junior doctor strikes is bad news for the government, which had been making good progress in restoring a semblance of order after the chaos of the Johnson and Truss regimes,” said a former Tory minister. “There is a political imperative to put the strikes in the rearview mirror.”
According to an Opinium poll earlier this year, the most important of Sunak’s “five priorities” to the public is cutting NHS waiting lists. Cutting national debt is more of a “nice-to-have”, while 25% said new laws on small boats crossing the Channel were not a priority.
Campaigners in the so-called blue wall seats – where affluent, liberal Tory voters have been drifting away from the party – have already reported their surprise at finding that the NHS has emerged as the main concern on the doorstep rather than more familiar issues in the seats, such as tax cuts.
“The NHS is the most salient issue on the doorstep for 2019 Tory voters, and now their failure to manage it will be on the front of newspapers day in, day out,” said a senior Lib Dem source. “My personal view is that the reason they keep going for immigration/asylum seekers is that they basically think anything is better than the story being the NHS.”
It comes at a time when most Tory MPs have been pleasantly surprised by the progress Sunak has made since becoming prime minister, which has seen him adopt cutting NHS waiting times as one of his five “priorities for 2023”. Yet the vague NHS pledge is suddenly looking harder to achieve than was initially believed.
Sunak’s team is acutely aware of the importance of improving the NHS over this year. James Forsyth, his political secretary, has long believed that a prolonged NHS crisis is likely to be a greater problem for the hopes of the party than high energy bills and the cost of living.
Some senior Tories are hoping that public support for nurses will turn as the strikes continue. “I am not sure that public sympathy will continue as a reasonable package for nurses was rejected,” said one former cabinet minister. “People are starting to realise that strikes inhibit economic growth, too. I think that the PM’s pledges look much more ambitious than perhaps was realised earlier this year, but that is a good thing.”
While the target of cutting waiting times is vague, the events of the last week have made the task far harder, according to senior NHS figures. “We cannot overlook the consequences of this week’s strike action,” said Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the NHS Confederation, pointing to the number of outpatient appointments and operations rescheduled, estimated at between 250,000 and 330,000.
“A huge amount of effort has gone into cancelling and then finding new dates for these appointments. With a waiting list already over the 7m mark and an understaffed workforce, these extra cancellations will only further delay progress in getting the waiting list down. Longer term, many are mindful about how they will recover lost ground when it comes to the backlog, and they are always concerned for the health of patients who have had operations and appointments pushed back.”
It is not the only one of Sunak’s five pledges to be under pressure this spring, despite the fact that the list was seen as easy for the government to achieve. Recent economic data has also put pressure on the promise to get “national debt falling”. Carl Emmerson, deputy director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, was only just meeting his very loose fiscal targets.
“What’s notable about the current target, to have debt falling in five years’ time, is just how loose it is compared with previous targets,” he said, “and that, despite this, the government is still only meeting it by a hair’s breadth.”
Local Tories are pledging to cut car parking charges rather than fix the potholes. It’s all a matter of priorities.
Devon roads are in a state of “managed decline”.
Something Cllr John Hart, leader of Devon County Council, said in the context of flooding seems to apply more generally: “Self-help is going to be the order of the day.”
Another Tory readers might remember, Norman Tebbit, once exhorted people to “get on your bike”. In Devon that needs revising to “get on your horse”.
I believe that local, county and national government have A DUTY OF CARE to all road users in England.
Motorists, motorcyclists and cyclists are being put in harm’s way every day by the extraordinary amount of potholes in our roads. Some of them are not only wide but very deep and I consider them to be dangerous.
The run down state of the roads is causing damage to vehicles every day. Your vehicles. Who pays for the new tyres and tracking to be realigned? Will government/council be the ones responsible for any accident that might have been caused by a driver swerving to avoid a pothole? After all, it is their fault that it is still there. Their responsibility. Is the government responsible for our physical well being if there is an accident directly relating to the state of the roads that are owned/maintained by them? What if you all sent your garage bills to your county council?
The extra money allocated by government will not begin to solve this problem nationally.
I believe that all levels of council and government are responsible in some way for funding or fixing. They need to step up to the duty of care they have to us as residents of England.
Please sign the petition. Share it to everyone. Don’t be the one that always moans and does nothing to help change things. Please, make them start to take notice and listen to our road using residents and the passengers they carry. Our roads are a disgrace.
Thank you!
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The British people, in their infinite wisdom, voted against changing the electoral system in a referendum 12 years ago. The introduction of an “alternative vote” system would have allowed them to number candidates in order of preference, and so do without the need for tactical voting, which involves guessing how other people are going to vote and making one’s own decision accordingly.
Editorial www.independent.co.uk
However, we report that the view of a number of election analysts, led by Professor Sir John Curtice, is that British voters are likely to engage in tactical voting in the local elections on 4 May on a grand scale. Thus they may achieve roughly what they would have achieved by way of the alternative vote – in this case, administering a ringing condemnation of the governing party and its record.
“Tactical voting happens when people dislike the government so much they will take whatever stick is available to beat it with,” Prof Curtice explains. An increasingly sophisticated electorate is capable of switching between Labour and the Liberal Democrats – and indeed other minor parties – depending on which candidate has the best chance of defeating the Conservative candidate in a given constituency or local government ward.
Prof Curtice predicts that this kind of anti-Tory switching could happen on the same scale as in 1992 and 1997 when Tory local election losses were exaggerated as voters sent a powerful message to an unpopular government.
Regardless of whether the government deserves to be punished, this is a welcome and democratic trend. Given that we do not have an electoral system that allows voters to express more than one preference, or that is designed to secure representation in proportion to the number of votes cast, voters must use the system we have in the most sophisticated way possible.
If the Conservatives’ real motive in introducing voter ID was to try to secure party advantage – which would seem odd, given that older voters are both less likely to have a photographic identity document and more likely to vote Tory – then they should be disproportionately punished for such an anti-democratic instinct.
If the government abolished preferential voting in the case of directly elected mayors in the belief that it would give Tory candidates an advantage, then the voters should use whatever means are available to them to deliver the bloodiest of noses.
But above all, if the voters feel strongly that the government is on the wrong track, then they are entitled to use whatever legitimate and democratic means they wish in order to convey that message. We would urge all citizens not just to use their vote, but to do so in whatever way they feel best makes their voice heard. This may involve voting for a second- or third-best candidate in the hope of blocking the worst. It may involve casting a vote on national issues rather than on the responsibilities of the local council.
In practice, it is likely that many Conservative councillors will lose their seats, not because of their own record locally, but because of the way people feel about the record of Rishi Sunak and his ministers. This is rough justice, but it is also a vibrant democracy in the hands of an increasingly informed electorate, determined to use the voting system to try to get what it wants.
“Tactical voting” is another way of saying “power to the people”.
As some of you may have read yesterday Alison Hernandez has been billed as the “Police and Crime Commissionaire for Devon” on the East Devon Conservative “Working for you” broadsheet publicising their election pledges. Is this one of them?
A salary of £88,600 per annum (May 2022) seems a lot for a uniformed door attendant, does this include a uniform allowance?
Has she published a selfie yet in her new role?
Also, should “improve assess” in her statement read: “improve asses”, just wondering? – Owl
East Devon Watch 