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LD by-election objectives – Win or lose deposit – politicalbetting.com

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  • MexicanpeteMexicanpete Posts: 24,588
    Leon said:

    The number of confirmed Omicron Covid cases in Scotland has jumped to 29 as Nicola Sturgeon warns the variant is now spreading fast in the community.

    The First Minister says cases of the little-understood strain will likely continue to rise in the coming days and the outbreak is no longer linked to single private event on November 20.

    Many of the new cases are now being linked to a Steps concert at the Hydro two days later.


    https://www.thecourier.co.uk/fp/news/2792382/omicron-covid-cases-in-scotland-jump-to-29-as-variant-now-spreading-in-community/

    A chain reaction that could result in tragedy!

    Some easy maths to be done here. If Omicron is widely seeded across the UK - as it now seems - with community transmission, there are probably 500 cases (conservatively) in the UK. If Omicron doubles every 4 days (it’s worse in Gauteng), that’s

    1000 cases a day by Dec 6

    2000 cases by Dec 10

    4000 cases by Dec 14

    8000 cases by Dec 18

    16,000 cases by Dec 22

    32,000 cases by Boxing Day

    64,000 cases by Dec 30

    128,000 cases by Jan 3

    256,000 cases by Jan 7

    512,000 cases by Jan 11

    1,028,000 cases a day by the middle of Jan


    Quite some pressure on the NHS there. Let’s hope they’re all ‘mild’

    Maybe I should have used inverted commas. A 'Chain Reaction' that resulted in 'Tragedy'.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,625

    Cyclefree said:

    Look at the sexual and moral incontinence of the adults in poor Arthur's life.

    A mother who has a child, leaves father, shacks up with someone else and kills him. A father who takes up with a woman and cruelly treats and abandons his own son to make this woman happy. A step-mother who has 5 children by 4 different men, who has never worked, who throws herself out of the window and aborts another child while in custody for some offence.

    I don't want to come over as some ancient prude. Evil has existed in all sorts of times and places and is no respecter of class or education. But if you look at a lot of these child murder/child abuse cases you see similar patterns: look at Baby P or any of the others over the years.

    Might we at some point as a society maybe think about saying a bit more clearly that this sort of sequential rutting and casual creation and abandonment of children is, well, wrong and to be discouraged?

    And, no, I don't have an easy answer as to how.

    Arthur's late Great Grandfather Kenneth Labinjo was my family GP when I was a child in Wythall near Birmingham, so Olivia Labinjo- Halcrow was no sink estate peasant. There are factors in modern life like alcoholism, drug abuse and feral procreation that are just being brushed under the carpet by Government. Tim Lawton MP was on earlier demanding the lynching (my interpretation) of the social workers. I'm sure that'll help.
    Lynching social workers is, of course, an essential part of the public expiation process. Ed Balls lynching Sharon Shoesmith, for example.

    https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/oct/29/ed-balls-sharon-shoesmith-baby-p-sacking-payout
    Poor dear Sharon Shoesmith was too busy directing her department to investigate the lady who was raising concerns about Baby P, to notice that Baby P was being battered to death.

    The terrible crime that the lady was accused of? Child abuse - to wit, a teenager had been shouting horrible threats at her. She lost her temper for one second and shouted back. Once.

    For that terrible, terrible crime, the energy of a child services department was required.

    No, not that dear Sharon was playing a bizarre game of favourites and outcasts at all. No sir.
  • TimSTimS Posts: 9,169
    Leon said:

    The number of confirmed Omicron Covid cases in Scotland has jumped to 29 as Nicola Sturgeon warns the variant is now spreading fast in the community.

    The First Minister says cases of the little-understood strain will likely continue to rise in the coming days and the outbreak is no longer linked to single private event on November 20.

    Many of the new cases are now being linked to a Steps concert at the Hydro two days later.


    https://www.thecourier.co.uk/fp/news/2792382/omicron-covid-cases-in-scotland-jump-to-29-as-variant-now-spreading-in-community/

    A chain reaction that could result in tragedy!

    Some easy maths to be done here. If Omicron is widely seeded across the UK - as it now seems - with community transmission, there are probably 500 cases (conservatively) in the UK. If Omicron doubles every 4 days (it’s worse in Gauteng), that’s

    1000 cases a day by Dec 6

    2000 cases by Dec 10

    4000 cases by Dec 14

    8000 cases by Dec 18

    16,000 cases by Dec 22

    32,000 cases by Boxing Day

    64,000 cases by Dec 30

    128,000 cases by Jan 3

    256,000 cases by Jan 7

    512,000 cases by Jan 11

    1,028,000 cases a day by the middle of Jan


    Quite some pressure on the NHS there. Let’s hope they’re all ‘mild’

    The great thing with that maths is that by the end of Jan everyone in the country would have had it, and we'd be at herd immunity.

    Another way of looking at it is in terms of total damage. Let's say current IFR is c.0.2% (pessimistic - based on 150 deaths per day and c.80,000 infections with 50% being recorded in tests). If Omicron increases breakthrough infection but IFR stays the same (which is pessimistic given boosters and new treatments) then the max deaths if 60 million are infected would be 120,000. But of course nowhere near 60m would be infected given pre-existing vax immunity, and IFR will keep going down. So we are into a bad case being probably similar to a bad flu season.
  • moonshinemoonshine Posts: 5,226
    Leon said:

    moonshine said:

    Leon said:

    The number of confirmed Omicron Covid cases in Scotland has jumped to 29 as Nicola Sturgeon warns the variant is now spreading fast in the community.

    The First Minister says cases of the little-understood strain will likely continue to rise in the coming days and the outbreak is no longer linked to single private event on November 20.

    Many of the new cases are now being linked to a Steps concert at the Hydro two days later.


    https://www.thecourier.co.uk/fp/news/2792382/omicron-covid-cases-in-scotland-jump-to-29-as-variant-now-spreading-in-community/

    A chain reaction that could result in tragedy!

    Some easy maths to be done here. If Omicron is widely seeded across the UK - as it now seems - with community transmission, there are probably 500 cases (conservatively) in the UK. If Omicron doubles every 4 days (it’s worse in Gauteng), that’s

    1000 cases a day by Dec 6

    2000 cases by Dec 10

    4000 cases by Dec 14

    8000 cases by Dec 18

    16,000 cases by Dec 22

    32,000 cases by Boxing Day

    64,000 cases by Dec 30

    128,000 cases by Jan 3

    256,000 cases by Jan 7

    512,000 cases by Jan 11

    1,028,000 cases a day by the middle of Jan


    Quite some pressure on the NHS there. Let’s hope they’re all ‘mild’

    You are such a cheery contributor
    Doesn’t take many months Leon before every atom in the observable universe is contaminated with Omicron. In reality, exponential growth curves find a natural ceiling well before that.
    Of course. If the case load follows my curve people will lock down voluntarily. The government will probably lockdown officially right after Xmas?

    But then there’s the question: will lockdowns work against a bug as infectious as Omicron? We dunno

    On the cheerier side, we still don’t know how Omicron functions in a highly vaxed context. It may be much less impressive. Fingers x’d
    I don’t think they will lockdown here. If the vaccines work and it’s largely anti vaxxers causing the problem, the clamour will be for vaxports, antivax taxes and whatever else before generalised lockdown. Including from no 11 and the Cabinet.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,149

    Carnyx said:

    Dulce et decorum est


    I wonder what calibre he was? And what nature of ammunition it was?
    57mm I believe so likely AP. No, not that kind of A. piercing.
    Sudden memory of the time I found a 2pdr shot on the beach when I was very small indeed. Fortunately it was a solid AP shot. Probably fired from one of the WW2 pillboxes along that stretch of the SE Scotland coast.
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 38,851

    Cyclefree said:

    Look at the sexual and moral incontinence of the adults in poor Arthur's life.

    A mother who has a child, leaves father, shacks up with someone else and kills him. A father who takes up with a woman and cruelly treats and abandons his own son to make this woman happy. A step-mother who has 5 children by 4 different men, who has never worked, who throws herself out of the window and aborts another child while in custody for some offence.

    I don't want to come over as some ancient prude. Evil has existed in all sorts of times and places and is no respecter of class or education. But if you look at a lot of these child murder/child abuse cases you see similar patterns: look at Baby P or any of the others over the years.

    Might we at some point as a society maybe think about saying a bit more clearly that this sort of sequential rutting and casual creation and abandonment of children is, well, wrong and to be discouraged?

    And, no, I don't have an easy answer as to how.

    Arthur's late Great Grandfather Kenneth Labinjo was my family GP when I was a child in Wythall near Birmingham, so Olivia Labinjo- Halcrow was no sink estate peasant. There are factors in modern life like alcoholism, drug abuse and feral procreation that are just being brushed under the carpet by Government. Tim Lawton MP was on earlier demanding the lynching (my interpretation) of the social workers. I'm sure that'll help.
    Lynching social workers is, of course, an essential part of the public expiation process. Ed Balls lynching Sharon Shoesmith, for example.

    https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/oct/29/ed-balls-sharon-shoesmith-baby-p-sacking-payout
    That was poor all round. Cameron tried to politicize it and Balls went for performative scapegoating. Both playing to the gallery. Not the best moment for our politics.
  • LostPasswordLostPassword Posts: 14,772
    edited December 2021
    ping said:

    Cyclefree said:

    Look at the sexual and moral incontinence of the adults in poor Arthur's life.

    A mother who has a child, leaves father, shacks up with someone else and kills him. A father who takes up with a woman and cruelly treats and abandons his own son to make this woman happy. A step-mother who has 5 children by 4 different men, who has never worked, who throws herself out of the window and aborts another child while in custody for some offence.

    I don't want to come over as some ancient prude. Evil has existed in all sorts of times and places and is no respecter of class or education. But if you look at a lot of these child murder/child abuse cases you see similar patterns: look at Baby P or any of the others over the years.

    Might we at some point as a society maybe think about saying a bit more clearly that this sort of sequential rutting and casual creation and abandonment of children is, well, wrong and to be discouraged?

    And, no, I don't have an easy answer as to how.

    Arthur's late Great Grandfather Kenneth Labinjo was my family GP when I was a child in Wythall near Birmingham, so Olivia Labinjo- Halcrow was no sink estate peasant. There are factors in modern life like alcoholism, drug abuse and feral procreation that are just being brushed under the carpet by Government. Tim Lawton MP was on earlier demanding the lynching (my interpretation) of the social workers. I'm sure that'll help.
    I do wonder, in this case, whether the social workers *really wanted to believe* the setup that Arthur had been placed into was a positive one - ie, what may have seemed to them like a stable family environment. And blinded by this bias, they ignored the warning signs.

    Clearly, the best situation for the kid was to live with his grandparents. Perhaps that should be a more common solution to these kind of broken home situations.
    One of the sentencing remarks is worth bearing in mind. The judge said,

    "It is a shocking feature of this case that your children, Tustin, lived a perfectly happy normal life in that household while this appalling cruelty to Arthur was taking place."

    Tustin was capable of being a good parent, but chose not to be, and deceived the social workers. This will be quite different to many of the troubled people that social workers deal with routinely.

    However, they really should have had another look when Arthur didn't return to school at the end of lockdown. Then it would have been obvious.
  • Nigelb said:

    The continued decline of political discourse in Poland.

    A Polish television station needs to placate the ruling party, which is putting pressure on private media now. How does it do it? By hiring a pundit famous for anti-Semitic and homophobic tirades, and giving him his own show...
    https://twitter.com/anneapplebaum/status/1466673357655580672

    Poland is a country with a very real anti-semitic problem, but also another half of the popoulation who are very strongly against this.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,625
    kinabalu said:

    Cyclefree said:

    Look at the sexual and moral incontinence of the adults in poor Arthur's life.

    A mother who has a child, leaves father, shacks up with someone else and kills him. A father who takes up with a woman and cruelly treats and abandons his own son to make this woman happy. A step-mother who has 5 children by 4 different men, who has never worked, who throws herself out of the window and aborts another child while in custody for some offence.

    I don't want to come over as some ancient prude. Evil has existed in all sorts of times and places and is no respecter of class or education. But if you look at a lot of these child murder/child abuse cases you see similar patterns: look at Baby P or any of the others over the years.

    Might we at some point as a society maybe think about saying a bit more clearly that this sort of sequential rutting and casual creation and abandonment of children is, well, wrong and to be discouraged?

    And, no, I don't have an easy answer as to how.

    Arthur's late Great Grandfather Kenneth Labinjo was my family GP when I was a child in Wythall near Birmingham, so Olivia Labinjo- Halcrow was no sink estate peasant. There are factors in modern life like alcoholism, drug abuse and feral procreation that are just being brushed under the carpet by Government. Tim Lawton MP was on earlier demanding the lynching (my interpretation) of the social workers. I'm sure that'll help.
    Lynching social workers is, of course, an essential part of the public expiation process. Ed Balls lynching Sharon Shoesmith, for example.

    https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/oct/29/ed-balls-sharon-shoesmith-baby-p-sacking-payout
    That was poor all round. Cameron tried to politicize it and Balls went for performative scapegoating. Both playing to the gallery. Not the best moment for our politics.
    There was some suspicion that Balls did what he did so that a member of Failure-Is-Not-An-Option club would get a payout.

    Personally, I don't believe that. Shoesmith wasn't quite high enough to be part of the magic circle....
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,149
    Pulpstar said:

    Just had my COVID booster!

    Good stuff. I'd advise a very early night tonight and saturday.
    And clear your decks for the weekend just in case - get your shopping in today etc. But good news really.
  • MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 37,603
    TimS said:

    Leon said:

    The number of confirmed Omicron Covid cases in Scotland has jumped to 29 as Nicola Sturgeon warns the variant is now spreading fast in the community.

    The First Minister says cases of the little-understood strain will likely continue to rise in the coming days and the outbreak is no longer linked to single private event on November 20.

    Many of the new cases are now being linked to a Steps concert at the Hydro two days later.


    https://www.thecourier.co.uk/fp/news/2792382/omicron-covid-cases-in-scotland-jump-to-29-as-variant-now-spreading-in-community/

    A chain reaction that could result in tragedy!

    Some easy maths to be done here. If Omicron is widely seeded across the UK - as it now seems - with community transmission, there are probably 500 cases (conservatively) in the UK. If Omicron doubles every 4 days (it’s worse in Gauteng), that’s

    1000 cases a day by Dec 6

    2000 cases by Dec 10

    4000 cases by Dec 14

    8000 cases by Dec 18

    16,000 cases by Dec 22

    32,000 cases by Boxing Day

    64,000 cases by Dec 30

    128,000 cases by Jan 3

    256,000 cases by Jan 7

    512,000 cases by Jan 11

    1,028,000 cases a day by the middle of Jan


    Quite some pressure on the NHS there. Let’s hope they’re all ‘mild’

    The great thing with that maths is that by the end of Jan everyone in the country would have had it, and we'd be at herd immunity.

    Another way of looking at it is in terms of total damage. Let's say current IFR is c.0.2% (pessimistic - based on 150 deaths per day and c.80,000 infections with 50% being recorded in tests). If Omicron increases breakthrough infection but IFR stays the same (which is pessimistic given boosters and new treatments) then the max deaths if 60 million are infected would be 120,000. But of course nowhere near 60m would be infected given pre-existing vax immunity, and IFR will keep going down. So we are into a bad case being probably similar to a bad flu season.
    I think there's also no signal on how severe reinfection is compared to first time infection. I'd imagine the severity will be significantly lower, though maybe in some older groups still significant enough to cause hospitalisation if they are unvaccinated.

    Omicron could cause a wave of coughing a spluttering across the 60m or so vaccinated or previously infected but I'm not sure that's worthy of all this alarm.

