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Am I alone in not caring less whether the cabinet are in the commons or not? Personally I’d rather a bigger distinction between the Executive and Legislature. And I also think parliamentary constituents can be short changed when their MP is distracted by issues at Cabinet. And of course, being an MP is a total sh1thouse job and attracts distinctly mid talent. We should aspire for our government to be drawn from a better quality pool than the den of thieves that is the Commons.

So, there is one rather significant issue that comes from having the Executive appointed by the Prime Minister, rather than as Members of Parliament:

Candidates for the role of Prime Minister would not have significant executive experience to draw upon when running for the role. MPs would not be able to tell which of their colleagues had actual decent organizational ability, because it would never be tested.

The same would be true of voters: all they would know would be which MP was best at asking silly gotcha questions whenever appointed ministers were summoned to testify before Parliament.

So, on balance, I think it would be a negative rather than a positive, because it would limit the ability of both ordinary voters and MPs to judge officials based on performance.

This seems like a ridiculous sentence for a juror who seemed to just want to understand more about the case . Prisons are full and yet they’re putting people in jail for this .

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c77zvl0777mo

Morning All!

Yes, and the judge seemed to throw the (verbal) book at him:
"Judge Tracey Lloyd-Clarke described Richards' actions as a "flagrant disobedience of the court's directions".'

Surely the discharge of him and his fellow jurors and a lecture on wasting the Court's time would have been sufficient.

A guy gets four months for misunderstanding a jury instruction which results in a delayed trial, whilst all those who defrauded the taxpayer by providing unusable PPE during a national panic, just get to sit and count the accruing interest on their ill gotten gains.

It's a funny old game Saint.

Sounds like he wasn’t even looking up anything about the trial itself, but about the definition of joint enterprise.

How is that worth 4 months in jail?

I see the lads are being driven mad by Türkiye. Prerhaps there need to be quotas for foreign words in public use.

If Turkey wishes to call itself Türkiye that's up to them. If we want to call them Turkey still thats up to us. Don't the French call us Grande Bretagne? And the Germans Großbritannien?

If they wish us to call them Turkiye, then there's no issues with being polite and respecting that.

However they want to use characters not in our alphabet.

다른 키보드도 사용 가능합니다

And special characters are easily inserted.

I almost flagged that comment.

There speaks a man who has never had to deal with Windows code page issues.

The same cultural impulse that delivers massively disproportionate representation of ethnic minorities on our screens also ensures that fathers are invariably portrayed as hapless idiots.

As I posted a few days ago, it is probably harmless and you’d sound like a nutter if you were to bang on about it, but it’s a thing and we shouldn’t demonise people who merely point it out.

Quite so, I've always thought Fathers for Justice (before they went barmy, and tried to kidnap Blair's kid) had a point.

There's a lot of superficial nonsense in our culture right now, one being upbraiding men for not taking enough paternity leave/taking on more childcare on the one hand, and then totally failing to empower them at all as fathers on the other.

They are only ever celebrated when they loudly proclaim how much they are "allies" of feminism.

Note: Fathers For Justice disbanded when a new member started *suggesting* all kinds of terroristic actions. Such as kidnapping Blair's son.

The "new member" turned out to be a police infiltrator from the group run (illegally!) by ACPO. The ones being sued, to this day, over the illegal actions they took. While infiltrating tree hugging and other mild protest groups.

xx

Incidentally, good news and long overdue:

Headlights to be reviewed after drivers complain of being 'blinded' at night
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn971jlpvvro

I have unusually sensitive eyes and driving at night is becoming a highly unpleasant experience. Not only are many modern headlights far too bright (in some cases clearly illegally bright) but too few people seem to know how to use the dipper.

Ad in the rise in the height of headlights (bigger, taller cars, SUVs etc) and the brighter lights and travelling on A roads at night can be a real pain in the arse. The brightness of even dipped lights can be an issue.

Which is ridiculous because articulated lorry headlights are typically well aimed and don’t blind me in my Polo. Tesla are by far the worst, it’s like looking into the sun.

I imagine that most of those being blinded are driving older cars on halogens. I don't drive one of our cars at night for this reason, it has me swearing constantly as I can't see dick on dipped beam. The Tesla otoh is great, I'm never blinded by oncoming traffic and can see everything. Presumably this is because my eyes are habituated driving it to high power LEDs. From this I conclude that the light issue will sort itself out when everyone is on decent headlights in a decade or so's time.

Yeah, because you're blinding everyone else. The problem is the next generation will have even brighter lights, and you'll be the one getting blinded.

We've seen this with the size of pick-up trucks in the US; the higher you are, the safer you are, so the bonnets (hoods) are now over 5 feet high.

