I think HS2 will likely follow the Edinburgh Trams and Crossrail "journey".
Political cowardice, incompetence, increased costs, lots of whining from the motoring lobby. Years or decades late.
And yet significantly higher patronage than expected. Over capacity immediately. Benefits not included in the business case appear out of nowhere.
Commuters jump out of their cars en masse. Increased footfall in local businesses. Huge economies of scale - the original line has seen a doubling of passengers itself, and Lothian Bus passenger numbers grew too.
BUILD IT
Yes. People are already complaining about crowding on the Elizabeth line. And ridership on the new guided busway system in Belfast has turned out to be so high that it would have justified building a proper tram system instead.
When was the last time that a major infrastructure project flopped? As in, something that was built as planned but produced nothing like the expected benefits?
The Millennium Dome, maybe? But it seems to be having a successful middle age. The Humber Bridge, probably - but has there been anything since then?
Doncaster "Robin Hood" Airport.
Fair enough. Last time I flew out of there was about 2 weeks after it opened. Our flight was delayed by 6 hours, and there wasn't a single other flight in and out during the entire time that we were waiting. I take it that it's still just as empty?
It wasn't really a major project, though - an existing RAF airfield with a gigantic runway that had been kept in good working order, an empty box of a terminal building, a car park, and an interminably trundling bus service from Doncaster.
The completely mad thing about this whole farrago is it looks like they took the decision to cancel the Manchester leg and announce it now, completely forgetting that they're in Manchester next week.
Then people have rather awkwardly pointed to the connection and now its as if the line is "OK we won't confirm anything now, we can cancel it officially in two weeks time instead once we've had the Conference, that'll make the awkwardness go away".
The rumour is that this was leaked deliberately to harm the government at this moment. Apparently aided and abetted by “the Times” and “spectator”??! However I don’t buy that as the leaks have been coming for months - about various delays and cost cutting measures. Likewise the rumours about Euston date back many months (the Sun ran this story - no Euston - in January)
It’s a cock up. Not a conspiracy. And what a massive cock up
When Lucy Letby was charged, no nurses stepped back.
This tells us a lot about the ratios of nurses who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
And the number of armed police officers who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
It tells us nothing
All it tells us is that police fear that grieving relatives may use social media to lash out at them as individuals and that their senior management are spineless bastards who would throw their officers to the wolves without a second thought
Bollocks.
If you have the power and responsibilities of an armed police officer, you have signed up for higher scrutiny and standards. Their job, that they chose to do, gives them the ability to deprive people of their freedoms before a trial and, in some cases, their lives. If that is done with impunity, cops are nothing but another street gang and their boss just happens to be the government. Police need to be held to a higher standard than your typical civvy because of that responsibility and power - not a lower standard - and should be more willing to sacrifice themselves and their individual pride for the consent of the public - not less.
To protect and serve means you have signed up to put yourself in harms way instead of letting bad things happen to the average Joe, and even suspects should be treated as the average Joe because they are not guilty until a court finds them guilty. Importing this US mindset that nothing is worth more than the life of a cop is a sure fire way to get American style policing - excess brutality and a feeling of being above the law.
I am a fully paid up member of tofu-eating wokerati liberal blob, but I am very nervous of an SO19 officer discharging his or her duty and his firearm against bad guys on our behalf and finding himself or herself the wrong side of the CPS.
Is there an argument that SO19 should be issued with a licence to kill in service without legal recourse? Much like Cressida Dick received no sanction and got promoted after Menenez got blown away after her and her team's panicked error. Dick, as I recall was the Operation Commander on the day.
I think HS2 will likely follow the Edinburgh Trams and Crossrail "journey".
Political cowardice, incompetence, increased costs, lots of whining from the motoring lobby. Years or decades late.
And yet significantly higher patronage than expected. Over capacity immediately. Benefits not included in the business case appear out of nowhere.
Commuters jump out of their cars en masse. Increased footfall in local businesses. Huge economies of scale - the original line has seen a doubling of passengers itself, and Lothian Bus passenger numbers grew too.
BUILD IT
Yes. People are already complaining about crowding on the Elizabeth line. And ridership on the new guided busway system in Belfast has turned out to be so high that it would have justified building a proper tram system instead.
When was the last time that a major infrastructure project flopped? As in, something that was built as planned but produced nothing like the expected benefits?
The Millennium Dome, maybe? But it seems to be having a successful middle age. The Humber Bridge, probably - but has there been anything since then?
Doncaster "Robin Hood" Airport.
Fair enough. Last time I flew out of there was about 2 weeks after it opened. Our flight was delayed by 6 hours, and there wasn't a single other flight in and out during the entire time that we were waiting. I take it that it's still just as empty?
It wasn't really a major project, though - an existing RAF airfield with a gigantic runway that had been kept in good working order, an empty box of a terminal building, a car park, and an interminably trundling bus service from Doncaster.
It was great for getting my elderly parents to and from the Canaries. They really appreciated it.
The completely mad thing about this whole farrago is it looks like they took the decision to cancel the Manchester leg and announce it now, completely forgetting that they're in Manchester next week.
Then people have rather awkwardly pointed to the connection and now its as if the line is "OK we won't confirm anything now, we can cancel it officially in two weeks time instead once we've had the Conference, that'll make the awkwardness go away".
The rumour is that this was leaked deliberately to harm the government at this moment. Apparently aided and abetted by “the Times” and “spectator”??! However I don’t buy that as the leaks have been coming for months - about various delays and cost cutting measures. Likewise the rumours about Euston date back many months (the Sun ran this story - no Euston - in January)
It’s a cock up. Not a conspiracy. And what a massive cock up
I have been quite busy this weekend and catching up this morning it seems Sunak is taking a hammering with only @HYUFD gamely defending him, though on Inheritance Tax it is his own personal interest at play here and frankly any change to IT would be insane at this time
On the wider issue of Sunak, he and Hunt are technocrats and accountants, and not politicians
They remind me of the attitude the IMF would have if called into the country, but it is politically tone deaf even though they are asking the right questions, not just on climate change but also on HS2, and I believe the same questions with confront Starmer and Reeves as soon as they go into office
Personally, I accept the conservative party are going into opposition and frankly an early GE and the inevitable change would be a relief
I do have a concern for the conservative party going forward if @HYUFD represents the future, as it is not a future I would accept as I became politically homeless but at 80, which I will be at the time of the next election, whatever happens is unlikely to affect myself or my wife and our main objective every day is to keep taking our pills and enjoy the love and company of our beloved family, including our 5 grand children who are all local to us.
When Lucy Letby was charged, no nurses stepped back.
This tells us a lot about the ratios of nurses who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
And the number of armed police officers who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
It tells us nothing
All it tells us is that police fear that grieving relatives may use social media to lash out at them as individuals and that their senior management are spineless bastards who would throw their officers to the wolves without a second thought
Bollocks.
If you have the power and responsibilities of an armed police officer, you have signed up for higher scrutiny and standards. Their job, that they chose to do, gives them the ability to deprive people of their freedoms before a trial and, in some cases, their lives. If that is done with impunity, cops are nothing but another street gang and their boss just happens to be the government. Police need to be held to a higher standard than your typical civvy because of that responsibility and power - not a lower standard - and should be more willing to sacrifice themselves and their individual pride for the consent of the public - not less.
To protect and serve means you have signed up to put yourself in harms way instead of letting bad things happen to the average Joe, and even suspects should be treated as the average Joe because they are not guilty until a court finds them guilty. Importing this US mindset that nothing is worth more than the life of a cop is a sure fire way to get American style policing - excess brutality and a feeling of being above the law.
Yes, but along with that there needs to be an understanding that the job a trained firearms officers do is *not* normal. They may have a matter of seconds or less to make a decision on whether to fire on a target or not - and there may be risks associated with not firing, to themselves, their colleagues, and other members of the public.
Whilst I'd blooming well hope that they're trained to make good instinctive decisions, they cannot be trained to always make perfect instinctive decisions.
And the problem with court cases over things like this is that a decision that had to be made in minutes or seconds, can be gone over for a matter of days, weeks or months in court - and with the benefit of information the officer may not have had (e.g. the presence or absence of a weapon on the suspect).
I know very little about this case in question, and I doubt we'll hear much more if substance before the court case. It may be the officer in question did murder/kill and innocent man; or it might be he made the wrong decision for understandable, if regrettably tragic, reasons.
This is also an argument for not arming all police: their training standards and personal competence need to be very high.
I would prefer not arming police at all.
This case has been brought after a year of investigating. It is unlikely that it has been brought without good evidence of wrongdoing, purposeful or otherwise.
My general feelings around firearmed officers is that the only situation you shoot is when civilian life is in jeopardy - either with someone clearly threatening people or seeming equipped and intending to do so. If the person is threatening the cop, it is part of the job as a cop to take that person in alive and for them to go through the process of justice, not for extrajudicial killing.
In this case Chris Kaba was shot in the head for the "crime" of being in a car registered to him that police had linked to a "firearm incident" and being somewhat irate at being stopped by the police suddenly, something that has probably happened to him often in his life for no good reason. No firearm was found on the scene. Again, even if the man was threatening the cop he was talking to - cops sign up for that. We do not have the death penalty, and being pissy to a police officer should not be a death sentence.
I think that a policeman has as much right as any other person to kill in self-defence (which is not to prejudge this particular case). A police officer is under no obligation to let himself be killed or seriously injured, by a suspect.
I actively disagree. Police are choosing to take a job where they get added responsibilities, added training and added resources to deescalate situations that the average person would not, alongside added power to enact non lethal violence against people that other people do not. A good police officer should be better equipped than a civvy to deal with a situation where they're at risk. The threshold for a police officer should be higher than that of a normal person.
The issue in the current case is that we don't know on what evidence charges have been brought. Until we do its going to be very hard to comment in any kind of constructive way. No firearm police officer can be just assumed innocent, but on the other hand the standards of proof of wrong-doing on their part should need to consider the full circumstances. Presumably the officer or officers who shot and killed Jean Charles de Menezes did not face prosecution for murder (I don't think they did, and certainly don't recall any suggestion that they should.)
There was a pathetic campaign within the police force, claiming that holding senior officers to account would risk the frontline officers being charged with something.
IIRC the frontline officers in the de Mendez case had a cast iron defence - they had obeyed orders, which were under rules which they had been specifically briefed on the legality of.
When Lucy Letby was charged, no nurses stepped back.
This tells us a lot about the ratios of nurses who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
And the number of armed police officers who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
It tells us nothing
All it tells us is that police fear that grieving relatives may use social media to lash out at them as individuals and that their senior management are spineless bastards who would throw their officers to the wolves without a second thought
Bollocks.
If you have the power and responsibilities of an armed police officer, you have signed up for higher scrutiny and standards. Their job, that they chose to do, gives them the ability to deprive people of their freedoms before a trial and, in some cases, their lives. If that is done with impunity, cops are nothing but another street gang and their boss just happens to be the government. Police need to be held to a higher standard than your typical civvy because of that responsibility and power - not a lower standard - and should be more willing to sacrifice themselves and their individual pride for the consent of the public - not less.
To protect and serve means you have signed up to put yourself in harms way instead of letting bad things happen to the average Joe, and even suspects should be treated as the average Joe because they are not guilty until a court finds them guilty. Importing this US mindset that nothing is worth more than the life of a cop is a sure fire way to get American style policing - excess brutality and a feeling of being above the law.
I am a fully paid up member of tofu-eating wokerati liberal blob, but I am very nervous of an SO19 officer discharging his or her duty and his firearm against bad guys on our behalf and finding himself or herself the wrong side of the CPS.
Is there an argument that SO19 should be issued with a licence to kill in service without legal recourse? Much like Cressida Dick received no sanction and got promoted after Menenez got blown away after her and her team's panicked error. Dick, as I recall was the Operation Commander on the day.
The inexorable rise of Dick was quite a marvel to behold.
I have been quite busy this weekend and catching up this morning it seems Sunak is taking a hammering with only @HYUFD gamely defending him, though on Inheritance Tax it is his own personal interest at play here and frankly any change to IT would be insane at this time
On the wider issue of Sunak, he and Hunt are technocrats and accountants, and not politicians
They remind me of the attitude the IMF would have if called into the country, but it is politically tone deaf even though they are asking the right questions, not just on climate change but also on HS2, and I believe the same questions with confront Starmer and Reeves as soon as they go into office
Personally, I accept the conservative party are going into opposition and frankly an early GE and the inevitable change would be a relief
I do have a concern for the conservative party going forward if @HYUFD represents the future, as it is not a future I would accept as I became politically homeless but at 80, which I will be at the time of the next election, whatever happens is unlikely to affect myself or my wife and our main objective every day is to keep taking our pills and enjoy the love and company of our beloved family, including our 5 grand children who are all local to us.
I like @HYUFD and enjoy his contribution to the site. However I completely disagree with him on IHT. I think IHT should be increased and perhaps the extra money raised to go towards a proper permanent solution to elderly social care. This government isn't going to deliver that. I don't think LAB will either.
When Lucy Letby was charged, no nurses stepped back.
This tells us a lot about the ratios of nurses who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
And the number of armed police officers who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
It tells us nothing
All it tells us is that police fear that grieving relatives may use social media to lash out at them as individuals and that their senior management are spineless bastards who would throw their officers to the wolves without a second thought
Bollocks.
If you have the power and responsibilities of an armed police officer, you have signed up for higher scrutiny and standards. Their job, that they chose to do, gives them the ability to deprive people of their freedoms before a trial and, in some cases, their lives. If that is done with impunity, cops are nothing but another street gang and their boss just happens to be the government. Police need to be held to a higher standard than your typical civvy because of that responsibility and power - not a lower standard - and should be more willing to sacrifice themselves and their individual pride for the consent of the public - not less.
To protect and serve means you have signed up to put yourself in harms way instead of letting bad things happen to the average Joe, and even suspects should be treated as the average Joe because they are not guilty until a court finds them guilty. Importing this US mindset that nothing is worth more than the life of a cop is a sure fire way to get American style policing - excess brutality and a feeling of being above the law.
I am a fully paid up member of tofu-eating wokerati liberal blob, but I am very nervous of an SO19 officer discharging his duty and his firearm against bad guys on our behalf and finding himself or herself the wrong side of the CPS.
Is there an argument that SO19 should be issued with a licence to kill in service without legal recourse? Much like Cressida Dick received no sanction and got promoted after Menenez got blown away after her and her team's panicked error. Dick, as I recall was the Operation Commander on the day.
We do not know that people are bad guys until a trial happens. Further in the thread I said if a suspect is clearly threatening civvies with a weapon and you get the order, yes. But we don't have the death penalty, and even if we did it should go through court, so extrajudicial killing should always be considered to be the worst option. Arguably every shooting by a cop should be highly scrutinised because they so often get the benefit of the doubt.
In the Chris Kaba case, with the information in public domain, the worst thing he did was try to drive away whilst police were talking to him and he hit a cop car - by accident or on purpose, who knows? And for that he was shot dead? He may have been in the wrong with his actions - but he didn't deserve to be killed extrajudicially for them.
When Lucy Letby was charged, no nurses stepped back.
This tells us a lot about the ratios of nurses who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
And the number of armed police officers who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
It tells us nothing
All it tells us is that police fear that grieving relatives may use social media to lash out at them as individuals and that their senior management are spineless bastards who would throw their officers to the wolves without a second thought
Bollocks.
If you have the power and responsibilities of an armed police officer, you have signed up for higher scrutiny and standards. Their job, that they chose to do, gives them the ability to deprive people of their freedoms before a trial and, in some cases, their lives. If that is done with impunity, cops are nothing but another street gang and their boss just happens to be the government. Police need to be held to a higher standard than your typical civvy because of that responsibility and power - not a lower standard - and should be more willing to sacrifice themselves and their individual pride for the consent of the public - not less.
To protect and serve means you have signed up to put yourself in harms way instead of letting bad things happen to the average Joe, and even suspects should be treated as the average Joe because they are not guilty until a court finds them guilty. Importing this US mindset that nothing is worth more than the life of a cop is a sure fire way to get American style policing - excess brutality and a feeling of being above the law.
I am a fully paid up member of tofu-eating wokerati liberal blob, but I am very nervous of an SO19 officer discharging his or her duty and his firearm against bad guys on our behalf and finding himself or herself the wrong side of the CPS.
Is there an argument that SO19 should be issued with a licence to kill in service without legal recourse? Much like Cressida Dick received no sanction and got promoted after Menenez got blown away after her and her team's panicked error. Dick, as I recall was the Operation Commander on the day.
The inexorable rise of Dick was quite a marvel to behold.
When Lucy Letby was charged, no nurses stepped back.
This tells us a lot about the ratios of nurses who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
And the number of armed police officers who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
It tells us nothing
All it tells us is that police fear that grieving relatives may use social media to lash out at them as individuals and that their senior management are spineless bastards who would throw their officers to the wolves without a second thought
Bollocks.
If you have the power and responsibilities of an armed police officer, you have signed up for higher scrutiny and standards. Their job, that they chose to do, gives them the ability to deprive people of their freedoms before a trial and, in some cases, their lives. If that is done with impunity, cops are nothing but another street gang and their boss just happens to be the government. Police need to be held to a higher standard than your typical civvy because of that responsibility and power - not a lower standard - and should be more willing to sacrifice themselves and their individual pride for the consent of the public - not less.
To protect and serve means you have signed up to put yourself in harms way instead of letting bad things happen to the average Joe, and even suspects should be treated as the average Joe because they are not guilty until a court finds them guilty. Importing this US mindset that nothing is worth more than the life of a cop is a sure fire way to get American style policing - excess brutality and a feeling of being above the law.
I am a fully paid up member of tofu-eating wokerati liberal blob, but I am very nervous of an SO19 officer discharging his or her duty and his firearm against bad guys on our behalf and finding himself or herself the wrong side of the CPS.
Is there an argument that SO19 should be issued with a licence to kill in service without legal recourse? Much like Cressida Dick received no sanction and got promoted after Menenez got blown away after her and her team's panicked error. Dick, as I recall was the Operation Commander on the day.
The inexorable rise of Dick was quite a marvel to behold.
When Lucy Letby was charged, no nurses stepped back.
This tells us a lot about the ratios of nurses who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
And the number of armed police officers who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
It tells us nothing
All it tells us is that police fear that grieving relatives may use social media to lash out at them as individuals and that their senior management are spineless bastards who would throw their officers to the wolves without a second thought
Bollocks.
If you have the power and responsibilities of an armed police officer, you have signed up for higher scrutiny and standards. Their job, that they chose to do, gives them the ability to deprive people of their freedoms before a trial and, in some cases, their lives. If that is done with impunity, cops are nothing but another street gang and their boss just happens to be the government. Police need to be held to a higher standard than your typical civvy because of that responsibility and power - not a lower standard - and should be more willing to sacrifice themselves and their individual pride for the consent of the public - not less.
To protect and serve means you have signed up to put yourself in harms way instead of letting bad things happen to the average Joe, and even suspects should be treated as the average Joe because they are not guilty until a court finds them guilty. Importing this US mindset that nothing is worth more than the life of a cop is a sure fire way to get American style policing - excess brutality and a feeling of being above the law.
I am a fully paid up member of tofu-eating wokerati liberal blob, but I am very nervous of an SO19 officer discharging his or her duty and his firearm against bad guys on our behalf and finding himself or herself the wrong side of the CPS.
Is there an argument that SO19 should be issued with a licence to kill in service without legal recourse? Much like Cressida Dick received no sanction and got promoted after Menenez got blown away after her and her team's panicked error. Dick, as I recall was the Operation Commander on the day.
The inexorable rise of Dick was quite a marvel to behold.
That's what she said.
I hope you're not implying there was any sort of crude double-meaning to my Dick references. Can't a former senior police officer have a perfectly innocent name without it being continually shoved down everyone's throat?
I think HS2 will likely follow the Edinburgh Trams and Crossrail "journey".
Political cowardice, incompetence, increased costs, lots of whining from the motoring lobby. Years or decades late.
And yet significantly higher patronage than expected. Over capacity immediately. Benefits not included in the business case appear out of nowhere.
Commuters jump out of their cars en masse. Increased footfall in local businesses. Huge economies of scale - the original line has seen a doubling of passengers itself, and Lothian Bus passenger numbers grew too.
BUILD IT
Yes. People are already complaining about crowding on the Elizabeth line. And ridership on the new guided busway system in Belfast has turned out to be so high that it would have justified building a proper tram system instead.
When was the last time that a major infrastructure project flopped? As in, something that was built as planned but produced nothing like the expected benefits?
The Millennium Dome, maybe? But it seems to be having a successful middle age. The Humber Bridge, probably - but has there been anything since then?
Edinburgh bypass, kinda.
The point of it was to allow vehicles, particularly commercial traffic, to bypass the city. This is undoubtedly a good thing for all parties.
Unfortunately, it's primarily used by Edinburgh residents to commute to the big business or retail parks to the west and east of the city.
This has two effects: it's induced increased rates of driving inside the city, as people make their way to the bypass. Edinburgh remains hugely congested.
But more importantly, the bypass is now at a complete standstill at rush hour, with those commercial vehicles stuck in traffic. Not good for the economy.
The solution? Close most of the junctions onto the bypass from the city and shift the balance back in favour of the excellent public transport that is available.
When Lucy Letby was charged, no nurses stepped back.
This tells us a lot about the ratios of nurses who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
And the number of armed police officers who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
It tells us nothing
All it tells us is that police fear that grieving relatives may use social media to lash out at them as individuals and that their senior management are spineless bastards who would throw their officers to the wolves without a second thought
Bollocks.
If you have the power and responsibilities of an armed police officer, you have signed up for higher scrutiny and standards. Their job, that they chose to do, gives them the ability to deprive people of their freedoms before a trial and, in some cases, their lives. If that is done with impunity, cops are nothing but another street gang and their boss just happens to be the government. Police need to be held to a higher standard than your typical civvy because of that responsibility and power - not a lower standard - and should be more willing to sacrifice themselves and their individual pride for the consent of the public - not less.
To protect and serve means you have signed up to put yourself in harms way instead of letting bad things happen to the average Joe, and even suspects should be treated as the average Joe because they are not guilty until a court finds them guilty. Importing this US mindset that nothing is worth more than the life of a cop is a sure fire way to get American style policing - excess brutality and a feeling of being above the law.
I am a fully paid up member of tofu-eating wokerati liberal blob, but I am very nervous of an SO19 officer discharging his or her duty and his firearm against bad guys on our behalf and finding himself or herself the wrong side of the CPS.
Is there an argument that SO19 should be issued with a licence to kill in service without legal recourse? Much like Cressida Dick received no sanction and got promoted after Menenez got blown away after her and her team's panicked error. Dick, as I recall was the Operation Commander on the day.
The inexorable rise of Dick was quite a marvel to behold.
Was Dick head at one stage?
Yes - every single officer in the Met effectively worked for Dick.