    Once again, I think waiting a couple of weeks for the data from a non-African country is really important. Hopefully we'll get something soon from the Netherlands.
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 27,840
    edited December 2021

    ping said:

    Cyclefree said:

    Look at the sexual and moral incontinence of the adults in poor Arthur's life.

    A mother who has a child, leaves father, shacks up with someone else and kills him. A father who takes up with a woman and cruelly treats and abandons his own son to make this woman happy. A step-mother who has 5 children by 4 different men, who has never worked, who throws herself out of the window and aborts another child while in custody for some offence.

    I don't want to come over as some ancient prude. Evil has existed in all sorts of times and places and is no respecter of class or education. But if you look at a lot of these child murder/child abuse cases you see similar patterns: look at Baby P or any of the others over the years.

    Might we at some point as a society maybe think about saying a bit more clearly that this sort of sequential rutting and casual creation and abandonment of children is, well, wrong and to be discouraged?

    And, no, I don't have an easy answer as to how.

    Arthur's late Great Grandfather Kenneth Labinjo was my family GP when I was a child in Wythall near Birmingham, so Olivia Labinjo- Halcrow was no sink estate peasant. There are factors in modern life like alcoholism, drug abuse and feral procreation that are just being brushed under the carpet by Government. Tim Lawton MP was on earlier demanding the lynching (my interpretation) of the social workers. I'm sure that'll help.
    I do wonder, in this case, whether the social workers *really wanted to believe* the setup that Arthur had been placed into was a positive one - ie, what may have seemed to them like a stable family environment. And blinded by this bias, they ignored the warning signs.

    Clearly, the best situation for the kid was to live with his grandparents. Perhaps that should be a more common solution to these kind of broken home situations.
    One of the sentencing remarks is worth bearing in mind. The judge said,

    "It is a shocking feature of this case that your children, Tustin, lived a perfectly happy normal life in that household while this appalling cruelty to Arthur was taking place."

    Tustin was capable of being a good parent, but chose not to be, and deceived the social workers. This will be quite different to many of the troubled people that social workers deal with routinely.

    However, they really should have had another look when Arthur didn't return to school at the end of lockdown. Then it would have been obvious.
    The school can't be exonerated. They have a safeguarding duty to investigate prolonged absence under Section 175 of the 2002 Education Act.
  • isamisam Posts: 40,731
    rcs1000 said:

    The by-election is yet more evidence of tactical voting between Labour and the Lib Dems, this will be hugely important if repeated at a GE

    PMSL the swing to the Opposition was less than average in a by-election.

    Despite the Lib Dems losing share, Labour's share rise was very poor for a by-election.

    If a GE is repeated based on this I'd expect an increased Tory majority.
    I agree that the LAB vote move was very small for a by-election but this seat was never seriously in contention and this was plain for all to see.

    N Shropshire should be the same. This is a strong Leave seat where the LDs start in third and where the %age of grads is just about average. So none of the factors that would normally be helpful.

    What gives the LDs an edge is having a powerful message in relation to the ex-MP. Whether an intense campaign will be enough I don't know. The message I've been seeing from campaign workers is that there is enough for them to believe they are in with a fighting chance. LD campaigns are able to reach many Tory voters in a way that Labour has never been able to do.
    I think that's right: if it hadn't been for the nature of Paterson's offences (and the foolish way he totally avoided giving even a half-hearted apology) then the LDs wouldn't stand a chance. As it is, they're going to be running on a "let 'em know that they can't get away with this stuff with a bloody nose", and it might work.

    As I said on the previous thread, I wouldn't be on the LDs at these odds - I think they're chances are more around the 18-20% level, not the 33-40% - but it is far from impossible that they win the by-election. 6-1 shots do, after all, come in one-in-six times.
    You’re on to something massive if your 6/1 bets come in one-in-six times
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 38,851

    kinabalu said:

    Cyclefree said:

    Look at the sexual and moral incontinence of the adults in poor Arthur's life.

    A mother who has a child, leaves father, shacks up with someone else and kills him. A father who takes up with a woman and cruelly treats and abandons his own son to make this woman happy. A step-mother who has 5 children by 4 different men, who has never worked, who throws herself out of the window and aborts another child while in custody for some offence.

    I don't want to come over as some ancient prude. Evil has existed in all sorts of times and places and is no respecter of class or education. But if you look at a lot of these child murder/child abuse cases you see similar patterns: look at Baby P or any of the others over the years.

    Might we at some point as a society maybe think about saying a bit more clearly that this sort of sequential rutting and casual creation and abandonment of children is, well, wrong and to be discouraged?

    And, no, I don't have an easy answer as to how.

    Arthur's late Great Grandfather Kenneth Labinjo was my family GP when I was a child in Wythall near Birmingham, so Olivia Labinjo- Halcrow was no sink estate peasant. There are factors in modern life like alcoholism, drug abuse and feral procreation that are just being brushed under the carpet by Government. Tim Lawton MP was on earlier demanding the lynching (my interpretation) of the social workers. I'm sure that'll help.
    Lynching social workers is, of course, an essential part of the public expiation process. Ed Balls lynching Sharon Shoesmith, for example.

    https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/oct/29/ed-balls-sharon-shoesmith-baby-p-sacking-payout
    That was poor all round. Cameron tried to politicize it and Balls went for performative scapegoating. Both playing to the gallery. Not the best moment for our politics.
    There was some suspicion that Balls did what he did so that a member of Failure-Is-Not-An-Option club would get a payout.

    Personally, I don't believe that. Shoesmith wasn't quite high enough to be part of the magic circle....
    You have again managed to craft a post that I don't really understand. Nobody does it better, I have to say.
  • LostPasswordLostPassword Posts: 14,772
    dixiedean said:

    ping said:

    Cyclefree said:

    Look at the sexual and moral incontinence of the adults in poor Arthur's life.

    A mother who has a child, leaves father, shacks up with someone else and kills him. A father who takes up with a woman and cruelly treats and abandons his own son to make this woman happy. A step-mother who has 5 children by 4 different men, who has never worked, who throws herself out of the window and aborts another child while in custody for some offence.

    I don't want to come over as some ancient prude. Evil has existed in all sorts of times and places and is no respecter of class or education. But if you look at a lot of these child murder/child abuse cases you see similar patterns: look at Baby P or any of the others over the years.

    Might we at some point as a society maybe think about saying a bit more clearly that this sort of sequential rutting and casual creation and abandonment of children is, well, wrong and to be discouraged?

    And, no, I don't have an easy answer as to how.

    Arthur's late Great Grandfather Kenneth Labinjo was my family GP when I was a child in Wythall near Birmingham, so Olivia Labinjo- Halcrow was no sink estate peasant. There are factors in modern life like alcoholism, drug abuse and feral procreation that are just being brushed under the carpet by Government. Tim Lawton MP was on earlier demanding the lynching (my interpretation) of the social workers. I'm sure that'll help.
    I do wonder, in this case, whether the social workers *really wanted to believe* the setup that Arthur had been placed into was a positive one - ie, what may have seemed to them like a stable family environment. And blinded by this bias, they ignored the warning signs.

    Clearly, the best situation for the kid was to live with his grandparents. Perhaps that should be a more common solution to these kind of broken home situations.
    One of the sentencing remarks is worth bearing in mind. The judge said,

    "It is a shocking feature of this case that your children, Tustin, lived a perfectly happy normal life in that household while this appalling cruelty to Arthur was taking place."

    Tustin was capable of being a good parent, but chose not to be, and deceived the social workers. This will be quite different to many of the troubled people that social workers deal with routinely.

    However, they really should have had another look when Arthur didn't return to school at the end of lockdown. Then it would have been obvious.
    The school can't be exonerated. They have a safeguarding duty to investigate prolonged absence under Section 175 of the 2002 Education Act.
    I might be misremembering, but I think Arthur died only a week and a day after the school reopened, and a teacher did report concerns to social services in that time. Clearly someone should have visited the house, whether the school, social services, or both.
  • BurgessianBurgessian Posts: 2,395

    Looking at North Shropshire while a safe Tory seat the swing Labour would have required is little more than the swing the Tories did get to gain Crewe and Nantwich.

    I can't see any reason why the Labour Party couldn't be bothered to try and win this seat, considering they were runners up and have a history of getting at least 30% of the vote there.

    If Labour were serious about winning the next election, they'd have tried to win North Shropshire. Even if the Lib Dems gain it, Labour's weakness means I expect t he Tories will regain it as part of their majority at the next election.

    BJO is right, Labour aren't a credible Opposition yet under Starmer. They aren't putting in the hard work that Cameron did.

    One thing Alastair Campbell always emphasised was the necessity for putting in the hard yards - part of the secret of Blair's success.
  • TimSTimS Posts: 9,169
    MaxPB said:

    TimS said:

    Leon said:

    The number of confirmed Omicron Covid cases in Scotland has jumped to 29 as Nicola Sturgeon warns the variant is now spreading fast in the community.

    The First Minister says cases of the little-understood strain will likely continue to rise in the coming days and the outbreak is no longer linked to single private event on November 20.

    Many of the new cases are now being linked to a Steps concert at the Hydro two days later.


    https://www.thecourier.co.uk/fp/news/2792382/omicron-covid-cases-in-scotland-jump-to-29-as-variant-now-spreading-in-community/

    A chain reaction that could result in tragedy!

    Some easy maths to be done here. If Omicron is widely seeded across the UK - as it now seems - with community transmission, there are probably 500 cases (conservatively) in the UK. If Omicron doubles every 4 days (it’s worse in Gauteng), that’s

    1000 cases a day by Dec 6

    2000 cases by Dec 10

    4000 cases by Dec 14

    8000 cases by Dec 18

    16,000 cases by Dec 22

    32,000 cases by Boxing Day

    64,000 cases by Dec 30

    128,000 cases by Jan 3

    256,000 cases by Jan 7

    512,000 cases by Jan 11

    1,028,000 cases a day by the middle of Jan


    Quite some pressure on the NHS there. Let’s hope they’re all ‘mild’

    The great thing with that maths is that by the end of Jan everyone in the country would have had it, and we'd be at herd immunity.

    Another way of looking at it is in terms of total damage. Let's say current IFR is c.0.2% (pessimistic - based on 150 deaths per day and c.80,000 infections with 50% being recorded in tests). If Omicron increases breakthrough infection but IFR stays the same (which is pessimistic given boosters and new treatments) then the max deaths if 60 million are infected would be 120,000. But of course nowhere near 60m would be infected given pre-existing vax immunity, and IFR will keep going down. So we are into a bad case being probably similar to a bad flu season.
    I think there's also no signal on how severe reinfection is compared to first time infection. I'd imagine the severity will be significantly lower, though maybe in some older groups still significant enough to cause hospitalisation if they are unvaccinated.

    Omicron could cause a wave of coughing a spluttering across the 60m or so vaccinated or previously infected but I'm not sure that's worthy of all this alarm.

    Once again, I think waiting a couple of weeks for the data from a non-African country is really important. Hopefully we'll get something soon from the Netherlands.
    I agree. Unless Omicron is significantly more severe in a naive population than Delta, even in a worst worst case scenario we are more than half way through the damage caused by this pandemic.

    I completely understand the need to flatten the curve when it comes to protecting the health system, but a big part of me feels like the sooner we get this properly over the better. Non-Covid health outcomes are getting worse and worse, there are warning signs everywhere.

    Booked my booster yesterday but the earliest date I could get was 24th Dec. Not sure it's a smart idea to get Pfizered the day before a whole morning of Christmas cookery and a massive booze-up, preceded by a late night stuffing stockings.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 61,581
    Some praise seems due to Biden for ending (for now at least) America's interminable drone wars.
    https://airwars.org/conflict-data
  • PJHPJH Posts: 443

    Pulpstar said:

    Glom said:

    AlistairM said:

    Throw away the key on these evil people

    Father is jailed for 21 years and his partner for a minimum of 29 years over the torture and killing of six-year-old Arthur Labinjo-Hughes
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-59522243

    How minimum is minimum? I know lots of things get said about our criminal justice system but what is the real situation. I'm more concerned she never be placed in a role of care ever again.
    "For some serious violent or sexual offences where the sentence is 7 years or more the offender will be released at the two-thirds point."
    29 year sentence: 19 yrs 4 months.

    She's 32 now so she'll be at least 51 when released, which is heavily odds against to have another child thankfully.
    Should have been a whole life tariff.

    If we had it, should have been the death penalty. Thankfully we don't have it, but should be a whole life tariff.
    Cases like this, and the Everard murder make me wonder about the death penalty. If the only argument against it is wrongful convictions then cases like this are surely certain enough? Why should these people be allowed another minute of life?
    I have some sympathy with that view, in that I share your revulsion at the crime. Wrongful conviction has been the mainstay argument against the death penalty, but there are others.

    1. I do not want the State to have the power of life and death over me.

    2. Juries will be less willing to convict if they think a death sentence might be imposed. In this case they might only have been willing to convict her for manslaughter rather than murder, and her sentence would then have been much lighter.
    On point 2, that is me. I would not under any circumstances convict if death was the penalty. I could not live with the knowledge that my decision led to the death of another person. Especially if it later turned out the the conviction was unsafe. (And yes, i know there is a counter argument, what happens if they are set free and kill again. But that's not my decision).
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,149
    TimS said:

    MaxPB said:

    TimS said:

    Leon said:

    The number of confirmed Omicron Covid cases in Scotland has jumped to 29 as Nicola Sturgeon warns the variant is now spreading fast in the community.

    The First Minister says cases of the little-understood strain will likely continue to rise in the coming days and the outbreak is no longer linked to single private event on November 20.

    Many of the new cases are now being linked to a Steps concert at the Hydro two days later.


    https://www.thecourier.co.uk/fp/news/2792382/omicron-covid-cases-in-scotland-jump-to-29-as-variant-now-spreading-in-community/

    A chain reaction that could result in tragedy!

    Some easy maths to be done here. If Omicron is widely seeded across the UK - as it now seems - with community transmission, there are probably 500 cases (conservatively) in the UK. If Omicron doubles every 4 days (it’s worse in Gauteng), that’s

    1000 cases a day by Dec 6

    2000 cases by Dec 10

    4000 cases by Dec 14

    8000 cases by Dec 18

    16,000 cases by Dec 22

    32,000 cases by Boxing Day

    64,000 cases by Dec 30

    128,000 cases by Jan 3

    256,000 cases by Jan 7

    512,000 cases by Jan 11

    1,028,000 cases a day by the middle of Jan


    Quite some pressure on the NHS there. Let’s hope they’re all ‘mild’

    The great thing with that maths is that by the end of Jan everyone in the country would have had it, and we'd be at herd immunity.

    Another way of looking at it is in terms of total damage. Let's say current IFR is c.0.2% (pessimistic - based on 150 deaths per day and c.80,000 infections with 50% being recorded in tests). If Omicron increases breakthrough infection but IFR stays the same (which is pessimistic given boosters and new treatments) then the max deaths if 60 million are infected would be 120,000. But of course nowhere near 60m would be infected given pre-existing vax immunity, and IFR will keep going down. So we are into a bad case being probably similar to a bad flu season.
    I think there's also no signal on how severe reinfection is compared to first time infection. I'd imagine the severity will be significantly lower, though maybe in some older groups still significant enough to cause hospitalisation if they are unvaccinated.

    Omicron could cause a wave of coughing a spluttering across the 60m or so vaccinated or previously infected but I'm not sure that's worthy of all this alarm.

    Once again, I think waiting a couple of weeks for the data from a non-African country is really important. Hopefully we'll get something soon from the Netherlands.
    I agree. Unless Omicron is significantly more severe in a naive population than Delta, even in a worst worst case scenario we are more than half way through the damage caused by this pandemic.

