BBC Today referred this morning to "X, formerly known as Twitter". It was a strange moment. Until that point I think most of us just continued thinking of it as Twitter with a silly new logo.
It's a bit like those country and city renamings. The most recent, which still hasn't caught on beyond diplomatic circles, being Turkiye. Though Twitter-X is a bit more in the Saigon-Ho Chi Minh City league.
I suspect "formerly known as Twitter" may end up being their effective name, like "the artist formerly known as Prince".
The payment for ex-MPs who lose their seats is going to be doubled from 2 months to 4 months.
And now its going to apply to MPs who voluntarily step down, not just those who lose their seats too.
What absolute grift.
I can see the issue with people who step down. But otherwise, MP is already a pretty unappealing career in terms of responsibility, job security and statistical likelihood of being murdered or injured by a member of the public, so a payoff of 4 months after losing your job with no notice period doesn't seem at all excessive to me. Most private sector jobs at similar mid-management pay levels pay between 3 and 6 months severance.
Why do infrastructure projects cost so many multiples more here than they do in any European country? Examples of road and rail projects given where the relative costs are astronomical.
Yes I get the "NIMBY tax" point they make. Some will say "our island is congested" - but we cost almost double the costs in Japan... Surely a lot of this is the Spiv tax. We pay a lot more than everyone else because fuck you. We don't have StateCo infrastructure companies like France so we get reamed by consortia who have a 47x markup on items as revenue earners. So HS2 costs 8x the cost per mile of the most recent LGV in France.
For all of the public vs private sector arguments, it is telling that countries where it is all done in the public sector have a lot more infrastructure than we do and at a lower cost.
The idea that it’s cheaper to get the private sector to do things rather than the “inefficient” public sector is one of the great myths of our era.
HS2 is being designed and managed at a high level by the public sector, and built by the private sector. The £1.5bn A14 Cambridge to Huntingdon improvement scheme, and was finished early (in part) despite Covid and more or less on budget. It too was designed and managed by the public sector at a high level, and built by the private sector.
There are many reasons why these projects can come in over budget and late; but decisions made early on in the project, and at a high level, can make a massive difference. As one example, who takes on risk for overruns, and how much do you set aside for such overruns?
The vast majority of large projects have both public and private involvement; partly because it is impossible to do anything large *without* governmental intervention at some level. And that's good; but it's easy for one side or the other to throw blame at the other side.
A very significant cost of HS2 relates to the contract. The government wants the consortium to be on the hook for decades for all kinds of unlikely scenarios. That has pushed the design into being built to withstand a 2012-style cataclysm with the costs for that as you might expect.
Had we built a high speed rail line at a spec and legal exposure that isn't insane, the cost would be a lot less.
Another example is the Great Western electrification fiasco. We had lost the industry knowledge to do such projects post-privatisation and had to start largely from scratch. So we ended up with ugly over-engineered masts supporting vastly overweight catenary which required very deep footers.
The cost of course was insane, hence having long sections of route where they did the drilling for the footers and bought the vastly over-engineered masts only for the DfT to scrap the scheme and literally scrap the metalwork. Worse is that there is still one point on the route where the catenary wire has to limbo under a bridge which wasn't raised and then over a level crossing that wasn't bridged. A nice 110mph restriction for no reason than crap design.
Putting it simply, we are egregiously shit at these projects. We spend stupid amounts of cash to get crapola infrastructure.
Another issue is Government continually changing the specs of projects. Euston HS2 station has more than doubled in cost from £2.4 billion to £4.8 billion largely because the Government kept changing the plans.
For HS2 as a whole the simple truth is the original project was massively under costed because that was the only way to get approval.
Bart likes to blame NIMBYism for these things because that is his pet obsession but that is rarely the reason. Crossrail was £4 billion over budget and 3 years late in part because of design and execution flaws in signalling and safety testing.
NIMBYism isn't the reason projects cost so much in this country. Poor planning and management, a lot of it due to short termism and changing priorities resulting from changing political climates which developers want to be insulated against financially play a massive part especially when so many people see some of these projects as costly and unnecessary white elephants.
The President of Guyana is now demanding slavery reparations. From the descendants of European Slave Traders. Fair enough, I am not a descendant of slavers.
IS there any specific reason why this is such a hot topic now. There have been several stories about it in the press in the last few days. Is there a commemoration of slavery taking place, or a concerted effort by reparations lobbyists ?
My family and I also deserve reparations for all the crimes the Empire committed in India and Pakistan.
I will accept £35 million and a knighthood (GCMG) to correct the damage caused to my family.
Oi. The Welsh have been oppressed and robbed for far longer. We demand $475 billion each, plus all Welsh people to be inducted into the order of the Garter, and Jacob Rees-Mogg to be sent to Cardiff to re-enact the fate of Cersei Lannister under the High Sparrow.
Actually, scrub that last one, I don't think the people of Cardiff should have to look at his naked body.
They may be out shopping for toast racks and need a comparator.
The payment for ex-MPs who lose their seats is going to be doubled from 2 months to 4 months.
And now its going to apply to MPs who voluntarily step down, not just those who lose their seats too.
What absolute grift.
I can see the issue with people who step down. But otherwise, MP is already a pretty unappealing career in terms of responsibility, job security and statistical likelihood of being murdered or injured by a member of the public, so a payoff of 4 months after losing your job with no notice period doesn't seem at all excessive to me. Most private sector jobs at similar mid-management pay levels pay between 3 and 6 months severance.
And at least it reduces one incentive for Nadine to cling on.
The payment for ex-MPs who lose their seats is going to be doubled from 2 months to 4 months.
And now its going to apply to MPs who voluntarily step down, not just those who lose their seats too.
What absolute grift.
For MPs who get voted out I can almost accept it. Sort of like redundancy. MPs stepping down should get nowt. Do the ones who have to stand down due to being crooks get the bung?
The payment for ex-MPs who lose their seats is going to be doubled from 2 months to 4 months.
And now its going to apply to MPs who voluntarily step down, not just those who lose their seats too.
What absolute grift.
I can see the issue with people who step down. But otherwise, MP is already a pretty unappealing career in terms of responsibility, job security and statistical likelihood of being murdered or injured by a member of the public, so a payoff of 4 months after losing your job with no notice period doesn't seem at all excessive to me. Most private sector jobs at similar mid-management pay levels pay between 3 and 6 months severance.
Most full time private sector jobs at similar level pay much less than being a part time MP does.
MP is a pretty appealing career earning more than 97% of the British public even at entry level without Ministerial responsibilities. That's why Mad Nads is in no hurry to step down without another sinecure, she wouldn't be worth that much in the real world.
Why do infrastructure projects cost so many multiples more here than they do in any European country? Examples of road and rail projects given where the relative costs are astronomical.
Yes I get the "NIMBY tax" point they make. Some will say "our island is congested" - but we cost almost double the costs in Japan... Surely a lot of this is the Spiv tax. We pay a lot more than everyone else because fuck you. We don't have StateCo infrastructure companies like France so we get reamed by consortia who have a 47x markup on items as revenue earners. So HS2 costs 8x the cost per mile of the most recent LGV in France.
For all of the public vs private sector arguments, it is telling that countries where it is all done in the public sector have a lot more infrastructure than we do and at a lower cost.
The idea that it’s cheaper to get the private sector to do things rather than the “inefficient” public sector is one of the great myths of our era.
HS2 is being designed and managed at a high level by the public sector, and built by the private sector. The £1.5bn A14 Cambridge to Huntingdon improvement scheme, and was finished early (in part) despite Covid and more or less on budget. It too was designed and managed by the public sector at a high level, and built by the private sector.
There are many reasons why these projects can come in over budget and late; but decisions made early on in the project, and at a high level, can make a massive difference. As one example, who takes on risk for overruns, and how much do you set aside for such overruns?
The vast majority of large projects have both public and private involvement; partly because it is impossible to do anything large *without* governmental intervention at some level. And that's good; but it's easy for one side or the other to throw blame at the other side.
A very significant cost of HS2 relates to the contract. The government wants the consortium to be on the hook for decades for all kinds of unlikely scenarios. That has pushed the design into being built to withstand a 2012-style cataclysm with the costs for that as you might expect.
Had we built a high speed rail line at a spec and legal exposure that isn't insane, the cost would be a lot less.
Another example is the Great Western electrification fiasco. We had lost the industry knowledge to do such projects post-privatisation and had to start largely from scratch. So we ended up with ugly over-engineered masts supporting vastly overweight catenary which required very deep footers.
The cost of course was insane, hence having long sections of route where they did the drilling for the footers and bought the vastly over-engineered masts only for the DfT to scrap the scheme and literally scrap the metalwork. Worse is that there is still one point on the route where the catenary wire has to limbo under a bridge which wasn't raised and then over a level crossing that wasn't bridged. A nice 110mph restriction for no reason than crap design.
Putting it simply, we are egregiously shit at these projects. We spend stupid amounts of cash to get crapola infrastructure.
I generally agree with that; but as the Cambridge to Huntingdon project shows, we can do it well. There are dozens of large infrastructure projects going on at any time, and most don't have massive problems. We notice the ones that do.
I'd also point out the reason we had lost industry knowledge of railway electrification was utterly down to the Brown and Blair governments, who only electrified a few miles of new route in 13 years (Crewe to Kidsgrove). Compared to virtually continuous electrification projects in the 1980s and 1990s.
The GWML electrification mess had many causes; from Dft mismanagement to Network Rail's reliance on untested technology. Thankfully they appear to have learnt many lessons for newer projects.
On the A14, the screw up is that its the A14. Built to the new Expressway format connecting one motorway to another, we've ended up with a blue gap. Was built efficiently but we still can't plan for shit.
On electrification, the issue we had for a long time was the contracts. You say down to Blair and Brown, and they were definitely in office. But the infrastructure was Failtrack who bankrupted themselves by failing to spend enough on preventative maintenance. The franchises wouldn't do electrification at their own cost as most were on 7 year contracts. Labour should have scrapped the whole franchise system but decided they had bigger things to do.
Even after the network and increasingly the franchises were brought under DfT control we still didn't do it, despite having both a rapidly-ageing fleet of diseasal units and a fleet of newer electric units not being used. Because variance in the contract is Bad News for the DfT.
The reason given by the CCRC for not proceeding is very strange. The comment was that there was "no certainty" that the other DNA found on the victim's clothing was "crime specific".
That makes it sound as though they were asking the wrong question entirely. Certainty that someone else's DNA was crime-specific would have proved that Malkinson was certainly innocent (given that there was only one assailant). Obviously, reasonable doubt of guilt is the correct criterion.
Depending on what they discovered, that conclusion might be reasonable. I think the bar is set quite high for a CCRC referral. ...
The criterion is just that "the Commission consider that there is a real possibility that the conviction, verdict, finding or sentence would not be upheld were the reference to be made ..." https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1995/35/section/13
The point I'm making is that standard of proof of guilt is "beyond reasonable doubt", so new evidence raising reasonable doubt should result in the appeal being upheld. But the CCRC comment makes it sound as they were dismissing the new evidence because it didn't provide certainty of innocence.
Isn't it reversed after a conviction? You don't have the presumption of guilt any more, so you have to prove innocence?
Not sure about the details of the provisions in England but in Scotland the test applied is has there been a miscarriage of justice which is very different from has something gone wrong?
It is therefore not enough to show 1 strand of evidence has become suspect or even wrong if there is other compelling evidence indicating guilt. I don’t know enough about the case to comment but it is likely that the CCRC took that view, at least initially.
Sadly not but it may improve their chances of holding their seats in the north east near Aberdeen.
Its all in play - it depends how other factors play out. Supporting the oil and gas industry feels like an obvious thing to do. I keep having people trying to school me online about actually how much of the revenue goes into bigcorp pockets and how actualy we'll export much of the oil we drill actually. Yes I know, but as the world transitions away from oil why can't we make money selling whats left of ours rather than spending money buying from someone else?
Problem for the Tories is that being pro-oil is also them being anti farming and fishing and people and business and renewables. They have that one thing right for the local economy and everything else wrong for the local economy. So the question for Lickspittle Duguid etc is will people put king oil over everything else? Because whilst I agree with him on that he is wrong on every other subject.
If Dolittle is the answer then Scotland is truly F**ked and people in North East are thicker than a bag of mince.
Do you actually like anybody, Malc? (Other than Mrs G and Alex Salmond, of course.)
Ydoethur, don't be a silly boy , it is politician's and that arsehole Foreskin that I don't like. There are a few exceptions as you say , I liked Ken Clarke, Lord Tonypandy, Betty Boothroyd , Harold Wilson and many others from the days when honest people were in politics not just to fill their own pockets.
Honest Georgie Thomas? Not a statement I've ever heard down in these parts.
Sadly not but it may improve their chances of holding their seats in the north east near Aberdeen.
Its all in play - it depends how other factors play out. Supporting the oil and gas industry feels like an obvious thing to do. I keep having people trying to school me online about actually how much of the revenue goes into bigcorp pockets and how actualy we'll export much of the oil we drill actually. Yes I know, but as the world transitions away from oil why can't we make money selling whats left of ours rather than spending money buying from someone else?
Problem for the Tories is that being pro-oil is also them being anti farming and fishing and people and business and renewables. They have that one thing right for the local economy and everything else wrong for the local economy. So the question for Lickspittle Duguid etc is will people put king oil over everything else? Because whilst I agree with him on that he is wrong on every other subject.
If Dolittle is the answer then Scotland is truly F**ked and people in North East are thicker than a bag of mince.
Do you actually like anybody, Malc? (Other than Mrs G and Alex Salmond, of course.)
Ydoethur, don't be a silly boy , it is politician's and that arsehole Foreskin that I don't like. There are a few exceptions as you say , I liked Ken Clarke, Lord Tonypandy, Betty Boothroyd , Harold Wilson and many others from the days when honest people were in politics not just to fill their own pockets.
Honest Georgie Thomas? Not a statement I've ever heard down in these parts.
Why do infrastructure projects cost so many multiples more here than they do in any European country? Examples of road and rail projects given where the relative costs are astronomical.
Yes I get the "NIMBY tax" point they make. Some will say "our island is congested" - but we cost almost double the costs in Japan... Surely a lot of this is the Spiv tax. We pay a lot more than everyone else because fuck you. We don't have StateCo infrastructure companies like France so we get reamed by consortia who have a 47x markup on items as revenue earners. So HS2 costs 8x the cost per mile of the most recent LGV in France.
For all of the public vs private sector arguments, it is telling that countries where it is all done in the public sector have a lot more infrastructure than we do and at a lower cost.
The idea that it’s cheaper to get the private sector to do things rather than the “inefficient” public sector is one of the great myths of our era.
HS2 is being designed and managed at a high level by the public sector, and built by the private sector. The £1.5bn A14 Cambridge to Huntingdon improvement scheme, and was finished early (in part) despite Covid and more or less on budget. It too was designed and managed by the public sector at a high level, and built by the private sector.
There are many reasons why these projects can come in over budget and late; but decisions made early on in the project, and at a high level, can make a massive difference. As one example, who takes on risk for overruns, and how much do you set aside for such overruns?
The vast majority of large projects have both public and private involvement; partly because it is impossible to do anything large *without* governmental intervention at some level. And that's good; but it's easy for one side or the other to throw blame at the other side.
A very significant cost of HS2 relates to the contract. The government wants the consortium to be on the hook for decades for all kinds of unlikely scenarios. That has pushed the design into being built to withstand a 2012-style cataclysm with the costs for that as you might expect.
Had we built a high speed rail line at a spec and legal exposure that isn't insane, the cost would be a lot less.
Another example is the Great Western electrification fiasco. We had lost the industry knowledge to do such projects post-privatisation and had to start largely from scratch. So we ended up with ugly over-engineered masts supporting vastly overweight catenary which required very deep footers.
