The fall of the Tory party

Was listening to a podcast the other day about the forthcoming local and mayoral elections.

Always thought Andy Street was not too bad for a Tory, seems to work quite closely with Andy Burnham and has distanced himself from the more crazy policies/elements of the Tory party. So was very surprised to hear that his long-term partner is Michael Fabricant. I am not saying there is anything wrong with that, just found it surprising!

I am not saying there is anything wrong with that

There's plenty wrong with it under the "never fuck a Tory" rule, and Fabricant having any sort of life partner is odd, such a strange guy I struggle to believe he's real and his name isn't a too on the nose joke.

what a fucking shitshow of a heartless government, in an ill conceived attempt at points scoring with a minority of right wing biggots.
fucking fuck the fucking tories.

Amen to that. What blows my mind is how much hatred is being whipped up for what's actually a fairly insignificant number of arrivals. Only 116,000 people have crossed the channel since 2018... barely more than the capacity of Wembley in 6 years. 5x that number emigrated from the UK last year alone. Imagine if we concentrated these wasted Rwanda funds on welcoming these desperate individuals and helping them get set up to contribute to our society?

If anyone wants to waste over 20 minutes of their lives on Liz Truss blaming everyone else for her own obvious and embarrassing mistakes, I can recommend this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNOBmL4DOc8

Imagine if we concentrated these wasted Rwanda funds on welcoming these desperate individuals and helping them get set up to contribute to our society?

Yeah but then who else would there be to blame for ruining public services and making people's lives shit?

It's just all so dark, init.

called AirTanker

Mis-spelt with a ‘T’?

Called AirTanker

Mis-spelt without a ‘Cun’?

The RAF have already said they don't have a secure enough airfield

Huh?

Andy Street was not too bad for a Tory

I've never understood how someone could rise to the top of the John Lewis Partnership, and be a Tory,
or,
how a Tory could be allowed to rise to the top of the JLP.

I'm sure his rise to the top was all down to his own brilliance and he could have done it without those pesky partners.

I asked PM for his response to deaths in the channel this morning:
“It’s a reminder of why my plan it so important because there’s a
certain element of compassion about everything that we’re doing.

“We want to prevent people making these very dangerous crossings.. if
you look at what’s happening criminal gangs are exploiting vulnerable
people they are packing more and more people into these non seaworthy
dinghies and you’ve seen an enormous increase in the numbers over the
past few years.

“This is what tragically happens when they push people out to see and
that’s why for matters of compassion more than anything else we must
actually break this business model”

https://twitter.com/KateEMcCann/status/1782724140971020558

Nice to see Newsround press pack is still going on.

A fine puff piece to a client journalist FFS 😑

Compassion?

WAFC Sunak is

Then put the processing centre in France, like has been offered by the French already.

Sure, that's the truly demonic part, this is all performative cruelty. Tories need a few drowned kids to keep it a live issue.

I’ve been told JLP’s “partner” model is only really the case because it has a huge pension deficit and so no one can afford to buy it. Not really as idealistic as I first thought.

Employees (partners) at JLP effectively own the business, so it is pretty idealistic. At least in comparison to most other profit driven companies.

As for no-one being able to 'afford' to buy the company, a company wide ballot would need to be held and a majority of employees would have to agree before they could even think of selling. Basically it's a non-starter.

Interesting. Do you work there? [i don’t] They were looking to sell 25% last year. I thought it needs only the representative council of the partners not every single partner in an open, but agree even that would be hard to get - maybe for a list of reserved matters it would need a full vote, I’ve not looked at the partnership agreement.

It was idealistic when set up, but it has had several bad years, isn’t paying out profit shares (three years running, which makes 3 of 7 since the 1950s i just read) and I was told it didn’t take external investment last year because it couldn’t find an investor.

I suppose it may have found one and then there partner council rejected the investment anyway!

I also thought it had an underlying huge pension deficit but that seems to be old news and now sorted out more or less

Didn't everything have a massive pension deficit when the interest rates were super low, then the truss-meister came and sorted it all out?

Haha probably! Theirs was particularly generous / unsustainable.

then the truss-meister came and sorted it all out?

Haven't the Tories lowered the life expectancy as well? Genius move to sort the pension deficits out from the liability side as well.

I worked there from 2015 to 2017 and was involved in the bottom level of democracy. The council has no executive power over day-to-day decisions. They hold a vote of confidence in the Chairperson every year and other than that they’re little more than a talking shop. I don’t remember enough about the constitution to say whether they would have a vote on something like a part sell off. Culturally it had reached a place where it was strictly hierarchical and speaking up was looked down in, in many ways it felt closest to the civil service which is where I started my career. From the various places I’ve worked, I’d say the franchised model has been best for promoting the healthy tension between top level ‘we need to go this way’ and operational ‘that won’t work because of xyz’.

As for the mayor of Birmingham, it was him and Mark Price who set the partnership up for a fall with their footprint expansions during and after the financial crisis whilst never sorting the back end processes out. The rumour was they didn’t get on and that was evidenced in how they built completely parallel organisations. I was in IT for Waitrose and had a counterpart in John Lewis and another in ‘Group’. There was only really enough work for one of us. IT overall had something like 1200 heads supporting a 500 store footprint across JL and Waitrose which was absurd. Six months after I left they brought the outsourcers in and everyone I used to work with was TUPE’d or made redundant.

As often happens, Street went off to to politics, Price was made Cameron’s business Tsar and the new leadership carried the can for the consequences of their decisions.