'A spokesperson for the RSE told the Herald: “Neil Oliver was elected to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2020. During his time as a fellow did not take part in any RSE business.
“In discussion with Mr Oliver, he understood that his current views on various matters, widely aired on television, put him at odds with scientific and broader academic learning within the Society.
"Following discussions, he offered to resign his association with the RSE with immediate effect.”'
Wonder if it's to do with this vaccine stuff we've all heard about?
As I was escorted around the Pomona cider brewery (near Bromyard) I had an epiphany from my Herefordshire childhood. You used to be able - aged 15 - to walk into one of the rougher but authentic pubs in Hereford and get a pint of “rough cider” - ie raw farmyard cider drawn straight from the barrel. The barrel which sat on the bar
Incredible in retrospect. Now the world - and the cider - is pasteurised
Buying scrumpy in plastic half gallon containers was very common when I was in my teens. Not sure if it can still be done nowadays.
As I was escorted around the Pomona cider brewery (near Bromyard) I had an epiphany from my Herefordshire childhood. You used to be able - aged 15 - to walk into one of the rougher but authentic pubs in Hereford and get a pint of “rough cider” - ie raw farmyard cider drawn straight from the barrel. The barrel which sat on the bar
Incredible in retrospect. Now the world - and the cider - is pasteurised
Still wooden and I think unpasteurised in the Somerset artisanal brewery I visit whenever down south.
Plenty of tiny producers still doing unpasteurised ciders and perries.
There was a pub in Doncaster when I were a lad that sold poteen for 40p a shot (late 90s).
'A spokesperson for the RSE told the Herald: “Neil Oliver was elected to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2020. During his time as a fellow did not take part in any RSE business.
“In discussion with Mr Oliver, he understood that his current views on various matters, widely aired on television, put him at odds with scientific and broader academic learning within the Society.
"Following discussions, he offered to resign his association with the RSE with immediate effect.”'
Wonder if it's to do with this vaccine stuff we've all heard about?
Rabid Nats in the..er..Royal Society of Edinburgh I’ll wager.
Interesting report - giving homeless people no strings attached money ($7500) led to better, and cheaper, outcomes for the homeless (average spend of $8277)
So, how many injuries is an acceptable number to have before doing anything?
Greater than zero.
I was peripherally involved in the design of NICE, which partly has to decide what treatments can be paid for on the NHS, and hence has to weigh up "small chance of saving some life" against "large chance of making life slightly better for many people" within any budgetary level. IIRC the decision was to set a price of £20,000 (I believe it's now about £30K?) for "one year of satisfactory life", so if drug A would make you on average live a year longer without a lot of pain and side-effects, it would be approved if it cost less than £20K/year. One that on average improved life a bit for 3 months and only cost £10K probably wouldn't.
A lot of people find this chilling - "You can't measure the cost of a life!" - but I think you really have to, no matter how generous or parsimonious your budget. Deciding on the size of the budget is a quite different issue, and much more about political priorities - that's the sort of thing that keeps me interested in politics.
Absolutley, Nick.
You not only can measure the cost of a life, you have to. I'm glad I don't have to do it myself, it would keep me awake nights, but I acknowledge and admire those that do. It is essentially what good government is about.
Take speed limits, for example, since the topic has cropped up here. There are about 1,500 deaths on our roads each year now (way down on what it was when I passed my test in 1966, though these facts are not necessarily linked) and we could easily get that down to a few dozen if we reduce the speed limit to 5mph. Such a reductio ad absurdum makes the point.
Somebody has to decide where to draw the line, which implies evaluation of the cost of a life. Tough, but somebody really has to do it.
I always remember that the day of the Hatfield Train Crash, which killed 4 people, a family of 4 were killed in a head on collission on the Newark Bypass. This made me go and look at the relative 'value per human life saved' numbers.
In 2000 this was aproximately £3 million person on the railways and £500,000 per person on the roads.
Thanks Richard.
I suspect I'm being dumb but could you briefly explain how such a differential arises?
I really don't know. I suspect it is because there is (or maybe was) no standardised system of cost/benefit analysis across Government. So one department or organisation is using one value whilst another uses a completely different one.
Intrestingly if you google for similar numbers today you get a standardised £1.8 million so maybe someone finally got around to sorting it out.
This report (PDF) is interesting. Pushes a particular argument, but provides some useful background. Has the £1.8M figure, so may be the one you were looking at for more recent figures, Richard.
On the broader point, there are also externalities to consider - public perception of risk, for example. How many deaths does it take to change behaviours - i.e. how many train crashes until train passenger numbers fall? We're less sensitive to road deaths, on the whole, because we are all, personally, well above average drivers and know that only idiots get killed on the road For trains, we don't trust the idiots driving if they start having crashes.
And as for dodgy concrete, it would take just one infant fatality to bring the Government down.
It must be said, I do wonder when a future government will finally accept moving out of Westminster. The place is falling down and really should be turned into a museum open to the public. It will give the party who does it the opportunity to move it somewhere outside of London, as well, which could be interesting.
Imagine, a new building that is set up for electronic voting and none of this walking through doors nonsense. I know the Tories and the traditionalists will hate it, and it might change the nature of parliament / the speaker and such - but it's been a long time coming. Put it in Manchester or Birmingham, separate out our politics a bit across the country so it's not so London centric and boom - big impact with minimal constitutional fuckery.
No thanks. Why make such a pointless change? It won't save any money as Houses of Parliament will still have to be maintained. It would just be vast additional pointless cost to satisfy those who believe that anything old must, inherently, be bad.
Part of my reasoning is, indeed, about how I don't think anything old must be bad, and want more people to experience it. I quite like the architecture of the building itself, and the inside is more modern than the outside looks. But also, I think we need to modernise our politics, and part of that will necessitate no more voting via walking through doors and standing swords width apart, and London shouldn't be the financial centre, the media centre, the cultural centre and the political centre of the country.
I also think that a point should come where you go "this really should belong to the people of the UK" and turning it into a museum about British politics would be a great way to do that.
I disagree entirely with you about the modernising of our politics. I want our political system to remain confrontational. I think the move towards consensus politics is extremely bad for democracy.
Without reading it let me guess the gist: we just need to believe in ourselves more so that we can capitalise on the benefits of Brexit?
I used to read the Telegraph but I've given up. Not so much its politics per se but the reactionary nature of it now. Take today's front page. 5 of the 6 pieces on the front are reactionary anti-woke. There's even one having a dig about climate change. It's not that there aren't news stories embedded within. It's that they are dressed up in increasingly embittered language by old people raging against the dying of the light.
