I agree with Mike that Trump has a less than 70% chance of the nomination. But the much better sell imo is for the WH. That's where the betting has it badly wrong. He should be triple the price he is.
Which other candidate for the nomination has a higher than 5% chance? DeSantis? Ramaswamy? Like, even if Trump was convicted and the GOP therefore said he couldn't be the nominee - I have no idea who they would pick because the party would be in open civil war. Part of how Trump keeps coming out on top in the GOP is that the party cannot face down the base it created, cannot agree on what they want in a leader, and cannot openly say what their policy agenda would be because it is too cruel for even their own voters to accept openly. Who else has the popularity for a coronation? No one! And if it comes down to the convention to replace him, well that could be anyone, even those who didn't run in the primary!
By lane, numbers-out-of-arse, not an offer to bet:
Christie, Pence, Haley and Scott are all below 5%.
DeSantis averages ~15%. Yes, he once rivalled Trump, but the indictments ended that (potentially in part because he defended Trump instead of putting the boot in there, giving his supporters permission to go back to Trump).
Who there can really push themselves out over Trump or if he gets canned by the RNC? No one, in my view.
It's August, there have been no debates, the voters aren't paying attention yet. One candidate has extremely high name recognition, and also they feel like he needs support. What the polling tells us is that the base don't hate Trump.That's an important data point, but it's not enough to call the race.
We also don't know who the voters are. The only way the anti-Trump candidates might win (absent a very lucky three-way split) is by turning out people who aren't being polled. But they might be able to do that.
We do know who the voters will likely be; the small number of people who are signed up members of the GOP and (in some states) independents who change their voter ID to GOP. And the GOP membership are fully behind Trump. There is also no turn out game to play with them, it's a shrinking cohort. ~70% of the membership "think Republicans should stand behind Trump amid the investigations and indictments he’s facing" and "say Trump has not committed serious crimes". That would need to essentially half to guarantee that Trump wouldn't be the nominee.
Typically a primary has about 30 million voters. A general election is like 150 million. The Dem side will likely be uncontested, so there are 4x the typical electorate who could register GOP if they're not already if required and vote. Generally they don't and it's just settled by party enthusiasts, but also nobody's tried running for office while out on bail for multiple crimes after losing an election and pretending they won it, so who knows.
Some states will try to keep it in the family - eg Iowa GOP seems like they'll require you to be registered GOP months ahead to keep out late switchers - but most of them will at least allow a late change of registration, if you're not already registered.
Surely SWR will be nationalised soon. Its performance is appalling, they seem to have completely given up installing new livery on the outside of the trains and by all accounts it is totally unprofitable.
Meanwhile, while everyone's been appalled by the Letby case or following the football, the Post Office Board has written to the Business Select Committee saying that no, the Board members will not be repaying the bonuses they awarded themselves for complying with the Inquiry even though -
- they have not complied with the Inquiry's demands - the accounts they were responsible for were misleading - the bonuses were justified by false information contained in those accounts.
This case, the endless NHS and police scandals and much else are symptomatic of a country with public organizations which are functional only in a basic way because they are running on fuel in the tank - structures, systems, practices etc., - created by previous generations.
But those running them now don't know how to put fuel in the tank or maintain the car. Or even where they're supposed to be driving to.
But what they are mostly good at is nicking the valuable bits out of the car, causing accidents and running away from those accidents as fast as possible.
Lots of people employed by these organisations, especially at the top, seem to think they exist principally for the benefit of those inside them - not to serve any actual purpose or function for others. So reputation (untethered to any actual achievement) becomes more important than anything else. My heart sinks when I see those passive aggressive notices saying that staff have a right to do their jobs without being assaulted etc - not because I disagree with the sentiment (good manners to those providing a service to you should be a given) - but because it so often indicates an organisation which thinks that it is doing you - the customer, client, patient etc., - an enormous favour in bothering to deal with you at all.
I agree with all of this post, and this bit in particular.
I long ago abandoned any belief that those running public services were on my side.
I disagree about the notices. They are there to help front line staff who are often the victims of both patient behaviour and the mismanagement of those higher up.
Even if they don't work, it's serves as a reminder that abusing staff is not acceptable behaviour.
Perhaps they should be paired with posters explaining what the formal complaints procedure is, and which senior manager is personally responsible for the care you are receiving?
I don't remember such notices being necessary in the past.
FWIW, both my wife and I have been the victims of aggressive behaviour by revenue collectors, who surrounded us and were very rude when arriving at Waterloo and unable to buy a ticket due to the guard's machine not working on board.
We didn't react aggressively but we certainly thought it was uncalled for, and I told them so.
PS Interesting question for some of us whether this is commercial behaviour (SWR) or inherited commercial (SE) or public sector (HMG policy on reducing subsidy, SE very recently nationalised).
Its a combination of things: Many operators have very poorly trained staff (to save money). They don't know things like ticket restrictions and have a "guilty until proven guilty" approach as company policy Fares are made deliberately obscure to scam as much money from passengers as possible. Hence declaring some trains as "peak" where "off-peak" tickets are not valid. This is often wrong but leads to huge rows Financial rewards for persecuting passengers. with zero risk as now a management contract
Meanwhile, while everyone's been appalled by the Letby case or following the football, the Post Office Board has written to the Business Select Committee saying that no, the Board members will not be repaying the bonuses they awarded themselves for complying with the Inquiry even though -
- they have not complied with the Inquiry's demands - the accounts they were responsible for were misleading - the bonuses were justified by false information contained in those accounts.
This case, the endless NHS and police scandals and much else are symptomatic of a country with public organizations which are functional only in a basic way because they are running on fuel in the tank - structures, systems, practices etc., - created by previous generations.
But those running them now don't know how to put fuel in the tank or maintain the car. Or even where they're supposed to be driving to.
But what they are mostly good at is nicking the valuable bits out of the car, causing accidents and running away from those accidents as fast as possible.
Lots of people employed by these organisations, especially at the top, seem to think they exist principally for the benefit of those inside them - not to serve any actual purpose or function for others. So reputation (untethered to any actual achievement) becomes more important than anything else. My heart sinks when I see those passive aggressive notices saying that staff have a right to do their jobs without being assaulted etc - not because I disagree with the sentiment (good manners to those providing a service to you should be a given) - but because it so often indicates an organisation which thinks that it is doing you - the customer, client, patient etc., - an enormous favour in bothering to deal with you at all.
I agree with all of this post, and this bit in particular.
I long ago abandoned any belief that those running public services were on my side.
I disagree about the notices. They are there to help front line staff who are often the victims of both patient behaviour and the mismanagement of those higher up.
Even if they don't work, it's serves as a reminder that abusing staff is not acceptable behaviour.
Perhaps they should be paired with posters explaining what the formal complaints procedure is, and which senior manager is personally responsible for the care you are receiving?
I don't remember such notices being necessary in the past.
FWIW, both my wife and I have been the victims of aggressive behaviour by revenue collectors, who surrounded us and were very rude when arriving at Waterloo and unable to buy a ticket due to the guard's machine not working on board.
We didn't react aggressively but we certainly thought it was uncalled for, and I told them so.
PS Interesting question for some of us whether this is commercial behaviour (SWR) or inherited commercial (SE) or public sector (HMG policy on reducing subsidy, SE very recently nationalised).
Its a combination of things: Many operators have very poorly trained staff (to save money). They don't know things like ticket restrictions and have a "guilty until proven guilty" approach as company policy Fares are made deliberately obscure to scam as much money from passengers as possible. Hence declaring some trains as "peak" where "off-peak" tickets are not valid. This is often wrong but leads to huge rows Financial rewards for persecuting passengers. with zero risk as now a management contract
Hmm. Are the ticket office closures going ahead? I'm a little behind the times, but it is sure going to make thjings much worse.
Meanwhile, while everyone's been appalled by the Letby case or following the football, the Post Office Board has written to the Business Select Committee saying that no, the Board members will not be repaying the bonuses they awarded themselves for complying with the Inquiry even though -
- they have not complied with the Inquiry's demands - the accounts they were responsible for were misleading - the bonuses were justified by false information contained in those accounts.
This case, the endless NHS and police scandals and much else are symptomatic of a country with public organizations which are functional only in a basic way because they are running on fuel in the tank - structures, systems, practices etc., - created by previous generations.
But those running them now don't know how to put fuel in the tank or maintain the car. Or even where they're supposed to be driving to.
But what they are mostly good at is nicking the valuable bits out of the car, causing accidents and running away from those accidents as fast as possible.
Lots of people employed by these organisations, especially at the top, seem to think they exist principally for the benefit of those inside them - not to serve any actual purpose or function for others. So reputation (untethered to any actual achievement) becomes more important than anything else. My heart sinks when I see those passive aggressive notices saying that staff have a right to do their jobs without being assaulted etc - not because I disagree with the sentiment (good manners to those providing a service to you should be a given) - but because it so often indicates an organisation which thinks that it is doing you - the customer, client, patient etc., - an enormous favour in bothering to deal with you at all.
I agree with all of this post, and this bit in particular.
I long ago abandoned any belief that those running public services were on my side.
No large organisation is on our side, public as well as private. Private just want to make huge profit and financial growth as easily as possible for their shareholders. Whether that's the handful of transnational corporations that manufacture "food" using cheap chemicals instead of actual food, energy companies or Costa coffee, they don't care about you. At least public services are somewhat accountable!
I'm assuming that by your qualifier of "large", you think that small (or medium?) sized organisations might be on the public's side.
What size would you you be thinking of?
Wondering whether somehow creating smaller organisations within larger organisations might be a way to improve the situation.
Realistically, no one in business is really "on our side". It's all about the money. Big companies certainly don't give a toss. A one man band probably gives a bit more of a toss as they're more accountable and the buck stops with them.
I've always been against the death penalty. I still am. But reading the victim impact statements on the Letby sentencing is severely challenging my long-held opinions. I was at a funeral of a baby that died at three months of natural causes a few weeks ago and it was absolutely gut-wrenching, terrible. The parents are my friends, they are utterly heartbroken, the grieving process is going to take a long time. It will last all their lives I expect.
Knowing what Letby has done, and the impact it has had on all those families, the dozens of people directly, badly, affected, for the rest of their lives, well it does make make me, for a few seconds, question my long-held beliefs. Lifelong incarceration almost seems too lenient.
"To take a life when a life has been taken, is not justice, it is revenge." - Desmond Tutu.
The death penalty is morally outrageous and vile. She should rot in jail for the rest of her life and think about the impact she has had. Death would be the easy way out.
If we could be 100% certain that the death penalty would only apply to those horrendously guilty, then I'd be OK with that level of revenge for crimes like this.
But we can't.
No manmade system is infallible. Life has risk. I say that a lot lately it seems, but its true - nothing can be perfect, we live in an imperfect world and people will always make mistakes.
So just as we have to accept that we can't prevent accidents or disease, we also have to accept we can't prevent miscarriages of justice.
And if miscarriages of justice can exist, then we can at least ensure that those who are victims of them aren't accidentally killed by the state in the mistaken belief they were guilty.
Forget Letby. Only a few days ago we were talking about the Andrew Malkinson case where he languished in prison for a crime he didn't commit. Compensation can't reward him for that time lost, but at least he's still alive. How many Malkinson's would be dead before they could see a false conviction overturned if we restored the death penalty?
And for that reason, and that reason alone, we must never under any circumstances ever restore the death penalty.
I agree with Mike that Trump has a less than 70% chance of the nomination. But the much better sell imo is for the WH. That's where the betting has it badly wrong. He should be triple the price he is.
Which other candidate for the nomination has a higher than 5% chance? DeSantis? Ramaswamy? Like, even if Trump was convicted and the GOP therefore said he couldn't be the nominee - I have no idea who they would pick because the party would be in open civil war. Part of how Trump keeps coming out on top in the GOP is that the party cannot face down the base it created, cannot agree on what they want in a leader, and cannot openly say what their policy agenda would be because it is too cruel for even their own voters to accept openly. Who else has the popularity for a coronation? No one! And if it comes down to the convention to replace him, well that could be anyone, even those who didn't run in the primary!
By lane, numbers-out-of-arse, not an offer to bet:
Christie, Pence, Haley and Scott are all below 5%.
DeSantis averages ~15%. Yes, he once rivalled Trump, but the indictments ended that (potentially in part because he defended Trump instead of putting the boot in there, giving his supporters permission to go back to Trump).
Who there can really push themselves out over Trump or if he gets canned by the RNC? No one, in my view.
It's August, there have been no debates, the voters aren't paying attention yet. One candidate has extremely high name recognition, and also they feel like he needs support. What the polling tells us is that the base don't hate Trump.That's an important data point, but it's not enough to call the race.
We also don't know who the voters are. The only way the anti-Trump candidates might win (absent a very lucky three-way split) is by turning out people who aren't being polled. But they might be able to do that.
Trump is a salutary lesson in the power of people with absolute bullet proof self-confidence, zero shame and the will to trample over dissent. Left to his own devices he will continue to steamroller anyone remotely more nuanced than him in a system (primaries) that favours candidates who look like winners, rather than those with good policies.
