Meanwhile, if there's any truth in it, the biggest political news may be this:
Jeremy Corbyn has been tipped to decide in just “weeks” whether to launch a new political movement to rival Keir Starmer’s Labour Party.
According to friends of the former Labour leader, Corbyn could launch a new party which could take voters dissatisfied with the current Labour Party away from Starmer.
Will it give free OWLs?
The risk for Labour is that Corbyn's energetic campaigning steals the market for those on the left wanting to vote for free owls. There's a sizeable political market for offering unachievable promises, as Reform is demonstrating on the right.
The Jo Swinson experience was not a happy one for the Lib Dems and it seems counter-intuitive that they want to repeat it. Having said that Ed Davey has been terrible, virtually invisible and adding nothing to the nation's story.
What are the Lib Dems for and what do they want? Presumably not another penny on NI or whatever to "pay" for education again. There should be a good opportunity for them in this election with many Tories deeply scunnered of their party and yet underwhelmed by Starmer. They seem at serious risk of not taking it by having so little to say.
Anyone who had ever actually listened to Jo Swinson - whether on QT, Today, in Parlt or whatever - could have foreseen that she wasn’t ready for the job. Her election was a classic example of media projecting what it wanted onto the role. I think Cooper might be better, she has a no nonsenseness about her that might play well in the blue wall, but would have little recognition outside we obsessives.
The LibDems just need to pitch pragmatism and internationalism. That’s where their votes are.
The Lib Dems will have an important role during the next Labour administration once, as I expect, Labour start getting all authoritarian. For now they are there to give the Tories a kicking in constituencies where Labour aren’t competitive.
I don’t see the knives out for Davey on social media and in coverage of the PO scandal, certainly not yet. The Davey angle seems to be for the moment much more salient on here than elsewhere. That can of course change rapidly.
The media are certainly having a crack - both the Times and Sun have editorials attacking him.
Notable that it’s Murdoch. He really doesn’t like the Lib Dems. They were an annoyance under Blair, an obstacle in the coalition and now a potential irritation during a Starmer government.
So lets say that Jezbollah launches the Peace and Justice Party. And attracts the crankies. Why would this B Ark threaten Labour as it sails the nutters off into the sunset?
Remember that the cranks already have a plethora of scab parties to vote for, many of which gather under the absurdly named "Left Unity" banner. If P&J (Marxist Leninist) gathers them all under His banner, so what?
I don't think the crank left get it. The further away they recede from the Labour movement, the more electable that movement is. And Clause 1 of the Labour Party constitution is very clear that it exists to get elected. So...
The Jo Swinson experience was not a happy one for the Lib Dems and it seems counter-intuitive that they want to repeat it. Having said that Ed Davey has been terrible, virtually invisible and adding nothing to the nation's story.
What are the Lib Dems for and what do they want? Presumably not another penny on NI or whatever to "pay" for education again. There should be a good opportunity for them in this election with many Tories deeply scunnered of their party and yet underwhelmed by Starmer. They seem at serious risk of not taking it by having so little to say.
Ed Davey seems more interested in exculpating his responsibility for the coalition and showing how left-wing he is by acting as Labour's mini-me.
That said, it really doesn't matter what the LDs do - they will pick up seats later this year just due to a Tory collapse and tactical voting, so it's neither a risk if he goes or stays.
Meanwhile, if there's any truth in it, the biggest political news may be this:
Jeremy Corbyn has been tipped to decide in just “weeks” whether to launch a new political movement to rival Keir Starmer’s Labour Party.
According to friends of the former Labour leader, Corbyn could launch a new party which could take voters dissatisfied with the current Labour Party away from Starmer.
Will it give free OWLs?
The risk for Labour is that Corbyn's energetic campaigning steals the market for those on the left wanting to vote for free owls. There's a sizeable political market for offering unachievable promises, as Reform is demonstrating on the right.
If he could focus on continuing and enhancing the existing free owl offer for the over-65s he might put a dent in Tory vote share. Especially if he could go on an anti-woke journey at the same time.
Strikes me that regardless of whether Davey was at fault in his actions over the Post Office, it's bad enough that this is a reminder to people about the Coalition, which is something the Lib Dems have never properly recovered from.
It's also a reminder about New Labour, who the mess started under.
No organisation comes out of this looking good. Politically, Labour, the Lib Dems and the Conservatives are all sullied by it, to one extent or another.
Point of order. It started under the Major Government (the fiasco, not the prosecutions). That said the Conservatives come out of this with relatively clean hands.
Did it? I thought the system came in after 1999? Might well be wrong, but I remember first reading/talking with colleagues about the problems in about 2004 or 5. The first prosecutions were well into New Labour's time ISTR.
The Horizon system was piloted in 1995 and the same problems were already apparent during the pilot. The full introduction started 1999.
Yes, but the issues with prosecutions came well into New Labour's time. It seems a little odd to try to pin this debacle on Major's government.
Despite Ms C majoring on the role of politicians, I think they are well down the list of potential cuplrits, certainly as far as the original problem is concerned. An industry IT system that is generating accounting errors really is something that a large company - especially one as exposed to scutiny as was the PO (being subject to public and media interest, a statutory regulator, a customer pressure group, and several powerful and active trade unions) - should have been able to sort out itself.
As the size and scale and knowledge of the developing scandal grew, the political world becomes more and more culpable, since while we do not rely on our ministers to find out whether a company's IT system is working, we do expect politicians to campaign against injustice on behalf of their constituents. The government's silence and inactivity over more recent years and its showering the PO CEO with honour and lining her up with a job inside 10 Downing Street, after all the key points of the story were known, is by far the bigger misjudgement.
I think Cyclefree has been considerably more critical of the PO and their lawyers than she has the politicians (though no doubt she'll speak for herself).
But the PO is 100% government owned, and government played a considerable role in the system procurement. Successive ministers ignored the pleas of victims of the miscarriage of justice. Their responsibility is surely a little more than failing to "campaign against injustice on behalf if their constituents". It lay squarely within their power to do much more than that.
Meanwhile, if there's any truth in it, the biggest political news may be this:
Jeremy Corbyn has been tipped to decide in just “weeks” whether to launch a new political movement to rival Keir Starmer’s Labour Party.
According to friends of the former Labour leader, Corbyn could launch a new party which could take voters dissatisfied with the current Labour Party away from Starmer.
Will it give free OWLs?
No but it gives your team another five years of inch-perfect government. Rishi is indeed a lucky General.
The vanity of Jeremy Corbyn. Worth 3 quid to every Conservative Party member.
How many votes would a Jez Party take from Labour and where? My guess is not many and where it doesn't matter.
After all, the Greens already function as a recycling bin for votes of disgruntled lefties.
We've been here before with Respect, TUSC, etc. Although the Corbo brand is strong, it isn't going to win any seats or swing many, if any, marginals.
An overtly Islamic party is probably a greater hypothetical danger to Labour. It is an inevitable and much-needed development.
Also... it's very late in the electoral cycle for this type of thing. There is almost no time to fleece idiots of their cash, think up a snappy name and register a domain, etc.
Meanwhile, if there's any truth in it, the biggest political news may be this:
Jeremy Corbyn has been tipped to decide in just “weeks” whether to launch a new political movement to rival Keir Starmer’s Labour Party.
According to friends of the former Labour leader, Corbyn could launch a new party which could take voters dissatisfied with the current Labour Party away from Starmer.
Will it give free OWLs?
No but it gives your team another five years of inch-perfect government. Rishi is indeed a lucky General.
The vanity of Jeremy Corbyn. Worth 3 quid to every Conservative Party member.
How many votes would a Jez Party take from Labour and where? My guess is not many and where it doesn't matter.
After all, the Greens already function as a recycling bin for votes of disgruntled lefties.
We've been here before with Respect, TUSC, etc. Although the Corbo brand is strong, it isn't going to win any seats or swing many, if any, marginals.
An overtly Islamic party is probably a greater hypothetical danger to Labour. It is an inevitable and much-needed development.
Strikes me that regardless of whether Davey was at fault in his actions over the Post Office, it's bad enough that this is a reminder to people about the Coalition, which is something the Lib Dems have never properly recovered from.
It's also a reminder about New Labour, who the mess started under.
No organisation comes out of this looking good. Politically, Labour, the Lib Dems and the Conservatives are all sullied by it, to one extent or another.
Point of order. It started under the Major Government (the fiasco, not the prosecutions). That said the Conservatives come out of this with relatively clean hands.
Did it? I thought the system came in after 1999? Might well be wrong, but I remember first reading/talking with colleagues about the problems in about 2004 or 5. The first prosecutions were well into New Labour's time ISTR.
The Horizon system was piloted in 1995 and the same problems were already apparent during the pilot. The full introduction started 1999.
Yes, but the issues with prosecutions came well into New Labour's time. It seems a little odd to try to pin this debacle on Major's government.
Despite Ms C majoring on the role of politicians, I think they are well down the list of potential cuplrits, certainly as far as the original problem is concerned. An industry IT system that is generating accounting errors really is something that a large company - especially one as exposed to scutiny as was the PO (being subject to public and media interest, a statutory regulator, a customer pressure group, and several powerful and active trade unions) - should have been able to sort out itself.
As the size and scale and knowledge of the developing scandal grew, the political world becomes more and more culpable, since while we do not rely on our ministers to find out whether a company's IT system is working, we do expect politicians to campaign against injustice on behalf of their constituents. The government's silence and inactivity over more recent years and its showering the PO CEO with honour and lining her up with a job inside 10 Downing Street, after all the key points of the story were known, is by far the bigger misjudgement.
I think Cyclefree has been considerably more critical of the PO and their lawyers than she has the politicians (though no doubt she'll speak for herself).
But the PO is 100% government owned, and government played a considerable role in the system procurement. Successive ministers ignored the pleas of victims of the miscarriage of justice. Their responsibility is surely a little more than failing to "campaign against injustice on behalf if their constituents". It lay squarely within their power to do much more than that.
The sub-Postmasters Union needs a substantial rocket up its fundament. Talk about the dog that not only didn’t bark, but actually rolled over to have it’s tummy tickled.
These Golden Globes are a dogs dinner. The host had the tone all wrong.
Liking Anatomy of a Fall and Beef being recognised. 👍🏻👍🏻 Disliking Oppenheimer getting a round one for Direction. 👎 I’m not much a fan of Bear or Crown either 👎👎
Havn’t seen Poor Things so can’t comment on that one, but it’s supposed to be bonkers and surprising. Don’t like Emma Stone at all but at least she beat the drivel that was Barbie
Are you Ben Shapiro?
Clearly not as I had to Google who he is.
“The conservative commentator set fire to two Barbie dolls in a scathing 43-minute video review of the film.”
It’s not that it tried to turn woke into an art form, though it did, it’s that it doesn’t make sense and is not even entertaining.
How can you live over there, the USA is nuts.
Ugh. Gongs for Barbie. This charade is nothing more than a Master Plumber annual dinner, handing out gongs for any old pump installation. What an utter waste of time.
Barbie got bums on seats in cinemas - regardless of the merits of the movie, it stopped the rot in cinema-going. So it was always going to be looked upon kindly.
No Marky - nobody actually likes the Barbie Movie, regardless if they felt oddly compelled to check what the fuss is all about. Film industry Gongs should give a recognition to Art, not marketing.
What do you think caused the mass lying to review sites? Why couldn't people just admit they hated the movie?
I rated Barbie 4.5 on Letterboxd, the overall mean score is 3.9.
Strikes me that regardless of whether Davey was at fault in his actions over the Post Office, it's bad enough that this is a reminder to people about the Coalition, which is something the Lib Dems have never properly recovered from.
It's also a reminder about New Labour, who the mess started under.
No organisation comes out of this looking good. Politically, Labour, the Lib Dems and the Conservatives are all sullied by it, to one extent or another.
Point of order. It started under the Major Government (the fiasco, not the prosecutions). That said the Conservatives come out of this with relatively clean hands.
Did it? I thought the system came in after 1999? Might well be wrong, but I remember first reading/talking with colleagues about the problems in about 2004 or 5. The first prosecutions were well into New Labour's time ISTR.
The Horizon system was piloted in 1995 and the same problems were already apparent during the pilot. The full introduction started 1999.
Yes, but the issues with prosecutions came well into New Labour's time. It seems a little odd to try to pin this debacle on Major's government.
Despite Ms C majoring on the role of politicians, I think they are well down the list of potential cuplrits, certainly as far as the original problem is concerned. An industry IT system that is generating accounting errors really is something that a large company - especially one as exposed to scutiny as was the PO (being subject to public and media interest, a statutory regulator, a customer pressure group, and several powerful and active trade unions) - should have been able to sort out itself.
As the size and scale and knowledge of the developing scandal grew, the political world becomes more and more culpable, since while we do not rely on our ministers to find out whether a company's IT system is working, we do expect politicians to campaign against injustice on behalf of their constituents. The government's silence and inactivity over more recent years and its showering the PO CEO with honour and lining her up with a job inside 10 Downing Street, after all the key points of the story were known, is by far the bigger misjudgement.
I think Cyclefree has been considerably more critical of the PO and their lawyers than she has the politicians (though no doubt she'll speak for herself).
But the PO is 100% government owned, and government played a considerable role in the system procurement. Successive ministers ignored the pleas of victims of the miscarriage of justice. Their responsibility is surely a little more than failing to "campaign against injustice on behalf if their constituents". It lay squarely within their power to do much more than that.
The sub-Postmasters Union needs a substantial rocket up its fundament. Talk about the dog that not only didn’t bark, but actually rolled over to have it’s tummy tickled.
The way its leader tried to sabotage the BIS SC hearing was disgraceful, for sure. What people didn't realise at the time was that the Federation had signed a then secret agreement that protected its role and the business position of SPMRs in return for promising not to criticise the Post Office. Which is a 'peculiar' position for any sort of trade union, even a pretend one like the Federation (which is better imagined as a sort of rotary club of small businesspeople). The CWU saw the opening to expand its representational base well back, and contnues to make inroads into the SPMRs. However a union of employed 'workers' like the CWU isn't perhaps the best fit for a bunch of independent self-employed business owners. Unions major on protecting terms and conditions and employment rights, whereas the SPMRs are probably more interested in their protecting their business footfall.
The Post Office Scandal was the slowest of slow burners for a number of reasons, one of which was that all three main parties in England were implicated, so there was little interest in political campaigning to exploit it for Party purposes. Now that the issue has truly caught fire, we suddenly see efforts to put a Party spin on things.
The denizens of this Site are fortunate. Thanks to Cyclefree, IanB2, and one or two others, we have been ahead of the curve, and less susceptible to the kind of partisan tubthumping so typical of inferior Sites. Indeed, Ms C cautioned us against such inappropriate bias numerous times, and none more telling than the post in which she listed the numerous Ministers responsible for the PO throughout the period of the scandal. I will refresh your memories:
"Since 1998 the Business Ministers were:-
Peter Mandelson Patricia Hewitt Alan Johnson (ex-postman) Peter Mandelson (again)
followed by 9 Business Ministers since 2010:-
Vince Cable Sajid Javid Greg Clark Andrea Leadsom Alok Sharma Kwasi Kwarteng Nadine Dorries Michelle Donelan Kemi Badenoch.
Also since 2010 there have been Ministers with specific responsibility for postal affairs:-
Ed Davey Norman Lamb Jo Swinson Jenny Willott Jo Swinson (again) Margot James (the only Minister so far to express any regret about their role in this affair) Andrew Griffiths Kelly Tolhurst Paul Scully Kevin Hollinrake. "
Whilst it is wholly appropriate to ask Sir Ed Davey to answer some sharp questions, it's a bit rich to single him out from that lot. Fortunately the Posters Of PB are not readily susceptible to witchhunts and can be relied upon to take a broader, more balanced view....can't they?
Btw, Ms C puts in a word above for Margot James. Alan Bates himself puts in a kind word for Norman Lamb. The rest....well if we are going to ask questions of Ed Davey, why not the others?
Do the LibDems actually need airtime in this cycle? Isn't it enough to be not the Tories and Winning Here in their target seats?
Yes, the blandness of Labour under current management facilitates tactical voting both ways. Although there are significant policy differences in detail (e.g. in new housing vs NIMBYism), both parties are primarily seen as being unthreatening non-Tories with few USPs to polarise sentiment either way.
we need Jezza back
Yes, that's probably the Tories' best hope.
Nah the Tories best hope is a turn in the economy and personal tax cuts. But even that will not give rhem a victory.
I agree: the (significant) turn in the economy managed by Major and Clarke did not help the Tories in 1997 because voters minds were already made up, *years* before the election (though what they reported to pollsters varied substantially) according to the current mood music). I think we are in much the same situation now.
Meanwhile, if there's any truth in it, the biggest political news may be this:
Jeremy Corbyn has been tipped to decide in just “weeks” whether to launch a new political movement to rival Keir Starmer’s Labour Party.
According to friends of the former Labour leader, Corbyn could launch a new party which could take voters dissatisfied with the current Labour Party away from Starmer.
Will it give free OWLs?
No but it gives your team another five years of inch-perfect government. Rishi is indeed a lucky General.
The vanity of Jeremy Corbyn. Worth 3 quid to every Conservative Party member.
How many votes would a Jez Party take from Labour and where? My guess is not many and where it doesn't matter.
After all, the Greens already function as a recycling bin for votes of disgruntled lefties.
We've been here before with Respect, TUSC, etc. Although the Corbo brand is strong, it isn't going to win any seats or swing many, if any, marginals.
An overtly Islamic party is probably a greater hypothetical danger to Labour. It is an inevitable and much-needed development.
Is it 'much needed' ?
Of course.
The geographical concentration of Muslims in the UK would make such a party quite FTPT efficient too.
The Post Office Scandal was the slowest of slow burners for a number of reasons, one of which was that all three main parties in England were implicated, so there was little interest in political campaigning to exploit it for Party purposes. Now that the issue has truly caught fire, we suddenly see efforts to put a Party spin on things.