    I completely understand the need to flatten the curve when it comes to protecting the health system, but a big part of me feels like the sooner we get this properly over the better. Non-Covid health outcomes are getting worse and worse, there are warning signs everywhere.

    Booked my booster yesterday but the earliest date I could get was 24th Dec. Not sure it's a smart idea to get Pfizered the day before a whole morning of Christmas cookery and a massive booze-up, preceded by a late night stuffing stockings.
    We really need that commiserate button.
  • PJH said:

    Pulpstar said:

    Glom said:

    AlistairM said:

    Throw away the key on these evil people

    Father is jailed for 21 years and his partner for a minimum of 29 years over the torture and killing of six-year-old Arthur Labinjo-Hughes
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-59522243

    How minimum is minimum? I know lots of things get said about our criminal justice system but what is the real situation. I'm more concerned she never be placed in a role of care ever again.
    "For some serious violent or sexual offences where the sentence is 7 years or more the offender will be released at the two-thirds point."
    29 year sentence: 19 yrs 4 months.

    She's 32 now so she'll be at least 51 when released, which is heavily odds against to have another child thankfully.
    Should have been a whole life tariff.

    If we had it, should have been the death penalty. Thankfully we don't have it, but should be a whole life tariff.
    Cases like this, and the Everard murder make me wonder about the death penalty. If the only argument against it is wrongful convictions then cases like this are surely certain enough? Why should these people be allowed another minute of life?
    I have some sympathy with that view, in that I share your revulsion at the crime. Wrongful conviction has been the mainstay argument against the death penalty, but there are others.

    1. I do not want the State to have the power of life and death over me.

    2. Juries will be less willing to convict if they think a death sentence might be imposed. In this case they might only have been willing to convict her for manslaughter rather than murder, and her sentence would then have been much lighter.
    On point 2, that is me. I would not under any circumstances convict if death was the penalty. I could not live with the knowledge that my decision led to the death of another person. Especially if it later turned out the the conviction was unsafe. (And yes, i know there is a counter argument, what happens if they are set free and kill again. But that's not my decision).
    There's an additional complication here too. They would have to screen out jurors like you and me in a trial where the death penalty is possible. Then you are no longer judged by a jury of your peers, but by a jury of those in favour of the death penalty, which creates all kinds of biases in the administration of justice.
  • NickPalmerNickPalmer Posts: 21,265
    edited December 2021
    I agree with Mike's header - there is definitely some sensible targeting going on.

    Labour has won the key Worthing by-election with 50% of the vote (to the Tory 40%) - this shifts the council into NOC (it was always Tory up to now) and gives a good shot at control next May. That was a key priority for SE Region - we were all urged to go there at the regional conference - and is a poster child for us along the southern coast, since up to 1992 Labour never had a single councillor there. Essentially the shift from domination by elderly conservative voters to younger people moving on from Brighton is producing a demographic shift along the coast, analogous to the progress being made by the LibDems inland.
  • Northern_AlNorthern_Al Posts: 7,461
    edited December 2021

    dixiedean said:

    ping said:

    Cyclefree said:

    Look at the sexual and moral incontinence of the adults in poor Arthur's life.

    A mother who has a child, leaves father, shacks up with someone else and kills him. A father who takes up with a woman and cruelly treats and abandons his own son to make this woman happy. A step-mother who has 5 children by 4 different men, who has never worked, who throws herself out of the window and aborts another child while in custody for some offence.

    I don't want to come over as some ancient prude. Evil has existed in all sorts of times and places and is no respecter of class or education. But if you look at a lot of these child murder/child abuse cases you see similar patterns: look at Baby P or any of the others over the years.

    Might we at some point as a society maybe think about saying a bit more clearly that this sort of sequential rutting and casual creation and abandonment of children is, well, wrong and to be discouraged?

    And, no, I don't have an easy answer as to how.

    Arthur's late Great Grandfather Kenneth Labinjo was my family GP when I was a child in Wythall near Birmingham, so Olivia Labinjo- Halcrow was no sink estate peasant. There are factors in modern life like alcoholism, drug abuse and feral procreation that are just being brushed under the carpet by Government. Tim Lawton MP was on earlier demanding the lynching (my interpretation) of the social workers. I'm sure that'll help.
    I do wonder, in this case, whether the social workers *really wanted to believe* the setup that Arthur had been placed into was a positive one - ie, what may have seemed to them like a stable family environment. And blinded by this bias, they ignored the warning signs.

    Clearly, the best situation for the kid was to live with his grandparents. Perhaps that should be a more common solution to these kind of broken home situations.
    One of the sentencing remarks is worth bearing in mind. The judge said,

    "It is a shocking feature of this case that your children, Tustin, lived a perfectly happy normal life in that household while this appalling cruelty to Arthur was taking place."

    Tustin was capable of being a good parent, but chose not to be, and deceived the social workers. This will be quite different to many of the troubled people that social workers deal with routinely.

    However, they really should have had another look when Arthur didn't return to school at the end of lockdown. Then it would have been obvious.
    The school can't be exonerated. They have a safeguarding duty to investigate prolonged absence under Section 175 of the 2002 Education Act.
    I might be misremembering, but I think Arthur died only a week and a day after the school reopened, and a teacher did report concerns to social services in that time. Clearly someone should have visited the house, whether the school, social services, or both.
    Part of the problem here is that many, many thousands of children didn't return to school at the end of lockdown, and vulnerable children were over-represented in these non-returnees. Indeed, significant numbers still haven't returned if school attendance figures are accurate.

    In these circumstances, neither schools nor social services have the capacity to chase up every case with the necessary diligence or thoroughness. Appalling though this case was, it is slightly reassuring that, as far as one knows, there aren't a plethora of such cases.
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 44,080

    dixiedean said:

    ping said:

    Cyclefree said:

    Look at the sexual and moral incontinence of the adults in poor Arthur's life.

    A mother who has a child, leaves father, shacks up with someone else and kills him. A father who takes up with a woman and cruelly treats and abandons his own son to make this woman happy. A step-mother who has 5 children by 4 different men, who has never worked, who throws herself out of the window and aborts another child while in custody for some offence.

    I don't want to come over as some ancient prude. Evil has existed in all sorts of times and places and is no respecter of class or education. But if you look at a lot of these child murder/child abuse cases you see similar patterns: look at Baby P or any of the others over the years.

    Might we at some point as a society maybe think about saying a bit more clearly that this sort of sequential rutting and casual creation and abandonment of children is, well, wrong and to be discouraged?

    And, no, I don't have an easy answer as to how.

    Arthur's late Great Grandfather Kenneth Labinjo was my family GP when I was a child in Wythall near Birmingham, so Olivia Labinjo- Halcrow was no sink estate peasant. There are factors in modern life like alcoholism, drug abuse and feral procreation that are just being brushed under the carpet by Government. Tim Lawton MP was on earlier demanding the lynching (my interpretation) of the social workers. I'm sure that'll help.
    I do wonder, in this case, whether the social workers *really wanted to believe* the setup that Arthur had been placed into was a positive one - ie, what may have seemed to them like a stable family environment. And blinded by this bias, they ignored the warning signs.

    Clearly, the best situation for the kid was to live with his grandparents. Perhaps that should be a more common solution to these kind of broken home situations.
    One of the sentencing remarks is worth bearing in mind. The judge said,

    "It is a shocking feature of this case that your children, Tustin, lived a perfectly happy normal life in that household while this appalling cruelty to Arthur was taking place."

    Tustin was capable of being a good parent, but chose not to be, and deceived the social workers. This will be quite different to many of the troubled people that social workers deal with routinely.

    However, they really should have had another look when Arthur didn't return to school at the end of lockdown. Then it would have been obvious.
    The school can't be exonerated. They have a safeguarding duty to investigate prolonged absence under Section 175 of the 2002 Education Act.
    I might be misremembering, but I think Arthur died only a week and a day after the school reopened, and a teacher did report concerns to social services in that time. Clearly someone should have visited the house, whether the school, social services, or both.
    It isn't surprising that in the chaos of lockdowns, bubbles and isolation over the last 18 months that some slip through the net.

    I used to get called to consult on suspicious injuries in children. It is an absolute minefield that I pity the child protection teams having to deal with. While fatal cases are not unusual, there are plenty more with that potential.
  • No, it's your fault....

    The general public are not taking the pandemic seriously, say the general public

    Taking it seriously - 35%
    Not taking it seriously - 57%

    https://yougov.co.uk/topics/health/survey-results/daily/2021/12/03/f8ae1/2?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=daily_questions&utm_campaign=question_2


    https://twitter.com/YouGov/status/1466795387860180997?s=20
  • RattersRatters Posts: 756

    Pulpstar said:

    Glom said:

    AlistairM said:

    Throw away the key on these evil people

    Father is jailed for 21 years and his partner for a minimum of 29 years over the torture and killing of six-year-old Arthur Labinjo-Hughes
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-59522243

    How minimum is minimum? I know lots of things get said about our criminal justice system but what is the real situation. I'm more concerned she never be placed in a role of care ever again.
    "For some serious violent or sexual offences where the sentence is 7 years or more the offender will be released at the two-thirds point."
    29 year sentence: 19 yrs 4 months.

    She's 32 now so she'll be at least 51 when released, which is heavily odds against to have another child thankfully.
    Should have been a whole life tariff.

    If we had it, should have been the death penalty. Thankfully we don't have it, but should be a whole life tariff.
    Quite agree on the whole life tariff. I had avoided reading the details of the story until today, and it made me feel sick to my stomach.

    Anyone who does that shouldn't have a chance to live in free society ever again.
  • MaxPB said:



    I think there's also no signal on how severe reinfection is compared to first time infection. I'd imagine the severity will be significantly lower, though maybe in some older groups still significant enough to cause hospitalisation if they are unvaccinated.

    Omicron could cause a wave of coughing a spluttering across the 60m or so vaccinated or previously infected but I'm not sure that's worthy of all this alarm.

    Once again, I think waiting a couple of weeks for the data from a non-African country is really important. Hopefully we'll get something soon from the Netherlands.

    Yeah, we really don't know anything much yet about either severity or the extent of any impact on vaccine effectiveness.

    By the sounds of it, we might have some data from Scotland quite soon. It sounds as though their Omicron wave is starting up fast.
  • MattWMattW Posts: 18,094

    The Economist on Lord Frost:

    Born in Derby and educated at a private school in Nottingham before a long but relatively unglamorous career in the Foreign Office, Lord Frost looks more like the middle-class provincials who predominate on the Tory benches than like his boss, who was born in New York and educated in Brussels and at Eton, and for whom Brexit appears more a wheeze than a cause. He was condescended to by eu negotiators, who thought his threats to walk out theatrical and childish. The old guard of the diplomatic service are crueller: they think him a third-rater. No great surprise, says one former colleague. “They hate his guts, because he’s proved them all wrong and destroyed their life’s work.”

    https://www.economist.com/britain/2021/12/04/to-understand-lord-frost-is-to-understand-britains-approach-to-brexit?frsc=dg|e

    "...educated at a private school in Nottingham ..."

    I am reminded as always at how small and incestuous our political classes are. There really are no outsiders.

    Frosty was at Nottingham High School at the same time as Edward "Dishwater" Davey. And Ed "National Treasure" Balls.

    And after school, they all trooped off to Oxford together.
    That's rather unfair I think. All from separate years.

    Davey started out in the Greens at Uni, then was a Lib Dem in the right place at the right time, and didn't mess up any stage of his political career. More of a self-made outsider. Not a very establishment backstory, though ambitious parents (then parent).

    David Frost is Civil Service / Diplomatic Service. Does that count as 'political class'?

    I don't know about Balls' political career, except that I think that he was in the Tory Society at Oxford.

    I'll give you that they all have traditional Good Independent School polish / confidence, and the benefits of an excellent education amongst groups that wanted to learn. Suspect the social networks are more Oxford than NHS, however. High School Boys tend to end up all over the place.

    I'll also give you that the school was Oxbridge focused, and paid a lot of attention to getting students to University even back then. In Davey's year about 35 from 120 went to Oxbridge, though it was a very good year.
  • TheuniondivvieTheuniondivvie Posts: 39,752
    edited December 2021
    I am at peace with whatever pro Union interpretation of this result HYUFD will apply.

    Edit: SNP candidate elected at stage 6 I believe.


  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,625
    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    Cyclefree said:

    Look at the sexual and moral incontinence of the adults in poor Arthur's life.

    A mother who has a child, leaves father, shacks up with someone else and kills him. A father who takes up with a woman and cruelly treats and abandons his own son to make this woman happy. A step-mother who has 5 children by 4 different men, who has never worked, who throws herself out of the window and aborts another child while in custody for some offence.

    I don't want to come over as some ancient prude. Evil has existed in all sorts of times and places and is no respecter of class or education. But if you look at a lot of these child murder/child abuse cases you see similar patterns: look at Baby P or any of the others over the years.

    Might we at some point as a society maybe think about saying a bit more clearly that this sort of sequential rutting and casual creation and abandonment of children is, well, wrong and to be discouraged?

    And, no, I don't have an easy answer as to how.

    Arthur's late Great Grandfather Kenneth Labinjo was my family GP when I was a child in Wythall near Birmingham, so Olivia Labinjo- Halcrow was no sink estate peasant. There are factors in modern life like alcoholism, drug abuse and feral procreation that are just being brushed under the carpet by Government. Tim Lawton MP was on earlier demanding the lynching (my interpretation) of the social workers. I'm sure that'll help.
    Lynching social workers is, of course, an essential part of the public expiation process. Ed Balls lynching Sharon Shoesmith, for example.

    https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/oct/29/ed-balls-sharon-shoesmith-baby-p-sacking-payout
    That was poor all round. Cameron tried to politicize it and Balls went for performative scapegoating. Both playing to the gallery. Not the best moment for our politics.
    There was some suspicion that Balls did what he did so that a member of Failure-Is-Not-An-Option club would get a payout.

    Personally, I don't believe that. Shoesmith wasn't quite high enough to be part of the magic circle....
    You have again managed to craft a post that I don't really understand. Nobody does it better, I have to say.
    The suspicion was that Balls was triangulating -

    1) Playing to the public by binning Shoesmith.
    2) Playing the gallery of "professionals" by ensuring that it was done in such a cack handed manner that she was guaranteed a 6 figure settlement and killing an possibility of further action against her.

    I doubt the idea - Shomesmith wasn't high enough to be part of the magic circle of those who are completely protected against the consequences of their own actions.
  • PJHPJH Posts: 443

    PJH said:

    Pulpstar said:

    Glom said:

    AlistairM said:

    Throw away the key on these evil people

    Father is jailed for 21 years and his partner for a minimum of 29 years over the torture and killing of six-year-old Arthur Labinjo-Hughes
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-59522243

    How minimum is minimum? I know lots of things get said about our criminal justice system but what is the real situation. I'm more concerned she never be placed in a role of care ever again.
    "For some serious violent or sexual offences where the sentence is 7 years or more the offender will be released at the two-thirds point."
    29 year sentence: 19 yrs 4 months.

    She's 32 now so she'll be at least 51 when released, which is heavily odds against to have another child thankfully.
    Should have been a whole life tariff.

    If we had it, should have been the death penalty. Thankfully we don't have it, but should be a whole life tariff.
    Cases like this, and the Everard murder make me wonder about the death penalty. If the only argument against it is wrongful convictions then cases like this are surely certain enough? Why should these people be allowed another minute of life?
    I have some sympathy with that view, in that I share your revulsion at the crime. Wrongful conviction has been the mainstay argument against the death penalty, but there are others.