I'm not blinding the others who have LED headlights. There doesn't have to be an arms race and one can be prevented by legislation; all it needs is everyone on roughly the same standard.

Everyone has to meet the same specification. The issue *may be* the specification needs changing. The review will look at that.

All vehicle lights are checked on the MOT and if they don’t meet the standard they will fail,the car.

If it's been the same specification forever then it clearly failed to anticipate LEDs (unsurprisingly) but now that they're there's zero point in changing it, the genie is out of the bottle. We just wait for almost all cars to have LEDs as older ones are scrapped.

But it hasn’t been the same ‘forever’. It is regularly updated and has been updated to account for LED lights. Last updated five years ago.

In that case there was no excuse for ending up in this situation, as the blinding effects of superior lights have been obvious at least since xenons came out.

I still see zero point in revising it given where we are now though. Stopping installing bright lights in new cars is about the worst possible thing that can be done as it means decades of intermittent blinding till today's LED cars die...

xx

Incidentally, good news and long overdue:

Headlights to be reviewed after drivers complain of being 'blinded' at night
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn971jlpvvro

I have unusually sensitive eyes and driving at night is becoming a highly unpleasant experience. Not only are many modern headlights far too bright (in some cases clearly illegally bright) but too few people seem to know how to use the dipper.

Ad in the rise in the height of headlights (bigger, taller cars, SUVs etc) and the brighter lights and travelling on A roads at night can be a real pain in the arse. The brightness of even dipped lights can be an issue.

Which is ridiculous because articulated lorry headlights are typically well aimed and don’t blind me in my Polo. Tesla are by far the worst, it’s like looking into the sun.

I imagine that most of those being blinded are driving older cars on halogens. I don't drive one of our cars at night for this reason, it has me swearing constantly as I can't see dick on dipped beam. The Tesla otoh is great, I'm never blinded by oncoming traffic and can see everything. Presumably this is because my eyes are habituated driving it to high power LEDs. From this I conclude that the light issue will sort itself out when everyone is on decent headlights in a decade or so's time.

I'm 42 and drive a modern car.

You are incorrect in your imagining.

If you are still having visual issues while having LED lights yourself, have you looked at e.g. Zeiss Drivesafe?

Never heard of it. What is it?

Edit - on checking this appears to be something to do with a lens for your glasses. But I don't wear glasses, so it's not likely to be terribly helpful.

Have you had the eye stuff looked at? AIUI night issues are quite common and often not properly looked for by optoms..

I have very thorough annual eye tests paid for by the NHS as my father had glaucoma.

No I do not have eyesight problems.

I have a problem with lights that are ridiculously bright whatever the expectation of the other driver.

YouGov / Sky / Times voting intention

RefUK 27%(+1),
CON 17%(nc),
LAB 17%(-3),
GRN 16%(+1)
LDEM 15%(nc),

According to YouGov, the 17% for Labour is, they believe believe, the lowest we have shown them on and the Green score is their highest.

Needless to say, it's an unusual result with four parties within 2 points of each other.

https://x.com/SamCoatesSky/status/1983053821849817502

Labour and the Tories now tied and only just ahead of the Greens and LDs shows that both the main parties are finding it difficult to distinguish themselves. Labour are losing votes to their left to the Greens and to the centre to the LDs and the Tories have already lost the right to Reform and under Kemi are losing centrist voters to the LDs as well.

Reform ahead clearly but only on 27% so still very vulnerable to anti Farage tactical voting

It's a fascinating time to be involved in politics! There is a very simple message from the electorate - they're mad as hell and they're not going to take it any more. The party who can offer the most convincing fix for the mess will win.

You don't think the winner will be the Party offering the most attractive illusion?

I think there are two more cycles: Reform and then radical left (Green or Sultana) And then we may consider facing up to our problems. But we are not at rock bottom yet.

Radical Left would be apocalyptic.

No-one would come out with any private assets intact out the other side, and it'd take us decades to recover, and many of us never would.

Interesting question? Would we prefer a Corbyn/Foot type government or Farage/Trump type of Government?

I appreciate it sounds like a choice of which foot would you like to shoot, but if I had to choose I would go for Corbyn/Foot because although they might be worse at running the economy (maybe?) they aren't obviously destroying the democracy. Further left and of course that is also a possibilty

Foot was a democrat, yes.

I would not be confident that a government led by Your Party would uphold democracy.

WRT Farage/Trump, I think that the latter is obviously willing to threaten violence against opponents, and to overturn constitutional norms. Farage is more of a Captain Mainwaring/Colonel Blimp-type character.