Clear enough in a Scottish context, but not in England, where for many unionism is effectively an expression of English nationalism.
Does unionism even exist in England? Union with whom? If the EU, then surely it is the antithesis of English nationalism, which most would identify with Brexiteers?
Clear enough in a Scottish context, but not in England, where for many unionism is effectively an expression of English nationalism.
Does unionism even exist in England? Union with whom? If the EU, then surely it is the antithesis of English nationalism, which most would identify with Brexiteers?
Ooh, now there's a question. I was talking about what is sometimes referred to as the "Celtic nationalists" - plaid, SNP, the Shinners. But it's use in England I did not consider.
I won't be able to answer questions until around 11am UK, so apologies. Any questions, please make them and I'll address them later. Hope that's ok. Thanks to @TSE and @rcs1000 for publishing ir
Clear enough in a Scottish context, but not in England, where for many unionism is effectively an expression of English nationalism.
Does unionism even exist in England? Union with whom? If the EU, then surely it is the antithesis of English nationalism, which most would identify with Brexiteers?
Ooh, now there's a question. I was talking about what is sometimes referred to as the "Celtic nationalists" - plaid, SNP, the Shinners. But it's use in England I did not consider.
I won't be able to answer questions until around 11am UK, so apologies. Any questions, please make them and I'll address them later. Hope that's ok. Thanks to @TSE and @rcs1000 for publishing ir
Clear enough in a Scottish context, but not in England, where for many unionism is effectively an expression of English nationalism.
Does unionism even exist in England? Union with whom? If the EU, then surely it is the antithesis of English nationalism, which most would identify with Brexiteers?
Ooh, now there's a question. I was talking about what is sometimes referred to as the "Celtic nationalists" - plaid, SNP, the Shinners. But it's use in England I did not consider.
I won't be able to answer questions until around 11am UK, so apologies. Any questions, please make them and I'll address them later. Hope that's ok. Thanks to @TSE and @rcs1000 for publishing ir
Until 1925, what is now the Conservative party was officially 'the Unionist Party' and that was because they supported a unitary state including Ireland.
At various times they also supported federation with the 'white' empire' - Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa (yes, yes, I know) and occasionally some of the Caribbean colonies (ditto) in a 'union of the empire.'
In May 2022, SNP MP Mhairi Black said that the Government was “sleepwalking closer to fascism”.
Did she clarify whether she meant the one in Westminster or the one in Holyrood?
The Tory party of Johnson and May was well ahead of the SNP on this to be fair. The Henry VIII stuff, the assaults on the right to protest, the demonisation of ECHR.
Clear enough in a Scottish context, but not in England, where for many unionism is effectively an expression of English nationalism.
Does unionism even exist in England? Union with whom? If the EU, then surely it is the antithesis of English nationalism, which most would identify with Brexiteers?
Ooh, now there's a question. I was talking about what is sometimes referred to as the "Celtic nationalists" - plaid, SNP, the Shinners. But it's use in England I did not consider.
I won't be able to answer questions until around 11am UK, so apologies. Any questions, please make them and I'll address them later. Hope that's ok. Thanks to @TSE and @rcs1000 for publishing ir
In England it is all about skin colour.
Not any more. Non-white leaders include the Prime Minister, a handful of Home Secretaries and recent Chancellors of the Exchequer and so on. Your own country's First Minister is another, and the Mayor of London.
And no-one cares.
The people calling for Rishi Sunak to go want him out because they dislike his politics, not his Hinduism, not his skin colour.
Clear enough in a Scottish context, but not in England, where for many unionism is effectively an expression of English nationalism.
Does unionism even exist in England? Union with whom? If the EU, then surely it is the antithesis of English nationalism, which most would identify with Brexiteers?
Ooh, now there's a question. I was talking about what is sometimes referred to as the "Celtic nationalists" - plaid, SNP, the Shinners. But it's use in England I did not consider.
I won't be able to answer questions until around 11am UK, so apologies. Any questions, please make them and I'll address them later. Hope that's ok. Thanks to @TSE and @rcs1000 for publishing ir
In England it is all about skin colour.
Not any more. Non-white leaders include the Prime Minister, a handful of Home Secretaries and recent Chancellors of the Exchequer and so on. Your own country's First Minister is another, and the Mayor of London.
And no-one cares.
The people calling for Rishi Sunak to go want him out because they dislike his politics, not his Hinduism, not his skin colour.
Similarly, I think there are grave misgivings about Vaughan Gething's qualifications to be FM of Wales, but I haven't heard any comments about his race (except tangentially insofar as his inability to speak Welsh may tell against him, but that's not linked to his skin colour).
Looks like a face off between him and Jeremy Miles, incidentally. A prediction on here (not by me) that Miles should be considered favourite is looking good so far despite his lower name recognition.
Clear enough in a Scottish context, but not in England, where for many unionism is effectively an expression of English nationalism.
Does unionism even exist in England? Union with whom? If the EU, then surely it is the antithesis of English nationalism, which most would identify with Brexiteers?
Ooh, now there's a question. I was talking about what is sometimes referred to as the "Celtic nationalists" - plaid, SNP, the Shinners. But it's use in England I did not consider.
I won't be able to answer questions until around 11am UK, so apologies. Any questions, please make them and I'll address them later. Hope that's ok. Thanks to @TSE and @rcs1000 for publishing ir
In England it is all about skin colour.
Not any more. Non-white leaders include the Prime Minister, a handful of Home Secretaries and recent Chancellors of the Exchequer and so on. Your own country's First Minister is another, and the Mayor of London.
And no-one cares.
The people calling for Rishi Sunak to go want him out because they dislike his politics, not his Hinduism, not his skin colour.
To some considerable extent I suspect that sport, and especially football, has had a hand in that.
So when Rishi Rich says that he is going to cut welfare payments, I'll stick my neck out and guess that this does not include the triple l9cked state pension.
The Sunday Times is putting the hoof into the Paul Maynard (Pensions Minister apparently, who knew?) for the usual tory financial misconduct shenanigans. We could be looking at another by-election. I am losing track of how many are in the offing now. Bone, Skidmore and Benton? And maybe this latest arsehole.
Clear enough in a Scottish context, but not in England, where for many unionism is effectively an expression of English nationalism.
Does unionism even exist in England? Union with whom? If the EU, then surely it is the antithesis of English nationalism, which most would identify with Brexiteers?
Ooh, now there's a question. I was talking about what is sometimes referred to as the "Celtic nationalists" - plaid, SNP, the Shinners. But it's use in England I did not consider.
I won't be able to answer questions until around 11am UK, so apologies. Any questions, please make them and I'll address them later. Hope that's ok. Thanks to @TSE and @rcs1000 for publishing ir
In England it is all about skin colour.
Not any more. Non-white leaders include the Prime Minister, a handful of Home Secretaries and recent Chancellors of the Exchequer and so on. Your own country's First Minister is another, and the Mayor of London.
And no-one cares.
The people calling for Rishi Sunak to go want him out because they dislike his politics, not his Hinduism, not his skin colour.
I think you miss MalcomG’s point. In Scotland Nationalism is easy - it displays itself as pro Scotland, anti anything English.
In England it’s way harder - most Nationalism appears as racism because the people who use the George Cross have a habit of picking on people based on skin colour, even when the person they tell to go home can honestly reply as I third generation immigrant “I’m walking round the corner to me Nan’s for tea”.
NEW - Sir Keir Starmer calls on the Prime Minister to set a date for a general election NOW & tells @SkyNews Sunak is "putting vanity before country" by wanting to clock up two years in Downing Street before calling a vote #TrevorPhillips @WilfredFrost
The Labour leader also says he is "very happy to do election debates" as "he wants every opportunity" to make his case to the country. He says individual debates will need to be negotiated
Asked which taxes he would prioritise to cut first, Sir Keir Starmer says "taxes on working people"
The Sunday Times is putting the hoof into the Paul Maynard (Pensions Minister apparently, who knew?) for the usual tory financial misconduct shenanigans. We could be looking at another by-election. I am losing track of how many are in the offing now. Bone, Skidmore and Benton? And maybe this latest arsehole.
I reported it yesterday but I suspect the investigation won’t be finished in time for anything to occur before the election.
And he’s probably got zero chance of retaining the seat..
Starmer on Sky News accuses Sunak of putting his own “vanity” before the country. Calls an election date:
“If he had a plan, he’d set the date. And he should set the date. I can’t help feeling that all he really wants to do is get two years clocked up on his premiership.”
So when Rishi Rich says that he is going to cut welfare payments, I'll stick my neck out and guess that this does not include the triple l9cked state pension.
Didn’t they announce. Crack down on disability because there is so much more home based office work I.e. the thing other departments are trying to crack down o and reduce.
On topic, I think we can still usefully divide political beliefs dichotomously, at least in the west, between people who most value Liberty and those who most value Equality
That division very roughly equals the old idea of the Right and the old idea of the Left
At extremes the desire for Liberty is reserved for certain groups, races, families, classes and becomes closer to Fascism or other far right ideas; on the left the extreme desire for Equality is allowed to trample over individual rights and becomes communism, Maoism or Wokeness
However the whole thing breaks down beyond that. Some on the right are green and europhile and religious some on the left are futurist and eurosceptic and atheist and so on
Lord knows how you organise all that. Perhaps it is a futile task
On topic, I think we can still usefully divide political beliefs dichotomously, at least in the west, between people who most value Liberty and those who most value Equality
That division very roughly equals the old idea of the Right and the old idea of the Left
At extremes the desire for Liberty is reserved for certain groups, races, families, classes and becomes closer to Fascism or other far right ideas; on the left the extreme desire for Equality is allowed to trample over individual rights and becomes communism, Maoism or Wokeness
However the whole thing breaks down beyond that. Some on the right are green and europhile and religious some on the left are futurist and eurosceptic and atheist and so on
Lord knows how you organise all that. Perhaps it is a futile task
Only if you see liberty as purely as an expression of rights around wealth and ownership. There are liberties which are valued higher in the centre and left, just as the right has a tendency to support the use of authoritarianism to protect its own liberties.
On topic, I think we can still usefully divide political beliefs dichotomously, at least in the west, between people who most value Liberty and those who most value Equality
That division very roughly equals the old idea of the Right and the old idea of the Left
At extremes the desire for Liberty is reserved for certain groups, races, families, classes and becomes closer to Fascism or other far right ideas; on the left the extreme desire for Equality is allowed to trample over individual rights and becomes communism, Maoism or Wokeness
However the whole thing breaks down beyond that. Some on the right are green and europhile and religious some on the left are futurist and eurosceptic and atheist and so on
Lord knows how you organise all that. Perhaps it is a futile task
Only if you see liberty as purely as an expression of rights around wealth and ownership. There are liberties which are valued higher in the centre and left, just as the right has a tendency to support the use of authoritarianism to protect its own liberties.
Jeez. I was trying to bring some simple sense to the question. Then you go and complicate it again
Ok there is no usefully simple way of classifying political beliefs. Is that better?
It’s always heartwarming to see that some folk who have never worked in the public sector are so skilled they can instantly diagnose all the issues (which, mysteriously, always manage to conform to their personal prejudices) and propose a solution which usually involves a change to “the culture”.
Sigh…
The public sector is roughly as good (and as bad) at doing things as the private sector (with some minor variances, generally based on being able to offer market pay). The big difference is that mistakes in the public sector have to be declared in full, whilst in the public sector they can usually be brushed under the carpet with the connivance of accountants and auditors.
"The big difference is that mistakes in the public sector have to be declared in full, whilst in the public sector they can usually be brushed under the carpet with the connivance of accountants and auditors."
Didn't you mean the second "public sector" in that sentence to read "private sector"?
I would cite the Post Office as a riposte to that sentiment but you know that already. Plus listed companies have to make market announcement - I pile cite a few examples there too.
But the Post Office during the key period (and since) was run by people brought in for their private sector expertise, who didn’t really understand what they were managing.
What we are looking at is a tragic confluence of private sector people focused on their key objective whilst not interested, or understanding, the environment they are in, supported by a load of career long public sector people trained to follow instructions and otherwise keep their heads down.
That is part of the explanation and an important factor. But I was responding to the claim that because it was in the public sector it had to declare its mistakes in full.
That has certainly not happened in the PO's case. If anything, partly to avoid embarrassing Ministers or at least Ministerial decisions and partly to permit the privatisation of Royal Mail, the unfolding problems were kept as quiet as possible for as long as possible, even to the extent of misleading courts and Parliament.
My read is that when Vennells arrives she was genuinely willing to try and sort the situation out. But she surely unappreciated the scale of the disaster, assuming they were dealing with a small number of anomalies that could be resolved without diverting her from her course. Which is what she will have been told, up the line. But at some point - pretty obviously shortly before Second Sight were sacked - she realised the scale of the catastrophe she was sitting on.
We can all see what the right thing to have done would have been. And I’m sure that 95% of us would swear that that’s what we would have done, in her position.
She will have found herself in a room full of senior people - long serving PO managers who understood things a lot better than her, maybe someone senior from Fuitisu still sowing misinformation, and - critically - some top lawyers who must have thought that they had a better than 50:50 chance of making the catastrophe go away with some disgraceful legal shenanigans, bankrupting the other party before the case got to a conclusion. As we can see, from both Wallis’s detailed account and the summary version dramatised by ITV, they very nearly succeeded. As it is, most of the money won by Bates and others went on legal costs.
Both the financial position of her business and her own personal reputation would have been trashed, had she come clean at that point - already being on record at the BIS SC and in the media as defending the PO position. So she had the choice between being honest and facing certain ordure, or gambling that she might make the whole thing go away.
We all know what the morally right thing to do was. But I’d bet that significantly less than 95% of us would have opted for the right path, put in her position.
I suspect there was also a great deal of Ministerial pressure not to do anything to impact the Post Office's route to profits.
But I have been in the position, both in the public sector and in the private sector, of having to tell very senior people (Ministers and Chief Executives) that what they would like to do is unlawful. That takes guts. And any CEO who ignores such advice is a bloody fool. It's not just about doing the morally right thing to do: it's about the difference between legality and illegality.
Susan Crichton, the GC, left suddenly in 2013 - not long after the external legal advice pointing out the unsafeness of the convictions and the first Second Sight report. I would really like to know the truth of what led to her departure and what advice she was giving. And what her successors and predecessors were doing and saying.
The role of the GC can be immensely powerful in such circumstances - if they use that power wisely and have the independence of character to use it. Not all do. Some are frankly useless. My guess is that her successor was more intent on facilitating a "let's sweep it under the carpet" job.
That is one reason why I think the role of the lawyers here has been so shameful. They should have been gatekeepers preventing morally dubious and unlawful behaviour. Instead they appear to have facilitated and carried it out.
I can agree with you there. Yet while the inquiry, and subsequent events, is likely to pour a cauldron of excrement over a few senior Post Office folk, and a few of the more junior ones whose evidence has been myopic, and maybe even some of the hapless oppos from Fujitsu, I’d wager that the legal profession - including the courts that convicted people merely because they couldn’t prove their innocence - will get off relatively lightly.
