"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).
We don’t live in an ideal world so we can’t always have an RCT.
My firm likes to sponsor scientific innovation/research, I’ll ask about if we can fund your parachute RCT.
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.
OK well the evidence doesn't seem to support that argument.
"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).
We don’t live in an ideal world so we can’t always have an RCT.
My firm likes to sponsor scientific innovation/research, I’ll ask about if we can fund your parachute RCT.
It sounds like a lot of fun.
Might I suggest we consider a setting with a more flexible approach to research ethics than the UK? Maybe China or Russia?
This question has been left unanswered for far too long!
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. Evolutionary selection based on women’s preferences? That will wind up the incel crowd even more. (Haven’t read the link, just trying to channel Leon)
"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.
The suggestion, upthread, that there may have been substitution of other toxic products is worth looking at..
Mr. Scotland, sexual selection is less referred to but sits alongside natural selection.
The latter is surviving long enough to procreate, the former is being chosen (though cultural and physical factors can affect how much impact 'choice' has).
"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.
The suggestion, upthread, that there may have been substitution of other toxic products is worth looking at..
Absolutely. It's what people do so would be no surprise if so.
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.
I read, a little while back, the diaries of a Southern lady doing the Civil War. Right at the top of Southern Society, as well. According to her, all the rich kids were totally anti-slavery.
While living on actual slave plantations, having slave servants etc.
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.
Yes, it does seem a bit snide.
What are the rates of pay/remuneration in equivalent armed "special units" in other European countries?
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.
"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.
The suggestion, upthread, that there may have been substitution of other toxic products is worth looking at..
Absolutely. It's what people do so would be no surprise if so.
It's probably best to think of it as a question unanswered, rather than starting to say it is probable etc.
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.
"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).
We don’t live in an ideal world so we can’t always have an RCT.
My firm likes to sponsor scientific innovation/research, I’ll ask about if we can fund your parachute RCT.
It sounds like a lot of fun.
Might I suggest we consider a setting with a more flexible approach to research ethics than the UK? Maybe China or Russia?
This question has been left unanswered for far too long!
Funny you mention China.
Yours truly was recently invited to a reception at the Chinese embassy next month.
I was going to say no but perhaps this research may change my mind.
"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).
We don’t live in an ideal world so we can’t always have an RCT.
My firm likes to sponsor scientific innovation/research, I’ll ask about if we can fund your parachute RCT.
It sounds like a lot of fun.
Might I suggest we consider a setting with a more flexible approach to research ethics than the UK? Maybe China or Russia?
This question has been left unanswered for far too long!
I believe there is a lab in Wuhan, China, that is looking for some new research topics.
There was a poster, forget his name, who was moderately engaged with the issue. Perhaps contact him?
"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.
Indeed, it shows PBunionists' understanding of Border geography. On a par with the Great Scottish Central Desert, inhabited by ragged tribes of Livingston FC cultists preying upon the periodic migrations of the Sevco Hordes from west to east and back again.
Though tbf I have just purchased a book on the history of the Solway Junction Railway and its famous viaduct over the firth. Quite a few folk would walk over it after the railway closed in 1921 in order to get a pint on the Sabbath. Obvs the fault of the SNP.
Edit: I'm not sure it is actually understood by many on here that the price controls actually affect only the industrial alcohol, jakie juices, stuff I wouldn't use for wiping down my cludgie.
"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.
The suggestion, upthread, that there may have been substitution of other toxic products is worth looking at..
Absolutely. It's what people do so would be no surprise if so.
A study could look at all hospitalisations/deaths related to any substance abuse (here they only looked at those with some relation to alcohol). I don't know how good the diagnostic coding is for that though (it is pretty good for alcohol) and you also run the risk of that outcome not being causally linked - e.g. have drugs come down in price/become more available unrelated to alcohol pricing. But would have been an interesting secondary outcome.
It might be that minimum alcohol pricing is a terrible idea if it just pushes people on to other things (depending on what those other things were).
On the Casey Report, I'd be astonished if her findings on the Met were absent in other police forces elsewhere if similar research were conducted, although of course the Met is likely to be the worst.
While I'm a huge fan of trade unions generally, I think the Police Federation is part of the problem, not the solution. They have a long history of defending the indefensible; they are like the police forces' very own DUP. Other unions have modernised - for example, teachers' unions these days put less effort into defending gross misconduct or incompetence where the evidence is unarguable. But not the Police Federation. I'm not sure how to reduce their influence, but it's an aspect that needs working on.
"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.
The suggestion, upthread, that there may have been substitution of other toxic products is worth looking at..
Absolutely. It's what people do so would be no surprise if so.
A study could look at all hospitalisations/deaths related to any substance abuse (here they only looked at those with some relation to alcohol). I don't know how good the diagnostic coding is for that though (it is pretty good for alcohol) and you also run the risk of that outcome not being causally linked - e.g. have drugs come down in price/become more available unrelated to alcohol pricing. But would have been an interesting secondary outcome.
It might be that minimum alcohol pricing is a terrible idea if it just pushes people on to other things (depending on what those other things were).
You mean it could be like something which prevented explicit and countable deaths but its impact had far worse effects on overall health and uncountable deaths and damage to people perhaps even far outweighing the damage of the thing that the govt sought to control.
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.
I read, a little while back, the diaries of a Southern lady doing the Civil War. Right at the top of Southern Society, as well. According to her, all the rich kids were totally anti-slavery.
While living on actual slave plantations, having slave servants etc.
Some people are hypocrites; that's not news, and it would be disingenuous to suggest that all of those who espouse similar views must also be hypocrites.
"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.
The suggestion, upthread, that there may have been substitution of other toxic products is worth looking at..
Absolutely. It's what people do so would be no surprise if so.
A study could look at all hospitalisations/deaths related to any substance abuse (here they only looked at those with some relation to alcohol). I don't know how good the diagnostic coding is for that though (it is pretty good for alcohol) and you also run the risk of that outcome not being causally linked - e.g. have drugs come down in price/become more available unrelated to alcohol pricing. But would have been an interesting secondary outcome.
It might be that minimum alcohol pricing is a terrible idea if it just pushes people on to other things (depending on what those other things were).
You mean it could be like something which prevented explicit and countable deaths but its impact had far worse effects on overall health and uncountable deaths and damage to people perhaps even far outweighing the damage of the thing that the govt sought to control.
Now. What does that remind us of.
Luckily all such things can be - and will/are being - assessed.
"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.
The suggestion, upthread, that there may have been substitution of other toxic products is worth looking at..
Absolutely. It's what people do so would be no surprise if so.
A study could look at all hospitalisations/deaths related to any substance abuse (here they only looked at those with some relation to alcohol). I don't know how good the diagnostic coding is for that though (it is pretty good for alcohol) and you also run the risk of that outcome not being causally linked - e.g. have drugs come down in price/become more available unrelated to alcohol pricing. But would have been an interesting secondary outcome.
It might be that minimum alcohol pricing is a terrible idea if it just pushes people on to other things (depending on what those other things were).
You mean it could be like something which prevented explicit and countable deaths but its impact had far worse effects on overall health and uncountable deaths and damage to people perhaps even far outweighing the damage of the thing that the govt sought to control.
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.
I read, a little while back, the diaries of a Southern lady doing the Civil War. Right at the top of Southern Society, as well. According to her, all the rich kids were totally anti-slavery.
While living on actual slave plantations, having slave servants etc.
My 16yo daughter told me yesterday that she had identified a group of people that really annoyed her - private school kids who make out that they're not like other private school kids. It's never too early to start navigating a complex hierarchical society like ours and its multiple layers of hypocrisy and privilege, I suppose. Anyway, the class hatred - directed upwards as it always should be - warmed my heart.
Just dropped in to say it's exactly 10 years since Robert put PB on Vanilla. Many of our oldest and wisest contributors signed up for duty on 21st or 22nd March 2013. Thanks, everyone. It's where I turn to most mornings in preference to the Today programme.
