Best Of

FPT ref DavidL's comments on juries

1) "pull jurors out of a hat" - my experience is being sorted into groups of 16 at the beginning of the week but it could just be done by computer in a matter of seconds once the juror register is complete
2) Judge briefing the Jury on their duties and responsibilities - apart from case specific issues this is boilerplate. Could be online with a little quiz and declaration, e.g. "If I do my own research on the internet" will I a) be better briefed than the legal counsel, b) be helping my fellow jurors to understand the case or c) do 6 months d) all of the above?
3) Check in advance whether witnesses need screens and prepare. In your cases I assume it's a given, so the screens should be there by default.

None of the above has to be on the critical path.

My experience is that if you're assigned to a trial in the morning then it's 11.30am by the time you're sat down, HHJ does his solemn briefing etc, now 12, they have a brief conflab and decide that there isn't time for 2 opening addresses before lunch, "jury will only remember one side", so break. 2pm before you're back in court in the afternoon, if Judge or barristers don't have an afternoon clash.

There are delays around sending Juries out and reassembling them, but they can just be sent to the next room rather than allowed to disperse.

Juries can be taken off the critical path for most of it. Leveson has just blamed them for the inefficiency of the professionals involved.

There is no way 2 would work - most people will just fast forward the video or put it on and do something else

Have all the jury prep etc run by court staff. The day before.

Have jury prep as a courthouse function, run by staff. As a continual operation. Lining up juries, get them sorted, warned, lanyarded.

So 9am, the judge, lawyers, etc all roll in together.

Judge can have the option to say - “I don’t look this jury, do you have a similar one? But in a shade of mauve?”

You're right, of course you're right, but you know the objections.

Spending a bit more to get a lot more is still spending more, and we've conditioned ourselves to not want that.

It's moving spending from frontline staff to backstage. And we've massively conditioned ourselves to not want that.

Yet again on pb the most vociferous criticism of the removal of jury trials comes from the very same people who want to massively cut public spending and reduce public sector pay and benefits dramatically.

The concept of we only get what we are willing to pay for seems to have completely passed them by.

What utter twaddle. I have been consistent in my opposition to this proposal and have suggested both above and BTL ways to raise money.

The justice system is the first and most fundamental duty of the state. This is not about saving money or not having the money to spend. It is a power grab by an illiberal and authoritarian minded bunch of third rate politicians with little understanding of or appreciation for our history, our freedoms and the fundamentals of a truly liberal democracy.

I am certainly not supporting Lammy's move, although I suspect he is not aiming at that as an end goal either but using this position to shift the Overton window in order get the Leveson proposals through.

If we want to successfully reform our justice system from here, then we have to spend significant amounts of money. We have to be willing to pay more in tax.

The total budget for the Ministry of Justice is ~£12bn, but the majority of that is on prisons, rather than the court system itself. You could fix the issues in the court system, without doing away with jury trials, for a sum of money that is less than a rounding error in the budget as a whole.

I am generally supportive of paying more tax, and I agree that the roots of the present crisis lie in the money saved from the Justice budget in the Coalition years, but I don't think your argument is on good ground here.

Flicking through the last thread I noticed a few of the Reform Lite posters criticising Rachel for being photographed with a chess board on her desk and one of them suggested she was trying to make herself look clever. She was infact underr 14 chess champion.

I think there's a lot of misogyny when it comes to Rachel. Would people be so patronising if it was Gove for example?

As always, two things can be true at once.

Is some criticism of Reeves misogynistic? Yes, because misogyny exists and I don’t think it’s particularly controversial to say that woman are often held to different standards. If you accept that then it does of course naturally follow that some of the criticism she attracts comes from that place.

But let’s not conflate criticism of her as being a poor steward of the economy as being down to her gender. She’s a poor steward of the economy. Her decisions have been highly questionable. Her political tactics have all backfired. She has contributed to a significant amount of economic uncertainty and loss of confidence in the UK. Criticism does not always equal prejudice.

