Best Of

City law firm boosts junior lawyer salaries to £189k in London
https://www.cityam.com/city-law-firm-boosts-junior-lawyer-salaries-to-189k-in-london/

More than the Prime Minister but less than an Olympic swimming pool.

And who seriously believes that Farage will give up all of his 10 jobs for that salary?

Unless he awards himself a million quid a year pay rise on day 1

He’s a disruptor. He’s there to disrupt the mainstream and establishment although he’s a part of it.

The moment he becomes that which he seeks to destroy the game is up, the fun is over.

He’s also surplus to requirements.

Agreed with your first two points, not so sure about the third.

Farage is absolutely vital to the project; noone else works as its figurehead. Tice is a nobody, Jenrick is too obviously a Tory with career disappointment, Yusuf too much an internet troll.

My hunch is that, if presented with an opportunity for actual responsibility, Farage will run away, much as he did in 2016 and 2019. He just needs an excuse.

I think Farage absolutely wants to be PM, because he wants the establishment to be forced to accept him as a member.

When KCIII dies Farage wants to be one of the people in the Accession Council. He wants to be in the room grinning rather than watching it on TV.

As to whether he genuinely wants to be PM for x years and try to pass legislation and deal with the budget I don't know. Given the way Trump is acting I think it is touchingly naive that some PBers believe Farage will be bound by existing rules and norms about a PM giving up external sources of income.

DecrepiterJohnL said:
Andy_JS said:
Can we please continue to talk about why Paul Quinn hasn't received a longer sentence after allowing Andrew Malkinson to spend 17 years in prison?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfbLCXIaZBo
Or should we talk about why Malkinson was not released for more than 12 years after DNA evidence exonerated him? Or why the CCRC turned him down twice. Or even how he came to be wrongly convicted in the first place.


I did some research into this and read the various reports. So if there's any interest, happy to share.

Please do share Cyclefree.

I am just bewildered that the CCRC turned the case down twice after the DNA evidence was available. How could they possibly have thought it was a safe conviction after that?

The judicial system has a deep seated fear of acknowledging the system is capable of error. "We do not err. We cannot err. If we are fallible - the system collapses. Regardless of the cost to poor individuals, we have to hold the line."

As evidenced by Lord Denning. The former Master of the Rolls Denning’s was involved in 1980, with the still-incarcerated Birmingham Six’s civil claim against the police. Dismissing the case, he said:

“Just consider the course of events if their action were to proceed to trial… If the six men failed it would mean that much time and money and worry would have been expended by many people to no good purpose. If they won, it would mean that the police were guilty of perjury; that they were guilty of violence and threats; that the confessions were involuntary and improperly admitted in evidence; and that the convictions were erroneous… That was such an appalling vista that every sensible person would say, ‘It cannot be right that these actions should go any further’.”

Denning did many good things and wrote many fine judgments. That was most certainly not one of them.

Cases like that are why I have always opposed the death penalty. If the judicial system gets it wrong it is often in the most egregious of cases (of which Letby might be one).

Letbys case stands or falls on the insulin evidence. If that can be explained without the need for exogenous administration then I think she may well be innocent.

doesn't explain why the babies stopped dying in that unit

I believe that the unit was downgraded and stopped treating the seriously unwell, very premature babies. And as this is a betting site there is always the chance that the unit was the outlier unit, the statistical freak among the national units.

I have no idea if she was guilty or not. I've read extensively and sadly the debate is very polarised (what isn't these days?) She did some weird things for sure - the notes, the online searches etc. But the idea of her putting insulin into feed bags that would be used on another shift is stretching and explanation to fit a theory. If it is possible for neo nates to have unusual ratios of insulin c-peptide then I think the case against her is in big trouble as those convictions were the key to all the rest.

My father has done his research on this case given his former job and his view now is that whilst her behaviour screams dodgy he thinks there's reasonable doubts on her guilt and if he were a juror he would have voted to acquit.

This had quite the impact on the wider medical community.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvgl5yyg1x6o

A panel of medical experts organised by her legal team think she might not be guilty. I’m not certain they count as being representative of the wider medical community.

The key factor was Dr Shoo Lee, his original study was used by the prosecution.