The denizens of this Site are fortunate. Thanks to Cyclefree, IanB2, and one or two others, we have been ahead of the curve, and less susceptible to the kind of partisan tubthumping so typical of inferior Sites. Indeed, Ms C cautioned us against such inappropriate bias numerous times, and none more telling than the post in which she listed the numerous Ministers responsible for the PO throughout the period of the scandal. I will refresh your memories:
"Since 1998 the Business Ministers were:-
Peter Mandelson Patricia Hewitt Alan Johnson (ex-postman) Peter Mandelson (again)
followed by 9 Business Ministers since 2010:-
Vince Cable Sajid Javid Greg Clark Andrea Leadsom Alok Sharma Kwasi Kwarteng Nadine Dorries Michelle Donelan Kemi Badenoch.
Also since 2010 there have been Ministers with specific responsibility for postal affairs:-
Ed Davey Norman Lamb Jo Swinson Jenny Willott Jo Swinson (again) Margot James (the only Minister so far to express any regret about their role in this affair) Andrew Griffiths Kelly Tolhurst Paul Scully Kevin Hollinrake. "
Whilst it is wholly appropriate to ask Sir Ed Davey to answer some sharp questions, it's a bit rich to single him out from that lot. Fortunately the Posters Of PB are not readily susceptible to witchhunts and can be relied upon to take a broader, more balanced view....can't they?
Btw, Ms C puts in a word above for Margot James. Alan Bates himself puts in a kind word for Norman Lamb. The rest....well if we are going to ask questions of Ed Davey, why not the others?
I think Cyclefree has done a great amount of work on this but be clear, there were programmes, podcasts (in particular) and many other consitent, authoritative sources and articles, not least by Computer Weekly, about this long before PB and CF took up the fight.
Meanwhile, if there's any truth in it, the biggest political news may be this:
Jeremy Corbyn has been tipped to decide in just “weeks” whether to launch a new political movement to rival Keir Starmer’s Labour Party.
According to friends of the former Labour leader, Corbyn could launch a new party which could take voters dissatisfied with the current Labour Party away from Starmer.
Will it give free OWLs?
No but it gives your team another five years of inch-perfect government. Rishi is indeed a lucky General.
The vanity of Jeremy Corbyn. Worth 3 quid to every Conservative Party member.
How many votes would a Jez Party take from Labour and where? My guess is not many and where it doesn't matter.
After all, the Greens already function as a recycling bin for votes of disgruntled lefties.
We've been here before with Respect, TUSC, etc. Although the Corbo brand is strong, it isn't going to win any seats or swing many, if any, marginals.
An overtly Islamic party is probably a greater hypothetical danger to Labour. It is an inevitable and much-needed development.
Is it 'much needed' ?
Of course.
The geographical concentration of Muslims in the UK would make such a party quite FTPT efficient too.
It's something I think we can all agree we all look forward to.
Peter Mandelson Patricia Hewitt Alan Johnson (ex-postman) Peter Mandelson (again)
followed by 9 Business Ministers since 2010:-
Vince Cable Sajid Javid Greg Clark Andrea Leadsom Alok Sharma Kwasi Kwarteng Nadine Dorries Michelle Donelan Kemi Badenoch.
Also since 2010 there have been Ministers with specific responsibility for postal affairs:-
Ed Davey Norman Lamb - "Alan Bates himself puts in a kind word for Norman Lamb." Jo Swinson Jenny Willott Jo Swinson (again) Margot James (the only Minister so far to express any regret about their role in this affair) Andrew Griffiths Kelly Tolhurst Paul Scully Kevin Hollinrake. "
The Post Office Scandal was the slowest of slow burners for a number of reasons, one of which was that all three main parties in England were implicated, so there was little interest in political campaigning to exploit it for Party purposes. Now that the issue has truly caught fire, we suddenly see efforts to put a Party spin on things.
The denizens of this Site are fortunate. Thanks to Cyclefree, IanB2, and one or two others, we have been ahead of the curve, and less susceptible to the kind of partisan tubthumping so typical of inferior Sites. Indeed, Ms C cautioned us against such inappropriate bias numerous times, and none more telling than the post in which she listed the numerous Ministers responsible for the PO throughout the period of the scandal. I will refresh your memories:
"Since 1998 the Business Ministers were:-
Peter Mandelson Patricia Hewitt Alan Johnson (ex-postman) Peter Mandelson (again)
followed by 9 Business Ministers since 2010:-
Vince Cable Sajid Javid Greg Clark Andrea Leadsom Alok Sharma Kwasi Kwarteng Nadine Dorries Michelle Donelan Kemi Badenoch.
Also since 2010 there have been Ministers with specific responsibility for postal affairs:-
Ed Davey Norman Lamb Jo Swinson Jenny Willott Jo Swinson (again) Margot James (the only Minister so far to express any regret about their role in this affair) Andrew Griffiths Kelly Tolhurst Paul Scully Kevin Hollinrake. "
Whilst it is wholly appropriate to ask Sir Ed Davey to answer some sharp questions, it's a bit rich to single him out from that lot. Fortunately the Posters Of PB are not readily susceptible to witchhunts and can be relied upon to take a broader, more balanced view....can't they?
Btw, Ms C puts in a word above for Margot James. Alan Bates himself puts in a kind word for Norman Lamb. The rest....well if we are going to ask questions of Ed Davey, why not the others?
Indeed.
What this episode actually illustrates is WHY politicians, particularly those who have achieved ministerial office, typically run a mile from campaigns and pressure groups unless and until they understand the consequences. And are no doubt so advised by Sir Humphrey.
Bates lobbied ministers before and after, and they all kept their distance, and if they got criticised at the time (or subsequently) for giving him the brush off, I must have missed it. Davey at least met Bates, listened to his concerns, put them to the PO, and fed the PO's (dishonest, we know now) response back. Even though it was very early in Britain's first coalition government since the war and he will have had two huge in-trays, political and ministerial.
By having made a tad more effort and offered a tad more engagement than his precessors and successors, his political and media opponents now have the chance to concoct their cynical smears based on nothing more than his having heard Bates's concerns in person rather than just set out by the letters received by every other minister.
Meanwhile, if there's any truth in it, the biggest political news may be this:
Jeremy Corbyn has been tipped to decide in just “weeks” whether to launch a new political movement to rival Keir Starmer’s Labour Party.
According to friends of the former Labour leader, Corbyn could launch a new party which could take voters dissatisfied with the current Labour Party away from Starmer.
Will it give free OWLs?
No but it gives your team another five years of inch-perfect government. Rishi is indeed a lucky General.
The vanity of Jeremy Corbyn. Worth 3 quid to every Conservative Party member.
How many votes would a Jez Party take from Labour and where? My guess is not many and where it doesn't matter.
After all, the Greens already function as a recycling bin for votes of disgruntled lefties.
We've been here before with Respect, TUSC, etc. Although the Corbo brand is strong, it isn't going to win any seats or swing many, if any, marginals.
An overtly Islamic party is probably a greater hypothetical danger to Labour. It is an inevitable and much-needed development.
Also... it's very late in the electoral cycle for this type of thing. There is almost no time to fleece idiots of their cash, think up a snappy name and register a domain, etc.
This is largely a non-story - or at best, a rehash of a story that's been rumbling ever since Corbyn's original suspension and perhaps before.
What substance is there? "Tipped to decide within weeks". Well, of course. The election could be in May, with a dissolution in March. Given that he hasn't yet given a categorical decision either way (which itself is very Corbyn when faced with a tough call in which his preference flies in the face of reality), but has a structure he could easily turn into a party, he has to make a call one way or the other within weeks, if he wants to remain in control of that choice, and assuming that Labour doesn't let him back. It's not the most penetrating piece of analysis.
He might win one seat - his own - but I agree that his influence beyond that would be very marginal. And even his own seat is very far from guaranteed.
So lets say that Jezbollah launches the Peace and Justice Party. And attracts the crankies. Why would this B Ark threaten Labour as it sails the nutters off into the sunset?
Remember that the cranks already have a plethora of scab parties to vote for, many of which gather under the absurdly named "Left Unity" banner. If P&J (Marxist Leninist) gathers them all under His banner, so what?
I don't think the crank left get it. The further away they recede from the Labour movement, the more electable that movement is. And Clause 1 of the Labour Party constitution is very clear that it exists to get elected. So...
The historical message is clear. Labour over decades suffer splits and periods of being unelectable. The splitting mentality is strong on the left, being in its nature quasi religious, but the greatest threat, the SDP, came from the social democrats Williams and Jenkins.
The Labour party, unelectable, compromised, incoherent, etc, are, unlike all the others going to lead the next government. Starmer is a sort of personal example of all the conjuring required.
Tentatively I think the only change it should think about would be to specifically renounce socialism, and clearly embrace a social democrat general philosophy, just one step further than the Clause 4 moment.
The time may come when it has to specifically renounce extreme Islamism too. Both these might be in Starmer's second term. Labour cannot win if and when it is seen as the route to power for the left or for the extreme end of its Islamic support base.
Do the LibDems actually need airtime in this cycle? Isn't it enough to be not the Tories and Winning Here in their target seats?
Yes, the blandness of Labour under current management facilitates tactical voting both ways. Although there are significant policy differences in detail (e.g. in new housing vs NIMBYism), both parties are primarily seen as being unthreatening non-Tories with few USPs to polarise sentiment either way.
we need Jezza back
Yes, that's probably the Tories' best hope.
Nah the Tories best hope is a turn in the economy and personal tax cuts. But even that will not give rhem a victory.
I agree: the (significant) turn in the economy managed by Major and Clarke did not help the Tories in 1997 because voters minds were already made up, *years* before the election (though what they reported to pollsters varied substantially) according to the current mood music). I think we are in much the same situation now.
There's also the well known maxim that when times look hard, people turn to the right for security, and when times look better people turn to the left for opportunity. Cf. 1945. If it looks like we've finally turned the economic corner it might well, ironically, make voting for Labour more attractive.
The Post Office Scandal was the slowest of slow burners for a number of reasons, one of which was that all three main parties in England were implicated, so there was little interest in political campaigning to exploit it for Party purposes. Now that the issue has truly caught fire, we suddenly see efforts to put a Party spin on things.
The denizens of this Site are fortunate. Thanks to Cyclefree, IanB2, and one or two others, we have been ahead of the curve, and less susceptible to the kind of partisan tubthumping so typical of inferior Sites. Indeed, Ms C cautioned us against such inappropriate bias numerous times, and none more telling than the post in which she listed the numerous Ministers responsible for the PO throughout the period of the scandal. I will refresh your memories:
"Since 1998 the Business Ministers were:-
Peter Mandelson Patricia Hewitt Alan Johnson (ex-postman) Peter Mandelson (again)
followed by 9 Business Ministers since 2010:-
Vince Cable Sajid Javid Greg Clark Andrea Leadsom Alok Sharma Kwasi Kwarteng Nadine Dorries Michelle Donelan Kemi Badenoch.
Also since 2010 there have been Ministers with specific responsibility for postal affairs:-
Ed Davey Norman Lamb Jo Swinson Jenny Willott Jo Swinson (again) Margot James (the only Minister so far to express any regret about their role in this affair) Andrew Griffiths Kelly Tolhurst Paul Scully Kevin Hollinrake. "
Whilst it is wholly appropriate to ask Sir Ed Davey to answer some sharp questions, it's a bit rich to single him out from that lot. Fortunately the Posters Of PB are not readily susceptible to witchhunts and can be relied upon to take a broader, more balanced view....can't they?
Btw, Ms C puts in a word above for Margot James. Alan Bates himself puts in a kind word for Norman Lamb. The rest....well if we are going to ask questions of Ed Davey, why not the others?
Business Minister seems a good path to party leadership candidate based on that.
The assumption here is that if you say you're a child but the Home Office classify you as an adult you were "caught" and you're actually an adult. The charities that are working with them say that the Home Office is routinely classifying people who are actually children as adults.
In 2022, at GMIAU we have seen an increase in the number of children being referred to us because the Home Office have placed them in adult accommodation having wrongly deemed them to be adults. Of the 15 referrals we received by June this year, 11 had their age wrongly changed by the Home Office to make them an adult. Over half of these children have now had their age accepted by their local authority and 4 of the remaining 5 continue to wait for an outcome. Nationwide, figures from 64 local authorities collected by the Helen Bamber Foundation show that in January to March 2022, 211 young people were referred to children’s services after having been sent to adult accommodation or detention. Two thirds were found to actually be children - 150 children had been placed in adult accommodation or detention in only three months.
Considering the record at the Home Office at getting things wrong, this story doesn't surprise me at all.
This is a good example of the difficulty of pandering to the anti-immigration people. The Sun shows some pictures of asylum seekers who look old (either because they were really lying about their age or because they failed to apply an appropriate skincare regime during their lifetime of civil war and their epic trek across continents) and says, "The Home Office is being taken advantage of!". So then the Home Office give instructions that anyone who might embarrass them on a Sun front page should be deemed to be an adult. Then a couple of years later The Sun gets hold of the Home Office figures for how many people they classified as adults and says, "Look, the number of cheaters we're taking in is soaring!"
The assumption here is that if you say you're a child but the Home Office classify you as an adult you were "caught" and you're actually an adult. The charities that are working with them say that the Home Office is routinely classifying people who are actually children as adults.
In 2022, at GMIAU we have seen an increase in the number of children being referred to us because the Home Office have placed them in adult accommodation having wrongly deemed them to be adults. Of the 15 referrals we received by June this year, 11 had their age wrongly changed by the Home Office to make them an adult. Over half of these children have now had their age accepted by their local authority and 4 of the remaining 5 continue to wait for an outcome. Nationwide, figures from 64 local authorities collected by the Helen Bamber Foundation show that in January to March 2022, 211 young people were referred to children’s services after having been sent to adult accommodation or detention. Two thirds were found to actually be children - 150 children had been placed in adult accommodation or detention in only three months.
Considering the record at the Home Office at getting things wrong, this story doesn't surprise me at all.
This is a good example of the difficulty of pandering to the anti-immigration people. The Sun shows some pictures of asylum seekers who look old (either because they were really lying about their age or because they failed to apply an appropriate skincare regime during their lifetime of civil war and their epic trek across continents) and says, "The Home Office is being taken advantage of!". So then the Home Office give instructions that anyone who might embarrass them on a Sun front page should be deemed to be an adult. Then a couple of years later The Sun gets hold of the Home Office figures for how many people they classified as adults and says, "Look, the number of cheaters we're taking in is soaring!"
If Luke Littler turned in Malaysia claiming asylum would they believe he was 16?
The Post Office Scandal was the slowest of slow burners for a number of reasons, one of which was that all three main parties in England were implicated, so there was little interest in political campaigning to exploit it for Party purposes. Now that the issue has truly caught fire, we suddenly see efforts to put a Party spin on things.
The denizens of this Site are fortunate. Thanks to Cyclefree, IanB2, and one or two others, we have been ahead of the curve, and less susceptible to the kind of partisan tubthumping so typical of inferior Sites. Indeed, Ms C cautioned us against such inappropriate bias numerous times, and none more telling than the post in which she listed the numerous Ministers responsible for the PO throughout the period of the scandal. I will refresh your memories:
"Since 1998 the Business Ministers were:-
Peter Mandelson Patricia Hewitt Alan Johnson (ex-postman) Peter Mandelson (again)
followed by 9 Business Ministers since 2010:-
Vince Cable Sajid Javid Greg Clark Andrea Leadsom Alok Sharma Kwasi Kwarteng Nadine Dorries Michelle Donelan Kemi Badenoch.
Also since 2010 there have been Ministers with specific responsibility for postal affairs:-
Ed Davey Norman Lamb Jo Swinson Jenny Willott Jo Swinson (again) Margot James (the only Minister so far to express any regret about their role in this affair) Andrew Griffiths Kelly Tolhurst Paul Scully Kevin Hollinrake. "
Whilst it is wholly appropriate to ask Sir Ed Davey to answer some sharp questions, it's a bit rich to single him out from that lot. Fortunately the Posters Of PB are not readily susceptible to witchhunts and can be relied upon to take a broader, more balanced view....can't they?
Btw, Ms C puts in a word above for Margot James. Alan Bates himself puts in a kind word for Norman Lamb. The rest....well if we are going to ask questions of Ed Davey, why not the others?
Indeed.
What this episode actually illustrates is WHY politicians, particularly those who have achieved ministerial office, typically run a mile from campaigns and pressure groups unless and until they understand the consequences. And are no doubt so advised by Sir Humphrey.
Bates lobbied ministers before and after, and they all kept their distance, and if they got criticised at the time (or subsequently) for giving him the brush off, I must have missed it. Davey at least met Bates, listened to his concerns, put them to the PO, and fed the PO's (dishonest, we know now) response back. Even though it was very early in Britain's first coalition government since the war and he will have had two huge in-trays, political and ministerial.
By having made a tad more effort and offered a tad more engagement than his precessors and successors, his political and media opponents now have the chance to concoct their cynical smears based on nothing more than his having heard Bates's concerns in person rather than just set out by the letters received by every other minister.
The reason he’s getting attention rather than the others is because he’s the leader of one of the main parties - if he weren’t and one of the others listed were, they would be getting stick and he wouldn’t. He’s unlucky to be in the wrong place at the wrong time
On topic, what does Daisy Cooper stand for? What do the Lib Dems stand for?
Davey's problem isn't so much the Post Office scandal, it's that he's a completely invisible presence on the stage. Why would anyone vote Lib Dem other than as an entirely tactical vote - which is an exceptionally weak foundation on which to build a strategy; one that cannot survive either the party gaining some sort of power and having to take tough decisions - other means of protest will be found - and must be tossed and turned as the relative popularity of the other parties changes.
Too many in the Lib Dems are stuck in a mindset from the 1980s and would try to bend the new political reality to that comfort zone than adapt their tactics and message to a changed world. It doesn't help that on a micro level, their tactics and messages work - they do still win by-elections here and there, and pick up gains where they put in the work - but isolated and unconnected victories based on transient tactical conditions (within a much wider sea of lost deposits, or equivalent) is treating politics as sport for an network of independents, not a political party.
The Post Office Scandal was the slowest of slow burners for a number of reasons, one of which was that all three main parties in England were implicated, so there was little interest in political campaigning to exploit it for Party purposes. Now that the issue has truly caught fire, we suddenly see efforts to put a Party spin on things.