When Lucy Letby was charged, no nurses stepped back.
This tells us a lot about the ratios of nurses who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
And the number of armed police officers who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
It tells us nothing
All it tells us is that police fear that grieving relatives may use social media to lash out at them as individuals and that their senior management are spineless bastards who would throw their officers to the wolves without a second thought
Bollocks.
If you have the power and responsibilities of an armed police officer, you have signed up for higher scrutiny and standards. Their job, that they chose to do, gives them the ability to deprive people of their freedoms before a trial and, in some cases, their lives. If that is done with impunity, cops are nothing but another street gang and their boss just happens to be the government. Police need to be held to a higher standard than your typical civvy because of that responsibility and power - not a lower standard - and should be more willing to sacrifice themselves and their individual pride for the consent of the public - not less.
To protect and serve means you have signed up to put yourself in harms way instead of letting bad things happen to the average Joe, and even suspects should be treated as the average Joe because they are not guilty until a court finds them guilty. Importing this US mindset that nothing is worth more than the life of a cop is a sure fire way to get American style policing - excess brutality and a feeling of being above the law.
I am a fully paid up member of tofu-eating wokerati liberal blob, but I am very nervous of an SO19 officer discharging his duty and his firearm against bad guys on our behalf and finding himself or herself the wrong side of the CPS.
Is there an argument that SO19 should be issued with a licence to kill in service without legal recourse? Much like Cressida Dick received no sanction and got promoted after Menenez got blown away after her and her team's panicked error. Dick, as I recall was the Operation Commander on the day.
We do not know that people are bad guys until a trial happens. Further in the thread I said if a suspect is clearly threatening civvies with a weapon and you get the order, yes. But we don't have the death penalty, and even if we did it should go through court, so extrajudicial killing should always be considered to be the worst option. Arguably every shooting by a cop should be highly scrutinised because they so often get the benefit of the doubt.
In the Chris Kaba case, with the information in public domain, the worst thing he did was try to drive away whilst police were talking to him and he hit a cop car - by accident or on purpose, who knows? And for that he was shot dead? He may have been in the wrong with his actions - but he didn't deserve to be killed extrajudicially for them.
If the facts are as described as in your final paragraph then it's an exceedingly speedy not guilty verdict as NX121 would likely have cause to believe he's (Kaba) is using his car as a weapon; and the charge should never have been brought.
The completely mad thing about this whole farrago is it looks like they took the decision to cancel the Manchester leg and announce it now, completely forgetting that they're in Manchester next week.
Then people have rather awkwardly pointed to the connection and now its as if the line is "OK we won't confirm anything now, we can cancel it officially in two weeks time instead once we've had the Conference, that'll make the awkwardness go away".
The rumour is that this was leaked deliberately to harm the government at this moment. Apparently aided and abetted by “the Times” and “spectator”??! However I don’t buy that as the leaks have been coming for months - about various delays and cost cutting measures. Likewise the rumours about Euston date back many months (the Sun ran this story - no Euston - in January)
It’s a cock up. Not a conspiracy. And what a massive cock up
It's Gove
What's Gove got to do with it?
Isn't that a Tina Turner song?
Well that's as maybe. 'SO' was saying it must be Gove Gove Gove and I was just querying that.
I think HS2 will likely follow the Edinburgh Trams and Crossrail "journey".
Political cowardice, incompetence, increased costs, lots of whining from the motoring lobby. Years or decades late.
And yet significantly higher patronage than expected. Over capacity immediately. Benefits not included in the business case appear out of nowhere.
Commuters jump out of their cars en masse. Increased footfall in local businesses. Huge economies of scale - the original line has seen a doubling of passengers itself, and Lothian Bus passenger numbers grew too.
BUILD IT
Yes. People are already complaining about crowding on the Elizabeth line. And ridership on the new guided busway system in Belfast has turned out to be so high that it would have justified building a proper tram system instead.
When was the last time that a major infrastructure project flopped? As in, something that was built as planned but produced nothing like the expected benefits?
The Millennium Dome, maybe? But it seems to be having a successful middle age. The Humber Bridge, probably - but has there been anything since then?
Edinburgh bypass, kinda.
The point of it was to allow vehicles, particularly commercial traffic, to bypass the city. This is undoubtedly a good thing for all parties.
Unfortunately, it's primarily used by Edinburgh residents to commute to the big business or retail parks to the west and east of the city.
This has two effects: it's induced increased rates of driving inside the city, as people make their way to the bypass. Edinburgh remains hugely congested.
But more importantly, the bypass is now at a complete standstill at rush hour, with those commercial vehicles stuck in traffic. Not good for the economy.
The solution? Close most of the junctions onto the bypass from the city and shift the balance back in favour of the excellent public transport that is available.
You defined success as it being used more than intended.
Now you call it a failure as its being used more than intended?
Make your mind up. It seems on your own objective criteria its been a riproaring success. I don't know anything about the situation, just going off what you said.
People want to drive to retail parks where they can load shopping into their boot rather than carry shopping home on a tram or bus shocker.
If the bypass is too congested due to a shortage of capacity don't bemoan its success, build another bypass. If a tramline or rail line is full you don't complain that its induced demand, you celebrate its success and argue for another to be built now - same with roads.
Stop being embarrassed by successful investment in infrastructure, its a kind of cultural cringe.
I think HS2 will likely follow the Edinburgh Trams and Crossrail "journey".
Political cowardice, incompetence, increased costs, lots of whining from the motoring lobby. Years or decades late.
And yet significantly higher patronage than expected. Over capacity immediately. Benefits not included in the business case appear out of nowhere.
Commuters jump out of their cars en masse. Increased footfall in local businesses. Huge economies of scale - the original line has seen a doubling of passengers itself, and Lothian Bus passenger numbers grew too.
BUILD IT
Yes. People are already complaining about crowding on the Elizabeth line. And ridership on the new guided busway system in Belfast has turned out to be so high that it would have justified building a proper tram system instead.
When was the last time that a major infrastructure project flopped? As in, something that was built as planned but produced nothing like the expected benefits?
The Millennium Dome, maybe? But it seems to be having a successful middle age. The Humber Bridge, probably - but has there been anything since then?
Edinburgh bypass, kinda.
The point of it was to allow vehicles, particularly commercial traffic, to bypass the city. This is undoubtedly a good thing for all parties.
Unfortunately, it's primarily used by Edinburgh residents to commute to the big business or retail parks to the west and east of the city.
This has two effects: it's induced increased rates of driving inside the city, as people make their way to the bypass. Edinburgh remains hugely congested.
But more importantly, the bypass is now at a complete standstill at rush hour, with those commercial vehicles stuck in traffic. Not good for the economy.
The solution? Close most of the junctions onto the bypass from the city and shift the balance back in favour of the excellent public transport that is available.
Hmm. Built in the 1980s - 1981-90 on checking. No hard shoulder, which doesn't help.
Only too familiar with the situation when there is an accident or flooding etc and the bypass backs up through the slip roads onto the radials and blocks them too.
But am I missing something? You pretty much need access to the bypass from the major radials (FB, Glasgow, Lanarkshire, Biggar, Peebles, Dalkeith, Dunbar etc.) because of the way that the hills/Forth cut between them. But you also need access to these same radials from Edinburgh. So ...?
When Lucy Letby was charged, no nurses stepped back.
This tells us a lot about the ratios of nurses who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
And the number of armed police officers who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
It tells us nothing
All it tells us is that police fear that grieving relatives may use social media to lash out at them as individuals and that their senior management are spineless bastards who would throw their officers to the wolves without a second thought
Bollocks.
If you have the power and responsibilities of an armed police officer, you have signed up for higher scrutiny and standards. Their job, that they chose to do, gives them the ability to deprive people of their freedoms before a trial and, in some cases, their lives. If that is done with impunity, cops are nothing but another street gang and their boss just happens to be the government. Police need to be held to a higher standard than your typical civvy because of that responsibility and power - not a lower standard - and should be more willing to sacrifice themselves and their individual pride for the consent of the public - not less.
To protect and serve means you have signed up to put yourself in harms way instead of letting bad things happen to the average Joe, and even suspects should be treated as the average Joe because they are not guilty until a court finds them guilty. Importing this US mindset that nothing is worth more than the life of a cop is a sure fire way to get American style policing - excess brutality and a feeling of being above the law.
I am a fully paid up member of tofu-eating wokerati liberal blob, but I am very nervous of an SO19 officer discharging his or her duty and his firearm against bad guys on our behalf and finding himself or herself the wrong side of the CPS.
Is there an argument that SO19 should be issued with a licence to kill in service without legal recourse? Much like Cressida Dick received no sanction and got promoted after Menenez got blown away after her and her team's panicked error. Dick, as I recall was the Operation Commander on the day.
The inexorable rise of Dick was quite a marvel to behold.
Was Dick head at one stage?
Yes - every single officer in the Met effectively worked for Dick.
Everyone at New Scotland Yard was controlled by Dick?
Wow. One might think they would exercise a little more caution.
More information about yesterday’s Khalino military airfield incident. As per Main Directorate of Intelligence of Ukraine: At the airfield "Khalino" in the Kursk region, a Ukrainian drone was landed by Russian electronic warfare systems on the runway. When the leadership of the aviation regiment and FSB officers arrived for closer inspection drone exploded. As claimed, the following were killed or injured during the explosion: → commander of the 14th aviation regiment; → one of his deputies; → a group of aviator officers; → a representative of the FSB military counterintelligence; → airport employees. https://x.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1706237220758147200?s=20
That somewhat reminds me of Operation Chariot and HMS Campbletown, which was filled with explosives and rammed into the dry docks gates at St Nazaire. The ship exploded many hours later.
"A party of 40 senior German officers and civilians who were on a tour of Campbeltown were killed. In total, the explosion killed about 360 men"
When Lucy Letby was charged, no nurses stepped back.
This tells us a lot about the ratios of nurses who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
And the number of armed police officers who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
It tells us nothing
All it tells us is that police fear that grieving relatives may use social media to lash out at them as individuals and that their senior management are spineless bastards who would throw their officers to the wolves without a second thought
Bollocks.
If you have the power and responsibilities of an armed police officer, you have signed up for higher scrutiny and standards. Their job, that they chose to do, gives them the ability to deprive people of their freedoms before a trial and, in some cases, their lives. If that is done with impunity, cops are nothing but another street gang and their boss just happens to be the government. Police need to be held to a higher standard than your typical civvy because of that responsibility and power - not a lower standard - and should be more willing to sacrifice themselves and their individual pride for the consent of the public - not less.
To protect and serve means you have signed up to put yourself in harms way instead of letting bad things happen to the average Joe, and even suspects should be treated as the average Joe because they are not guilty until a court finds them guilty. Importing this US mindset that nothing is worth more than the life of a cop is a sure fire way to get American style policing - excess brutality and a feeling of being above the law.
Yes, but along with that there needs to be an understanding that the job a trained firearms officers do is *not* normal. They may have a matter of seconds or less to make a decision on whether to fire on a target or not - and there may be risks associated with not firing, to themselves, their colleagues, and other members of the public.
Whilst I'd blooming well hope that they're trained to make good instinctive decisions, they cannot be trained to always make perfect instinctive decisions.
And the problem with court cases over things like this is that a decision that had to be made in minutes or seconds, can be gone over for a matter of days, weeks or months in court - and with the benefit of information the officer may not have had (e.g. the presence or absence of a weapon on the suspect).
I know very little about this case in question, and I doubt we'll hear much more if substance before the court case. It may be the officer in question did murder/kill and innocent man; or it might be he made the wrong decision for understandable, if regrettably tragic, reasons.
This is also an argument for not arming all police: their training standards and personal competence need to be very high.
I would prefer not arming police at all.
This case has been brought after a year of investigating. It is unlikely that it has been brought without good evidence of wrongdoing, purposeful or otherwise.
My general feelings around firearmed officers is that the only situation you shoot is when civilian life is in jeopardy - either with someone clearly threatening people or seeming equipped and intending to do so. If the person is threatening the cop, it is part of the job as a cop to take that person in alive and for them to go through the process of justice, not for extrajudicial killing.
In this case Chris Kaba was shot in the head for the "crime" of being in a car registered to him that police had linked to a "firearm incident" and being somewhat irate at being stopped by the police suddenly, something that has probably happened to him often in his life for no good reason. No firearm was found on the scene. Again, even if the man was threatening the cop he was talking to - cops sign up for that. We do not have the death penalty, and being pissy to a police officer should not be a death sentence.
It's a complicated issue because firearms officers put their lives on the line defending the public and make difficult split second decisions, relying on intelligence that they have to take on trust, and they might sometimes make a mistake. If you want people to sign up for this, they have to feel that they won't be penalised too heavily for making a mistake. Equally though the public needs to know that the police don't act with impunity, and police who act recklessly will be punished. It's a fiendishly difficult path to navigate, and while I understand why armed officers have handed back their guns I think they need to accept that the CPS think their colleague has a case to answer - I would be surprised if the bar for a prosecution weren't quite high - and allow the justice system to do its job.
The CPS must know plenty about this case that's not in the public domain. If the case is as I think it, then it's a travesty NX121 has been charged. One thing though, I have no idea why the case hasn't jumped the queue - if the CPS feel they sufficient evidence to charge (I'm doubtful but apparently they do) then it strikes me as a case that absolutely needs to be heard as soon as possible both for the family of Kaba and NX121. It's ridiculous it's been delayed for another year. I can't think of a case more in the public interest to be dealt with in a timely fashion quite honestly.
Every case that’s this serious “deserves” to jump the queue.
The fact that we have these ridiculous delays in the justice system is degrading the functioning of society in all sorts of ways, visible & invisible. Armed police officers going on strike is just a visible symptom.
Looking at the case list for the Old Bailey today, none of the cases - extremely serious as they all are - need to be seen as urgently as this one. Indeed the tragic events in action in case in courtroom 5 today took place after this one
When Lucy Letby was charged, no nurses stepped back.
This tells us a lot about the ratios of nurses who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
And the number of armed police officers who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
It tells us nothing
All it tells us is that police fear that grieving relatives may use social media to lash out at them as individuals and that their senior management are spineless bastards who would throw their officers to the wolves without a second thought
Bollocks.
If you have the power and responsibilities of an armed police officer, you have signed up for higher scrutiny and standards. Their job, that they chose to do, gives them the ability to deprive people of their freedoms before a trial and, in some cases, their lives. If that is done with impunity, cops are nothing but another street gang and their boss just happens to be the government. Police need to be held to a higher standard than your typical civvy because of that responsibility and power - not a lower standard - and should be more willing to sacrifice themselves and their individual pride for the consent of the public - not less.
To protect and serve means you have signed up to put yourself in harms way instead of letting bad things happen to the average Joe, and even suspects should be treated as the average Joe because they are not guilty until a court finds them guilty. Importing this US mindset that nothing is worth more than the life of a cop is a sure fire way to get American style policing - excess brutality and a feeling of being above the law.
I am a fully paid up member of tofu-eating wokerati liberal blob, but I am very nervous of an SO19 officer discharging his duty and his firearm against bad guys on our behalf and finding himself or herself the wrong side of the CPS.
Is there an argument that SO19 should be issued with a licence to kill in service without legal recourse? Much like Cressida Dick received no sanction and got promoted after Menenez got blown away after her and her team's panicked error. Dick, as I recall was the Operation Commander on the day.
We do not know that people are bad guys until a trial happens. Further in the thread I said if a suspect is clearly threatening civvies with a weapon and you get the order, yes. But we don't have the death penalty, and even if we did it should go through court, so extrajudicial killing should always be considered to be the worst option. Arguably every shooting by a cop should be highly scrutinised because they so often get the benefit of the doubt.
In the Chris Kaba case, with the information in public domain, the worst thing he did was try to drive away whilst police were talking to him and he hit a cop car - by accident or on purpose, who knows? And for that he was shot dead? He may have been in the wrong with his actions - but he didn't deserve to be killed extrajudicially for them.
If the facts are as described as in your final paragraph then it's an exceedingly speedy not guilty verdict as NX121 would likely have cause to believe he's (Kaba) is using his car as a weapon; and the charge should never have been brought.
So anyone who tries to drive away when cops are talking to them is allowed to be shot? How about anyone who just tries to leave when questioned by cops? Resisting arrest is executable now, is it, as long as the perp is big and scary? It isn't proportionate. Cops do not have the right to kill anyone doing something that scares them or they don't like.
When Lucy Letby was charged, no nurses stepped back.
This tells us a lot about the ratios of nurses who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
And the number of armed police officers who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
It tells us nothing
All it tells us is that police fear that grieving relatives may use social media to lash out at them as individuals and that their senior management are spineless bastards who would throw their officers to the wolves without a second thought
Bollocks.
If you have the power and responsibilities of an armed police officer, you have signed up for higher scrutiny and standards. Their job, that they chose to do, gives them the ability to deprive people of their freedoms before a trial and, in some cases, their lives. If that is done with impunity, cops are nothing but another street gang and their boss just happens to be the government. Police need to be held to a higher standard than your typical civvy because of that responsibility and power - not a lower standard - and should be more willing to sacrifice themselves and their individual pride for the consent of the public - not less.
To protect and serve means you have signed up to put yourself in harms way instead of letting bad things happen to the average Joe, and even suspects should be treated as the average Joe because they are not guilty until a court finds them guilty. Importing this US mindset that nothing is worth more than the life of a cop is a sure fire way to get American style policing - excess brutality and a feeling of being above the law.
I am a fully paid up member of tofu-eating wokerati liberal blob, but I am very nervous of an SO19 officer discharging his or her duty and his firearm against bad guys on our behalf and finding himself or herself the wrong side of the CPS.
Is there an argument that SO19 should be issued with a licence to kill in service without legal recourse? Much like Cressida Dick received no sanction and got promoted after Menenez got blown away after her and her team's panicked error. Dick, as I recall was the Operation Commander on the day.
The inexorable rise of Dick was quite a marvel to behold.
Was Dick head at one stage?
Yes - every single officer in the Met effectively worked for Dick.
Everyone at New Scotland Yard was controlled by Dick?
When Lucy Letby was charged, no nurses stepped back.
This tells us a lot about the ratios of nurses who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
And the number of armed police officers who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
It tells us nothing
All it tells us is that police fear that grieving relatives may use social media to lash out at them as individuals and that their senior management are spineless bastards who would throw their officers to the wolves without a second thought
Bollocks.
If you have the power and responsibilities of an armed police officer, you have signed up for higher scrutiny and standards. Their job, that they chose to do, gives them the ability to deprive people of their freedoms before a trial and, in some cases, their lives. If that is done with impunity, cops are nothing but another street gang and their boss just happens to be the government. Police need to be held to a higher standard than your typical civvy because of that responsibility and power - not a lower standard - and should be more willing to sacrifice themselves and their individual pride for the consent of the public - not less.
To protect and serve means you have signed up to put yourself in harms way instead of letting bad things happen to the average Joe, and even suspects should be treated as the average Joe because they are not guilty until a court finds them guilty. Importing this US mindset that nothing is worth more than the life of a cop is a sure fire way to get American style policing - excess brutality and a feeling of being above the law.
Yes, but along with that there needs to be an understanding that the job a trained firearms officers do is *not* normal. They may have a matter of seconds or less to make a decision on whether to fire on a target or not - and there may be risks associated with not firing, to themselves, their colleagues, and other members of the public.
Whilst I'd blooming well hope that they're trained to make good instinctive decisions, they cannot be trained to always make perfect instinctive decisions.
And the problem with court cases over things like this is that a decision that had to be made in minutes or seconds, can be gone over for a matter of days, weeks or months in court - and with the benefit of information the officer may not have had (e.g. the presence or absence of a weapon on the suspect).
I know very little about this case in question, and I doubt we'll hear much more if substance before the court case. It may be the officer in question did murder/kill and innocent man; or it might be he made the wrong decision for understandable, if regrettably tragic, reasons.
This is also an argument for not arming all police: their training standards and personal competence need to be very high.
I would prefer not arming police at all.
This case has been brought after a year of investigating. It is unlikely that it has been brought without good evidence of wrongdoing, purposeful or otherwise.
My general feelings around firearmed officers is that the only situation you shoot is when civilian life is in jeopardy - either with someone clearly threatening people or seeming equipped and intending to do so. If the person is threatening the cop, it is part of the job as a cop to take that person in alive and for them to go through the process of justice, not for extrajudicial killing.
In this case Chris Kaba was shot in the head for the "crime" of being in a car registered to him that police had linked to a "firearm incident" and being somewhat irate at being stopped by the police suddenly, something that has probably happened to him often in his life for no good reason. No firearm was found on the scene. Again, even if the man was threatening the cop he was talking to - cops sign up for that. We do not have the death penalty, and being pissy to a police officer should not be a death sentence.
I think that a policeman has as much right as any other person to kill in self-defence (which is not to prejudge this particular case). A police officer is under no obligation to let himself be killed or seriously injured, by a suspect.
I actively disagree. Police are choosing to take a job where they get added responsibilities, added training and added resources to deescalate situations that the average person would not, alongside added power to enact non lethal violence against people that other people do not. A good police officer should be better equipped than a civvy to deal with a situation where they're at risk. The threshold for a police officer should be higher than that of a normal person.
The right to self-defence is fundamental to all human beings.
Decriminalising the murder of police officers is quite simply the daftest idea I've ever read.
I didn't say decriminalising the murder of police officers I just believe that, with their resources and training, they should be better equipped to neutralise a threat non lethally and therefore have a higher bar to pass than the average person when it comes to being able to defend themselves using lethal force.
The law of self-defence works fine in this country. It has a subjective test - did the person raising the defence have a genuine fear of death or GBH, and an objective one - was the amount of force used in all the circumstances reasonable. There is no need to amend it to afford extra protection towards people who are engaged in criminal activity.
Death or serious injury at police hands is very rare.
Just as there's no need to heighten the threshold for investigating a police shooting, as has been suggested.
The delay is utterly meaningless frankly. It means the Northern leg will be determined by the incoming Labour government next year unless the polls change dramatically.
Over to you Starmer.
Is it meaningless ? Presumably a policy change will have costs related to changes in contracts, even if it's looking several years ahead ( @Casino_Royale ?) ?
Only to change again in 12-18 months' time.
Yes.
Also, and this isn't widely known, almost all the construction contracts at HS2 were let on a cost-plus basis (which means contractors are rewarded at their cost, plus their overhead, plus a - decent - profit) for any work they do, and compensated for any change or delay on top, which essentially means they take little to no risk.
This can happen when the scope and risk allocation isn't clear, such that the supply chain simply won't take on the works without it, which is exactly what has happened with HS2: the business case kept changing, and so did the core scope (which was overengineered to the original spec of speed, and then never revised to reflect the modified capacity argument) all the while as the network was meddled with on a CapEx basis whilst the line was porked out to deal with political challenges and objections. And, they still haven't made a decision on Euston.
It's a case study of poor sponsorship and client control.
