Blair .... Good Or Bad.

[wanzelbin]

Tony Blair's effectively run a huge company for 10 years, creating a good financial position, maintained excellent relations with its most important customer and supplier (the US), and sorted a rather nasty problem in the Northern Ireland department that had been causing major problems for nearly 100 years.

 

However, staff moral appears to be quite low.

[DavyR]

I also agree 100% with Jack Sparrow's comment about the ridiculous obsession with "targets" - set a target, and human ingenuity will find a way of meeting it. This always looks good on paper, regardless of its impact in the real world (which is often detrimental).

[Steve Walker]

We have elections same as you Newt, but we don't tend to shoot them in between times if that's what you mean.

 

I hear that Blair is going to provide Brown with a new official car, as a goodwill gesture for all of the years they have worked together:

 

[ColinW]

Anyone who thinks things would be better under the tories is deluded. The tories governed this country at a time when we were the world's fourth biggest oil producing nation. Did you see any of that money, because I sure didn't? When it comes to thieving, they make Blair and Brown look like rank amateurs.

The things which really hack people off about Britain in 2007, crime, feral youths, dirty hospitals and illegal immigrants won't improve at all under a Conservative government (they started the rot in all those things anyway). The difference that we will see is that instead of taking money from the south and spending in the north, like labour do, the tories will take money off us all and put it straight into their own pockets.

[Steve Walker]

I also agree 100% with Jack Sparrow's comment about the ridiculous obsession with "targets" - set a target, and human ingenuity will find a way of meeting it. This always looks good on paper, regardless of its impact in the real world (which is often detrimental).

 

I also think that the unhealthy obsession with monitoring is a problem, born of the desire to micromanage absolutely everything. Someone should remind them that you can't fatten a pig by weighing it.

[DavyR]

We have elections same as you Newt, but we don't tend to shoot them in between times if that's what you mean.

 

At least, we haven't done for some time.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spencer_Perceval

[nick]

Hi Jack Sparrow

 

I agree with you that this obsession with targets is detrimental to just about any service to which they are applied. However the problem is having decided to use the system of targets to measure performance it is a very difficult task to stop and put something else in place.

 

There may be a chance when Gordon takes over, put as he was the prime mover for it's implementation it is unlikely to disappear.

 

The role of the PM is not the nuts and bolts of implementation, that is down to a civil service which largely does as it pleases within the framework set by government. I don't think anyone can criticise the extra money that has been pumped into the NHS, that was an act of political will. How the civil servants set about applying that money is not really something in which senior politicians can or even should get involved - over and above setting the high level goals. It is not their fault that managers see a short-cut to how to achieve targets without actually dealing with the root causes of the problems the government have set out to tackle.

 

For that we need to blame some very good academics that sold the current monitoring system (I forget what it is called) to the government. For them it was an experiment, but it was sold to the government as a panacea for all ills. They dived in headlong. The academics now say it doesn't work, but have not offered any real way out of the mess they have caused. Don't forget politicians are not very bright, if they would they would make a fortune working for a living. So they come to politics burning with bright ideas of how to make the world a better place. They get elected and then the civil service tells them why they cannot do most of the things they set out to do. The few ideas they are allowed to run with then get watered down and turned into civil servants versions of what they wanted to do.

 

For Blair to have managed to do anything he wanted - and in particular fund the NHS at something like a proper level is an incredible feat. He not only did it in the face of outright opposition from the Chancellor, but hostility from with the treasury and Dept of Health civil service too!

[DavyR]

For Blair to have managed to do anything he wanted - and in particular fund the NHS at something like a proper level is an incredible feat. He not only did it in the face of outright opposition from the Chancellor, but hostility from with the treasury and Dept of Health civil service too!

 

It's just a shame that so little of that money directly reached patient care, due to someone at a high level underestimating the costs of Agenda for Change, the new Consultants' Contract, cutting junior doctors' working hours, etc.

[Sportsman]

Anyone know if Tony is likely to be having a closing down sale ?

It's just that I am in the market for a couple of small peerages (just for the kids you understand) so I thought if I bung him a few quid I might get a bit off

Worth a shot

[chesters1]

he doesent need the money Cherie due to his bungling of the immigration process directly controlled by her old man (vested interest on the part of hubby???) will make millions from those cases stretched out for years for persons that had so many loopholes to go through in legislation rushed through purely to look "hard" to a worried public.

had it not been introduced those money making persons would be "home" already.

tony needed to be hard with his euro masters rather than bow to them for the slightest reason.

 

people forget blair is responsible for everything that happens below him good and bad (at least a american president had the balls to say the buck stops here) if your old dad dies through mismanagement in a hospital then blair is to blame just as much as the hospital ,strangely though blair will get millions a year bragging about mismanagement ,the illegal invasion of iraq ,the deaths of hundreds of thousand iraqi's and afghanistani's and no doupt become a lord ,strange leadership when its subjects are fined for dropping a fag end but the leaders getting away with murder without a murmer ,now strangely a conspiritor to all the above is being "elected" reminds me of a dictator state and its jobs for the boys or communism where the leaders lead a life of riley whilst punishing everyone below them.

Edited May 10, 2007 by chesters1