Best Of

Didn't expect to read this in the Economist.

"It increasingly looks as if Lucy Letby’s conviction was unsafe
The case of a nurse jailed for killing babies exposes deep problems with British justice"

https://www.economist.com/britain/2025/02/10/it-increasingly-looks-as-if-lucy-letbys-conviction-was-unsafe

I wish instead of making these judgements in the print media, the papers asked the questions and then let the processes take their course.

I am not close enough to the case to know one way or the other, but clearly Letby’s representatives have a right to argue that and to go through the judicial process to have the case reviewed. If the conviction is unsafe then she should be freed, obviously.

But there’s something in this whole saga I find deeply unedifying, with commentators enjoying loudly playing judge and jury in the centre of a deeply troubling situation which involves an awful lot of bereaved parents.

There was an article in Guardian (yes, I know) earlier this week by Neena Modi, Professor of Neonatal medicine at Imperial College and past president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, in which she sets out her concern, notably that Countess of Chester wasn't equipped or staffed to deal with really seriously ill babies, and some at least of these children had been identified as such before their mothers went into labour.

If she's guilty then she is currently correctly incarcerated. It does no harm to re-investigate the evidence. If she is still found guilty she stays there. If she is innocent, then its in all our interests to have justice done.

I think the great danger about this case is that a lot of people have started taking an interest but without enough evidence. They were not in the court for the trial. They did not hear the witnesses. They are aware of previous failures on legal systems, such as the seemingly similar Dutch case. And so a lot of people are starting to question whether the outcome of the case was right.

I am always skeptical when statistics and juries meet. In general the great unwashed has little comprehension of statistics and is certainly not able to spot fallacies in the thinking. There was, allegedly, a chart showing that all the babies who died or were harmed happened when Letby was on duty. It has been alleged that other deaths happened when she was not there but were excluded from said chart. Some people suspect that the chart which seems so damning may in fact be an example of the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. Others assert that it isn't.

Its surely only fair (to all concerned) to be robust in this.

@benrileysmith

Keir Starmer tells Zelensky that Ukraine **will** one day join Nato, despite Trump’s defence sec ruling it out this week.

Also appears to call for extra weapons for Ukraine (“further lethal aid”).

Readout of their call below. Very much not the Trump admin’s position.

https://x.com/benrileysmith/status/1890337756464689222

Which is all well and good but unless the European powers are willing to fully step up to the mark and replace all of the current US support so that Trump loses his whip hand it is an empty gesture. We cannot do this alone and I hope we are speaking urgently to France, Germany, Poland and the Baltic states together with anyone else who is willing to help.

We need to be in a position to tell Trump to piss off but words alone or modest additional quantities of armaments will not do it.

I think we should not be too parochial about this. Pretty much the whole western world is suffering from low growth right now, it is not just our inept politicians that are struggling for the answers.

The reasons for this are complicated but clearly the overwhelming debt arising from long periods of overspending is catching up with us. We are struggling to keep demand up. We can't afford to invest for our own future, we are dependent upon the generosity of others. In addition we face a lot of challenges like a need to do something radical about our defence systems and a public sector, as we were discussing last night, that absorbs ever more funds with no additional results.

This is not just happening here. The particular problems may vary from country to country but the overall gloom is the same. I fear that our economic model, based on ever greater boosts of public spending funded by debt to get short term demand in the hope that that sparks wider growth may have run out of road.

Indeed. And we’ve also run out of road in terms of mass immigration- which has been our “go-to” for two decades

Public won’t take any more. Britain is mutinous

Mass immigration is another, largely futile attempt to keep the Ponzi scheme going. When old age pensions were introduced most recipients would live a relatively brief time, certainly in comparison with their working history. That is no longer true.

My recently departed mother in law worked at a modest level until her late 50s when she retired because her husband had already retired at 55. She lived to 89. Given the breaks when raising her children she received pension for nearly as long as she worked. Her husband left school at 14 and started work. He retired 41 years later as an electrical and mechanical engineer and then lived another 26 years before dying of Alzheimer's.

Neither of these is even remotely sustainable unless you import a lot more young worker (or marks I believe they are called) to buy into the scheme. Many in the UK may not like the other consequences of mass immigration but they may not like the alternatives either.

Worth remembering as far as pensions go that when the National Assistance Act 1948 which established the modern State Pension was passed, average male life expectency was 64.8 years. It was no accident that the pension age was set at 65.