Lee became involved in the Letby case after being made aware that one of his research papers, a 1989 paper on pulmonary vascular air embolism in newborns, was used by the prosecution’s leading expert witness, retired consultant paediatrician Dewi Evans, to support his theory that Letby had injected air into the bloodstream of babies. Lee was not asked to give evidence at the time of the original case and only afterwards became aware that his paper was used.

https://www.bmj.com/content/388/bmj.r250

It’s not usual practice to go get the authors of research papers to come be expert witnesses. There’s nothing unusual about Lee not being approached or informed.

The prosecution case was not reliant on that particular piece of evidence. The evidence of insulin overdoses was more important. As also was the fact Letby had stolen medical records and hidden them under her bed, written guilty notes, conducted unusual web searches, her inappropriate behaviour around grieving parents, and the witness evidence about her behaviour around two babies.

And the deaths stopped when she was removed.

The unit stopped handling such sick babies - arguably it shouldn’t have been in the first place. We should be better at stats than that. It’s like councils reducing a speed limit on a road after a couple of fatal accidents and then claiming it worked because no more accidents occur.

They made some changes but not of enough significance to explain the sharp fall.

If there are say 100 units handling premature babies what are the chances that one will have a spike in deaths like that seen at Chester? And that the spike will the regress to the mean?

Pass. I'm a bit rusty.

What's happening with Letby anyway? Is there a chance of a retrial? Or is it all just amateur punditry now?

She has appealed her convictions, but all her appeals were rejected. The Court concluded in her main appeal that the trial had been "thoughtful, fair, comprehensive and correct" and that none of the challenges raised by the defence were "arguable".

She’s now sent her case to the Criminal Cases Review Commission, who could order another appeal be heard. We await their response.

Given the state of maternity care in England we will no doubt hear in 15-20 years that it is a monumental injustice and was in fact a cover up of incompetence and butt covering.

I don't think anybody disputes the latter point. Their safeguarding procedures were more amateurish and the coverups of blatant and serious problems more egregious than those of OFSTED under that lunatic Spielman.

The question is, was it an injustice? At the moment I'm personally inclined to think it probably wasn't, but they can happen.

There are massive failures in Maternity care in the UK. The one up the road from me at Nottingham is quite shocking.

But these are very different to problems on neonatal units such as the one Letby worked at. The babies that suddenly died in her care were often nearly ready for discharge when they suddenly and mysteriously deteriated.

Do not forget that as well as the deaths there are a large number of near misees resulting in lifelong disability. The Baby K story is typical with her standing over a deteriorating baby doing nothing with the alarms turned off.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/jun/25/lucy-letby-denies-tampering-baby-breathing-tube?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

The idea that somehow she was the scapegoat to cover up for unit failures is risible. A murderer on the loose is far worse for unit reputation than a string of preventable deaths. The hospital management famously pushed concerns away rather than deal with real concerns:

BBC News - Hospital bosses ignored months of doctors' warnings about Lucy Letby - BBC News
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-66120934?app-referrer=deep-link

.

Looking at Starmers approval ratings they crashed straight after the WFA debacle .

I still find it astonishing that no one in No 10 and Starmer himself didn’t stop Reeves from putting through what will end up being the worst policy decision of recent times .

All that political pain for what was a paltry sum saved .

Starmer is a lawyer, not a politician, and has no discernible political judgement. As for why Number 10 generally did not act, that begs the question whether they knew about it in advance. Rachel Reeves is also a technocrat and, as with George Osborne's omnishambles budget, it is likely the Chancellor accepted the WFA cut from a list of Treasury suggestions without a great deal of thought.

It was a perfectly sensible financial decision presented badly.

There are worse crimes.

It was and sadly once they were on the back foot, it was the same with slowing the rate of growth of benefits, and their backbenchers under pressure from well organised lobbying campaigns they were always going to fold and SKS lost his authority overnight.

WFA was a ridiculous frippery from a bygone age before pensioners did not form a large part of those with the highest disposable income after housing costs in the country. It was absolutely the right thing to do, it is astonishing that this relic survived the Osborne years. We have got to get away from the situation where so much of our limited resources are given away to those not in need by way of universal benefits. Sooner or later that is going to include at least some of the pension.

