It seems strange that the UK allows citizens from so many countries in for what is essentially an unlimited amount of time while also obsessing about illegal immigration. Why don’t we monitor and time limit entries from the EU/EEA, US, NZ, Australia etc, like they do to us?
Where I’m living at the moment, there’s a £10/day fine on anyone overstaying a visa, of any nationality or visa type, payable at a police station or immigration office before departure.
Do you think the UK should implement a similar system?
Kinnock’s main problem was that by 1987 a lot of people felt that the UK was heading in the right direction and could also clearly remember when it wasn’t. By 1992, things weren’t so great but the Tories did still have some credit in the bank and Kinnock was too associated with an old school Labour that a lot of voters felt was too much of a risk to back.
Why I am less convinced about 1992 parallels than many others is that even in that election the Tories had serious, discernible, palpable achievements to talk about. The country was in a better place than it had been in 1979. I just don’t see that similar narrative for the next election.
Put it this way, in 1992, did voters feel they were better off and living in a more successful UK than the one they had in 1979? Pretty much, yes. Ask the same questions about 2010 and 2024, and I doubt enough people will be equally as positive.
At the next election, the main Tory argument will essentially be: “It could be even worse if we aren’t in charge.” The Labour one will be: “It should be so much better than the way it is. Fundamentally, Labour will be right.
The challenge is that there are 650 individual elections. To get from where the party is now to a majority means winning in over 120 more of these than in 2019. And that means everything falling right in terms of vote distribution and turnout in very different parts of the country. It’s a very tough ask.
Much more likely, IMO, are big swings in places like Wales and the North West, alongside much lower swings in the East and North Midlands and the Black Country. That’s why I think Labour most seats but no majority is most likely. Scotland becoming a proper battleground may change that, though.
Don't agree with all of this but this is a fair and intelligent analysis.
I think Starmer's problem is his problem is unenthused base (except by the prospect of winning) and floaters who are almost entirely with him out of a desire to see the end of the Tories.
That is not a very stable or deep coalition.
Starmer like Kinnock has an almost universally hostile print media with obvious exceptions. Blair did not.
The Conservative Party also now own the BBC which makes headway even trickier for Starmer- Labour.
If the voters believe their own eyes as to the state of the nation, rather than through the prism of the Daily Mail, Labour have a chance, if not Sunak wins (unless Johnson replaces him).
The dad of someone in my son's class is ex-Met police. I guess I won't be discussing the Casey report with him..
Why not? He might have an opinion
True. I have a couple of good friends who are 'ex' and I find their comments well-rounded and sensible. They don't call geese swans and they don't regard all coppers as saints or sinners.
I don't think either would have much problem with the Casey Report and would want to see it implemented, and not ignored like others before it.
It seems strange that the UK allows citizens from so many countries in for what is essentially an unlimited amount of time while also obsessing about illegal immigration. Why don’t we monitor and time limit entries from the EU/EEA, US, NZ, Australia etc, like they do to us?
Where I’m living at the moment, there’s a £10/day fine on anyone overstaying a visa, of any nationality or visa type, payable at a police station or immigration office before departure.
Do you think the UK should implement a similar system?
Doesn't that make it more likely that the dodgy ones will stay for good? *perverseincentive*
It seems strange that the UK allows citizens from so many countries in for what is essentially an unlimited amount of time while also obsessing about illegal immigration. Why don’t we monitor and time limit entries from the EU/EEA, US, NZ, Australia etc, like they do to us?
Where I’m living at the moment, there’s a £10/day fine on anyone overstaying a visa, of any nationality or visa type, payable at a police station or immigration office before departure.
Do you think the UK should implement a similar system?
I think the wider question is whether we care if someone from those countries we let through our unmonitored e-gates stays a few days over the limit, or even months. They aren't entitled to welfare or any state assistance for housing, their kids can't enroll at schools and they probably have jobs and families to go back to. As long as the system is only open to countries of comparable income levels I see no reason to change it.
Make your targets achievable and you will fool some of the people
ie inflation is predicted to come down to 2.9% so i will say I will get it down to 5%
NHS is told to target long waits at the cost of everything else so bound to achieve a fall in long waiters
Wholesale energy has plummeted .....
Sensible Politics but hardly a success compared to anytime except now
Good point but the two promises you don't mention are going to be harder to achieve:
"Third, we will make sure our national debt is falling so that we can secure the future of public services."
Unless he has confused deficit with debt that's not happening.
"Fifth, we will pass new laws to stop small boats, making sure that if you come to this country illegally, you are detained and swiftly removed."
Strictly he will say he's passed the laws but no one will count that as a success if the small boats keep coming. Will they stop? I don't know but I doubt it tbh.
I note PB is debating the merits if a Labour leader from four decades back. You might better be asking what on earth the Home Secretaries of the last two decades have been doing.
Being told that “I wouldn’t go there, Minister” by their permanent officials...
That is a pitiful excuse for their failure.
It’s not even an excuse - a sort of whine.
I note that the disciplinary system is part of the problem -minority officers much more likely to be in trouble.
A savage little nastiness of failing systems is that they like to use such systems to attack those they don’t like and those “that don’t fit in”.
In medicine , the old favourite was saying that doctors who complain are mentally ill, need to signed off work and “retired”.
The police have a history of accusing anti-corruption campaigners of corruption on flimsy grounds.
Inside track: Roger Waters has completely re-recorded Dark Side of the Moon. The take (from somebody who had rather hoped otherwise): "It's brilliant....."
On top of that, you have the toxic and adversarial nature of OFSTED, a legacy of Woodhead. Woodhead was actually driven out of teaching because he was a bad teacher, and his McCarthyite obsession with 'fifteen/eighteen/five hundred thousand' bad teachers was a legacy of this. On occasions, OFSTED has risen above this to become useful, but too often it seems to rely on whoever is in charge. While leadership is useful, it should not yaw around like this merely because of it. There seems to be no depth or consistency in its systems and as a result its reports compared across eras are again pretty much worthless.
In terms of what has happened here the current fad of OFSTED is to turn up with preconceived ideas and go through fitting the facts to those ideas. The issue in this case is they had clearly decided to fail it on safeguarding and therefore they changed a playground fight into 'peer on peer abuse.' They tried that in a school I was working in last year - claiming a teacher had hit a child - only to have to retract after video footage proved this was not true (that school fortunately had CCTV).
On the substantive point I do not see how the headteacher can refuse entry on those grounds, as it is a statutory requirement. And, unfortunately, OFSTED care no more for the safety of teachers than they do children.She would be on much stronger grounds - as would everyone else - refusing them entry on the grounds that they do not have sufficient safeguarding clearances. That might actually startle even the useless failure Spielman into finally doing something (preferably resigning).
I thought they failed the school on leadership not - as the Mail has emphasised for their own reasons - a playground fight. That (plus the dancing) was just an observation
"Scotland’s pioneering policy of minimum pricing for alcohol has been linked to a 13% drop in the number of deaths from alcohol consumption, and hundreds fewer hospitalisations, according to a study."
It seems strange that the UK allows citizens from so many countries in for what is essentially an unlimited amount of time while also obsessing about illegal immigration. Why don’t we monitor and time limit entries from the EU/EEA, US, NZ, Australia etc, like they do to us?
Where I’m living at the moment, there’s a £10/day fine on anyone overstaying a visa, of any nationality or visa type, payable at a police station or immigration office before departure.
Do you think the UK should implement a similar system?
Doesn't that make it more likely that the dodgy ones will stay for good? *perverseincentive*
They can stay for as long as they like, so long as they avoid officialdom and pay the fine on the way out.
It’s not uncommon to be interviewing someone for a job, who admits to being several months overstayed after they either lost their last job or arrived on a short-term visit visa. If I employ them, I’ll need to either give them a loan or a sign-on bonus, in order to clear the overstay fine before they can get a work visa.
Occasionally, every five years or so, they have a 3-month amnesty, when overstayers can make themselves known and leave the country without fine. If you’ve been here illegally for five years, you’re up to £17k in fines!
It seems strange that the UK allows citizens from so many countries in for what is essentially an unlimited amount of time while also obsessing about illegal immigration. Why don’t we monitor and time limit entries from the EU/EEA, US, NZ, Australia etc, like they do to us?
Where I’m living at the moment, there’s a £10/day fine on anyone overstaying a visa, of any nationality or visa type, payable at a police station or immigration office before departure.
Do you think the UK should implement a similar system?
I think the wider question is whether we care if someone from those countries we let through our unmonitored e-gates stays a few days over the limit, or even months. They aren't entitled to welfare or any state assistance for housing, their kids can't enroll at schools and they probably have jobs and families to go back to. As long as the system is only open to countries of comparable income levels I see no reason to change it.
I agree ... but a lot of those EU member states do not have comparable income levels.
"Scotland’s pioneering policy of minimum pricing for alcohol has been linked to a 13% drop in the number of deaths from alcohol consumption, and hundreds fewer hospitalisations, according to a study."
Hmm.
The research was observational, so cannot prove conclusively that the significant fall in deaths was due to the minimum unit pricing policy
"Scotland’s pioneering policy of minimum pricing for alcohol has been linked to a 13% drop in the number of deaths from alcohol consumption, and hundreds fewer hospitalisations, according to a study."
The Lancet is even more "never wrong" than PB comments
I think everyone knows the real source of the problems in the Met.
Lol Where's that quote taken from?
PB, surely.
I think that the Senior Management Team (SMT) *is* obsessed with being Woke. In the most superficial, and missing-the-point kind of presentee fashion you could imagine.
Which is why I like to say that Chief Constable Savage is alive, well and got 100% on all his multiple choice diversity exams. He overseas a policy of arresting people for ordering their coffee “black”. Black people, mostly. At anti-racism demos.
I don't buy this mountain to climb in one go argument for Labour. The electorate isn't as sluggish and incremental these days where majorities have to be progressively chipped away at by modest swings. When sentiment goes it will go, en mass.
My argument isn't that. It's that I think large (current) Labour leads could haemorrhage just as easily into the high 30s and a stalemate if Starmer doesn't enthuse his base and retain floaters but Sunak does his.
Sure, there's sentiment, but there's also logistics. There are only so many constituencies that Labour activists can target, and they have to start with winning back the ones that Corbyn lost.
On anyther note, I must say that I'm glad to see my thesis make it into a header. And the split between the new pollsters and the experienced pollsters is exacerbated by the former group polling much more often.
"Scotland’s pioneering policy of minimum pricing for alcohol has been linked to a 13% drop in the number of deaths from alcohol consumption, and hundreds fewer hospitalisations, according to a study."
Quite. THough some of us did provide evidence in support.