You may well be right, Ian. There is however a lot more to come yet, so who knows who will get off lightly and who will not. The Law Society has a dreadful reputation for failing to deal strenously with its errant members, but maybe it will surprise us this time around.
Meanwhile I ask how many of us could have defended a dodgy computer system knowing full well that by doing so we were sending innocent people to jail and destroying lives? I don't think it is many as 5%. You have to be right hard-nosed bastard to do that kind of thing.
But everyone’s knowledge was incomplete, from top to bottom, for varying reasons.
Mostly everyone, Ian. Can it really be true however that at no time did Vennells and her closest colleagues appreciate that the doubts about Horizon implied that the PO could be responsible for a huge miscarriage of justice?
Her appearance before the Inquiry will indeed be interesting, as you indicated.
As I suggested above, I think the true scale of the scandal they were sitting on only became apparent to those at the top during Second Sight. While many further down knew the problems with their bit of the jigsaw but never saw the bigger picture.
At that point Vennells had the choice between certain financial, career, and repetitional disaster immediately, or gambling that some high paid dodgy lawyers could make the whole thing go away. Morally, she clearly made the wrong choice - the right decision made more difficult by all the other senior folk in the room urging her on (easy when the buck was never stopping with them) who are all now keeping their heads down and feigning amnesia when asked anything too close to the mark.
But logically, she made the right choice, since she chose a 50% chance of marginally greater ruin over 100% of ruin nevertheless. Had she come clean in 2015, no-one now would be giving her any credit for not having spun the affair out for a then unimaginable - now very real, almost ten more years - since had it not happened, it wouldn’t have seemed possible.
But she's facing the very real prospect of chokey now, Ian, and possibly quite a long stretch. As Ms C pointed out earlier, the choice she made wasn't just morally incorrect, it was probably illegal.
I don't think that's logical or smart.
Btw, may I take the opportunity of saying that I have found your dialogues with Ms C on this subject riveting. They have contributed greatly to one of the most compelling discussions I have ever followed on PB, and I have been kicking around this place since its early days.
Thank you kindly.
When I said "logical" (optimal is perhaps more correct), I simply meant from a decision-tree approach, scoring the outcomes and probabalities. And you're right that if (and that's still a big 'if') the penalty turns out hugely more severe than it would have been had she come clean after Second Sight, then you would also be right that the decision then wasn't (although you'd have to weight the 50% chance of getting off against the chance and severity of the possible penalty now).
My argument was simply that you don't get anycredit in life, or politics, for doing stuff that avoids a then totally hypothetical even worse mess, if things are already very bad.
The story has been known, for those who cared to look, for years, yet Vennells was given a job in the Cabinet Office, Chair of an NHS Trust, and a couple of other directorships. And held these despite protests and complaints in each case, until public pressure and the developing legal story made it impossible. Prior to the ITV drama I would have put money on there being no penalty other than, possibly, losing the CBE and a possible, but legally tricky, private prosecution.
The ITV drama shows the power of media and public attention - and the pressure for some sort of punishment is clearly now building (the petition to take away her CBE, which has been running for three years but only had about 10,000 signatures last week, is now heading toward a million). But the public's attention span is usually short and may move on...
Incidentally, isn't it shameful that the Tories are trying to stir up blame for the LibDem junior ministers who were in post for a small, but critical, part of the story - when they gave Vennells a JOB IN THE CABINET OFFICE as well as the CBE when the whole saga was already in the public domain?
NEW - Sir Keir Starmer calls on the Prime Minister to set a date for a general election NOW & tells @SkyNews Sunak is "putting vanity before country" by wanting to clock up two years in Downing Street before calling a vote #TrevorPhillips @WilfredFrost
The Labour leader also says he is "very happy to do election debates" as "he wants every opportunity" to make his case to the country. He says individual debates will need to be negotiated
Asked which taxes he would prioritise to cut first, Sir Keir Starmer says "taxes on working people"
So more cuts to Employee NI as that is the only tax only paid by working people
Alas, your conclusion walks directly into the extremist agenda: to colonize the centre and other concepts like freedom, democracy and justice in the name of hate. I can't think of a more successful rebranding in modern history than that of fascism. It has been able to shed goosestepping, leather straps, and Rudolph Hess' birthday and take on the garb of suits and moderation all in the name of hate. Trojan horse usurpation has always been the key strategy of the right wing extremism has always been the strategy when moving the political goal posts in society. I recommend you get away from this anemic quantification and read som: Hannah Arendt, Reinhardt Koselleck, Seymore Lipset, or Theda Stocpol. Particularly Barrington Moore's Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy springs to mind as an increasingly relevant model for understanding the longitudinal structural processes leading to fascist regimes and providing an operational definition of what fascism even is
On topic, I think we can still usefully divide political beliefs dichotomously, at least in the west, between people who most value Liberty and those who most value Equality
That division very roughly equals the old idea of the Right and the old idea of the Left
At extremes the desire for Liberty is reserved for certain groups, races, families, classes and becomes closer to Fascism or other far right ideas; on the left the extreme desire for Equality is allowed to trample over individual rights and becomes communism, Maoism or Wokeness
However the whole thing breaks down beyond that. Some on the right are green and europhile and religious some on the left are futurist and eurosceptic and atheist and so on
Lord knows how you organise all that. Perhaps it is a futile task
Only if you see liberty as purely as an expression of rights around wealth and ownership. There are liberties which are valued higher in the centre and left, just as the right has a tendency to support the use of authoritarianism to protect its own liberties.
Indeed - and a crucial difference between equality of opportunity, which tends to appeal more to liberals, and equality of outcomes, which tends to appeal more to socialists.
Clear enough in a Scottish context, but not in England, where for many unionism is effectively an expression of English nationalism.
Does unionism even exist in England? Union with whom? If the EU, then surely it is the antithesis of English nationalism, which most would identify with Brexiteers?
Ooh, now there's a question. I was talking about what is sometimes referred to as the "Celtic nationalists" - plaid, SNP, the Shinners. But it's use in England I did not consider.
I won't be able to answer questions until around 11am UK, so apologies. Any questions, please make them and I'll address them later. Hope that's ok. Thanks to @TSE and @rcs1000 for publishing ir
In England it is all about skin colour.
Not any more. Non-white leaders include the Prime Minister, a handful of Home Secretaries and recent Chancellors of the Exchequer and so on. Your own country's First Minister is another, and the Mayor of London.
And no-one cares.
The people calling for Rishi Sunak to go want him out because they dislike his politics, not his Hinduism, not his skin colour.
Clear enough in a Scottish context, but not in England, where for many unionism is effectively an expression of English nationalism.
Does unionism even exist in England? Union with whom? If the EU, then surely it is the antithesis of English nationalism, which most would identify with Brexiteers?
Ooh, now there's a question. I was talking about what is sometimes referred to as the "Celtic nationalists" - plaid, SNP, the Shinners. But it's use in England I did not consider.
I won't be able to answer questions until around 11am UK, so apologies. Any questions, please make them and I'll address them later. Hope that's ok. Thanks to @TSE and @rcs1000 for publishing ir
In England it is all about skin colour.
Not any more. Non-white leaders include the Prime Minister, a handful of Home Secretaries and recent Chancellors of the Exchequer and so on. Your own country's First Minister is another, and the Mayor of London.
And no-one cares.
The people calling for Rishi Sunak to go want him out because they dislike his politics, not his Hinduism, not his skin colour.
I think you miss MalcomG’s point. In Scotland Nationalism is easy - it displays itself as pro Scotland, anti anything English.
In England it’s way harder - most Nationalism appears as racism because the people who use the George Cross have a habit of picking on people based on skin colour, even when the person they tell to go home can honestly reply as I third generation immigrant “I’m walking round the corner to me Nan’s for tea”.
An outdated view, I think. By and large we've moved on; witness our politicians, our sports stars (as OKC says) and just propinquity.
Starmer on Sky News accuses Sunak of putting his own “vanity” before the country. Calls an election date:
“If he had a plan, he’d set the date. And he should set the date. I can’t help feeling that all he really wants to do is get two years clocked up on his premiership.”
This could get boring quickly. It is the Leader of the Opposition's job to call for elections. We get that. But there ought to be more to it. When the election comes, why should we vote for the new guy and not the old guy?
So when Rishi Rich says that he is going to cut welfare payments, I'll stick my neck out and guess that this does not include the triple l9cked state pension.
Didn’t they announce. Crack down on disability because there is so much more home based office work I.e. the thing other departments are trying to crack down o and reduce.
None of it will happen, none of it needs to happen.
Promise it for 2026 or so, spend the savings now and leave the next government holding the pooy baby.
If I didn't live here, I'd almost like to see Sunak win and deal with the minefield he is laying.
I still think of this as circle, or horseshoe if you prefer; extreme left and right become indistinguishable autocracies.
I don't think that a very accurate picture. The far right and far left don't look much alike apart from being prone to both factionalism and political violence. Its the acceptance of verbal and physical violence as a political tool that leads to anti-semitism, and factionalism is rooted in personality cults.
So when Rishi Rich says that he is going to cut welfare payments, I'll stick my neck out and guess that this does not include the triple l9cked state pension.
The triple lock is a good thing. Our state pension is not generous. Where money can be saved is on higher rate tax relief on pension contributions which benefits the well-paid, such as politicians and columnists who call instead for an end to the triple lock.
So when Rishi Rich says that he is going to cut welfare payments, I'll stick my neck out and guess that this does not include the triple l9cked state pension.
The triple lock is a good thing. Our state pension is not generous. Where money can be saved is on higher rate tax relief on pension contributions which benefits the well-paid, such as politicians and columnists who call instead for an end to the triple lock.
Except we do want people to save for their retirement.
Pensions are deferred income, and are taxed when taken. The wealthy among us will be paying higher rate taxation in retirement.
NEW - Sir Keir Starmer calls on the Prime Minister to set a date for a general election NOW & tells @SkyNews Sunak is "putting vanity before country" by wanting to clock up two years in Downing Street before calling a vote #TrevorPhillips @WilfredFrost
The Labour leader also says he is "very happy to do election debates" as "he wants every opportunity" to make his case to the country. He says individual debates will need to be negotiated
Asked which taxes he would prioritise to cut first, Sir Keir Starmer says "taxes on working people"
So more cuts to Employee NI as that is the only tax only paid by working people
It would be sensible - and may even be what they have in mind - to continue in similar vein, until the potential tax hike for pensioners (and others with unearned income) by merging tax and NI is seen as manageable ?.
Clear enough in a Scottish context, but not in England, where for many unionism is effectively an expression of English nationalism.
Does unionism even exist in England? Union with whom? If the EU, then surely it is the antithesis of English nationalism, which most would identify with Brexiteers?
Ooh, now there's a question. I was talking about what is sometimes referred to as the "Celtic nationalists" - plaid, SNP, the Shinners. But it's use in England I did not consider.
I won't be able to answer questions until around 11am UK, so apologies. Any questions, please make them and I'll address them later. Hope that's ok. Thanks to @TSE and @rcs1000 for publishing ir
In England it is all about skin colour.
Not any more. Non-white leaders include the Prime Minister, a handful of Home Secretaries and recent Chancellors of the Exchequer and so on. Your own country's First Minister is another, and the Mayor of London.
And no-one cares.
The people calling for Rishi Sunak to go want him out because they dislike his politics, not his Hinduism, not his skin colour.
There is some truth to that, but nowadays racism is more implicit.
For example suggesting that Sunak is not really committed to this country has a whiff of nativism to it as well as a legitimate criticism of his former Green Card, Santa Monica house and Non-Dom wife.
So when Rishi Rich says that he is going to cut welfare payments, I'll stick my neck out and guess that this does not include the triple l9cked state pension.
The triple lock is a good thing. Our state pension is not generous. Where money can be saved is on higher rate tax relief on pension contributions which benefits the well-paid, such as politicians and columnists who call instead for an end to the triple lock.
But it locks in an inexorable rise in cost for an item in the accounts that is already both sizeable and inexorably growing due to the ageing population.
It would be more sensible to target funding at those poorer pensioners genuinely in need, rather than helicoptering it onto the entire cohort of the retired, when their disposable income is now - remarkably - already greater on average than those in work.
So when Rishi Rich says that he is going to cut welfare payments, I'll stick my neck out and guess that this does not include the triple l9cked state pension.
The triple lock is a good thing. Our state pension is not generous. Where money can be saved is on higher rate tax relief on pension contributions which benefits the well-paid, such as politicians and columnists who call instead for an end to the triple lock.
Except we do want people to save for their retirement.
Pensions are deferred income, and are taxed when taken. The wealthy among us will be paying higher rate taxation in retirement.
Yes we do, but standard rate tax relief will do that, and remember the well-paid are almost certainly benefiting from salary sacrifice so their current income tax bill is reduced (at higher rate) by those contributions. It's a win-win for the better off, and this proposal would only slightly reduce one of those wins.
I still think of this as circle, or horseshoe if you prefer; extreme left and right become indistinguishable autocracies.
I don't think that a very accurate picture. The far right and far left don't look much alike apart from being prone to both factionalism and political violence. Its the acceptance of verbal and physical violence as a political tool that leads to anti-semitism, and factionalism is rooted in personality cults.
I suggest that it's hard to divide dictatorships into two radically different camps according to how it feels to be on the receiving end. Many of the attitudes and many of the outcomes are very similar. Ask the Poles. And of course Mr H (let's try and dodge Godwin's law with an initial) and his party started out as socialist. Yes, the two sides hate each other, but that's because they're rivals for the same radical intolerance and hate each other in the way of two violent gangs of opposing football team supporters. Yet they're both football gangs.
If you tried to generalise, a left-wing dictatorship tends to be pretty grim for most people except for a small preferred elite, whereas a right-wing dictatorship tends to be truly appalling for a minority and perhaps not quite so bad for a majority. But I'm not sure even that generalisation would stand up to too many examples.
Clear enough in a Scottish context, but not in England, where for many unionism is effectively an expression of English nationalism.
Does unionism even exist in England? Union with whom? If the EU, then surely it is the antithesis of English nationalism, which most would identify with Brexiteers?
Ooh, now there's a question. I was talking about what is sometimes referred to as the "Celtic nationalists" - plaid, SNP, the Shinners. But it's use in England I did not consider.
I won't be able to answer questions until around 11am UK, so apologies. Any questions, please make them and I'll address them later. Hope that's ok. Thanks to @TSE and @rcs1000 for publishing ir
In England it is all about skin colour.
Not any more. Non-white leaders include the Prime Minister, a handful of Home Secretaries and recent Chancellors of the Exchequer and so on. Your own country's First Minister is another, and the Mayor of London.
And no-one cares.
The people calling for Rishi Sunak to go want him out because they dislike his politics, not his Hinduism, not his skin colour.
There is some truth to that, but nowadays racism is more implicit.