Ah, apologies - I mentioned that there was something unusual with the risk allocation on HS2 earlier in the previous thread, but managed to get the specifics exactly inverted.
What sort of mitigations can we put in place in order to avoid this sort of situation with future projects? Perhaps some sort of independent delivery authority, which would take charge once the initial political decision to proceed has been taken?
Yes. Keep the civil service beaks out of it. Like the vaccines. Imagine they'd been tasked with vaccine delivery?
I had Bank of England independence in mind when I said that, but that's a model which I suspect you might feel is a little creaky at best!
But the Vaccine Taskforce is a good comparison. The government sets the end goal, together with some broad priorities within that, and defines the funding envelope. And then it it's handed off to an Infrastructure Taskforce who are charged with getting the work done.
The work of the taskforce would be funded to cover the bare minimum of costs, with a bigger chunk on top which would be paid according to results. They'd still be responsible to parliament, with a select ctte to scrutinise their work - but government wouldn't be able to change the goal or funding without passing further legislation.
That'd shield it from short-term politicking (which Sunak would claim to appreciate!), in-fighting SpAds, and civil servants with misaligned priorities. And it'd also be similar enough to the late C19th way of doing things that traditionalists would be kept happy.
We certainly need to do something. As things stand, projects that run for longer than one parliament risk becoming almost undeliverable, and that's going to have huge costs for us in the future.
But why would Gove want to destroy Rishi? Is he doing Boris a favour, preparing the ground for a return by portraying Boris as the northerners' friend?
The completely mad thing about this whole farrago is it looks like they took the decision to cancel the Manchester leg and announce it now, completely forgetting that they're in Manchester next week.
Then people have rather awkwardly pointed to the connection and now its as if the line is "OK we won't confirm anything now, we can cancel it officially in two weeks time instead once we've had the Conference, that'll make the awkwardness go away".
The rumour is that this was leaked deliberately to harm the government at this moment. Apparently aided and abetted by “the Times” and “spectator”??! However I don’t buy that as the leaks have been coming for months - about various delays and cost cutting measures. Likewise the rumours about Euston date back many months (the Sun ran this story - no Euston - in January)
It’s a cock up. Not a conspiracy. And what a massive cock up
It's Gove
What's Gove got to do with it?
What's Gove but a second-hand emotion? What's Gove got to do, got to do with it? Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken?
I think HS2 will likely follow the Edinburgh Trams and Crossrail "journey".
Political cowardice, incompetence, increased costs, lots of whining from the motoring lobby. Years or decades late.
And yet significantly higher patronage than expected. Over capacity immediately. Benefits not included in the business case appear out of nowhere.
Commuters jump out of their cars en masse. Increased footfall in local businesses. Huge economies of scale - the original line has seen a doubling of passengers itself, and Lothian Bus passenger numbers grew too.
BUILD IT
Yes. People are already complaining about crowding on the Elizabeth line. And ridership on the new guided busway system in Belfast has turned out to be so high that it would have justified building a proper tram system instead.
When was the last time that a major infrastructure project flopped? As in, something that was built as planned but produced nothing like the expected benefits?
The Millennium Dome, maybe? But it seems to be having a successful middle age. The Humber Bridge, probably - but has there been anything since then?
Edinburgh bypass, kinda.
The point of it was to allow vehicles, particularly commercial traffic, to bypass the city. This is undoubtedly a good thing for all parties.
Unfortunately, it's primarily used by Edinburgh residents to commute to the big business or retail parks to the west and east of the city.
This has two effects: it's induced increased rates of driving inside the city, as people make their way to the bypass. Edinburgh remains hugely congested.
But more importantly, the bypass is now at a complete standstill at rush hour, with those commercial vehicles stuck in traffic. Not good for the economy.
The solution? Close most of the junctions onto the bypass from the city and shift the balance back in favour of the excellent public transport that is available.
You defined success as it being used more than intended.
Now you call it a failure as its being used more than intended?
Make your mind up. It seems on your own objective criteria its been a riproaring success. I don't know anything about the situation, just going off what you said.
People want to drive to retail parks where they can load shopping into their boot rather than carry shopping home on a tram or bus shocker.
If the bypass is too congested due to a shortage of capacity don't bemoan its success, build another bypass. If a tramline or rail line is full you don't complain that its induced demand, you celebrate its success and argue for another to be built now - same with roads.
Stop being embarrassed by successful investment in infrastructure, its a kind of cultural cringe.
When Lucy Letby was charged, no nurses stepped back.
This tells us a lot about the ratios of nurses who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
And the number of armed police officers who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
It tells us nothing
All it tells us is that police fear that grieving relatives may use social media to lash out at them as individuals and that their senior management are spineless bastards who would throw their officers to the wolves without a second thought
Bollocks.
If you have the power and responsibilities of an armed police officer, you have signed up for higher scrutiny and standards. Their job, that they chose to do, gives them the ability to deprive people of their freedoms before a trial and, in some cases, their lives. If that is done with impunity, cops are nothing but another street gang and their boss just happens to be the government. Police need to be held to a higher standard than your typical civvy because of that responsibility and power - not a lower standard - and should be more willing to sacrifice themselves and their individual pride for the consent of the public - not less.
To protect and serve means you have signed up to put yourself in harms way instead of letting bad things happen to the average Joe, and even suspects should be treated as the average Joe because they are not guilty until a court finds them guilty. Importing this US mindset that nothing is worth more than the life of a cop is a sure fire way to get American style policing - excess brutality and a feeling of being above the law.
I am a fully paid up member of tofu-eating wokerati liberal blob, but I am very nervous of an SO19 officer discharging his duty and his firearm against bad guys on our behalf and finding himself or herself the wrong side of the CPS.
Is there an argument that SO19 should be issued with a licence to kill in service without legal recourse? Much like Cressida Dick received no sanction and got promoted after Menenez got blown away after her and her team's panicked error. Dick, as I recall was the Operation Commander on the day.
We do not know that people are bad guys until a trial happens. Further in the thread I said if a suspect is clearly threatening civvies with a weapon and you get the order, yes. But we don't have the death penalty, and even if we did it should go through court, so extrajudicial killing should always be considered to be the worst option. Arguably every shooting by a cop should be highly scrutinised because they so often get the benefit of the doubt.
In the Chris Kaba case, with the information in public domain, the worst thing he did was try to drive away whilst police were talking to him and he hit a cop car - by accident or on purpose, who knows? And for that he was shot dead? He may have been in the wrong with his actions - but he didn't deserve to be killed extrajudicially for them.
If the facts are as described as in your final paragraph then it's an exceedingly speedy not guilty verdict as NX121 would likely have cause to believe he's (Kaba) is using his car as a weapon; and the charge should never have been brought.
Also that car was linked to fire-arms, so there was the extra level of threat implied.
When Lucy Letby was charged, no nurses stepped back.
This tells us a lot about the ratios of nurses who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
And the number of armed police officers who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
It tells us nothing
All it tells us is that police fear that grieving relatives may use social media to lash out at them as individuals and that their senior management are spineless bastards who would throw their officers to the wolves without a second thought
Bollocks.
If you have the power and responsibilities of an armed police officer, you have signed up for higher scrutiny and standards. Their job, that they chose to do, gives them the ability to deprive people of their freedoms before a trial and, in some cases, their lives. If that is done with impunity, cops are nothing but another street gang and their boss just happens to be the government. Police need to be held to a higher standard than your typical civvy because of that responsibility and power - not a lower standard - and should be more willing to sacrifice themselves and their individual pride for the consent of the public - not less.
To protect and serve means you have signed up to put yourself in harms way instead of letting bad things happen to the average Joe, and even suspects should be treated as the average Joe because they are not guilty until a court finds them guilty. Importing this US mindset that nothing is worth more than the life of a cop is a sure fire way to get American style policing - excess brutality and a feeling of being above the law.
I am a fully paid up member of tofu-eating wokerati liberal blob, but I am very nervous of an SO19 officer discharging his duty and his firearm against bad guys on our behalf and finding himself or herself the wrong side of the CPS.
Is there an argument that SO19 should be issued with a licence to kill in service without legal recourse? Much like Cressida Dick received no sanction and got promoted after Menenez got blown away after her and her team's panicked error. Dick, as I recall was the Operation Commander on the day.
We do not know that people are bad guys until a trial happens. Further in the thread I said if a suspect is clearly threatening civvies with a weapon and you get the order, yes. But we don't have the death penalty, and even if we did it should go through court, so extrajudicial killing should always be considered to be the worst option. Arguably every shooting by a cop should be highly scrutinised because they so often get the benefit of the doubt.
In the Chris Kaba case, with the information in public domain, the worst thing he did was try to drive away whilst police were talking to him and he hit a cop car - by accident or on purpose, who knows? And for that he was shot dead? He may have been in the wrong with his actions - but he didn't deserve to be killed extrajudicially for them.
If the facts are as described as in your final paragraph then it's an exceedingly speedy not guilty verdict as NX121 would likely have cause to believe he's (Kaba) is using his car as a weapon; and the charge should never have been brought.
So anyone who tries to drive away when cops are talking to them is allowed to be shot? How about anyone who just tries to leave when questioned by cops? Resisting arrest is executable now, is it, as long as the perp is big and scary? It isn't proportionate. Cops do not have the right to kill anyone doing something that scares them or they don't like.
The completely mad thing about this whole farrago is it looks like they took the decision to cancel the Manchester leg and announce it now, completely forgetting that they're in Manchester next week.
Then people have rather awkwardly pointed to the connection and now its as if the line is "OK we won't confirm anything now, we can cancel it officially in two weeks time instead once we've had the Conference, that'll make the awkwardness go away".
The rumour is that this was leaked deliberately to harm the government at this moment. Apparently aided and abetted by “the Times” and “spectator”??! However I don’t buy that as the leaks have been coming for months - about various delays and cost cutting measures. Likewise the rumours about Euston date back many months (the Sun ran this story - no Euston - in January)
It’s a cock up. Not a conspiracy. And what a massive cock up
It's Gove
What's Gove got to do with it?
What's Gove but a second-hand emotion? What's Gove got to do, got to do with it? Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken?
You sent me home I was so surprised to find that after all It doesn't hurt to be alone
Cause you got Gove, Gove Gove on your side..
Except you probably haven't, because he's a sneaky backstabbing so and so.
When Lucy Letby was charged, no nurses stepped back.
This tells us a lot about the ratios of nurses who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
And the number of armed police officers who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
It tells us nothing
All it tells us is that police fear that grieving relatives may use social media to lash out at them as individuals and that their senior management are spineless bastards who would throw their officers to the wolves without a second thought
Bollocks.
If you have the power and responsibilities of an armed police officer, you have signed up for higher scrutiny and standards. Their job, that they chose to do, gives them the ability to deprive people of their freedoms before a trial and, in some cases, their lives. If that is done with impunity, cops are nothing but another street gang and their boss just happens to be the government. Police need to be held to a higher standard than your typical civvy because of that responsibility and power - not a lower standard - and should be more willing to sacrifice themselves and their individual pride for the consent of the public - not less.
To protect and serve means you have signed up to put yourself in harms way instead of letting bad things happen to the average Joe, and even suspects should be treated as the average Joe because they are not guilty until a court finds them guilty. Importing this US mindset that nothing is worth more than the life of a cop is a sure fire way to get American style policing - excess brutality and a feeling of being above the law.
I am a fully paid up member of tofu-eating wokerati liberal blob, but I am very nervous of an SO19 officer discharging his duty and his firearm against bad guys on our behalf and finding himself or herself the wrong side of the CPS.
Is there an argument that SO19 should be issued with a licence to kill in service without legal recourse? Much like Cressida Dick received no sanction and got promoted after Menenez got blown away after her and her team's panicked error. Dick, as I recall was the Operation Commander on the day.
We do not know that people are bad guys until a trial happens. Further in the thread I said if a suspect is clearly threatening civvies with a weapon and you get the order, yes. But we don't have the death penalty, and even if we did it should go through court, so extrajudicial killing should always be considered to be the worst option. Arguably every shooting by a cop should be highly scrutinised because they so often get the benefit of the doubt.
In the Chris Kaba case, with the information in public domain, the worst thing he did was try to drive away whilst police were talking to him and he hit a cop car - by accident or on purpose, who knows? And for that he was shot dead? He may have been in the wrong with his actions - but he didn't deserve to be killed extrajudicially for them.
If the facts are as described as in your final paragraph then it's an exceedingly speedy not guilty verdict as NX121 would likely have cause to believe he's (Kaba) is using his car as a weapon; and the charge should never have been brought.
So anyone who tries to drive away when cops are talking to them is allowed to be shot? How about anyone who just tries to leave when questioned by cops? Resisting arrest is executable now, is it, as long as the perp is big and scary? It isn't proportionate. Cops do not have the right to kill anyone doing something that scares them or they don't like.
Seems a bit odd that if it's such an open and shut case for the actions of the cop being justified, that they seem so collectively resistant to transparent justice being done. It's almost like they're against cops being challenged on their actions on principle.
All the chat about armed cops being given inadequate guidance on how to respond in extreme situations suggests that this is going to be part of the defence of NX121.
When Lucy Letby was charged, no nurses stepped back.
This tells us a lot about the ratios of nurses who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
And the number of armed police officers who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
It tells us nothing
All it tells us is that police fear that grieving relatives may use social media to lash out at them as individuals and that their senior management are spineless bastards who would throw their officers to the wolves without a second thought
Bollocks.
If you have the power and responsibilities of an armed police officer, you have signed up for higher scrutiny and standards. Their job, that they chose to do, gives them the ability to deprive people of their freedoms before a trial and, in some cases, their lives. If that is done with impunity, cops are nothing but another street gang and their boss just happens to be the government. Police need to be held to a higher standard than your typical civvy because of that responsibility and power - not a lower standard - and should be more willing to sacrifice themselves and their individual pride for the consent of the public - not less.
To protect and serve means you have signed up to put yourself in harms way instead of letting bad things happen to the average Joe, and even suspects should be treated as the average Joe because they are not guilty until a court finds them guilty. Importing this US mindset that nothing is worth more than the life of a cop is a sure fire way to get American style policing - excess brutality and a feeling of being above the law.
Yes, but along with that there needs to be an understanding that the job a trained firearms officers do is *not* normal. They may have a matter of seconds or less to make a decision on whether to fire on a target or not - and there may be risks associated with not firing, to themselves, their colleagues, and other members of the public.
Whilst I'd blooming well hope that they're trained to make good instinctive decisions, they cannot be trained to always make perfect instinctive decisions.
And the problem with court cases over things like this is that a decision that had to be made in minutes or seconds, can be gone over for a matter of days, weeks or months in court - and with the benefit of information the officer may not have had (e.g. the presence or absence of a weapon on the suspect).
I know very little about this case in question, and I doubt we'll hear much more if substance before the court case. It may be the officer in question did murder/kill and innocent man; or it might be he made the wrong decision for understandable, if regrettably tragic, reasons.
This is also an argument for not arming all police: their training standards and personal competence need to be very high.
I would prefer not arming police at all.
This case has been brought after a year of investigating. It is unlikely that it has been brought without good evidence of wrongdoing, purposeful or otherwise.
My general feelings around firearmed officers is that the only situation you shoot is when civilian life is in jeopardy - either with someone clearly threatening people or seeming equipped and intending to do so. If the person is threatening the cop, it is part of the job as a cop to take that person in alive and for them to go through the process of justice, not for extrajudicial killing.
In this case Chris Kaba was shot in the head for the "crime" of being in a car registered to him that police had linked to a "firearm incident" and being somewhat irate at being stopped by the police suddenly, something that has probably happened to him often in his life for no good reason. No firearm was found on the scene. Again, even if the man was threatening the cop he was talking to - cops sign up for that. We do not have the death penalty, and being pissy to a police officer should not be a death sentence.
I think that a policeman has as much right as any other person to kill in self-defence (which is not to prejudge this particular case). A police officer is under no obligation to let himself be killed or seriously injured, by a suspect.
I actively disagree. Police are choosing to take a job where they get added responsibilities, added training and added resources to deescalate situations that the average person would not, alongside added power to enact non lethal violence against people that other people do not. A good police officer should be better equipped than a civvy to deal with a situation where they're at risk. The threshold for a police officer should be higher than that of a normal person.
The right to self-defence is fundamental to all human beings.
Decriminalising the murder of police officers is quite simply the daftest idea I've ever read.
I didn't say decriminalising the murder of police officers I just believe that, with their resources and training, they should be better equipped to neutralise a threat non lethally and therefore have a higher bar to pass than the average person when it comes to being able to defend themselves using lethal force.
The law of self-defence works fine in this country. It has a subjective test - did the person raising the defence have a genuine fear of death or GBH, and an objective one - was the amount of force used in all the circumstances reasonable. There is no need to amend it to afford extra protection towards people who are engaged in criminal activity.
Death or serious injury at police hands is very rare.
Just as there's no need to heighten the threshold for investigating a police shooting, as has been suggested.
Why? If a cop discharges a gun and it kills someone, of course there should be a review to know that that was justifiable use of force. In my job if I do a project spending money I have to produce a report afterwards justifying the spend - I would argue that taking a life is more significant than spending money. Part of that review process should be adversarial, part of that process should also require things like therapy for the cop because killing people has bad effects on people.
If the assumption is every time a cop kills someone is justified (which is essentially what some politicians, papers, and people here seem to be suggesting) then cops can kill with impunity? The same cops we know are institutionally sexist and racist? The same cops you should just run away from if they're trying to sexually assault you?
In the immortal words of Uncle Ben - with great power comes great responsibility. In my mind, in any functional society, with great responsibility should come great oversight.
When Lucy Letby was charged, no nurses stepped back.
This tells us a lot about the ratios of nurses who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
And the number of armed police officers who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
It tells us nothing
All it tells us is that police fear that grieving relatives may use social media to lash out at them as individuals and that their senior management are spineless bastards who would throw their officers to the wolves without a second thought
Bollocks.
If you have the power and responsibilities of an armed police officer, you have signed up for higher scrutiny and standards. Their job, that they chose to do, gives them the ability to deprive people of their freedoms before a trial and, in some cases, their lives. If that is done with impunity, cops are nothing but another street gang and their boss just happens to be the government. Police need to be held to a higher standard than your typical civvy because of that responsibility and power - not a lower standard - and should be more willing to sacrifice themselves and their individual pride for the consent of the public - not less.
To protect and serve means you have signed up to put yourself in harms way instead of letting bad things happen to the average Joe, and even suspects should be treated as the average Joe because they are not guilty until a court finds them guilty. Importing this US mindset that nothing is worth more than the life of a cop is a sure fire way to get American style policing - excess brutality and a feeling of being above the law.
I am a fully paid up member of tofu-eating wokerati liberal blob, but I am very nervous of an SO19 officer discharging his or her duty and his firearm against bad guys on our behalf and finding himself or herself the wrong side of the CPS.
Is there an argument that SO19 should be issued with a licence to kill in service without legal recourse? Much like Cressida Dick received no sanction and got promoted after Menenez got blown away after her and her team's panicked error. Dick, as I recall was the Operation Commander on the day.
No. That would be almost certain to be abused, sooner or later.
Probably sooner.
We need to better resource the criminal justice system. And probably the IOPC.
The NZ election is now less than three weeks away.
Labour are stagnant in the polls. If anything, they continue to lose support from their natural base to the Greens.
It is widely assumed that Chris Luxon, former CEO of Air NZ, will be the next Prime Minister.
However, hopes of a stable coalition with the urban liberal ACT Party are fading, and it looks like there will be some kind of dependency on the Ukippy populists, NZFirst, led by 78-yo Winston Peters.
ACT, who have previously said they won’t serve alongside NZFirst, have recently softened their tone.
When Lucy Letby was charged, no nurses stepped back.
This tells us a lot about the ratios of nurses who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
And the number of armed police officers who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
It tells us nothing
All it tells us is that police fear that grieving relatives may use social media to lash out at them as individuals and that their senior management are spineless bastards who would throw their officers to the wolves without a second thought
Bollocks.
If you have the power and responsibilities of an armed police officer, you have signed up for higher scrutiny and standards. Their job, that they chose to do, gives them the ability to deprive people of their freedoms before a trial and, in some cases, their lives. If that is done with impunity, cops are nothing but another street gang and their boss just happens to be the government. Police need to be held to a higher standard than your typical civvy because of that responsibility and power - not a lower standard - and should be more willing to sacrifice themselves and their individual pride for the consent of the public - not less.
To protect and serve means you have signed up to put yourself in harms way instead of letting bad things happen to the average Joe, and even suspects should be treated as the average Joe because they are not guilty until a court finds them guilty. Importing this US mindset that nothing is worth more than the life of a cop is a sure fire way to get American style policing - excess brutality and a feeling of being above the law.
I am a fully paid up member of tofu-eating wokerati liberal blob, but I am very nervous of an SO19 officer discharging his duty and his firearm against bad guys on our behalf and finding himself or herself the wrong side of the CPS.
Is there an argument that SO19 should be issued with a licence to kill in service without legal recourse? Much like Cressida Dick received no sanction and got promoted after Menenez got blown away after her and her team's panicked error. Dick, as I recall was the Operation Commander on the day.
We do not know that people are bad guys until a trial happens. Further in the thread I said if a suspect is clearly threatening civvies with a weapon and you get the order, yes. But we don't have the death penalty, and even if we did it should go through court, so extrajudicial killing should always be considered to be the worst option. Arguably every shooting by a cop should be highly scrutinised because they so often get the benefit of the doubt.
In the Chris Kaba case, with the information in public domain, the worst thing he did was try to drive away whilst police were talking to him and he hit a cop car - by accident or on purpose, who knows? And for that he was shot dead? He may have been in the wrong with his actions - but he didn't deserve to be killed extrajudicially for them.
So it turned out he wasn't a suicide bomber after all. Didn't we go through a phase of people deliberately driving cars into pedestrians?
I just don't know enough of the operational circumstances, the intelligence they had, the instructions given and the decision that had to be taken. But murder? Of someone he doesn't know? Whilst he is doing his job? That surely requires at least a reckless indifference as to whether or not there was any justification for taking the decision to shoot. I am really struggling to see that. Manslaughter, maybe.
Labour’s loss will be a remarkable event, as it comes three years after they won a historic absolute majority - the only such event of the modern (post-PR) era.
But why would Gove want to destroy Rishi? Is he doing Boris a favour, preparing the ground for a return by portraying Boris as the northerners' friend?
When Lucy Letby was charged, no nurses stepped back.
This tells us a lot about the ratios of nurses who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
And the number of armed police officers who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
It tells us nothing
All it tells us is that police fear that grieving relatives may use social media to lash out at them as individuals and that their senior management are spineless bastards who would throw their officers to the wolves without a second thought
Bollocks.