A neat summation of the current government. Notable in the Rees-Mogg spat the other day was that he criticised the lack of things being done by the government. Parliament sits with short days because there is nothing being done by the government.
The public are clear that the country is falling apart all around them. Yet the government not only does nothing, it seems to be it absolute denial that is happening. Note the RAAC scandal - Sunak insists that he increased funding as he cut it, that a lack of complaints by Starmer means there is no problem, and anyway most students won't be eaten by the shark therefore there is no shark.
I asked my Dad, who is a buildings surveyor working for a local authority, about the concrete. He was quite dismissive, feeling it's been blown out of proportion by structural engineers who stand to gain masses of work by the crisis. I tend to agree.
He is exactly right, people keep using the term "crumbling" when talking about Schools. How many school buildings have collapsed, how many injuries have occured?
Er… how many injuries is an acceptable number to have before doing anything?
You have to balance risk and cost (not just financial but also the disruption to education, etc)
Yeah but it's the same kind of solely capitalist-driven argument which led to the Zeebrugge ferry disaster in which 193 people died or, indeed, Aberfan in which 116 school children were crushed / suffocated to death whilst at school along with 28 adults.
The cost here is disrupted education for children. That needs to be factored in vs the risk of a localised collapse.
A localised collapse? As opposed to what? Every school building collapsing at once? Don't worry, kids, when your roof collapses on you, it will only be your class. 3B down the hall will be fine.
There is an ever-present risk of deaths due to gas explosions, but we're not in a hurry to turn off the supply.
Echidnas don’t have stomachs.
(If we’re just sharing random facts unrelated to the topic at hand.)
I really wish, in my professional capacity, I could find a way of helping.But I have no particular entree into the place and I fear that resistance to any real change is deep-seated.
It’s all vaguely reminiscent of the old joke about the physiatrists and the light bulb.
Informant: How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb?
Collector: I don’t know, how many?
Informant: One, but the light has to want to change.
The helicopter operators, and the air traffic controllers, to bring up two subjects yesterday, they want to change, to see continuous improvement in how they operate.
But how much does the NHS or the police, as organisations, actually want to change?
There is a movement in some areas of healthcare to mimic airlines - I've seen plenty of slides at conferences about air accident fatality rates over time compared to healthcare fatality rates. It needs automation of detection of unusual patterns etc. Things like NEWS* and the pharma tracking system I mentioned come out of that kind of mindset (driver there was errors in prescribing and 'lost' medications).
As we saw with Letby though, the complainants are not always believed, which discourages others from raising concerns, particularly without direct evidence.
*disclaimer of personal interest - I had some involvement in NEWS
However, we’re dealing with a very technological, well regulated, and relatively new industry, where a no-blame ‘just’ culture has been embedded for decades, and where not just accidents but relatively minor incidents get reported, so that everyone can learn from everyone else’s bad day at work.
Pc Cliff Mitchell, 23, was arrested after officers were called to an address in Hackbridge, south west London, on Tuesday, by a member of the public who found the woman.
Police were told the woman had been attacked inside a house by a man known to her, who subsequently forced her into a car.
Mitchell, a serving police officer, was not on duty at the time of the incident and has now been suspended from the force.
The Met. That’s a shock !!
I know. Who’d have thought there would be (alleged) rapists in the Met?
Yet Braverman thinks it is rainbow flags causing loss of public confidence in the Met.
Well the senior Met officers, and the mayor, seem to think that waving rainbow flags is more important than rooting out the rapists in their own organisation, so why would the HS want to disagree?
Isn't it possible to both root out rapists and to be a diversity positive police force, or do you think they can only do one or the other?
I do think it possible, but I think the prioritising of image and box ticking exercises over meaningful change and intolerance of a rancid culture is pretty clear.
It's not that a flag or whatever causes things, but that the forces don't care about hard decisions of reform, and focus more on trivial actions because that's easy.
They even resist meaningful action.
It all falls into the reality that misgendering someone on Twitter brings out half a dozen officers for half a day; but house burglaries, car thefts, shoplifting etc, are just minor problems that don’t matter to the police beyond providing a reference number for an insurance claim.
Good argument, apart from the bit about it being not true.
I really wish, in my professional capacity, I could find a way of helping.But I have no particular entree into the place and I fear that resistance to any real change is deep-seated.
It’s all vaguely reminiscent of the old joke about the physiatrists and the light bulb.
Informant: How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb?
Collector: I don’t know, how many?
Informant: One, but the light has to want to change.
The helicopter operators, and the air traffic controllers, to bring up two subjects yesterday, they want to change, to see continuous improvement in how they operate.
But how much does the NHS or the police, as organisations, actually want to change?
There is a movement in some areas of healthcare to mimic airlines - I've seen plenty of slides at conferences about air accident fatality rates over time compared to healthcare fatality rates. It needs automation of detection of unusual patterns etc. Things like NEWS* and the pharma tracking system I mentioned come out of that kind of mindset (driver there was errors in prescribing and 'lost' medications).
As we saw with Letby though, the complainants are not always believed, which discourages others from raising concerns, particularly without direct evidence.
*disclaimer of personal interest - I had some involvement in NEWS
However, we’re dealing with a very technological, well regulated, and relatively new industry, where a no-blame ‘just’ culture has been embedded for decades, and where not just accidents but relatively minor incidents get reported, so that everyone can learn from everyone else’s bad day at work.
This is also why the North Sea Oil Industry is so safe these days. Near Miss Reporting and Risk Matrices are a massive part of everyday life in the industry.
Pc Cliff Mitchell, 23, was arrested after officers were called to an address in Hackbridge, south west London, on Tuesday, by a member of the public who found the woman.
Police were told the woman had been attacked inside a house by a man known to her, who subsequently forced her into a car.
Mitchell, a serving police officer, was not on duty at the time of the incident and has now been suspended from the force.
The Met. That’s a shock !!
I know. Who’d have thought there would be (alleged) rapists in the Met?
Yet Braverman thinks it is rainbow flags causing loss of public confidence in the Met.
Well the senior Met officers, and the mayor, seem to think that waving rainbow flags is more important than rooting out the rapists in their own organisation, so why would the HS want to disagree?
Isn't it possible to both root out rapists and to be a diversity positive police force, or do you think they can only do one or the other?
I do think it possible, but I think the prioritising of image and box ticking exercises over meaningful change and intolerance of a rancid culture is pretty clear.