Of course, this was famously the scheme which led one David Frost to appeal to the European institutions - spot the difference:
I note PB is debating the merits if a Labour leader from four decades back. You might better be asking what on earth the Home Secretaries of the last two decades have been doing.
Reorganising the Home Office? John Reid said it was not fit for purpose, so Justice was split off, and since then policing, border control and the courts have never been in better shape!
That is why I am sceptical of "break up the Met" as a solution to anything. Change the cap badge and a couple of years of chaos will fix the immediate problem of saving politicians' necks until the general election. Never mind systems, procedures or personnel. After that it will be bring in a new Commissioner, as if that has never been tried before.
A failed organisation of that size - the Met accounts for over a quarter of all policing - and with multiple roles, is just too big to adequately reform. Breaking it up would give at least the chance that one ur two of the new forces actually improve.
As an aside, it's both absurd and contemptible that the man who presided over the Met as Mayor, and appointed one of the worst two Home Secretaries in modern times, is now attacking Parliamentary due process for investigating his behaviour.
It's come to something when of the last three Home Secretaries Michael Green, er, Grant Shapps stands out as a beacon of competence and integrity compared to the other two.
Mind you, if he'd been given more than three days he might have found a way to cock things up again.
The report has barely been published, and already the first bad faith argument from the leading police representative.
“I don’t think we will see another person like that in the police.”
He added: “We absolutely accept the findings but we have to be a little bit careful here. Are we saying every Met police officer is racist and homophobic? That is quite dangerous.
“Met colleagues are on their knees. We have a broken force, they are just leaving in their droves.
“It is quite scary what we are creating here. The punishing of police just does not stop. The new commissioner has made a vow to change what is going on and is changing what is going on.”
Bog standard 'criticise the police and you are attacking them, upsetting the officers'. Works every time.
It's just so tin eared. If he want to show leadership and reform a large part of it has to come from the rank and file who he is meant to represent. How hard would it have been to say yes there are problems we are working with the SLT to root out the bad actors, protect the good officers and will implement the recommendations whole heartedly. That's what the front line want, support to get rid of the bastards not them protecting. The difficulty is that by almost default many complaints are seen as being made out of spite (often by those being arrested trying to distract from their own bad behaviour thus making it easy to lump all complaint in this bracket). Really it should be straight forward, lead by example, get rid of the bad ones publicly and loudly, praise to high heaven those who do well so that the negative is overwhelmed by the positive and officers don't feel like they're being hit constantly. Personally we need to revisit merging forces we have too many small ones but bigger forces also have their own challenges. Also abolish Cleveland police who are singularly useless and seemingly corrupt.
It's interesting to see what the decay factor in loathing for the Cons, specifically Johnson's and Truss' administrations, will be.
Although it is still the Cons and they do need to be taught a lesson at not being shit these past few years, nevertheless there is a new approach.
Inflation is subsiding, the strikes are being settled, it seems that the people in charge aren't lunatics...
All this as you say could mean much less of a shellacking than otherwise might have been the case.
ie, people forget and in politics they forget quite quickly. Strikes sorted, inflation on the way down, looking at addressing the metropolitan police, non-mad people in charge, Boris being hauled over the coals, etc.
Meanwhile Lab remains boring and untested, and Rishi shot Labour's boring but competent fox. Not to say that the voters won't punish the party but I can see why the Lab lead is diminishing.
Folk.will be receiving Council Tax bills. Just got mine. If you pay by direct debit, you won't have paid Feb1 or Mar1. Hundred quids plus if you're lucky out of disposable income next month. Quite frankly can't afford mine.
Same
Plus the energy bung stops about now for most (all?) of us. That's a few percent that will hit our bank balances, even if it doesn't show up in the stats.
Month vs. money... It's as simple as that.
I thought the energy bung was continuing another three months? And prices coming down?
A straw in the wind is that I had an email the other day from EDF touting for business. Not had that for a while.
Agree on the cap, and yes the energy market looks to be settling down.
But I think the "£400 off, no questions asked" scheme isn't being extended, unless someone knows different. That's been paying about a third of my DD over the winter.
If your energy company has set your DD correctly then it shouldn't change - DDs should have been set in the autumn based on autumn/winter usage with government discount and (lower) spring/summer usage without it.
But most councils' refusal to take CT DD over 12 months perplexes me.
It's interesting to see what the decay factor in loathing for the Cons, specifically Johnson's and Truss' administrations, will be.
Although it is still the Cons and they do need to be taught a lesson at not being shit these past few years, nevertheless there is a new approach.
Inflation is subsiding, the strikes are being settled, it seems that the people in charge aren't lunatics...
All this as you say could mean much less of a shellacking than otherwise might have been the case.
ie, people forget and in politics they forget quite quickly. Strikes sorted, inflation on the way down, looking at addressing the metropolitan police, non-mad people in charge, Boris being hauled over the coals, etc.
Meanwhile Lab remains boring and untested, and Rishi shot Labour's boring but competent fox. Not to say that the voters won't punish the party but I can see why the Lab lead is diminishing.
I said at the start of the year that the Tories only needed to improve half a point a month and Labour decline half a point a month for the next election to be very interesting.
As to the question in the article; an issue is this. There are two distinct types of rejection of the government in place at any moment. Failure past; and failure current.
The issue for Sunak is how well he can tell the story of Truss, May, Boris and general uselessness as well as moral failure being past and not present.
Major could not recover from ERM and all that partly because he was the same PM that oversaw it. An OK present was destroyed by this.
Most, not all, of the rejection of the Tories is about past fails both political and moral.
Sunak's position is tough, but not as hopeless as Major's.
Nicola Sturgeon said she would argue she was “not out of step” with the Scottish public around the issues of trans rights and the gender recognition act.
On which the clock is ticking. A Judicial review normally has to be lodged within 3 months of the decision complained of. The s35 order was, I think, 17th January so more than 2 months have now passed. I suspect if Forbes wins that is the end of the matter but Useless has committed himself to challenging it.
I was thinking of other cases David , ie the £600K and the fallout re the lying to committee investigating Salmond case and the FOI commissioner is about to take to court as lies were told about who held the evidence so it was excluded etc. Sure there are others as well, one day the perjuries will come up. I will stop there or I will be here all day. Bet some squeaky bums in the NEC as well just now.
I think everyone knows the real source of the problems in the Met.
Lol Where's that quote taken from?
PB, surely.
I think that the Senior Management Team (SMT) *is* obsessed with being Woke. In the most superficial, and missing-the-point kind of presentee fashion you could imagine.
Which is why I like to say that Chief Constable Savage is alive, well and got 100% on all his multiple choice diversity exams. He overseas a policy of arresting people for ordering their coffee “black”. Black people, mostly. At anti-racism demos.
Meanwhile, they can clear up many more ‘crimes’ by policing Twitter, than they could ever achieve by going after car thieves and burglars. Just give those victims a crime number for their insurance.
"Scotland’s pioneering policy of minimum pricing for alcohol has been linked to a 13% drop in the number of deaths from alcohol consumption, and hundreds fewer hospitalisations, according to a study."
I know (a little) one of the academics who was pushing this for a long time. His evidence was always pretty compelling.
"Scotland’s pioneering policy of minimum pricing for alcohol has been linked to a 13% drop in the number of deaths from alcohol consumption, and hundreds fewer hospitalisations, according to a study."
Kinnock’s main problem was that by 1987 a lot of people felt that the UK was heading in the right direction and could also clearly remember when it wasn’t. By 1992, things weren’t so great but the Tories did still have some credit in the bank and Kinnock was too associated with an old school Labour that a lot of voters felt was too much of a risk to back.
Why I am less convinced about 1992 parallels than many others is that even in that election the Tories had serious, discernible, palpable achievements to talk about. The country was in a better place than it had been in 1979. I just don’t see that similar narrative for the next election.
Put it this way, in 1992, did voters feel they were better off and living in a more successful UK than the one they had in 1979? Pretty much, yes. Ask the same questions about 2010 and 2024, and I doubt enough people will be equally as positive.
At the next election, the main Tory argument will essentially be: “It could be even worse if we aren’t in charge.” The Labour one will be: “It should be so much better than the way it is. Fundamentally, Labour will be right.
The challenge is that there are 650 individual elections. To get from where the party is now to a majority means winning in over 120 more of these than in 2019. And that means everything falling right in terms of vote distribution and turnout in very different parts of the country. It’s a very tough ask.
Much more likely, IMO, are big swings in places like Wales and the North West, alongside much lower swings in the East and North Midlands and the Black Country. That’s why I think Labour most seats but no majority is most likely. Scotland becoming a proper battleground may change that, though.
Don't agree with all of this but this is a fair and intelligent analysis.
I think Starmer's problem is his problem is unenthused base (except by the prospect of winning) and floaters who are almost entirely with him out of a desire to see the end of the Tories.
That is not a very stable or deep coalition.
Starmer like Kinnock has an almost universally hostile print media with obvious exceptions. Blair did not.
The Conservative Party also now own the BBC which makes headway even trickier for Starmer- Labour.
If the voters believe their own eyes as to the state of the nation, rather than through the prism of the Daily Mail, Labour have a chance, if not Sunak wins (unless Johnson replaces him).
I hope that by tomorrow night, we can finally lay to rest the "unless Johnson..." caveat.
It's interesting to see what the decay factor in loathing for the Cons, specifically Johnson's and Truss' administrations, will be.
Although it is still the Cons and they do need to be taught a lesson at not being shit these past few years, nevertheless there is a new approach.
Inflation is subsiding, the strikes are being settled, it seems that the people in charge aren't lunatics...
All this as you say could mean much less of a shellacking than otherwise might have been the case.
ie, people forget and in politics they forget quite quickly. Strikes sorted, inflation on the way down, looking at addressing the metropolitan police, non-mad people in charge, Boris being hauled over the coals, etc.
Meanwhile Lab remains boring and untested, and Rishi shot Labour's boring but competent fox. Not to say that the voters won't punish the party but I can see why the Lab lead is diminishing.
I said at the start of the year that the Tories only needed to improve half a point a month and Labour decline half a point a month for the next election to be very interesting.
Chip, chip, chip is what Sunak needs.
Boris and Liz must seem a world away to many voters, part of the whole Covid/lockdown/mad Cons leadership nightmare that we are slowly awakening from.
I think everyone knows the real source of the problems in the Met.
Lol Where's that quote taken from?
PB, surely.
I think that the Senior Management Team (SMT) *is* obsessed with being Woke. In the most superficial, and missing-the-point kind of presentee fashion you could imagine.