More fundamentally, chess champion/enthusiast or not, why would she have a chess set placed so prominently in front of her at her desk at work, if not for the photo op and to get people like us talking about her chess prowess?

Whenever I see a chess board strategically placed in a promotional photo I always check to see if it is correctly set up. You would be amazed how often the board is the wrong way round. Non-players might be surprised to know there is a right and wrong way. Regular players spot the mistake instantly.

I guess the job of placing the board is delegated to an oik and the chances of that person knowing about this is less than fifty-fifty.

Spot the deliberate mistake...

The king and queen on the top rank are on the wrong squares

Ironic that the 'BBC Verify' post in the live feed about the two child benefit cap and poverty uses the bullshit 'relative poverty' measure.

You may not like it, that's fair enough, but it's a clear, objective, and widely used measure. Hardly something to criticise BBC Verify for.

Out of interest what would you propose as the measure of poverty? Does a child need to be starving, in rags, no shoes?

When we interrogate our idea of poverty it is always a relative concept at its core, because poverty is ultimately about being excluded from the normal patterns of consumption and participation in our current society. In my view it is so-called 'absolute' poverty measures that are bullshit.

Not being able to 'keep up with the Joneses' in a neighbourhood pissing contest doesn't make someone poor. It makes them unable to afford an unnecessary and 'fashionable' splurging of cash you don't have on things you don't need. And the idea that should be subsidised by the taxpayer is just another tier in the cake of relative poverty bullshit.

Edited: as an aside, I'll be AFK for the Budget, which is a shame but needs must.

It's not about keeping up with Jones's. The point is that what we might consider an absolute poverty line now would be very different to the absolute poverty line 50 years ago, because we have different expectations about what constitutes a minimum standard of living, and these expectations are related to what we consider a normal standard of living. This is why I find the idea of some kind of objective and immutable poverty line fundamentally dishonest.

As always it depends on what is done with the concept. Relative and absolute poverty are clearly different ideas. Relative poverty has the property of being more or less by definition ineradicable. Absolute poverty has the property of being a quantity of immiseration which is unacceptable when encountered, especially in children.

Damage is done by leftists who elide relative poverty into something self evidently bad, when it is not self evident. Rightists do harm by insisting the real measure should be more like absolute poverty, which we should not contemplate for anyone. Imprecision and ambiguity is the permanent friend of lobbyists.

If you define relative poverty as some fraction of median income then it needn't be ineradicable as long as the fraction is not too close to 1. This doesn't mean that we should necessarily seek to eradicate it - like any policy we should consider the balance of costs and benefits. Most likely the poor will always be with us.
Personally I just think that people who advocate for 'absolute' poverty measures just haven't thought very deeply about what poverty really is or how we define it.

I think that defining poverty as a % of median income is pretty meaningless.

But, I would agree that definitions of poverty can and should rise over time. Subsistence is $3 per day, per person, but in a rich world country, you would want to define poverty well above that figure.

You're going soft, Sean.

I am going out to lunch at a pub overlooking the estuary, while I still have the money to afford it.

The existence of jury trials is NOT the reason for court delays. The reasons are:

1. Reducing court sitting days even though the Lady Chief Justice has said judges can sit for more days so there is no lack of availability.
2. Closure and selling of courts.
3. A lack of sufficient funding for the justice system at every level.

1 and 2 are easily remediable. You do not abolish an 800 year old fundamental principle because of a lack of short-term funding. Unless you're an illiberal cretin, that is.

This is a power grab by the state of one of the few areas in British life which really is democratic, generally - though not invariably - works well and, crucially, is not controlled by the state and cannot be pressured by it. And can tell the state to get stuffed when it overreaches eg Ponting, the Colston Four. That is why authoritarians hate it and want to get rid of it. It must be resisted by all possible means.