The denizens of this Site are fortunate. Thanks to Cyclefree, IanB2, and one or two others, we have been ahead of the curve, and less susceptible to the kind of partisan tubthumping so typical of inferior Sites. Indeed, Ms C cautioned us against such inappropriate bias numerous times, and none more telling than the post in which she listed the numerous Ministers responsible for the PO throughout the period of the scandal. I will refresh your memories:
"Since 1998 the Business Ministers were:-
Peter Mandelson Patricia Hewitt Alan Johnson (ex-postman) Peter Mandelson (again)
followed by 9 Business Ministers since 2010:-
Vince Cable Sajid Javid Greg Clark Andrea Leadsom Alok Sharma Kwasi Kwarteng Nadine Dorries Michelle Donelan Kemi Badenoch.
Also since 2010 there have been Ministers with specific responsibility for postal affairs:-
Ed Davey Norman Lamb Jo Swinson Jenny Willott Jo Swinson (again) Margot James (the only Minister so far to express any regret about their role in this affair) Andrew Griffiths Kelly Tolhurst Paul Scully Kevin Hollinrake. "
Whilst it is wholly appropriate to ask Sir Ed Davey to answer some sharp questions, it's a bit rich to single him out from that lot. Fortunately the Posters Of PB are not readily susceptible to witchhunts and can be relied upon to take a broader, more balanced view....can't they?
Btw, Ms C puts in a word above for Margot James. Alan Bates himself puts in a kind word for Norman Lamb. The rest....well if we are going to ask questions of Ed Davey, why not the others?
Your first paragraph is not true. Or wasn't true in 2010. The Conservative-led coalition government could have dumped the whole steaming mess on Labour, so the fact it didn't suggests the coalition was very high-minded or that this was not yet a scandal, even if it should have been.
We are plagued by incurious ministers and officials. Yes, Prime Minister got there first. Why didn't you ask him a lot of questions? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOI3SNVAVwg
Strikes me that regardless of whether Davey was at fault in his actions over the Post Office, it's bad enough that this is a reminder to people about the Coalition, which is something the Lib Dems have never properly recovered from.
It's also a reminder about New Labour, who the mess started under.
No organisation comes out of this looking good. Politically, Labour, the Lib Dems and the Conservatives are all sullied by it, to one extent or another.
7 ministers prior to Davey (all therefore Labour) apparently refused to meet with Bates too.
Media frenzy needs to pick a villain though, and they have picked on Davey. These things are often not fair.
Fair (ironically, given the issue) doesn't come in to it. One could argue that Ken Clarke was significantly more responsible for failing to act over the contaminated blood scandal - which destroyed even more lives. And despite that he is quite reasonably regarded as one if the better ministers of the last half century.
Davey was almost certainly misled by the PO and let down by civil servants. Nonetheless, he was the responsible minister who missed a chance to halt a miscarriage of justice. I don't think there's any upside to his toughing this out - and if he acts promptly, significant benefit in stepping down, as a matter of both principle and pragmatism.
I think it’s more likely that Davey’s (relatively minor) role in the affair will have been entirely forgotten by the general election. PB always overestimates the probabilities of people needing to resign over things.
The Times and the Tory Party have done a good spinning job, but I don't see it as resination stuff, especially if he grasps the nettle now and tells it like it was.
Another question about the Post Office scandal is whether there is a single MP, Minister or senior Civil Servant who does not read Private Eye? Or newspaper editor, come to that.
There was the article in Computer Weekly nearly fifteen years ago. There have been occasional articles in the serious papers and a lot more in Private Eye, as well as local paper coverage of many of the individual cases. Bates’s campaign has been going for twenty years and both he and many of the affected individuals have lobbied their own MPs throughout that entire period. A handful of those MPs have been raising the matter in parliament for more than ten years. Bates’s campaign has lobbied every junior minister responsible for the PO since New Labour days, but only one was interested enough to meet him personally. There’s been a Panorama documentary, a twenty-part radio series on R4, and items on other media including commercial radio. And there’s a book available in both hardback and paperback that tells the whole story. And internet sites from the campaign and others; even, late in the story, some items on PB. And the statutory inquiry has been up and running since last year.
Yet it’s taken a bit of telly drama on ITV over the holiday period to have everyone running about in apparent surprise and shock…..
Yes, Sunak was talking at the weekend like he'd only just heard of it. Despicable. I used to have quite a bit of time for him, but I now hope he gets shafted at the next election, as he deserves.
On topic, what does Daisy Cooper stand for? What do the Lib Dems stand for?
Davey's problem isn't so much the Post Office scandal, it's that he's a completely invisible presence on the stage. Why would anyone vote Lib Dem other than as an entirely tactical vote - which is an exceptionally weak foundation on which to build a strategy; one that cannot survive either the party gaining some sort of power and having to take tough decisions - other means of protest will be found - and must be tossed and turned as the relative popularity of the other parties changes.
Too many in the Lib Dems are stuck in a mindset from the 1980s and would try to bend the new political reality to that comfort zone than adapt their tactics and message to a changed world. It doesn't help that on a micro level, their tactics and messages work - they do still win by-elections here and there, and pick up gains where they put in the work - but isolated and unconnected victories based on transient tactical conditions (within a much wider sea of lost deposits, or equivalent) is treating politics as sport for an network of independents, not a political party.
Kim Jong-un's daughter on track to assume power as aunt fades from spotlight: analysts
https://m.koreatimes.co.kr/pages/article.asp?newsIdx=366530 When North Korean leader Kim Jong-un's daughter, known as Ju-ae, made her first public appearance in late 2022, few analysts saw her as his successor, with some suggesting that his sister, Kim Yo-jong, was more likely to take the throne if something happens to his ability to rule.
But about a year later, many experts, including top-level agents at South Korea's national spy agency, think that Ju-ae is on track to assume the top spot. Meanwhile, the North Korean leader's ambitious sister appears to have been sidelined from the media spotlight, according to analysts, Monday.
A further basis for such claims was provided by Rodong Sinmun, North Korea's official newspaper, which used honorifics exclusively for Ju-ae and her father in the coverage of their inspection of a poultry farm in Hwangju County, some 45 kilometers south of the North's capital Pyongyang. Monday's issue of the newspaper, on the other hand, plainly described other high-ranking officials who followed them, including Yo-jong and Premier Kim Tok-hun, without using the same honorifics...
Meanwhile, if there's any truth in it, the biggest political news may be this:
Jeremy Corbyn has been tipped to decide in just “weeks” whether to launch a new political movement to rival Keir Starmer’s Labour Party.
According to friends of the former Labour leader, Corbyn could launch a new party which could take voters dissatisfied with the current Labour Party away from Starmer.
Will it give free OWLs?
No but it gives your team another five years of inch-perfect government. Rishi is indeed a lucky General.
The vanity of Jeremy Corbyn. Worth 3 quid to every Conservative Party member.
How many votes would a Jez Party take from Labour and where? My guess is not many and where it doesn't matter.
After all, the Greens already function as a recycling bin for votes of disgruntled lefties.
We've been here before with Respect, TUSC, etc. Although the Corbo brand is strong, it isn't going to win any seats or swing many, if any, marginals.
An overtly Islamic party is probably a greater hypothetical danger to Labour. It is an inevitable and much-needed development.
Also... it's very late in the electoral cycle for this type of thing. There is almost no time to fleece idiots of their cash, think up a snappy name and register a domain, etc.
This is largely a non-story - or at best, a rehash of a story that's been rumbling ever since Corbyn's original suspension and perhaps before.
What substance is there? "Tipped to decide within weeks". Well, of course. The election could be in May, with a dissolution in March. Given that he hasn't yet given a categorical decision either way (which itself is very Corbyn when faced with a tough call in which his preference flies in the face of reality), but has a structure he could easily turn into a party, he has to make a call one way or the other within weeks, if he wants to remain in control of that choice, and assuming that Labour doesn't let him back. It's not the most penetrating piece of analysis.
He might win one seat - his own - but I agree that his influence beyond that would be very marginal. And even his own seat is very far from guaranteed.
Jeremy Corbyn should not form a new party but should himself stand in the general election, in the seat next door to his own. He might even win. Were you still up for Keir Starmer?
On topic, what does Daisy Cooper stand for? What do the Lib Dems stand for?
Davey's problem isn't so much the Post Office scandal, it's that he's a completely invisible presence on the stage. Why would anyone vote Lib Dem other than as an entirely tactical vote - which is an exceptionally weak foundation on which to build a strategy; one that cannot survive either the party gaining some sort of power and having to take tough decisions - other means of protest will be found - and must be tossed and turned as the relative popularity of the other parties changes.
Too many in the Lib Dems are stuck in a mindset from the 1980s and would try to bend the new political reality to that comfort zone than adapt their tactics and message to a changed world. It doesn't help that on a micro level, their tactics and messages work - they do still win by-elections here and there, and pick up gains where they put in the work - but isolated and unconnected victories based on transient tactical conditions (within a much wider sea of lost deposits, or equivalent) is treating politics as sport for an network of independents, not a political party.
While there's much to agree with in that -particularly on Davey and the lack of strategy - the "why would anyone vote Lib Dem other than as an entirely tactical vote" part is easy enough for habitual LD voters such as myself: liberalism. The other parties don't really offer that. The Tories did, to an extent, under Cameron - there is also a liberal Conservative tradition although it seems to have been lost post-Cameron and the great Tory purge under Johnson. Many in labour seem to lack liberal instincts, preferring greater state control.
In a seat where the LDs have a chance, the reason in clear - more liberal voices and votes in parliament, that can combine with the liberals from other parties to block some legislation and to support others. In safe seats, it expresses a preference, as any vote for a minor party does. UKIP, afterall, got noticed for vote share and influenced the direction of this country without winning any new seats.
Of course, under PR we'd have more parties. It might mean the end of the LDs, with a split into liberal centre-right (with some Tories) and liberal centre-left (with some from Labour). I would not see that as a bad thing, the de-merger, if you like, of the Liberals and SDP.
One might as well - or even more so - ask why vote Yorkshire Party, other than as a protest vote
ETA: I'm reasonably impressed by what I've seen of Cooper, but there is a danger of projection, where being #notDavey is seen as enough in the same way as Swinson was #notCable, without actually thinking about whether that is better or worse.
The assumption here is that if you say you're a child but the Home Office classify you as an adult you were "caught" and you're actually an adult. The charities that are working with them say that the Home Office is routinely classifying people who are actually children as adults.
In 2022, at GMIAU we have seen an increase in the number of children being referred to us because the Home Office have placed them in adult accommodation having wrongly deemed them to be adults. Of the 15 referrals we received by June this year, 11 had their age wrongly changed by the Home Office to make them an adult. Over half of these children have now had their age accepted by their local authority and 4 of the remaining 5 continue to wait for an outcome. Nationwide, figures from 64 local authorities collected by the Helen Bamber Foundation show that in January to March 2022, 211 young people were referred to children’s services after having been sent to adult accommodation or detention. Two thirds were found to actually be children - 150 children had been placed in adult accommodation or detention in only three months.
Considering the record at the Home Office at getting things wrong, this story doesn't surprise me at all.
This is a good example of the difficulty of pandering to the anti-immigration people. The Sun shows some pictures of asylum seekers who look old (either because they were really lying about their age or because they failed to apply an appropriate skincare regime during their lifetime of civil war and their epic trek across continents) and says, "The Home Office is being taken advantage of!". So then the Home Office give instructions that anyone who might embarrass them on a Sun front page should be deemed to be an adult. Then a couple of years later The Sun gets hold of the Home Office figures for how many people they classified as adults and says, "Look, the number of cheaters we're taking in is soaring!"
He was 17! A lot of people sympathetic to asylum seekers don’t even consider that to be a child
So lets say that Jezbollah launches the Peace and Justice Party. And attracts the crankies. Why would this B Ark threaten Labour as it sails the nutters off into the sunset?
Remember that the cranks already have a plethora of scab parties to vote for, many of which gather under the absurdly named "Left Unity" banner. If P&J (Marxist Leninist) gathers them all under His banner, so what?
I don't think the crank left get it. The further away they recede from the Labour movement, the more electable that movement is. And Clause 1 of the Labour Party constitution is very clear that it exists to get elected. So...
The historical message is clear. Labour over decades suffer splits and periods of being unelectable. The splitting mentality is strong on the left, being in its nature quasi religious, but the greatest threat, the SDP, came from the social democrats Williams and Jenkins.
The Labour party, unelectable, compromised, incoherent, etc, are, unlike all the others going to lead the next government. Starmer is a sort of personal example of all the conjuring required.
Tentatively I think the only change it should think about would be to specifically renounce socialism, and clearly embrace a social democrat general philosophy, just one step further than the Clause 4 moment.
The time may come when it has to specifically renounce extreme Islamism too. Both these might be in Starmer's second term. Labour cannot win if and when it is seen as the route to power for the left or for the extreme end of its Islamic support base.
The biggest threat to Labour came from the left gaining, or nearly gaining, power.
The SDP split only happened because of the strength of the Bennite left in the early 1980s; the disaster of the 2019 election was a direct function of Corbyn being leader. Both scenarios could easily have been worse had Benn won the deputy leadership election - a totemic loss that proved to many that the situation was salvageable - or had the Change UK splitters not made such a hash of their departure, or had they persuaded the likes of Watson to join them, or had they jumped ship directly to the Lib Dems.
In each case, it wasn't the right that threatened Labour, other than in reaction to the left's ascendancy.
The assumption here is that if you say you're a child but the Home Office classify you as an adult you were "caught" and you're actually an adult. The charities that are working with them say that the Home Office is routinely classifying people who are actually children as adults.
In 2022, at GMIAU we have seen an increase in the number of children being referred to us because the Home Office have placed them in adult accommodation having wrongly deemed them to be adults. Of the 15 referrals we received by June this year, 11 had their age wrongly changed by the Home Office to make them an adult. Over half of these children have now had their age accepted by their local authority and 4 of the remaining 5 continue to wait for an outcome. Nationwide, figures from 64 local authorities collected by the Helen Bamber Foundation show that in January to March 2022, 211 young people were referred to children’s services after having been sent to adult accommodation or detention. Two thirds were found to actually be children - 150 children had been placed in adult accommodation or detention in only three months.
Considering the record at the Home Office at getting things wrong, this story doesn't surprise me at all.
This is a good example of the difficulty of pandering to the anti-immigration people. The Sun shows some pictures of asylum seekers who look old (either because they were really lying about their age or because they failed to apply an appropriate skincare regime during their lifetime of civil war and their epic trek across continents) and says, "The Home Office is being taken advantage of!". So then the Home Office give instructions that anyone who might embarrass them on a Sun front page should be deemed to be an adult. Then a couple of years later The Sun gets hold of the Home Office figures for how many people they classified as adults and says, "Look, the number of cheaters we're taking in is soaring!"
He was 17! A lot of people sympathetic to asylum seekers don’t even consider that to be a child
The assumption here is that if you say you're a child but the Home Office classify you as an adult you were "caught" and you're actually an adult. The charities that are working with them say that the Home Office is routinely classifying people who are actually children as adults.
In 2022, at GMIAU we have seen an increase in the number of children being referred to us because the Home Office have placed them in adult accommodation having wrongly deemed them to be adults. Of the 15 referrals we received by June this year, 11 had their age wrongly changed by the Home Office to make them an adult. Over half of these children have now had their age accepted by their local authority and 4 of the remaining 5 continue to wait for an outcome. Nationwide, figures from 64 local authorities collected by the Helen Bamber Foundation show that in January to March 2022, 211 young people were referred to children’s services after having been sent to adult accommodation or detention. Two thirds were found to actually be children - 150 children had been placed in adult accommodation or detention in only three months.
Considering the record at the Home Office at getting things wrong, this story doesn't surprise me at all.
This is a good example of the difficulty of pandering to the anti-immigration people. The Sun shows some pictures of asylum seekers who look old (either because they were really lying about their age or because they failed to apply an appropriate skincare regime during their lifetime of civil war and their epic trek across continents) and says, "The Home Office is being taken advantage of!". So then the Home Office give instructions that anyone who might embarrass them on a Sun front page should be deemed to be an adult. Then a couple of years later The Sun gets hold of the Home Office figures for how many people they classified as adults and says, "Look, the number of cheaters we're taking in is soaring!"
He was 17! A lot of people sympathetic to asylum seekers don’t even consider that to be a child
I went to see One Life yesterday (the Nicholas Winton story - still very moving despite being so familiar). A detail that isn't highlighted is that AIUI Britain was after some bureaucratic delay reasonably welcoming to Jewish children fleeing Nazism, less so to adults. That's something we should be ashamed of in retrospect.
Shame is, however, largely a waste of time unless it leads us to reconsider our current attitudes to asylum-seekers. We should err on the side of generosity, especially where the claim is a matter of life and death. If some people thereby fiddle the system, so be it.
Strikes me that regardless of whether Davey was at fault in his actions over the Post Office, it's bad enough that this is a reminder to people about the Coalition, which is something the Lib Dems have never properly recovered from.
It's also a reminder about New Labour, who the mess started under.
No organisation comes out of this looking good. Politically, Labour, the Lib Dems and the Conservatives are all sullied by it, to one extent or another.
7 ministers prior to Davey (all therefore Labour) apparently refused to meet with Bates too.
Media frenzy needs to pick a villain though, and they have picked on Davey. These things are often not fair.
Fair (ironically, given the issue) doesn't come in to it. One could argue that Ken Clarke was significantly more responsible for failing to act over the contaminated blood scandal - which destroyed even more lives. And despite that he is quite reasonably regarded as one if the better ministers of the last half century.
Davey was almost certainly misled by the PO and let down by civil servants. Nonetheless, he was the responsible minister who missed a chance to halt a miscarriage of justice. I don't think there's any upside to his toughing this out - and if he acts promptly, significant benefit in stepping down, as a matter of both principle and pragmatism.
I think it’s more likely that Davey’s (relatively minor) role in the affair will have been entirely forgotten by the general election. PB always overestimates the probabilities of people needing to resign over things.
The Times and the Tory Party have done a good spinning job, but I don't see it as resination stuff, especially if he grasps the nettle now and tells it like it was.
I don’t think it is spin. The SPMasters themselves are naming Davey as a particularly unhelpful minister - and there are emails to show it
On top of that, there is the deeply awkward fact that Davey himself went on to work for the lawyers prosecuting the sainted post people. That’s surely just bad luck. But it’s terrible optics nonetheless
If he survives he is badly tarnished. The LDs’ USP is being “nice”. And “better than the rest”
And I am sure there are other politicians who are blameworthy and the PO bigwigs are the main culprits
On topic, what does Daisy Cooper stand for? What do the Lib Dems stand for?
