Best Of

"Bedbound pensioner, 84, convicted of not insuring car she'll never use again

An 84-year-old woman who is bedbound and reliant on daily care has been convicted of a driving offence after failing to insure a car"

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/pensioner-convicted-car-insurance-bedbound-single-justice-procedure-dvla-b1261313.html

Paywalled. Can't see a rather critical issue. Is it on the road, or on her drive?

If the former, then the alternative is, I suppose, being accused of dumping - which may not be preferable these days?

Also, did she respond to the notice?

“My car which has always been parked on my drive was of no use to me and I did not insure it on renewal as I will never drive again and have surrendered my driving licence."

There is no mention of whether it was SORNed.

Presumably no, which is the issue of computer-says-no idiots, following the Process State.

The Process is to SORN, you have not followed Process, so you must be prosecuted.

The logical response to that response would instead be "OK, if the car is on drive and you are not driving it again and have surrendered your licence, you need to SORN it, we will assist you with that". Rather than "we will send you to court for not following Process".

Yes, remember 2015GE and how Martin "Kaboom" Boon reacted to this, by self-censoring his polls.

Being an outlier is uncomfortable, but it doesn't mean you're wrong. It is high-risk though: you are feted as a genius if you're right, and pilloried if you're wrong.

It was Damian from Survation who self censored his own poll.

Fair enough. I recall Martin Boon making a fool of himself over it, though.

Perhaps he was simply too confident of the result and the outcome (incorrectly) on his Twitter feed.

2017 was a bonkers time.

I was told the week Mrs May announced the election the Tory private polling had the Tories winning a majority of 294 and potentially over 300 if Scotland played ball.

I have no doubt that poll was kosher (I think the best public poll had the Tories winning a majority of around 200).

The irony is that the polling led Mrs May to propose the dementia tax thinking a hefty majority was in the bag.

OGH and I made a hefty profit selling the Tories at 395ish seats.

Yes, she got found it. I lost money because I thought no-one would ever touch Jeremy Corbyn. Her style of privately deciding what to do and then refusing to engage, communicate or listen really pissed people off.

Thankfully, I traded out my position to near neutral on the night itself.

To be fair, at least May announced policies. Instead of Starmer's ending of trial by jury in most cases, throwing away British sovereign territory and paying for the privilege, and hiking taxes to pump directly into benefits. Not to mention the probable (we'll see) approval for the Chinese 'embassy'.

One has to think like a Labourite.

The objective here is to consolidate the left-wing vote in an environment where Labour is bleeding heavily to the Greens and Lib Dems, and in the next election its base alone might put it in contention in a 4-way fight. It isn't to win over "floating voters" to Reform/Tories, and non-Labour voters rooting for Wes Streeting are like non-Tory voters rooting for Rory Stewart.

So, I'd say Ed Miliband has a real chance.

Labour would be better served by worrying about the Greens and piss diamonds than Reform.

Polanski was not good on QT. His ‘let’s get migrants over to do the jobs we don’t want to do’ is not the winning line he thought it was. As Kelly Osborne found out in the USA.

It shows his privilege and comfortable middle-class position, though.

Which is where most Greens now come from.

The sort of people who hated Brexit because they lost their minimum wage cleaners and babysitters.

Show me you don't know any Remainers, without saying you don't know any Remainers.

I’ve met people like that. In Wiltshire, there were some incomers to Malmesbury who fought against development on a mishmash of Green/Nimby excuses. After some wine, they would comment that if a factory got built locally, then wages would go up - which would hit them.

Strangely, the locals (pushed into the housing estate over the hill) all voted…

Maybe Wiltshire attracts that sort of person. It's not an argument I have ever heard anybody make round here.

They tended to be people who’d cashed in a house in London for a lovely stone house with land.

I found it interesting that they’d acquired the attitude of the Squirearchy with it - what they want is economic & social stasis. At least locally, for them.

Right, they've bought into a certain idea of the countryside, that they don't want disrupted. And they're insecure because they aren't rooted in their community. And they might have left London because "it's changed so much". They might not actually be that well off either - they have accumulated wealth through the happy accident of buying a terraced house in London at the right time. So they're economically insecure too. It makes sense. But among the left liberal denizens of my bit of London - the absolutely most tofu eating of the Remainer wokerati, seriously - this is not an argument I have ever heard.
Ironically at the time of Brexit our cleaner was not from the EU. Whereas now our cleaner is from the EU. And our child minder was from the PB Tory saintly caste of "white British", although we don't employ her any more as our kids are too old. We still see her and her family from time to time, though. We pay our cleaner £17/hour. Nobody I know saw EU membership as a source of cheap domestic labour, we certainly didn't.

Polanski made a big mistake with that comment as it not only highlighted migrants for jobs that Brits don't want to do but also denigrated an entire profession to the business of 'wiping bums'.

I know far more about social care than I would like due to family situation and this kind of labelling is appalling frankly.

But we all make mistakes and it was live TV and he is a newbie. The best bet for him is to explain himself more and apologise.

Or, knowing how he operates, do a tic tock of him being a carer for a day on the front line etc.

Polanski made a major error there. Migrants come here to do the jobs we don’t want to do.

Reminiscent of Kelly Osborne in the US on The Voice. But at least she was challenged for her supremacy.

I don't think so. Polanski isn't going for the Reform vote.

Being pro-immigration doesn't have a plurality on PB but has significant support and puts clear green water between the Greens and the overcrowded anti-immigrant vote of Mahmood/Jenrick/Farage.

The unrestricted immigration and extreme nimbyism puts Polanski in competition with the LibDems though.

I suppose Polanski isn't even pretending he wants economic growth though.

If you are genuinely pro growth you will argue for immigration. People who don't like immigration will accept the trade off of less growth, which is essentially Starmer's position. Coincidentally, and I think it is coincidental, Polanski's suggestion of immigration for menial jobs was the unspoken policy of previous governments because it's one of the few levers they can pull to improve the economy.

Wrong

There are multiple ways to achieve growth without importing labour.

Investing in productivity is one way. Another is moving the economy towards higher paid, higher productivity industries that already exist.

Cheap importer labour is the cheap boiled sweets of economics - feels good at first. Terrible as a long term diet.

Anyone else fed up with "scanning a QR-code" and "downloading our app" ?

I'm fed up being obligated to interface with the world around me though my phone.

No, it makes my life so much easier.

It makes my life considerably harder. Particularly if I don't have my phone. Or I do have my phone but it has no battery.

Honestly, the tech of 2007 was entirely fine.

Agreed. Being forced to download apps just to buy something is a complete no-no for me as a basic security issue. (Quite apart from the possibility of the QR code or the website in question being fake, like those put on stickers over car-parking site notice QR codes.)