Regarding the Met: the late, great Paul Foot was no stranger to police corruption and one of his party pieces was a rendering of If you want to know the time ask a policeman with its original satirical intonation. Back in the days of music hall it referred to a constable's practice of frisking every body (dead or alive) for valuables 'for safe keeping'.
"Every member of the force has a watch and chain ... OF COURSE."
On the Casey Report, I'd be astonished if her findings on the Met were absent in other police forces elsewhere if similar research were conducted, although of course the Met is likely to be the worst.
While I'm a huge fan of trade unions generally, I think the Police Federation is part of the problem, not the solution. They have a long history of defending the indefensible; they are like the police forces' very own DUP. Other unions have modernised - for example, teachers' unions these days put less effort into defending gross misconduct or incompetence where the evidence is unarguable. But not the Police Federation. I'm not sure how to reduce their influence, but it's an aspect that needs working on.
Completely agree. They are an integral part of toxic police culture. I'm saying this as an avowed trades unionist.
The Met does, I think, have particular structural issues which exacerbate the underlying issues though - sheer size, scope of remit etc.
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.
I wouldn't put Louise Casey in that group though, she went to a comprehensive school then Goldsmiths after working in a holiday camp and resitting her A levels, according to Wiki. The sad thing about the Casey report is that none of it is surprising. Most Met coppers are good people - I know some of them - but there is something deeply broken about its institutional culture. It might be beyond saving, perhaps it needs rebuilding from the ground up like they did in Northern Ireland.
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.
I read, a little while back, the diaries of a Southern lady doing the Civil War. Right at the top of Southern Society, as well. According to her, all the rich kids were totally anti-slavery.
While living on actual slave plantations, having slave servants etc.
Some people are hypocrites; that's not news, and it would be disingenuous to suggest that all of those who espouse similar views must also be hypocrites.
Oh indeed. But actions speak louder than words.
If a man says he is anti-slavery, while living on the profits of hundred of slaves *he owns*, I'd say he's a hypocrite.
Saying you are all down with Dur Kidz because you get some employees to attend gay pride events, while ignoring rampant homophobia - it's less hypocritical. But not much.
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.
I wouldn't put Louise Casey in that group though, she went to a comprehensive school then Goldsmiths after working in a holiday camp and resitting her A levels, according to Wiki. The sad thing about the Casey report is that none of it is surprising. Most Met coppers are good people - I know some of them - but there is something deeply broken about its institutional culture. It might be beyond saving, perhaps it needs rebuilding from the ground up like they did in Northern Ireland.
One thing on which there’s broad agreement here this morning, is that the Met needs the RUC treatment. Disband it, and reform with senior officers recruited from elsewhere.
I’d go further and split out the national and diplomatic parts into a separate org under the Home Office, while leaving the force in charge of policing the city squarely under the Mayor. The weird dual-hatting of Met police governance, has been part of the problem.
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.
I read, a little while back, the diaries of a Southern lady doing the Civil War. Right at the top of Southern Society, as well. According to her, all the rich kids were totally anti-slavery.
While living on actual slave plantations, having slave servants etc.
My 16yo daughter told me yesterday that she had identified a group of people that really annoyed her - private school kids who make out that they're not like other private school kids. It's never too early to start navigating a complex hierarchical society like ours and its multiple layers of hypocrisy and privilege, I suppose. Anyway, the class hatred - directed upwards as it always should be - warmed my heart.
What in her mind constitutes a worthy target of hatred? Is it wealth? Schooling? Accent? Size of house? Number of ponies? Quality of job (would, say, a professional oh I don't know economist be a justifiable target of opprobrium)?
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.
I read, a little while back, the diaries of a Southern lady doing the Civil War. Right at the top of Southern Society, as well. According to her, all the rich kids were totally anti-slavery.
While living on actual slave plantations, having slave servants etc.
My 16yo daughter told me yesterday that she had identified a group of people that really annoyed her - private school kids who make out that they're not like other private school kids. It's never too early to start navigating a complex hierarchical society like ours and its multiple layers of hypocrisy and privilege, I suppose. Anyway, the class hatred - directed upwards as it always should be - warmed my heart.
It's sad that hatred, of any form, should warm your heart or - indeed - anyone elses.
"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.
The suggestion, upthread, that there may have been substitution of other toxic products is worth looking at..
Absolutely. It's what people do so would be no surprise if so.
A study could look at all hospitalisations/deaths related to any substance abuse (here they only looked at those with some relation to alcohol). I don't know how good the diagnostic coding is for that though (it is pretty good for alcohol) and you also run the risk of that outcome not being causally linked - e.g. have drugs come down in price/become more available unrelated to alcohol pricing. But would have been an interesting secondary outcome.
It might be that minimum alcohol pricing is a terrible idea if it just pushes people on to other things (depending on what those other things were).
You mean it could be like something which prevented explicit and countable deaths but its impact had far worse effects on overall health and uncountable deaths and damage to people perhaps even far outweighing the damage of the thing that the govt sought to control.
Now. What does that remind us of.
Luckily all such things can be - and will/are being - assessed.
Just dropped in to say it's exactly 10 years since Robert put PB on Vanilla. Many of our oldest and wisest contributors signed up for duty on 21st or 22nd March 2013. Thanks, everyone. It's where I turn to most mornings in preference to the Today programme.
Regarding the Met: the late, great Paul Foot was no stranger to police corruption and one of his party pieces was a rendering of If you want to know the time ask a policeman with its original satirical intonation. Back in the days of music hall it referred to a constable's practice of frisking every body (dead or alive) for valuables 'for safe keeping'.
"Every member of the force has a watch and chain ... OF COURSE."
I remember his post at the time..
"I hate the new Disqus!
I hate the new Disqus!
I HATE the new Disqus!"
And lo and behold, we lost the Disqus and peace reigned.
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.
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).
We don’t live in an ideal world so we can’t always have an RCT.
My firm likes to sponsor scientific innovation/research, I’ll ask about if we can fund your parachute RCT.
It sounds like a lot of fun.
Might I suggest we consider a setting with a more flexible approach to research ethics than the UK? Maybe China or Russia?
This question has been left unanswered for far too long!
I believe there is a lab in Wuhan, China, that is looking for some new research topics.
There was a poster, forget his name, who was moderately engaged with the issue. Perhaps contact him?
For some uncaccountable reason this report today also comes to mind:
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/3909703-fox-news-producer-network-sue-each-other-amid-dominion-fight/ Fox News and one of its producers filed lawsuits against each other on Monday, according to news reports, potentially posing a new obstacle for the network amid its ongoing legal battle against Dominion Voting Systems. Abby Grossberg, who has worked with Fox hosts Tucker Carlson and Maria Bartiromo, says in her filings in New York and Delaware that before giving a September deposition in Dominion’s $1.6 billion defamation suit over false 2020 election claims, she was coached in “a coercive and intimidating manner” to protect executives and on-air talent. Grossberg also alleges that at Fox she was forced to work in an environment rampant with sexism and misogyny. “That’s what the culture is there,” she said in an interview with The New York Times. “They don’t respect or value women.” Fox, meanwhile, filed a complaint in the Supreme Court of New York seeking to block Grossberg’s claims. ..
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/3909703-fox-news-producer-network-sue-each-other-amid-dominion-fight/ Fox News and one of its producers filed lawsuits against each other on Monday, according to news reports, potentially posing a new obstacle for the network amid its ongoing legal battle against Dominion Voting Systems. Abby Grossberg, who has worked with Fox hosts Tucker Carlson and Maria Bartiromo, says in her filings in New York and Delaware that before giving a September deposition in Dominion’s $1.6 billion defamation suit over false 2020 election claims, she was coached in “a coercive and intimidating manner” to protect executives and on-air talent. Grossberg also alleges that at Fox she was forced to work in an environment rampant with sexism and misogyny. “That’s what the culture is there,” she said in an interview with The New York Times. “They don’t respect or value women.” Fox, meanwhile, filed a complaint in the Supreme Court of New York seeking to block Grossberg’s claims. ..