It's not that a flag or whatever causes things, but that the forces don't care about hard decisions of reform, and focus more on trivial actions because that's easy.
They even resist meaningful action.
It all falls into the reality that misgendering someone on Twitter brings out half a dozen officers for half a day; but house burglaries, car thefts, shoplifting etc, are just minor problems that don’t matter to the police beyond providing a reference number for an insurance claim.
Good argument, apart from the bit about it being not true.
Sadly, I have to report that from my experience it is true, by it may be untypical.
Was at the Battle of Britain war memorial today. Now there is something that puts stress into perspective. 4 or even 5 scrambles a day with no great assurance you are coming back from any of them and you may burn to death. They say the waiting was the worst part and I can well believe it. Tough days, unbelievable heroism.
I really wish, in my professional capacity, I could find a way of helping.But I have no particular entree into the place and I fear that resistance to any real change is deep-seated.
It’s all vaguely reminiscent of the old joke about the physiatrists and the light bulb.
Informant: How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb?
Collector: I don’t know, how many?
Informant: One, but the light has to want to change.
The helicopter operators, and the air traffic controllers, to bring up two subjects yesterday, they want to change, to see continuous improvement in how they operate.
But how much does the NHS or the police, as organisations, actually want to change?
There is a movement in some areas of healthcare to mimic airlines - I've seen plenty of slides at conferences about air accident fatality rates over time compared to healthcare fatality rates. It needs automation of detection of unusual patterns etc. Things like NEWS* and the pharma tracking system I mentioned come out of that kind of mindset (driver there was errors in prescribing and 'lost' medications).
As we saw with Letby though, the complainants are not always believed, which discourages others from raising concerns, particularly without direct evidence.
*disclaimer of personal interest - I had some involvement in NEWS
However, we’re dealing with a very technological, well regulated, and relatively new industry, where a no-blame ‘just’ culture has been embedded for decades, and where not just accidents but relatively minor incidents get reported, so that everyone can learn from everyone else’s bad day at work.
What is sad is how obvious 911 is in that chart.
What’s amazing, is that nothing like it has happened since.
Interesting for the future of the UK that the same poll shows a likely SNP/GREEN majority at HOLYROOD of 11.
Does it? The latest R&W figures for Holyrood indicates 25% SNP and 14% Green on the Regional List (so combined 39%, well down on the 48% combined in 2021), with Labour leading the Regional List on 30%. The SNP still lead in the constituency vote with 39% versus 30% for Labour, and that may yield quite a lot of seats - but that lead is miles down on the 26% lead at the last Scottish elections.
I've not done the maths but are you sure you're looking at the same poll, because there is no chance of those numbers delivering an SNP/Green majority.
Someone has done the maths. I accept Stats for Lefties are not PB faves, but Mark McGeoghehan is yer actual Scotch polling expert, and I assume wouldn’t rt without having some faith in them.
So, how many injuries is an acceptable number to have before doing anything?
Greater than zero.
I was peripherally involved in the design of NICE, which partly has to decide what treatments can be paid for on the NHS, and hence has to weigh up "small chance of saving some life" against "large chance of making life slightly better for many people" within any budgetary level. IIRC the decision was to set a price of £20,000 (I believe it's now about £30K?) for "one year of satisfactory life", so if drug A would make you on average live a year longer without a lot of pain and side-effects, it would be approved if it cost less than £20K/year. One that on average improved life a bit for 3 months and only cost £10K probably wouldn't.
A lot of people find this chilling - "You can't measure the cost of a life!" - but I think you really have to, no matter how generous or parsimonious your budget. Deciding on the size of the budget is a quite different issue, and much more about political priorities - that's the sort of thing that keeps me interested in politics.
Absolutley, Nick.
You not only can measure the cost of a life, you have to. I'm glad I don't have to do it myself, it would keep me awake nights, but I acknowledge and admire those that do. It is essentially what good government is about.
Take speed limits, for example, since the topic has cropped up here. There are about 1,500 deaths on our roads each year now (way down on what it was when I passed my test in 1966, though these facts are not necessarily linked) and we could easily get that down to a few dozen if we reduce the speed limit to 5mph. Such a reductio ad absurdum makes the point.
Somebody has to decide where to draw the line, which implies evaluation of the cost of a life. Tough, but somebody really has to do it.
I always remember that the day of the Hatfield Train Crash, which killed 4 people, a family of 4 were killed in a head on collission on the Newark Bypass. This made me go and look at the relative 'value per human life saved' numbers.
In 2000 this was aproximately £3 million person on the railways and £500,000 per person on the roads.
Thanks Richard.
I suspect I'm being dumb but could you briefly explain how such a differential arises?
I really don't know. I suspect it is because there is (or maybe was) no standardised system of cost/benefit analysis across Government. So one department or organisation is using one value whilst another uses a completely different one.
Intrestingly if you google for similar numbers today you get a standardised £1.8 million so maybe someone finally got around to sorting it out.
This report (PDF) is interesting. Pushes a particular argument, but provides some useful background. Has the £1.8M figure, so may be the one you were looking at for more recent figures, Richard.
On the broader point, there are also externalities to consider - public perception of risk, for example. How many deaths does it take to change behaviours - i.e. how many train crashes until train passenger numbers fall? We're less sensitive to road deaths, on the whole, because we are all, personally, well above average drivers and know that only idiots get killed on the road For trains, we don't trust the idiots driving if they start having crashes.
And as for dodgy concrete, it would take just one infant fatality to bring the Government down.
It must be said, I do wonder when a future government will finally accept moving out of Westminster. The place is falling down and really should be turned into a museum open to the public. It will give the party who does it the opportunity to move it somewhere outside of London, as well, which could be interesting.
Imagine, a new building that is set up for electronic voting and none of this walking through doors nonsense. I know the Tories and the traditionalists will hate it, and it might change the nature of parliament / the speaker and such - but it's been a long time coming. Put it in Manchester or Birmingham, separate out our politics a bit across the country so it's not so London centric and boom - big impact with minimal constitutional fuckery.
No thanks. Why make such a pointless change? It won't save any money as Houses of Parliament will still have to be maintained. It would just be vast additional pointless cost to satisfy those who believe that anything old must, inherently, be bad.
Part of my reasoning is, indeed, about how I don't think anything old must be bad, and want more people to experience it. I quite like the architecture of the building itself, and the inside is more modern than the outside looks. But also, I think we need to modernise our politics, and part of that will necessitate no more voting via walking through doors and standing swords width apart, and London shouldn't be the financial centre, the media centre, the cultural centre and the political centre of the country.