Which is why I like to say that Chief Constable Savage is alive, well and got 100% on all his multiple choice diversity exams. He overseas a policy of arresting people for ordering their coffee “black”. Black people, mostly. At anti-racism demos.
Meanwhile, they can clear up many more ‘crimes’ by policing Twitter, than they could ever achieve by going after car thieves and burglars.
Think SMT targets - getting in the way of such targets is getting in the way of someone else getting a promotion for your work. And them getting an expensive, abstract looking award for Policing.
"Scotland’s pioneering policy of minimum pricing for alcohol has been linked to a 13% drop in the number of deaths from alcohol consumption, and hundreds fewer hospitalisations, according to a study."
Quite. THough some of us did provide evidence in support.
Of course, this was famously the scheme which led one David Frost to appeal to the European institutions - spot the difference:
Nevertheless the last few years must have been boom time for the English side of the border, what with folk nipping over for a fag in Carlisle pubs, driving down for regular stock ups in Northumbrian offies and the exodus of Scots wanting to enjoy a Covid unrestricted Hogmanay. Canny northerners are set to make another killing when they start convoys of trucks containing empty cans & bottles to take advantage of the DRS. Good times.
Given that the average lead in the ten polls preceding that Deltapoll one was 19.5%, I think it's misleading to give it so much prominence. (And the other three polls that overlapped with the Deltapoll sampling dates give an average lead of just over 20%.)
"Scotland’s pioneering policy of minimum pricing for alcohol has been linked to a 13% drop in the number of deaths from alcohol consumption, and hundreds fewer hospitalisations, according to a study."
Hmm.
The research was observational, so cannot prove conclusively that the significant fall in deaths was due to the minimum unit pricing policy
Yes, but short of an RCT, that is the best evidence.
Anything not an RCT is 'observational'. The research linking smoking to lung cancer was observational. The research that uncovered problems with giving pregnant women Thalidomide was observational. The evidence supporting the efficacy of parachutes at reducing risk of severe injury after jumping out of an aeroplane is merely observational.*
Outside of drug trials, pretty much everything is observational. Without randomisation you can't directly infer causation as there might be some unmeasured factor that explains the observations instead. Good studies try very hard to include everything relevant, look for proxies, look for adjustments or different settings that might have one unobserved factor but not another etc etc.
(And don't diss 'observational' - as an epidemiologist, that's my life's work )
*the joyless barstards in the Research Ethics Committee vetoed the RCT on parachute use
Nicola Sturgeon said she would argue she was “not out of step” with the Scottish public around the issues of trans rights and the gender recognition act.
On which the clock is ticking. A Judicial review normally has to be lodged within 3 months of the decision complained of. The s35 order was, I think, 17th January so more than 2 months have now passed. I suspect if Forbes wins that is the end of the matter but Useless has committed himself to challenging it.
I was thinking of other cases David , ie the £600K and the fallout re the lying to committee investigating Salmond case and the FOI commissioner is about to take to court as lies were told about who held the evidence so it was excluded etc. Sure there are others as well, one day the perjuries will come up. I will stop there or I will be here all day. Bet some squeaky bums in the NEC as well just now.
I am thinking of the David Owen book on how leadership drives the leaders slightly mad on the end. He thought that John Major was one of the few not to disappear up his own arse - possibly because he had such a tough time in the job.
I think that Sturgeon went on too long - and became a parody of herself.
"Scotland’s pioneering policy of minimum pricing for alcohol has been linked to a 13% drop in the number of deaths from alcohol consumption, and hundreds fewer hospitalisations, according to a study."
Hmm.
The research was observational, so cannot prove conclusively that the significant fall in deaths was due to the minimum unit pricing policy
Yes, but short of an RCT, that is the best evidence.
Anything not an RCT is 'observational'. The research linking smoking to lung cancer was observational. The research that uncovered problems with giving pregnant women Thalidomide was observational. The evidence supporting the efficacy of parachutes at reducing risk of severe injury after jumping out of an aeroplane is merely observational.*
Outside of drug trials, pretty much everything is observational. Without randomisation you can't directly infer causation as there might be some unmeasured factor that explains the observations instead. Good studies try very hard to include everything relevant, look for proxies, look for adjustments or different settings that might have one unobserved factor but not another etc etc.
(And don't diss 'observational' - as an epidemiologist, that's my life's work )
*the joyless barstards in the Research Ethics Committee vetoed the RCT on parachute use
Careful, you're sounding dangerously like someone who knows something about this.
Observational research also allowed Covid-19 deniers to say Covid-19 was no worse than the common cold and to say most us had Covid-19 by April 2020.
Covid19 was of course worse than the cold, and the flu.
But lockdown was a mistake anyway and even worse than the cold or the flu too.
Lockdown was worse than extra people dying from natural causes.
You did it to yourselves. Imagine imprisoning yourself in your own home for months on end just because a pair of fucking moronic charlatans like Hancock and Johnson told you to. Total beta cuck move. Slave mentality.
So, what methodology does observational research actually entail? Is it to anecdotes as intelligent design is to creationism?
Pretty much everything is looking at stuff from the outside - observational.
That’s what medical trials are, pretty much, for example. You don’t have a super duper microscope watching the chemical reactions inside the trial volunteers. You observe that x% of those on the drug recovered vs y% on the placebo.
"Scotland’s pioneering policy of minimum pricing for alcohol has been linked to a 13% drop in the number of deaths from alcohol consumption, and hundreds fewer hospitalisations, according to a study."
Hmm.
The research was observational, so cannot prove conclusively that the significant fall in deaths was due to the minimum unit pricing policy
Yes, but short of an RCT, that is the best evidence.
Anything not an RCT is 'observational'. The research linking smoking to lung cancer was observational. The research that uncovered problems with giving pregnant women Thalidomide was observational. The evidence supporting the efficacy of parachutes at reducing risk of severe injury after jumping out of an aeroplane is merely observational.*
Outside of drug trials, pretty much everything is observational. Without randomisation you can't directly infer causation as there might be some unmeasured factor that explains the observations instead. Good studies try very hard to include everything relevant, look for proxies, look for adjustments or different settings that might have one unobserved factor but not another etc etc.
(And don't diss 'observational' - as an epidemiologist, that's my life's work )
*the joyless barstards in the Research Ethics Committee vetoed the RCT on parachute use
Nicola Sturgeon said she would argue she was “not out of step” with the Scottish public around the issues of trans rights and the gender recognition act.
On which the clock is ticking. A Judicial review normally has to be lodged within 3 months of the decision complained of. The s35 order was, I think, 17th January so more than 2 months have now passed. I suspect if Forbes wins that is the end of the matter but Useless has committed himself to challenging it.
I was thinking of other cases David , ie the £600K and the fallout re the lying to committee investigating Salmond case and the FOI commissioner is about to take to court as lies were told about who held the evidence so it was excluded etc. Sure there are others as well, one day the perjuries will come up. I will stop there or I will be here all day. Bet some squeaky bums in the NEC as well just now.
I am thinking of the David Owen book on how leadership drives the leaders slightly mad on the end. He thought that John Major was one of the few not to disappear up his own arse...
"Scotland’s pioneering policy of minimum pricing for alcohol has been linked to a 13% drop in the number of deaths from alcohol consumption, and hundreds fewer hospitalisations, according to a study."
Still, suppose it's better that the drunks are all banging benzos rather than knocking back the special brew, eh?
That’s a really interesting hypothesis, as the increase in drug deaths has been much more pronounced in Scotland than in England, in the past five years.
So, what methodology does observational research actually entail? Is it to anecdotes as intelligent design is to creationism?
Think Twitter poll.
People will modify their behaviour if they are being observed/have to record their behaviour.
They're using death and hospitalisation data (so data that are routinely collected for all deaths and hospital admissions for all people) so there is no direct observation - the people included would not have known they were included and would not have been asked to record anything.
Looking in more detail, they've used ITS and contolled ITS, which are part of the family of quasi-experimental methods which are as close to a trial as you can get without doing a trial and do enable causal inference. Probably third in the strength of causal inference after a randomised controlled trial and a regression discontinuity design (first has randomisation, which makes it certain effects are due to treatment; second has effective randomisation over a small interval - if done well then pretty much as certain; third - ITS - doesn't have randomisation, but has multiple controls - here before and after in Scotland and also before and after in England, lacking the intervention).
ETA: Joint third or maybe fourth is difference in difference, then you're into the more standard epi studies such as cohort/case-control where you can't really claim causation, but the association/corellation, while not implying causation, may waggle it's eyebrows suggestively.
"Scotland’s pioneering policy of minimum pricing for alcohol has been linked to a 13% drop in the number of deaths from alcohol consumption, and hundreds fewer hospitalisations, according to a study."
Hmm.
The research was observational, so cannot prove conclusively that the significant fall in deaths was due to the minimum unit pricing policy
Yes, but short of an RCT, that is the best evidence.
Anything not an RCT is 'observational'. The research linking smoking to lung cancer was observational. The research that uncovered problems with giving pregnant women Thalidomide was observational. The evidence supporting the efficacy of parachutes at reducing risk of severe injury after jumping out of an aeroplane is merely observational.*
Outside of drug trials, pretty much everything is observational. Without randomisation you can't directly infer causation as there might be some unmeasured factor that explains the observations instead. Good studies try very hard to include everything relevant, look for proxies, look for adjustments or different settings that might have one unobserved factor but not another etc etc.
(And don't diss 'observational' - as an epidemiologist, that's my life's work )
*the joyless barstards in the Research Ethics Committee vetoed the RCT on parachute use
"Scotland’s pioneering policy of minimum pricing for alcohol has been linked to a 13% drop in the number of deaths from alcohol consumption, and hundreds fewer hospitalisations, according to a study."
Scotch Experts all over England will be scratching their heads
So, what methodology does observational research actually entail? Is it to anecdotes as intelligent design is to creationism?
O/T, intelligent design deserves to be evaluated with more care. Philosophically this can't be done within the academy, as academia's philosophical (not factual) rules don't permit it, being beyond empiricism's boundaries. This does not mean it can't be done, or could not be true.
Creationism it isn't.
BTW I think observational means qualitative rather than quantitative research.The sort anthropologists like.
I don't buy this mountain to climb in one go argument for Labour. The electorate isn't as sluggish and incremental these days where majorities have to be progressively chipped away at by modest swings. When sentiment goes it will go, en mass.
My argument isn't that. It's that I think large (current) Labour leads could haemorrhage just as easily into the high 30s and a stalemate if Starmer doesn't enthuse his base and retain floaters but Sunak does his.
Sure, there's sentiment, but there's also logistics. There are only so many constituencies that Labour activists can target, and they have to start with winning back the ones that Corbyn lost.