For some reason a phrase about rats and ships comes to mind.
Also the scene in Dune, where Paul comments on finding footmarks on the shoulders of drowned fishermen.
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.
I read, a little while back, the diaries of a Southern lady doing the Civil War. Right at the top of Southern Society, as well. According to her, all the rich kids were totally anti-slavery.
While living on actual slave plantations, having slave servants etc.
My 16yo daughter told me yesterday that she had identified a group of people that really annoyed her - private school kids who make out that they're not like other private school kids. It's never too early to start navigating a complex hierarchical society like ours and its multiple layers of hypocrisy and privilege, I suppose. Anyway, the class hatred - directed upwards as it always should be - warmed my heart.
It's sad that hatred, of any form, should warm your heart or - indeed - anyone elses.
Chill guys, it was a joke combined with a meditation on hypocrisy - people pretending to be something they're not, and how their peers call them out on it. Thought it was an interesting observation that she made - it struck me because she never usually says anything mean about anyone, her generation are much nicer than we were at that age generally.
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.
I read, a little while back, the diaries of a Southern lady doing the Civil War. Right at the top of Southern Society, as well. According to her, all the rich kids were totally anti-slavery.
While living on actual slave plantations, having slave servants etc.
Some people are hypocrites; that's not news, and it would be disingenuous to suggest that all of those who espouse similar views must also be hypocrites.
Things like racism and misogyny are much bigger problems than hypocrisy and virtue-signalling about them. Getting more animated about the latter than the former is something I find utterly bizarre. The Met police are in the spotlight yet again today but they aren’t some completely unrepresentative outlier. The prejudices embedded in their culture are rife in society and people kid themselves if they think otherwise.
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.
I read, a little while back, the diaries of a Southern lady doing the Civil War. Right at the top of Southern Society, as well. According to her, all the rich kids were totally anti-slavery.
While living on actual slave plantations, having slave servants etc.
My 16yo daughter told me yesterday that she had identified a group of people that really annoyed her - private school kids who make out that they're not like other private school kids. It's never too early to start navigating a complex hierarchical society like ours and its multiple layers of hypocrisy and privilege, I suppose. Anyway, the class hatred - directed upwards as it always should be - warmed my heart.
What in her mind constitutes a worthy target of hatred? Is it wealth? Schooling? Accent? Size of house? Number of ponies? Quality of job (would, say, a professional oh I don't know economist be a justifiable target of opprobrium)?
Who could hate an economist? They're such reasonable people.
"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.
The suggestion, upthread, that there may have been substitution of other toxic products is worth looking at..
Absolutely. It's what people do so would be no surprise if so.
A study could look at all hospitalisations/deaths related to any substance abuse (here they only looked at those with some relation to alcohol). I don't know how good the diagnostic coding is for that though (it is pretty good for alcohol) and you also run the risk of that outcome not being causally linked - e.g. have drugs come down in price/become more available unrelated to alcohol pricing. But would have been an interesting secondary outcome.
It might be that minimum alcohol pricing is a terrible idea if it just pushes people on to other things (depending on what those other things were).
You mean it could be like something which prevented explicit and countable deaths but its impact had far worse effects on overall health and uncountable deaths and damage to people perhaps even far outweighing the damage of the thing that the govt sought to control.
Now. What does that remind us of.
Tinfoil?
Nah, probably the replacement of clinging cling film by non-clinging cling film*, I reckon Blood-pressure related deaths probably far outweigh deaths avoided by food contamination.
*was that actually a thing, or is the 'cling film used to be better' thing just a myth?
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.
I read, a little while back, the diaries of a Southern lady doing the Civil War. Right at the top of Southern Society, as well. According to her, all the rich kids were totally anti-slavery.
While living on actual slave plantations, having slave servants etc.
My 16yo daughter told me yesterday that she had identified a group of people that really annoyed her - private school kids who make out that they're not like other private school kids. It's never too early to start navigating a complex hierarchical society like ours and its multiple layers of hypocrisy and privilege, I suppose. Anyway, the class hatred - directed upwards as it always should be - warmed my heart.
What in her mind constitutes a worthy target of hatred? Is it wealth? Schooling? Accent? Size of house? Number of ponies? Quality of job (would, say, a professional oh I don't know economist be a justifiable target of opprobrium)?
Who could hate an economist? They're such reasonable people.
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.
I wouldn't put Louise Casey in that group though, she went to a comprehensive school then Goldsmiths after working in a holiday camp and resitting her A levels, according to Wiki. The sad thing about the Casey report is that none of it is surprising. Most Met coppers are good people - I know some of them - but there is something deeply broken about its institutional culture. It might be beyond saving, perhaps it needs rebuilding from the ground up like they did in Northern Ireland.
One thing on which there’s broad agreement here this morning, is that the Met needs the RUC treatment. Disband it, and reform with senior officers recruited from elsewhere.
I’d go further and split out the national and diplomatic parts into a separate org under the Home Office, while leaving the force in charge of policing the city squarely under the Mayor. The weird dual-hatting of Met police governance, has been part of the problem.
The Northern Ireland model, of working with face-eating leopards, rather than bringing them to justice, is absolutely not how the Met should be “reformed.”
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/3909703-fox-news-producer-network-sue-each-other-amid-dominion-fight/ Fox News and one of its producers filed lawsuits against each other on Monday, according to news reports, potentially posing a new obstacle for the network amid its ongoing legal battle against Dominion Voting Systems. Abby Grossberg, who has worked with Fox hosts Tucker Carlson and Maria Bartiromo, says in her filings in New York and Delaware that before giving a September deposition in Dominion’s $1.6 billion defamation suit over false 2020 election claims, she was coached in “a coercive and intimidating manner” to protect executives and on-air talent. Grossberg also alleges that at Fox she was forced to work in an environment rampant with sexism and misogyny. “That’s what the culture is there,” she said in an interview with The New York Times. “They don’t respect or value women.” Fox, meanwhile, filed a complaint in the Supreme Court of New York seeking to block Grossberg’s claims. ..
Would it be wrong to want Tucker Carlson to be hit by a wayward Russian hypersonic missile?
"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.
The suggestion, upthread, that there may have been substitution of other toxic products is worth looking at..
Absolutely. It's what people do so would be no surprise if so.
A study could look at all hospitalisations/deaths related to any substance abuse (here they only looked at those with some relation to alcohol). I don't know how good the diagnostic coding is for that though (it is pretty good for alcohol) and you also run the risk of that outcome not being causally linked - e.g. have drugs come down in price/become more available unrelated to alcohol pricing. But would have been an interesting secondary outcome.
It might be that minimum alcohol pricing is a terrible idea if it just pushes people on to other things (depending on what those other things were).
You mean it could be like something which prevented explicit and countable deaths but its impact had far worse effects on overall health and uncountable deaths and damage to people perhaps even far outweighing the damage of the thing that the govt sought to control.
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/3909703-fox-news-producer-network-sue-each-other-amid-dominion-fight/ Fox News and one of its producers filed lawsuits against each other on Monday, according to news reports, potentially posing a new obstacle for the network amid its ongoing legal battle against Dominion Voting Systems. Abby Grossberg, who has worked with Fox hosts Tucker Carlson and Maria Bartiromo, says in her filings in New York and Delaware that before giving a September deposition in Dominion’s $1.6 billion defamation suit over false 2020 election claims, she was coached in “a coercive and intimidating manner” to protect executives and on-air talent. Grossberg also alleges that at Fox she was forced to work in an environment rampant with sexism and misogyny. “That’s what the culture is there,” she said in an interview with The New York Times. “They don’t respect or value women.” Fox, meanwhile, filed a complaint in the Supreme Court of New York seeking to block Grossberg’s claims. ..
Would it be wrong to want Tucker Carlson to be hit by a wayward Russian hypersonic missile?