The cost of course was insane, hence having long sections of route where they did the drilling for the footers and bought the vastly over-engineered masts only for the DfT to scrap the scheme and literally scrap the metalwork. Worse is that there is still one point on the route where the catenary wire has to limbo under a bridge which wasn't raised and then over a level crossing that wasn't bridged. A nice 110mph restriction for no reason than crap design.
Putting it simply, we are egregiously shit at these projects. We spend stupid amounts of cash to get crapola infrastructure.
Another issue is Government continually changing the specs of projects. Euston HS2 station has more than doubled in cost from £2.4 billion to £4.8 billion largely because the Government kept changing the plans.
For HS2 as a whole the simple truth is the original project was massively under costed because that was the only way to get approval.
Bart likes to blame NIMBYism for these things because that is his pet obsession but that is rarely the reason. Crossrail was £4 billion over budget and 3 years late in part because of design and execution flaws in signalling and safety testing.
NIMBYism isn't the reason projects cost so much in this country. Poor planning and management, a lot of it due to short termism and changing priorities resulting from changing political climates which developers want to be insulated against financially play a massive part especially when so many people see some of these projects as costly and unnecessary white elephants.
This seems to be true in multiple areas of large scale investment including notoriously defence contracting, but I think we all know intuitively from our home renovation projects or from watching Grand Designs that the surest way to multiply the cost of a project is to keep changing the spec.
I've noticed in business in recent years a fashion for that awful word "agility", which too often seems to mean tinkering with plans on the slightest whim. Any time I hear a new strategy is intended to deliver stable long term results I chuckle because I know in 6 months time there will be a new new strategy along to displace the old new one.
The payment for ex-MPs who lose their seats is going to be doubled from 2 months to 4 months.
And now its going to apply to MPs who voluntarily step down, not just those who lose their seats too.
What absolute grift.
For MPs who get voted out I can almost accept it. Sort of like redundancy. MPs stepping down should get nowt. Do the ones who have to stand down due to being crooks get the bung?
Stepping down? It's like resigning. What redundo?
Standing down as a result opf petition = being sacked for not doing the job. Zero hope of redundo, I'd say.
The President of Guyana is now demanding slavery reparations. From the descendants of European Slave Traders. Fair enough, I am not a descendant of slavers.
IS there any specific reason why this is such a hot topic now. There have been several stories about it in the press in the last few days. Is there a commemoration of slavery taking place, or a concerted effort by reparations lobbyists ?
My family and I also deserve reparations for all the crimes the Empire committed in India and Pakistan.
I will accept £35 million and a knighthood (GCMG) to correct the damage caused to my family.
Presumably Brits descended from those enslaved by the Barbary Corsairs, Vikings and Romans will also be able to sue Turkey, Morocco, Denmark and Italy?
The President of Guyana is now demanding slavery reparations. From the descendants of European Slave Traders. Fair enough, I am not a descendant of slavers.
IS there any specific reason why this is such a hot topic now. There have been several stories about it in the press in the last few days. Is there a commemoration of slavery taking place, or a concerted effort by reparations lobbyists ?
My family and I also deserve reparations for all the crimes the Empire committed in India and Pakistan.
I will accept £35 million and a knighthood (GCMG) to correct the damage caused to my family.
Irish Catholic here. Get in the queue.
The people of Libya and Abyssinia might have something to say about the other side of your ancestry.
That side is also Jewish. Also Southern Italians have a beef with the Northern Italians and French who didn't treat them nicely. Then there are the claims against the North Africans who invaded Spain which is where the Italian family originally came from.
Gosh, sorting out all these claims and counter-claims is going to be mighty fun for lawyers......
The President of Guyana is now demanding slavery reparations. From the descendants of European Slave Traders. Fair enough, I am not a descendant of slavers.
IS there any specific reason why this is such a hot topic now. There have been several stories about it in the press in the last few days. Is there a commemoration of slavery taking place, or a concerted effort by reparations lobbyists ?
The reason given by the CCRC for not proceeding is very strange. The comment was that there was "no certainty" that the other DNA found on the victim's clothing was "crime specific".
That makes it sound as though they were asking the wrong question entirely. Certainty that someone else's DNA was crime-specific would have proved that Malkinson was certainly innocent (given that there was only one assailant). Obviously, reasonable doubt of guilt is the correct criterion.
Depending on what they discovered, that conclusion might be reasonable. I think the bar is set quite high for a CCRC referral. ...
The criterion is just that "the Commission consider that there is a real possibility that the conviction, verdict, finding or sentence would not be upheld were the reference to be made ..." https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1995/35/section/13
The point I'm making is that standard of proof of guilt is "beyond reasonable doubt", so new evidence raising reasonable doubt should result in the appeal being upheld. But the CCRC comment makes it sound as they were dismissing the new evidence because it didn't provide certainty of innocence.
Isn't it reversed after a conviction? You don't have the presumption of guilt any more, so you have to prove innocence?
Not sure about the details of the provisions in England but in Scotland the test applied is has there been a miscarriage of justice which is very different from has something gone wrong?
It is therefore not enough to show 1 strand of evidence has become suspect or even wrong if there is other compelling evidence indicating guilt. I don’t know enough about the case to comment but it is likely that the CCRC took that view, at least initially.
Well, I was thinking more of the Hanratty case, where AIUI the judges took the view that unless evidence proving him innocent was found, there was no reason to overturn the conviction. That's why the family took those DNA tests and were rather horrified when the results strongly suggested Hanratty was guilty.
I think also with Sion Jenkins once doubts had been cast on the evidence the Court of Appeal ordered a retrial not an acquittal, although I could be wrong about that.
Why do infrastructure projects cost so many multiples more here than they do in any European country? Examples of road and rail projects given where the relative costs are astronomical.
Yes I get the "NIMBY tax" point they make. Some will say "our island is congested" - but we cost almost double the costs in Japan... Surely a lot of this is the Spiv tax. We pay a lot more than everyone else because fuck you. We don't have StateCo infrastructure companies like France so we get reamed by consortia who have a 47x markup on items as revenue earners. So HS2 costs 8x the cost per mile of the most recent LGV in France.
For all of the public vs private sector arguments, it is telling that countries where it is all done in the public sector have a lot more infrastructure than we do and at a lower cost.
The idea that it’s cheaper to get the private sector to do things rather than the “inefficient” public sector is one of the great myths of our era.
HS2 is being designed and managed at a high level by the public sector, and built by the private sector. The £1.5bn A14 Cambridge to Huntingdon improvement scheme, and was finished early (in part) despite Covid and more or less on budget. It too was designed and managed by the public sector at a high level, and built by the private sector.
There are many reasons why these projects can come in over budget and late; but decisions made early on in the project, and at a high level, can make a massive difference. As one example, who takes on risk for overruns, and how much do you set aside for such overruns?
The vast majority of large projects have both public and private involvement; partly because it is impossible to do anything large *without* governmental intervention at some level. And that's good; but it's easy for one side or the other to throw blame at the other side.
A very significant cost of HS2 relates to the contract. The government wants the consortium to be on the hook for decades for all kinds of unlikely scenarios. That has pushed the design into being built to withstand a 2012-style cataclysm with the costs for that as you might expect.
Had we built a high speed rail line at a spec and legal exposure that isn't insane, the cost would be a lot less.
Another example is the Great Western electrification fiasco. We had lost the industry knowledge to do such projects post-privatisation and had to start largely from scratch. So we ended up with ugly over-engineered masts supporting vastly overweight catenary which required very deep footers.
The cost of course was insane, hence having long sections of route where they did the drilling for the footers and bought the vastly over-engineered masts only for the DfT to scrap the scheme and literally scrap the metalwork. Worse is that there is still one point on the route where the catenary wire has to limbo under a bridge which wasn't raised and then over a level crossing that wasn't bridged. A nice 110mph restriction for no reason than crap design.
Putting it simply, we are egregiously shit at these projects. We spend stupid amounts of cash to get crapola infrastructure.
Another issue is Government continually changing the specs of projects. Euston HS2 station has more than doubled in cost from £2.4 billion to £4.8 billion largely because the Government kept changing the plans.
For HS2 as a whole the simple truth is the original project was massively under costed because that was the only way to get approval.
Bart likes to blame NIMBYism for these things because that is his pet obsession but that is rarely the reason. Crossrail was £4 billion over budget and 3 years late in part because of design and execution flaws in signalling and safety testing.
NIMBYism isn't the reason projects cost so much in this country. Poor planning and management, a lot of it due to short termism and changing priorities resulting from changing political climates which developers want to be insulated against financially play a massive part especially when so many people see some of these projects as costly and unnecessary white elephants.
It's certainly hard to see how NIMBY could explain an *underground* line, or upgrading an *existing* railway line ...
Pretty clear set of by-elections last night, reflecting recent patterns.
Most relevant being a Labour gain from Conservative in Dudley on a straight 11% swing.
But also Lib Dem win in IoW on 47% from not standing last time (swing less relevant as Vectis had the seat last time).
And Green holding on in Bristol and seeming to consolidate minor party support.
Caveats. That's a swing in Dudley TO the Tories of 2.1% since May. It's a Lab gain on the 2021 election, but a ward the Tories only won in '21 and '22. But Bristol is a much better Labour result. A swing of 6.9% from the Greens since 2021. Another stonking win from nowhere for the LD's in IOW.
The IOW has always been a bit of a funny one, but good result for The Peril nevertheless.
Obviously I agree with the general view of Cyclefree in wanting justice and better administration of things. all this must happen.
I have one significant query over two related areas; Malkinson and Letby.
A simple question:
Following Shipman and Allitt what was there about the possibility of medical and caring staff murdering people that those in charge of systems at all levels did not know?
Answer: Nothing.
Another question: Following many cases in which fresh evidence cast doubt on convictions, what was there about the possibility of DNA evidence casting doubt on an identification case conviction that those in charge of systems at all levels did not know?
Answer: Nothing.
These two truths limit the usefulness of any public enquiry.
What should happen is that there should be full investigation by independent police (using people of great ability and integrity) of both these cases, and prosecutions of those in public office who dod not act justly.
The public enquiries should follow, not precede, these prosecutions. I predict that after the usual massive lapse of time no-one will be prosecuted.
The President of Guyana is now demanding slavery reparations. From the descendants of European Slave Traders. Fair enough, I am not a descendant of slavers.
IS there any specific reason why this is such a hot topic now. There have been several stories about it in the press in the last few days. Is there a commemoration of slavery taking place, or a concerted effort by reparations lobbyists ?
My family and I also deserve reparations for all the crimes the Empire committed in India and Pakistan.
I will accept £35 million and a knighthood (GCMG) to correct the damage caused to my family.
Presumably Brits descended from those enslaved by the Barbary Corsairs, Vikings and Romans will also be able to sue Turkey, Morocco, Denmark and Italy?
Absolutely.
But the real fun will come as @TSE rises to open the case when we sue the French...
The President of Guyana is now demanding slavery reparations. From the descendants of European Slave Traders. Fair enough, I am not a descendant of slavers.
IS there any specific reason why this is such a hot topic now. There have been several stories about it in the press in the last few days. Is there a commemoration of slavery taking place, or a concerted effort by reparations lobbyists ?
My family and I also deserve reparations for all the crimes the Empire committed in India and Pakistan.
I will accept £35 million and a knighthood (GCMG) to correct the damage caused to my family.
Presumably Brits descended from those enslaved by the Barbary Corsairs, Vikings and Romans will also be able to sue Turkey, Morocco, Denmark and Italy?
Is that the example put out by CCHQ? You do seem keen to repeat it at every chance.
Greater Manchester Police appear to be most to blame.
Legal/Justice system taking 16 years to correct what they knew absolutely was a wrong decision is up there.
He was let down every step of the way, but it started with the police.
Please explain?
Presumbly the Police investigated, found the evidence that led them to think they had the right person and handed the evidence over to the CPS who were convinced by the evidence and where it convinced a jury that he was guilty too. That seems to be the Police doing their job.
Subsequent evidence helped show he was not guilty, and that was in the hands of the legal/justice system for years without them properly dealing with it.
The Police get many things wrong, but they seem least to blame in this instance?
Incorrect. They concealed crucial evidence and forged other evidence.
But the CCRC did have the relevant information for years too, right? So they can't just blame the Police either, they need to take responsibility too.
An all round terrible failure.
I'm not letting the CCRC off the hook for their own failures, but they would have been irrelevant if the police hadn't fitted him up in the first place.
What puzzles me more is why they did that. There doesn't seem any particular reason for them to hate Malkinson which is the usual reason for somebody being fitted up. As far as I know he had no police record.
It is odd - but I don't think all that unusual ?
For another measure of how seriously the CCRC still takes the case:
Yet Helen Pitcher, the chair of the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), has been notably silent in answering questions about the chances it missed to end the 17 years Malkinson spent in prison for a rape he did not commit.
The Guardian can reveal that Pitcher has been in Montenegro, where she is promoting her property business...
A piss poor part-time Chair.
Shami Chakrabarti Dido Harding Paula Vennells Cressida Dick Helen Pitcher
Nice to see that women can be as equally useless as men.
Greater Manchester Police appear to be most to blame.
Legal/Justice system taking 16 years to correct what they knew absolutely was a wrong decision is up there.
He was let down every step of the way, but it started with the police.
Please explain?
Presumbly the Police investigated, found the evidence that led them to think they had the right person and handed the evidence over to the CPS who were convinced by the evidence and where it convinced a jury that he was guilty too. That seems to be the Police doing their job.
Subsequent evidence helped show he was not guilty, and that was in the hands of the legal/justice system for years without them properly dealing with it.
The Police get many things wrong, but they seem least to blame in this instance?
Incorrect. They concealed crucial evidence and forged other evidence.
But the CCRC did have the relevant information for years too, right? So they can't just blame the Police either, they need to take responsibility too.
An all round terrible failure.
I'm not letting the CCRC off the hook for their own failures, but they would have been irrelevant if the police hadn't fitted him up in the first place.
What puzzles me more is why they did that. There doesn't seem any particular reason for them to hate Malkinson which is the usual reason for somebody being fitted up. As far as I know he had no police record.
It is odd - but I don't think all that unusual ?
For another measure of how seriously the CCRC still takes the case:
Yet Helen Pitcher, the chair of the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), has been notably silent in answering questions about the chances it missed to end the 17 years Malkinson spent in prison for a rape he did not commit.
The Guardian can reveal that Pitcher has been in Montenegro, where she is promoting her property business...
A piss poor part-time Chair.
Shami Chakrabarti Dido Harding Paula Vennells Cressida Dick Helen Pitcher
Nice to see that women can be as equally useless as men.
Nigerian man dies and police find £27 billion piled up in his apartment. He had been trying to give it away for 15 years, but nobody would reply to his emails.
The President of Guyana is now demanding slavery reparations. From the descendants of European Slave Traders. Fair enough, I am not a descendant of slavers.
IS there any specific reason why this is such a hot topic now. There have been several stories about it in the press in the last few days. Is there a commemoration of slavery taking place, or a concerted effort by reparations lobbyists ?
The President of Guyana is now demanding slavery reparations. From the descendants of European Slave Traders. Fair enough, I am not a descendant of slavers.
IS there any specific reason why this is such a hot topic now. There have been several stories about it in the press in the last few days. Is there a commemoration of slavery taking place, or a concerted effort by reparations lobbyists ?
The payment for ex-MPs who lose their seats is going to be doubled from 2 months to 4 months.
And now its going to apply to MPs who voluntarily step down, not just those who lose their seats too.
What absolute grift.
I can see the issue with people who step down. But otherwise, MP is already a pretty unappealing career in terms of responsibility, job security and statistical likelihood of being murdered or injured by a member of the public, so a payoff of 4 months after losing your job with no notice period doesn't seem at all excessive to me. Most private sector jobs at similar mid-management pay levels pay between 3 and 6 months severance.
Most full time private sector jobs at similar level pay much less than being a part time MP does.
MP is a pretty appealing career earning more than 97% of the British public even at entry level without Ministerial responsibilities. That's why Mad Nads is in no hurry to step down without another sinecure, she wouldn't be worth that much in the real world.