I also think that a point should come where you go "this really should belong to the people of the UK" and turning it into a museum about British politics would be a great way to do that.
I disagree entirely with you about the modernising of our politics. I want our political system to remain confrontational. I think the move towards consensus politics is extremely bad for democracy.
I don't necessarily want consensus politics - I just want more efficient politics. The idea of walking through a door to vote rather than just pressing a button is annoying. Like, the whole "whips physically walking you over the threshold" thing is bad, and also time consuming. People pressing a button and it being counted is quick, you can have more votes, you can have longer debates.
Also, they will have to leave for a long period of time to fix it up eventually. What are we going to have instead, a portacabin parliament? They will spend the money for a replacement anyway, so might as well make it suitable for the job at hand, make it permanent and have Westminster Palace as a great place for the public to learn about the history of British parliamentary democracy.
Pc Cliff Mitchell, 23, was arrested after officers were called to an address in Hackbridge, south west London, on Tuesday, by a member of the public who found the woman.
Police were told the woman had been attacked inside a house by a man known to her, who subsequently forced her into a car.
Mitchell, a serving police officer, was not on duty at the time of the incident and has now been suspended from the force.
The Met. That’s a shock !!
I know. Who’d have thought there would be (alleged) rapists in the Met?
Yet Braverman thinks it is rainbow flags causing loss of public confidence in the Met.
Well the senior Met officers, and the mayor, seem to think that waving rainbow flags is more important than rooting out the rapists in their own organisation, so why would the HS want to disagree?
Isn't it possible to both root out rapists and to be a diversity positive police force, or do you think they can only do one or the other?
I do think it possible, but I think the prioritising of image and box ticking exercises over meaningful change and intolerance of a rancid culture is pretty clear.
It's not that a flag or whatever causes things, but that the forces don't care about hard decisions of reform, and focus more on trivial actions because that's easy.
They even resist meaningful action.
It all falls into the reality that misgendering someone on Twitter brings out half a dozen officers for half a day; but house burglaries, car thefts, shoplifting etc, are just minor problems that don’t matter to the police beyond providing a reference number for an insurance claim.
Good argument, apart from the bit about it being not true.
Sadly, I have to report that from my experience it is true, by it may be untypical.
The latter part is more accurate. The former part is not. Misgendering someone on Twitter leads to absolutely no police response in >99.9% of cases, possibly 100%.
Interesting for the future of the UK that the same poll shows a likely SNP/GREEN majority at HOLYROOD of 11.
Does it? The latest R&W figures for Holyrood indicates 25% SNP and 14% Green on the Regional List (so combined 39%, well down on the 48% combined in 2021), with Labour leading the Regional List on 30%. The SNP still lead in the constituency vote with 39% versus 30% for Labour, and that may yield quite a lot of seats - but that lead is miles down on the 26% lead at the last Scottish elections.
I've not done the maths but are you sure you're looking at the same poll, because there is no chance of those numbers delivering an SNP/Green majority.
Someone has done the maths. I accept Stats for Lefties are not PB faves, but Mark McGeochan is yer actual Scotch polling expert, and I assume wouldn’t rt without having some faith in them.
I call BS.
Firstly, it's nonsensical based on the numbers in the actual poll and, secondly, it's Stats For Lefties, the home of BS.
As I was escorted around the Pomona cider brewery (near Bromyard) I had an epiphany from my Herefordshire childhood. You used to be able - aged 15 - to walk into one of the rougher but authentic pubs in Hereford and get a pint of “rough cider” - ie raw farmyard cider drawn straight from the barrel. The barrel which sat on the bar
Incredible in retrospect. Now the world - and the cider - is pasteurised
We have a number of cider festivals down here in deepest East Kent and you can still get farmyard cider from a wooden barrel from them but whether that counts as the kind of "Rough Cider" of your halcyon days I have no idea.
Pc Cliff Mitchell, 23, was arrested after officers were called to an address in Hackbridge, south west London, on Tuesday, by a member of the public who found the woman.
Police were told the woman had been attacked inside a house by a man known to her, who subsequently forced her into a car.
Mitchell, a serving police officer, was not on duty at the time of the incident and has now been suspended from the force.
The Met. That’s a shock !!
I know. Who’d have thought there would be (alleged) rapists in the Met?
Yet Braverman thinks it is rainbow flags causing loss of public confidence in the Met.
Well the senior Met officers, and the mayor, seem to think that waving rainbow flags is more important than rooting out the rapists in their own organisation, so why would the HS want to disagree?
Isn't it possible to both root out rapists and to be a diversity positive police force, or do you think they can only do one or the other?
I do think it possible, but I think the prioritising of image and box ticking exercises over meaningful change and intolerance of a rancid culture is pretty clear.
It's not that a flag or whatever causes things, but that the forces don't care about hard decisions of reform, and focus more on trivial actions because that's easy.
They even resist meaningful action.
It all falls into the reality that misgendering someone on Twitter brings out half a dozen officers for half a day; but house burglaries, car thefts, shoplifting etc, are just minor problems that don’t matter to the police beyond providing a reference number for an insurance claim.
Good argument, apart from the bit about it being not true.
To be fair to Sandpit, the second part is true - but that has essentially always been the case for police. Police do not exist to catch petty criminals, they exist to prove to insurance companies that petty crime has really happened so that poor people don't scam insurance companies. Police only care about property damage, theft and such when it happens to significantly richer people than the average. But yes, the antitrans brain worms do still seem to be strong on this forum.
So, how many injuries is an acceptable number to have before doing anything?
Greater than zero.
I was peripherally involved in the design of NICE, which partly has to decide what treatments can be paid for on the NHS, and hence has to weigh up "small chance of saving some life" against "large chance of making life slightly better for many people" within any budgetary level. IIRC the decision was to set a price of £20,000 (I believe it's now about £30K?) for "one year of satisfactory life", so if drug A would make you on average live a year longer without a lot of pain and side-effects, it would be approved if it cost less than £20K/year. One that on average improved life a bit for 3 months and only cost £10K probably wouldn't.
A lot of people find this chilling - "You can't measure the cost of a life!" - but I think you really have to, no matter how generous or parsimonious your budget. Deciding on the size of the budget is a quite different issue, and much more about political priorities - that's the sort of thing that keeps me interested in politics.
Absolutley, Nick.