    1. I do not want the State to have the power of life and death over me.

    2. Juries will be less willing to convict if they think a death sentence might be imposed. In this case they might only have been willing to convict her for manslaughter rather than murder, and her sentence would then have been much lighter.
    On point 2, that is me. I would not under any circumstances convict if death was the penalty. I could not live with the knowledge that my decision led to the death of another person. Especially if it later turned out the the conviction was unsafe. (And yes, i know there is a counter argument, what happens if they are set free and kill again. But that's not my decision).
    There's an additional complication here too. They would have to screen out jurors like you and me in a trial where the death penalty is possible. Then you are no longer judged by a jury of your peers, but by a jury of those in favour of the death penalty, which creates all kinds of biases in the administration of justice.
    And thinking about it, that opens up a whole can of worms, what other views are unacceptable for a juror? Gender, religion, race...

    Anyway, I would just give the required answer.
  • JBriskin3JBriskin3 Posts: 1,254
    edited December 2021

    I agree with Mike's header - there is definitely some sensible targeting going on.

    Labour has won the key Worthing by-election with 50% of the vote (to the Tory 40%) - this shifts the council into NOC (it was always Tory up to now) and gives a good shot at control next May. That was a key priority for SE Region - we were all urged to go there at the regional conference - and is a poster child for us along the southern coast, since up to 1992 Labour never had a single councillor there. Essentially the shift from domination by elderly conservative voters to younger people moving on from Brighton is producing a demographic shift along the coast, analogous to the progress being made by the LibDems inland.

    Tactical voting seems to be working for the unofficial Lab/Lib Dem alliance.

    Shame we still have not quite got the hang of it in Scotland.
  • SelebianSelebian Posts: 7,257

    Selebian said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Conservative MPs have warned that it may be "too late" to shore up support in North Shropshire, with just two weeks before the next by-election.

    Boris Johnson has held on to his party’s seat in Old Bexley and Sidcup, but the Conservative majority was slashed from almost 19,000 to just 4,478. Louie French, the Tory candidate, won the election triggered by the death of James Brokenshire with a 51.4 per cent share of the vote, compared with Labour’s 30.8 per cent.

    Backbenchers praised Justin Tomlinson, the deputy party chairman, for running a "slick" and "very solid campaign", which one said was "the best I've seen in terms of competency".

    His team will now switch their focus to North Shropshire, with a vote on Dec 16 triggered by the resignation of Owen Paterson amid the row over sleaze allegations.

    One said today's result was "a relief", but added: "North Shropshire will be different because there is a more organised opposition in place, and other parties are taking it more seriously."

    "Vibes coming back are not good," said one. "JT's team switch to Shropshire on Monday but I suspect it'll be too late.. he can't be everywhere and was determined to get [Old Bexley] over the line."

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2021/12/03/boris-johnson-news-bexley-by-election-starmer-labour-brexit/

    Absolutely clunking expectation management, but presumably the reason they are saying they are worried is they are actually worried

    Interesting (by which I mean either stupid or deliberately misleading) that the DT majors on the absolute change in majority between elections with very different turnouts. Has there ever been a government by election hold without a 'slashed' majority in absolute terms?
    I can only think of the Glenrothes by election in 2008 where Labour slightly increased both their absolute vote and share (although their majority was cut by the SNP) but this is probably isn't what you're looking for.
    Yep, still a 'slashed majority' (in terms of absolute votes in the majority and arguably in the %, too) but an interesting example, thank you.
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 27,840
    Foxy said:

    dixiedean said:

    ping said:

    Cyclefree said:

    Look at the sexual and moral incontinence of the adults in poor Arthur's life.

    A mother who has a child, leaves father, shacks up with someone else and kills him. A father who takes up with a woman and cruelly treats and abandons his own son to make this woman happy. A step-mother who has 5 children by 4 different men, who has never worked, who throws herself out of the window and aborts another child while in custody for some offence.

    I don't want to come over as some ancient prude. Evil has existed in all sorts of times and places and is no respecter of class or education. But if you look at a lot of these child murder/child abuse cases you see similar patterns: look at Baby P or any of the others over the years.

    Might we at some point as a society maybe think about saying a bit more clearly that this sort of sequential rutting and casual creation and abandonment of children is, well, wrong and to be discouraged?

    And, no, I don't have an easy answer as to how.

    Arthur's late Great Grandfather Kenneth Labinjo was my family GP when I was a child in Wythall near Birmingham, so Olivia Labinjo- Halcrow was no sink estate peasant. There are factors in modern life like alcoholism, drug abuse and feral procreation that are just being brushed under the carpet by Government. Tim Lawton MP was on earlier demanding the lynching (my interpretation) of the social workers. I'm sure that'll help.
    I do wonder, in this case, whether the social workers *really wanted to believe* the setup that Arthur had been placed into was a positive one - ie, what may have seemed to them like a stable family environment. And blinded by this bias, they ignored the warning signs.

    Clearly, the best situation for the kid was to live with his grandparents. Perhaps that should be a more common solution to these kind of broken home situations.
    One of the sentencing remarks is worth bearing in mind. The judge said,

    "It is a shocking feature of this case that your children, Tustin, lived a perfectly happy normal life in that household while this appalling cruelty to Arthur was taking place."

    Tustin was capable of being a good parent, but chose not to be, and deceived the social workers. This will be quite different to many of the troubled people that social workers deal with routinely.

    However, they really should have had another look when Arthur didn't return to school at the end of lockdown. Then it would have been obvious.
    The school can't be exonerated. They have a safeguarding duty to investigate prolonged absence under Section 175 of the 2002 Education Act.
    I might be misremembering, but I think Arthur died only a week and a day after the school reopened, and a teacher did report concerns to social services in that time. Clearly someone should have visited the house, whether the school, social services, or both.
    It isn't surprising that in the chaos of lockdowns, bubbles and isolation over the last 18 months that some slip through the net.

    I used to get called to consult on suspicious injuries in children. It is an absolute minefield that I pity the child protection teams having to deal with. While fatal cases are not unusual, there are plenty more with that potential.
    Child Protection is a thankless task.
  • JBriskin3JBriskin3 Posts: 1,254
    edited December 2021

    I am at peace with whatever pro Union interpretation of this result HYUFD will apply.

    Edit: SNP candidate elected at stage 6 I believe.


    I'm not HYUFD

    But we've known for a while that tactical voting doesn't work in Scotland when the coalition of chaos have total domination over media coverage.
  • IanB2 said:

    Looking at North Shropshire while a safe Tory seat the swing Labour would have required is little more than the swing the Tories did get to gain Crewe and Nantwich.

    I can't see any reason why the Labour Party couldn't be bothered to try and win this seat, considering they were runners up and have a history of getting at least 30% of the vote there.

    If Labour were serious about winning the next election, they'd have tried to win North Shropshire. Even if the Lib Dems gain it, Labour's weakness means I expect t he Tories will regain it as part of their majority at the next election.

    BJO is right, Labour aren't a credible Opposition yet under Starmer. They aren't putting in the hard work that Cameron did.

    The prospects of winning a seat rest more upon the propensity of those who didn’t vote for you last time to switch in your favour, than upon the number who actually voted for you the last time. Labour’s second places in the south are of no benefit if there aren’t enough among the rest of the voters who would ever be willing to back them.
    Indeed but you build to an election winning position by going for firsts, not seconds.

    The prize and momentum from winning a by-election from the government is so big for the Opposition that like in Crewe and Nantwich or similar the Opposition really should be trying to seize their opportunities.

    In a by election the primary Opposition should be seeking to give the government a good kicking. Not stand back and see the minor parties do so.
  • PJH said:

    PJH said:

    Pulpstar said:

    Glom said:

    AlistairM said:

    Throw away the key on these evil people

    Father is jailed for 21 years and his partner for a minimum of 29 years over the torture and killing of six-year-old Arthur Labinjo-Hughes
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-59522243

    How minimum is minimum? I know lots of things get said about our criminal justice system but what is the real situation. I'm more concerned she never be placed in a role of care ever again.
    "For some serious violent or sexual offences where the sentence is 7 years or more the offender will be released at the two-thirds point."
    29 year sentence: 19 yrs 4 months.

    She's 32 now so she'll be at least 51 when released, which is heavily odds against to have another child thankfully.
    Should have been a whole life tariff.

    If we had it, should have been the death penalty. Thankfully we don't have it, but should be a whole life tariff.
    Cases like this, and the Everard murder make me wonder about the death penalty. If the only argument against it is wrongful convictions then cases like this are surely certain enough? Why should these people be allowed another minute of life?
    I have some sympathy with that view, in that I share your revulsion at the crime. Wrongful conviction has been the mainstay argument against the death penalty, but there are others.

    1. I do not want the State to have the power of life and death over me.

    2. Juries will be less willing to convict if they think a death sentence might be imposed. In this case they might only have been willing to convict her for manslaughter rather than murder, and her sentence would then have been much lighter.
    On point 2, that is me. I would not under any circumstances convict if death was the penalty. I could not live with the knowledge that my decision led to the death of another person. Especially if it later turned out the the conviction was unsafe. (And yes, i know there is a counter argument, what happens if they are set free and kill again. But that's not my decision).
    There's an additional complication here too. They would have to screen out jurors like you and me in a trial where the death penalty is possible. Then you are no longer judged by a jury of your peers, but by a jury of those in favour of the death penalty, which creates all kinds of biases in the administration of justice.
    And thinking about it, that opens up a whole can of worms, what other views are unacceptable for a juror? Gender, religion, race...

    Anyway, I would just give the required answer.
    Presumably you would give the true answer when questioned under oath, or risk going to jail for perjury...
  • algarkirkalgarkirk Posts: 10,343
    IanB2 said:

    Looking at North Shropshire while a safe Tory seat the swing Labour would have required is little more than the swing the Tories did get to gain Crewe and Nantwich.

    I can't see any reason why the Labour Party couldn't be bothered to try and win this seat, considering they were runners up and have a history of getting at least 30% of the vote there.

    If Labour were serious about winning the next election, they'd have tried to win North Shropshire. Even if the Lib Dems gain it, Labour's weakness means I expect t he Tories will regain it as part of their majority at the next election.

    BJO is right, Labour aren't a credible Opposition yet under Starmer. They aren't putting in the hard work that Cameron did.

    The prospects of winning a seat rest more upon the propensity of those who didn’t vote for you last time to switch in your favour, than upon the number who actually voted for you the last time. Labour’s second places in the south are of no benefit if there aren’t enough among the rest of the voters who would ever be willing to back them.
    The fact that Labour is making no effort to win, and are making every effort to let someone else win instead, in a seat where they came second, following a vacancy caused by a political scandal is extraordinary. The reasoning will be much too subtle for the several million extra voters they need maybe in 18 month's time.

  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,149
    JBriskin3 said:

    I am at peace with whatever pro Union interpretation of this result HYUFD will apply.

    Edit: SNP candidate elected at stage 6 I believe.


    I'm not HYUFD

    But we've known for a while that tactical voting doesn't work in Scotland when the coalition of chaos have total domination over media coverage.
    Labour and the Tories? I wouldn't go quite so far, even if the National is simply a way for the relevant Unionist firm to recoup some of the losses made by making the Herald hard unionist.
  • eekeek Posts: 24,797
    algarkirk said:

    IanB2 said:

    Looking at North Shropshire while a safe Tory seat the swing Labour would have required is little more than the swing the Tories did get to gain Crewe and Nantwich.

    I can't see any reason why the Labour Party couldn't be bothered to try and win this seat, considering they were runners up and have a history of getting at least 30% of the vote there.

    If Labour were serious about winning the next election, they'd have tried to win North Shropshire. Even if the Lib Dems gain it, Labour's weakness means I expect t he Tories will regain it as part of their majority at the next election.

    BJO is right, Labour aren't a credible Opposition yet under Starmer. They aren't putting in the hard work that Cameron did.

    The prospects of winning a seat rest more upon the propensity of those who didn’t vote for you last time to switch in your favour, than upon the number who actually voted for you the last time. Labour’s second places in the south are of no benefit if there aren’t enough among the rest of the voters who would ever be willing to back them.
    The fact that Labour is making no effort to win, and are making every effort to let someone else win instead, in a seat where they came second, following a vacancy caused by a political scandal is extraordinary. The reasoning will be much too subtle for the several million extra voters they need maybe in 18 month's time.

    In 2 weeks time No one will care - that Labour didn't fight this seat.

  • boulayboulay Posts: 3,773

    Pulpstar said:

    Glom said:

    AlistairM said:

    Throw away the key on these evil people

    Father is jailed for 21 years and his partner for a minimum of 29 years over the torture and killing of six-year-old Arthur Labinjo-Hughes
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-59522243

    How minimum is minimum? I know lots of things get said about our criminal justice system but what is the real situation. I'm more concerned she never be placed in a role of care ever again.
    "For some serious violent or sexual offences where the sentence is 7 years or more the offender will be released at the two-thirds point."
    29 year sentence: 19 yrs 4 months.

    She's 32 now so she'll be at least 51 when released, which is heavily odds against to have another child thankfully.
    Should have been a whole life tariff.

    If we had it, should have been the death penalty. Thankfully we don't have it, but should be a whole life tariff.
    Cases like this, and the Everard murder make me wonder about the death penalty. If the only argument against it is wrongful convictions then cases like this are surely certain enough? Why should these people be allowed another minute of life?
    Rather than a state organised death penalty I would rather see a team of rogue special forces financed by someone ridiculously wealthy and a bit left field (Elon Musk…?) extract these murderers and take them off to a secret facility and carry out exactly the same treatment to the murderer over the same time scale ending with their death so that they spend their last days truly feeling the results of their evil for themselves….

    Then it’s available on YouTube as a warning to others.

    As that’s clearly not possible I desperately don’t want her to be able to kill herself or be killed in prison but would rather she experienced 29 years of fear, beatings, abuse etc so that every day is torture.
  • JBriskin3 said:

    I am at peace with whatever pro Union interpretation of this result HYUFD will apply.

    Edit: SNP candidate elected at stage 6 I believe.


    I'm not HYUFD

    But we've known for a while that tactical voting doesn't work in Scotland when the coalition of chaos have total domination over media coverage.
    I agree.
    The Unionist coalition (such as it is) is certainly chaotic, and despite having the media almost entirely on their side, can't land a punch.
  • moonshine said:

    Leon said:

    moonshine said:

    Leon said:

    The number of confirmed Omicron Covid cases in Scotland has jumped to 29 as Nicola Sturgeon warns the variant is now spreading fast in the community.

    The First Minister says cases of the little-understood strain will likely continue to rise in the coming days and the outbreak is no longer linked to single private event on November 20.

    Many of the new cases are now being linked to a Steps concert at the Hydro two days later.


    https://www.thecourier.co.uk/fp/news/2792382/omicron-covid-cases-in-scotland-jump-to-29-as-variant-now-spreading-in-community/

    A chain reaction that could result in tragedy!

    Some easy maths to be done here. If Omicron is widely seeded across the UK - as it now seems - with community transmission, there are probably 500 cases (conservatively) in the UK. If Omicron doubles every 4 days (it’s worse in Gauteng), that’s

    1000 cases a day by Dec 6

    2000 cases by Dec 10

    4000 cases by Dec 14

    8000 cases by Dec 18

    16,000 cases by Dec 22

    32,000 cases by Boxing Day

    64,000 cases by Dec 30

    128,000 cases by Jan 3

    256,000 cases by Jan 7

    512,000 cases by Jan 11

    1,028,000 cases a day by the middle of Jan


    Quite some pressure on the NHS there. Let’s hope they’re all ‘mild’

    You are such a cheery contributor
    Doesn’t take many months Leon before every atom in the observable universe is contaminated with Omicron. In reality, exponential growth curves find a natural ceiling well before that.
    Of course. If the case load follows my curve people will lock down voluntarily. The government will probably lockdown officially right after Xmas?