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.
I wouldn't put Louise Casey in that group though, she went to a comprehensive school then Goldsmiths after working in a holiday camp and resitting her A levels, according to Wiki. The sad thing about the Casey report is that none of it is surprising. Most Met coppers are good people - I know some of them - but there is something deeply broken about its institutional culture. It might be beyond saving, perhaps it needs rebuilding from the ground up like they did in Northern Ireland.
One thing on which there’s broad agreement here this morning, is that the Met needs the RUC treatment. Disband it, and reform with senior officers recruited from elsewhere.
I’d go further and split out the national and diplomatic parts into a separate org under the Home Office, while leaving the force in charge of policing the city squarely under the Mayor. The weird dual-hatting of Met police governance, has been part of the problem.
The Northern Ireland model, of working with face-eating leopards, rather than bringing them to justice, is absolutely not how the Met should be “reformed.”
Agree. But stripping out the non-London bits (part to NCA and part to a proper Economic Crime Agency) is both long overdue and could help the refresh. Not least because you can then change the geography.
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.
My take is, Tories have out performed Labour 3 years running now in campaigning for these national elections. But they will still struggle to get their voters out so end up with less than 28% and some losses. The good results for Lib Dem’s will boost their national opinion polling from where it’s been languishing, at least for a time. But we will learn nothing about next years GE. The Tory’s could lose seats this spring by not getting voters out, but get them all out next year for GE creating a well hung parliament.
@hyufd FYI re our fun charity bet. Although I expect to lose anyway I have just received a leaflet from the Independents in Guildford which makes me think the LDs won't do so well here this time, making my chances of winning even worse.
Anyone looking at the results last time might think the LDs did well in Guildford. They did ok, but when you look at the individual results it was the Indies (R4GV) who really did well. They turned over rock solid safe Tory safe seats to become rock solid R4GV seats. In my ward moving from the Tories getting 70% of the vote to R4GV getting 70% of the vote.
This isn't down to national swings. The Tories locally have made a pigs ear of stuff big time. They are even disliked by the neighbouring Tories so they got slaughtered.
R4GV didn't get more because they couldn't field anywhere near a full slate. They appear to be only 3 short of a full slate so far this time and are trying to fill those.
That could be very bad news for the LDs. hope I am wrong and I don't see R4GV doing so well in the more built up areas, but I think they will make advances.
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/3909703-fox-news-producer-network-sue-each-other-amid-dominion-fight/ Fox News and one of its producers filed lawsuits against each other on Monday, according to news reports, potentially posing a new obstacle for the network amid its ongoing legal battle against Dominion Voting Systems. Abby Grossberg, who has worked with Fox hosts Tucker Carlson and Maria Bartiromo, says in her filings in New York and Delaware that before giving a September deposition in Dominion’s $1.6 billion defamation suit over false 2020 election claims, she was coached in “a coercive and intimidating manner” to protect executives and on-air talent. Grossberg also alleges that at Fox she was forced to work in an environment rampant with sexism and misogyny. “That’s what the culture is there,” she said in an interview with The New York Times. “They don’t respect or value women.” Fox, meanwhile, filed a complaint in the Supreme Court of New York seeking to block Grossberg’s claims. ..
Would it be wrong to want Tucker Carlson to be hit by a wayward Russian hypersonic missile?
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.
My take is, Tories have out performed Labour 3 years running now in campaigning for these national elections. But they will still struggle to get their voters out so end up with less than 28% and some losses. The good results for Lib Dem’s will boost their national opinion polling from where it’s been languishing, at least for a time. But we will learn nothing about next years GE. The Tory’s could lose seats this spring by not getting voters out, but get them all out next year for GE creating a well hung parliament.
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.
I read, a little while back, the diaries of a Southern lady doing the Civil War. Right at the top of Southern Society, as well. According to her, all the rich kids were totally anti-slavery.
While living on actual slave plantations, having slave servants etc.
Some people are hypocrites; that's not news, and it would be disingenuous to suggest that all of those who espouse similar views must also be hypocrites.
Things like racism and misogyny are much bigger problems than hypocrisy and virtue-signalling about them. Getting more animated about the latter than the former is something I find utterly bizarre. The Met police are in the spotlight yet again today but they aren’t some completely unrepresentative outlier. The prejudices embedded in their culture are rife in society and people kid themselves if they think otherwise.
I think there's a few different arguments here. The Daily Mail article quoted above comes close to saying that a predictable backlash against promoting diversity is what is *causing* otherwise decent Met police officers to misbehave, which I think is bullshit. Others are saying that box-ticking exercises are a distraction from doing the actual work needed to be done, and they might have a point. I've seen first hand (in a case that has had no publicity whatsoever, and we've all probably heard of others) that the Met is rotten to the core, corrupt police officers who protect criminals are themselves protected by the force from top to bottom. Police officers conspire together to destroy evidence against themselves and well-connected criminals, and blacken the reputation of complainants. I can only assume those decent police officers who must exist are too scared to speak out because they know they won't get the backing of those running the show. Personally I don't think box-ticking is relevant one way or another, what is needed is a guarantee of support for those who speak out. This goes way beyond the prejudices that are also rife in society, it's a culture of corruption and impunity that needs to be tackled.
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.
I read, a little while back, the diaries of a Southern lady doing the Civil War. Right at the top of Southern Society, as well. According to her, all the rich kids were totally anti-slavery.
While living on actual slave plantations, having slave servants etc.
Some people are hypocrites; that's not news, and it would be disingenuous to suggest that all of those who espouse similar views must also be hypocrites.
Things like racism and misogyny are much bigger problems than hypocrisy and virtue-signalling about them. Getting more animated about the latter than the former is something I find utterly bizarre. The Met police are in the spotlight yet again today but they aren’t some completely unrepresentative outlier. The prejudices embedded in their culture are rife in society and people kid themselves if they think otherwise.
Part of the problem with the Met is that they they think the performative stuff is "job jobbed". That box ticked. Etc.
"We've done all our diversity courses, and passed. What else do you want?"
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.
My take is, Tories have out performed Labour 3 years running now in campaigning for these national elections. But they will still struggle to get their voters out so end up with less than 28% and some losses. The good results for Lib Dem’s will boost their national opinion polling from where it’s been languishing, at least for a time. But we will learn nothing about next years GE. The Tory’s could lose seats this spring by not getting voters out, but get them all out next year for GE creating a well hung parliament.
Actually....
Experience on the doorstep is that locally, getting the vote out isn't an issue. The party brand locally is still in decent shape.
It's persuading them to give the Conservatives their vote in the next General that is the challenge.
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/3909703-fox-news-producer-network-sue-each-other-amid-dominion-fight/ Fox News and one of its producers filed lawsuits against each other on Monday, according to news reports, potentially posing a new obstacle for the network amid its ongoing legal battle against Dominion Voting Systems. Abby Grossberg, who has worked with Fox hosts Tucker Carlson and Maria Bartiromo, says in her filings in New York and Delaware that before giving a September deposition in Dominion’s $1.6 billion defamation suit over false 2020 election claims, she was coached in “a coercive and intimidating manner” to protect executives and on-air talent. Grossberg also alleges that at Fox she was forced to work in an environment rampant with sexism and misogyny. “That’s what the culture is there,” she said in an interview with The New York Times. “They don’t respect or value women.” Fox, meanwhile, filed a complaint in the Supreme Court of New York seeking to block Grossberg’s claims. ..
A sexist and misogynistic culture, coercion and intimidation, so it's not just the Metropolitan Police then?
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.
My take is, Tories have out performed Labour 3 years running now in campaigning for these national elections. But they will still struggle to get their voters out so end up with less than 28% and some losses. The good results for Lib Dem’s will boost their national opinion polling from where it’s been languishing, at least for a time. But we will learn nothing about next years GE. The Tory’s could lose seats this spring by not getting voters out, but get them all out next year for GE creating a well hung parliament.
Actually....