You not only can measure the cost of a life, you have to. I'm glad I don't have to do it myself, it would keep me awake nights, but I acknowledge and admire those that do. It is essentially what good government is about.
Take speed limits, for example, since the topic has cropped up here. There are about 1,500 deaths on our roads each year now (way down on what it was when I passed my test in 1966, though these facts are not necessarily linked) and we could easily get that down to a few dozen if we reduce the speed limit to 5mph. Such a reductio ad absurdum makes the point.
Somebody has to decide where to draw the line, which implies evaluation of the cost of a life. Tough, but somebody really has to do it.
I always remember that the day of the Hatfield Train Crash, which killed 4 people, a family of 4 were killed in a head on collission on the Newark Bypass. This made me go and look at the relative 'value per human life saved' numbers.
In 2000 this was aproximately £3 million person on the railways and £500,000 per person on the roads.
Thanks Richard.
I suspect I'm being dumb but could you briefly explain how such a differential arises?
I really don't know. I suspect it is because there is (or maybe was) no standardised system of cost/benefit analysis across Government. So one department or organisation is using one value whilst another uses a completely different one.
Intrestingly if you google for similar numbers today you get a standardised £1.8 million so maybe someone finally got around to sorting it out.
This report (PDF) is interesting. Pushes a particular argument, but provides some useful background. Has the £1.8M figure, so may be the one you were looking at for more recent figures, Richard.
On the broader point, there are also externalities to consider - public perception of risk, for example. How many deaths does it take to change behaviours - i.e. how many train crashes until train passenger numbers fall? We're less sensitive to road deaths, on the whole, because we are all, personally, well above average drivers and know that only idiots get killed on the road For trains, we don't trust the idiots driving if they start having crashes.
And as for dodgy concrete, it would take just one infant fatality to bring the Government down.
It must be said, I do wonder when a future government will finally accept moving out of Westminster. The place is falling down and really should be turned into a museum open to the public. It will give the party who does it the opportunity to move it somewhere outside of London, as well, which could be interesting.
Imagine, a new building that is set up for electronic voting and none of this walking through doors nonsense. I know the Tories and the traditionalists will hate it, and it might change the nature of parliament / the speaker and such - but it's been a long time coming. Put it in Manchester or Birmingham, separate out our politics a bit across the country so it's not so London centric and boom - big impact with minimal constitutional fuckery.
No thanks. Why make such a pointless change? It won't save any money as Houses of Parliament will still have to be maintained. It would just be vast additional pointless cost to satisfy those who believe that anything old must, inherently, be bad.
Part of my reasoning is, indeed, about how I don't think anything old must be bad, and want more people to experience it. I quite like the architecture of the building itself, and the inside is more modern than the outside looks. But also, I think we need to modernise our politics, and part of that will necessitate no more voting via walking through doors and standing swords width apart, and London shouldn't be the financial centre, the media centre, the cultural centre and the political centre of the country.
I also think that a point should come where you go "this really should belong to the people of the UK" and turning it into a museum about British politics would be a great way to do that.
I disagree entirely with you about the modernising of our politics. I want our political system to remain confrontational. I think the move towards consensus politics is extremely bad for democracy.
I don't necessarily want consensus politics - I just want more efficient politics. The idea of walking through a door to vote rather than just pressing a button is annoying. Like, the whole "whips physically walking you over the threshold" thing is bad, and also time consuming. People pressing a button and it being counted is quick, you can have more votes, you can have longer debates.
Also, they will have to leave for a long period of time to fix it up eventually. What are we going to have instead, a portacabin parliament? They will spend the money for a replacement anyway, so might as well make it suitable for the job at hand, make it permanent and have Westminster Palace as a great place for the public to learn about the history of British parliamentary democracy.
I have no problem with them moving for the duration of the renovations and have long argued for the abolition of the whips system. But I think any permanent move would be pointless and costly. And of course an excuse for the modernisers to mess with our systems to the detriment of the democratic process.
Interesting for the future of the UK that the same poll shows a likely SNP/GREEN majority at HOLYROOD of 11.
Does it? The latest R&W figures for Holyrood indicates 25% SNP and 14% Green on the Regional List (so combined 39%, well down on the 48% combined in 2021), with Labour leading the Regional List on 30%. The SNP still lead in the constituency vote with 39% versus 30% for Labour, and that may yield quite a lot of seats - but that lead is miles down on the 26% lead at the last Scottish elections.
I've not done the maths but are you sure you're looking at the same poll, because there is no chance of those numbers delivering an SNP/Green majority.
Someone has done the maths. I accept Stats for Lefties are not PB faves, but Mark McGeoghehan is yer actual Scotch polling expert, and I assume wouldn’t rt without having some faith in them.
The SNP vote has been remarkably resilient, in the circumstances. Interesting to see if there is a large divergence between Westminster and Holyrood voting intention over the next few years.
I really wish, in my professional capacity, I could find a way of helping.But I have no particular entree into the place and I fear that resistance to any real change is deep-seated.
It’s all vaguely reminiscent of the old joke about the physiatrists and the light bulb.
Informant: How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb?
Collector: I don’t know, how many?
Informant: One, but the light has to want to change.
The helicopter operators, and the air traffic controllers, to bring up two subjects yesterday, they want to change, to see continuous improvement in how they operate.
But how much does the NHS or the police, as organisations, actually want to change?
There is a movement in some areas of healthcare to mimic airlines - I've seen plenty of slides at conferences about air accident fatality rates over time compared to healthcare fatality rates. It needs automation of detection of unusual patterns etc. Things like NEWS* and the pharma tracking system I mentioned come out of that kind of mindset (driver there was errors in prescribing and 'lost' medications).
As we saw with Letby though, the complainants are not always believed, which discourages others from raising concerns, particularly without direct evidence.
*disclaimer of personal interest - I had some involvement in NEWS
However, we’re dealing with a very technological, well regulated, and relatively new industry, where a no-blame ‘just’ culture has been embedded for decades, and where not just accidents but relatively minor incidents get reported, so that everyone can learn from everyone else’s bad day at work.
What is sad is how obvious 911 is in that chart.
What’s amazing, is that nothing like it has happened since.
They have certainly got a lot stricter in the first world about access to flight decks etc. What is perhaps more surprising is how few lives have been lost to bombings since the 90s.
Interesting for the future of the UK that the same poll shows a likely SNP/GREEN majority at HOLYROOD of 11.
