About that 'British Isa', chaps...

OTD in 2000 I joined Investors' Chronicle as an 'online news editor' based in Maple House, opposite Warren St tube station
Three office moves and 24 years later I'm still in the Financial Times fold...

Most notable thing about this is how George Osborne talks of austerity like it's a debate he just won at Oxford
As opposed to a decade-long clusterfuck that's left every British public service on its knees newyorker.com/magazine/2024/…

Titter ye not - this is where it's heading

Shades of the Post Office scandal here, with far more people affected
HMRC trying to argue that at least 10 known suicides aren't their fault because procedures were followed - the perennial public-sector get-out
ft.com/content/cb0c2c…

Yesterday the Daily Mail claimed National Trust has 'secretly' stopped using butter in its scones in a 'virtue-signalling betrayal' of heritage. It now transpires the very same Daily Mail glowingly published our scone recipe in 2018 MADE WITH MARGARINE!!!
dailym.ai/2FLXvMe

Tl;dr we don’t know, but not for a while….

WTAF is this heretical abomination?!
Reverend Awdry must be spinning in his grave

'bangs head on desk repeatedly...'

Also take a look at public sector schemes. Retired teachers got a bigger rise (10.1%) than working teachers (6.5%) last year

This is indeed an absolute red herring
The real 'privatisation' is the running down of the service to the point where anyone who can afford it, and has an actual life to get on with, pays to go private
Leaving NHS as a last-resort, ER-type service

What makes Thames Water 'uninvestable' might just be its £18bn debt pile and the £3bn plus of dividends it paid to its parasitic former owner
Not the fact that the regulator has belatedly woken up
ft.com/content/be156e…

Interesting David Willetts point: when Thatcher rebased state pensions to prices, Tory electoral support was much wider. Fact that it is now concentrated in the over-65s has led to this ridiculous pandering over pensions: conservativehome.com/2024/03/26/dav…