On anyther note, I must say that I'm glad to see my thesis make it into a header. And the split between the new pollsters and the experienced pollsters is exacerbated by the former group polling much more often.
Do activists being active in a constituency make much difference in a general election?
"You might expect that in seats where one party has a large and persistent advantage, voters may be more likely to consider the result a foregone conclusion and thus may be less likely to turn out, whereas closer, more unpredictable contests would be more likely to motivate voters to try and influence the outcome.
In fact, there appears to be little or no relationship between seat safeness and turnout. The chart below shows 2017 election turnout in each seat plotted against the marginality of the result in 2015 and 2017. Seats are spread diffusely across the chart with no discernible pattern linking marginality and turnout percentages."
"Scotland’s pioneering policy of minimum pricing for alcohol has been linked to a 13% drop in the number of deaths from alcohol consumption, and hundreds fewer hospitalisations, according to a study."
Hmm.
The research was observational, so cannot prove conclusively that the significant fall in deaths was due to the minimum unit pricing policy
Yes, but short of an RCT, that is the best evidence.
Anything not an RCT is 'observational'. The research linking smoking to lung cancer was observational. The research that uncovered problems with giving pregnant women Thalidomide was observational. The evidence supporting the efficacy of parachutes at reducing risk of severe injury after jumping out of an aeroplane is merely observational.*
Outside of drug trials, pretty much everything is observational. Without randomisation you can't directly infer causation as there might be some unmeasured factor that explains the observations instead. Good studies try very hard to include everything relevant, look for proxies, look for adjustments or different settings that might have one unobserved factor but not another etc etc.
(And don't diss 'observational' - as an epidemiologist, that's my life's work )
*the joyless barstards in the Research Ethics Committee vetoed the RCT on parachute use
Careful, you're sounding dangerously like someone who knows something about this.
If ever there was a reason for banning someone from PB this must be it. Sorry @Selebian but if you start posting stuff on which you have actual expertise I think you will be doomed.
"Scotland’s pioneering policy of minimum pricing for alcohol has been linked to a 13% drop in the number of deaths from alcohol consumption, and hundreds fewer hospitalisations, according to a study."
Hmm.
The research was observational, so cannot prove conclusively that the significant fall in deaths was due to the minimum unit pricing policy
Yes, but short of an RCT, that is the best evidence.
Anything not an RCT is 'observational'. The research linking smoking to lung cancer was observational. The research that uncovered problems with giving pregnant women Thalidomide was observational. The evidence supporting the efficacy of parachutes at reducing risk of severe injury after jumping out of an aeroplane is merely observational.*
Outside of drug trials, pretty much everything is observational. Without randomisation you can't directly infer causation as there might be some unmeasured factor that explains the observations instead. Good studies try very hard to include everything relevant, look for proxies, look for adjustments or different settings that might have one unobserved factor but not another etc etc.
(And don't diss 'observational' - as an epidemiologist, that's my life's work )
*the joyless barstards in the Research Ethics Committee vetoed the RCT on parachute use
My father is Mr Randomised Control Trial.
Observation is the hypothesis, RCT is the proof.
If only life (or even medicine) were so simple.
Indeed.
It’s from my father how I learned that correlation doesn’t imply causation.
"Scotland’s pioneering policy of minimum pricing for alcohol has been linked to a 13% drop in the number of deaths from alcohol consumption, and hundreds fewer hospitalisations, according to a study."
"Scotland’s pioneering policy of minimum pricing for alcohol has been linked to a 13% drop in the number of deaths from alcohol consumption, and hundreds fewer hospitalisations, according to a study."
It's good to see the Tories back on the board after a very long hibernation. Just a quick flash of an unseasonal thaw and they're jumping around like squirrels. Any more 'likes' from felix and he'll give himself a hernia. But nice to see Fitilass and Gin back back and Carlotta with a big smile on her face and even a joke from William Glenn.
But Make the most of them. Miss Rabbit looks like the only sane Tory out there. One poll by the most erratic pollster in pollsterville doesn't change the season
Mr. Eagles, that reminds me of a fun finding from university.
Ice-cream sales and drownings correlate highly. The question is: does drowning make people buy ice-cream, or does ice-cream purchasing cause drownings?
Deltapoll having the Conservatives on 35% is an obvious outlier. Their rolling average has been between 25% and 27% for about 6 months. Even with this striking outlier, Labour's lead is still in double figures. How long until the Labour lead is in single figures? A long, long time if even extreme outliers can't do it.
Nicola Sturgeon said she would argue she was “not out of step” with the Scottish public around the issues of trans rights and the gender recognition act.
On which the clock is ticking. A Judicial review normally has to be lodged within 3 months of the decision complained of. The s35 order was, I think, 17th January so more than 2 months have now passed. I suspect if Forbes wins that is the end of the matter but Useless has committed himself to challenging it.
I was thinking of other cases David , ie the £600K and the fallout re the lying to committee investigating Salmond case and the FOI commissioner is about to take to court as lies were told about who held the evidence so it was excluded etc. Sure there are others as well, one day the perjuries will come up. I will stop there or I will be here all day. Bet some squeaky bums in the NEC as well just now.
I am thinking of the David Owen book on how leadership drives the leaders slightly mad on the end. He thought that John Major was one of the few not to disappear up his own arse - possibly because he had such a tough time in the job.
I think that Sturgeon went on too long - and became a parody of herself.
If you look back the first thing she did after becoming leader was to get rid of any democracy, her and henchman Robertson shut down anyone else being able to vote on anything and then the Murrells and Robertson as tehir acolyte ran everything , no-one was allowed to question anything and they put muppet placepersons in all eth positions required. Anyone contesting the leader's orders was squashed, deselected , etc evn to teh point of trying to stitch them up.
"Scotland’s pioneering policy of minimum pricing for alcohol has been linked to a 13% drop in the number of deaths from alcohol consumption, and hundreds fewer hospitalisations, according to a study."
Still, suppose it's better that the drunks are all banging benzos rather than knocking back the special brew, eh?
That’s a really interesting hypothesis, as the increase in drug deaths has been much more pronounced in Scotland than in England, in the past five years.
It's as "observational" as the study in the Guardian, but the huge increase in benzo related deaths in Scotland over the last five years while England has remained stable does seem like a smoking gun...
Although I arrived at this conclusion myself (from the investigative school of "no shit, sherlock"), I've been googling and looks like I'm not the only one to arrive at this conclusion -
"Annemarie Ward, founder of Faces & Voices of Recovery UK (Favor), a drug and alcohol charity promoting recovery, echoed the concern. She said: “Anecdotally, this is the case. If you can buy street Valium at 20 pence a pill, and the price of super strength alcohol is more expensive and has risen, you will take the cheapest route to oblivion. We predicted this when minimum alcohol pricing was introduced.”
And I particularly liked this quote from a Scottish comedian that clearly explains the substitution effect:
"“No one was ever going to say, “Right, I can’t afford a bottle of cider so I will take up jogging.””
It seems strange that the UK allows citizens from so many countries in for what is essentially an unlimited amount of time while also obsessing about illegal immigration. Why don’t we monitor and time limit entries from the EU/EEA, US, NZ, Australia etc, like they do to us?
Where I’m living at the moment, there’s a £10/day fine on anyone overstaying a visa, of any nationality or visa type, payable at a police station or immigration office before departure.
Do you think the UK should implement a similar system?
I think the wider question is whether we care if someone from those countries we let through our unmonitored e-gates stays a few days over the limit, or even months. They aren't entitled to welfare or any state assistance for housing, their kids can't enroll at schools and they probably have jobs and families to go back to. As long as the system is only open to countries of comparable income levels I see no reason to change it.
I agree ... but a lot of those EU member states do not have comparable income levels.
Sure but there's no state assistance for them to stay here and they'll be risking deportation and being permanently barred from the UK if they work illegally to overstay. It's not something particularly worrying.
"Scotland’s pioneering policy of minimum pricing for alcohol has been linked to a 13% drop in the number of deaths from alcohol consumption, and hundreds fewer hospitalisations, according to a study."
Scotch Experts all over England will be scratching their heads
Amazing. The Scots have discovered price elasticity of demand.
I thought you were campaigning Malc for your god-given right to self-determination including, presumably, drinking yourselves into an early grave.
No one could doubt that if you increase the price of a good, consumption of that good will decrease; the issue is one of individual sovereignty. I didn't have you down as a Nanny Stater, I must say.
Mr. Eagles, that reminds me of a fun finding from university.
Ice-cream sales and drownings correlate highly. The question is: does drowning make people buy ice-cream, or does ice-cream purchasing cause drownings?
It’s much worse.
Ice cream consumption leads to murder.
A pirate shortage caused global warming.
Living in a poor country increases penis size. (Great news for an independent Scotland)
I don't buy this mountain to climb in one go argument for Labour. The electorate isn't as sluggish and incremental these days where majorities have to be progressively chipped away at by modest swings. When sentiment goes it will go, en mass.
My argument isn't that. It's that I think large (current) Labour leads could haemorrhage just as easily into the high 30s and a stalemate if Starmer doesn't enthuse his base and retain floaters but Sunak does his.
Sure, there's sentiment, but there's also logistics. There are only so many constituencies that Labour activists can target, and they have to start with winning back the ones that Corbyn lost.
On anyther note, I must say that I'm glad to see my thesis make it into a header. And the split between the new pollsters and the experienced pollsters is exacerbated by the former group polling much more often.
Do activists being active in a constituency make much difference in a general election?
"You might expect that in seats where one party has a large and persistent advantage, voters may be more likely to consider the result a foregone conclusion and thus may be less likely to turn out, whereas closer, more unpredictable contests would be more likely to motivate voters to try and influence the outcome.
In fact, there appears to be little or no relationship between seat safeness and turnout. The chart below shows 2017 election turnout in each seat plotted against the marginality of the result in 2015 and 2017. Seats are spread diffusely across the chart with no discernible pattern linking marginality and turnout percentages."
The area where activist presence mskes most difference is IMO in tactical voting. Lots of non-Tory voeters will go with whoever seems to be making most of the running locally. That tends to be the LibDems, which is helpful in blue wall seats but also deployed in seats like Upminster where they have no realistic chance. If Davey can persuade keen canvassers really to concentrate on the targets (which is what Labour activists mostly do - it's why I spent the last election in Portsmouth), the non-Tory side will be better off everywhere.
Deltapoll having the Conservatives on 35% is an obvious outlier. Their rolling average has been between 25% and 27% for about 6 months. Even with this striking outlier, Labour's lead is still in double figures. How long until the Labour lead is in single figures? A long, long time if even extreme outliers can't do it.