For example suggesting that Sunak is not really committed to this country has a whiff of nativism to it as well as a legitimate criticism of his former Green Card, Santa Monica house and Non-Dom wife.
That is not racist but specific to Rishi. No-one said the same about Priti or Suella, for instance, and David Cameron's (family) tax arrangements were previously questioned.
Politics is multi axis, though people try to squeeze everything into left vs right, and wonder why it doesn't fit.
The opposite of conservative is radical. Conservatives want to keep everything the same, radicals want to rip things up and change them. What where Theresa May's self comforting words when her election went wrong? "Nothing has changed!". She and Liz Truss are opposites.
The opposite of Liberal is Authoritarian. The term 'nanny state' could have been coined for Blair and Brown - low level authoritarianism. The most ridiculed was Brown's 'gulags for slags'. That, and Labour's one-size-fits-all approach to things is why the Lib Dems are not fond of Labour governments.
Left vs Right, boiled down to its essence, is about the size of the state - how much it should do, and so how much it should spend, and so how much it should tax. Despite the name, the Conservatives are a right wing party. Labour are obviously on the left, though it's different wings can't agree on where. For the Lib Dems, L vs R is a tertiary identity at best. They are Liberals first and radicals second, at least in their constitution.
So when Rishi Rich says that he is going to cut welfare payments, I'll stick my neck out and guess that this does not include the triple l9cked state pension.
The triple lock is a good thing. Our state pension is not generous. Where money can be saved is on higher rate tax relief on pension contributions which benefits the well-paid, such as politicians and columnists who call instead for an end to the triple lock.
But it locks in an inexorable rise in cost for an item in the accounts that is already both sizeable and inexorably growing due to the ageing population.
It would be more sensible to target funding at those poorer pensioners genuinely in need, rather than helicoptering it onto the entire cohort of the retired, when their disposable income is now - remarkably - already greater on average than those in work.
Pensions are already taxed as income. And none of the triple lock critics say it should be abolished but kept for the poor. Yes, if we project forward ad infinitum, pensions will become unaffordable but that day is far off.
So when Rishi Rich says that he is going to cut welfare payments, I'll stick my neck out and guess that this does not include the triple l9cked state pension.
Didn’t they announce. Crack down on disability because there is so much more home based office work I.e. the thing other departments are trying to crack down o and reduce.
None of it will happen, none of it needs to happen.
Promise it for 2026 or so, spend the savings now and leave the next government holding the pooy baby.
If I didn't live here, I'd almost like to see Sunak win and deal with the minefield he is laying.
That's the problem here - all the Tory party doing is laying traps for the next Government - it's announced but completely unplanned spending cuts which then need to be taken.
The one thing we won't have is someone asking - you said spending cuts - which departments and what are the cutting.
There is then a whole set of questions that you can follow with depending on how you want the PM / Minister to squirm...
So when Rishi Rich says that he is going to cut welfare payments, I'll stick my neck out and guess that this does not include the triple l9cked state pension.
The triple lock is a good thing. Our state pension is not generous. Where money can be saved is on higher rate tax relief on pension contributions which benefits the well-paid, such as politicians and columnists who call instead for an end to the triple lock.
But it locks in an inexorable rise in cost for an item in the accounts that is already both sizeable and inexorably growing due to the ageing population.
It would be more sensible to target funding at those poorer pensioners genuinely in need, rather than helicoptering it onto the entire cohort of the retired, when their disposable income is now - remarkably - already greater on average than those in work.
Pensions are already taxed as income. And none of the triple lock critics say it should be abolished but kept for the poor. Yes, if we project forward ad infinitum, pensions will become unaffordable but that day is far off.
And if you keep the TL for poorer pensioners only, that implies some sort of means test, which means that some/many people won't bother making provision for their retirement.
So when Rishi Rich says that he is going to cut welfare payments, I'll stick my neck out and guess that this does not include the triple l9cked state pension.
The triple lock is a good thing. Our state pension is not generous. Where money can be saved is on higher rate tax relief on pension contributions which benefits the well-paid, such as politicians and columnists who call instead for an end to the triple lock.
But it locks in an inexorable rise in cost for an item in the accounts that is already both sizeable and inexorably growing due to the ageing population.
It would be more sensible to target funding at those poorer pensioners genuinely in need, rather than helicoptering it onto the entire cohort of the retired, when their disposable income is now - remarkably - already greater on average than those in work.
Pensions are already taxed as income. And none of the triple lock critics say it should be abolished but kept for the poor. Yes, if we project forward ad infinitum, pensions will become unaffordable but that day is far off.
missing the point that unearned income (including capital gains) is taxed less than income from employment.
So when Rishi Rich says that he is going to cut welfare payments, I'll stick my neck out and guess that this does not include the triple l9cked state pension.
The triple lock is a good thing. Our state pension is not generous. Where money can be saved is on higher rate tax relief on pension contributions which benefits the well-paid, such as politicians and columnists who call instead for an end to the triple lock.
But it locks in an inexorable rise in cost for an item in the accounts that is already both sizeable and inexorably growing due to the ageing population.
It would be more sensible to target funding at those poorer pensioners genuinely in need, rather than helicoptering it onto the entire cohort of the retired, when their disposable income is now - remarkably - already greater on average than those in work.
Pensions are already taxed as income. And none of the triple lock critics say it should be abolished but kept for the poor. Yes, if we project forward ad infinitum, pensions will become unaffordable but that day is far off.
missing the point that unearned income (including capital gains) is taxed less than income from employment.
Pensioners do not pay national insurance, and pension income is taxed as income, so it is the same.
Today's Sunday Rawnsley, on an (nowadays unusual) sunny and dry day...
A Labour veteran, thinking to compare the tepid feelings towards his party in the present day with the last time it was in opposition preparing to be in government, recently lamented to me: “For all that Keir has achieved, it doesn’t feel like 1997.”
[But] Sir Tony, as he has since become, was an ace at delivering uplifting oratory when he thought the occasion demanded it, but the stats tell us that this did not excite a substantial majority of the electorate. The most crucial factor in the Blair landslide of ’97 was not soaring expectations of what a Labour government would deliver; it was the collapse of support for the Conservatives and efficient anti-Tory tactical voting. His Labour was very constrained in what it initially promised it could deliver, even though it knew that it would come to power with the economy doing well.
[So] the bequest from the Tories to a Starmer government will be much grimmer...what you could call the “hope deficit” is more acute for Sir Keir than it was for Labour 27 years ago. Added to which, voter cynicism about politicians and their promises has rarely been deeper.
I think [Starmer] overestimates the Tories when he suggests that they have deliberately schemed to squeeze the optimism out of the nation. The evidence suggests they are not clever enough to be that cunning. What is true is that Britain is heading towards an election shrouded in a dank miasma of despair that anyone can fix our many problems. One dispiriting possible consequence of this is that we will endure a nastily negative election campaign followed by a low turnout...
If hope is to be revitalised, it is probably more likely to happen after we have had a change of government, rather than before. It will be helpful to Labour if Sir Keir can generate a flicker of hope before the election, but the sterner test will be whether he has it in him to lift the country out of the slough of despondency once he has the power to do more than talk about it.
So when Rishi Rich says that he is going to cut welfare payments, I'll stick my neck out and guess that this does not include the triple l9cked state pension.
The triple lock is a good thing. Our state pension is not generous. Where money can be saved is on higher rate tax relief on pension contributions which benefits the well-paid, such as politicians and columnists who call instead for an end to the triple lock.
But it locks in an inexorable rise in cost for an item in the accounts that is already both sizeable and inexorably growing due to the ageing population.
It would be more sensible to target funding at those poorer pensioners genuinely in need, rather than helicoptering it onto the entire cohort of the retired, when their disposable income is now - remarkably - already greater on average than those in work.
Pensions are already taxed as income. And none of the triple lock critics say it should be abolished but kept for the poor. Yes, if we project forward ad infinitum, pensions will become unaffordable but that day is far off.
If political parties are frightened of removing the triple lock then we risk sailing past the point at which it becomes unaffordable.
A good example of politics winning over good governance.
So when Rishi Rich says that he is going to cut welfare payments, I'll stick my neck out and guess that this does not include the triple l9cked state pension.
The triple lock is a good thing. Our state pension is not generous. Where money can be saved is on higher rate tax relief on pension contributions which benefits the well-paid, such as politicians and columnists who call instead for an end to the triple lock.
But it locks in an inexorable rise in cost for an item in the accounts that is already both sizeable and inexorably growing due to the ageing population.
It would be more sensible to target funding at those poorer pensioners genuinely in need, rather than helicoptering it onto the entire cohort of the retired, when their disposable income is now - remarkably - already greater on average than those in work.
Pensions are already taxed as income. And none of the triple lock critics say it should be abolished but kept for the poor. Yes, if we project forward ad infinitum, pensions will become unaffordable but that day is far off.
If political parties are frightened of removing the triple lock then we risk sailing past the point at which it becomes unaffordable.
A good example of politics winning over good governance.
That is for decades to come. We shall all have flying cars by then. Right now we can afford to keep the triple lock.
Dr. Foxy, seems a bit ambiguous (at best) to throw around racism when the very example you pick you also describe as being potentially legitimate.
I am not saying that criticism of Sunaks commitment to the country is always implicit racism, just that it may be so. There is sufficient cover to create a denial intent.
I read on the previous thread that some sort of huge SNPbadness was about to break.
Well?
You are in Scotland. Nip down to the newsagent and tell us if they did "hold the front page" or if some PBer fell for a social media hoax and a photoshopped newspaper.
An interesting piece. Examples of the graphs would have helped but I appreciate length is always an issue for a header.
What the header, and indeed the discussion BTL, show is that it is increasingly difficult and complicated to classify someone's political beliefs in a broad category that carries a coherent meaning. One point that I think hasn't been made to date is that this is the reason that political parties have also become less coherent and disciplined.
So yesterday we had a former Tory Minister Chris Skidmore resigning because he doesn't think that the government should be issuing licences for fresh exploration in the North Sea. How do you classify that? According to Wiki he was Chairman of the Bow Group and a fellow of the Policy Exchange. He has been active in Tory politics since he was a teenager and supported Truss's Free Enterprise Group. An almost classic Tory but he has resigned the Whip and may soon be to resign his seat. If you can't create a tent big enough to include people like that how do you create a government?
Holding parties together in such an atmosphere is incredibly difficult creating governments that lack coherence, stability and a sense of purpose. I think that the politician who has proven to be the best at this in recent decades was Nicola Sturgeon but look what has happened since she left the scene. The famous SNP self discipline has collapsed and dissent is rife. This simply means that the SNP have fallen to earth and are in a similar position to most political parties.
We see this in the Commons. Both parties have an exceptional number of people who have been expelled or simply chosen to leave. In Labour's case this includes the former leader. In the last Parliament we had the likes of Ken Clarke expelled. What this means for the future is that any government elected with a small majority simply will not survive. There will be too many single issue obsessives who will split away.
So when Rishi Rich says that he is going to cut welfare payments, I'll stick my neck out and guess that this does not include the triple l9cked state pension.
The triple lock is a good thing. Our state pension is not generous. Where money can be saved is on higher rate tax relief on pension contributions which benefits the well-paid, such as politicians and columnists who call instead for an end to the triple lock.
But it locks in an inexorable rise in cost for an item in the accounts that is already both sizeable and inexorably growing due to the ageing population.
It would be more sensible to target funding at those poorer pensioners genuinely in need, rather than helicoptering it onto the entire cohort of the retired, when their disposable income is now - remarkably - already greater on average than those in work.
Pensions are already taxed as income. And none of the triple lock critics say it should be abolished but kept for the poor. Yes, if we project forward ad infinitum, pensions will become unaffordable but that day is far off.
missing the point that unearned income (including capital gains) is taxed less than income from employment.
Pensioners do not pay national insurance, and pension income is taxed as income, so it is the same.
Eh?
For working age people, income is heavily taxed via national insurance.
Pension income would only be taxed the same, if the exemption given to pensioners is removed and pension income is taxed by national insurance.
Everyone earning the same amount should pay the same rate of tax.
It’s always heartwarming to see that some folk who have never worked in the public sector are so skilled they can instantly diagnose all the issues (which, mysteriously, always manage to conform to their personal prejudices) and propose a solution which usually involves a change to “the culture”.
Sigh…
The public sector is roughly as good (and as bad) at doing things as the private sector (with some minor variances, generally based on being able to offer market pay). The big difference is that mistakes in the public sector have to be declared in full, whilst in the public sector they can usually be brushed under the carpet with the connivance of accountants and auditors.
"The big difference is that mistakes in the public sector have to be declared in full, whilst in the public sector they can usually be brushed under the carpet with the connivance of accountants and auditors."
Didn't you mean the second "public sector" in that sentence to read "private sector"?
I would cite the Post Office as a riposte to that sentiment but you know that already. Plus listed companies have to make market announcement - I pile cite a few examples there too.
But the Post Office during the key period (and since) was run by people brought in for their private sector expertise, who didn’t really understand what they were managing.
What we are looking at is a tragic confluence of private sector people focused on their key objective whilst not interested, or understanding, the environment they are in, supported by a load of career long public sector people trained to follow instructions and otherwise keep their heads down.
That is part of the explanation and an important factor. But I was responding to the claim that because it was in the public sector it had to declare its mistakes in full.
That has certainly not happened in the PO's case. If anything, partly to avoid embarrassing Ministers or at least Ministerial decisions and partly to permit the privatisation of Royal Mail, the unfolding problems were kept as quiet as possible for as long as possible, even to the extent of misleading courts and Parliament.
My read is that when Vennells arrives she was genuinely willing to try and sort the situation out. But she surely unappreciated the scale of the disaster, assuming they were dealing with a small number of anomalies that could be resolved without diverting her from her course. Which is what she will have been told, up the line. But at some point - pretty obviously shortly before Second Sight were sacked - she realised the scale of the catastrophe she was sitting on.
We can all see what the right thing to have done would have been. And I’m sure that 95% of us would swear that that’s what we would have done, in her position.
She will have found herself in a room full of senior people - long serving PO managers who understood things a lot better than her, maybe someone senior from Fuitisu still sowing misinformation, and - critically - some top lawyers who must have thought that they had a better than 50:50 chance of making the catastrophe go away with some disgraceful legal shenanigans, bankrupting the other party before the case got to a conclusion. As we can see, from both Wallis’s detailed account and the summary version dramatised by ITV, they very nearly succeeded. As it is, most of the money won by Bates and others went on legal costs.
Both the financial position of her business and her own personal reputation would have been trashed, had she come clean at that point - already being on record at the BIS SC and in the media as defending the PO position. So she had the choice between being honest and facing certain ordure, or gambling that she might make the whole thing go away.
We all know what the morally right thing to do was. But I’d bet that significantly less than 95% of us would have opted for the right path, put in her position.
I suspect there was also a great deal of Ministerial pressure not to do anything to impact the Post Office's route to profits.