This proposal shows how much contempt Labour has for us and our liberties.

Was Colston overreach? Not everyone agrees that its ok to vandalise things you don't like. I'd have preferred them found guilty but with a minimum penalty. I.e. they did the crime, but we understand and sympathise with why.

Indeed see also the Labour councillor who was acquitted of hate speech. I support juries overall but when they render not guilty verdicts for political reasons rather than on the law the case for judge led verdicts in middle ranked offences grows. The escort rider who killed an elderly lady crossing the road at speed escorting the Duchess of Edinburgh might also have been convicted of death by careless driving by a judge which a jury acquitted him of

Driving offences is an area where trial by jury is failing the victims, pick any 12 random people and there's probably 2 or 3 who think it's normal to text and speed.

If the public at large think that people should be able to text and speed and that this is just an inherent risk of life, then that’s the jury system working as intended.

Ironic that the 'BBC Verify' post in the live feed about the two child benefit cap and poverty uses the bullshit 'relative poverty' measure.

You may not like it, that's fair enough, but it's a clear, objective, and widely used measure. Hardly something to criticise BBC Verify for.

Out of interest what would you propose as the measure of poverty? Does a child need to be starving, in rags, no shoes?

It is not legitimate. Using a relative measure means someone can be perfectly well-off but because others are even better off the former are deemed to be 'poor'. And if those even better off suddenly have a great downturn in fortune then the previously 'poor' magically becomes 'wealthy' despite having no extra money whatsoever.

An absolute measure is fairer.

An absolute measure at what level?

Surely it wouldn't be beyond the whit of man to find a standardised measurement of what we think people should be able to afford to achieve a basic standard of living, and then link it to the ONS "basket of goods" inflation measure or similar?

A good part of the problem (at least from a technical point of view) is that the driver (or otherwise) of poverty is housing cost. My children may well be technically below the "child poverty" line based on income, but as we own our house mortgage free, and don't have tastes in things like cars, in reality we can live like kings.

FPT ref DavidL's comments on juries

1) "pull jurors out of a hat" - my experience is being sorted into groups of 16 at the beginning of the week but it could just be done by computer in a matter of seconds once the juror register is complete
2) Judge briefing the Jury on their duties and responsibilities - apart from case specific issues this is boilerplate. Could be online with a little quiz and declaration, e.g. "If I do my own research on the internet" will I a) be better briefed than the legal counsel, b) be helping my fellow jurors to understand the case or c) do 6 months d) all of the above?
3) Check in advance whether witnesses need screens and prepare. In your cases I assume it's a given, so the screens should be there by default.

None of the above has to be on the critical path.

My experience is that if you're assigned to a trial in the morning then it's 11.30am by the time you're sat down, HHJ does his solemn briefing etc, now 12, they have a brief conflab and decide that there isn't time for 2 opening addresses before lunch, "jury will only remember one side", so break. 2pm before you're back in court in the afternoon, if Judge or barristers don't have an afternoon clash.

There are delays around sending Juries out and reassembling them, but they can just be sent to the next room rather than allowed to disperse.

Juries can be taken off the critical path for most of it. Leveson has just blamed them for the inefficiency of the professionals involved.

There is no way 2 would work - most people will just fast forward the video or put it on and do something else

Have all the jury prep etc run by court staff. The day before.

Have jury prep as a courthouse function, run by staff. As a continual operation. Lining up juries, get them sorted, warned, lanyarded.

So 9am, the judge, lawyers, etc all roll in together.

Judge can have the option to say - “I don’t look this jury, do you have a similar one? But in a shade of mauve?”

You're right, of course you're right, but you know the objections.

Spending a bit more to get a lot more is still spending more, and we've conditioned ourselves to not want that.

It's moving spending from frontline staff to backstage. And we've massively conditioned ourselves to not want that.

Yet again on pb the most vociferous criticism of the removal of jury trials comes from the very same people who want to massively cut public spending and reduce public sector pay and benefits dramatically.