If you have the power and responsibilities of an armed police officer, you have signed up for higher scrutiny and standards. Their job, that they chose to do, gives them the ability to deprive people of their freedoms before a trial and, in some cases, their lives. If that is done with impunity, cops are nothing but another street gang and their boss just happens to be the government. Police need to be held to a higher standard than your typical civvy because of that responsibility and power - not a lower standard - and should be more willing to sacrifice themselves and their individual pride for the consent of the public - not less.
To protect and serve means you have signed up to put yourself in harms way instead of letting bad things happen to the average Joe, and even suspects should be treated as the average Joe because they are not guilty until a court finds them guilty. Importing this US mindset that nothing is worth more than the life of a cop is a sure fire way to get American style policing - excess brutality and a feeling of being above the law.
I am a fully paid up member of tofu-eating wokerati liberal blob, but I am very nervous of an SO19 officer discharging his duty and his firearm against bad guys on our behalf and finding himself or herself the wrong side of the CPS.
Is there an argument that SO19 should be issued with a licence to kill in service without legal recourse? Much like Cressida Dick received no sanction and got promoted after Menenez got blown away after her and her team's panicked error. Dick, as I recall was the Operation Commander on the day.
We do not know that people are bad guys until a trial happens. Further in the thread I said if a suspect is clearly threatening civvies with a weapon and you get the order, yes. But we don't have the death penalty, and even if we did it should go through court, so extrajudicial killing should always be considered to be the worst option. Arguably every shooting by a cop should be highly scrutinised because they so often get the benefit of the doubt.
In the Chris Kaba case, with the information in public domain, the worst thing he did was try to drive away whilst police were talking to him and he hit a cop car - by accident or on purpose, who knows? And for that he was shot dead? He may have been in the wrong with his actions - but he didn't deserve to be killed extrajudicially for them.
If the facts are as described as in your final paragraph then it's an exceedingly speedy not guilty verdict as NX121 would likely have cause to believe he's (Kaba) is using his car as a weapon; and the charge should never have been brought.
So anyone who tries to drive away when cops are talking to them is allowed to be shot? How about anyone who just tries to leave when questioned by cops? Resisting arrest is executable now, is it, as long as the perp is big and scary? It isn't proportionate. Cops do not have the right to kill anyone doing something that scares them or they don't like.
Makes you wonder why this person in Somerset didn't die in a hail of bullets...
The delay is utterly meaningless frankly. It means the Northern leg will be determined by the incoming Labour government next year unless the polls change dramatically.
Over to you Starmer.
Is it meaningless ? Presumably a policy change will have costs related to changes in contracts, even if it's looking several years ahead ( @Casino_Royale ?) ?
Only to change again in 12-18 months' time.
Yes.
Also, and this isn't widely known, almost all the construction contracts at HS2 were let on a cost-plus basis (which means contractors are rewarded at their cost, plus their overhead, plus a - decent - profit) for any work they do, and compensated for any change or delay on top, which essentially means they take little to no risk.
This can happen when the scope and risk allocation isn't clear, such that the supply chain simply won't take on the works without it, which is exactly what has happened with HS2: the business case kept changing, and so did the core scope (which was overengineered to the original spec of speed, and then never revised to reflect the modified capacity argument) all the while as the network was meddled with on a CapEx basis whilst the line was porked out to deal with political challenges and objections. And, they still haven't made a decision on Euston.
It's a case study of poor sponsorship and client control.
Ah, apologies - I mentioned that there was something unusual with the risk allocation on HS2 earlier in the previous thread, but managed to get the specifics exactly inverted.
What sort of mitigations can we put in place in order to avoid this sort of situation with future projects? Perhaps some sort of independent delivery authority, which would take charge once the initial political decision to proceed has been taken?
Yes. Keep the civil service beaks out of it. Like the vaccines. Imagine they'd been tasked with vaccine delivery?
I had Bank of England independence in mind when I said that, but that's a model which I suspect you might feel is a little creaky at best!
But the Vaccine Taskforce is a good comparison. The government sets the end goal, together with some broad priorities within that, and defines the funding envelope. And then it it's handed off to an Infrastructure Taskforce who are charged with getting the work done.
The work of the taskforce would be funded to cover the bare minimum of costs, with a bigger chunk on top which would be paid according to results. They'd still be responsible to parliament, with a select ctte to scrutinise their work - but government wouldn't be able to change the goal or funding without passing further legislation.
That'd shield it from short-term politicking (which Sunak would claim to appreciate!), in-fighting SpAds, and civil servants with misaligned priorities. And it'd also be similar enough to the late C19th way of doing things that traditionalists would be kept happy.
We certainly need to do something. As things stand, projects that run for longer than one parliament risk becoming almost undeliverable, and that's going to have huge costs for us in the future.
There's something in that, but there's also a problem that politicians go for major projects that are all or nothing essentially, which results in this HS2 madness.
Take a leaf out of the motorways book when they were built. The M6 is the longest motorway in England and the first to begin construction, but it wasn't all opened at once. In 1958 it began life as simply the Preston Bypass and cost in the tens of millions in modern money, not tens of billions.
Year by year then from 1958 to the end of the 70s roughly we had patches built across the country which were individually usable from when they were built, and eventually over time joined up into something grander.
There's no need to go all in from day one. Design some new routes and build them piecemeal, opening each one as soon as its built, rather than spending decades on white elephants because they're more impressive sounding projects.
Its a shame we've wasted fifty years and not continued doing what we were doing then, all parties bear responsibility. If we'd continued investing in our infrastructure at the rate we were then, how much better off would we be now?
As bad as things are in the UK for Sunak, Trudeau has had a worse week of it.
Hosting Zelensky was the only thing that went right for Trudeau after a horrendous time, and he's even ballsed that up.
I wonder who'll be gone first? Trudeau or Sunak.
Were media and political culture in Canada as rigorous in its scrutiny and criticism as is the case in Britain, I think Trudeau le Petit would already have gone years ago - he has survived some quite remarkable scandals and cock-ups.
The latest HS2 rumour doing the rounds is a delay rather than scrapping .
Basically we’re too frightened to cancel it but will just kick it into the long grass. Anyone thinking that this section of HS2 will ever be built is clearly deluded .
When Lucy Letby was charged, no nurses stepped back.
This tells us a lot about the ratios of nurses who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
And the number of armed police officers who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
It tells us nothing
All it tells us is that police fear that grieving relatives may use social media to lash out at them as individuals and that their senior management are spineless bastards who would throw their officers to the wolves without a second thought
Bollocks.
If you have the power and responsibilities of an armed police officer, you have signed up for higher scrutiny and standards. Their job, that they chose to do, gives them the ability to deprive people of their freedoms before a trial and, in some cases, their lives. If that is done with impunity, cops are nothing but another street gang and their boss just happens to be the government. Police need to be held to a higher standard than your typical civvy because of that responsibility and power - not a lower standard - and should be more willing to sacrifice themselves and their individual pride for the consent of the public - not less.
To protect and serve means you have signed up to put yourself in harms way instead of letting bad things happen to the average Joe, and even suspects should be treated as the average Joe because they are not guilty until a court finds them guilty. Importing this US mindset that nothing is worth more than the life of a cop is a sure fire way to get American style policing - excess brutality and a feeling of being above the law.
I am a fully paid up member of tofu-eating wokerati liberal blob, but I am very nervous of an SO19 officer discharging his duty and his firearm against bad guys on our behalf and finding himself or herself the wrong side of the CPS.
Is there an argument that SO19 should be issued with a licence to kill in service without legal recourse? Much like Cressida Dick received no sanction and got promoted after Menenez got blown away after her and her team's panicked error. Dick, as I recall was the Operation Commander on the day.
We do not know that people are bad guys until a trial happens. Further in the thread I said if a suspect is clearly threatening civvies with a weapon and you get the order, yes. But we don't have the death penalty, and even if we did it should go through court, so extrajudicial killing should always be considered to be the worst option. Arguably every shooting by a cop should be highly scrutinised because they so often get the benefit of the doubt.
In the Chris Kaba case, with the information in public domain, the worst thing he did was try to drive away whilst police were talking to him and he hit a cop car - by accident or on purpose, who knows? And for that he was shot dead? He may have been in the wrong with his actions - but he didn't deserve to be killed extrajudicially for them.
If the facts are as described as in your final paragraph then it's an exceedingly speedy not guilty verdict as NX121 would likely have cause to believe he's (Kaba) is using his car as a weapon; and the charge should never have been brought.
Also that car was linked to fire-arms, so there was the extra level of threat implied.
So what - there was no one suggested he had a fire arm, was not brandishing anything that could be construed as a fire arm, and no fire arm was found in the car afterwards. Again - the burden of evidence for taking a life should be extremely high. If you are a police officer who has the ability to take a life, that should only be done in a scenario where it is clear that there is a threat to life. From the info we have, which in the worst case scenario is a guy ramming a cop car with his car (something that is not a execution worthy crime) and in the best light could have been a car jerking forward and tapping a car, does a man deserve to die? I think clearly not.
I have been quite busy this weekend and catching up this morning it seems Sunak is taking a hammering with only @HYUFD gamely defending him, though on Inheritance Tax it is his own personal interest at play here and frankly any change to IT would be insane at this time
On the wider issue of Sunak, he and Hunt are technocrats and accountants, and not politicians
They remind me of the attitude the IMF would have if called into the country, but it is politically tone deaf even though they are asking the right questions, not just on climate change but also on HS2, and I believe the same questions with confront Starmer and Reeves as soon as they go into office
Personally, I accept the conservative party are going into opposition and frankly an early GE and the inevitable change would be a relief
I do have a concern for the conservative party going forward if @HYUFD represents the future, as it is not a future I would accept as I became politically homeless but at 80, which I will be at the time of the next election, whatever happens is unlikely to affect myself or my wife and our main objective every day is to keep taking our pills and enjoy the love and company of our beloved family, including our 5 grand children who are all local to us.
Sunak reminds me of the sort of technocrat that Italy elects when no one has won the election and you just need someone to keep the wheels turning until the next time. Except it turns out he is not that great at keeping wheels turning after all.
The latest HS2 rumour doing the rounds is a delay rather than scrapping .
Basically we’re too frightened to cancel it but will just kick it into the long grass. Anyone thinking that this section of HS2 will ever be built is clearly deluded .
A delay solely to pretend that Rishi can afford to deliver tax cuts.
The latest HS2 rumour doing the rounds is a delay rather than scrapping .
Basically we’re too frightened to cancel it but will just kick it into the long grass. Anyone thinking that this section of HS2 will ever be built is clearly deluded .
A delay until a party with fewer prominent HS2 sceptics comes to power?
When Lucy Letby was charged, no nurses stepped back.
This tells us a lot about the ratios of nurses who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
And the number of armed police officers who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
It tells us nothing
All it tells us is that police fear that grieving relatives may use social media to lash out at them as individuals and that their senior management are spineless bastards who would throw their officers to the wolves without a second thought
Bollocks.
If you have the power and responsibilities of an armed police officer, you have signed up for higher scrutiny and standards. Their job, that they chose to do, gives them the ability to deprive people of their freedoms before a trial and, in some cases, their lives. If that is done with impunity, cops are nothing but another street gang and their boss just happens to be the government. Police need to be held to a higher standard than your typical civvy because of that responsibility and power - not a lower standard - and should be more willing to sacrifice themselves and their individual pride for the consent of the public - not less.
To protect and serve means you have signed up to put yourself in harms way instead of letting bad things happen to the average Joe, and even suspects should be treated as the average Joe because they are not guilty until a court finds them guilty. Importing this US mindset that nothing is worth more than the life of a cop is a sure fire way to get American style policing - excess brutality and a feeling of being above the law.
I am a fully paid up member of tofu-eating wokerati liberal blob, but I am very nervous of an SO19 officer discharging his duty and his firearm against bad guys on our behalf and finding himself or herself the wrong side of the CPS.
Is there an argument that SO19 should be issued with a licence to kill in service without legal recourse? Much like Cressida Dick received no sanction and got promoted after Menenez got blown away after her and her team's panicked error. Dick, as I recall was the Operation Commander on the day.
We do not know that people are bad guys until a trial happens. Further in the thread I said if a suspect is clearly threatening civvies with a weapon and you get the order, yes. But we don't have the death penalty, and even if we did it should go through court, so extrajudicial killing should always be considered to be the worst option. Arguably every shooting by a cop should be highly scrutinised because they so often get the benefit of the doubt.
In the Chris Kaba case, with the information in public domain, the worst thing he did was try to drive away whilst police were talking to him and he hit a cop car - by accident or on purpose, who knows? And for that he was shot dead? He may have been in the wrong with his actions - but he didn't deserve to be killed extrajudicially for them.
If the facts are as described as in your final paragraph then it's an exceedingly speedy not guilty verdict as NX121 would likely have cause to believe he's (Kaba) is using his car as a weapon; and the charge should never have been brought.
So anyone who tries to drive away when cops are talking to them is allowed to be shot? How about anyone who just tries to leave when questioned by cops? Resisting arrest is executable now, is it, as long as the perp is big and scary? It isn't proportionate. Cops do not have the right to kill anyone doing something that scares them or they don't like.
Makes you wonder why this person in Somerset didn't die in a hail of bullets...
I mean, in that situation once he's out of the truck - you arrest him. Whilst he's in the truck you leave him the fuck alone, keep and eye on him and get all civilians out of the area. If he had a firearm on him when exiting the truck I'd say shooting him would be justified.
I have been quite busy this weekend and catching up this morning it seems Sunak is taking a hammering with only @HYUFD gamely defending him, though on Inheritance Tax it is his own personal interest at play here and frankly any change to IT would be insane at this time
On the wider issue of Sunak, he and Hunt are technocrats and accountants, and not politicians
They remind me of the attitude the IMF would have if called into the country, but it is politically tone deaf even though they are asking the right questions, not just on climate change but also on HS2, and I believe the same questions with confront Starmer and Reeves as soon as they go into office
Personally, I accept the conservative party are going into opposition and frankly an early GE and the inevitable change would be a relief
I do have a concern for the conservative party going forward if @HYUFD represents the future, as it is not a future I would accept as I became politically homeless but at 80, which I will be at the time of the next election, whatever happens is unlikely to affect myself or my wife and our main objective every day is to keep taking our pills and enjoy the love and company of our beloved family, including our 5 grand children who are all local to us.
The latest HS2 rumour doing the rounds is a delay rather than scrapping .
Basically we’re too frightened to cancel it but will just kick it into the long grass. Anyone thinking that this section of HS2 will ever be built is clearly deluded .
A delay solely to pretend that Rishi can afford to deliver tax cuts.
Yes, that's got to be the political calculation. Create enough fiscal headroom for a pre-election budget and give the next government the problem of what do to.
When Lucy Letby was charged, no nurses stepped back.
This tells us a lot about the ratios of nurses who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
And the number of armed police officers who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
It tells us nothing
All it tells us is that police fear that grieving relatives may use social media to lash out at them as individuals and that their senior management are spineless bastards who would throw their officers to the wolves without a second thought
All of that applies to the medics. And their management is just the same, in quality.
Not at all.
When patients suffer harm or die in hospital there is an investigation, but with an eye to improving procedures and outcomes. It is fortunately rare that medics are accused pf murder. It is often put down as being a mistake or an accident or just bad luck.
With the police, the families almost never accept that “their Johnny” could be in any way culpable for ending up in a situation where armed police are involved. Their first instinct is all too often to blame the police.
Clearly if the police commit an offence that should be investigated, but you can understand why they want clear guidance and support from management
The latest HS2 rumour doing the rounds is a delay rather than scrapping .
Basically we’re too frightened to cancel it but will just kick it into the long grass. Anyone thinking that this section of HS2 will ever be built is clearly deluded .
A delay solely to pretend that Rishi can afford to deliver tax cuts.
No 10 has worked out belatedly that cutting taxes after moaning about a lack of money for HS2 might not be a good look .
The latest HS2 rumour doing the rounds is a delay rather than scrapping .
Basically we’re too frightened to cancel it but will just kick it into the long grass. Anyone thinking that this section of HS2 will ever be built is clearly deluded .
A delay solely to pretend that Rishi can afford to deliver tax cuts.
Yes, that's got to be the political calculation. Create enough fiscal headroom for a pre-election budget and give the next government the problem of what do to.
A tax cut will excite the right wing tabloids and dare Labour to follow suit.
I doubt it will be to inheritance tax. I think we are seeing a hell of a lot of kites being flown, albeit v clumsily.
When Lucy Letby was charged, no nurses stepped back.
This tells us a lot about the ratios of nurses who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
And the number of armed police officers who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
It tells us nothing
All it tells us is that police fear that grieving relatives may use social media to lash out at them as individuals and that their senior management are spineless bastards who would throw their officers to the wolves without a second thought
Bollocks.
If you have the power and responsibilities of an armed police officer, you have signed up for higher scrutiny and standards. Their job, that they chose to do, gives them the ability to deprive people of their freedoms before a trial and, in some cases, their lives. If that is done with impunity, cops are nothing but another street gang and their boss just happens to be the government. Police need to be held to a higher standard than your typical civvy because of that responsibility and power - not a lower standard - and should be more willing to sacrifice themselves and their individual pride for the consent of the public - not less.
To protect and serve means you have signed up to put yourself in harms way instead of letting bad things happen to the average Joe, and even suspects should be treated as the average Joe because they are not guilty until a court finds them guilty. Importing this US mindset that nothing is worth more than the life of a cop is a sure fire way to get American style policing - excess brutality and a feeling of being above the law.
I am a fully paid up member of tofu-eating wokerati liberal blob, but I am very nervous of an SO19 officer discharging his duty and his firearm against bad guys on our behalf and finding himself or herself the wrong side of the CPS.
Is there an argument that SO19 should be issued with a licence to kill in service without legal recourse? Much like Cressida Dick received no sanction and got promoted after Menenez got blown away after her and her team's panicked error. Dick, as I recall was the Operation Commander on the day.
We do not know that people are bad guys until a trial happens. Further in the thread I said if a suspect is clearly threatening civvies with a weapon and you get the order, yes. But we don't have the death penalty, and even if we did it should go through court, so extrajudicial killing should always be considered to be the worst option. Arguably every shooting by a cop should be highly scrutinised because they so often get the benefit of the doubt.
In the Chris Kaba case, with the information in public domain, the worst thing he did was try to drive away whilst police were talking to him and he hit a cop car - by accident or on purpose, who knows? And for that he was shot dead? He may have been in the wrong with his actions - but he didn't deserve to be killed extrajudicially for them.
So it turned out he wasn't a suicide bomber after all. Didn't we go through a phase of people deliberately driving cars into pedestrians?
I just don't know enough of the operational circumstances, the intelligence they had, the instructions given and the decision that had to be taken. But murder? Of someone he doesn't know? Whilst he is doing his job? That surely requires at least a reckless indifference as to whether or not there was any justification for taking the decision to shoot. I am really struggling to see that. Manslaughter, maybe.
Again - everyone driving erratically deserves to be shot coz they could be a suicide bomber? No, obviously outrageous, completely stupid. I cannot see any necessity to take a shot in the situation as we know it, and if the CPS are willing to bring it to case I imagine that the situation is unlikely to be the scenario most favourable for the cop, or they wouldn't be bringing the charge.
The completely mad thing about this whole farrago is it looks like they took the decision to cancel the Manchester leg and announce it now, completely forgetting that they're in Manchester next week.
Then people have rather awkwardly pointed to the connection and now its as if the line is "OK we won't confirm anything now, we can cancel it officially in two weeks time instead once we've had the Conference, that'll make the awkwardness go away".
The rumour is that this was leaked deliberately to harm the government at this moment. Apparently aided and abetted by “the Times” and “spectator”??! However I don’t buy that as the leaks have been coming for months - about various delays and cost cutting measures. Likewise the rumours about Euston date back many months (the Sun ran this story - no Euston - in January)
It’s a cock up. Not a conspiracy. And what a massive cock up
It's Gove
What's Gove got to do with it?
What's Gove but a second-hand emotion? What's Gove got to do, got to do with it? Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken?
You sent me home I was so surprised to find that after all It doesn't hurt to be alone
Cause you got Gove, Gove Gove on your side..
Except you probably haven't, because he's a sneaky backstabbing so and so.
Gove hurts, Gove scars Gove wounds and marks Any heart Not tough or strong enough To take a lot of pain, take a lot of pain Gove is like a cloud Holds a lot of rain Gove hurts Ooh, ooh, Gove hurts
When Lucy Letby was charged, no nurses stepped back.
This tells us a lot about the ratios of nurses who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
And the number of armed police officers who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
It tells us nothing
All it tells us is that police fear that grieving relatives may use social media to lash out at them as individuals and that their senior management are spineless bastards who would throw their officers to the wolves without a second thought
Bollocks.
If you have the power and responsibilities of an armed police officer, you have signed up for higher scrutiny and standards. Their job, that they chose to do, gives them the ability to deprive people of their freedoms before a trial and, in some cases, their lives. If that is done with impunity, cops are nothing but another street gang and their boss just happens to be the government. Police need to be held to a higher standard than your typical civvy because of that responsibility and power - not a lower standard - and should be more willing to sacrifice themselves and their individual pride for the consent of the public - not less.
To protect and serve means you have signed up to put yourself in harms way instead of letting bad things happen to the average Joe, and even suspects should be treated as the average Joe because they are not guilty until a court finds them guilty. Importing this US mindset that nothing is worth more than the life of a cop is a sure fire way to get American style policing - excess brutality and a feeling of being above the law.
I am a fully paid up member of tofu-eating wokerati liberal blob, but I am very nervous of an SO19 officer discharging his duty and his firearm against bad guys on our behalf and finding himself or herself the wrong side of the CPS.
Is there an argument that SO19 should be issued with a licence to kill in service without legal recourse? Much like Cressida Dick received no sanction and got promoted after Menenez got blown away after her and her team's panicked error. Dick, as I recall was the Operation Commander on the day.
We do not know that people are bad guys until a trial happens. Further in the thread I said if a suspect is clearly threatening civvies with a weapon and you get the order, yes. But we don't have the death penalty, and even if we did it should go through court, so extrajudicial killing should always be considered to be the worst option. Arguably every shooting by a cop should be highly scrutinised because they so often get the benefit of the doubt.
In the Chris Kaba case, with the information in public domain, the worst thing he did was try to drive away whilst police were talking to him and he hit a cop car - by accident or on purpose, who knows? And for that he was shot dead? He may have been in the wrong with his actions - but he didn't deserve to be killed extrajudicially for them.
This is not the Wild West, with police officers gunning down anyone who looks at them crossways. Police killings are very rare. And, they are thoroughly investigated.
You, on the other hand, with no knowledge of the case, have already deemed the officer in question to be guilty.
The completely mad thing about this whole farrago is it looks like they took the decision to cancel the Manchester leg and announce it now, completely forgetting that they're in Manchester next week.
Then people have rather awkwardly pointed to the connection and now its as if the line is "OK we won't confirm anything now, we can cancel it officially in two weeks time instead once we've had the Conference, that'll make the awkwardness go away".