Does it? The latest R&W figures for Holyrood indicates 25% SNP and 14% Green on the Regional List (so combined 39%, well down on the 48% combined in 2021), with Labour leading the Regional List on 30%. The SNP still lead in the constituency vote with 39% versus 30% for Labour, and that may yield quite a lot of seats - but that lead is miles down on the 26% lead at the last Scottish elections.
I've not done the maths but are you sure you're looking at the same poll, because there is no chance of those numbers delivering an SNP/Green majority.
Someone has done the maths. I accept Stats for Lefties are not PB faves, but Mark McGeochan is yer actual Scotch polling expert, and I assume wouldn’t rt without having some faith in them.
I call BS.
Firstly, it's nonsensical based on the numbers in the actual poll and, secondly, it's Stats For Lefties, the home of BS.
Looks optimistic for both the SNP and the little green helpers to me, especially the latter. Probably pessimistic for the Tories whose vote is geographically advantageous these days.
Interesting for the future of the UK that the same poll shows a likely SNP/GREEN majority at HOLYROOD of 11.
Does it? The latest R&W figures for Holyrood indicates 25% SNP and 14% Green on the Regional List (so combined 39%, well down on the 48% combined in 2021), with Labour leading the Regional List on 30%. The SNP still lead in the constituency vote with 39% versus 30% for Labour, and that may yield quite a lot of seats - but that lead is miles down on the 26% lead at the last Scottish elections.
I've not done the maths but are you sure you're looking at the same poll, because there is no chance of those numbers delivering an SNP/Green majority.
Someone has done the maths. I accept Stats for Lefties are not PB faves, but Mark McGeochan is yer actual Scotch polling expert, and I assume wouldn’t rt without having some faith in them.
I call BS.
Firstly, it's nonsensical based on the numbers in the actual poll and, secondly, it's Stats For Lefties, the home of BS.
Despite you not having done the maths, I yield to your obviously unprejudiced expertise in the matter.
Pc Cliff Mitchell, 23, was arrested after officers were called to an address in Hackbridge, south west London, on Tuesday, by a member of the public who found the woman.
Police were told the woman had been attacked inside a house by a man known to her, who subsequently forced her into a car.
Mitchell, a serving police officer, was not on duty at the time of the incident and has now been suspended from the force.
The Met. That’s a shock !!
I know. Who’d have thought there would be (alleged) rapists in the Met?
Yet Braverman thinks it is rainbow flags causing loss of public confidence in the Met.
Well the senior Met officers, and the mayor, seem to think that waving rainbow flags is more important than rooting out the rapists in their own organisation, so why would the HS want to disagree?
Isn't it possible to both root out rapists and to be a diversity positive police force, or do you think they can only do one or the other?
I do think it possible, but I think the prioritising of image and box ticking exercises over meaningful change and intolerance of a rancid culture is pretty clear.
It's not that a flag or whatever causes things, but that the forces don't care about hard decisions of reform, and focus more on trivial actions because that's easy.
They even resist meaningful action.
It all falls into the reality that misgendering someone on Twitter brings out half a dozen officers for half a day; but house burglaries, car thefts, shoplifting etc, are just minor problems that don’t matter to the police beyond providing a reference number for an insurance claim.
Good argument, apart from the bit about it being not true.
Sadly, I have to report that from my experience it is true, by it may be untypical.
The latter part is more accurate. The former part is not. Misgendering someone on Twitter leads to absolutely no police response in >99.9% of cases, possibly 100%.
Take your point. I was interpreting 'misgendering' as any minor inconsequential misdemeanour for which a box can be ticked effortlessly, rather than investigating properly a real crime,which of course is difficult.
Interesting for the future of the UK that the same poll shows a likely SNP/GREEN majority at HOLYROOD of 11.
Does it? The latest R&W figures for Holyrood indicates 25% SNP and 14% Green on the Regional List (so combined 39%, well down on the 48% combined in 2021), with Labour leading the Regional List on 30%. The SNP still lead in the constituency vote with 39% versus 30% for Labour, and that may yield quite a lot of seats - but that lead is miles down on the 26% lead at the last Scottish elections.
I've not done the maths but are you sure you're looking at the same poll, because there is no chance of those numbers delivering an SNP/Green majority.
Someone has done the maths. I accept Stats for Lefties are not PB faves, but Mark McGeochan is yer actual Scotch polling expert, and I assume wouldn’t rt without having some faith in them.
I call BS.
Firstly, it's nonsensical based on the numbers in the actual poll and, secondly, it's Stats For Lefties, the home of BS.
I yield to your obviously unprejudiced expertise in the matter.
Comparing with 2021, the actual poll the Stats for Lefties thing is based on shows SNP on the constituencies down 9% and Labour up 9% (Greens don't matter for constituencies) and the list shows SNP/Green combined down 9% and Labour up 22%.
Stats for Lefties say that translates to the SNP/Green bloc losing just two of their 72 seats.
If they aren't wilfully wrong, then their calculators are broken. Their analysis simply cannot possibly be correct. That's not prejudice - it's maths.
Interesting for the future of the UK that the same poll shows a likely SNP/GREEN majority at HOLYROOD of 11.
Does it? The latest R&W figures for Holyrood indicates 25% SNP and 14% Green on the Regional List (so combined 39%, well down on the 48% combined in 2021), with Labour leading the Regional List on 30%. The SNP still lead in the constituency vote with 39% versus 30% for Labour, and that may yield quite a lot of seats - but that lead is miles down on the 26% lead at the last Scottish elections.
I've not done the maths but are you sure you're looking at the same poll, because there is no chance of those numbers delivering an SNP/Green majority.
Someone has done the maths. I accept Stats for Lefties are not PB faves, but Mark McGeochan is yer actual Scotch polling expert, and I assume wouldn’t rt without having some faith in them.
I call BS.
Firstly, it's nonsensical based on the numbers in the actual poll and, secondly, it's Stats For Lefties, the home of BS.
I just plugged the RW numbers into a seat calculator and it came out with SNP 55 (-11) Lab 36 (+14) Green 16 (+8) Con 15 (-16) LD 9 (+5)
Normal caveats apply, but the Stats for Lefties / Geohegan numbers look sound to me, if the RW numbers were to hold up.
My understanding of AMS is imperfect but isn’t there a chance if SLab increase their constituency seats that they lose out on the regions?
Interesting for the future of the UK that the same poll shows a likely SNP/GREEN majority at HOLYROOD of 11.