The concept of we only get what we are willing to pay for seems to have completely passed them by.

I have no idea if this is true, but it is rational for opinions to come in related sets, and opinions which don't arise in related ways lack an underlying coherence. Rather than turning the point into a meaningless (and maybe unverified) piece of ad hominem, it would be more useful to examine the relation of the set of opinions, and consider its worth.

What is irrational about wanting to have a much smaller state while keeping the jury system? We had juries when we had a much smaller state. (I am not proposing either, personally, but there is nothing counter intuitive about it.)

The frustration is the party led by this group of people have been in power most of my lifetime, and to be fair match the views of the electorate in not wanting to increase taxes.

So we have court rooms out of use because of leaks, because we don't want to spend money.
We have a lack of lawyers and judges, because we don't want to spend money.
Our prisons can't cope, because we don't want to spend money.
Prisoners come out early, without any thought of rehabilitation and commit more crime.

Whilst I would prefer jury trials and functioning prisons myself, it does grate to hear the attacks on the status quo from the supporters of the establishment party with zero consideration of how we get here, or any serious thought on how we can change course and what resources that requires.

Except for a very short time under Mrs T, public expenditure has risen throughout the last decades. The state in various forms manages 44% of total expenditure, over £40,000 per household, just a little short of the highest in Europe and in the middle of the developed pack. Despite that there is not a single area not crying out for much more spending. Something is wrong with the model, but it isn't that taxes are very significantly too low.

We have no money

Yet we are spending £700 million on saving a handful of salmon. Billions on an armoured vehicle that literally makes the occupants chronically ill. We can’t find GPs, while we train GPs who can’t get jobs. We have no money to look after children with special needs, but councils are block booking taxis to send them to school - as opposed to a school bus.

It’s feast-or-famine mode spending. Often on insane things.

This is the fault of the Treasury - insane budget rules where we seem to look at today and don't worry about tomorrow. The GP issue is a perfect example - we can't afford to hire them full time, but we can afford emergency cover. Or transport - can't afford a bus but can afford emergency cover.

Do you get it yet? We cut because the Treasury says we must cut. But cuts to provision do not remove the need - which remains. And emergency provision must be done - from a separate budget - which costs more than the cut.

I keep saying we need to invest in this stuff and be told we have no money. We do - we're literally burning it. Will need a short transition where we both burn cash and invest cash, but then no more bonfires.

This post hits so hard. It seems like Westminster and Whitehall know it too, but won't do anything.

I am utterly fucking sick of this stupidity. Its as bad up here as well. Winter snot season - schools asking parents to send their kids in with tissues as the school is running out. Teachers joking about wanting classroom supplies for presents from their kids instead of sweeties. There's literally no money at the front line - but we have schools with heating stuck on full so that everyone melts and windows need to keep being opened (in the summer as well!) because budget rules don't allow repairs when the school is scheduled for replacement in 2019.

Bureaucrats drown in the micro whilst missing the macro and strategic. You can't the detail because the structure is wrong, but you can't spend money on the structure because you're spending too much money in emergency micro fixes.

House building. Everyone agrees we need to build more houses but we're building less. Why?
Land banking by developers
Arcane endless planning regulations
Housing Associations starved of resources
A comprehensive lack of builders sparkies joiners plumbers plasterers etc etc - oh and we'd have to import much of the materiel because we've stopped making them because lack of money.
But we can't import as we left the EU and they cost more. And we don't like all these forrin workers taking jobs from the untrained unwilling flag shagging fucks.

FFS. Start at the strategic. OK, we need to build 1.5m houses the fuck yesterday.
So we need to train the people who will build them. FE colleges here is cash. And a marketing campaign to make building cool
We need to invest in a brickworks and other stuff - tax incentives to get manufacturing here
We need to allow LHAs to borrow to build
We need to bonfire the planning barriers
We need to give the land bankers 6 months to start or lose the land
All to build a flood of apartments and starter homes at a social rent as never for sale. Which allows a significant drop in % of wages wasted on rent which allows more money to circulate in the economy which means jobs and more taxes which pays back the investment in skills etc

Will get any of that? Will we bollocks.