Experience on the doorstep is that locally, getting the vote out isn't an issue. The party brand locally is still in decent shape.
It's persuading them to give the Conservatives their vote in the next General that is the challenge.
Other way round in Woking (at least for the locals...):
Woking is currently subject to a government review of its finances. Control of the council passed to the Liberal Democrats last year, after a fraught local election which partly focused on the vast debt pile accumulated by the former Conservative administration.
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/3909703-fox-news-producer-network-sue-each-other-amid-dominion-fight/ Fox News and one of its producers filed lawsuits against each other on Monday, according to news reports, potentially posing a new obstacle for the network amid its ongoing legal battle against Dominion Voting Systems. Abby Grossberg, who has worked with Fox hosts Tucker Carlson and Maria Bartiromo, says in her filings in New York and Delaware that before giving a September deposition in Dominion’s $1.6 billion defamation suit over false 2020 election claims, she was coached in “a coercive and intimidating manner” to protect executives and on-air talent. Grossberg also alleges that at Fox she was forced to work in an environment rampant with sexism and misogyny. “That’s what the culture is there,” she said in an interview with The New York Times. “They don’t respect or value women.” Fox, meanwhile, filed a complaint in the Supreme Court of New York seeking to block Grossberg’s claims. ..
A sexist and misogynistic culture, coercion and intimidation, so it's not just the Metropolitan Police then?
“The logic of events dictates we become a Chinese resource colony. Our servers will be from Huawei. We will be China’s major suppliers of everything. They will get gas from Power of Siberia. By the end of 2023 the yuan will be our main trade currency.” https://twitter.com/maxseddon/status/1638060457117270020
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.”
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."
Activists desperately want to believe they make a crucial difference. I'm sceptical that any impact is as large as they think.
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.
My take is, Tories have out performed Labour 3 years running now in campaigning for these national elections. But they will still struggle to get their voters out so end up with less than 28% and some losses. The good results for Lib Dem’s will boost their national opinion polling from where it’s been languishing, at least for a time. But we will learn nothing about next years GE. The Tory’s could lose seats this spring by not getting voters out, but get them all out next year for GE creating a well hung parliament.
Actually....
Experience on the doorstep is that locally, getting the vote out isn't an issue. The party brand locally is still in decent shape.
It's persuading them to give the Conservatives their vote in the next General that is the challenge.
Other way round in Woking (at least for the locals...):
Woking is currently subject to a government review of its finances. Control of the council passed to the Liberal Democrats last year, after a fraught local election which partly focused on the vast debt pile accumulated by the former Conservative administration.
The former leader of the council had a grandiose vision for Woking being the new commuter hub for London. This would boost retail to the stars and in turn would attract other employers, with lots of people in vast tower blocks - high density, short commute etc.
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.”
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/3909703-fox-news-producer-network-sue-each-other-amid-dominion-fight/ Fox News and one of its producers filed lawsuits against each other on Monday, according to news reports, potentially posing a new obstacle for the network amid its ongoing legal battle against Dominion Voting Systems. Abby Grossberg, who has worked with Fox hosts Tucker Carlson and Maria Bartiromo, says in her filings in New York and Delaware that before giving a September deposition in Dominion’s $1.6 billion defamation suit over false 2020 election claims, she was coached in “a coercive and intimidating manner” to protect executives and on-air talent. Grossberg also alleges that at Fox she was forced to work in an environment rampant with sexism and misogyny. “That’s what the culture is there,” she said in an interview with The New York Times. “They don’t respect or value women.” Fox, meanwhile, filed a complaint in the Supreme Court of New York seeking to block Grossberg’s claims. ..
Would it be wrong to want Tucker Carlson to be hit by a wayward Russian hypersonic missile?
No.
Trump = Charles Lindbergh
The Plot Against America needs updating.
Good morning
Trump = Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin (going down faster than your latest "girlfriend")
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.”
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."
Activists desperately want to believe they make a crucial difference. I'm sceptical that any impact is as large as they think.
I find it an interesting result, if true. I would have thought that turnout would be higher in marginals firstly because people in marginals would be more motivated to actually vote, but also I would have thought targeting by parties would make a bit of a difference. Maybe there are confounding factors. Or maybe in a general election most people are just paying attention to the national arguments and leaders etc. I always tended to find the local leaflets and canvassing just annoying, from whichever party - at least in a general election.
The detection rate for rape is now so low in London that “you may as well say it is legal”, one Met officer told a landmark review.
The damning report by the crossbench peer Baroness Casey found examples of bad practice in the way sexual cases were handled including freezers holding vital forensic evidence being too crammed to close and even breaking down.
A lunchbox was found in the same fridge that rape samples were being kept in which would have contaminated the evidence, the review was told.
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/3909703-fox-news-producer-network-sue-each-other-amid-dominion-fight/ Fox News and one of its producers filed lawsuits against each other on Monday, according to news reports, potentially posing a new obstacle for the network amid its ongoing legal battle against Dominion Voting Systems. Abby Grossberg, who has worked with Fox hosts Tucker Carlson and Maria Bartiromo, says in her filings in New York and Delaware that before giving a September deposition in Dominion’s $1.6 billion defamation suit over false 2020 election claims, she was coached in “a coercive and intimidating manner” to protect executives and on-air talent. Grossberg also alleges that at Fox she was forced to work in an environment rampant with sexism and misogyny. “That’s what the culture is there,” she said in an interview with The New York Times. “They don’t respect or value women.” Fox, meanwhile, filed a complaint in the Supreme Court of New York seeking to block Grossberg’s claims. ..
Would it be wrong to want Tucker Carlson to be hit by a wayward Russian hypersonic missile?
No.
Trump = Charles Lindbergh
The Plot Against America needs updating.
Good morning
Trump = Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin (going down faster than your latest "girlfriend")
That's very unfair on von Zeppelin - who created a company that produced (relatively) some of the safest airships made. Due to hard work, good engineering and intelligent approach to design.
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.
My take is, Tories have out performed Labour 3 years running now in campaigning for these national elections. But they will still struggle to get their voters out so end up with less than 28% and some losses. The good results for Lib Dem’s will boost their national opinion polling from where it’s been languishing, at least for a time. But we will learn nothing about next years GE. The Tory’s could lose seats this spring by not getting voters out, but get them all out next year for GE creating a well hung parliament.
Actually....
Experience on the doorstep is that locally, getting the vote out isn't an issue. The party brand locally is still in decent shape.
It's persuading them to give the Conservatives their vote in the next General that is the challenge.
Other way round in Woking (at least for the locals...):
Woking is currently subject to a government review of its finances. Control of the council passed to the Liberal Democrats last year, after a fraught local election which partly focused on the vast debt pile accumulated by the former Conservative administration.
I saw a Tory leaflet delivered to my Dad's house. It was rather hoping that the electorate had amnesia. It was blaming the LDs for the mess, after all they are running the council now so it must be them.
Gay Met officers described how they were forced to endure homophobic abuse from their colleagues on a regular basis, with one saying he was so scared of the police he would avoid walking past them when off duty.
In a landmark review of the force's culture, Dame Louise Casey declared Scotland Yard “institutionally homophobic”, with a third of LGBT+ officers reporting that they had been bullied at work.
One openly gay officer described how he had been the target of a sustained campaign of homophobia from inside the Met.
He said he had joined the police because he cared deeply about public service and protecting communities, but had received appalling personal abuse from some of his colleagues.
The report stated: “He has been anonymously targeted on social media with homophobic slurs, calling him a “f----t” and a “c--- sucker”.
But he said when he had tried to report the matter to his superiors they had brushed off his concerns, with one telling him: “If you were a straight white man we would not be having this conversation.”
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.
I read, a little while back, the diaries of a Southern lady doing the Civil War. Right at the top of Southern Society, as well. According to her, all the rich kids were totally anti-slavery.
While living on actual slave plantations, having slave servants etc.