You've missed the point of the header. Your "rolling average" is dominated by these new, untested firms.
"Scotland’s pioneering policy of minimum pricing for alcohol has been linked to a 13% drop in the number of deaths from alcohol consumption, and hundreds fewer hospitalisations, according to a study."
Scotch Experts all over England will be scratching their heads
It's full-on, "these are not approved facts they must be wrong, let me find a naughty word and dodgy analogy I can use to rubbish them without thinking about it too much."
Complete embarrassment. Wish I could say I was surprised.
"Scotland’s pioneering policy of minimum pricing for alcohol has been linked to a 13% drop in the number of deaths from alcohol consumption, and hundreds fewer hospitalisations, according to a study."
Still, suppose it's better that the drunks are all banging benzos rather than knocking back the special brew, eh?
That’s a really interesting hypothesis, as the increase in drug deaths has been much more pronounced in Scotland than in England, in the past five years.
One thing that seems to have changed - at least anecdotally - is that in the Olde Days alcoholics were just alcoholics.
These days there seems to be more of the “addict” thing - were drugs get substituted for alcohol. And not just by the people at the bottom of society, either….
"Scotland’s pioneering policy of minimum pricing for alcohol has been linked to a 13% drop in the number of deaths from alcohol consumption, and hundreds fewer hospitalisations, according to a study."
Hmm.
The research was observational, so cannot prove conclusively that the significant fall in deaths was due to the minimum unit pricing policy
Yes, but short of an RCT, that is the best evidence.
Anything not an RCT is 'observational'. The research linking smoking to lung cancer was observational. The research that uncovered problems with giving pregnant women Thalidomide was observational. The evidence supporting the efficacy of parachutes at reducing risk of severe injury after jumping out of an aeroplane is merely observational.*
Outside of drug trials, pretty much everything is observational. Without randomisation you can't directly infer causation as there might be some unmeasured factor that explains the observations instead. Good studies try very hard to include everything relevant, look for proxies, look for adjustments or different settings that might have one unobserved factor but not another etc etc.
(And don't diss 'observational' - as an epidemiologist, that's my life's work )
*the joyless barstards in the Research Ethics Committee vetoed the RCT on parachute use
My father is Mr Randomised Control Trial.
Observation is the hypothesis, RCT is the proof.
There's a difference between observation by a clinician with a handfull of patients and observation using a whole population dataset. The former only gives you a hypothesis (see the ideas of various wonder drugs for Covid, most nixed by RCTs, a few verified). The latter is good evidence and in the many cases where you can't do a RCT* it's foolish to dismiss strong evidence (e.g. the potential harmful effects of the Astra Zeneca vaccine, which were not picked up in the RCT - too small a sample - but evident in population level observational data, which also of course showed that the benefits outweighed risks for older people).
*Pretty much everything apart from potentially beneficial interventions such as drugs or medical kit. You won't get ethical approval to test whether excessive alcohol consumption is harmful (and even if you do - good luck ensuring your control group abstain/stick to the prescribed level).
Mr. Eagles, that reminds me of a fun finding from university.
Ice-cream sales and drownings correlate highly. The question is: does drowning make people buy ice-cream, or does ice-cream purchasing cause drownings?
It’s much worse.
Ice cream consumption leads to murder.
A pirate shortage caused global warming.
Living in a poor country increases penis size. (Great news for an independent Scotland)
Hmm. I'm torn. Most of the time I think it will be 1997 on stilts; but then I think: doesn't this look just like 1992 all over again - A Labour party creeping from the shadow of far-left domination, and a Tory party led by a calm pragmatist determined to put all the tumultuous recent history behind him? Problem is: Starmer is no Blair but he's also no Kinnock, but then Rishi is no Major. Just dunno...
Why was Kinnock so hated at the time and apparently still hated? Whenever I see archive footage of him he comes across as moderate and conciliatory and a decent likeable sort, especially compared to the choice for PM at the last election.
Good grief. An awful lot of nothing, delivered in the style of Lenin himself. And still those behind him got so cheesed off they couldn’t applaud or even look at him.
What a shower. That’s put me right off.
Sunak should use that clip to guarantee Tory majority “do you really want to put this lot into power? Seriously?”
Kinnock is an awful man, nonetheless I am not backing any of your racing tips if you read the tealeaves so poorly. Without that speech, New Labour would likely as not have never existed. I had forgotten how much I despised Eric Heffer and Degsy.
You've read the room wrong there Rabbit, anyone who gets Heffer to throw his toys out of the pram isn't all bad
I guess I never truly appreciated what alternatives were.
Hence the greater enthusiasm for nationalised industries among the young who never knew them than the old who did….
Privatised (non- competition, cartel model) utilities, remind me how well that all works.
Today's BT is infinitely better than the one I grew up with.
Not just in the U.K. - the model spread - when I moved to Brussels the first time the waiting list for a telephone line was 6 months “and count yourself lucky”. When I moved back for a second time 3 years later the privatised company was “I’m sorry, we won’t be able to get to you until this Wednesday at 10.45 - I hope that’s ok?”
Yup, we forget how dire things used to be in the BT days. Well, most of us do anyway, in many other countries the state-owned monopoly still exists, and you’ll be waiting weeks or months for a phone line.
That's why most of the young do not have landlines. Most people are forced to have one in order to get broadband.. and pay the line rental, which is ludicrous. My supplier charges me 24 quid Inc vat and a free Internet phone which we only use for international calls which is almost always cheaper than using our mobiles eg Portugal 1.5p per minute as opposed to Vodaphone's swingeing rates and similar from BT. You should avoid BT if you can similarly Virgin. BTs promises about turning up are wishful thinking in my experience.
I think everyone knows the real source of the problems in the Met.
Lol Where's that quote taken from?
PB, surely.
I think that the Senior Management Team (SMT) *is* obsessed with being Woke. In the most superficial, and missing-the-point kind of presentee fashion you could imagine.
Which is why I like to say that Chief Constable Savage is alive, well and got 100% on all his multiple choice diversity exams. He overseas a policy of arresting people for ordering their coffee “black”. Black people, mostly. At anti-racism demos.
Chief Constable Savage would ensure that police cars were painted in rainbow stripes during Pride month, he’d organise a crackdown on rude comments on Twitter, he’d talk about “decolonisation”, while ignoring toxic behaviour by his officers, and hounding whistleblowers out of their jobs, as he coasted towards his knighthood and big pension.
I think what really defines “woke” is that it is entirely performative, while being uninterested in actual reform.
I don't buy this mountain to climb in one go argument for Labour. The electorate isn't as sluggish and incremental these days where majorities have to be progressively chipped away at by modest swings. When sentiment goes it will go, en mass.
My argument isn't that. It's that I think large (current) Labour leads could haemorrhage just as easily into the high 30s and a stalemate if Starmer doesn't enthuse his base and retain floaters but Sunak does his.
Sure, there's sentiment, but there's also logistics. There are only so many constituencies that Labour activists can target, and they have to start with winning back the ones that Corbyn lost.
On anyther note, I must say that I'm glad to see my thesis make it into a header. And the split between the new pollsters and the experienced pollsters is exacerbated by the former group polling much more often.
Do activists being active in a constituency make much difference in a general election?
"You might expect that in seats where one party has a large and persistent advantage, voters may be more likely to consider the result a foregone conclusion and thus may be less likely to turn out, whereas closer, more unpredictable contests would be more likely to motivate voters to try and influence the outcome.
In fact, there appears to be little or no relationship between seat safeness and turnout. The chart below shows 2017 election turnout in each seat plotted against the marginality of the result in 2015 and 2017. Seats are spread diffusely across the chart with no discernible pattern linking marginality and turnout percentages."
The parties think it does, otherwise they wouldn't do it!
It would be interesting to see that chart for the 2010 and 2015 elections and also split by defending/challenging party and with postal vote prevalence. I can off the top of my head think of a few things where some significance may be lost by lumping everything into a single chart.
That said, if that chart does give an accurate picture, it takes away one of the arguments of the PR lobby.
Mr. Eagles, that reminds me of a fun finding from university.
Ice-cream sales and drownings correlate highly. The question is: does drowning make people buy ice-cream, or does ice-cream purchasing cause drownings?
It’s much worse.
Ice cream consumption leads to murder.
A pirate shortage caused global warming.
Living in a poor country increases penis size. (Great news for an independent Scotland)
The ice cream/murder one is a bad example for bizarre since the correlation is of a causative nature in the same way as ice cream/drownings is.
There's even a causal pathway for that, is there not - I remember reading about the Ice Cream Wars in Glasgow
(More seriously, all the above correlations disappear if you either control for fairly obvious confounders or use any of the quasi-experimental methods that do permit causal inference)
Mr. Eagles, that reminds me of a fun finding from university.
Ice-cream sales and drownings correlate highly. The question is: does drowning make people buy ice-cream, or does ice-cream purchasing cause drownings?
It’s much worse.
Ice cream consumption leads to murder.
A pirate shortage caused global warming.
Living in a poor country increases penis size. (Great news for an independent Scotland)
Hmm. I'm torn. Most of the time I think it will be 1997 on stilts; but then I think: doesn't this look just like 1992 all over again - A Labour party creeping from the shadow of far-left domination, and a Tory party led by a calm pragmatist determined to put all the tumultuous recent history behind him? Problem is: Starmer is no Blair but he's also no Kinnock, but then Rishi is no Major. Just dunno...
Why was Kinnock so hated at the time and apparently still hated? Whenever I see archive footage of him he comes across as moderate and conciliatory and a decent likeable sort, especially compared to the choice for PM at the last election.
Good grief. An awful lot of nothing, delivered in the style of Lenin himself. And still those behind him got so cheesed off they couldn’t applaud or even look at him.
What a shower. That’s put me right off.
Sunak should use that clip to guarantee Tory majority “do you really want to put this lot into power? Seriously?”
Kinnock is an awful man, nonetheless I am not backing any of your racing tips if you read the tealeaves so poorly. Without that speech, New Labour would likely as not have never existed. I had forgotten how much I despised Eric Heffer and Degsy.
You've read the room wrong there Rabbit, anyone who gets Heffer to throw his toys out of the pram isn't all bad
I guess I never truly appreciated what alternatives were.
Hence the greater enthusiasm for nationalised industries among the young who never knew them than the old who did….
Privatised (non- competition, cartel model) utilities, remind me how well that all works.
Today's BT is infinitely better than the one I grew up with.
Not just in the U.K. - the model spread - when I moved to Brussels the first time the waiting list for a telephone line was 6 months “and count yourself lucky”. When I moved back for a second time 3 years later the privatised company was “I’m sorry, we won’t be able to get to you until this Wednesday at 10.45 - I hope that’s ok?”