No they don't. Most MPs work much longer than 9 to 5 and spend weekends in constituencies.
It is a perfectly reasonable severance package for MPs but is actually less generous than most comparable public or private sector jobs on £80k a year would get
The payment for ex-MPs who lose their seats is going to be doubled from 2 months to 4 months.
And now its going to apply to MPs who voluntarily step down, not just those who lose their seats too.
What absolute grift.
I can see the issue with people who step down. But otherwise, MP is already a pretty unappealing career in terms of responsibility, job security and statistical likelihood of being murdered or injured by a member of the public, so a payoff of 4 months after losing your job with no notice period doesn't seem at all excessive to me. Most private sector jobs at similar mid-management pay levels pay between 3 and 6 months severance.
Most full time private sector jobs at similar level pay much less than being a part time MP does.
MP is a pretty appealing career earning more than 97% of the British public even at entry level without Ministerial responsibilities. That's why Mad Nads is in no hurry to step down without another sinecure, she wouldn't be worth that much in the real world.
No they don't. Most MPs work much longer than 9 to 5 and spend weekends in constituencies.
It is a perfectly reasonable severance package for MPs but is actually less generous than most comparable public or private sector jobs on £80k a year would get
What's a severance package? They never filtered down to my level.
The payment for ex-MPs who lose their seats is going to be doubled from 2 months to 4 months.
And now its going to apply to MPs who voluntarily step down, not just those who lose their seats too.
What absolute grift.
This might be an unpopular view but it makes sense in a way. IPSO’s argument is that an MP and their office are working to the point of the election and so there are going to be legacy issues and handover issues that will take time to deal with. This bit is obviously debatable in relation to some MPs as they don’t seem to work anyway but it’s not unreasonable as it is surely better to ensure a full and comprehensive handover of case work.
Maybe it should not have been extended to the MP themself but only to their staff and office expenses but quite hard to continue a handover if half way through the MP isn’t being paid in anyway so withdraws their involvement and leaves it to the remaining staff.
Where I think it is important is for those MPs who employ staff in their constituency offices, and amazingly there are MPs who don’t just employ family, who will need to find new jobs due to a situation out of their direct control and so for them I feel it’s ok that a sensible period of redundancy is in place.
It would of course be worse if MPs had chosen and voted for this and it’s not great optics at the moment but it’s not totally unreasonable.
The reason given by the CCRC for not proceeding is very strange. The comment was that there was "no certainty" that the other DNA found on the victim's clothing was "crime specific".
That makes it sound as though they were asking the wrong question entirely. Certainty that someone else's DNA was crime-specific would have proved that Malkinson was certainly innocent (given that there was only one assailant). Obviously, reasonable doubt of guilt is the correct criterion.
Depending on what they discovered, that conclusion might be reasonable. I think the bar is set quite high for a CCRC referral. ...
The criterion is just that "the Commission consider that there is a real possibility that the conviction, verdict, finding or sentence would not be upheld were the reference to be made ..." https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1995/35/section/13
The point I'm making is that standard of proof of guilt is "beyond reasonable doubt", so new evidence raising reasonable doubt should result in the appeal being upheld. But the CCRC comment makes it sound as they were dismissing the new evidence because it didn't provide certainty of innocence.
Isn't it reversed after a conviction? You don't have the presumption of guilt any more, so you have to prove innocence?
Not sure about the details of the provisions in England but in Scotland the test applied is has there been a miscarriage of justice which is very different from has something gone wrong?
It is therefore not enough to show 1 strand of evidence has become suspect or even wrong if there is other compelling evidence indicating guilt. I don’t know enough about the case to comment but it is likely that the CCRC took that view, at least initially.
Well, I was thinking more of the Hanratty case, where AIUI the judges took the view that unless evidence proving him innocent was found, there was no reason to overturn the conviction. That's why the family took those DNA tests and were rather horrified when the results strongly suggested Hanratty was guilty.
I think also with Sion Jenkins once doubts had been cast on the evidence the Court of Appeal ordered a retrial not an acquittal, although I could be wrong about that.
Yes. They ordered a retrial. IIRC after two retrials where the jury failed to agree the matter rested, with a formal acquittal.
The Biden administration sued Elon Musk-owned rocket and satellite company SpaceX on Thursday for allegedly discriminating against asylum seekers and refugees in hiring.
“The lawsuit alleges that, from at least September 2018 to May 2022, SpaceX routinely discouraged asylees and refugees from applying and refused to hire or consider them, because of their citizenship status, in violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act,” the Justice Department said in a statement.
A politically motivated attack on a company run by an African American immigrant.
Not a good look !!!!
If you ever want to consider whether the term "African American" should be used for a white person, look up the Wikipedia flame war on Charlize Theron... ☹️
Oooh, one to avoid I think I imagine it became quite...tetchy.
The payment for ex-MPs who lose their seats is going to be doubled from 2 months to 4 months.
And now its going to apply to MPs who voluntarily step down, not just those who lose their seats too.
What absolute grift.
I can see the issue with people who step down. But otherwise, MP is already a pretty unappealing career in terms of responsibility, job security and statistical likelihood of being murdered or injured by a member of the public, so a payoff of 4 months after losing your job with no notice period doesn't seem at all excessive to me. Most private sector jobs at similar mid-management pay levels pay between 3 and 6 months severance.
Most full time private sector jobs at similar level pay much less than being a part time MP does.
MP is a pretty appealing career earning more than 97% of the British public even at entry level without Ministerial responsibilities. That's why Mad Nads is in no hurry to step down without another sinecure, she wouldn't be worth that much in the real world.
No they don't. Most MPs work much longer than 9 to 5 and spend weekends in constituencies.
It is a perfectly reasonable severance package for MPs but is actually less generous than most comparable public or private sector jobs on £80k a year would get
What's a severance package? They never filtered down to my level.
The President of Guyana is now demanding slavery reparations. From the descendants of European Slave Traders. Fair enough, I am not a descendant of slavers.
IS there any specific reason why this is such a hot topic now. There have been several stories about it in the press in the last few days. Is there a commemoration of slavery taking place, or a concerted effort by reparations lobbyists ?
Pretty clear set of by-elections last night, reflecting recent patterns.
Most relevant being a Labour gain from Conservative in Dudley on a straight 11% swing.
But also Lib Dem win in IoW on 47% from not standing last time (swing less relevant as Vectis had the seat last time).
And Green holding on in Bristol and seeming to consolidate minor party support.
Caveats. That's a swing in Dudley TO the Tories of 2.1% since May. It's a Lab gain on the 2021 election, but a ward the Tories only won in '21 and '22. But Bristol is a much better Labour result. A swing of 6.9% from the Greens since 2021. Another stonking win from nowhere for the LD's in IOW.
The IOW has always been a bit of a funny one, but good result for The Peril nevertheless.
The payment for ex-MPs who lose their seats is going to be doubled from 2 months to 4 months.
And now its going to apply to MPs who voluntarily step down, not just those who lose their seats too.
What absolute grift.
I can see the issue with people who step down. But otherwise, MP is already a pretty unappealing career in terms of responsibility, job security and statistical likelihood of being murdered or injured by a member of the public, so a payoff of 4 months after losing your job with no notice period doesn't seem at all excessive to me. Most private sector jobs at similar mid-management pay levels pay between 3 and 6 months severance.
Most full time private sector jobs at similar level pay much less than being a part time MP does.
MP is a pretty appealing career earning more than 97% of the British public even at entry level without Ministerial responsibilities. That's why Mad Nads is in no hurry to step down without another sinecure, she wouldn't be worth that much in the real world.
No they don't. Most MPs work much longer than 9 to 5 and spend weekends in constituencies.
It is a perfectly reasonable severance package for MPs but is actually less generous than most comparable public or private sector jobs on £80k a year would get
What's a severance package? They never filtered down to my level.
You can get redundancy packages at any level
Obviously, but not if you just decide to leave your job.
The payment for ex-MPs who lose their seats is going to be doubled from 2 months to 4 months.
And now its going to apply to MPs who voluntarily step down, not just those who lose their seats too.
What absolute grift.
I can see the issue with people who step down. But otherwise, MP is already a pretty unappealing career in terms of responsibility, job security and statistical likelihood of being murdered or injured by a member of the public, so a payoff of 4 months after losing your job with no notice period doesn't seem at all excessive to me. Most private sector jobs at similar mid-management pay levels pay between 3 and 6 months severance.
Most full time private sector jobs at similar level pay much less than being a part time MP does.
MP is a pretty appealing career earning more than 97% of the British public even at entry level without Ministerial responsibilities. That's why Mad Nads is in no hurry to step down without another sinecure, she wouldn't be worth that much in the real world.
No they don't. Most MPs work much longer than 9 to 5 and spend weekends in constituencies.
It is a perfectly reasonable severance package for MPs but is actually less generous than most comparable public or private sector jobs on £80k a year would get
You make "spend weekends in constituencies sound like part of the job. Isn't that where they are supposed to live?
Why do infrastructure projects cost so many multiples more here than they do in any European country? Examples of road and rail projects given where the relative costs are astronomical.
Yes I get the "NIMBY tax" point they make. Some will say "our island is congested" - but we cost almost double the costs in Japan... Surely a lot of this is the Spiv tax. We pay a lot more than everyone else because fuck you. We don't have StateCo infrastructure companies like France so we get reamed by consortia who have a 47x markup on items as revenue earners. So HS2 costs 8x the cost per mile of the most recent LGV in France.
For all of the public vs private sector arguments, it is telling that countries where it is all done in the public sector have a lot more infrastructure than we do and at a lower cost.
The idea that it’s cheaper to get the private sector to do things rather than the “inefficient” public sector is one of the great myths of our era.
HS2 is being designed and managed at a high level by the public sector, and built by the private sector. The £1.5bn A14 Cambridge to Huntingdon improvement scheme, and was finished early (in part) despite Covid and more or less on budget. It too was designed and managed by the public sector at a high level, and built by the private sector.
There are many reasons why these projects can come in over budget and late; but decisions made early on in the project, and at a high level, can make a massive difference. As one example, who takes on risk for overruns, and how much do you set aside for such overruns?
The vast majority of large projects have both public and private involvement; partly because it is impossible to do anything large *without* governmental intervention at some level. And that's good; but it's easy for one side or the other to throw blame at the other side.
A very significant cost of HS2 relates to the contract. The government wants the consortium to be on the hook for decades for all kinds of unlikely scenarios. That has pushed the design into being built to withstand a 2012-style cataclysm with the costs for that as you might expect.
Had we built a high speed rail line at a spec and legal exposure that isn't insane, the cost would be a lot less.
Another example is the Great Western electrification fiasco. We had lost the industry knowledge to do such projects post-privatisation and had to start largely from scratch. So we ended up with ugly over-engineered masts supporting vastly overweight catenary which required very deep footers.
The cost of course was insane, hence having long sections of route where they did the drilling for the footers and bought the vastly over-engineered masts only for the DfT to scrap the scheme and literally scrap the metalwork. Worse is that there is still one point on the route where the catenary wire has to limbo under a bridge which wasn't raised and then over a level crossing that wasn't bridged. A nice 110mph restriction for no reason than crap design.
Putting it simply, we are egregiously shit at these projects. We spend stupid amounts of cash to get crapola infrastructure.
Another issue is Government continually changing the specs of projects. Euston HS2 station has more than doubled in cost from £2.4 billion to £4.8 billion largely because the Government kept changing the plans.
For HS2 as a whole the simple truth is the original project was massively under costed because that was the only way to get approval.
Bart likes to blame NIMBYism for these things because that is his pet obsession but that is rarely the reason. Crossrail was £4 billion over budget and 3 years late in part because of design and execution flaws in signalling and safety testing.
NIMBYism isn't the reason projects cost so much in this country. Poor planning and management, a lot of it due to short termism and changing priorities resulting from changing political climates which developers want to be insulated against financially play a massive part especially when so many people see some of these projects as costly and unnecessary white elephants.
It's certainly hard to see how NIMBY could explain an *underground* line, or upgrading an *existing* railway line ...
*) Increased construction traffic on roads. *) Noise from works *) Ventilation / access shafts for tunnelling works *) Subsidence / vibration concerns
All of these can be valid concerns; to the extent HS2 has a 50-mile long temporary haul alongside part of it, and a 1.7 mile-long network of conveyor belts in London.
The payment for ex-MPs who lose their seats is going to be doubled from 2 months to 4 months.
And now its going to apply to MPs who voluntarily step down, not just those who lose their seats too.
What absolute grift.
I can see the issue with people who step down. But otherwise, MP is already a pretty unappealing career in terms of responsibility, job security and statistical likelihood of being murdered or injured by a member of the public, so a payoff of 4 months after losing your job with no notice period doesn't seem at all excessive to me. Most private sector jobs at similar mid-management pay levels pay between 3 and 6 months severance.
Most full time private sector jobs at similar level pay much less than being a part time MP does.
MP is a pretty appealing career earning more than 97% of the British public even at entry level without Ministerial responsibilities. That's why Mad Nads is in no hurry to step down without another sinecure, she wouldn't be worth that much in the real world.
No they don't. Most MPs work much longer than 9 to 5 and spend weekends in constituencies.
It is a perfectly reasonable severance package for MPs but is actually less generous than most comparable public or private sector jobs on £80k a year would get
You make "spend weekends in constituencies sound like part of the job. Isn't that where they are supposed to live?
He doesn't get it. He's a robot, programmed to tug his forelock at anybody with a title. Incapable of arguing against his programmers.
The President of Guyana is now demanding slavery reparations. From the descendants of European Slave Traders. Fair enough, I am not a descendant of slavers.
IS there any specific reason why this is such a hot topic now. There have been several stories about it in the press in the last few days. Is there a commemoration of slavery taking place, or a concerted effort by reparations lobbyists ?
The President of Guyana is now demanding slavery reparations. From the descendants of European Slave Traders. Fair enough, I am not a descendant of slavers.
IS there any specific reason why this is such a hot topic now. There have been several stories about it in the press in the last few days. Is there a commemoration of slavery taking place, or a concerted effort by reparations lobbyists ?
My family and I also deserve reparations for all the crimes the Empire committed in India and Pakistan.
I will accept £35 million and a knighthood (GCMG) to correct the damage caused to my family.
I've chosen to identify with my Irish antecendants, which has to get me off the hook for whatever tax will pay for thus?
My Great Great Grandfather was born in Jamaica. I'm in the money!
My Great great grandmother was Belgium. Do I have to pay twice ?
You're in luck. The Belgian Congo was run by the King himself, not the Belgian people, for most of the relevant period.
That was anything but lucky for them of course given he made Mussolini look like a nice human being.
I had a client, who I liked very much, who as a young man was a Belgian Paratrooper and was sent into the Congo in 1960 during the crisis. He told me that the things he had to do under orders and the things he saw destroyed his mental health. To add insult to injury his whole platoon were arrested when they returned to Belgium for doing what they had been ordered to do and eventually were quietly released.
He was from an incredibly wealthy family and when I was dealing with him we were using his trust assets that he was now solely entitled to as he wanted to buy huge tracts of land in a certain country where he could take his extended family and friends and associates and not have any of them be bothered by any government again. He had worked out how many natural springs, the acreage needed to be more than self sufficient, the works.
Belgium’s behaviour in the Congo knocks anything from the rest of the colonial times into a cocked hat.
It is a redundancy package effectively, MPs pay has risen below inflation this year
I get the redundancy bit. But MPs leaving of their own free will should get nothing, like the people they allegedly represent.
I would favour a decent payment for those MPs transitioning back to regular life. We need people of talent to apply, and even a former fireman needs a bit of time to reestablish themselves.
I would also deduct from this any outside earnings, as clearly those people have already transitioned to outside earnings.
It just means lawyers and other Tory chums will line their pockets for years , trouser a fortune and it will be the normal , "lessons have been learned" till the next time it happens. They may as well save the millions they will fork out to grifters.