    But then there’s the question: will lockdowns work against a bug as infectious as Omicron? We dunno

    On the cheerier side, we still don’t know how Omicron functions in a highly vaxed context. It may be much less impressive. Fingers x’d
    I don’t think they will lockdown here. If the vaccines work and it’s largely anti vaxxers causing the problem, the clamour will be for vaxports, antivax taxes and whatever else before generalised lockdown. Including from no 11 and the Cabinet.
    The unvaccinated should have the right to live as they please.

    But if they're a disproportionate burden on the NHS because of their choices, they should face a tax just like smokers do.

    That principle has long been established. The NHS needs taxes to survive.
  • JBriskin3JBriskin3 Posts: 1,254
    Carnyx said:

    JBriskin3 said:

    I am at peace with whatever pro Union interpretation of this result HYUFD will apply.

    Edit: SNP candidate elected at stage 6 I believe.


    I'm not HYUFD

    But we've known for a while that tactical voting doesn't work in Scotland when the coalition of chaos have total domination over media coverage.
    Labour and the Tories? I wouldn't go quite so far, even if the National is simply a way for the relevant Unionist firm to recoup some of the losses made by making the Herald hard unionist.
    If only Labour and the Tories could form an alliance in Scotland- it might save us from the nightmare that is left-wing nationalism.
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826
    edited December 2021
    JBriskin3 said:

    I agree with Mike's header - there is definitely some sensible targeting going on.

    Labour has won the key Worthing by-election with 50% of the vote (to the Tory 40%) - this shifts the council into NOC (it was always Tory up to now) and gives a good shot at control next May. That was a key priority for SE Region - we were all urged to go there at the regional conference - and is a poster child for us along the southern coast, since up to 1992 Labour never had a single councillor there. Essentially the shift from domination by elderly conservative voters to younger people moving on from Brighton is producing a demographic shift along the coast, analogous to the progress being made by the LibDems inland.

    Tactical voting seems to be working for the unofficial Lab/Lib Dem alliance.

    Shame we still have not quite got the hang of it in Scotland.
    No it isn't. Lab haven't won a single seat yet from tactical voting.

    Though there seems to be tactical voting in place in Scotland ... Former Labour voters now tactically vote SNP to keep out the Tories.
  • maaarshmaaarsh Posts: 3,391
    Cases very marginally up in England, flat in UK and testing up more strongly. Basically looks like the mini spike this week is driven by more testing in the wake of wall to wall coverage. If true, it should mean some cases have been 'pulled forward' and we'll get a dip afterwards rather like the return to school fall in September.
  • FF43FF43 Posts: 15,547

    The Economist on Lord Frost:

    Born in Derby and educated at a private school in Nottingham before a long but relatively unglamorous career in the Foreign Office, Lord Frost looks more like the middle-class provincials who predominate on the Tory benches than like his boss, who was born in New York and educated in Brussels and at Eton, and for whom Brexit appears more a wheeze than a cause. He was condescended to by eu negotiators, who thought his threats to walk out theatrical and childish. The old guard of the diplomatic service are crueller: they think him a third-rater. No great surprise, says one former colleague. “They hate his guts, because he’s proved them all wrong and destroyed their life’s work.”

    https://www.economist.com/britain/2021/12/04/to-understand-lord-frost-is-to-understand-britains-approach-to-brexit?frsc=dg|e

    I suspect.his colleague means to say Frost thinks he's proved them all wrong, which is a bit different.

    Not sure if Frost is trying to be the Robespierre of Brexit, but he's a genuinely interesting mix of fanaticism and opportunism. There's no-one else like him in the Cabinet.
  • The next election will have a large amount of tactical voting and the Lib Dems will make a lot of gains IMHO.
  • JBriskin3JBriskin3 Posts: 1,254

    JBriskin3 said:

    I agree with Mike's header - there is definitely some sensible targeting going on.

    Labour has won the key Worthing by-election with 50% of the vote (to the Tory 40%) - this shifts the council into NOC (it was always Tory up to now) and gives a good shot at control next May. That was a key priority for SE Region - we were all urged to go there at the regional conference - and is a poster child for us along the southern coast, since up to 1992 Labour never had a single councillor there. Essentially the shift from domination by elderly conservative voters to younger people moving on from Brighton is producing a demographic shift along the coast, analogous to the progress being made by the LibDems inland.

    Tactical voting seems to be working for the unofficial Lab/Lib Dem alliance.

    Shame we still have not quite got the hang of it in Scotland.
    No it isn't. Lab haven't won a single seat yet from tactical voting.
    Well it's working for the Lib Dems at least.

    Tactical voting is hard to get right as Scotland has proved.
  • PJHPJH Posts: 443
    edited December 2021

    PJH said:

    PJH said:

    Pulpstar said:

    Glom said:

    AlistairM said:

    Throw away the key on these evil people

    Father is jailed for 21 years and his partner for a minimum of 29 years over the torture and killing of six-year-old Arthur Labinjo-Hughes
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-59522243

    How minimum is minimum? I know lots of things get said about our criminal justice system but what is the real situation. I'm more concerned she never be placed in a role of care ever again.
    "For some serious violent or sexual offences where the sentence is 7 years or more the offender will be released at the two-thirds point."
    29 year sentence: 19 yrs 4 months.

    She's 32 now so she'll be at least 51 when released, which is heavily odds against to have another child thankfully.
    Should have been a whole life tariff.

    If we had it, should have been the death penalty. Thankfully we don't have it, but should be a whole life tariff.
    Cases like this, and the Everard murder make me wonder about the death penalty. If the only argument against it is wrongful convictions then cases like this are surely certain enough? Why should these people be allowed another minute of life?
    I have some sympathy with that view, in that I share your revulsion at the crime. Wrongful conviction has been the mainstay argument against the death penalty, but there are others.

    1. I do not want the State to have the power of life and death over me.

    2. Juries will be less willing to convict if they think a death sentence might be imposed. In this case they might only have been willing to convict her for manslaughter rather than murder, and her sentence would then have been much lighter.
    On point 2, that is me. I would not under any circumstances convict if death was the penalty. I could not live with the knowledge that my decision led to the death of another person. Especially if it later turned out the the conviction was unsafe. (And yes, i know there is a counter argument, what happens if they are set free and kill again. But that's not my decision).
    There's an additional complication here too. They would have to screen out jurors like you and me in a trial where the death penalty is possible. Then you are no longer judged by a jury of your peers, but by a jury of those in favour of the death penalty, which creates all kinds of biases in the administration of justice.
    And thinking about it, that opens up a whole can of worms, what other views are unacceptable for a juror? Gender, religion, race...

    Anyway, I would just give the required answer.
    Presumably you would give the true answer when questioned under oath, or risk going to jail for perjury...
    But how would you prove it, if I didn't give away my true feelings?
  • JBriskin3JBriskin3 Posts: 1,254

    JBriskin3 said:

    I am at peace with whatever pro Union interpretation of this result HYUFD will apply.

    Edit: SNP candidate elected at stage 6 I believe.


    I'm not HYUFD

    But we've known for a while that tactical voting doesn't work in Scotland when the coalition of chaos have total domination over media coverage.
    I agree.
    The Unionist coalition (such as it is) is certainly chaotic, and despite having the media almost entirely on their side, can't land a punch.
    Media have been biased to SNP Types for quite a while now.

    e.g. Nippys fifteen minutes of hate that was shown for a whole year.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,625
    boulay said:

    Pulpstar said:

    Glom said:

    AlistairM said:

    Throw away the key on these evil people

    Father is jailed for 21 years and his partner for a minimum of 29 years over the torture and killing of six-year-old Arthur Labinjo-Hughes
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-59522243

    How minimum is minimum? I know lots of things get said about our criminal justice system but what is the real situation. I'm more concerned she never be placed in a role of care ever again.
    "For some serious violent or sexual offences where the sentence is 7 years or more the offender will be released at the two-thirds point."
    29 year sentence: 19 yrs 4 months.

    She's 32 now so she'll be at least 51 when released, which is heavily odds against to have another child thankfully.
    Should have been a whole life tariff.

    If we had it, should have been the death penalty. Thankfully we don't have it, but should be a whole life tariff.
    Cases like this, and the Everard murder make me wonder about the death penalty. If the only argument against it is wrongful convictions then cases like this are surely certain enough? Why should these people be allowed another minute of life?
    Rather than a state organised death penalty I would rather see a team of rogue special forces financed by someone ridiculously wealthy and a bit left field (Elon Musk…?) extract these murderers and take them off to a secret facility and carry out exactly the same treatment to the murderer over the same time scale ending with their death so that they spend their last days truly feeling the results of their evil for themselves….

    Then it’s available on YouTube as a warning to others.

    As that’s clearly not possible I desperately don’t want her to be able to kill herself or be killed in prison but would rather she experienced 29 years of fear, beatings, abuse etc so that every day is torture.
    So a paramilitary death squad run by rich people?

    {Fidel Castaño has entered the chat}
  • No, it's your fault....

    The general public are not taking the pandemic seriously, say the general public

    Taking it seriously - 35%
    Not taking it seriously - 57%

    https://yougov.co.uk/topics/health/survey-results/daily/2021/12/03/f8ae1/2?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=daily_questions&utm_campaign=question_2


    https://twitter.com/YouGov/status/1466795387860180997?s=20

    I'm not taking the pandemic seriously anymore.

    The pandemic is a bad joke dragged on far too long now.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,149

    JBriskin3 said:

    I agree with Mike's header - there is definitely some sensible targeting going on.

    Labour has won the key Worthing by-election with 50% of the vote (to the Tory 40%) - this shifts the council into NOC (it was always Tory up to now) and gives a good shot at control next May. That was a key priority for SE Region - we were all urged to go there at the regional conference - and is a poster child for us along the southern coast, since up to 1992 Labour never had a single councillor there. Essentially the shift from domination by elderly conservative voters to younger people moving on from Brighton is producing a demographic shift along the coast, analogous to the progress being made by the LibDems inland.

    Tactical voting seems to be working for the unofficial Lab/Lib Dem alliance.

    Shame we still have not quite got the hang of it in Scotland.
    No it isn't. Lab haven't won a single seat yet from tactical voting.

    Though there seems to be tactical voting in place in Scotland ... Former Labour voters now tactically vote SNP to keep out the Tories.
    It is certainly working for the unofficial Lab/Tory alliance in Morningside (Prop: I. Murray MP). I well remember my surprise whern the Graun reported him as advocating that Labour voters vote Tory to keep the SNP out so long as the Torties voted Labour to keep the SNP out (ie in his constituency).

    https://www.thenational.scot/news/15236862.ian-murray-backs-tactical-voting-for-tories-to-keep-snp-out/
  • MattW said:

    The Economist on Lord Frost:

    Born in Derby and educated at a private school in Nottingham before a long but relatively unglamorous career in the Foreign Office, Lord Frost looks more like the middle-class provincials who predominate on the Tory benches than like his boss, who was born in New York and educated in Brussels and at Eton, and for whom Brexit appears more a wheeze than a cause. He was condescended to by eu negotiators, who thought his threats to walk out theatrical and childish. The old guard of the diplomatic service are crueller: they think him a third-rater. No great surprise, says one former colleague. “They hate his guts, because he’s proved them all wrong and destroyed their life’s work.”

    https://www.economist.com/britain/2021/12/04/to-understand-lord-frost-is-to-understand-britains-approach-to-brexit?frsc=dg|e

    "...educated at a private school in Nottingham ..."

    I am reminded as always at how small and incestuous our political classes are. There really are no outsiders.

    Frosty was at Nottingham High School at the same time as Edward "Dishwater" Davey. And Ed "National Treasure" Balls.

    And after school, they all trooped off to Oxford together.
    That's rather unfair I think. All from separate years.

    Davey started out in the Greens at Uni, then was a Lib Dem in the right place at the right time, and didn't mess up any stage of his political career. More of a self-made outsider. Not a very establishment backstory, though ambitious parents (then parent).

    David Frost is Civil Service / Diplomatic Service. Does that count as 'political class'?

    I don't know about Balls' political career, except that I think that he was in the Tory Society at Oxford.

    I'll give you that they all have traditional Good Independent School polish / confidence, and the benefits of an excellent education amongst groups that wanted to learn. Suspect the social networks are more Oxford than NHS, however. High School Boys tend to end up all over the place.

    I'll also give you that the school was Oxbridge focused, and paid a lot of attention to getting students to University even back then. In Davey's year about 35 from 120 went to Oxbridge, though it was a very good year.
    Frost seems to be a classic of the minor public school genre, an over-promoted, over-confident, ill-informed Little Englander always ready to pander to the powerful to gain favour.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,149
    JBriskin3 said:

    Carnyx said:

    JBriskin3 said:

    I am at peace with whatever pro Union interpretation of this result HYUFD will apply.

    Edit: SNP candidate elected at stage 6 I believe.


    I'm not HYUFD

    But we've known for a while that tactical voting doesn't work in Scotland when the coalition of chaos have total domination over media coverage.
    Labour and the Tories? I wouldn't go quite so far, even if the National is simply a way for the relevant Unionist firm to recoup some of the losses made by making the Herald hard unionist.
    If only Labour and the Tories could form an alliance in Scotland- it might save us from the nightmare that is left-wing nationalism.
    They do where you live, in Aberdeen.
  • JBriskin3JBriskin3 Posts: 1,254

    JBriskin3 said:

    I agree with Mike's header - there is definitely some sensible targeting going on.

    Labour has won the key Worthing by-election with 50% of the vote (to the Tory 40%) - this shifts the council into NOC (it was always Tory up to now) and gives a good shot at control next May. That was a key priority for SE Region - we were all urged to go there at the regional conference - and is a poster child for us along the southern coast, since up to 1992 Labour never had a single councillor there. Essentially the shift from domination by elderly conservative voters to younger people moving on from Brighton is producing a demographic shift along the coast, analogous to the progress being made by the LibDems inland.

    Tactical voting seems to be working for the unofficial Lab/Lib Dem alliance.

    Shame we still have not quite got the hang of it in Scotland.
    No it isn't. Lab haven't won a single seat yet from tactical voting.

    Though there seems to be tactical voting in place in Scotland ... Former Labour voters now tactically vote SNP to keep out the Tories.
    If you think people like @Farooq are examples of a normal Scots person then you're just simply wrong.
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 44,080
    dixiedean said:

    Foxy said:

    dixiedean said:

    ping said:

    Cyclefree said:

    Look at the sexual and moral incontinence of the adults in poor Arthur's life.

    A mother who has a child, leaves father, shacks up with someone else and kills him. A father who takes up with a woman and cruelly treats and abandons his own son to make this woman happy. A step-mother who has 5 children by 4 different men, who has never worked, who throws herself out of the window and aborts another child while in custody for some offence.

    I don't want to come over as some ancient prude. Evil has existed in all sorts of times and places and is no respecter of class or education. But if you look at a lot of these child murder/child abuse cases you see similar patterns: look at Baby P or any of the others over the years.

    Might we at some point as a society maybe think about saying a bit more clearly that this sort of sequential rutting and casual creation and abandonment of children is, well, wrong and to be discouraged?

    And, no, I don't have an easy answer as to how.