Yup, we forget how dire things used to be in the BT days. Well, most of us do anyway, in many other countries the state-owned monopoly still exists, and you’ll be waiting weeks or months for a phone line.
That's why most of the young do not have landlines. Most are forced to have one in order to get broadband.. and pay the line rental, which is ludicrous. My supplier charges me 24 quid Inc vat and a free Internet phone which we only use for international calls which is almost always cheaper than using our mobiles eg Portugal 1.5p per minute as opposed to Vodaphone's swingeing rates and similar from BT. You should avoid BT if you can similarly Virgin. BTs promises about turning up are wishful thinking in my experience.
I haven't had a landline phone handset for the best part of a decade. If broadband suppliers were forced to drop the "you have to pay for line rental" then they'd just reduce line rental to a nominal fee and put the broadband charge up because that's what people are actually paying for.
And for the love of god, Vodafone has never been spelt with a "ph"!
"Scotland’s pioneering policy of minimum pricing for alcohol has been linked to a 13% drop in the number of deaths from alcohol consumption, and hundreds fewer hospitalisations, according to a study."
Still, suppose it's better that the drunks are all banging benzos rather than knocking back the special brew, eh?
That’s a really interesting hypothesis, as the increase in drug deaths has been much more pronounced in Scotland than in England, in the past five years.
One thing that seems to have changed - at least anecdotally - is that in the Olde Days alcoholics were just alcoholics.
These days there seems to be more of the “addict” thing - were drugs get substituted for alcohol. And not just by the people at the bottom of society, either….
The minimum pricing exactly targets those at the bottom. It has no effect whatsoever on people quaffing champagne or single malts.
It's good to see the Tories back on the board after a very long hibernation. Just a quick flash of an unseasonal thaw and they're jumping around like squirrels. Any more 'likes' from felix and he'll give himself a hernia. But nice to see Fitilass and Gin back back and Carlotta with a big smile on her face and even a joke from William Glenn.
But Make the most of them. Miss Rabbit looks like the only sane Tory out there. One poll by the most erratic pollster in pollsterville doesn't change the season
Here is Deltapolling in form of a picture.
The key is, if all you see is potato, you are fine, no issues, if you see a face anywhere on this potato, you are a servant of Satan.
So, what methodology does observational research actually entail? Is it to anecdotes as intelligent design is to creationism?
Think Twitter poll.
People will modify their behaviour if they are being observed/have to record their behaviour.
Ummm... this was (I think) a population-based study based on medical records. It doesn't have the problem of people altering their behaviour because they were told they were being observed.
Nor does it have the self-selection bias of a Twitter poll.
Nor is it similar to the kind of observational study where someone says "we gave ivermectin to these 10 patients and it seemed to help them".
Yes, correlation doesn't equal causation, but in the absence of any alternative explanations this kind of study is decent evidence. To say it's like a Twitter poll or the kind of tiny observational studies that were misused to promote false information during Covid is quite wrong.
I think everyone knows the real source of the problems in the Met.
Lol Where's that quote taken from?
PB, surely.
I think that the Senior Management Team (SMT) *is* obsessed with being Woke. In the most superficial, and missing-the-point kind of presentee fashion you could imagine.
Which is why I like to say that Chief Constable Savage is alive, well and got 100% on all his multiple choice diversity exams. He overseas a policy of arresting people for ordering their coffee “black”. Black people, mostly. At anti-racism demos.
Chief Constable Savage would ensure that police cars were painted in rainbow stripes during Pride month, he’d organise a crackdown on rude comments on Twitter, he’d talk about “decolonisation”, while ignoring toxic behaviour by his officers, and hounding whistleblowers out of their jobs, as he coasted towards his knighthood and big pension.
I think what really defines “woke” is that it is entirely performative, while being uninterested in actual reform.
That is exactly right I think.
Plus CC Savage would set up a whole unit to research Victorian police officers who’d won awards, to find something racist they said, so he could take their names off the wall.
While railroading a black PC for making a single innocent mistake. And protecting “one of the boys” for a trivial matter concerning 5kg of cocaine.
"Scotland’s pioneering policy of minimum pricing for alcohol has been linked to a 13% drop in the number of deaths from alcohol consumption, and hundreds fewer hospitalisations, according to a study."
Still, suppose it's better that the drunks are all banging benzos rather than knocking back the special brew, eh?
Yes, there's a potential effect there. I don't know whether there is research looking at the potential link (i.e. is it the same demographics, switching, or a new problem that is coincidental rather than linked).
I do seem to recall, though (when someone posted some Spectator 'analysis' on this) that I checked England and there was a similar trend in drugs deaths, absent minimum alcohol pricing.
"Scotland’s pioneering policy of minimum pricing for alcohol has been linked to a 13% drop in the number of deaths from alcohol consumption, and hundreds fewer hospitalisations, according to a study."
Hmm.
The research was observational, so cannot prove conclusively that the significant fall in deaths was due to the minimum unit pricing policy
Yes, but short of an RCT, that is the best evidence.
Anything not an RCT is 'observational'. The research linking smoking to lung cancer was observational. The research that uncovered problems with giving pregnant women Thalidomide was observational. The evidence supporting the efficacy of parachutes at reducing risk of severe injury after jumping out of an aeroplane is merely observational.*
Outside of drug trials, pretty much everything is observational. Without randomisation you can't directly infer causation as there might be some unmeasured factor that explains the observations instead. Good studies try very hard to include everything relevant, look for proxies, look for adjustments or different settings that might have one unobserved factor but not another etc etc.
(And don't diss 'observational' - as an epidemiologist, that's my life's work )
*the joyless barstards in the Research Ethics Committee vetoed the RCT on parachute use
Careful, you're sounding dangerously like someone who knows something about this.
If ever there was a reason for banning someone from PB this must be it. Sorry @Selebian but if you start posting stuff on which you have actual expertise I think you will be doomed.
It's ok, I'm just shitposting. I'm actually a General in the Ukrainian Army, which is why I've been keeping quiet on that situation
Mr. Eagles, that reminds me of a fun finding from university.
Ice-cream sales and drownings correlate highly. The question is: does drowning make people buy ice-cream, or does ice-cream purchasing cause drownings?
It’s much worse.
Ice cream consumption leads to murder.
A pirate shortage caused global warming.
Living in a poor country increases penis size. (Great news for an independent Scotland)
The ice cream/murder one is a bad example for bizarre since the correlation is of a causative nature in the same way as ice cream/drownings is.
There's even a causal pathway for that, is there not - I remember reading about the Ice Cream Wars in Glasgow
(More seriously, all the above correlations disappear if you either control for fairly obvious confounders or use any of the quasi-experimental methods that do permit causal inference)
The ice cream wars stuff was on a tv program when I was small. I still find ice cream vans sinister….
So, what methodology does observational research actually entail? Is it to anecdotes as intelligent design is to creationism?
Think Twitter poll.
People will modify their behaviour if they are being observed/have to record their behaviour.
As Selebian suggests, it would take a superhuman effort to avoid hospitalisation and/or death just to keep some observational bean counters happy.
The alcoholics could have all decided to exercise their national data opt-outs, I guess, to mess up any studies. But I don't think that gets you out of the death data. Making sure to die in England might help confuse things, but would probably require moving to England just before death, too. Great effort all round if so.
"Scotland’s pioneering policy of minimum pricing for alcohol has been linked to a 13% drop in the number of deaths from alcohol consumption, and hundreds fewer hospitalisations, according to a study."
Hmm.
The research was observational, so cannot prove conclusively that the significant fall in deaths was due to the minimum unit pricing policy
Yes, but short of an RCT, that is the best evidence.
Anything not an RCT is 'observational'. The research linking smoking to lung cancer was observational. The research that uncovered problems with giving pregnant women Thalidomide was observational. The evidence supporting the efficacy of parachutes at reducing risk of severe injury after jumping out of an aeroplane is merely observational.*
Outside of drug trials, pretty much everything is observational. Without randomisation you can't directly infer causation as there might be some unmeasured factor that explains the observations instead. Good studies try very hard to include everything relevant, look for proxies, look for adjustments or different settings that might have one unobserved factor but not another etc etc.
(And don't diss 'observational' - as an epidemiologist, that's my life's work )
*the joyless barstards in the Research Ethics Committee vetoed the RCT on parachute use
My father is Mr Randomised Control Trial.
Observation is the hypothesis, RCT is the proof.
Difficult to create another Scotland where minimum pricing didn't go ahead though.
I don't buy this mountain to climb in one go argument for Labour. The electorate isn't as sluggish and incremental these days where majorities have to be progressively chipped away at by modest swings. When sentiment goes it will go, en mass.
My argument isn't that. It's that I think large (current) Labour leads could haemorrhage just as easily into the high 30s and a stalemate if Starmer doesn't enthuse his base and retain floaters but Sunak does his.
Sure, there's sentiment, but there's also logistics. There are only so many constituencies that Labour activists can target, and they have to start with winning back the ones that Corbyn lost.
On anyther note, I must say that I'm glad to see my thesis make it into a header. And the split between the new pollsters and the experienced pollsters is exacerbated by the former group polling much more often.
Do activists being active in a constituency make much difference in a general election?
"You might expect that in seats where one party has a large and persistent advantage, voters may be more likely to consider the result a foregone conclusion and thus may be less likely to turn out, whereas closer, more unpredictable contests would be more likely to motivate voters to try and influence the outcome.
In fact, there appears to be little or no relationship between seat safeness and turnout. The chart below shows 2017 election turnout in each seat plotted against the marginality of the result in 2015 and 2017. Seats are spread diffusely across the chart with no discernible pattern linking marginality and turnout percentages."
The parties think it does, otherwise they wouldn't do it!
It would be interesting to see that chart for the 2010 and 2015 elections and also split by defending/challenging party and with postal vote prevalence. I can off the top of my head think of a few things where some significance may be lost by lumping everything into a single chart.
That said, if that chart does give an accurate picture, it takes away one of the arguments of the PR lobby.
Well it probably makes a small difference, if done well. Of course parties also come against constituency spending limits I guess. I was surprised how little difference it seems to make on turnout, but like you say, you'd probably need to dig a little deeper into the data.
I'm not sure it totally takes away one of the arguments for PR. Those engaged enough in politics to be 100% certain that the result in their constituency is a foregone conclusion are likely to vote anyway - I know I do!
Mr. Eagles, that reminds me of a fun finding from university.
Ice-cream sales and drownings correlate highly. The question is: does drowning make people buy ice-cream, or does ice-cream purchasing cause drownings?