Looks lovely , but you are not giving us as much output as our previous travel consultant , more pictures please.
Ha, I’ll see what I can do!
Just had breakfast, and will go and explore the city. The hotel was advertising tours to Auswitch, which wasn’t what we had in mind for a fun day in Poland! Local museums and bars, much better.
Sadly not but it may improve their chances of holding their seats in the north east near Aberdeen.
Its all in play - it depends how other factors play out. Supporting the oil and gas industry feels like an obvious thing to do. I keep having people trying to school me online about actually how much of the revenue goes into bigcorp pockets and how actualy we'll export much of the oil we drill actually. Yes I know, but as the world transitions away from oil why can't we make money selling whats left of ours rather than spending money buying from someone else?
Problem for the Tories is that being pro-oil is also them being anti farming and fishing and people and business and renewables. They have that one thing right for the local economy and everything else wrong for the local economy. So the question for Lickspittle Duguid etc is will people put king oil over everything else? Because whilst I agree with him on that he is wrong on every other subject.
If Dolittle is the answer then Scotland is truly F**ked and people in North East are thicker than a bag of mince.
Do you actually like anybody, Malc? (Other than Mrs G and Alex Salmond, of course.)
Ydoethur, don't be a silly boy , it is politician's and that arsehole Foreskin that I don't like. There are a few exceptions as you say , I liked Ken Clarke, Lord Tonypandy, Betty Boothroyd , Harold Wilson and many others from the days when honest people were in politics not just to fill their own pockets.
Honest Georgie Thomas? Not a statement I've ever heard down in these parts.
The reason given by the CCRC for not proceeding is very strange. The comment was that there was "no certainty" that the other DNA found on the victim's clothing was "crime specific".
That makes it sound as though they were asking the wrong question entirely. Certainty that someone else's DNA was crime-specific would have proved that Malkinson was certainly innocent (given that there was only one assailant). Obviously, reasonable doubt of guilt is the correct criterion.
Depending on what they discovered, that conclusion might be reasonable. I think the bar is set quite high for a CCRC referral. ...
The criterion is just that "the Commission consider that there is a real possibility that the conviction, verdict, finding or sentence would not be upheld were the reference to be made ..." https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1995/35/section/13
The point I'm making is that standard of proof of guilt is "beyond reasonable doubt", so new evidence raising reasonable doubt should result in the appeal being upheld. But the CCRC comment makes it sound as they were dismissing the new evidence because it didn't provide certainty of innocence.
Isn't it reversed after a conviction? You don't have the presumption of guilt any more, so you have to prove innocence?
Not sure about the details of the provisions in England but in Scotland the test applied is has there been a miscarriage of justice which is very different from has something gone wrong?
It is therefore not enough to show 1 strand of evidence has become suspect or even wrong if there is other compelling evidence indicating guilt. I don’t know enough about the case to comment but it is likely that the CCRC took that view, at least initially.
Well, I was thinking more of the Hanratty case, where AIUI the judges took the view that unless evidence proving him innocent was found, there was no reason to overturn the conviction. That's why the family took those DNA tests and were rather horrified when the results strongly suggested Hanratty was guilty.
I think also with Sion Jenkins once doubts had been cast on the evidence the Court of Appeal ordered a retrial not an acquittal, although I could be wrong about that.
The Hanratty DNA results were on inspection rather less compelling than you might suppose but it is certainly true that it was impossible to prove Hanratty innocent and that is likely to remain the case forever, mainly because of the complete mess the police made of the investigation at the time.
Personally I think it unlikely he did do it, but I am sure the verdict will now never be overturned.
One thing about these various Inquiries bothers me, though (well, more than one..). It's that they are too focused on the particular. One on the appalling Malkinson miscarriage of justice. Another on the appalling Post Office Horizon miscarriage of justice. If we are really going to 'learn lessons', shouldn't we be focusing on what these scandals have in common, which will no doubt apply to the next appalling miscarriage of justice, and the many less publicised ones?
Similarly, the real lessons which should be learnt from the Letby case aren't really about a murderous staff member on a neo-natal ward, but about how the NHS handles whistleblowers. The Letby case is an extreme, but atypical, example of a wider dysfunction in investigating concerns. The lessons should focus on the wider issue.
You are absolutely right.
I see a lot of commonalities between these various scandals - not just with other NHS scandals but with police ones and City ones too. It is difficult enough to join up the lessons inside one organisation, though it is a very important part of what needs doing. But within government and and other public services? That should be one of those changes that ought to be made - to have someone / some team responsible for joining these dots and trying to do a read across not just in relation to why things have gone wrong but in how to put them right.
For instance, there is much the police and the NHS could learn from finance. I could bore on about this for ages. But no-one at the top will think: maybe we could learn from what other sectors have been through.
The whistleblowing aspect is particularly important. This is my day job. I have just written for one of my clients an article on this - and when published - happy to provide a link to anyone interested.
Organisations do not really understand - or choose to understand - the human behaviours behind why staff are worried about raising concerns and why those at the top react in the way they do. Until they do they will have little success building structures/ processes that encourage people to do the right thing and stop or make it hard for them to do the wrong thing.
The other key issue - especially in the NHS - is the absolute necessity of having an independent investigation team, independent of management, that staff could - because of its independence and professionalism - trust.
Infuriating. Honestly, I know I am blowing my own trumpet but there is lots people like me and plenty of others could do to help, inform and teach these organisations.
😠
One thing which jumped out of the page when I was reading the reports on the Letby case was the response to her allegation that the consultants had been 'bullying' her by raising concerns about the number of unexplained deaths on her watch. That seems to have triggered a much bigger process than the suspicious deaths themselves , culminating in the bizarre farce of 'mediation'. How the hell could anyone mediate between her, and the doctors who with good cause, and rightly as it turned out, suspected her of being responsible for those deaths?
And yet this is how the NHS works.
Presumably the mediator came up with proposals that both sides accept that she had only killed half the babies alleged.
Well, the jury did something quite similar.
True. I wonder how they feel about that now. They were out for a month. Most juries in my experience are back within 4 hours, 6 being the normal limit.
That the jury took several days to reach even the first verdicts should give us pause. We are discussing the inquiry as if Letby had been so obviously bang to rights that the hospital should have realised immediately.
And it was not only the jury. The police investigation lasted more than a year before Letby was arrested.
You are ignoring the fact that there were many separate charges considered - on some if which she was found not guilty (presumably because of insufficient evidence).
It is absolutely unwarranted to assume, or even to suggest, that there is doubt over the convictions simply because of the length of the investigation, and time taken by the jury.
The jury was trickling in verdicts throughout the process. More importantly, I am not suggesting Letby is innocent. I am saying that her guilt was not so obvious that the hospital should have seen immediately what took the police more than a year and the jury several weeks, and this needs to be borne in mind during any review.
It just means lawyers and other Tory chums will line their pockets for years , trouser a fortune and it will be the normal , "lessons have been learned" till the next time it happens. They may as well save the millions they will fork out to grifters.
Looks lovely , but you are not giving us as much output as our previous travel consultant , more pictures please.
Ha, I’ll see what I can do!
Just had breakfast, and will go and explore the city. The hotel was advertising tours to Auswitch, which wasn’t what we had in mind for a fun day in Poland! Local museums and bars, much better.
The Auschwitz tour is a grim day out, and even though we know the reality to see it firsthand makes an incredible impact.
The stroll along the river to where the dragon lives is a pleasant day. Skip the salt mines.
Why do infrastructure projects cost so many multiples more here than they do in any European country? Examples of road and rail projects given where the relative costs are astronomical.
Yes I get the "NIMBY tax" point they make. Some will say "our island is congested" - but we cost almost double the costs in Japan... Surely a lot of this is the Spiv tax. We pay a lot more than everyone else because fuck you. We don't have StateCo infrastructure companies like France so we get reamed by consortia who have a 47x markup on items as revenue earners. So HS2 costs 8x the cost per mile of the most recent LGV in France.
For all of the public vs private sector arguments, it is telling that countries where it is all done in the public sector have a lot more infrastructure than we do and at a lower cost.
The idea that it’s cheaper to get the private sector to do things rather than the “inefficient” public sector is one of the great myths of our era.
HS2 is being designed and managed at a high level by the public sector, and built by the private sector. The £1.5bn A14 Cambridge to Huntingdon improvement scheme, and was finished early (in part) despite Covid and more or less on budget. It too was designed and managed by the public sector at a high level, and built by the private sector.
There are many reasons why these projects can come in over budget and late; but decisions made early on in the project, and at a high level, can make a massive difference. As one example, who takes on risk for overruns, and how much do you set aside for such overruns?
The vast majority of large projects have both public and private involvement; partly because it is impossible to do anything large *without* governmental intervention at some level. And that's good; but it's easy for one side or the other to throw blame at the other side.
A very significant cost of HS2 relates to the contract. The government wants the consortium to be on the hook for decades for all kinds of unlikely scenarios. That has pushed the design into being built to withstand a 2012-style cataclysm with the costs for that as you might expect.
Had we built a high speed rail line at a spec and legal exposure that isn't insane, the cost would be a lot less.
Another example is the Great Western electrification fiasco. We had lost the industry knowledge to do such projects post-privatisation and had to start largely from scratch. So we ended up with ugly over-engineered masts supporting vastly overweight catenary which required very deep footers.
The cost of course was insane, hence having long sections of route where they did the drilling for the footers and bought the vastly over-engineered masts only for the DfT to scrap the scheme and literally scrap the metalwork. Worse is that there is still one point on the route where the catenary wire has to limbo under a bridge which wasn't raised and then over a level crossing that wasn't bridged. A nice 110mph restriction for no reason than crap design.
Putting it simply, we are egregiously shit at these projects. We spend stupid amounts of cash to get crapola infrastructure.
I generally agree with that; but as the Cambridge to Huntingdon project shows, we can do it well. There are dozens of large infrastructure projects going on at any time, and most don't have massive problems. We notice the ones that do.
I'd also point out the reason we had lost industry knowledge of railway electrification was utterly down to the Brown and Blair governments, who only electrified a few miles of new route in 13 years (Crewe to Kidsgrove). Compared to virtually continuous electrification projects in the 1980s and 1990s.
The GWML electrification mess had many causes; from Dft mismanagement to Network Rail's reliance on untested technology. Thankfully they appear to have learnt many lessons for newer projects.
On the A14, the screw up is that its the A14. Built to the new Expressway format connecting one motorway to another, we've ended up with a blue gap. Was built efficiently but we still can't plan for shit.
On electrification, the issue we had for a long time was the contracts. You say down to Blair and Brown, and they were definitely in office. But the infrastructure was Failtrack who bankrupted themselves by failing to spend enough on preventative maintenance. The franchises wouldn't do electrification at their own cost as most were on 7 year contracts. Labour should have scrapped the whole franchise system but decided they had bigger things to do.
Even after the network and increasingly the franchises were brought under DfT control we still didn't do it, despite having both a rapidly-ageing fleet of diseasal units and a fleet of newer electric units not being used. Because variance in the contract is Bad News for the DfT.
Its perculiarly British bullshit.
On railway electrification, the issue was that the Labour government under Brown and Blair did not invest in electrification. It's quite simple. They chose not to. It is nothing to do with franchises or Railtrack (which ceased to exist eight years before the end of the Labour government).
Compare and contrast with the massive mileage electrified under... (drum rolls) Thatcher and Major.
Labour chose not to electrify, and that led to the industrial knowledge gap that led to the GWML fiasco. It's not as simple as Labour=pro-railways and Conservatives=anti-railways.
The A14 Cambridge to Huntingdon scheme has, IMHO, been a massive success.
Why do infrastructure projects cost so many multiples more here than they do in any European country? Examples of road and rail projects given where the relative costs are astronomical.
Yes I get the "NIMBY tax" point they make. Some will say "our island is congested" - but we cost almost double the costs in Japan... Surely a lot of this is the Spiv tax. We pay a lot more than everyone else because fuck you. We don't have StateCo infrastructure companies like France so we get reamed by consortia who have a 47x markup on items as revenue earners. So HS2 costs 8x the cost per mile of the most recent LGV in France.
For all of the public vs private sector arguments, it is telling that countries where it is all done in the public sector have a lot more infrastructure than we do and at a lower cost.
The idea that it’s cheaper to get the private sector to do things rather than the “inefficient” public sector is one of the great myths of our era.
HS2 is being designed and managed at a high level by the public sector, and built by the private sector. The £1.5bn A14 Cambridge to Huntingdon improvement scheme, and was finished early (in part) despite Covid and more or less on budget. It too was designed and managed by the public sector at a high level, and built by the private sector.
There are many reasons why these projects can come in over budget and late; but decisions made early on in the project, and at a high level, can make a massive difference. As one example, who takes on risk for overruns, and how much do you set aside for such overruns?
The vast majority of large projects have both public and private involvement; partly because it is impossible to do anything large *without* governmental intervention at some level. And that's good; but it's easy for one side or the other to throw blame at the other side.
A very significant cost of HS2 relates to the contract. The government wants the consortium to be on the hook for decades for all kinds of unlikely scenarios. That has pushed the design into being built to withstand a 2012-style cataclysm with the costs for that as you might expect.
Had we built a high speed rail line at a spec and legal exposure that isn't insane, the cost would be a lot less.
Another example is the Great Western electrification fiasco. We had lost the industry knowledge to do such projects post-privatisation and had to start largely from scratch. So we ended up with ugly over-engineered masts supporting vastly overweight catenary which required very deep footers.
The cost of course was insane, hence having long sections of route where they did the drilling for the footers and bought the vastly over-engineered masts only for the DfT to scrap the scheme and literally scrap the metalwork. Worse is that there is still one point on the route where the catenary wire has to limbo under a bridge which wasn't raised and then over a level crossing that wasn't bridged. A nice 110mph restriction for no reason than crap design.
Putting it simply, we are egregiously shit at these projects. We spend stupid amounts of cash to get crapola infrastructure.
I generally agree with that; but as the Cambridge to Huntingdon project shows, we can do it well. There are dozens of large infrastructure projects going on at any time, and most don't have massive problems. We notice the ones that do.
I'd also point out the reason we had lost industry knowledge of railway electrification was utterly down to the Brown and Blair governments, who only electrified a few miles of new route in 13 years (Crewe to Kidsgrove). Compared to virtually continuous electrification projects in the 1980s and 1990s.
The GWML electrification mess had many causes; from Dft mismanagement to Network Rail's reliance on untested technology. Thankfully they appear to have learnt many lessons for newer projects.
On the A14, the screw up is that its the A14. Built to the new Expressway format connecting one motorway to another, we've ended up with a blue gap. Was built efficiently but we still can't plan for shit.
On electrification, the issue we had for a long time was the contracts. You say down to Blair and Brown, and they were definitely in office. But the infrastructure was Failtrack who bankrupted themselves by failing to spend enough on preventative maintenance. The franchises wouldn't do electrification at their own cost as most were on 7 year contracts. Labour should have scrapped the whole franchise system but decided they had bigger things to do.
Even after the network and increasingly the franchises were brought under DfT control we still didn't do it, despite having both a rapidly-ageing fleet of diseasal units and a fleet of newer electric units not being used. Because variance in the contract is Bad News for the DfT.
Its perculiarly British bullshit.
On railway electrification, the issue was that the Labour government under Brown and Blair did not invest in electrification. It's quite simple. They chose not to. It is nothing to do with franchises or Railtrack (which ceased to exist eight years before the end of the Labour government).
Compare and contrast with the massive mileage electrified under... (drum rolls) Thatcher and Major.
Labour chose not to electrify, and that led to the industrial knowledge gap that led to the GWML fiasco. It's not as simple as Labour=pro-railways and Conservatives=anti-railways.
The A14 Cambridge to Huntingdon scheme has, IMHO, been a massive success.