My 16yo daughter told me yesterday that she had identified a group of people that really annoyed her - private school kids who make out that they're not like other private school kids. It's never too early to start navigating a complex hierarchical society like ours and its multiple layers of hypocrisy and privilege, I suppose. Anyway, the class hatred - directed upwards as it always should be - warmed my heart.
Multiple layers of hypocrisy is right. I wonder when she will wake up to your own.
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.”
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."
Activists desperately want to believe they make a crucial difference. I'm sceptical that any impact is as large as they think.
I think that activists make bugger all difference at general elections. Just look at 1997 - the swings to Labour in "unwinnable" seats (that we won) where no campaigning took place were on a par with the swings in seats that were targeted. Voters make their minds up based on the national situation and national campaign, not because some beardy chaps on their door on a Monday teatime.
For local elections, I think there is a greater potential to make a difference - we gained our ward against the national swing 2 years ago for example - but still the big picture of gains and losses follows the national picture. The 'ground campaign' is actually a 'get people off their arses to vote" campaign, not an attempt to change minds.
“For households in Scotland energy prices have not been frozen at two and a half grand—indeed, the average bill in Scotland has been closer to £3,500.”
That was the claim from the SNP leader in Westminster, Stephen Flynn MP in parliament last week.
But energy regulator Ofgem has told FactCheck that it “do[es]n’t recognise” the figure and that it “doesn’t ring true”.
The detection rate for rape is now so low in London that “you may as well say it is legal”, one Met officer told a landmark review.
The damning report by the crossbench peer Baroness Casey found examples of bad practice in the way sexual cases were handled including freezers holding vital forensic evidence being too crammed to close and even breaking down.
A lunchbox was found in the same fridge that rape samples were being kept in which would have contaminated the evidence, the review was told.
This is the sort of incompetence that needs to be fixed urgently, rather than yet another bureaucratic reorganisation. It would also be interesting to know if Casey said anything about the practice of building specialist units (good) that have the side effect of denuding local stations of expertise and their best coppers.
Ken Marsh, chairman of the Police Federation, said: “I think it is a bit disingenuous to say there could be another David Carrick or Wayne Couzens in the Met police.
“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.
Lovely example of a false argument here in bold. The report of course says no such thing about every officer. So 'report is dangerous' is brought into play with no foundation.
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.
I think you have to put that in context, though. One of Casey's points was that the very well resourced armed policing unit was failing despite the disproportionate share of resources directed to it. At the same time as rape cases were basically not investigated, for lack of resource.
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.
I read, a little while back, the diaries of a Southern lady doing the Civil War. Right at the top of Southern Society, as well. According to her, all the rich kids were totally anti-slavery.
While living on actual slave plantations, having slave servants etc.
Some people are hypocrites; that's not news, and it would be disingenuous to suggest that all of those who espouse similar views must also be hypocrites.
Things like racism and misogyny are much bigger problems than hypocrisy and virtue-signalling about them. Getting more animated about the latter than the former is something I find utterly bizarre. The Met police are in the spotlight yet again today but they aren’t some completely unrepresentative outlier. The prejudices embedded in their culture are rife in society and people kid themselves if they think otherwise.
Part of the problem with the Met is that they they think the performative stuff is "job jobbed". That box ticked. Etc.
"We've done all our diversity courses, and passed. What else do you want?"
Of all the causes of their prejudice against women and minorities it's a bit odd to alight on this as one to home in on. It's unlikely to be a material factor imo. I mean, were they less racist and misogynistic back in the old days when 'diversity' meant recruiting a few northerners?
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.
I read, a little while back, the diaries of a Southern lady doing the Civil War. Right at the top of Southern Society, as well. According to her, all the rich kids were totally anti-slavery.
While living on actual slave plantations, having slave servants etc.
My 16yo daughter told me yesterday that she had identified a group of people that really annoyed her - private school kids who make out that they're not like other private school kids. It's never too early to start navigating a complex hierarchical society like ours and its multiple layers of hypocrisy and privilege, I suppose. Anyway, the class hatred - directed upwards as it always should be - warmed my heart.
Multiple layers of hypocrisy is right. I wonder when she will wake up to your own.
Some years ago, I was helping out at a communal workshop. Some of the youngsters using the place were banging on about The Man, hating on the rich etc. They were rather shocked when I pointed out that, since they had very good jobs they were, in fact, The Man.
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.
I read, a little while back, the diaries of a Southern lady doing the Civil War. Right at the top of Southern Society, as well. According to her, all the rich kids were totally anti-slavery.
While living on actual slave plantations, having slave servants etc.
My 16yo daughter told me yesterday that she had identified a group of people that really annoyed her - private school kids who make out that they're not like other private school kids. It's never too early to start navigating a complex hierarchical society like ours and its multiple layers of hypocrisy and privilege, I suppose. Anyway, the class hatred - directed upwards as it always should be - warmed my heart.
Multiple layers of hypocrisy is right. I wonder when she will wake up to your own.
Ooh, how cutting! Nothing stirs up PB quite like a mild barb directed at the privately educated. I don't think I'm any more of a hypocrite than anybody else, to be honest.
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.
My take is, Tories have out performed Labour 3 years running now in campaigning for these national elections. But they will still struggle to get their voters out so end up with less than 28% and some losses. The good results for Lib Dem’s will boost their national opinion polling from where it’s been languishing, at least for a time. But we will learn nothing about next years GE. The Tory’s could lose seats this spring by not getting voters out, but get them all out next year for GE creating a well hung parliament.
Actually....
Experience on the doorstep is that locally, getting the vote out isn't an issue. The party brand locally is still in decent shape.
It's persuading them to give the Conservatives their vote in the next General that is the challenge.
Other way round in Woking (at least for the locals...):
Woking is currently subject to a government review of its finances. Control of the council passed to the Liberal Democrats last year, after a fraught local election which partly focused on the vast debt pile accumulated by the former Conservative administration.
I saw a Tory leaflet delivered to my Dad's house. It was rather hoping that the electorate had amnesia. It was blaming the LDs for the mess, after all they are running the council now so it must be them.
Well, Bozo and Trump both show that you can fool some people all the time.
So Boris is innocent. Well, that's a relief. Why is it double-spaced, by the way? Does Boris still use a manual typewriter and is leaving room for manual corrections?
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.
I read, a little while back, the diaries of a Southern lady doing the Civil War. Right at the top of Southern Society, as well. According to her, all the rich kids were totally anti-slavery.
While living on actual slave plantations, having slave servants etc.
Some people are hypocrites; that's not news, and it would be disingenuous to suggest that all of those who espouse similar views must also be hypocrites.
Things like racism and misogyny are much bigger problems than hypocrisy and virtue-signalling about them. Getting more animated about the latter than the former is something I find utterly bizarre. The Met police are in the spotlight yet again today but they aren’t some completely unrepresentative outlier. The prejudices embedded in their culture are rife in society and people kid themselves if they think otherwise.
Part of the problem with the Met is that they they think the performative stuff is "job jobbed". That box ticked. Etc.
"We've done all our diversity courses, and passed. What else do you want?"
Of all the causes of their prejudice against women and minorities it's a bit odd to alight on this as one to home in on. It's unlikely to be a material factor imo. I mean, were they less racist and misogynistic back in the old days when 'diversity' meant recruiting a few northerners?
No. I mean that they think the performative bullshit = proof there is no problem.
So they think they don't need to anything about the racism, homophobia etc.
Bit like the banks obsessing whether 99% of staff has clicked through the exams on Not Being A Criminal.
They are probably less racist than, say, in the 1960s. Simply because society as a whole has got less racist.
Mr. JohnL, it's unusual nowadays but a few people do still double space things. I did some beta-reading in the past, and one of the writers double spaced.
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.
I read, a little while back, the diaries of a Southern lady doing the Civil War. Right at the top of Southern Society, as well. According to her, all the rich kids were totally anti-slavery.
While living on actual slave plantations, having slave servants etc.