It’s much worse.
Ice cream consumption leads to murder.
A pirate shortage caused global warming.
Living in a poor country increases penis size. (Great news for an independent Scotland)
"Scotland’s pioneering policy of minimum pricing for alcohol has been linked to a 13% drop in the number of deaths from alcohol consumption, and hundreds fewer hospitalisations, according to a study."
Hmm.
The research was observational, so cannot prove conclusively that the significant fall in deaths was due to the minimum unit pricing policy
Yes, but short of an RCT, that is the best evidence.
Anything not an RCT is 'observational'. The research linking smoking to lung cancer was observational. The research that uncovered problems with giving pregnant women Thalidomide was observational. The evidence supporting the efficacy of parachutes at reducing risk of severe injury after jumping out of an aeroplane is merely observational.*
Outside of drug trials, pretty much everything is observational. Without randomisation you can't directly infer causation as there might be some unmeasured factor that explains the observations instead. Good studies try very hard to include everything relevant, look for proxies, look for adjustments or different settings that might have one unobserved factor but not another etc etc.
(And don't diss 'observational' - as an epidemiologist, that's my life's work )
*the joyless barstards in the Research Ethics Committee vetoed the RCT on parachute use
My father is Mr Randomised Control Trial.
Observation is the hypothesis, RCT is the proof.
Difficult to create another Scotland where minimum pricing didn't go ahead though.
You could do a cluster-RCT where you randomised minimum pricing to, say, county level or constituency or something. But good luck getting that past governments (massive mess for enforcement) and easy for a lot of people to simply shop out of area to avoid the minimum pricing.
Looking for a reduced effect in areas very near the border with England would be interesting, but there probably aren't sufficient numbers to really conclude much.
What they've done here, in lay terms, is compare hospitalisations and deaths in Scotland before and after the introduction of minimum pricing. Which is a farily standard analysis, but open to the 'what if something else happened at the same time' problem (maybe simply the level of publicity from the scheme made people thing about and reduce their drinking?). So they also looked at the same outcomes in England before and after alcohol pricing happened in Scotland and then they also combined the two.
"Scotland’s pioneering policy of minimum pricing for alcohol has been linked to a 13% drop in the number of deaths from alcohol consumption, and hundreds fewer hospitalisations, according to a study."
Hmm.
The research was observational, so cannot prove conclusively that the significant fall in deaths was due to the minimum unit pricing policy
Yes, but short of an RCT, that is the best evidence.
Anything not an RCT is 'observational'. The research linking smoking to lung cancer was observational. The research that uncovered problems with giving pregnant women Thalidomide was observational. The evidence supporting the efficacy of parachutes at reducing risk of severe injury after jumping out of an aeroplane is merely observational.*
Outside of drug trials, pretty much everything is observational. Without randomisation you can't directly infer causation as there might be some unmeasured factor that explains the observations instead. Good studies try very hard to include everything relevant, look for proxies, look for adjustments or different settings that might have one unobserved factor but not another etc etc.
(And don't diss 'observational' - as an epidemiologist, that's my life's work )
*the joyless barstards in the Research Ethics Committee vetoed the RCT on parachute use
My father is Mr Randomised Control Trial.
Observation is the hypothesis, RCT is the proof.
Difficult to create another Scotland where minimum pricing didn't go ahead though.
You could do a cluster-RCT where you randomised minimum pricing to, say, county level or constituency or something. But good luck getting that past governments (massive mess for enforcement) and easy for a lot of people to simply shop out of area to avoid the minimum pricing.
Looking for a reduced effect in areas very near the border with England would be interesting, but there probably aren't sufficient numbers to really conclude much.
What they've done here, in lay terms, is compare hospitalisations and deaths in Scotland before and after the introduction of minimum pricing. Which is a farily standard analysis, but open to the 'what if something else happened at the same time' problem (maybe simply the level of publicity from the scheme made people thing about and reduce their drinking?). So they also looked at the same outcomes in England before and after alcohol pricing happened in Scotland and then they also combined the two.
As I noted above, what is the big mystery here?
Increase price = lower demand.
The product in question is toxic hence
lower demand = fewer deaths.
Voila - price elasticity of demand in action.
The question is not that at all. The question is is it right for government to penalise those worst off who have to pay more for their alcohol, and is it every Scotsperson's god (he/she)-given right to drink themselves to death.
I don't buy this mountain to climb in one go argument for Labour. The electorate isn't as sluggish and incremental these days where majorities have to be progressively chipped away at by modest swings. When sentiment goes it will go, en mass.
My argument isn't that. It's that I think large (current) Labour leads could haemorrhage just as easily into the high 30s and a stalemate if Starmer doesn't enthuse his base and retain floaters but Sunak does his.
Sure, there's sentiment, but there's also logistics. There are only so many constituencies that Labour activists can target, and they have to start with winning back the ones that Corbyn lost.
On anyther note, I must say that I'm glad to see my thesis make it into a header. And the split between the new pollsters and the experienced pollsters is exacerbated by the former group polling much more often.
Do activists being active in a constituency make much difference in a general election?
"You might expect that in seats where one party has a large and persistent advantage, voters may be more likely to consider the result a foregone conclusion and thus may be less likely to turn out, whereas closer, more unpredictable contests would be more likely to motivate voters to try and influence the outcome.
In fact, there appears to be little or no relationship between seat safeness and turnout. The chart below shows 2017 election turnout in each seat plotted against the marginality of the result in 2015 and 2017. Seats are spread diffusely across the chart with no discernible pattern linking marginality and turnout percentages."
The parties think it does, otherwise they wouldn't do it!
It would be interesting to see that chart for the 2010 and 2015 elections and also split by defending/challenging party and with postal vote prevalence. I can off the top of my head think of a few things where some significance may be lost by lumping everything into a single chart.
That said, if that chart does give an accurate picture, it takes away one of the arguments of the PR lobby.
Well it probably makes a small difference, if done well. Of course parties also come against constituency spending limits I guess. I was surprised how little difference it seems to make on turnout, but like you say, you'd probably need to dig a little deeper into the data.
I'm not sure it totally takes away one of the arguments for PR. Those engaged enough in politics to be 100% certain that the result in their constituency is a foregone conclusion are likely to vote anyway - I know I do!
Some PR advocates definitely use "some people don't bother to vote because they live in "safe seats" so they think their vote doesn't count" as an argument.
I think everyone knows the real source of the problems in the Met.
Lol Where's that quote taken from?
PB, surely.
I think that the Senior Management Team (SMT) *is* obsessed with being Woke. In the most superficial, and missing-the-point kind of presentee fashion you could imagine.
Which is why I like to say that Chief Constable Savage is alive, well and got 100% on all his multiple choice diversity exams. He overseas a policy of arresting people for ordering their coffee “black”. Black people, mostly. At anti-racism demos.
Chief Constable Savage would ensure that police cars were painted in rainbow stripes during Pride month, he’d organise a crackdown on rude comments on Twitter, he’d talk about “decolonisation”, while ignoring toxic behaviour by his officers, and hounding whistleblowers out of their jobs, as he coasted towards his knighthood and big pension.
I think what really defines “woke” is that it is entirely performative, while being uninterested in actual reform.
What defines "woke" is people. The pro-woke define it as "not being a bigot", while the anti-woke define it as "pretending not to be a bigot". I think we can all agree that being a bigot is indeed bad, and the pretending not to be a bigot is also bad. So all we are disagreeing about is the definition of a word. Which is really a bit silly.
Excessive salaries is an odd phrase, isn't it? I'm always a bit suspicious that some Establishment critics of the police hate the idea that working class kids who never went to Oxbridge can be well paid.
ooked at the Opinion Polling for April 2022, just before last years locals. Over 90% had Labour in the lead but only by single figures and the Lib Dems 8 -10%. Looks like the percentage results in May will be similar to last year, which was bad for the Tories. Their only breathing space is that the 2019 seats are coming round again when UKIP and the Lib Dems did very wel,l so they may do better seat wise.
Comments
Do you think the UK should implement a similar system?
The Conservative Party also now own the BBC which makes headway even trickier for Starmer- Labour.
If the voters believe their own eyes as to the state of the nation, rather than through the prism of the Daily Mail, Labour have a chance, if not Sunak wins (unless Johnson replaces him).
I don't think either would have much problem with the Casey Report and would want to see it implemented, and not ignored like others before it.
"Third, we will make sure our national debt is falling so that we can secure the future of public services."
Unless he has confused deficit with debt that's not happening.
"Fifth, we will pass new laws to stop small boats, making sure that if you come to this country illegally, you are detained and swiftly removed."
Strictly he will say he's passed the laws but no one will count that as a success if the small boats keep coming. Will they stop? I don't know but I doubt it tbh.
https://tinyurl.com/28ukuw5u
I note that the disciplinary system is part of the problem -minority officers much more likely to be in trouble.
A savage little nastiness of failing systems is that they like to use such systems to attack those they don’t like and those “that don’t fit in”.
In medicine , the old favourite was saying that doctors who complain are mentally ill, need to signed off work and “retired”.
The police have a history of accusing anti-corruption campaigners of corruption on flimsy grounds.
And so on
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/mar/21/scotlands-minimum-pricing-linked-to-13-drop-in-alcohol-related-deaths-study-finds
"Scotland’s pioneering policy of minimum pricing for alcohol has been linked to a 13% drop in the number of deaths from alcohol consumption, and hundreds fewer hospitalisations, according to a study."
It’s not uncommon to be interviewing someone for a job, who admits to being several months overstayed after they either lost their last job or arrived on a short-term visit visa. If I employ them, I’ll need to either give them a loan or a sign-on bonus, in order to clear the overstay fine before they can get a work visa.
Occasionally, every five years or so, they have a 3-month amnesty, when overstayers can make themselves known and leave the country without fine. If you’ve been here illegally for five years, you’re up to £17k in fines!
The research was observational, so cannot prove conclusively that the significant fall in deaths was due to the minimum unit pricing policy
Which is why I like to say that Chief Constable Savage is alive, well and got 100% on all his multiple choice diversity exams. He overseas a policy of arresting people for ordering their coffee “black”. Black people, mostly. At anti-racism demos.
On anyther note, I must say that I'm glad to see my thesis make it into a header. And the split between the new pollsters and the experienced pollsters is exacerbated by the former group polling much more often.
Of course, this was famously the scheme which led one David Frost to appeal to the European institutions - spot the difference:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-35160396
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/oct/11/ecj-must-have-no-role-in-northern-ireland-protocol-david-frost-says
How hard would it have been to say yes there are problems we are working with the SLT to root out the bad actors, protect the good officers and will implement the recommendations whole heartedly.