Not even that, it was exceeded by the double bubble malfunction that the triple lock does when an inflation spike is followed by a pay spike the subsequent year. Something that I'm sure nobody considered at the time, but you can't help seeing once it's there.

The political problem is that there's Noone Quite Like Grandma.

Yes, though it is a political truism on PB that the Triple Lock and WFA must go, this polls very badly, even with the young.

A large part of the problem is that few in Britain understand where governments spend money.

Time for politicians to educate them, rather than pandering to them, then.
Doing the latter only sets them up for failure every time they're in government, which is one reason they're held in such low esteem.

I can't say I have much hope of Burnham on that score.

Looking at Starmers approval ratings they crashed straight after the WFA debacle .

I still find it astonishing that no one in No 10 and Starmer himself didn’t stop Reeves from putting through what will end up being the worst policy decision of recent times .

All that political pain for what was a paltry sum saved .

Starmer is a lawyer, not a politician, and has no discernible political judgement. As for why Number 10 generally did not act, that begs the question whether they knew about it in advance. Rachel Reeves is also a technocrat and, as with George Osborne's omnishambles budget, it is likely the Chancellor accepted the WFA cut from a list of Treasury suggestions without a great deal of thought.

I still think the WFA changes were perfectly fine but I accept they communicated it horrendously and perhaps there is no way to do this policy that doesn’t tank your popularity.

Supposedly Osborne and Cameron were also given this policy as an option and vetoed it. That shows they have a lot more political ability than Starmer and Reeves.

Trouble is that we've had about forty years of society elevating politics over government, which is the underlyreason for all of this.

And I'm not entirely sure what we do about it. Politicians explaining the situation and their solutions, clearly and compellingly, would be a start... But they would still need a way to reach the national audience and an audience prepared to listen.

Neither of those things really exists right now. It's more comforting to believe that, if we punish Bad People X, it will all be fine- we just have to work out who X are, and that's fun. If a politician comes along saying "it's more complicated than that" (was Rory the ex-Tory the last one to try?), they don't get far.

And whilst there's a market for talking things though properly, it's niche rather than mass. The days of ten million people watching the News at Ten are long gone.

DecrepiterJohnL said:
Andy_JS said:
Can we please continue to talk about why Paul Quinn hasn't received a longer sentence after allowing Andrew Malkinson to spend 17 years in prison?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfbLCXIaZBo
Or should we talk about why Malkinson was not released for more than 12 years after DNA evidence exonerated him? Or why the CCRC turned him down twice. Or even how he came to be wrongly convicted in the first place.


I did some research into this and read the various reports. So if there's any interest, happy to share.

Please do share Cyclefree.

I am just bewildered that the CCRC turned the case down twice after the DNA evidence was available. How could they possibly have thought it was a safe conviction after that?

The judicial system has a deep seated fear of acknowledging the system is capable of error. "We do not err. We cannot err. If we are fallible - the system collapses. Regardless of the cost to poor individuals, we have to hold the line."

As evidenced by Lord Denning. The former Master of the Rolls Denning’s was involved in 1980, with the still-incarcerated Birmingham Six’s civil claim against the police. Dismissing the case, he said:

“Just consider the course of events if their action were to proceed to trial… If the six men failed it would mean that much time and money and worry would have been expended by many people to no good purpose. If they won, it would mean that the police were guilty of perjury; that they were guilty of violence and threats; that the confessions were involuntary and improperly admitted in evidence; and that the convictions were erroneous… That was such an appalling vista that every sensible person would say, ‘It cannot be right that these actions should go any further’.”

Denning did many good things and wrote many fine judgments. That was most certainly not one of them.

Cases like that are why I have always opposed the death penalty. If the judicial system gets it wrong it is often in the most egregious of cases (of which Letby might be one).

Letbys case stands or falls on the insulin evidence. If that can be explained without the need for exogenous administration then I think she may well be innocent.

doesn't explain why the babies stopped dying in that unit

I believe that the unit was downgraded and stopped treating the seriously unwell, very premature babies. And as this is a betting site there is always the chance that the unit was the outlier unit, the statistical freak among the national units.