Does it? The latest R&W figures for Holyrood indicates 25% SNP and 14% Green on the Regional List (so combined 39%, well down on the 48% combined in 2021), with Labour leading the Regional List on 30%. The SNP still lead in the constituency vote with 39% versus 30% for Labour, and that may yield quite a lot of seats - but that lead is miles down on the 26% lead at the last Scottish elections.
I've not done the maths but are you sure you're looking at the same poll, because there is no chance of those numbers delivering an SNP/Green majority.
Someone has done the maths. I accept Stats for Lefties are not PB faves, but Mark McGeochan is yer actual Scotch polling expert, and I assume wouldn’t rt without having some faith in them.
I call BS.
Firstly, it's nonsensical based on the numbers in the actual poll and, secondly, it's Stats For Lefties, the home of BS.
I just plugged the RW numbers into a seat calculator and it came out with SNP 55 (-11) Lab 36 (+14) Green 16 (+8) Con 15 (-16) LD 9 (+5)
Normal caveats apply, but the Stats for Lefties / Geohegan numbers look sound to me, if the RW numbers were to hold up.
Alternatively, both you and Stats for Lefties are using the same online seat calculator.
As I was escorted around the Pomona cider brewery (near Bromyard) I had an epiphany from my Herefordshire childhood. You used to be able - aged 15 - to walk into one of the rougher but authentic pubs in Hereford and get a pint of “rough cider” - ie raw farmyard cider drawn straight from the barrel. The barrel which sat on the bar
Incredible in retrospect. Now the world - and the cider - is pasteurised
We have a number of cider festivals down here in deepest East Kent and you can still get farmyard cider from a wooden barrel from them but whether that counts as the kind of "Rough Cider" of your halcyon days I have no idea.
I asked the cider maker at Pomona (a guy from Kent). He reckoned it would have been a local farmer with a small orchard just selling his own barrel to the pub - I remember the cider literally tasting “rough”. It had bits in it. But arguably nicer than Strongbow from the Bulmers factory
I find cider almost impossible to drink now. Because of the years 12-17 drinking it endlessly. I have a reflexive revulsion
Interesting for the future of the UK that the same poll shows a likely SNP/GREEN majority at HOLYROOD of 11.
Does it? The latest R&W figures for Holyrood indicates 25% SNP and 14% Green on the Regional List (so combined 39%, well down on the 48% combined in 2021), with Labour leading the Regional List on 30%. The SNP still lead in the constituency vote with 39% versus 30% for Labour, and that may yield quite a lot of seats - but that lead is miles down on the 26% lead at the last Scottish elections.
I've not done the maths but are you sure you're looking at the same poll, because there is no chance of those numbers delivering an SNP/Green majority.
Someone has done the maths. I accept Stats for Lefties are not PB faves, but Mark McGeoghehan is yer actual Scotch polling expert, and I assume wouldn’t rt without having some faith in them.
Shuffling around of the unionist allocation would be a disappointing outcome after all this kerfuffle. Not from all perspectives, admittedly.
As I was escorted around the Pomona cider brewery (near Bromyard) I had an epiphany from my Herefordshire childhood. You used to be able - aged 15 - to walk into one of the rougher but authentic pubs in Hereford and get a pint of “rough cider” - ie raw farmyard cider drawn straight from the barrel. The barrel which sat on the bar
Incredible in retrospect. Now the world - and the cider - is pasteurised
Buying scrumpy in plastic half gallon containers was very common when I was in my teens. Not sure if it can still be done nowadays.
Oh, yes. Different sizes of plastic jerrican available in the place I mentioned earlier. Wooden barrels , too. And filled to your requirements from the barrel, if there isn't a canister of the right size already prepared.
Scrumpy and perry - fresh and live - are two of the things I love about the Westcountry.
Whoah. Hereford looking quite woebegone and beaten up. A lot of empty properties. First real signs of urban distress
It was much better than this 18 months ago?!
Do you see what I mean about a tale of two High Towns? The Chads end looks like a de-militarised zone and Widemarsh St. not so bad Although it sounds worse than it did six months ago.
If you really want to see decayed finery head 20 miles East to Great Malvern, more West Midlands than Marches granted, but dreadful nonetheless.
As I was escorted around the Pomona cider brewery (near Bromyard) I had an epiphany from my Herefordshire childhood. You used to be able - aged 15 - to walk into one of the rougher but authentic pubs in Hereford and get a pint of “rough cider” - ie raw farmyard cider drawn straight from the barrel. The barrel which sat on the bar
Incredible in retrospect. Now the world - and the cider - is pasteurised
I used to drink pints of scrumpy in the Coronation Tap in Clifton Bristol long time ago. The landlord wouldn't serve it to my wife, "I'd rather take the sign from the door than serve a woman scrumpy". My wife wasn't impressed. Scrumpy isn't good for your stomach lining. Greenish and cloudy. It was said you could dissolve horse shoe nails in it.
Interesting for the future of the UK that the same poll shows a likely SNP/GREEN majority at HOLYROOD of 11.
Does it? The latest R&W figures for Holyrood indicates 25% SNP and 14% Green on the Regional List (so combined 39%, well down on the 48% combined in 2021), with Labour leading the Regional List on 30%. The SNP still lead in the constituency vote with 39% versus 30% for Labour, and that may yield quite a lot of seats - but that lead is miles down on the 26% lead at the last Scottish elections.
I've not done the maths but are you sure you're looking at the same poll, because there is no chance of those numbers delivering an SNP/Green majority.
Someone has done the maths. I accept Stats for Lefties are not PB faves, but Mark McGeoghehan is yer actual Scotch polling expert, and I assume wouldn’t rt without having some faith in them.
Shuffling around of the unionist allocation would be a disappointing outcome after all this kerfuffle. Not from all perspectives, admittedly.
But isn't that logical? It would suggest that the same amount of voters are convinced of unionism / independence - but aren't necessarily wedded to a specific party to deliver that. Indeed, that was the reason of the rise of Scotch Tories, no? That they were the "reasonable unionists"? Now Labour is "back to being serious", why wouldn't it only be a shuffling of unionist votes and therefore representation?
So, how many injuries is an acceptable number to have before doing anything?
Greater than zero.
I was peripherally involved in the design of NICE, which partly has to decide what treatments can be paid for on the NHS, and hence has to weigh up "small chance of saving some life" against "large chance of making life slightly better for many people" within any budgetary level. IIRC the decision was to set a price of £20,000 (I believe it's now about £30K?) for "one year of satisfactory life", so if drug A would make you on average live a year longer without a lot of pain and side-effects, it would be approved if it cost less than £20K/year. One that on average improved life a bit for 3 months and only cost £10K probably wouldn't.