    Arthur's late Great Grandfather Kenneth Labinjo was my family GP when I was a child in Wythall near Birmingham, so Olivia Labinjo- Halcrow was no sink estate peasant. There are factors in modern life like alcoholism, drug abuse and feral procreation that are just being brushed under the carpet by Government. Tim Lawton MP was on earlier demanding the lynching (my interpretation) of the social workers. I'm sure that'll help.
    I do wonder, in this case, whether the social workers *really wanted to believe* the setup that Arthur had been placed into was a positive one - ie, what may have seemed to them like a stable family environment. And blinded by this bias, they ignored the warning signs.

    Clearly, the best situation for the kid was to live with his grandparents. Perhaps that should be a more common solution to these kind of broken home situations.
    One of the sentencing remarks is worth bearing in mind. The judge said,

    "It is a shocking feature of this case that your children, Tustin, lived a perfectly happy normal life in that household while this appalling cruelty to Arthur was taking place."

    Tustin was capable of being a good parent, but chose not to be, and deceived the social workers. This will be quite different to many of the troubled people that social workers deal with routinely.

    However, they really should have had another look when Arthur didn't return to school at the end of lockdown. Then it would have been obvious.
    The school can't be exonerated. They have a safeguarding duty to investigate prolonged absence under Section 175 of the 2002 Education Act.
    I might be misremembering, but I think Arthur died only a week and a day after the school reopened, and a teacher did report concerns to social services in that time. Clearly someone should have visited the house, whether the school, social services, or both.
    It isn't surprising that in the chaos of lockdowns, bubbles and isolation over the last 18 months that some slip through the net.

    I used to get called to consult on suspicious injuries in children. It is an absolute minefield that I pity the child protection teams having to deal with. While fatal cases are not unusual, there are plenty more with that potential.
    Child Protection is a thankless task.
    Indeed, and not an easy one to recruit into.

    I am not convinced that the adversarial system is the best approach, as it does put off parents who are at the end of their (often limited) capabilities. Any admission is likely to be heavily sanctioned. Projections are for 100 000 to be in care in England by 2025, a massive number for councils to be dealing with.

  • JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 38,526
    boulay said:

    Pulpstar said:

    Glom said:

    AlistairM said:

    Throw away the key on these evil people

    Father is jailed for 21 years and his partner for a minimum of 29 years over the torture and killing of six-year-old Arthur Labinjo-Hughes
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-59522243

    How minimum is minimum? I know lots of things get said about our criminal justice system but what is the real situation. I'm more concerned she never be placed in a role of care ever again.
    "For some serious violent or sexual offences where the sentence is 7 years or more the offender will be released at the two-thirds point."
    29 year sentence: 19 yrs 4 months.

    She's 32 now so she'll be at least 51 when released, which is heavily odds against to have another child thankfully.
    Should have been a whole life tariff.

    If we had it, should have been the death penalty. Thankfully we don't have it, but should be a whole life tariff.
    Cases like this, and the Everard murder make me wonder about the death penalty. If the only argument against it is wrongful convictions then cases like this are surely certain enough? Why should these people be allowed another minute of life?
    Rather than a state organised death penalty I would rather see a team of rogue special forces financed by someone ridiculously wealthy and a bit left field (Elon Musk…?) extract these murderers and take them off to a secret facility and carry out exactly the same treatment to the murderer over the same time scale ending with their death so that they spend their last days truly feeling the results of their evil for themselves….

    Then it’s available on YouTube as a warning to others.

    As that’s clearly not possible I desperately don’t want her to be able to kill herself or be killed in prison but would rather she experienced 29 years of fear, beatings, abuse etc so that every day is torture.
    Elon Musk would just use it against any of his employees who refused to work over Thanksgiving on his command ... ;)
  • JBriskin3JBriskin3 Posts: 1,254
    Carnyx said:

    JBriskin3 said:

    Carnyx said:

    JBriskin3 said:

    I am at peace with whatever pro Union interpretation of this result HYUFD will apply.

    Edit: SNP candidate elected at stage 6 I believe.


    I'm not HYUFD

    But we've known for a while that tactical voting doesn't work in Scotland when the coalition of chaos have total domination over media coverage.
    Labour and the Tories? I wouldn't go quite so far, even if the National is simply a way for the relevant Unionist firm to recoup some of the losses made by making the Herald hard unionist.
    If only Labour and the Tories could form an alliance in Scotland- it might save us from the nightmare that is left-wing nationalism.
    They do where you live, in Aberdeen.
    Touche! Aberdeen leading the way on this one indeed.
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 38,851

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    Cyclefree said:

    Look at the sexual and moral incontinence of the adults in poor Arthur's life.

    A mother who has a child, leaves father, shacks up with someone else and kills him. A father who takes up with a woman and cruelly treats and abandons his own son to make this woman happy. A step-mother who has 5 children by 4 different men, who has never worked, who throws herself out of the window and aborts another child while in custody for some offence.

    I don't want to come over as some ancient prude. Evil has existed in all sorts of times and places and is no respecter of class or education. But if you look at a lot of these child murder/child abuse cases you see similar patterns: look at Baby P or any of the others over the years.

    Might we at some point as a society maybe think about saying a bit more clearly that this sort of sequential rutting and casual creation and abandonment of children is, well, wrong and to be discouraged?

    And, no, I don't have an easy answer as to how.

    Arthur's late Great Grandfather Kenneth Labinjo was my family GP when I was a child in Wythall near Birmingham, so Olivia Labinjo- Halcrow was no sink estate peasant. There are factors in modern life like alcoholism, drug abuse and feral procreation that are just being brushed under the carpet by Government. Tim Lawton MP was on earlier demanding the lynching (my interpretation) of the social workers. I'm sure that'll help.
    Lynching social workers is, of course, an essential part of the public expiation process. Ed Balls lynching Sharon Shoesmith, for example.

    https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/oct/29/ed-balls-sharon-shoesmith-baby-p-sacking-payout
    That was poor all round. Cameron tried to politicize it and Balls went for performative scapegoating. Both playing to the gallery. Not the best moment for our politics.
    There was some suspicion that Balls did what he did so that a member of Failure-Is-Not-An-Option club would get a payout.

    Personally, I don't believe that. Shoesmith wasn't quite high enough to be part of the magic circle....
    You have again managed to craft a post that I don't really understand. Nobody does it better, I have to say.
    The suspicion was that Balls was triangulating -

    1) Playing to the public by binning Shoesmith.
    2) Playing the gallery of "professionals" by ensuring that it was done in such a cack handed manner that she was guaranteed a 6 figure settlement and killing an possibility of further action against her.

    I doubt the idea - Shomesmith wasn't high enough to be part of the magic circle of those who are completely protected against the consequences of their own actions.
    Ah ok, got you. No, I'd find 2 a bit too 'conspiracy complex' even if she was part of a magic circle which she surely wasn't. But 1, yes. Or perhaps more accurately, to the public via the tabloids.
  • JBriskin3 said:

    JBriskin3 said:

    I agree with Mike's header - there is definitely some sensible targeting going on.

    Labour has won the key Worthing by-election with 50% of the vote (to the Tory 40%) - this shifts the council into NOC (it was always Tory up to now) and gives a good shot at control next May. That was a key priority for SE Region - we were all urged to go there at the regional conference - and is a poster child for us along the southern coast, since up to 1992 Labour never had a single councillor there. Essentially the shift from domination by elderly conservative voters to younger people moving on from Brighton is producing a demographic shift along the coast, analogous to the progress being made by the LibDems inland.

    Tactical voting seems to be working for the unofficial Lab/Lib Dem alliance.

    Shame we still have not quite got the hang of it in Scotland.
    No it isn't. Lab haven't won a single seat yet from tactical voting.

    Though there seems to be tactical voting in place in Scotland ... Former Labour voters now tactically vote SNP to keep out the Tories.
    If you think people like @Farooq are examples of a normal Scots person then you're just simply wrong.
    The election results say otherwise.

    If you think people banging on about SNP types are a normal Scots person is look for some evidence of that.
  • PJHPJH Posts: 443

    The next election will have a large amount of tactical voting and the Lib Dems will make a lot of gains IMHO.

    Don't forget, nearly all the potential LD-->Lab switchers already are voting Labour (see Canterbury for example). So Labour doesn't have much scope to benefit. The group mostly not yet voting tactically are the Lab-->LD ones. There's a lot of unwinding to do post Coalition, but unlike you I don't think it will win many seats unless the Tories self-destruct.
  • AnabobazinaAnabobazina Posts: 19,620
    TimS said:

    MaxPB said:

    TimS said:

    Leon said:

    The number of confirmed Omicron Covid cases in Scotland has jumped to 29 as Nicola Sturgeon warns the variant is now spreading fast in the community.

    The First Minister says cases of the little-understood strain will likely continue to rise in the coming days and the outbreak is no longer linked to single private event on November 20.

    Many of the new cases are now being linked to a Steps concert at the Hydro two days later.


    https://www.thecourier.co.uk/fp/news/2792382/omicron-covid-cases-in-scotland-jump-to-29-as-variant-now-spreading-in-community/

    A chain reaction that could result in tragedy!

    Some easy maths to be done here. If Omicron is widely seeded across the UK - as it now seems - with community transmission, there are probably 500 cases (conservatively) in the UK. If Omicron doubles every 4 days (it’s worse in Gauteng), that’s

    1000 cases a day by Dec 6

    2000 cases by Dec 10

    4000 cases by Dec 14

    8000 cases by Dec 18

    16,000 cases by Dec 22

    32,000 cases by Boxing Day

    64,000 cases by Dec 30

    128,000 cases by Jan 3

    256,000 cases by Jan 7

    512,000 cases by Jan 11

    1,028,000 cases a day by the middle of Jan


    Quite some pressure on the NHS there. Let’s hope they’re all ‘mild’

    The great thing with that maths is that by the end of Jan everyone in the country would have had it, and we'd be at herd immunity.

    Another way of looking at it is in terms of total damage. Let's say current IFR is c.0.2% (pessimistic - based on 150 deaths per day and c.80,000 infections with 50% being recorded in tests). If Omicron increases breakthrough infection but IFR stays the same (which is pessimistic given boosters and new treatments) then the max deaths if 60 million are infected would be 120,000. But of course nowhere near 60m would be infected given pre-existing vax immunity, and IFR will keep going down. So we are into a bad case being probably similar to a bad flu season.
    I think there's also no signal on how severe reinfection is compared to first time infection. I'd imagine the severity will be significantly lower, though maybe in some older groups still significant enough to cause hospitalisation if they are unvaccinated.

    Omicron could cause a wave of coughing a spluttering across the 60m or so vaccinated or previously infected but I'm not sure that's worthy of all this alarm.

    Once again, I think waiting a couple of weeks for the data from a non-African country is really important. Hopefully we'll get something soon from the Netherlands.
    I agree. Unless Omicron is significantly more severe in a naive population than Delta, even in a worst worst case scenario we are more than half way through the damage caused by this pandemic.

    I completely understand the need to flatten the curve when it comes to protecting the health system, but a big part of me feels like the sooner we get this properly over the better. Non-Covid health outcomes are getting worse and worse, there are warning signs everywhere.

    Booked my booster yesterday but the earliest date I could get was 24th Dec. Not sure it's a smart idea to get Pfizered the day before a whole morning of Christmas cookery and a massive booze-up, preceded by a late night stuffing stockings.
    That's the truly hardcore Christmas experience right there.
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 38,851
    boulay said:

    Pulpstar said:

    Glom said:

    AlistairM said:

    Throw away the key on these evil people

    Father is jailed for 21 years and his partner for a minimum of 29 years over the torture and killing of six-year-old Arthur Labinjo-Hughes
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-59522243

    How minimum is minimum? I know lots of things get said about our criminal justice system but what is the real situation. I'm more concerned she never be placed in a role of care ever again.
    "For some serious violent or sexual offences where the sentence is 7 years or more the offender will be released at the two-thirds point."
    29 year sentence: 19 yrs 4 months.

    She's 32 now so she'll be at least 51 when released, which is heavily odds against to have another child thankfully.
    Should have been a whole life tariff.

    If we had it, should have been the death penalty. Thankfully we don't have it, but should be a whole life tariff.
    Cases like this, and the Everard murder make me wonder about the death penalty. If the only argument against it is wrongful convictions then cases like this are surely certain enough? Why should these people be allowed another minute of life?
    Rather than a state organised death penalty I would rather see a team of rogue special forces financed by someone ridiculously wealthy and a bit left field (Elon Musk…?) extract these murderers and take them off to a secret facility and carry out exactly the same treatment to the murderer over the same time scale ending with their death so that they spend their last days truly feeling the results of their evil for themselves….

    Then it’s available on YouTube as a warning to others.

    As that’s clearly not possible I desperately don’t want her to be able to kill herself or be killed in prison but would rather she experienced 29 years of fear, beatings, abuse etc so that every day is torture.
    No.
  • MattWMattW Posts: 18,094
    edited December 2021
    MattW said:

    The Economist on Lord Frost:

    Born in Derby and educated at a private school in Nottingham before a long but relatively unglamorous career in the Foreign Office, Lord Frost looks more like the middle-class provincials who predominate on the Tory benches than like his boss, who was born in New York and educated in Brussels and at Eton, and for whom Brexit appears more a wheeze than a cause. He was condescended to by eu negotiators, who thought his threats to walk out theatrical and childish. The old guard of the diplomatic service are crueller: they think him a third-rater. No great surprise, says one former colleague. “They hate his guts, because he’s proved them all wrong and destroyed their life’s work.”

    https://www.economist.com/britain/2021/12/04/to-understand-lord-frost-is-to-understand-britains-approach-to-brexit?frsc=dg|e

    "...educated at a private school in Nottingham ..."

    I am reminded as always at how small and incestuous our political classes are. There really are no outsiders.

    Frosty was at Nottingham High School at the same time as Edward "Dishwater" Davey. And Ed "National Treasure" Balls.

    And after school, they all trooped off to Oxford together.
    That's rather unfair I think. All from separate years.

    Davey started out in the Greens at Uni, then was a Lib Dem in the right place at the right time, and didn't mess up any stage of his political career. More of a self-made outsider. School of hard knocks though middle class. Not a very establishment backstory, though ambitious parents (then parent).

    David Frost is Civil Service / Diplomatic Service. Does that count as 'political class'?

    I don't know about Balls' political career, except that I think that he was in the Tory Society at Oxford.

    I'll give you that they all have traditional Good Independent School polish / confidence, and the benefits of an excellent education amongst groups that wanted to learn. Suspect the social networks are more Oxford than NHS, however. High School Boys tend to end up all over the place.

    I'll also give you that the school was Oxbridge focused, and paid a lot of attention to getting students to University even back then. In Davey's year about 35 from 120 went to Oxbridge, though it was a very good year.
    Reflecting, not sure that Davey's year was quite 120 students. The entire school from 8-18 was just under 1000.

    Looking at the roll of NHS MPs since Ken Clarke (ie half a century's worth), it's interesting that most of them stayed local until recently:

    Apart from Davey / Balls, it is Geoff Hoon / Ken Clarke / Piers Merchant / Jim Lester / James Morris.

    4 Tories, 2 Labour, 1 LibDem. Plus Lord Frost.

    I'm interested that until recently they are nearly all locals who stayed local for their constituencies.

    I've said before that I think it is more an Oxbridge Mafia issue, rather than Independent Schools.
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 76,274
    edited December 2021
    This isn't ideal....

    13th December has been pencilled in as the date for the boosters programme to be ramped up...On this timetable, it looks unlikely that many under-40s will be able to get a booster before the new year.

    https://twitter.com/HugoGye/status/1466782187680903172?s=20

    Less Dunkirk spirit, more we will get to you after Christmas holidays.
  • AnabobazinaAnabobazina Posts: 19,620
    maaarsh said:

    Cases very marginally up in England, flat in UK and testing up more strongly. Basically looks like the mini spike this week is driven by more testing in the wake of wall to wall coverage. If true, it should mean some cases have been 'pulled forward' and we'll get a dip afterwards rather like the return to school fall in September.