I have no idea if she was guilty or not. I've read extensively and sadly the debate is very polarised (what isn't these days?) She did some weird things for sure - the notes, the online searches etc. But the idea of her putting insulin into feed bags that would be used on another shift is stretching and explanation to fit a theory. If it is possible for neo nates to have unusual ratios of insulin c-peptide then I think the case against her is in big trouble as those convictions were the key to all the rest.

My father has done his research on this case given his former job and his view now is that whilst her behaviour screams dodgy he thinks there's reasonable doubts on her guilt and if he were a juror he would have voted to acquit.

This had quite the impact on the wider medical community.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvgl5yyg1x6o

A panel of medical experts organised by her legal team think she might not be guilty. I’m not certain they count as being representative of the wider medical community.

The key factor was Dr Shoo Lee, his original study was used by the prosecution.

Lee became involved in the Letby case after being made aware that one of his research papers, a 1989 paper on pulmonary vascular air embolism in newborns, was used by the prosecution’s leading expert witness, retired consultant paediatrician Dewi Evans, to support his theory that Letby had injected air into the bloodstream of babies. Lee was not asked to give evidence at the time of the original case and only afterwards became aware that his paper was used.

https://www.bmj.com/content/388/bmj.r250

It’s not usual practice to go get the authors of research papers to come be expert witnesses. There’s nothing unusual about Lee not being approached or informed.

The prosecution case was not reliant on that particular piece of evidence. The evidence of insulin overdoses was more important. As also was the fact Letby had stolen medical records and hidden them under her bed, written guilty notes, conducted unusual web searches, her inappropriate behaviour around grieving parents, and the witness evidence about her behaviour around two babies.

And the deaths stopped when she was removed.

The unit stopped handling such sick babies - arguably it shouldn’t have been in the first place. We should be better at stats than that. It’s like councils reducing a speed limit on a road after a couple of fatal accidents and then claiming it worked because no more accidents occur.

They made some changes but not of enough significance to explain the sharp fall.

If there are say 100 units handling premature babies what are the chances that one will have a spike in deaths like that seen at Chester? And that the spike will the regress to the mean?

Pass. I'm a bit rusty.

What's happening with Letby anyway? Is there a chance of a retrial? Or is it all just amateur punditry now?

She has appealed her convictions, but all her appeals were rejected. The Court concluded in her main appeal that the trial had been "thoughtful, fair, comprehensive and correct" and that none of the challenges raised by the defence were "arguable".

She’s now sent her case to the Criminal Cases Review Commission, who could order another appeal be heard. We await their response.

Meanwhile, on this warm sunny morning in Germany, today’s Rawnsley:

The leader of Reform is…beginning to look a bit desperate. He had been flirting with trying to present his party as one maturing into “respectability” in an effort to persuade voters who are Reform-curious but queasy about racism and extremism that they no longer have anything to worry about. So what explains his ugly turn towards the politics of racial paranoia? Panic is probably the best answer.

Reform still leads all other parties, but any deflation of its bubble is disconcerting for a leader who has prized momentum as the definition of success. Usually inescapable at byelections, he has been largely absent from the contest for Makerfield, where he might be exposed to questions about that [£5 million] donation.

Also troubling to him is the durability of the Conservative party. The Tories are not exactly in fabulous shape, but they are resolutely refusing to concede to Mr Farage’s demand to be recognised as the undisputed master of the right in British politics. Defections from the Conservatives, much fanfared at the time, have caused more strife for Reform than they have trouble for the Tories.

What matters to Mr Farage is that he is threatened by a new competitor he hadn’t expected. After a quarter of a century menacing the Tories from the right, now there is a fireship aimed at his own party from the even further right. If you think relations between Reform and the Conservatives are bad, those between Reform and Restore are ferocious.

For those of us watching from a safe distance, there is a temptation to smile at this cage fight on the extremes of the right. But there is also a disturbing dimension to the grim grapple over who can be the most nasty party of the right. If this grisly competition has so little respect for the wishes of a grieving family, you can be sure it has absolutely none for the rest of us.

Empty waffle. No more insightful than political Twitter.

It’s hardly a Damascene revelation that relations between Reform and Restore are less than cordial.

Reform are also holding/gaining slightly in the polls.

I don't think pooh-poohing Rawnsley's argument here works, either as thesis or as tactic.