A lot of people find this chilling - "You can't measure the cost of a life!" - but I think you really have to, no matter how generous or parsimonious your budget. Deciding on the size of the budget is a quite different issue, and much more about political priorities - that's the sort of thing that keeps me interested in politics.
Absolutley, Nick.
You not only can measure the cost of a life, you have to. I'm glad I don't have to do it myself, it would keep me awake nights, but I acknowledge and admire those that do. It is essentially what good government is about.
Take speed limits, for example, since the topic has cropped up here. There are about 1,500 deaths on our roads each year now (way down on what it was when I passed my test in 1966, though these facts are not necessarily linked) and we could easily get that down to a few dozen if we reduce the speed limit to 5mph. Such a reductio ad absurdum makes the point.
Somebody has to decide where to draw the line, which implies evaluation of the cost of a life. Tough, but somebody really has to do it.
I always remember that the day of the Hatfield Train Crash, which killed 4 people, a family of 4 were killed in a head on collission on the Newark Bypass. This made me go and look at the relative 'value per human life saved' numbers.
In 2000 this was aproximately £3 million person on the railways and £500,000 per person on the roads.
Thanks Richard.
I suspect I'm being dumb but could you briefly explain how such a differential arises?
I really don't know. I suspect it is because there is (or maybe was) no standardised system of cost/benefit analysis across Government. So one department or organisation is using one value whilst another uses a completely different one.
Intrestingly if you google for similar numbers today you get a standardised £1.8 million so maybe someone finally got around to sorting it out.
This report (PDF) is interesting. Pushes a particular argument, but provides some useful background. Has the £1.8M figure, so may be the one you were looking at for more recent figures, Richard.
On the broader point, there are also externalities to consider - public perception of risk, for example. How many deaths does it take to change behaviours - i.e. how many train crashes until train passenger numbers fall? We're less sensitive to road deaths, on the whole, because we are all, personally, well above average drivers and know that only idiots get killed on the road For trains, we don't trust the idiots driving if they start having crashes.
And as for dodgy concrete, it would take just one infant fatality to bring the Government down.
It must be said, I do wonder when a future government will finally accept moving out of Westminster. The place is falling down and really should be turned into a museum open to the public. It will give the party who does it the opportunity to move it somewhere outside of London, as well, which could be interesting.
Imagine, a new building that is set up for electronic voting and none of this walking through doors nonsense. I know the Tories and the traditionalists will hate it, and it might change the nature of parliament / the speaker and such - but it's been a long time coming. Put it in Manchester or Birmingham, separate out our politics a bit across the country so it's not so London centric and boom - big impact with minimal constitutional fuckery.
No thanks. Why make such a pointless change? It won't save any money as Houses of Parliament will still have to be maintained. It would just be vast additional pointless cost to satisfy those who believe that anything old must, inherently, be bad.
Part of my reasoning is, indeed, about how I don't think anything old must be bad, and want more people to experience it. I quite like the architecture of the building itself, and the inside is more modern than the outside looks. But also, I think we need to modernise our politics, and part of that will necessitate no more voting via walking through doors and standing swords width apart, and London shouldn't be the financial centre, the media centre, the cultural centre and the political centre of the country.
I also think that a point should come where you go "this really should belong to the people of the UK" and turning it into a museum about British politics would be a great way to do that.
I disagree entirely with you about the modernising of our politics. I want our political system to remain confrontational. I think the move towards consensus politics is extremely bad for democracy.
I unfortunately agree. Things about which we have a consensus are not for politics. Politics is for things where a consensus does not exist.
Was at the Battle of Britain war memorial today. Now there is something that puts stress into perspective. 4 or even 5 scrambles a day with no great assurance you are coming back from any of them and you may burn to death. They say the waiting was the worst part and I can well believe it. Tough days, unbelievable heroism.
During the war my grandparents lived not far from Hornchurch airfield, and their younger son, my uncle, reached call-up. Grammar school, excellent sportsman, he seemed destined for the RAF, but my grandmother apparently threw a fit. No way was her youngest child going to risk his life the way she saw young men daily. So he joined the Army and was blown up outside Caen. He survived, but only just.
Pc Cliff Mitchell, 23, was arrested after officers were called to an address in Hackbridge, south west London, on Tuesday, by a member of the public who found the woman.
Police were told the woman had been attacked inside a house by a man known to her, who subsequently forced her into a car.
Mitchell, a serving police officer, was not on duty at the time of the incident and has now been suspended from the force.
The Met. That’s a shock !!
I know. Who’d have thought there would be (alleged) rapists in the Met?
Yet Braverman thinks it is rainbow flags causing loss of public confidence in the Met.
There are many reasons for not having confidence in the Met. Conflicts of interest is just one of them. Ask the families of those young gay men killed by Stephen Port what good those rainbow flags did them when all the police officers involved were so useless, indeed so useless that some of them were then promoted.
Comments
There was a pub in Doncaster when I were a lad that sold poteen for 40p a shot (late 90s).
https://twitter.com/rcbregman/status/1699406128902447476?s=20
(If we’re just sharing random facts unrelated to the topic at hand.)
They say the waiting was the worst part and I can well believe it.
Tough days, unbelievable heroism.
I accept Stats for Lefties are not PB faves, but Mark McGeoghehan is yer actual Scotch polling expert, and I assume wouldn’t rt without having some faith in them.
Also, they will have to leave for a long period of time to fix it up eventually. What are we going to have instead, a portacabin parliament? They will spend the money for a replacement anyway, so might as well make it suitable for the job at hand, make it permanent and have Westminster Palace as a great place for the public to learn about the history of British parliamentary democracy.
Firstly, it's nonsensical based on the numbers in the actual poll and, secondly, it's Stats For Lefties, the home of BS.
It was much better than this 18 months ago?!
Stats for Lefties say that translates to the SNP/Green bloc losing just two of their 72 seats.
If they aren't wilfully wrong, then their calculators are broken. Their analysis simply cannot possibly be correct. That's not prejudice - it's maths.
New thread
I find cider almost impossible to drink now. Because of the years 12-17 drinking it endlessly. I have a reflexive revulsion
Scrumpy and perry - fresh and live - are two of the things I love about the Westcountry.
If you really want to see decayed finery head 20 miles East to Great Malvern, more West Midlands than Marches granted, but dreadful nonetheless.
So he joined the Army and was blown up outside Caen. He survived, but only just.