Davey's problem isn't so much the Post Office scandal, it's that he's a completely invisible presence on the stage. Why would anyone vote Lib Dem other than as an entirely tactical vote - which is an exceptionally weak foundation on which to build a strategy; one that cannot survive either the party gaining some sort of power and having to take tough decisions - other means of protest will be found - and must be tossed and turned as the relative popularity of the other parties changes.
Too many in the Lib Dems are stuck in a mindset from the 1980s and would try to bend the new political reality to that comfort zone than adapt their tactics and message to a changed world. It doesn't help that on a micro level, their tactics and messages work - they do still win by-elections here and there, and pick up gains where they put in the work - but isolated and unconnected victories based on transient tactical conditions (within a much wider sea of lost deposits, or equivalent) is treating politics as sport for an network of independents, not a political party.
If you're asking what parties stand for nowadays, the question is just as pertinent for Labour and Tory.
The LibDems have to adapt to their position as a third party with relatively even support in a political system designed to suit the two larger parties. Unless and until they genuinely break through, they will always be more of a guerilla force than an army, and must adopt tactics to match. Lectures from an army general about how they should fight are of limited value.
At LibDem Conferences, they spend a huge amount of time - more than the other parties - producing and debating long, worthy but essentially turgid policy documents on almost everything, as if they were a government in waiting. It is almost entirely a complete waste of time and effort, and doesn't win a single vote. Although ironically it did make producing the Coalition Agreement with the Tories much easier, as Letwin actually bothered to read them all. The Tory negotiators offered the LibDems lots of policy concessions on smaller stuff that big picture LibDems like Clegg probably didn't even know were his policies in the first place.
The assumption here is that if you say you're a child but the Home Office classify you as an adult you were "caught" and you're actually an adult. The charities that are working with them say that the Home Office is routinely classifying people who are actually children as adults.
In 2022, at GMIAU we have seen an increase in the number of children being referred to us because the Home Office have placed them in adult accommodation having wrongly deemed them to be adults. Of the 15 referrals we received by June this year, 11 had their age wrongly changed by the Home Office to make them an adult. Over half of these children have now had their age accepted by their local authority and 4 of the remaining 5 continue to wait for an outcome. Nationwide, figures from 64 local authorities collected by the Helen Bamber Foundation show that in January to March 2022, 211 young people were referred to children’s services after having been sent to adult accommodation or detention. Two thirds were found to actually be children - 150 children had been placed in adult accommodation or detention in only three months.
Considering the record at the Home Office at getting things wrong, this story doesn't surprise me at all.
This is a good example of the difficulty of pandering to the anti-immigration people. The Sun shows some pictures of asylum seekers who look old (either because they were really lying about their age or because they failed to apply an appropriate skincare regime during their lifetime of civil war and their epic trek across continents) and says, "The Home Office is being taken advantage of!". So then the Home Office give instructions that anyone who might embarrass them on a Sun front page should be deemed to be an adult. Then a couple of years later The Sun gets hold of the Home Office figures for how many people they classified as adults and says, "Look, the number of cheaters we're taking in is soaring!"
Having teenage children and observing how some 16 year olds look like 11 year olds and others look like grown ups it is always remarkable to me how people seem able to claim categorically that someone is lying about their age. My own daughter had some xrays done as we were concerned that she wasn't growing and they showed her skeletal age was 3 years behind her actual age. People just mature at vastly different paces.
The assumption here is that if you say you're a child but the Home Office classify you as an adult you were "caught" and you're actually an adult. The charities that are working with them say that the Home Office is routinely classifying people who are actually children as adults.
In 2022, at GMIAU we have seen an increase in the number of children being referred to us because the Home Office have placed them in adult accommodation having wrongly deemed them to be adults. Of the 15 referrals we received by June this year, 11 had their age wrongly changed by the Home Office to make them an adult. Over half of these children have now had their age accepted by their local authority and 4 of the remaining 5 continue to wait for an outcome. Nationwide, figures from 64 local authorities collected by the Helen Bamber Foundation show that in January to March 2022, 211 young people were referred to children’s services after having been sent to adult accommodation or detention. Two thirds were found to actually be children - 150 children had been placed in adult accommodation or detention in only three months.
Considering the record at the Home Office at getting things wrong, this story doesn't surprise me at all.
This is a good example of the difficulty of pandering to the anti-immigration people. The Sun shows some pictures of asylum seekers who look old (either because they were really lying about their age or because they failed to apply an appropriate skincare regime during their lifetime of civil war and their epic trek across continents) and says, "The Home Office is being taken advantage of!". So then the Home Office give instructions that anyone who might embarrass them on a Sun front page should be deemed to be an adult. Then a couple of years later The Sun gets hold of the Home Office figures for how many people they classified as adults and says, "Look, the number of cheaters we're taking in is soaring!"
Having teenage children and observing how some 16 year olds look like 11 year olds and others look like grown ups it is always remarkable to me how people seem able to claim categorically that someone is lying about their age. My own daughter had some xrays done as we were concerned that she wasn't growing and they showed her skeletal age was 3 years behind her actual age. People just mature at vastly different paces.
I have a thirteen year old grandson who is 6' 2" tall.
Cricket fans living in Somerset will be pleased to hear he is a pretty decent fast bowler.
The assumption here is that if you say you're a child but the Home Office classify you as an adult you were "caught" and you're actually an adult. The charities that are working with them say that the Home Office is routinely classifying people who are actually children as adults.
In 2022, at GMIAU we have seen an increase in the number of children being referred to us because the Home Office have placed them in adult accommodation having wrongly deemed them to be adults. Of the 15 referrals we received by June this year, 11 had their age wrongly changed by the Home Office to make them an adult. Over half of these children have now had their age accepted by their local authority and 4 of the remaining 5 continue to wait for an outcome. Nationwide, figures from 64 local authorities collected by the Helen Bamber Foundation show that in January to March 2022, 211 young people were referred to children’s services after having been sent to adult accommodation or detention. Two thirds were found to actually be children - 150 children had been placed in adult accommodation or detention in only three months.
Considering the record at the Home Office at getting things wrong, this story doesn't surprise me at all.
This is a good example of the difficulty of pandering to the anti-immigration people. The Sun shows some pictures of asylum seekers who look old (either because they were really lying about their age or because they failed to apply an appropriate skincare regime during their lifetime of civil war and their epic trek across continents) and says, "The Home Office is being taken advantage of!". So then the Home Office give instructions that anyone who might embarrass them on a Sun front page should be deemed to be an adult. Then a couple of years later The Sun gets hold of the Home Office figures for how many people they classified as adults and says, "Look, the number of cheaters we're taking in is soaring!"
He was 17! A lot of people sympathetic to asylum seekers don’t even consider that to be a child
I went to see One Life yesterday (the Nicholas Winton story - still very moving despite being so familiar). A detail that isn't highlighted is that AIUI Britain was after some bureaucratic delay reasonably welcoming to Jewish children fleeing Nazism, less so to adults. That's something we should be ashamed of in retrospect.
Shame is, however, largely a waste of time unless it leads us to reconsider our current attitudes to asylum-seekers. We should err on the side of generosity, especially where the claim is a matter of life and death. If some people thereby fiddle the system, so be it.
The difference here is that these Asylum seekers aren’t fleeing Nazi Germany where they will surely be killed, but are in France which is a safe country. If we were separated by the channel from Syria or Afghanistan, rather than somewhere we like to go on holiday, I’m sure people would be more welcoming of system fiddlers
So lets say that Jezbollah launches the Peace and Justice Party. And attracts the crankies. Why would this B Ark threaten Labour as it sails the nutters off into the sunset?
Remember that the cranks already have a plethora of scab parties to vote for, many of which gather under the absurdly named "Left Unity" banner. If P&J (Marxist Leninist) gathers them all under His banner, so what?
I don't think the crank left get it. The further away they recede from the Labour movement, the more electable that movement is. And Clause 1 of the Labour Party constitution is very clear that it exists to get elected. So...
The historical message is clear. Labour over decades suffer splits and periods of being unelectable. The splitting mentality is strong on the left, being in its nature quasi religious, but the greatest threat, the SDP, came from the social democrats Williams and Jenkins.
The Labour party, unelectable, compromised, incoherent, etc, are, unlike all the others going to lead the next government. Starmer is a sort of personal example of all the conjuring required.
Tentatively I think the only change it should think about would be to specifically renounce socialism, and clearly embrace a social democrat general philosophy, just one step further than the Clause 4 moment.
The time may come when it has to specifically renounce extreme Islamism too. Both these might be in Starmer's second term. Labour cannot win if and when it is seen as the route to power for the left or for the extreme end of its Islamic support base.
The biggest threat to Labour came from the left gaining, or nearly gaining, power.
The SDP split only happened because of the strength of the Bennite left in the early 1980s; the disaster of the 2019 election was a direct function of Corbyn being leader. Both scenarios could easily have been worse had Benn won the deputy leadership election - a totemic loss that proved to many that the situation was salvageable - or had the Change UK splitters not made such a hash of their departure, or had they persuaded the likes of Watson to join them, or had they jumped ship directly to the Lib Dems.
In each case, it wasn't the right that threatened Labour, other than in reaction to the left's ascendancy.
Yes, but the point really is that it remains true (SFAICS) that Labour can't win from the left. The Labour party from 1979 until the accession of Smith (1992 after defeat) was stupendously enjoyable knockabout for politics anoraks but didn't win any power at all.
In 1992 (Kinnock, leftish) and 2017 (Jezza) it came a bit close to winning, but where they lost to very weak Tories.
In 2017 against the worst Tory campaign in modern times, which deserved to get annihilated, Labour won 55 seats fewer than the Tories.
Another question about the Post Office scandal is whether there is a single MP, Minister or senior Civil Servant who does not read Private Eye? Or newspaper editor, come to that.
There was the article in Computer Weekly nearly fifteen years ago. There have been occasional articles in the serious papers and a lot more in Private Eye, as well as local paper coverage of many of the individual cases. Bates’s campaign has been going for twenty years and both he and many of the affected individuals have lobbied their own MPs throughout that entire period. A handful of those MPs have been raising the matter in parliament for more than ten years. Bates’s campaign has lobbied every junior minister responsible for the PO since New Labour days, but only one was interested enough to meet him personally. There’s been a Panorama documentary, a twenty-part radio series on R4, and items on other media including commercial radio. And there’s a book available in both hardback and paperback that tells the whole story. And internet sites from the campaign and others; even, late in the story, some items on PB. And the statutory inquiry has been up and running since last year.
Yet it’s taken a bit of telly drama on ITV over the holiday period to have everyone running about in apparent surprise and shock…..
Yes, Sunak was talking at the weekend like he'd only just heard of it. Despicable. I used to have quite a bit of time for him, but I now hope he gets shafted at the next election, as he deserves.
How many questions has Starmer asked about it at PMQs?
On topic, what does Daisy Cooper stand for? What do the Lib Dems stand for?
Davey's problem isn't so much the Post Office scandal, it's that he's a completely invisible presence on the stage. Why would anyone vote Lib Dem other than as an entirely tactical vote - which is an exceptionally weak foundation on which to build a strategy; one that cannot survive either the party gaining some sort of power and having to take tough decisions - other means of protest will be found - and must be tossed and turned as the relative popularity of the other parties changes.
Too many in the Lib Dems are stuck in a mindset from the 1980s and would try to bend the new political reality to that comfort zone than adapt their tactics and message to a changed world. It doesn't help that on a micro level, their tactics and messages work - they do still win by-elections here and there, and pick up gains where they put in the work - but isolated and unconnected victories based on transient tactical conditions (within a much wider sea of lost deposits, or equivalent) is treating politics as sport for an network of independents, not a political party.
While there's much to agree with in that -particularly on Davey and the lack of strategy - the "why would anyone vote Lib Dem other than as an entirely tactical vote" part is easy enough for habitual LD voters such as myself: liberalism. The other parties don't really offer that. The Tories did, to an extent, under Cameron - there is also a liberal Conservative tradition although it seems to have been lost post-Cameron and the great Tory purge under Johnson. Many in labour seem to lack liberal instincts, preferring greater state control.
In a seat where the LDs have a chance, the reason in clear - more liberal voices and votes in parliament, that can combine with the liberals from other parties to block some legislation and to support others. In safe seats, it expresses a preference, as any vote for a minor party does. UKIP, afterall, got noticed for vote share and influenced the direction of this country without winning any new seats.
Of course, under PR we'd have more parties. It might mean the end of the LDs, with a split into liberal centre-right (with some Tories) and liberal centre-left (with some from Labour). I would not see that as a bad thing, the de-merger, if you like, of the Liberals and SDP.
One might as well - or even more so - ask why vote Yorkshire Party, other than as a protest vote
ETA: I'm reasonably impressed by what I've seen of Cooper, but there is a danger of projection, where being #notDavey is seen as enough in the same way as Swinson was #notCable, without actually thinking about whether that is better or worse.
And I'd be delighted if the Lib Dems were to proudly and vividly wave the banner of liberalism. I don't doubt that there is a strong belief in it that runs through the party at all levels (though one too easily overtaken by the tactical demands of by-elections - see endless campaigning against people developing their land). But it ain't happening. God knows that in the world as it is there's a need for people to stand up for freedom of speech, of action, for the rule of law and for democracy, and to make those arguments from first principles because freedoms in society are a Good Thing. But I'm not seeing it happen. And without putting forward those basic beliefs and core values, there's no movement built on them, despite the opportunity.
As for the Yorkshire Party, leaving aside where we have won councillors, yes, of course there's a large element of a protest vote against the iniquitous allocation of money and power in the country. But it's also a protest for for an answer to that; we offer solutions as well as critique and complaint.
On topic, what does Daisy Cooper stand for? What do the Lib Dems stand for?
Davey's problem isn't so much the Post Office scandal, it's that he's a completely invisible presence on the stage. Why would anyone vote Lib Dem other than as an entirely tactical vote - which is an exceptionally weak foundation on which to build a strategy; one that cannot survive either the party gaining some sort of power and having to take tough decisions - other means of protest will be found - and must be tossed and turned as the relative popularity of the other parties changes.
Too many in the Lib Dems are stuck in a mindset from the 1980s and would try to bend the new political reality to that comfort zone than adapt their tactics and message to a changed world. It doesn't help that on a micro level, their tactics and messages work - they do still win by-elections here and there, and pick up gains where they put in the work - but isolated and unconnected victories based on transient tactical conditions (within a much wider sea of lost deposits, or equivalent) is treating politics as sport for an network of independents, not a political party.
If you're asking what parties stand for nowadays, the question is just as pertinent for Labour and Tory.
The LibDems have to adapt to their position as a third party with relatively even support in a political system designed to suit the two larger parties. Unless and until they genuinely break through, they will always be more of a guerilla force than an army, and must adopt tactics to match. Lectures from an army general about how they should fight are of limited value.
At LibDem Conferences, they spend a huge amount of time - more than the other parties - producing and debating long, worthy but essentially turgid policy documents on almost everything, as if they were a government in waiting. It is almost entirely a complete waste of time and effort, and doesn't win a single vote. Although ironically it did make producing the Coalition Agreement with the Tories much easier, as Letwin actually bothered to read them all.
TBF, David is himself something of a guerrilla these days.
Another question about the Post Office scandal is whether there is a single MP, Minister or senior Civil Servant who does not read Private Eye? Or newspaper editor, come to that.
There was the article in Computer Weekly nearly fifteen years ago. There have been occasional articles in the serious papers and a lot more in Private Eye, as well as local paper coverage of many of the individual cases. Bates’s campaign has been going for twenty years and both he and many of the affected individuals have lobbied their own MPs throughout that entire period. A handful of those MPs have been raising the matter in parliament for more than ten years. Bates’s campaign has lobbied every junior minister responsible for the PO since New Labour days, but only one was interested enough to meet him personally. There’s been a Panorama documentary, a twenty-part radio series on R4, and items on other media including commercial radio. And there’s a book available in both hardback and paperback that tells the whole story. And internet sites from the campaign and others; even, late in the story, some items on PB. And the statutory inquiry has been up and running since last year.
Yet it’s taken a bit of telly drama on ITV over the holiday period to have everyone running about in apparent surprise and shock…..
It’s been a background scandal in the IT world since Computer Weekly started on this.
You are seeing a few things here, I think.
1) the complete absence of IT parented people in high government and media - lots of generalists. Who are proud of switching off when IT is mentioned. We’ve had some here - “stop going on about the boring stuff”
2) this affects too many powerful people and interest groups…
3) who think it is jolly unfair that some maths and tech stuff should upset their brilliant records as NU10K’rs
4) it’s not real until it’s broken through in popular debate.
The assumption here is that if you say you're a child but the Home Office classify you as an adult you were "caught" and you're actually an adult. The charities that are working with them say that the Home Office is routinely classifying people who are actually children as adults.
In 2022, at GMIAU we have seen an increase in the number of children being referred to us because the Home Office have placed them in adult accommodation having wrongly deemed them to be adults. Of the 15 referrals we received by June this year, 11 had their age wrongly changed by the Home Office to make them an adult. Over half of these children have now had their age accepted by their local authority and 4 of the remaining 5 continue to wait for an outcome. Nationwide, figures from 64 local authorities collected by the Helen Bamber Foundation show that in January to March 2022, 211 young people were referred to children’s services after having been sent to adult accommodation or detention. Two thirds were found to actually be children - 150 children had been placed in adult accommodation or detention in only three months.
Considering the record at the Home Office at getting things wrong, this story doesn't surprise me at all.
This is a good example of the difficulty of pandering to the anti-immigration people. The Sun shows some pictures of asylum seekers who look old (either because they were really lying about their age or because they failed to apply an appropriate skincare regime during their lifetime of civil war and their epic trek across continents) and says, "The Home Office is being taken advantage of!". So then the Home Office give instructions that anyone who might embarrass them on a Sun front page should be deemed to be an adult. Then a couple of years later The Sun gets hold of the Home Office figures for how many people they classified as adults and says, "Look, the number of cheaters we're taking in is soaring!"
Having teenage children and observing how some 16 year olds look like 11 year olds and others look like grown ups it is always remarkable to me how people seem able to claim categorically that someone is lying about their age. My own daughter had some xrays done as we were concerned that she wasn't growing and they showed her skeletal age was 3 years behind her actual age. People just mature at vastly different paces.