Some people are hypocrites; that's not news, and it would be disingenuous to suggest that all of those who espouse similar views must also be hypocrites.
Things like racism and misogyny are much bigger problems than hypocrisy and virtue-signalling about them. Getting more animated about the latter than the former is something I find utterly bizarre. The Met police are in the spotlight yet again today but they aren’t some completely unrepresentative outlier. The prejudices embedded in their culture are rife in society and people kid themselves if they think otherwise.
I think there's a few different arguments here. The Daily Mail article quoted above comes close to saying that a predictable backlash against promoting diversity is what is *causing* otherwise decent Met police officers to misbehave, which I think is bullshit. Others are saying that box-ticking exercises are a distraction from doing the actual work needed to be done, and they might have a point. I've seen first hand (in a case that has had no publicity whatsoever, and we've all probably heard of others) that the Met is rotten to the core, corrupt police officers who protect criminals are themselves protected by the force from top to bottom. Police officers conspire together to destroy evidence against themselves and well-connected criminals, and blacken the reputation of complainants. I can only assume those decent police officers who must exist are too scared to speak out because they know they won't get the backing of those running the show. Personally I don't think box-ticking is relevant one way or another, what is needed is a guarantee of support for those who speak out. This goes way beyond the prejudices that are also rife in society, it's a culture of corruption and impunity that needs to be tackled.
I agree with all of what you say here. Blaming the 'diversity industry' is feeble. It's people like the Mail scrabbling around to find a culprit they are comfortable with.
As for the Met not being an outlier, by this I don't mean to downplay the problem, or that society as a whole has the same level of prejudice as they do. My point is more that (imo) we underestimate how prevalent these attitudes are.
Recruit good people and support them to stay that way - this would be my trite one-liner solution for what needs to be done.
I can't figure out if Johnson is more weirdly obsessed with Cummings than Cummings is with Johnson,or vice versa. They're like a couple that have gone through an ugly divorce. Still, they'll always have Brexit to remind them of happier times.
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.
I read, a little while back, the diaries of a Southern lady doing the Civil War. Right at the top of Southern Society, as well. According to her, all the rich kids were totally anti-slavery.
While living on actual slave plantations, having slave servants etc.
Some people are hypocrites; that's not news, and it would be disingenuous to suggest that all of those who espouse similar views must also be hypocrites.
Things like racism and misogyny are much bigger problems than hypocrisy and virtue-signalling about them. Getting more animated about the latter than the former is something I find utterly bizarre. The Met police are in the spotlight yet again today but they aren’t some completely unrepresentative outlier. The prejudices embedded in their culture are rife in society and people kid themselves if they think otherwise.
Yeah, but no. It's about condemning the way that more effort goes into performative gestures, rather than into actually disciplining officers who are racist, or misogynistic bullies.
It's also about condemning the way that virtue-signalling can become an excuse for ignoring serious crime, eg treating electoral intimidation or child-grooming as "cultural matters".
I can't figure out if Johnson is more weirdly obsessed with Cummings than Cummings is with Johnson,or vice versa. They're like a couple that have gone through an ugly divorce. Still, they'll always have Brexit to remind them of happier times.
The reality is Cummings was ditched for Carrie Johnson (in a political adviser sense, she is a former Director of Communications for the Tory Party.)
Ironically, it is one of the few occasions where Boris Johnson has been loyal to any of his wives.
Ken Marsh, chairman of the Police Federation, said: “I think it is a bit disingenuous to say there could be another David Carrick or Wayne Couzens in the Met police.
“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.
Lovely example of a false argument here in bold. The report of course says no such thing about every officer. So 'report is dangerous' is brought into play with no foundation.
Seems like a pretty disgraceful comment from Ken Marsh. What is dangerous is the Metropolitan Police protecting the criminals and racists in their own ranks. And instead of cleaning things up trying to blame others with stupid remarks like his.
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.
I read, a little while back, the diaries of a Southern lady doing the Civil War. Right at the top of Southern Society, as well. According to her, all the rich kids were totally anti-slavery.
While living on actual slave plantations, having slave servants etc.
Some people are hypocrites; that's not news, and it would be disingenuous to suggest that all of those who espouse similar views must also be hypocrites.
Things like racism and misogyny are much bigger problems than hypocrisy and virtue-signalling about them. Getting more animated about the latter than the former is something I find utterly bizarre. The Met police are in the spotlight yet again today but they aren’t some completely unrepresentative outlier. The prejudices embedded in their culture are rife in society and people kid themselves if they think otherwise.
Part of the problem with the Met is that they they think the performative stuff is "job jobbed". That box ticked. Etc.
"We've done all our diversity courses, and passed. What else do you want?"
Of all the causes of their prejudice against women and minorities it's a bit odd to alight on this as one to home in on. It's unlikely to be a material factor imo. I mean, were they less racist and misogynistic back in the old days when 'diversity' meant recruiting a few northerners?
I agree with the earloer quote about woke being one of the reasons the police has lost its way - but lost its way in a not-actually-solving-crimes sense. I don't think woke has made it more racist and misogynist. Just not evidently less racist and misogynist.
I can't figure out if Johnson is more weirdly obsessed with Cummings than Cummings is with Johnson,or vice versa. They're like a couple that have gone through an ugly divorce. Still, they'll always have Brexit to remind them of happier times.
The reality is Cummings was ditched for Carrie Johnson (in a political adviser sense, she is a former Director of Communications for the Tory Party.)
Ironically, it is one of the few occasions where Boris Johnson has been loyal to any of his wives.
I guess Carrie could give him things that Dom couldn't. No wonder Dom acts so wounded. The whole tone of Johnson's "defence" is so whiny though, as you noted. It'd be funny if it wasn't all so cheap and demeaning to the office of prime minister, and by extension to us as a country.
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.”
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."
Activists desperately want to believe they make a crucial difference. I'm sceptical that any impact is as large as they think.
I think that activists make bugger all difference at general elections. Just look at 1997 - the swings to Labour in "unwinnable" seats (that we won) where no campaigning took place were on a par with the swings in seats that were targeted. Voters make their minds up based on the national situation and national campaign, not because some beardy chaps on their door on a Monday teatime.
For local elections, I think there is a greater potential to make a difference - we gained our ward against the national swing 2 years ago for example - but still the big picture of gains and losses follows the national picture. The 'ground campaign' is actually a 'get people off their arses to vote" campaign, not an attempt to change minds.
Yep. FInd your vote, get it out.
Get your MP/councillor/candidate (in that order) to have a word with waverers.
(I remember back in 1987, Heseltine came to give the pavement-pounders a pep talk - and basically said it makes no diference. You have to do it to be visible - because your opponents are.
Comments
My firm likes to sponsor scientific innovation/research, I’ll ask about if we can fund your parachute RCT.
It sounds like a lot of fun.
This question has been left unanswered for far too long!
The latter is surviving long enough to procreate, the former is being chosen (though cultural and physical factors can affect how much impact 'choice' has).
While living on actual slave plantations, having slave servants etc.
What are the rates of pay/remuneration in equivalent armed "special units" in other European countries?
Yours truly was recently invited to a reception at the Chinese embassy next month.
I was going to say no but perhaps this research may change my mind.
There was a poster, forget his name, who was moderately engaged with the issue. Perhaps contact him?
Though tbf I have just purchased a book on the history of the Solway Junction Railway and its famous viaduct over the firth. Quite a few folk would walk over it after the railway closed in 1921 in order to get a pint on the Sabbath. Obvs the fault of the SNP.
Edit: I'm not sure it is actually understood by many on here that the price controls actually affect only the industrial alcohol, jakie juices, stuff I wouldn't use for wiping down my cludgie.
It might be that minimum alcohol pricing is a terrible idea if it just pushes people on to other things (depending on what those other things were).