    Indeed, the increase in testing is outstripping the increase in positive tests. Effectively flat, to my eye.
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 38,851

    moonshine said:

    Leon said:

    moonshine said:

    Leon said:

    The number of confirmed Omicron Covid cases in Scotland has jumped to 29 as Nicola Sturgeon warns the variant is now spreading fast in the community.

    The First Minister says cases of the little-understood strain will likely continue to rise in the coming days and the outbreak is no longer linked to single private event on November 20.

    Many of the new cases are now being linked to a Steps concert at the Hydro two days later.


    https://www.thecourier.co.uk/fp/news/2792382/omicron-covid-cases-in-scotland-jump-to-29-as-variant-now-spreading-in-community/

    A chain reaction that could result in tragedy!

    Some easy maths to be done here. If Omicron is widely seeded across the UK - as it now seems - with community transmission, there are probably 500 cases (conservatively) in the UK. If Omicron doubles every 4 days (it’s worse in Gauteng), that’s

    1000 cases a day by Dec 6

    2000 cases by Dec 10

    4000 cases by Dec 14

    8000 cases by Dec 18

    16,000 cases by Dec 22

    32,000 cases by Boxing Day

    64,000 cases by Dec 30

    128,000 cases by Jan 3

    256,000 cases by Jan 7

    512,000 cases by Jan 11

    1,028,000 cases a day by the middle of Jan


    Quite some pressure on the NHS there. Let’s hope they’re all ‘mild’

    You are such a cheery contributor
    Doesn’t take many months Leon before every atom in the observable universe is contaminated with Omicron. In reality, exponential growth curves find a natural ceiling well before that.
    Of course. If the case load follows my curve people will lock down voluntarily. The government will probably lockdown officially right after Xmas?

    But then there’s the question: will lockdowns work against a bug as infectious as Omicron? We dunno

    On the cheerier side, we still don’t know how Omicron functions in a highly vaxed context. It may be much less impressive. Fingers x’d
    I don’t think they will lockdown here. If the vaccines work and it’s largely anti vaxxers causing the problem, the clamour will be for vaxports, antivax taxes and whatever else before generalised lockdown. Including from no 11 and the Cabinet.
    The unvaccinated should have the right to live as they please.

    But if they're a disproportionate burden on the NHS because of their choices, they should face a tax just like smokers do.

    That principle has long been established. The NHS needs taxes to survive.
    Interesting idea, Philip. Certainly better than withholding medical treatment. How to implement though?
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,625

    boulay said:

    Pulpstar said:

    Glom said:

    AlistairM said:

    Throw away the key on these evil people

    Father is jailed for 21 years and his partner for a minimum of 29 years over the torture and killing of six-year-old Arthur Labinjo-Hughes
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-59522243

    How minimum is minimum? I know lots of things get said about our criminal justice system but what is the real situation. I'm more concerned she never be placed in a role of care ever again.
    "For some serious violent or sexual offences where the sentence is 7 years or more the offender will be released at the two-thirds point."
    29 year sentence: 19 yrs 4 months.

    She's 32 now so she'll be at least 51 when released, which is heavily odds against to have another child thankfully.
    Should have been a whole life tariff.

    If we had it, should have been the death penalty. Thankfully we don't have it, but should be a whole life tariff.
    Cases like this, and the Everard murder make me wonder about the death penalty. If the only argument against it is wrongful convictions then cases like this are surely certain enough? Why should these people be allowed another minute of life?
    Rather than a state organised death penalty I would rather see a team of rogue special forces financed by someone ridiculously wealthy and a bit left field (Elon Musk…?) extract these murderers and take them off to a secret facility and carry out exactly the same treatment to the murderer over the same time scale ending with their death so that they spend their last days truly feeling the results of their evil for themselves….

    Then it’s available on YouTube as a warning to others.

    As that’s clearly not possible I desperately don’t want her to be able to kill herself or be killed in prison but would rather she experienced 29 years of fear, beatings, abuse etc so that every day is torture.
    Elon Musk would just use it against any of his employees who refused to work over Thanksgiving on his command ... ;)
    Hmmm.. A death squad run by hyper active workaholic with unlimited finances and the ability to perform intercontinental weapons strikes .

    What could possibly go wrong?
  • PulpstarPulpstar Posts: 75,842
    One policy would win the Tories the next GE very easily indeed. A ref on you know what..
  • JBriskin3JBriskin3 Posts: 1,254

    JBriskin3 said:

    JBriskin3 said:

    I agree with Mike's header - there is definitely some sensible targeting going on.

    Labour has won the key Worthing by-election with 50% of the vote (to the Tory 40%) - this shifts the council into NOC (it was always Tory up to now) and gives a good shot at control next May. That was a key priority for SE Region - we were all urged to go there at the regional conference - and is a poster child for us along the southern coast, since up to 1992 Labour never had a single councillor there. Essentially the shift from domination by elderly conservative voters to younger people moving on from Brighton is producing a demographic shift along the coast, analogous to the progress being made by the LibDems inland.

    Tactical voting seems to be working for the unofficial Lab/Lib Dem alliance.

    Shame we still have not quite got the hang of it in Scotland.
    No it isn't. Lab haven't won a single seat yet from tactical voting.

    Though there seems to be tactical voting in place in Scotland ... Former Labour voters now tactically vote SNP to keep out the Tories.
    If you think people like @Farooq are examples of a normal Scots person then you're just simply wrong.
    The election results say otherwise.

    If you think people banging on about SNP types are a normal Scots person is look for some evidence of that.
    Prof Curtice was on Sky a week after the Holyrood elections and stated that Anti-SNP Type tactical had a role in limiting the coalition of choas's majority.
  • isamisam Posts: 40,731
    edited December 2021
    The child abuse case that led to Trevor Phillips’ 180 on multiculturalism

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b078hlsz
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,149

    boulay said:

    Pulpstar said:

    Glom said:

    AlistairM said:

    Throw away the key on these evil people

    Father is jailed for 21 years and his partner for a minimum of 29 years over the torture and killing of six-year-old Arthur Labinjo-Hughes
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-59522243

    How minimum is minimum? I know lots of things get said about our criminal justice system but what is the real situation. I'm more concerned she never be placed in a role of care ever again.
    "For some serious violent or sexual offences where the sentence is 7 years or more the offender will be released at the two-thirds point."
    29 year sentence: 19 yrs 4 months.

    She's 32 now so she'll be at least 51 when released, which is heavily odds against to have another child thankfully.
    Should have been a whole life tariff.

    If we had it, should have been the death penalty. Thankfully we don't have it, but should be a whole life tariff.
    Cases like this, and the Everard murder make me wonder about the death penalty. If the only argument against it is wrongful convictions then cases like this are surely certain enough? Why should these people be allowed another minute of life?
    Rather than a state organised death penalty I would rather see a team of rogue special forces financed by someone ridiculously wealthy and a bit left field (Elon Musk…?) extract these murderers and take them off to a secret facility and carry out exactly the same treatment to the murderer over the same time scale ending with their death so that they spend their last days truly feeling the results of their evil for themselves….

    Then it’s available on YouTube as a warning to others.

    As that’s clearly not possible I desperately don’t want her to be able to kill herself or be killed in prison but would rather she experienced 29 years of fear, beatings, abuse etc so that every day is torture.
    Elon Musk would just use it against any of his employees who refused to work over Thanksgiving on his command ... ;)
    Hmmm.. A death squad run by hyper active workaholic with unlimited finances and the ability to perform intercontinental weapons strikes .

    What could possibly go wrong?
    The white fluffy cat gets mange?
  • GlomGlom Posts: 13
    Ratters said:

    Pulpstar said:

    Glom said:

    AlistairM said:

    Throw away the key on these evil people

    Father is jailed for 21 years and his partner for a minimum of 29 years over the torture and killing of six-year-old Arthur Labinjo-Hughes
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-59522243

    How minimum is minimum? I know lots of things get said about our criminal justice system but what is the real situation. I'm more concerned she never be placed in a role of care ever again.
    "For some serious violent or sexual offences where the sentence is 7 years or more the offender will be released at the two-thirds point."
    29 year sentence: 19 yrs 4 months.

    She's 32 now so she'll be at least 51 when released, which is heavily odds against to have another child thankfully.
    Should have been a whole life tariff.

    If we had it, should have been the death penalty. Thankfully we don't have it, but should be a whole life tariff.
    Quite agree on the whole life tariff. I had avoided reading the details of the story until today, and it made me feel sick to my stomach.

    Anyone who does that shouldn't have a chance to live in free society ever again.
    Literally sick. Reading the news stories has really put me in a bad place today. I've been no good to anyone. I seem to be getting worse for sensitivity to horrors like this.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,625
    Carnyx said:

    boulay said:

    Pulpstar said:

    Glom said:

    AlistairM said:

    Throw away the key on these evil people

    Father is jailed for 21 years and his partner for a minimum of 29 years over the torture and killing of six-year-old Arthur Labinjo-Hughes
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-59522243

    How minimum is minimum? I know lots of things get said about our criminal justice system but what is the real situation. I'm more concerned she never be placed in a role of care ever again.
    "For some serious violent or sexual offences where the sentence is 7 years or more the offender will be released at the two-thirds point."
    29 year sentence: 19 yrs 4 months.

    She's 32 now so she'll be at least 51 when released, which is heavily odds against to have another child thankfully.
    Should have been a whole life tariff.

    If we had it, should have been the death penalty. Thankfully we don't have it, but should be a whole life tariff.
    Cases like this, and the Everard murder make me wonder about the death penalty. If the only argument against it is wrongful convictions then cases like this are surely certain enough? Why should these people be allowed another minute of life?
    Rather than a state organised death penalty I would rather see a team of rogue special forces financed by someone ridiculously wealthy and a bit left field (Elon Musk…?) extract these murderers and take them off to a secret facility and carry out exactly the same treatment to the murderer over the same time scale ending with their death so that they spend their last days truly feeling the results of their evil for themselves….

    Then it’s available on YouTube as a warning to others.

    As that’s clearly not possible I desperately don’t want her to be able to kill herself or be killed in prison but would rather she experienced 29 years of fear, beatings, abuse etc so that every day is torture.
    Elon Musk would just use it against any of his employees who refused to work over Thanksgiving on his command ... ;)
    Hmmm.. A death squad run by hyper active workaholic with unlimited finances and the ability to perform intercontinental weapons strikes .

    What could possibly go wrong?
    The white fluffy cat gets mange?
    There is....

    image
  • StockyStocky Posts: 9,653
    edited December 2021
    boulay said:

    Pulpstar said:

    Glom said:

    AlistairM said:

    Throw away the key on these evil people

    Father is jailed for 21 years and his partner for a minimum of 29 years over the torture and killing of six-year-old Arthur Labinjo-Hughes
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-59522243

    How minimum is minimum? I know lots of things get said about our criminal justice system but what is the real situation. I'm more concerned she never be placed in a role of care ever again.
    "For some serious violent or sexual offences where the sentence is 7 years or more the offender will be released at the two-thirds point."
    29 year sentence: 19 yrs 4 months.

    She's 32 now so she'll be at least 51 when released, which is heavily odds against to have another child thankfully.
    Should have been a whole life tariff.

    If we had it, should have been the death penalty. Thankfully we don't have it, but should be a whole life tariff.
    Cases like this, and the Everard murder make me wonder about the death penalty. If the only argument against it is wrongful convictions then cases like this are surely certain enough? Why should these people be allowed another minute of life?
    Rather than a state organised death penalty I would rather see a team of rogue special forces financed by someone ridiculously wealthy and a bit left field (Elon Musk…?) extract these murderers and take them off to a secret facility and carry out exactly the same treatment to the murderer over the same time scale ending with their death so that they spend their last days truly feeling the results of their evil for themselves….

    Then it’s available on YouTube as a warning to others.

    As that’s clearly not possible I desperately don’t want her to be able to kill herself or be killed in prison but would rather she experienced 29 years of fear, beatings, abuse etc so that every day is torture.
    Gosh - no - that's awful - do you really think that? An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind etc ...

    I am anti-death penalty - but not through some bleeding heart notion of wanting the heinous lifers to carry on living. It is wrong for the state to execute people. But if prisoners were given an option of life in prison or suicide by assisted dying then I would be happy with that; they can choose it at any time in the sentence - would have the added bonuses of saving taxpayers a fortune and aiding population control.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,149
    Pulpstar said:

    One policy would win the Tories the next GE very easily indeed. A ref on you know what..

    Yes, but it'd be like Brexit. The devil is in the detail. Public or private; castration and quartering for traitors; the copyright of the "confession" beloinging to the C of E priest who gets the exclusive job to console the victim; the rope contract going to you know whose chum; and so on.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,625
    UK cases by specimen date

    image
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 38,851

    I agree with Mike's header - there is definitely some sensible targeting going on.

    Labour has won the key Worthing by-election with 50% of the vote (to the Tory 40%) - this shifts the council into NOC (it was always Tory up to now) and gives a good shot at control next May. That was a key priority for SE Region - we were all urged to go there at the regional conference - and is a poster child for us along the southern coast, since up to 1992 Labour never had a single councillor there. Essentially the shift from domination by elderly conservative voters to younger people moving on from Brighton is producing a demographic shift along the coast, analogous to the progress being made by the LibDems inland.

    Yes, that looks a great result in Worthing. Very heartening. Must be some lessons from whatever they're doing there.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,625
    UK cases by specimen date and scaled to 100K

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  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,625
    UK R

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  • pingping Posts: 3,724
    Pulpstar said:

    One policy would win the Tories the next GE very easily indeed. A ref on you know what..

    At heart, I think Boris is more a liberal than a populist. Wasn’t there a quote from him early on in his journalism career where, when asked what he truly believed, his only answer was that he was against the death penalty?
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,149
    JBriskin3 said:

    JBriskin3 said:

    JBriskin3 said:

    I agree with Mike's header - there is definitely some sensible targeting going on.

    Labour has won the key Worthing by-election with 50% of the vote (to the Tory 40%) - this shifts the council into NOC (it was always Tory up to now) and gives a good shot at control next May. That was a key priority for SE Region - we were all urged to go there at the regional conference - and is a poster child for us along the southern coast, since up to 1992 Labour never had a single councillor there. Essentially the shift from domination by elderly conservative voters to younger people moving on from Brighton is producing a demographic shift along the coast, analogous to the progress being made by the LibDems inland.

    Tactical voting seems to be working for the unofficial Lab/Lib Dem alliance.

    Shame we still have not quite got the hang of it in Scotland.
    No it isn't. Lab haven't won a single seat yet from tactical voting.

    Though there seems to be tactical voting in place in Scotland ... Former Labour voters now tactically vote SNP to keep out the Tories.
    If you think people like @Farooq are examples of a normal Scots person then you're just simply wrong.
    The election results say otherwise.

    If you think people banging on about SNP types are a normal Scots person is look for some evidence of that.
    Prof Curtice was on Sky a week after the Holyrood elections and stated that Anti-SNP Type tactical had a role in limiting the coalition of choas's majority.
    Wouldn't have said that. No such thing as a coalition then. Or even now with the Greens.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,625
    Case summary

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  • StockyStocky Posts: 9,653
    kinabalu said:

    moonshine said:

    Leon said:

    moonshine said:

    Leon said:

    The number of confirmed Omicron Covid cases in Scotland has jumped to 29 as Nicola Sturgeon warns the variant is now spreading fast in the community.

    The First Minister says cases of the little-understood strain will likely continue to rise in the coming days and the outbreak is no longer linked to single private event on November 20.