But I have been in the position, both in the public sector and in the private sector, of having to tell very senior people (Ministers and Chief Executives) that what they would like to do is unlawful. That takes guts. And any CEO who ignores such advice is a bloody fool. It's not just about doing the morally right thing to do: it's about the difference between legality and illegality.
Susan Crichton, the GC, left suddenly in 2013 - not long after the external legal advice pointing out the unsafeness of the convictions and the first Second Sight report. I would really like to know the truth of what led to her departure and what advice she was giving. And what her successors and predecessors were doing and saying.
The role of the GC can be immensely powerful in such circumstances - if they use that power wisely and have the independence of character to use it. Not all do. Some are frankly useless. My guess is that her successor was more intent on facilitating a "let's sweep it under the carpet" job.
That is one reason why I think the role of the lawyers here has been so shameful. They should have been gatekeepers preventing morally dubious and unlawful behaviour. Instead they appear to have facilitated and carried it out.
I can agree with you there. Yet while the inquiry, and subsequent events, is likely to pour a cauldron of excrement over a few senior Post Office folk, and a few of the more junior ones whose evidence has been myopic, and maybe even some of the hapless oppos from Fujitsu, I’d wager that the legal profession - including the courts that convicted people merely because they couldn’t prove their innocence - will get off relatively lightly.
You may well be right, Ian. There is however a lot more to come yet, so who knows who will get off lightly and who will not. The Law Society has a dreadful reputation for failing to deal strenously with its errant members, but maybe it will surprise us this time around.
Meanwhile I ask how many of us could have defended a dodgy computer system knowing full well that by doing so we were sending innocent people to jail and destroying lives? I don't think it is many as 5%. You have to be right hard-nosed bastard to do that kind of thing.
But everyone’s knowledge was incomplete, from top to bottom, for varying reasons.
Mostly everyone, Ian. Can it really be true however that at no time did Vennells and her closest colleagues appreciate that the doubts about Horizon implied that the PO could be responsible for a huge miscarriage of justice?
Her appearance before the Inquiry will indeed be interesting, as you indicated.
As I suggested above, I think the true scale of the scandal they were sitting on only became apparent to those at the top during Second Sight. While many further down knew the problems with their bit of the jigsaw but never saw the bigger picture.
At that point Vennells had the choice between certain financial, career, and repetitional disaster immediately, or gambling that some high paid dodgy lawyers could make the whole thing go away. Morally, she clearly made the wrong choice - the right decision made more difficult by all the other senior folk in the room urging her on (easy when the buck was never stopping with them) who are all now keeping their heads down and feigning amnesia when asked anything too close to the mark.
But logically, she made the right choice, since she chose a 50% chance of marginally greater ruin over 100% of ruin nevertheless. Had she come clean in 2015, no-one now would be giving her any credit for not having spun the affair out for a then unimaginable - now very real, almost ten more years - since had it not happened, it wouldn’t have seemed possible.
But she's facing the very real prospect of chokey now, Ian, and possibly quite a long stretch. As Ms C pointed out earlier, the choice she made wasn't just morally incorrect, it was probably illegal.
I don't think that's logical or smart.
Btw, may I take the opportunity of saying that I have found your dialogues with Ms C on this subject riveting. They have contributed greatly to one of the most compelling discussions I have ever followed on PB, and I have been kicking around this place since its early days.
Thank you kindly.
When I said "logical" (optimal is perhaps more correct), I simply meant from a decision-tree approach, scoring the outcomes and probabalities. And you're right that if (and that's still a big 'if') the penalty turns out hugely more severe than it would have been had she come clean after Second Sight, then you would also be right that the decision then wasn't (although you'd have to weight the 50% chance of getting off against the chance and severity of the possible penalty now).
My argument was simply that you don't get anycredit in life, or politics, for doing stuff that avoids a then totally hypothetical even worse mess, if things are already very bad.
The story has been known, for those who cared to look, for years, yet Vennells was given a job in the Cabinet Office, Chair of an NHS Trust, and a couple of other directorships. And held these despite protests and complaints in each case, until public pressure and the developing legal story made it impossible. Prior to the ITV drama I would have put money on there being no penalty other than, possibly, losing the CBE and a possible, but legally tricky, private prosecution.
The ITV drama shows the power of media and public attention - and the pressure for some sort of punishment is clearly now building (the petition to take away her CBE, which has been running for three years but only had about 10,000 signatures last week, is now heading toward a million). But the public's attention span is usually short and may move on...
Incidentally, isn't it shameful that the Tories are trying to stir up blame for the LibDem junior ministers who were in post for a small, but critical, part of the story - when they gave Vennells a JOB IN THE CABINET OFFICE as well as the CBE when the whole saga was already in the public domain?
Yes - the decision to reward her in 2019 is both baffling and disgusting.
But I think the reason there has been a focus on the Lib Dems is because Ed Davey came out with his explanation and is still in politics. There has also been the release of the Bates correspondence with him, following the ITV drama.
Alan Bates has also talked about the other Ministers he wrote to: Stephen Timms, Norman Lamb, Jo Swinson etc before the litigation was launched but as they are no longer in politics no-one really cares about them.
It is clear that Davey did look into the allegations, but that the PO and Fujitsu insisted that the Horizon system didn't allow remote access and logged each entry in a separate file down to each keystroke.
I read on the previous thread that some sort of huge SNPbadness was about to break.
Well?
You are in Scotland. Nip down to the newsagent and tell us if they did "hold the front page" or if some PBer fell for a social media hoax and a photoshopped newspaper.
As far as I can see their revelation is that Yousaf is going to make a speech on Monday about economics (no tittering at the back) explaining how Scotland's economic performance will be transformed by independence because, well, because some other carefully selected small countries do better than us. Or something.
Meanwhile Scotland's largely devolved economy continues to flatline, nothing is done in the recent budget to encourage investment here, nothing to attract higher earners, nothing to address our growing skills gap and nothing to address our failing education system. And the shadow of Grangemouth and the loss of industrial output that that represents hangs over everything like a cowl. The UK will avoid recession this year. Scotland won't.
I read on the previous thread that some sort of huge SNPbadness was about to break.
Well?
You are in Scotland. Nip down to the newsagent and tell us if they did "hold the front page" or if some PBer fell for a social media hoax and a photoshopped newspaper.
Buy a newspaper? Along with most of the population, I’m done with that caveman jive daddy oh.
Never underestimate the capacity of the average Yoon to whip themselves into a conspiracy fuelled frenzy.
They showed it at exactly the right time - just after the festivities when people were still likely to be watching TV rather than being back at work and with nothing to compete. Plus some excellent marketing involving the actors - especially them saying that they didn't know anything about it, switched off on hearing "computers" but then got angry when they learnt the true story. It exactly mirrored how many people feel and was a brilliant way to get people to watch the drama.
It is clear that Davey did look into the allegations, but that the PO and Fujitsu insisted that the Horizon system didn't allow remote access and logged each entry in a separate file down to each keystroke.
We know that now not to be true, but that is Fujitsu's fault and untruth.
I think that's an answer to a different question - key presses have nothing to do with database transactions but it's unfair to expect none technical people to pick up the issue.
So Davey isn't at fault and at best Fujitsu carefully answered the question asked and not the question that was meant.
In reality I'm being very generous to Fujitsu there - they carefully answered a different question to the one that was being asked.
An interesting piece. Examples of the graphs would have helped but I appreciate length is always an issue for a header.
What the header, and indeed the discussion BTL, show is that it is increasingly difficult and complicated to classify someone's political beliefs in a broad category that carries a coherent meaning. One point that I think hasn't been made to date is that this is the reason that political parties have also become less coherent and disciplined.
So yesterday we had a former Tory Minister Chris Skidmore resigning because he doesn't think that the government should be issuing licences for fresh exploration in the North Sea. How do you classify that? According to Wiki he was Chairman of the Bow Group and a fellow of the Policy Exchange. He has been active in Tory politics since he was a teenager and supported Truss's Free Enterprise Group. An almost classic Tory but he has resigned the Whip and may soon be to resign his seat. If you can't create a tent big enough to include people like that how do you create a government?
Holding parties together in such an atmosphere is incredibly difficult creating governments that lack coherence, stability and a sense of purpose. I think that the politician who has proven to be the best at this in recent decades was Nicola Sturgeon but look what has happened since she left the scene. The famous SNP self discipline has collapsed and dissent is rife. This simply means that the SNP have fallen to earth and are in a similar position to most political parties.
We see this in the Commons. Both parties have an exceptional number of people who have been expelled or simply chosen to leave. In Labour's case this includes the former leader. In the last Parliament we had the likes of Ken Clarke expelled. What this means for the future is that any government elected with a small majority simply will not survive. There will be too many single issue obsessives who will split away.
We need more than two parties of government. Far better is PR, where all strands of opinion can be voiced.
One reason that I have never entered party politics for election (though have been a member of Labour 1994-2003, and Lib Dems 2013-present) is that my political views are incoherent. They really do not match any political party. I am a minority of one.
They showed it at exactly the right time - just after the festivities when people were still likely to be watching TV rather than being back at work and with nothing to compete. Plus some excellent marketing involving the actors - especially them saying that they didn't know anything about it, switched off on hearing "computers" but then got angry when they learnt the true story. It exactly mirrored how many people feel and was a brilliant way to get people to watch the drama.
I watched the first episode last night. It was excellent and once again stirred righteous anger as well as hope.
It is clear that Davey did look into the allegations, but that the PO and Fujitsu insisted that the Horizon system didn't allow remote access and logged each entry in a separate file down to each keystroke.
We know that now not to be true, but that is Fujitsu's fault and untruth.
I think that's an answer to a different question - key presses have nothing to do with database transactions but it's unfair to expect none technical people to pick up the issue.
So Davey isn't at fault and at best Fujitsu carefully answered the question asked and not the question that was meant.
In reality I'm being very generous to Fujitsu there - they carefully answered a different question to the one that was being asked.
Davey was told by that Horizon didn't allow remote access. We know that at least was an outright untruth.
An interesting piece. Examples of the graphs would have helped but I appreciate length is always an issue for a header.
What the header, and indeed the discussion BTL, show is that it is increasingly difficult and complicated to classify someone's political beliefs in a broad category that carries a coherent meaning. One point that I think hasn't been made to date is that this is the reason that political parties have also become less coherent and disciplined.
So yesterday we had a former Tory Minister Chris Skidmore resigning because he doesn't think that the government should be issuing licences for fresh exploration in the North Sea. How do you classify that? According to Wiki he was Chairman of the Bow Group and a fellow of the Policy Exchange. He has been active in Tory politics since he was a teenager and supported Truss's Free Enterprise Group. An almost classic Tory but he has resigned the Whip and may soon be to resign his seat. If you can't create a tent big enough to include people like that how do you create a government?
Holding parties together in such an atmosphere is incredibly difficult creating governments that lack coherence, stability and a sense of purpose. I think that the politician who has proven to be the best at this in recent decades was Nicola Sturgeon but look what has happened since she left the scene. The famous SNP self discipline has collapsed and dissent is rife. This simply means that the SNP have fallen to earth and are in a similar position to most political parties.
We see this in the Commons. Both parties have an exceptional number of people who have been expelled or simply chosen to leave. In Labour's case this includes the former leader. In the last Parliament we had the likes of Ken Clarke expelled. What this means for the future is that any government elected with a small majority simply will not survive. There will be too many single issue obsessives who will split away.
We need more than two parties of government. Far better is PR, where all strands of opinion can be voiced.
One reason that I have never entered party politics for election (though have been a member of Labour 1994-2003, and Lib Dems 2013-present) is that my political views are incoherent. They really do not match any political party. I am a minority of one.
I am similar and I expect an increasing majority are. I was last in a political party in about 2008 being the Lib Dems. Since then I have been broadly Conservative but deeply frustrated with much of their policies most of the time. Cameron came closest to bringing me into the fold but since then it has been much more problematic. The current government's policies on Rwanda, on HS2, on defence and on the taxation of those who work for a living have driven me to distraction. I will not be joining any political party soon.
An interesting piece. Examples of the graphs would have helped but I appreciate length is always an issue for a header.
What the header, and indeed the discussion BTL, show is that it is increasingly difficult and complicated to classify someone's political beliefs in a broad category that carries a coherent meaning. One point that I think hasn't been made to date is that this is the reason that political parties have also become less coherent and disciplined.
So yesterday we had a former Tory Minister Chris Skidmore resigning because he doesn't think that the government should be issuing licences for fresh exploration in the North Sea. How do you classify that? According to Wiki he was Chairman of the Bow Group and a fellow of the Policy Exchange. He has been active in Tory politics since he was a teenager and supported Truss's Free Enterprise Group. An almost classic Tory but he has resigned the Whip and may soon be to resign his seat. If you can't create a tent big enough to include people like that how do you create a government?
Holding parties together in such an atmosphere is incredibly difficult creating governments that lack coherence, stability and a sense of purpose. I think that the politician who has proven to be the best at this in recent decades was Nicola Sturgeon but look what has happened since she left the scene. The famous SNP self discipline has collapsed and dissent is rife. This simply means that the SNP have fallen to earth and are in a similar position to most political parties.
We see this in the Commons. Both parties have an exceptional number of people who have been expelled or simply chosen to leave. In Labour's case this includes the former leader. In the last Parliament we had the likes of Ken Clarke expelled. What this means for the future is that any government elected with a small majority simply will not survive. There will be too many single issue obsessives who will split away.
We need more than two parties of government. Far better is PR, where all strands of opinion can be voiced.
One reason that I have never entered party politics for election (though have been a member of Labour 1994-2003, and Lib Dems 2013-present) is that my political views are incoherent. They really do not match any political party. I am a minority of one.
So, ideally, are we looking at 67,736,802 parties?
Anyone who can persuade their mum to vote for them, would be off to a flyer
An interesting piece. Examples of the graphs would have helped but I appreciate length is always an issue for a header.
What the header, and indeed the discussion BTL, show is that it is increasingly difficult and complicated to classify someone's political beliefs in a broad category that carries a coherent meaning. One point that I think hasn't been made to date is that this is the reason that political parties have also become less coherent and disciplined.
So yesterday we had a former Tory Minister Chris Skidmore resigning because he doesn't think that the government should be issuing licences for fresh exploration in the North Sea. How do you classify that? According to Wiki he was Chairman of the Bow Group and a fellow of the Policy Exchange. He has been active in Tory politics since he was a teenager and supported Truss's Free Enterprise Group. An almost classic Tory but he has resigned the Whip and may soon be to resign his seat. If you can't create a tent big enough to include people like that how do you create a government?
Holding parties together in such an atmosphere is incredibly difficult creating governments that lack coherence, stability and a sense of purpose. I think that the politician who has proven to be the best at this in recent decades was Nicola Sturgeon but look what has happened since she left the scene. The famous SNP self discipline has collapsed and dissent is rife. This simply means that the SNP have fallen to earth and are in a similar position to most political parties.
