With Bio-Waste Spreader: "The government has appointed ex-National Farmers Union (NFU) president Baroness (Minette) Batters to lead a 'farm profitability review'. Although she was an effective campaigner for national food self-sufficiency during her NFU tenure, her record of resisting environmental initiatives suggests she'll simply propose a watering-down of green regulations to improve profits…"
With MD: "The Nuffield Trust has helpfully combined different data sets to work out where the NHS budget went in England in 2022-23. It breaks down as follows: NHS trusts spent £68.1bn on acute care, and £10.4bn on mental health care; and the total GP/primary care spend was £9.4bn. Community healthcare by NHS trusts cost £7.8bn, ambulance care £3bn, and the local authority public health grant was a tiny £2.7bn…"
With Dr B Ching: "The government has promised that the unified rail network under Great British Railways (GBR) will 'put passengers first' from 2027. But innovations by its own companies on the east-coast mainline put operational convenience before passengers. In February 2024, government-owned LNER started a 'pilot' where refundable off-peak walk-up fares were suspended for trips from London King's Cross to Newcastle, Berwick and Edinburgh (and vice versa). The 1990s rail privatisation legislation protected and regulated those fares…"
With Remote Controller: "Forget a butterfly flutter causing a tornado. A truly startling example of chaos theory is that the 26,966 Lichfield constituents who voted for Dave Robertson of Labour or Richard Howard of Reform on 4 July last year resulted, last Monday, in Sir Michael Fabricant high-fiving Sir Daley Thompson in a fake house in north-west London while saying: 'Groovy, baby!' The 30 percent anti-Conservative swing that ended Fabricant's 32-year parliamentary career left him free to sign up for Celebrity Big Brother…"
With Old Sparky: "Billions in subsidies for developing renewable electricity projects are issued via auctions in annual 'allocation rounds' (ARs). This year's round, AR7, is running badly late, to the detriment of energy secretary Ed Miliband's already flaky 2030 target for decarbonisation. The delay arises from an embarrassing, unpublicised technical cock-up in the energy department's budgeting methodology…"
With Lunchtime O'Boulez: "As fallout continues from the Wigmore Hall's decision to reject Arts Council England funding – a two-fingered gesture at how the council functions – ACE is on a mission to save face. Last week chair Nicholas Serota 'congratulated' the Wigmore for being financially able to go it alone, while at the same time defending ACE's bureaucratic Let's Create strategy, which ties arts organisations in knots…"
With Slicker: "Just as global trade is interconnected, so too is global finance. But while cross-border trade flows are transparent, similar money flows have become far less so. And therein lies much of the risk, both short and long term from the Trump tariff shock to world financial markets because of what another Donald – former US defence secretary Rumsfeld – once described as "the known unknowns..."
Letter from Port Louis
From Our Own Correspondent: "After 60 years, a deal is finally in sight under which Mauritius will gain sovereignty of the Chagos Islands from Britain. Some on the right in the UK are aghast; but it has Washington's blessing. Only Mauritius, and its Chagossian subjects, are left pondering their fate. As ever with post-colonial clean-ups, the devil is in the defence contracts and deferred payments…"