I know Johnson over here is pretty shameless and unrepentant, but several times now he's shown he is responsive to being tapped on the shoulder by the men in grey suits when the game looks like it's up. Trump was not, even with everything stacked against him. Not the slightest chink in the armour, and that's a key difference. The only people he blinked in front of were foreign leaders, and GOP members don't seem to worry about that. It's going to be down to the Democrats, the voters, and possibly the justice process, to defeat him.
Trump also blinked in front of himself.
Having left the gate open and the guard-dog locked up, it would have been trivially easy to rob the house. However, conducting an actual coup on Jan 6 would have involved violence and planning he clearly wasn't willing to engage in, preferring instead to hope that a show of force would create the pressure (or 'events') to deliver him the result he wanted.
But had he asked someone with experience in armed conflict to plan and direct the riot (or had a friend-of-a-friend been given the nod to contract someone like that), it would have been a simple task to either intimidate Congress into voting as desired, or to detain (or worse) enough members to ensure the vote went the right way, or both.
As for whether such a vote would be sustained under legal challenge, firstly there's the question of whether it'd even be justiciable, secondly the same or similar tactics could be applied to SCOTUS members, and thirdly it's arguable that the vote was (would have been) the vote and despite the conditions, it was constitutionally valid (particularly true if the absent members were dead rather than just detained).
But going down that road really would have been crossing the Rubicon and establishing a Putinesque dictatorship, and that was clearly beyond what he was willing to risk. Whether that's for lack of imagination or fear of the electric chair had it failed, or just a general squeamishness about authorising force in general (he did less in that regard globally than any president since perhaps Hoover) is open to question.
Meanwhile, while everyone's been appalled by the Letby case or following the football, the Post Office Board has written to the Business Select Committee saying that no, the Board members will not be repaying the bonuses they awarded themselves for complying with the Inquiry even though -
- they have not complied with the Inquiry's demands - the accounts they were responsible for were misleading - the bonuses were justified by false information contained in those accounts.
This case, the endless NHS and police scandals and much else are symptomatic of a country with public organizations which are functional only in a basic way because they are running on fuel in the tank - structures, systems, practices etc., - created by previous generations.
But those running them now don't know how to put fuel in the tank or maintain the car. Or even where they're supposed to be driving to.
But what they are mostly good at is nicking the valuable bits out of the car, causing accidents and running away from those accidents as fast as possible.
Lots of people employed by these organisations, especially at the top, seem to think they exist principally for the benefit of those inside them - not to serve any actual purpose or function for others. So reputation (untethered to any actual achievement) becomes more important than anything else. My heart sinks when I see those passive aggressive notices saying that staff have a right to do their jobs without being assaulted etc - not because I disagree with the sentiment (good manners to those providing a service to you should be a given) - but because it so often indicates an organisation which thinks that it is doing you - the customer, client, patient etc., - an enormous favour in bothering to deal with you at all.
I agree with all of this post, and this bit in particular.
I long ago abandoned any belief that those running public services were on my side.
No large organisation is on our side, public as well as private. Private just want to make huge profit and financial growth as easily as possible for their shareholders. Whether that's the handful of transnational corporations that manufacture "food" using cheap chemicals instead of actual food, energy companies or Costa coffee, they don't care about you. At least public services are somewhat accountable!
I'm assuming that by your qualifier of "large", you think that small (or medium?) sized organisations might be on the public's side.
What size would you you be thinking of?
Wondering whether somehow creating smaller organisations within larger organisations might be a way to improve the situation.
Realistically, no one in business is really "on our side". It's all about the money. Big companies certainly don't give a toss. A one man band probably gives a bit more of a toss as they're more accountable and the buck stops with them.
Also, certain sorts of corporate evil are much easier to do if there are several intermediaries between the decision and the person who has to make it happen. CS Lewis was onto something seventy years ago...
The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern.
I agree with Mike that Trump has a less than 70% chance of the nomination. But the much better sell imo is for the WH. That's where the betting has it badly wrong. He should be triple the price he is.
Which other candidate for the nomination has a higher than 5% chance? DeSantis? Ramaswamy? Like, even if Trump was convicted and the GOP therefore said he couldn't be the nominee - I have no idea who they would pick because the party would be in open civil war. Part of how Trump keeps coming out on top in the GOP is that the party cannot face down the base it created, cannot agree on what they want in a leader, and cannot openly say what their policy agenda would be because it is too cruel for even their own voters to accept openly. Who else has the popularity for a coronation? No one! And if it comes down to the convention to replace him, well that could be anyone, even those who didn't run in the primary!
By lane, numbers-out-of-arse, not an offer to bet:
Christie, Pence, Haley and Scott are all below 5%.
DeSantis averages ~15%. Yes, he once rivalled Trump, but the indictments ended that (potentially in part because he defended Trump instead of putting the boot in there, giving his supporters permission to go back to Trump).
Who there can really push themselves out over Trump or if he gets canned by the RNC? No one, in my view.
It's August, there have been no debates, the voters aren't paying attention yet. One candidate has extremely high name recognition, and also they feel like he needs support. What the polling tells us is that the base don't hate Trump.That's an important data point, but it's not enough to call the race.
We also don't know who the voters are. The only way the anti-Trump candidates might win (absent a very lucky three-way split) is by turning out people who aren't being polled. But they might be able to do that.
Trump is a salutary lesson in the power of people with absolute bullet proof self-confidence, zero shame and the will to trample over dissent. Left to his own devices he will continue to steamroller anyone remotely more nuanced than him in a system (primaries) that favours candidates who look like winners, rather than those with good policies.
I know Johnson over here is pretty shameless and unrepentant, but several times now he's shown he is responsive to being tapped on the shoulder by the men in grey suits when the game looks like it's up. Trump was not, even with everything stacked against him. Not the slightest chink in the armour, and that's a key difference. The only people he blinked in front of were foreign leaders, and GOP members don't seem to worry about that. It's going to be down to the Democrats, the voters, and possibly the justice process, to defeat him.
Trump also blinked in front of himself.
Having left the gate open and the guard-dog locked up, it would have been trivially easy to rob the house. However, conducting an actual coup on Jan 6 would have involved violence and planning he clearly wasn't willing to engage in, preferring instead to hope that a show of force would create the pressure (or 'events') to deliver him the result he wanted.
But had he asked someone with experience in armed conflict to plan and direct the riot (or had a friend-of-a-friend been given the nod to contract someone like that), it would have been a simple task to either intimidate Congress into voting as desired, or to detain (or worse) enough members to ensure the vote went the right way, or both.
As for whether such a vote would be sustained under legal challenge, firstly there's the question of whether it'd even be justiciable, secondly the same or similar tactics could be applied to SCOTUS members, and thirdly it's arguable that the vote was (would have been) the vote and despite the conditions, it was constitutionally valid (particularly true if the absent members were dead rather than just detained).
But going down that road really would have been crossing the Rubicon and establishing a Putinesque dictatorship, and that was clearly beyond what he was willing to risk. Whether that's for lack of imagination or fear of the electric chair had it failed, or just a general squeamishness about authorising force in general (he did less in that regard globally than any president since perhaps Hoover) is open to question.
Unless the armed forces and DC police leadership had been willing to be involved, which they weren't, then even the above would have failed
@Malmesbury Looks like Letby's supervisor, Alison Kelly has been promoted since she was in charge of her, now suspended nursing director at the Northern Care Alliance.
On the death penalty: this is precisely the kind of case where there might well be a miscarriage of justice. Complex, technical, reliance on expert advice.
I don't doubt the conviction but I can imagine how it could go wrong in similar cases.
I agree with Mike that Trump has a less than 70% chance of the nomination. But the much better sell imo is for the WH. That's where the betting has it badly wrong. He should be triple the price he is.
Which other candidate for the nomination has a higher than 5% chance? DeSantis? Ramaswamy? Like, even if Trump was convicted and the GOP therefore said he couldn't be the nominee - I have no idea who they would pick because the party would be in open civil war. Part of how Trump keeps coming out on top in the GOP is that the party cannot face down the base it created, cannot agree on what they want in a leader, and cannot openly say what their policy agenda would be because it is too cruel for even their own voters to accept openly. Who else has the popularity for a coronation? No one! And if it comes down to the convention to replace him, well that could be anyone, even those who didn't run in the primary!
By lane, numbers-out-of-arse, not an offer to bet:
Christie, Pence, Haley and Scott are all below 5%.
DeSantis averages ~15%. Yes, he once rivalled Trump, but the indictments ended that (potentially in part because he defended Trump instead of putting the boot in there, giving his supporters permission to go back to Trump).
Who there can really push themselves out over Trump or if he gets canned by the RNC? No one, in my view.
It's August, there have been no debates, the voters aren't paying attention yet. One candidate has extremely high name recognition, and also they feel like he needs support. What the polling tells us is that the base don't hate Trump.That's an important data point, but it's not enough to call the race.
We also don't know who the voters are. The only way the anti-Trump candidates might win (absent a very lucky three-way split) is by turning out people who aren't being polled. But they might be able to do that.
Trump is a salutary lesson in the power of people with absolute bullet proof self-confidence, zero shame and the will to trample over dissent. Left to his own devices he will continue to steamroller anyone remotely more nuanced than him in a system (primaries) that favours candidates who look like winners, rather than those with good policies.
I know Johnson over here is pretty shameless and unrepentant, but several times now he's shown he is responsive to being tapped on the shoulder by the men in grey suits when the game looks like it's up. Trump was not, even with everything stacked against him. Not the slightest chink in the armour, and that's a key difference. The only people he blinked in front of were foreign leaders, and GOP members don't seem to worry about that. It's going to be down to the Democrats, the voters, and possibly the justice process, to defeat him.
Trump also blinked in front of himself.
Having left the gate open and the guard-dog locked up, it would have been trivially easy to rob the house. However, conducting an actual coup on Jan 6 would have involved violence and planning he clearly wasn't willing to engage in, preferring instead to hope that a show of force would create the pressure (or 'events') to deliver him the result he wanted.
But had he asked someone with experience in armed conflict to plan and direct the riot (or had a friend-of-a-friend been given the nod to contract someone like that), it would have been a simple task to either intimidate Congress into voting as desired, or to detain (or worse) enough members to ensure the vote went the right way, or both.
As for whether such a vote would be sustained under legal challenge, firstly there's the question of whether it'd even be justiciable, secondly the same or similar tactics could be applied to SCOTUS members, and thirdly it's arguable that the vote was (would have been) the vote and despite the conditions, it was constitutionally valid (particularly true if the absent members were dead rather than just detained).
But going down that road really would have been crossing the Rubicon and establishing a Putinesque dictatorship, and that was clearly beyond what he was willing to risk. Whether that's for lack of imagination or fear of the electric chair had it failed, or just a general squeamishness about authorising force in general (he did less in that regard globally than any president since perhaps Hoover) is open to question.
Unless the armed forces and DC police leadership had been willing to be involved, which they weren't, then even the above would have failed
Re the armed forces, Trump was commander-in-chief. he could have ordered them to do nothing. Intervening then would have been mutinous and, arguably, a counter-coup (unless Pence and the cabinet could have invoked the 25th Amendment and Pence then ordered the army in - but a key part of the plan would have been to separate the cabinet and deny communications to avoid that possibility, or simply to kill Pence as without a VP, that provision becomes inoperable anyway).
The DC police would have been inadequate to deal with a properly planned coup, unless they were willing to countenance causing many deaths from the early stages.
I agree with Mike that Trump has a less than 70% chance of the nomination. But the much better sell imo is for the WH. That's where the betting has it badly wrong. He should be triple the price he is.
Which other candidate for the nomination has a higher than 5% chance? DeSantis? Ramaswamy? Like, even if Trump was convicted and the GOP therefore said he couldn't be the nominee - I have no idea who they would pick because the party would be in open civil war. Part of how Trump keeps coming out on top in the GOP is that the party cannot face down the base it created, cannot agree on what they want in a leader, and cannot openly say what their policy agenda would be because it is too cruel for even their own voters to accept openly. Who else has the popularity for a coronation? No one! And if it comes down to the convention to replace him, well that could be anyone, even those who didn't run in the primary!
By lane, numbers-out-of-arse, not an offer to bet:
Christie, Pence, Haley and Scott are all below 5%.
DeSantis averages ~15%. Yes, he once rivalled Trump, but the indictments ended that (potentially in part because he defended Trump instead of putting the boot in there, giving his supporters permission to go back to Trump).
Who there can really push themselves out over Trump or if he gets canned by the RNC? No one, in my view.
It's August, there have been no debates, the voters aren't paying attention yet. One candidate has extremely high name recognition, and also they feel like he needs support. What the polling tells us is that the base don't hate Trump.That's an important data point, but it's not enough to call the race.
We also don't know who the voters are. The only way the anti-Trump candidates might win (absent a very lucky three-way split) is by turning out people who aren't being polled. But they might be able to do that.