We see this in the Commons. Both parties have an exceptional number of people who have been expelled or simply chosen to leave. In Labour's case this includes the former leader. In the last Parliament we had the likes of Ken Clarke expelled. What this means for the future is that any government elected with a small majority simply will not survive. There will be too many single issue obsessives who will split away.
We need more than two parties of government. Far better is PR, where all strands of opinion can be voiced.
One reason that I have never entered party politics for election (though have been a member of Labour 1994-2003, and Lib Dems 2013-present) is that my political views are incoherent. They really do not match any political party. I am a minority of one.
I am similar and I expect an increasing majority are. I was last in a political party in about 2008 being the Lib Dems. Since then I have been broadly Conservative but deeply frustrated with much of their policies most of the time. Cameron came closest to bringing me into the fold but since then it has been much more problematic. The current government's policies on Rwanda, on HS2, on defence and on the taxation of those who work for a living have driven me to distraction. I will not be joining any political party soon.
What gets me is we have a plan for growth and yet HS2 which would end up being a national backbone infrastructure project is penny pinched to death.
Previously Manchester is expected to have viaducts to bring the trains in while Italy & France go - hmm this train isn't as fast as it could be let's tunnel under the city and build a new station for Bologna (and now Florence, Marseille).
We'll ignore the Dutch and American approach that keeping trains on platforms is a waste of resources so let's extend HS2 to say Croydon and terminate the trains somewhere cheaper (which is what Amsterdam and New York are doing the equivalent of).
The major Birmingham University global survey on attitude to religion throws up some interesting stuff.
Of the countries surveyed (UK, USA, Argentina, Australia, Canada, Spain), Germany had the fewest identifying as religious or spiritual, and also the fewest saying that their "religious, spiritual or non-religious position" is "important to who you are and how you view the world". The latter score being highest in the US and Argentina, but even in the US, only 59%.
In the UK, Canada, Australia and (interestingly) Spain, the breakdown of responses to this question were pretty similar, with "important" percentages of 32-36% and "not important" of 42-46%.
For the converse question, how important is "science" to the same, Spain comes out highest at 71%. Who knew the Spanish were so scientific? Equally surprising, the UK came in second lowest (after the Germans) at 52%, behind even the US where 24% claim to be creationists (12% in UK, 7% in Germany, 6% Spain).
The responses to the latter question correlate strongly with level of education.
Asked whether religion has more negative consequences for society than positive, in all countries except the US, more people said negative, with negative achieving a majority (50%) in the UK, Germany & Canada (51%), Spain (54%) and Australia (56%). Argentina was lower at 37% but with "positive" coming in lower still at 31%.
For the same question about science, in all countries there are significant majorities for seeing science as positve with again Spain leading the way at 74% (negative 10%), and again the US (53%, negative 26%) and Argentina (46%, negative 20%) at the other end. The proportions agreeing are higher for those identifying as non-religious/spiritual, but the pluralities remain among the religious respondents. Again, a positive view of science correlates strongly with level of education.
The responses to how reliable people find a range of scientific and spiritual 'experts' broadly reflects the above, with medical practitioners leading the way in all countries as being seen as most reliable. An interesting counter-finding is that Argentinians, despite being more religious on most survey quesions, nevertheless had a lower (23%) proportion who see religious leaders as reliable sources of information.
Generally, younger people found experts more reliable across all countries and types of expert (both scientific and religious) than older people.
I still think of this as circle, or horseshoe if you prefer; extreme left and right become indistinguishable autocracies.
I don't think that a very accurate picture. The far right and far left don't look much alike apart from being prone to both factionalism and political violence. Its the acceptance of verbal and physical violence as a political tool that leads to anti-semitism, and factionalism is rooted in personality cults.
I suggest that it's hard to divide dictatorships into two radically different camps according to how it feels to be on the receiving end. Many of the attitudes and many of the outcomes are very similar. Ask the Poles. And of course Mr H (let's try and dodge Godwin's law with an initial) and his party started out as socialist. Yes, the two sides hate each other, but that's because they're rivals for the same radical intolerance and hate each other in the way of two violent gangs of opposing football team supporters. Yet they're both football gangs.
If you tried to generalise, a left-wing dictatorship tends to be pretty grim for most people except for a small preferred elite, whereas a right-wing dictatorship tends to be truly appalling for a minority and perhaps not quite so bad for a majority. But I'm not sure even that generalisation would stand up to too many examples.
It does just largely descend into the same thing. I do actively dislike the defining of fascism as just something horrible that you dont like. It was more than that it was a creed, a loose set of ideas which more than just hating disabled people and internationalists polluting national values (and sucking resources away from the nation).
An interesting piece. Examples of the graphs would have helped but I appreciate length is always an issue for a header.
What the header, and indeed the discussion BTL, show is that it is increasingly difficult and complicated to classify someone's political beliefs in a broad category that carries a coherent meaning. One point that I think hasn't been made to date is that this is the reason that political parties have also become less coherent and disciplined.
So yesterday we had a former Tory Minister Chris Skidmore resigning because he doesn't think that the government should be issuing licences for fresh exploration in the North Sea. How do you classify that? According to Wiki he was Chairman of the Bow Group and a fellow of the Policy Exchange. He has been active in Tory politics since he was a teenager and supported Truss's Free Enterprise Group. An almost classic Tory but he has resigned the Whip and may soon be to resign his seat. If you can't create a tent big enough to include people like that how do you create a government?
Holding parties together in such an atmosphere is incredibly difficult creating governments that lack coherence, stability and a sense of purpose. I think that the politician who has proven to be the best at this in recent decades was Nicola Sturgeon but look what has happened since she left the scene. The famous SNP self discipline has collapsed and dissent is rife. This simply means that the SNP have fallen to earth and are in a similar position to most political parties.
We see this in the Commons. Both parties have an exceptional number of people who have been expelled or simply chosen to leave. In Labour's case this includes the former leader. In the last Parliament we had the likes of Ken Clarke expelled. What this means for the future is that any government elected with a small majority simply will not survive. There will be too many single issue obsessives who will split away.
We need more than two parties of government. Far better is PR, where all strands of opinion can be voiced.
One reason that I have never entered party politics for election (though have been a member of Labour 1994-2003, and Lib Dems 2013-present) is that my political views are incoherent. They really do not match any political party. I am a minority of one.
I am similar and I expect an increasing majority are. I was last in a political party in about 2008 being the Lib Dems. Since then I have been broadly Conservative but deeply frustrated with much of their policies most of the time. Cameron came closest to bringing me into the fold but since then it has been much more problematic. The current government's policies on Rwanda, on HS2, on defence and on the taxation of those who work for a living have driven me to distraction. I will not be joining any political party soon.
I too was taken in by Cameron, and voted for the Conservatives in 2010. I saw the need for change, and how New Labour had become rotten in power, and was willing to take at face value that the Conservative Party had changed. It had indeed changed, but the social liberalism of Cameroonism has certainly been reversed now, replaced by a rather unpleasant streak of Culture War.
I do look back on the Coalition positively, despite some significant errors including by the Lib Dems. Indeed that was when I became active on PB.
It is clear that Davey did look into the allegations, but that the PO and Fujitsu insisted that the Horizon system didn't allow remote access and logged each entry in a separate file down to each keystroke.
We know that now not to be true, but that is Fujitsu's fault and untruth.
I think that's an answer to a different question - key presses have nothing to do with database transactions but it's unfair to expect none technical people to pick up the issue.
So Davey isn't at fault and at best Fujitsu carefully answered the question asked and not the question that was meant.
In reality I'm being very generous to Fujitsu there - they carefully answered a different question to the one that was being asked.
Saying a computer system is "robust" is meaningless. What does "robust" mean? Robust for what?
A software system may work very well for purpose A but not for purpose B. What error logs were there? What internal audit reports on it were there? What quality assurance was done? Etc. I am no IT expert but these questions are not hard to ask and even less so if you take advice from those who do understand these matters.
The other obvious questions to have asked are: who does the investigation into the discrepancies? What are their qualifications for doing so? How do they check that this is not caused by software or other faults? What quality assurance is done on their reports? Are these reports disclosed to the defendants during the prosecutions as they are legally obliged to be? And so on.
There was a basic lack of curiosity.
The balloon really should have gone up when Second Sight reported that they were being denied access to the documents they were promised. That was a red flag. Then when they were sacked just before their second report came out. That was another one.
The major Birmingham University global survey on attitude to religion throws up some interesting stuff.
Of the countries surveyed (UK, USA, Argentina, Australia, Canada, Spain), Germany had the fewest identifying as religious or spiritual, and also the fewest saying that their "religious, spiritual or non-religious position" is "important to who you are and how you view the world". The latter score being highest in the US and Argentina, but even in the US, only 59%.
In the UK, Canada, Australia and (interestingly) Spain, the breakdown of responses to this question were pretty similar, with "important" percentages of 32-36% and "not important" of 42-46%.
For the converse question, how important is "science" to the same, Spain comes out highest at 71%. Who knew the Spanish were so scientific? Equally surprising, the UK came in second lowest (after the Germans) at 52%, behind even the US where 24% claim to be creationists (12% in UK, 7% in Germany, 6% Spain).
The responses to the latter question correlate strongly with level of education.
Asked whether religion has more negative consequences for society than positive, in all countries except the US, more people said negative, with negative achieving a majority (50%) in the UK, Germany & Canada (51%), Spain (54%) and Australia (56%). Argentina was lower at 37% but with "positive" coming in lower still at 31%.
For the same question about science, in all countries there are significant majorities for seeing science as positve with again Spain leading the way at 74% (negative 10%), and again the US (53%, negative 26%) and Argentina (46%, negative 20%) at the other end. The proportions agreeing are higher for those identifying as non-religious/spiritual, but the pluralities remain among the religious respondents. Again, a positive view of science correlates strongly with level of education.
The responses to how reliable people find a range of scientific and spiritual 'experts' broadly reflects the above, with medical practitioners leading the way in all countries as being seen as most reliable. An interesting counter-finding is that Argentinians, despite being more religious on most survey quesions, nevertheless had a lower (23%) proportion who see religious leaders as reliable sources of information.
Generally, younger people found experts more reliable across all countries and types of expert (both scientific and religious) than older people.
Ironically, the further decay of religious belief - in the west, at least - is happening just as science tentatively says, Er, wait, hold on
Here’s an eyebrow raising blog where a materialist scientist says “yeah; reincarnation may be true”
For the purposes of transcendental clarity, I do not believe in reincarnation - at least I don’t think so. I DO believe the edifice of strict scientific materialism, as we have known it, is under unprecedented siege, and is perhaps beginning to totter
It’s always heartwarming to see that some folk who have never worked in the public sector are so skilled they can instantly diagnose all the issues (which, mysteriously, always manage to conform to their personal prejudices) and propose a solution which usually involves a change to “the culture”.
Sigh…
The public sector is roughly as good (and as bad) at doing things as the private sector (with some minor variances, generally based on being able to offer market pay). The big difference is that mistakes in the public sector have to be declared in full, whilst in the public sector they can usually be brushed under the carpet with the connivance of accountants and auditors.
"The big difference is that mistakes in the public sector have to be declared in full, whilst in the public sector they can usually be brushed under the carpet with the connivance of accountants and auditors."
Didn't you mean the second "public sector" in that sentence to read "private sector"?
I would cite the Post Office as a riposte to that sentiment but you know that already. Plus listed companies have to make market announcement - I pile cite a few examples there too.
But the Post Office during the key period (and since) was run by people brought in for their private sector expertise, who didn’t really understand what they were managing.
What we are looking at is a tragic confluence of private sector people focused on their key objective whilst not interested, or understanding, the environment they are in, supported by a load of career long public sector people trained to follow instructions and otherwise keep their heads down.
That is part of the explanation and an important factor. But I was responding to the claim that because it was in the public sector it had to declare its mistakes in full.
That has certainly not happened in the PO's case. If anything, partly to avoid embarrassing Ministers or at least Ministerial decisions and partly to permit the privatisation of Royal Mail, the unfolding problems were kept as quiet as possible for as long as possible, even to the extent of misleading courts and Parliament.
My read is that when Vennells arrives she was genuinely willing to try and sort the situation out. But she surely unappreciated the scale of the disaster, assuming they were dealing with a small number of anomalies that could be resolved without diverting her from her course. Which is what she will have been told, up the line. But at some point - pretty obviously shortly before Second Sight were sacked - she realised the scale of the catastrophe she was sitting on.
We can all see what the right thing to have done would have been. And I’m sure that 95% of us would swear that that’s what we would have done, in her position.
She will have found herself in a room full of senior people - long serving PO managers who understood things a lot better than her, maybe someone senior from Fuitisu still sowing misinformation, and - critically - some top lawyers who must have thought that they had a better than 50:50 chance of making the catastrophe go away with some disgraceful legal shenanigans, bankrupting the other party before the case got to a conclusion. As we can see, from both Wallis’s detailed account and the summary version dramatised by ITV, they very nearly succeeded. As it is, most of the money won by Bates and others went on legal costs.
Both the financial position of her business and her own personal reputation would have been trashed, had she come clean at that point - already being on record at the BIS SC and in the media as defending the PO position. So she had the choice between being honest and facing certain ordure, or gambling that she might make the whole thing go away.
We all know what the morally right thing to do was. But I’d bet that significantly less than 95% of us would have opted for the right path, put in her position.
I suspect there was also a great deal of Ministerial pressure not to do anything to impact the Post Office's route to profits.
But I have been in the position, both in the public sector and in the private sector, of having to tell very senior people (Ministers and Chief Executives) that what they would like to do is unlawful. That takes guts. And any CEO who ignores such advice is a bloody fool. It's not just about doing the morally right thing to do: it's about the difference between legality and illegality.
Susan Crichton, the GC, left suddenly in 2013 - not long after the external legal advice pointing out the unsafeness of the convictions and the first Second Sight report. I would really like to know the truth of what led to her departure and what advice she was giving. And what her successors and predecessors were doing and saying.
The role of the GC can be immensely powerful in such circumstances - if they use that power wisely and have the independence of character to use it. Not all do. Some are frankly useless. My guess is that her successor was more intent on facilitating a "let's sweep it under the carpet" job.
That is one reason why I think the role of the lawyers here has been so shameful. They should have been gatekeepers preventing morally dubious and unlawful behaviour. Instead they appear to have facilitated and carried it out.
I can agree with you there. Yet while the inquiry, and subsequent events, is likely to pour a cauldron of excrement over a few senior Post Office folk, and a few of the more junior ones whose evidence has been myopic, and maybe even some of the hapless oppos from Fujitsu, I’d wager that the legal profession - including the courts that convicted people merely because they couldn’t prove their innocence - will get off relatively lightly.
You may well be right, Ian. There is however a lot more to come yet, so who knows who will get off lightly and who will not. The Law Society has a dreadful reputation for failing to deal strenously with its errant members, but maybe it will surprise us this time around.