That's what the front line want, support to get rid of the bastards not them protecting.
The difficulty is that by almost default many complaints are seen as being made out of spite (often by those being arrested trying to distract from their own bad behaviour thus making it easy to lump all complaint in this bracket).
Really it should be straight forward, lead by example, get rid of the bad ones publicly and loudly, praise to high heaven those who do well so that the negative is overwhelmed by the positive and officers don't feel like they're being hit constantly.
Personally we need to revisit merging forces we have too many small ones but bigger forces also have their own challenges. Also abolish Cleveland police who are singularly useless and seemingly corrupt.
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/4340829#Comment_4340829
It's interesting to see what the decay factor in loathing for the Cons, specifically Johnson's and Truss' administrations, will be.
Although it is still the Cons and they do need to be taught a lesson at not being shit these past few years, nevertheless there is a new approach.
Inflation is subsiding, the strikes are being settled, it seems that the people in charge aren't lunatics...
All this as you say could mean much less of a shellacking than otherwise might have been the case.
ie, people forget and in politics they forget quite quickly. Strikes sorted, inflation on the way down, looking at addressing the metropolitan police, non-mad people in charge, Boris being hauled over the coals, etc.
Meanwhile Lab remains boring and untested, and Rishi shot Labour's boring but competent fox. Not to say that the voters won't punish the party but I can see why the Lab lead is diminishing.
But most councils' refusal to take CT DD over 12 months perplexes me.
Chip, chip, chip is what Sunak needs.
The issue for Sunak is how well he can tell the story of Truss, May, Boris and general uselessness as well as moral failure being past and not present.
Major could not recover from ERM and all that partly because he was the same PM that oversaw it. An OK present was destroyed by this.
Most, not all, of the rejection of the Tories is about past fails both political and moral.
Sunak's position is tough, but not as hopeless as Major's.
Sure there are others as well, one day the perjuries will come up. I will stop there or I will be here all day. Bet some squeaky bums in the NEC as well just now.
Now let's look at the figures for drug deaths... https://www.gov.scot/publications/evidence-review-current-trends-benzodiazepine-use-scotland/pages/3/
Still, suppose it's better that the drunks are all banging benzos rather than knocking back the special brew, eh?
But lockdown was a mistake anyway and even worse than the cold or the flu too.
Lockdown was worse than extra people dying from natural causes.
Good times.
Anything not an RCT is 'observational'. The research linking smoking to lung cancer was observational. The research that uncovered problems with giving pregnant women Thalidomide was observational. The evidence supporting the efficacy of parachutes at reducing risk of severe injury after jumping out of an aeroplane is merely observational.*
Outside of drug trials, pretty much everything is observational. Without randomisation you can't directly infer causation as there might be some unmeasured factor that explains the observations instead. Good studies try very hard to include everything relevant, look for proxies, look for adjustments or different settings that might have one unobserved factor but not another etc etc.
(And don't diss 'observational' - as an epidemiologist, that's my life's work
*the joyless barstards in the Research Ethics Committee vetoed the RCT on parachute use
I think that Sturgeon went on too long - and became a parody of herself.
People will modify their behaviour if they are being observed/have to record their behaviour.
That’s what medical trials are, pretty much, for example. You don’t have a super duper microscope watching the chemical reactions inside the trial volunteers. You observe that x% of those on the drug recovered vs y% on the placebo.
Observation is the hypothesis, RCT is the proof.
Looking in more detail, they've used ITS and contolled ITS, which are part of the family of quasi-experimental methods which are as close to a trial as you can get without doing a trial and do enable causal inference. Probably third in the strength of causal inference after a randomised controlled trial and a regression discontinuity design (first has randomisation, which makes it certain effects are due to treatment; second has effective randomisation over a small interval - if done well then pretty much as certain; third - ITS - doesn't have randomisation, but has multiple controls - here before and after in Scotland and also before and after in England, lacking the intervention).
ETA: Joint third or maybe fourth is difference in difference, then you're into the more standard epi studies such as cohort/case-control where you can't really claim causation, but the association/corellation, while not implying causation, may waggle it's eyebrows suggestively.
Creationism it isn't.
BTW I think observational means qualitative rather than quantitative research.The sort anthropologists like.
There doesn't seem to be higher turnout in marginals according to:
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/ge2017-marginal-seats-and-turnout/
"You might expect that in seats where one party has a large and persistent advantage, voters may be more likely to consider the result a foregone conclusion and thus may be less likely to turn out, whereas closer, more unpredictable contests would be more likely to motivate voters to try and influence the outcome.
In fact, there appears to be little or no relationship between seat safeness and turnout. The chart below shows 2017 election turnout in each seat plotted against the marginality of the result in 2015 and 2017. Seats are spread diffusely across the chart with no discernible pattern linking marginality and turnout percentages."
It’s from my father how I learned that correlation doesn’t imply causation.
Oh, and the seatbelt death fallacy.
Does one have a greater scale of impact than the other?
But Make the most of them. Miss Rabbit looks like the only sane Tory out there. One poll by the most erratic pollster in pollsterville doesn't change the season
Ice-cream sales and drownings correlate highly. The question is: does drowning make people buy ice-cream, or does ice-cream purchasing cause drownings?
https://www.gov.scot/binaries/content/gallery/publications/research-analysis/2022/03/evidence-review-current-trends-benzodiazepine-use-scotland/SCT03224727481_g04.png
Although I arrived at this conclusion myself (from the investigative school of "no shit, sherlock"), I've been googling and looks like I'm not the only one to arrive at this conclusion -
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/minimum-alcohol-pricing-has-driven-people-to-street-drugs-say-experts-8t5z8tsf9
From the article:
"Annemarie Ward, founder of Faces & Voices of Recovery UK (Favor), a drug and alcohol charity promoting recovery, echoed the concern. She said: “Anecdotally, this is the case. If you can buy street Valium at 20 pence a pill, and the price of super strength alcohol is more expensive and has risen, you will take the cheapest route to oblivion. We predicted this when minimum alcohol pricing was introduced.”
And I particularly liked this quote from a Scottish comedian that clearly explains the substitution effect:
"“No one was ever going to say, “Right, I can’t afford a bottle of cider so I will take up jogging.””
What's the point of switching everyone to eConsults if you can't request them when you want to?
I thought you were campaigning Malc for your god-given right to self-determination including, presumably, drinking yourselves into an early grave.
No one could doubt that if you increase the price of a good, consumption of that good will decrease; the issue is one of individual sovereignty. I didn't have you down as a Nanny Stater, I must say.
Ice cream consumption leads to murder.
A pirate shortage caused global warming.
Living in a poor country increases penis size. (Great news for an independent Scotland)
Quite few others here.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/amphtml/kjh2110/the-10-most-bizarre-correlations
Complete embarrassment. Wish I could say I was surprised.
These days there seems to be more of the “addict” thing - were drugs get substituted for alcohol. And not just by the people at the bottom of society, either….
*Pretty much everything apart from potentially beneficial interventions such as drugs or medical kit. You won't get ethical approval to test whether excessive alcohol consumption is harmful (and even if you do - good luck ensuring your control group abstain/stick to the prescribed level).
My supplier charges me 24 quid Inc vat and a free Internet phone which we only use for international calls which is almost always cheaper than using our mobiles eg Portugal 1.5p per minute as opposed to Vodaphone's swingeing rates and similar from BT. You should avoid BT if you can similarly Virgin. BTs promises about turning up are wishful thinking in my experience.
I think what really defines “woke” is that it is entirely performative, while being uninterested in actual reform.
It would be interesting to see that chart for the 2010 and 2015 elections and also split by defending/challenging party and with postal vote prevalence. I can off the top of my head think of a few things where some significance may be lost by lumping everything into a single chart.
That said, if that chart does give an accurate picture, it takes away one of the arguments of the PR lobby.
(More seriously, all the above correlations disappear if you either control for fairly obvious confounders or use any of the quasi-experimental methods that do permit causal inference)
And for the love of god, Vodafone has never been spelt with a "ph"!
The key is, if all you see is potato, you are fine, no issues, if you see a face anywhere on this potato, you are a servant of Satan.
Nor does it have the self-selection bias of a Twitter poll.
Nor is it similar to the kind of observational study where someone says "we gave ivermectin to these 10 patients and it seemed to help them".
Yes, correlation doesn't equal causation, but in the absence of any alternative explanations this kind of study is decent evidence. To say it's like a Twitter poll or the kind of tiny observational studies that were misused to promote false information during Covid is quite wrong.
Plus CC Savage would set up a whole unit to research Victorian police officers who’d won awards, to find something racist they said, so he could take their names off the wall.
While railroading a black PC for making a single innocent mistake. And protecting “one of the boys” for a trivial matter concerning 5kg of cocaine.
I do seem to recall, though (when someone posted some Spectator 'analysis' on this) that I checked England and there was a similar trend in drugs deaths, absent minimum alcohol pricing.
So end of year IMO
I'm not sure it totally takes away one of the arguments for PR. Those engaged enough in politics to be 100% certain that the result in their constituency is a foregone conclusion are likely to vote anyway - I know I do!
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36792094/
Looking for a reduced effect in areas very near the border with England would be interesting, but there probably aren't sufficient numbers to really conclude much.
What they've done here, in lay terms, is compare hospitalisations and deaths in Scotland before and after the introduction of minimum pricing. Which is a farily standard analysis, but open to the 'what if something else happened at the same time' problem (maybe simply the level of publicity from the scheme made people thing about and reduce their drinking?). So they also looked at the same outcomes in England before and after alcohol pricing happened in Scotland and then they also combined the two.
Increase price = lower demand.
The product in question is toxic hence
lower demand = fewer deaths.
Voila - price elasticity of demand in action.
The question is not that at all. The question is is it right for government to penalise those worst off who have to pay more for their alcohol, and is it every Scotsperson's god (he/she)-given right to drink themselves to death.
Dame Louise said there was a sense of “entitlement” within armed policing units and a preoccupation with pay and remuneration that was not evident in other parts of the Met.
“There is no incentive for officers who are earning excessive salaries to change the existing model,” the report stated.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/03/21/casey-review-officers-mets-armed-police-units-game-system-money/ (£££)
Excessive salaries is an odd phrase, isn't it? I'm always a bit suspicious that some Establishment critics of the police hate the idea that working class kids who never went to Oxbridge can be well paid.
Looks like the percentage results in May will be similar to last year, which was bad for the Tories.
Their only breathing space is that the 2019 seats are coming round again when UKIP and the Lib Dems did very wel,l so they may do better seat wise.