Does anyone have any idea of the real cost to the country of the post-Grenfell building regulations ?

A minor example:

How much does it cost to replace two rotting windows in Britain in 2025?
More than you might think
https://www.samdumitriu.com/p/how-much-does-it-cost-to-replace

My house is 230 years old and listed - believe me I know the cost!

Out front of the commercial part of the building is an iron fence which is literally rusted away in a few places. Really needs replacing, but the planning officer refused to consider a non-LFL alternative. Despite this fence not being original or actually part of the listing.

So the plan is to literally let it rust away to nothing. I will keep repairing and repainting it. Until part of it breaks off then I'll be allowed to remove it because dangerous.

Ironic that the 'BBC Verify' post in the live feed about the two child benefit cap and poverty uses the bullshit 'relative poverty' measure.

You may not like it, that's fair enough, but it's a clear, objective, and widely used measure. Hardly something to criticise BBC Verify for.

Out of interest what would you propose as the measure of poverty? Does a child need to be starving, in rags, no shoes?

It is not legitimate. Using a relative measure means someone can be perfectly well-off but because others are even better off the former are deemed to be 'poor'. And if those even better off suddenly have a great downturn in fortune then the previously 'poor' magically becomes 'wealthy' despite having no extra money whatsoever.

An absolute measure is fairer.

Yep. Relative poverty is NOT a measure of individual circumstance, it is a measure of inequality. The left love it. Absolute poverty is whether you can heat your house, eat food etc. The almost universal adoption of relative poverty has not helped.

I can see it having some utility as a measure, but it is reported on as if it is like absolute poverty, which I think confuses what is being talked about as they are not the same thing and one is more vital a concern than the other.

I don't disagree with this but the conversation started with @Morris_Dancer: "Ironic that the 'BBC Verify' post in the live feed about the two child benefit cap and poverty uses the bullshit 'relative poverty' measure."

My point is that 'relative poverty' is not a 'bullshit measure', it's just one that MD doesn't like. No reason to criticise BBC Verify for using it.

FPT ref DavidL's comments on juries

1) "pull jurors out of a hat" - my experience is being sorted into groups of 16 at the beginning of the week but it could just be done by computer in a matter of seconds once the juror register is complete
2) Judge briefing the Jury on their duties and responsibilities - apart from case specific issues this is boilerplate. Could be online with a little quiz and declaration, e.g. "If I do my own research on the internet" will I a) be better briefed than the legal counsel, b) be helping my fellow jurors to understand the case or c) do 6 months d) all of the above?
3) Check in advance whether witnesses need screens and prepare. In your cases I assume it's a given, so the screens should be there by default.

None of the above has to be on the critical path.

My experience is that if you're assigned to a trial in the morning then it's 11.30am by the time you're sat down, HHJ does his solemn briefing etc, now 12, they have a brief conflab and decide that there isn't time for 2 opening addresses before lunch, "jury will only remember one side", so break. 2pm before you're back in court in the afternoon, if Judge or barristers don't have an afternoon clash.

There are delays around sending Juries out and reassembling them, but they can just be sent to the next room rather than allowed to disperse.

Juries can be taken off the critical path for most of it. Leveson has just blamed them for the inefficiency of the professionals involved.

The court hours and all the wasted time etc are horrendous, all down to feathering lawyers and judges pockets.

Yeah. We should abandon trial altogether. Waste of time.

I suggest a leg of darts to decide guilt or innocence and then a roll of the dice for the length of sentence. Stream it on netflix with decent product placement and we could not just save a fortune but get some revenue in too.

Nonsense.