Sec 3 draws a sharp line btw law and politics. The first part is a legal command about who cannot hold office that doesn’t demand action by Congress. But the second allows “Congress by a vote of 2/3 of each House” to lift a disqualification. The framers gave Congress — not POTUS or SCOTUS — power to grant a Sec 3 waiver on policy grounds: https://twitter.com/tribelaw/status/1744280678559088667
Absolutely. I doubt Ms C or any of us here would dispute that.
Interesting that Amol Rajan was interviewing Idris Elba about knife crime on Today this morning and asked what was it about actors that gave them a special position to opine about this, that or the other. Elba responded that he was speaking as a parent (oh that Emma Thompson would do similarly but I digress).
But there is no doubt absolutely that this was ignited by the entertainment industry. Private Eye, CW, others, tried and failed to make it front page news but Toby Jones did and Jule Hesmaongeahsdauaulgh has been speaking about it also subsequently. That's the society we live in.
Another question about the Post Office scandal is whether there is a single MP, Minister or senior Civil Servant who does not read Private Eye? Or newspaper editor, come to that.
There was the article in Computer Weekly nearly fifteen years ago. There have been occasional articles in the serious papers and a lot more in Private Eye, as well as local paper coverage of many of the individual cases. Bates’s campaign has been going for twenty years and both he and many of the affected individuals have lobbied their own MPs throughout that entire period. A handful of those MPs have been raising the matter in parliament for more than ten years. Bates’s campaign has lobbied every junior minister responsible for the PO since New Labour days, but only one was interested enough to meet him personally. There’s been a Panorama documentary, a twenty-part radio series on R4, and items on other media including commercial radio. And there’s a book available in both hardback and paperback that tells the whole story. And internet sites from the campaign and others; even, late in the story, some items on PB. And the statutory inquiry has been up and running since last year.
Yet it’s taken a bit of telly drama on ITV over the holiday period to have everyone running about in apparent surprise and shock…..
Yes, Sunak was talking at the weekend like he'd only just heard of it. Despicable. I used to have quite a bit of time for him, but I now hope he gets shafted at the next election, as he deserves.
How many questions has Starmer asked about it at PMQs?
On topic, what does Daisy Cooper stand for? What do the Lib Dems stand for?
Davey's problem isn't so much the Post Office scandal, it's that he's a completely invisible presence on the stage. Why would anyone vote Lib Dem other than as an entirely tactical vote - which is an exceptionally weak foundation on which to build a strategy; one that cannot survive either the party gaining some sort of power and having to take tough decisions - other means of protest will be found - and must be tossed and turned as the relative popularity of the other parties changes.
Too many in the Lib Dems are stuck in a mindset from the 1980s and would try to bend the new political reality to that comfort zone than adapt their tactics and message to a changed world. It doesn't help that on a micro level, their tactics and messages work - they do still win by-elections here and there, and pick up gains where they put in the work - but isolated and unconnected victories based on transient tactical conditions (within a much wider sea of lost deposits, or equivalent) is treating politics as sport for an network of independents, not a political party.
Just to be clear, I'm not asking on my own account here; I'm putting the question that the sort of member of the public might; someone who votes at elections, follows the news inasfar as there are headlines, is aware of the main issues and concerns of the time but doesn't pay day-to-day attention to political detail.
Also worth noting that the ITV postal drama was actually POSITIVE about one politician: the Tory MP James Arbuthnot
I actually found that quite refreshing. When “a Tory MP” hoved into view I thought, wearily, here we go, he’ll be another gammony, blazer wearing fox hunter who wants to buy all the post offices and turn them into sweat shops. But no. The scriptwriter avoided that and made him pleasant and sincere and hard working. Which added to the drama - merely by being unexpected
Another question about the Post Office scandal is whether there is a single MP, Minister or senior Civil Servant who does not read Private Eye? Or newspaper editor, come to that.
There was the article in Computer Weekly nearly fifteen years ago. There have been occasional articles in the serious papers and a lot more in Private Eye, as well as local paper coverage of many of the individual cases. Bates’s campaign has been going for twenty years and both he and many of the affected individuals have lobbied their own MPs throughout that entire period. A handful of those MPs have been raising the matter in parliament for more than ten years. Bates’s campaign has lobbied every junior minister responsible for the PO since New Labour days, but only one was interested enough to meet him personally. There’s been a Panorama documentary, a twenty-part radio series on R4, and items on other media including commercial radio. And there’s a book available in both hardback and paperback that tells the whole story. And internet sites from the campaign and others; even, late in the story, some items on PB. And the statutory inquiry has been up and running since last year.
Yet it’s taken a bit of telly drama on ITV over the holiday period to have everyone running about in apparent surprise and shock…..
It’s been a background scandal in the IT world since Computer Weekly started on this.
You are seeing a few things here, I think.
1) the complete absence of IT parented people in high government and media - lots of generalists. Who are proud of switching off when IT is mentioned. We’ve had some here - “stop going on about the boring stuff”
2) this affects too many powerful people and interest groups…
3) who think it is jolly unfair that some maths and tech stuff should upset their brilliant records as NU10K’rs
4) it’s not real until it’s broken through in popular debate.
5) we are used to trusting the technology. Ditzy human vs megacomputer company and our (perhaps subconscious) thoughts are to go with the latter.
Also worth noting that the ITV postal drama was actually POSITIVE about one politician: the Tory MP James Arbuthnot
I actually found that quite refreshing. When “a Tory MP” hoved into view I thought, wearily, here we go, he’ll be another gammony, blazer wearing fox hunter who wants to buy all the post offices and turn them into sweat shops. But no. The scriptwriter avoided that and made him pleasant and sincere and hard working. Which added to the drama - merely by being unexpected
He deserves a little credit
The Mail's review was quite snooty that not enough credit had been given to, er, The Daily Mail. But they did get a mention in e.4. If I was Computer Weekly I'd be more aggrieved, given their consistent championing of this cause. But I'm sure they are delighted that it has been brought to a wider public consciousness.
Question - are there AI bots operating on LinkedIn? Had a DM from someone looking to organise a chat between me and her boss. But she seems insistent on WhatsApp, and her boss appears not to exist...
Another question about the Post Office scandal is whether there is a single MP, Minister or senior Civil Servant who does not read Private Eye? Or newspaper editor, come to that.
There was the article in Computer Weekly nearly fifteen years ago. There have been occasional articles in the serious papers and a lot more in Private Eye, as well as local paper coverage of many of the individual cases. Bates’s campaign has been going for twenty years and both he and many of the affected individuals have lobbied their own MPs throughout that entire period. A handful of those MPs have been raising the matter in parliament for more than ten years. Bates’s campaign has lobbied every junior minister responsible for the PO since New Labour days, but only one was interested enough to meet him personally. There’s been a Panorama documentary, a twenty-part radio series on R4, and items on other media including commercial radio. And there’s a book available in both hardback and paperback that tells the whole story. And internet sites from the campaign and others; even, late in the story, some items on PB. And the statutory inquiry has been up and running since last year.
Yet it’s taken a bit of telly drama on ITV over the holiday period to have everyone running about in apparent surprise and shock…..
It’s been a background scandal in the IT world since Computer Weekly started on this.
You are seeing a few things here, I think.
1) the complete absence of IT parented people in high government and media - lots of generalists. Who are proud of switching off when IT is mentioned. We’ve had some here - “stop going on about the boring stuff”
2) this affects too many powerful people and interest groups…
3) who think it is jolly unfair that some maths and tech stuff should upset their brilliant records as NU10K’rs
4) it’s not real until it’s broken through in popular debate.
On point 1, also note at least one sudden U-turn on PB as a result of the drama programme. But the story of the Prodigal Son applies, even if the brother who stayed dutifully at home is a whisker unimpressed.
Ed seems to get no coverage at all, which is OK for Starmer who wants to win by default and seems to operate on a basis that no coverage is better than any risky coverage, but for the Lib Dems they need to do something to get the oxygen of publicity.
Its not just that the Post Office scandal is bad for Ed, its that its the only thing most people will now associate with him as there's been a complete vacuum of coverage for anything else.
Replacing him with Daisy Cooper is a good idea. I don't know much about what if anything she stands for, but she's a fresh face and telegenic and doesn't look like an invisible sidekick to Starmer.
What have the Lib Dems got to lose?
As a LD supporter, I've sometimes wondered if Davey's association with the Conservatives via the Coalition could also weigh him down come GE day. It's a ready made goal for Labour. "Everyone hates the Tories" (again) and look, he was part of them for five years...........
I wonder what has happened to Layla Moran though. She was the bright young thing about three years ago, but I've heard nothing from her since.
(Then again, the LDs have been very starved of any publicity lately, excepting their by-election gains)
Question - are there AI bots operating on LinkedIn? Had a DM from someone looking to organise a chat between me and her boss. But she seems insistent on WhatsApp, and her boss appears not to exist...
If it comes across as friendly, personable and helpful then it's probably an AI bot rather than someone working in the recruitment industry.
The Post Office Scandal was the slowest of slow burners for a number of reasons, one of which was that all three main parties in England were implicated, so there was little interest in political campaigning to exploit it for Party purposes. Now that the issue has truly caught fire, we suddenly see efforts to put a Party spin on things.
The denizens of this Site are fortunate. Thanks to Cyclefree, IanB2, and one or two others, we have been ahead of the curve, and less susceptible to the kind of partisan tubthumping so typical of inferior Sites. Indeed, Ms C cautioned us against such inappropriate bias numerous times, and none more telling than the post in which she listed the numerous Ministers responsible for the PO throughout the period of the scandal. I will refresh your memories:
"Since 1998 the Business Ministers were:-
Peter Mandelson Patricia Hewitt Alan Johnson (ex-postman) Peter Mandelson (again)
followed by 9 Business Ministers since 2010:-
Vince Cable Sajid Javid Greg Clark Andrea Leadsom Alok Sharma Kwasi Kwarteng Nadine Dorries Michelle Donelan Kemi Badenoch.
Also since 2010 there have been Ministers with specific responsibility for postal affairs:-
Ed Davey Norman Lamb Jo Swinson Jenny Willott Jo Swinson (again) Margot James (the only Minister so far to express any regret about their role in this affair) Andrew Griffiths Kelly Tolhurst Paul Scully Kevin Hollinrake. "
Whilst it is wholly appropriate to ask Sir Ed Davey to answer some sharp questions, it's a bit rich to single him out from that lot. Fortunately the Posters Of PB are not readily susceptible to witchhunts and can be relied upon to take a broader, more balanced view....can't they?
Btw, Ms C puts in a word above for Margot James. Alan Bates himself puts in a kind word for Norman Lamb. The rest....well if we are going to ask questions of Ed Davey, why not the others?
Your first paragraph is not true. Or wasn't true in 2010. The Conservative-led coalition government could have dumped the whole steaming mess on Labour, so the fact it didn't suggests the coalition was very high-minded or that this was not yet a scandal, even if it should have been.
We are plagued by incurious ministers and officials. Yes, Prime Minister got there first. Why didn't you ask him a lot of questions? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOI3SNVAVwg
As ever with YM, on the mark. Backbench and junior politicans have an incentive (more so in opposition) to hunt stuff out, hoping to find something that might make their name. Ministers have a strong incentive not to go looking into stuff, for fear of finding more work, more problems or, worst of all, something very nasty that they are then seen as responsible for. The official advice will often be, don't go looking under the stone.
Strikes me that regardless of whether Davey was at fault in his actions over the Post Office, it's bad enough that this is a reminder to people about the Coalition, which is something the Lib Dems have never properly recovered from.
It's also a reminder about New Labour, who the mess started under.
No organisation comes out of this looking good. Politically, Labour, the Lib Dems and the Conservatives are all sullied by it, to one extent or another.
7 ministers prior to Davey (all therefore Labour) apparently refused to meet with Bates too.
Media frenzy needs to pick a villain though, and they have picked on Davey. These things are often not fair.
Fair (ironically, given the issue) doesn't come in to it. One could argue that Ken Clarke was significantly more responsible for failing to act over the contaminated blood scandal - which destroyed even more lives. And despite that he is quite reasonably regarded as one if the better ministers of the last half century.
Davey was almost certainly misled by the PO and let down by civil servants. Nonetheless, he was the responsible minister who missed a chance to halt a miscarriage of justice. I don't think there's any upside to his toughing this out - and if he acts promptly, significant benefit in stepping down, as a matter of both principle and pragmatism.
I think it’s more likely that Davey’s (relatively minor) role in the affair will have been entirely forgotten by the general election. PB always overestimates the probabilities of people needing to resign over things.
The Times and the Tory Party have done a good spinning job, but I don't see it as resination stuff, especially if he grasps the nettle now and tells it like it was.
I don’t think it is spin. The SPMasters themselves are naming Davey as a particularly unhelpful minister - and there are emails to show it
On top of that, there is the deeply awkward fact that Davey himself went on to work for the lawyers prosecuting the sainted post people. That’s surely just bad luck. But it’s terrible optics nonetheless
If he survives he is badly tarnished. The LDs’ USP is being “nice”. And “better than the rest”
And I am sure there are other politicians who are blameworthy and the PO bigwigs are the main culprits
Yes, I agree, and I certainly don't burn many candles for Sir Ed. I think he is getting no more or less than he deserves, and much will depend on how he handles it.
Btw, I posted yesterday discouraging you from any self-deprecation regarding your earlier attitude to the PO scandal. I hope you saw it.
Question - are there AI bots operating on LinkedIn? Had a DM from someone looking to organise a chat between me and her boss. But she seems insistent on WhatsApp, and her boss appears not to exist...
Of course, there are AI bots operating everywhere. Also lying humans.
A recent scam I heard about is to do a fake job interview where you get someone to download some code from GitHub to do a task to show you can code. To do this you have to install dependencies, and the dependencies install malware.
Another question about the Post Office scandal is whether there is a single MP, Minister or senior Civil Servant who does not read Private Eye? Or newspaper editor, come to that.
There was the article in Computer Weekly nearly fifteen years ago. There have been occasional articles in the serious papers and a lot more in Private Eye, as well as local paper coverage of many of the individual cases. Bates’s campaign has been going for twenty years and both he and many of the affected individuals have lobbied their own MPs throughout that entire period. A handful of those MPs have been raising the matter in parliament for more than ten years. Bates’s campaign has lobbied every junior minister responsible for the PO since New Labour days, but only one was interested enough to meet him personally. There’s been a Panorama documentary, a twenty-part radio series on R4, and items on other media including commercial radio. And there’s a book available in both hardback and paperback that tells the whole story. And internet sites from the campaign and others; even, late in the story, some items on PB. And the statutory inquiry has been up and running since last year.
Yet it’s taken a bit of telly drama on ITV over the holiday period to have everyone running about in apparent surprise and shock…..
It’s been a background scandal in the IT world since Computer Weekly started on this.
You are seeing a few things here, I think.
1) the complete absence of IT parented people in high government and media - lots of generalists. Who are proud of switching off when IT is mentioned. We’ve had some here - “stop going on about the boring stuff”
2) this affects too many powerful people and interest groups…
3) who think it is jolly unfair that some maths and tech stuff should upset their brilliant records as NU10K’rs
4) it’s not real until it’s broken through in popular debate.
5) we are used to trusting the technology. Ditzy human vs megacomputer company and our (perhaps subconscious) thoughts are to go with the latter.
Indeed. We've recently seen this with the way cranks were treated who questioned Covid vaccines.
Strikes me that regardless of whether Davey was at fault in his actions over the Post Office, it's bad enough that this is a reminder to people about the Coalition, which is something the Lib Dems have never properly recovered from.
It's also a reminder about New Labour, who the mess started under.
No organisation comes out of this looking good. Politically, Labour, the Lib Dems and the Conservatives are all sullied by it, to one extent or another.
Point of order. It started under the Major Government (the fiasco, not the prosecutions). That said the Conservatives come out of this with relatively clean hands.
Curious why you think the Conservatives have relatively clean hands? They ran the government for the whole period while something could have been done but wasn't.
I don't think it is mainly a political story. The Post Office and Fujitsu are the most culpable. Ed Davey has a specific political problem in that he was previously a minister in charge of the Post Office and he is still in politics when the music finally stopped. Beyond that, to the extent it's a political story, the buck surely stops with the government in charge?
Another question about the Post Office scandal is whether there is a single MP, Minister or senior Civil Servant who does not read Private Eye? Or newspaper editor, come to that.
There was the article in Computer Weekly nearly fifteen years ago. There have been occasional articles in the serious papers and a lot more in Private Eye, as well as local paper coverage of many of the individual cases. Bates’s campaign has been going for twenty years and both he and many of the affected individuals have lobbied their own MPs throughout that entire period. A handful of those MPs have been raising the matter in parliament for more than ten years. Bates’s campaign has lobbied every junior minister responsible for the PO since New Labour days, but only one was interested enough to meet him personally. There’s been a Panorama documentary, a twenty-part radio series on R4, and items on other media including commercial radio. And there’s a book available in both hardback and paperback that tells the whole story. And internet sites from the campaign and others; even, late in the story, some items on PB. And the statutory inquiry has been up and running since last year.
Yet it’s taken a bit of telly drama on ITV over the holiday period to have everyone running about in apparent surprise and shock…..
Yes, Sunak was talking at the weekend like he'd only just heard of it. Despicable. I used to have quite a bit of time for him, but I now hope he gets shafted at the next election, as he deserves.
And in my lengthy list I forgot the televised BIS Select Committee hearing of 2015.
Also worth noting that the ITV postal drama was actually POSITIVE about one politician: the Tory MP James Arbuthnot
I actually found that quite refreshing. When “a Tory MP” hoved into view I thought, wearily, here we go, he’ll be another gammony, blazer wearing fox hunter who wants to buy all the post offices and turn them into sweat shops. But no. The scriptwriter avoided that and made him pleasant and sincere and hard working. Which added to the drama - merely by being unexpected
He deserves a little credit
The Mail's review was quite snooty that not enough credit had been given to, er, The Daily Mail. But they did get a mention in e.4. If I was Computer Weekly I'd be more aggrieved, given their consistent championing of this cause. But I'm sure they are delighted that it has been brought to a wider public consciousness.