Have used it quite a bit this year and it does seem a decent bit of road, very useful for those of us hacking up to Norfolk.
It is a redundancy package effectively, MPs pay has risen below inflation this year
I get the redundancy bit. But MPs leaving of their own free will should get nothing, like the people they allegedly represent.
I would favour a decent payment for those MPs transitioning back to regular life. We need people of talent to apply, and even a former fireman needs a bit of time to reestablish themselves.
I would also deduct from this any outside earnings, as clearly those people have already transitioned to outside earnings.
I sort of get that. The trouble is, most MPs, no matter how diligent and committed they appear, tend to end up very wealthy from being an MP. The great unwashed transition from job to job without any payoff. Might get a bit of redundancy. They don't get time to reestablish themselves. I accept the need to get people of talent to apply, but ....how's that working out?
The payment for ex-MPs who lose their seats is going to be doubled from 2 months to 4 months.
And now its going to apply to MPs who voluntarily step down, not just those who lose their seats too.
What absolute grift.
For MPs who get voted out I can almost accept it. Sort of like redundancy. MPs stepping down should get nowt. Do the ones who have to stand down due to being crooks get the bung?
I remember the same debate back in 2010. The argument was that not giving the package to MPs standing down voluntarily gave them an incentive to hang on (maybe even stand on a token basis as an Independent) even when they were clearly tired or otherwise no longer suitable (whether through scandal or simply age).
IIRC I got 6 months' pay, or maybe it was 4, so I'm in no position to criticise. But MPs generally struggle to resume former careers (the idea of my going back to IT after 13 years out of it was clearly ridicuolous) so there's a case for not making seat loss - often for no particvular fault of their own - not instantly calamitous.
One thing about these various Inquiries bothers me, though (well, more than one..). It's that they are too focused on the particular. One on the appalling Malkinson miscarriage of justice. Another on the appalling Post Office Horizon miscarriage of justice. If we are really going to 'learn lessons', shouldn't we be focusing on what these scandals have in common, which will no doubt apply to the next appalling miscarriage of justice, and the many less publicised ones?
Similarly, the real lessons which should be learnt from the Letby case aren't really about a murderous staff member on a neo-natal ward, but about how the NHS handles whistleblowers. The Letby case is an extreme, but atypical, example of a wider dysfunction in investigating concerns. The lessons should focus on the wider issue.
You are absolutely right.
I see a lot of commonalities between these various scandals - not just with other NHS scandals but with police ones and City ones too. It is difficult enough to join up the lessons inside one organisation, though it is a very important part of what needs doing. But within government and and other public services? That should be one of those changes that ought to be made - to have someone / some team responsible for joining these dots and trying to do a read across not just in relation to why things have gone wrong but in how to put them right.
For instance, there is much the police and the NHS could learn from finance. I could bore on about this for ages. But no-one at the top will think: maybe we could learn from what other sectors have been through.
The whistleblowing aspect is particularly important. This is my day job. I have just written for one of my clients an article on this - and when published - happy to provide a link to anyone interested.
Organisations do not really understand - or choose to understand - the human behaviours behind why staff are worried about raising concerns and why those at the top react in the way they do. Until they do they will have little success building structures/ processes that encourage people to do the right thing and stop or make it hard for them to do the wrong thing.
The other key issue - especially in the NHS - is the absolute necessity of having an independent investigation team, independent of management, that staff could - because of its independence and professionalism - trust.
Infuriating. Honestly, I know I am blowing my own trumpet but there is lots people like me and plenty of others could do to help, inform and teach these organisations.
😠
One thing which jumped out of the page when I was reading the reports on the Letby case was the response to her allegation that the consultants had been 'bullying' her by raising concerns about the number of unexplained deaths on her watch. That seems to have triggered a much bigger process than the suspicious deaths themselves , culminating in the bizarre farce of 'mediation'. How the hell could anyone mediate between her, and the doctors who with good cause, and rightly as it turned out, suspected her of being responsible for those deaths?
And yet this is how the NHS works.
Presumably the mediator came up with proposals that both sides accept that she had only killed half the babies alleged.
Well, the jury did something quite similar.
True. I wonder how they feel about that now. They were out for a month. Most juries in my experience are back within 4 hours, 6 being the normal limit.
That the jury took several days to reach even the first verdicts should give us pause. We are discussing the inquiry as if Letby had been so obviously bang to rights that the hospital should have realised immediately.
And it was not only the jury. The police investigation lasted more than a year before Letby was arrested.
Two different tests: what the hospital needed to do was not assess whether the nurse was guilty of murder but whether there was a risk to those baby patients. There clearly was a risk and, given that there appeared to be no medical reasons for the deaths, the matter should have been reported to the police.
The test for assessing whether there was evidence of a crime and whether an individual is guilty of that crime is different and higher.
It may well be that Letby should have been moved to different duties earlier than she was, although even there we need to be careful not to set up a bully's charter. Possibly there should be a central unit of NHS investigators between the trust and the police.
In 1978 the Anti Nazi League was formed to counter the way the National Front & other far right parties scapegoated black people, obscuring the real problems of poverty, cuts in education and in social services etc. Among those who financed its launch - Michael Parkinson. https://twitter.com/Mr_Dave_Haslam/status/1692167314467430681
The payment for ex-MPs who lose their seats is going to be doubled from 2 months to 4 months.
And now its going to apply to MPs who voluntarily step down, not just those who lose their seats too.
What absolute grift.
I can see the issue with people who step down. But otherwise, MP is already a pretty unappealing career in terms of responsibility, job security and statistical likelihood of being murdered or injured by a member of the public, so a payoff of 4 months after losing your job with no notice period doesn't seem at all excessive to me. Most private sector jobs at similar mid-management pay levels pay between 3 and 6 months severance.
Most full time private sector jobs at similar level pay much less than being a part time MP does.
MP is a pretty appealing career earning more than 97% of the British public even at entry level without Ministerial responsibilities. That's why Mad Nads is in no hurry to step down without another sinecure, she wouldn't be worth that much in the real world.
No they don't. Most MPs work much longer than 9 to 5 and spend weekends in constituencies.
It is a perfectly reasonable severance package for MPs but is actually less generous than most comparable public or private sector jobs on £80k a year would get
You make "spend weekends in constituencies sound like part of the job. Isn't that where they are supposed to live?
It is part of the job. Many MPs do constituency surgeries on a Saturday, have fetes, markets, religious services, remembrance day, openings of new buildings etc to attend on the weekends too
It is a redundancy package effectively, MPs pay has risen below inflation this year
That a hundred or two Tory MPs are about to lose their seats is mere coincidence.
It was decided by IPSA not the government and would apply to SNP MPs who lose their seats and Labour and LD MPs who lose their seats at future general elections too
The reason given by the CCRC for not proceeding is very strange. The comment was that there was "no certainty" that the other DNA found on the victim's clothing was "crime specific".
That makes it sound as though they were asking the wrong question entirely. Certainty that someone else's DNA was crime-specific would have proved that Malkinson was certainly innocent (given that there was only one assailant). Obviously, reasonable doubt of guilt is the correct criterion.
Depending on what they discovered, that conclusion might be reasonable. I think the bar is set quite high for a CCRC referral. ...
The criterion is just that "the Commission consider that there is a real possibility that the conviction, verdict, finding or sentence would not be upheld were the reference to be made ..." https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1995/35/section/13
The point I'm making is that standard of proof of guilt is "beyond reasonable doubt", so new evidence raising reasonable doubt should result in the appeal being upheld. But the CCRC comment makes it sound as they were dismissing the new evidence because it didn't provide certainty of innocence.
Isn't it reversed after a conviction? You don't have the presumption of guilt any more, so you have to prove innocence?
Not sure about the details of the provisions in England but in Scotland the test applied is has there been a miscarriage of justice which is very different from has something gone wrong?
It is therefore not enough to show 1 strand of evidence has become suspect or even wrong if there is other compelling evidence indicating guilt. I don’t know enough about the case to comment but it is likely that the CCRC took that view, at least initially.
Well, I was thinking more of the Hanratty case, where AIUI the judges took the view that unless evidence proving him innocent was found, there was no reason to overturn the conviction. That's why the family took those DNA tests and were rather horrified when the results strongly suggested Hanratty was guilty.
I think also with Sion Jenkins once doubts had been cast on the evidence the Court of Appeal ordered a retrial not an acquittal, although I could be wrong about that.
The Hanratty DNA results were on inspection rather less compelling than you might suppose but it is certainly true that it was impossible to prove Hanratty innocent and that is likely to remain the case forever, mainly because of the complete mess the police made of the investigation at the time.
Personally I think it unlikely he did do it, but I am sure the verdict will now never be overturned.
The Hanratty case is another reminder of the unreliability of eye-witness identification, even from the victim. That said, it may well be significant that Hanratty's gun was found hidden in a place that Hanratty had previously advocated hiding guns: under a bus seat.
Trying to get hold of Donald Trumps weighing scales anyone know where I can get some. #215lb
Actually scrap that I have realised if you only put 1 foot on them and the other on the floor you can weigh the same as Donald no need to buy new scales.
I thought I was losing weight, but the scales were just rubbing against the wall.
Coincidentally, I was 215lbs (97.5kg) in early May before starting a sustained exercise/diet regime (I'm just under 6' 2")
As of this morning, I was 176 lbs (79.8kg), which was gratifying.
Greater Manchester Police appear to be most to blame.
Legal/Justice system taking 16 years to correct what they knew absolutely was a wrong decision is up there.
He was let down every step of the way, but it started with the police.
Please explain?
Presumbly the Police investigated, found the evidence that led them to think they had the right person and handed the evidence over to the CPS who were convinced by the evidence and where it convinced a jury that he was guilty too. That seems to be the Police doing their job.
Subsequent evidence helped show he was not guilty, and that was in the hands of the legal/justice system for years without them properly dealing with it.
The Police get many things wrong, but they seem least to blame in this instance?
Incorrect. They concealed crucial evidence and forged other evidence.
But the CCRC did have the relevant information for years too, right? So they can't just blame the Police either, they need to take responsibility too.
An all round terrible failure.
I'm not letting the CCRC off the hook for their own failures, but they would have been irrelevant if the police hadn't fitted him up in the first place.
What puzzles me more is why they did that. There doesn't seem any particular reason for them to hate Malkinson which is the usual reason for somebody being fitted up. As far as I know he had no police record.
It is odd - but I don't think all that unusual ?
For another measure of how seriously the CCRC still takes the case:
Yet Helen Pitcher, the chair of the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), has been notably silent in answering questions about the chances it missed to end the 17 years Malkinson spent in prison for a rape he did not commit.
The Guardian can reveal that Pitcher has been in Montenegro, where she is promoting her property business...
A piss poor part-time Chair.
Shami Chakrabarti Dido Harding Paula Vennells Cressida Dick Helen Pitcher
Nice to see that women can be as equally useless as men.
Perhaps these appointments should be full-time rather than letting the great and the good run portfolio careers.
The payment for ex-MPs who lose their seats is going to be doubled from 2 months to 4 months.
And now its going to apply to MPs who voluntarily step down, not just those who lose their seats too.
What absolute grift.
For MPs who get voted out I can almost accept it. Sort of like redundancy. MPs stepping down should get nowt. Do the ones who have to stand down due to being crooks get the bung?
I remember the same debate back in 2010. The argument was that not giving the package to MPs standing down voluntarily gave them an incentive to hang on (maybe even stand on a token basis as an Independent) even when they were clearly tired or otherwise no longer suitable (whether through scandal or simply age).
IIRC I got 6 months' pay, or maybe it was 4, so I'm in no position to criticise. But MPs generally struggle to resume former careers (the idea of my going back to IT after 13 years out of it was clearly ridicuolous) so there's a case for not making seat loss - often for no particvular fault of their own - not instantly calamitous.
There's no easy answer, it just doesn't play well with people struggling to pay the mortgage. MPs, rightly or wrongly, all seem like they're on the gravy train, not subject to the same stresses and rules the rest of us follow. We're all told we have to look after ourselves, put a bit away for a rainy day, plan for retirement, have an emergency fund. Can't afford your bills, even though youre working, or lost your job? Tough shit. MPs? Just milk it for as long as you can, then when you've had enough or get voted out, the old boys/girls network will sort you out. Here's a few grand to tide you over until the directorship/charity job/ company you lobbied for job kicks in. Might be harsh, but it's how it appears.
Trying to get hold of Donald Trumps weighing scales anyone know where I can get some. #215lb
Actually scrap that I have realised if you only put 1 foot on them and the other on the floor you can weigh the same as Donald no need to buy new scales.
I thought I was losing weight, but the scales were just rubbing against the wall.
Coincidentally, I was 215lbs (97.5kg) in early May before starting a sustained exercise/diet regime (I'm just under 6' 2")
As of this morning, I was 176 lbs (79.8kg), which was gratifying.
Why do infrastructure projects cost so many multiples more here than they do in any European country? Examples of road and rail projects given where the relative costs are astronomical.
Yes I get the "NIMBY tax" point they make. Some will say "our island is congested" - but we cost almost double the costs in Japan... Surely a lot of this is the Spiv tax. We pay a lot more than everyone else because fuck you. We don't have StateCo infrastructure companies like France so we get reamed by consortia who have a 47x markup on items as revenue earners. So HS2 costs 8x the cost per mile of the most recent LGV in France.
For all of the public vs private sector arguments, it is telling that countries where it is all done in the public sector have a lot more infrastructure than we do and at a lower cost.
The idea that it’s cheaper to get the private sector to do things rather than the “inefficient” public sector is one of the great myths of our era.
HS2 is being designed and managed at a high level by the public sector, and built by the private sector. The £1.5bn A14 Cambridge to Huntingdon improvement scheme, and was finished early (in part) despite Covid and more or less on budget. It too was designed and managed by the public sector at a high level, and built by the private sector.
There are many reasons why these projects can come in over budget and late; but decisions made early on in the project, and at a high level, can make a massive difference. As one example, who takes on risk for overruns, and how much do you set aside for such overruns?
The vast majority of large projects have both public and private involvement; partly because it is impossible to do anything large *without* governmental intervention at some level. And that's good; but it's easy for one side or the other to throw blame at the other side.
A very significant cost of HS2 relates to the contract. The government wants the consortium to be on the hook for decades for all kinds of unlikely scenarios. That has pushed the design into being built to withstand a 2012-style cataclysm with the costs for that as you might expect.
Had we built a high speed rail line at a spec and legal exposure that isn't insane, the cost would be a lot less.
Another example is the Great Western electrification fiasco. We had lost the industry knowledge to do such projects post-privatisation and had to start largely from scratch. So we ended up with ugly over-engineered masts supporting vastly overweight catenary which required very deep footers.
The cost of course was insane, hence having long sections of route where they did the drilling for the footers and bought the vastly over-engineered masts only for the DfT to scrap the scheme and literally scrap the metalwork. Worse is that there is still one point on the route where the catenary wire has to limbo under a bridge which wasn't raised and then over a level crossing that wasn't bridged. A nice 110mph restriction for no reason than crap design.
Putting it simply, we are egregiously shit at these projects. We spend stupid amounts of cash to get crapola infrastructure.
I generally agree with that; but as the Cambridge to Huntingdon project shows, we can do it well. There are dozens of large infrastructure projects going on at any time, and most don't have massive problems. We notice the ones that do.
I'd also point out the reason we had lost industry knowledge of railway electrification was utterly down to the Brown and Blair governments, who only electrified a few miles of new route in 13 years (Crewe to Kidsgrove). Compared to virtually continuous electrification projects in the 1980s and 1990s.
The GWML electrification mess had many causes; from Dft mismanagement to Network Rail's reliance on untested technology. Thankfully they appear to have learnt many lessons for newer projects.
On the A14, the screw up is that its the A14. Built to the new Expressway format connecting one motorway to another, we've ended up with a blue gap. Was built efficiently but we still can't plan for shit.