    Many of the new cases are now being linked to a Steps concert at the Hydro two days later.


    https://www.thecourier.co.uk/fp/news/2792382/omicron-covid-cases-in-scotland-jump-to-29-as-variant-now-spreading-in-community/

    A chain reaction that could result in tragedy!

    Some easy maths to be done here. If Omicron is widely seeded across the UK - as it now seems - with community transmission, there are probably 500 cases (conservatively) in the UK. If Omicron doubles every 4 days (it’s worse in Gauteng), that’s

    1000 cases a day by Dec 6

    2000 cases by Dec 10

    4000 cases by Dec 14

    8000 cases by Dec 18

    16,000 cases by Dec 22

    32,000 cases by Boxing Day

    64,000 cases by Dec 30

    128,000 cases by Jan 3

    256,000 cases by Jan 7

    512,000 cases by Jan 11

    1,028,000 cases a day by the middle of Jan


    Quite some pressure on the NHS there. Let’s hope they’re all ‘mild’

    You are such a cheery contributor
    Doesn’t take many months Leon before every atom in the observable universe is contaminated with Omicron. In reality, exponential growth curves find a natural ceiling well before that.
    Of course. If the case load follows my curve people will lock down voluntarily. The government will probably lockdown officially right after Xmas?

    But then there’s the question: will lockdowns work against a bug as infectious as Omicron? We dunno

    On the cheerier side, we still don’t know how Omicron functions in a highly vaxed context. It may be much less impressive. Fingers x’d
    I don’t think they will lockdown here. If the vaccines work and it’s largely anti vaxxers causing the problem, the clamour will be for vaxports, antivax taxes and whatever else before generalised lockdown. Including from no 11 and the Cabinet.
    The unvaccinated should have the right to live as they please.

    But if they're a disproportionate burden on the NHS because of their choices, they should face a tax just like smokers do.

    That principle has long been established. The NHS needs taxes to survive.
    Interesting idea, Philip. Certainly better than withholding medical treatment. How to implement though?
    Use the new NI charge that comes in next April? A higher rate for the unvaccinated.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,625
    UK hospitals

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  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,625
    UK deaths

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  • AnabobazinaAnabobazina Posts: 19,620

    Leon said:

    The number of confirmed Omicron Covid cases in Scotland has jumped to 29 as Nicola Sturgeon warns the variant is now spreading fast in the community.

    The First Minister says cases of the little-understood strain will likely continue to rise in the coming days and the outbreak is no longer linked to single private event on November 20.

    Many of the new cases are now being linked to a Steps concert at the Hydro two days later.


    https://www.thecourier.co.uk/fp/news/2792382/omicron-covid-cases-in-scotland-jump-to-29-as-variant-now-spreading-in-community/

    A chain reaction that could result in tragedy!

    Some easy maths to be done here. If Omicron is widely seeded across the UK - as it now seems - with community transmission, there are probably 500 cases (conservatively) in the UK. If Omicron doubles every 4 days (it’s worse in Gauteng), that’s

    1000 cases a day by Dec 6

    2000 cases by Dec 10

    4000 cases by Dec 14

    8000 cases by Dec 18

    16,000 cases by Dec 22

    32,000 cases by Boxing Day

    64,000 cases by Dec 30

    128,000 cases by Jan 3

    256,000 cases by Jan 7

    512,000 cases by Jan 11

    1,028,000 cases a day by the middle of Jan


    Quite some pressure on the NHS there. Let’s hope they’re all ‘mild’

    You are such a cheery contributor
    Would mean everyone in the UK having had it by Valentine's Day.

    A quick way to end the pandemic I guess!
  • JBriskin3JBriskin3 Posts: 1,254
    Carnyx said:

    JBriskin3 said:

    JBriskin3 said:

    JBriskin3 said:

    I agree with Mike's header - there is definitely some sensible targeting going on.

    Labour has won the key Worthing by-election with 50% of the vote (to the Tory 40%) - this shifts the council into NOC (it was always Tory up to now) and gives a good shot at control next May. That was a key priority for SE Region - we were all urged to go there at the regional conference - and is a poster child for us along the southern coast, since up to 1992 Labour never had a single councillor there. Essentially the shift from domination by elderly conservative voters to younger people moving on from Brighton is producing a demographic shift along the coast, analogous to the progress being made by the LibDems inland.

    Tactical voting seems to be working for the unofficial Lab/Lib Dem alliance.

    Shame we still have not quite got the hang of it in Scotland.
    No it isn't. Lab haven't won a single seat yet from tactical voting.

    Though there seems to be tactical voting in place in Scotland ... Former Labour voters now tactically vote SNP to keep out the Tories.
    If you think people like @Farooq are examples of a normal Scots person then you're just simply wrong.
    The election results say otherwise.

    If you think people banging on about SNP types are a normal Scots person is look for some evidence of that.
    Prof Curtice was on Sky a week after the Holyrood elections and stated that Anti-SNP Type tactical had a role in limiting the coalition of choas's majority.
    Wouldn't have said that. No such thing as a coalition then. Or even now with the Greens.
    The greens have got seats in the cabinet dimwit.
  • StuartDicksonStuartDickson Posts: 12,146
    edited December 2021

    I am at peace with whatever pro Union interpretation of this result HYUFD will apply.

    Edit: SNP candidate elected at stage 6 I believe.


    I can remember when Fort William was rock-solid Labour territory, and Ardnamurchan rock-solid Lib Dem. Now Labour don’t even bother putting up a candidate, and the Lib Dems are on 10% behind the Greens.

    (I am a former SNP candidate for Ardnamurchan, and have knocked many doors in Lochaber.)
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,625
    Age related data

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  • PulpstarPulpstar Posts: 75,842
    edited December 2021

    This isn't ideal....

    13th December has been pencilled in as the date for the boosters programme to be ramped up...On this timetable, it looks unlikely that many under-40s will be able to get a booster before the new year.

    https://twitter.com/HugoGye/status/1466782187680903172?s=20

    Less Dunkirk spirit, more we will get to you after Christmas holidays.

    That's 10 days away, if we do 500,000 boosters a day till then that takes us to around 25 million, which is broadly where we were by the end of May. It's OK I think as we're still getting through plenty of over 40s in the next 10 days.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,149
    JBriskin3 said:

    Carnyx said:

    JBriskin3 said:

    JBriskin3 said:

    JBriskin3 said:

    I agree with Mike's header - there is definitely some sensible targeting going on.

    Labour has won the key Worthing by-election with 50% of the vote (to the Tory 40%) - this shifts the council into NOC (it was always Tory up to now) and gives a good shot at control next May. That was a key priority for SE Region - we were all urged to go there at the regional conference - and is a poster child for us along the southern coast, since up to 1992 Labour never had a single councillor there. Essentially the shift from domination by elderly conservative voters to younger people moving on from Brighton is producing a demographic shift along the coast, analogous to the progress being made by the LibDems inland.

    Tactical voting seems to be working for the unofficial Lab/Lib Dem alliance.

    Shame we still have not quite got the hang of it in Scotland.
    No it isn't. Lab haven't won a single seat yet from tactical voting.

    Though there seems to be tactical voting in place in Scotland ... Former Labour voters now tactically vote SNP to keep out the Tories.
    If you think people like @Farooq are examples of a normal Scots person then you're just simply wrong.
    The election results say otherwise.

    If you think people banging on about SNP types are a normal Scots person is look for some evidence of that.
    Prof Curtice was on Sky a week after the Holyrood elections and stated that Anti-SNP Type tactical had a role in limiting the coalition of choas's majority.
    Wouldn't have said that. No such thing as a coalition then. Or even now with the Greens.
    The greens have got seats in the cabinet dimwit.
    (a) not a coalition but an agreement
    (b) that wasn't even thought of in 2017 so your quoting the Prof is seriously off somewhere.
  • JBriskin3JBriskin3 Posts: 1,254
    Carnyx said:

    JBriskin3 said:

    JBriskin3 said:

    JBriskin3 said:

    I agree with Mike's header - there is definitely some sensible targeting going on.

    Labour has won the key Worthing by-election with 50% of the vote (to the Tory 40%) - this shifts the council into NOC (it was always Tory up to now) and gives a good shot at control next May. That was a key priority for SE Region - we were all urged to go there at the regional conference - and is a poster child for us along the southern coast, since up to 1992 Labour never had a single councillor there. Essentially the shift from domination by elderly conservative voters to younger people moving on from Brighton is producing a demographic shift along the coast, analogous to the progress being made by the LibDems inland.

    Tactical voting seems to be working for the unofficial Lab/Lib Dem alliance.

    Shame we still have not quite got the hang of it in Scotland.
    No it isn't. Lab haven't won a single seat yet from tactical voting.

    Though there seems to be tactical voting in place in Scotland ... Former Labour voters now tactically vote SNP to keep out the Tories.
    If you think people like @Farooq are examples of a normal Scots person then you're just simply wrong.
    The election results say otherwise.

    If you think people banging on about SNP types are a normal Scots person is look for some evidence of that.
    Prof Curtice was on Sky a week after the Holyrood elections and stated that Anti-SNP Type tactical had a role in limiting the coalition of choas's majority.
    Wouldn't have said that. No such thing as a coalition then. Or even now with the Greens.
    Okay he said anti-SNP tactical voting.

    To me SNP = SNP Types

    It's in my style guide and isn't a difficult concept.
  • CyclefreeCyclefree Posts: 25,074

    ping said:

    Cyclefree said:

    Look at the sexual and moral incontinence of the adults in poor Arthur's life.

    A mother who has a child, leaves father, shacks up with someone else and kills him. A father who takes up with a woman and cruelly treats and abandons his own son to make this woman happy. A step-mother who has 5 children by 4 different men, who has never worked, who throws herself out of the window and aborts another child while in custody for some offence.

    I don't want to come over as some ancient prude. Evil has existed in all sorts of times and places and is no respecter of class or education. But if you look at a lot of these child murder/child abuse cases you see similar patterns: look at Baby P or any of the others over the years.

    Might we at some point as a society maybe think about saying a bit more clearly that this sort of sequential rutting and casual creation and abandonment of children is, well, wrong and to be discouraged?

    And, no, I don't have an easy answer as to how.

    Arthur's late Great Grandfather Kenneth Labinjo was my family GP when I was a child in Wythall near Birmingham, so Olivia Labinjo- Halcrow was no sink estate peasant. There are factors in modern life like alcoholism, drug abuse and feral procreation that are just being brushed under the carpet by Government. Tim Lawton MP was on earlier demanding the lynching (my interpretation) of the social workers. I'm sure that'll help.
    I do wonder, in this case, whether the social workers *really wanted to believe* the setup that Arthur had been placed into was a positive one - ie, what may have seemed to them like a stable family environment. And blinded by this bias, they ignored the warning signs.

    Clearly, the best situation for the kid was to live with his grandparents. Perhaps that should be a more common solution to these kind of broken home situations.
    One of the sentencing remarks is worth bearing in mind. The judge said,

    "It is a shocking feature of this case that your children, Tustin, lived a perfectly happy normal life in that household while this appalling cruelty to Arthur was taking place."

    Tustin was capable of being a good parent, but chose not to be, and deceived the social workers. This will be quite different to many of the troubled people that social workers deal with routinely.

    However, they really should have had another look when Arthur didn't return to school at the end of lockdown. Then it would have been obvious.
    Her other children did not live with her but nearby in yet another household.
  • NickPalmerNickPalmer Posts: 21,265
    PJH said:

    The next election will have a large amount of tactical voting and the Lib Dems will make a lot of gains IMHO.

    Don't forget, nearly all the potential LD-->Lab switchers already are voting Labour (see Canterbury for example). So Labour doesn't have much scope to benefit. The group mostly not yet voting tactically are the Lab-->LD ones. There's a lot of unwinding to do post Coalition, but unlike you I don't think it will win many seats unless the Tories self-destruct.
    Not really. As we've just seen, three quarters of LibDem voters in 2019 are willing to switch tactically. Lab->LD switching is already commonplace (I know Labour members who routinely vote LD because of where they live) and will become more so if there's sensible focusing of the kind we're seeing this month. I don't think we can realistically stop candidates from doing their best, but they should get zero support from HQ where appropriate.

  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,149
    edited December 2021
    JBriskin3 said:

    Carnyx said:

    JBriskin3 said:

    JBriskin3 said:

    JBriskin3 said:

    I agree with Mike's header - there is definitely some sensible targeting going on.

    Labour has won the key Worthing by-election with 50% of the vote (to the Tory 40%) - this shifts the council into NOC (it was always Tory up to now) and gives a good shot at control next May. That was a key priority for SE Region - we were all urged to go there at the regional conference - and is a poster child for us along the southern coast, since up to 1992 Labour never had a single councillor there. Essentially the shift from domination by elderly conservative voters to younger people moving on from Brighton is producing a demographic shift along the coast, analogous to the progress being made by the LibDems inland.

    Tactical voting seems to be working for the unofficial Lab/Lib Dem alliance.

    Shame we still have not quite got the hang of it in Scotland.
    No it isn't. Lab haven't won a single seat yet from tactical voting.

    Though there seems to be tactical voting in place in Scotland ... Former Labour voters now tactically vote SNP to keep out the Tories.
    If you think people like @Farooq are examples of a normal Scots person then you're just simply wrong.
    The election results say otherwise.

    If you think people banging on about SNP types are a normal Scots person is look for some evidence of that.
    Prof Curtice was on Sky a week after the Holyrood elections and stated that Anti-SNP Type tactical had a role in limiting the coalition of choas's majority.
    Wouldn't have said that. No such thing as a coalition then. Or even now with the Greens.
    Okay he said anti-SNP tactical voting.

    To me SNP = SNP Types

    It's in my style guide and isn't a difficult concept.
    You quoted him as referring to the 'coalition of chaos'. Edit: = Labour-SNP coalition, hence the confusion.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,625
    COVID Summary

    - Cases nationally crawling up. Still seeing a gradual fall in the older groups
    - Hospital admission are still falling, but the rate seems to be slowing. In England a definite uptick in 18-64 and 85+ with 65-84 falls slowing....
    - Deaths still falling steadily.
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 38,851

    Leon said:

    The number of confirmed Omicron Covid cases in Scotland has jumped to 29 as Nicola Sturgeon warns the variant is now spreading fast in the community.

    The First Minister says cases of the little-understood strain will likely continue to rise in the coming days and the outbreak is no longer linked to single private event on November 20.

    Many of the new cases are now being linked to a Steps concert at the Hydro two days later.


    https://www.thecourier.co.uk/fp/news/2792382/omicron-covid-cases-in-scotland-jump-to-29-as-variant-now-spreading-in-community/

    A chain reaction that could result in tragedy!

    Some easy maths to be done here. If Omicron is widely seeded across the UK - as it now seems - with community transmission, there are probably 500 cases (conservatively) in the UK. If Omicron doubles every 4 days (it’s worse in Gauteng), that’s

    1000 cases a day by Dec 6

    2000 cases by Dec 10

    4000 cases by Dec 14

    8000 cases by Dec 18

    16,000 cases by Dec 22

    32,000 cases by Boxing Day

    64,000 cases by Dec 30

    128,000 cases by Jan 3

    256,000 cases by Jan 7

    512,000 cases by Jan 11

    1,028,000 cases a day by the middle of Jan


    Quite some pressure on the NHS there. Let’s hope they’re all ‘mild’

    You are such a cheery contributor
    Would mean everyone in the UK having had it by Valentine's Day.

    A quick way to end the pandemic I guess!
    Until the next variant that evades prior immunity.

    Sorry - :smile:
This discussion has been closed.