While I'm a huge fan of trade unions generally, I think the Police Federation is part of the problem, not the solution. They have a long history of defending the indefensible; they are like the police forces' very own DUP. Other unions have modernised - for example, teachers' unions these days put less effort into defending gross misconduct or incompetence where the evidence is unarguable. But not the Police Federation. I'm not sure how to reduce their influence, but it's an aspect that needs working on.
Now. What does that remind us of.
Regarding the Met: the late, great Paul Foot was no stranger to police corruption and one of his party pieces was a rendering of If you want to know the time ask a policeman with its original satirical intonation. Back in the days of music hall it referred to a constable's practice of frisking every body (dead or alive) for valuables 'for safe keeping'.
"Every member of the force has a watch and chain ... OF COURSE."
The Met does, I think, have particular structural issues which exacerbate the underlying issues though - sheer size, scope of remit etc.
The sad thing about the Casey report is that none of it is surprising. Most Met coppers are good people - I know some of them - but there is something deeply broken about its institutional culture. It might be beyond saving, perhaps it needs rebuilding from the ground up like they did in Northern Ireland.
If a man says he is anti-slavery, while living on the profits of hundred of slaves *he owns*, I'd say he's a hypocrite.
Saying you are all down with Dur Kidz because you get some employees to attend gay pride events, while ignoring rampant homophobia - it's less hypocritical. But not much.
I’d go further and split out the national and diplomatic parts into a separate org under the Home Office, while leaving the force in charge of policing the city squarely under the Mayor. The weird dual-hatting of Met police governance, has been part of the problem.
"I hate the new Disqus!
I hate the new Disqus!
I HATE the new Disqus!"
And lo and behold, we lost the Disqus and peace reigned.
https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2023/mar/20/ball-games-did-prue-leith-know-she-was-wearing-a-suggestive-necklace
Edit: and this too, also today:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/mar/20/psychedelic-brew-ayahuasca-profound-impact-brain-scans-dmt
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/3909703-fox-news-producer-network-sue-each-other-amid-dominion-fight/
Fox News and one of its producers filed lawsuits against each other on Monday, according to news reports, potentially posing a new obstacle for the network amid its ongoing legal battle against Dominion Voting Systems.
Abby Grossberg, who has worked with Fox hosts Tucker Carlson and Maria Bartiromo, says in her filings in New York and Delaware that before giving a September deposition in Dominion’s $1.6 billion defamation suit over false 2020 election claims, she was coached in “a coercive and intimidating manner” to protect executives and on-air talent.
Grossberg also alleges that at Fox she was forced to work in an environment rampant with sexism and misogyny.
“That’s what the culture is there,” she said in an interview with The New York Times. “They don’t respect or value women.”
Fox, meanwhile, filed a complaint in the Supreme Court of New York seeking to block Grossberg’s claims. ..
Also the scene in Dune, where Paul comments on finding footmarks on the shoulders of drowned fishermen.
*was that actually a thing, or is the 'cling film used to be better' thing just a myth?
Alan Dershowitz says prosecution of Trump is "a violation of the Bible"
https://twitter.com/JasonSCampbell/status/1637891958721880070
Trump = Charles Lindbergh
The Plot Against America needs updating.
Anyone looking at the results last time might think the LDs did well in Guildford. They did ok, but when you look at the individual results it was the Indies (R4GV) who really did well. They turned over rock solid safe Tory safe seats to become rock solid R4GV seats. In my ward moving from the Tories getting 70% of the vote to R4GV getting 70% of the vote.
This isn't down to national swings. The Tories locally have made a pigs ear of stuff big time. They are even disliked by the neighbouring Tories so they got slaughtered.
R4GV didn't get more because they couldn't field anywhere near a full slate. They appear to be only 3 short of a full slate so far this time and are trying to fill those.
That could be very bad news for the LDs. hope I am wrong and I don't see R4GV doing so well in the more built up areas, but I think they will make advances.
A few weeks later GE2017 made significant Gains
https://english.nv.ua/nation/russia-mobilizes-20-000-people-every-month-ukrainian-intelligence-says-news-50312067.html
Trouble is, its losing 25,000....
"We've done all our diversity courses, and passed. What else do you want?"
Experience on the doorstep is that locally, getting the vote out isn't an issue. The party brand locally is still in decent shape.
It's persuading them to give the Conservatives their vote in the next General that is the challenge.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/feb/21/woking-surrey-council-brink-insolvency-debts-2bn
Woking is currently subject to a government review of its finances. Control of the council passed to the Liberal Democrats last year, after a fraught local election which partly focused on the vast debt pile accumulated by the former Conservative administration.
https://twitter.com/maxseddon/status/1638060457117270020
Trump = Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin (going down faster than your latest "girlfriend")
The damning report by the crossbench peer Baroness Casey found examples of bad practice in the way sexual cases were handled including freezers holding vital forensic evidence being too crammed to close and even breaking down.
A lunchbox was found in the same fridge that rape samples were being kept in which would have contaminated the evidence, the review was told.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/03/21/casey-review-rape-may-legal-london-met-police-officer-said/
None of that seems very Trumpian.
In a landmark review of the force's culture, Dame Louise Casey declared Scotland Yard “institutionally homophobic”, with a third of LGBT+ officers reporting that they had been bullied at work.
One openly gay officer described how he had been the target of a sustained campaign of homophobia from inside the Met.
He said he had joined the police because he cared deeply about public service and protecting communities, but had received appalling personal abuse from some of his colleagues.
The report stated: “He has been anonymously targeted on social media with homophobic slurs, calling him a “f----t” and a “c--- sucker”.
But he said when he had tried to report the matter to his superiors they had brushed off his concerns, with one telling him: “If you were a straight white man we would not be having this conversation.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/03/21/casey-review-gay-met-officer-scared-police-wouldnt-walk-past/
For local elections, I think there is a greater potential to make a difference - we gained our ward against the national swing 2 years ago for example - but still the big picture of gains and losses follows the national picture. The 'ground campaign' is actually a 'get people off their arses to vote" campaign, not an attempt to change minds.
“For households in Scotland energy prices have not been frozen at two and a half grand—indeed, the average bill in Scotland has been closer to £3,500.”
That was the claim from the SNP leader in Westminster, Stephen Flynn MP in parliament last week.
But energy regulator Ofgem has told FactCheck that it “do[es]n’t recognise” the figure and that it “doesn’t ring true”.
https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-snp-energy-bills-claim-doesnt-ring-true-says-ofgem
https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/119498/default/
“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.
Lovely example of a false argument here in bold. The report of course says no such thing about every officer. So 'report is dangerous' is brought into play with no foundation.
One of Casey's points was that the very well resourced armed policing unit was failing despite the disproportionate share of resources directed to it.
At the same time as rape cases were basically not investigated, for lack of resource.
Located in Sagunt, 18 miles north of the Spanish city of Valencia, the battery cell plant will have an initial annual output of 40 GWh.
https://insideevs.com/news/658035/volkswagen-breaks-ground-on-second-battery-gigafactory-in-europe/
So they think they don't need to anything about the racism, homophobia etc.
Bit like the banks obsessing whether 99% of staff has clicked through the exams on Not Being A Criminal.
They are probably less racist than, say, in the 1960s. Simply because society as a whole has got less racist.
As for the Met not being an outlier, by this I don't mean to downplay the problem, or that society as a whole has the same level of prejudice as they do. My point is more that (imo) we underestimate how prevalent these attitudes are.
Recruit good people and support them to stay that way - this would be my trite one-liner solution for what needs to be done.
It's also about condemning the way that virtue-signalling can become an excuse for ignoring serious crime, eg treating electoral intimidation or child-grooming as "cultural matters".
Why does that "word" trigger me so much?
Ironically, it is one of the few occasions where Boris Johnson has been loyal to any of his wives.
Get your MP/councillor/candidate (in that order) to have a word with waverers.
(I remember back in 1987, Heseltine came to give the pavement-pounders a pep talk - and basically said it makes no diference. You have to do it to be visible - because your opponents are.
That really fired up the troops.....)
Factory x 10^9 is much less annoying?