Instead of trial and prison - a TV show where the suspects are hunted by the public/professional hunters.

If they are caught, they die. If they stay alive and free for 30 days, they get a cash prize.

Turn justice into a profit centre, with popular participation.

Been watching Running Man?

We went to see it yesterday. Hokum, but entertaining nonetheless

Yes we saw it at the weekend and found it surprisingly good and a more thoughtful version than the Arnie original. Stephen King also has said the new film is closer to his book

A few messages in there. A little bit of anti capitalism and anti consumerism.

It held my interest for the whole time.

Sandra Dickinson in it too, my god, I know we all age but I would never have knew it was her until the titles rolled.

We ended up having a nice meal after at the Rabbit Hole in Durham.

I am going out to lunch at a pub overlooking the estuary, while I still have the money to afford it.

The existence of jury trials is NOT the reason for court delays. The reasons are:

1. Reducing court sitting days even though the Lady Chief Justice has said judges can sit for more days so there is no lack of availability.
2. Closure and selling of courts.
3. A lack of sufficient funding for the justice system at every level.

1 and 2 are easily remediable. You do not abolish an 800 year old fundamental principle because of a lack of short-term funding. Unless you're an illiberal cretin, that is.

This is a power grab by the state of one of the few areas in British life which really is democratic, generally - though not invariably - works well and, crucially, is not controlled by the state and cannot be pressured by it. And can tell the state to get stuffed when it overreaches eg Ponting, the Colston Four. That is why authoritarians hate it and want to get rid of it. It must be resisted by all possible means.

This proposal shows how much contempt Labour has for us and our liberties.

Was Colston overreach? Not everyone agrees that its ok to vandalise things you don't like. I'd have preferred them found guilty but with a minimum penalty. I.e. they did the crime, but we understand and sympathise with why.

Indeed see also the Labour councillor who was acquitted of hate speech. I support juries overall but when they render not guilty verdicts for political reasons rather than on the law the case for judge led verdicts in middle ranked offences grows. The escort rider who killed an elderly lady crossing the road at speed escorting the Duchess of Edinburgh might also have been convicted of death by careless driving by a judge which a jury acquitted him of

Driving offences is an area where trial by jury is failing the victims, pick any 12 random people and there's probably 2 or 3 who think it's normal to text and speed.

FPT ref DavidL's comments on juries

1) "pull jurors out of a hat" - my experience is being sorted into groups of 16 at the beginning of the week but it could just be done by computer in a matter of seconds once the juror register is complete
2) Judge briefing the Jury on their duties and responsibilities - apart from case specific issues this is boilerplate. Could be online with a little quiz and declaration, e.g. "If I do my own research on the internet" will I a) be better briefed than the legal counsel, b) be helping my fellow jurors to understand the case or c) do 6 months d) all of the above?
3) Check in advance whether witnesses need screens and prepare. In your cases I assume it's a given, so the screens should be there by default.

None of the above has to be on the critical path.

My experience is that if you're assigned to a trial in the morning then it's 11.30am by the time you're sat down, HHJ does his solemn briefing etc, now 12, they have a brief conflab and decide that there isn't time for 2 opening addresses before lunch, "jury will only remember one side", so break. 2pm before you're back in court in the afternoon, if Judge or barristers don't have an afternoon clash.

There are delays around sending Juries out and reassembling them, but they can just be sent to the next room rather than allowed to disperse.

Juries can be taken off the critical path for most of it. Leveson has just blamed them for the inefficiency of the professionals involved.

There is no way 2 would work - most people will just fast forward the video or put it on and do something else

Have all the jury prep etc run by court staff. The day before.

Have jury prep as a courthouse function, run by staff. As a continual operation. Lining up juries, get them sorted, warned, lanyarded.

So 9am, the judge, lawyers, etc all roll in together.

Judge can have the option to say - “I don’t look this jury, do you have a similar one? But in a shade of mauve?”