We do know who the voters will likely be; the small number of people who are signed up members of the GOP and (in some states) independents who change their voter ID to GOP. And the GOP membership are fully behind Trump. There is also no turn out game to play with them, it's a shrinking cohort. ~70% of the membership "think Republicans should stand behind Trump amid the investigations and indictments he’s facing" and "say Trump has not committed serious crimes". That would need to essentially half to guarantee that Trump wouldn't be the nominee.
Typically a primary has about 30 million voters. A general election is like 150 million. The Dem side will likely be uncontested, so there are 4x the typical electorate who could register GOP if they're not already if required and vote. Generally they don't and it's just settled by party enthusiasts, but also nobody's tried running for office while out on bail for multiple crimes after losing an election and pretending they won it, so who knows.
Some states will try to keep it in the family - eg Iowa GOP seems like they'll require you to be registered GOP months ahead to keep out late switchers - but most of them will at least allow a late change of registration, if you're not already registered.
The Democrat *presidential* primary will be (more-or-less) uncontested but remember that there are also primaries for all sorts of other offices and if you want to vote in those, you may well need to be a registered Democrat or at least not vote in the GOP primaries.
If the Conservative Party offered a vote on the death penalty or to leave the EHRC they would lose my vote for good. I have voted Tory in the past and may well do so again if Labour cock up (I am of the view that changes of government are healthy) but not if they support these two things. It would be morally outrageous.
the most obvious weapons the Ukrainians are lacking have been fighter jets and long range artillery. We've sent them the storm shadow and France has sent something similar but the US refuses to send ATACMS. The fact we are only now talking about sending fighter jets 18 months after the start of the full scale war is damning. They're obviously going to need them in the longer term so where was the planning?
Is it because the US want to keep Ukraine hanging by a thread and thus maximise their leverage? Do they worry about Russia doing so badly that they fear the internal destabilisation that might bring? Or do they want a protracted war so that Russia is weakened as much as possible? I really don't know.
It is interesting to see the dividing lines in Nato though. The UK/Dutch/Nordics/Baltics/Poles/Czechs seem to be the most belligerent.
There’s so much politics around this war in the US, that’s not the case almost anywhere else.
It starts with every shipment of arms being assigned a massive dollar value, that’s possibly the inflation-adjusted price of the now-obsolete weapons from several decades ago, and isn’t money actually being spent today, but allows opponents to suggest that this ‘money’ may better be spent domestically. The President saying “We are giving another $20bn to Ukraine” when there’s a massive domestic disaster in Hawaii, doesn’t help.
There’s also the running story of Hunter Biden and the very well paid job he had in Ukraine a few years ago, which is allowing Republicans to oppose military aid to Ukraine as a clear rebuke to Biden himself.
I suspect that the messaging would change under a different administration, but the actual result on the ground wouldn’t be too different. A Republican President would bring forward billions of dollars in defence spending to keep jobs in rural states, and casually announce a load of cheap disposals of old stuff to friendly NATO countries.
Nowhere else has such daily political dividing lines about this war, and it’s a little weird to watch their commentary on it. Basically the centrist position is to support the Ukranians, with both the anti-war left and the anti-spending right lined up on the other side.
ATACMS might actually be able to take out the Kerch bridge.
The 'far left' and 'far right' taking the same side, while the centre take the opposite, is not remotely unusual though. Its standard horseshoe theory.
The problem Ukraine and West have though is that currently an extreme is running for one of the mainstream parties.
Trump and DeSantis are no more to be trusted on Ukraine or Russia than Corbyn and McDonnell were.
For the sake of Ukraine and the whole of the West we have to hope they're not victorious.
That doesn't apply to the entire GOP, any more than it applied to all of Labour. If its the likes of Christie who win, just like if Starmer does, then the aid will continue. Under Trump/DeSantis though then all bets are off.
I think that the language used in the US will change considerably under a different administration, but the reality on the ground will continue to be pretty much the same as it is now, no matter who is elected.
That sounds like hopecasting and the future of Ukraine is too important for that.
Do you think the reality on the ground would have been the same in the UK had Corbyn won?
I think that the MIC in the US is more powerful than any president, and that they’ll find ways to continue what they do regardless of who’s nominally in charge.
Similar thinking from the permenant bureaucracy was very much in evidence between Jan 2017 and Jan 2021.
Now normally I’d say that was a bad thing, but in the case of Ukraine I’ll say it’s a good thing.
This is getting into "vote for Leopard's Eating Faces Party as they won't eat our face" territory.
Trump has opposed supporting Ukraine. Trump opposed giving aid to Ukraine while in office. Trump has a grudge against Zelensky as he wouldn't help him with the Hunter Biden issue. Trump supported Putin. Trump literally responded to the invasion of Ukraine by saying it was a "genius" move by Putin. Trump has been purging those who would stand up for the military establishment to surround himself with Yesmen.
To just assume that Ukraine, if it still needs our help by 2025, will get it from Trump when Trump has for years said the polar opposite and wants rid of the MIC establishment people whom he seems to think stood in the way of him keeping power last time ... Is to sacrifice Ukraine and its future.
It's not good enough.
Trump would just be isolationist but continue his trade war with China and the EU.
It is up to European powers and Turkey helped ideally by fellow NATO Canada to fund our militaries enough we don't always need to rely on the US to defend Europe, our own continent and that includes continuing to supply Ukraine v Putin.
We cannot always rely on the US electing Presidents who want to police the globe
And isolationist is a terrible thing, especially when it comes to the war in Ukraine.
We can not always rely on US electing Presidents who want to police the globe, but we should all hope that a President who wants to aide Ukraine to the best of America's abilities is in power at least until the end of this war. Which is not Trump, or DeSantis.
It might be other GOP candidates like Christie, if you want the GOP to win over the Democrats.
Yes but that is up to Americans to decide.
Remember at the end of the day it was the UK under Johnson and Poland who first supplied Zelensky with the weapons he needed to push back Putin, not the US even under Biden and not Paris or Berlin either.
We should take more responsibility for policing our own continent in Europe not rely on US voters not electing an isolationist president and Germany in particular should spend more on defence
Wrong.
The US & U.K. had been involved in training, arming and helping the Ukrainians since 2014. As were some of the neighbouring countries (Poland, Baltics and others)
Yet it was only the UK and Poland who stepped up weapons supplies in the weeks before Putin's invasion.
At the end of the day it is our responsibility to police our own continent, the US will likely sometimes elect isolationist Presidents and is more focused on containing China now longer term than Russia
It's worth noting that during the period 2014 (following Russia's annexation of Crimea) to 2020, France was, after the US, by far the biggest exporter of weapons to Ukraine.
I was reading an article in the Canary (waits for the boos to die down...) and it used a phrase I'd not seen before: "UK’s official establishment stenography club" for the media (shortened to "stenographers"). It's meant to give the impression that all the media do is write down what they are told. I think it's a brilliant phrase and I shall add it to my Bag Of Annoying Phrases. If you want to read the original it's here, although the antiWoke of you will wish to don leaded glass and rubber gauntlets first...
If the Conservative Party offered a vote on the death penalty or to leave the EHRC they would lose my vote for good. I have voted Tory in the past and may well do so again if Labour cock up (I am of the view that changes of government are healthy) but not if they support these two things. It would be morally outrageous.
I'm not sure, as a member of the Labour party, you should say that you could vote for the Tories in the future. Isn't this the kind of thing that gets people kicked out of Labour (@Rochdalepioneers)?
It’s expected that she will receive a whole-life tarrif, given the nature and number of the convictions.
She can't not receive a whole-life tariff. I can't think of any possible wriggle room that the judge has.
Aggravating factors. Multiple deaths Abuse of position of trust Extremely vulnerable victims
Mitigating factors None that I can think of.
The only mitigating factor I can think of is if she's crazy, and you kind of have to be to do this, but that's not been put before the court it seems.
How do you get to that conclusion. No psychological evidence offered by her defence - I doubt she's heading to Rampton, Ashworth or Broadmoor.
That was the point, you can't get to that conclusion, since there's no evidence put before the court to suggest that.
Ah yes we're in agreement. I don't think anyone is quite in their right mind at the time if they commit murder, but there's a large gap between that and it being mitigation to stay in a secure hospital rather than a prison. One for eminently qualified psychiatrists to ensure the correct division takes place.
I was reading an article in the Canary (waits for the boos to die down...) and it used a phrase I'd not seen before: "UK’s official establishment stenography club" for the media (shortened to "stenographers"). It's meant to give the impression that all the media do is write down what they are told. I think it's a brilliant phrase and I shall add it to my Bag Of Annoying Phrases. If you want to read the original it's here, although the antiWoke of you will wish to don leaded glass and rubber gauntlets first...
Didn't we get rid of stenographers years ago, possibly decades? You and the Canary might as well talk about abacuses for all anyone under 50 will understand.
If the Conservative Party offered a vote on the death penalty or to leave the EHRC they would lose my vote for good. I have voted Tory in the past and may well do so again if Labour cock up (I am of the view that changes of government are healthy) but not if they support these two things. It would be morally outrageous.
I'm not sure, as a member of the Labour party, you should say that you could vote for the Tories in the future. Isn't this the kind of thing that gets people kicked out of Labour (@Rochdalepioneers)?
Assuming I am still a member of the Labour Party. Which I may not be.
On the death penalty: this is precisely the kind of case where there might well be a miscarriage of justice. Complex, technical, reliance on expert advice.
I don't doubt the conviction but I can imagine how it could go wrong in similar cases.
Exactly what I was thinking. Remember @DavidL 's post a few days back about the problems of uncritical analysis of attendance records.
Also add as other factors to your first para: big moral panic and hysteria in the newspapers (though the judge will no doubt have done his best to eradicate that as an issue in this and other cases, it can potentially affect police, supporting agencies, and CPS).
One thing that would worry me very much - already does, it's hardly confined to the issue of capital punishment - is the decline in forensic scientific support in general.
I was reading an article in the Canary (waits for the boos to die down...) and it used a phrase I'd not seen before: "UK’s official establishment stenography club" for the media (shortened to "stenographers"). It's meant to give the impression that all the media do is write down what they are told. I think it's a brilliant phrase and I shall add it to my Bag Of Annoying Phrases. If you want to read the original it's here, although the antiWoke of you will wish to don leaded glass and rubber gauntlets first...
Didn't we get rid of stenographers years ago, possibly decades? You and the Canary might as well talk about abacuses for all anyone under 50 will understand.
Meanwhile, while everyone's been appalled by the Letby case or following the football, the Post Office Board has written to the Business Select Committee saying that no, the Board members will not be repaying the bonuses they awarded themselves for complying with the Inquiry even though -
- they have not complied with the Inquiry's demands - the accounts they were responsible for were misleading - the bonuses were justified by false information contained in those accounts.
This case, the endless NHS and police scandals and much else are symptomatic of a country with public organizations which are functional only in a basic way because they are running on fuel in the tank - structures, systems, practices etc., - created by previous generations.
But those running them now don't know how to put fuel in the tank or maintain the car. Or even where they're supposed to be driving to.
But what they are mostly good at is nicking the valuable bits out of the car, causing accidents and running away from those accidents as fast as possible.
Lots of people employed by these organisations, especially at the top, seem to think they exist principally for the benefit of those inside them - not to serve any actual purpose or function for others. So reputation (untethered to any actual achievement) becomes more important than anything else. My heart sinks when I see those passive aggressive notices saying that staff have a right to do their jobs without being assaulted etc - not because I disagree with the sentiment (good manners to those providing a service to you should be a given) - but because it so often indicates an organisation which thinks that it is doing you - the customer, client, patient etc., - an enormous favour in bothering to deal with you at all.
I agree with all of this post, and this bit in particular.
I long ago abandoned any belief that those running public services were on my side.
I disagree about the notices. They are there to help front line staff who are often the victims of both patient behaviour and the mismanagement of those higher up.
Even if they don't work, it's serves as a reminder that abusing staff is not acceptable behaviour.
Perhaps they should be paired with posters explaining what the formal complaints procedure is, and which senior manager is personally responsible for the care you are receiving?
I don't remember such notices being necessary in the past.
FWIW, both my wife and I have been the victims of aggressive behaviour by revenue collectors, who surrounded us and were very rude when arriving at Waterloo and unable to buy a ticket due to the guard's machine not working on board.
We didn't react aggressively but we certainly thought it was uncalled for, and I told them so.
PS Interesting question for some of us whether this is commercial behaviour (SWR) or inherited commercial (SE) or public sector (HMG policy on reducing subsidy, SE very recently nationalised).
Its a combination of things: Many operators have very poorly trained staff (to save money). They don't know things like ticket restrictions and have a "guilty until proven guilty" approach as company policy Fares are made deliberately obscure to scam as much money from passengers as possible. Hence declaring some trains as "peak" where "off-peak" tickets are not valid. This is often wrong but leads to huge rows Financial rewards for persecuting passengers. with zero risk as now a management contract
Hmm. Are the ticket office closures going ahead? I'm a little behind the times, but it is sure going to make thjings much worse.
Of course! The government want to kill the railways - it costs too much and gives ministers too much aggro. They can hide behind the private contractors despite all of them being DfT puppets.