On electrification, the issue we had for a long time was the contracts. You say down to Blair and Brown, and they were definitely in office. But the infrastructure was Failtrack who bankrupted themselves by failing to spend enough on preventative maintenance. The franchises wouldn't do electrification at their own cost as most were on 7 year contracts. Labour should have scrapped the whole franchise system but decided they had bigger things to do.
Even after the network and increasingly the franchises were brought under DfT control we still didn't do it, despite having both a rapidly-ageing fleet of diseasal units and a fleet of newer electric units not being used. Because variance in the contract is Bad News for the DfT.
Its perculiarly British bullshit.
On railway electrification, the issue was that the Labour government under Brown and Blair did not invest in electrification. It's quite simple. They chose not to. It is nothing to do with franchises or Railtrack (which ceased to exist eight years before the end of the Labour government).
Compare and contrast with the massive mileage electrified under... (drum rolls) Thatcher and Major.
Labour chose not to electrify, and that led to the industrial knowledge gap that led to the GWML fiasco. It's not as simple as Labour=pro-railways and Conservatives=anti-railways.
The A14 Cambridge to Huntingdon scheme has, IMHO, been a massive success.
Have used it quite a bit this year and it does seem a decent bit of road, very useful for those of us hacking up to Norfolk.
It is a decent bit of road. The A14 was built on the cheap in the 1990s - much of it was just upgrades of existing roads. The western junction with the M6/M1 was an absolute mess until it as sorted out a few years ago; many of the junctions with small roads were and are, poor. The road at Huntingdon was also a real mess, with two major (and busy) roundabouts. The new scheme was alleviated the latter, and also improved it as far as Milton.
There are still issues: there really should be an A428/southbound M11 junction, which would make a big difference to Coton and Madingley. But the whole A14 from the M1/M6 to Cambridge is far better than it was a decade ago.
While they have a shakey future, the question for many counties is - why don't companies like this exist in your country? The amounts of money are quire small.
In the UK, there was an element of suppressing potential competitors to Ariane. This seems to have ended, finally.
The reason given by the CCRC for not proceeding is very strange. The comment was that there was "no certainty" that the other DNA found on the victim's clothing was "crime specific".
That makes it sound as though they were asking the wrong question entirely. Certainty that someone else's DNA was crime-specific would have proved that Malkinson was certainly innocent (given that there was only one assailant). Obviously, reasonable doubt of guilt is the correct criterion.
Depending on what they discovered, that conclusion might be reasonable. I think the bar is set quite high for a CCRC referral. ...
The criterion is just that "the Commission consider that there is a real possibility that the conviction, verdict, finding or sentence would not be upheld were the reference to be made ..." https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1995/35/section/13
The point I'm making is that standard of proof of guilt is "beyond reasonable doubt", so new evidence raising reasonable doubt should result in the appeal being upheld. But the CCRC comment makes it sound as they were dismissing the new evidence because it didn't provide certainty of innocence.
Isn't it reversed after a conviction? You don't have the presumption of guilt any more, so you have to prove innocence?
Not sure about the details of the provisions in England but in Scotland the test applied is has there been a miscarriage of justice which is very different from has something gone wrong?
It is therefore not enough to show 1 strand of evidence has become suspect or even wrong if there is other compelling evidence indicating guilt. I don’t know enough about the case to comment but it is likely that the CCRC took that view, at least initially.
Well, I was thinking more of the Hanratty case, where AIUI the judges took the view that unless evidence proving him innocent was found, there was no reason to overturn the conviction. That's why the family took those DNA tests and were rather horrified when the results strongly suggested Hanratty was guilty.
I think also with Sion Jenkins once doubts had been cast on the evidence the Court of Appeal ordered a retrial not an acquittal, although I could be wrong about that.
The Hanratty DNA results were on inspection rather less compelling than you might suppose but it is certainly true that it was impossible to prove Hanratty innocent and that is likely to remain the case forever, mainly because of the complete mess the police made of the investigation at the time.
Personally I think it unlikely he did do it, but I am sure the verdict will now never be overturned.
Having looked into the case, I would disagree.
It wasn't maybe a brilliant police investigation, but the evidence against him is pretty much irrefutable. Just to run through it:
1) He was identified by the surviving victim who never wavered in her belief that he was the killer. Yes, she had wrongly identified somebody else in a different identity parade earlier, but she hadn't been told that if she didn't recognise anyone she didn't have to chose one. She thought they were asking 'what was the closest match to the person you saw?'
2) He stayed in a hotel room where two cartridge cases were found from the bullets used in the murders.
3) The gun used in the murder was found wrapped in a handkerchief that had mucus on it which matched his DNA profile. No other DNA was found on the handkerchief.
4) His semen was on Valerie Storey's knickers. There was some indication of a second sample of semen, but the question remains, why was his there?
5) He gave not one but two false alibis for the time of the murders.
6) About the only really odd feature of the case was that he told Gregston he couldn't drive, but there could be explanations for that including possibly laying a false trail.
7) Although Peter Alphon later confessed to the murder, leaving aside the fact he didn't match the description of the killer, wasn't identified in a parade and was well known as a psychotic attention seeker, he was paid to confess by Paul Foot as part of his campaign against the death penalty.
8) There was some confusion over the colour of the killer's eyes. However, Storey had in fact said 'blue' which was shortened to 'bl' and misread as 'br' ie 'brown' in the first press release.
Now it is impossible Hanratty was innocent? Not impossible, I suppose. In the sense it's not impossible that one day Boris Johnson might say something truthful.
But you are looking at not only a truly vast conspiracy but one which had knowledge of future DNA techniques to store his mucus and semen to be planted on the evidence at the right moment if he was innnocent.
He might have got away with it under today's rules (this being before the Police and Criminal Evidence Act) but bluntly I think it unlikely. Killers have been convicted on far less (Adrian Prout springs to mind) and Storey's evidence on its own was pretty compelling. Staying at a hotel habituated by criminals under a false name and lying about it is also not the smartest idea in the world.
Hanratty himself was said to have been quite open about his guilt when not under caution. He just didn't think it could be proved.
Trying to get hold of Donald Trumps weighing scales anyone know where I can get some. #215lb
Actually scrap that I have realised if you only put 1 foot on them and the other on the floor you can weigh the same as Donald no need to buy new scales.
I thought I was losing weight, but the scales were just rubbing against the wall.
Coincidentally, I was 215lbs (97.5kg) in early May before starting a sustained exercise/diet regime (I'm just under 6' 2")
As of this morning, I was 176 lbs (79.8kg), which was gratifying.
Are you American? What happened to stones?
They were quoting in pounds, so I followed suit.
From 15 stone 5 (I actually peaked at 15 stone 9 after Christmas) to 12 stone 8.
The payment for ex-MPs who lose their seats is going to be doubled from 2 months to 4 months.
And now its going to apply to MPs who voluntarily step down, not just those who lose their seats too.
What absolute grift.
For MPs who get voted out I can almost accept it. Sort of like redundancy. MPs stepping down should get nowt. Do the ones who have to stand down due to being crooks get the bung?
I remember the same debate back in 2010. The argument was that not giving the package to MPs standing down voluntarily gave them an incentive to hang on (maybe even stand on a token basis as an Independent) even when they were clearly tired or otherwise no longer suitable (whether through scandal or simply age).
IIRC I got 6 months' pay, or maybe it was 4, so I'm in no position to criticise. But MPs generally struggle to resume former careers (the idea of my going back to IT after 13 years out of it was clearly ridicuolous) so there's a case for not making seat loss - often for no particvular fault of their own - not instantly calamitous.
Nick, was this before or after the reforms to the system? I can't recall the exact date.
I sometimes get it in the neck on social media for pointing out how much better the current system is than the previous one, and how most of "Expenses" are actually office staff costs.
When I was last employed by someone else, the notice was iirc 4 weeks minimum or one week per year of service up until 12 weeks max. That comparison, unless it has changed, makes 4 months hard to justify.
I still stand by the basic principle I argued in 2009-2010 - that MPs should be treated exactly the same as everybody else.
Why do infrastructure projects cost so many multiples more here than they do in any European country? Examples of road and rail projects given where the relative costs are astronomical.
Yes I get the "NIMBY tax" point they make. Some will say "our island is congested" - but we cost almost double the costs in Japan... Surely a lot of this is the Spiv tax. We pay a lot more than everyone else because fuck you. We don't have StateCo infrastructure companies like France so we get reamed by consortia who have a 47x markup on items as revenue earners. So HS2 costs 8x the cost per mile of the most recent LGV in France.
For all of the public vs private sector arguments, it is telling that countries where it is all done in the public sector have a lot more infrastructure than we do and at a lower cost.
The idea that it’s cheaper to get the private sector to do things rather than the “inefficient” public sector is one of the great myths of our era.
HS2 is being designed and managed at a high level by the public sector, and built by the private sector. The £1.5bn A14 Cambridge to Huntingdon improvement scheme, and was finished early (in part) despite Covid and more or less on budget. It too was designed and managed by the public sector at a high level, and built by the private sector.
There are many reasons why these projects can come in over budget and late; but decisions made early on in the project, and at a high level, can make a massive difference. As one example, who takes on risk for overruns, and how much do you set aside for such overruns?
The vast majority of large projects have both public and private involvement; partly because it is impossible to do anything large *without* governmental intervention at some level. And that's good; but it's easy for one side or the other to throw blame at the other side.
A very significant cost of HS2 relates to the contract. The government wants the consortium to be on the hook for decades for all kinds of unlikely scenarios. That has pushed the design into being built to withstand a 2012-style cataclysm with the costs for that as you might expect.
Had we built a high speed rail line at a spec and legal exposure that isn't insane, the cost would be a lot less.
Another example is the Great Western electrification fiasco. We had lost the industry knowledge to do such projects post-privatisation and had to start largely from scratch. So we ended up with ugly over-engineered masts supporting vastly overweight catenary which required very deep footers.
The cost of course was insane, hence having long sections of route where they did the drilling for the footers and bought the vastly over-engineered masts only for the DfT to scrap the scheme and literally scrap the metalwork. Worse is that there is still one point on the route where the catenary wire has to limbo under a bridge which wasn't raised and then over a level crossing that wasn't bridged. A nice 110mph restriction for no reason than crap design.
Putting it simply, we are egregiously shit at these projects. We spend stupid amounts of cash to get crapola infrastructure.
I generally agree with that; but as the Cambridge to Huntingdon project shows, we can do it well. There are dozens of large infrastructure projects going on at any time, and most don't have massive problems. We notice the ones that do.
I'd also point out the reason we had lost industry knowledge of railway electrification was utterly down to the Brown and Blair governments, who only electrified a few miles of new route in 13 years (Crewe to Kidsgrove). Compared to virtually continuous electrification projects in the 1980s and 1990s.
The GWML electrification mess had many causes; from Dft mismanagement to Network Rail's reliance on untested technology. Thankfully they appear to have learnt many lessons for newer projects.
On the A14, the screw up is that its the A14. Built to the new Expressway format connecting one motorway to another, we've ended up with a blue gap. Was built efficiently but we still can't plan for shit.
On electrification, the issue we had for a long time was the contracts. You say down to Blair and Brown, and they were definitely in office. But the infrastructure was Failtrack who bankrupted themselves by failing to spend enough on preventative maintenance. The franchises wouldn't do electrification at their own cost as most were on 7 year contracts. Labour should have scrapped the whole franchise system but decided they had bigger things to do.
Even after the network and increasingly the franchises were brought under DfT control we still didn't do it, despite having both a rapidly-ageing fleet of diseasal units and a fleet of newer electric units not being used. Because variance in the contract is Bad News for the DfT.
Its perculiarly British bullshit.
On railway electrification, the issue was that the Labour government under Brown and Blair did not invest in electrification. It's quite simple. They chose not to. It is nothing to do with franchises or Railtrack (which ceased to exist eight years before the end of the Labour government).
Compare and contrast with the massive mileage electrified under... (drum rolls) Thatcher and Major.
Labour chose not to electrify, and that led to the industrial knowledge gap that led to the GWML fiasco. It's not as simple as Labour=pro-railways and Conservatives=anti-railways.
The A14 Cambridge to Huntingdon scheme has, IMHO, been a massive success.
Have used it quite a bit this year and it does seem a decent bit of road, very useful for those of us hacking up to Norfolk.
It is a decent bit of road. The A14 was built on the cheap in the 1990s - much of it was just upgrades of existing roads. The western junction with the M6/M1 was an absolute mess until it as sorted out a few years ago; many of the junctions with small roads were and are, poor. The road at Huntingdon was also a real mess, with two major (and busy) roundabouts. The new scheme was alleviated the latter, and also improved it as far as Milton.
There are still issues: there really should be an A428/southbound M11 junction, which would make a big difference to Coton and Madingley. But the whole A14 from the M1/M6 to Cambridge is far better than it was a decade ago.
Fun fact:
You can (theoretically) drive from the M11/A406 junction near Redbridge all the way to the M8/M74 junction in Glasgow without changing lanes, via the M11, A14, M6, M6 Toll, M6, A74 (M), and M74. It's basically one big dual carriageway!
The payment for ex-MPs who lose their seats is going to be doubled from 2 months to 4 months.
And now its going to apply to MPs who voluntarily step down, not just those who lose their seats too.
What absolute grift.
For MPs who get voted out I can almost accept it. Sort of like redundancy. MPs stepping down should get nowt. Do the ones who have to stand down due to being crooks get the bung?
I remember the same debate back in 2010. The argument was that not giving the package to MPs standing down voluntarily gave them an incentive to hang on (maybe even stand on a token basis as an Independent) even when they were clearly tired or otherwise no longer suitable (whether through scandal or simply age).
IIRC I got 6 months' pay, or maybe it was 4, so I'm in no position to criticise. But MPs generally struggle to resume former careers (the idea of my going back to IT after 13 years out of it was clearly ridicuolous) so there's a case for not making seat loss - often for no particvular fault of their own - not instantly calamitous.
And this leading to the issue of second jobs, training and influencing.
For an MP -
1) Going back to your old career in anything knowledge based - IT, other technologies would be impossible without complete retraining. Maybe as senior management. 2) You've probably had no training or updates in your time as an MP - no career development. 3) This leads directly to the non-ex jobs (1 day a year, £££££) which are about your contacts in politics and the permanent structures of government. For many ex MPs, that's all they have to offer.
Trying to get hold of Donald Trumps weighing scales anyone know where I can get some. #215lb
Actually scrap that I have realised if you only put 1 foot on them and the other on the floor you can weigh the same as Donald no need to buy new scales.
I thought I was losing weight, but the scales were just rubbing against the wall.
Coincidentally, I was 215lbs (97.5kg) in early May before starting a sustained exercise/diet regime (I'm just under 6' 2")
As of this morning, I was 176 lbs (79.8kg), which was gratifying.
That's an amazing achievement. Don't be too hard on yourself going forward. Expect to put some back on but with luck and keeping an eye out for excess you will level off at a much lower weight.
The payment for ex-MPs who lose their seats is going to be doubled from 2 months to 4 months.
And now its going to apply to MPs who voluntarily step down, not just those who lose their seats too.
What absolute grift.
For MPs who get voted out I can almost accept it. Sort of like redundancy. MPs stepping down should get nowt. Do the ones who have to stand down due to being crooks get the bung?
I remember the same debate back in 2010. The argument was that not giving the package to MPs standing down voluntarily gave them an incentive to hang on (maybe even stand on a token basis as an Independent) even when they were clearly tired or otherwise no longer suitable (whether through scandal or simply age).
IIRC I got 6 months' pay, or maybe it was 4, so I'm in no position to criticise. But MPs generally struggle to resume former careers (the idea of my going back to IT after 13 years out of it was clearly ridicuolous) so there's a case for not making seat loss - often for no particvular fault of their own - not instantly calamitous.