The rumour is that this was leaked deliberately to harm the government at this moment. Apparently aided and abetted by “the Times” and “spectator”??! However I don’t buy that as the leaks have been coming for months - about various delays and cost cutting measures. Likewise the rumours about Euston date back many months (the Sun ran this story - no Euston - in January)
It’s a cock up. Not a conspiracy. And what a massive cock up
Call me naive (don't all rush at once), but I keep thinking that it's all smoke and mirrors. Leak a few things over time about HS2 cutbacks. Force the Opposition to commit to HS2 in full. Then get the Opposition to commit to review the costs and maybe cut back (because you've shafted the economy). Issue non-denial denials. Commit to nothing.
And then... before the assembled masses at Heston Aerodrome the Party Conference... Commit to completing HS2 in full all the way to the Rovers Return.
And then I sober up. At which point I realise that they are not that bright. As @Leon says, the leaks have been coming for months. Rishi can't even buy trousers that fit him properly so I doubt very much that he's mapped a path all the way to Conference only to say (with an attempt a theatrical flourish) "I fooled you all".
The latest HS2 rumour doing the rounds is a delay rather than scrapping .
Basically we’re too frightened to cancel it but will just kick it into the long grass. Anyone thinking that this section of HS2 will ever be built is clearly deluded .
Delaying it is do dumb. It's not going to get any cheaper. Just get it finished, London Euston to Manchester. Then do the Leeds leg along with NPR.
The latest HS2 rumour doing the rounds is a delay rather than scrapping .
Basically we’re too frightened to cancel it but will just kick it into the long grass. Anyone thinking that this section of HS2 will ever be built is clearly deluded .
A delay solely to pretend that Rishi can afford to deliver tax cuts.
Yes, that's got to be the political calculation. Create enough fiscal headroom for a pre-election budget and give the next government the problem of what do to.
Which given that the overall effect of delay and restart will be to push the cost even higher is a pretty shitty thing to do.
If they carry on salting the ground like this, it would almost be funny if the Conservatives did win next time and had to sort out the minefield they have set up.
Though probably funnier if it happened to a different country, please.
Right. A brilliant weekend's rugby, but a massive failure for me due to my overestimation of the might of the southern hemisphere. I had backed Namibia to beat the handicap (70 odd points) against France, England to beat the handicap of 50 points against Chile, South Africa to beat Ireland and Australia to beat Wales (handicaps of a point or two in those last two too - can't remember exactly). In the event only England succeeded. France turned up against Namibia - I had thought they gallically wouldn't bother; Ireland were superb, with SAF making/being forced into a couple off odd selections, Wales were brilliant, and Australia were, even by recent standards, awful.
So with that caveat in mind, this week I am going for a treble: Uruguay to beat Namibia by more than 17; Japan with a five point head start to beat Samoa; New Zealand to beat Italy by more than 26. Treble gives me 6.41/1.
I have been quite busy this weekend and catching up this morning it seems Sunak is taking a hammering with only @HYUFD gamely defending him, though on Inheritance Tax it is his own personal interest at play here and frankly any change to IT would be insane at this time
On the wider issue of Sunak, he and Hunt are technocrats and accountants, and not politicians
They remind me of the attitude the IMF would have if called into the country, but it is politically tone deaf even though they are asking the right questions, not just on climate change but also on HS2, and I believe the same questions with confront Starmer and Reeves as soon as they go into office
Personally, I accept the conservative party are going into opposition and frankly an early GE and the inevitable change would be a relief
I do have a concern for the conservative party going forward if @HYUFD represents the future, as it is not a future I would accept as I became politically homeless but at 80, which I will be at the time of the next election, whatever happens is unlikely to affect myself or my wife and our main objective every day is to keep taking our pills and enjoy the love and company of our beloved family, including our 5 grand children who are all local to us.
How's the petition going?
Very well! Residents of Wales are signing it all around the world.
Good to hear.
There was some fake news analysis from TomTom (published by the MSM) that suggested journey times had only marginally increased while speeds had dropped substantially.
When Lucy Letby was charged, no nurses stepped back.
This tells us a lot about the ratios of nurses who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
And the number of armed police officers who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
It tells us nothing
All it tells us is that police fear that grieving relatives may use social media to lash out at them as individuals and that their senior management are spineless bastards who would throw their officers to the wolves without a second thought
Bollocks.
If you have the power and responsibilities of an armed police officer, you have signed up for higher scrutiny and standards. Their job, that they chose to do, gives them the ability to deprive people of their freedoms before a trial and, in some cases, their lives. If that is done with impunity, cops are nothing but another street gang and their boss just happens to be the government. Police need to be held to a higher standard than your typical civvy because of that responsibility and power - not a lower standard - and should be more willing to sacrifice themselves and their individual pride for the consent of the public - not less.
To protect and serve means you have signed up to put yourself in harms way instead of letting bad things happen to the average Joe, and even suspects should be treated as the average Joe because they are not guilty until a court finds them guilty. Importing this US mindset that nothing is worth more than the life of a cop is a sure fire way to get American style policing - excess brutality and a feeling of being above the law.
I am a fully paid up member of tofu-eating wokerati liberal blob, but I am very nervous of an SO19 officer discharging his duty and his firearm against bad guys on our behalf and finding himself or herself the wrong side of the CPS.
Is there an argument that SO19 should be issued with a licence to kill in service without legal recourse? Much like Cressida Dick received no sanction and got promoted after Menenez got blown away after her and her team's panicked error. Dick, as I recall was the Operation Commander on the day.
We do not know that people are bad guys until a trial happens. Further in the thread I said if a suspect is clearly threatening civvies with a weapon and you get the order, yes. But we don't have the death penalty, and even if we did it should go through court, so extrajudicial killing should always be considered to be the worst option. Arguably every shooting by a cop should be highly scrutinised because they so often get the benefit of the doubt.
In the Chris Kaba case, with the information in public domain, the worst thing he did was try to drive away whilst police were talking to him and he hit a cop car - by accident or on purpose, who knows? And for that he was shot dead? He may have been in the wrong with his actions - but he didn't deserve to be killed extrajudicially for them.
If the facts are as described as in your final paragraph then it's an exceedingly speedy not guilty verdict as NX121 would likely have cause to believe he's (Kaba) is using his car as a weapon; and the charge should never have been brought.
So anyone who tries to drive away when cops are talking to them is allowed to be shot? How about anyone who just tries to leave when questioned by cops? Resisting arrest is executable now, is it, as long as the perp is big and scary? It isn't proportionate. Cops do not have the right to kill anyone doing something that scares them or they don't like.
Christ I hope you aren't on his jury.
Why? I am open to further evidence that shows otherwise, but I do happen to think that extrajudicial killing is something that requires a high bar to justify - why is that outrageous enough to bar me from a jury?
The latest HS2 rumour doing the rounds is a delay rather than scrapping .
Basically we’re too frightened to cancel it but will just kick it into the long grass. Anyone thinking that this section of HS2 will ever be built is clearly deluded .
A delay solely to pretend that Rishi can afford to deliver tax cuts.
No 10 has worked out belatedly that cutting taxes after moaning about a lack of money for HS2 might not be a good look .
God this government makes me sick .
According to Yougov more Northerners oppose HS2 than support it anyway.
When Lucy Letby was charged, no nurses stepped back.
This tells us a lot about the ratios of nurses who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
And the number of armed police officers who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
It tells us nothing
All it tells us is that police fear that grieving relatives may use social media to lash out at them as individuals and that their senior management are spineless bastards who would throw their officers to the wolves without a second thought
Bollocks.
If you have the power and responsibilities of an armed police officer, you have signed up for higher scrutiny and standards. Their job, that they chose to do, gives them the ability to deprive people of their freedoms before a trial and, in some cases, their lives. If that is done with impunity, cops are nothing but another street gang and their boss just happens to be the government. Police need to be held to a higher standard than your typical civvy because of that responsibility and power - not a lower standard - and should be more willing to sacrifice themselves and their individual pride for the consent of the public - not less.
To protect and serve means you have signed up to put yourself in harms way instead of letting bad things happen to the average Joe, and even suspects should be treated as the average Joe because they are not guilty until a court finds them guilty. Importing this US mindset that nothing is worth more than the life of a cop is a sure fire way to get American style policing - excess brutality and a feeling of being above the law.
I am a fully paid up member of tofu-eating wokerati liberal blob, but I am very nervous of an SO19 officer discharging his duty and his firearm against bad guys on our behalf and finding himself or herself the wrong side of the CPS.
Is there an argument that SO19 should be issued with a licence to kill in service without legal recourse? Much like Cressida Dick received no sanction and got promoted after Menenez got blown away after her and her team's panicked error. Dick, as I recall was the Operation Commander on the day.
We do not know that people are bad guys until a trial happens. Further in the thread I said if a suspect is clearly threatening civvies with a weapon and you get the order, yes. But we don't have the death penalty, and even if we did it should go through court, so extrajudicial killing should always be considered to be the worst option. Arguably every shooting by a cop should be highly scrutinised because they so often get the benefit of the doubt.
In the Chris Kaba case, with the information in public domain, the worst thing he did was try to drive away whilst police were talking to him and he hit a cop car - by accident or on purpose, who knows? And for that he was shot dead? He may have been in the wrong with his actions - but he didn't deserve to be killed extrajudicially for them.
This is not the Wild West, with police officers gunning down anyone who looks at them crossways. Police killings are very rare. And, they are thoroughly investigated.
You, on the other hand, with no knowledge of the case, have already deemed the officer in question to be guilty.
I have said, with the knowledge in the public domain, I do not see any reason for Chris Kaba to have been killed extrajudicially. I have also said that the bar for that should be very high. It doesn't matter if it happens daily, or is a once in a lifetime experience - justifying killing someone should have the highest bar to be met. It is an act of irreparable harm. Short of the clear threat of a suspect killing someone - every other method should be exhausted first. And police have the resources, training and position in society to do every other method - they have the power to ram his car in retaliation, drag him out of the car, handcuff him, put him in the back of a van and detain him for hours on end. That in and of itself is an immense amount of power that cops should have to justify when they use it. Killing someone is greater than even that.
The latest HS2 rumour doing the rounds is a delay rather than scrapping .
Basically we’re too frightened to cancel it but will just kick it into the long grass. Anyone thinking that this section of HS2 will ever be built is clearly deluded .
A delay solely to pretend that Rishi can afford to deliver tax cuts.
No 10 has worked out belatedly that cutting taxes after moaning about a lack of money for HS2 might not be a good look .
God this government makes me sick .
According to Yougov more Northerners oppose HS2 than support it anyway.
Of course, we Northerners drive. If you want to help the North then invest in our long-neglected motorway network that hasn't been touched for fifty years would be a better starting point than yet another bloody trainline to London.
And if you're going to invest in Northern Rail, then invest in Northern Rail. NPR would be a far better levelling up exercise than a trainline to London.
But to actually build HS2 but then not bother with the one link to the North? That's just adding insult to injury, then spitting at us too.
The latest HS2 rumour doing the rounds is a delay rather than scrapping .
Basically we’re too frightened to cancel it but will just kick it into the long grass. Anyone thinking that this section of HS2 will ever be built is clearly deluded .
A delay solely to pretend that Rishi can afford to deliver tax cuts.
No 10 has worked out belatedly that cutting taxes after moaning about a lack of money for HS2 might not be a good look .
God this government makes me sick .
According to Yougov more Northerners oppose HS2 than support it anyway.
Of course, we Northerners drive. If you want to help the North then invest in our long-neglected motorway network that hasn't been touched for fifty years would be a better starting point than yet another bloody trainline to London.
And if you're going to invest in Northern Rail, then invest in Northern Rail. NPR would be a far better levelling up exercise than a trainline to London.
But to actually build HS2 but then not bother with the one link to the North? That's just adding insult to injury, then spitting at us too.
When Lucy Letby was charged, no nurses stepped back.
This tells us a lot about the ratios of nurses who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
And the number of armed police officers who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
It tells us nothing
All it tells us is that police fear that grieving relatives may use social media to lash out at them as individuals and that their senior management are spineless bastards who would throw their officers to the wolves without a second thought
All of that applies to the medics. And their management is just the same, in quality.
Not at all.
When patients suffer harm or die in hospital there is an investigation, but with an eye to improving procedures and outcomes. It is fortunately rare that medics are accused pf murder. It is often put down as being a mistake or an accident or just bad luck.
With the police, the families almost never accept that “their Johnny” could be in any way culpable for ending up in a situation where armed police are involved. Their first instinct is all too often to blame the police.
Clearly if the police commit an offence that should be investigated, but you can understand why they want clear guidance and support from management
The list of medics who’ve been given criminal sanctions for on job actions is not short.
The bill for damages awarded to patroness and their relatives isn’t trivial either.
And plenty of relatives go after the NHS/individuals. Sometimes with justification.
The delay is utterly meaningless frankly. It means the Northern leg will be determined by the incoming Labour government next year unless the polls change dramatically.
Over to you Starmer.
Is it meaningless ? Presumably a policy change will have costs related to changes in contracts, even if it's looking several years ahead ( @Casino_Royale ?) ?
Only to change again in 12-18 months' time.
Yes.
Also, and this isn't widely known, almost all the construction contracts at HS2 were let on a cost-plus basis (which means contractors are rewarded at their cost, plus their overhead, plus a - decent - profit) for any work they do, and compensated for any change or delay on top, which essentially means they take little to no risk.
This can happen when the scope and risk allocation isn't clear, such that the supply chain simply won't take on the works without it, which is exactly what has happened with HS2: the business case kept changing, and so did the core scope (which was overengineered to the original spec of speed, and then never revised to reflect the modified capacity argument) all the while as the network was meddled with on a CapEx basis whilst the line was porked out to deal with political challenges and objections. And, they still haven't made a decision on Euston.
It's a case study of poor sponsorship and client control.
Ah, apologies - I mentioned that there was something unusual with the risk allocation on HS2 earlier in the previous thread, but managed to get the specifics exactly inverted.
What sort of mitigations can we put in place in order to avoid this sort of situation with future projects? Perhaps some sort of independent delivery authority, which would take charge once the initial political decision to proceed has been taken?
Yes. Keep the civil service beaks out of it. Like the vaccines. Imagine they'd been tasked with vaccine delivery?
I had Bank of England independence in mind when I said that, but that's a model which I suspect you might feel is a little creaky at best!
But the Vaccine Taskforce is a good comparison. The government sets the end goal, together with some broad priorities within that, and defines the funding envelope. And then it it's handed off to an Infrastructure Taskforce who are charged with getting the work done.
The work of the taskforce would be funded to cover the bare minimum of costs, with a bigger chunk on top which would be paid according to results. They'd still be responsible to parliament, with a select ctte to scrutinise their work - but government wouldn't be able to change the goal or funding without passing further legislation.
That'd shield it from short-term politicking (which Sunak would claim to appreciate!), in-fighting SpAds, and civil servants with misaligned priorities. And it'd also be similar enough to the late C19th way of doing things that traditionalists would be kept happy.
We certainly need to do something. As things stand, projects that run for longer than one parliament risk becoming almost undeliverable, and that's going to have huge costs for us in the future.
There's something in that, but there's also a problem that politicians go for major projects that are all or nothing essentially, which results in this HS2 madness.
Take a leaf out of the motorways book when they were built. The M6 is the longest motorway in England and the first to begin construction, but it wasn't all opened at once. In 1958 it began life as simply the Preston Bypass and cost in the tens of millions in modern money, not tens of billions.
Year by year then from 1958 to the end of the 70s roughly we had patches built across the country which were individually usable from when they were built, and eventually over time joined up into something grander.
There's no need to go all in from day one. Design some new routes and build them piecemeal, opening each one as soon as its built, rather than spending decades on white elephants because they're more impressive sounding projects.
Its a shame we've wasted fifty years and not continued doing what we were doing then, all parties bear responsibility. If we'd continued investing in our infrastructure at the rate we were then, how much better off would we be now?
That would be the type of approach which I would suggest in my professional life - lots of small and medium-sized projects designed to meet a set of roughly-aligned intermediate goals.
Certainly, it seems clear in retrospect that mashing things like the Euston rebuild, new station capacity for Birmingham, and a chunk of the Old Oak Common area redevelopment into the HS2 project has been a disaster. All of those things should have been done anyway, and could easily have been managed separately, with their own budgets.
On the other hand, the HS2-HS1 link was removed from the project because "we can deliver that better as part of Crossrail 2". Well, that's not going to happen now, so the link will likely never happen - all of the potential work sites that would have been needed have since been built on, or are about to be built on. The land round there is far too valuable to be kept in limbo for a project that might not be resurrected for another three decades, if ever.
It's also hard to see how the government would go about managing the extra legislation that would be required to cut projects into smaller chunks, even if each individual act was simpler and less contentious. Would there actually be the capacity to do that?
When Lucy Letby was charged, no nurses stepped back.
This tells us a lot about the ratios of nurses who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
And the number of armed police officers who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
It tells us nothing
All it tells us is that police fear that grieving relatives may use social media to lash out at them as individuals and that their senior management are spineless bastards who would throw their officers to the wolves without a second thought
Bollocks.
If you have the power and responsibilities of an armed police officer, you have signed up for higher scrutiny and standards. Their job, that they chose to do, gives them the ability to deprive people of their freedoms before a trial and, in some cases, their lives. If that is done with impunity, cops are nothing but another street gang and their boss just happens to be the government. Police need to be held to a higher standard than your typical civvy because of that responsibility and power - not a lower standard - and should be more willing to sacrifice themselves and their individual pride for the consent of the public - not less.
To protect and serve means you have signed up to put yourself in harms way instead of letting bad things happen to the average Joe, and even suspects should be treated as the average Joe because they are not guilty until a court finds them guilty. Importing this US mindset that nothing is worth more than the life of a cop is a sure fire way to get American style policing - excess brutality and a feeling of being above the law.
I am a fully paid up member of tofu-eating wokerati liberal blob, but I am very nervous of an SO19 officer discharging his duty and his firearm against bad guys on our behalf and finding himself or herself the wrong side of the CPS.
Is there an argument that SO19 should be issued with a licence to kill in service without legal recourse? Much like Cressida Dick received no sanction and got promoted after Menenez got blown away after her and her team's panicked error. Dick, as I recall was the Operation Commander on the day.
We do not know that people are bad guys until a trial happens. Further in the thread I said if a suspect is clearly threatening civvies with a weapon and you get the order, yes. But we don't have the death penalty, and even if we did it should go through court, so extrajudicial killing should always be considered to be the worst option. Arguably every shooting by a cop should be highly scrutinised because they so often get the benefit of the doubt.
In the Chris Kaba case, with the information in public domain, the worst thing he did was try to drive away whilst police were talking to him and he hit a cop car - by accident or on purpose, who knows? And for that he was shot dead? He may have been in the wrong with his actions - but he didn't deserve to be killed extrajudicially for them.
This is not the Wild West, with police officers gunning down anyone who looks at them crossways. Police killings are very rare. And, they are thoroughly investigated.
You, on the other hand, with no knowledge of the case, have already deemed the officer in question to be guilty.
I have said, with the knowledge in the public domain, I do not see any reason for Chris Kaba to have been killed extrajudicially. I have also said that the bar for that should be very high. It doesn't matter if it happens daily, or is a once in a lifetime experience - justifying killing someone should have the highest bar to be met. It is an act of irreparable harm. Short of the clear threat of a suspect killing someone - every other method should be exhausted first. And police have the resources, training and position in society to do every other method - they have the power to ram his car in retaliation, drag him out of the car, handcuff him, put him in the back of a van and detain him for hours on end. That in and of itself is an immense amount of power that cops should have to justify when they use it. Killing someone is greater than even that.
We shouldn't be referencing a specific live case by name.
I think HS2 will likely follow the Edinburgh Trams and Crossrail "journey".
Political cowardice, incompetence, increased costs, lots of whining from the motoring lobby. Years or decades late.
And yet significantly higher patronage than expected. Over capacity immediately. Benefits not included in the business case appear out of nowhere.
Commuters jump out of their cars en masse. Increased footfall in local businesses. Huge economies of scale - the original line has seen a doubling of passengers itself, and Lothian Bus passenger numbers grew too.
BUILD IT
TLDR: HS2 is going to be a disaster but still worth doing, in the end.
Our pessimism on the benefits of public transport investment is a sort of cultural cringe.
Our pessimism on the benefits of investment is cringe.
We stopped building our motorway network in the 1970s too. Fifty wasted years while our population has grown 25%
We need to get going on investment. Roads, rails, trams, paths - we've neglected them all and we need to invest in all of them sadly.
You can only neglect your infrastructure so long before it creaks.
You will be SHOCKED when you hear about Mr Beeching.
Let me see if I can put it in a way you may understand.
Abandoning investment in our road infrastructure fifty long years ago and leaving things to be neglected while our population has grown by a quarter in that time, has been as damaging as the Beeching cuts to rail at a time while our population was stable.
You wonder why I say its not either/or, we need both? That's why. Maybe that will help you come around to understanding the stunning neglect our infrastructure has suffered for half a century.
The delay is utterly meaningless frankly. It means the Northern leg will be determined by the incoming Labour government next year unless the polls change dramatically.
Over to you Starmer.
Is it meaningless ? Presumably a policy change will have costs related to changes in contracts, even if it's looking several years ahead ( @Casino_Royale ?) ?
Only to change again in 12-18 months' time.
Yes.
Also, and this isn't widely known, almost all the construction contracts at HS2 were let on a cost-plus basis (which means contractors are rewarded at their cost, plus their overhead, plus a - decent - profit) for any work they do, and compensated for any change or delay on top, which essentially means they take little to no risk.
This can happen when the scope and risk allocation isn't clear, such that the supply chain simply won't take on the works without it, which is exactly what has happened with HS2: the business case kept changing, and so did the core scope (which was overengineered to the original spec of speed, and then never revised to reflect the modified capacity argument) all the while as the network was meddled with on a CapEx basis whilst the line was porked out to deal with political challenges and objections. And, they still haven't made a decision on Euston.
It's a case study of poor sponsorship and client control.
Ah, apologies - I mentioned that there was something unusual with the risk allocation on HS2 earlier in the previous thread, but managed to get the specifics exactly inverted.
What sort of mitigations can we put in place in order to avoid this sort of situation with future projects? Perhaps some sort of independent delivery authority, which would take charge once the initial political decision to proceed has been taken?
Yes. Keep the civil service beaks out of it. Like the vaccines. Imagine they'd been tasked with vaccine delivery?
I had Bank of England independence in mind when I said that, but that's a model which I suspect you might feel is a little creaky at best!
But the Vaccine Taskforce is a good comparison. The government sets the end goal, together with some broad priorities within that, and defines the funding envelope. And then it it's handed off to an Infrastructure Taskforce who are charged with getting the work done.