You're right, of course you're right, but you know the objections.

Spending a bit more to get a lot more is still spending more, and we've conditioned ourselves to not want that.

It's moving spending from frontline staff to backstage. And we've massively conditioned ourselves to not want that.

Yet again on pb the most vociferous criticism of the removal of jury trials comes from the very same people who want to massively cut public spending and reduce public sector pay and benefits dramatically.

The concept of we only get what we are willing to pay for seems to have completely passed them by.

I have no idea if this is true, but it is rational for opinions to come in related sets, and opinions which don't arise in related ways lack an underlying coherence. Rather than turning the point into a meaningless (and maybe unverified) piece of ad hominem, it would be more useful to examine the relation of the set of opinions, and consider its worth.

What is irrational about wanting to have a much smaller state while keeping the jury system? We had juries when we had a much smaller state. (I am not proposing either, personally, but there is nothing counter intuitive about it.)

The frustration is the party led by this group of people have been in power most of my lifetime, and to be fair match the views of the electorate in not wanting to increase taxes.

So we have court rooms out of use because of leaks, because we don't want to spend money.
We have a lack of lawyers and judges, because we don't want to spend money.
Our prisons can't cope, because we don't want to spend money.
Prisoners come out early, without any thought of rehabilitation and commit more crime.

Whilst I would prefer jury trials and functioning prisons myself, it does grate to hear the attacks on the status quo from the supporters of the establishment party with zero consideration of how we get here, or any serious thought on how we can change course and what resources that requires.

Except for a very short time under Mrs T, public expenditure has risen throughout the last decades. The state in various forms manages 44% of total expenditure, over £40,000 per household, just a little short of the highest in Europe and in the middle of the developed pack. Despite that there is not a single area not crying out for much more spending. Something is wrong with the model, but it isn't that taxes are very significantly too low.

We have no money

Yet we are spending £700 million on saving a handful of salmon. Billions on an armoured vehicle that literally makes the occupants chronically ill. We can’t find GPs, while we train GPs who can’t get jobs. We have no money to look after children with special needs, but councils are block booking taxis to send them to school - as opposed to a school bus.

It’s feast-or-famine mode spending. Often on insane things.

This has probably always happened. Citing examples of "waste" is only one side of the argument. A lot of people have their lives helped if not enhanced by what Government and its agencies do and to simply and perpetually highlight the faults misses the point.

When I was in local Government, there was this paradox of apparent waste (though tens of thousands against a total budget of more than a £1 billion isn't that significant) but you knew what the council was providing in terms of libraries, youth centres and social care and the people providing it was making a difference to people's lives.

The problem is the pattern - we have lost control of public spending. Which results in starving spending on needed things.

Spend £700 million on court infrastructure and staff, say. Rather than saving a shop windows worth of salmon. Think how many clerks you could hire to prepare juries for the courts.

Merge NI & IT to reduce the admin overhead.

Buy the “world beating” ACV that actually exists - CV-90. Aside from it actually working, costing a fraction of what Ajax does, it will reduce the burden on the NHS.

Train U.K. medics overseas. Using the overseas aid budget - it will be supporting developing world health systems, after all. Then we have more medics - so less agency staff on the NHS (cheaper), less stress on the existing NHS staff (retainment), more U.K. citizens with qualifications for jobs which are in high demand…

This is about running procurement and government intelligently. Cost control and productivity - both are not being done.

The IMT training programme, which my girlfriend has applied for, seems to be up there with the most competitive years ever.

The below screenshot is from the BMA but it highlights how ridiculous the situation is. Luckily my partner has got an interview so fingers crossed. She can certainly do the job.

Indeed

Some years ago, to try and end the evils of nepotism in the NHS, they introduced a hilariously rigid form to fill in to apply for jobs.

In one instance, a doctor was not given the option of putting in that he had done a full PhD on the exact specialism he was applying for (in addition to his other pill rolling degrees)