Meanwhile I ask how many of us could have defended a dodgy computer system knowing full well that by doing so we were sending innocent people to jail and destroying lives? I don't think it is many as 5%. You have to be right hard-nosed bastard to do that kind of thing.
But everyone’s knowledge was incomplete, from top to bottom, for varying reasons.
Mostly everyone, Ian. Can it really be true however that at no time did Vennells and her closest colleagues appreciate that the doubts about Horizon implied that the PO could be responsible for a huge miscarriage of justice?
Her appearance before the Inquiry will indeed be interesting, as you indicated.
As I suggested above, I think the true scale of the scandal they were sitting on only became apparent to those at the top during Second Sight. While many further down knew the problems with their bit of the jigsaw but never saw the bigger picture.
At that point Vennells had the choice between certain financial, career, and repetitional disaster immediately, or gambling that some high paid dodgy lawyers could make the whole thing go away. Morally, she clearly made the wrong choice - the right decision made more difficult by all the other senior folk in the room urging her on (easy when the buck was never stopping with them) who are all now keeping their heads down and feigning amnesia when asked anything too close to the mark.
But logically, she made the right choice, since she chose a 50% chance of marginally greater ruin over 100% of ruin nevertheless. Had she come clean in 2015, no-one now would be giving her any credit for not having spun the affair out for a then unimaginable - now very real, almost ten more years - since had it not happened, it wouldn’t have seemed possible.
But she's facing the very real prospect of chokey now, Ian, and possibly quite a long stretch. As Ms C pointed out earlier, the choice she made wasn't just morally incorrect, it was probably illegal.
I don't think that's logical or smart.
Btw, may I take the opportunity of saying that I have found your dialogues with Ms C on this subject riveting. They have contributed greatly to one of the most compelling discussions I have ever followed on PB, and I have been kicking around this place since its early days.
Thank you kindly.
When I said "logical" (optimal is perhaps more correct), I simply meant from a decision-tree approach, scoring the outcomes and probabalities. And you're right that if (and that's still a big 'if') the penalty turns out hugely more severe than it would have been had she come clean after Second Sight, then you would also be right that the decision then wasn't (although you'd have to weight the 50% chance of getting off against the chance and severity of the possible penalty now).
My argument was simply that you don't get anycredit in life, or politics, for doing stuff that avoids a then totally hypothetical even worse mess, if things are already very bad.
The story has been known, for those who cared to look, for years, yet Vennells was given a job in the Cabinet Office, Chair of an NHS Trust, and a couple of other directorships. And held these despite protests and complaints in each case, until public pressure and the developing legal story made it impossible. Prior to the ITV drama I would have put money on there being no penalty other than, possibly, losing the CBE and a possible, but legally tricky, private prosecution.
The ITV drama shows the power of media and public attention - and the pressure for some sort of punishment is clearly now building (the petition to take away her CBE, which has been running for three years but only had about 10,000 signatures last week, is now heading toward a million). But the public's attention span is usually short and may move on...
Incidentally, isn't it shameful that the Tories are trying to stir up blame for the LibDem junior ministers who were in post for a small, but critical, part of the story - when they gave Vennells a JOB IN THE CABINET OFFICE as well as the CBE when the whole saga was already in the public domain?
Yes - the decision to reward her in 2019 is both baffling and disgusting.
But I think the reason there has been a focus on the Lib Dems is because Ed Davey came out with his explanation and is still in politics. There has also been the release of the Bates correspondence with him, following the ITV drama.
Alan Bates has also talked about the other Ministers he wrote to: Stephen Timms, Norman Lamb, Jo Swinson etc before the litigation was launched but as they are no longer in politics no-one really cares about them.
It's not just that Davey is still in politics: he will soon be on our screens saying he wants a role in Government. (I'm assuming he won't be as stupid as Swinson and say he is looking to be our PM.) But he will be seeking a position as Minister in a coalition (when Starmer has an even worse election campaign than Theresa May).
He doesn't inspire confidence in that role. He appears to have kept his head down, when for years he could have been making noise that he was lied to by Fujitsu - and that helped cause this great injustice.
An interesting piece. Examples of the graphs would have helped but I appreciate length is always an issue for a header.
What the header, and indeed the discussion BTL, show is that it is increasingly difficult and complicated to classify someone's political beliefs in a broad category that carries a coherent meaning. One point that I think hasn't been made to date is that this is the reason that political parties have also become less coherent and disciplined.
So yesterday we had a former Tory Minister Chris Skidmore resigning because he doesn't think that the government should be issuing licences for fresh exploration in the North Sea. How do you classify that? According to Wiki he was Chairman of the Bow Group and a fellow of the Policy Exchange. He has been active in Tory politics since he was a teenager and supported Truss's Free Enterprise Group. An almost classic Tory but he has resigned the Whip and may soon be to resign his seat. If you can't create a tent big enough to include people like that how do you create a government?
Holding parties together in such an atmosphere is incredibly difficult creating governments that lack coherence, stability and a sense of purpose. I think that the politician who has proven to be the best at this in recent decades was Nicola Sturgeon but look what has happened since she left the scene. The famous SNP self discipline has collapsed and dissent is rife. This simply means that the SNP have fallen to earth and are in a similar position to most political parties.
We see this in the Commons. Both parties have an exceptional number of people who have been expelled or simply chosen to leave. In Labour's case this includes the former leader. In the last Parliament we had the likes of Ken Clarke expelled. What this means for the future is that any government elected with a small majority simply will not survive. There will be too many single issue obsessives who will split away.
We need more than two parties of government. Far better is PR, where all strands of opinion can be voiced.
One reason that I have never entered party politics for election (though have been a member of Labour 1994-2003, and Lib Dems 2013-present) is that my political views are incoherent. They really do not match any political party. I am a minority of one.
I am similar and I expect an increasing majority are. I was last in a political party in about 2008 being the Lib Dems. Since then I have been broadly Conservative but deeply frustrated with much of their policies most of the time. Cameron came closest to bringing me into the fold but since then it has been much more problematic. The current government's policies on Rwanda, on HS2, on defence and on the taxation of those who work for a living have driven me to distraction. I will not be joining any political party soon.
What gets me is we have a plan for growth and yet HS2 which would end up being a national backbone infrastructure project is penny pinched to death.
Previously Manchester is expected to have viaducts to bring the trains in while Italy & France go - hmm this train isn't as fast as it could be let's tunnel under the city and build a new station for Bologna (and now Florence, Marseille).
We'll ignore the Dutch and American approach that keeping trains on platforms is a waste of resources so let's extend HS2 to say Croydon and terminate the trains somewhere cheaper (which is what Amsterdam and New York are doing the equivalent of).
The penny pinching of HS2 was an extreme example of the incapability of our political classes to commit to long term structural projects essential for growth, not in this Parliament (which is their entire focus) but the one after and the one after that. I see no evidence that Labour are going to be any better at this.
It is clear that Davey did look into the allegations, but that the PO and Fujitsu insisted that the Horizon system didn't allow remote access and logged each entry in a separate file down to each keystroke.
We know that now not to be true, but that is Fujitsu's fault and untruth.
I think that's an answer to a different question - key presses have nothing to do with database transactions but it's unfair to expect none technical people to pick up the issue.
So Davey isn't at fault and at best Fujitsu carefully answered the question asked and not the question that was meant.
In reality I'm being very generous to Fujitsu there - they carefully answered a different question to the one that was being asked.
Saying a computer system is "robust" is meaningless. What does "robust" mean? Robust for what?
A software system may work very well for purpose A but not for purpose B. What error logs were there? What internal audit reports on it were there? What quality assurance was done? Etc. I am no IT expert but these questions are not hard to ask and even less so if you take advice from those who do understand these matters.
The other obvious questions to have asked are: who does the investigation into the discrepancies? What are their qualifications for doing so? How do they check that this is not caused by software or other faults? What quality assurance is done on their reports? Are these reports disclosed to the defendants during the prosecutions as they are legally obliged to be? And so on.
There was a basic lack of curiosity.
The balloon really should have gone up when Second Sight reported that they were being denied access to the documents they were promised. That was a red flag. Then when they were sacked just before their second report came out. That was another one.
Oh the entire response is meaningless but it achieved the aim of silencing Ministerial interest for a bit so job done...
It is clear that Davey did look into the allegations, but that the PO and Fujitsu insisted that the Horizon system didn't allow remote access and logged each entry in a separate file down to each keystroke.
We know that now not to be true, but that is Fujitsu's fault and untruth.
I think that's an answer to a different question - key presses have nothing to do with database transactions but it's unfair to expect none technical people to pick up the issue.
So Davey isn't at fault and at best Fujitsu carefully answered the question asked and not the question that was meant.
In reality I'm being very generous to Fujitsu there - they carefully answered a different question to the one that was being asked.
Saying a computer system is "robust" is meaningless. What does "robust" mean? Robust for what?
A software system may work very well for purpose A but not for purpose B. What error logs were there? What internal audit reports on it were there? What quality assurance was done? Etc. I am no IT expert but these questions are not hard to ask and even less so if you take advice from those who do understand these matters.
The other obvious questions to have asked are: who does the investigation into the discrepancies? What are their qualifications for doing so? How do they check that this is not caused by software or other faults? What quality assurance is done on their reports? Are these reports disclosed to the defendants during the prosecutions as they are legally obliged to be? And so on.
There was a basic lack of curiosity.
The balloon really should have gone up when Second Sight reported that they were being denied access to the documents they were promised. That was a red flag. Then when they were sacked just before their second report came out. That was another one.
Fair play to you @Cyclefree for banging this drum. Even from far away in Bangkok - ah, sweet Bangkok, as the sun sets - I can see that the Post Office scandal has finally surfaced, and is roiling the seas of social media, and - belatedly - achieved national salience
Likewise @Peter_the_Punter and @IanB2 and everyone else who has jangled this tambourine. It now resounds
It STILL bores the moobs off me, but that is absolutely my fault for being easily bored by post offices. I shall watch the ITV drama tonight (which has clearly shifted everything); hopefully I will feel some empathy - and curiosity
So when Rishi Rich says that he is going to cut welfare payments, I'll stick my neck out and guess that this does not include the triple l9cked state pension.
The triple lock is a good thing. Our state pension is not generous. Where money can be saved is on higher rate tax relief on pension contributions which benefits the well-paid, such as politicians and columnists who call instead for an end to the triple lock.
But it locks in an inexorable rise in cost for an item in the accounts that is already both sizeable and inexorably growing due to the ageing population.
It would be more sensible to target funding at those poorer pensioners genuinely in need, rather than helicoptering it onto the entire cohort of the retired, when their disposable income is now - remarkably - already greater on average than those in work.
Pensions are already taxed as income. And none of the triple lock critics say it should be abolished but kept for the poor. Yes, if we project forward ad infinitum, pensions will become unaffordable but that day is far off.
If political parties are frightened of removing the triple lock then we risk sailing past the point at which it becomes unaffordable.
A good example of politics winning over good governance.
Good morning
It is unsustainable and the next government will have no choice but change it, and I may add, increase he pension age incrementally
True. Although I get the impression that government is in "we must do something" mode - that press story giving the impression that the Met Police had sprung into action, when in the detail you could see that the cited 'criminal investigation' has been running since 2020 and so far achieved very little - smacks of some spin doctor just wanting to get stuff in the press to create the illusion of a rapid response...
An interesting piece. Examples of the graphs would have helped but I appreciate length is always an issue for a header.
What the header, and indeed the discussion BTL, show is that it is increasingly difficult and complicated to classify someone's political beliefs in a broad category that carries a coherent meaning. One point that I think hasn't been made to date is that this is the reason that political parties have also become less coherent and disciplined.
So yesterday we had a former Tory Minister Chris Skidmore resigning because he doesn't think that the government should be issuing licences for fresh exploration in the North Sea. How do you classify that? According to Wiki he was Chairman of the Bow Group and a fellow of the Policy Exchange. He has been active in Tory politics since he was a teenager and supported Truss's Free Enterprise Group. An almost classic Tory but he has resigned the Whip and may soon be to resign his seat. If you can't create a tent big enough to include people like that how do you create a government?
Holding parties together in such an atmosphere is incredibly difficult creating governments that lack coherence, stability and a sense of purpose. I think that the politician who has proven to be the best at this in recent decades was Nicola Sturgeon but look what has happened since she left the scene. The famous SNP self discipline has collapsed and dissent is rife. This simply means that the SNP have fallen to earth and are in a similar position to most political parties.
We see this in the Commons. Both parties have an exceptional number of people who have been expelled or simply chosen to leave. In Labour's case this includes the former leader. In the last Parliament we had the likes of Ken Clarke expelled. What this means for the future is that any government elected with a small majority simply will not survive. There will be too many single issue obsessives who will split away.
We need more than two parties of government. Far better is PR, where all strands of opinion can be voiced.
One reason that I have never entered party politics for election (though have been a member of Labour 1994-2003, and Lib Dems 2013-present) is that my political views are incoherent. They really do not match any political party. I am a minority of one.
I am similar and I expect an increasing majority are. I was last in a political party in about 2008 being the Lib Dems. Since then I have been broadly Conservative but deeply frustrated with much of their policies most of the time. Cameron came closest to bringing me into the fold but since then it has been much more problematic. The current government's policies on Rwanda, on HS2, on defence and on the taxation of those who work for a living have driven me to distraction. I will not be joining any political party soon.
I too was taken in by Cameron, and voted for the Conservatives in 2010. I saw the need for change, and how New Labour had become rotten in power, and was willing to take at face value that the Conservative Party had changed. It had indeed changed, but the social liberalism of Cameroonism has certainly been reversed now, replaced by a rather unpleasant streak of Culture War.
I do look back on the Coalition positively, despite some significant errors including by the Lib Dems. Indeed that was when I became active on PB.
Likewise in both respects.
I think that the Coalition was one of the best periods of government in my adult life time. Of course they made mistakes, as all governments do, but that is in the nature of things. What would we give for that level of incompetence now? It would be deeply aspirational both for the present government and the Labour opposition.
It basically said the Post Office was unable to account for cash and stock across its entire network and its systems were unfit for purpose.
So 2 independent reports in 2013 saying that the Post Office could not put its own socks on in the morning and we're expected to accept that Ministers should not be told about it or were not told about this despite this company being owned and funded by us.
The Post Office Board was in breach of its duties. At this time Alice Perkins, Jack Straw's wife, an ex-civil servant was the Chair. So it's not just Ms Vennells who needs to answer questions or have her honours removed. Ms Perkins was Chair for a crucial 4 years from 2011 - 2015.
She has remained quiet unlike Ed Davey and had the gall to say that she left the Post Office in a better situation than when she started.
Amazing that these people manage to cross the road without being run over so blind they must be.
a) Magnets don't work in water b) School shooting is very sad but parents need to get over it c) Abraham Lincoln shouldn't be famous. If he negotiated it (the Civil War) we wouldn't know who he was.
As far as c) is concerned (ignoring the minor point of negotiating slavery) he obviously doesn't like that he isn't the most famous president. He shouldn't worry. He will be, but not for the reasons he thinks.