There's no easy answer, it just doesn't play well with people struggling to pay the mortgage. MPs, rightly or wrongly, all seem like they're on the gravy train, not subject to the same stresses and rules the rest of us follow. We're all told we have to look after ourselves, put a bit away for a rainy day, plan for retirement, have an emergency fund. Can't afford your bills, even though youre working, or lost your job? Tough shit. MPs? Just milk it for as long as you can, then when you've had enough or get voted out, the old boys/girls network will sort you out. Here's a few grand to tide you over until the directorship/charity job/ company you lobbied for job kicks in. Might be harsh, but it's how it appears.
Certainly true that frontbenchers often go onto lucrative directorships and advisor roles. Far less so for the backbenchers.
The payment for ex-MPs who lose their seats is going to be doubled from 2 months to 4 months.
And now its going to apply to MPs who voluntarily step down, not just those who lose their seats too.
What absolute grift.
For MPs who get voted out I can almost accept it. Sort of like redundancy. MPs stepping down should get nowt. Do the ones who have to stand down due to being crooks get the bung?
I remember the same debate back in 2010. The argument was that not giving the package to MPs standing down voluntarily gave them an incentive to hang on (maybe even stand on a token basis as an Independent) even when they were clearly tired or otherwise no longer suitable (whether through scandal or simply age).
IIRC I got 6 months' pay, or maybe it was 4, so I'm in no position to criticise. But MPs generally struggle to resume former careers (the idea of my going back to IT after 13 years out of it was clearly ridicuolous) so there's a case for not making seat loss - often for no particvular fault of their own - not instantly calamitous.
Nick, was this before or after the reforms to the system? I can't recall the exact date.
I sometimes get it in the neck on social media for pointing out how much better the current system is than the previous one, and how most of "Expenses" are actually office staff costs.
When I was last employed by someone else, the notice was iirc 4 weeks minimum or one week per year of service up until 12 weeks max. That comparison, unless it has changed, makes 4 months hard to justify.
I still stand by the basic principle I argued in 2009-2010 - that MPs should be treated exactly the same as everybody else.
When a company I was working for shut its office in the UK, they gave everyone 1 month per year of service, plus an extra month. That's not uncommon in high end IT.
O/T there is a series on R4 called “The Reunion” where they get together a group of people involved in a big situation or event and they recount the events from their perspective, always interesting.
Todays was about Lockerbie and it’s moving and incredibly interesting. Easy to forget what a massive and horrific terrorist event it was. Worth listening on Sounds if anyone is interested.
Why do infrastructure projects cost so many multiples more here than they do in any European country? Examples of road and rail projects given where the relative costs are astronomical.
Yes I get the "NIMBY tax" point they make. Some will say "our island is congested" - but we cost almost double the costs in Japan... Surely a lot of this is the Spiv tax. We pay a lot more than everyone else because fuck you. We don't have StateCo infrastructure companies like France so we get reamed by consortia who have a 47x markup on items as revenue earners. So HS2 costs 8x the cost per mile of the most recent LGV in France.
For all of the public vs private sector arguments, it is telling that countries where it is all done in the public sector have a lot more infrastructure than we do and at a lower cost.
The idea that it’s cheaper to get the private sector to do things rather than the “inefficient” public sector is one of the great myths of our era.
HS2 is being designed and managed at a high level by the public sector, and built by the private sector. The £1.5bn A14 Cambridge to Huntingdon improvement scheme, and was finished early (in part) despite Covid and more or less on budget. It too was designed and managed by the public sector at a high level, and built by the private sector.
There are many reasons why these projects can come in over budget and late; but decisions made early on in the project, and at a high level, can make a massive difference. As one example, who takes on risk for overruns, and how much do you set aside for such overruns?
The vast majority of large projects have both public and private involvement; partly because it is impossible to do anything large *without* governmental intervention at some level. And that's good; but it's easy for one side or the other to throw blame at the other side.
A very significant cost of HS2 relates to the contract. The government wants the consortium to be on the hook for decades for all kinds of unlikely scenarios. That has pushed the design into being built to withstand a 2012-style cataclysm with the costs for that as you might expect.
Had we built a high speed rail line at a spec and legal exposure that isn't insane, the cost would be a lot less.
Another example is the Great Western electrification fiasco. We had lost the industry knowledge to do such projects post-privatisation and had to start largely from scratch. So we ended up with ugly over-engineered masts supporting vastly overweight catenary which required very deep footers.
The cost of course was insane, hence having long sections of route where they did the drilling for the footers and bought the vastly over-engineered masts only for the DfT to scrap the scheme and literally scrap the metalwork. Worse is that there is still one point on the route where the catenary wire has to limbo under a bridge which wasn't raised and then over a level crossing that wasn't bridged. A nice 110mph restriction for no reason than crap design.
Putting it simply, we are egregiously shit at these projects. We spend stupid amounts of cash to get crapola infrastructure.
I generally agree with that; but as the Cambridge to Huntingdon project shows, we can do it well. There are dozens of large infrastructure projects going on at any time, and most don't have massive problems. We notice the ones that do.
I'd also point out the reason we had lost industry knowledge of railway electrification was utterly down to the Brown and Blair governments, who only electrified a few miles of new route in 13 years (Crewe to Kidsgrove). Compared to virtually continuous electrification projects in the 1980s and 1990s.
The GWML electrification mess had many causes; from Dft mismanagement to Network Rail's reliance on untested technology. Thankfully they appear to have learnt many lessons for newer projects.
On the A14, the screw up is that its the A14. Built to the new Expressway format connecting one motorway to another, we've ended up with a blue gap. Was built efficiently but we still can't plan for shit.
On electrification, the issue we had for a long time was the contracts. You say down to Blair and Brown, and they were definitely in office. But the infrastructure was Failtrack who bankrupted themselves by failing to spend enough on preventative maintenance. The franchises wouldn't do electrification at their own cost as most were on 7 year contracts. Labour should have scrapped the whole franchise system but decided they had bigger things to do.
Even after the network and increasingly the franchises were brought under DfT control we still didn't do it, despite having both a rapidly-ageing fleet of diseasal units and a fleet of newer electric units not being used. Because variance in the contract is Bad News for the DfT.
Its perculiarly British bullshit.
On railway electrification, the issue was that the Labour government under Brown and Blair did not invest in electrification. It's quite simple. They chose not to. It is nothing to do with franchises or Railtrack (which ceased to exist eight years before the end of the Labour government).
Compare and contrast with the massive mileage electrified under... (drum rolls) Thatcher and Major.
Labour chose not to electrify, and that led to the industrial knowledge gap that led to the GWML fiasco. It's not as simple as Labour=pro-railways and Conservatives=anti-railways.
The A14 Cambridge to Huntingdon scheme has, IMHO, been a massive success.
Have used it quite a bit this year and it does seem a decent bit of road, very useful for those of us hacking up to Norfolk.
It is a decent bit of road. The A14 was built on the cheap in the 1990s - much of it was just upgrades of existing roads. The western junction with the M6/M1 was an absolute mess until it as sorted out a few years ago; many of the junctions with small roads were and are, poor. The road at Huntingdon was also a real mess, with two major (and busy) roundabouts. The new scheme was alleviated the latter, and also improved it as far as Milton.
There are still issues: there really should be an A428/southbound M11 junction, which would make a big difference to Coton and Madingley. But the whole A14 from the M1/M6 to Cambridge is far better than it was a decade ago.
I was going to say "buy cheap, buy twice", except it wasn't that low cost at the time- just shoddy. Hence this jolly number by the then chaplain of Girton;
Neat illustration of the British Doom Loop, though. Because the act of building stuff is so difficult and expensive, we delay, skimp, faff and cut corners, which then require spending even more when we admit we have to do them properly.
I don't know how we fix that, but it would help an awful lot if we did.
Trying to get hold of Donald Trumps weighing scales anyone know where I can get some. #215lb
Actually scrap that I have realised if you only put 1 foot on them and the other on the floor you can weigh the same as Donald no need to buy new scales.
I thought I was losing weight, but the scales were just rubbing against the wall.
Coincidentally, I was 215lbs (97.5kg) in early May before starting a sustained exercise/diet regime (I'm just under 6' 2")
As of this morning, I was 176 lbs (79.8kg), which was gratifying.
That's an amazing achievement. Don't be too hard on yourself going forward. Expect to put some back on but with luck and keeping an eye out for excess you will level off at a much lower weight.
Thanks. I will admit to feeling rather pleased with myself. (And I'm sleeping much better, not getting heartburn and indigestion when I lie down any more, much more energy... it's a great feeling)
My plan (after our holiday, which was my reason for having a target) is to try to set up a habit of continuing the exercise regime at a lower intensity and keep with the routine of the lower-calorie foods on which I've alighted (malt loaf is great for breakfast, for example, as it's nicely filling), and try to level off after we get back.
Having done all this, I don't want to throw it all away.
The payment for ex-MPs who lose their seats is going to be doubled from 2 months to 4 months.
And now its going to apply to MPs who voluntarily step down, not just those who lose their seats too.
What absolute grift.
For MPs who get voted out I can almost accept it. Sort of like redundancy. MPs stepping down should get nowt. Do the ones who have to stand down due to being crooks get the bung?
I remember the same debate back in 2010. The argument was that not giving the package to MPs standing down voluntarily gave them an incentive to hang on (maybe even stand on a token basis as an Independent) even when they were clearly tired or otherwise no longer suitable (whether through scandal or simply age).
IIRC I got 6 months' pay, or maybe it was 4, so I'm in no position to criticise. But MPs generally struggle to resume former careers (the idea of my going back to IT after 13 years out of it was clearly ridicuolous) so there's a case for not making seat loss - often for no particvular fault of their own - not instantly calamitous.
Nick, was this before or after the reforms to the system? I can't recall the exact date.
I sometimes get it in the neck on social media for pointing out how much better the current system is than the previous one, and how most of "Expenses" are actually office staff costs.
When I was last employed by someone else, the notice was iirc 4 weeks minimum or one week per year of service up until 12 weeks max. That comparison, unless it has changed, makes 4 months hard to justify.
I still stand by the basic principle I argued in 2009-2010 - that MPs should be treated exactly the same as everybody else.
When a company I was working for shut its office in the UK, they gave everyone 1 month per year of service, plus an extra month. That's not uncommon in high end IT.
That was the redundancy system (4 weeks per year) that many UK engineering companies used to run until taken over by Arnold Weinstock's GEC, then the salami slicing would start.
This is the theory from iPSA: The money is aimed at helping ex-MPs close down their offices and manage the departure of their staff.
At the last general election departing MPs were paid for two months after losing their seats.
However, IPSA, which sets the rules for MPs' expenses, has said this is not long enough and that the time period should be increased to four months.
The eligibility for the payments has also been expanded to cover those who voluntarily stand down at the election as well as those who lose their seat.
MPs who stand down before an election period will not receive the payments.
Explaining the change IPSA, the Independent Standards Authority, said the work of an MP - such as helping constituents - continued right up to election day and they could only begin to close their offices once a new MP had been elected.
The payment for ex-MPs who lose their seats is going to be doubled from 2 months to 4 months.
And now its going to apply to MPs who voluntarily step down, not just those who lose their seats too.
What absolute grift.
For MPs who get voted out I can almost accept it. Sort of like redundancy. MPs stepping down should get nowt. Do the ones who have to stand down due to being crooks get the bung?
I remember the same debate back in 2010. The argument was that not giving the package to MPs standing down voluntarily gave them an incentive to hang on (maybe even stand on a token basis as an Independent) even when they were clearly tired or otherwise no longer suitable (whether through scandal or simply age).
IIRC I got 6 months' pay, or maybe it was 4, so I'm in no position to criticise. But MPs generally struggle to resume former careers (the idea of my going back to IT after 13 years out of it was clearly ridicuolous) so there's a case for not making seat loss - often for no particvular fault of their own - not instantly calamitous.
And this leading to the issue of second jobs, training and influencing.
For an MP -
1) Going back to your old career in anything knowledge based - IT, other technologies would be impossible without complete retraining. Maybe as senior management. 2) You've probably had no training or updates in your time as an MP - no career development. 3) This leads directly to the non-ex jobs (1 day a year, £££££) which are about your contacts in politics and the permanent structures of government. For many ex MPs, that's all they have to offer.
IIRC @NickPalmer went into a job with an animal welfare company. The salary was by my standards was quite impressive, although PB has different thresholds for "impressive"
The payment for ex-MPs who lose their seats is going to be doubled from 2 months to 4 months.
And now its going to apply to MPs who voluntarily step down, not just those who lose their seats too.
What absolute grift.
For MPs who get voted out I can almost accept it. Sort of like redundancy. MPs stepping down should get nowt. Do the ones who have to stand down due to being crooks get the bung?
I remember the same debate back in 2010. The argument was that not giving the package to MPs standing down voluntarily gave them an incentive to hang on (maybe even stand on a token basis as an Independent) even when they were clearly tired or otherwise no longer suitable (whether through scandal or simply age).
IIRC I got 6 months' pay, or maybe it was 4, so I'm in no position to criticise. But MPs generally struggle to resume former careers (the idea of my going back to IT after 13 years out of it was clearly ridicuolous) so there's a case for not making seat loss - often for no particvular fault of their own - not instantly calamitous.
Nick, was this before or after the reforms to the system? I can't recall the exact date.
I sometimes get it in the neck on social media for pointing out how much better the current system is than the previous one, and how most of "Expenses" are actually office staff costs.
When I was last employed by someone else, the notice was iirc 4 weeks minimum or one week per year of service up until 12 weeks max. That comparison, unless it has changed, makes 4 months hard to justify.
I still stand by the basic principle I argued in 2009-2010 - that MPs should be treated exactly the same as everybody else.
When a company I was working for shut its office in the UK, they gave everyone 1 month per year of service, plus an extra month. That's not uncommon in high end IT.
When I was made redundant from a global megacorp in the IT space, we got the statutory minimum. The following round, a few months later, was more generous.
In 1978 the Anti Nazi League was formed to counter the way the National Front & other far right parties scapegoated black people, obscuring the real problems of poverty, cuts in education and in social services etc. Among those who financed its launch - Michael Parkinson. https://twitter.com/Mr_Dave_Haslam/status/1692167314467430681
With John Arlott, was almost alone as a journalist against the MCC over the 1970 South African tour.
It's meant to hark back to The Apprentice, I think. It's what made him after all. Of all the things he is that's the main thing he is, a reality tv star.
The payment for ex-MPs who lose their seats is going to be doubled from 2 months to 4 months.
And now its going to apply to MPs who voluntarily step down, not just those who lose their seats too.
What absolute grift.
For MPs who get voted out I can almost accept it. Sort of like redundancy. MPs stepping down should get nowt. Do the ones who have to stand down due to being crooks get the bung?
I remember the same debate back in 2010. The argument was that not giving the package to MPs standing down voluntarily gave them an incentive to hang on (maybe even stand on a token basis as an Independent) even when they were clearly tired or otherwise no longer suitable (whether through scandal or simply age).
IIRC I got 6 months' pay, or maybe it was 4, so I'm in no position to criticise. But MPs generally struggle to resume former careers (the idea of my going back to IT after 13 years out of it was clearly ridicuolous) so there's a case for not making seat loss - often for no particvular fault of their own - not instantly calamitous.
There's no easy answer, it just doesn't play well with people struggling to pay the mortgage. MPs, rightly or wrongly, all seem like they're on the gravy train, not subject to the same stresses and rules the rest of us follow. We're all told we have to look after ourselves, put a bit away for a rainy day, plan for retirement, have an emergency fund. Can't afford your bills, even though youre working, or lost your job? Tough shit. MPs? Just milk it for as long as you can, then when you've had enough or get voted out, the old boys/girls network will sort you out. Here's a few grand to tide you over until the directorship/charity job/ company you lobbied for job kicks in. Might be harsh, but it's how it appears.
Certainly true that frontbenchers often go onto lucrative directorships and advisor roles. Far less so for the backbenchers.