Yes. Proper journalists on computer weekly it seems: well done them
There are some quiet heroes besides Alan Bates. But an awful lot of villains
I remember saying a year ago, as I was yawning (again, and wrongly) over the tediousness of this scandal, that what it needed was a STORY - a few human examples to make it vivid and emotional. That’s exactly what ITV did: well done them, too
It is pleasing that homemade TV drama can still do this - change an entire national conversation and for a righteous cause
Some other Pb-er noted that the scriptwriter used every single cliche in the book - from the pints at the pub table to the lovable cake making lady to the absurdly pretty house in snowdonia - but who cares. It really worked
On Corbyn, time doesn't stand still. He's a busted flush, yesterday's man. Even the many lefties I know who were fervent Corbyinistas back in 2017 have grown weary of him. The only way he could have any impact is if his 'new party' (which I don't think will happen) peeled off a significant number of current Labour MPs, and there's no chance of that. In summary, Corbyn doesn't really matter. I think it's unlikely he'd even win his own seat. Indeed, I'd be surprised if he stood.
Also worth noting that the ITV postal drama was actually POSITIVE about one politician: the Tory MP James Arbuthnot
I actually found that quite refreshing. When “a Tory MP” hoved into view I thought, wearily, here we go, he’ll be another gammony, blazer wearing fox hunter who wants to buy all the post offices and turn them into sweat shops. But no. The scriptwriter avoided that and made him pleasant and sincere and hard working. Which added to the drama - merely by being unexpected
He deserves a little credit
The Mail's review was quite snooty that not enough credit had been given to, er, The Daily Mail. But they did get a mention in e.4. If I was Computer Weekly I'd be more aggrieved, given their consistent championing of this cause. But I'm sure they are delighted that it has been brought to a wider public consciousness.
Yes. Proper journalists on computer weekly it seems: well done them
There are some quiet heroes besides Alan Bates. But an awful lot of villains
I remember saying a year ago, as I was yawning (again, and wrongly) over the tediousness of this scandal, that what it needed was a STORY - a few human examples to make it vivid and emotional. That’s exactly what ITV did: well done them, too
It is pleasing that homemade TV drama can still do this - change an entire national conversation and for a righteous cause
Some other Pb-er noted that the scriptwriter used every single cliche in the book - from the pints at the pub table to the lovable cake making lady to the absurdly pretty house in snowdonia - but who cares. It really worked
Yep there was a review which said words to the effect of it went in with Size 12s pulling out every dramatic device in the box but sometimes a story demands to be told in primary colours.
Strikes me that regardless of whether Davey was at fault in his actions over the Post Office, it's bad enough that this is a reminder to people about the Coalition, which is something the Lib Dems have never properly recovered from.
It's also a reminder about New Labour, who the mess started under.
No organisation comes out of this looking good. Politically, Labour, the Lib Dems and the Conservatives are all sullied by it, to one extent or another.
Point of order. It started under the Major Government (the fiasco, not the prosecutions). That said the Conservatives come out of this with relatively clean hands.
Did it? I thought the system came in after 1999? Might well be wrong, but I remember first reading/talking with colleagues about the problems in about 2004 or 5. The first prosecutions were well into New Labour's time ISTR.
The Horizon system was piloted in 1995 and the same problems were already apparent during the pilot. The full introduction started 1999.
Yes, but the issues with prosecutions came well into New Labour's time. It seems a little odd to try to pin this debacle on Major's government.
Despite Ms C majoring on the role of politicians, I think they are well down the list of potential cuplrits, certainly as far as the original problem is concerned. An industry IT system that is generating accounting errors really is something that a large company - especially one as exposed to scutiny as was the PO (being subject to public and media interest, a statutory regulator, a customer pressure group, and several powerful and active trade unions) - should have been able to sort out itself.
As the size and scale and knowledge of the developing scandal grew, the political world becomes more and more culpable, since while we do not rely on our ministers to find out whether a company's IT system is working, we do expect politicians to campaign against injustice on behalf of their constituents. The government's silence and inactivity over more recent years and its showering the PO CEO with honour and lining her up with a job inside 10 Downing Street, after all the key points of the story were known, is by far the bigger misjudgement.
Fujitsu fucked up. Then lied about it The Post Ofice fucked up. Then lied about it. The Civil Service tried to ignore it. Then briefed politicians there was nothing to see here The politicians were incredibly incurious
Also worth noting that the ITV postal drama was actually POSITIVE about one politician: the Tory MP James Arbuthnot
I actually found that quite refreshing. When “a Tory MP” hoved into view I thought, wearily, here we go, he’ll be another gammony, blazer wearing fox hunter who wants to buy all the post offices and turn them into sweat shops. But no. The scriptwriter avoided that and made him pleasant and sincere and hard working. Which added to the drama - merely by being unexpected
He deserves a little credit
The Mail's review was quite snooty that not enough credit had been given to, er, The Daily Mail. But they did get a mention in e.4. If I was Computer Weekly I'd be more aggrieved, given their consistent championing of this cause. But I'm sure they are delighted that it has been brought to a wider public consciousness.
I have praised the DM here for its coverage of the scandal. It gave me cramp to do so, but I did it.
The excellence of CW has been widely acknowledged.
James Arbuthnot was once my MP. This isn't the first starring role as champion of worthy causes that he's played.
Nobody has a problem with giving credit where credit is due, regardless. Personally I am even inclined to give Boris Johnson a thumbs up for authorising the Public Inquiry, and trust that it doesn't create too many enemies on here.
Another question about the Post Office scandal is whether there is a single MP, Minister or senior Civil Servant who does not read Private Eye? Or newspaper editor, come to that.
There was the article in Computer Weekly nearly fifteen years ago. There have been occasional articles in the serious papers and a lot more in Private Eye, as well as local paper coverage of many of the individual cases. Bates’s campaign has been going for twenty years and both he and many of the affected individuals have lobbied their own MPs throughout that entire period. A handful of those MPs have been raising the matter in parliament for more than ten years. Bates’s campaign has lobbied every junior minister responsible for the PO since New Labour days, but only one was interested enough to meet him personally. There’s been a Panorama documentary, a twenty-part radio series on R4, and items on other media including commercial radio. And there’s a book available in both hardback and paperback that tells the whole story. And internet sites from the campaign and others; even, late in the story, some items on PB. And the statutory inquiry has been up and running since last year.
Yet it’s taken a bit of telly drama on ITV over the holiday period to have everyone running about in apparent surprise and shock…..
It’s been a background scandal in the IT world since Computer Weekly started on this.
You are seeing a few things here, I think.
1) the complete absence of IT parented people in high government and media - lots of generalists. Who are proud of switching off when IT is mentioned. We’ve had some here - “stop going on about the boring stuff”
2) this affects too many powerful people and interest groups…
3) who think it is jolly unfair that some maths and tech stuff should upset their brilliant records as NU10K’rs
4) it’s not real until it’s broken through in popular debate.
Very good points.
To which we can add, that the power of the internet and social media as a platform for campaigning has been over-rated in comparison to good, old fashioned, supposed-to-be-dead prime-time television .
Absolutely. I doubt Ms C or any of us here would dispute that.
Interesting that Amol Rajan was interviewing Idris Elba about knife crime on Today this morning and asked what was it about actors that gave them a special position to opine about this, that or the other. Elba responded that he was speaking as a parent (oh that Emma Thompson would do similarly but I digress).
But there is no doubt absolutely that this was ignited by the entertainment industry. Private Eye, CW, others, tried and failed to make it front page news but Toby Jones did and Jule Hesmaongeahsdauaulgh has been speaking about it also subsequently. That's the society we live in.
That’s not a new thing or a bad thing. That’s just the power of drama and story. It’s why fiction outsells non fiction. It’s why people watch movies by the billion but documentaries once every so often.
In a story you are allowed to change things and add colour and humour and life and make it all sing. Or move you to tears
It is nearly always the best way to bring something to public attention, if it can be done
Another question about the Post Office scandal is whether there is a single MP, Minister or senior Civil Servant who does not read Private Eye? Or newspaper editor, come to that.
There was the article in Computer Weekly nearly fifteen years ago. There have been occasional articles in the serious papers and a lot more in Private Eye, as well as local paper coverage of many of the individual cases. Bates’s campaign has been going for twenty years and both he and many of the affected individuals have lobbied their own MPs throughout that entire period. A handful of those MPs have been raising the matter in parliament for more than ten years. Bates’s campaign has lobbied every junior minister responsible for the PO since New Labour days, but only one was interested enough to meet him personally. There’s been a Panorama documentary, a twenty-part radio series on R4, and items on other media including commercial radio. And there’s a book available in both hardback and paperback that tells the whole story. And internet sites from the campaign and others; even, late in the story, some items on PB. And the statutory inquiry has been up and running since last year.
Yet it’s taken a bit of telly drama on ITV over the holiday period to have everyone running about in apparent surprise and shock…..
It’s been a background scandal in the IT world since Computer Weekly started on this.
You are seeing a few things here, I think.
1) the complete absence of IT parented people in high government and media - lots of generalists. Who are proud of switching off when IT is mentioned. We’ve had some here - “stop going on about the boring stuff”
2) this affects too many powerful people and interest groups…
3) who think it is jolly unfair that some maths and tech stuff should upset their brilliant records as NU10K’rs
4) it’s not real until it’s broken through in popular debate.
5) we are used to trusting the technology. Ditzy human vs megacomputer company and our (perhaps subconscious) thoughts are to go with the latter.
Indeed. We've recently seen this with the way cranks were treated who questioned Covid vaccines.
There’s a difference between stating that all the BA pilots have secretly died of heart failure and demanding unquestioning agreement with unvalidated IT systems.
In the first case, making up bullshit vs peer reviewed, regulated science, complete with published evidence and a problem reporting mechanism. Every adverse reaction to a vaccine can and generally is reported via the explicit mechanism designed for this, and the results reviewed.
In the second case, it was literally legal fiat to say that IT systems are always right. Which was done because otherwise lawyers might have to learn about IT. And that wouldn’t be fair on Proper Generalists.
Another question about the Post Office scandal is whether there is a single MP, Minister or senior Civil Servant who does not read Private Eye? Or newspaper editor, come to that.
There was the article in Computer Weekly nearly fifteen years ago. There have been occasional articles in the serious papers and a lot more in Private Eye, as well as local paper coverage of many of the individual cases. Bates’s campaign has been going for twenty years and both he and many of the affected individuals have lobbied their own MPs throughout that entire period. A handful of those MPs have been raising the matter in parliament for more than ten years. Bates’s campaign has lobbied every junior minister responsible for the PO since New Labour days, but only one was interested enough to meet him personally. There’s been a Panorama documentary, a twenty-part radio series on R4, and items on other media including commercial radio. And there’s a book available in both hardback and paperback that tells the whole story. And internet sites from the campaign and others; even, late in the story, some items on PB. And the statutory inquiry has been up and running since last year.
Yet it’s taken a bit of telly drama on ITV over the holiday period to have everyone running about in apparent surprise and shock…..
Yes, Sunak was talking at the weekend like he'd only just heard of it. Despicable. I used to have quite a bit of time for him, but I now hope he gets shafted at the next election, as he deserves.
How many questions has Starmer asked about it at PMQs?
Not enough.
PMQs doesn't work to hold the government to account, nor does it get to any answers. All that would zing back across the chamber is some pre-prepared barb about how it was all New Labour's fault in the first place.
Meanwhile, if there's any truth in it, the biggest political news may be this:
Jeremy Corbyn has been tipped to decide in just “weeks” whether to launch a new political movement to rival Keir Starmer’s Labour Party.
According to friends of the former Labour leader, Corbyn could launch a new party which could take voters dissatisfied with the current Labour Party away from Starmer.
Will it give free OWLs?
No but it gives your team another five years of inch-perfect government. Rishi is indeed a lucky General.
The vanity of Jeremy Corbyn. Worth 3 quid to every Conservative Party member.
How many votes would a Jez Party take from Labour and where? My guess is not many and where it doesn't matter.
After all, the Greens already function as a recycling bin for votes of disgruntled lefties.
We've been here before with Respect, TUSC, etc. Although the Corbo brand is strong, it isn't going to win any seats or swing many, if any, marginals.
An overtly Islamic party is probably a greater hypothetical danger to Labour. It is an inevitable and much-needed development.
Also... it's very late in the electoral cycle for this type of thing. There is almost no time to fleece idiots of their cash, think up a snappy name and register a domain, etc.
This is largely a non-story - or at best, a rehash of a story that's been rumbling ever since Corbyn's original suspension and perhaps before.
What substance is there? "Tipped to decide within weeks". Well, of course. The election could be in May, with a dissolution in March. Given that he hasn't yet given a categorical decision either way (which itself is very Corbyn when faced with a tough call in which his preference flies in the face of reality), but has a structure he could easily turn into a party, he has to make a call one way or the other within weeks, if he wants to remain in control of that choice, and assuming that Labour doesn't let him back. It's not the most penetrating piece of analysis.
He might win one seat - his own - but I agree that his influence beyond that would be very marginal. And even his own seat is very far from guaranteed.
Jeremy Corbyn should not form a new party but should himself stand in the general election, in the seat next door to his own. He might even win. Were you still up for Keir Starmer?
Corbyn would have a reasonable chance of holding his own seat, but absolutely sod all chance of winning Starmer's.
He doesn't have the history of being the area's MP, with strong links to local groups and individuals he's helped out over the decades. It would all too obviously be motivated by revenge, and the absolutely overwhelming majority of voters in one of the safest Labour seats in the country are just looking for a change of government - they aren't interested in an elderly crank who just hasn't been on people's radar really in the four years since he humiliatingly lost to Johnson. And I'd be very, very surprised if he tried to go for any seat but his existing one.
He's got a fair chance in his own seat on an argument of, "You've known me for decades, I've done the hard yards as your MP, and will basically vote with Labour on most stuff". Even then, a decent Labour candidate has a fair shout of winning it. They've not picked yet, though - it's an odd one for the prospective Labour MP as it could be a seat for life but it slightly depends what Corbyn does, and you immediately make yourself unpopular with a section of your colleagues by taking on the Jezziah.
Absolutely. I doubt Ms C or any of us here would dispute that.
Interesting that Amol Rajan was interviewing Idris Elba about knife crime on Today this morning and asked what was it about actors that gave them a special position to opine about this, that or the other. Elba responded that he was speaking as a parent (oh that Emma Thompson would do similarly but I digress).
But there is no doubt absolutely that this was ignited by the entertainment industry. Private Eye, CW, others, tried and failed to make it front page news but Toby Jones did and Jule Hesmaongeahsdauaulgh has been speaking about it also subsequently. That's the society we live in.
That’s not a new thing or a bad thing. That’s just the power of drama and story. It’s why fiction outsells non fiction. It’s why people watch movies by the billion but documentaries once every so often.
In a story you are allowed to change things and add colour and humour and life and make it all sing. Or move you to tears
It is nearly always the best way to bring something to public attention, if it can be done
Oh yes hondootedly. A spate of podcasts have changed things of late also. Thinking of Serial and Adnan Syed plus perhaps The Staircase.
Another question about the Post Office scandal is whether there is a single MP, Minister or senior Civil Servant who does not read Private Eye? Or newspaper editor, come to that.
There was the article in Computer Weekly nearly fifteen years ago. There have been occasional articles in the serious papers and a lot more in Private Eye, as well as local paper coverage of many of the individual cases. Bates’s campaign has been going for twenty years and both he and many of the affected individuals have lobbied their own MPs throughout that entire period. A handful of those MPs have been raising the matter in parliament for more than ten years. Bates’s campaign has lobbied every junior minister responsible for the PO since New Labour days, but only one was interested enough to meet him personally. There’s been a Panorama documentary, a twenty-part radio series on R4, and items on other media including commercial radio. And there’s a book available in both hardback and paperback that tells the whole story. And internet sites from the campaign and others; even, late in the story, some items on PB. And the statutory inquiry has been up and running since last year.
Yet it’s taken a bit of telly drama on ITV over the holiday period to have everyone running about in apparent surprise and shock…..
It’s been a background scandal in the IT world since Computer Weekly started on this.
You are seeing a few things here, I think.
1) the complete absence of IT parented people in high government and media - lots of generalists. Who are proud of switching off when IT is mentioned. We’ve had some here - “stop going on about the boring stuff”
2) this affects too many powerful people and interest groups…
3) who think it is jolly unfair that some maths and tech stuff should upset their brilliant records as NU10K’rs
4) it’s not real until it’s broken through in popular debate.
5) we are used to trusting the technology. Ditzy human vs megacomputer company and our (perhaps subconscious) thoughts are to go with the latter.
Indeed. We've recently seen this with the way cranks were treated who questioned Covid vaccines.
People don't understand the difference between the "giant-innovators" [MS, Google, AWS, once-upon-a-time IBM] and the "pile-em-high-sell-em-cheap" consultancy bullshit merchants [Fujitsu, Accenture, Deloitte, WiPro] and the consulting arm of those global innovators [IBM Global Services, MS Consulting etc.]
We have a massive global problem with giant low-quality IT consulting organizations with a merry-go-round of poorly-mentored early-career employees who are T&M-ed into staff-augmentation style delivery contracts.
This Fujitsu scandal was big enough to have publicly-visible fallout but the reality is that this good-money-after-bad failure mode is endemic.
Also worth noting that the ITV postal drama was actually POSITIVE about one politician: the Tory MP James Arbuthnot
I actually found that quite refreshing. When “a Tory MP” hoved into view I thought, wearily, here we go, he’ll be another gammony, blazer wearing fox hunter who wants to buy all the post offices and turn them into sweat shops. But no. The scriptwriter avoided that and made him pleasant and sincere and hard working. Which added to the drama - merely by being unexpected
He deserves a little credit
Having known him personally a little, at least in the past, I hope that he's sent ITV a fine case of wine, since he was extraordinarily lucky with his portrayal. Which isn't to detract from the difference he's made with the campaign.
I wonder who among the reasonably broad cast of campaigners can take the credit for getting ITV interested in a drama, on what at first glance must have seemed a challenging topic. Wallis, perhaps?
A PBer (I think it's @Malmesbury: could be @JosiasJessop) is convinced that the British State is captured by and serves a small group of people. This group is referred to as The Nu10K. They are characterised by i) high-paid administrative positions, ii) rarely fired for incompetence, and iii) when fired for incompetence are rapidly reemployed at the same or higher wage.