The work of the taskforce would be funded to cover the bare minimum of costs, with a bigger chunk on top which would be paid according to results. They'd still be responsible to parliament, with a select ctte to scrutinise their work - but government wouldn't be able to change the goal or funding without passing further legislation.
That'd shield it from short-term politicking (which Sunak would claim to appreciate!), in-fighting SpAds, and civil servants with misaligned priorities. And it'd also be similar enough to the late C19th way of doing things that traditionalists would be kept happy.
We certainly need to do something. As things stand, projects that run for longer than one parliament risk becoming almost undeliverable, and that's going to have huge costs for us in the future.
There's something in that, but there's also a problem that politicians go for major projects that are all or nothing essentially, which results in this HS2 madness.
Take a leaf out of the motorways book when they were built. The M6 is the longest motorway in England and the first to begin construction, but it wasn't all opened at once. In 1958 it began life as simply the Preston Bypass and cost in the tens of millions in modern money, not tens of billions.
Year by year then from 1958 to the end of the 70s roughly we had patches built across the country which were individually usable from when they were built, and eventually over time joined up into something grander.
There's no need to go all in from day one. Design some new routes and build them piecemeal, opening each one as soon as its built, rather than spending decades on white elephants because they're more impressive sounding projects.
Its a shame we've wasted fifty years and not continued doing what we were doing then, all parties bear responsibility. If we'd continued investing in our infrastructure at the rate we were then, how much better off would we be now?
That's a very road-oriented argument, though, whatever its merits for that area. Doesn't work for a railway using a whole new level of rolling stock and track, not least because the signalling will almost certainly be modernised at the same time.
I will highlight the reference to the Casey Report for people:
Casey Review and firearms officers:
The Baroness Casey Review, published in March 2023, outlined widespread issues with the Metropolitan Police culture and leadership.
Casey recommended the Met: “Clean itself up by bringing in an independent team to run its misconduct system; introducing higher vetting standard…; tackling toxic cultures with clearer statements of standards for all and tougher enforcement of them; and disbanding and reforming ‘dark corner’ units where some of the worst behaviours have been found and officers are equipped to carry lethal firearms.”
Chapter 6 of the review focused on the firearms unit of the Met in particular. Casey highlighted, “a deeply troubling, toxic culture” as well as a “widely held view in the Command and in the rest of the Met that firearms officers ‘need to be allowed’ to bend or break the rules.” This, she found, covers a catalogue of poor behaviours including, “the acceptance of insidious attitudes including misogyny, racism and ableism in the Command”.
The delay is utterly meaningless frankly. It means the Northern leg will be determined by the incoming Labour government next year unless the polls change dramatically.
Over to you Starmer.
Is it meaningless ? Presumably a policy change will have costs related to changes in contracts, even if it's looking several years ahead ( @Casino_Royale ?) ?
Only to change again in 12-18 months' time.
Yes.
Also, and this isn't widely known, almost all the construction contracts at HS2 were let on a cost-plus basis (which means contractors are rewarded at their cost, plus their overhead, plus a - decent - profit) for any work they do, and compensated for any change or delay on top, which essentially means they take little to no risk.
This can happen when the scope and risk allocation isn't clear, such that the supply chain simply won't take on the works without it, which is exactly what has happened with HS2: the business case kept changing, and so did the core scope (which was overengineered to the original spec of speed, and then never revised to reflect the modified capacity argument) all the while as the network was meddled with on a CapEx basis whilst the line was porked out to deal with political challenges and objections. And, they still haven't made a decision on Euston.
It's a case study of poor sponsorship and client control.
Ah, apologies - I mentioned that there was something unusual with the risk allocation on HS2 earlier in the previous thread, but managed to get the specifics exactly inverted.
What sort of mitigations can we put in place in order to avoid this sort of situation with future projects? Perhaps some sort of independent delivery authority, which would take charge once the initial political decision to proceed has been taken?
Yes. Keep the civil service beaks out of it. Like the vaccines. Imagine they'd been tasked with vaccine delivery?
I had Bank of England independence in mind when I said that, but that's a model which I suspect you might feel is a little creaky at best!
But the Vaccine Taskforce is a good comparison. The government sets the end goal, together with some broad priorities within that, and defines the funding envelope. And then it it's handed off to an Infrastructure Taskforce who are charged with getting the work done.
The work of the taskforce would be funded to cover the bare minimum of costs, with a bigger chunk on top which would be paid according to results. They'd still be responsible to parliament, with a select ctte to scrutinise their work - but government wouldn't be able to change the goal or funding without passing further legislation.
That'd shield it from short-term politicking (which Sunak would claim to appreciate!), in-fighting SpAds, and civil servants with misaligned priorities. And it'd also be similar enough to the late C19th way of doing things that traditionalists would be kept happy.
We certainly need to do something. As things stand, projects that run for longer than one parliament risk becoming almost undeliverable, and that's going to have huge costs for us in the future.
There's something in that, but there's also a problem that politicians go for major projects that are all or nothing essentially, which results in this HS2 madness.
Take a leaf out of the motorways book when they were built. The M6 is the longest motorway in England and the first to begin construction, but it wasn't all opened at once. In 1958 it began life as simply the Preston Bypass and cost in the tens of millions in modern money, not tens of billions.
Year by year then from 1958 to the end of the 70s roughly we had patches built across the country which were individually usable from when they were built, and eventually over time joined up into something grander.
There's no need to go all in from day one. Design some new routes and build them piecemeal, opening each one as soon as its built, rather than spending decades on white elephants because they're more impressive sounding projects.
Its a shame we've wasted fifty years and not continued doing what we were doing then, all parties bear responsibility. If we'd continued investing in our infrastructure at the rate we were then, how much better off would we be now?
That's a very road-oriented argument, though, whatever its merits for that area. Doesn't work for a railway using a whole new level of rolling stock and track, not least because the signalling will almost certainly be modernised at the same time.
Sure it can if you're talking local transportation rather than grand projects.
Want to build Northern Powerhouse Rail? You could start by building the stretch from Liverpool to Warrington, then open that once constructed. And repeat that across the network until its all built.
The instance on doing it as a grand project to London is what's made it take forever.
The delay is utterly meaningless frankly. It means the Northern leg will be determined by the incoming Labour government next year unless the polls change dramatically.
Over to you Starmer.
Is it meaningless ? Presumably a policy change will have costs related to changes in contracts, even if it's looking several years ahead ( @Casino_Royale ?) ?
Only to change again in 12-18 months' time.
Yes.
Also, and this isn't widely known, almost all the construction contracts at HS2 were let on a cost-plus basis (which means contractors are rewarded at their cost, plus their overhead, plus a - decent - profit) for any work they do, and compensated for any change or delay on top, which essentially means they take little to no risk.
This can happen when the scope and risk allocation isn't clear, such that the supply chain simply won't take on the works without it, which is exactly what has happened with HS2: the business case kept changing, and so did the core scope (which was overengineered to the original spec of speed, and then never revised to reflect the modified capacity argument) all the while as the network was meddled with on a CapEx basis whilst the line was porked out to deal with political challenges and objections. And, they still haven't made a decision on Euston.
It's a case study of poor sponsorship and client control.
Ah, apologies - I mentioned that there was something unusual with the risk allocation on HS2 earlier in the previous thread, but managed to get the specifics exactly inverted.
What sort of mitigations can we put in place in order to avoid this sort of situation with future projects? Perhaps some sort of independent delivery authority, which would take charge once the initial political decision to proceed has been taken?
Yes. Keep the civil service beaks out of it. Like the vaccines. Imagine they'd been tasked with vaccine delivery?
I had Bank of England independence in mind when I said that, but that's a model which I suspect you might feel is a little creaky at best!
But the Vaccine Taskforce is a good comparison. The government sets the end goal, together with some broad priorities within that, and defines the funding envelope. And then it it's handed off to an Infrastructure Taskforce who are charged with getting the work done.
The work of the taskforce would be funded to cover the bare minimum of costs, with a bigger chunk on top which would be paid according to results. They'd still be responsible to parliament, with a select ctte to scrutinise their work - but government wouldn't be able to change the goal or funding without passing further legislation.
That'd shield it from short-term politicking (which Sunak would claim to appreciate!), in-fighting SpAds, and civil servants with misaligned priorities. And it'd also be similar enough to the late C19th way of doing things that traditionalists would be kept happy.
We certainly need to do something. As things stand, projects that run for longer than one parliament risk becoming almost undeliverable, and that's going to have huge costs for us in the future.
There's something in that, but there's also a problem that politicians go for major projects that are all or nothing essentially, which results in this HS2 madness.
Take a leaf out of the motorways book when they were built. The M6 is the longest motorway in England and the first to begin construction, but it wasn't all opened at once. In 1958 it began life as simply the Preston Bypass and cost in the tens of millions in modern money, not tens of billions.
Year by year then from 1958 to the end of the 70s roughly we had patches built across the country which were individually usable from when they were built, and eventually over time joined up into something grander.
There's no need to go all in from day one. Design some new routes and build them piecemeal, opening each one as soon as its built, rather than spending decades on white elephants because they're more impressive sounding projects.
Its a shame we've wasted fifty years and not continued doing what we were doing then, all parties bear responsibility. If we'd continued investing in our infrastructure at the rate we were then, how much better off would we be now?
That's a very road-oriented argument, though, whatever its merits for that area. Doesn't work for a railway using a whole new level of rolling stock and track, not least because the signalling will almost certainly be modernised at the same time.
When Lucy Letby was charged, no nurses stepped back.
This tells us a lot about the ratios of nurses who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
And the number of armed police officers who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
It tells us nothing
All it tells us is that police fear that grieving relatives may use social media to lash out at them as individuals and that their senior management are spineless bastards who would throw their officers to the wolves without a second thought
Bollocks.
If you have the power and responsibilities of an armed police officer, you have signed up for higher scrutiny and standards. Their job, that they chose to do, gives them the ability to deprive people of their freedoms before a trial and, in some cases, their lives. If that is done with impunity, cops are nothing but another street gang and their boss just happens to be the government. Police need to be held to a higher standard than your typical civvy because of that responsibility and power - not a lower standard - and should be more willing to sacrifice themselves and their individual pride for the consent of the public - not less.
To protect and serve means you have signed up to put yourself in harms way instead of letting bad things happen to the average Joe, and even suspects should be treated as the average Joe because they are not guilty until a court finds them guilty. Importing this US mindset that nothing is worth more than the life of a cop is a sure fire way to get American style policing - excess brutality and a feeling of being above the law.
I am a fully paid up member of tofu-eating wokerati liberal blob, but I am very nervous of an SO19 officer discharging his duty and his firearm against bad guys on our behalf and finding himself or herself the wrong side of the CPS.
Is there an argument that SO19 should be issued with a licence to kill in service without legal recourse? Much like Cressida Dick received no sanction and got promoted after Menenez got blown away after her and her team's panicked error. Dick, as I recall was the Operation Commander on the day.
We do not know that people are bad guys until a trial happens. Further in the thread I said if a suspect is clearly threatening civvies with a weapon and you get the order, yes. But we don't have the death penalty, and even if we did it should go through court, so extrajudicial killing should always be considered to be the worst option. Arguably every shooting by a cop should be highly scrutinised because they so often get the benefit of the doubt.
In the Chris Kaba case, with the information in public domain, the worst thing he did was try to drive away whilst police were talking to him and he hit a cop car - by accident or on purpose, who knows? And for that he was shot dead? He may have been in the wrong with his actions - but he didn't deserve to be killed extrajudicially for them.
This is not the Wild West, with police officers gunning down anyone who looks at them crossways. Police killings are very rare. And, they are thoroughly investigated.
You, on the other hand, with no knowledge of the case, have already deemed the officer in question to be guilty.
I have said, with the knowledge in the public domain, I do not see any reason for Chris Kaba to have been killed extrajudicially. I have also said that the bar for that should be very high. It doesn't matter if it happens daily, or is a once in a lifetime experience - justifying killing someone should have the highest bar to be met. It is an act of irreparable harm. Short of the clear threat of a suspect killing someone - every other method should be exhausted first. And police have the resources, training and position in society to do every other method - they have the power to ram his car in retaliation, drag him out of the car, handcuff him, put him in the back of a van and detain him for hours on end. That in and of itself is an immense amount of power that cops should have to justify when they use it. Killing someone is greater than even that.
It’s for the prosecution to prove the officer guilty, not for the defendant to prove himself innocent. There is no very high bar for this defendant, or any other defendant, to have to clear.
There are only two issues:-
1. Did the defendant genuinely believe that Kaba posed a serious risk to the life or health of the defendant, or some other person?
2. If he thought that, was shooting him reasonable in the circumstances?
On topic: In the US, wealth is often a negative for Republican candidates, but not for Democratic candidates. Notable examples: FDR, the Kennedys, and, currently, California Governor Gavin Newsom.
There are ways Republicans can lessen that problem. For example, by putting their assets in a blind trust, after they are elected.
Or by showing they are in touch with average people, as George W. Bush did, in a number of ways. For example, by earning his money by providing something popular, a major league baseball team. (From time to time, he sat in the regular seats so he could listen to fans' thoughts about ways to improve their experiences at the ball park.)
I'm not sure that's entirely true. Trump tends if anything to exaggerate his wealth and business acumen for political advantage as a Republican, whereas Bloomberg was seen as an elitist who tried to buy the Democratic nomination.
It's possible those on the economic right find it a bit trickier overall if they are wealthy, however, simply because the type of policies they implement tend to be small state and low tax, and the obvious jibe is that this benefits them personally. A wealthy centre/left politician is less likely to be implementing the type of policies that can easily be portrayed as benefiting themselves and their friends.
In practice, only the wealthy have much chance to get ahead in US politics.
Joe Biden isn't massively wealthy, is he? Or at least he wasn't as VP - he made a lot from books/speaking engagements in his post-VP, pre-President period.
I mean, these things are relative - clearly, he is a lot wealthier than most Americans, and was well paid as a Senator for decades. But he's nowhere near the group of US politicians who can self-fund to a significant degree.
I will highlight the reference to the Casey Report for people:
Casey Review and firearms officers:
The Baroness Casey Review, published in March 2023, outlined widespread issues with the Metropolitan Police culture and leadership.
Casey recommended the Met: “Clean itself up by bringing in an independent team to run its misconduct system; introducing higher vetting standard…; tackling toxic cultures with clearer statements of standards for all and tougher enforcement of them; and disbanding and reforming ‘dark corner’ units where some of the worst behaviours have been found and officers are equipped to carry lethal firearms.”
Chapter 6 of the review focused on the firearms unit of the Met in particular. Casey highlighted, “a deeply troubling, toxic culture” as well as a “widely held view in the Command and in the rest of the Met that firearms officers ‘need to be allowed’ to bend or break the rules.” This, she found, covers a catalogue of poor behaviours including, “the acceptance of insidious attitudes including misogyny, racism and ableism in the Command”.
Or,as a friend of mine once put it to me, they should stop employing cowboys and encouraging to behave like cowboys.
Anyway if it is true that hundreds have handed in their guns, I feel a whole lot safer.
Right. A brilliant weekend's rugby, but a massive failure for me due to my overestimation of the might of the southern hemisphere. I had backed Namibia to beat the handicap (70 odd points) against France, England to beat the handicap of 50 points against Chile, South Africa to beat Ireland and Australia to beat Wales (handicaps of a point or two in those last two too - can't remember exactly). In the event only England succeeded. France turned up against Namibia - I had thought they gallically wouldn't bother; Ireland were superb, with SAF making/being forced into a couple off odd selections, Wales were brilliant, and Australia were, even by recent standards, awful.
So with that caveat in mind, this week I am going for a treble: Uruguay to beat Namibia by more than 17; Japan with a five point head start to beat Samoa; New Zealand to beat Italy by more than 26. Treble gives me 6.41/1.
Japan might let you down there
Thanks Farooq. The handicaps are all evens-ish, so the bookies reckon that score par. I thought 5 points a little ungenerous actually, given the results in the tournament so far - but I think Japan are a better team than their results suggest. I'm also banking on at least one card for Samoa. However, we shall see! Seeing teams like Japan and Samoa is one of the joys of the RWC.
I will highlight the reference to the Casey Report for people:
Casey Review and firearms officers:
The Baroness Casey Review, published in March 2023, outlined widespread issues with the Metropolitan Police culture and leadership.
Casey recommended the Met: “Clean itself up by bringing in an independent team to run its misconduct system; introducing higher vetting standard…; tackling toxic cultures with clearer statements of standards for all and tougher enforcement of them; and disbanding and reforming ‘dark corner’ units where some of the worst behaviours have been found and officers are equipped to carry lethal firearms.”
Chapter 6 of the review focused on the firearms unit of the Met in particular. Casey highlighted, “a deeply troubling, toxic culture” as well as a “widely held view in the Command and in the rest of the Met that firearms officers ‘need to be allowed’ to bend or break the rules.” This, she found, covers a catalogue of poor behaviours including, “the acceptance of insidious attitudes including misogyny, racism and ableism in the Command”.
All of which is entirely irrelevant to the case in question.
The delay is utterly meaningless frankly. It means the Northern leg will be determined by the incoming Labour government next year unless the polls change dramatically.
Over to you Starmer.
Is it meaningless ? Presumably a policy change will have costs related to changes in contracts, even if it's looking several years ahead ( @Casino_Royale ?) ?
Only to change again in 12-18 months' time.
Yes.
Also, and this isn't widely known, almost all the construction contracts at HS2 were let on a cost-plus basis (which means contractors are rewarded at their cost, plus their overhead, plus a - decent - profit) for any work they do, and compensated for any change or delay on top, which essentially means they take little to no risk.
This can happen when the scope and risk allocation isn't clear, such that the supply chain simply won't take on the works without it, which is exactly what has happened with HS2: the business case kept changing, and so did the core scope (which was overengineered to the original spec of speed, and then never revised to reflect the modified capacity argument) all the while as the network was meddled with on a CapEx basis whilst the line was porked out to deal with political challenges and objections. And, they still haven't made a decision on Euston.
It's a case study of poor sponsorship and client control.
Ah, apologies - I mentioned that there was something unusual with the risk allocation on HS2 earlier in the previous thread, but managed to get the specifics exactly inverted.
What sort of mitigations can we put in place in order to avoid this sort of situation with future projects? Perhaps some sort of independent delivery authority, which would take charge once the initial political decision to proceed has been taken?
Yes. Keep the civil service beaks out of it. Like the vaccines. Imagine they'd been tasked with vaccine delivery?
I had Bank of England independence in mind when I said that, but that's a model which I suspect you might feel is a little creaky at best!
But the Vaccine Taskforce is a good comparison. The government sets the end goal, together with some broad priorities within that, and defines the funding envelope. And then it it's handed off to an Infrastructure Taskforce who are charged with getting the work done.
The work of the taskforce would be funded to cover the bare minimum of costs, with a bigger chunk on top which would be paid according to results. They'd still be responsible to parliament, with a select ctte to scrutinise their work - but government wouldn't be able to change the goal or funding without passing further legislation.
That'd shield it from short-term politicking (which Sunak would claim to appreciate!), in-fighting SpAds, and civil servants with misaligned priorities. And it'd also be similar enough to the late C19th way of doing things that traditionalists would be kept happy.
We certainly need to do something. As things stand, projects that run for longer than one parliament risk becoming almost undeliverable, and that's going to have huge costs for us in the future.
There's something in that, but there's also a problem that politicians go for major projects that are all or nothing essentially, which results in this HS2 madness.
Take a leaf out of the motorways book when they were built. The M6 is the longest motorway in England and the first to begin construction, but it wasn't all opened at once. In 1958 it began life as simply the Preston Bypass and cost in the tens of millions in modern money, not tens of billions.
Year by year then from 1958 to the end of the 70s roughly we had patches built across the country which were individually usable from when they were built, and eventually over time joined up into something grander.
There's no need to go all in from day one. Design some new routes and build them piecemeal, opening each one as soon as its built, rather than spending decades on white elephants because they're more impressive sounding projects.
Its a shame we've wasted fifty years and not continued doing what we were doing then, all parties bear responsibility. If we'd continued investing in our infrastructure at the rate we were then, how much better off would we be now?
That's a very road-oriented argument, though, whatever its merits for that area. Doesn't work for a railway using a whole new level of rolling stock and track, not least because the signalling will almost certainly be modernised at the same time.
Sure it can if you're talking local transportation rather than grand projects.
Want to build Northern Powerhouse Rail? You could start by building the stretch from Liverpool to Warrington, then open that once constructed. And repeat that across the network until its all built.
The instance on doing it as a grand project to London is what's made it take forever.
Trouble with that argument is it's still stuck on C19 decisions. It's very much as if you insisted on making a motorway by widening only the roads existing in the 1930s - including ones goiung through city centres, and so on.
That approach to NPR is itself a very strong indication of a second grade system devised by second grade minds in Whitehall and Westminster.
The delay is utterly meaningless frankly. It means the Northern leg will be determined by the incoming Labour government next year unless the polls change dramatically.
Over to you Starmer.
Is it meaningless ? Presumably a policy change will have costs related to changes in contracts, even if it's looking several years ahead ( @Casino_Royale ?) ?
Only to change again in 12-18 months' time.
Yes.
Also, and this isn't widely known, almost all the construction contracts at HS2 were let on a cost-plus basis (which means contractors are rewarded at their cost, plus their overhead, plus a - decent - profit) for any work they do, and compensated for any change or delay on top, which essentially means they take little to no risk.
This can happen when the scope and risk allocation isn't clear, such that the supply chain simply won't take on the works without it, which is exactly what has happened with HS2: the business case kept changing, and so did the core scope (which was overengineered to the original spec of speed, and then never revised to reflect the modified capacity argument) all the while as the network was meddled with on a CapEx basis whilst the line was porked out to deal with political challenges and objections. And, they still haven't made a decision on Euston.
It's a case study of poor sponsorship and client control.
Ah, apologies - I mentioned that there was something unusual with the risk allocation on HS2 earlier in the previous thread, but managed to get the specifics exactly inverted.
What sort of mitigations can we put in place in order to avoid this sort of situation with future projects? Perhaps some sort of independent delivery authority, which would take charge once the initial political decision to proceed has been taken?
Yes. Keep the civil service beaks out of it. Like the vaccines. Imagine they'd been tasked with vaccine delivery?
I had Bank of England independence in mind when I said that, but that's a model which I suspect you might feel is a little creaky at best!
But the Vaccine Taskforce is a good comparison. The government sets the end goal, together with some broad priorities within that, and defines the funding envelope. And then it it's handed off to an Infrastructure Taskforce who are charged with getting the work done.
The work of the taskforce would be funded to cover the bare minimum of costs, with a bigger chunk on top which would be paid according to results. They'd still be responsible to parliament, with a select ctte to scrutinise their work - but government wouldn't be able to change the goal or funding without passing further legislation.
That'd shield it from short-term politicking (which Sunak would claim to appreciate!), in-fighting SpAds, and civil servants with misaligned priorities. And it'd also be similar enough to the late C19th way of doing things that traditionalists would be kept happy.