The fact that the Tories have not collapsed, despite figures such as Jenrick walking out is, I think, pretty significant. The defections have helped the Tories by getting rid of an overly ambitions and disloyal crew, but have weakened the RefUK "insurgency" brand. The polls are not demonstrating the kind of momentum that could lead RefUK to any kind of power, and may have already turned over. Even more problematic, increasingly Farage is being challenged on the dodgy donations, his closeness to Trump and the question of what he got for mouthing Putin propaganda over Ukraine- and this is defintely cutting through. If the punters are right, Farage will win nothing in the three by-elections and may even see the Tories snatch an unexpected victory in Aberdeen South, which seriously challenges the idea that the right should unite under his questionable leadership.

This could be the beginning of a slow puncture for RefUK which takes them out of the game.

Rawnsley has been phoning it in for a while now

The Tories have gone backwards. I think Kemi is doing a decent job but I’m not the target audience and never likely to vote for them. They’re not gaining or moving forward in the polls

Looking at Starmers approval ratings they crashed straight after the WFA debacle .

I still find it astonishing that no one in No 10 and Starmer himself didn’t stop Reeves from putting through what will end up being the worst policy decision of recent times .

All that political pain for what was a paltry sum saved .

Starmer is a lawyer, not a politician, and has no discernible political judgement. As for why Number 10 generally did not act, that begs the question whether they knew about it in advance. Rachel Reeves is also a technocrat and, as with George Osborne's omnishambles budget, it is likely the Chancellor accepted the WFA cut from a list of Treasury suggestions without a great deal of thought.

It was a perfectly sensible financial decision presented badly.

There are worse crimes.

It was and sadly once they were on the back foot, it was the same with slowing the rate of growth of benefits, and their backbenchers under pressure from well organised lobbying campaigns they were always going to fold and SKS lost his authority overnight.

WFA was a ridiculous frippery from a bygone age before pensioners did not form a large part of those with the highest disposable income after housing costs in the country. It was absolutely the right thing to do, it is astonishing that this relic survived the Osborne years. We have got to get away from the situation where so much of our limited resources are given away to those not in need by way of universal benefits. Sooner or later that is going to include at least some of the pension.

Not even that, it was exceeded by the double bubble malfunction that the triple lock does when an inflation spike is followed by a pay spike the subsequent year. Something that I'm sure nobody considered at the time, but you can't help seeing once it's there.

The political problem is that there's Noone Quite Like Grandma.

Yes, though it is a political truism on PB that the Triple Lock and WFA must go, this polls very badly, even with the young.

A large part of the problem is that few in Britain understand where governments spend money.

Meanwhile, on this warm sunny morning in Germany, today’s Rawnsley:

The leader of Reform is…beginning to look a bit desperate. He had been flirting with trying to present his party as one maturing into “respectability” in an effort to persuade voters who are Reform-curious but queasy about racism and extremism that they no longer have anything to worry about. So what explains his ugly turn towards the politics of racial paranoia? Panic is probably the best answer.

Reform still leads all other parties, but any deflation of its bubble is disconcerting for a leader who has prized momentum as the definition of success. Usually inescapable at byelections, he has been largely absent from the contest for Makerfield, where he might be exposed to questions about that [£5 million] donation.

Also troubling to him is the durability of the Conservative party. The Tories are not exactly in fabulous shape, but they are resolutely refusing to concede to Mr Farage’s demand to be recognised as the undisputed master of the right in British politics. Defections from the Conservatives, much fanfared at the time, have caused more strife for Reform than they have trouble for the Tories.

What matters to Mr Farage is that he is threatened by a new competitor he hadn’t expected. After a quarter of a century menacing the Tories from the right, now there is a fireship aimed at his own party from the even further right. If you think relations between Reform and the Conservatives are bad, those between Reform and Restore are ferocious.

For those of us watching from a safe distance, there is a temptation to smile at this cage fight on the extremes of the right. But there is also a disturbing dimension to the grim grapple over who can be the most nasty party of the right. If this grisly competition has so little respect for the wishes of a grieving family, you can be sure it has absolutely none for the rest of us.

Empty waffle. No more insightful than political Twitter.

It’s hardly a Damascene revelation that relations between Reform and Restore are less than cordial.

Reform are also holding/gaining slightly in the polls.