The best outcome for the United States, and for the GOP, is for Trump to lose in an election, and lose big, whether that be in the primaries or in the general election. Of course Trump would still say it was a fix and he really won bigly, but a big, clear loss for him, and indeed for the likes of MTG in Congress, would be the best way of persuading people.
I think there’s a reasonable chance that that outcome will come to pass. I fail to see how Trump gains any votes compared to 2020, but there are plenty of reasons for him to lose votes.
I was reading an article in the Canary (waits for the boos to die down...) and it used a phrase I'd not seen before: "UK’s official establishment stenography club" for the media (shortened to "stenographers"). It's meant to give the impression that all the media do is write down what they are told. I think it's a brilliant phrase and I shall add it to my Bag Of Annoying Phrases. If you want to read the original it's here, although the antiWoke of you will wish to don leaded glass and rubber gauntlets first...
Didn't we get rid of stenographers years ago, possibly decades? You and the Canary might as well talk about abacuses for all anyone under 50 will understand.
Er, plenty of abacuses in primary schools. And there are stenographers in courts, so plenty on TV I assume.
Of course! The government want to kill the railways - it costs too much and gives ministers too much aggro. They can hide behind the private contractors despite all of them being DfT puppets.
I am so glad I get to use TfL services most of the time which whilst too expensive in my view, are actually decent
Within most of our lifetimes, we have had the death penalty for high treason.
And it was wrong then as it is now.
Perhaps. Oddly for such an emotive issue, I don't think I have passionate opinions either way. I wouldn't want a death sentence for Letby I don't think. Though not to be too much of a ratepayer about it, but I do have a slight resentment that we have to keep her for the rest of her life, which will probably cost more than putting her through Eton on a continual loop.
The best outcome for the United States, and for the GOP, is for Trump to lose in an election, and lose big, whether that be in the primaries or in the general election. Of course Trump would still say it was a fix and he really won bigly, but a big, clear loss for him, and indeed for the likes of MTG in Congress, would be the best way of persuading people.
I think there’s a reasonable chance that that outcome will come to pass. I fail to see how Trump gains any votes compared to 2020, but there are plenty of reasons for him to lose votes.
This post is a keeper. The hubris of the 2016 Clinton campaign waves hello.....
Edit to add: I don't disagree with the first paragraph, but I think its incredibly brave to call this given Biden's administration since 2020.
Meanwhile, while everyone's been appalled by the Letby case or following the football, the Post Office Board has written to the Business Select Committee saying that no, the Board members will not be repaying the bonuses they awarded themselves for complying with the Inquiry even though -
- they have not complied with the Inquiry's demands - the accounts they were responsible for were misleading - the bonuses were justified by false information contained in those accounts.
This case, the endless NHS and police scandals and much else are symptomatic of a country with public organizations which are functional only in a basic way because they are running on fuel in the tank - structures, systems, practices etc., - created by previous generations.
But those running them now don't know how to put fuel in the tank or maintain the car. Or even where they're supposed to be driving to.
But what they are mostly good at is nicking the valuable bits out of the car, causing accidents and running away from those accidents as fast as possible.
Lots of people employed by these organisations, especially at the top, seem to think they exist principally for the benefit of those inside them - not to serve any actual purpose or function for others. So reputation (untethered to any actual achievement) becomes more important than anything else. My heart sinks when I see those passive aggressive notices saying that staff have a right to do their jobs without being assaulted etc - not because I disagree with the sentiment (good manners to those providing a service to you should be a given) - but because it so often indicates an organisation which thinks that it is doing you - the customer, client, patient etc., - an enormous favour in bothering to deal with you at all.
I agree with all of this post, and this bit in particular.
I long ago abandoned any belief that those running public services were on my side.
I disagree about the notices. They are there to help front line staff who are often the victims of both patient behaviour and the mismanagement of those higher up.
Even if they don't work, it's serves as a reminder that abusing staff is not acceptable behaviour.
Perhaps they should be paired with posters explaining what the formal complaints procedure is, and which senior manager is personally responsible for the care you are receiving?
I don't remember such notices being necessary in the past.
FWIW, both my wife and I have been the victims of aggressive behaviour by revenue collectors, who surrounded us and were very rude when arriving at Waterloo and unable to buy a ticket due to the guard's machine not working on board.
We didn't react aggressively but we certainly thought it was uncalled for, and I told them so.
PS Interesting question for some of us whether this is commercial behaviour (SWR) or inherited commercial (SE) or public sector (HMG policy on reducing subsidy, SE very recently nationalised).
Its a combination of things: Many operators have very poorly trained staff (to save money). They don't know things like ticket restrictions and have a "guilty until proven guilty" approach as company policy Fares are made deliberately obscure to scam as much money from passengers as possible. Hence declaring some trains as "peak" where "off-peak" tickets are not valid. This is often wrong but leads to huge rows Financial rewards for persecuting passengers. with zero risk as now a management contract
Hmm. Are the ticket office closures going ahead? I'm a little behind the times, but it is sure going to make thjings much worse.
Of course! The government want to kill the railways - it costs too much and gives ministers too much aggro. They can hide behind the private contractors despite all of them being DfT puppets.
Getting more difficult as renationalisation proceeds, though.
Within most of our lifetimes, we have had the death penalty for high treason.
And it was wrong then as it is now.
Perhaps. Oddly for such an emotive issue, I don't think I have passionate opinions either way. I wouldn't want a death sentence for Letby I don't think. Though not to be too much of a ratepayer about it, but I do have a slight resentment that we have to keep her for the rest of her life, which will probably cost more than putting her through Eton on a continual loop.
The evidence suggests that the death penalty is far more expensive than prison.
It must never, ever be brought back. It is appalling.
I was reading an article in the Canary (waits for the boos to die down...) and it used a phrase I'd not seen before: "UK’s official establishment stenography club" for the media (shortened to "stenographers"). It's meant to give the impression that all the media do is write down what they are told. I think it's a brilliant phrase and I shall add it to my Bag Of Annoying Phrases. If you want to read the original it's here, although the antiWoke of you will wish to don leaded glass and rubber gauntlets first...
Didn't we get rid of stenographers years ago, possibly decades? You and the Canary might as well talk about abacuses for all anyone under 50 will understand.
Er, plenty of abacuses in primary schools. And there are stenographers in courts, so plenty on TV I assume.
First picture I received from our nursery was my daughter with an abacus. Before she'd even rolled
Of course! The government want to kill the railways - it costs too much and gives ministers too much aggro. They can hide behind the private contractors despite all of them being DfT puppets.
Getting more difficult as renationalisation proceeds, though.
SWR must be next, surely. @RochdalePioneers do you have any insight?
I agree with Mike that Trump has a less than 70% chance of the nomination. But the much better sell imo is for the WH. That's where the betting has it badly wrong. He should be triple the price he is.
Which other candidate for the nomination has a higher than 5% chance? DeSantis? Ramaswamy? Like, even if Trump was convicted and the GOP therefore said he couldn't be the nominee - I have no idea who they would pick because the party would be in open civil war. Part of how Trump keeps coming out on top in the GOP is that the party cannot face down the base it created, cannot agree on what they want in a leader, and cannot openly say what their policy agenda would be because it is too cruel for even their own voters to accept openly. Who else has the popularity for a coronation? No one! And if it comes down to the convention to replace him, well that could be anyone, even those who didn't run in the primary!
By lane, numbers-out-of-arse, not an offer to bet:
Christie, Pence, Haley and Scott are all below 5%.
DeSantis averages ~15%. Yes, he once rivalled Trump, but the indictments ended that (potentially in part because he defended Trump instead of putting the boot in there, giving his supporters permission to go back to Trump).
Who there can really push themselves out over Trump or if he gets canned by the RNC? No one, in my view.
It's August, there have been no debates, the voters aren't paying attention yet. One candidate has extremely high name recognition, and also they feel like he needs support. What the polling tells us is that the base don't hate Trump.That's an important data point, but it's not enough to call the race.
We also don't know who the voters are. The only way the anti-Trump candidates might win (absent a very lucky three-way split) is by turning out people who aren't being polled. But they might be able to do that.
Trump is a salutary lesson in the power of people with absolute bullet proof self-confidence, zero shame and the will to trample over dissent. Left to his own devices he will continue to steamroller anyone remotely more nuanced than him in a system (primaries) that favours candidates who look like winners, rather than those with good policies.
I know Johnson over here is pretty shameless and unrepentant, but several times now he's shown he is responsive to being tapped on the shoulder by the men in grey suits when the game looks like it's up. Trump was not, even with everything stacked against him. Not the slightest chink in the armour, and that's a key difference. The only people he blinked in front of were foreign leaders, and GOP members don't seem to worry about that. It's going to be down to the Democrats, the voters, and possibly the justice process, to defeat him.
Trump also blinked in front of himself.
Having left the gate open and the guard-dog locked up, it would have been trivially easy to rob the house. However, conducting an actual coup on Jan 6 would have involved violence and planning he clearly wasn't willing to engage in, preferring instead to hope that a show of force would create the pressure (or 'events') to deliver him the result he wanted.
But had he asked someone with experience in armed conflict to plan and direct the riot (or had a friend-of-a-friend been given the nod to contract someone like that), it would have been a simple task to either intimidate Congress into voting as desired, or to detain (or worse) enough members to ensure the vote went the right way, or both.
As for whether such a vote would be sustained under legal challenge, firstly there's the question of whether it'd even be justiciable, secondly the same or similar tactics could be applied to SCOTUS members, and thirdly it's arguable that the vote was (would have been) the vote and despite the conditions, it was constitutionally valid (particularly true if the absent members were dead rather than just detained).
But going down that road really would have been crossing the Rubicon and establishing a Putinesque dictatorship, and that was clearly beyond what he was willing to risk. Whether that's for lack of imagination or fear of the electric chair had it failed, or just a general squeamishness about authorising force in general (he did less in that regard globally than any president since perhaps Hoover) is open to question.
Let us understand this: Trump genuinely believed he had won the election. Engaging in violence suggests that he lost the election. Right up until the Jan 6th debacle the push was to get the correct result declared. They spent a lot of money on spurious legal challenge, a lot of time pulling together the rival slates of electors, and illegally put a lot of pressure on state officials in not just Georgia to declare the true result.
When Trump told the Georgia officials to "find" the votes needed to declare him the winner he didn't ask them to make these up. He won, by a much bigger margin. They just needed to see sense. And the coup plot for the 6th was simple - Pence recognises the "correct" slates of electors and Trump is declared the rightful winner. Or it goes to the House constitutionally and Trump is declared the rightful winner.
I was reading an article in the Canary (waits for the boos to die down...) and it used a phrase I'd not seen before: "UK’s official establishment stenography club" for the media (shortened to "stenographers"). It's meant to give the impression that all the media do is write down what they are told. I think it's a brilliant phrase and I shall add it to my Bag Of Annoying Phrases. If you want to read the original it's here, although the antiWoke of you will wish to don leaded glass and rubber gauntlets first...
Didn't we get rid of stenographers years ago, possibly decades? You and the Canary might as well talk about abacuses for all anyone under 50 will understand.
Good. The sentence isn't used enough IMHO, it should be the default for all murderers.
Its not used because it is a bloody nightmare for the Prison service. Someone on a whole life sentence has literally nothing to lose. They can bite, kick, stab whatever whenever the opportunity arises. Try creating a safe system of work around people like that.
My heart is for the death penalty. For both a sense of retribution and justice, and to avoid excessive long-term cost to the state. I think we dismiss the emotive desire to see ‘real justice’ done too easily.
But my head is 100% against it. Justice is fallible, and the notion of the state being able to kill is a hell of a rubicon.
Within most of our lifetimes, we have had the death penalty for high treason.
And it was wrong then as it is now.
Perhaps. Oddly for such an emotive issue, I don't think I have passionate opinions either way. I wouldn't want a death sentence for Letby I don't think. Though not to be too much of a ratepayer about it, but I do have a slight resentment that we have to keep her for the rest of her life, which will probably cost more than putting her through Eton on a continual loop.
The evidence suggests that the death penalty is far more expensive than prison.
It must never, ever be brought back. It is appalling.
I don't think it'd be appropriate in this case. Not because of anything Letby has or hasn't done - but to my mind the case needs to be beyond ALL doubt. This case is a long way beyond reasonable doubt but it doesn't cross the 'all' doubt threshold to my mind.
Of course! The government want to kill the railways - it costs too much and gives ministers too much aggro. They can hide behind the private contractors despite all of them being DfT puppets.
I am so glad I get to use TfL services most of the time which whilst too expensive in my view, are actually decent
He’s getting a lot of name recognition, after getting himself out there and talking to everyone who will have him. Also a lot of new media, hour-long interviews and podcasts.
Good. The sentence isn't used enough IMHO, it should be the default for all murderers.
I think we could only manage that if we had transportation, which I would bring back. I'd build prisons in Sub-Saharan Africa and send violent criminals there.
The best outcome for the United States, and for the GOP, is for Trump to lose in an election, and lose big, whether that be in the primaries or in the general election. Of course Trump would still say it was a fix and he really won bigly, but a big, clear loss for him, and indeed for the likes of MTG in Congress, would be the best way of persuading people.