The assumption here is that if you say you're a child but the Home Office classify you as an adult you were "caught" and you're actually an adult. The charities that are working with them say that the Home Office is routinely classifying people who are actually children as adults.
In 2022, at GMIAU we have seen an increase in the number of children being referred to us because the Home Office have placed them in adult accommodation having wrongly deemed them to be adults. Of the 15 referrals we received by June this year, 11 had their age wrongly changed by the Home Office to make them an adult. Over half of these children have now had their age accepted by their local authority and 4 of the remaining 5 continue to wait for an outcome. Nationwide, figures from 64 local authorities collected by the Helen Bamber Foundation show that in January to March 2022, 211 young people were referred to children’s services after having been sent to adult accommodation or detention. Two thirds were found to actually be children - 150 children had been placed in adult accommodation or detention in only three months.
Considering the record at the Home Office at getting things wrong, this story doesn't surprise me at all.
This is a good example of the difficulty of pandering to the anti-immigration people. The Sun shows some pictures of asylum seekers who look old (either because they were really lying about their age or because they failed to apply an appropriate skincare regime during their lifetime of civil war and their epic trek across continents) and says, "The Home Office is being taken advantage of!". So then the Home Office give instructions that anyone who might embarrass them on a Sun front page should be deemed to be an adult. Then a couple of years later The Sun gets hold of the Home Office figures for how many people they classified as adults and says, "Look, the number of cheaters we're taking in is soaring!"
He was 17! A lot of people sympathetic to asylum seekers don’t even consider that to be a child
I went to see One Life yesterday (the Nicholas Winton story - still very moving despite being so familiar). A detail that isn't highlighted is that AIUI Britain was after some bureaucratic delay reasonably welcoming to Jewish children fleeing Nazism, less so to adults. That's something we should be ashamed of in retrospect.
Shame is, however, largely a waste of time unless it leads us to reconsider our current attitudes to asylum-seekers. We should err on the side of generosity, especially where the claim is a matter of life and death. If some people thereby fiddle the system, so be it.
The difference here is that these Asylum seekers aren’t fleeing Nazi Germany where they will surely be killed, but are in France which is a safe country. If we were separated by the channel from Syria or Afghanistan, rather than somewhere we like to go on holiday, I’m sure people would be more welcoming of system fiddlers
But the accident of geography should not be used as an excuse to avoid taking a fair share. France takes many more asylum-seekers than we do, and countries next to trouble spots (e.g. Jordan) take vastly more. We should at least sign up to the EU deal whereby countries either agree to take a proportionate share of refugees or agree to pay to help countries who do.
Alternatively, we should facilitate applications from trouble spots through local UK Embassies, instead of the Hunger Games route of forcing them to try and get across the Channel to get consideration. If that was combined with a higher threshold to get accepted (e.g. not just discrimination but an actual threat to life OR a skill useful in Britain) it could potentially be accepted by some immigrant-sceptic people too - the boat question would disappear, replaced by an orderly process. A higher threshold would need renegotiation of treaties, but it would at least be a respectable position for immigrant sceptics to take.
Strikes me that regardless of whether Davey was at fault in his actions over the Post Office, it's bad enough that this is a reminder to people about the Coalition, which is something the Lib Dems have never properly recovered from.
It's also a reminder about New Labour, who the mess started under.
No organisation comes out of this looking good. Politically, Labour, the Lib Dems and the Conservatives are all sullied by it, to one extent or another.
Point of order. It started under the Major Government (the fiasco, not the prosecutions). That said the Conservatives come out of this with relatively clean hands.
Did it? I thought the system came in after 1999? Might well be wrong, but I remember first reading/talking with colleagues about the problems in about 2004 or 5. The first prosecutions were well into New Labour's time ISTR.
The Horizon system was piloted in 1995 and the same problems were already apparent during the pilot. The full introduction started 1999.
Yes, but the issues with prosecutions came well into New Labour's time. It seems a little odd to try to pin this debacle on Major's government.
Despite Ms C majoring on the role of politicians, I think they are well down the list of potential cuplrits, certainly as far as the original problem is concerned. An industry IT system that is generating accounting errors really is something that a large company - especially one as exposed to scutiny as was the PO (being subject to public and media interest, a statutory regulator, a customer pressure group, and several powerful and active trade unions) - should have been able to sort out itself.
As the size and scale and knowledge of the developing scandal grew, the political world becomes more and more culpable, since while we do not rely on our ministers to find out whether a company's IT system is working, we do expect politicians to campaign against injustice on behalf of their constituents. The government's silence and inactivity over more recent years and its showering the PO CEO with honour and lining her up with a job inside 10 Downing Street, after all the key points of the story were known, is by far the bigger misjudgement.
The politicians were at fault initially in making the legal change on computer evidence (for the reasons I have previously explained). They were also at fault in not ensuring that the CEOs ensured that the IT issues were properly sorted. Those in actual charge of the Royal Mail and the Post Office have the primary responsibility - together with the lawyers - for the prosecutions and the response to the Inquiry
And the politicians are now to blame for the way they have failed to put matters right, their rewarding of those who have done wrong and, very possibly, their aiding and abetting of the cover up through their silence (or maybe worse?). And for not ensuring that the Post Office responds properly to the Inquiry.
Really there is plenty of blame to throw at all those concerned from the late 1990s onwards.
Another question about the Post Office scandal is whether there is a single MP, Minister or senior Civil Servant who does not read Private Eye? Or newspaper editor, come to that.
There was the article in Computer Weekly nearly fifteen years ago. There have been occasional articles in the serious papers and a lot more in Private Eye, as well as local paper coverage of many of the individual cases. Bates’s campaign has been going for twenty years and both he and many of the affected individuals have lobbied their own MPs throughout that entire period. A handful of those MPs have been raising the matter in parliament for more than ten years. Bates’s campaign has lobbied every junior minister responsible for the PO since New Labour days, but only one was interested enough to meet him personally. There’s been a Panorama documentary, a twenty-part radio series on R4, and items on other media including commercial radio. And there’s a book available in both hardback and paperback that tells the whole story. And internet sites from the campaign and others; even, late in the story, some items on PB. And the statutory inquiry has been up and running since last year.
Yet it’s taken a bit of telly drama on ITV over the holiday period to have everyone running about in apparent surprise and shock…..
It’s been a background scandal in the IT world since Computer Weekly started on this.
You are seeing a few things here, I think.
1) the complete absence of IT parented people in high government and media - lots of generalists. Who are proud of switching off when IT is mentioned. We’ve had some here - “stop going on about the boring stuff”
2) this affects too many powerful people and interest groups…
3) who think it is jolly unfair that some maths and tech stuff should upset their brilliant records as NU10K’rs
4) it’s not real until it’s broken through in popular debate.
5) we are used to trusting the technology. Ditzy human vs megacomputer company and our (perhaps subconscious) thoughts are to go with the latter.
Your point 5 is just point 1 - the general public trust computers but anyone in IT knows that no program is perfect and even if the program is perfect, other things can still go wrong resulting in problems
Strikes me that regardless of whether Davey was at fault in his actions over the Post Office, it's bad enough that this is a reminder to people about the Coalition, which is something the Lib Dems have never properly recovered from.
It's also a reminder about New Labour, who the mess started under.
No organisation comes out of this looking good. Politically, Labour, the Lib Dems and the Conservatives are all sullied by it, to one extent or another.
But my point was that regardless of who looks bad or good in relation to their actions over the Post Office, the bare fact that people are reminded about the Lib Dems having been in the Coalition is bad for them.
It is only bad for them in the Corbynite sense of it being better to be out of power with your principles inviolate, than in government with all the messy, disappointing compromise that that entails.
Better to be in power is the sensible view.
Davey resigning, and the election of a new leader, would get the LibDems considerable media coverage, looking at it cynically.
With a general election pencilled in for the beginning of May, I do not think that now is the right time to start and internal leadership campaaign. Away, you siren voices!!!!
And people, especially the Tory inclined, are looking at the national picture. I would imagine that electors in the target seats - and the public does not know which ones these are- will have started to become sated with Lib Dem information.
Another question about the Post Office scandal is whether there is a single MP, Minister or senior Civil Servant who does not read Private Eye? Or newspaper editor, come to that.
There was the article in Computer Weekly nearly fifteen years ago. There have been occasional articles in the serious papers and a lot more in Private Eye, as well as local paper coverage of many of the individual cases. Bates’s campaign has been going for twenty years and both he and many of the affected individuals have lobbied their own MPs throughout that entire period. A handful of those MPs have been raising the matter in parliament for more than ten years. Bates’s campaign has lobbied every junior minister responsible for the PO since New Labour days, but only one was interested enough to meet him personally. There’s been a Panorama documentary, a twenty-part radio series on R4, and items on other media including commercial radio. And there’s a book available in both hardback and paperback that tells the whole story. And internet sites from the campaign and others; even, late in the story, some items on PB. And the statutory inquiry has been up and running since last year.
Yet it’s taken a bit of telly drama on ITV over the holiday period to have everyone running about in apparent surprise and shock…..
It’s been a background scandal in the IT world since Computer Weekly started on this.
You are seeing a few things here, I think.
1) the complete absence of IT parented people in high government and media - lots of generalists. Who are proud of switching off when IT is mentioned. We’ve had some here - “stop going on about the boring stuff”
2) this affects too many powerful people and interest groups…
3) who think it is jolly unfair that some maths and tech stuff should upset their brilliant records as NU10K’rs
4) it’s not real until it’s broken through in popular debate.
5) we are used to trusting the technology. Ditzy human vs megacomputer company and our (perhaps subconscious) thoughts are to go with the latter.
Indeed. We've recently seen this with the way cranks were treated who questioned Covid vaccines.
There's rather a large difference in that the safety data on vaccines is promptly published, widely disseminated, and regularly updated. The cranks are just cranks.
The assumption here is that if you say you're a child but the Home Office classify you as an adult you were "caught" and you're actually an adult. The charities that are working with them say that the Home Office is routinely classifying people who are actually children as adults.
In 2022, at GMIAU we have seen an increase in the number of children being referred to us because the Home Office have placed them in adult accommodation having wrongly deemed them to be adults. Of the 15 referrals we received by June this year, 11 had their age wrongly changed by the Home Office to make them an adult. Over half of these children have now had their age accepted by their local authority and 4 of the remaining 5 continue to wait for an outcome. Nationwide, figures from 64 local authorities collected by the Helen Bamber Foundation show that in January to March 2022, 211 young people were referred to children’s services after having been sent to adult accommodation or detention. Two thirds were found to actually be children - 150 children had been placed in adult accommodation or detention in only three months.
Considering the record at the Home Office at getting things wrong, this story doesn't surprise me at all.
This is a good example of the difficulty of pandering to the anti-immigration people. The Sun shows some pictures of asylum seekers who look old (either because they were really lying about their age or because they failed to apply an appropriate skincare regime during their lifetime of civil war and their epic trek across continents) and says, "The Home Office is being taken advantage of!". So then the Home Office give instructions that anyone who might embarrass them on a Sun front page should be deemed to be an adult. Then a couple of years later The Sun gets hold of the Home Office figures for how many people they classified as adults and says, "Look, the number of cheaters we're taking in is soaring!"
He was 17! A lot of people sympathetic to asylum seekers don’t even consider that to be a child
I went to see One Life yesterday (the Nicholas Winton story - still very moving despite being so familiar). A detail that isn't highlighted is that AIUI Britain was after some bureaucratic delay reasonably welcoming to Jewish children fleeing Nazism, less so to adults. That's something we should be ashamed of in retrospect.
Shame is, however, largely a waste of time unless it leads us to reconsider our current attitudes to asylum-seekers. We should err on the side of generosity, especially where the claim is a matter of life and death. If some people thereby fiddle the system, so be it.
The difference here is that these Asylum seekers aren’t fleeing Nazi Germany where they will surely be killed, but are in France which is a safe country. If we were separated by the channel from Syria or Afghanistan, rather than somewhere we like to go on holiday, I’m sure people would be more welcoming of system fiddlers
But the accident of geography should not be used as an excuse to avoid taking a fair share. France takes many more asylum-seekers than we do, and countries next to trouble spots (e.g. Jordan) take vastly more. We should at least sign up to the EU deal whereby countries either agree to take a proportionate share of refugees or agree to pay to help countries who do.
Alternatively, we should facilitate applications from trouble spots through local UK Embassies, instead of the Hunger Games route of forcing them to try and get across the Channel to get consideration. If that was combined with a higher threshold to get accepted (e.g. not just discrimination but an actual threat to life OR a skill useful in Britain) it could potentially be accepted by some immigrant-sceptic people too - the boat question would disappear, replaced by an orderly process. A higher threshold would need renegotiation of treaties, but it would at least be a respectable position for immigrant sceptics to take.
People dealing with the ‘cost of living crisis’ who think there’s too much immigration aren’t going to be sympathetic to that first argument, especially when they discover what they thought to be true all along; half those claiming to be children are actually adults. They’ll just see them as economic migrants fiddling the system
Meanwhile, if there's any truth in it, the biggest political news may be this:
Jeremy Corbyn has been tipped to decide in just “weeks” whether to launch a new political movement to rival Keir Starmer’s Labour Party.
According to friends of the former Labour leader, Corbyn could launch a new party which could take voters dissatisfied with the current Labour Party away from Starmer.
Will it give free OWLs?
No but it gives your team another five years of inch-perfect government. Rishi is indeed a lucky General.
The vanity of Jeremy Corbyn. Worth 3 quid to every Conservative Party member.
How many votes would a Jez Party take from Labour and where? My guess is not many and where it doesn't matter.
After all, the Greens already function as a recycling bin for votes of disgruntled lefties.
We've been here before with Respect, TUSC, etc. Although the Corbo brand is strong, it isn't going to win any seats or swing many, if any, marginals.
An overtly Islamic party is probably a greater hypothetical danger to Labour. It is an inevitable and much-needed development.
Also... it's very late in the electoral cycle for this type of thing. There is almost no time to fleece idiots of their cash, think up a snappy name and register a domain, etc.
This is largely a non-story - or at best, a rehash of a story that's been rumbling ever since Corbyn's original suspension and perhaps before.
What substance is there? "Tipped to decide within weeks". Well, of course. The election could be in May, with a dissolution in March. Given that he hasn't yet given a categorical decision either way (which itself is very Corbyn when faced with a tough call in which his preference flies in the face of reality), but has a structure he could easily turn into a party, he has to make a call one way or the other within weeks, if he wants to remain in control of that choice, and assuming that Labour doesn't let him back. It's not the most penetrating piece of analysis.
He might win one seat - his own - but I agree that his influence beyond that would be very marginal. And even his own seat is very far from guaranteed.
Jeremy Corbyn should not form a new party but should himself stand in the general election, in the seat next door to his own. He might even win. Were you still up for Keir Starmer?
Corbyn would have a reasonable chance of holding his own seat, but absolutely sod all chance of winning Starmer's.
He doesn't have the history of being the area's MP, with strong links to local groups and individuals he's helped out over the decades. It would all too obviously be motivated by revenge, and the absolutely overwhelming majority of voters in one of the safest Labour seats in the country are just looking for a change of government - they aren't interested in an elderly crank who just hasn't been on people's radar really in the four years since he humiliatingly lost to Johnson. And I'd be very, very surprised if he tried to go for any seat but his existing one.
He's got a fair chance in his own seat on an argument of, "You've known me for decades, I've done the hard yards as your MP, and will basically vote with Labour on most stuff". Even then, a decent Labour candidate has a fair shout of winning it. They've not picked yet, though - it's an odd one for the prospective Labour MP as it could be a seat for life but it slightly depends what Corbyn does, and you immediately make yourself unpopular with a section of your colleagues by taking on the Jezziah.
Also worth noting that the ITV postal drama was actually POSITIVE about one politician: the Tory MP James Arbuthnot
I actually found that quite refreshing. When “a Tory MP” hoved into view I thought, wearily, here we go, he’ll be another gammony, blazer wearing fox hunter who wants to buy all the post offices and turn them into sweat shops. But no. The scriptwriter avoided that and made him pleasant and sincere and hard working. Which added to the drama - merely by being unexpected
The assumption here is that if you say you're a child but the Home Office classify you as an adult you were "caught" and you're actually an adult. The charities that are working with them say that the Home Office is routinely classifying people who are actually children as adults.
In 2022, at GMIAU we have seen an increase in the number of children being referred to us because the Home Office have placed them in adult accommodation having wrongly deemed them to be adults. Of the 15 referrals we received by June this year, 11 had their age wrongly changed by the Home Office to make them an adult. Over half of these children have now had their age accepted by their local authority and 4 of the remaining 5 continue to wait for an outcome. Nationwide, figures from 64 local authorities collected by the Helen Bamber Foundation show that in January to March 2022, 211 young people were referred to children’s services after having been sent to adult accommodation or detention. Two thirds were found to actually be children - 150 children had been placed in adult accommodation or detention in only three months.
Considering the record at the Home Office at getting things wrong, this story doesn't surprise me at all.
This is a good example of the difficulty of pandering to the anti-immigration people. The Sun shows some pictures of asylum seekers who look old (either because they were really lying about their age or because they failed to apply an appropriate skincare regime during their lifetime of civil war and their epic trek across continents) and says, "The Home Office is being taken advantage of!". So then the Home Office give instructions that anyone who might embarrass them on a Sun front page should be deemed to be an adult. Then a couple of years later The Sun gets hold of the Home Office figures for how many people they classified as adults and says, "Look, the number of cheaters we're taking in is soaring!"
He was 17! A lot of people sympathetic to asylum seekers don’t even consider that to be a child
I went to see One Life yesterday (the Nicholas Winton story - still very moving despite being so familiar). A detail that isn't highlighted is that AIUI Britain was after some bureaucratic delay reasonably welcoming to Jewish children fleeing Nazism, less so to adults. That's something we should be ashamed of in retrospect.
Shame is, however, largely a waste of time unless it leads us to reconsider our current attitudes to asylum-seekers. We should err on the side of generosity, especially where the claim is a matter of life and death. If some people thereby fiddle the system, so be it.