We certainly need to do something. As things stand, projects that run for longer than one parliament risk becoming almost undeliverable, and that's going to have huge costs for us in the future.
There's something in that, but there's also a problem that politicians go for major projects that are all or nothing essentially, which results in this HS2 madness.
Take a leaf out of the motorways book when they were built. The M6 is the longest motorway in England and the first to begin construction, but it wasn't all opened at once. In 1958 it began life as simply the Preston Bypass and cost in the tens of millions in modern money, not tens of billions.
Year by year then from 1958 to the end of the 70s roughly we had patches built across the country which were individually usable from when they were built, and eventually over time joined up into something grander.
There's no need to go all in from day one. Design some new routes and build them piecemeal, opening each one as soon as its built, rather than spending decades on white elephants because they're more impressive sounding projects.
Its a shame we've wasted fifty years and not continued doing what we were doing then, all parties bear responsibility. If we'd continued investing in our infrastructure at the rate we were then, how much better off would we be now?
That's a very road-oriented argument, though, whatever its merits for that area. Doesn't work for a railway using a whole new level of rolling stock and track, not least because the signalling will almost certainly be modernised at the same time.
Unlike BR to be road-oriented.
But it was a fallacious argument.
Trams, rail etc can all be built piecemeal and then hooked up with an overarching plan but intermediate steps.
You don't need to wait until the entire city is covered in trams before you open your first stops and get the first trams moving. You don't need to wait until the entire rail network is built before you can open your first stops. There's no difference between motorways and railways like that, motorways you can only get on and off at specific junctions not wherever you please - but build it piecemeal and it can be achieved step by step while preparing to go onto the next step.
We need more SMART targets. Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely.
The delay is utterly meaningless frankly. It means the Northern leg will be determined by the incoming Labour government next year unless the polls change dramatically.
Over to you Starmer.
Is it meaningless ? Presumably a policy change will have costs related to changes in contracts, even if it's looking several years ahead ( @Casino_Royale ?) ?
Only to change again in 12-18 months' time.
Yes.
Also, and this isn't widely known, almost all the construction contracts at HS2 were let on a cost-plus basis (which means contractors are rewarded at their cost, plus their overhead, plus a - decent - profit) for any work they do, and compensated for any change or delay on top, which essentially means they take little to no risk.
This can happen when the scope and risk allocation isn't clear, such that the supply chain simply won't take on the works without it, which is exactly what has happened with HS2: the business case kept changing, and so did the core scope (which was overengineered to the original spec of speed, and then never revised to reflect the modified capacity argument) all the while as the network was meddled with on a CapEx basis whilst the line was porked out to deal with political challenges and objections. And, they still haven't made a decision on Euston.
It's a case study of poor sponsorship and client control.
Ah, apologies - I mentioned that there was something unusual with the risk allocation on HS2 earlier in the previous thread, but managed to get the specifics exactly inverted.
What sort of mitigations can we put in place in order to avoid this sort of situation with future projects? Perhaps some sort of independent delivery authority, which would take charge once the initial political decision to proceed has been taken?
Yes. Keep the civil service beaks out of it. Like the vaccines. Imagine they'd been tasked with vaccine delivery?
I had Bank of England independence in mind when I said that, but that's a model which I suspect you might feel is a little creaky at best!
But the Vaccine Taskforce is a good comparison. The government sets the end goal, together with some broad priorities within that, and defines the funding envelope. And then it it's handed off to an Infrastructure Taskforce who are charged with getting the work done.
The work of the taskforce would be funded to cover the bare minimum of costs, with a bigger chunk on top which would be paid according to results. They'd still be responsible to parliament, with a select ctte to scrutinise their work - but government wouldn't be able to change the goal or funding without passing further legislation.
That'd shield it from short-term politicking (which Sunak would claim to appreciate!), in-fighting SpAds, and civil servants with misaligned priorities. And it'd also be similar enough to the late C19th way of doing things that traditionalists would be kept happy.
We certainly need to do something. As things stand, projects that run for longer than one parliament risk becoming almost undeliverable, and that's going to have huge costs for us in the future.
There's something in that, but there's also a problem that politicians go for major projects that are all or nothing essentially, which results in this HS2 madness.
Take a leaf out of the motorways book when they were built. The M6 is the longest motorway in England and the first to begin construction, but it wasn't all opened at once. In 1958 it began life as simply the Preston Bypass and cost in the tens of millions in modern money, not tens of billions.
Year by year then from 1958 to the end of the 70s roughly we had patches built across the country which were individually usable from when they were built, and eventually over time joined up into something grander.
There's no need to go all in from day one. Design some new routes and build them piecemeal, opening each one as soon as its built, rather than spending decades on white elephants because they're more impressive sounding projects.
Its a shame we've wasted fifty years and not continued doing what we were doing then, all parties bear responsibility. If we'd continued investing in our infrastructure at the rate we were then, how much better off would we be now?
That's a very road-oriented argument, though, whatever its merits for that area. Doesn't work for a railway using a whole new level of rolling stock and track, not least because the signalling will almost certainly be modernised at the same time.
Sure it can if you're talking local transportation rather than grand projects.
Want to build Northern Powerhouse Rail? You could start by building the stretch from Liverpool to Warrington, then open that once constructed. And repeat that across the network until its all built.
The instance on doing it as a grand project to London is what's made it take forever.
I agree 100%. They can also then respond to demand properly.
On topic: In the US, wealth is often a negative for Republican candidates, but not for Democratic candidates. Notable examples: FDR, the Kennedys, and, currently, California Governor Gavin Newsom.
There are ways Republicans can lessen that problem. For example, by putting their assets in a blind trust, after they are elected.
Or by showing they are in touch with average people, as George W. Bush did, in a number of ways. For example, by earning his money by providing something popular, a major league baseball team. (From time to time, he sat in the regular seats so he could listen to fans' thoughts about ways to improve their experiences at the ball park.)
I'm not sure that's entirely true. Trump tends if anything to exaggerate his wealth and business acumen for political advantage as a Republican, whereas Bloomberg was seen as an elitist who tried to buy the Democratic nomination.
It's possible those on the economic right find it a bit trickier overall if they are wealthy, however, simply because the type of policies they implement tend to be small state and low tax, and the obvious jibe is that this benefits them personally. A wealthy centre/left politician is less likely to be implementing the type of policies that can easily be portrayed as benefiting themselves and their friends.
In practice, only the wealthy have much chance to get ahead in US politics.
Joe Biden isn't massively wealthy, is he? Or at least he wasn't as VP - he made a lot from books/speaking engagements in his post-VP, pre-President period.
I mean, these things are relative - clearly, he is a lot wealthier than most Americans, and was well paid as a Senator for decades. But he's nowhere near the group of US politicians who can self-fund to a significant degree.
Nor was De Santis, he had a net worth less than $1 million until he wrote a book.
If you rise through the party machine you don't have to be that wealthy, if you want to go straight to the top elections for Senate or President or Governor it helps to be wealthy however, same for an Independent bid in the US for those positions
When Lucy Letby was charged, no nurses stepped back.
This tells us a lot about the ratios of nurses who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
And the number of armed police officers who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
It tells us nothing
All it tells us is that police fear that grieving relatives may use social media to lash out at them as individuals and that their senior management are spineless bastards who would throw their officers to the wolves without a second thought
Bollocks.
If you have the power and responsibilities of an armed police officer, you have signed up for higher scrutiny and standards. Their job, that they chose to do, gives them the ability to deprive people of their freedoms before a trial and, in some cases, their lives. If that is done with impunity, cops are nothing but another street gang and their boss just happens to be the government. Police need to be held to a higher standard than your typical civvy because of that responsibility and power - not a lower standard - and should be more willing to sacrifice themselves and their individual pride for the consent of the public - not less.
To protect and serve means you have signed up to put yourself in harms way instead of letting bad things happen to the average Joe, and even suspects should be treated as the average Joe because they are not guilty until a court finds them guilty. Importing this US mindset that nothing is worth more than the life of a cop is a sure fire way to get American style policing - excess brutality and a feeling of being above the law.
I am a fully paid up member of tofu-eating wokerati liberal blob, but I am very nervous of an SO19 officer discharging his duty and his firearm against bad guys on our behalf and finding himself or herself the wrong side of the CPS.
Is there an argument that SO19 should be issued with a licence to kill in service without legal recourse? Much like Cressida Dick received no sanction and got promoted after Menenez got blown away after her and her team's panicked error. Dick, as I recall was the Operation Commander on the day.
We do not know that people are bad guys until a trial happens. Further in the thread I said if a suspect is clearly threatening civvies with a weapon and you get the order, yes. But we don't have the death penalty, and even if we did it should go through court, so extrajudicial killing should always be considered to be the worst option. Arguably every shooting by a cop should be highly scrutinised because they so often get the benefit of the doubt.
In the Chris Kaba case, with the information in public domain, the worst thing he did was try to drive away whilst police were talking to him and he hit a cop car - by accident or on purpose, who knows? And for that he was shot dead? He may have been in the wrong with his actions - but he didn't deserve to be killed extrajudicially for them.
This is not the Wild West, with police officers gunning down anyone who looks at them crossways. Police killings are very rare. And, they are thoroughly investigated.
You, on the other hand, with no knowledge of the case, have already deemed the officer in question to be guilty.
It's a little bit too much like the Wild West for my liking, Sean.
The killing of Jean Charles de Menezes lifted the veil under which these operations are usually performed and what we saw wasn't pretty. I don't see much reason to believe that things have changed since. I wish that weren't the case.
I think HS2 will likely follow the Edinburgh Trams and Crossrail "journey".
Political cowardice, incompetence, increased costs, lots of whining from the motoring lobby. Years or decades late.
And yet significantly higher patronage than expected. Over capacity immediately. Benefits not included in the business case appear out of nowhere.
Commuters jump out of their cars en masse. Increased footfall in local businesses. Huge economies of scale - the original line has seen a doubling of passengers itself, and Lothian Bus passenger numbers grew too.
BUILD IT
TLDR: HS2 is going to be a disaster but still worth doing, in the end.
Our pessimism on the benefits of public transport investment is a sort of cultural cringe.
Our pessimism on the benefits of investment is cringe.
We stopped building our motorway network in the 1970s too. Fifty wasted years while our population has grown 25%
We need to get going on investment. Roads, rails, trams, paths - we've neglected them all and we need to invest in all of them sadly.
You can only neglect your infrastructure so long before it creaks.
You will be SHOCKED when you hear about Mr Beeching.
Let me see if I can put it in a way you may understand.
Abandoning investment in our road infrastructure fifty long years ago and leaving things to be neglected while our population has grown by a quarter in that time, has been as damaging as the Beeching cuts to rail at a time while our population was stable.
You wonder why I say its not either/or, we need both? That's why. Maybe that will help you come around to understanding the stunning neglect our infrastructure has suffered for half a century.
I am not sure you are correct. More roads just mean more congestion.
I remember my enthusiasm in the late eighties when I could get off the North and South Circular roads and onto the shiny new M25.
The M25 is now a car park. Or are you planning on a series of concentric motorways every 5 miles out from the current motorway. If you do that there will only be room for motorways and nothing else in Southern England and the Home Counties. Building motorways is not the answer. Sh*t public transport on the other hand is a disaster.
The latest HS2 rumour doing the rounds is a delay rather than scrapping .
Basically we’re too frightened to cancel it but will just kick it into the long grass. Anyone thinking that this section of HS2 will ever be built is clearly deluded .
A delay solely to pretend that Rishi can afford to deliver tax cuts.
No 10 has worked out belatedly that cutting taxes after moaning about a lack of money for HS2 might not be a good look .
God this government makes me sick .
According to Yougov more Northerners oppose HS2 than support it anyway.
Of course, we Northerners drive. If you want to help the North then invest in our long-neglected motorway network that hasn't been touched for fifty years would be a better starting point than yet another bloody trainline to London.
And if you're going to invest in Northern Rail, then invest in Northern Rail. NPR would be a far better levelling up exercise than a trainline to London.
But to actually build HS2 but then not bother with the one link to the North? That's just adding insult to injury, then spitting at us too.
Don't expect gratitude from Northerners for that.
There isn't a special Northern driving gene.
Indeed, people in the north have some of the lowest access to cars outside of London, and some of the shortest commutes.
The delay is utterly meaningless frankly. It means the Northern leg will be determined by the incoming Labour government next year unless the polls change dramatically.
Over to you Starmer.
Is it meaningless ? Presumably a policy change will have costs related to changes in contracts, even if it's looking several years ahead ( @Casino_Royale ?) ?
Only to change again in 12-18 months' time.
Yes.
Also, and this isn't widely known, almost all the construction contracts at HS2 were let on a cost-plus basis (which means contractors are rewarded at their cost, plus their overhead, plus a - decent - profit) for any work they do, and compensated for any change or delay on top, which essentially means they take little to no risk.
This can happen when the scope and risk allocation isn't clear, such that the supply chain simply won't take on the works without it, which is exactly what has happened with HS2: the business case kept changing, and so did the core scope (which was overengineered to the original spec of speed, and then never revised to reflect the modified capacity argument) all the while as the network was meddled with on a CapEx basis whilst the line was porked out to deal with political challenges and objections. And, they still haven't made a decision on Euston.
It's a case study of poor sponsorship and client control.
Ah, apologies - I mentioned that there was something unusual with the risk allocation on HS2 earlier in the previous thread, but managed to get the specifics exactly inverted.
What sort of mitigations can we put in place in order to avoid this sort of situation with future projects? Perhaps some sort of independent delivery authority, which would take charge once the initial political decision to proceed has been taken?
Yes. Keep the civil service beaks out of it. Like the vaccines. Imagine they'd been tasked with vaccine delivery?
I had Bank of England independence in mind when I said that, but that's a model which I suspect you might feel is a little creaky at best!
But the Vaccine Taskforce is a good comparison. The government sets the end goal, together with some broad priorities within that, and defines the funding envelope. And then it it's handed off to an Infrastructure Taskforce who are charged with getting the work done.
The work of the taskforce would be funded to cover the bare minimum of costs, with a bigger chunk on top which would be paid according to results. They'd still be responsible to parliament, with a select ctte to scrutinise their work - but government wouldn't be able to change the goal or funding without passing further legislation.
That'd shield it from short-term politicking (which Sunak would claim to appreciate!), in-fighting SpAds, and civil servants with misaligned priorities. And it'd also be similar enough to the late C19th way of doing things that traditionalists would be kept happy.
We certainly need to do something. As things stand, projects that run for longer than one parliament risk becoming almost undeliverable, and that's going to have huge costs for us in the future.
There's something in that, but there's also a problem that politicians go for major projects that are all or nothing essentially, which results in this HS2 madness.
Take a leaf out of the motorways book when they were built. The M6 is the longest motorway in England and the first to begin construction, but it wasn't all opened at once. In 1958 it began life as simply the Preston Bypass and cost in the tens of millions in modern money, not tens of billions.
Year by year then from 1958 to the end of the 70s roughly we had patches built across the country which were individually usable from when they were built, and eventually over time joined up into something grander.
There's no need to go all in from day one. Design some new routes and build them piecemeal, opening each one as soon as its built, rather than spending decades on white elephants because they're more impressive sounding projects.
Its a shame we've wasted fifty years and not continued doing what we were doing then, all parties bear responsibility. If we'd continued investing in our infrastructure at the rate we were then, how much better off would we be now?
That's a very road-oriented argument, though, whatever its merits for that area. Doesn't work for a railway using a whole new level of rolling stock and track, not least because the signalling will almost certainly be modernised at the same time.
Sure it can if you're talking local transportation rather than grand projects.
Want to build Northern Powerhouse Rail? You could start by building the stretch from Liverpool to Warrington, then open that once constructed. And repeat that across the network until its all built.
The instance on doing it as a grand project to London is what's made it take forever.
Trouble with that argument is it's still stuck on C19 decisions. It's very much as if you insisted on making a motorway by widening only the roads existing in the 1930s - including ones goiung through city centres, and so on.
That approach to NPR is itself a very strong indication of a second grade system devised by second grade minds in Whitehall and Westminster.
Eh? I'm talking about a new line.
There's already a rail line between Warrington and Liverpool, indeed between all those places, but as far as I'm aware NPR is planned as a new line.
So break the new line into specific, measurable, achievable and realistic timely steps and open each step when its done while preparing for the next steps.
Sure you won't get all the benefits immediately, but you'll get some benefits sooner and you'll get on with actually just building the bloody thing rather than going back and forth for decades.
Don't wait half a century for it all to be built before opening any of it.
When Lucy Letby was charged, no nurses stepped back.
This tells us a lot about the ratios of nurses who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
And the number of armed police officers who think they have committed murder to the number who know they haven’t.
It tells us nothing
All it tells us is that police fear that grieving relatives may use social media to lash out at them as individuals and that their senior management are spineless bastards who would throw their officers to the wolves without a second thought
Bollocks.
If you have the power and responsibilities of an armed police officer, you have signed up for higher scrutiny and standards. Their job, that they chose to do, gives them the ability to deprive people of their freedoms before a trial and, in some cases, their lives. If that is done with impunity, cops are nothing but another street gang and their boss just happens to be the government. Police need to be held to a higher standard than your typical civvy because of that responsibility and power - not a lower standard - and should be more willing to sacrifice themselves and their individual pride for the consent of the public - not less.
To protect and serve means you have signed up to put yourself in harms way instead of letting bad things happen to the average Joe, and even suspects should be treated as the average Joe because they are not guilty until a court finds them guilty. Importing this US mindset that nothing is worth more than the life of a cop is a sure fire way to get American style policing - excess brutality and a feeling of being above the law.
I am a fully paid up member of tofu-eating wokerati liberal blob, but I am very nervous of an SO19 officer discharging his duty and his firearm against bad guys on our behalf and finding himself or herself the wrong side of the CPS.
Is there an argument that SO19 should be issued with a licence to kill in service without legal recourse? Much like Cressida Dick received no sanction and got promoted after Menenez got blown away after her and her team's panicked error. Dick, as I recall was the Operation Commander on the day.
We do not know that people are bad guys until a trial happens. Further in the thread I said if a suspect is clearly threatening civvies with a weapon and you get the order, yes. But we don't have the death penalty, and even if we did it should go through court, so extrajudicial killing should always be considered to be the worst option. Arguably every shooting by a cop should be highly scrutinised because they so often get the benefit of the doubt.
In the Chris Kaba case, with the information in public domain, the worst thing he did was try to drive away whilst police were talking to him and he hit a cop car - by accident or on purpose, who knows? And for that he was shot dead? He may have been in the wrong with his actions - but he didn't deserve to be killed extrajudicially for them.
This is not the Wild West, with police officers gunning down anyone who looks at them crossways. Police killings are very rare. And, they are thoroughly investigated.
You, on the other hand, with no knowledge of the case, have already deemed the officer in question to be guilty.
It's a little bit too much like the Wild West for my liking, Sean.
The killing of Jean Charles de Menezes lifted the veil under which these operations usually operate and what we saw wasn't pretty. I don't see much reason to believe that things have changed since. I wish that weren't the case.
Nobody was guilty of murder in that case, and such cases are extremely rare.
I think HS2 will likely follow the Edinburgh Trams and Crossrail "journey".
Political cowardice, incompetence, increased costs, lots of whining from the motoring lobby. Years or decades late.
And yet significantly higher patronage than expected. Over capacity immediately. Benefits not included in the business case appear out of nowhere.
Commuters jump out of their cars en masse. Increased footfall in local businesses. Huge economies of scale - the original line has seen a doubling of passengers itself, and Lothian Bus passenger numbers grew too.
BUILD IT
TLDR: HS2 is going to be a disaster but still worth doing, in the end.
Our pessimism on the benefits of public transport investment is a sort of cultural cringe.
Our pessimism on the benefits of investment is cringe.
We stopped building our motorway network in the 1970s too. Fifty wasted years while our population has grown 25%
We need to get going on investment. Roads, rails, trams, paths - we've neglected them all and we need to invest in all of them sadly.
You can only neglect your infrastructure so long before it creaks.
You will be SHOCKED when you hear about Mr Beeching.
Let me see if I can put it in a way you may understand.
Abandoning investment in our road infrastructure fifty long years ago and leaving things to be neglected while our population has grown by a quarter in that time, has been as damaging as the Beeching cuts to rail at a time while our population was stable.
You wonder why I say its not either/or, we need both? That's why. Maybe that will help you come around to understanding the stunning neglect our infrastructure has suffered for half a century.
I am not sure you are correct. More roads just mean more congestion.
I remember my enthusiasm in the late eighties when I could get off the North and South Circular roads and onto the shiny new M25.
The M25 is now a car park. Or are you planning on a series of concentric motorways every 5 miles out from the current motorway. If you do that there will only be room for motorways and nothing else in Southern England and the Home Counties. Building motorways is not the answer. Sh*t public transport on the other hand is a disaster.
More roads don't mean more congestion, more people do. Our population has grown 25% in that timeline.
What new motorways were built in that time? None?
If you have a motorway network designed for our current population, then add 17 million people while not building a single other motorway (not counting the M6 Toll here, what a joke that is) then what did you expect?
Yes a second M25 would be a fantastic idea, a lot of vehicles travelling into that one have no need to be there. And if our population is stable then that might be all you need, but if our population keeps growing we'll keep needing more and more infrastructure.
Ideally though would be motorways and new towns and cities away from London. Why does everyone have to go into London?
Build more Milton Keynes and other new towns across the country, no need for everyone to be going into a single city. And their cars will be nowhere near your M25.
The delay is utterly meaningless frankly. It means the Northern leg will be determined by the incoming Labour government next year unless the polls change dramatically.
Over to you Starmer.
Is it meaningless ? Presumably a policy change will have costs related to changes in contracts, even if it's looking several years ahead ( @Casino_Royale ?) ?
Only to change again in 12-18 months' time.
Yes.
Also, and this isn't widely known, almost all the construction contracts at HS2 were let on a cost-plus basis (which means contractors are rewarded at their cost, plus their overhead, plus a - decent - profit) for any work they do, and compensated for any change or delay on top, which essentially means they take little to no risk.
This can happen when the scope and risk allocation isn't clear, such that the supply chain simply won't take on the works without it, which is exactly what has happened with HS2: the business case kept changing, and so did the core scope (which was overengineered to the original spec of speed, and then never revised to reflect the modified capacity argument) all the while as the network was meddled with on a CapEx basis whilst the line was porked out to deal with political challenges and objections. And, they still haven't made a decision on Euston.
It's a case study of poor sponsorship and client control.
Ah, apologies - I mentioned that there was something unusual with the risk allocation on HS2 earlier in the previous thread, but managed to get the specifics exactly inverted.
What sort of mitigations can we put in place in order to avoid this sort of situation with future projects? Perhaps some sort of independent delivery authority, which would take charge once the initial political decision to proceed has been taken?