An interesting piece. Examples of the graphs would have helped but I appreciate length is always an issue for a header.
What the header, and indeed the discussion BTL, show is that it is increasingly difficult and complicated to classify someone's political beliefs in a broad category that carries a coherent meaning. One point that I think hasn't been made to date is that this is the reason that political parties have also become less coherent and disciplined.
So yesterday we had a former Tory Minister Chris Skidmore resigning because he doesn't think that the government should be issuing licences for fresh exploration in the North Sea. How do you classify that? According to Wiki he was Chairman of the Bow Group and a fellow of the Policy Exchange. He has been active in Tory politics since he was a teenager and supported Truss's Free Enterprise Group. An almost classic Tory but he has resigned the Whip and may soon be to resign his seat. If you can't create a tent big enough to include people like that how do you create a government?
Holding parties together in such an atmosphere is incredibly difficult creating governments that lack coherence, stability and a sense of purpose. I think that the politician who has proven to be the best at this in recent decades was Nicola Sturgeon but look what has happened since she left the scene. The famous SNP self discipline has collapsed and dissent is rife. This simply means that the SNP have fallen to earth and are in a similar position to most political parties.
We see this in the Commons. Both parties have an exceptional number of people who have been expelled or simply chosen to leave. In Labour's case this includes the former leader. In the last Parliament we had the likes of Ken Clarke expelled. What this means for the future is that any government elected with a small majority simply will not survive. There will be too many single issue obsessives who will split away.
We need more than two parties of government. Far better is PR, where all strands of opinion can be voiced.
One reason that I have never entered party politics for election (though have been a member of Labour 1994-2003, and Lib Dems 2013-present) is that my political views are incoherent. They really do not match any political party. I am a minority of one.
I am similar and I expect an increasing majority are. I was last in a political party in about 2008 being the Lib Dems. Since then I have been broadly Conservative but deeply frustrated with much of their policies most of the time. Cameron came closest to bringing me into the fold but since then it has been much more problematic. The current government's policies on Rwanda, on HS2, on defence and on the taxation of those who work for a living have driven me to distraction. I will not be joining any political party soon.
What gets me is we have a plan for growth and yet HS2 which would end up being a national backbone infrastructure project is penny pinched to death.
Previously Manchester is expected to have viaducts to bring the trains in while Italy & France go - hmm this train isn't as fast as it could be let's tunnel under the city and build a new station for Bologna (and now Florence, Marseille).
We'll ignore the Dutch and American approach that keeping trains on platforms is a waste of resources so let's extend HS2 to say Croydon and terminate the trains somewhere cheaper (which is what Amsterdam and New York are doing the equivalent of).
The penny pinching of HS2 was an extreme example of the incapability of our political classes to commit to long term structural projects essential for growth, not in this Parliament (which is their entire focus) but the one after and the one after that. I see no evidence that Labour are going to be any better at this.
Thing is, it wasn’t just penny pinching. Part of the problem with HS2 was the opposite, gold plating a project, going for maximum high spec everything - 600kph trains with diamond tipped ticket collectors
if you’ve ever watched an LNER Azuma train race through Luton without stopping you will notice they go REALLY fast, certainly fast enough for a country as small and compact as the UK. 125mph. We don’t actually NEED more than that, do we?
It is clear that Davey did look into the allegations, but that the PO and Fujitsu insisted that the Horizon system didn't allow remote access and logged each entry in a separate file down to each keystroke.
We know that now not to be true, but that is Fujitsu's fault and untruth.
I think that's an answer to a different question - key presses have nothing to do with database transactions but it's unfair to expect none technical people to pick up the issue.
So Davey isn't at fault and at best Fujitsu carefully answered the question asked and not the question that was meant.
In reality I'm being very generous to Fujitsu there - they carefully answered a different question to the one that was being asked.
Saying a computer system is "robust" is meaningless. What does "robust" mean? Robust for what?
"Robust" is a word carefully chosen to mean, for the speaker, that the system runs and doesn't crash or collapse, yet to the listener, convey the impression it means "accurate".
I read on the previous thread that some sort of huge SNPbadness was about to break.
Well?
You are in Scotland. Nip down to the newsagent and tell us if they did "hold the front page" or if some PBer fell for a social media hoax and a photoshopped newspaper.
I missed that last night, but guess the most credulous person on the planet has been 'had', again?
The Trailers. To wet our appetite, Poster talks to Admins in main room about submitted article, not via one of PBs rest rooms - fascism will be defined for us. Oh Goodie can’t wait.
Wikipedia Defined by Wikipedia as Fascism (/ˈfæʃɪzəm/ FASH-iz-əm) is a far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement,[1][2][3] characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.[2][3]. Personally I would question “far right” and “natural social hierarchy.” All of those things on the list could be practiced by a middle way centerist, or someone AOL or vague on political leanings, couldn’t they?
Boots. The simplest and most effective definition of fascism is footwear. Fascism isn’t politics or ideas at all - It’s the uniform. It’s all about dressing up. Droogism. Belonging to a street gang. They look in the mirror before leaving the bedsit and see style and panache. We see mummy’s boys - immaturity - clowns.
I still think of this as circle, or horseshoe if you prefer; extreme left and right become indistinguishable autocracies.
I don't think that a very accurate picture. The far right and far left don't look much alike apart from being prone to both factionalism and political violence. Its the acceptance of verbal and physical violence as a political tool that leads to anti-semitism, and factionalism is rooted in personality cults.
I suggest that it's hard to divide dictatorships into two radically different camps according to how it feels to be on the receiving end. Many of the attitudes and many of the outcomes are very similar. Ask the Poles. And of course Mr H (let's try and dodge Godwin's law with an initial) and his party started out as socialist. Yes, the two sides hate each other, but that's because they're rivals for the same radical intolerance and hate each other in the way of two violent gangs of opposing football team supporters. Yet they're both football gangs.
If you tried to generalise, a left-wing dictatorship tends to be pretty grim for most people except for a small preferred elite, whereas a right-wing dictatorship tends to be truly appalling for a minority and perhaps not quite so bad for a majority. But I'm not sure even that generalisation would stand up to too many examples.
It does just largely descend into the same thing. I do actively dislike the defining of fascism as just something horrible that you dont like. It was more than that it was a creed, a loose set of ideas which more than just hating disabled people and internationalists polluting national values (and sucking resources away from the nation).
I think there are some defining features of fascism that are distinct.
1) Leadership cults are integral to fascism. The vision of the Leader embodying the people, and therefore the state. They are however not unique to facism, being found in other totalitarian systems like Communism, Theocracies and absolute monarchies.
2) There is an idealisation of a unique people, with a common culture and outlook, with special distinctive features and manifest destiny.
This refuses to accept that the people are not a single variety, but are actually quite diverse ethnically, culturally, religiously etc. This is the root of the nativism and racism of fascist ideology.
3) There is a culture of physicality and machismo, that defines the reborn nation and has contempt for intellectualism and other habits seen as effete. This leads to systemic homophobia, misogyny and political violence.
I don't think we have more than a tiny percentage of such people in Britain.
I read on the previous thread that some sort of huge SNPbadness was about to break.
Well?
You are in Scotland. Nip down to the newsagent and tell us if they did "hold the front page" or if some PBer fell for a social media hoax and a photoshopped newspaper.
Buy a newspaper? Along with most of the population, I’m done with that caveman jive daddy oh.
Never underestimate the capacity of the average Yoon to whip themselves into a conspiracy fuelled frenzy.
I am getting visions of a TV crew finding 'the average Scot' - Perhaps called Glen and hailing from Dunfermline, and handing him a big cheque for £10,000 courtesy of independence.
I read on the previous thread that some sort of huge SNPbadness was about to break.
Well?
You are in Scotland. Nip down to the newsagent and tell us if they did "hold the front page" or if some PBer fell for a social media hoax and a photoshopped newspaper.
Buy a newspaper? Along with most of the population, I’m done with that caveman jive daddy oh.
Never underestimate the capacity of the average Yoon to whip themselves into a conspiracy fuelled frenzy.
I am getting visions of a TV crew finding 'the average Scot' - Perhaps called Glen and hailing from Dunfermline, and handing him a big cheque for £10,000 courtesy of independence.
Was that honestly the story “embargoed until Sunday” - or was it a feeble Yoon hoax?
It is clear that Davey did look into the allegations, but that the PO and Fujitsu insisted that the Horizon system didn't allow remote access and logged each entry in a separate file down to each keystroke.
We know that now not to be true, but that is Fujitsu's fault and untruth.
I think that's an answer to a different question - key presses have nothing to do with database transactions but it's unfair to expect none technical people to pick up the issue.
So Davey isn't at fault and at best Fujitsu carefully answered the question asked and not the question that was meant.
In reality I'm being very generous to Fujitsu there - they carefully answered a different question to the one that was being asked.
Saying a computer system is "robust" is meaningless. What does "robust" mean? Robust for what?
A software system may work very well for purpose A but not for purpose B. What error logs were there? What internal audit reports on it were there? What quality assurance was done? Etc. I am no IT expert but these questions are not hard to ask and even less so if you take advice from those who do understand these matters.
The other obvious questions to have asked are: who does the investigation into the discrepancies? What are their qualifications for doing so? How do they check that this is not caused by software or other faults? What quality assurance is done on their reports? Are these reports disclosed to the defendants during the prosecutions as they are legally obliged to be? And so on.
There was a basic lack of curiosity.
The balloon really should have gone up when Second Sight reported that they were being denied access to the documents they were promised. That was a red flag. Then when they were sacked just before their second report came out. That was another one.
Fair play to you @Cyclefree for banging this drum. Even from far away in Bangkok - ah, sweet Bangkok, as the sun sets - I can see that the Post Office scandal has finally surfaced, and is roiling the seas of social media, and - belatedly - achieved national salience
Likewise @Peter_the_Punter and @IanB2 and everyone else who has jangled this tambourine. It now resounds
It STILL bores the moobs off me, but that is absolutely my fault for being easily bored by post offices. I shall watch the ITV drama tonight (which has clearly shifted everything); hopefully I will feel some empathy - and curiosity
Thanks.
I am interested professionally. But also because my own profession - not just lawyers but lawyers who do investigations - have behaved so abysmally. This shames me. I know what it is needed to do good investigations, to run a really effective investigations team, to manage the internal and external stakeholders, to gain the confidence and trust and respect of those you deal with etc., and to see the total lack of professionalism and any sense of ethical underpinning displayed in this case over such a long period and the utter shamelessness of those involved, even when faced with the human consequences of what they have done, really pains - and infuriates - me.
If it helps, think of it as a lot of creative types in Soho persecuted by some rogue AI and lying lawyers.
Comments
Clear enough in a Scottish context, but not in England, where for many unionism is effectively an expression of English nationalism.
I won't be able to answer questions until around 11am UK, so apologies. Any questions, please make them and I'll address them later. Hope that's ok. Thanks to @TSE and @rcs1000 for publishing ir
Did she clarify whether she meant the one in Westminster or the one in Holyrood?
At various times they also supported federation with the 'white' empire' - Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa (yes, yes, I know) and occasionally some of the Caribbean colonies (ditto) in a 'union of the empire.'
And good morning, one and all
https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/hybrid-electric-ferry-nicola-sturgeon-31823730
And no-one cares.
The people calling for Rishi Sunak to go want him out because they dislike his politics, not his Hinduism, not his skin colour.
Looks like a face off between him and Jeremy Miles, incidentally. A prediction on here (not by me) that Miles should be considered favourite is looking good so far despite his lower name recognition.
In Scotland Nationalism is easy - it displays itself as pro Scotland, anti anything English.
In England it’s way harder - most Nationalism appears as racism because the people who use the George Cross have a habit of picking on people based on skin colour, even when the person they tell to go home can honestly reply as I third generation immigrant “I’m walking round the corner to me Nan’s for tea”.
NEW - Sir Keir Starmer calls on the Prime Minister to set a date for a general election NOW & tells @SkyNews Sunak is "putting vanity before country" by wanting to clock up two years in Downing Street before calling a vote #TrevorPhillips
@WilfredFrost
The Labour leader also says he is "very happy to do election debates" as "he wants every opportunity" to make his case to the country. He says individual debates will need to be negotiated
Asked which taxes he would prioritise to cut first, Sir Keir Starmer says "taxes on working people"
And he’s probably got zero chance of retaining the seat..
Starmer on Sky News accuses Sunak of putting his own “vanity” before the country. Calls an election date:
“If he had a plan, he’d set the date. And he should set the date. I can’t help feeling that all he really wants to do is get two years clocked up on his premiership.”
That division very roughly equals the old idea of the Right and the old idea of the Left
At extremes the desire for Liberty is reserved for certain groups, races, families, classes and becomes closer to Fascism or other far right ideas; on the left the extreme desire for Equality is allowed to trample over individual rights and becomes communism, Maoism or Wokeness
However the whole thing breaks down beyond that. Some on the right are green and europhile and religious some on the left are futurist and eurosceptic and atheist and so on
Lord knows how you organise all that. Perhaps it is a futile task
Unfortunately his followers still plague us.
I still think of this as circle, or horseshoe if you prefer; extreme left and right become indistinguishable autocracies.
Ok there is no usefully simple way of classifying political beliefs. Is that better?
When I said "logical" (optimal is perhaps more correct), I simply meant from a decision-tree approach, scoring the outcomes and probabalities. And you're right that if (and that's still a big 'if') the penalty turns out hugely more severe than it would have been had she come clean after Second Sight, then you would also be right that the decision then wasn't (although you'd have to weight the 50% chance of getting off against the chance and severity of the possible penalty now).
My argument was simply that you don't get anycredit in life, or politics, for doing stuff that avoids a then totally hypothetical even worse mess, if things are already very bad.
The story has been known, for those who cared to look, for years, yet Vennells was given a job in the Cabinet Office, Chair of an NHS Trust, and a couple of other directorships. And held these despite protests and complaints in each case, until public pressure and the developing legal story made it impossible. Prior to the ITV drama I would have put money on there being no penalty other than, possibly, losing the CBE and a possible, but legally tricky, private prosecution.
The ITV drama shows the power of media and public attention - and the pressure for some sort of punishment is clearly now building (the petition to take away her CBE, which has been running for three years but only had about 10,000 signatures last week, is now heading toward a million). But the public's attention span is usually short and may move on...
Incidentally, isn't it shameful that the Tories are trying to stir up blame for the LibDem junior ministers who were in post for a small, but critical, part of the story - when they gave Vennells a JOB IN THE CABINET OFFICE as well as the CBE when the whole saga was already in the public domain?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Origins_of_Dictatorship_and_Democracy
Promise it for 2026 or so, spend the savings now and leave the next government holding the pooy baby.
If I didn't live here, I'd almost like to see Sunak win and deal with the minefield he is laying.
Pensions are deferred income, and are taxed when taken. The wealthy among us will be paying higher rate taxation in retirement.