I think there’s a reasonable chance that that outcome will come to pass. I fail to see how Trump gains any votes compared to 2020, but there are plenty of reasons for him to lose votes.
This post is a keeper. The hubris of the 2016 Clinton campaign waves hello.....
Edit to add: I don't disagree with the first paragraph, but I think its incredibly brave to call this given Biden's administration since 2020.
I’m happy to review this post after the election. I haven’t “called it” and I certainly don’t think that the Democrats should be taking anything for granted. As I said, I think there’s a reasonable chance Trump will lose big. There is also a chance that he loses by a narrow margin and a chance he wins.
Were I living in the US, I’d be happy with Biden’s administration: high employment, lower inflation than Europe, support for Ukraine, investment in infrastructure etc.
Of course! The government want to kill the railways - it costs too much and gives ministers too much aggro. They can hide behind the private contractors despite all of them being DfT puppets.
I am so glad I get to use TfL services most of the time which whilst too expensive in my view, are actually decent
And yet, no ticket offices at most TfL stations.
Personally that is something I am not hugely against going but I accept I am not in the audience of people it helps, e.g. the elderly (who I am often accused of hating) and disabled.
My heart is for the death penalty. For both a sense of retribution and justice, and to avoid excessive long-term cost to the state. I think we dismiss the emotive desire to see ‘real justice’ done too easily.
But my head is 100% against it. Justice is fallible, and the notion of the state being able to kill is a hell of a rubicon.
Especially when we've just had the Andrew Malkinson case where someone spent 17 years in jail for a crime they didn't commit.
Of course! The government want to kill the railways - it costs too much and gives ministers too much aggro. They can hide behind the private contractors despite all of them being DfT puppets.
Getting more difficult as renationalisation proceeds, though.
SWR must be next, surely. @RochdalePioneers do you have any insight?
South Western Railway is what's called a Direct Award. The former franchise is operated by private contractors operating under the direction of the Department for Transport.
The term "renationalisation" is meaningless. Most of the former franchises have been "renationalised". Which means they are run by OLR Rail Ltd - who are private contractors operating under the direction of the Department for Transport.
A few - SWR and Avanti as examples - are direct awards where the private company is not OLR Rail. But its all the same - the DfT make all of the decisions down to an absurdly macro level. At no point were any of the passenger rail operators ever privatised - a private contractor operating to a fixed-term contract granted by the state owner is not the state owner selling it to the private contractor. But even that pretence is long gone.
The DfT are now firmly in charge. Which is why the railways are such a catastrofuck. Meanwhile, TrenItalia have just announced plans to operate competing services against SNCF and SNCB and DB across Norther Europe. StateCo operations run commercially prove that you need to keep state ownership to make them financially viable and responsible to society, but run commercially to actually run services. The very last people we need to be running our trains are the Department for Transport.
Of course! The government want to kill the railways - it costs too much and gives ministers too much aggro. They can hide behind the private contractors despite all of them being DfT puppets.
I am so glad I get to use TfL services most of the time which whilst too expensive in my view, are actually decent
And yet, no ticket offices at most TfL stations.
Far simpler/more predictable, taking a short distance mass transit train in an area that is well known and where special fares are rare, and many users do the trip daily and/or with a pass.
Within most of our lifetimes, we have had the death penalty for high treason.
And it was wrong then as it is now.
Perhaps. Oddly for such an emotive issue, I don't think I have passionate opinions either way. I wouldn't want a death sentence for Letby I don't think. Though not to be too much of a ratepayer about it, but I do have a slight resentment that we have to keep her for the rest of her life, which will probably cost more than putting her through Eton on a continual loop.
The evidence suggests that the death penalty is far more expensive than prison.
It must never, ever be brought back. It is appalling.
Is that not in America, where people are on death row for decades? In the UK, I think it was quite brisk, you got an appeal, and if that was thrown out, the sentence was carried out. Of course, there were miscarriages of justice.
Of course! The government want to kill the railways - it costs too much and gives ministers too much aggro. They can hide behind the private contractors despite all of them being DfT puppets.
Getting more difficult as renationalisation proceeds, though.
SWR must be next, surely. @RochdalePioneers do you have any insight?
South Western Railway is what's called a Direct Award. The former franchise is operated by private contractors operating under the direction of the Department for Transport.
The term "renationalisation" is meaningless. Most of the former franchises have been "renationalised". Which means they are run by OLR Rail Ltd - who are private contractors operating under the direction of the Department for Transport.
A few - SWR and Avanti as examples - are direct awards where the private company is not OLR Rail. But its all the same - the DfT make all of the decisions down to an absurdly macro level. At no point were any of the passenger rail operators ever privatised - a private contractor operating to a fixed-term contract granted by the state owner is not the state owner selling it to the private contractor. But even that pretence is long gone.
The DfT are now firmly in charge. Which is why the railways are such a catastrofuck. Meanwhile, TrenItalia have just announced plans to operate competing services against SNCF and SNCB and DB across Norther Europe. StateCo operations run commercially prove that you need to keep state ownership to make them financially viable and responsible to society, but run commercially to actually run services. The very last people we need to be running our trains are the Department for Transport.
I am not sure what you mean by "private contractors operating under the direction of the DfT"...
DFT OLR Holdings Limited is wholly owned by the Secretary of State for Transport.
Of course! The government want to kill the railways - it costs too much and gives ministers too much aggro. They can hide behind the private contractors despite all of them being DfT puppets.
Getting more difficult as renationalisation proceeds, though.
SWR must be next, surely. @RochdalePioneers do you have any insight?
South Western Railway is what's called a Direct Award. The former franchise is operated by private contractors operating under the direction of the Department for Transport.
The term "renationalisation" is meaningless. Most of the former franchises have been "renationalised". Which means they are run by OLR Rail Ltd - who are private contractors operating under the direction of the Department for Transport.
A few - SWR and Avanti as examples - are direct awards where the private company is not OLR Rail. But its all the same - the DfT make all of the decisions down to an absurdly macro level. At no point were any of the passenger rail operators ever privatised - a private contractor operating to a fixed-term contract granted by the state owner is not the state owner selling it to the private contractor. But even that pretence is long gone.
The DfT are now firmly in charge. Which is why the railways are such a catastrofuck. Meanwhile, TrenItalia have just announced plans to operate competing services against SNCF and SNCB and DB across Norther Europe. StateCo operations run commercially prove that you need to keep state ownership to make them financially viable and responsible to society, but run commercially to actually run services. The very last people we need to be running our trains are the Department for Transport.
I wholeheartedly support a proper StateCo in this country operating in the way you allude to.
I hope that is what Labour will do but I am not totally confident.
I fail to see what paying the Hong Kong Metro operator is doing for the South Western mainline.
On the death penalty: this is precisely the kind of case where there might well be a miscarriage of justice. Complex, technical, reliance on expert advice.
I don't doubt the conviction but I can imagine how it could go wrong in similar cases.
Exactly what I was thinking. Remember @DavidL 's post a few days back about the problems of uncritical analysis of attendance records.
Also add as other factors to your first para: big moral panic and hysteria in the newspapers (though the judge will no doubt have done his best to eradicate that as an issue in this and other cases, it can potentially affect police, supporting agencies, and CPS).
One thing that would worry me very much - already does, it's hardly confined to the issue of capital punishment - is the decline in forensic scientific support in general.
Good post.
The one case of clearly wrongful conviction that I know much about is James Hanratty, for the 'A6' murder. There is little doubt that moral panic and press hysteria played a significant part in the outcome.
Within most of our lifetimes, we have had the death penalty for high treason.
And it was wrong then as it is now.
Perhaps. Oddly for such an emotive issue, I don't think I have passionate opinions either way. I wouldn't want a death sentence for Letby I don't think. Though not to be too much of a ratepayer about it, but I do have a slight resentment that we have to keep her for the rest of her life, which will probably cost more than putting her through Eton on a continual loop.
The evidence suggests that the death penalty is far more expensive than prison.
It must never, ever be brought back. It is appalling.
Is that not in America, where people are on death row for decades? In the UK, I think it was quite brisk, you got an appeal, and if that was thrown out, the sentence was carried out. Of course, there were miscarriages of justice.
Within most of our lifetimes, we have had the death penalty for high treason.
And it was wrong then as it is now.
Perhaps. Oddly for such an emotive issue, I don't think I have passionate opinions either way. I wouldn't want a death sentence for Letby I don't think. Though not to be too much of a ratepayer about it, but I do have a slight resentment that we have to keep her for the rest of her life, which will probably cost more than putting her through Eton on a continual loop.
The evidence suggests that the death penalty is far more expensive than prison.
It must never, ever be brought back. It is appalling.
Is that not in America, where people are on death row for decades? In the UK, I think it was quite brisk, you got an appeal, and if that was thrown out, the sentence was carried out. Of course, there were miscarriages of justice.
And that is why it must never come back. Killing the wrong people.
Of course! The government want to kill the railways - it costs too much and gives ministers too much aggro. They can hide behind the private contractors despite all of them being DfT puppets.
I am so glad I get to use TfL services most of the time which whilst too expensive in my view, are actually decent
And yet, no ticket offices at most TfL stations.
TfL are an interesting case. There is a significant financial penalty in buying a ticket vs tapping in and out. That penalty is not made clear, and certainly isn't something done by tourists. So ticket office or not, TfL charge an effective Tourist Tax selling tickets from all of the big stations...
The best outcome for the United States, and for the GOP, is for Trump to lose in an election, and lose big, whether that be in the primaries or in the general election. Of course Trump would still say it was a fix and he really won bigly, but a big, clear loss for him, and indeed for the likes of MTG in Congress, would be the best way of persuading people.
I think there’s a reasonable chance that that outcome will come to pass. I fail to see how Trump gains any votes compared to 2020, but there are plenty of reasons for him to lose votes.
This post is a keeper. The hubris of the 2016 Clinton campaign waves hello.....
Edit to add: I don't disagree with the first paragraph, but I think its incredibly brave to call this given Biden's administration since 2020.
I’m happy to review this post after the election. I haven’t “called it” and I certainly don’t think that the Democrats should be taking anything for granted. As I said, I think there’s a reasonable chance Trump will lose big. There is also a chance that he loses by a narrow margin and a chance he wins.
Were I living in the US, I’d be happy with Biden’s administration: high employment, lower inflation than Europe, support for Ukraine, investment in infrastructure etc.
On the death penalty: this is precisely the kind of case where there might well be a miscarriage of justice. Complex, technical, reliance on expert advice.
I don't doubt the conviction but I can imagine how it could go wrong in similar cases.
Exactly what I was thinking. Remember @DavidL 's post a few days back about the problems of uncritical analysis of attendance records.
Also add as other factors to your first para: big moral panic and hysteria in the newspapers (though the judge will no doubt have done his best to eradicate that as an issue in this and other cases, it can potentially affect police, supporting agencies, and CPS).
One thing that would worry me very much - already does, it's hardly confined to the issue of capital punishment - is the decline in forensic scientific support in general.
Good post.
The one case of clearly wrongful conviction that I know much about is James Hanratty, for the 'A6' murder. There is little doubt that moral panic and press hysteria played a significant part in the outcome.
Actually, the weight of evidence now is probably that Hanratty was guilty, following DNA analysis. However, at the time, it did seem a weak conviction.
I've always been against the death penalty. I still am. But reading the victim impact statements on the Letby sentencing is severely challenging my long-held opinions. I was at a funeral of a baby that died at three months of natural causes a few weeks ago and it was absolutely gut-wrenching, terrible. The parents are my friends, they are utterly heartbroken, the grieving process is going to take a long time. It will last all their lives I expect.
Knowing what Letby has done, and the impact it has had on all those families, the dozens of people directly, badly, affected, for the rest of their lives, well it does make make me, for a few seconds, question my long-held beliefs. Lifelong incarceration almost seems too lenient.
"To take a life when a life has been taken, is not justice, it is revenge." - Desmond Tutu.
The death penalty is morally outrageous and vile. She should rot in jail for the rest of her life and think about the impact she has had. Death would be the easy way out.
If we could be 100% certain that the death penalty would only apply to those horrendously guilty, then I'd be OK with that level of revenge for crimes like this.
But we can't.
No manmade system is infallible. Life has risk. I say that a lot lately it seems, but its true - nothing can be perfect, we live in an imperfect world and people will always make mistakes.
So just as we have to accept that we can't prevent accidents or disease, we also have to accept we can't prevent miscarriages of justice.
And if miscarriages of justice can exist, then we can at least ensure that those who are victims of them aren't accidentally killed by the state in the mistaken belief they were guilty.
Forget Letby. Only a few days ago we were talking about the Andrew Malkinson case where he languished in prison for a crime he didn't commit. Compensation can't reward him for that time lost, but at least he's still alive. How many Malkinson's would be dead before they could see a false conviction overturned if we restored the death penalty?
And for that reason, and that reason alone, we must never under any circumstances ever restore the death penalty.