I don't have an issue with MP "redundancy" packages, but people who leave their job of their own free will don't get paid off. I hear the cries of " MPs deserve special treatment as they give up their lives to serve us". I don't subscribe to that, but let's be generous, but they still should have to do what the rest of us do. Plan. Save. Keep your skills up, retrain. Live a normal life, with the same jeopardy of employment as the rest of us. If I left my job after 14 years of my own violition I'd get nothing. Why should an MP get a payoff?
The US chose to take ab initios only - no Fulcrum/Flanker drivers. Probably wise. There are 6 of them in the UK now learning English (hopefully not in the North East) then they are going to Cazaux in France to fly the Alpha. Adl'A presumably have this capacity as they are switching to PC-21.
F-16 'B' Course is 40 weeks which qualifies you to be the wingman of somebody who knows what they are doing. The US lavishes a lot of time on trainees with survival training etc. Presumably Ukraine don't give a fuck about any of that so they might be able to chop 5-6 weeks out of the program.
Start to finish F-16 training for US crew is about 950 days elapsed which is amazingly fast. It takes the RAF 6-7 years to get an acne strewn oik combat ready on a Typhoon gun squadron.
The payment for ex-MPs who lose their seats is going to be doubled from 2 months to 4 months.
And now its going to apply to MPs who voluntarily step down, not just those who lose their seats too.
What absolute grift.
For MPs who get voted out I can almost accept it. Sort of like redundancy. MPs stepping down should get nowt. Do the ones who have to stand down due to being crooks get the bung?
I remember the same debate back in 2010. The argument was that not giving the package to MPs standing down voluntarily gave them an incentive to hang on (maybe even stand on a token basis as an Independent) even when they were clearly tired or otherwise no longer suitable (whether through scandal or simply age).
IIRC I got 6 months' pay, or maybe it was 4, so I'm in no position to criticise. But MPs generally struggle to resume former careers (the idea of my going back to IT after 13 years out of it was clearly ridicuolous) so there's a case for not making seat loss - often for no particvular fault of their own - not instantly calamitous.
And this leading to the issue of second jobs, training and influencing.
For an MP -
1) Going back to your old career in anything knowledge based - IT, other technologies would be impossible without complete retraining. Maybe as senior management. 2) You've probably had no training or updates in your time as an MP - no career development. 3) This leads directly to the non-ex jobs (1 day a year, £££££) which are about your contacts in politics and the permanent structures of government. For many ex MPs, that's all they have to offer.
IIRC @NickPalmer went into a job with an animal welfare company. The salary was by my standards was quite impressive, although PB has different thresholds for "impressive"
Yes, jobs requiring an understanding of how politics works are the obvious option, and because I'd done a lot of animal issues in Parliament and chaired a successful working group with the pharma industry and anti-vivisectionists (an unusual feat!(, I was seen as good material. Still took a year and felt myself lucky, though.
Salarty - I was on £100K in IT before I went into Parliament, £48K when elected, and IIRC £50K when I got the new job. Would have been much better off sticking to IT, but not remotely the same satisfaction.
It's meant to hark back to The Apprentice, I think. It's what made him after all. Of all the things he is that's the main thing he is, a reality tv star.
To be fair to Trump (not something you read everyday) he was a business celebrity long before The Apprentice, which is no doubt why he got The Apprentice job. Alan Sugar was much the same over here. What The Apprentice did for Trump was bail out his property company because he'd negotiated co-ownership of the format which was successful in America and around the world, paying Trump hundreds of millions of dollars.
Comments
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/aug/16/pay-rises-should-be-a-reward-for-productivity-says-rishi-sunak
For HS2 as a whole the simple truth is the original project was massively under costed because that was the only way to get approval.
Bart likes to blame NIMBYism for these things because that is his pet obsession but that is rarely the reason. Crossrail was £4 billion over budget and 3 years late in part because of design and execution flaws in signalling and safety testing.
NIMBYism isn't the reason projects cost so much in this country. Poor planning and management, a lot of it due to short termism and changing priorities resulting from changing political climates which developers want to be insulated against financially play a massive part especially when so many people see some of these projects as costly and unnecessary white elephants.
MP is a pretty appealing career earning more than 97% of the British public even at entry level without Ministerial responsibilities. That's why Mad Nads is in no hurry to step down without another sinecure, she wouldn't be worth that much in the real world.
Maybe this is his plan to force her out...
On electrification, the issue we had for a long time was the contracts. You say down to Blair and Brown, and they were definitely in office. But the infrastructure was Failtrack who bankrupted themselves by failing to spend enough on preventative maintenance. The franchises wouldn't do electrification at their own cost as most were on 7 year contracts. Labour should have scrapped the whole franchise system but decided they had bigger things to do.
Even after the network and increasingly the franchises were brought under DfT control we still didn't do it, despite having both a rapidly-ageing fleet of diseasal units and a fleet of newer electric units not being used. Because variance in the contract is Bad News for the DfT.
Its perculiarly British bullshit.
It is therefore not enough to show 1 strand of evidence has become suspect or even wrong if there is other compelling evidence indicating guilt. I don’t know enough about the case to comment but it is likely that the CCRC took that view, at least initially.
I've noticed in business in recent years a fashion for that awful word "agility", which too often seems to mean tinkering with plans on the slightest whim. Any time I hear a new strategy is intended to deliver stable long term results I chuckle because I know in 6 months time there will be a new new strategy along to displace the old new one.
https://open.substack.com/pub/mjtcoldwater/p/lucid-intervals-the-harrowing-and?r=1ld3ue&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
Standing down as a result opf petition = being sacked for not doing the job. Zero hope of redundo, I'd say.
Gosh, sorting out all these claims and counter-claims is going to be mighty fun for lawyers......
I think also with Sion Jenkins once doubts had been cast on the evidence the Court of Appeal ordered a retrial not an acquittal, although I could be wrong about that.
I have one significant query over two related areas; Malkinson and Letby.
A simple question:
Following Shipman and Allitt what was there about the possibility of medical and caring staff murdering people that those in charge of systems at all levels did not know?
Answer: Nothing.
Another question: Following many cases in which fresh evidence cast doubt on convictions, what was there about the possibility of DNA evidence casting doubt on an identification case conviction that those in charge of systems at all levels did not know?
Answer: Nothing.
These two truths limit the usefulness of any public enquiry.
What should happen is that there should be full investigation by independent police (using people of great ability and integrity) of both these cases, and prosecutions of those in public office who dod not act justly.
The public enquiries should follow, not precede, these prosecutions. I predict that after the usual massive lapse of time no-one will be prosecuted.
But the real fun will come as @TSE rises to open the case when we sue the French...
Shami Chakrabarti
Dido Harding
Paula Vennells
Cressida Dick
Helen Pitcher
Nice to see that women can be as equally useless as men.
Nigerian man dies and police find £27 billion piled up in his apartment. He had been trying to give it away for 15 years, but nobody would reply to his emails.
That was anything but lucky for them of course given he made Mussolini look like a nice human being.
It is a perfectly reasonable severance package for MPs but is actually less generous than most comparable public or private sector jobs on £80k a year would get
Maybe it should not have been extended to the MP themself but only to their staff and office expenses but quite hard to continue a handover if half way through the MP isn’t being paid in anyway so withdraws their involvement and leaves it to the remaining staff.
Where I think it is important is for those MPs who employ staff in their constituency offices, and amazingly there are MPs who don’t just employ family, who will need to find new jobs due to a situation out of their direct control and so for them I feel it’s ok that a sensible period of redundancy is in place.
It would of course be worse if MPs had chosen and voted for this and it’s not great optics at the moment but it’s not totally unreasonable.
Standing on the Verge of Getting it on (for several generations)?
Isn't that where they are supposed to live?
*) Noise from works
*) Ventilation / access shafts for tunnelling works
*) Subsidence / vibration concerns
All of these can be valid concerns; to the extent HS2 has a 50-mile long temporary haul alongside part of it, and a 1.7 mile-long network of conveyor belts in London.
He was from an incredibly wealthy family and when I was dealing with him we were using his trust assets that he was now solely entitled to as he wanted to buy huge tracts of land in a certain country where he could take his extended family and friends and associates and not have any of them be bothered by any government again. He had worked out how many natural springs, the acreage needed to be more than self sufficient, the works.
Belgium’s behaviour in the Congo knocks anything from the rest of the colonial times into a cocked hat.
I would also deduct from this any outside earnings, as clearly those people have already transitioned to outside earnings.
Just had breakfast, and will go and explore the city. The hotel was advertising tours to Auswitch, which wasn’t what we had in mind for a fun day in Poland! Local museums and bars, much better.
Personally I think it unlikely he did do it, but I am sure the verdict will now never be overturned.
The stroll along the river to where the dragon lives is a pleasant day. Skip the salt mines.
Compare and contrast with the massive mileage electrified under... (drum rolls) Thatcher and Major.
Labour chose not to electrify, and that led to the industrial knowledge gap that led to the GWML fiasco. It's not as simple as Labour=pro-railways and Conservatives=anti-railways.
The A14 Cambridge to Huntingdon scheme has, IMHO, been a massive success.
https://twitter.com/PhysInHistory/status/1694968407559704759
I accept the need to get people of talent to apply, but ....how's that working out?
IIRC I got 6 months' pay, or maybe it was 4, so I'm in no position to criticise. But MPs generally struggle to resume former careers (the idea of my going back to IT after 13 years out of it was clearly ridicuolous) so there's a case for not making seat loss - often for no particvular fault of their own - not instantly calamitous.
In 1978 the Anti Nazi League was formed to counter the way the National Front & other far right parties scapegoated black people, obscuring the real problems of poverty, cuts in education and in social services etc. Among those who financed its launch - Michael Parkinson.
https://twitter.com/Mr_Dave_Haslam/status/1692167314467430681
https://twitter.com/Die__Trying_/status/1694909261288010087
As of this morning, I was 176 lbs (79.8kg), which was gratifying.
And it looks as though there is some movement past Robotyne.
MPs? Just milk it for as long as you can, then when you've had enough or get voted out, the old boys/girls network will sort you out. Here's a few grand to tide you over until the directorship/charity job/ company you lobbied for job kicks in.
Might be harsh, but it's how it appears.
There are still issues: there really should be an A428/southbound M11 junction, which would make a big difference to Coton and Madingley. But the whole A14 from the M1/M6 to Cambridge is far better than it was a decade ago.
Rocket Lab starting to reuse their rockets.
While they have a shakey future, the question for many counties is - why don't companies like this exist in your country? The amounts of money are quire small.
In the UK, there was an element of suppressing potential competitors to Ariane. This seems to have ended, finally.
It wasn't maybe a brilliant police investigation, but the evidence against him is pretty much irrefutable. Just to run through it:
1) He was identified by the surviving victim who never wavered in her belief that he was the killer. Yes, she had wrongly identified somebody else in a different identity parade earlier, but she hadn't been told that if she didn't recognise anyone she didn't have to chose one. She thought they were asking 'what was the closest match to the person you saw?'
2) He stayed in a hotel room where two cartridge cases were found from the bullets used in the murders.
3) The gun used in the murder was found wrapped in a handkerchief that had mucus on it which matched his DNA profile. No other DNA was found on the handkerchief.
4) His semen was on Valerie Storey's knickers. There was some indication of a second sample of semen, but the question remains, why was his there?
5) He gave not one but two false alibis for the time of the murders.
6) About the only really odd feature of the case was that he told Gregston he couldn't drive, but there could be explanations for that including possibly laying a false trail.
7) Although Peter Alphon later confessed to the murder, leaving aside the fact he didn't match the description of the killer, wasn't identified in a parade and was well known as a psychotic attention seeker, he was paid to confess by Paul Foot as part of his campaign against the death penalty.
8) There was some confusion over the colour of the killer's eyes. However, Storey had in fact said 'blue' which was shortened to 'bl' and misread as 'br' ie 'brown' in the first press release.
Now it is impossible Hanratty was innocent? Not impossible, I suppose. In the sense it's not impossible that one day Boris Johnson might say something truthful.
But you are looking at not only a truly vast conspiracy but one which had knowledge of future DNA techniques to store his mucus and semen to be planted on the evidence at the right moment if he was innnocent.
He might have got away with it under today's rules (this being before the Police and Criminal Evidence Act) but bluntly I think it unlikely. Killers have been convicted on far less (Adrian Prout springs to mind) and Storey's evidence on its own was pretty compelling. Staying at a hotel habituated by criminals under a false name and lying about it is also not the smartest idea in the world.
Hanratty himself was said to have been quite open about his guilt when not under caution. He just didn't think it could be proved.
From 15 stone 5 (I actually peaked at 15 stone 9 after Christmas) to 12 stone 8.
I sometimes get it in the neck on social media for pointing out how much better the current system is than the previous one, and how most of "Expenses" are actually office staff costs.
When I was last employed by someone else, the notice was iirc 4 weeks minimum or one week per year of service up until 12 weeks max. That comparison, unless it has changed, makes 4 months hard to justify.
I still stand by the basic principle I argued in 2009-2010 - that MPs should be treated exactly the same as everybody else.
You can (theoretically) drive from the M11/A406 junction near Redbridge all the way to the M8/M74 junction in Glasgow without changing lanes, via the M11, A14, M6, M6 Toll, M6, A74 (M), and M74. It's basically one big dual carriageway!
For an MP -
1) Going back to your old career in anything knowledge based - IT, other technologies would be impossible without complete retraining. Maybe as senior management.
2) You've probably had no training or updates in your time as an MP - no career development.
3) This leads directly to the non-ex jobs (1 day a year, £££££) which are about your contacts in politics and the permanent structures of government. For many ex MPs, that's all they have to offer.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/JrMqIGiPSq8
Todays was about Lockerbie and it’s moving and incredibly interesting. Easy to forget what a massive and horrific terrorist event it was. Worth listening on Sounds if anyone is interested.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRUylyUTaG0
Neat illustration of the British Doom Loop, though. Because the act of building stuff is so difficult and expensive, we delay, skimp, faff and cut corners, which then require spending even more when we admit we have to do them properly.
I don't know how we fix that, but it would help an awful lot if we did.
(And I'm sleeping much better, not getting heartburn and indigestion when I lie down any more, much more energy... it's a great feeling)
My plan (after our holiday, which was my reason for having a target) is to try to set up a habit of continuing the exercise regime at a lower intensity and keep with the routine of the lower-calorie foods on which I've alighted (malt loaf is great for breakfast, for example, as it's nicely filling), and try to level off after we get back.
Having done all this, I don't want to throw it all away.
This is the theory from iPSA:
The money is aimed at helping ex-MPs close down their offices and manage the departure of their staff.
At the last general election departing MPs were paid for two months after losing their seats.
However, IPSA, which sets the rules for MPs' expenses, has said this is not long enough and that the time period should be increased to four months.
The eligibility for the payments has also been expanded to cover those who voluntarily stand down at the election as well as those who lose their seat.
MPs who stand down before an election period will not receive the payments.
Explaining the change IPSA, the Independent Standards Authority, said the work of an MP - such as helping constituents - continued right up to election day and they could only begin to close their offices once a new MP had been elected.
I don't subscribe to that, but let's be generous, but they still should have to do what the rest of us do. Plan. Save. Keep your skills up, retrain. Live a normal life, with the same jeopardy of employment as the rest of us. If I left my job after 14 years of my own violition I'd get nothing. Why should an MP get a payoff?
F-16 'B' Course is 40 weeks which qualifies you to be the wingman of somebody who knows what they are doing. The US lavishes a lot of time on trainees with survival training etc. Presumably Ukraine don't give a fuck about any of that so they might be able to chop 5-6 weeks out of the program.
Start to finish F-16 training for US crew is about 950 days elapsed which is amazingly fast. It takes the RAF 6-7 years to get an acne strewn oik combat ready on a Typhoon gun squadron.
Salarty - I was on £100K in IT before I went into Parliament, £48K when elected, and IIRC £50K when I got the new job. Would have been much better off sticking to IT, but not remotely the same satisfaction.