Maybe we need a political STELE OF REVEALING
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stele_of_Ankh-ef-en-Khonsu
For example suggesting that Sunak is not really committed to this country has a whiff of nativism to it as well as a legitimate criticism of his former Green Card, Santa Monica house and Non-Dom wife.
It would be more sensible to target funding at those poorer pensioners genuinely in need, rather than helicoptering it onto the entire cohort of the retired, when their disposable income is now - remarkably - already greater on average than those in work.
If you tried to generalise, a left-wing dictatorship tends to be pretty grim for most people except for a small preferred elite, whereas a right-wing dictatorship tends to be truly appalling for a minority and perhaps not quite so bad for a majority. But I'm not sure even that generalisation would stand up to too many examples.
The opposite of conservative is radical. Conservatives want to keep everything the same, radicals want to rip things up and change them. What where Theresa May's self comforting words when her election went wrong? "Nothing has changed!". She and Liz Truss are opposites.
The opposite of Liberal is Authoritarian. The term 'nanny state' could have been coined for Blair and Brown - low level authoritarianism. The most ridiculed was Brown's 'gulags for slags'. That, and Labour's one-size-fits-all approach to things is why the Lib Dems are not fond of Labour governments.
Left vs Right, boiled down to its essence, is about the size of the state - how much it should do, and so how much it should spend, and so how much it should tax. Despite the name, the Conservatives are a right wing party. Labour are obviously on the left, though it's different wings can't agree on where. For the Lib Dems, L vs R is a tertiary identity at best. They are Liberals first and radicals second, at least in their constitution.
Dr. Foxy, seems a bit ambiguous (at best) to throw around racism when the very example you pick you also describe as being potentially legitimate.
@KevinASchofield
Being reminded of this story, for some reason.
‘I'm Not Tetchy' Says Tetchy Rishi Sunak, Tetchily
The one thing we won't have is someone asking - you said spending cuts - which departments and what are the cutting.
There is then a whole set of questions that you can follow with depending on how you want the PM / Minister to squirm...
A Labour veteran, thinking to compare the tepid feelings towards his party in the present day with the last time it was in opposition preparing to be in government, recently lamented to me: “For all that Keir has achieved, it doesn’t feel like 1997.”
[But] Sir Tony, as he has since become, was an ace at delivering uplifting oratory when he thought the occasion demanded it, but the stats tell us that this did not excite a substantial majority of the electorate. The most crucial factor in the Blair landslide of ’97 was not soaring expectations of what a Labour government would deliver; it was the collapse of support for the Conservatives and efficient anti-Tory tactical voting. His Labour was very constrained in what it initially promised it could deliver, even though it knew that it would come to power with the economy doing well.
[So] the bequest from the Tories to a Starmer government will be much grimmer...what you could call the “hope deficit” is more acute for Sir Keir than it was for Labour 27 years ago. Added to which, voter cynicism about politicians and their promises has rarely been deeper.
I think [Starmer] overestimates the Tories when he suggests that they have deliberately schemed to squeeze the optimism out of the nation. The evidence suggests they are not clever enough to be that cunning. What is true is that Britain is heading towards an election shrouded in a dank miasma of despair that anyone can fix our many problems. One dispiriting possible consequence of this is that we will endure a nastily negative election campaign followed by a low turnout...
If hope is to be revitalised, it is probably more likely to happen after we have had a change of government, rather than before. It will be helpful to Labour if Sir Keir can generate a flicker of hope before the election, but the sterner test will be whether he has it in him to lift the country out of the slough of despondency once he has the power to do more than talk about it.
A good example of politics winning over good governance.
https://news.sky.com/story/mr-bates-vs-the-post-office-justice-secretary-examines-how-to-clear-names-of-workers-caught-up-in-horizon-it-scandal-13043410
Huzzah for ITV.
Well?
What the header, and indeed the discussion BTL, show is that it is increasingly difficult and complicated to classify someone's political beliefs in a broad category that carries a coherent meaning. One point that I think hasn't been made to date is that this is the reason that political parties have also become less coherent and disciplined.
So yesterday we had a former Tory Minister Chris Skidmore resigning because he doesn't think that the government should be issuing licences for fresh exploration in the North Sea. How do you classify that? According to Wiki he was Chairman of the Bow Group and a fellow of the Policy Exchange. He has been active in Tory politics since he was a teenager and supported Truss's Free Enterprise Group. An almost classic Tory but he has resigned the Whip and may soon be to resign his seat. If you can't create a tent big enough to include people like that how do you create a government?
Holding parties together in such an atmosphere is incredibly difficult creating governments that lack coherence, stability and a sense of purpose. I think that the politician who has proven to be the best at this in recent decades was Nicola Sturgeon but look what has happened since she left the scene. The famous SNP self discipline has collapsed and dissent is rife. This simply means that the SNP have fallen to earth and are in a similar position to most political parties.
We see this in the Commons. Both parties have an exceptional number of people who have been expelled or simply chosen to leave. In Labour's case this includes the former leader. In the last Parliament we had the likes of Ken Clarke expelled. What this means for the future is that any government elected with a small majority simply will not survive. There will be too many single issue obsessives who will split away.
For working age people, income is heavily taxed via national insurance.
Pension income would only be taxed the same, if the exemption given to pensioners is removed and pension income is taxed by national insurance.
Everyone earning the same amount should pay the same rate of tax.
But I think the reason there has been a focus on the Lib Dems is because Ed Davey came out with his explanation and is still in politics. There has also been the release of the Bates correspondence with him, following the ITV drama.
Alan Bates has also talked about the other Ministers he wrote to: Stephen Timms, Norman Lamb, Jo Swinson etc before the litigation was launched but as they are no longer in politics no-one really cares about them.
https://twitter.com/MichaelLCrick/status/1743929872563466648?t=WtLTwLV5Qtq2DPtHurHIXQ&s=19
It is clear that Davey did look into the allegations, but that the PO and Fujitsu insisted that the Horizon system didn't allow remote access and logged each entry in a separate file down to each keystroke.
https://twitter.com/MichaelLCrick/status/1743930008282837255?t=mpZfJVtnIKDMIaAhz0jqfw&s=19
We know that now not to be true, but that is Fujitsu's fault and untruth.
Meanwhile Scotland's largely devolved economy continues to flatline, nothing is done in the recent budget to encourage investment here, nothing to attract higher earners, nothing to address our growing skills gap and nothing to address our failing education system. And the shadow of Grangemouth and the loss of industrial output that that represents hangs over everything like a cowl. The UK will avoid recession this year. Scotland won't.
Never underestimate the capacity of the average Yoon to whip themselves into a conspiracy fuelled frenzy.
So Davey isn't at fault and at best Fujitsu carefully answered the question asked and not the question that was meant.
In reality I'm being very generous to Fujitsu there - they carefully answered a different question to the one that was being asked.
One reason that I have never entered party politics for election (though have been a member of Labour 1994-2003, and Lib Dems 2013-present) is that my political views are incoherent. They really do not match any political party. I am a minority of one.
Forgive me it was delicious, so sweet and so cold
Anyone who can persuade their mum to vote for them, would be off to a flyer
Previously Manchester is expected to have viaducts to bring the trains in while Italy & France go - hmm this train isn't as fast as it could be let's tunnel under the city and build a new station for Bologna (and now Florence, Marseille).
We'll ignore the Dutch and American approach that keeping trains on platforms is a waste of resources so let's extend HS2 to say Croydon and terminate the trains somewhere cheaper (which is what Amsterdam and New York are doing the equivalent of).
Of the countries surveyed (UK, USA, Argentina, Australia, Canada, Spain), Germany had the fewest identifying as religious or spiritual, and also the fewest saying that their "religious, spiritual or non-religious position" is "important to who you are and how you view the world". The latter score being highest in the US and Argentina, but even in the US, only 59%.
In the UK, Canada, Australia and (interestingly) Spain, the breakdown of responses to this question were pretty similar, with "important" percentages of 32-36% and "not important" of 42-46%.
For the converse question, how important is "science" to the same, Spain comes out highest at 71%. Who knew the Spanish were so scientific? Equally surprising, the UK came in second lowest (after the Germans) at 52%, behind even the US where 24% claim to be creationists (12% in UK, 7% in Germany, 6% Spain).
The responses to the latter question correlate strongly with level of education.
Asked whether religion has more negative consequences for society than positive, in all countries except the US, more people said negative, with negative achieving a majority (50%) in the UK, Germany & Canada (51%), Spain (54%) and Australia (56%). Argentina was lower at 37% but with "positive" coming in lower still at 31%.
For the same question about science, in all countries there are significant majorities for seeing science as positve with again Spain leading the way at 74% (negative 10%), and again the US (53%, negative 26%) and Argentina (46%, negative 20%) at the other end. The proportions agreeing are higher for those identifying as non-religious/spiritual, but the pluralities remain among the religious respondents. Again, a positive view of science correlates strongly with level of education.
The responses to how reliable people find a range of scientific and spiritual 'experts' broadly reflects the above, with medical practitioners leading the way in all countries as being seen as most reliable. An interesting counter-finding is that Argentinians, despite being more religious on most survey quesions, nevertheless had a lower (23%) proportion who see religious leaders as reliable sources of information.
Generally, younger people found experts more reliable across all countries and types of expert (both scientific and religious) than older people.
I do look back on the Coalition positively, despite some significant errors including by the Lib Dems. Indeed that was when I became active on PB.
A software system may work very well for purpose A but not for purpose B. What error logs were there? What internal audit reports on it were there? What quality assurance was done? Etc. I am no IT expert but these questions are not hard to ask and even less so if you take advice from those who do understand these matters.
The other obvious questions to have asked are: who does the investigation into the discrepancies? What are their qualifications for doing so? How do they check that this is not caused by software or other faults? What quality assurance is done on their reports? Are these reports disclosed to the defendants during the prosecutions as they are legally obliged to be? And so on.
There was a basic lack of curiosity.
The balloon really should have gone up when Second Sight reported that they were being denied access to the documents they were promised. That was a red flag. Then when they were sacked just before their second report came out. That was another one.
Here’s an eyebrow raising blog where a materialist scientist says “yeah; reincarnation may be true”
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/bering-in-mind/ian-stevensone28099s-case-for-the-afterlife-are-we-e28098skepticse28099-really-just-cynics/
For the purposes of transcendental clarity, I do not believe in reincarnation - at least I don’t think so. I DO believe the edifice of strict scientific materialism, as we have known it, is under unprecedented siege, and is perhaps beginning to totter
He doesn't inspire confidence in that role. He appears to have kept his head down, when for years he could have been making noise that he was lied to by Fujitsu - and that helped cause this great injustice.
Likewise @Peter_the_Punter and @IanB2 and everyone else who has jangled this tambourine. It now resounds
It STILL bores the moobs off me, but that is absolutely my fault for being easily bored by post offices. I shall watch the ITV drama tonight (which has clearly shifted everything); hopefully I will feel some empathy - and curiosity
It is unsustainable and the next government will have no choice but change it, and I may add, increase he pension age incrementally
I think that the Coalition was one of the best periods of government in my adult life time. Of course they made mistakes, as all governments do, but that is in the nature of things. What would we give for that level of incompetence now? It would be deeply aspirational both for the present government and the Labour opposition.
https://www.jfsa.org.uk/uploads/5/4/3/1/54312921/document_25_-_detica_netreveal_fraud_analysis_011013_1.pdf
It basically said the Post Office was unable to account for cash and stock across its entire network and its systems were unfit for purpose.
So 2 independent reports in 2013 saying that the Post Office could not put its own socks on in the morning and we're expected to accept that Ministers should not be told about it or were not told about this despite this company being owned and funded by us.
The Post Office Board was in breach of its duties. At this time Alice Perkins, Jack Straw's wife, an ex-civil servant was the Chair. So it's not just Ms Vennells who needs to answer questions or have her honours removed. Ms Perkins was Chair for a crucial 4 years from 2011 - 2015.
She has remained quiet unlike Ed Davey and had the gall to say that she left the Post Office in a better situation than when she started.
Amazing that these people manage to cross the road without being run over so blind they must be.
a) Magnets don't work in water
b) School shooting is very sad but parents need to get over it
c) Abraham Lincoln shouldn't be famous. If he negotiated it (the Civil War) we wouldn't know who he was.
As far as c) is concerned (ignoring the minor point of negotiating slavery) he obviously doesn't like that he isn't the most famous president. He shouldn't worry. He will be, but not for the reasons he thinks.
if you’ve ever watched an LNER Azuma train race through Luton without stopping you will notice they go REALLY fast, certainly fast enough for a country as small and compact as the UK. 125mph. We don’t actually NEED more than that, do we?
https://www.railway-technology.com/projects/virgin-trains-azuma-trains/
It occurs to me we should just have built more of those and relabelled them “high speed”. Job done for a third the price
The Trailers.
To wet our appetite, Poster talks to Admins in main room about submitted article, not via one of PBs rest rooms - fascism will be defined for us. Oh Goodie can’t wait.
Wikipedia
Defined by Wikipedia as Fascism (/ˈfæʃɪzəm/ FASH-iz-əm) is a far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement,[1][2][3] characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.[2][3].
Personally I would question “far right” and “natural social hierarchy.” All of those things on the list could be practiced by a middle way centerist, or someone AOL or vague on political leanings, couldn’t they?
Boots.
The simplest and most effective definition of fascism is footwear. Fascism isn’t politics or ideas at all - It’s the uniform. It’s all about dressing up. Droogism. Belonging to a street gang. They look in the mirror before leaving the bedsit and see style and panache. We see mummy’s boys - immaturity - clowns.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism#/media/File:Mussolini_and_Hitler_1940_(retouched).jpg
Hope this helps.
1) Leadership cults are integral to fascism. The vision of the Leader embodying the people, and therefore the state. They are however not unique to facism, being found in other totalitarian systems like Communism, Theocracies and absolute monarchies.
2) There is an idealisation of a unique people, with a common culture and outlook, with special distinctive features and manifest destiny.
This refuses to accept that the people are not a single variety, but are actually quite diverse ethnically, culturally, religiously etc. This is the root of the nativism and racism of fascist ideology.
3) There is a culture of physicality and machismo, that defines the reborn nation and has contempt for intellectualism and other habits seen as effete. This leads to systemic homophobia, misogyny and political violence.
I don't think we have more than a tiny percentage of such people in Britain.
I am interested professionally. But also because my own profession - not just lawyers but lawyers who do investigations - have behaved so abysmally. This shames me. I know what it is needed to do good investigations, to run a really effective investigations team, to manage the internal and external stakeholders, to gain the confidence and trust and respect of those you deal with etc., and to see the total lack of professionalism and any sense of ethical underpinning displayed in this case over such a long period and the utter shamelessness of those involved, even when faced with the human consequences of what they have done, really pains - and infuriates - me.
If it helps, think of it as a lot of creative types in Soho persecuted by some rogue AI and lying lawyers.