Yep. Although my objection to the DP is wider than this. If the objection is *only* because you can't be sure of guilt it leaves the door open to implement it in certain cases. Cases where the crime is wicked enough and there is zero doubt about the culprit. I can think of some cases like that. You could envisage a new 'superguilty' (ie zero doubt) verdict for these, carrying the DP, and people whose sole objection to the DP is uncertainty of guilt would presumably be ok with this, whereas I wouldn't.
Good. The sentence isn't used enough IMHO, it should be the default for all murderers.
I think we could only manage that if we had transportation, which I would bring back. I'd build prisons in Sub-Saharan Africa and send violent criminals there.
Why should we dump our violent criminals on Africa? We wouldn’t take theirs after all.
I agree with Mike that Trump has a less than 70% chance of the nomination. But the much better sell imo is for the WH. That's where the betting has it badly wrong. He should be triple the price he is.
Which other candidate for the nomination has a higher than 5% chance? DeSantis? Ramaswamy? Like, even if Trump was convicted and the GOP therefore said he couldn't be the nominee - I have no idea who they would pick because the party would be in open civil war. Part of how Trump keeps coming out on top in the GOP is that the party cannot face down the base it created, cannot agree on what they want in a leader, and cannot openly say what their policy agenda would be because it is too cruel for even their own voters to accept openly. Who else has the popularity for a coronation? No one! And if it comes down to the convention to replace him, well that could be anyone, even those who didn't run in the primary!
By lane, numbers-out-of-arse, not an offer to bet:
Christie, Pence, Haley and Scott are all below 5%.
DeSantis averages ~15%. Yes, he once rivalled Trump, but the indictments ended that (potentially in part because he defended Trump instead of putting the boot in there, giving his supporters permission to go back to Trump).
Who there can really push themselves out over Trump or if he gets canned by the RNC? No one, in my view.
It's August, there have been no debates, the voters aren't paying attention yet. One candidate has extremely high name recognition, and also they feel like he needs support. What the polling tells us is that the base don't hate Trump.That's an important data point, but it's not enough to call the race.
We also don't know who the voters are. The only way the anti-Trump candidates might win (absent a very lucky three-way split) is by turning out people who aren't being polled. But they might be able to do that.
Trump is a salutary lesson in the power of people with absolute bullet proof self-confidence, zero shame and the will to trample over dissent. Left to his own devices he will continue to steamroller anyone remotely more nuanced than him in a system (primaries) that favours candidates who look like winners, rather than those with good policies.
I know Johnson over here is pretty shameless and unrepentant, but several times now he's shown he is responsive to being tapped on the shoulder by the men in grey suits when the game looks like it's up. Trump was not, even with everything stacked against him. Not the slightest chink in the armour, and that's a key difference. The only people he blinked in front of were foreign leaders, and GOP members don't seem to worry about that. It's going to be down to the Democrats, the voters, and possibly the justice process, to defeat him.
Trump also blinked in front of himself.
Having left the gate open and the guard-dog locked up, it would have been trivially easy to rob the house. However, conducting an actual coup on Jan 6 would have involved violence and planning he clearly wasn't willing to engage in, preferring instead to hope that a show of force would create the pressure (or 'events') to deliver him the result he wanted.
But had he asked someone with experience in armed conflict to plan and direct the riot (or had a friend-of-a-friend been given the nod to contract someone like that), it would have been a simple task to either intimidate Congress into voting as desired, or to detain (or worse) enough members to ensure the vote went the right way, or both.
As for whether such a vote would be sustained under legal challenge, firstly there's the question of whether it'd even be justiciable, secondly the same or similar tactics could be applied to SCOTUS members, and thirdly it's arguable that the vote was (would have been) the vote and despite the conditions, it was constitutionally valid (particularly true if the absent members were dead rather than just detained).
But going down that road really would have been crossing the Rubicon and establishing a Putinesque dictatorship, and that was clearly beyond what he was willing to risk. Whether that's for lack of imagination or fear of the electric chair had it failed, or just a general squeamishness about authorising force in general (he did less in that regard globally than any president since perhaps Hoover) is open to question.
Let us understand this: Trump genuinely believed he had won the election. Engaging in violence suggests that he lost the election. Right up until the Jan 6th debacle the push was to get the correct result declared. They spent a lot of money on spurious legal challenge, a lot of time pulling together the rival slates of electors, and illegally put a lot of pressure on state officials in not just Georgia to declare the true result.
When Trump told the Georgia officials to "find" the votes needed to declare him the winner he didn't ask them to make these up. He won, by a much bigger margin. They just needed to see sense. And the coup plot for the 6th was simple - Pence recognises the "correct" slates of electors and Trump is declared the rightful winner. Or it goes to the House constitutionally and Trump is declared the rightful winner.
It's a nice theory of the case. But it's flatly contradicted by the evidence showing Trump presented evidence in post election litigation that he knew to be false.
Of course! The government want to kill the railways - it costs too much and gives ministers too much aggro. They can hide behind the private contractors despite all of them being DfT puppets.
Getting more difficult as renationalisation proceeds, though.
SWR must be next, surely. @RochdalePioneers do you have any insight?
South Western Railway is what's called a Direct Award. The former franchise is operated by private contractors operating under the direction of the Department for Transport.
The term "renationalisation" is meaningless. Most of the former franchises have been "renationalised". Which means they are run by OLR Rail Ltd - who are private contractors operating under the direction of the Department for Transport.
A few - SWR and Avanti as examples - are direct awards where the private company is not OLR Rail. But its all the same - the DfT make all of the decisions down to an absurdly macro level. At no point were any of the passenger rail operators ever privatised - a private contractor operating to a fixed-term contract granted by the state owner is not the state owner selling it to the private contractor. But even that pretence is long gone.
The DfT are now firmly in charge. Which is why the railways are such a catastrofuck. Meanwhile, TrenItalia have just announced plans to operate competing services against SNCF and SNCB and DB across Norther Europe. StateCo operations run commercially prove that you need to keep state ownership to make them financially viable and responsible to society, but run commercially to actually run services. The very last people we need to be running our trains are the Department for Transport.
I am not sure what you mean by "private contractors operating under the direction of the DfT"...
DFT OLR Holdings Limited is wholly owned by the Secretary of State for Transport.
And who are they? The Holding Company is owned by the DfT. That HoldCo contracts operations out to another private sector consortium - Arup, SNC Lavalin Rail, and Ernst & Young.
On the death penalty: this is precisely the kind of case where there might well be a miscarriage of justice. Complex, technical, reliance on expert advice.
I don't doubt the conviction but I can imagine how it could go wrong in similar cases.
Exactly what I was thinking. Remember @DavidL 's post a few days back about the problems of uncritical analysis of attendance records.
Also add as other factors to your first para: big moral panic and hysteria in the newspapers (though the judge will no doubt have done his best to eradicate that as an issue in this and other cases, it can potentially affect police, supporting agencies, and CPS).
One thing that would worry me very much - already does, it's hardly confined to the issue of capital punishment - is the decline in forensic scientific support in general.
Good post.
The one case of clearly wrongful conviction that I know much about is James Hanratty, for the 'A6' murder. There is little doubt that moral panic and press hysteria played a significant part in the outcome.
Actually, the weight of evidence now is probably that Hanratty was guilty, following DNA analysis. However, at the time, it did seem a weak conviction.
I've always been against the death penalty. I still am. But reading the victim impact statements on the Letby sentencing is severely challenging my long-held opinions. I was at a funeral of a baby that died at three months of natural causes a few weeks ago and it was absolutely gut-wrenching, terrible. The parents are my friends, they are utterly heartbroken, the grieving process is going to take a long time. It will last all their lives I expect.
Knowing what Letby has done, and the impact it has had on all those families, the dozens of people directly, badly, affected, for the rest of their lives, well it does make make me, for a few seconds, question my long-held beliefs. Lifelong incarceration almost seems too lenient.
"To take a life when a life has been taken, is not justice, it is revenge." - Desmond Tutu.
The death penalty is morally outrageous and vile. She should rot in jail for the rest of her life and think about the impact she has had. Death would be the easy way out.
If we could be 100% certain that the death penalty would only apply to those horrendously guilty, then I'd be OK with that level of revenge for crimes like this.
But we can't.
No manmade system is infallible. Life has risk. I say that a lot lately it seems, but its true - nothing can be perfect, we live in an imperfect world and people will always make mistakes.
So just as we have to accept that we can't prevent accidents or disease, we also have to accept we can't prevent miscarriages of justice.
And if miscarriages of justice can exist, then we can at least ensure that those who are victims of them aren't accidentally killed by the state in the mistaken belief they were guilty.
Forget Letby. Only a few days ago we were talking about the Andrew Malkinson case where he languished in prison for a crime he didn't commit. Compensation can't reward him for that time lost, but at least he's still alive. How many Malkinson's would be dead before they could see a false conviction overturned if we restored the death penalty?
And for that reason, and that reason alone, we must never under any circumstances ever restore the death penalty.
Yep. Although my objection to the DP is wider than this. If the objection is *only* because you can't be sure of guilt it leaves the door open to implement it in certain cases. Cases where the crime is wicked enough and there is zero doubt about the culprit. I can think of some cases like that. You could envisage a new 'superguilty' (ie zero doubt) verdict for these, carrying the DP, and people whose sole objection to the DP is uncertainty of guilt would presumably be ok with this, whereas I wouldn't.
The 'practical' objection to that is that there's no clear dividing line between the superguilty and the normal-guilty, and where grey areas exist, injustices will occur (not to mention that some cases will look superguilty at the time and subsequently be found not to be).
As an aside, there is evidence from before its abolition that where the death penalty was 'in play' juries tended to convict to a higher level of certainty anyway - with the result that some were acquitted when they wouldn't otherwise have been, and had actually done the crime.
On the death penalty: this is precisely the kind of case where there might well be a miscarriage of justice. Complex, technical, reliance on expert advice.
I don't doubt the conviction but I can imagine how it could go wrong in similar cases.
Exactly what I was thinking. Remember @DavidL 's post a few days back about the problems of uncritical analysis of attendance records.
Also add as other factors to your first para: big moral panic and hysteria in the newspapers (though the judge will no doubt have done his best to eradicate that as an issue in this and other cases, it can potentially affect police, supporting agencies, and CPS).
One thing that would worry me very much - already does, it's hardly confined to the issue of capital punishment - is the decline in forensic scientific support in general.
Good post.
The one case of clearly wrongful conviction that I know much about is James Hanratty, for the 'A6' murder. There is little doubt that moral panic and press hysteria played a significant part in the outcome.
I have not been following the Letby case in detail but winced when I saw some of the reporting. Notably a (BBC, I think) report which showed a table of Nurses1, 2, 3 ... Letby ... 36 against shifts with untoward events/deaths, with X's marked in the correct locations, and a solid column for Letby. Yet that graphic had had most of the columns taken out - so one couldn't get a sense of how many other nurses there might have been who almost scored the same total.
No, I don’t think that’s characterising the case against her accurately. It omits several lines of evidence. There’s a BBC Panorama that goes through the evidence on iPlayer.
In particular, there was evidence for 2 deaths that the babies had been administered insulin, i.e. deliberately killed. This is different to older cases that were based on statistical interpretation of unusual deaths. Here, there was strong evidence that the babies had been murdered. That doesn’t tell you who did it, of course, but it does rule out that this was just an unlucky coincidence of deaths by natural causes. Letby was present in both cases.
There was evidence pertaining to her behaviour. In one case, a doctor saw her standing over a baby doing nothing while the baby’s oxygen levels were falling. At other times, she was observed paying a lot of attention to babies that she wasn’t assigned to. Various items of paperwork relating to the babies who had died were found under her bed.
The best outcome for the United States, and for the GOP, is for Trump to lose in an election, and lose big, whether that be in the primaries or in the general election. Of course Trump would still say it was a fix and he really won bigly, but a big, clear loss for him, and indeed for the likes of MTG in Congress, would be the best way of persuading people.
I think there’s a reasonable chance that that outcome will come to pass. I fail to see how Trump gains any votes compared to 2020, but there are plenty of reasons for him to lose votes.
This post is a keeper. The hubris of the 2016 Clinton campaign waves hello.....
Edit to add: I don't disagree with the first paragraph, but I think its incredibly brave to call this given Biden's administration since 2020.
I’m happy to review this post after the election. I haven’t “called it” and I certainly don’t think that the Democrats should be taking anything for granted. As I said, I think there’s a reasonable chance Trump will lose big. There is also a chance that he loses by a narrow margin and a chance he wins.
Were I living in the US, I’d be happy with Biden’s administration: high employment, lower inflation than Europe, support for Ukraine, investment in infrastructure etc.
The John Oliver bit about desparately wanting him to run is a classic, as is the Bill Maher audience reaction to Ann Coulter’s suggestion that Trump should be the favourite for the nomination.
Of course! The government want to kill the railways - it costs too much and gives ministers too much aggro. They can hide behind the private contractors despite all of them being DfT puppets.
Getting more difficult as renationalisation proceeds, though.
SWR must be next, surely. @RochdalePioneers do you have any insight?