Yes. Keep the civil service beaks out of it. Like the vaccines. Imagine they'd been tasked with vaccine delivery?
I had Bank of England independence in mind when I said that, but that's a model which I suspect you might feel is a little creaky at best!
But the Vaccine Taskforce is a good comparison. The government sets the end goal, together with some broad priorities within that, and defines the funding envelope. And then it it's handed off to an Infrastructure Taskforce who are charged with getting the work done.
The work of the taskforce would be funded to cover the bare minimum of costs, with a bigger chunk on top which would be paid according to results. They'd still be responsible to parliament, with a select ctte to scrutinise their work - but government wouldn't be able to change the goal or funding without passing further legislation.
That'd shield it from short-term politicking (which Sunak would claim to appreciate!), in-fighting SpAds, and civil servants with misaligned priorities. And it'd also be similar enough to the late C19th way of doing things that traditionalists would be kept happy.
We certainly need to do something. As things stand, projects that run for longer than one parliament risk becoming almost undeliverable, and that's going to have huge costs for us in the future.
There's something in that, but there's also a problem that politicians go for major projects that are all or nothing essentially, which results in this HS2 madness.
Take a leaf out of the motorways book when they were built. The M6 is the longest motorway in England and the first to begin construction, but it wasn't all opened at once. In 1958 it began life as simply the Preston Bypass and cost in the tens of millions in modern money, not tens of billions.
Year by year then from 1958 to the end of the 70s roughly we had patches built across the country which were individually usable from when they were built, and eventually over time joined up into something grander.
There's no need to go all in from day one. Design some new routes and build them piecemeal, opening each one as soon as its built, rather than spending decades on white elephants because they're more impressive sounding projects.
Its a shame we've wasted fifty years and not continued doing what we were doing then, all parties bear responsibility. If we'd continued investing in our infrastructure at the rate we were then, how much better off would we be now?
That's a very road-oriented argument, though, whatever its merits for that area. Doesn't work for a railway using a whole new level of rolling stock and track, not least because the signalling will almost certainly be modernised at the same time.
Sure it can if you're talking local transportation rather than grand projects.
Want to build Northern Powerhouse Rail? You could start by building the stretch from Liverpool to Warrington, then open that once constructed. And repeat that across the network until its all built.
The instance on doing it as a grand project to London is what's made it take forever.
Trouble with that argument is it's still stuck on C19 decisions. It's very much as if you insisted on making a motorway by widening only the roads existing in the 1930s - including ones goiung through city centres, and so on.
That approach to NPR is itself a very strong indication of a second grade system devised by second grade minds in Whitehall and Westminster.
Eh? I'm talking about a new line.
There's already a rail line between Warrington and Liverpool, indeed between all those places, but as far as I'm aware NPR is planned as a new line.
So break the new line into specific, measurable, achievable and realistic timely steps and open each step when its done while preparing for the next steps.
Sure you won't get all the benefits immediately, but you'll get some benefits sooner and you'll get on with actually just building the bloody thing rather than going back and forth for decades.
Don't wait half a century for it all to be built before opening any of it.
But a new line in bits is useless unless it connects with existing bits. Above all for an inter-city long range line. And you want to be able to have the new line away from the old one to make better use of line layout.
I think HS2 will likely follow the Edinburgh Trams and Crossrail "journey".
Political cowardice, incompetence, increased costs, lots of whining from the motoring lobby. Years or decades late.
And yet significantly higher patronage than expected. Over capacity immediately. Benefits not included in the business case appear out of nowhere.
Commuters jump out of their cars en masse. Increased footfall in local businesses. Huge economies of scale - the original line has seen a doubling of passengers itself, and Lothian Bus passenger numbers grew too.
BUILD IT
TLDR: HS2 is going to be a disaster but still worth doing, in the end.
Our pessimism on the benefits of public transport investment is a sort of cultural cringe.
Our pessimism on the benefits of investment is cringe.
We stopped building our motorway network in the 1970s too. Fifty wasted years while our population has grown 25%
We need to get going on investment. Roads, rails, trams, paths - we've neglected them all and we need to invest in all of them sadly.
You can only neglect your infrastructure so long before it creaks.
You will be SHOCKED when you hear about Mr Beeching.
Let me see if I can put it in a way you may understand.
Abandoning investment in our road infrastructure fifty long years ago and leaving things to be neglected while our population has grown by a quarter in that time, has been as damaging as the Beeching cuts to rail at a time while our population was stable.
You wonder why I say its not either/or, we need both? That's why. Maybe that will help you come around to understanding the stunning neglect our infrastructure has suffered for half a century.
I am not sure you are correct. More roads just mean more congestion.
I remember my enthusiasm in the late eighties when I could get off the North and South Circular roads and onto the shiny new M25.
The M25 is now a car park. Or are you planning on a series of concentric motorways every 5 miles out from the current motorway. If you do that there will only be room for motorways and nothing else in Southern England and the Home Counties. Building motorways is not the answer. Sh*t public transport on the other hand is a disaster.
More roads don't mean more congestion, more people do. Our population has grown 25% in that timeline.
What new motorways were built in that time? None?
If you have a motorway network designed for our current population, then add 17 million people while not building a single other motorway (not counting the M6 Toll here, what a joke that is) then what did you expect?
Yes a second M25 would be a fantastic idea, a lot of vehicles travelling into that one have no need to be there. And if our population is stable then that might be all you need, but if our population keeps growing we'll keep needing more and more infrastructure.
Why not a third one?
FYI: 40% of households in Liverpool do not have access to a car. 53% of people in Middlesbrough have a commute less than 10km.
Labour’s loss will be a remarkable event, as it comes three years after they won a historic absolute majority - the only such event of the modern (post-PR) era.
Has the turnaround arisen because of Covid and the response to it? Are there parallels to the UK?
(FWIW I understand that NZ dealt very well in the early stages at keeping Covid out, but at substantial cost (isolating the nation, stopping people coming home for funerals etc)) and then the inevitable need to re-open seeing more deaths than at any other time).
The completely mad thing about this whole farrago is it looks like they took the decision to cancel the Manchester leg and announce it now, completely forgetting that they're in Manchester next week.
Then people have rather awkwardly pointed to the connection and now its as if the line is "OK we won't confirm anything now, we can cancel it officially in two weeks time instead once we've had the Conference, that'll make the awkwardness go away".
The rumour is that this was leaked deliberately to harm the government at this moment. Apparently aided and abetted by “the Times” and “spectator”??! However I don’t buy that as the leaks have been coming for months - about various delays and cost cutting measures. Likewise the rumours about Euston date back many months (the Sun ran this story - no Euston - in January)
It’s a cock up. Not a conspiracy. And what a massive cock up
Call me naive (don't all rush at once), but I keep thinking that it's all smoke and mirrors. Leak a few things over time about HS2 cutbacks. Force the Opposition to commit to HS2 in full. Then get the Opposition to commit to review the costs and maybe cut back (because you've shafted the economy). Issue non-denial denials. Commit to nothing.
And then... before the assembled masses at Heston Aerodrome the Party Conference... Commit to completing HS2 in full all the way to the Rovers Return.
And then I sober up. At which point I realise that they are not that bright. As @Leon says, the leaks have been coming for months. Rishi can't even buy trousers that fit him properly so I doubt very much that he's mapped a path all the way to Conference only to say (with an attempt a theatrical flourish) "I fooled you all".
Roll on the General Election.
The whole 3D chess ideation stems from people who are ideologically close to a figure who displays all the signs of being an actual moron. It's hard to process that, and in their dissonance they hallucinate genius plans where none exist.
The sad truth is that, no matter your ideology, there are very stupid people who agree with you. Once you grasp that it becomes nice and easy to free yourself from defending idiots with ever more exotic stories of how this or that dumb thing is actually part of a clever plan.
I'm not sure if there's anybody in the party smart enough to play chess (irrespective of dimension). For the record, I'm far from "ideologically close" to these morons.
Comments
It wasn't really a major project, though - an existing RAF airfield with a gigantic runway that had been kept in good working order, an empty box of a terminal building, a car park, and an interminably trundling bus service from Doncaster.
Is there an argument that SO19 should be issued with a licence to kill in service without legal recourse? Much like Cressida Dick received no sanction and got promoted after Menenez got blown away after her and her team's panicked error. Dick, as I recall was the Operation Commander on the day.
I have been quite busy this weekend and catching up this morning it seems Sunak is taking a hammering with only @HYUFD gamely defending him, though on Inheritance Tax it is his own personal interest at play here and frankly any change to IT would be insane at this time
On the wider issue of Sunak, he and Hunt are technocrats and accountants, and not politicians
They remind me of the attitude the IMF would have if called into the country, but it is politically tone deaf even though they are asking the right questions, not just on climate change but also on HS2, and I believe the same questions with confront Starmer and Reeves as soon as they go into office
Personally, I accept the conservative party are going into opposition and frankly an early GE and the inevitable change would be a relief
I do have a concern for the conservative party going forward if @HYUFD represents the future, as it is not a future I would accept as I became politically homeless but at 80, which I will be at the time of the next election, whatever happens is unlikely to affect myself or my wife and our main objective every day is to keep taking our pills and enjoy the love and company of our beloved family, including our 5 grand children who are all local to us.
IIRC the frontline officers in the de Mendez case had a cast iron defence - they had obeyed orders, which were under rules which they had been specifically briefed on the legality of.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-66910334
QTWTAI "are they still going?"
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12557491/Former-Olympic-rower-James-Cracknell-chosen-Tory-election-candidate-Colchester.html
In the Chris Kaba case, with the information in public domain, the worst thing he did was try to drive away whilst police were talking to him and he hit a cop car - by accident or on purpose, who knows? And for that he was shot dead? He may have been in the wrong with his actions - but he didn't deserve to be killed extrajudicially for them.
(etc etc)
The point of it was to allow vehicles, particularly commercial traffic, to bypass the city. This is undoubtedly a good thing for all parties.
Unfortunately, it's primarily used by Edinburgh residents to commute to the big business or retail parks to the west and east of the city.
This has two effects: it's induced increased rates of driving inside the city, as people make their way to the bypass. Edinburgh remains hugely congested.
But more importantly, the bypass is now at a complete standstill at rush hour, with those commercial vehicles stuck in traffic. Not good for the economy.
The solution? Close most of the junctions onto the bypass from the city and shift the balance back in favour of the excellent public transport that is available.
Now you call it a failure as its being used more than intended?
Make your mind up. It seems on your own objective criteria its been a riproaring success. I don't know anything about the situation, just going off what you said.
People want to drive to retail parks where they can load shopping into their boot rather than carry shopping home on a tram or bus shocker.
If the bypass is too congested due to a shortage of capacity don't bemoan its success, build another bypass. If a tramline or rail line is full you don't complain that its induced demand, you celebrate its success and argue for another to be built now - same with roads.
Stop being embarrassed by successful investment in infrastructure, its a kind of cultural cringe.
Only too familiar with the situation when there is an accident or flooding etc and the bypass backs up through the slip roads onto the radials and blocks them too.
But am I missing something? You pretty much need access to the bypass from the major radials (FB, Glasgow, Lanarkshire, Biggar, Peebles, Dalkeith, Dunbar etc.) because of the way that the hills/Forth cut between them. But you also need access to these same radials from Edinburgh. So ...?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12047151/Heavily-pregnant-woman-lover-accused-murdering-mummified-pensioner-appear-court.html
But the Vaccine Taskforce is a good comparison. The government sets the end goal, together with some broad priorities within that, and defines the funding envelope. And then it it's handed off to an Infrastructure Taskforce who are charged with getting the work done.
The work of the taskforce would be funded to cover the bare minimum of costs, with a bigger chunk on top which would be paid according to results. They'd still be responsible to parliament, with a select ctte to scrutinise their work - but government wouldn't be able to change the goal or funding without passing further legislation.
That'd shield it from short-term politicking (which Sunak would claim to appreciate!), in-fighting SpAds, and civil servants with misaligned priorities. And it'd also be similar enough to the late C19th way of doing things that traditionalists would be kept happy.
We certainly need to do something. As things stand, projects that run for longer than one parliament risk becoming almost undeliverable, and that's going to have huge costs for us in the future.
What's Gove got to do, got to do with it?
Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken?
I was so surprised to find that after all
It doesn't hurt to be alone
Cause you got Gove, Gove
Gove on your side..
Except you probably haven't, because he's a sneaky backstabbing so and so.
All the chat about armed cops being given inadequate guidance on how to respond in extreme situations suggests that this is going to be part of the defence of NX121.
If the assumption is every time a cop kills someone is justified (which is essentially what some politicians, papers, and people here seem to be suggesting) then cops can kill with impunity? The same cops we know are institutionally sexist and racist? The same cops you should just run away from if they're trying to sexually assault you?
In the immortal words of Uncle Ben - with great power comes great responsibility. In my mind, in any functional society, with great responsibility should come great oversight.
That would be almost certain to be abused, sooner or later.
Probably sooner.
We need to better resource the criminal justice system. And probably the IOPC.
Labour are stagnant in the polls. If anything, they continue to lose support from their natural base to the Greens.
It is widely assumed that Chris Luxon, former CEO of Air NZ, will be the next Prime Minister.
However, hopes of a stable coalition with the urban liberal ACT Party are fading, and it looks like there will be some kind of dependency on the Ukippy populists, NZFirst, led by 78-yo Winston Peters.
ACT, who have previously said they won’t serve alongside NZFirst, have recently softened their tone.
I just don't know enough of the operational circumstances, the intelligence they had, the instructions given and the decision that had to be taken. But murder? Of someone he doesn't know? Whilst he is doing his job? That surely requires at least a reckless indifference as to whether or not there was any justification for taking the decision to shoot. I am really struggling to see that. Manslaughter, maybe.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-somerset-66775434
Take a leaf out of the motorways book when they were built. The M6 is the longest motorway in England and the first to begin construction, but it wasn't all opened at once. In 1958 it began life as simply the Preston Bypass and cost in the tens of millions in modern money, not tens of billions.
Year by year then from 1958 to the end of the 70s roughly we had patches built across the country which were individually usable from when they were built, and eventually over time joined up into something grander.
There's no need to go all in from day one. Design some new routes and build them piecemeal, opening each one as soon as its built, rather than spending decades on white elephants because they're more impressive sounding projects.
Its a shame we've wasted fifty years and not continued doing what we were doing then, all parties bear responsibility. If we'd continued investing in our infrastructure at the rate we were then, how much better off would we be now?
Basically we’re too frightened to cancel it but will just kick it into the long grass. Anyone thinking that this section of HS2 will ever be built is clearly deluded .
When patients suffer harm or die in hospital there is an investigation, but with an eye to improving procedures and outcomes. It is fortunately rare that medics are accused pf murder. It is often put down as being a mistake or an accident or just bad luck.
With the police, the families almost never accept that “their Johnny” could be in any way culpable for ending up in a situation where armed police are involved. Their first instinct is all too often to blame the police.
Clearly if the police commit an offence that should be investigated, but you can understand why they want clear guidance and support from management
God this government makes me sick .
I doubt it will be to inheritance tax.
I think we are seeing a hell of a lot of kites being flown, albeit v clumsily.
Gove wounds and marks
Any heart
Not tough or strong enough
To take a lot of pain, take a lot of pain
Gove is like a cloud
Holds a lot of rain
Gove hurts
Ooh, ooh, Gove hurts
You, on the other hand, with no knowledge of the case, have already deemed the officer in question to be guilty.
And then... before the assembled masses at
Heston Aerodromethe Party Conference... Commit to completing HS2 in full all the way to the Rovers Return.And then I sober up. At which point I realise that they are not that bright. As @Leon says, the leaks have been coming for months. Rishi can't even buy trousers that fit him properly so I doubt very much that he's mapped a path all the way to Conference only to say (with an attempt a theatrical flourish) "I fooled you all".
Roll on the General Election.
If they carry on salting the ground like this, it would almost be funny if the Conservatives did win next time and had to sort out the minefield they have set up.
Though probably funnier if it happened to a different country, please.
So with that caveat in mind, this week I am going for a treble:
Uruguay to beat Namibia by more than 17;
Japan with a five point head start to beat Samoa;
New Zealand to beat Italy by more than 26.
Treble gives me 6.41/1.
There was some fake news analysis from TomTom (published by the MSM) that suggested journey times had only marginally increased while speeds had dropped substantially.
And this kid's life was saved (but who cares): https://twitter.com/scowlingmonkey/status/1705554112622850069?t=4K7iRFTHcbLsvkKI0x3LSg&s=19
Only Londoners are mainly in favour
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/trackers/support-for-high-speed-rail-hs2?crossBreak=north
We haven't had a PM who has been in power that long since Blair and Poilievre is a competent Conservative Opposition Leader
And if you're going to invest in Northern Rail, then invest in Northern Rail. NPR would be a far better levelling up exercise than a trainline to London.
But to actually build HS2 but then not bother with the one link to the North? That's just adding insult to injury, then spitting at us too.
Don't expect gratitude from Northerners for that.
The bill for damages awarded to patroness and their relatives isn’t trivial either.
And plenty of relatives go after the NHS/individuals. Sometimes with justification.
Certainly, it seems clear in retrospect that mashing things like the Euston rebuild, new station capacity for Birmingham, and a chunk of the Old Oak Common area redevelopment into the HS2 project has been a disaster. All of those things should have been done anyway, and could easily have been managed separately, with their own budgets.
On the other hand, the HS2-HS1 link was removed from the project because "we can deliver that better as part of Crossrail 2". Well, that's not going to happen now, so the link will likely never happen - all of the potential work sites that would have been needed have since been built on, or are about to be built on. The land round there is far too valuable to be kept in limbo for a project that might not be resurrected for another three decades, if ever.
It's also hard to see how the government would go about managing the extra legislation that would be required to cut projects into smaller chunks, even if each individual act was simpler and less contentious. Would there actually be the capacity to do that?
Abandoning investment in our road infrastructure fifty long years ago and leaving things to be neglected while our population has grown by a quarter in that time, has been as damaging as the Beeching cuts to rail at a time while our population was stable.
You wonder why I say its not either/or, we need both? That's why. Maybe that will help you come around to understanding the stunning neglect our infrastructure has suffered for half a century.
https://www.inquest.org.uk/police-accountability-response
I will highlight the reference to the Casey Report for people:
Casey Review and firearms officers:
The Baroness Casey Review, published in March 2023, outlined widespread issues with the Metropolitan Police culture and leadership.
Casey recommended the Met: “Clean itself up by bringing in an independent team to run its misconduct system; introducing higher vetting standard…; tackling toxic cultures with clearer statements of standards for all and tougher enforcement of them; and disbanding and reforming ‘dark corner’ units where some of the worst behaviours have been found and officers are equipped to carry lethal firearms.”
Chapter 6 of the review focused on the firearms unit of the Met in particular. Casey highlighted, “a deeply troubling, toxic culture” as well as a “widely held view in the Command and in the rest of the Met that firearms officers ‘need to be allowed’ to bend or break the rules.” This, she found, covers a catalogue of poor behaviours including, “the acceptance of insidious attitudes including misogyny, racism and ableism in the Command”.
Want to build Northern Powerhouse Rail? You could start by building the stretch from Liverpool to Warrington, then open that once constructed. And repeat that across the network until its all built.
The instance on doing it as a grand project to London is what's made it take forever.
There are only two issues:-
1. Did the defendant genuinely believe that Kaba posed a serious risk to the life or health of the defendant, or some other person?
2. If he thought that, was shooting him reasonable in the circumstances?
I mean, these things are relative - clearly, he is a lot wealthier than most Americans, and was well paid as a Senator for decades. But he's nowhere near the group of US politicians who can self-fund to a significant degree.
Anyway if it is true that hundreds have handed in their guns, I feel a whole lot safer.
The handicaps are all evens-ish, so the bookies reckon that score par. I thought 5 points a little ungenerous actually, given the results in the tournament so far - but I think Japan are a better team than their results suggest. I'm also banking on at least one card for Samoa. However, we shall see!
Seeing teams like Japan and Samoa is one of the joys of the RWC.
That approach to NPR is itself a very strong indication of a second grade system devised by second grade minds in Whitehall and Westminster.
Trams, rail etc can all be built piecemeal and then hooked up with an overarching plan but intermediate steps.
You don't need to wait until the entire city is covered in trams before you open your first stops and get the first trams moving. You don't need to wait until the entire rail network is built before you can open your first stops. There's no difference between motorways and railways like that, motorways you can only get on and off at specific junctions not wherever you please - but build it piecemeal and it can be achieved step by step while preparing to go onto the next step.
We need more SMART targets. Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely.
If you rise through the party machine you don't have to be that wealthy, if you want to go straight to the top elections for Senate or President or Governor it helps to be wealthy however, same for an Independent bid in the US for those positions
The killing of Jean Charles de Menezes lifted the veil under which these operations are usually performed and what we saw wasn't pretty. I don't see much reason to believe that things have changed since. I wish that weren't the case.
I remember my enthusiasm in the late eighties when I could get off the North and South Circular roads and onto the shiny new M25.
The M25 is now a car park. Or are you planning on a series of concentric motorways every 5 miles out from the current motorway. If you do that there will only be room for motorways and nothing else in Southern England and the Home Counties. Building motorways is not the answer. Sh*t public transport on the other hand is a disaster.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/census/maps/choropleth/housing/number-of-cars-or-vans/number-of-cars-3a/no-cars-or-vans-in-household?lad=E08000012
https://www.ons.gov.uk/census/maps/choropleth/work/distance-travelled-to-work/workplace-travel-4a/less-than-10km?lad=E06000002
There's already a rail line between Warrington and Liverpool, indeed between all those places, but as far as I'm aware NPR is planned as a new line.
So break the new line into specific, measurable, achievable and realistic timely steps and open each step when its done while preparing for the next steps.
Sure you won't get all the benefits immediately, but you'll get some benefits sooner and you'll get on with actually just building the bloody thing rather than going back and forth for decades.
Don't wait half a century for it all to be built before opening any of it.
What new motorways were built in that time? None?
If you have a motorway network designed for our current population, then add 17 million people while not building a single other motorway (not counting the M6 Toll here, what a joke that is) then what did you expect?
Yes a second M25 would be a fantastic idea, a lot of vehicles travelling into that one have no need to be there. And if our population is stable then that might be all you need, but if our population keeps growing we'll keep needing more and more infrastructure.
Ideally though would be motorways and new towns and cities away from London. Why does everyone have to go into London?
Build more Milton Keynes and other new towns across the country, no need for everyone to be going into a single city. And their cars will be nowhere near your M25.
FYI: 40% of households in Liverpool do not have access to a car. 53% of people in Middlesbrough have a commute less than 10km.
(FWIW I understand that NZ dealt very well in the early stages at keeping Covid out, but at substantial cost (isolating the nation, stopping people coming home for funerals etc)) and then the inevitable need to re-open seeing more deaths than at any other time).