The difference here is that these Asylum seekers aren’t fleeing Nazi Germany where they will surely be killed, but are in France which is a safe country. If we were separated by the channel from Syria or Afghanistan, rather than somewhere we like to go on holiday, I’m sure people would be more welcoming of system fiddlers
But the accident of geography should not be used as an excuse to avoid taking a fair share. France takes many more asylum-seekers than we do, and countries next to trouble spots (e.g. Jordan) take vastly more. We should at least sign up to the EU deal whereby countries either agree to take a proportionate share of refugees or agree to pay to help countries who do.
Alternatively, we should facilitate applications from trouble spots through local UK Embassies, instead of the Hunger Games route of forcing them to try and get across the Channel to get consideration. If that was combined with a higher threshold to get accepted (e.g. not just discrimination but an actual threat to life OR a skill useful in Britain) it could potentially be accepted by some immigrant-sceptic people too - the boat question would disappear, replaced by an orderly process. A higher threshold would need renegotiation of treaties, but it would at least be a respectable position for immigrant sceptics to take.
People dealing with the ‘cost of living crisis’ who think there’s too much immigration aren’t going to be sympathetic to that first argument, especially when they discover what they thought to be true all along; half those claiming to be children are actually adults. They’ll just see them as economic migrants fiddling the system
A PBer (I think it's @Malmesbury: could be @JosiasJessop) is convinced that the British State is captured by and serves a small group of people. This group is referred to as The Nu10K. They are characterised by i) high-paid administrative positions, ii) rarely fired for incompetence, and iii) when fired for incompetence are rapidly reemployed at the same or higher wage.
I think he's right, btw
Were you asking for the names of specific people?
I invented the term. The Old Upper 10,000 were the aristocracy plus moderately distant relations. See The Squirearchy.
The New Upper 10,000 are their replacement. In addition to the 3 characteristics above, I would add iv) an instinctive protection of other NU10K’rs
Comments
Remember that the cranks already have a plethora of scab parties to vote for, many of which gather under the absurdly named "Left Unity" banner. If P&J (Marxist Leninist) gathers them all under His banner, so what?
I don't think the crank left get it. The further away they recede from the Labour movement, the more electable that movement is. And Clause 1 of the Labour Party constitution is very clear that it exists to get elected. So...
That said, it really doesn't matter what the LDs do - they will pick up seats later this year just due to a Tory collapse and tactical voting, so it's neither a risk if he goes or stays.
But the PO is 100% government owned, and government played a considerable role in the system procurement. Successive ministers ignored the pleas of victims of the miscarriage of justice.
Their responsibility is surely a little more than failing to "campaign against injustice on behalf if their constituents". It lay squarely within their power to do much more than that.
An overtly Islamic party is probably a greater hypothetical danger to Labour. It is an inevitable and much-needed development.
Also... it's very late in the electoral cycle for this type of thing. There is almost no time to fleece idiots of their cash, think up a snappy name and register a domain, etc.
Was like watching a long Wikipedia article that jumped around a bit.
First two hours building up to Trinity good. Last hour with Strauss dragged a bit.
Nuclear explosions and special effects good.
The denizens of this Site are fortunate. Thanks to Cyclefree, IanB2, and one or two others, we have been ahead of the curve, and less susceptible to the kind of partisan tubthumping so typical of inferior Sites. Indeed, Ms C cautioned us against such inappropriate bias numerous times, and none more telling than the post in which she listed the numerous Ministers responsible for the PO throughout the period of the scandal. I will refresh your memories:
"Since 1998 the Business Ministers were:-
Peter Mandelson
Patricia Hewitt
Alan Johnson (ex-postman)
Peter Mandelson (again)
followed by 9 Business Ministers since 2010:-
Vince Cable
Sajid Javid
Greg Clark
Andrea Leadsom
Alok Sharma
Kwasi Kwarteng
Nadine Dorries
Michelle Donelan
Kemi Badenoch.
Also since 2010 there have been Ministers with specific responsibility for postal affairs:-
Ed Davey
Norman Lamb
Jo Swinson
Jenny Willott
Jo Swinson (again)
Margot James (the only Minister so far to express any regret about their role in this affair)
Andrew Griffiths
Kelly Tolhurst
Paul Scully
Kevin Hollinrake. "
Whilst it is wholly appropriate to ask Sir Ed Davey to answer some sharp questions, it's a bit rich to single him out from that lot. Fortunately the Posters Of PB are not readily susceptible to witchhunts and can be relied upon to take a broader, more balanced view....can't they?
Btw, Ms C puts in a word above for Margot James. Alan Bates himself puts in a kind word for Norman Lamb. The rest....well if we are going to ask questions of Ed Davey, why not the others?
The geographical concentration of Muslims in the UK would make such a party quite FTPT efficient too.
What this episode actually illustrates is WHY politicians, particularly those who have achieved ministerial office, typically run a mile from campaigns and pressure groups unless and until they understand the consequences. And are no doubt so advised by Sir Humphrey.
Bates lobbied ministers before and after, and they all kept their distance, and if they got criticised at the time (or subsequently) for giving him the brush off, I must have missed it. Davey at least met Bates, listened to his concerns, put them to the PO, and fed the PO's (dishonest, we know now) response back. Even though it was very early in Britain's first coalition government since the war and he will have had two huge in-trays, political and ministerial.
By having made a tad more effort and offered a tad more engagement than his precessors and successors, his political and media opponents now have the chance to concoct their cynical smears based on nothing more than his having heard Bates's concerns in person rather than just set out by the letters received by every other minister.
What substance is there? "Tipped to decide within weeks". Well, of course. The election could be in May, with a dissolution in March. Given that he hasn't yet given a categorical decision either way (which itself is very Corbyn when faced with a tough call in which his preference flies in the face of reality), but has a structure he could easily turn into a party, he has to make a call one way or the other within weeks, if he wants to remain in control of that choice, and assuming that Labour doesn't let him back. It's not the most penetrating piece of analysis.
He might win one seat - his own - but I agree that his influence beyond that would be very marginal. And even his own seat is very far from guaranteed.
The Labour party, unelectable, compromised, incoherent, etc, are, unlike all the others going to lead the next government. Starmer is a sort of personal example of all the conjuring required.
Tentatively I think the only change it should think about would be to specifically renounce socialism, and clearly embrace a social democrat general philosophy, just one step further than the Clause 4 moment.
The time may come when it has to specifically renounce extreme Islamism too. Both these might be in Starmer's second term. Labour cannot win if and when it is seen as the route to power for the left or for the extreme end of its Islamic support base.
Davey's problem isn't so much the Post Office scandal, it's that he's a completely invisible presence on the stage. Why would anyone vote Lib Dem other than as an entirely tactical vote - which is an exceptionally weak foundation on which to build a strategy; one that cannot survive either the party gaining some sort of power and having to take tough decisions - other means of protest will be found - and must be tossed and turned as the relative popularity of the other parties changes.
Too many in the Lib Dems are stuck in a mindset from the 1980s and would try to bend the new political reality to that comfort zone than adapt their tactics and message to a changed world. It doesn't help that on a micro level, their tactics and messages work - they do still win by-elections here and there, and pick up gains where they put in the work - but isolated and unconnected victories based on transient tactical conditions (within a much wider sea of lost deposits, or equivalent) is treating politics as sport for an network of independents, not a political party.
We are plagued by incurious ministers and officials. Yes, Prime Minister got there first. Why didn't you ask him a lot of questions?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOI3SNVAVwg
https://m.koreatimes.co.kr/pages/article.asp?newsIdx=366530
When North Korean leader Kim Jong-un's daughter, known as Ju-ae, made her first public appearance in late 2022, few analysts saw her as his successor, with some suggesting that his sister, Kim Yo-jong, was more likely to take the throne if something happens to his ability to rule.
But about a year later, many experts, including top-level agents at South Korea's national spy agency, think that Ju-ae is on track to assume the top spot. Meanwhile, the North Korean leader's ambitious sister appears to have been sidelined from the media spotlight, according to analysts, Monday.
A further basis for such claims was provided by Rodong Sinmun, North Korea's official newspaper, which used honorifics exclusively for Ju-ae and her father in the coverage of their inspection of a poultry farm in Hwangju County, some 45 kilometers south of the North's capital Pyongyang. Monday's issue of the newspaper, on the other hand, plainly described other high-ranking officials who followed them, including Yo-jong and Premier Kim Tok-hun, without using the same honorifics...
In a seat where the LDs have a chance, the reason in clear - more liberal voices and votes in parliament, that can combine with the liberals from other parties to block some legislation and to support others. In safe seats, it expresses a preference, as any vote for a minor party does. UKIP, afterall, got noticed for vote share and influenced the direction of this country without winning any new seats.
Of course, under PR we'd have more parties. It might mean the end of the LDs, with a split into liberal centre-right (with some Tories) and liberal centre-left (with some from Labour). I would not see that as a bad thing, the de-merger, if you like, of the Liberals and SDP.
One might as well - or even more so - ask why vote Yorkshire Party, other than as a protest vote
ETA: I'm reasonably impressed by what I've seen of Cooper, but there is a danger of projection, where being #notDavey is seen as enough in the same way as Swinson was #notCable, without actually thinking about whether that is better or worse.
The SDP split only happened because of the strength of the Bennite left in the early 1980s; the disaster of the 2019 election was a direct function of Corbyn being leader. Both scenarios could easily have been worse had Benn won the deputy leadership election - a totemic loss that proved to many that the situation was salvageable - or had the Change UK splitters not made such a hash of their departure, or had they persuaded the likes of Watson to join them, or had they jumped ship directly to the Lib Dems.
In each case, it wasn't the right that threatened Labour, other than in reaction to the left's ascendancy.
Absolutely. I doubt Ms C or any of us here would dispute that.
Shame is, however, largely a waste of time unless it leads us to reconsider our current attitudes to asylum-seekers. We should err on the side of generosity, especially where the claim is a matter of life and death. If some people thereby fiddle the system, so be it.
On top of that, there is the deeply awkward fact that Davey himself went on to work for the lawyers prosecuting the sainted post people. That’s surely just bad luck. But it’s terrible optics nonetheless
If he survives he is badly tarnished. The LDs’ USP is being “nice”. And “better than the rest”
And I am sure there are other politicians who are blameworthy and the PO bigwigs are the main culprits
The LibDems have to adapt to their position as a third party with relatively even support in a political system designed to suit the two larger parties. Unless and until they genuinely break through, they will always be more of a guerilla force than an army, and must adopt tactics to match. Lectures from an army general about how they should fight are of limited value.
At LibDem Conferences, they spend a huge amount of time - more than the other parties - producing and debating long, worthy but essentially turgid policy documents on almost everything, as if they were a government in waiting. It is almost entirely a complete waste of time and effort, and doesn't win a single vote. Although ironically it did make producing the Coalition Agreement with the Tories much easier, as Letwin actually bothered to read them all. The Tory negotiators offered the LibDems lots of policy concessions on smaller stuff that big picture LibDems like Clegg probably didn't even know were his policies in the first place.
Cricket fans living in Somerset will be pleased to hear he is a pretty decent fast bowler.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/jan/08/nasa-peregrine-1-vulcan-rocket-carrying-nasa-moon-lander-lifts-off-in-florida
...As well as the lunar lander, the mission is also delivering a memorial payload into space containing the remains and DNA of several people associated with the Star Trek television franchise, including the actors James Doohan, DeForest Kelley and Nichelle Nichols.
In 1992 (Kinnock, leftish) and 2017 (Jezza) it came a bit close to winning, but where they lost to very weak Tories.
In 2017 against the worst Tory campaign in modern times, which deserved to get annihilated, Labour won 55 seats fewer than the Tories.
As for the Yorkshire Party, leaving aside where we have won councillors, yes, of course there's a large element of a protest vote against the iniquitous allocation of money and power in the country. But it's also a protest for for an answer to that; we offer solutions as well as critique and complaint.
You are seeing a few things here, I think.
1) the complete absence of IT parented people in high government and media - lots of generalists. Who are proud of switching off when IT is mentioned. We’ve had some here - “stop going on about the boring stuff”
2) this affects too many powerful people and interest groups…
3) who think it is jolly unfair that some maths and tech stuff should upset their brilliant records as NU10K’rs
4) it’s not real until it’s broken through in popular debate.
https://twitter.com/BBCSport/status/1742300513058631832
https://twitter.com/tribelaw/status/1744280678559088667
Trump does have a remedy, if disqualified...
But there is no doubt absolutely that this was ignited by the entertainment industry. Private Eye, CW, others, tried and failed to make it front page news but Toby Jones did and Jule Hesmaongeahsdauaulgh has been speaking about it also subsequently. That's the society we live in.
Thanx.
And they won't be reading Lib Dem Voice.
I actually found that quite refreshing. When “a Tory MP” hoved into view I thought, wearily, here we go, he’ll be another gammony, blazer wearing fox hunter who wants to buy all the post offices and turn them into sweat shops. But no. The scriptwriter avoided that and made him pleasant and sincere and hard working. Which added to the drama - merely by being unexpected
He deserves a little credit
I wonder what has happened to Layla Moran though. She was the bright young thing about three years ago, but I've heard nothing from her since.
(Then again, the LDs have been very starved of any publicity lately, excepting their by-election gains)
Btw, I posted yesterday discouraging you from any self-deprecation regarding your earlier attitude to the PO scandal. I hope you saw it.
Self-deprecation doesn't suit you.
A recent scam I heard about is to do a fake job interview where you get someone to download some code from GitHub to do a task to show you can code. To do this you have to install dependencies, and the dependencies install malware.
I don't think it is mainly a political story. The Post Office and Fujitsu are the most culpable. Ed Davey has a specific political problem in that he was previously a minister in charge of the Post Office and he is still in politics when the music finally stopped. Beyond that, to the extent it's a political story, the buck surely stops with the government in charge?
There are some quiet heroes besides Alan Bates. But an awful lot of villains
I remember saying a year ago, as I was yawning (again, and wrongly) over the tediousness of this scandal, that what it needed was a STORY - a few human examples to make it vivid and emotional. That’s exactly what ITV did: well done them, too
It is pleasing that homemade TV drama can still do this - change an entire national conversation and for a righteous cause
Some other Pb-er noted that the scriptwriter used every single cliche in the book - from the pints at the pub table to the lovable cake making lady to the absurdly pretty house in snowdonia - but who cares. It really worked
In summary, Corbyn doesn't really matter. I think it's unlikely he'd even win his own seat. Indeed, I'd be surprised if he stood.
The Post Ofice fucked up. Then lied about it.
The Civil Service tried to ignore it. Then briefed politicians there was nothing to see here
The politicians were incredibly incurious
The excellence of CW has been widely acknowledged.
James Arbuthnot was once my MP. This isn't the first starring role as champion of worthy causes that he's played.
Nobody has a problem with giving credit where credit is due, regardless. Personally I am even inclined to give Boris Johnson a thumbs up for authorising the Public Inquiry, and trust that it doesn't create too many enemies on here.
To which we can add, that the power of the internet and social media as a platform for campaigning has been over-rated in comparison to good, old fashioned, supposed-to-be-dead prime-time television .
In a story you are allowed to change things and add colour and humour and life and make it all sing. Or move you to tears
It is nearly always the best way to bring something to public attention, if it can be done
Nige may have put his foot in it. Or maybe he knows but is just trying to see if any mud sticks
Why did @Keir_Starmer not intervene in the Horizon scandal when he was Director of Public Prosecutions?
The story first broke in 2009, yet the prosecutions continued until 2015.
Given the mounting concern at the time and over 700 cases, he has serious questions to answer.
https://x.com/nigel_farage/status/1744297950182793638?s=46&t=CW4pL-mMpTqsJXCdjW0Z6Q
In the first case, making up bullshit vs peer reviewed, regulated science, complete with published evidence and a problem reporting mechanism. Every adverse reaction to a vaccine can and generally is reported via the explicit mechanism designed for this, and the results reviewed.
In the second case, it was literally legal fiat to say that IT systems are always right. Which was done because otherwise lawyers might have to learn about IT. And that wouldn’t be fair on Proper Generalists.
He doesn't have the history of being the area's MP, with strong links to local groups and individuals he's helped out over the decades. It would all too obviously be motivated by revenge, and the absolutely overwhelming majority of voters in one of the safest Labour seats in the country are just looking for a change of government - they aren't interested in an elderly crank who just hasn't been on people's radar really in the four years since he humiliatingly lost to Johnson. And I'd be very, very surprised if he tried to go for any seat but his existing one.
He's got a fair chance in his own seat on an argument of, "You've known me for decades, I've done the hard yards as your MP, and will basically vote with Labour on most stuff". Even then, a decent Labour candidate has a fair shout of winning it. They've not picked yet, though - it's an odd one for the prospective Labour MP as it could be a seat for life but it slightly depends what Corbyn does, and you immediately make yourself unpopular with a section of your colleagues by taking on the Jezziah.
We have a massive global problem with giant low-quality IT consulting organizations with a merry-go-round of poorly-mentored early-career employees who are T&M-ed into staff-augmentation style delivery contracts.
This Fujitsu scandal was big enough to have publicly-visible fallout but the reality is that this good-money-after-bad failure mode is endemic.
I wonder who among the reasonably broad cast of campaigners can take the credit for getting ITV interested in a drama, on what at first glance must have seemed a challenging topic. Wallis, perhaps?
I think he's right, btw
Were you asking for the names of specific people?
Alternatively, we should facilitate applications from trouble spots through local UK Embassies, instead of the Hunger Games route of forcing them to try and get across the Channel to get consideration. If that was combined with a higher threshold to get accepted (e.g. not just discrimination but an actual threat to life OR a skill useful in Britain) it could potentially be accepted by some immigrant-sceptic people too - the boat question would disappear, replaced by an orderly process. A higher threshold would need renegotiation of treaties, but it would at least be a respectable position for immigrant sceptics to take.
And the politicians are now to blame for the way they have failed to put matters right, their rewarding of those who have done wrong and, very possibly, their aiding and abetting of the cover up through their silence (or maybe worse?). And for not ensuring that the Post Office responds properly to the Inquiry.
Really there is plenty of blame to throw at all those concerned from the late 1990s onwards.
And people, especially the Tory inclined, are looking at the national picture. I would imagine that electors in the target seats - and the public does not know which ones these are- will have started to become sated with Lib Dem information.
On that score...
Why fears over a ‘tripledemic’ are surging
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/4392133-fears-tripledemic-surging/
The New Upper 10,000 are their replacement. In addition to the 3 characteristics above, I would add iv) an instinctive protection of other NU10K’rs