South Western Railway is what's called a Direct Award. The former franchise is operated by private contractors operating under the direction of the Department for Transport.
The term "renationalisation" is meaningless. Most of the former franchises have been "renationalised". Which means they are run by OLR Rail Ltd - who are private contractors operating under the direction of the Department for Transport.
A few - SWR and Avanti as examples - are direct awards where the private company is not OLR Rail. But its all the same - the DfT make all of the decisions down to an absurdly macro level. At no point were any of the passenger rail operators ever privatised - a private contractor operating to a fixed-term contract granted by the state owner is not the state owner selling it to the private contractor. But even that pretence is long gone.
The DfT are now firmly in charge. Which is why the railways are such a catastrofuck. Meanwhile, TrenItalia have just announced plans to operate competing services against SNCF and SNCB and DB across Norther Europe. StateCo operations run commercially prove that you need to keep state ownership to make them financially viable and responsible to society, but run commercially to actually run services. The very last people we need to be running our trains are the Department for Transport.
I am not sure what you mean by "private contractors operating under the direction of the DfT"...
DFT OLR Holdings Limited is wholly owned by the Secretary of State for Transport.
And who are they? The Holding Company is owned by the DfT. That HoldCo contracts operations out to another private sector consortium - Arup, SNC Lavalin Rail, and Ernst & Young.
Well "OLR Rail Ltd" doesn't exist, so I looked at the next closest thing!
There are a few of these about. To be honest, that amounts to "there have been miscarriages of justice in the past, therefore, this may be one too."
I might be wrong, but I think it is beyond doubt that there was someone murdering and attempting to murder the babies. That, obviously doesn't prove Letby's guilt, but it means the relevance of those other cases is much diminished.
Of course! The government want to kill the railways - it costs too much and gives ministers too much aggro. They can hide behind the private contractors despite all of them being DfT puppets.
I am so glad I get to use TfL services most of the time which whilst too expensive in my view, are actually decent
And yet, no ticket offices at most TfL stations.
TfL are an interesting case. There is a significant financial penalty in buying a ticket vs tapping in and out. That penalty is not made clear, and certainly isn't something done by tourists. So ticket office or not, TfL charge an effective Tourist Tax selling tickets from all of the big stations...
More of an Idiot Tax – there are signs and announcements everywhere that you don't need to buy a ticket, just tap your card, watch or phone. Anyone who subsequently insists on queueing up to buy a stupid piece of paper when the whole network is contactless is somewhat dim, IMO.
Within most of our lifetimes, we have had the death penalty for high treason.
And it was wrong then as it is now.
Perhaps. Oddly for such an emotive issue, I don't think I have passionate opinions either way. I wouldn't want a death sentence for Letby I don't think. Though not to be too much of a ratepayer about it, but I do have a slight resentment that we have to keep her for the rest of her life, which will probably cost more than putting her through Eton on a continual loop.
The evidence suggests that the death penalty is far more expensive than prison.
It must never, ever be brought back. It is appalling.
Is that not in America, where people are on death row for decades? In the UK, I think it was quite brisk, you got an appeal, and if that was thrown out, the sentence was carried out. Of course, there were miscarriages of justice.
Indeed. As one of our (at the time) most respected judges put it, in regard to the Birmingham Six: ..If the six men win, it will mean that the police are guilty of perjury, that they are guilty of violence and threats, that the confessions were invented and improperly admitted in evidence and the convictions were erroneous... This is such an appalling vista that every sensible person in the land would say that it cannot be right that these actions should go any further...
"We shouldn't have all these campaigns to get the Birmingham Six released if they'd been hanged. They'd have been forgotten and the whole community would have been satisfied." ..
Of course! The government want to kill the railways - it costs too much and gives ministers too much aggro. They can hide behind the private contractors despite all of them being DfT puppets.
Getting more difficult as renationalisation proceeds, though.
SWR must be next, surely. @RochdalePioneers do you have any insight?
South Western Railway is what's called a Direct Award. The former franchise is operated by private contractors operating under the direction of the Department for Transport.
The term "renationalisation" is meaningless. Most of the former franchises have been "renationalised". Which means they are run by OLR Rail Ltd - who are private contractors operating under the direction of the Department for Transport.
A few - SWR and Avanti as examples - are direct awards where the private company is not OLR Rail. But its all the same - the DfT make all of the decisions down to an absurdly macro level. At no point were any of the passenger rail operators ever privatised - a private contractor operating to a fixed-term contract granted by the state owner is not the state owner selling it to the private contractor. But even that pretence is long gone.
The DfT are now firmly in charge. Which is why the railways are such a catastrofuck. Meanwhile, TrenItalia have just announced plans to operate competing services against SNCF and SNCB and DB across Norther Europe. StateCo operations run commercially prove that you need to keep state ownership to make them financially viable and responsible to society, but run commercially to actually run services. The very last people we need to be running our trains are the Department for Transport.
I am not sure what you mean by "private contractors operating under the direction of the DfT"...
DFT OLR Holdings Limited is wholly owned by the Secretary of State for Transport.
And who are they? The Holding Company is owned by the DfT. That HoldCo contracts operations out to another private sector consortium - Arup, SNC Lavalin Rail, and Ernst & Young.
Well "OLR Rail Ltd" doesn't exist, so I looked at the next closest thing!
Apologies - they only refer to the HoldCo these days.
Point is that the DfT run everything via contractors. Whether the board member of the operator is from SNC-Lavalin or First or Arriva doesn't matter much practically speaking.
Of course! The government want to kill the railways - it costs too much and gives ministers too much aggro. They can hide behind the private contractors despite all of them being DfT puppets.
I am so glad I get to use TfL services most of the time which whilst too expensive in my view, are actually decent
And yet, no ticket offices at most TfL stations.
TfL are an interesting case. There is a significant financial penalty in buying a ticket vs tapping in and out. That penalty is not made clear, and certainly isn't something done by tourists. So ticket office or not, TfL charge an effective Tourist Tax selling tickets from all of the big stations...
More of an Idiot Tax – there are signs and announcements everywhere that you don't need to buy a ticket, just tap your card, watch or phone. Anyone who subsequently insists on queueing up to buy a stupid piece of paper when the whole network is contactless is somewhat dim, IMO.
What if you are a non-UK person and your bank charges £lots in foreign transaction fees?
In extension to the whole life order that's present in this case, I'd suggest an additional hardship would be "life without contact". Simply her meals would be hatched through to her, she'd never leave her cell and would never speak to anyone again.
On the death penalty: this is precisely the kind of case where there might well be a miscarriage of justice. Complex, technical, reliance on expert advice.
I don't doubt the conviction but I can imagine how it could go wrong in similar cases.
Exactly what I was thinking. Remember @DavidL 's post a few days back about the problems of uncritical analysis of attendance records.
Also add as other factors to your first para: big moral panic and hysteria in the newspapers (though the judge will no doubt have done his best to eradicate that as an issue in this and other cases, it can potentially affect police, supporting agencies, and CPS).
One thing that would worry me very much - already does, it's hardly confined to the issue of capital punishment - is the decline in forensic scientific support in general.
Good post.
The one case of clearly wrongful conviction that I know much about is James Hanratty, for the 'A6' murder. There is little doubt that moral panic and press hysteria played a significant part in the outcome.
I have not been following the Letby case in detail but winced when I saw some of the reporting. Notably a (BBC, I think) report which showed a table of Nurses1, 2, 3 ... Letby ... 36 against shifts with untoward events/deaths, with X's marked in the correct locations, and a solid column for Letby. Yet that graphic had had most of the columns taken out - so one couldn't get a sense of how many other nurses there might have been who almost scored the same total.
You can see the sheet online. It lists 25 events and 38 nurses. Letby was present at all 25. The next highest count is 7.
Franchising has failed – the last time I checked 5-6 franchises has been renationalised because the moronic privateers who were running them ran them into the ground.
Renationalise what's left, and start afresh.
A single brand, a single arse to kick, a la TfL but for the whole nation.
Of course! The government want to kill the railways - it costs too much and gives ministers too much aggro. They can hide behind the private contractors despite all of them being DfT puppets.
I am so glad I get to use TfL services most of the time which whilst too expensive in my view, are actually decent
And yet, no ticket offices at most TfL stations.
TfL are an interesting case. There is a significant financial penalty in buying a ticket vs tapping in and out. That penalty is not made clear, and certainly isn't something done by tourists. So ticket office or not, TfL charge an effective Tourist Tax selling tickets from all of the big stations...
More of an Idiot Tax – there are signs and announcements everywhere that you don't need to buy a ticket, just tap your card, watch or phone. Anyone who subsequently insists on queueing up to buy a stupid piece of paper when the whole network is contactless is somewhat dim, IMO.
What if you are a non-UK person and your bank charges £lots in foreign transaction fees?
Or elderly, or a child, or a person with learning difficulties…
I agree with Mike that Trump has a less than 70% chance of the nomination. But the much better sell imo is for the WH. That's where the betting has it badly wrong. He should be triple the price he is.
Which other candidate for the nomination has a higher than 5% chance? DeSantis? Ramaswamy? Like, even if Trump was convicted and the GOP therefore said he couldn't be the nominee - I have no idea who they would pick because the party would be in open civil war. Part of how Trump keeps coming out on top in the GOP is that the party cannot face down the base it created, cannot agree on what they want in a leader, and cannot openly say what their policy agenda would be because it is too cruel for even their own voters to accept openly. Who else has the popularity for a coronation? No one! And if it comes down to the convention to replace him, well that could be anyone, even those who didn't run in the primary!
By lane, numbers-out-of-arse, not an offer to bet:
Christie, Pence, Haley and Scott are all below 5%.
DeSantis averages ~15%. Yes, he once rivalled Trump, but the indictments ended that (potentially in part because he defended Trump instead of putting the boot in there, giving his supporters permission to go back to Trump).
Who there can really push themselves out over Trump or if he gets canned by the RNC? No one, in my view.
It's August, there have been no debates, the voters aren't paying attention yet. One candidate has extremely high name recognition, and also they feel like he needs support. What the polling tells us is that the base don't hate Trump.That's an important data point, but it's not enough to call the race.
We also don't know who the voters are. The only way the anti-Trump candidates might win (absent a very lucky three-way split) is by turning out people who aren't being polled. But they might be able to do that.
Trump is a salutary lesson in the power of people with absolute bullet proof self-confidence, zero shame and the will to trample over dissent. Left to his own devices he will continue to steamroller anyone remotely more nuanced than him in a system (primaries) that favours candidates who look like winners, rather than those with good policies.
I know Johnson over here is pretty shameless and unrepentant, but several times now he's shown he is responsive to being tapped on the shoulder by the men in grey suits when the game looks like it's up. Trump was not, even with everything stacked against him. Not the slightest chink in the armour, and that's a key difference. The only people he blinked in front of were foreign leaders, and GOP members don't seem to worry about that. It's going to be down to the Democrats, the voters, and possibly the justice process, to defeat him.
Trump also blinked in front of himself.
Having left the gate open and the guard-dog locked up, it would have been trivially easy to rob the house. However, conducting an actual coup on Jan 6 would have involved violence and planning he clearly wasn't willing to engage in, preferring instead to hope that a show of force would create the pressure (or 'events') to deliver him the result he wanted.
But had he asked someone with experience in armed conflict to plan and direct the riot (or had a friend-of-a-friend been given the nod to contract someone like that), it would have been a simple task to either intimidate Congress into voting as desired, or to detain (or worse) enough members to ensure the vote went the right way, or both.
As for whether such a vote would be sustained under legal challenge, firstly there's the question of whether it'd even be justiciable, secondly the same or similar tactics could be applied to SCOTUS members, and thirdly it's arguable that the vote was (would have been) the vote and despite the conditions, it was constitutionally valid (particularly true if the absent members were dead rather than just detained).
But going down that road really would have been crossing the Rubicon and establishing a Putinesque dictatorship, and that was clearly beyond what he was willing to risk. Whether that's for lack of imagination or fear of the electric chair had it failed, or just a general squeamishness about authorising force in general (he did less in that regard globally than any president since perhaps Hoover) is open to question.
Let us understand this: Trump genuinely believed he had won the election. Engaging in violence suggests that he lost the election. Right up until the Jan 6th debacle the push was to get the correct result declared. They spent a lot of money on spurious legal challenge, a lot of time pulling together the rival slates of electors, and illegally put a lot of pressure on state officials in not just Georgia to declare the true result.
When Trump told the Georgia officials to "find" the votes needed to declare him the winner he didn't ask them to make these up. He won, by a much bigger margin. They just needed to see sense. And the coup plot for the 6th was simple - Pence recognises the "correct" slates of electors and Trump is declared the rightful winner. Or it goes to the House constitutionally and Trump is declared the rightful winner.
And yet he did engage in violence. He assembled a mob, incited it, stood back the normal security arrangements and protection, and failed to call in the national guard even after the mob had invaded the Capitol (having chanted to kill Pence along the way there).
Whether Trump genuinely believed he won or not - and enough is on record to prove that Trump intended to declare victory *whatever the result* - he should have known that Congress, left to itself, would endorse the Biden votes.
Besides, he could easily have rationalised that if violence was necessary to enforce the 'rightful' election outcome, then it was justified on that basis alone.
No, I don’t think that’s characterising the case against her accurately. It omits several lines of evidence. There’s a BBC Panorama that goes through the evidence on iPlayer.
In particular, there was evidence for 2 deaths that the babies had been administered insulin, i.e. deliberately killed. This is different to older cases that were based on statistical interpretation of unusual deaths. Here, there was strong evidence that the babies had been murdered. That doesn’t tell you who did it, of course, but it does rule out that this was just an unlucky coincidence of deaths by natural causes. Letby was present in both cases.
There was evidence pertaining to her behaviour. In one case, a doctor saw her standing over a baby doing nothing while the baby’s oxygen levels were falling. At other times, she was observed paying a lot of attention to babies that she wasn’t assigned to. Various items of paperwork relating to the babies who had died were found under her bed.
Sure, cross check different kinds of evidence. That makes a stronger case.
But be careful about paperwork. Could be explained precisely because the babies had died and she was in trouble and wanted to secure some evidence for herself.
When I was working, I did very occasionally take home a copy of a document if I though I might need it to secure my interests - in one case concerning a work related injury, and in another where a colleague had complained about me and my line manager had handled it very badly and I wanted an accurate record of the meeting in question in case ti went pear shaped. Trivial, sure, and for anything more serious, I'd have gone to the union and lawyered up, but not everyone is so rational
He’s getting a lot of name recognition, after getting himself out there and talking to everyone who will have him. Also a lot of new media, hour-long interviews and podcasts.
Of course! The government want to kill the railways - it costs too much and gives ministers too much aggro. They can hide behind the private contractors despite all of them being DfT puppets.
I am so glad I get to use TfL services most of the time which whilst too expensive in my view, are actually decent
And yet, no ticket offices at most TfL stations.
TfL are an interesting case. There is a significant financial penalty in buying a ticket vs tapping in and out. That penalty is not made clear, and certainly isn't something done by tourists. So ticket office or not, TfL charge an effective Tourist Tax selling tickets from all of the big stations...
More of an Idiot Tax – there are signs and announcements everywhere that you don't need to buy a ticket, just tap your card, watch or phone. Anyone who subsequently insists on queueing up to buy a stupid piece of paper when the whole network is contactless is somewhat dim, IMO.
What if you are a non-UK person and your bank charges £lots in foreign transaction fees?
How are they funding the rest of their trip? And are the fees meaningfully more than the premium for paper tix anyway?
Of course! The government want to kill the railways - it costs too much and gives ministers too much aggro. They can hide behind the private contractors despite all of them being DfT puppets.
I am so glad I get to use TfL services most of the time which whilst too expensive in my view, are actually decent
And yet, no ticket offices at most TfL stations.
TfL are an interesting case. There is a significant financial penalty in buying a ticket vs tapping in and out. That penalty is not made clear, and certainly isn't something done by tourists. So ticket office or not, TfL charge an effective Tourist Tax selling tickets from all of the big stations...
More of an Idiot Tax – there are signs and announcements everywhere that you don't need to buy a ticket, just tap your card, watch or phone. Anyone who subsequently insists on queueing up to buy a stupid piece of paper when the whole network is contactless is somewhat dim, IMO.
What if you are a non-UK person and your bank charges £lots in foreign transaction fees?
Or elderly, or a child, or a person with learning difficulties…
All of these groups can and do use contactless. Next.
Of course! The government want to kill the railways - it costs too much and gives ministers too much aggro. They can hide behind the private contractors despite all of them being DfT puppets.
I am so glad I get to use TfL services most of the time which whilst too expensive in my view, are actually decent
And yet, no ticket offices at most TfL stations.
TfL are an interesting case. There is a significant financial penalty in buying a ticket vs tapping in and out. That penalty is not made clear, and certainly isn't something done by tourists. So ticket office or not, TfL charge an effective Tourist Tax selling tickets from all of the big stations...
More of an Idiot Tax – there are signs and announcements everywhere that you don't need to buy a ticket, just tap your card, watch or phone. Anyone who subsequently insists on queueing up to buy a stupid piece of paper when the whole network is contactless is somewhat dim, IMO.
What if you are a non-UK person and your bank charges £lots in foreign transaction fees?
Or elderly, or a child, or a person with learning difficulties…
Or simply not familiar with TfL. I had real trouble with my Oyster card, and very nearly overpaid massively by accident - it was only because I had a local with me that I didn't.
Comments
Some states will try to keep it in the family - eg Iowa GOP seems like they'll require you to be registered GOP months ahead to keep out late switchers - but most of them will at least allow a late change of registration, if you're not already registered.
Many operators have very poorly trained staff (to save money). They don't know things like ticket restrictions and have a "guilty until proven guilty" approach as company policy
Fares are made deliberately obscure to scam as much money from passengers as possible. Hence declaring some trains as "peak" where "off-peak" tickets are not valid. This is often wrong but leads to huge rows
Financial rewards for persecuting passengers. with zero risk as now a management contract
He thanks Stalin for murdering priests for being priests, because as a result:
“we have so many Russian martyrs to whom we can pray"
https://twitter.com/visegrad24/status/1692499045267177927
But we can't.
No manmade system is infallible. Life has risk. I say that a lot lately it seems, but its true - nothing can be perfect, we live in an imperfect world and people will always make mistakes.
So just as we have to accept that we can't prevent accidents or disease, we also have to accept we can't prevent miscarriages of justice.
And if miscarriages of justice can exist, then we can at least ensure that those who are victims of them aren't accidentally killed by the state in the mistaken belief they were guilty.
Forget Letby. Only a few days ago we were talking about the Andrew Malkinson case where he languished in prison for a crime he didn't commit. Compensation can't reward him for that time lost, but at least he's still alive. How many Malkinson's would be dead before they could see a false conviction overturned if we restored the death penalty?
And for that reason, and that reason alone, we must never under any circumstances ever restore the death penalty.
Having left the gate open and the guard-dog locked up, it would have been trivially easy to rob the house. However, conducting an actual coup on Jan 6 would have involved violence and planning he clearly wasn't willing to engage in, preferring instead to hope that a show of force would create the pressure (or 'events') to deliver him the result he wanted.
But had he asked someone with experience in armed conflict to plan and direct the riot (or had a friend-of-a-friend been given the nod to contract someone like that), it would have been a simple task to either intimidate Congress into voting as desired, or to detain (or worse) enough members to ensure the vote went the right way, or both.
As for whether such a vote would be sustained under legal challenge, firstly there's the question of whether it'd even be justiciable, secondly the same or similar tactics could be applied to SCOTUS members, and thirdly it's arguable that the vote was (would have been) the vote and despite the conditions, it was constitutionally valid (particularly true if the absent members were dead rather than just detained).
But going down that road really would have been crossing the Rubicon and establishing a Putinesque dictatorship, and that was clearly beyond what he was willing to risk. Whether that's for lack of imagination or fear of the electric chair had it failed, or just a general squeamishness about authorising force in general (he did less in that regard globally than any president since perhaps Hoover) is open to question.
Multiple deaths
Abuse of position of trust
Extremely vulnerable victims
Mitigating factors
None that I can think of.
The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-66569258
I don't doubt the conviction but I can imagine how it could go wrong in similar cases.
The DC police would have been inadequate to deal with a properly planned coup, unless they were willing to countenance causing many deaths from the early stages.
How must the families, many of whom have sat through ten months of trial and seven or eight years of grief, be dealing with this now?
https://www.nzz.ch/international/ukraine-krise-was-der-westen-kiew-an-waffen-geliefert-hat-ld.1666637
Also add as other factors to your first para: big moral panic and hysteria in the newspapers (though the judge will no doubt have done his best to eradicate that as an issue in this and other cases, it can potentially affect police, supporting agencies, and CPS).
One thing that would worry me very much - already does, it's hardly confined to the issue of capital punishment - is the decline in forensic scientific support in general.
I think there’s a reasonable chance that that outcome will come to pass. I fail to see how Trump gains any votes compared to 2020, but there are plenty of reasons for him to lose votes.
Edit to add: I don't disagree with the first paragraph, but I think its incredibly brave to call this given Biden's administration since 2020.
Just reading this and wondering whether it's characterizing the case against her accurately:
https://old.reddit.com/r/scienceLucyLetby/comments/15w5mvx/analysis_of_letby_case_particular_focus_on/
It must never, ever be brought back. It is appalling.
When Trump told the Georgia officials to "find" the votes needed to declare him the winner he didn't ask them to make these up. He won, by a much bigger margin. They just needed to see sense. And the coup plot for the 6th was simple - Pence recognises the "correct" slates of electors and Trump is declared the rightful winner. Or it goes to the House constitutionally and Trump is declared the rightful winner.
But my head is 100% against it. Justice is fallible, and the notion of the state being able to kill is a hell of a rubicon.
Were I living in the US, I’d be happy with Biden’s administration: high employment, lower inflation than Europe, support for Ukraine, investment in infrastructure etc.
The term "renationalisation" is meaningless. Most of the former franchises have been "renationalised". Which means they are run by OLR Rail Ltd - who are private contractors operating under the direction of the Department for Transport.
A few - SWR and Avanti as examples - are direct awards where the private company is not OLR Rail. But its all the same - the DfT make all of the decisions down to an absurdly macro level. At no point were any of the passenger rail operators ever privatised - a private contractor operating to a fixed-term contract granted by the state owner is not the state owner selling it to the private contractor. But even that pretence is long gone.
The DfT are now firmly in charge. Which is why the railways are such a catastrofuck. Meanwhile, TrenItalia have just announced plans to operate competing services against SNCF and SNCB and DB across Norther Europe. StateCo operations run commercially prove that you need to keep state ownership to make them financially viable and responsible to society, but run commercially to actually run services. The very last people we need to be running our trains are the Department for Transport.
Compare the complexity elsewhere.
DFT OLR Holdings Limited is wholly owned by the Secretary of State for Transport.
I hope that is what Labour will do but I am not totally confident.
I fail to see what paying the Hong Kong Metro operator is doing for the South Western mainline.
The one case of clearly wrongful conviction that I know much about is James Hanratty, for the 'A6' murder. There is little doubt that moral panic and press hysteria played a significant part in the outcome.
Of course him actually being President wasn't.
But it's flatly contradicted by the evidence showing Trump presented evidence in post election litigation that he knew to be false.
But that doesn't invalidate the general point.
As an aside, there is evidence from before its abolition that where the death penalty was 'in play' juries tended to convict to a higher level of certainty anyway - with the result that some were acquitted when they wouldn't otherwise have been, and had actually done the crime.
In particular, there was evidence for 2 deaths that the babies had been administered insulin, i.e. deliberately killed. This is different to older cases that were based on statistical interpretation of unusual deaths. Here, there was strong evidence that the babies had been murdered. That doesn’t tell you who did it, of course, but it does rule out that this was just an unlucky coincidence of deaths by natural causes. Letby was present in both cases.
There was evidence pertaining to her behaviour. In one case, a doctor saw her standing over a baby doing nothing while the baby’s oxygen levels were falling. At other times, she was observed paying a lot of attention to babies that she wasn’t assigned to. Various items of paperwork relating to the babies who had died were found under her bed.
I might be wrong, but I think it is beyond doubt that there was someone murdering and attempting to murder the babies. That, obviously doesn't prove Letby's guilt, but it means the relevance of those other cases is much diminished.
As one of our (at the time) most respected judges put it, in regard to the Birmingham Six:
..If the six men win, it will mean that the police are guilty of perjury, that they are guilty of violence and threats, that the confessions were invented and improperly admitted in evidence and the convictions were erroneous... This is such an appalling vista that every sensible person in the land would say that it cannot be right that these actions should go any further...
"We shouldn't have all these campaigns to get the Birmingham Six released if they'd been hanged. They'd have been forgotten and the whole community would have been satisfied." ..
Point is that the DfT run everything via contractors. Whether the board member of the operator is from SNC-Lavalin or First or Arriva doesn't matter much practically speaking.
Franchising has failed – the last time I checked 5-6 franchises has been renationalised because the moronic privateers who were running them ran them into the ground.
Renationalise what's left, and start afresh.
A single brand, a single arse to kick, a la TfL but for the whole nation.
Whether Trump genuinely believed he won or not - and enough is on record to prove that Trump intended to declare victory *whatever the result* - he should have known that Congress, left to itself, would endorse the Biden votes.
Besides, he could easily have rationalised that if violence was necessary to enforce the 'rightful' election outcome, then it was justified on that basis alone.
But be careful about paperwork. Could be explained precisely because the babies had died and she was in trouble and wanted to secure some evidence for herself.
When I was working, I did very occasionally take home a copy of a document if I though I might need it to secure my interests - in one case concerning a work related injury, and in another where a colleague had complained about me and my line manager had handled it very badly and I wanted an accurate record of the meeting in question in case ti went pear shaped. Trivial, sure, and for anything more serious, I'd have gone to the union and lawyered up, but not everyone is so rational